The famous line preserved in Plutarch's Sayings of Spartan Women (Moralia 241F) seems to make pretty straightforward demands of Spartan warriors. "Either this or on this" (e tan e epi tas), the mother says to her son, handing him his shield to go to war. The expectation was, apparently, for a brave warrior either to win the fight and carry his shield home, or to be brought home on his shield as one of the heroic fallen. The alternative - to come home without the shield, having thrown it away or lost it - was unacceptable.

There's only one problem with this simple rule: all our other evidence agrees that the Spartans didn't actually bring their dead home.

Unlike other major states like Athens, which spent lavishly on the repatriation of their war dead for public burial, the Spartans were in the habit of burying their dead on or near the battlefield as a lasting reminder of their sacrifice. Mounds scattered all over Greece would testify to Spartan commitment to its allies and foreign interests. The famous epigram to the dead of Thermopylai, composed by the poet Simonides, attests to the practice:

Stranger, tell the people of Lakedaimon, that we lie here, obedient to their commands.

There's a reason the epigram says "we lie here". It's because the Spartan dead actually did lay there, and (with the exception of Leonidas himself) were never brought home, even after the Persians were defeated a year later. We have more concrete evidence than this: the Spartans who fell fighting against the democratic insurgents at Athens in 403 BC were actually buried in the Kerameikos at Athens and have been recovered there. We know it's the same guys because the inscription over the tomb contains the name of the commanding officer whom Xenophon notes as one of the fallen. This is rock-solid evidence. Fallen Spartans weren't carried home. Their shields never made it home either.

It's clear, then, that the line is just rhetorical. It doesn't reflect a real Spartan practice. At best it harks back to an earlier period when particularly wealthy Spartans were still brought home if they died in war; the people of Sparta's heyday would still have been able to see the crumbling markers of their graves by the roadside. But they wouldn't have been carried on top of unwieldy, dome-shaped shields. In any case, it's clear that the statement is not meant to be taken literally. We don't need to be too concerned with what the line regards as the sole available outcomes for a Spartan going off to war. Much more relevant is the question what the line means.

What it means is that in the Classical Greek world there was great shame attached to losing one's shield in battle, since those who dropped their shield usually did it to make an easier getaway. The Greek aspis was a heavy, cumbersome thing held by a double grip you had to loop your whole lower arm through; you couldn't drop it easily just by letting to. If you were trying to make speed you'd have to make the conscious decision to fling the shield. In other words, those Greek hoplites who ended up without a shield after a battle would have marked themselves as "cowards" who had run away from the fight. It didn't matter if the battle had been won; the individual without a shield had not done his part. That is the key point - not the shield itself, but what its loss implies about one's behaviour. Plutarch (Moralia 220A) preserves another saying from a Spartan king that seems to prove the point the mother was making:

When someone asked why they punish with disgrace those among them who lost their shields, but did not do the same thing to those who lost their helmets or their breastplates, [Demaratos] said, "Because they put those on for their own sake, but the shield for the common good of the whole line."

Now, the punishment of "disgrace" mentioned there is actually the Greek atimia, which literally means "dishonour" but was also used to describe the punishment of stripping someone of their citizen rights. Admittedly, the Spartan punishment for this form of supposed cowardice didn't quite stretch that far. Other sources describe the treatment of "tremblers", which involved the removal of various rights and a social ostracism, but no loss of citizen status. The same crime was punished more harshly in Athens:

All who left their post, or were convicted of draft evasion or cowardice or failure to fight in a naval battle, or threw away their shields, or were convicted of three times bearing false witness or three times issuing a false summons, or maltreated their parents – all of these were deprived of citizen rights but kept their property.

-- Andokides 1.47

This was an unbearable punishment in a status-obsessed world in which the difference between citizen and non-citizen was enormous. Unsurprisingly, "shield-thrower" was a common insult at Athens, a synonym for coward and a name you'd call someone you thought unworthy of citizen status.

So, would this be the fate that awaited our Spartan warrior, who couldn't find his shield even as his victorious comrades stripped the bodies of the fallen enemy? Would he be judged a "trembler" and treated as an outcast in Spartan society, forced to sit alone at dinner and be picked last in ball games (Xenophon, Constitution of the Spartans 9.4-5)?

Most likely not. The passages describing the treatment of cowards at Sparta are very well known, but they describe only the ideal of tradition and the letter of the law. They don't describe a situation occurring in practice. Back in 2006, when Jean Ducat scoured the sources for evidence of people actually punished with atimia for cowardice in battle, he found only a single unambiguous example (Aristodemos, the sole survivor of Thermopylai). We know of no other case in which anyone was convicted for flinging their shield away, for being a coward, for leaving his assigned station, or any of the other infractions that ought to have resulted in the "trembler treatment". What we do have is two three separate examples in which large numbers of Spartans did surrender their arms or run away from battle, after which the laws against cowardice were specifically deemed not to apply. In other words, we have just one individual case where a Spartan allegedly ran from battle and had the book thrown at him; if it happened to a big enough group, the Spartans were smart enough to look the other way. After all, put enough men of military age together in a state of permanent humiliation, and they might get some thoughts as to how they might restore their status. Besides, Sparta was constantly hemorrhaeging citizens, and couldn't afford to ostracise any significant chunk of the few they had left.

Of course, our Spartan is alone and might therefore be subject to greater scrutiny. His fate might depend on what his comrades saw of the event where he lost his shield, or the explanation he offers for his inability to find it after the battle. But the key point is that the loss of the shield is only a symbol of cowardice, just like the "come home on your shield" line is only a symbol of death in battle. What actually matters is whether our Spartan committed the crime of running away from a fight, abandoning the position assigned to him by his officers and by Spartan law. If he was seen to do so, he might face the charge of cowardice and be punished with atimia, if the authorities are particularly keen to make an example of him. But if he was not seen to behave like a coward, the loss of his shield will be trivial to the story, and he will likely go free. And his helot shieldbearer will have an easier time on the way home, so that's a perk.

 

Edit: actually that source is Ducat, J., ‘The Spartan “Tremblers”’ (trans. J.-P. Shaw), in S. Hodkinson/A. Powell (eds.), Sparta & War (2006), 1-55