At any rate, that blog is a must read for any history-myth-debunker, especially around military. Also highly recommended is their analysis of the LotR battles and campaigns, which fare well historicaly, and the GoT, which ... doesn't.
Same is true of the RSS feed! No summaries, just the whole thing.
I do prefer to go to the blog because the blog handles footnotes better (hover works on desktop to show them in a popup, and tapping on them works correctly with the back button on mobile), and often the footnotes are really good.
His take down of the "steppe nomadic warriors" nonsense in movies and TV shows, and especially of the Dothraki and how they don't make any sense, is also very interesting.
To me the most surprising thing is that Deveraux considers Lord of the Rings more grounded on history than Game of Thrones, when GoT was "sold" to audiences as a grittier, more realistic take on medieval fantasy. But very little in GoT makes any "medieval" sense, it's almost entirely fantasy with a "grimdark" tone instead of a fairy tale/folklore tone.
(Which, like Devereaux points out, would be perfectly acceptable as artistic license ... if only GoT hadn't been sold to us as "more realistic" by George Martin!)
Not having read his takedown, IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros. But the more core systems of society and war aren't deeply thought through. When people say it's "realistic" it's more so in the sense of "yup, nobles and soldiers really would rape peasants," not in any tremendously larger sense. And they consider LOTR unrealistic not because the battles are unrealistic, but because the infrastructure of society is mostly invisible, especially outside of the Shire.
You should read his articles. It will fairly quickly disabuse you of some preconceptions. In particular, the shire is a quite realistic portrayal of peasants and lords and such once you realize Bilbo is mostly nobility.
I think I noted that the Shire is different, if not wildly different, from most other locales in LOTR. In general the Shire is much more realistic than other LOTR Locales (IMO). Though there's for sure an element of just ignoring things that don't matter too much - like how Lothlórien works economically.
But I'll look at the article, I've read other ACOUP stuff and enjoyed.
There's also that Peter Jackson's movies botch (intentionally, for dramatic purposes) some things that are present in the books.
For example, the city of Gondor seems like a giant fortress without any fields or farmers working outside its walls to sustain it. This even before any siege. So what do they eat?
Tolkien wouldn't have made this mistake, it's likely Jackson's. And I understand why: people want to see epic battles, farmers doing their thing are a low cinematic priority.
> IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros
Devereaux argues precisely the contrary, that LotR is more realistic than GoT at presenting faux-medieval societies and the feudal caste! Perhaps Tolkien simply did his research better... or that simply by taking medieval and ancient literature as his sources, he got it better.
He has quite a bit to say about the system of vassallage as depicted in GoT, as well as the relationship between the Church and both the common people and the nobles. Devereaux argues that the cynical take in GoT, i.e. that most nobles didn't believe in their religion and only cynically used it when it suits their purposes (which is the norm, not the exception in GoT!) is at odds with the real middle-ages.
Also, none of Deveraux's objections focus on obviously fantasy things like zombies or dragons, he's not trying to score cheap points, and he explicitly states he's living magic & dragons out of the equation. No realistic explanation could come out of them, anyway.
Again, none of this would be a problem if we accepted GoT as pure fantasy (as I do, by the way -- I'm a fan), but it was actually hyped as "more realistic"!
I must be looking at the wrong articles because the two I started reading were all about logistics. (For both universes.)
My memory of Lord of the Rings is that the Shire mostly makes sense, but outside of the Shire, the world doesn't totally add up. The Roharim seem like romanticized Ango-Saxon eorls, but basically on grass plains and without obvious agriculture, the elves kind of just magically subsist, Orthanc is populated with orcs going through a secret industrial revolution without a food supply, large stretches of the world are basically empty... Once out of the Shire I don't really remember there being serfs or peasants or churches or much agriculture. It's possible my memory is betraying me, though.
That said my view on why there's a perception of Game of Thrones as more realistic than "most fantasy" is that in the 1200s through 1600s there really was a ton of plotting and power seeking, and a ton of violence, and social status really was a huge determinant of who could do what and how much would be overlooked. And lots of fantasy pre GoTs had various kinds of chosen one narratives, with side of light overcoming obvious evil, with middle ages trappings being little more than window dressing on permutations of Luke Skywalker or just sort of pre modern alternative societies. While GoTs goes hard on the violence, corruption, actual class differences, and power struggle plotting, and mostly does so without basing those things on magical or spiritual alignments. So IMO it's got flaws and is not a fantasy retelling of the real middle ages, but just clears a low bar of not really romanticizing feudalism and having power struggles that are more people-driven.
