A Warrior by Any Other Name: The Rise and Fall of the Spartan Ideal
by
His Excellency The Honourable George Palmer KCMG, KB. Governor of Pendragon, Governor Emeritus of Sparta.
This treatise should be read as a response to Researcher Hartley's monograph on Cultural Nominative Determinism, previously published in Volume II, Issue 1 of this journal.It is a sign of the priorities of the Imperial Academic Society that there is no official social history of the Laconia System or indeed any other system, an oversight that greatly complicates the work of the sociocultural historian. As the first Governor of Sparta I flatter myself that I know a little something of the history of the early years of the colony and it's people and may have something to contribute on the subject. I have drawn on my experiences and various record and archives to produce the following potted history of the system and it's inhabitants, in the hope my amateur efforts may assist other researchers in this fascinating field.
The starting point must be that the system was not originally called Laconia. Admiralty records show that, after being discovered by the HMS
Beaufort under Commander Copper (the future Admiral Cooper), the system was assigned the name Centaurus under the astrologically based naming schema used by Survey Command in that period. The discovery occurred towards the end of the first exploration wave when public and political interest was beginning to wane, especially for systems like Centaurus which lacked an obvious distinguishing feature. Centaurus was catalogued as a binary system with a large asteroid belt and three jump points, a couple of moderate effort terraforming possibilities were identified along with good, but far from spectacular, mineral deposits scattered across several moons and planets. In short it was nothing particularly special for a public still enthralled by the shocking discovery of the mysterious alien constructions on Orford Ness, the only exception being the spark of interest from the astrophysics community who finally had a chance to closely study a binary star system. The system would remain in this low interest state for several years until the Epsilon Indi Incident and the disastrous and shocking first contact with the Automotons. The full story of that incident need not detain us, but briefly Epsilon Indi is jump connected to Centaurus and, while it had been discovered by the HMS
Beaufort as early as 2207 it had not been surveyed or even explored beyond a cursory EM scan. It was not until 2212 that the a proper survey was started with HMS
Challenger tasked to investigate the system, she was lost with all hands in a massed missile strike from the Automoton forces who had been orbiting the second planet. The larger survey cruiser HMS
Shackleton investigated the loss of communication with first survey, discovering both the wreck and, thanks to her far larger and more modern sensors, detecting the hostile ships at a safe distance. Efforts were made to communicate, with our current knowledge of the abdominal necro-mechanical nature of the Automotons we know these were doomed to failure and indeed they were soon abandoned. The culmination of the incident was the near-catastrophic attempted attack by the 1st Cruiser Squadron, the ships suffering heavy damage and barely escaping the system intact having done no damage to the enemy beyond depleting their missile stocks. As the unwillingness and indeed apparent inability of the Automoton ships to traverse a jump point was unknown this string of events was a shock to the people and politicians of the Empire. The response to this shock is where where the Sparta story truly begins.
Epsilon Indi is a mere 4 jumps from Sol and at that time all the intervening systems were essentially empty, colonisation efforts having been focused on the far more promising Orion branch. Centaurus suddenly became the first line of defence and the first beginnings of what would become the Sparta colony were made. The cargo fleets of the Royal Fleet Auxiliary swung into action and a listening post and refuelling station were established on what was still referred to as Centaurus II. The second Battle of Epsilon Indi in 2213 saw a reinforced cruiser squadron suffer a less serious but equally one-sided defeat and the Admiralty realise that containment of the Automoton was going to be a long term commitment. To this end it was decided a full colony in the system would be valuable, to support refit, repair and recreation facilities and allow the picketing forces to be maintained without having to travel back to Sol. Here we come to the critical decision, the choice to name the colony Sparta. The official position was that it was the Greek connotations of Centaurus that prompted the name with it's associations with defiance and martial vigour, this is correct but far from the full story. The choice was in fact a degree of gallows humour from the officers involved, while it was expected that the defenders of the colony both in orbit and on the ground would fight hard, it was also expected they would inevitably lose such was the technological advantage of the enemy. Thus the colony was named for a group who were 'all bark and no bite' a name which proved sadly prescient; the gap between the confident front presented to the public and the results of the simulated defence exercises was uncomfortably vast for my entire time as Governor.
Despite the looming threat at the gate, the early years of Sparta were not significantly different from any other military focused colony. With every month and then year that passed without the Automoton's bursting through the jump point the threat receded in the public mind. In late 2217 the system even experienced further development with an auto-mining installation established on Gorgon and the start of the private sector Amyclae Minerals operations on the eponymous moon. These were the last events I directly experienced as in 2218 I was moved to my current role as Governor of Pendragon, given later events it is darkly humorous that this was because Pendragon was seen as less politically and culturally stable than Sparta and more in need of a safe set of hands. It would fall to the new governor, the dramatically named Max Power, to handle the double shock of the encounters with two new, hostile alien species. The Gravehenge Cartel and the Sourmagh Combine were wildly different but from the perspective of Sparta they had three key similarities; they were hostile, they were close and crucially they were active. The running battles throughout the aliens home systems and back through Gladius and even Wayland caused something approaching panic as the system seemed surrounded by enemies. The response was another key point in the history of the colony, Governor Power made the unfortunate decision to rally the populace partly as British citizens but also as Spartans, perhaps inspired by his own "colonial" background as a graduate of the Luna Academy. The immediate threat passed and the Royal Navy would push back and then contain the two new enemies but by then the cultural infection had already taken hold, sadly encouraged by the inexperienced Governor.
