The Arizona Daily Wildcat supplies some "Fast Facts"--dealing with Alexander the Great's sparing of Pindar's house, and with Laconism:
- Alexander the Great spared one house after he captured Thebes in 335 B.C. The city had refused to surrender, and he ordered it to be razed to the ground. Because he loved poetry, he spared the house in which Pindar the poet had lived more than a century before.
- Spartan youngsters were taught to be terse in speech. They were supposed to act rather than to talk - the less said, the better. The district surrounding the city of Sparta (and the first area Sparta came to dominate) was named Laconia. To be terse in speech, therefore, is to be laconic.
The former was picked up by Milton (Sonnet 8) as protection for himself in 1642:
Lift not thy spear against the Muses' Bowre.
The great Emathian Conqueror bid spare
The house of Pindarus, when Temple and Towre
Went to the ground...
It is also the opening incident of Anna Apostolou's 1998 mystery, A Murder in Thebes...Of course, it was not necessarily just the fact that Pindar was a poet that saved his house...see this article, for example (search the page for "Pindar")...
Meanwhile, a commenter on the Belmont Club blog--the post in question is discussing Victor Davis Hanson's review of Oliver Stone's Alexander--quotes from VDH's Carnage and Culture, on the subject of this incident...and the appropriateness of a comparison with that quintessential 20th-century dictator...Adolf Hitler.
...My journey from regarding Alexander as a Hero to comparing him to Hitler has been an arduous one, for which the works of VDH can be given the credit(or blame). I too have misplaced my copy of "Soul of Battle," but here is a little blurb from "Carnage and Culture:"
Scholars sometimes compare Alexander to Caesar, Hannibal, or Napoleon...There are affinities with each; but an even better match would be Adolf Hitler...Hitler similarly engineered a brilliant but brutal march eastward...Both were self-acclaimed mystics, intent on loot and plunder under the guise of emmissaries bringing Western "culture" to the East and "freeing" oppressed peoples...For every promise of a "brotherhood of man," there was a "thousand-year Reich"; for every house of Pindar saved among the rubble of Thebes, there were visions of a new Rome in Berlin; for every gutted Parmenio, there was a murdered Rommel, for every desolate Tyre, Gaza, or Sogdiana, there was a ransacked Warsaw or Kiev; and for every Gedrosian desert, a suicidal Stalingrad.
I have corrected a few typos in the commenter's transcription (search for phrases from this excerpt at Amazon, and you can see it for yourself--that's how I corrected it)...
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