Or, much less than an army of super warriors. They did not win more battles than their rivals. I think of them as Greece's FARC, distinguished mainly by their abuse of their own children and everyone they depended on for their own survival.
Do you have a source that dives more into this? Specifically breaking down how they weren't actually more effective, contrary to what might be considered common belief.
Willingness to have sex with another male is not being "gay". Attitudes towards gender and sex are not just a new thing, many cultures, historically, have had far more fluid concepts of these things.
"Willingness to have sex with another male" does not preclude willingness to have sex with a female and therefore is not the definition of homosexuality.
where do you get the idea that all men were gay? and no, being gay is not and never was a choice. one can have sex with people (of the same sex) even when they're not attracted to them but that doesn't make them gay.
counterpoint: a lesbian is able to have sex with a man but that doesn't make her straight either.
> In short: Sparta’s overall military performance is profoundly average over the Classical period. They don’t even manage a winning record!
> 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.
Sparta at its peak was 10-20 times smaller than Athens. With such a huge population difference you'd expect Sparta to not even put up a fight, but they did and often won and took over large parts of Greece. So to me it is strange to say that the spartan people didn't punch above its weight militarily. If they didn't nobody would have written about them since they were just another small town in Greece.
The problem with Sparta was their inability to incorporate other people into their culture. An example of a warrior tribe very similar to Sparta but did properly incorporate new cultures is Rome, and they conquered the entire Mediterranean that way. We would probably have called it "The great Spartan Empire" if Sparta was a bit different.
Edit: I think the "myth" part was that Spartan warriors were any better than others elite soldiers. They weren't. But they fielded a disproportionally large amount of elite warriors for their size. Rome did the same, and made their new territories also adopt that culture, which allowed them to just expand and expand.
> Sparta at its peak was 10-20 times smaller than Athens.
No, it wasn't. It had a broadly similar population; it's just that most of that population were slaves. And they did have slave auxiliaries, so it wasn't necessarily a manpower issue.
It is about 10 times if you count slaves, 20 if you don't.
They had conquered other territories which they used as auxiliaries, yes, but those were just normal Greek troops and wasn't anything special or unique to Sparta. And the reason small Sparta could conquer them in the first place was the strong army they had. Not strong as in super human, but strong as in numerous well trained soldiers. Anyone who made their kids practice warfare got soldiers to that level.
I think Sparta was overrated militarily, but logically, a great army may still have a losing record, because the only people who would even dare fight them are ones who think they can actually win. Imagine all of the wars which were never even fought, because their enemies were scared of their army.
Yeah, but you only get the list of Spartan defeats, especially before Leuctra by counting battles that have Spartan commanders but not actually any Spartan troops. Mind you, that is a real deficiency of the Spartan system that they frequently have to fight battles with allied troops and not their own because they don't have logistical capacity, have too few hoplites, or are unwilling to have the helots unsupervised for too long, but that's slightly different from what people are saying when they mean the Spartan hoplites were generally pretty good at smashing other Greek Cities' hoplites.
Besides the obvious modern political axe you’re grinding, the parallel doesn’t quite apply to ancient Sparta. While the Spartiates had more training and equipment, the same was not true of the lower caste armies they also fielded. The US army has great logistics; the Spartans could only afford boats when Persia paid for them to beat up their neighbors.
I wasn't really grinding an axe at all. Just pointing out the fact that "super powers" with lots of toys and training does not always mean an automatic "W" on the scoreboard. It was true in the days of Sparta, and it is true today.
You’re saying the US lost militarily in Afghanistan, which didn’t really happen. The war was won, and could be maintained indefinitely without wrecking the economy. But the only way to win the peace would have been a century of colonialism, for a place that hasn’t been worth it since wooden ships bypassed the Silk Road.
I never said anything about any specific conflict. You're putting words in my mouth, and I quite frankly find it rude. I get to decide what goes in, it's the only decision I have as I can't control what comes out.
I don't think US really wants to "win" these conflicts. The truth may be political but I think they favor more a prolonged conflict as opposed to a quick and swift execution. They seem to "need" these encounters all over the world in order to justify the enormous military budget/spending and you cannot do that without a "threat". My .20
It's not popular belief, it's popular culture. The onus is on the myth makers to substantiate their claims. The idea of super soldiers is anthological comedy. It's fantasy.
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc?
I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
I highly recommend the linked series; it's accessible and fascinating.
The upshot though is: Think of battle at the time as being a little bit like some sort of bizarre college sport where everyone lines up, locked arms, and then smashes into each other. With, yes, weapons, but fatality rates were not enormous.
