7 ms·

On the topic of Spartan societey in general, a really good read is https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ https://acoup.blog/category/collect

• ianbicking 5y ago
  Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in reality terribly cruel, corrupted, and decadent.
  • kybernetikos 5y ago
    I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.
    • ianbicking 5y ago
      Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.
      • rsynnott 5y ago
        > Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that. Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio. > That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.
      • naravara 5y ago
        > Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work. The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races. Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.
    • rsynnott 5y ago
      SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.
      • a1369209993 5y ago
        > SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
        • rsynnott 5y ago
          I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?) I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.
          • a1369209993 5y ago
            > particularly the later stories. That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well. (My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.) 0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called. 1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is. 2: Really, believability versus any extreme.
    • abecedarius 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination SF novels inspired in part by Sparta.
  • gadders 5y ago
    I always thought the tactics of the Krypteia against the helots looked similar to the KKK.
  • lifeisstillgood 5y ago
    He recently appeared in the EconTalk podcast and its worth hearing too (will find the link). But they touched on Sparta and the thing that struck me was just how unequal - something like 5% or less of the population of Sparta (and it was a big state by Greek standards), only 5% were "free" - everyone else was a Slave. The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.
    • inglor_cz 5y ago
      Modern Gulf emirates have a similar ratio of citizens to guest workers. Western profesionnals are treated with respect, but manual workers from India or Philippines are basically slaves in everything but name. How the history repeats itself, this time among hi-tech skyscrapers.
      • hutzlibu 5y ago
        When the gangsters keep the papers of the workers, the lines do indeed get blurry. But it is still quite a difference between exploiting someone weaker and actually owning a person and be legally able to do anything with him or her.
        • inglor_cz 5y ago
          I would say that one is de facto slave if their superiors can rape or kill them without legal repercussions.
          • hutzlibu 5y ago
            I would agree to that. They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc. A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
            • brezelgoring 5y ago
  • int_19h 5y ago
    It's worse. Sparta is basically the first proto-fascist state in history (or, at least, the first recorded as such).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago
  It is a very interesting series. However, I think he understates classic Spartan military prowess. If you look at Deveraux's list of military victories and defeats, you will see a lot of the defeats came after the Peloponnesian war. I believe even Greek sources talked about how Spartan society became softer after winning the Peloponnesian war. Also, the Spartans were famous for their army not their navy. If you take the list and remove naval battles and battles fought after the Peloponnesian War, you end up with something like 12 victories and 4 defeats with is a 75% win rate which is likely pretty impressive all things considered.
  • lq313c 5y ago
    He also points out that the Spartans fought primarily against much weaker opponents, making their military prowess not so impressive. If I constantly pick fights against children, my win rate would be quite high as well.
    • klipt 5y ago
      But isn't "all their opponents were weaker" just another way of saying "Sparta was unusually strong"?
      • nsajko 5y ago
        No.
      • jcranmer 5y ago
        What was pointed out was that the way the Greeks organized their battle formations, the strongest of their formation would generally face the weakest of their opponents' formation. Since Spartans were usually seen as the strongest, this meant they faced generally those seen as the weakest. And he also points out that when this general model is explicitly broken, the Spartans really suffer in their documented military effectiveness.
        • klipt 5y ago
• lelandfe 5y ago
  Been meaning to turn this one into a PDF to read on the train. I wonder if he's ever considered publishing that or some of his other long reads. A low estimate has This Isn't Sparta at 130 pages. Images take that higher.
• YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
  That is a very biased article that is playing up all the aspects of Spartan society that modern audiences would find repulsive for internet likes. At the end of the day it is not unlike the film it criticises (300) except it's going all the way to the other end and painting a portrait of a grim, evil empire. It is good to keep in mind that pretty much all ancient societies had norms and customs that we find repulsive today, from pederasty, to slavery, including sexual slavery, to killing of female children, to depriving women of all human rights and treating them as chattel. Sparta sounds particularly bad if one does not know much about the ancients. Otherwise they sound somewhat ordinary and only a bit more up themselves than others.
  • baybal2 5y ago
    > to depriving women of all human rights and treating them as chattel. A wife was a chattel, as per law, up until the 20th century in a number of European countries.
  • JackFr 5y ago
    Yes, the ancients were very different from us. But Sparta was special even to contemporaries. And it was special ways that are especially appalling to modern sensibilities. It’s dishonest to ignore that.
  • fishtoaster 5y ago
    Iirc that series addresses this critique in some depth, pointing out that sparta was particularly awful even by the standards of other greek states. Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved. Since sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people, they relied on particularly brutal methods to keep down the regular slave revolts, making them considerably crueler than their contemporaries.
    • hutzlibu 5y ago
      The implications of 80% enslaved people are indeed very harsh. Which makes this "painting a portrait of a grim, evil empire." quite accurate. I cannot find much noble ideals in the "glorious" spartans.
• unemphysbro 5y ago
  His econtalk appearance was great: https://www.econtalk.org/bret-devereaux-on-ancient-greece-and-rome/ https://www.econtalk.org/bret-devereaux-on-ancient-greece-an...