A collection of short, terse sayings attributed to Spartan women, prizing courage, civic duty, and shame over personal grief or luxury.
Lacaenarum Apophthegmata ("Sayings of Spartan Women") is a brief compilation within Plutarch's Moralia, gathering one- or two-line anecdotes and quips attributed to named and unnamed women of Sparta. It sits alongside his companion piece on Spartan men's sayings and his Life of Lycurgus, part of Plutarch's broader interest in Spartan discipline (agoge) as a model of civic virtue. Most entries follow the same pattern: a mother, wife, or daughter is told of a son's or husband's death, cowardice, or wound, and answers with a clipped, often brutal line that subordinates personal feeling to the honor of Sparta.
The named figures include Argileonis, mother of the general Brasidas, who tells visiting Amphipolitans that Sparta has many men better than her dead son; Gorgo, daughter of King Cleomenes and wife of Leonidas, who mocks the bribe-bearing envoy Aristagoras and tells her husband, departing for Thermopylae, to "marry a good man and bear good children"; and Damatria, who kills her own son for cowardice and is memorialized in a two-line epitaph. Most of the other sayings are anonymous, attached only to the type "another woman" or "a Spartan woman," which underscores that these are meant as representative of a whole female civic character rather than individual biography. Several sayings culminate in a mother receiving news that all her sons died, then asking only how the city itself fared, and rejoicing on hearing it was victorious.
The collection matters as evidence of how later Greek and Roman writers idealized (and to some degree invented or curated) Sparta as a counter-image to their own softer societies. The sayings collapse maternal grief into patriotic slogan, valorizing death in battle over safety, shame over pain, and the collective over the individual, including grim moments such as a mother killing her son with a roof tile for bringing news of defeat rather than victory, or a captive woman killing herself rather than accept an order beneath her freedom. Read as a set, the piece is less a historical record than a rhetorical anthology built to instruct Greco-Roman readers in an extreme ideal of civic self-sacrifice.
“Strangers, my son was indeed fine and good, but Sparta has many men better than he.”
— Lacaenarum Apophthegmata · read this chapter →
“Father, this little stranger will ruin you, unless you throw him out of the house quickly.”
— Lacaenarum Apophthegmata · read this chapter →
“Because we alone give birth to men.”
— Lacaenarum Apophthegmata · read this chapter →
“That is not what I asked, you wretched slave, but how our country fares.”
— Lacaenarum Apophthegmata · read this chapter →
“Child, either with this or on this.”
— Lacaenarum Apophthegmata · read this chapter →
It is a short section of Plutarch's Moralia collecting terse sayings attributed to Spartan women, most of them mothers responding to news of a son's death, wound, or cowardice in battle. The recurring point is that these women prized Sparta's honor above personal grief, sometimes to the point of killing or disowning cowardly sons.
Gorgo was the daughter of King Cleomenes I and wife of King Leonidas of Sparta. In this collection she mocks the envoy Aristagoras for trying to bribe her father into war, and when Leonidas leaves for Thermopylae she tells him to 'marry a good man and bear good children' if he dies.
Plutarch reports it as fact in a few named cases, such as Damatria, who is said to have killed her son on his return for being 'a coward and unworthy of her,' with an epitaph quoted to that effect. Modern historians treat these as idealized or legendary anecdotes rather than verified events, since Plutarch is writing centuries after classical Sparta and compiling a curated moral collection.
It is the line a Spartan mother says while handing her son his shield as he leaves for war: come back either carrying the shield (victorious) or carried on it (dead), but never abandon it by fleeing. It appears in this text as one of several shield-related sayings from Spartan mothers.
Plutarch collected these sayings, alongside a parallel set attributed to Spartan men, as part of his broader fascination with Sparta's disciplined civic culture (agoge). The women's sayings serve to show that the famous Spartan austerity and devotion to the state were instilled by mothers and wives as much as by formal training.
Moralia: Ad Principem Ineruditum · Moralia: Adversus Colotem · Moralia: Amatoriae Narrationes · Moralia: Amatorius · Moralia: An Recte Dictum Sit Latenter Esse Vivendum · Moralia: An Seni Respublica Gerenda Sit · Moralia: An Virtus Doceri Possit · Moralia: An Vitiositas Ad Infelicitatem Sufficia · Moralia: Animine An Corporis Affectiones Sint Piores · Moralia: Apophthegmata Laconica · Moralia: Aquane An Ignis Sit Utilior · Moralia: Bruta Animalia Ratione Uti