Spartan School (2019)

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/

by greesil • 5 years ago

172 154 5 years ago

acoup.blog

smsm42• 5 years ago

A lot of great content in that blog, highly recommended (if you have days of free time for reading ;)

Clewza3132• 5 years ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21398893

knodi123• 5 years ago

Wow, I knew the stories of Spartans were grossly distorted in modern pop culture, but I never imagined it would be by this much. A Spartan coming-of-age story would be a horrific true-crime documentary in modern western civilization.

drak0n1c2• 5 years ago

There's a historically accurate novel about a Spartan boy's coming-of-age. "Gates of Fire" by Steven Pressfield - a very good read and widely celebrated classic.

jfoutz• 5 years ago

Gates of fire is a great book, that I would recommend. But it’s a novel. The Spartans didn’t really write anything down. All the character interaction is great, but cut from whole cloth of the author s imagination. It’s a great story. The big fight might be accurate, but about as accurate as a third hand account.

But yes, I really enjoyed it. Good book.

xapata2• 5 years ago

I think the author of the linked article might disagree with the claim of historical accuracy for that novel. He wrote at length about Pressfield's misconceptions.

https://acoup.blog/2021/01/29/collections-the-universal-warr...

railton2• 5 years ago

The comic "Three" does a good job of telling the story of Helots in Sparta.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20638282-three

greesil• 5 years ago

The post was a real eye opener for me as well.

haltingproblem3• 5 years ago

The incessant celebration of Sparta in the culture of the West is truly abhorrent. What of Sparta was worth celebrating? Their child soldiers, mass enslavement, hunting of other men, mindless wars, ......

They produced no literature, goods, art or bequeathed anything to posterity other than their notoriety as a brutal martial society even that is being questioned. The messy Romans were far better and interesting through their start as a monarchy, transitioning through republic and empire to end as a theological autocracy.

The nearest thing to Spart might be Genghis Khan's Mongols. They Mongols were true nomads whose capital was a tent city. They left no trace of Empire but were secular and bequeathed many important technologies to the world - none of which were their invention. They neither created anything on their own nor built any civilizations but their fame for conquest and administration.

What did the Spartans accomplish?

Edit: Quite a few folks downthread are chiding me for being unaware of the Mongol's contribution to our present society. First, I am comparing them favorably to the Spartans. Second, I have actually been to Ulan Bataar and worked in their cultural institutions preserving Mongol "artefacts" . I have also studied with Mongol teachers and count Mongols as friends. I counsel those counselling me based on books they have read or secondary/tertiary source material on the internet to reconsider their assumptions. Your advice might be well intentioned but off the mark.

The Mongols were tremendous administrators. They were also ruthless nomads who loathed cities, civilization and all its trappings. There is no sign of Genghis' Khan's empire anywhere on this planet. Why? His court was a tent just like his city was a tent city. He also sacked Baghdad and almost every city they came upon including killing the men and raping millions of women and burning their libraries. Yes, they imported postal systems, bureaucracy, paper and whatever else to the world but they also killed 50-100MM people and burned down cities across the middle east for no reason because they did not like them. The descendants of Genghis Khan like Taimur Lame single handedly destroyed vast swaths of Persia, Georgia, Iraq and laid waste to Northern India raising mountains of skulls along the way.

You can keep your postal systems and secular courts, I would like to get some of the cities they sacked and their libraries back.

IgorPartola• 5 years ago

I highly recommend you check out a biography of Genghis Khan. I think you will find that you hold a few misconceptions about the Mongol Empire, as I did when I read more about him abs what he did. For example, the Mongol empire hosted the very first theological debate and was itself run as a sort of modern corporation. The Soviet Union did quite a bit to mar it all up.

gostsamo3• 5 years ago

What do you mean with "theological debate"? I'm asking because this is rather broad term which could be disputed.

Amezarak• 5 years ago

"Theological debate" must require a lot of qualifiers, because there certainly were an abundance of theological debates prior to the Mongols, some of them historically famous.

neolog4• 5 years ago

Wikipedia says

Spartan women also enjoyed considerably more rights and equality with men than elsewhere in classical antiquity.

Clewza3132• 5 years ago

Part III of the linked blog demolishes that pretty effectively:

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

TL;DR: Spartan elite women were slightly freer than Athenian women, mostly because all their housework was outsourced to an army of slaves. But they were not citizens, could not choose who to marry, and were by and large treated as property, up to and including lending to other men.

The 95+% of Spartan women who were not in the elite, on the other hand, led lives that were miserable even by the low standards of antiquity, including random rape and murder during the yearly crypteia purges.

otherme123• 5 years ago

Careful with what "spartan" means. There were a lot of spartans, and the bulk of them were helots (slaves), a good bunch were perioikoi (kind of free, but not citizens) and less than 5% spartiate (full citizens). Only spartiate women enjoyed more rights than other greek women.