I do think Tolkien is much more influenced by and matches way more pre-1200s stuff. And particularly things like the Hobbit, his outside LoTR writings, fit super well into what I'd label kind of the "Beowulf to Egil" sort of era/time period.
I do agree that the relationship of religion and behavior in the middle ages is very hard to understand from a modern perspective - and I don't think it's some GoTs even tries at. (Though obviously we did eventually get the reformation because the divide between the Bible and the Church grew too large and too obvious, but it's also not very likely the case that those precipitating the reformation disbelieved.)
GoT is basically Medieval War of Roses meets LoveCraft (especially obvious if you read up on the map the author published with cities not visited). The lovecraftian parts got pretty much cut to the bone. None of the moongrass, that is overgrowing the dothraki steppe. Barely any of the insanity that goes with wizzardry.
It would be cool to see an interpretation of the Mongol horde in the sense that Devereaux uses them; in contrast to the silly Dothraki. Dudes riding high-grass-mileage little mares and pulling off preposterous feats of logistics…
moderately off-topic because we're here discussing acoup.blog, but i just finished the fall of civilizations podcast episodes on the rise and fall of the mongols. it's really fascinating and sheds quite a bit of light on some things that have been mythologized about chinggis khan
> His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject.
That’s why I love his blog. His reading recommendations are almost all very approachable to non-historians and are always fascinating, especially the books that look at the nitty gritty details of warfare.
I just read Waging War by Wayne E. Lee based off of his recommendation from his logistics/command collections and it’s been a great read start to finish about innovation in warfare (in the broadest sense).
I like Devereaux's take on the Spartans, but I see people repeating it every time the Spartan's are mentioned. I worry that I'm only getting to see two perspectives on the Spartans: the naive glorification and Devereaux's takedown. Does anyone know of a good third source? Ideally another historian who would still be interesting to an amateur.
I do sometimes think this about the info I get from his blog. He’s a fun writer and so I think, like lots of us, I probably over-value his takedowns.
But, we should keep in mind the stakes, right? He provides a compelling argument that, actually, Sparta was not even that great at marshaling up a bunch of guys with big spears. That’s a nice beachhead in the conversation as to whether Spartan values are valuable, if you think they aren’t.
But even if he is wrong, what does it mean? Big groups of guys with spears don’t win wars nowadays anyway so even if we think a value system’s ability to win wars is very important (pretty questionable!) spartan-ism is obviously much worse than something like liberal democracy, which produced nukes and stealth bombers which could kill, like, endless numbers of spear guys (however good they are at lining up).
What does it mean to be “equivalent” anyway? I mean, the fact that we’d have to do some funky normalization to the standards of the era is itself an indictment of Spartan values, right? Every major power of even somewhat recent history is very decadent by their standards, including the Soviet Union. If somebody thinks Soviet feats were impressive, they should just adopt Soviet values instead I guess.
The claim was that liberal democracy not Sparta created nukes and stealth bombers, when Sparta didn't exist in the modern age, and couldn't have created such things no matter how they organized their society. This isn't a promotion of Spartan ideals, rather it's just pointing out that the comparison doesn't work for obvious reasons.
It's a bit more complicated than that. Militarily, we rather consistently win (or at least not lose). The trouble is that the new regimes we establish end up reliant on us for defense, and unless we're willing to be said regimes' military for decades on end (like we were with Japan) or at the very least maintain permanent military presences (like we did with West Germany until its reunification with East Germany, and like we're still doing with South Korea and Japan), those regimes prove incapable of defending themselves from the adversaries we defeated to establish said regimes in the first place.
That's exactly what happened with South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: as soon as we pulled out "victorious", the newly-established allied regime was unable to defend itself against North Vietnam / ISIS / the Taliban (respectively).
The US can destroy anyone by one guy pressing a button.