Spartiates - the tiny warrior elite of Sparta - are a bunch of very rich asshole frat boy jocks who are far too cool to train or anything, but that was fine because training doesn't really matter for a glorified shoving match, and nobody else was bothering to train either. What matters a bit more is that they spend every day living together, eating lots of meat, getting drunk, raping and torturing slaves, and if they feel like it, going hunting, so they're all beefy, well fed, fit, and can afford the very best gear. Also they have excellent cohesion thanks to all that bonding while drinking and/or torturing slaves, so man for man, they're pretty effective. Of course, these battles/shoving matches are big enough that they have to drag along a bunch of non-citizens and slaves and allies from other Greek city states to pad out the numbers, so that undercuts their advantage. Although note that Spartiates are by far the most prestigious, and there's a strict rule that both teams line up with the most prestigious on the right side, facing the enemies left side (where the weakest, poorest, and least prestigious units are slotted in).
So yes, individually, Spartiates were...well, not great warriors, but man for man they were the most effective fighters on the field, especially since they consistently faced the weakest opponents. But Spartan armies were not unusually effective, and Sparta as a polity failed to achieve its strategic objectives. History is full of glorious defeats where Spartiates lost impressively; so much so that in one famous instance where a bunch of Spartiates were captured by Athenians, they had to confirm that they were actually Spartans - not because they lost (that wasn't unexpected) but because they were expecting a doomed fight to the end.
So yes, Sparta was let down by truly horrible logistics and diplomacy, but their military record wasn't much better. Quite good at beating up their slaves and/or the weakest unit on the opposing army though, so there's that?
This description also works well for the bands of knights in the so-called age of chivalry.
It’s easy to be on the winning side when you’re cruising around on a horse, protected from random arrows and blows from unarmored people on foot, and hacking away at same from above with a sword or axe.
Spartan martial prowess wasn't anymore effective, individually or as a group than any other group of their time. Eating beef and raping slaves is simply not good enough reason to persist this mythology.
Carthaginian sacred band had better equipment, fitness, tactics and discipline, combined with a religious zeal that made their morale unbreakable. They also ate meat, whatever that's worth. Apart from a single dubious and assuredly propagandized solo account from well known liar in history, Sparta simply has no consistent feats to backup any of the mythology that has been popularized by comic books and movies.
By off chance, did you mean the Thebian Sacred Band? Since they did beat the Spartans, whereas the Carthaginian Sacred Band was a different era, and while known for being "elite" by we know them best by two defeats they suffered.
This reminds me of my relatively new pet peeve when watching any military element in a movie. Every time they gather in a room, the soldiers arrange themselves at attention as scenery. I get that it's mostly symbolic of how organized and dedicated they are, but having been in the military, the last thing a soldier is looking to do is stand at attention.
Movie soldiery (wide term to include knights, personal bodyguards, etc...) have this innate knowledge on how to form ranks and break ranks in perfect unison with no commands.
The professional military is relatively rare throughout history, but is somehow idealized and projected onto those factions which did well militarily. Realistically the Spartans only had to be a little better man for man than those around them in order to be the best in the world.
My pet peeve are troops holding positions and ranks (who would fight rank and file on a modern battle field?), only to break formation and charge (at running speed as if sprinting increases damage by 1D10 in real life) the enemy, screaming heroically. Hotzendorff and Codorna would be proud.
If you like this there's a meaty seven part blog series by historian Bret Devereaux about the mythology surrounding Sparta. It offers an account of what Sparta and the Spartan military was really like as well as how the Spartan mythos evolved.
...the analysis of one historian is just that. But the analysis of many historians is more likely to be true, and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely. Certainly more likely to be true than a popular conception primarily driven by comic books, Hollywood films, and popularizations written by non-historians.
It's also worth looking at the historian's analysis, and questioning what sources they have, what they're claiming to know, and how plausible it is for them to make those claims. If your analysis, let's say, starts and ends with "Plutarch said it, and we should trust Plutarch", well, when Plutarch wrote about Sparta and its peak, he was writing about time as distant to him as Elizabethan England is to us, and with no more first hand knowledge.
Academic history has its own fashions and political movements, even over decades; if we look at academic history from 50 years ago we see plenty of cases where the popular conception was closer to the truth than the academic consensus, much less any given review article from a single academic. Devereaux make some insightful points but he also has some very clear biases of his own; you only have to compare how he writes about a lack of written culture in Native American tribes to see that he's holding Sparta to a very different standard.
>and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely.
Yes, but at one point, the widely held belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, the earth itself was flat, and the sun was a god being pulled through the heavens in a chariot of fire.
So, sometimes consensus isn't right either. Just a bunch of people agreeeing because it is the path of least resistance.
