SOURCE: Tigerstedt, E. N. “Lacedaemon: History, Myth, and Propaganda.” In Stockholm Studies in History of Literature 9: The Legend of Sparta in Classical Antiquity, Volume I, pp. 19-28. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1965.

In the following essay, Tigerstedt considers why so much of Spartan history and culture is cloaked in myth and legend.

The growth of a historical legend such as that of Sparta presupposes a nucleus around which it more or less gradually crystalized. Scholars, it is true, are often forced to resign themselves to the annoying fact that while they must assume the existence of such a nucleus they are unable to define it more precisely. Here we are more fortunate. We are concerned with a city and a state whose life was enacted in the clear light of history, not to say world history, whose fate was described by Greece's most important historians and whose institutions were analyzed...