On the other hand, to win a non-nuclear war in the modern age, you need clever political positioning and a realistic end goal as well as battlefield results. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 were all unwinnable no matter how well you fought.
Take a look at the links and sources mentioned in his retrospective on the Sparta series: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r.... Devereaux mentions some different approaches that modern historians take towards Sparta, particularly Steven Hodkinson's arguments that Sparta was more typical and less unusual compared to the other Greek poleis; following up on that work would probably be a useful counterpoint.
There are lots of sources, the article briefly covers many of them. They all share in common the fact that there is very little real information and so we can only read behind the lines at trying to find the truth. Devereaux is one of the few takes that admit to this problem, and for that alone is makes him my favored source. It quickly becomes clear if you read these that most takes on the Spartans are using the lack of information to read some favored angle.
I'd be interested in another historian's take if different. I'm reasonably confident that they will be similar to Devereaux's take though, so I'm not looking.
I just feel the need to clarify that Devereaux is barely left-leaning. He keeps his politics pretty firmly out of his blogs for the most part, but when he does break out politics he's pretty clearly very close to the center relative to what we think today when we hear "left" and "right".
As a historian (and, I believe, a good one), he seems to see the complexity of the current partisan dynamic too clearly to dogmatically pick a side.
He wrote a hysterical philippic [1] just before the election calling Trump a fascist, which was written with about the same level of historical rigour as the Paul Krugman's rants exhibit for economics.
You may argue that "Trump is a fascist" and you are entitled to that view, but that is not a centrist view, and is at odds with the majority of the US population, which voted for Trump.
generally speaking he is decidedly centrist in his historical perspectives. it is uncritical to paint in broad strokes over a post, or two, in which he uses historical analysis to communicate a progressive perspective that warns against the danger(s) of an incoming administration
>>it is uncritical to paint in broad strokes over a post, or two, in which he uses historical analysis to communicate a progressive perspective
There have only been a couple of posts where he discusses current politics, so that is all I have to go on.
However, from reading his material, I think it would be fair to say he is against the "great man of history" theory, which tends to be a more left wing interpretation.
You need to provide better arguments than telling your interlocutor to check sources. This is just FUD unless you have concrete facts to share that make him wrong.
The majority of the US population did not vote for him. Only a portion could vote, and only a portion of those voted, and out of those 49.9% voted for him.
Pointless pedantry. I think you know what is meant by a majority in an election. He won the popular vote. I'm obviously not including toddlers etc in my statement.
Perhaps, but I'm not interested in making a point. I'm interested in discovering why it's not important to you to describe the election result precisely.
What was the participation? 60% or so? I think so. So maybe 30-35% of the people who could have voted for him actually did. In the US population large portions are unable to vote. You correctly pointed out the very young, but also the pre-adolescent young, the disobedient, the non-citizen, the precarious worker, the infirm and so on should also be included.
So the majority you had in mind is rather small compared to what you literally compared it to. I'm guessing the result feels like 'the will of the people' to you anyway? Do you feel like most usians approved of the current regime? Do you also think that 'the will of the people' is inherently democratic? Inherently good, even?
I think the description I gave is consistent with the one used when Democrats get the "majority" of the vote. You can sealion the definition as much as you like, but it won't make you right.
The result feels as much the will of the people as any other US election result.
Are you trying to assert that fascism can't be popular? He pretty clearly stated the criteria and how he considers trump's movement in respect to them. You can refute the point¹ but you haven't, merely stating you disagree with them based on the popular vote.
¹ Not to me, I won't read it. I don't care and I've heard enough fascism apologetics on HN in the last few years.
I'm trying to assert that calling Trump a fascist is a left wing opinion, and not one shared by centrists like Obama, given how friendly they were at Carter's funeral.
But you won't see this, as you have chosen self righteousness over knowledge. And no-one is apologising for fascism because he isn't one.
I like his spartan review but really don't like the Fremen mirage article. With Bret Devereaux he uses the classic ideal of - if all you have is a hammer then all your problems are nails. In this instance he is using the Roman history "hammer" to subdue all issues he disagrees with the Fremen mythology.
I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology.
As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed.
I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.
