> It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta. The author

> It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta. The author addresses this VERY directly and at length in a "Conclusions: Who Matters?" section of one of the posts. For example (though the whole section is worth a read): > All too often, I see students read the Greek contempt for the poor man, the non-citizen, or the slave with horror but then immediately turn around and replicate those patterns of thought in their own thinking about these societies (well of course the ‘mob’ cannot be trusted to rule – Thucydides and Xenophon said so – to which I am endlessly responding, ‘yes, but should you believe them?‘). > Indeed, this credulous approach to the source tradition – accepting not only the facts they give, but also their guesses about what is to them the distant past and their judgments about the moral worth of a Sparta that probably never existed – is so common that it has had a name since the 1933, le mirage spartiate, coined by Francois Ollier. Rousseau and Jefferson had an excuse for their gullibility – we do not. 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...