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A military historian’s analysis of Spartan myth

114 points by aeontech 7y ago

nabla9 7y ago
Sparta was like North Korea of Ancient Greece. - Isolationist country. - Young are indoctrinated in rigid militant ideology (agoge). - Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed to have valuable money, just worthless tokens. - The main job of the spartan army was to suppress helots and protect the old rulers. People serve the military and the state, not the other way around. - No creativity in warfare. Incompetents and arrogant leaders just attack with hoplites until they run out of food and have to retreat.
- HenryBemis 7y ago
  > North Korea You cannot simply make a comparison of X democracy today (or dictatorship in this case) to a city-state of Ancient Greece. Back then it was do or die. Wars were in the daily menu. For a state that was isolated geographically (in comparison to other powerful/richer city-states like Athens or Messina, the only way to stay alive is brute force, be the ultimate killing machine. The landscape also didn't help much. Stuck between two mountains, path to the north lead nowhere, sea to the south was 30-40km away. Perfect place to make it difficult to be invaded but poor enough to not thrive. Also.. creativity? I would need creativity to beat a MMA pro in a fight. On his side, he would just throw a punch. Creativity is for the weak! (like me)
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    Except Sparta doesn't seem to have actually been particularly successful militarily, instead relying more on a reputation for military success, according to this analysis.
    - yongjik 7y ago
      ...so, more like North Korea? :) "Get out of my way! I'm a crazy madman who may start war at the slightest provocation, and I don't care that it will also kill me!" has been NK's signature shtick for decades. Other than a few nukes and a crapton of grunt soldiers, their military power is actually rather underwhelming.
  - nabla9 7y ago
    "Was like North Korea of Ancient Greece" was not direct comparison. It's relative analogy like chicken:egg :: tree:seed. Sparta:Athens :: North Korea:South Korea Sparta was to Athens like North Korea is to South Korea.
  - vkou 7y ago
    North Korea is actually a very apt analogy, because ~85% of people living in Sparta were chattel slaves... Who were, as part of a Spartan citizen's right of passage into manhood (And, in addition to that, as a fun annual holiday), were hunted, and killed for sport. Actually, even North Korea sounds like the worker's paradise, in comparison. (And no, this state of affairs was not common among Mediterranean city states. Athens and later Rome had a ~50% slave population, and (legally) considered killing a slave to be murder.) As for staying alive through brute force, I may observe that your city-state may be able to stay alive more successfully, if it didn't spend most of its time warring against its own enslaved people. Which is what the Spartans did. (Hint: Hunting your slaves for sport does not endear you to them... In a state where 6 out of 7 men are enslaved, and two thirds of the freedmen hate the guts of the ruling class.)
- calvinmorrison 7y ago
  - Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed to have valuable money, just worthless tokens. So the united states?
  - shantly 7y ago
    More like a company town paying in scrip. Dollars trade just fine outside the borders of the US, for non-US goods and services. Or at least trade readily for other things that do, in the worst case.
  - dang 7y ago
    Please don't post flamebait to Hacker News. When this kind of thing starts a flamewar, if it isn't arson it's certainly negligence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- scott_s 7y ago
  That's the author's conclusion in the final paragraph of the final entry.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  Your descriptive points are closer to Pakistan than NK.
  - friendlybus 7y ago
    I'm serious. Pakistan relies on it's military state more than you would think. Nk is actively corrupt and all-worshipping of the diety-leader kim jong in a way both Sparta and Pakistan are not. Nk actively seeks to control and suppress domestic traders with power where it can and enslaves people into work camp gulags. Those are unique distinctions from Sparta and Pakistan.
kilo_bravo_3 7y ago
