Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

Wow, I can’t imagine what it was like to comment in morse code.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

I really should read my own blog.

One of our two political parties is a cult whose leader admires Vladimir Putin.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

Let the trolls come, and then ignore them. that’s the worst thing you can do to a troll.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

… pundit janitors mopping up after the gop

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

In my day, never was longer.

Fundamental belief of white supremacy: white people are presumed innocent, minorities are presumed guilty.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Republicans choose power over democracy, every day.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Highbrow Entertainment Open Thread: They… Are… SPARTA!!!

Highbrow Entertainment Open Thread: They… Are… SPARTA!!!

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But they had such a KEWL saga / movie / video game!… A historian explains, for those aspiring authoritarians who imagine themselves as the citizen elites ruling over dozen, nay hundreds, of faceless broken slaves — “Spartans Were Losers”:

The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well…

Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.

To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth…

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved…

Gosh, I wonder if this Peculiar Institution might have anything to do with the Spartan-tastic fantasies of our modern American… authoritarians?

(It’s been almost sixty years, but my first memories of reading about Sparta involved my mother’s battered 1930s edition of Hendrik Willem van Loon‘s The Story of Mankind. As I remember it, van Loon kinda stressed that the British Empire had its reasons for promoting the glory of an ancient culture where a tiny minority of institutionally-reared elite males ‘righteously’ ruled over a vast expanse of lesser, uncultured tribalists. These reasons, he pointed out, did not particularly translate to a democratic global culture, especially in a place like America. But of course van Loon was writing in a time where a different European society’s political theories also bent towards Sparta worship.)

Guy with 14.4K followers responds to Professor Devereaux:

Reader Interactions

144Comments

  2. 2.

    Kyle

    I don’t know if the current chuds who dream of military victory dream of Sparta, but they do dream of being Wolverines from Red Dawn.

  5. 5.

    dmsilev

    A while back, I remember reading a long-form version of that article, going into considerable detail about all the many ways in which Sparta sucked compared to their peer city-states and how their reputation was mostly a myth.

    Still, at least we can laugh at the right-winger love-fest for a movie that was about as homoerotic as possible while still being something that mainstream theaters were willing to show.

  6. 6.

    Jackie

    Indictment! Not for J6 – yet – but MAL:

    “A maintenance worker at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago private club has been charged by Special Counsel Jack Smith in the same criminal case against former President Donald Trump, the AP reports.”

    This involves the draining of the pool and “accidentally” flooding the area where the classified documents were kept.

    PLUS!:

    “Donald Trump is facing additional charges in the Justice Department’s classified documents investigation,” the AP reports.”

    ”“The additional allegations of obstruction and willful retention of national defense information were added to the indictment Thursday by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s team of prosecutors.””

  7. 7.

    prufrock

    It seems the more militarized the society, the worse it is at logistics. For example, all the Axis powers inflicted a lot of their supply problems on themselves, even early in the war when things were going well for them otherwise.

     

    It may come down to the simple fact that if your society instills a desire for glory in too many of its citizens, there won’t be enough people left who are willing to do the mundane tasks that are boring but necessary to successfully prosecute a war.

  9. 9.

    p.a.

    @dmsilev: Still, at least we can laugh at the right-winger love-fest for a movie that was about as homoerotic as possible while still being something that mainstream theaters were willing to show.

     

     

    These people really have less self-awareness than amoeba.  An amoeba will move toward what benefits it and away from threats.  An amoeba would never ingest horse de-wormer.

  10. 10.

    UncleEbeneezer

    So…people can’t study history unless they admire historical figures?  That is an utterly ridiculous claim that sounds an awful lot like an attempt to justify white-washing the past in order to keep historical study rooted in nostalgia.

  11. 11.

    bleh

    Let’s not go overboard attributing reasoned debate based on imperfect knowledge of history to people who never matured emotionally beyond, say, 10-12 years old.

    Might as well debate the historical accuracy of, I dunno, the Hulk, or Wolverines!

  12. 12.

    piratedan

    @Jackie: I believe that they added a Mr. DeOliviera to the list of people on the hook for 45.  He’s supposedly the brains behind the convenient flooding of the MAL server room, based on what I’ve seen on the web.

    so a Nauta equivalent, if you wish….

  14. 14.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    I hate to say it, but my HS alma mater’s sports teams were called the Spartans…

    lol

    They were fairly decent FWIW

  17. 17.

    Chetan Murthy

    It’s so great that Deveraux is getting a slot in Foreign Policy.  So many of his posts/post-series have been enormously educational and timely, these past few years.

  18. 18.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @prufrock:

    I remember reading that late into the war the Nazi government basically stole from their own citizen’s savings. Minimum wage laws were also suspended

  19. 19.

    coozledad

    The Spartans caught a lucky break at Aegospotami, anyway. The Athenians had beached their ships to go hunt down something to eat, and the Spartans just torched the unguarded vessels.

  20. 20.

    Roger Moore

    I think the key to understanding the modern fascination with the Spartans is that their contemporaries were impressed by them.  Herodotus, for instance, apologized in his work for contradicting the generally held belief in his time that the Spartans had been most responsible for Greek victory in the Persian War.  It’s clear the Spartans had a huge mystique among the Greeks, and that’s reflected in the way the primary sources wrote about them.  That bias was perpetuated by subsequent historians who depended on those primary sources. It’s one of the key things to understand about doing history.  Yes, it’s important to go back to primary sources, but you need to keep an eye on their biases.