I read this previously and from memory it relies a lot on what Athens wrote about Sparta? I'm no historian but I was wondering if there's bias there, because they mostly despised each other and Athens kept records whereas Sparta didn't. It seems reasonable that you'd write a bunch of stuff about your enemies being inhumane and generally shit. Maybe the sometimes nicer things written about them coincided with periods of peace and alliance? Just spit balling, it's still an interesting and informative read.
It's also been a while since I read it but he address some of those points in the extended series as they come up.
IIRC the two main things are that one of the main athenian sources greatly admired sparta and wanted athens to be more like it, so was actually biased in the other way than you'd expect. And in the other sources it's clear that some degree of respect for sparta's history and military tenacity was common among at least the athenian elite whose views we have access to.
Also in an extended conflict in a complex political environment involving other military powers, it can sometimes be to your benefit to acknowledge or even inflate the might of your enemy. A polity's regional stature is not improved by having a hard time defeating a weak opponent. So to some extent athenians probably contributed to sparta's enduring reputation as a formidable military power.
So yeah the sources are biased but mainly in ways that an informed-enough reader can recognize and account for and still draw useful information from them, albeit carefully. Which, I learned from this blog, is a big part of the actual practice of the discipline of history.
> This is not to say that Diodorus Siculus recorded a more accurate depiction of these events, but his phrasing does more closely mirror the flowery language with which ancient leaders probably addressed each other.
Woof. The Spartans were famous for their disdain for flowery words. Herodotus discussed it explicitly, and Thucydides reflected it when writing Spartan dialogue. They preferred to speak plainly and get straight to the point. This common understanding of spartan speech is even enshrined in the English language, via the word 'laconic', meaning "using few words".
Before sharing your insights with the world, do try to make sure you know what you're talking about.
For those interested in the topic of Sparta, I can highly recommend Bret C. Devereaux's series of blog posts on the subject at https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... (2019). It corrects many myths about the Spartans on the basis of the contemporary state of research.
Molon Labe, as it is used in popular culture today, is not being used as a stealth call to go back to the popular understanding of Spartan virtues, let alone secretly a call to go back to real Spartan organization.
It just means don't take my guns, and a vague threat of violence if you try. Nothing more.
This is exactly the conclusion of the article, which I think was put very well:
> As a new generation of people adopts the Spartans as historical role models, we should understand that they’re probably telling us more about themselves than the actual people who lived in Sparta more than two millennia ago.
If it just means "don't take my guns", that's what they would write on their merch instead of some greek letters most people can't read. By using this Spartan phrase they're trying to evoke the mythical greatness of Sparta, and that is what this article is about.
Yeah, and everybody in Alabama always says "Go Team, Win Win Win" instead of "Roll Tide" because nobody can understand what "Roll Tide" means.
Nobody is actually invoking anything beyond the absolutely most superficial "Spartanness" and going deep into "Well, actually, the Spartans were not nice people if you dig deeply into the truth" is not relevant when nobody else is digging that deeply. To a first approximation nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess".
Despite all the sensitivity in the university system in the past 5-10 years, I've never even heard a whiff of a suggestion that Michigan State University needs to change its mascot... because nobody, not even the educated and politically sensitive, thinks anything about Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess". If anyone had any sort of real knowledge about the situation it would have been considered extremely extremely insensitive... but nobody thinks about these things. Hard to get much more proof than that.
> "nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond.."
"Sparta" is a "symbol" in our culture's "language of symbols" which stands roughly for "brutal and effective masculine warrior ethic, worthy of respect and fear". It is probably the single most unambiguous symbol available for this kind of thing, and is therefore used constantly—when somebody wants to make an argument like "might makes right", or "what if we didn't care about other people", or "men must be strong, austere, and violent to be worthy of respect", a reference to Sparta is never far away. Even when they don't make explicit reference to Sparta, it lends credibility to these sorts of ethics. It acquires its power from the fact that it actually existed in history and was seemingly successful, that it lives on with a generally admiring connotation, that it stands for the pinnacle of achievement in a certain sense.
The point of an attack on the historical accuracy of the symbolic Sparta is to weaken the power of the symbol to be used for evil. It did not exist as remembered, nor for all that long, it was not particularly effective, the admiration of Sparta has been concocted after-the-fact by commentators trying to fit it into their agendas, it was not as brutal as it is imagined to be, nor was it particularly important in history. It was just a weird and particularly unpleasant culture that existed at one point.