It's true that historians have been talking about the myth of spartan excellence for over a century, with one of the key works being Le Mirage Spartiate, published 1933.
It's true that there is extensive scholarship analysing what is (and is not) known about Sparta and the Spartiates, and it's not positive for the Spartans.
It's true than Sparta has very few defenders among professional historians, in large part because the historical record to support such a defence is so limited.
And it's certainly true that despite all that, the consensus could be wrong! As you note, other consensus views have been shown to be wrong and have been overturned. But what is also true is that doing so took evidence.
Such evidence was readily available for showing that, eg, the earth is not the center of the universe, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and the earth is not flat. Such evidence is not going to be readily available about Sparta. We're talking about things that occurred ~2500 years ago; and in truth we likely have the bulk of all the evidence we'll ever have about Sparta. All that's left is to interpret it, and such interpretations seem fairly clear cut.
I wouldn't hold my breath for a major re-assessment.
> Yes, but at one point, the widely held belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, the earth itself was flat
I think it’s important to distinguish between the widely held beliefs of a populace as a whole and the widely held beliefs of experts in a field. I’ll leave aside the point that fields have often gotten narrower as they have gotten deeper. But I will point out that Aristarchus of Samos posited a heliocentric model since some time between 300 and 200 BC and Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the earth to within the order of 1% error at roughly similar times.
A tangent: is it important what the widely held beliefs of members of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes society believed? I’m not sure. Many members of their society didn’t have access to information or skills that would let them come to these more accurate conclusions. And if they did, there’s nothing particularly actionable for them; imagine a farmer: is knowing the earth isn’t the center of the solar system something that could help them more efficiently grow crops? In this sense, the truth doesn’t have any direct value for them whereas there are potential negative social implications for minority beliefs.
But bottom line: it’s not about consensus itself; it’s about consensus evolving as the most likely scenario given the data available. People in a field will generally have access to more information and the tools to integrate that information into hypotheses than the population as a whole. But certainly experts can still get things wrong. I would just tend to expect better from them than the populace as a whole.
It seems that the fact that Capernicus, the expert of his field(s), and his facts were held in such low regard that he was imprisoned for going against the current group think of what was true.
It doesn't matter how expert one is when the "truth" directly contradicts the established "truth" of populace belief. If populace beliefs are greater than the "truth" (or those who speak them) being proposed, "truth" gets subjugated to the basement level prisons.
That doesn't make anti consensus opinion right by definition. In case I am not part of the experts in any given field, I have not ground to stand on to challenge that consensus. And looking back at history, the scientific consensus is changing all the time. Quite often with the obsolete one staying on as a pop cultural trope.
>I have not ground to stand on to challenge that consensus.
Good thing Copernicus didn't follow this line of thinking. Anytime someone comes up against group think, there is always the resistance against it. It's only natural. Being willing to listen to the unpopular opinion to at least evaluate it before dismissing it out of hand is what separates science. It is the responsibility of the "dissident" to persuade and show evidence. People should not switch beliefs willy-nilly.
Copernicus was an expert. Those who have spent years laboring to understand a subject do occasionally ignore the bright upstart who has mastered the field and then proves them wrong. But that doesn’t oblige them to credit ignorance as serious argument in the name of “being willing to listen to unpopular opinion”.
And this isn’t about credentialism either. You can tell the lion by his claw; a knowledgeable non-credentialed expert will not be dismissed as easily.
Except Copernicus was an expert in the field and thus his repudiation of established model had a basis to stand on including thorough work to support his claim.
I think I'll consider consensus among historians as having more credibility than mythology developed for movies and comic books.
And even if the consensus opinion is wrong, that doesn't make the non-consensus opinion correct, it just makes it another unverified, poorly-sourced possibility.
The article you link is the worst kind of telling of history: overflowing with bias, preaching and pontificating and making moral judgments left and right about things that happenned more than 2000 years ago. It is an internet rant, designed to provoke clicks and outrage, and its only reason of existence is the existence of the film, 300, a fantasy, that presents a fantastical image of Sparta, that the author then proceeds to deconstruct as if it were reality, or as if anyone claimed was reality. It is one gigantic straw man.
Instead of consuming one person's opinion, second-hand, why not read the original historical sources?
For example:
The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians, by Xenophon
> And so on. Read history; and make up your own mind.
I'm of the opinion that this "do your own research" is generally bad advice. One person can be expert in a very limited number of fields, and one of the main advantages of our modern society is that we can afford to have experts in very niche areas.
It's much better to recognize who are the actual experts in any given subject, and read their output / follow their advice. Even historians have very limited specialties; someone who's expert of the ancient Greece would restrain from commenting authoritatively on renaissance topics.
