14 ms·

Sparta was more than an army of super warriors

82 points by oedmarap 5y ago

xqcgrek2 5y ago
The Spartans had a good marketing and merchandising department.
- pbaka 5y ago
  Branded loincloth ?
- ldargin 5y ago
  Good one!
neaden 5y ago
I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior, just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve in the same manner and have time for poetry, hunting, and the other activities that a proper Greek citizen should do.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  That’s really more of a myth than reality. If you read actual reports of Spartan self reported history, they always report that they were equal in some mythical past, not that they are equal in the author’s current time. In reality there were pretty severe socio-economic differences even among the slave holding citizen class. The equality among the citizens is really propaganda, not reality.
  - neaden 5y ago
    Sure that's true. I just think the military aspect of it is what gets focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
- dragontamer 5y ago
  The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man. And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon, distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society. Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't need to do anything wrong to "deserve" a beating. It was simply necessary to ensure that the Helots would never rise up against the aristocrats / Spartan elite. The whole "equality" thing is just a myth and whitewashing of history. Spartans were awful people living in awful times. > have time for poetry Much of we know about Spartans is from what Athenians wrote about them, because Spartans were largely illiterate (and prideful of that too). Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    > Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write. The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing. For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry > Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadžić, many of these epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral tradition, transmitted by bards and singers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing. Which makes it ripe for editorial changes whether intentional or not. Even if it was eventually canonized in print, it's still based on the recollections of generational hearsay. Most of history must be read with large grains of salt
    - chakkepolja 5y ago
      Another example is 'Vadakkan Pattukkal' (lit. northern ballads), in Indian state of Kerala.
bennylope 5y ago
If you like this there's a meaty seven part blog series by historian Bret Devereaux about the mythology surrounding Sparta. It offers an account of what Sparta and the Spartan military was really like as well as how the Spartan mythos evolved. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
- arisAlexis 5y ago
  Opinion is a big part of history. One historian's analysis is not fefinitive proof rather a view that may be close to the truth.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    Yes, but... ...the analysis of one historian is just that. But the analysis of many historians is more likely to be true, and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely. Certainly more likely to be true than a popular conception primarily driven by comic books, Hollywood films, and popularizations written by non-historians. It's also worth looking at the historian's analysis, and questioning what sources they have, what they're claiming to know, and how plausible it is for them to make those claims. If your analysis, let's say, starts and ends with "Plutarch said it, and we should trust Plutarch", well, when Plutarch wrote about Sparta and its peak, he was writing about time as distant to him as Elizabethan England is to us, and with no more first hand knowledge.
    - dylan604 5y ago
      >and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely. Yes, but at one point, the widely held belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, the earth itself was flat, and the sun was a god being pulled through the heavens in a chariot of fire. So, sometimes consensus isn't right either. Just a bunch of people agreeeing because it is the path of least resistance.
      - 5y ago
ncmncm 5y ago
Or, much less than an army of super warriors. They did not win more battles than their rivals. I think of them as Greece's FARC, distinguished mainly by their abuse of their own children and everyone they depended on for their own survival.
- myfartsarefoul 5y ago
  Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc? I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
  - p_l 5y ago
    The already linked few times blog post series goes into that topic as well. It is really thorough and I heartily recommend it.
  - Lazare 5y ago