These are attacks on the structural integrity of a whole set of ideas which are regularly used to justify cruelty, abuse, and violence, and which mislead people—young men especially—as to the nature of virtue.
That it is sometimes used harmlessly doesn't have much to do with this at all.
For every fallacy there is a fallacy of that fallacy.
Words mean what they mean as intended by the people who use them, but they also have history. Also and especially, phrases have history. Keeping not only the original language but also the original alphabet/script/glyphs/characters strongly call back to that history.
Sparta buried her war dead on the field in mass graves. A hoplon shield isn't useful to carry a body in the first place. This is the first I've heard that attributed to Plutarch, however...
> [A Spartan mother], as she handed her son his shield, exhorted him, saying, "Either this or upon this."
The Loeb editor comments: "[Attributed] to Gorgo by Aristotle in his Aphorisms, as quoted by Stobaeus, Florilegium VII.31, but it is often spoken of as a regular Spartan custom. Cf., for example, the scholium on Thucydides II.39. Ancient writers were not agreed whether the second half meant to fall upon the shield (dead or wounded) or to be brought home dead upon it. In support of the second (traditional) interpretation cf. Moralia 235A, and Valerius Maximus II.7 ext. 2."
Valerius Maximus II.7 ext. 2 is "maternarum blanditiarum memores, quibus [...] monebantur ut aut vivi cum armis in conspectum earum venirent aut mortui in armis referrentur" — "remembering their mothers' admonition [...] that they should next be seen alive with their armor or reported dead in it."
Plutarch's Moralia 235A, in the Sayings of Spartans, is a verse attributed to Dioscurides: "Lifeless to Pitane came, on his shield upborne, Thrasybulus..."
Moralia 235B supplies my new favorite laconism:
> When Philip of Macedon sent some orders to the Spartans by letter, they wrote thus in reply: "As to what you wrote about: No."
Plutarch is well known for just making things up. He was the Greek version of the dude in the pub with wild tales about the time he went fishing and caught a shark during a wild storm. When in reality the story actually boiled down to "he caught a fish once".
There's certainly a place for revisionist history and the Spartan legend seemed like a fair target even before Steven Pressfield's Gates of Fire, but it seems ironic to be skewering the Frank-Miller-300 caricature in service to his own caricature of the "second-amendment-sticker-on-my-pickup-truck" guys who are his real target.
"I just bet those Spartans would be coal rolling me in their diesel Ford F-350's with their lifted tires and MAGA bumpter stickers today if they could!"
The group that came closest to achieving the Spartan ideal was the Mongol Empire. The Mongol Empire was the largest empire in human history, and it was created by tough, hard-trained horse-riding nomads.
It wasn't just about being tough. The Mongols had good operational doctrine.
Here's a modern evaluation by a U.S. Army officer.[1] They used intelligence and mobility to dominate the battlefield with smaller forces than their opponents.
They had a good system for selecting leaders with a track record of winning.
They were surprisingly good at planning, and at coordinating large units.
That's how you win wars.
The Mongol Empire collapsed due to internal political problems. No external enemy could take them down.
I am Spartan. I grew up in Sparta, Greece.
I am in my "ancient Sparta" reading phase for some months now, I read everything from (modern) Greek, Foreign authors and researchers, as well as ancient texts with references to Sparta (even books/scrolls about "Helen of Troy" or as we call her in Greece/Greek "beautiful Helene" - Ωραία Ελένη.
There is SO MUCH to know about (Ancient) Sparta.
Two Kings? - Check
City without Walls? (who would be crazy enough to attack?) - Check
Simple legislation? (one written Law - Lycurgus) - Check (debatable - depends on the book/scroll)
One prison cell - 4 walls, no ceiling, you stay in until some other criminal is convicted and replaced you (not much crime back in the day) - Check
There was a big shift in the change of the dominant 'tribe' (Δωριείς vs Αχαιοί) post the financial ruin and loss of many men of the Trojan War.
Anyway.. for anyone who hasn't read about Ancient Sparta, it is one of the 'things' that reading it will fulfill you.