Everyone can read the source material on history/medicine/astronomy/whatever for their enjoyment. Absolutely nobody should think they understand the topic better than someone who has dedicated their professional career on it. Outside of your slimmest core competence you are just another hobbyist with very flawed understanding.
>> I'm of the opinion that this "do your own research" is generally bad advice.
I never used the words "do your own research" and I will very please ask you to not quote me as saying words I didn't actually say.
Further, "do your own research" is what conspiracy theorists say. Are you saying that my advice to read Herodotus and Thucydides is on the same level as spreading anti-vaxx propaganda or 5g-conspiracy theories?
As to expertise, I'm Greek and I grew up reading history. Literally. Not at school, where the teaching of history was a deplorable affair of memorising passages from school books, but at home. Just because I'm that kind of nerd. When other kids got dinosaurs and xboxes for Crhistmas, I got Xenophon in leather-bound tomes, with the ancient and modern text in opposite pages so I could read the original and understand it.
So I'm "expert" enough in what I'm talking about that, if you're interested in the opinion of knolwedgeable others, you should take pause and listen to what I say: the blog posts linked above are full of hot air and peddle a bunch of bullshit misreadings of history, deliberately so to provoke outrage and clicks. You won't learn anything useful by reading them.
Read the sources I link to. You don't need to be an expert in anything to read some English translations of ancient texts. You just need to be curious to know exactly who said what.
Edit: btw, the author of the blog posts is an expert on Rome ("Bret is a historian of the broader ancient Mediterranean in general and of ancient Rome in particular"; from his about page). So when he's talking about Sparta, he's not the expert you think he is. The same goes for many other of his blog posts, e.g. ones on the Middle Ages etc. If we went toe-to-toe on ancient Greek history, he might beat me on points (e.g. off the top of my head I dond't remember the date of the Battle of Salamis), but he's got as much a leg to stand on to write what he did as I have to call bullshit on it.
I'm not trying to comment on your expertise or about how Spartans actually were, sorry if my rant came out that way. I obviously don't know a thing about you or the Spartans.
I explicitly quoted you, not trying to put words in your mouth. I do think that "read [sources], and make up your own mind" is exactly the same as "do your own research". I can't see any difference in meaning there.
My commentary was on the trend to dismiss authorities in favor of, literally, "making up your own mind". Reading the sources is not enough. They need putting into context, and understanding the positions of the historical authors. I could read original sources all day and come out with an invalid understanding.
Again, I'm not saying this article is correct. I'm saying a layman should read experts instead of interpreting sources themselves if they want to understand better.
The problem is that the "expert" who wrote the blog posts is not an expert in the subject of the blog posts and he's talking about subjects that a particular group of people, other Greeks who, like me, grew up reading our ancient history as other kids read Marvel comics, know very well and have their own strong opinions about [1].
I agree with you that we should trust the opinions of experts. However, expertise is not only acquired through professional interestes. The opinion of professional experts cannot automatically trump the opinion of everybody else, regadless of their amount of knowledge.
In any case, it should be noted that a blog post like the one above would never pass muster as an academic text, like a scholarly paper or a textbook chapter. My main beef with the blog posts above is that they express strong personal opinions in a manner meant to cause an emotional response- which should never be what a historian does.
___________
[1] Typically, those are nationalistic opinions that I don't share, btw. But there is something to be said about everybody and their little dog wanting to tell you all about ancient Greek history, but completely ignoring what Greeks themselves think about it.
>> I explicitly quoted you, not trying to put words in your mouth. I do think that "read [sources], and make up your own mind" is exactly the same as "do your own research". I can't see any difference in meaning there.
This is what you wrote:
begin_quote
> And so on. Read history; and make up your own mind.
I'm of the opinion that this "do your own research" is generally bad advice.
end_quote
So you quoted me, but then you also quoted "do your own research" as if that was what I said, not as if that was your interpretation of what I said. In the future, if you wish to discuss your interpretation of the words that someone acually said, I suggest you make this more clear. For instance, instead of saying 'this "do your own research"' say something like:
"I interpret your suggestion to "Read history" as a prompt to "do your own research" because ..." etc.
Because if you just put words in quotes and then reply to the words in quotes, what am I supposed to do? I didn't say that thing, so should I just ignore it? Are you replying to what I said or to something you just felt like replying to?
I quoted you and then equated that quote with the phrase "do your own research". I think it was very explicit that I didn't put words in your mouth, but brought up that they say the same thing. Then I proceeded to rant why I don't think this is good advice.
