Were the Spartans the only Greeks against eternal life?

Ozone

My knowledge about Spartans is very limited, but I've at least heard that the thing they cherished most was a warriors death, and the idea of living forever would be hell to them.

Is this exclusive to Spartans in Ancient Greek culture?

I find it interesting for a culture to be against living forever. That seems rare to me. But maybe it isn't and I just don't know yet :{o~
 

Avitus

Ozone said:
My knowledge about Spartans is very limited, but I've at least heard that the thing they cherished most was a warriors death, and the idea of living forever would be hell to them.

Is this exclusive to Spartans in Ancient Greek culture?

I find it interesting for a culture to be against living forever. That seems rare to me. But maybe it isn't and I just don't know yet :{o~
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Most warrior cultures look forward to heroic death, like the crusaders or other religious zealots. Vikings too now I think of it. Although I can't be 100% on this, I imagine that the armies of all the Greek city states had a similar love for death with glory and honor to those of Sparta, but Sparta emphasized miltary values in civilian life. On a more concrete note, Socrates once called dying the least terrible thing that can happen to a person, so there were definitely other Greeks who didn't want to live for ever.
 

Flocculencio

Donor
Well IIRC in the classical Greek worldview you only got a decent afterlife if you had a heroic death or had been otherwise exceptional. That way you got to go to the Elysian Fields. If you were just ordinary you had to go to the Asphodel Meadows where you just hover around listlessly.
 

cimon

"Glorious death" appears as early as the Homeric Poems,Iliad and Odyssey along with other values which were the legacy of those poems to the Greeks that evryone tried to live by;it was not common with the Spartans only.What was unique with the Spartans was the fact that they never retreated from the battle;they would win or die!That was(along with their training of course) that made the Spartans so dangerous.
 

aktarian

SPJ said:
I guess that Leonidas never really intended to "DINE IN HELL!" then huh? :D
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Considering Greeks didn't understand hell as we do, no. IIRC he said "dine in Hades".

Neither did Romans so giving Germanics hell on comander's command makes no sense. :rolleyes:
 

mrmandias

Flocculencio said:
Well IIRC in the classical Greek worldview you only got a decent afterlife if you had a heroic death or had been otherwise exceptional. That way you got to go to the Elysian Fields. If you were just ordinary you had to go to the Asphodel Meadows where you just hover around listlessly.
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The Elysian Fields were never the mainstream Greek conception, at least not during the classic period. They were a late and uncertain tradition, more a poetic fancy than anything. Most Mediterranean peoples of the time had a conception of a pretty sucky afterlife where you were only a shadow of a living person.
 

brokenman

aktarian said:
Considering Greeks didn't understand hell as we do, no. IIRC he said "dine in Hades".

Neither did Romans so giving Germanics hell on comander's command makes no sense. :rolleyes:
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Hades was a god. Proper would be "Dine in Tartarus" or "Dine in the Underworld".
 

Andreas

mrmandias said:
The Elysian Fields were never the mainstream Greek conception, at least not during the classic period. They were a late and uncertain tradition, more a poetic fancy than anything. Most Mediterranean peoples of the time had a conception of a pretty sucky afterlife where you were only a shadow of a living person.
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I think you 're correct. Nevertheless, there were a couple of similar to the Elyssian Fields concepts around, such as the "Islands of the Happy". Anyway, I guess that what most of the Greeks desired were an exceptional life and/or a heroic death, so that they would secure their "υστεροφημία" (Hysterophemia), meaning a long-lasting good memory of them among the living, after they die.
 

Kishan

In most of the cultures, the warriors aspired for heroic death in the battlefield as their most desirable end. They hoped to ascend the heaven of heroes as a result of such a hero's death. Thus it is an eternal afterlife that they hope to attain. Was the Spartans any different? Everybody knows that "eternal" life is not possible in this world. The only eternal life that a believer hopes to attain is in the heaven after death.
 

robertp6165

cimon said:
"Glorious death" appears as early as the Homeric Poems,Iliad and Odyssey along with other values which were the legacy of those poems to the Greeks that evryone tried to live by;it was not common with the Spartans only.What was unique with the Spartans was the fact that they never retreated from the battle;they would win or die!That was(along with their training of course) that made the Spartans so dangerous.
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It was also a large part of what, in the end, destroyed them. Because when they did lose, it was a major disaster for the Spartan state and the numbers of the citizen class took a long time to recover. Eventually the disasters happened frequently enough that the citizen class didn't recover, and went into a downward spiral from which they never returned.
 

robertp6165

mrmandias said:
The Elysian Fields were never the mainstream Greek conception, at least not during the classic period. They were a late and uncertain tradition, more a poetic fancy than anything. Most Mediterranean peoples of the time had a conception of a pretty sucky afterlife where you were only a shadow of a living person.
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Well, that's partially true. The ancient Hebrew (and modern Jewish) concept of Sheol was quite similar to the original Greek conception of the afterlife (Hades). But the concept of the Elysian Fields goes back at least to the time of Homer and Hesiod, which are about as "mainstream" as it gets in Greek mythology.
 

cimon

robertp6165 said:
It was also a large part of what, in the end, destroyed them. Because when they did lose, it was a major disaster for the Spartan state and the numbers of the citizen class took a long time to recover. Eventually the disasters happened frequently enough that the citizen class didn't recover, and went into a downward spiral from which they never returned.
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The citizen classes in Sparta and later in Athens were based on completely false grounds and without any real foresight;take this example:General Miltiades son of Miltiades,the victor of Marathon,lord of the Chersonese(Gallipoli) was an Athenian citizen in order to be elected general in 490 BC.his mother was a local ruler's daughter bordering Miltiades domains(non-Greek),In 458 BC according to thelaws of Ephialtes and Pericles that required both parents Athenians, he wouldn't be a citizen;the corresponding law iin Sparta concerned 'Neodamodeis' children of Spartan fathers and(probably) a perioikos lover.If the Neodamodeis were accepted as citizens,the demographic problem of Sparta would have been solved...
 
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