Meaning
Austere, disciplined, and uncomplaining - by choice or necessity. Applied to conditions (a spartan bedsit) or to people (a spartan traveller), the word praises endurance and shrugs at comfort, taking its tone from the city that made a virtue of having little. Approving, even romantic; it praises the person who does not complain. The laconic cousin covers the words they do not waste while being spartan. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Sparta, capital of Laconia, trained its citizens to disdain comfort and rhetoric alike, and Europe has been using the name for austerity ever since. The English adjective is old - Wiktionary traces it through Middle English Spartan and Spertan from Latin Spartanus - and the modern lowercase sense, showing indifference to luxury, is simply the city's whole social system compressed into a word. The record behind it is the famous one: Plutarch's collections of Laconic sayings, the ephors' one-word answer of If to Philip II of Macedon's threat to turn them out, the reply of Come and take them to the demand for weapons at Thermopylae, and Plato's remark in the Protagoras that Spartans concealed their wisdom and shot in a brief remark only when the moment came. The adjective keeps the discipline and quietly drops the brutality.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- spartan conditions
- Spartan discipline
- spartan lifestyle
Usage Examples
- The field station was spartan in the extreme - two bunks, one stove, a shelf of maps - and the glaciologists loved it.
- His spartan approach to luggage ran to one bag, any climate, any month of the year.
- The hostel's spartan breakfast, served in silence, was bread, butter, and more bread.