And Sparta has a higher share of helots than any other polis. If you are a woman in Sparta, almost sure that you are a helot (as many rights as a cow). Remember also that Spartiates regularly went to war against the helots, and Plutarch even remarked how cruel and harsh they were with the slaves.

So Sparta was arguably at least as bad as any other polis to be a woman unless you win the birth lottery as a spartiate.

kergonath• 5 years ago

But then, Wikipedia is to be read critically, and is not a source of unquestionable truth. Particularly when there is a value judgment such as in your quote.

drak0n1c2• 5 years ago

The respect, if not endorsement, for their uniquely ruthless ethos accomplished a lot over the centuries. Morale might not be quantified in the records, but it certainly had effects in the rise and fall of civilizations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molon_labe#Modern_use

schoen• 5 years ago

By the way, the same author has written a fair amount about the Mongols

https://acoup.blog/?s=mongols

mostly but not exclusively pointing out that George R. R. Martin was not really familiar with them in using them as an inspiration for the Dothraki.

He says that the Mongols did have their own creativity and art (beyond the "conquest and administration" stuff). You might want to check that out, as it seems like our modern outsider cultural impressions of Mongols can be as limited as our impressions of Spartans!

amitprayal2• 5 years ago

who said that the Mongols did not have art? they made excellent cups from the skulls of there dead enemies.

keiferski5• 5 years ago

Your impression of the Mongols is very wrong. They were exceptionally advanced in a number of things, including religious tolerance and syncretism and military strategy. They left immense “traces of empire”, the largest being the exchange of ideas during the peaceful era of Pax Mongolia.

Judging a historical civilization by how much it has affected the present is also a bit myopic.

haltingproblem3• 5 years ago

Tolerance for religions just not for the people who practiced them. Razing whole cities and murdering every male citizen and raping every woman but leaving the houses of worship standing because they dgaf about whom their victims worshipped is tolerance I guess.

amitprayal2• 5 years ago

all true, and in addition to that they made excellent cups from the skulls of there dead enemies.

peteretep• 5 years ago

I suspect that deification of a Warrior archetype is as old as civilization itself, and every society simply tries to find historical examples where the nasty reality of militarism can be conveniently white-washed away.

2,500 years is enough time to have passed that there aren't any inconvenient Helots still around to ask difficult questions.

jabl• 5 years ago

Perhaps it's not a coincidence that fascism is on the rise again, now that living memory of WWII is all but gone.

zozbot234• 5 years ago

In the Proto-Indo-European social stratification system, the warrior class was second in line below the priestly/clerical/shamanic class and above the lower classes of common merchants/craftsmen and farmers. These ideas are still very influential on European-derived societies as a whole.

danaris• 5 years ago

This same blog has a separate (but related) series of posts about pretty much this topic: he calls it The Fremen Mirage.

Here's the start of it: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...

It's pretty fascinating stuff, though it can take a while to get through.

azernik6• 5 years ago

Note that the celebration of Sparta goes all the way back to their contemporaries in the rest of Greece. Generally, like today, their image was used as a rhetorical cudgel to beat your opponents with; usually for being too democratic, not "manly" enough, too attached to the civilian economy, &c

That celebration is an expression of a long-running thread of similarly abhorrent tendencies in Western intellectual tradition.

IncRnd2• 5 years ago

They produced no literature, goods, art or bequeathed anything to posterity other than their notoriety as a brutal martial society even that is being questioned. The messy Romans were far better and interesting through their start as a monarchy, transitioning through republic and empire to end as a theological autocracy.

I think you picked-up a skewed version of History.

Sparta, the first democracy in recorded history, was one of the few Grecian areas where women could go to school, own property, and engage in sports. Throughout the rest of Greece, most women were illiterate. The Spartan constitution is the first known to have an Assembly composed of all citizens.

Plutarch said, "devotion to the intellect is more characteristic of Sparta than love of physical exercise."

Socrates said, "the most ancient and fertile homes of philosophy among the Greeks are Crete and Sparta, where are found more sophists than anywhere on earth."

The oldest recorded heterosexual love poem was the work of a Spartan poet praising Spartan maidens.

spaced-out• 5 years ago

Throughout the rest of Greece, most women were illiterate.

Most women in Sparta were illiterate too.

andi999• 5 years ago

Thanks, I read up on the democracy claim, and I was very surprised. Today I learnt something new.

selimthegrim• 5 years ago

Ulugh Beg and Nasiruddin Tusi (sponsored by Hulagu) must be fitting somewhere in your charnel house. (And I too have had Mongolian coworkers, for transparency's sake)

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

People tend to worship warriors when they themselves feel powerless or threatened by an outside enemy.