If you think there's a difference in the meaning of these two phrases, I can clarify that the rest of that comment applies both to "read, and make up your own mind" and "do your own research" separately.
You actually have to be pretty careful with this, particularly for the ancient world stuff. The 'historians' of the ancient world were not really historians in the modern context; they were generally closer to gossip columnists. If you uncritically read the main sources on late Republic and early Imperial Rome, say, you'd get some very weird (and contradictory) ideas about it.
Of course. So let me make a further suggestion: read modern historians (or read them too).
I don't know who are the authorities on Sparta and ancient Greeece. But don't get your opinions about those subjects from an internet rant aimed at shocking people who only know Sparta from its depiction in 300 and who can legitimately not tell apart the hyperbole and the fantasy from reality.
Read "history", in general. Don't just read some guy's blog post, even if he's a historian. Even if he's an expert. If you're going to trust the opinion of experts, consult proper scholarly work and read more than one expert.
Does all that sound too unreasonable, or, like an other poster said, like I'm suggesting you "do your own research" (like the anti-vaxxers)?
The author is an academic historian. And it’s not… saying anything very controversial. It’s pretty much the mainstream view on Sparta.
I mean, obviously reading more is better. But this is a perfectly fine resource and links to lots of further reading. This blog is a far better thing for a normal person to read than the stuff you linked; it basically represents current understanding, whereas some of what you linked, while important sources _because we don't have all that many sources_ (historians have to take what they can get; for an extreme example see the Historia Augusta...) are bordering on fanfiction.
Well, now I don't know why you are being downvoted. Here, have a compensatory uppie. dang says that's part of being a good citizen around here.
Edit: re fanfiction. I honestly have no idea what you mean. Fanfiction? Who else do you think has more accurate and objective accounts of ancient history than ancient historians? Do you think modern historians have some kind of crystal ball that they can look through the mists of time and see with clear eyes the things that happened 2000 years ago?
Ancient historians were not very accurate or even honest, or objective. What better sources are there? You really think that an internet rant is a better source for historical knowledge than ancient authors? I mean, if you really think so I am really going to bang my head on the wall very, very hard in complete despair. This is the internet?
> Who else do you think has more accurate and objective accounts of ancient history than ancient historians?
Modern historians who've synthesised the work of ancient historians and figured out, insofar as possible, what actually happened. Like, the sources are generally _contradictory_, and contain things which cannot possibly be true, and often supernatural elements.
> You really think that an internet rant is a better source for historical knowledge than ancient authors?
Unless you're willing to single-handledly reproduce a century or so of analysis, then, yes, reading this blog post (or a modern history text on Sparta) will give you more context on Sparta than reading the ancient sources. A _huge_ amount of work has been put into understanding ancient history, and ignoring it and just going for the ancient sources is nonsensical.
That blog post is not scholarly work. It's one guy's opinion - rather, one guy's internet rant. Rants are no good sources of information and I wish I didn't have to explain why, but they are primarily aimed at emotions rather than the intellect.
If you want to read modern analysis, then read scholarly works, not blog posts on the internet. And it doesn't matter who the author is, a rant on the internets is a rant on the internets, not a source of knowledge.
These authors and their works are all cited and discussed in the series. Some of the authors you cite even bash each other; Thucydides calls Herodotus a bit of a fabulist.
I don't care about that. Above, I suggest to read up on the original sources and make up your mind, rather than consuming someon else's opinions, then spreading them across the internets as if they're some kind of holy fact. Do you have any objection to that? Read the origional sources. Do you disagree with that suggestion?
Sorry, but are you saying that the blog posts above are an objective analysis of historical sources, without "biases, [disagreement], making things up" etc?
No, seriously, when you read that blog post, did you think "ah, that is an objective analysis of history, without any personal opinions or any attempt to promote an agenda"?
Objectivity is impossible, and no one here is making the point that the author of this series had no personal opinions on the topic.
It's a given that the author of this series has a bias, just like everyone does. Part of the academic tradition is to cite references (as this author does) and present the reasoning behind the arguments (as this author does).
That said, if Herodotus does have biases in his Histories, how would you identify them? Do you think it's fundamentally impossible, because you too have biases?
What Herodotus (and Xenophon, Thucydides, Plutarch, etc) is writing about happened more than 2000 years ago. I don't have any "bias" that relates to what he wrote. I just can't get worked up about how the ancient Spartans murdered their slaves, as I can't get worked up about how every other Greek city did not grant any rights to "free" women, or how the priests of the Aztecs sacrificed POWs and then sold their flesh to the market to be consumed by the ordinary citizens of Tenochtitlan, or about the cannibalism at the siege of Maara [1].