Fun fact for the movie 300. The producers sent photographers and photographed the valley, mountains, made an actual scenery of the landscape. I remember watching the movie and understanding where EXACTLY they had placed their cameras from the angle of the mountains, etc. I later asked around and they verified my suspicion.
One issue though.. they they started "marching north" towards Thermopylae, in reality/in the real landscape they walked to the SOUTH, and I remember watching the movie in Athens, and apparently it was me and some other Spartan in the audience, so we both yelled at that point "hey malakes, you are going the wrong way"
One last thing. Perhaps for the foreigners the most famous phrase is "μολων λαβε". For Greeks (I bet you!) is "ή ταν ή επί τας" which literally translates to "either THE or ON THE", which means "I will either walk back CARRYING my/THE shield, or I will be brought back dead CARRIED ON my/THE shield" (apologies for the caps)
Don’t worry: we’re indirectly thinking about Rome by thinking about their perception of ancient Sparta. Rome is the Kevin Bacon of western historical thought: we’re never more than 6 hops away.
Ah yes, good ol' "moron rube" fellas, whose entire understanding of their role models is based on Hollywood depictions.
I was primed to agree with the article's premises, until...
> Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack?
...is this really the moral of the story here? That the Spartans should've just surrendered? That the proper response to a superior force (of another oligarchical, slave-dependent society) wanting to subjugate you into said oligarchical, slave-dependent society is to... simply roll over and let it happen?
That's the real irony here about the Moron Rubes. They envision themselves as Spartans defending Greece from the Persian onslaught, but they have much more in common with Ephialtes.
Hmm. I think US-USSR / Athens-Sparta is a poor analogy. They spoke the same language, and it’s a two day walk. I’m going to defer to Athenians on the character of Sparta over modernish debunkers.
I think that's trying to draw the metaphor too far. The point is just that people have a tendency to be fascinated with their enemies, and exaggerate the differences between them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Other_(philosophy)
The best and most recent example of that, for a modern American, would be the USSR. You do come across similar processes with, say, Chinese or Arabs, but they're not explicit enemies, and there's more cultural integration and exchange in those cases.
Sparta is a very poor example of a working city state, though.
Also, it’s a very strange position because there is a good reason why there aren’t more city states: they get steamrolled when a better organised neighbour wants to take their stuff.
> Sparta is a very poor example of a working city state, though.
Indeed. Bret Devereaux makes a good case that Sparta was actually bad at being a city state, and that their restrictive citizenship laws meant it was constantly shrinking.
Is there a example of a modern city state being conquered? HK was returned to China at the end of a lease, Sevastopol wasn't a city state, Kuwait also not a city state. I can't think of one.
A standing army is not the only way to ensure continued existence. Republic of Ireland has something like 6000 troops, no Navy as such, I'm not sure they have any armed aircraft, and yet... there it is.
I wasn't talking about "continued existence" in general, but about defense against an invasion ("being conquered", I defaulted to "by military invasion"). The Republic of Ireland doesn't have an army that could defend it, it would have to rely on more powerful allies. (I'm discounting guerrilla resistance by civilians, etc).
> Is there a example of a modern city state being conquered?
I think there are no modern city states in the same sense that ancient Athens, Rome, Carthage, Sparta, or Renaissance Florence and Milan were.
Those seem to be microstates, or small countries with the single dominant city along other cities, rather than city-states.
I'm aware they are listed in Wikipedia as "can be considered" city-states, but I don't think that's in the sense we mean here.
This matters because my main objection is that city-states in the same sense as Sparta, Athens, etc, no longer exist in the modern world, and as such, the question "is there a example of a modern city state being conquered?" is moot.
There aren’t many examples of modern city states to begin with. San Marino and Monaco could disappear overnight and not many people would care. Hong Kong and Macau were tokens, pawns that changed hands in the colonial Great Game, but that never really controlled their destiny.
Obvious exceptions are Vatican City and Singapore, which benefit from different kinds of safety. But there is no region that remains in the world like medieval Italy or the Holy Roman Empire, or classical Greece. All of them got swallowed.
The line will be build the way it is designed, due to atomics in a unstable region making a line ideal to statistically "defend" against expected hostilities destroying traditional cities.