  21. 21.

    bleh

    @piratedan: CNN also saying there is evidence that TFG told him he wanted the video records deleted, which may explain the additional obstruction charge.

    Big fat orange drops of flop-sweat …

  25. 25.

    Subsole

    @prufrock:

    I would argue that militarism, or at least right wing militarism, is at heart a Romanticist/emotionally-rooted ideology. It is a vicious, emotional lashing out at logic and reason and coolly-measured thought. It may dress itself up in the trappings of same, but ultimately those trappings are deployed for emotional gratification.

    Witness the endless hordes of debate-me-bros. They are not engaging in debate to convince. They are debating to hurt, to trigger, to evoke the hot cathartic flash of seeing the person they disagree with humbled and made lesser. It is not, in any sense, debate. It is snot-nosed bullying dressed up in a windsor-knot.

    Such ideology (if we so wish to dishonor the word) disdains the hard, difficult work of the intellect. All of it. The kind of work that is the very bedrock and DNA of logistics.

    They suck at diplomacy and they suck at logistics and very, very often they suck dead skunk ass at fighting wars, because they aren’t interested in any of that. They pursue all that for emotional gratification rather than concrete achievement.

    The right wing state cannot help but collapse into a flaming ruin. Because it is not strong enough to do the hard work of being a state. It is too busy being the soft, padded little emotional hugbox/playground of frightened, angry people.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @Baud:

    I remember seeing a really good, similar thing contrasting Sparta and Thespiae.  Thespiae sent a contingent of hoplites to fight at Thermopylae- a larger one than the Spartans sent, BTW- that fought just as well as the Spartans did.  The difference was that Thespiae was a cultured place, so that today actors are known as thespians, while Sparta was a dull, boring place so that we say something bare bones with no frills is spartan.

  30. 30.

    Subsole

     

    I would actually like to see a HS team call itself the Sacred Band.

    Just to watch ALL the heads explode.

  31. 31.

    Jackie

    @bleh: The prosecutor experts on MSNBC are speculating DeOliviera may have flipped.

    I see a pool of yellow sweat…

  32. 32.

    Mike in NC

    Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire

    A really terrible book. Steve Bannon probably read it several times.

  37. 37.

    bleh

    @Jackie: That was my first thought.  He lied like a good factotum, he got caught and squeezed hard, he sang, and this charge is part of the deal.  Or maybe they think he has more to tell, and this charge is part of the squeeze.  Either way, it seems all but certain he’s the source of at least some of the info that’s behind the additional obstruction charge of TFG.

  38. 38.

    Subsole

    @Roger Moore:

    It has been observed that, at least in the modern era, people who treat violence as some deep, mystical, genetically-mandated act of testosteroid strengthitude tend to fare very, very poorly indeed when they come up against folks who take a more pragmatic, workaday approach to their violence.

  41. 41.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Subsole: Deveraux makes the argument (backed up with historical facts) that it has been thus since the founding of city-based civilizations of reasonable size.  Cities allow specialization that supports armies that can train as units for long periods, and hence get their skills up.  They allow specialization in all the kit that goes with those soldiers, which takes a massive tail of workers who aren’t soldiers, with very, very specialized skills.  And on and on.

  42. 42.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @coozledad:

    Thucydides had all kinds of axes to grind. An early David Petraeus.

    Spot on. Conservative and arrogant. Difficult to read in Greek to boot.

  44. 44.

    Subsole

    @coozledad: Yeah. One of the more heartbreaking experiences of my youth was seeing footage of the emaciated, ragged horses struggling along on Operation Barbarossa.

    War is no place for a man, and damn sure not an innocent animal…

  45. 45.

    Chip Daniels

    @prufrock:

    Its been demonstrated convincingly that undemocratic societies generally CAN’T make the trains run on time, or make much of anything work because the central organizing principle is loyalty, not competence.

  48. 48.

    Geminid

    Sparta’s success in the second phase of the Peloponnian war was enabled by an Athenian. Alcibiades had been picked to be a general in the ill-fated Athenian expedition to Syracuse. But when he got word that he was to be recalled to Athens and put on trial for sacrilege, Alcibiades defected to Sparta. He gave the Spartans some shrewd advice: fortify Decelea, on Attica’s western edge, and use it as a base from which to ravage Attica’s farms year-round.

    Alcibiades later defected back to Athens after he got the wife one of Sparta’s two kings pregnant. He was a successful general for Athens until he fell out with authorities again, and fled to the Anatolian coast. Alcibiades was killed there not long after, by bandits said to be in the pay of the Persian governor.

    Alcibiades was a student of Socrates, and he makes an appearance in Plato’s Symposium. He also figures in an anecdote about his stay in Sparta. In Athens, Alcibiades was famous for his luxurious ways, so people wondered how he would adapt to the simple life Spartans prided themselves in. The story is that when he ate the Spartan’s distinctive black bean soup with gusto, a Spartan asked Alcibiades what he thought of Sparta’s famous “black broth.”

    “Now I know why the Spartans do not fear death,” he replied.

  49. 49.

    PJ

    @Roger Moore: The Spartans dominated Greece militarily for around 200 years.  It’s not that they never lost, but they had the only professional army in the area – citizens of other cities all had other jobs they had to do, and they drilled when they could.  The Spartans had helots to do all their work, so could spend all their time training.

