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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fascism is "characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and strong regimentation of society and of the economy" [0].
There isn't really much hint of that at the moment, although the spectre always lurks. I suppose China is a fairly strong example of how a 1-party state can achieve success.
Even then there is a pretty strong argument that their political organisation is one of the biggest things holding them back. The major strategic strength has been the program of encouraging and engaging with foreign investment and that doesn't require any particular political structure.
That is the end state of Fascism that Fascists aim to achieve, but Fascists are still fascists even if they have not yet achieved it.
The first move in the Fascists playbook is destabilising and de-legitimising democracy. Suppression of dissent and centralising nationalist and unilateralist economic policies can only really come after the consolidation of centralised power.
Have we seen recent attempts to de-legitimise the democratic process in the US? Perhaps by someone willing to use state security forces to interfere in state policing of protests and escalate and provoke violence? Perhaps by a charismatic figure holding mass rallies in front of adoring worshipers of a cult of personality? Perhaps by someone encouraging militias and engaging in race baiting and nationalist unilateralism?
That's the playbook, but it starts with attacks on the democratic process. It's the key to everything else.
You're clearly intimating that the fascists in America are all on the right, but there's a strong totalitarian streak on the left growing and consolidating as well, including violence, rallies, disinterest in civil virtues (due process, free expression, etc.).
Evil clowns to the left, the Joker to the right, and I wish there was a middle to be stuck in.
Yes that's true, extremists in any political faction share a lot of common characteristics, and de-legitimising their opponents is step one. Deplatforming is a significant concern for sure. That doesn't excuse it anyone though. What disappoints me, both of us probably, are those that argue vehemently that it's wrong when one group does it but give it a pass when it's done by their political allies on any side.
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.
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!
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.
The 300 Spartans and their allies' mission was to hold off the Persian army for as long as possible, allowing the Greek city-states to better prepare their defence.
Sparta didn't fall though. And anyway, surely they did the best such a small force could do, since they all perished. That's kinda the opposite of failure, no?
The UK didn't fall after losing a good chunk of their army and almost all of their heavy equipment in the Battle of France. It was still a defeat.
In the Thermopylae case, they failed at their intended objective (defeat the Persian army on land) and wasted a good-sized force. The fact that the defeat was set in stone the moment they chose the place and time of the engagement doesn't make it any less of a defeat.
(Note that "the 300" is only counting the Spartiates i.e. citizens; there were a total of 1-2K Spartan soldiers, and many more forces from other Greek poleis.)
It can be a success if you fulfill your strategic objectives (see e.g. the American units that were nearly completely destroyed in the early weeks of the Korean War buying time for troops to arrive at the Pusan Perimeter). In this case, they unambiguously failed at those strategic objectives.
It’s very clear in Herodotus that a delay wasn’t actually the mission, they intended to win. It just wasn’t a good plan.
Anyway, even if you grant that they were just trying to buy time (they weren’t), dying to the man in exchange for an extra day or so accomplished nothing militarily.
That presumes a modern strategic intent, though, which was often absent from ancient warfare. If the mission of the Spartans was to secure kleos -- the only immortality the the Greeks valued -- then they succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings. Almost 2500 years later we are still talking about them. J.E. Lendon presents a compelling argument that this was, in fact how ancient warriors thought in "Song of Wrath".
While he Greek certainly glorified a heroic death, wars still had strategic purpose and were fought with the intention to defeat the enemy.
The battle of Salamis where the Greek defeated the Persians was definitely considered a success at the time, not a failure because they didn't get to die heroically every last man!
But in case of a defeat it is common to spin it as some kind of moral victory. Just see how the British spun the defeat at Dunkerque in the beginning of WWII. But that does not mean they didn't care about winning.
To be sure, the normative way of winning kleos was victory, to whit Marathon and Platea.
The Greeks also had very different rules awarding time for sea combat and land combat (rooted in Homer). In land combat, the model was Achilles, and stratagems and tricks detracted from the time of a victory, while in sea combat, the model was Odysseus, and metis ruled, so strategems and tricks were in bounds, hence the glory of Themistocles.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
What is the reasonable additional cost in lives of citizens in order to capture a Bin Laden type terrorist alive, hold a public trial, and presumably sentence him to life in prison?
Taking someone like that out with a bullet or a drone is much less risky operationally. They also avoid the additional geopolitical complexity of needing occupying forces in the relevant country.
Maybe there should be some pre-operation due process rights, but it seems callous in other ways to insist on non-violence in all cases. Especially in response to catastrophic violence.
> Killing is abnormal. Whenever someone is intentionally killed, it is a failure of society and an incredible tragedy.
For the victim of killing, there's no difference between "being killed" and "dying". It's not that your life gets less valuable or your pain gets eased if you die from natural causes. And eventually we all die, death itself is not abnormal, then what's the big deal about killing?
Killing is not a tragedy. Dying early if you could live longer is a tragedy.