Contemporary Europe has a lot of unrest in close proximity (Niger, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine) and mass movements of people. Mr. Erdogan ruling the same Asia Minor where Persian armies once came from* is very clearly not our friend nor good neighbour. At the same time, most European militaries are chronically underinvested.

That will lead some to escapism and search for possible heroes, which isn't really history, but mythology.

* I know that the bulk of Persian empire was further east, but Asia Minor was still the staging region for invasions into Europe. Logically so, the geography is clear.

rayiner2• 5 years ago

Literature, goods, and art aren’t the only things that define society. Protecting yourself and effectively killing your enemies is a central part of the human experience, just as much as those other things. Selflessness and bravery to that end has always been celebrated throughout human history because it’s necessary to the survival of societies.

In modern western society we can generally avoid looking that in the face, for the same reason we can buy packaged meat and separate ourselves from the mass slaughter of animals. But that doesn’t make that fact of life go away and at some level we all understand that.

cedilla3• 5 years ago

Killing ist not a part of the human experience.

It ist only the distance you mention that even allows you to glorify the ultimate dehumanizing act.

That it is even romantice in the context of child soldiers speaks volumes.

gnull3• 5 years ago

Selflessness and bravery to that end has always been celebrated throughout human history because it’s necessary to the survival of societies

I believe there's more romanticizing in this statement than evidence for it.

Ideas are subject to natural selection as much as individuals are. And for an idea to win this natural selection, it's not necessary to be useful for our species. Some ideas spread will because they give their carriers advantage over other people, like Science; some because they just resonate with our minds well and spread fast, like viral videos from Tiktok. Romanticizing of Spartans could easily fall into the latter category.

I agree that being able to defeat (and possibly kill) your enemies was important for us throughout history, but I doubt that being a stereotypical Spartan helps one do that. In the next parts of the linked post on Spartans, acoup says that they weren't as strong army as they were believed to be. Their greatest strength was their badass fame advertized by Socrates.

watwut5• 5 years ago

Protecting yourself and effectively killing your enemies is a central part of the human experience, [...] Selflessness and bravery to that end has always been celebrated

A lot of violence that went on in Sparta was fundamentally selfish. And quite often it had nothing to do with protecting yourself. And also, quite a lot of it was not brave at all - the treatment of helots or pretty much anyone who was lower in social standing then you was violent but not brave at all. It was violence simply against people with zero chance to defend themselves intended to keep things that way.

There is that odd thing where people kneed jerk assume that violence of the past must have been well reasoned, noble and form of self sacrifice. Pretty often, it is simply not a case.

seer• 5 years ago

I'm not one to say anything good about Sparta, as I pretty much agree with what acoup has to say in his blog about them.

What I think is going on is not that people like what Spartans actually did, people are simply enamoured by their honourable and majestic portrayal in popular culture. What youngster does not fantasise of being that small and determined band of soldiers that holds off the hordes of brutal barbarians, only with their shields, spears, courage and martial prowess? Who doesn't want to be part of that 250 men that defy a whole empire, _and succeed_, immortalised in songs and poems? (I mean they all die by the end, but they do kinda succeed in their mission).

The way I think about it is that for me there are two (or more even) Spartas. The historical "Sparta" that were brutal oppressors, like a case study how _not_ to structure a society, lots of lessons to learn from it. And the mythical "SPARTA!" one, full of honourable dudes and courageous women, that we can aspire to be, even if they were not real. No reason why they can't coexist in our minds, we just need to be careful which one we talk about.

When people say they "like Sparta" I don't immediately feel that they are silently singling that they will be ok with slavery and secret police, I think they want to be strong people fighting to protect their brethren, and that's generally OK with me.

goto113• 5 years ago

Just a nitpick but the Spartans at Thermopylae did not succeed in their mission at all. They barely slowed the advance of the Persian army.

matkoniecz5• 5 years ago

_and succeed_, immortalised in songs and poems? (I mean they all die by the end, but they do kinda succeed in their mission).

Battle of Thermopylae was a loss, not success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae

Result Persian victory[a]
Territorial changes Persians gain control of Phocis, Boeotia, and Attica[5]

azernik6• 5 years ago

The problem with people's adulation for this mythical Sparta is that it includes ideas about causation (they were strong because they were monomaniacally focused on war!) and morality (military strength is a more important merit for a society than economic success or cultural output!) drawn from the real Sparta.

ie people who want to reproduce the mythical Sparta often advocate the social structure of the real Sparta, thinking it will lead to those mythical benefits. And instead it leads to monstrosity.

EdwardDiego• 5 years ago

I don't know how much stock you put in this, but I always enjoyed the study that found that Genghis' depredations changed the climate.

https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match-defores...

enriquto2• 5 years ago

The incessant celebration of Sparta in the culture of the West is truly abhorrent.