    Sparta had lots of problems – they could never leave home for too long for fear of the helots revolting, and due to restrictions on the Spartiate class, their number of professional soldiers steadily dwindled – but they had the overall best army in Greece until the Epaminondas figured out weighting the line to win hoplite battles.  Devereaux exaggerates when he says that they were losers – it’s like saying the Prussians were losers because they lost WWI and WWII.  This is true, but it ignores that they won an awful lot of battles for a couple of hundred years.

  50. 50.

    Subsole

    @Chetan Murthy:

    Yes. He makes the very good point that vast, multiethnic, multicultural empires have larger pools to draw on. Both in skill and raw bodies

    The monocult ethnostate is a sociogenetic dead end.

    …So of course the conservatives are rushing to embrace it and drag us all along for the ride.

     

    @Sure Lurkalot: I always appreciated Thucydides. He at least seemed to give a damn about the suffering that befell people as a result of war.

    I don’t like his attitude to democracy, but, honestly? If I’d sat there and watched my politia vote to go to Syracuse, I’d probably despair for the concept a bit, too…

  54. 54.

    Chetan Murthy

    @PJ:

    it’s like saying the Prussians were losers because they lost WWI and WWII.

    Adam Tooze had an entire semester seminar about this.  His argument (IIRC) was that the Prussian way of war was a smashing first strike, hoping to destroy the enemy completely, bringing them to surrender.  When that doesn’t happen, they basically have nothing, being unable to mount the full society-wide mobilization to support a war of attrition.  In that sense, yes, they were losers.

  56. 56.

    Subsole

    @PJ:

    In fairness to Prof. Devereaux, in his initial series over at ACOUP, he didn’t argue that the Spartans were losers, tactically speaking. Merely that they were above average.

    He does argue that strategically and operationally, they stank on ice.

    I’m sure someone could argue with that assessment. I can’t.

  57. 57.

    PJ

    @Subsole: Direct democracy leads to a lot of bad decisions, as the Athenians demonstrated time and time again.  Indirect democracy has a lot of problems, too, but fewer, and less extreme, as the Americans demonstrate time and time again.

  58. 58.

    different-church-lady

    It’s super weird that some people don’t realize they can still have all the movie Spartans they want no matter what historians say.

  59. 59.

    Subsole

    @PJ:

    Very true. Democracies also tend to correct those bad decisions at much less cost than competitor modes. If only because you can just vote the screw-ups out instead of having to get your paramilitaries to batter their paramils into submission first.

  61. 61.

    PJ

    @Subsole: I’ve read the same historical sources as Devereaux.  He doesn’t have some magic insight into things.  What happened to the Spartans happens to a lot of states at war – they are successful until they are not.  The Spartans couldn’t make an extended empire work, but neither could the Athenians (for mostly different reasons.)

  62. 62.

    Subsole

    @different-church-lady:

    I can’t speak for the entire type, but the few I encountered all seemed to embrace Sparta because they didn’t know how to laugh at themselves.

    They were thus very poorly equipped to handle other people laughing at them.

    Completely unarmed, you might say.

  64. 64.

    PJ

    @Chetan Murthy: As I said in another post, it’s the same as with many states and military power – they are successful until they are not.  The Thebans figured out how to win at hoplite warfare by weighting one side of the line and broke Spartan military supremacy.  The Macedonians took that and added longer spears and superior cavalry and crushed the Thebans thirty years later.

  65. 65.

    Fraud Guy

    Is this the DeVos plan for schools?:

    The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics.

  66. 66.

    geg6

    I have come to the conclusion that these 300 fanbois on the hard right are deeply closeted and self-hating.  It’s kind of sad if you forget they are also violent shitheads.

  67. 67.

    Another Scott

    Someone here pointed us to Bret’s site a year or few ago, probably in a thread about shaving cats or something. It’s well worth clicking over to read his longer comments there.

    Smart dude who writes well.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  75. 75.

    PJ

    @Subsole: Until one side (e.g., the GOP) decides that using paramilitaries to win victories is far superior to winning at the ballot box.

  76. 76.

    Chetan Murthy

    I got three teeth pulled recently (and bone powder put in, in preparation for implants) [wow,  talk about pricey!!] and …. the literature really scares you about the dangers of messing up the stitches, etc.  I wasn’t sure I knew how to brush my teeth safely and not fuck up the stitches, so I decided to just not eat for the 21 days until I see the dentist next.  Which is less of a problem than one might think, b/c I have a ton of fat to get rid of.  So it’s been going fine ….. *except* that I guess a lot of my entertainment came from cooking dishes to eat for dinner.  So now that’s all gone.  Snif.  Life is so boring, not eating.  And I can’t really exercise either, b/c I was used to swimming (can’t do that) or lifting weights (no strenuous exertion while fasting).

    So boring.

  77. 77.

    Jay

    @Another Scott:

    toilets?

    wouldn’t you need to have a plumber for that?

    running water?

    a bear patrol to protect the outhouses and people shitting in the woods*?

    *bears are territorial about their latrines

  78. 78.

    Grumpy Old Railroader

    Many decades ago Grumpy’s alma mater sports teams were the Spartans. Grumpy not caring one iota about sports, hung out with a crew that referred to the jocks as the Fart’n Spartans

  79. 79.

    Redshift

    @UncleEbeneezer:

    So…people can’t study history unless they admire historical figures? That is an utterly ridiculous claim that sounds an awful lot like an attempt to justify white-washing the past in order to keep historical study rooted in nostalgia.

    It does fit with their idiotic belief that if school children are taught anything bad about their country, it will make them hate it.

