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It’s worth mentioning that Spartan women held huge amounts of wealth due to the violence within their society (men’s wealth would be inherited by their wives wh

It’s worth mentioning that Spartan women held huge amounts of wealth due to the violence within their society (men’s wealth would be inherited by their wives who would then remarry). According to Aristotle (who is very biased) the women lived lives of luxury. The point of this is that the women who extol the violence of men have a material self interest in the deaths of their men (minimally as a class, potentially individually).

dustintrex 5y ago
Some of the 5% of Spartan women who were full citizens, perhaps. However, Sparta was an extremely unequal society, with some 85% either slaves or helots (also slaves, but owned by the state, not individuals).
- marcosdumay 5y ago
  Well, that goes for every commentary on ancient societies. Unless it's explicitly about slaves and outcasts, it's about the at most 10% of the society that wasn't. At some point the Romans got more people to participate on their society, but that's centuries after any of that.
  - TchoBeer 5y ago
    Do you have a source for this?
    - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
      It's true. Just read any hisoty source for any historical period before modern times. See how many accounts you can find about the lives of "common people", which usually means slaves, serfs, etc. Even in modern times, you hear about Churchill or Lincoln, but where are the stories of the carpenters, or farmers, the milk maids or the nurses, the midwives or the factory workers? Who remembers their names, what they achieved, what they held dear, who they loved and married, and how they died? Most of hisotry is about the people that hold all the power in their hands and most of the time their great deeds is to crush everyone else underfoot. We learn the dates and placenames of the great battles where king so-and-so defeated king such-and-such, but do we ever hear the names of the hundreds or thousands of their men who left their families and land to go and die a sad, senseless death?
      - 1123581321 5y ago
        This is eloquent but silly. There is a lot of good research, and popular accounts of it, on the effects of population-level status and trends on historical events. Given the article topic I would suggest starting with Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1905125305?tag=fivebooks001-20 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1905125305?tag=fivebooks001-20
        YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
        Instead I suggest you start with the primary sources like Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle. I sure have and I don't need to read k'th- hand accounts, for large k, like the one you suggest.
  - brazzy 5y ago
    > Unless it's explicitly about slaves and outcasts, it's about the at most 10% of the society that wasn't. This is absolutely not true. Pretty much no other society in history actually held more than 80% of the population enslaved like Sparta did. Rome certainly never did, nor did the other Greek states of the era.
    - int_19h 5y ago
      It should also be noted that in Sparta, the Spartan class was outright prohibited from any productive labor.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    Sparta's demographic makeup was deeply weird even for the time. There's a decent summary here: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-ii-spartan-equality/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... (tl;dr: >95% of people in Sparta were some sort of underclass, almost all slaves. By contrast, about 60% of people in Athens were an underclass, of which 70% slaves)
- orange_joe 5y ago
  The named women aren’t helots and it’s unlikely the unnamed women would be helots either. I was under the impression The only group we refer to as Spartan are that minority population of elites as the rest were referred to as helots (who were also unable to serve in their military)
  - nestorD 5y ago
    That is the point of the comment I believe: pointing out that we tend to ignore the vast majority of the inhabitants of Sparta when we think of Spartans.
chalst 5y ago
It's worth noting that Aristotle was not a disinterested commentator on Sparta: he loathed the relatively high amount of freedom Spartan women had compared to Athenian women, and went out of his way to argue that when bad things happened to Sparta it had resulted from this. See, e.g., http://jsphfrtz.com/aristotles-interpretation-of-spartan-women-written-march-1-2004/ http://jsphfrtz.com/aristotles-interpretation-of-spartan-wom...
- orange_joe 5y ago
  Yeah, he was super biased. For a number of reasons. I just kept it as a parenthetical because I think it’s fair to assume that they were relatively wealthy, more equal and powerful than their contemporaries, even if Aristotle is likely overstating the extent of these differences.
at_a_remove 5y ago
Their sayings do have a rather "disposable" view of their sons. I suppose it is the equivalent of that loathsome White Feather movement, which had a too-significant overlap with the Suffragettes of the time.
- datameta 5y ago
  Would you mind expanding upon this?
  - SyzygistSix 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
    - datameta 5y ago
      It seems that a primary supporter of the White Feather movement was a key member of the _anti_suffrage movement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Augusta_Ward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Augusta_Ward So, I am interested what sort of overlap with the Suffrage movement the parent commenter was talking about.