The only reason Sparta lasted as long as it did was because it was a valueless minor city-state not worth the effort of conquering until the point that conquering and absorbing it was so effortless that it was done almost as an afterthought. It was a sick and broken society populated by fanatics, that was quickly (on a historical timescale) out-advanced by its neighbors. Imagine if a casino-less (Mormon Fort-era) Las Vegas, NV was full of militiamen and religious zealots and got involved in a war with the surrounding area and it managed conquer all of Clark County, the county that surrounds it, and control it for about 30 years by implementing a cruel system that enslaved most of its population. And then that short-lived city-state collapsed after the rest of the Nevada developed over the decades to the point that a coalition of other small counties quickly steamrolled the now-decrepit and hollow Clark County city-state. Like, super steamrolled. Like the rest of Nevada had developed tanks and artillery and the "Vegans" still fought with Mormon Fort-era weaponry. That's Sparta. I don't get why Sparta seems to be so fetishized, particularly by people who are not pleasant to be around.
- paleotrope 7y ago
  Sparta is fetishized because they beat Athens in the Peloponnesian war and Plato idealized the spartans.
  - hodgesrm 7y ago
    There was also that little skirmish at Thermopylae that helped grow the legend.
    - lolinder 7y ago
      I'd argue that the mythology surrounding Thermopylae is the result of the mythology surrounding Sparta, rather than the other way around. Objectively, Thermopylae was an abject defeat (even by Herodotus's account) that didn't do anything to save Greece from Persia conquering basically everything. The only reason it's more than a historical footnote is because of the Spartan legend.
gumby 7y ago
Would love to see the same for Athens. An amazing place but popular culture doesn’t reflect how profoundly alien their culture was: more of an honor-killing kind of place rather than some paradise of erudition.
Isamu 7y ago
I like an analysis that includes operations and logistics, which is how long or large campaigns are won or lost. >It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits on how effectively the Spartan army could be utilized. You may have the best soldiers – and again, Sparta does not appear to have always had the best soldiers – but they are of no use if you cannot get them to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools, ships) they need to win the fight.
- sandworm101 7y ago
  >> if you cannot get them to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools, ships) they need to win the fight. That is one area where modern warfare is very different than ancient warfare. Siege weapons were not normally 'brought'. They were created when and as needed. An ancient engineer could turn a forest into a trebuchet, something akin to a modern engineer building a fighter jet out of rocks. So too with food. Ancient armies lived off the land. They pillaged and took what they needed. The concept of moving food to feed an army on a distant shore was just not an option as recently as WWI.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    While it's true that siege weapons and food were not transported via supply lines in the sense that modern militaries plan for it, that doesn't mean that logistics wasn't an important concept in Classical Greece. Even if you're living off the land, you still have to actually figure out how to transform the local produce into food, and actually procure sufficient local produce (if you're settling down for a siege, you can't exactly rely only on the nearest fields). Sparta's attempt to lay siege to Athens failed several years in a row entirely because they couldn't manage to support that level of logistical sophistication, which is a pretty indicting failure, even given the simpler problem it was 2500 years ago.
  - mhink 7y ago
    For a more fun take on this, the author also has an extremely thorough analysis of the “military history” in Lord of the Rings. He specifically discusses siege engines in the context of the Battle of the Pellenor and food supplies in the context of Aragorn’s campaign to Mordor immediately thereafter.
gorgonical 7y ago
After reading the first one, "on spartan schooling" I'm a little sad. I understand the point of casting a more clear light on the alien and brutal practices of ancient civilizations, but the distaste and condemnation that the author uses evokes British colonizers talking about their subjects, combined with a tinge of social justice history revisionism. One of the central concepts of anthropology (and I think, by extension, history) is that you don't judge other people disjoint from you in space and time with your cultural norms. History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't admire the more interesting parts of history.