Generally I find it ridiculous to moralise about ancient peoples. The blog posts above are just one big moralising moralisation about ancient Sparta. People who share their link are probably people who really get all their knowledge of history from films like 300, people who sincerely, honest-to-G0d, hand-on-heart, thought the Spartans were noble warriors with huge gnashers and sculpted six-packs, who are utterly shocked to learn about the helots, and about the Agoge, and how the 300 Spartans of Leonidas were not alone in Thermopylae, hence why a blog rant appeals to them as some kind of font of revelatory knowledge.
And hence my advice to such people to read actual history and not continue to take their knowledge of history from shallow, unscientific sources like blog rants. Intellectual laziness is what makes people keep sharing this rubbish, not any kind of desire to know any sort of unbiased, objective truth.
None of those are "history" in the sense of academic historical text looking at primary sources. They were all written with agendas, none of which were "document the historical reality of the Spartans".
Really? Herodotus, "the father of history" is not history?
Anyway, I suppose I shouldn't be pessimistic and take your one comment as an indication that a random blog post on the internet is treated as a more authoritative source than the original texts from which it -ultimately, though evidently indirectly- draws its information.
Edit:
>> They were all written with agendas, none of which were "document the historical reality of the Spartans".
How do you think we know the "historical reality of Sparta"? And do you think you will find that "documented" in a blog post?
Herodotus made a hell of a lot up, relied on oral reports and explicitly states that none of what he writes is intended to be relied on - it is merely what people told him. I think you actually need to read the linked blog that you seem so dismissive of, and come up with some substantive rebuttals to the points he makes rather than just making this rather lame appeal to historical authority.
Yes, I've read the linked blog post, thank you very much for making an ass of u and me.
And btw, that Herodotus, while being "the father of history" was full of shit, is something that any Greek school kid will tell you readily, so bringing this up is just a shallow dismissal of my point: that all we know about ancient times is what ancient authors have written, like Herodotus, Xenophon, Thucydides, Plato, and Plutarch. You will not learn more about ancient times by a blog post that quotes them second- and third-hand, all the while expressing strong personal opinions about what they have written, than if you read the actual first-hand sources, biased as they may be.
Like, you're the second or third person who makes this point: Herodotus confabulated. Sure. And who else didn't? Who else are you going to get your knowledge of what happened 2000 years ago than from the people who wrote about it all around the time it was going on?
I mean, do you think there are some other, magickally objective and accurate sources about ancient Sparta, than the ancient Greek authors I suggest people read?
No sure, just you have strongly dismissive opinions of someone you mockingly refer to as a mere blog author, and I felt I had to weigh in. I confess I definitely don't know nearly as much as I'd like about the ancient world, especially not to the extent of having read the primary sources but I feel like you're missing the point of people's reactions.
I think the underlying point is that you actually can learn more about the ancient world despite not necessarily possesing any more primary source knowledge - things can be inferred, close analysis can change perspectives and so on.
I know it isn't the point you're trying to make but you sound like you're trying to dismiss the entire premise of historical research. Like, we don't have any new information (which is patently false by the way, maybe not so relevant to this particular topic but new information comes to light pretty much daily) so therefore we should simply not think about it anymore. I'm not trying to be dismissive of your argument and you clearly feel quite strongly about it.
Do you think all historical research is bunk or just this argument?
Where did you see all that? "[A]ll historical research is bunk"? I "mockingly refer to [The Pedant] as a mere blog author"? I'm "trying to dismiss the entire premise of historical research"? You found those things in my comments? Are you replying to someone else?
Are you sure you are in conversation with me, and what I wrote, rather than some other opinion that you have confused my comments with?
I mean, what the hell? I have said none of the things you say I said and I don't even believe them! Where the hell did I write "mere blog author" about anyone?
>all we know about ancient times is what ancient authors have written
Contemporary approaches to ancient history do not rely exclusively on literary sources, but build a much fuller picture from epigraphy (inscriptions and graffiti can tell us a lot), archaeology, and numismatics.
You're right, not all knowledge comes from ancient authors. But I don't agree that there is enough information in epigrams and so on, to figure anything out with the context provided by long-form prose by authors who were sometimes even contemporary with the events they describe. I guess that's opinion though.
> Which brings us back to Herodotus (remember, way back in the first of these, I said we'd talk about Herodotus?) because he isn't just observing the Spartan reputation, Herodotus is manufacturing the Spartan reputation. Herodotus is our main source for early Greek history (read: pre-480) and for the two Persian invasions of Greece. Herodotus' Histories cover a range of places and topics - Persia, Greece, Scythia, Egypt - and contain a mixture of history, ethnography, mythology and straight up falsehoods. But - as François Hartog famously pointed out in his The Mirror of Herodotus (originally in French as Le Miroir d'Hérodote), Herodotus is writing about Greece, even when he is writing about Persia - those other cultures and places exist to provide contrasts to the things that Herodotus thinks bind all of the fractious and fiercely independent Greek poleis. And he is perfectly willing to manufacture the past to make it fit that vision.