Socrates was killed for being a Sparta supporter in Athens (also for being a formidable troll). His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing. Make of that what you want, but for anybody who knows some history, your sentence will sound pretty confusing and contradictory. The celebration of Sparta is not some decadent modern fad; it lies at the very root of our civilization! We are defined by being Sparta supporters.

matkoniecz5• 5 years ago

His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing.

What you mean by that?

We are defined by being Sparta supporters.

Even if you assume that "Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing." then it does not mean that we are defined by what his mentor supported.

watwut5• 5 years ago

I am not defined by Socrates or Plato. I dont think they define us as a civilization either, despite regular and persistent attempts of some people to claim so.

Socrates hated democracy, we are trying to be one. Socrates got executed and the further developments went without him.

leto_ii2• 5 years ago

Socrates was killed for being a Sparta supporter in Athens

I think Socrates' admiration for Sparta is questioned by some scholars. Since the man himself didn't leave behind any written work, all we know of him we know indirectly, mostly from Plato. Popper for example considers that a lot of the more authoritarian ideas ascribed to Socrates were actually Plato's views [1]. The general problem of figuring out what exactly Socrates thought, how he acted etc. is actually a significant sub-field of scholarship [2].

His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing

This is silliness. While the tremendous importance of Classical Greece can't be denied, the idea that there is a monolithic thing called 'Western Civilization' that has a clear start is extremely simplistic. Are the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Minoans, the Hittites etc. not part of 'Western Civilization'? How about the Christians that spent many centuries actually destroying and forgetting the works and achievements of the ancient world [3]?

The celebration of Sparta is not some decadent modern fad; it lies at the very root of our civilization! We are defined by being Sparta supporters.

This is even more silliness. By the same token you could say that slavery or infanticide lie at the very root of 'our civilization'. We (who exactly is we in this case? Americans? Europeans? people of the Levant or North Africa?) are defined by our actions and beliefs, not by some supposedly sacred historical heritage that should never be questioned or relinquished lest that leads to the collapse of our current society.

[1] 'Contrary to major Plato scholars of his day, Popper divorced Plato's ideas from those of Socrates, claiming that the former in his later years expressed none of the humanitarian and democratic tendencies of his teacher. In particular, Popper accuses Plato of betraying Socrates in the Republic, wherein Plato portrays Socrates sympathizing with totalitarianism' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem

[3] See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age

goto113• 5 years ago

His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing.

That is an absurd claim! Plato is perhaps the most important philosopher, but other creations of Greek culture like tragedy, comedy, epics, history, sculpture, architecture, democracy, geometry predates Plato.

Plato actually hated a lot of the things we consider civilization like poetry, acting and democracy.

isolli• 5 years ago

What I read (but I can't remember where) is that Mongols would use the threat of razing as a way to force cities to surrender. If the city surrendered, they were spared, if not, they were razed. Pour encourager les autres, if you will.

arethuza• 5 years ago

Wasn't that fairly common in ancient warfare - cities that surrendered would be treated better than those that chose to put up a fight?

e.g. The Siege of Tyre

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre_(332_BC)

Edit: Mind you the Mongols do seem to have been quite methodical about it:

"On the first night while laying siege to a city, the leader of the Mongol forces would lead from a white tent: if the city surrendered, all would be spared. On the second day, he would use a red tent: if the city surrendered, the men would all be killed, but the rest would be spared. On the third day, he would use a black tent: no quarter would be given."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege

neolog4• 5 years ago

You can keep your postal systems and secular courts, I would like to get some of the cities they sacked and their libraries back.

That's a really big tradeoff, how did you arrive at your conclusion?

neolog4• 5 years ago

Seems like other people agree with parent. Can someone explain how they trade off between these things?

ldbooth• 5 years ago

Generally what we read in Durant was ... Not a lot on balance. Their 3 branches of government and the position and treatment of women in spartan society was notable at the time.

YeGoblynQueenne6• 5 years ago

> What did the Spartans accomplish?

That is a question to ask the Spartans and perhaps their contemporaries. Not people from 2,000 years in the future.

I think the article and your comment both make a mistake, the same mistake: complaining that an ancient civilisation did not hold itself up to our modern morals.

TheCapeGreek2• 5 years ago

Nitpick: unless ancient Greek changed the sounds of vowels between my high school class and today, ἀγωγή is ah-go-ghee, not ah-go-GAY.

divbzero• 5 years ago

I wonder how close it is to how the ancient Greek pronounced it. Would our Greek scholars sound like non-native speakers to the ancient Greek? Or maybe barely even intelligible?

TheCapeGreek2• 5 years ago

There were quite a lot of differences for sure, and many more modifiers on vowels than modern Greek, but I never heard that particular example. That particular modifier doesn't make it sound like that especially.

