Musk and Trump in the Oval Office. Image: White House.

Ancient Sparta was a weird place (almost as weird as the US) and all the other Greek city states, as well as the Persians, knew it. It was an oligarchy, ruled by the city-state’s oldest families, where almost all of the labor was performed by an enslaved population of non-native born Spartans (helots) so that the home-grown Spartans could spend all day buffing up their physiques and fine-tuning their war-making skills.

Men and women in Sparta lived separately, even after marriage. Yet even though Sparta was the ultimate Brotopia, Spartan women generally enjoyed more “rights” than other Greek women, even in democratic Athens. For example, the Spartan women were the only women in ancient Greece who could own property and speak openly during political debates. They were also sent to compete against the men from Athens, Corinth, Thebes, Aegina in the Olympic Games. The Spartan princess Cynisca competed in four chariot races and won twice, once in 396 BCE and again in 392 BCE. (This was, of course, even more humiliating for the Hellenic boys on the sporting grounds of Olympia, than when Lia Thomas, the female trans swimmer, tied FoxNews darling Riley Gaines for fifth place(!) in the 200 yard freestyle at the NCAA championships. Still, the humbled Ancient Greeks didn’t ban women from competing against men at the games.)

One of the laws handed down by the great Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus was that Sparta was to have no written laws. I said it was weird. What we know of the Spartan constitution comes largely from Socrates’ student Xenophon (a better read and much more interesting dude than Plato IMHO), who sold his considerable services to Sparta during the Peloponnesian war.

The aversion to writing didn’t just apply to laws. Spartans didn’t write epic poetry, plays, philosophy, biographical sketches or history, even accounts of their own storied battles at Thermopylae and Plataea. They could write and read. But they choose not to, perhaps heeding the warning (and one I wish multiple times a week I’d heeded) of the Egyptian deity Thamus to Thoth, the Ibis-headed god who invented writing:

This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. (The Phaedrus, Plato)

You’ll begin to appreciate the wisdom of Thamus’s warning when you try to remember the deleted data on Covid infections from the CDC, the toxic waste sites near you from the elided Toxic Release Inventory, the amount of sea level rise at your beach house over the last 30 years measured by the soon-be-defunct NOAA, the 1-800 number for FEMA after the F-5 tornado wiped out your house or those DOT reports on how likely your Tesla cybertruck is likely self-immolate.

Like the US, Sparta was an oligarchy, in that it was run by a small group of elites; yet it wasn’t an oligarchy that was obsessed with the accumulation of wealth. You won’t find any Spartan coins in museums because they never minted any, using iron bars instead, which had limited value only among other Spartans. (No wine merchant from Naxos was going to accept iron bars as a payment for a shipload of amphora filled with the island’s famous vintage.) Indeed, Spartans were prohibited by one of Lycurgus’s unwritten laws from engaging in any kind of commerce, all of which was handled by another group of people (free but denied citizenship rights) called the Períoikoi, much of which consisted of renting out the Sparta-trained soldiers as mercenaries. But hoarding and avarice were universally frowned upon.

The Spartans didn’t build monuments or marble temples. When I hiked through Sparta 45 years ago, there were only a few overgrown stone walls to mark the presence of one of the most powerful city states in the Mediterranean for more than three hundred years. (The lack of ruins hardly mattered since no marble temples, not even the Parthenon, could compete with the beauty of the snow-capped Taygetus Mountains that the Spartans woke up to every morning and I spent the next three days hiking in, through up dark gorges to sparking ridges with a knapsack containing a copy of Thucydides, dried fish, chunks of Graviera cheese and a winesking of retsina–still not a fan.) It was an austere society, but an austerity shared by all, if not equally.

Now, I arrive at my point, such as it is. Sparta’s government was unique in that it had two chief executives, call them “kings”, if you like, who had equal power (and powerful they must have been since both “royal” families traced their origins to the seed of Hercules). Sparta was one of the few Diarchies that we know of (the Roman Republic model its two consuls after the Spartan system, though the consuls were limited to one-year terms and, until the rise of the dictators Sulla, Crassus, Pompey and Julius Caesar in the first century BCE, the real power resided with the Senate).