Humanity murdered it's way to choking the planet to death, so I would really contest the claim that killing isn't an essential part of what it means to be human. We're the best, most efficient and most ruthless when it comes to murdering everything else. That's why we are where we are.
> 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.
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.
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.
They were violent conquerors, like essentially every other civilization in history. They just happened to be better at it.
The religious tolerance of the Mongols in comparison to their contemporaries is well-established.
> As Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and waged war on most of Asia he became known as one of the most ruthless and brutal warlords of all time. However, one hallmark during his military conquest was his tolerance of all religions. He embraced diversity and decreed religious freedom for everyone.[17] Genghis Khan’s tolerance proved to be beneficial for him. Genghis continued to use religious persecution to his benefit. He would use suppressed people as spies in cities such as Baghdad and then take the land, assimilating all those willing.[18] In Amy Chua's book Day of Empire, she claims that “... the Mongols were more religiously open than any other power in the world.”
We should also be very aware that most of the writing we have on the Mongols comes from their enemies. It is almost certainly biased and likely over-exaggerates certain things.
You're describing every army. When violence is done, the things you describe happen. We all understand that. We're trying to talk about the other things that also happened.
I'm not really sure why, unless one is a moral relativist.
Of course, I don't mean that it isn't necessary to take into account what background situation they are in, and what the consequences of different policies would be.
Perhaps gluttony is always bad, but the amount and types of harm it causes depends on the food supply. And similarly, perhaps slavery is always wrong, but different cultures have practiced different forms of it, which had varying degrees of wrongness, perhaps some of which could even have been less wrong than our prison labor system.
We do not judge someone who is struggling to pay for their own food much for neglecting to provide food for the homeless they pass by, at least not compared to someone who is very wealthy passing by the same person. In the same way, perhaps we could speak about our current society having much greater wealth and resources than the society of the past, and therefore is able to afford to do more, and therefore has more of an obligation to do more,
but none of this should change the truth that good is good and bad is bad, and the nature of the good is the same throughout time.
Indeed, common opinion can drift to be more or less correct in some ways , while being less or more correct in other ways.
I don’t claim that all things our society says is bad which past societies said was good (or visa versa) , that ours is the correct one, nor always that theirs was the correct one.
Im just saying that there is a correct view (for at least almost all practically relevant and well-defined moral questions), and people across time should all strive to have the correct view, even if it clashes with views of the past or views of the future (though it may be wise to consider why people in the past had whatever view and why people in the future might have whatever view, and take these into account when trying to have the correct view)
Yeah, but we dont use this particular thing to claim that what Hitler or Stalin or yesterdays mass shooter did was actually ok. Even further into history, we do judge individuals freely on range of things - perceived betrayal being popular one.
We also celebrate historical people quite a lot - and we praise them and put them on pedestal as good examples it would be biased to not talk about flaws too.
We kill people today and justify it as good. (Warfare, executions.) There's no guarantee that future societies won't consider us barbaric.
> it would be biased to not talk about flaws too
Frankly we are obsessed about finding flaws in historical people. For example, Einstein treated his wife not so well. I don't feel any compulsion to bring that into a discussion of his achievements. It doesn't diminish his achievements.
> We kill people today and justify it as good. (Warfare, executions.) There's no guarantee that future societies won't consider us barbaric.
Which is fine and so what. Had Hitler won or Stalin won, I would be perceived and lesser and bad. So what?
Executions have a lot of opposition now. Various warfare has a lot of opposition now. People now judge both prosecutors and politicians that cause all that war related suffering.
> Frankly we are obsessed about finding flaws in historical people.
First, you made up obsession. Second, what you call historical flaws were pretty often subject of massive criticism of contemporaries. They were pretty often not really the norm.
Third, when you praise values or behavior of back then, the bad side of it is completely fair game. Because the wins are often related, facilitaded by or directly caused the ugly side.
> For example, Einstein treated his wife not so well. I don't feel any compulsion to bring that into a discussion of his achievements. It doesn't diminish his achievements.
And if you was taking about his relationship advice, his marriage behavior would suddenly matter.
If you talked about why women in past did not had same achievements as men, his wife history is very nice example to be used.
Modern idolatry requires modern morals. Alexander also conquered a large swaths of land, did not read about him sacking cities or imposing rape and death on the subjugated populace.
If anything, Greek culture and armies gradually assimilated over the centuries into native cultures.
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.
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.
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.
So, debate as a performance? This makes it much less innovative than it sounds.
It was customary for big religions to stage such debates when trying to convert a pagan society. Check the history of Cyril and Methodius and their khazar mission which is 4-5 hundreds years prier.
Yes, so the participants in the debates were doing it for what if not to prove their religions? And the audience was their either to bee converted or to enjoy themselves.
The Mongols held theological debates, for various reasons. It was a novel thing in that place at the time. Political reasons, cultural reasons, and pure curiosity from Genghis and subsequent leaders. The Mughal (term derived from mongol, although they had a tenuous relationship) leader Akbar did similar things about 300 years later.