  80. 80.

    bbleh

    Sorry to go OT again but just gotta say, I love how this indictment is such a curveball.  Like, everybody was gearing up for a Great Big January 6 Extravaganza and … oh btw there’s still this Espionage Act thing? and we’ve found more stuff on TFG? like, obstruction and that Bedminster thing?

    It’s like Indictment Whiplash, lol.

    Ok sorry, back to SPARTA!!!

  81. 81.

    Steeplejack

    @lowtechcyclist:

    I finally got around to the new Bluey episodes, and they are excellent. (I think you were the one who expressed interest when I reported that they were released here.) On Disney+ they start with “Musical Statues” and proceed from there. “Onesies” and “Space” are particularly good.

  83. 83.

    Subsole

    @PJ:

    Fair enough. I am not an expert, and am definitely not equipped to debate one.

     

    (Of course, meanwhile the Shahanshah is watching all of this and shaking his head with a rueful chuckle at the thought of any of these people calling themselves an empire…)

  85. 85.

    YY_Sima Qian

    While I definitely agree w/ Devereaux’s overall point about the nonsensical idolatry that the US military displays toward Spartan icons, I think he actually undermines his argument by going overboard on supposed Spartan military “mediocrity”. Spartan prowess in hoplite phalanx warfare on land was undisputed in contemporary accounts. Reading Thucydides’ the Peloponnesian War, every time Sparta marched on Athens w/ its allies, the Athenians hid behind its strong fortifications (which nullified hoplite tactics), & relied upon its superb navy to supply the city, maintain trade & sustain its empire. It was not an easy choice for the Athenians, because its farmlands were located outside of the fortifications. It would not have made these choices if the Spartan army was a mediocre opponent that the Athenians thought they had a decent chance against.

    Ancient Greek hoplite phalanx tactics relied up on discipline & obedience to command in order not to break when the shield walls clashed, & as the two sides tired. The Spartiates excelled at both. Spartiates were also, by the standards of the day, professional soldiers that constantly trained in hoplite warfare as adults, having helot slaves to do everything else. The hoplites of the other Greek city states were amateurs that were farmers/tradesmen 1st. That also showed on the battlefield. Sparta’s declined followed its demographic collapse, not be able to maintain the size of the Spartiate cohort. It was also exhausted from the Peloponnesian War, overextended by its hegemony after defeating Athens, & deeply indebted to Persia. One might say the Thebans out-Spartanned the Spartans w/ the Sacred Band, finally defeating Sparta at Leuctra & ending its hegemony. Even then, the Thebans had to employ a phalanx of 50 deep to break the Spartans by overwhelming mass, as the latter employed the standard practice of 8 – 12 man deep phalanx.

    On the seas, of course, Sparta was less than mediocre (except under the leadership of Lysander), relying upon its Corinthian allies who were nevertheless outmatched by the Athenians. Even here, Sparta was able to leverage Persian loans to keep funding new fleets.

  86. 86.

    HumboldtBlue

    This Argentina v South Africa match going down to the wire. The Argentines have tied it at 2-all after two quick goals.

  87. 87.

    Steeplejack

    @Chetan Murthy:

    When my jaws were wired shut for two months I survived on protein drinks, broth and thin soups. Also the occasional McDonald’s chocolate shake.

  88. 88.

    oldster

    @Chetan Murthy:

    I hope you are talking to a doctor about what to drink while you are fasting. 21 days of fasting is pretty extreme — I’m not saying that you cannot do it, but there are healthier and less healthy ways.

    You should also talk to your dentist about oral care while you are fasting — just because you are not taking in new food does not mean that your mouth does not need attention. Perhaps rinsing and mouthwashes? Again — your dentist will know better.

    But I’m worried about you — you’re one of my favorite commenters, both here and at Crooked Timber. Stay healthy!

  89. 89.

    oldster

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    It’s a real treat for me to see all of the Classical History fans speaking out on this thread. Clearly a lot of people who have read about and care about Greek History! Great stuff.

  90. 90.

    patrick II

    Fortunately for the rest of Greece, Sparta did not have a nuclear umbrella making their city a safe zone preventing retaliation for their inept aggressiveness towards their neighbors.

  91. 91.

    Brachiator

    @dmsilev:

    Still, at least we can laugh at the right-winger love-fest for a movie that was about as homoerotic as possible while still being something that mainstream theaters were willing to show.

    Ancient Athens, Sparta, Thebes all had elements that we might find deplorable. Athens also depended a great deal on slavery and on the work of people who were non-citizens. It still seems that the women of Sparta had more independence compared to the women of Athens.

    I remember reading a renowned book about the women of ancient Athens. Unfortunately, it was one of those not quite really feminist books that focused exclusively on upper class women. I am not hugely knowledgeable when it comes to ancient history, but later I ran across some entertaining and informed articles and podcasts by women historians who tried to provide a more rounded view of ancient Greek societies. I find it cool to note that there may have been a good number of women who were merchants.

    Conversely, even though Persia was the great enemy of Athens and Sparta, I don’t know much about ancient Persian society and the degree to which it was actually repressive compared to the Greek world.

    But I do find these societies, with all their flaws, fascinating.

    I also read that the Romans were also impressed with Spartan society and after conquering them, kept a shrunken version around as a kind of Disney like theme park. They admired the Spartans, but rendered them harmless and irrelevant.

    And the contrast of Sparta and Athens is fascinating. One society that apparently cared little about culture or other attributes of civilization and the Athenians, who deeply loved theater, etc.

  92. 92.

