Laconophilia
Admirers of the Spartans typically praise their valour and success in war, their "laconic" austerity and self-restraint, their aristocratic and virtuous ways, the stable order of their political life, and their constitution, with its tripartite mixed government.
Cimon persuaded the Athenians to send soldiers to aid Sparta, when the helots (serfs of the Spartans) revolted and fortified Mount Ithome.
[4] Plato's Republic, which is set in the 5th century BC, gives credibility to this claim by having Socrates opine that the Spartan or Cretan type of political regime is the favorite of "the many".
[5] A group of extreme Laconising oligarchs, known as the Thirty Tyrants, seized power in Athens in 404 BC and held it for eleven months, assisted by a Spartan army.
[8] Aristotle regarded the kind of laws adopted by Crete and Sparta as especially apt to produce virtuous and law-abiding citizens, although he also criticises the Cretans and Spartans themselves as incompetent and corrupt, and built on a culture of war.
This was only reinforced when Agis IV and Cleomenes III attempted to "restore the ancestral constitution" at Sparta, which no man then living had experienced.
[citation needed][10] In later centuries, Greek philosophers, especially Platonists, often described Sparta as an ideal state, strong, brave, and free from the corruptions of commerce and money.
[12] It became fashionable for the Romans to visit Lacedaemon and see the rites of Artemis Orthia, as a sort of tourist attraction – the nearest Greece had to offer to gladiatorial games.
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, consistently portrays the Spartans, except when actually facing battle, as rustic, hesitant, uncooperative, corrupt, and naïve.
[15] Even after the collapse, and idealisation, of Sparta, Polybius wrote, "My object, then, in this digression is to make it manifest by actual facts that, for guarding their own country with absolute safety, and for preserving their own freedom, the legislation of Lycurgus was entirely sufficient; and for those who are content with these objects we must concede that there neither exists nor ever has existed a constitution and civil order preferable to that of Sparta.
Niccolò Machiavelli agreed that Sparta was noteworthy for its long and static existence, but nevertheless asserted that, for virtù and glory, Rome was much preferable (Discourses).
The Swiss-French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau contrasted Sparta favourably with Athens in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, arguing that its austere constitution was preferable to the more cultured nature of Athenian life.
[17] Alexander Hamilton mocked the Laconophilia of his era as unrealistic: We may preach till we are tired of the theme, the necessity of disinterestedness in republics, without making a single proselyte.
There is a total dissimulation in the circumstances, as well as the manners, of society among us; and it is as ridiculous to seek for models in the simple ages of Greece and Rome, as it would be to go in quest of them among the Hottentots and Laplanders.
He used the new disciplines of comparative linguistics and source-criticism to argue that the Dorians represented a distinct ethno-linguistic group whose original culture could be isolated from later influences.
Müller's emphasis on the northern origins and racial qualities of the Spartans later fed into the development of Nordicism, the theory of the superiority of a North European Master Race.
Frank H. Hankins summarises views of the American Nordicist Madison Grant, writing in 1916: Sparta is pictured as particularly Nordic on account of the purity of its Dorian stock, while Athens is more of a mixture.