- glennpratt 7y ago
  It's primarily a criticism of modern perception of Sparta, particularly "300". I don't see why it need be any more fair than it is. > comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state
- jcranmer 7y ago
  > History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't admire the more interesting parts of history. But if you only admire the interesting parts, you get a horribly inaccurate picture. Indeed, because the study of history traditionally relied on the surviving written accounts, and there was little, if any, consideration of their potential bias, we have a rather jaundiced view of most of history that is passed into popular culture and knowledge. It is only quite recently--late 20th century--that the field itself has started to point out that, for example, given that all we know of Caligula is written by his enemies, maybe the accounts of his sex orgies is about as accurate as discussions of Clinton's pizza parlor sex ring (which is to say, a complete and utter fabrication). For writers targeting a popular audience, there is generally a greater tendency to balance the horrible inaccuracies that circulate in popular thought (partially driven, sadly, by school curricula which are very slow to accept that "traditional" history is often completely and totally wrong) by focusing on the aspects that most directly contradict what the audience assumes. And that's what the author here is doing.
yorwba 7y ago
There was a submission from the same blog on the front page yesterday, which I assume is what led OP to discover this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382247 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382247 (about war elephants)
- aeontech 7y ago
  Indeed! I knew Sparta just by reputation, like most people I expect, so this was a rather surprising and fascinating series. It was a second surprise to come to this thread and see so many people vehemently dismissing the article, the author’s knowledge or tone, to defend Sparta as they see it. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that other than, I suppose, some people really really admire Sparta as mythologized and dislike reading anything that contradicts that image.
mrec 7y ago
For anyone interested in this, I'd highly recommend /u/Iphikrates' three-part summary of the Spartan reputational mirage on /r/AskHistorians a couple of years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_the_military_worship_of_the_spartans_really/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_th...
Tsugumo 7y ago
This article is laughably bad. I don't think the author put any effort into understanding the culture. No attempt is made to understand why the Spartans made certain decisions. The perspective seems to be, 'they didn't make decisions like us modern smart people would, so they were dumb and mean.' Lines like "because Sparta produced so little of value" do well to reveal this. So little of value to who? "...essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the periokoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system..." So much for Hegel.
dr_dshiv 7y ago
I love it when classical history is discussed on HN! When we realize our civilization is thousands of years old, it is easier to imagine it lasting thousands more years. I highly recommend that people make use of original source material when making an argument so that you can contribute constructively. The original sources are FUN to read -- we are lucky that the internet makes this so accessible. I like the Perseus project, because it has almost everything. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
mips_avatar 7y ago
Thanks for stealing most of my day with your interesting articles.
aitchnyu 7y ago
When did historians finally strip Sparta of its great image? When Roman Stoics praised Spartans, did they treat them as perfect role models or as a cruel people who had certain qualities to emulate?
baud147258 7y ago
Isn't the military might of Sparta an example of history written by the losers? I mean one important source for the Peloponnesian War was Thucydides, who was on the losing side of the war. And when writing his book, he might have wanted to cast himself in the best light possible, by depicting his victorious opponents as the best military in Greece?
cafard 7y ago
https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unimaginably-different/ https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unim...

