Were the Ancient Spartans Blond?

The ancient Spartans have been a subject of intense fascination and speculation for thousands of years. The Sparta that exists in the popular imagination is often quite different from the one that existed in historical reality. This phenomenon is so well established that it even has a name; historians have labelled the imaginary Sparta that has so intrigued people throughout history “the Spartan mirage.”

One very peculiar aspect of how Sparta has been imagined in modern times is the idea that the overwhelming majority of the ancient Spartans had blond hair. This idea was far more popular a century ago than it is today, but it still hasn’t entirely died out. The idea is especially prominent among white supremacists, who like to imagine the ancient Spartans as blond Aryans who defended Greece against the non-white barbarian hordes of the Persian Empire.

The idea of the “blond Spartans,” however, is based on very little evidence. People mostly only continued to believe in it because it supports their own mythology of racial superiority.

The perception of the Spartans as blond

I recently finished reading the novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker, which was originally published in 1911. The novel is a work of fiction about the life of Aristodemos of Sparta, who, according to the Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC), was one of only two Spartan hoplites to survive the Battle of Thermopylai in 480 BC.

I read the book as part of a project about the modern reception of ancient Sparta for one of my classes. It presents a view of the ancient Spartans that is typical of early twentieth-century historical fiction set in ancient Greece—complete with characters talking in faux-archaic language, near-constant references to obscure people, places, and ideas from ancient Greek sources, and a romanticized depiction of the relationship between a master and slave.

One of the more peculiar aspects of the novel is its apparent obsession with the idea that the ancient Spartans were all blond and that blond hair was a defining physical feature of the Spartans.

ABOVE: Cover illustration for the novel The Coward of Thermopylae by Caroline Dale Snedeker

Spartan characters in the novel are consistently described as having blond hair, while Athenian characters are consistently described as having black hair. The main character of the novel, Aristodemos, is described as the child of a Spartan mother and an Athenian father. When Snedeker describes Aristodemos’s appearance, she says:

“The boy was all Athenian, with never a feature of mother save her golden hair. He was spare with the thinness of ten years, but showing already the deftness of step, and delicate control that Athenian training gave.”

Later in the novel, when the character Lykos sees a Spartan woman for the first time, he is astonished by her golden hair, which the author spends a full paragraph describing in great detail:

“The maiden stood bareheaded, crowned like a goddess with her golden hair, the rich colourful golden of the south. It parted rippling down her temples like the hair of Hera, was drawn softly back under a fillet into loose knot behind. It curled, glittered, fairly played with the sun, and gave her whole figure a sense of lightness and of wings.”

“Lykos’s soul suddenly went into his glittering eyes. All unconscious, absorbed in the girl’s beauty, he actually spoke to her out loud.

“Daughter of golden haired Menelaos, how fair thou art!”

The goddess Hera is indeed depicted with curly blond hair in some surviving ancient Greek vase paintings.

ABOVE: Detail of a depiction of the goddess Hera from the tondo of an Attic white-ground kylix dating to c. 470 BC or thereabouts, discovered at the site of Vulci in Etruria, depicting the goddess with curly blond hair

There is a dark side to this focus on the Spartans’ supposed blondness, though; the reason why the Spartans’ blond hair is such a focus of interest for Snedeker in particular is because she portrays the Greco-Persian Wars as a racial conflict between the blond Aryan Spartans and the non-white races that make up the Persian army.

When Snedeker describes the Persian armies, she emphasizes the idea that those are the hordes of non-white barbarians that have come to wipe out white civilization. She particularly focuses on the alleged presence of black people among the Persian forces; in the novel, Aristodemos has a whole conversation with a random Phthian about how disgusting and inferior they think black people are:

“‘I did but wonder,’ he said, ‘who be those black men yonder smelling worse than many goats?’ He pointed to a strange half naked band of ebon savages who wore upon their heads the skins of horses’ heads, with the ears set upright, the mane serving for a crest. They seemed creatures of some unwholesome dream.”

“‘Those,’ said the Greek, ‘be Lybians. Men say that where they live is sand only, stretched out like the sea. But shouldst see their hair! ’Tis black sheep’s wool, and no hair at all!’”

The Achaemenid Empire did rule parts of Africa at the time when Xerxes I launched his invasion of Greece in 480 BC and it is possible that there may have been some people in Xerxes I’s army that we would consider “black. “ After all, Egypt was under the rule of the Achaemenid Empire at the time and, as I discuss in this article from April 2020, there were definitely some people in ancient Egypt who we would consider “black.”

