(2013) and of Understanding Greek Warfare (2019). He is also the co-author (with C. Jacob Butera) of Battles and Battlefields of Ancient Greece: A Guide to their History, Topography, and Archaeology (2019).
Sears applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sparta and the Commemoration of War, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Sparta and the Commemoration of War concludes the third chapter of the book, a section on how the Spartans commemorated the Persian Wars, especially the last stand of the Three Hundred at Thermopylae in 480 BCE. The page states that the Spartans did not think of themselves as liberators, but instead focused on the excellence, glory, and fame of their war dead. Other states that did focus their commemorations on freedom-fighting, such as Athens and Corinth, tended to be more interventionist and fight more wars than the Spartans did after the Persian invasion. The Spartans eventually embraced liberation rhetoric too, which led them to fight more wars just as their Greek counterparts did.Learn more about Sparta and the Commemoration of War at the Cambridge University Press website.
The Page 99 Test, to be frank, works freakishly well for Sparta and the Commemoration of War. The paragraphs on this page encapsulate the main argument of the book, that, counterintuitively, when the Spartans emphasized what we would now consider “bad” reasons for fighting – glory, fame, and so on – they fought less often and less destructively than when they later claimed to fight for “good” reasons – such as for freedom or selflessly in the interests of all Greeks.
We sometimes talk about our own war dead in terms of glory and manly heroism, but we usually focus on self-sacrifice for higher ideals and altruistic campaigns on behalf of others. Yet, like the example of the Spartans reveals, commemorating war in terms of soldiers dying for freedom has done little to prevent war or mitigate its horrors. In fact, quite the opposite seems to be true, which the Spartans themselves found out.
How we remember war and commemorate the fallen reveals a lot about how we understand war in general, and has a bearing on how likely we are to fight wars in the future. We might not want to exalt glory and fame above all else as the Spartans did, but we should not mistake the commemorative rhetoric of freedom as being somehow anti-war. Ancient Sparta warns us that the language of liberation can disguise war-mongering, and, in the end, it does not often bring genuine liberation at all. Readers jumping to page 99 will find this core idea spelled out pretty clearly.
--Marshal Zeringue
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