114 points by aeontech 7y ago

Sparta was like North Korea of Ancient Greece. - Isolationist country. - Young are indoctrinated in rigid militant ideology (agoge). - Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed to have valuable money, just worthless tokens. - The main job of the spartan army was to suppress helots and protect the old rulers. People serve the military and the state, not the other way around. - No creativity in warfare. Incompetents and arrogant leaders just attack with hoplites until they run out of food and have to retreat.

HenryBemis 7y ago
> North Korea You cannot simply make a comparison of X democracy today (or dictatorship in this case) to a city-state of Ancient Greece. Back then it was do or die. Wars were in the daily menu. For a state that was isolated geographically (in comparison to other powerful/richer city-states like Athens or Messina, the only way to stay alive is brute force, be the ultimate killing machine. The landscape also didn't help much. Stuck between two mountains, path to the north lead nowhere, sea to the south was 30-40km away. Perfect place to make it difficult to be invaded but poor enough to not thrive. Also.. creativity? I would need creativity to beat a MMA pro in a fight. On his side, he would just throw a punch. Creativity is for the weak! (like me)
- jcranmer 7y ago
  Except Sparta doesn't seem to have actually been particularly successful militarily, instead relying more on a reputation for military success, according to this analysis.
  - yongjik 7y ago
    ...so, more like North Korea? :) "Get out of my way! I'm a crazy madman who may start war at the slightest provocation, and I don't care that it will also kill me!" has been NK's signature shtick for decades. Other than a few nukes and a crapton of grunt soldiers, their military power is actually rather underwhelming.
- nabla9 7y ago
  "Was like North Korea of Ancient Greece" was not direct comparison. It's relative analogy like chicken:egg :: tree:seed. Sparta:Athens :: North Korea:South Korea Sparta was to Athens like North Korea is to South Korea.
- vkou 7y ago
  North Korea is actually a very apt analogy, because ~85% of people living in Sparta were chattel slaves... Who were, as part of a Spartan citizen's right of passage into manhood (And, in addition to that, as a fun annual holiday), were hunted, and killed for sport. Actually, even North Korea sounds like the worker's paradise, in comparison. (And no, this state of affairs was not common among Mediterranean city states. Athens and later Rome had a ~50% slave population, and (legally) considered killing a slave to be murder.) As for staying alive through brute force, I may observe that your city-state may be able to stay alive more successfully, if it didn't spend most of its time warring against its own enslaved people. Which is what the Spartans did. (Hint: Hunting your slaves for sport does not endear you to them... In a state where 6 out of 7 men are enslaved, and two thirds of the freedmen hate the guts of the ruling class.)
calvinmorrison 7y ago
- Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed to have valuable money, just worthless tokens. So the united states?
- shantly 7y ago
  More like a company town paying in scrip. Dollars trade just fine outside the borders of the US, for non-US goods and services. Or at least trade readily for other things that do, in the worst case.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't post flamebait to Hacker News. When this kind of thing starts a flamewar, if it isn't arson it's certainly negligence. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
scott_s 7y ago
That's the author's conclusion in the final paragraph of the final entry.
friendlybus 7y ago
Your descriptive points are closer to Pakistan than NK.
- friendlybus 7y ago
  I'm serious. Pakistan relies on it's military state more than you would think. Nk is actively corrupt and all-worshipping of the diety-leader kim jong in a way both Sparta and Pakistan are not. Nk actively seeks to control and suppress domestic traders with power where it can and enslaves people into work camp gulags. Those are unique distinctions from Sparta and Pakistan.

kilo_bravo_3 7y ago

The only reason Sparta lasted as long as it did was because it was a valueless minor city-state not worth the effort of conquering until the point that conquering and absorbing it was so effortless that it was done almost as an afterthought. It was a sick and broken society populated by fanatics, that was quickly (on a historical timescale) out-advanced by its neighbors. Imagine if a casino-less (Mormon Fort-era) Las Vegas, NV was full of militiamen and religious zealots and got involved in a war with the surrounding area and it managed conquer all of Clark County, the county that surrounds it, and control it for about 30 years by implementing a cruel system that enslaved most of its population. And then that short-lived city-state collapsed after the rest of the Nevada developed over the decades to the point that a coalition of other small counties quickly steamrolled the now-decrepit and hollow Clark County city-state. Like, super steamrolled. Like the rest of Nevada had developed tanks and artillery and the "Vegans" still fought with Mormon Fort-era weaponry. That's Sparta. I don't get why Sparta seems to be so fetishized, particularly by people who are not pleasant to be around.

paleotrope 7y ago
Sparta is fetishized because they beat Athens in the Peloponnesian war and Plato idealized the spartans.
- hodgesrm 7y ago
  There was also that little skirmish at Thermopylae that helped grow the legend.
  - lolinder 7y ago
    I'd argue that the mythology surrounding Thermopylae is the result of the mythology surrounding Sparta, rather than the other way around. Objectively, Thermopylae was an abject defeat (even by Herodotus's account) that didn't do anything to save Greece from Persia conquering basically everything. The only reason it's more than a historical footnote is because of the Spartan legend.

