
 A military historian’s analysis of Spartan myth - aeontech
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/
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mrec
For anyone interested in this, I'd highly recommend /u/Iphikrates' three-part
summary of the Spartan reputational mirage on /r/AskHistorians a couple of
years ago.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_th...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_the_military_worship_of_the_spartans_really/)

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nabla9
Sparta was like North Korea of Ancient Greece.

\- Isolationist country.

\- Young are indoctrinated in rigid militant ideology (agoge).

\- Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed
to have valuable money, just worthless tokens.

\- The main job of the spartan army was to suppress helots and protect the old
rulers. People serve the military and the state, not the other way around.

\- No creativity in warfare. Incompetents and arrogant leaders just attack
with hoplites until they run out of food and have to retreat.

~~~
HenryBemis
> North Korea

You cannot simply make a comparison of X democracy today (or dictatorship in
this case) to a city-state of Ancient Greece. Back then it was do or die. Wars
were in the daily menu. For a state that was isolated geographically (in
comparison to other powerful/richer city-states like Athens or Messina, the
only way to stay alive is brute force, be the ultimate killing machine. The
landscape also didn't help much. Stuck between two mountains, path to the
north lead nowhere, sea to the south was 30-40km away. Perfect place to make
it difficult to be invaded but poor enough to not thrive.

Also.. creativity? I would need creativity to beat a MMA pro in a fight. On
his side, he would just throw a punch. Creativity is for the weak! (like me)

~~~
jcranmer
Except Sparta doesn't seem to have _actually_ been particularly successful
militarily, instead relying more on a reputation for military success,
according to this analysis.

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yongjik
...so, more like North Korea? :)

"Get out of my way! I'm a crazy madman who may start war at the slightest
provocation, and I don't care that it will also kill me!" has been NK's
signature shtick for decades. Other than a few nukes and a crapton of grunt
soldiers, their military power is actually rather underwhelming.

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dr_dshiv
I love it when classical history is discussed on HN! When we realize our
civilization is thousands of years old, it is easier to imagine it lasting
thousands more years.

I highly recommend that people make use of original source material when
making an argument so that you can contribute constructively. The original
sources are FUN to read -- we are lucky that the internet makes this so
accessible.

I like the Perseus project, because it has almost everything.
[http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/)

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Isamu
I like an analysis that includes operations and logistics, which is how long
or large campaigns are won or lost.

>It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been
modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal,
placing severe limits on how effectively the Spartan army could be utilized.
You may have the best soldiers – and again, Sparta does not appear to have
always had the best soldiers – but they are of no use if you cannot get them
to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools, ships) they need to win
the fight.

~~~
sandworm101
>> if you cannot get them to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools,
ships) they need to win the fight.

That is one area where modern warfare is very different than ancient warfare.
Siege weapons were not normally 'brought'. They were created when and as
needed. An ancient engineer could turn a forest into a trebuchet, something
akin to a modern engineer building a fighter jet out of rocks. So too with
food. Ancient armies lived off the land. They pillaged and took what they
needed. The concept of moving food to feed an army on a distant shore was just
not an option as recently as WWI.

~~~
jcranmer
While it's true that siege weapons and food were not transported via supply
lines in the sense that modern militaries plan for it, that doesn't mean that
logistics wasn't an important concept in Classical Greece. Even if you're
living off the land, you still have to actually figure out how to transform
the local produce into food, and actually procure sufficient local produce (if
you're settling down for a siege, you can't exactly rely only on the nearest
fields). Sparta's attempt to lay siege to Athens failed several years in a row
entirely because they couldn't manage to support that level of logistical
sophistication, which is a pretty indicting failure, even given the simpler
problem it was 2500 years ago.

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gumby
Would love to see the same for Athens. An amazing place but popular culture
doesn’t reflect how profoundly _alien_ their culture was: more of an honor-
killing kind of place rather than some paradise of erudition.

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baud147258
Isn't the military might of Sparta an example of history written by the
losers? I mean one important source for the Peloponnesian War was Thucydides,
who was on the losing side of the war. And when writing his book, he might
have wanted to cast himself in the best light possible, by depicting his
victorious opponents as the best military in Greece?

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mips_avatar
Thanks for stealing most of my day with your interesting articles.

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yorwba
There was a submission from the same blog on the front page yesterday, which I
assume is what led OP to discover this one:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382247](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382247)
(about war elephants)

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aeontech
Indeed! I knew Sparta just by reputation, like most people I expect, so this
was a rather surprising and fascinating series.

It was a second surprise to come to this thread and see so many people
vehemently dismissing the article, the author’s knowledge or tone, to defend
Sparta as they see it. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that other than,
I suppose, some people really really admire Sparta as mythologized and dislike
reading anything that contradicts that image.