Think of it similar to Latin where real pronunciation was quite different to how you hear it quoted in media today, e.g. Veni, Vidi Vici sounding more like Weni, Widi, Wiki.

imagine99• 5 years ago

With extremely strong accents and sometimes probably hardly intelligible, depending on which time and place they land in. One primary problem is that there was no "Ancient Greek" pronunciation. Greece was not a single country back then but consisted of many different regions and kingdoms, who frequently went to war with each other (which I always found rather ridiculous. Compare the Kingdom of Rhode Island going to war with the City State of New York).

So Greek was what is called a pluricentric language and had IIRC at least five major dialects (Attic, Ionic, East Greek, West Greek etc.). Of course these changed significantly over the centuries, too.

There is obviously a whole field of research into Ancient Greek phonology and they have various points of reference to determine possible pronunciation. There are also a number of surviving texts that do discuss pronunciation of some words.

However, to me the most interesting tidbit was always that they found out how to pronounce the letter "η" (which in modern Greek is similar to "ee" like "meet") when a fragment of an ancient comedy by Aristophanes was discovered in which a guy is about to be sacrificed by a priest (I think?) and the priest tells him to behave like a sheep (as a kind of proverbial "sacrificial lamb" I suppose) and imitate sheep noises (difficult to put in English but something like "baa").

This was rendered as "βῆ βῆ" in the fragment and because Greek sheep have not changed their accent over the millennia, we were able to get some insight in to how that must have sounded. ;-)

sdenton4• 5 years ago

There's some idea of ancient greek pronunciation based on phonetic misspellings found scattered about. I studied /some/ ancient greek in undergrad, and when I visited Greece it did, indeed, seen like a while different language, with large shifts in both pronunciation and meaning of words. My favorite was agathos, which is noble and good in ancient greek, but means native or simple minded in modern greek.

Also worth keeping in mind that broadcast and recordings do a lot of work to reduce language drift today, over time but especially over geography. A mountainous, watery place like Greece almost certainly would have a lot of drift in accent and informal language.

[On edit: That feeling when you swipe out a long comment, hit submit, and see a fresh neighboring long comment making the same points better.]

involans• 5 years ago

Eta had the value of a long mid front vowel (long "e"). German "See" is very close, but for English, the closest approximation is probably "say", which is a diphthong. This refers to Ancient classical pronunciation, before the Hellenistic period.

It is definitely not a hight front vowel ("see"), which is the value it had in Koine and has in modern Greek.

ThomasWinwood2• 5 years ago

The pronunciation used in schools for didactic purposes has only a modest relationship to authentic historical pronunciation. Pronouncing eta as [i] is an influence from modern Greek - in ancient times it was [ɛː], as described by the author (and as used in my secondary school Ancient Greek class - when we switched teacher to one who pronounced it [i], he conformed to our standard rather than vice versa). The bLogicarian has an article [1] which goes into more detail with some recordings, or you can pick up a copy of Vox Graeca by W. Sidney Allen.

[1] https://blogicarian.blogspot.com/2012/10/ancient-greek-food-...

irrational2• 5 years ago

As I was reading about the Spartan systems for indoctrinating and conditioning children, I couldn’t help but wonder how far future historians will regard our modern school systems. I went through the public school system and consider it barbaric, traumatizing, indoctrinating, etc. and yet... I still sent my own kids to public school. Why? Because... that’s just what we do. I suspect that is one of the reasons the Spartans sent their own kids. I also suspect future people will be as horrified by our current school system as we are by the Spartan system.

xwdv• 5 years ago

Some people live in the future and already send their kids to private schools or do homeschool. They are horrified by the public school system.

Niksko• 5 years ago

In Australia, public schools consistently outperform private schools, despite having less money.

If you want to spend thousands to send your child to a private school, so that they get a mediocre, spoon fed education, with superfluous 'perks' that don't help their development, and surrounded by rich kids who's privilege will rub off on them, that's fine by me. But the only goof justification is if you don't have a good public school as an alternative. Otherwise you're wasting your money.

leotaku2• 5 years ago

I sincerely do not understand what you are talking about. I, and I assume also you, have just read about an education system where boys aged 7 are separated from their parents, underfed, whipped, beaten and basically forced into sexual relationship with older men. How do any of these horrors compare in the slightest to what is happening in any 21st century western public school?

I know that my experience was most likely more idyllic than most, but which outgrowths of modern public education (active shooter drills, windowless rooms, zero-tolerance policies?) make you hold it in such low regard?

inglor_cz2• 5 years ago

Your school experience mostly depends on who your peers are, not on the official policies of the school. The adults control only superficial 10 % of the situation, the rest is upon the kids, with a possible punishment afterwards, if some boundaries are visibly and publicly crossed.

People describing their school lives in modern Western countries will tell you completely different stories. From almost idyllic to hells of abuse (even sexual) and bullying that made them consider suicide before the age of twelve.