gumby 7y ago

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

Isamu 7y ago

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

sandworm101 7y ago
>> if you cannot get them to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools, ships) they need to win the fight. That is one area where modern warfare is very different than ancient warfare. Siege weapons were not normally 'brought'. They were created when and as needed. An ancient engineer could turn a forest into a trebuchet, something akin to a modern engineer building a fighter jet out of rocks. So too with food. Ancient armies lived off the land. They pillaged and took what they needed. The concept of moving food to feed an army on a distant shore was just not an option as recently as WWI.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  While it's true that siege weapons and food were not transported via supply lines in the sense that modern militaries plan for it, that doesn't mean that logistics wasn't an important concept in Classical Greece. Even if you're living off the land, you still have to actually figure out how to transform the local produce into food, and actually procure sufficient local produce (if you're settling down for a siege, you can't exactly rely only on the nearest fields). Sparta's attempt to lay siege to Athens failed several years in a row entirely because they couldn't manage to support that level of logistical sophistication, which is a pretty indicting failure, even given the simpler problem it was 2500 years ago.
- mhink 7y ago
  For a more fun take on this, the author also has an extremely thorough analysis of the “military history” in Lord of the Rings. He specifically discusses siege engines in the context of the Battle of the Pellenor and food supplies in the context of Aragorn’s campaign to Mordor immediately thereafter.

gorgonical 7y ago

After reading the first one, "on spartan schooling" I'm a little sad. I understand the point of casting a more clear light on the alien and brutal practices of ancient civilizations, but the distaste and condemnation that the author uses evokes British colonizers talking about their subjects, combined with a tinge of social justice history revisionism. One of the central concepts of anthropology (and I think, by extension, history) is that you don't judge other people disjoint from you in space and time with your cultural norms. History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't admire the more interesting parts of history.

glennpratt 7y ago
It's primarily a criticism of modern perception of Sparta, particularly "300". I don't see why it need be any more fair than it is. > comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state
jcranmer 7y ago
> History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't admire the more interesting parts of history. But if you only admire the interesting parts, you get a horribly inaccurate picture. Indeed, because the study of history traditionally relied on the surviving written accounts, and there was little, if any, consideration of their potential bias, we have a rather jaundiced view of most of history that is passed into popular culture and knowledge. It is only quite recently--late 20th century--that the field itself has started to point out that, for example, given that all we know of Caligula is written by his enemies, maybe the accounts of his sex orgies is about as accurate as discussions of Clinton's pizza parlor sex ring (which is to say, a complete and utter fabrication). For writers targeting a popular audience, there is generally a greater tendency to balance the horrible inaccuracies that circulate in popular thought (partially driven, sadly, by school curricula which are very slow to accept that "traditional" history is often completely and totally wrong) by focusing on the aspects that most directly contradict what the audience assumes. And that's what the author here is doing.

yorwba 7y ago

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

aeontech 7y ago
Indeed! I knew Sparta just by reputation, like most people I expect, so this was a rather surprising and fascinating series. It was a second surprise to come to this thread and see so many people vehemently dismissing the article, the author’s knowledge or tone, to defend Sparta as they see it. Not sure what conclusion to draw from that other than, I suppose, some people really really admire Sparta as mythologized and dislike reading anything that contradicts that image.

mrec 7y ago

For anyone interested in this, I'd highly recommend /u/Iphikrates' three-part summary of the Spartan reputational mirage on /r/AskHistorians a couple of years ago. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_the_military_worship_of_the_spartans_really/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_th...

Tsugumo 7y ago

This article is laughably bad. I don't think the author put any effort into understanding the culture. No attempt is made to understand why the Spartans made certain decisions. The perspective seems to be, 'they didn't make decisions like us modern smart people would, so they were dumb and mean.' Lines like "because Sparta produced so little of value" do well to reveal this. So little of value to who? "...essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the periokoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system..." So much for Hegel.

dr_dshiv 7y ago

I love it when classical history is discussed on HN! When we realize our civilization is thousands of years old, it is easier to imagine it lasting thousands more years. I highly recommend that people make use of original source material when making an argument so that you can contribute constructively. The original sources are FUN to read -- we are lucky that the internet makes this so accessible. I like the Perseus project, because it has almost everything. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/ http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

mips_avatar 7y ago

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

aitchnyu 7y ago

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

baud147258 7y ago

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

cafard 7y ago

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unimaginably-different/ https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unim...