5 ms·

Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in real

Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in reality terribly cruel, corrupted, and decadent.

kybernetikos 5y ago
I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.
- ianbicking 5y ago
  Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.
  - naravara 5y ago
    > Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work. The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races. Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that. Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio. > That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.
  - a1369209993 5y ago
    > SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?) I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.
      - a1369209993 5y ago
        > particularly the later stories. That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well. (My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.) 0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called. 1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is. 2: Really, believability versus any extreme.
- abecedarius 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination SF novels inspired in part by Sparta.
gadders 5y ago
I always thought the tactics of the Krypteia against the helots looked similar to the KKK.
lifeisstillgood 5y ago
He recently appeared in the EconTalk podcast and its worth hearing too (will find the link). But they touched on Sparta and the thing that struck me was just how unequal - something like 5% or less of the population of Sparta (and it was a big state by Greek standards), only 5% were "free" - everyone else was a Slave. The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.
- inglor_cz 5y ago
  Modern Gulf emirates have a similar ratio of citizens to guest workers. Western profesionnals are treated with respect, but manual workers from India or Philippines are basically slaves in everything but name. How the history repeats itself, this time among hi-tech skyscrapers.
  - hutzlibu 5y ago
    When the gangsters keep the papers of the workers, the lines do indeed get blurry. But it is still quite a difference between exploiting someone weaker and actually owning a person and be legally able to do anything with him or her.
    - inglor_cz 5y ago
      I would say that one is de facto slave if their superiors can rape or kill them without legal repercussions.
      - hutzlibu 5y ago
        I would agree to that. They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc. A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
        brezelgoring 5y ago
int_19h 5y ago
It's worse. Sparta is basically the first proto-fascist state in history (or, at least, the first recorded as such).
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

kybernetikos 5y ago

I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.

ianbicking 5y ago
Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.
- naravara 5y ago
  > Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work. The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races. Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that. Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio. > That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.
rsynnott 5y ago
SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.
- a1369209993 5y ago
  > SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?) I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.
    - a1369209993 5y ago
      > particularly the later stories. That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well. (My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.) 0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called. 1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is. 2: Really, believability versus any extreme.
abecedarius 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Domination SF novels inspired in part by Sparta.

gadders 5y ago

I always thought the tactics of the Krypteia against the helots looked similar to the KKK.

lifeisstillgood 5y ago

He recently appeared in the EconTalk podcast and its worth hearing too (will find the link). But they touched on Sparta and the thing that struck me was just how unequal - something like 5% or less of the population of Sparta (and it was a big state by Greek standards), only 5% were "free" - everyone else was a Slave. The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.

inglor_cz 5y ago
Modern Gulf emirates have a similar ratio of citizens to guest workers. Western profesionnals are treated with respect, but manual workers from India or Philippines are basically slaves in everything but name. How the history repeats itself, this time among hi-tech skyscrapers.
- hutzlibu 5y ago
  When the gangsters keep the papers of the workers, the lines do indeed get blurry. But it is still quite a difference between exploiting someone weaker and actually owning a person and be legally able to do anything with him or her.
  - inglor_cz 5y ago
    I would say that one is de facto slave if their superiors can rape or kill them without legal repercussions.
    - hutzlibu 5y ago
      I would agree to that. They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc. A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
      - brezelgoring 5y ago

int_19h 5y ago

It's worse. Sparta is basically the first proto-fascist state in history (or, at least, the first recorded as such).

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]