    Chetan Murthy

    @oldster: Heh, thank you for the compliment!

    indeed I have a rinse (chlorhexone-something-something) from the dentist, and I can actually brush the front teeth safely, so I do that; I asked the dental surgeon’s office (an assistant called me back) but, y’know, when I asked “when will it be safe for me to brush without worrying about screwing up my stitches?” she said “after the doctor sees you next” (21 days).  In short, if I’m going to play it safe — which is my only goal here, not weight loss — I’m not going to brush for 21 days.  B/c FFS I don’t want to mess up these stitches.It’s a bicuspid, a premolar,  and a back molar, all over the mouth, not on one side.
    the goal isn’t about weight loss.  It is *only* that I want to avoid having to brush my teeth much, and esp. not the back teeth.  And the only way I know to do that, is to not eat.It’s actually not as hard as it seems.  I don’t feel hunger, and I take potassium and some salt from time-to-time during the day.  Need to get some magnesium citrate.  But really, it’s just not that bad.

    Again, I just don’t want to fuck up these stitches.  I had a good bit of infection under one of the molars, and I’m really anxious that it heal up as well as possible.  So, y’know, willing to go to great lengths to ensure that.

    But, again, boy howdy, SOOO BOOOORRRRRIIING.

  94. 94.

    Jay

    @YY_Sima Qian:

    As Devereaux notes, the bulk of the Spartan Army comprised Heliot’s and “allies”. Basically cannon fodder used to exhaust and harass the enemy Hopilite formations long before the Spartan’s started their “push”.

  96. 96.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Brachiator: Mary Beard’s _SPQR_ studies the lives of ordinary Romans, and not merely the 1%.  And also of Roman women (again, of all classes).  She’s pretty clear that the life of an upper-class Roman matron consisted in childbirth-pregnancy-lather-rinse-repeat until either death in childbed or menopause.  Since (as Brad Delong put it) “bear a child, lose a tooth”, even these upper-class matrons probably weren’t in the greatest of health after their many pregnancies.  Of course, many of their children died in infancy (of disease) and many of the rest in wars.  So it was pretty awful.

    And for poor Roman women (the vast majority) it was much, much, much worse.

  97. 97.

    Subsole

     

     

    @YY_Sima Qian: Funny enough, I seem to recall reading somewhere that there were surprisingly few straight up phalanx on phalanx battles during the Peloponnesian War.

    A lot of it was raiding, civil war, sieges, ambushes, coups, and what we would likely call irregular warfare.

    At least on land.

    At sea, it was pretty much the Ancient Greek equivalent of the Pacific Theater. Just absolutely apocalyptic battles.

  99. 99.

    PJ

    @Chetan Murthy: supposedly Roman soldiers of the Empire had the best health care of anyone until the 20th century.  I mean, I’d hate to be a king or a peasant with an illness from say 500 AD until 1900.

  100. 100.

    Subsole

    @patrick II:

    Alas, their ultimate liberator was the King of Macedon. And his son.

     

    @PJ: And then some stuff happened and badda-bing, badda-bucid, now we’re Seleucid.

  101. 101.

    Tehanu

    @Chetan Murthy: Absolutely. Anyone interested in history at all should read his blog (https://acoup.blog/).

    @Subsole: The right wing state cannot help but collapse into a flaming ruin. Because it is not strong enough to do the hard work of being a state. It is too busy being the soft, padded little emotional hugbox/playground of frightened, angry people.

    Thanks for this!

  102. 102.

    Chetan Murthy

    @PJ: I remember Brad Delong had a post about whether you’d rather be Mr. Darcy (from Pride and Prejudice) or any random middle-class office worker today.  And of course the answer is clear: the latter.  One of the Rothschilds died of an infected abscess in the 19th century.

    I’d say later than 1900 though: sulfa drugs were invented in 1935 and pennicillin in 1928.  So … maybe 1940 to be safe?

  103. 103.

    slightly_peeved

    @prufrock:

    I don’t have the reference to hand, but I believe there were British field kitchens in WW2 that prided themselves on how close to the front line they could deliver a fresh-cooked dinner.

    A focus on dying nobly for one’s country has problems both from a tactical standpoint and a logistical standpoint, as Patton pointed out. Sometimes the battle is won not by individual glory, but by the bunch of dudes standing together with their pikes pointing in the right directions.

  104. 104.

    Kirk

    @prufrock:

    It may come down to the simple fact that if your society instills a desire for glory in too many of its citizens, there won’t be enough people left who are willing to do the mundane tasks that are boring but necessary to successfully prosecute a war.

    There was a milfic story I read a long time ago. The protagonist leader said something to the effect of, “Our foes are the greatest warriors on the planet. They will lose, because we are soldiers.” Blah blah logistics and other not-glorious support, etc.

    It stuck with me because as I read actual military history, it remained true. If you want to win battles study tactics. If you want to wars study logistics. (Actually, if you really want to win wars study politics. Logistics only wins the fighting part of war.)

  105. 105.

    Jay

    @Kirk:

    Battles are strategy,

    Logistics win wars,

    Tactics is what the guys do on the ground to take objectives or defend objectives.

  106. 106.

    Brachiator

    @Chetan Murthy:

    Mary Beard’s _SPQR_ studies the lives of ordinary Romans, and not merely the 1%.

    I agree that Beard is an absolute treasure, but I also note that I prefer reading about ancient Greece and Egypt than Rome.

    But I have a number of her lectures queued up on YouTube. I really like one on everyday life in Pompeii.

    I think we still have much to learn about the lives of men and women in ancient societies. I think it a narrow stereotype to assert that their lives were limited to their lives as mothers.

