What Cliff Did They Drop the Spartan Babies
"This is Sparta?" we asked, disappointed, as we stared out at the barren mural below us. At that place isn't much to meet of ancient Sparta nowadays, and, according to Thucydides, there never really was much to see: the Spartans famously had avoided all luxury and ostentation. My fellow travelers through Greece—more often than not graduate students in Classics or Archeology—kicked around some aboriginal rocks so called it a twenty-four hours.
With no carefully carved marble or jumbo temples to dazzle u.s.a., our interest in the Lacedaemonians was quickly dwindling…until we piled onto our omnibus the next morning and drove up the mount to a cliff called the Apothetai. Hither, we were told, the Spartans had brought their unwanted babies and either abandoned them to face "exposure" to the gods and the elements or flung them into the chasm below. Our faces lit upward. Finally—there was something to see of ancient Sparta! This was the "blasphemy" and "madness" that Gerard Butler had (shamefully) taught us to look.[i] This was Sparta.
We had such fun at the Apothetai, posing for dramatic photos and pretending to cast each other into the chasm. On that hot July morning, I gave little thought to the haunting screams that once must have echoed from the cliff's abyss. I did non consider the hurting mothers and fathers must take felt, forced to carelessness or slaughter whichever babies the Spartan elders had deemed "flawed" and therefore unworthy of life. Thrilled at the barbarism of the Spartans, seemingly a globe apart from our civilized society of hospitals and obstetricians, I only laughed and smiled for the photographic camera.
Less than a week later, however, ii things happened: I stumbled upon the Center for Medical Progress's gruesome video of Dr. Deborah Nucatola cavalierly discussing the sale of aborted fetal tissue over dejeuner, and I saw a plastic bag full of bones—the basic of 449 infants and fetuses who had been tossed into a Hellenistic well in Athens.
Some of the disposed infants had died from premature birth, others from disease or infection, and even so others were likely victims of infanticide due to their ugly nativity defects. Simply any the cause, these children had about all died within their first calendar week of life, and their bodies had been dropped down a secluded well, never to be seen again until they were uncovered by archaeologists over two thousand years later.
As we poured over the little basic, the mood was entirely dissimilar from our jolly photo op on the Spartan cliff. With each body'south story or diagnosis, we became more and more somber. Last week's laughs were replaced with shudders and sighs. At times, we were moved to tears. Rationally, of course, we knew that even had they lived to adulthood, these Athenians would be long expressionless past at present anyhow. And notwithstanding we still felt the demand to weep for the curt, unfulfilled lives of the bones before us.
What had changed betwixt our trip to the Apothetai and our afternoon with the skeletons? Had we become more than sympathetic people? Had we all of a sudden adopted a new moral code? No, presumably we had not.
Simply in that location is something fundamentally different about hearing glorified legends of death and seeing the evidence of that decease up close. There was no sense of humour to be found in that bag of bones. All summer nosotros had been trained to reconstruct the ruins of aboriginal material objects and buildings with our minds, and then when confronted with the ruins of human corpses, I began to reconstruct the corpses with my mind, too. I saw dying babies, mothers wailing in despair, and midwives stealing off in the expressionless of night to dispose of the bodies. I no longer thought of a legendary, operatic tradition—I thought only of the reality of premature death faced by individual families each twelvemonth throughout the ancient globe, whether in Sparta, Athens, or elsewhere entirely.
And therein lies the power of the Center for Medical Progress's videos, which were commencement to go viral that very same day. The organization recognizes that the specific is more likely to capture our attention than sweeping statistics—indeed, the statistics may serve merely to desensitize us to the issue at mitt; as Josef Stalin once observed, 1 death is a tragedy, but a one thousand thousand deaths is a statistic. That we are susceptible to desensitization about infant expiry and fetal ballgame is evident everywhere—from my photos atop the Spartan Apothetai to the video of Planned Parenthood's Dr. Nucatola blithely discussing the sale of fetal body parts while munching salad and sipping wine. To counter that desensitization, the Center for Medical Progress decided to hold up a metaphoric bag of bones.
We may hear the numbers—that over 1 one thousand thousand fetuses are aborted in the United States every yr,[2] that 37% of Planned Parenthood's non-government health services revenue comes from ballgame services[three]—just it is entirely unlike to spotter a video in which the bodily trunk of a specific, aborted fetus lies displayed in a Planed Parenthood petri dish, gear up to be sold to the nearest stem prison cell researcher. No matter one's belief about when life begins, information technology is difficult to deny that the aborted fetus in the video, at 11.vi weeks onetime, is far from a meaningless clump of cells. With clearly delineated legs and arms, every bit well as a brain, a stomach, a liver, and a centre that was beating until just a few hours before, the miniature body, similar the bones in the Athenian well, serves equally a stark reminder that, statistics aside, a little boy was prevented from living. Those tiny eyeballs in the dish never had the chance to open upwardly and come across the globe around them. Those teeny hands never got to cling to their female parent's chest.
With these videos now out in the open, volition naught change? Volition we continue killing a million babies each year, will the government continue to fund the organization that sells those babies' torso parts, and volition Dr. Nucatola and her minions proceed the video's chilling refrain: "I'm going to basically beat beneath, I'yard gonna crush above, and I'1000 gonna see if I can become information technology all intact"?
If nosotros trust Plutarch's account in Lycurgus, then information technology seems the Spartans knew that babies deemed unfit by the assembly of elders would exist left to die at the Apothetai: the practice of exposure was common noesis. And yet the Spartans brought their unwanted infants far from their city, to a remote cliff, equally if they believed that the widely accepted practice were still somehow inherently incorrect. After all, if they had been completely sanguine about exposure and infanticide, would they not have performed information technology out in the open for all to come across, with their customary, triumphant defense of death, "This is Sparta!"?
Perhaps the Spartans, similar the Athenians, believed that the death of an infant would bring a sort of pollution to the city. Information technology is idea that the Athenians non merely threw their dead babies into far-off wells to protect their urban center from the "miasma" of untimely death, simply also sacrificed dogs into the wells, too, to counteract the pollution.
Where is that idea of pollution today? Where is the acquittance that what we are doing is somehow inherently wrong? We abort over 1 million babies each year. We, like the Spartan elders, frequently cull to eliminate those humans that nosotros deem unfit and imperfect (lest we forget, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a famous eugenicist). And now, thanks to this summer's videos, nosotros accept seen up close what, exactly, goes on in abortion clinics across America. Yet, similar the Spartans, we knowingly allow the slaughter to go along, and, worse than the Spartans, nosotros limited no shame for our actions. We do non accept our unwanted babies to distant cliffs or wells, for fear that their untimely deaths will offend the gods and bring pollution to the city; rather, we accept them to government-funded institutions and proudly pat ourselves on the back for our enlightened feminism and advanced medical techniques.
I shouldn't have laughed at the Spartans' barbarism that day at the Apothetai. We may take hospitals and obstetricians, but we have non advanced from the cliff or the well; if anything, we have taken a step backwards by becoming and so desensitized that nosotros practice not even realize or acknowledge that what nosotros do is wrong. Barbarism isn't throwing unwanted babies off cliffs. Atrocity is throwing unwanted babies off metaphorical cliffs, and then laughing nigh information technology over lunch and a glass of red wine. This is blasphemy. This is madness. But this is not Sparta—this is 21st century America.
Solveig Gold is a junior from New York Metropolis, majoring in the Classics Department. She can be reached at slgold@princeton.edu.
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Source: http://theprincetontory.com/this-is-blasphemy-this-is-madness-planned-parenthood-and-the-spartans/
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