Nevertheless, the surviving ancient Greek sources pertaining to the Greco-Persian Wars do not focus on the presence of the black people in Xerxes I’s army and we can probably safely assume that they did not make up an especially large portion of the army.

Furthermore, the way the Lybians are portrayed in Snedeker’s novel is more rooted in early twentieth century American prejudices and racial stereotypes than in anything from the actual ancient Greek sources. People who we would consider “black” are mentioned in ancient Greek sources, but they are not portrayed as stinking “half naked ebon savages.” (Mind you, Aithiopians are sometimes stereotyped negatively in Greek texts, but, when they are stereotyped negatively, they aren’t stereotyped in the same way that the Lybians in Snedeker’s novel are.)

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a head of an African man from Ptolemaic Egypt dating to between c. 120 and c. 100 BC

The idea of blond Spartans today

The idea that the ancient Spartans were overwhelmingly blond has largely faded from popular culture. In October 2019, I wrote a detailed article debunking the historical inaccuracies in the 2006 fantasy action film 300, which is by far the best-known representation of ancient Sparta in modern popular culture. In that film, most of the Spartans are portrayed with black or brown hair, including the main character, King Leonidas. The makers of that film clearly didn’t subscribe to the “blond Spartans” idea.

Nevertheless, the idea of the “blond Spartans” has certainly not gone away. Nowadays, the idea seems to be mainly found on right-wing conspiracy theorist and white supremacist websites. For instance, here is a lengthy post on the conspiracy theory website Above Top Secret claiming that “blue eyes and blond hair were considered to be common among the aristocrats (upper class) in ancient Greek and Roman society.” The article specifically claims that “women of Sparta” were all blond.

Here is an article by a man named John Harrison Sims that was published on 1 October 2010 on the white supremacist website The Unz Review, which is otherwise known for promoting Neo-Nazi ideology, especially hard-core anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. In the article, Sims claims that ancient Greece was an exclusively white civilization and that the ancient Spartans and Thebans were members of the supreme Nordic race. Sims writes:

“Thus, classical Greece was a fusion, both cultural and racial, of these two types of whites. Some city-states, such as Thebes and Sparta, were predominantly Nordic. Others, such as Athens, were predominantly Mediterranean, and still others were mixtures of the two.”

A post on the white supremacist blog Disenchanted Scholar dated to 2 October 2015 quotes the portion of Sims’s article talking about ancient Sparta. The anonymous author of the post remarks:

“And that’s why the Ancients had Empires. The IQ required would match.”

The author of the blog is, of course, implying that white people with blond hair and blue eyes naturally have higher IQs than other people and that they are therefore uniquely suited to building empires.

Obviously, this is all just a boatload of racist nonsense. Nevertheless, someone who happened to stumble across one of these articles who didn’t subscribe to the racist ideology presented in them could easily be fooled into thinking that the idea that the ancient Spartans were particularly noted for their blondness was rooted in real historical evidence.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the claim from a post on the right-wing conspiracy theorist website Above Top Secret that the women of ancient Sparta were all blond

A look at the supposed evidence for Spartan blondness

After looking at all these articles claiming that the ancient Spartans were overwhelmingly blond, I have found that they all tend to cite the same pieces of evidence. Namely, here is all the evidence that is usually cited to support the idea of Spartan blondness:

• In the Iliad, Menelaos, the king of Sparta, is often described using the epithet ξανθός (xanthós), which refers to a sort of golden hair color that is somewhere between light brown, blond, and red.

• The Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BC) describes Helen of Sparta is described as “ξανθή” (xanthḗ), which is the feminine form of ξανθός, in Fragment 23. (I previously discussed this passage in this article about Helen’s appearance that I published in August 2019.)

• The Spartan poet Alkman (lived c. seventh century BC) describes the character Hagesichora, a Spartan woman, as having “golden hair” and a “silver face” in his poem known today as the Louvre Partheneion. Alkman also refers to the Spartan poet Megalostrata as “ξανθή” in Fragment 37.

• The Greek lyric poet Bakchylides of Keos (lived c. 518 – c. 451 BC) references “ξανθαὶ Λακεδαιμον[ίων],” which means “the reddish-blond-haired women of the Spartans,” in his twentieth ode.

At first glance, this evidence might seem convincing, but, upon closer examination, it all quickly falls apart.