  107. 107.

    Chetan Murthy

    @slightly_peeved: Deveraux has quoted from either Greek or Roman sources about the importance of soldiers in the various formations the Greeks and Romans employed absolutely not breaking ranks for any possible reason whatsoever.  I remember one of those formations was where each soldiers shield protected the soldier to his left, So if he dropped the shield it wasn’t he who got hit but the guy next to him.

  108. 108.

    Gvg

    @Chetan Murthy: I don’t think that is right. I think you should be asking the dentist more specific questions and taking a brush off from a receptionist, in fact he should not have sent you home without better instructions. You should also be checking with your doctor about a fast like that.
    When I had infections and dental surgery, and again when I had implants I got very specific instructions and was given an extra soft toothbrush to use after a week. Dentists do not approve of not brushing. That can lead to infections too.

    I also used a water pic on other parts of my mouth. Well my dentist and periodontist talked a lot about what I was supposed to do and when to call him if specific things happened. I think I am not impressed with yours. I do not believe fasting was intended.

  109. 109.

    slightly_peeved

    @Chetan Murthy:From what little I’ve read about battles and weaponry, victory in warfare for millenia has often come down to having a big group of people with pointy sticks working as a team. The hollow square formation was used from Plutarch’s time to Napoleon’s.​​

  110. 110.

    Brachiator

    @Subsole:

    Alas, their ultimate liberator was the King of Macedon. And his son. … And then some stuff happened and badda-bing, badda-bucid, now we’re Seleucid.

    Reminds me of a favorite video.

    History of the entire world. In about 19 minutes.

  111. 111.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @PJ: One of the 1st Western movies to be shown on Chinese state TV in the ‘80s was the 300 Spartans. As a very impressionable very young lad, I was indoctrinated into the romanticism about Sparta & the evil of Persia. Imagine my surprise a decade later, reading Thucydides, that Sparta was only able to sustain its war against Athens w/ Persian loans.

  112. 112.

    Subsole

    Going back to an earlier point.

    One parallel that flattened me at the time was just how nakedly Hitlerian Trump was. And I don’t just mean the bigotry. I mean temperamentally.

    They were both flakes. Nasty, shrill, vituperative flakes who slept in late and fobbed off all the work onto sycophants who looted the country blind because they literally did not know how to do anything else. Both just staggeringly in over their heads and bullshitting as fast as they could. Spinning wild fantasies about triumph after triumph, like they were going to bullshit the Allies. Or a virus. Or a supply chain.

    And the people behind them played along, because they didn’t want a strong Germany/America/wherever. They wanted goodhappy bellyfeel tripleplusnow!

    To them, a strong nation means a nation that is strong enough to meet their every whim…but too weak to ever challenge them.

    It’s like how some guys want a woman who is independent enough to be conquered…but not independent enough to ever refuse them.

    They don’t want guns. They want to never lose an argument, ever again.

    We can debate and discuss the relative merits of Spartan prowess, but ultimately the issue at hand is less one of numbers and logic and historical detail. The issue is how do we use our minds to defeat a movement that marches on its emotions??

    These guys aren’t turning to Sparta because Sparta was tough. That’s beside the point. They’re turning to Sparta because Sparta was a land where might makes right and all problems worth solving could he solved with a phalanx. And they are fool enough to think they’d be the ones holding the spears. And not, y’know, the Helots getting raped in a field or gurgling his life out through a slit trachea because whoops, krypteia-season sure does slip up on you doesn’t it?

    They worship Sparta because Sparta is a story. 

    What, I ask, is our story?

  114. 114.

    Jay

    @Chetan Murthy:

    a key thing for the Roman’s left shield tactic, was so the right hand could stab forward with the gladius, few were able to deal with a Legion moving forward slowly like a combine.

  116. 116.

    Bupalos

    I don’t know if “losers” is the best description, they did sort of punch above their weight, considering that weight-class is “poor, nasty, brutish, scraggly, miserable hellhole”. Kind of a North Korea style miracle that a society can be that much of an empty human horrowshow and somehow persist.

  117. 117.

    Cacti

    @Chetan Murthy: Well, they did kick the shit out of France in the Franco-Prussian War. And were beating the combined forces of France, the UK, and Russia in WWI until we dragged their asses across the finish line. Then again in WWII.

  118. 118.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Cacti: yes, tactically they were excellent.  They just sucked at the operational, strategic, and grand strategic levels. And those are the ones that matter the most.  It doesn’t matter how many battles you win if you lose the war.

  121. 121.

    PJ

    @Anotherlurker: I am not a fan of Sparta, but I think it’s a disservice to get your history from a blog on the internet.  At best, it’s a mostly accurate sketch.  The other thing is that some political systems are worse than others (and I think the Spartan’s was much worse than what was going elsewhere at the time), but they are all just people doing people things.  The further something is in the past, the better we should be able to look at it critically but also sympathetically, and ask, how did things end up like this?  Rather than “these are the good guys we should emulate” and “these are the bad guys we should despise.”

  123. 123.

    Anotherlurker

    @Anotherlurker: I waited too long and I could not delete my comment.   Please ignore my comment at 112. Everything has been better said by others on this thread.

  124. 124.

    Bupalos

    I guess I’m lucky I went through my graduate education in classics when sparta was pointedly thought of through cold war eyes as an artless and drab version of the Soviet Union.

    Not exactly accurate, but not as stupid as this new version.

  125. 125.