> we should remember that, in actual history, Sparta was an oppressive society that established itself as the enemy of the Greek city-states that valued democracy and the arts. We should also remember that many of the modern people who have been most enthusiastic about the Spartans as historical role models have also been really enthusiastic about oppressing and killing their fellow human beings.
My interest in Sparta is that it exemplifies how elite a group of people can become when they focus on one thing. As mentioned in the article, Sparta beat Athens in the Second Peloponnesian War. Athens was the naval and intellectual powerhouse of the area at the time, yet the unsophisticated specialized warmongers won. It illustrates that in life hyperfocusing can yield results. I do not forget that Sparta was an oppressive and brutal society that I in no way would want to live in. I do not idealize their caste culture or slaveholding, but sometimes the bad guys win, and Sparta is a colorful example of that.
> Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack?
Interestingly, the Greeks did end up fending off the Persian invasion due to the victory at the Battle of Salamis where the Athenian navy crushed the Persian navy. The Spartan stand at Thermopylae was critical to delay the invasion though, let's not pretend like those deaths were futile.
>My interest in Sparta is that it exemplifies how elite a group of people can become when they focus on one thing.
Except they weren't particularly elite. As (already mentioned) A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry author Bret Devereaux points out[1]:
"Instead, what we might say is that the Spartans phalanx was, in most respects, just like every other Greek hoplite phalanx, with the addition that Spartan command and coordination was somewhat better, but hardly excellent by the broader standards of antiquity."
And, as he also observes, any Spartan superiority didn't manifest on the battlefield:
I will give it a read, thanks for the source. I'm definitely guilty of indulging in pop culture impressions of the Spartan warrior being the most disciplined and elite singular unit in history so this will be an interesting read.
Does Thermopylae count as a loss by this definition? As I'm sure it does, that doesn't dispel much of the myth of the prowess of the individual Spartan warrior, which is really what I find intriguing about the whole thing.
Yes, Thermopylae is counted as a defeat in coalition (the author gives a full list of every battle and his categorization in the linked blog post, you can read it for yourself).
One of the Spartan losses is when they decide to pretend to not be Spartan so they can surprise their opponents with their skill, but they turn out instead to be utterly wrecked by their opponents. The Spartans really do seem to be mediocre fighters (not good, but not bad either) with a stellar PR agency.
> I'm definitely guilty of indulging in pop culture impressions of the Spartan warrior being the most disciplined and elite singular unit in history so this will be an interesting read.
There are better examples of forces that were actually good, even if they are less flattering in pop culture. For example, there is a reason why the Romans ended up controlling the Mediterranean and not the Spartans.
Do you likewise idealize chattel slavers' plantations? Eichmann's bureaucracy?
What do you emulate from King Leopold's "colorful" subjugation of the Congo? How do you coach subordinates to follow the example of the conquistadors who plundered Latin America?
Are we so short of winning "good guys" that we must plumb the depths of evil for role models?
> The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.
Of course not. We must however be reminded in the West that weakness is not the same as goodness and that all the pontificating on virtues doesn't matter if your society can be dominated by another (ie. Athens losing to Sparta). My problem with the article and your response is the notion that anyone interested in the (supposed) military capability of the Spartans are de facto Nazis, when in fact it might just be interesting history we can still learn from. There's a saying about babies and bathwater or something.
The mythos around Sparta appeals to the fascist aesthetic, it always had, there's nothing new under the sun. The nazis were very found of their ahistorical perception of what Sparta supposedly was: the strong treading on the weak, a glorification of masculinity, etc.
Isn't the most popular myth about 300 Spartans facing off against the powerful Persian Empire bent on conquering Greek lands? Which is based on a historical event, but there were several thousand other Greeks helping the Spartan warriors in a narrow pass, because fighting in the open would have benefited the much larger Persian force.
(Edit, the author is Bret C. Devereaux)
And a long-running series on the "Fremen myth", which is similar to the retro-spective glorification of/mythology around Sparta. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
At any rate, that blog is a must read for any history-myth-debunker, especially around military. Also highly recommended is their analysis of the LotR battles and campaigns, which fare well historicaly, and the GoT, which ... doesn't.
He also does medieval game reviews!
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