The system's adoption of the Spartan ideals, or at least a heavily romanticised, sanitised and anglicised version of those ideals, was initially seen by the rest of the Empire as a mostly harmless fad. A few of the more public facing institutions were renamed but kept the same in form and more obviously the system was 'refounded' with it's current name of Laconia after a vicious bureaucratic fight which I'm told is still the talk of Civil Service legend. Culturally there was a fashion for speech to be as brief and witty as possible, while an affectation to being the frontline defenders of the Empire, but not expecting 'civilians' to appreciate that, was all but compulsory. This was not all talk, shipyards and training grounds were built, the colony was one of the few that had a waiting list to join the Navy and Army and a Military Academy was founded to train new leaders. The peak of this was the saga of HMS
Bellerophon, like many an ambitious colony it was decided to build a capital ship, in this case a variant of the
Renown-class battlecruiser. The technical specs need not detain us as it was the name that attracted the more intense interest, the Spartans wished to name the ship after a mythical hero such as Lysander or more controversially Leonidas. This did not go down well with the the rest of the Empire however, the Admiralty noted neither option had any real pedigree as a capital ship name and that the historical connotations of both names were not wholly positive. Far more seriously this was the point where the Imperial Parliament decided that the affectation with Sparta was tipping over into a dangerous obsession. The immediate problem was resolved when
Bellerophon emerged as an acceptable compromise being both classical and having been used for many successful and celebrated Royal Navy capital ships for centuries. In parallel with this pressure began to be applied to reshape the colony, beginning at the top; Governor Power was reassigned to Gomorrah (a new colony in the Nocturne system) and put under the close supervision of the system Governor-General based on Gotham. It is however unclear how much influence this had as these moves occurred in parallel with developments in the wider Empire that also undermined the system's identity. The Grand Fleet under Admiral Vaughan, and led by the famed and feted battlecruisers HMS
Renown and
Repulse, had swept the Sourmagh and the Gravenenge from the stars in 2223 and 2224. While the campaigns to conqueror their homeworlds would be far longer grinding campaigns of attrition the final result was never in doubt once the Empire controlled orbit. This was followed up by the 4th Battle of Epsilon Indi where HMS
Repulse and the 5th Cruiser Squadron was able to destroy the mobile Automoton ships in that system, even if the orbital bases remained too tough a nut to crack. The change however was clear, the Spartan claim to being a 'frontier' system, always somewhat shaky, was now a subject of open derision, something encouraged by the new Governor through official and unofficial channels. The final blow was the first triumphant deployment of HMS
Dreadnought in the 6th Battle of Epsilon Indi in early 2227, after which Commodore Shepard was the first Navy officer able to report a complete victory against the Automoton with all enemy ships and bases destroyed. Amongst the celebrations even the most stubborn Spartan realised that the game was up.
From a hardheaded practical perspective nothing changed, there was no grand redeployment of forces away and no fleet of cargo ships swooping down to move critical infrastructure to it's new home. What had changed was that Sparta was no longer a key defensive base with an implacable foe on the other side of a jump point, she was now a core world deep in the heart of the Empire, several jumps away from the actual frontier colonies let alone an actual threat. It would be Nimrod and Nocturne who became the frontline systems while Laconia had to adapt to a new role. It was one she was well suited to, Sparta remained a Sector Capital with a respectable industrial base, on the military side her academy remained prestigious and she was home to the largest army recruitment and training base outside of Sol while her skies held the third largest shipyard complex in the Empire. But it required a different mentality and as the population began that change so the more performative elements of their affected Spartan identity began to fall away. The core elements did not change, to this day there is not a single commercial shipyard in orbit and recruitment rates for the academies and army training centre remain way above average, but the details and presentation did. The first proof of this was in the cruiser design contest in late 2227, the Spartan design proposal did not have a Greek or even Classical name but was called Challenger. An entirely traditional Royal Navy capital ship name she also honoured the survey ship that had been lost during the initial exploration of Epsilon Indi, an example of how the system could have their own priorities and mythos while still being within the British mainstream.
I cannot pretend to be a dispassionate commentator on this subject, but I do not believe the Spartan phase of the colony was inevitable or even predictable with our current understanding of colonial socio-pyschology. Other colonies have been on the front line of severe threats and not undergone such radical changes, The Drift in the Gladius system was jump connected to two alien homeworld systems but did not remake itself as a high-Victorian society. (In passing it is worth noting that this colony was expected by the Admiralty and General Staff to be able to hold out against enemy attack and so was named after a group that fought hard and won). The speed with which the change took hold of Sparta and then the greater speed with which it collapsed do not suggest a deep rooted phenomenon but something transient and evanescent. I would tentatively suggest that due to it's location and resources the system was always going to develop as a large shipbuilding and army recruitment and training hub, but the large military academy and complete lack of commercial yards is very much a Spartan legacy.
I hope this treatise does aid in starting a more professional and thorough sociocultural study of the system, above all I feel there would be great value for the field in understanding why cultural normative determinism took hold so strongly there and not in other similar systems. If a theory for predicting when and how this phenomenon will manifest could be developed I feel sure it would be of great value to the Empire and may finally attract the official attention the subject deserves.
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OOC Notes - I ended up with a fair amount of depth behind things in this game and I do hope this barely tangentially fighting related post is of interest, though it is of course far too late to do anything about that. I would note the RNG was particularly helpful in this game, for instance the first Governor of Sparta had the character traits Academic and Observer, so of course he had to write something into this most prestigious of journals.