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cafard
[https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-
unim...](https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unimaginably-
different/)

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gorgonical
After reading the first one, "on spartan schooling" I'm a little sad. I
understand the point of casting a more clear light on the alien and brutal
practices of ancient civilizations, but the distaste and condemnation that the
author uses evokes British colonizers talking about their subjects, combined
with a tinge of social justice history revisionism. One of the central
concepts of anthropology (and I think, by extension, history) is that you
don't judge other people disjoint from you in space and time with your
cultural norms.

History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down,
and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't
admire the more interesting parts of history.

~~~
parliament32
Although the author is knowledgeable, I too find it incredibly frustrating to
read his writing. An opposing viewpoint is fine but the sheer amount of bias,
outrageism (note the number of times he mentiones how "sickened" he was during
his research), and condemnation made it impossible for me to read any further
than the first post.

~~~
jcranmer
Reading the first and last two posts, the outrageism is definitely far less
present in the latter than the former. You should at least read the sixth post
as well, which evaluates how deserved Sparta's military reputation was
(spoiler alert: it wasn't).

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aitchnyu
When did historians finally strip Sparta of its great image? When Roman Stoics
praised Spartans, did they treat them as perfect role models or as a cruel
people who had certain qualities to emulate?

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kilo_bravo_3
The only reason Sparta lasted as long as it did was because it was a valueless
minor city-state not worth the effort of conquering until the point that
conquering and absorbing it was so effortless that it was done almost as an
afterthought.

It was a sick and broken society populated by fanatics, that was quickly (on a
historical timescale) out-advanced by its neighbors.

Imagine if a casino-less (Mormon Fort-era) Las Vegas, NV was full of
militiamen and religious zealots and got involved in a war with the
surrounding area and it managed conquer all of Clark County, the county that
surrounds it, and control it for about 30 years by implementing a cruel system
that enslaved most of its population.

And then that short-lived city-state collapsed after the rest of the Nevada
developed over the decades to the point that a coalition of other small
counties quickly steamrolled the now-decrepit and hollow Clark County city-
state.

Like, super steamrolled. Like the rest of Nevada had developed tanks and
artillery and the "Vegans" still fought with Mormon Fort-era weaponry.

That's Sparta.

I don't get why Sparta seems to be so fetishized, particularly by people who
are not pleasant to be around.

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paleotrope
Sparta is fetishized because they beat Athens in the Peloponnesian war and
Plato idealized the spartans.

~~~
coldtea
Sparta was considered important way before they "beat Athens". And it has
nothing to do with Plato either.

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lolinder
Can you provide a source or an alternative point of origin for Sparta's
importance? You've stated categorically that the parent is misinformed, but
provided no information to back it up.

~~~
coldtea
Why, are the claims controversial? They're backed by 2+ millenia of
historiography.

Just off of the easiest sources available on the web:

Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of
the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the
rising naval power of Athens. Sparta was the principal enemy of Athens during
the Peloponnesian War (between 431 and 404 BC), from which it emerged
victorious. (...) Sparta was the subject of fascination in its own day, as
well as in Western culture following the revival of classical learning. (...)
In ancient times "Many of the noblest and best of the Athenians always
considered the Spartan state nearly as an ideal theory realised in practice."
Many Greek philosophers, especially Platonists, would often describe Sparta as
an ideal state, strong, brave, and free from the corruptions of commerce and
money.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta)

Sparta was one of the most important Greek city-states throughout the Archaic
and Classical periods and was famous for its military prowess. The
professional and well-trained Spartan hoplites with their distinctive red
cloaks, long hair, and lambda-emblazoned shields were probably the best and
most feared fighters in Greece, fighting with distinction at such key battles
as Thermopylae and Plataea in the early 5th century BCE.
[https://www.ancient.eu/sparta/](https://www.ancient.eu/sparta/)

During the 5th century BC Sparta was very powerful. This was due to her army,
which was feared by other Greeks. Sparta focused on producing good soldiers
and all Spartan male citizens were part of the army. The Spartan army played
an important role in the Greek victory over the Persians, in 480-479 BC.
[http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/sparta/home_set.html](http://www.ancientgreece.co.uk/sparta/home_set.html)

The Athenian view of Sparta oscillated between admiration and fear, according
to whether their warlike neighbors were allies or enemies. Without Spartan
participation in the war against Persia at the beginning of the fifth century
B.C.— especially their heroic stand at the critical Battle of Thermopylae in
480—the Persians may well have conquered Greece.
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/magazine/2016/11-12/sparta-
military-greek-civilization/)

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Tsugumo
This article is laughably bad. I don't think the author put any effort into
understanding the culture. No attempt is made to understand why the Spartans
made certain decisions. The perspective seems to be, 'they didn't make
decisions like us modern smart people would, so they were dumb and mean.'
Lines like "because Sparta produced so little of value" do well to reveal
this. So little of value to who?

"...essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue
mistreating the helots and the periokoi. In practice – given Sparta’s
desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued
unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system..."

So much for Hegel.

