Did Spartan Shields Really Bear the Letter Lambda?

In popular culture, ancient Spartan hoplites are virtually always portrayed as fighting with shields decorated with the Greek letter lambda (Λ). This letter, of course, stands for Λακεδαίμων (Lakedaímōn), which was the most common name in antiquity for the Greek polis (i.e., “city-state”) that included that settlement of Sparta.

In historical reality, Greek hoplites, including Spartan hoplites, were expected to provide their own equipment and they could decorate their shields however they wished. Although there is evidence to suggest that a few Spartans probably did choose to decorate their shields with the letter lambda, the vast majority seem to have decorated their shields with other symbols, geometric designs, and images.

The misconception of the Spartan lambda

The misconception that all Spartan hoplites always carried shields bearing the letter lambda is absolutely ubiquitous in popular culture. Notably, in the 2006 fantasy action film 300, directed by Zack Snyder and based on the 1998 limited comic book series 300 by Frank Miller, all the Spartans are portrayed using perfectly uniform, unpainted, iron shields embossed with the letter lambda.

I’ve already written an entire article about how the film 300 is a wildly historically inaccurate piece of propaganda that deliberately distorts history to promote a right-wing extremist message that can be described as borderline fascist at best. In that article, I briefly address the inaccuracy of the Spartans all having identical shields, but I don’t talk about the use of the letter lambda specifically and whether it is accurate.

ABOVE: Screenshot from the 2006 fantasy action film 300 depicting a phalanx of Spartan hoplites with uniform shields bearing the Greek letter lambda

Movies are not the only place where you’ll see Spartan shields bearing the letter lambda. The idea that Spartan hoplites always carried shields with this letter on them is so thoroughly ingrained into the popular consciousness, that, if you simply search for the words “Spartan shield” in Google Images, every image that shows up in the first page of results depicts a shield bearing the letter lambda.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the search results in Google Images for the phrase “Spartan shield”

The shield with the letter lambda is so iconic and so inextricably associated with Sparta in the popular imagination that the current revision of the Wikipedia article “Sparta” even has an image of a shield with the letter lambda on it in the infobox at the top of the page, as though it were an official symbol of Sparta!

ABOVE: Screenshot of the current revision of the Wikipedia article “Sparta,” showing the shield with the letter lambda in the infobox

How ancient Greek shields worked

In historical reality, Greek hoplites in all poleis, including Sparta, were expected to provide their own equipment. Consequently, a hoplite’s shield was his personal property, not property issued to him by the state, and shields were not at all uniform. Greek hoplites regularly decorated their own shields with a wide array of diverse personal symbols, geometric designs, and images.

Surviving ancient Greek depictions of hoplites’ shields reveal the sheer diversity of the decorations they used. Below, for instance, is the famous Chigi Vase, a Proto-Corinthian olpe dated to between c. 650 and c. 640 BCE that was discovered in an Etruscan tomb in 1881. The vase depicts two armies of hoplites lined up to fight each other. The shield designs of the army on the right are clearly visible.

A couple hoplites have images of birds on their shields. One hoplite has the head of a bull on his. The soldier on the end has the face of the Gorgon Medousa, which is evidently meant to strike fear into the enemy hoplites. (As I discuss in this article I wrote in October 2020, the ancient Greeks widely used Medousa’s face as an apotropaic symbol to frighten away malevolent supernatural forces, so it only makes sense that a soldier would paint this symbol on his shield.)

ABOVE: Detail of the Chigi Vase, a Proto-Corinthian olpe dated to between c. 650 and c. 640 BCE, depicting Greek hoplites with shields decorated with a variety of symbols and patterns

The evidence for Spartans using shields with the letter lambda

The only piece of evidence that exists for the Spartans bearing the letter lambda on their shields is one extremely brief, out-of-context fragment from a lost comedy written by the Athenian comic playwright Eupolis (lived c. 446 – c. 411 BCE). It is numbered in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Eupolis’s fragments as Fragment 394. It seems to be mocking a cowardly man who fled from battle at the sight of Spartan shields.

This fragment has survived solely through quotation by the medieval Greek patriarch, scholar, and lexicographer Photios I of Constantinople (lived c. 810 – 893 CE) in the entry for the letter lambda in his Lexicon (p. 200.7). It reads as follows in the original Attic Greek:

“ἐξεπλάγη γὰρ ἰδὼν στίλβοντα τὰ λάβδα.”

This means, in my own English translation:

“For he was terrified when he saw the flashing lambdas.”

This is it—the sole surviving piece of evidence that supports all those lambdas you see in every single modern representation of the ancient Spartans. It’s only a single line, composed of six words in Greek, lifted by a medieval Greek lexicographer out-of-context from an unknown comedy written by a fifth-century BCE Athenian playwright. There is absolutely no mention of Spartans bearing shields with the letter lambda in any other ancient source.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust that is believed to represent the Athenian comic playwright Eupolis, who provides the sole surviving ancient reference to the Spartans painting the letter lambda on their shields

Evidence of Spartan soldiers using decorations other than lambdas

Given the fragment of Eupolis that I have just quoted, it is highly probable that at least a few Spartan hoplites really did decorate their shields with the letter lambda. This is in line with more general evidence that hoplites sometimes decorated their shields with the first letter of the name of their polis.

There is, however, compelling evidence that the vast majority of Spartan hoplites decorated their shields with other designs. Archaeologists have found hundreds of thousands of tiny, flat, lead votive figurines at sanctuaries all over Lakonia, the region around Sparta, dating to between roughly the mid-seventh century BCE and the mid-fourth century BCE. These figurines were most likely made by perioikoi (i.e., free people who lived in Lakonia under the rule of the Lakedaimonian state who did not possess citizenship).

It just so happens that many of these figurines depict hoplites bearing shields, who are almost certainly supposed to be Spartans. What’s interesting is that not a single one of these figurines depicts a hoplite with a lambda on his shield. Instead, they depict hoplites bearing shields decorated with all kinds of geometric designs, personal insignias, and images of animals. It therefore seems clear that Spartan hoplites were like hoplites from other Greek poleis; they decorated their shields however they wanted and lambdas were by no means the predominant decoration of choice.

ABOVE: Photograph from the Metropolitan Museum of Art website depicting a Lakonian lead votive figurine from the shrine of Artemis Orthia representing a Spartan hoplite with a shield bearing a geometric design, dating to the sixth or fifth century BCE