What the ancient Greeks really meant by “ξανθός”

First of all, we need to clarify the meaning of the Greek word ξανθός. When most English speakers hear the word “blond,” they immediately think of a very light yellowish color. This is the hair color that the actress Marilyn Monroe (lived 1926 – 1962) had for most of her career and it is the color that most women dye their hair when they say they are dying it “blond.”

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of Marilyn Monroe with bleached blond hair in the 1953 film Niagara. This is the color most Americans immediately think of when they hear the word “blond.”

It is possible that the Greek word ξανθός may have sometimes referred to this color, but this is certainly not the color that the ancient Greeks would have immediately associated with the word. When describing very light blond hair, the ancient Greeks generally did not call it “ξανθός”; instead they called it “λευκός” (leukós), which means “white” or “very light in color.”

The word ξανθός actually usually refers to a sort of reddish-brownish-blondish color. To give you an idea of the sort of color this word generally refers to, the verb ξανθίζω (xanthízō) literally means “to make golden brown” and generally refers to the process of cooking something. Obviously, when you are cooking something, you don’t want it to be a light yellow color; instead you want more of a golden brown color. A much more accurate translation of the word ξανθός would actually be “tawny.”

Incidentally, my own hair is probably fairly close to the color that the ancient Greeks most often had in mind when they used the word “ξανθός.” As you can tell from the photograph below, my hair is not a yellow blond, but rather a somewhat darker, golden brown color. I still normally think of myself as “blond,” but my hair isn’t exactly the color that most people think of when they hear that word.

ABOVE: Photograph I took of myself in August 2019

Some more holes in the idea of “blond Spartans”

In any case, many deities and heroes in the Homeric poems aside from just Menelaos are described as “ξανθός”—not because tawny hair was a common feature among the ancient Greeks, but rather because most people had black hair and tawny hair was rare enough that those who did have it stood out. When Homer calls a hero “ξανθός,” he is doing it to show that there is something remarkable about that hero’s appearance, something unusual that is worth mentioning.

My sister tells me that, in Japanese anime, the main character usually has very elaborate and brightly colored hair. According to her, this is done to set that character apart from the other characters and make them more visible. When Homer describes a hero as “ξανθός,” he’s basically doing the same thing; he’s trying to set that hero apart and show that there’s something unusual about their appearance.

Furthermore, according to Greek mythology, neither Helen nor Menelaos were of Spartan ancestry. Helen was the daughter of Zeus (a god) and Leda (an Aitolian princess) and Menelaos was the son of Atreus (the king of Mykenai) and Aërope (a Kretan princess). How these mythical characters of non-Spartan ancestry are described in poetry, then, is basically irrelevant to how the actual native Spartans looked in reality.

The white supremacists like citing Alkman’s poetry as evidence for Spartan blondness, but Alkman never actually says that most Spartans had blond hair; he just describes two Spartan women—one of whom, Hagesichora, is probably a fictional creation anyway—as having tawny hair. Furthermore, as we have seen, it was common for poets to describe notable people as having tawny hair because this was a way of showing that they were physically unusual.

Bakchylides references some Spartan women as having tawny hair, but he does not say that all Spartan women had tawny hair, or even most of them. It is likely that Bakchylides was simply employing the same trick as Homer, Sappho, and Alkman; since his twentieth ode is about Sparta, he describes Spartan women as having tawny hair simply to show that they were physically remarkable.

Finally, there is not a single passage in any surviving prose work that claims that the ancient Spartans all had blond hair. Even authors who wrote extensively about the Spartans and their culture, such as Herodotos, Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BC), Xenophon (lived c. 431 – 354 BC), and Ploutarchos of Chaironeia (lived c. 46 – after c. 119 AD), never say anything about the Spartans having been remarkably blond.

If the Spartans really were overwhelmingly blond, we would expect the historians to take note of this. Instead, the historians say nothing about it at all.

ABOVE: First-century AD Roman fresco from Pompeii, showing Helen about to embark for Troy. Here Helen is depicted with what appears to be auburn hair.

Conclusion

The idea of the blond Spartans seems to be nothing but a racist fantasy based solely on a handful of references to specific Spartans with blond hair in certain works of Greek poetry. I’m sure a few Spartans probably had blond hair, but the idea that all or even most of them had blond hair is clearly misguided. Blond hair in general has never been particularly common in Greece or the Peloponnesos and the evidence to support the idea that the ancient Spartans were all blond is remarkably scant.