> ... for Herodotus, Sparta is the expression of an ideal form of `Greekness' and in Herodotus' logic, being well-governed (eunomia is the Greek term) results primarily in military excellence. For the story Herodotus is telling to work, Sparta - as one of the leading states resisting Persia - must be well governed and it must be military excellent. That's what will make a good story - and Herodotus never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. ..
> Herodotus ...does show up in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, where he is treated as a famous historian who knows many things. Which is a bit funny, given that the historian of that period, Thucydides, takes a dim view of him.
> And so, Herodotus - the myth-maker - talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes (Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy; even more fantastically inept was the initial Spartan plan to hold on the Isthmus of Corinth as if no one had ever seen a boat before).
> The spin worked. Herodotus' work was well known, even in antiquity, and he set the tone for all subsequent retellings of the Persian wars (despite the frequent complaints by later ancient authors that Herodotus' reliability was - let's say, complicated. I don't want to give the wrong impression: Herodotus is a valuable source, just one that - like all sources - has his own agenda at play).
The blog post series does link to its references, like The Mirror of Herodotus, as well in-line citations like "Hdt. 9.35.2" (one of several explicit Herodotus references), as well as "Thuc. 4.40.2", "Xen. Lac. 4.5, 5.9", "Plat. Lach. 182d-183a.", and many more.
>> There are many types of history. Herodotus was not writing from any sense of a modern 'academic historical text'.
Sure. So read modern academic historical texts, if you prefer- but don't take your knowledge of history from a blog rant on the internets.
The passages you quote make it clear that the author of the blog posts is commenting on sources commenting on Herodotus. He cites Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, etc, but there's nothing easier than copying citations one hasn't read.
And how can I know that he hasn't read the citations he cites? I can't, but I can know that he's untrustworthy because he makes things up as he sees fit.
For example, there's the case of the Spartiate/Spartan divide. From memory (because that's a long rant and I don't have the patience to read it again) the author is making a distinction between free "Spartiates" and enslaved "Spartans", as if there were two different words with these two different meanings. That is a complete fabrication: the Greek language, both ancient and modern, has one word for "inhabitant of Sparta", "σπαρτιάτης" (female: "σπαρτιάτισσα"). "Spartiate" and "Spartan" are simply different latinisations of the same Greek word, rather than sub-categories of the concept of "inhabitant of Sparta" with slightly different meanings.
At the very least, the author of the blog posts should have made it clear that the distinction between free "Spartiates" and enslaved "Spartans" is his own, but he fails to do so. A reader who doesn't know the Greek language, or the subject of the blog posts, will come away thinking that this is some kind of standard terminology, not something the author made up for his blog posts.
Again, this should give pause. The author straight up made stuff up to put in his blog rant. What else has he made up? Can you say? Can anyone, who takes their knowledge of Sparta and ancient Greece from sources like that blog post, only?
To this particular point, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartiate would seem to suggest (admittedly poorly cited) that there was in fact a distinction made within Spartan society between free and enslaved Spartans.
The only reference it sources is confusingly Xenophon, who you have admonished others for not reading - I confess I haven't myself, so will do some digging!
A distinction was certainly made between free citizens of Sparta and their slaves! Just to be perfectly clear, I don't disagree with that.
What I point out is that this distinction was not made by using different words that both meant "inhabitant of Sparta", in particular not "Spartiate" and "Spartan". As far as I can tell, the slaves of Sparta were only known as "helots".
The general point is that the ancients didn't think of the slaves living in a city as "citi-z-ens" of that city, probably because they were not actually citizens, in the legal sense, according to the laws of the era. For example, you will find no ancient source, and I believe no modern source either, calling the slaves living in Athens, "Athenians". They were the Athenians' slaves, they lived and worked in Athens, but they were not "Athenians".
This is not completely unlike modern times. For example, I live and work in the UK, but I'm by no means "British" and nobody would refer to me and others like me as "British", simply because we live and work in Britain. Rather, "British" is reserved for, well, citizens of the United Kingdom. The rest of us that have the malfortune to be domiciled on the British Isles are "immigrants" (or "bloody foreigners"), in any case there are different words, with different roots, to describe us.
I'm happy to clarify this further if there is still confusion. I blame the author of the blog posts for the confusion, btw.
