Sparta

The broader Greek name of the Spartan state, Lakedaímōn, naming the land and polity rather than the town, and the source of the citizens’ own self-designation, Lakedaimonioi, Lacedaemonians. It is the older and in some senses the official name: Homer’s catalogue lists the contingent of Lakedaímōn, the realm of Menelaus, and Spartan inscriptions and treaties use Lakedaimonioi where one might expect “Spartans.” The name was also personified as a mythical king, Lacedaemon, son of Zeus and husband of Sparta.

Lakedaímōn is the name the Spartans preferred for themselves, and its survival explains an oddity of English: the abbreviation on the Spartan shield was the letter lambda, for Lakedaímōn, not sigma for Sparta. Where most cities on these pages have one name that splits into many forms, Sparta has two names from the start, a city and a state, and this is the one the Spartans answered to. It heads the second family on the page, the polity beside the town.

The Greek name of the town itself, Spártē, the cluster of villages on the banks of the Eurotas that formed the unwalled city of Sparta. It is one of the two names by which the Greeks knew the place, the narrower one, naming the settlement rather than the state. Homer uses it of the city of Menelaus, and it is the standard name of the polis in classical prose, beside the broader Lakedaímōn for the realm.

Spártē is the form English took as Sparta, the name that won out in modern usage over its twin. Thucydides notes that the city, made of scattered villages without grand temples or walls, did not look the part of the power it was, and would seem, if deserted, far weaker than its fame; the modest town-name Spártē carries something of that, the plain name of a place whose strength was never in its buildings. It heads one of the two families on this page, the city beside the state.

The Latin name for the Spartan state, Lacedaemōn, taken from the Greek, with the adjective Lacedaemonius for its people and things. Latin kept both of Sparta’s names in use, Sparta and Lacedaemōn, just as Greek did, and Roman writers move between them freely; Livy narrates the wars of Lacedaemon and Cicero cites the discipline of the Lacedaemonii. The form passed into the learned vocabulary of medieval and modern Europe.

Lacedaemōn is the survival, in the West, of Sparta’s other name. It never became the everyday word that Sparta did, but it persisted in scholarship, and the Spartan land left a further mark on English in the adjective Laconic, from Laconia, the region of the Lacedaemonians; the famous brevity of Spartan speech is preserved in a word that remembers not Sparta the town but the wider Lacedaemonian name. The complex of Spartan names left its trace on English twice over, once as a place and once as a manner of speaking.

The Latin name for the city, Sparta, taken from the Greek Spártē with the regular adaptation of the final vowel. To Roman writers Sparta was the proverbial city of discipline and austerity, its laws of Lycurgus a stock example in moral and political argument; the name appears throughout Latin history and rhetoric as shorthand for stern simplicity. It is the form that modern European languages inherited.

Sparta is the city-name as the West received it, and the one that displaced Lacedaemon in common modern use. Where antiquity carried both names together, the modern world mostly kept only this one, so that the people who called themselves Lakedaimonioi are remembered as Spartans. The Latin entry is the hinge on which that simplification turned, the moment the doubled name began to settle, in the West, toward a single form.

The Arabic form of the city-name, Asbarṭa, with the prosthetic vowel that Arabic regularly supplies before an initial consonant cluster like sp-. Sparta reached the Arabic-writing world through the history of the Greeks that the Abbasid scholars inherited and translated, the wars with Persia and the rivalry with Athens; it is a name of the historians rather than the geographers, a place in the past more than a town on any contemporary map.

Asbarṭa shows the city-name surviving its journey east intact in all but its opening sound, which Arabic phonology reshaped. It carries the narrower of Sparta’s two names, the town rather than the state, and stands beside its companion Lakdimon as proof that the doubleness of the Greek name was not lost in translation: the Arabic historians, like the Greek and Latin ones, knew the place by both of its names at once.

The Arabic form of Sparta’s other name, Lakdimon, taken from the Greek Lakedaímōn through the Greek histories the Abbasid scholars rendered into Arabic. That the Arabic tradition preserved this name at all, beside Asbarṭa, shows how faithfully it followed its Greek sources, which used the two names side by side; a tradition working only from hearsay would have kept one name, not both.

Lakdimon completes the dual name across the page’s three languages. Greek had Spártē and Lakedaímōn, Latin Sparta and Lacedaemōn, and Arabic Asbarṭa and Lakdimon; in each, the city and the state stood as two names for one people. The doubleness that began on the Eurotas, where the town and the realm were called by different words, survived every translation, so that to know Sparta fully in any of these languages was always to know it twice.