And now a Diarchy has assumed power in the United States, featuring a duumvirate of Trump and the world’s richest human, Elon Musk. The difference being: in Sparta, the diarchy, according to Aristotle, was meant to serve as a check on absolutist power and here it is being used to consolidate it.

Unlike our two kings, the Spartan leaders were not verbose. They spoke in short, declarative sentences and didn’t ramble. They were in a word: “Laconic,” whose etymology is derived from the name of the greater Spartan city state: Lacedaemon (Laconia).

Last week our co-rulers made separate appearances at CPAC, a kind of Dionysian festival for the Cult of MAGA, where both of them were far from laconic about their plans to recreate the Republic in their own images.

Taking Xenophon as my model, I’ve pulled some relevant quotations from our two Diarchs so that we’ll have a keener sense of exactly the kind of tyranny-by-two that is in store for us…

On Their Own Awesomeness

Musk: I am become meme. Yeah. I was living the meme. It’s just — I was living the dream, and I was living the meme, and that’s, pretty much what’s happening.

I mean, DOGE started out as a meme. Think about it! Now it’s real! But it’s cool! This is awesome.

We’re, you know, we’re trying to get good things done, but also, like, you know, have a good time doing it and, uh, you know, and have, like, a sense of humor.

You know. So, like, I mean, the sort of the left wanted to make comedy illegal, you know, you can’t make fun of anything. So this is, like, comedy suuuuuucks. It’s like, nothing’s funny. You can’t make fun of anything.

It’s like, LEGALIZE COMEDY! YEEEAH! Legalize Comedy!…Freedom of speech, having fun again, it seems like we should… We should have a good time. You know?

I mean, I thought, I thought we were sort of heading for a point of no return really, you know, until, um, that’s why it was so essential that President Trump win the election and, and that there, there be a Republican majority in the House and Senate, which, thanks to you [gestures generally at CPAC audience] that, that has been accomplished. Yeah.

The Biden administration was, was attacking me next level. I mean, the Department of Justice — or Injustice, under the Biden administration — was, I mean, they were suing SpaceX. They’re suing SpaceX for not hiring asylum seekers. And we’re like, but it’s actually illegal for us to hire asylum seekers because we’re… rocket technology is covered under ITAR rules, which that means it’s an advanced weapons technology, yeah. And so we can only hire permanent residents or green card or citizens, right? Like, so we’re damned if we do, damned if we don’t. We said like, so how can they sue us for not hiring asylum seekers when it’s actually illegal for us to do so. But nonetheless, there was a big Department of Justice or Injustice case about this against SpaceX, so obviously it was an antagonistic situation, and those astronauts were supposed to be up there for eight days, and now they’re up for eight months. Does that make any sense? And we, we, we, obviously could have brought them back sooner, but they didn’t want anyone who could support President Trump to look good. Basically.

That’s the, that’s the that’s the issue.

Trump: I heard O’Reilly last night say Donald Trump for the first four weeks is the greatest president ever in the history of our country. That was O’Reilly. Bill O’Reilly is alright. You know who he said second was? George Washington. That’s not bad. I beat George Washington. I love beating George Washington.

I watched this MSNBC, which is a threat to democracy, actually. They’re—they’re stone cold, but they’re stuttering. They’re all screwed up. They’re all mentally screwed up. They don’t know what—their ratings have gone down the tubes. I don’t even talk about CNN. CNN sort of like, I don’t know. They—they—they are pathetic, actually. But MSNBC was mean. Their ratings are absolutely down.

This Rachel Maddow, what does she have? She’s got nothing. Nothing. She took—she took a sabbatical where she worked one day a week. They paid her a lot of money. She gets no ratings. I should go against her in the ratings because I’ll tell you, she gets no rate. All she does is to talk about Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, all different subjects. Trump this, Trump that. But these people are really—I mean, they lie. You—they shouldn’t be allowed to lie every night. They are really a vehicle of the Democrat party. They should........

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