Articles
‘"Anti-Enlightenment": National Socialist Educators' Troubled Relationship with Humanism and the Philhellenist Tradition'in Publications of the English Goethe Society 82 (3), 2013, pp. 193-207.
This article examines some of the ways in which scholars and educators under National Socialism attempted to construct a model of philhellenism for the ‘Thousand Year Reich’ which explicitly defined itself as descended from, yet opposed to, earlier manifestations of the phenomenon, especially as personified by Enlightenment figures such as Winckelmann and Goethe. They also proclaimed a return to the true, ‘living’ spirit of the original Greek gymnasion.Read more...
"'In Sparta fühlte ich mich wie in einer deutschen Stadt" (Goebbels): The Leaders of the Third Reich and the Spartan Nationalist Paradigm'in English and German Nationalist and Antisemitic Discourse, 1871-1945, ed. Felicity Rash, Geraldine Horan, Daniel Wildmann, Oxford (Peter Lang) 2013, pp. 91-115.
This article examines some of the ways in which many of the Third Reich's leading figures (including Hitler, Goering, Goebbels, Rust and Rosenberg) treated Sparta as the perfect paradigm of a racially-pure warrior-state, as well as claiming that, in a certain sense, the Reich was Sparta incarnate.Read more...
'Spartan Supremacy: A "Possession for Ever"? Early fourth-century expectations of enduring ascendancy'in Hindsight in Greek and Roman History, ed. Anton Powell, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2013, pp. 91-112.
This article explores and analyses the ways in which historians, both modern and ancient, have applied hindsight to the Spartan empire of 404-371 B.C., and to its downfall. Many modern treatments of the period are even labelled as studies in Spartan failure, and thus betray a tendency to over-emphasise error and lack of foresight on the part of Sparta.Read more...
'"Spartanische Pimpfe": The Importance of Sparta in the Ideology of the Adolf Hitler Schools'in Sparta in Modern Thought. Politics, History and Culture, ed. Stephen Hodkinson, Ian Macgregor Morris, Swansea (Classical Press of Wales) 2012, pp. 315-42.
This article explores the ways in which an ancient history textbook by the well-known archaeologist and educator Otto-Wilhelm von Vacano, entitled 'Sparta: The Life-Struggle of an Aryan Master Race', was used to encourage pupils at the Adolf Hitler Schools to identify with young Spartans, and to see Spartan history in proto-National Socialist terms.Read more...
'"Go, tell the Prussians…": The Spartan paradigm in Prussian military thought during the long nineteenth century'in New Voices in Classical Reception Studies ejournal, Issue 7 (2012), pp. 25-39.
This article examines the ways in which Ancient Spartan history and mores, and in particular the Spartan art of war, were often portrayed as providing useful precedents for the Prussian military. Commentators frequently saw the Officer-Corps as embodying a type of ‘new Sparta’ in Prussia, recreating a similarly militaristic and socially exclusive society in contemporary terms.Read more...
'"Spartanische Pädagogik deutscher Art": The influence of Sparta on the Royal Prussian Cadet Schools (1818-1920)'in Das antike Sparta, ed. Anton Powell, Vassiliki Pothou, Stuttgart (Franz Steiner Verlag), 2017, pp. 157-80. Based on an abridged version of the third and fourth chapters of the author's doctoral thesis, this article provides a useful summary of those findings which concern laconophilia in the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps. The paper on which the article is based was first presented at a conference of the International Sparta Seminar which took place at Regensburg University in September 2009.Read more...