    Anotherlurker

    @PJ: Sorry, but Spartan society is something to despise.  Their emulation by right wing assholes is very concerning.

  126. 126.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Subsole: There were few phalanx clashes in the Peloponnesian War because the Athenians refused such battles to the Spartans, knowing they were likely to lose. For the same reason, the Syracusans hid behind their fortifications to wait out the Athenian expedition, until reinforcements arrived. Spartan hoplite supremacy came to the fore in the Battle of Mantinea, again, rescuing its faltering allies from setback early in the battle.

    Brasidas’ exploits in Thraces were very un-Spartan, & his campaign was waged w/ few Spartiates. Thus he was considered “the most Athenian of Spartans”.

    The sea battles were apocalyptic because the Athenians had lopsided advantage.

  127. 127.

    raven

    “Go tell to Sparta, thou who passest by, that here, obedient to her laws, we lie.” – Thermopylae

  129. 129.

    raven

    @Bupalos:

    Ὦ ξεῖν’, ἀγγέλλειν Λακεδαιμονίοις ὅτι τῇδε
    κείμεθα, τοῖς κείνων ῥήμασι πειθόμενοι

  130. 130.

    Subsole

     

    @YY_Sima Qian: Worth bearing in mind that the first armistice came about when a bunch of invincible Spartiates got themselves stuck on an island and were at risk of acquiring some new, surplus fletching from Athenian archers. 

    Even if the Spartan phalanx was the best at what it did, it was very often stymied by an enemy that refused to meet it on its terms. I mean, the red-cloaks didn’t have much luck getting into Plataea, either. And their walls were a lot less imposing than Athens’. 

    So while I see your point about underselling Spartan strength, I am forced to ask just how much of an asset that strength actually was. You could argue that it let them dictate the terms of battle by forcing the Athenians to hide behind their walls…but it didn’t. The Athenians ran riot, raiding all over the Peloponnese while the invincible phalanx squatted outside the walls it wasn’t invincible enough to get over. That is not a testament to Spartan might. That is an army whose leadership is wasting its strength because it cannot think of any way to actually engage with the enemy. It is the performance of an offensive, not an actual one.

    The nicest thing I could say is that Sparta got so good at phalanx, it forgot how to be good at anything else. Or more accurately (and, I think, worse) failed to ever imagine that it might need to be good at anything else

    Though, again, this is all my opinion as a layman. I am not an expert, I am not equipped to argue with one.

  131. 131.

    Bupalos

    @raven: yeah, no one will ever explain where that guy got the idea of “passing by” out of that, and the choice  for “obedient to law” is unsupportable and obscures what may be intentional poetic ambiguity. It’s amazing that has somehow passed as the standard translation for quoting. Not that translation is easy. Artfully I’d go with;

    Stranger, go tell the Lacedeimonians that we lie here, under their command.

    Clunky-but-accurate, the last bit might be “true to their dictates.”

  132. 132.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Jay: Using peltasts wielding ranged weapons (sling shots & javelins) to soften up an enemy & chase away the harassing  cavalry is standard practice for all Greek city states’ hoplite armies, not just Spartan. In a phalanx line, there is a tendency for “right hand drift” as it advanced, as hoplites consciously or unconsciously tried to hug the man to his right to stay under the cover of the shield. Hoplite armies would place their most disciplined & experienced troops on the right flank to minimize the drift. In a Spartan coalition army, its allies would be placed on the center & the left wing, tasked w/ holding on against the opposition just long enough while the Spartan phalanxes quickly crushed its weak opposition.

    At Leuctra, the Theban coalition went against past practice & heavily concentrated its smaller army on the left flank, including the Sacred Band, opposite the Spartans on its traditional right flank. They also staggered their much weaker center and right away from the opponent line so that they would not come in contact w/ the stronger enemy before the Theban left had crushed the Spartans. Otherwise, while the Sacred Band crushed the Spartans, the Theban center & right would have been crushed in their turn, & Leuctra would not have been a decisive victory.

  134. 134.

    YY_Sima Qian

    @Subsole: I don’t claim to be an expert either. However, hoplite phalanxes were the standard way of war among Greek city states, despite the terrain not being actually conducive to phalanx maneuvers. Few Greek hoplite armies could reduce fortifications at that time.

    Ancient warfare was not always that sophisticated, & at the time of the Peloponnesian War perhaps only a couple of centuries removed from being ritualistic affairs.

    Spartans were not noted for their improvisation or adventurism (which is why characters such as Brasidas, Lysander & Agesilaus II stood out), but their land campaigns did exact a heavy toll on the Athenians, especially after they took Alcibiades’ advise & fortified Decelea to deny the Athenians their farmlands year round. This forced Athens to even more heavily exploit their colonies & vassals, causing resentment & defections. The crowded living conditions were also conducive to the spread of plaques, which decimated Athenian leadership (including Pericles) as well as rank & file.

    The Spartan army was certainly not invincible even at the height of Spartan hegemony, but the Peace of Nicias was made possible because the pro-war leaders in both Sparta (Brasidas) & Athens (Cleon) were killed at Amphipolis (a most un-Spartan Campaign, led by the most un-Spartan commander, leading a most un-Spartan army).

  135. 135.

    Mike G

    Highly conceited braggarts with miserable actual performance.

    Basically the Texans of their time.

  136. 136.

    Tony Jay

    Dropping in far too late to say that everything that needs to said has been said.

    Sparta is only a viable example to follow if you’re an inhabitant of Fictionia and/or a weasily creep of a right winger looking for a broken mirror to reflect in.