If we judge schools by the average, they are much better than the Spartan agoge, but if we judge them by the worst ones, I am not sure if it is still the case.

matkoniecz5• 5 years ago

modern public education (active shooter drills, windowless rooms, zero-tolerance policies?)

Note that most of that is unique to USA education. Especially "active shooter drills".

fooker• 5 years ago

outgrowths of modern public education (active shooter drills, windowless rooms, zero-tolerance policies?)

All these seem to be uniquely US problems..

puchatek• 5 years ago

I can sort of imagine how it could be seen as indoctrinating and be unintendedly traumatizing, but barbaric?

mdpopescu2• 5 years ago

Yep. When I tell people "if I cared about my children's education I wouldn't have sent them to school" they act horrified. However, while I could lie and say that I do care about their education very much, my actions say otherwise.

I send them to school because I am lazy. That is the opposite of caring. My younger daughter had some nasty experiences in school, up to having to call the cops because she was sexually assaulted in class.

Schools are a cesspit.

irrational2• 5 years ago

I'm not saying that Spartan system = Current system. I'm saying that our view of the Spartan system = how future people will view our current system.

kmonsen• 5 years ago

By coincidence I watched a similar YouTube video today: https://youtu.be/hMQmU0epVr4

beloch• 5 years ago

I think it was Will Durant who described Sparta best.

I can't find the quote, but to paraphrase, Durant stated that Sparta ceased to be a civilization in that it produced no art, literature, or culture of any kind. The Spartan citizen class shrank until every hour of every citizen's life was occupied just trying to control their own populace and territory with murder and fear. We remember and honour their tenacity, but forget that it was made necessary by the extreme dysfunction of their society.

Gibbon12• 5 years ago

My thought is without the other Greeks and their art, literature, and architecture we would know nothing and care nothing about the Spartans. Eventually some empire would have rolled over them, found the Spartan ruling class annoying and sent them to oblivion.

genghizkhan• 5 years ago

I think this is what the Macedonians and the Romans did end up doing. By the time of the Romans, Sparta was a glorified "theme park", for lack of a better word.

mcosta2• 5 years ago

From 650 to 550 BCE, Spartan arts were at their height, producing some of the most intricate and beautiful works of bronze, stone, wood, and ivory in the known world. The sculptors of Sparta were particularly well known for their works in bronze, capturing the essence of the form they chose to represent. They not only sculpted in Sparta, but branched out to Delphi and Olympia, bringing with them their skilled craftsmanship. In fact, Spartan bronzes were so highly regarded that they were given to other national leaders as gifts, thereby spreading over the known world.

Cultures have ups and downs .

chevill• 5 years ago

I was looking for a link to examples so here it is for anyone else curious about Spartan art.

https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/spar/hd_spar.htm

xapata2• 5 years ago

The interesting question is then what causes contributed to the change.

pegasus4• 5 years ago

It produced a warrior culture which made a lasting impression on the Western psyche, witness the interest it's still raising two and a half thousand years later.

azernik6• 5 years ago

It produced external myths about a warrior culture. Thank Athenian and Roman authors, not Sparta itself, whose reality was only tangentially related to those myths.

j7ake• 5 years ago

I wonder what is the proper way to view an ancient civilization in our modern perspective, because directly comparing ancient societies with even the worst modern society may actually, on net, favor the bad modern society.

Humanity seems to have progressively improved in the treatment of the underclass (e.g., slavery, poverty) such that direct comparison of any ancient society using our modern standards will conclude that ancient societies have nothing from which we can apply to our culture.

I feel there is some wisdom to be gleaned from ancient societies, but at the same time these societies practiced customs that would be abhorrent to most societies today.

rayiner2• 5 years ago

The proper way is the way we have been doing: dispassionately and scientifically. Study them the same way we study nature. Maybe marvel at the things that make societies especially effective on their own terms. Avoid moral judgments, in the same way we don’t judge a praying mantis for eating her mates.

krageon5• 5 years ago

It isn't more admirable to analyse things while denying part of what makes you human. We should look at Spartans (and everything else), from every angle: Emotional, logical, etc. Denying parts of what we are is why the world is as fucked as it is.

brobdingnagians• 5 years ago

Likewise, our society practices things which would be abhorrent to most ancient societies. I do think we are doing better than most of them, but how can I know what is my own bias from being in this society?

matkoniecz5• 5 years ago

directly comparing ancient societies with even the worst modern society may actually, on net, favor the bad modern society.

Note that important argument made by author is that even ancient authors - who were fine with slavery - still mentioned what was happening in Sparta as unusually cruel and extreme.

And in other societies even slaves had some minimal legal or cultural protection. Spartan society celebrated murdering slaves.

From second post in series:

"The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards."