In the end, you're downvoting me for calling out an angry rant on the internets as an angry rant on the internets and for calling out your intellectual laziness that accepts to get its knowledge second- and third-hand, from angry rants on the internets, as intellectually lazy.
This is the internets. A toxic shithole full of intellectually lazy and wilfully ignorant people who don't want to know, don't want to learn, don't want to read and study, just want to be entertained and outraged and cancel each other out. Like a good, old, Roman mob.
> This is the internets. A toxic shithole full of intellectually lazy and wilfully ignorant people who don't want to know, don't want to learn, don't want to read and study, just want to be entertained and outraged and cancel each other out. Like a good, old, Roman mob.
You're coming out of this looking as nothing so much as a prime example of exactly what you complain about.
I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.
> The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the passive (or ‘receptive’, ‘subordinate’) partner in a homosexual relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient Greece.
‘Twink’ doesn’t really connote a passive role though (you can be a twink and a top). Similarly for ‘bear’. Twinks can also be post-adolescent. So I don’t think ‘twink’ and ‘bear’ are very good translations of these terms, which are based on quite a different conception of gay relationships than the one we have now.
Happy to concede that it's more vague gesturing at "Look, a similar thing was happening 3,000 years ago and is happening today" than the same thing but it's not like it's unrecognisable.
Fixed title: Sparta was NOT an army of super warrior.
From what I understand, it was a fantasy model heralded by conservative Greeks as an example for all but is as much based in reality than the golden past of the people calling to "make America great again". It is projecting into the past an ideal that never was.
I don't understand the point of the article. In quantitative terms one can say that Y was better than X. Like: Usa in the 20th century was better at creating technology. Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's not discimination or racism or whatever. I think it's because in modern times saying Y is better than X is bad. Except for in sports. Weird.
Well I am Greek and had read a lot of stuff also at school about it. In ancient Greece they were considered as such. How do you know it's a trope? Statistical data?
It doesn't matter how "tough" Spartans were. They were largely illiterate and terrible at logistics. Its hard to win battles when you're terrible at supply lines. And its hard to keep track of supplies if you don't know how to read or write.
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I've commonly heard that Spartans were good at fighting but bad at war. Turns out that a band of illiterate warriors is largely a bad idea for an army composition. If the war goes on too long, they simply run out of supplies and leave (Or, if they're forced to fight, they run out of supplies and lose)
Ever since decisive battles stopped being a thing with industrialization, I know one European country that started and lost two world wars due deficits in strategy, operations and supply. Tactically it wasn't too bad so.
The propaganda of an elite class of warriors is useful. It's basically why the US Marines exist, and such stories are useful for recruitment and morale purposes. (Furthermore: Army can pickup on the engineering, supply and logistics problems).
But there is also the truth and history that we want to learn about sometimes. I think the Spartan mythos was useful to other Greeks, and the Spartan mythos remains useful today (in the form of US Marines).
But the myth is distinct from the real and actual history. It is beneficial to peel back the propaganda sometimes and analyze history for what it is.
Spartans did not win battles more often than others. Spartans couldn't field an army for extended periods of time. Etc. Etc. And yet we have these stories and written history of how great a warrior they were.
Thus: they probably were good at fighting (almost universally accepted). But war is more than just a fight. All the other bits of war were hampered by Spartan society, most noticably their illiteracy.
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc?
I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
Does it matter, though? A loss is a loss. It doesn't matter if they lost because their warriors were weak, or if their leaders were poor strategists. They still lost, and a big part of the mythos around Sparta (at least to me) is that they were a city of strong warriors who won most of their battles.
I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior, just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve in the same manner and have time for poetry, hunting, and the other activities that a proper Greek citizen should do.
That’s really more of a myth than reality. If you read actual reports of Spartan self reported history, they always report that they were equal in some mythical past, not that they are equal in the author’s current time.
In reality there were pretty severe socio-economic differences even among the slave holding citizen class. The equality among the citizens is really propaganda, not reality.
The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man.
And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon, distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society. Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't need to do anything wrong to "deserve" a beating. It was simply necessary to ensure that the Helots would never rise up against the aristocrats / Spartan elite.
The whole "equality" thing is just a myth and whitewashing of history. Spartans were awful people living in awful times.
> have time for poetry
Much of we know about Spartans is from what Athenians wrote about them, because Spartans were largely illiterate (and prideful of that too). Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
> Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing.
For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry
> Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadžić, many of these epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral tradition, transmitted by bards and singers.
>Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing.
Which makes it ripe for editorial changes whether intentional or not. Even if it was eventually canonized in print, it's still based on the recollections of generational hearsay.
Most of history must be read with large grains of salt