dustintrex 5y ago

Some of the 5% of Spartan women who were full citizens, perhaps. However, Sparta was an extremely unequal society, with some 85% either slaves or helots (also slaves, but owned by the state, not individuals).

marcosdumay 5y ago
Well, that goes for every commentary on ancient societies. Unless it's explicitly about slaves and outcasts, it's about the at most 10% of the society that wasn't. At some point the Romans got more people to participate on their society, but that's centuries after any of that.
- TchoBeer 5y ago
  Do you have a source for this?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
    It's true. Just read any hisoty source for any historical period before modern times. See how many accounts you can find about the lives of "common people", which usually means slaves, serfs, etc. Even in modern times, you hear about Churchill or Lincoln, but where are the stories of the carpenters, or farmers, the milk maids or the nurses, the midwives or the factory workers? Who remembers their names, what they achieved, what they held dear, who they loved and married, and how they died? Most of hisotry is about the people that hold all the power in their hands and most of the time their great deeds is to crush everyone else underfoot. We learn the dates and placenames of the great battles where king so-and-so defeated king such-and-such, but do we ever hear the names of the hundreds or thousands of their men who left their families and land to go and die a sad, senseless death?
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      This is eloquent but silly. There is a lot of good research, and popular accounts of it, on the effects of population-level status and trends on historical events. Given the article topic I would suggest starting with Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1905125305?tag=fivebooks001-20 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1905125305?tag=fivebooks001-20
      - YeGoblynQueenne 5y ago
        Instead I suggest you start with the primary sources like Thucydides, Plutarch, Xenophon, Plato and Aristotle. I sure have and I don't need to read k'th- hand accounts, for large k, like the one you suggest.
- brazzy 5y ago
  > Unless it's explicitly about slaves and outcasts, it's about the at most 10% of the society that wasn't. This is absolutely not true. Pretty much no other society in history actually held more than 80% of the population enslaved like Sparta did. Rome certainly never did, nor did the other Greek states of the era.
  - int_19h 5y ago
    It should also be noted that in Sparta, the Spartan class was outright prohibited from any productive labor.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  Sparta's demographic makeup was deeply weird even for the time. There's a decent summary here: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-ii-spartan-equality/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p... (tl;dr: >95% of people in Sparta were some sort of underclass, almost all slaves. By contrast, about 60% of people in Athens were an underclass, of which 70% slaves)
orange_joe 5y ago
The named women aren’t helots and it’s unlikely the unnamed women would be helots either. I was under the impression The only group we refer to as Spartan are that minority population of elites as the rest were referred to as helots (who were also unable to serve in their military)
- nestorD 5y ago
  That is the point of the comment I believe: pointing out that we tend to ignore the vast majority of the inhabitants of Sparta when we think of Spartans.

chalst 5y ago

It's worth noting that Aristotle was not a disinterested commentator on Sparta: he loathed the relatively high amount of freedom Spartan women had compared to Athenian women, and went out of his way to argue that when bad things happened to Sparta it had resulted from this. See, e.g., http://jsphfrtz.com/aristotles-interpretation-of-spartan-women-written-march-1-2004/ http://jsphfrtz.com/aristotles-interpretation-of-spartan-wom...

orange_joe 5y ago
Yeah, he was super biased. For a number of reasons. I just kept it as a parenthetical because I think it’s fair to assume that they were relatively wealthy, more equal and powerful than their contemporaries, even if Aristotle is likely overstating the extent of these differences.

at_a_remove 5y ago

Their sayings do have a rather "disposable" view of their sons. I suppose it is the equivalent of that loathsome White Feather movement, which had a too-significant overlap with the Suffragettes of the time.

datameta 5y ago
Would you mind expanding upon this?
- SyzygistSix 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_feather
  - datameta 5y ago
    It seems that a primary supporter of the White Feather movement was a key member of the _anti_suffrage movement: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Augusta_Ward https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Augusta_Ward So, I am interested what sort of overlap with the Suffrage movement the parent commenter was talking about.