Laconophilia is love or admiration of Sparta and of the Spartan culture or constitution. The term derives from Laconia, the part of the Peloponnesus where the Spartans lived.
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. Ancient Laconophilia started to appear as early as the 5th century BC, and even contributed a new verb to Ancient Greek: λακωνίζειν (literally: to act like a Laconian). Praise of the Spartan city-state persisted within classical literature ever afterward, and surfaced again during the Renaissance.
The French classicist François Ollier in his 1933 book Le mirage spartiate (The Spartan Mirage) warned that a major scholarly problem is that all surviving accounts of Sparta were by non-Spartans who often excessively idealized their subject.[1] The term "Spartan Mirage" has come to refer to "idealized distortions and inventions regarding the character of Spartan society in the works of non-Spartan writers," beginning in Greek and Roman antiquity and continuing through the medieval and modern eras.[2] These accounts of Sparta are typically associated with the social or political concerns of the writer.[2] No accounts survive by the Spartans themselves, if such were ever written.
- ^ Hodkinson, Stephen "The Imaginary Spartan Politeria" pp. 22–81 from The Imaginary Polis: Symposium, January 7–10, 2004 edited by Mogens Herman Hansen, Copenhagen: Danske Videnskabernes Selskab, 2005 p. 222.
- ^ a b Hodkinson S (31 December 2002). "Introduction". Sparta: Beyond the Mirage. The Classical Press of Wales. doi:10.2307/j.ctv1n357hd. ISBN 978-1-914535-20-8.