    It was above average at one particular tactic for long enough to win a reputation, but the brutalist enforcement of conformity that allowed it to win an above average number of open-field phalanx battles for a few hundred years also prevented it from adapting to the improvements its rivals made to their own tactics. And because a static conservative state built on the back of mass slavery tends to promote leaders who spend all their time thinking about keeping the slaves down, it didn’t have a long-term political/economic strategy for dominating a crowded peninsula with an imperialist superpower next door. 

    There’s no contradiction in saying that the Spartan system wasn’t the super-soldier production line it’s fanbois yearn for while also acknowledging that it was good enough, for a time, to beat some Attican farmers.

    And at the end of the day, it’s not even the military himbo musk that makes it so attractive, it’s the slavery. It had a lot of slavery for a long time and didn’t celebrate artsy-fartsy cleverness.

    Slave-girls. That’s the pull. Spartaphilia is just Gorphilia without the crappy writing and talking ants.

  137. 137.

    AM in NC

    In my 9th grade Ancient & Medieval History class we studied the Greek city-states, and even at age 14 I knew Athens was the FAR superior model for living. Who wants to live in a “cultureless” militarized state? Especially as a woman? No thank you.

  138. 138.

    YY_Sima Qian

    I really think Sparta needs to be evaluated as it actually existed, & not through the distorting lenses of the fantasy of the 300 & its reactionary admirers in modern America.

    Sparta was the undisputed land power in Ancient Greece for a century, from the Greco-Persian Wars to the Battle of Leuctra, as much as Athens was the undisputed naval power between the Greco-Persian Wars to the end of the Peloponnesian War. Sparta’s military prowess on land allowed it to conquer Laconia & Messenia & enslaved the local population as helots, & suppressed the helots to sustain its political economy. It’s military prowess on land was the reason the other Greek city states sought its leadership against the Persians during the Greco-Persian Wars, even though it was reluctant at times. It’s military prowess on land underwrote its hegemony over the Peloponnesian League before the Peloponnesian War, defeated the Athenian Empire through the course of the Peloponnesian War, sustained its hegemony over all of Greece after the Peloponnesian War, allowed Greek forces led by Spartans to range deep into Asia Minor against Persian satrapies, & saw off a challenge to its hegemony by a coalition of Athens/Thebes/Corinth/Argos (funded by Persia) in the Corinthian War. A full strength Spartan Army was not defeated on the field until the Battle of Leuctra. It had even built a respectable navy after the Peloponnesian War to help sustain its imperium in Greece & the Aegean.

    Spartan prowess on land, & Athenian prowess on the waves, can be seen from their exploits during their respective phases of decline. At the end of the Peloponnesian War, despite being short of friends, manpower & funds, the Athenian navy could still prevail over the Spartans & allies more often than not. Even after Leuctra, after being abandoned by almost all of its allies & vassals, after the Theban coalition invaded Laconia & freed most of the helots (thus rendering its political economy unviable), Sparta was still able to defend its unwalled city from multiple helot revolts & 4 expeditions led by Epaminondas. It had seized Crete as Alexander the Great campaigned against Persia, & led a group of Greek city states to revolt against Macedon & laid siege to Megalopolis. After initially breaking Macedonian lines, the Spartan led army was defeated at Megalopolis under the weight of overwhelming numbers, & King Agis III died fighting in the rear guard to allow the other forces retreat. Sparta remained a major power in Greece until the end of the 3rd Century B.C.

    The Spartan army was never invincible, & certainly should not be idolized. As its demographics declined, freed helots & hired mercenaries made up larger portions of its army, it became ever less invincible. The Spartan army under Leonidas & Pausanias was not the same as the one under Agesilaus II, or the one under Agis III. However, we should not underestimate Spartan military power, otherwise its hegemony 1st over the Peloponnese, then over Greece & the Aegean, would not have been possible. It was a professional & disciplined force during an age when rival armies were composed of part time amateurs. In the Antiquity, that counted for a lot. The Athenian navy having a core of professional rowers drawn from its lower classes was also a key reason for its naval supremacy.

    Sparta left no cultural legacy because its society did not value culture. There is not much inspiration to be drawn from its political organization (oligarchy of dual hereditary kings checked by a council of elders) or its political economy (rested on brutal exploitation & suppression of helots), although some of the Founding Fathers of the US seemed to have drawn more inspiration from Sparta’s oligarchy (& the Roman Republic) than Athenian democracy. Even militarily, Sparta did not leave behind much of a legacy beyond its storied reputation. The hoplite phalanxes were superseded by later innovations, & the Roman legions probably left a larger legacy through western history.

  139. 139.

    Robert Sneddon

    @Subsole: Horses limit military logistics operation range to a hundred kilometres at best from a central depot because the fodder for the horses has to be carried by something and more often than not it’s on wagons pulled by other horses. There’s also a speed limit since horses spend a lot of their waking time eating so there’s only so many kilometres a day they can actually travel.

    Mules are better for logistics since they can eat off the land better than horses but they’re more difficult to handle.

  142. 142.

    Paul in KY

    @PJ: Yup. If anyone was going back in time to anywhere in Europe during that time period, my number 1 advice would be: ‘Stay the hell away from anyone calling themselves a doctor!!’

  144. 144.

    GoBlueInOak

    What we need is a 300-style movie but about how the Theban Band of Super Solider Uber-Gays utterly defeated the Toxic Masculinity Spartans.  And then had the mother of all vogue-ing battles to celebrate it.

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