"Given how very little our sources care for the lives and experiences of any enslaved people, the unanimity of their testimony that life as a helot was awful is nothing short of astounding. This is an institution that shocks the conscience of ancient slaveholders."

"Plutarch relates the saying that “in Sparta the free man is more free than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave” (Plut. Lyc. 28.5). He can only be referring to the helots here. Indeed, Plutarch’s statement is telling – the helots were treated poorly by the standards of ancient chattel slavery, which is, I must stress, an incredibly low bar."

veddox• 5 years ago

Humanity seems to have progressively improved in the treatment of the underclass (e.g., slavery, poverty)

Yeah, I don't buy that. At least not in this simplified form of the "moral progress narrative". While it is true that many modern societies at least nominally try to treat the underclass well, this is by no means a global undertaking, nor is it always successful. Slavery and poverty are alive and well.

Human nature hasn't changed - we still have a phenomenal capacity for ignoring the suffering of others, especially when that suffering is conveniently far away. We have an equally great capacity for actively tolerating, or even directly causing this suffering, when it benefits us.

"A society is measured by how it treats its weakest members", but this measure is (if at all) only weakly related with "civilisational progress". Many of the great civilisations of the past were absolutely barbaric, many of the advanced nations of the modern world continue to be - or at times, fall back into such a pattern.

In the West, the combination of Christian ethics and Enlightenment ideals seem, on the whole, to have brought localised improvements for the underclass. But there are sufficient areas in which Western countries continue to ignore suffering, and multiple examples of "social moral progress" rapidly degrading into stark, ruthless, violence against the weak.

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

At that time, the stability and fitness regimes were admired. Of course this could not last forever, there is always someone stronger.

I have seen criticism about child soldiers. This is relative and not comparable to todays child soldiers. In some regions you did not even have to be aged 10 to get married.

What the western and rest of world is doing today with soldiers is no less despicable. Either they are forced to serve via mandate or often out of economical desperation, only to be deployed as cannon fodder because the politicians failed to come up with a diplomatic solution. Many if them aged 18-20, those are kids, not professional mercenaries. Hell, at least in some places the kings rewarded soldiers with some land parcels.

Yes Sparta was an oligarchy with fascist taint. One could argue at least they did not follow the Janissary procedure(read that and tell me how that compares to spartan recruitment).

It is easy to condemn past violence and lifestyle from the peaceful environment in the 21st century.

I have seen the argument that Turkish immigrants are not easy to immigrate in Germany. Do you know how their parents from the first wave were welcomed and treated? These will not integrate in this lifetime. But their kids do and will, most of them. Try talking to them. Successful immigration is a 2 way road.

cedilla3• 5 years ago

The article goes into excrutiating detail and compares the Spartan abuse with both contemporary and modern abuse.

No, what "western society" does is not comparable to what Sparta did to and with its soldiers.

Also to note: the promises of land for soldiers were as frequently made as they were broken. Politicians have always been reluctant to reward soldiers and keep all their promises, once the fighting is done.

ybbond2• 5 years ago

good read.

I read this in my 15 minutes slacking off and it refresh my mind to continue working afterwards.

gnulinux• 5 years ago

You surely must have an insanely fast reading speed if your read this in 15 mins?

ybbond2• 5 years ago

the combination of portrait monitor and few skimmings may help. note that the 15 minutes only for the 1st part. I read the 2nd and 3rd part just now.

pegasus4• 5 years ago

Here's a contrasting view, for balance: https://www.spartareconsidered.com/home.html

Since most of what we know of Sparta comes from non-Spartans who were either very much pro or very much against them, there's little chance we'll ever have a provably objective view of them.

yannis7• 5 years ago

nit: there are some fragments, say the speech of Spartan King Archidamus, which are recorded in sources like Thucydedes -- these you _may_ consider them as sources that reveal Spartans' self-understanding to some extent

YeGoblynQueenne6• 5 years ago

I've read this article before and it sounds like the author is motivated by some sort of weird culture war. For instance:

Xenophon (Xen. Lac. 2.12-14) disagrees and argues that these relationships were not sexual. Xenophon has the benefit of proximity (writing 500 years before Plutarch), but at the same time openly admits that it was widely believed that these relationships were sexual, and Xenophon is expressly writing in defense of Spartan customs. Even if Xenophon is correct about the ideal nature of these relationships, we have to assume he wouldn’t tell us about occasions where that ideal was broken.

Well, if Xenophon is wrting in defense of Sparta and Plutarch is writing after 500 years, we should at the very least consider the two sources equally unreliable, rather than pick a side.

It's a great idea to dispell the myths, modern and ancient, that surround the Spartans, but I think this is going all the way to the other end and it ends up with an also distorted image of ancient Sparta (Lacaedemon).