I recommend reading Genghis Khan and the Quest for God if you want further information.
"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.
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.
I think care should go the other way. "Spartan" clearly means "a citizen of Sparta", not just "an inhabitant of Sparta" just as "Athenian" means "a citizen of Athens", and not just "an inhabitant of Athens". The article seems to be making the same kind of assumption but I believe this is an unorthodox interpretation of the term, "spartan".
For a modern example, I've lived 15 years in Britain (i.e. the UK) and I'm legally resident in the country but I am not, in any meaning of the term, "British".
Perhaps there is a confusion between the term "spartan" (which you render with a small "S") and "Spartiate"? In Greek there is only one word, "Σπαρτιάτης" ("Spartiates"). I believe the use of the term "spartan" to distinghuish between citizens of Sparta and e.g. helots or perioikoi, is a modern habit. As in very modern- as a young Greek I was fascinated with the ancient era and so I read a lot on ancient Greece but I don't remember such a distinction anywhere in the (Greek-language) sources I studied.
Indeed, if I try to translate "spartan" in Greek so that it sounds like a different word to "spartiates", I'd have to say something like "Σπαρτινός". But that is not a word I've ever heard spoken in Greece, nor, dare I say, has anyone else.
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.
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.
He also points out in this post that rape was so common there's an entire, identifiable social class of Spartan bastards (_nothoi_ / _mothakes_).
> But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers.
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.
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."
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.
> 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.
> 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...
While Nixey's work has come under criticism, calling the whole idea a myth is too dismissive. Once early Christianity became the state religion it acted very aggressively towards anything that could be considered 'pagan'. Take a look at the following article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_pagans_in_the_l...
At one point the degree of callousness was so high that they even stripped the roof of the Pantheon in Rome for copper [1]. Things like this bring up images of Isis blowing up Palmyra, not the idea of a smooth and enlightened preservation and continuation of the classical Greco-Roman world.
> 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.
I was thinking about a celebrated quotation by A.N.Whitehead: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
> it does not mean that we are defined by what his mentor supported
Plato's entire written corpus consists in Socrates speaking. If you accept Plato's great influence, you have that.
Supposedly. We have no idea to what degree Plato's character of Socrates resembles the real one. It's a pretty common strategy even today to put one's own ideas into the mouths of famous dead people, as that makes them seem more profound.
> 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.
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.
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)
> 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.
Namely, you learned that "an Assembly composed of all citizens" is not meaningful democracy if the class of "citizens" is defined so narrowly that this comes out to a tiny ruling class dominating a vast majority of subjugated people.
That is a good description of the Athenian democracy where only landed indigenous men were part of the demos, women had no rights, let alone the right to vote, immigrants (metoikoi) also could not vote or own real estate and the economy was supported by relentless slave labour.
Not desiring Fascism through Democracy is one of the reasons the US has a bicameral legislature and the President has a veto power. Much of the Federal Structure is to protect the rights of the individual in the context of rulemaking by the majority. This is a constant source of friction, but it is intentional, the reasons for which are shown in this very discussion.
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.
> 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."
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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. ;-)
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.
> 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.
What you call "real pronunciation" is the pronunciation in the Classical dialect of Latin[0].
What you hear pronounced most often is the Liturgical[1] dialect, which is certainly how I learned to sing Latin in choir in college (a secular school) and I'm pretty sure the Liturgical dialect is what's most commonly taught in Catholic schools. (I'm not Catholic and I didn't attend a Catholic school, but that's my understanding.)
Given the scientific revolution's roots in the Renaissance[2], I presume many scientists use pronunciation somewhere between Liturgical and Classical Latin.
I don't know where this idea that the "ci" group is pronounced "ki" came from (or "cae" / "ce" is pronounced "ke"). Given that both Italian and Romanian preserved them as "tchi" / "tche" (so Caesar is "Tche-zar", not "Ke-zar" as I read somewhere), I have some strong doubts about it.
Romanian adopted the Latin alphabet in the 19th century and the spelling was intentionally based on Italian. So it's not a good representative for this particular argument — of course it spells it this way, because it was intentionally chosen to spell it this way by importing Italian spelling rules for these sounds.
Much like the majority of the Latin-speaking world, Italian underwent a sound change where [k] softened before a front vowel. The original [k] can be found in Sardinian and the now-extinct African Romance.
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.]
Agathos reminds me, nimrod in English used to mean a mighty hunter and after Looney Toons used it sarcastically to make fun of Elmer Fudd now means dimwit.
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.
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?
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.
I partly agree, but isn't that more of an issue about children being barbarians than about school being a barbaric institution?
As you say, adults only have control over superficial parts of these dynamics. I'm dubious that they can exercise more control without extensive restrictions on the youths freedoms and in turn their development. So these problems just seem inevitable wherever groups of children or teenagers meet.
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.
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.
>> 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.
> 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."
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.