YeGoblynQueenne6• 5 years ago

> As we’ll see, the significance of this supposed achievement is also undermined by the fact that the majority of people living under the Spartan state did not take part in it. Heck, the majority of males living in the Spartan state didn’t take part in it. Hell, even the majority of free, non-foreign men weren’t eligible. That’s because the agoge was restricted to the Spartan citizen class – the spartiates – who in turn comprised only a tiny minority of the people actually living in Sparta.

Thus the article makes a distinction betwen "Spartan citizen" and everyone else living in Sparta (historically, Lacedaemon). In the next article in the series the author makes it even more explicit, saying (of the social hierarchy of Sparta):

> At the top were the Spartiates, the full-citizen male Spartans.

This distinction between "Spartiates" and (other) "Spartans" is a modern invention. There is nowhere, in the entire body of Greek historiography any such distinction to be found. Indeed, such a distinction would be lignuistically impossible because there isn't, in the Greek language, a different word for "Spartiates" and "Spartan". These two words are different only in their English rendition (and perhaps in other European languages also).

In (ancient and modern) Greek, a male from Sparta is a "Spartiates" (Σπαρτιάτης, with an eta, male singular). A female from Sparta is a "Spartiatissa" (Σπαρτιάτισσα). Many people from Sparta are "Spartiates" (Σπαρτιάτες, with an epsilon, male plural).

All of these grammatical forms represent the same concept: of a free, full citizen of Sparta, i.e. what the author of the article calls a "Spartiate". Anyone else is never referred to, in the Greek ancient sources by any kind of demonym derived from "Sparta". The reason being that those other people inhabiting the land of Sparta and serving the Spartans, were the Spartans' slaves and it was not a done thing in the ancient world to refer to the slaves of a people by the same demonym as the free people.

Compare for example "Athenian" (Αθηναίος), the demonym of the male, free citizens of Athens, and never used to refer to the slaves (δούλοι), or the foreigners (μέτοικοι, metics, basically immigrants) also living in Athens. The same goes for Corinthians, Megarites, Argites, Thebans, etc etc.

The next article in the series takes this modern misconception, or perhaps invention, and runs with it, somehow turning the fact that Spartans had slaves that had no rights into an indictment of Spartmant society. Unfortunately, the same can be said e.g. of Athens, where only indigenous males enjoyed the privileges of the Athenian democracy (while it lasted) while women and slaves had no rights and immigrants hadn't even the right to own land in Athens.

In short, it seems to me that this series of articles is strongly motivated not from any wish to set the record straight on the true history of Sparta and its inhabitants, but by a desire to provoke outrage for a people who died 2000 years ago. As if we didn't have enough calls to be outraged for modern matters already.

Bottom line, please don't take your knowledge of history from some guy with a blog on the internets.

matkoniecz5• 5 years ago

somehow turning the fact that Spartans had slaves that had no rights into an indictment of Spartmant society

Note that important argument made by author is that even ancient authors - who were fine with slavery - still mentioned what was happening in Sparta as unusually cruel and extreme.

And in other societies even slaves had some minimal legal or cultural protection. Spartan society celebrated murdering slaves.

From second post in series:

"The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards."

YeGoblynQueenne6• 5 years ago

I'm primarily commenting on the misconception about "Spartan" and "Spartiates" being different words in Greek.

On the other hand, this is an exaggeration:

> "The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards."

World-historical standards should include, for example, the Aztecs, who sacrificed their prisonners of war and then slaughtered them and sold their meat at the market for families to buy and eat [1].

The Spartans were possibly more cruel to their slaves than all other Greek city-states at the time as a society, in the sense that they had murder rituals that others certainly didn't have. But in most places in the entire ancient world, the life of a slave, or her dignity, was not protected in any meaningful way and some, hopefully few, masters would have murdered and raped their slaves with impunity (though perhaps polite society would tut-tut, but not much more than if the master had murdered or raped his dog). For instance, the Spartans murdered their helots outright but the Athenians sent theirs to work at the silver mines at Laurion where they lived a short, miserable life and died en masse [2].

I am Athenian (obviously modern so) and I grew up with the ancient historians and more recent works so I'm used to thinking of the Spartans as the "bad guys" mainly because of the Peloponnesian War. But the author's criticism of their society is exaggerated and is not sufficiently placed in context of the era. In any case, as the author admits, most of the sources on Sparta were, indeed, Athenian and cannot be trusted to have been entirely objective. But even taking them at face value, sufficient context is not given.

_____________

[1] See: Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España. I have a French translation not at hand, so I can't quote directly- my apologies.

[2] During the tyranny of Peisistratos systematic exploitation of the mineral resources of Athens began. Shafts were driven down into the ground and galleries opened where slaves, chained, naked, and branded, worked the seams illuminated only by guttering oil lamps. An unrecorded number were children. It was a miserable, dangerous, and brief life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mines_of_Laurion

Spartan School (2019)

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