    I highly recommend the linked series; it's accessible and fascinating. The upshot though is: Think of battle at the time as being a little bit like some sort of bizarre college sport where everyone lines up, locked arms, and then smashes into each other. With, yes, weapons, but fatality rates were not enormous. Spartiates - the tiny warrior elite of Sparta - are a bunch of very rich asshole frat boy jocks who are far too cool to train or anything, but that was fine because training doesn't really matter for a glorified shoving match, and nobody else was bothering to train either. What matters a bit more is that they spend every day living together, eating lots of meat, getting drunk, raping and torturing slaves, and if they feel like it, going hunting, so they're all beefy, well fed, fit, and can afford the very best gear. Also they have excellent cohesion thanks to all that bonding while drinking and/or torturing slaves, so man for man, they're pretty effective. Of course, these battles/shoving matches are big enough that they have to drag along a bunch of non-citizens and slaves and allies from other Greek city states to pad out the numbers, so that undercuts their advantage. Although note that Spartiates are by far the most prestigious, and there's a strict rule that both teams line up with the most prestigious on the right side, facing the enemies left side (where the weakest, poorest, and least prestigious units are slotted in). So yes, individually, Spartiates were...well, not great warriors, but man for man they were the most effective fighters on the field, especially since they consistently faced the weakest opponents. But Spartan armies were not unusually effective, and Sparta as a polity failed to achieve its strategic objectives. History is full of glorious defeats where Spartiates lost impressively; so much so that in one famous instance where a bunch of Spartiates were captured by Athenians, they had to confirm that they were actually Spartans - not because they lost (that wasn't unexpected) but because they were expecting a doomed fight to the end. So yes, Sparta was let down by truly horrible logistics and diplomacy, but their military record wasn't much better. Quite good at beating up their slaves and/or the weakest unit on the opposing army though, so there's that?
arisAlexis 5y ago
I don't understand the point of the article. In quantitative terms one can say that Y was better than X. Like: Usa in the 20th century was better at creating technology. Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's not discimination or racism or whatever. I think it's because in modern times saying Y is better than X is bad. Except for in sports. Weird.
- zardo 5y ago
  >Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's a popular trope, and it's not true.
  - arisAlexis 5y ago
    Well I am Greek and had read a lot of stuff also at school about it. In ancient Greece they were considered as such. How do you know it's a trope? Statistical data?
    - AmateurAtMost 5y ago
      Yes, statistical analysis of their victories and defeats. It's an excellent book. I'd recommend it.
      - myfartsarefoul 5y ago
        Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc? I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
        kelnos 5y ago
        Does it matter, though? A loss is a loss. It doesn't matter if they lost because their warriors were weak, or if their leaders were poor strategists. They still lost, and a big part of the mythos around Sparta (at least to me) is that they were a city of strong warriors who won most of their battles.
LanceH 5y ago
This reminds me of my relatively new pet peeve when watching any military element in a movie. Every time they gather in a room, the soldiers arrange themselves at attention as scenery. I get that it's mostly symbolic of how organized and dedicated they are, but having been in the military, the last thing a soldier is looking to do is stand at attention. Movie soldiery (wide term to include knights, personal bodyguards, etc...) have this innate knowledge on how to form ranks and break ranks in perfect unison with no commands. The professional military is relatively rare throughout history, but is somehow idealized and projected onto those factions which did well militarily. Realistically the Spartans only had to be a little better man for man than those around them in order to be the best in the world.
- hef19898 5y ago
  My pet peeve are troops holding positions and ranks (who would fight rank and file on a modern battle field?), only to break formation and charge (at running speed as if sprinting increases damage by 1D10 in real life) the enemy, screaming heroically. Hotzendorff and Codorna would be proud.
pmcpinto 5y ago
On Sparta by Plutarch is an amazing book about the Spartan civilization
ldbooth 5y ago
I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lrem 5y ago
  Wasn't that all of ancient Grece?
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  Twink and bear has a long history. > The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the passive (or ‘receptive’, ‘subordinate’) partner in a homosexual relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos
  - foldr 5y ago
    ‘Twink’ doesn’t really connote a passive role though (you can be a twink and a top). Similarly for ‘bear’. Twinks can also be post-adolescent. So I don’t think ‘twink’ and ‘bear’ are very good translations of these terms, which are based on quite a different conception of gay relationships than the one we have now.
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      Happy to concede that it's more vague gesturing at "Look, a similar thing was happening 3,000 years ago and is happening today" than the same thing but it's not like it's unrecognisable.
      - foldr 5y ago
        I wouldn’t connect gay ‘tribes’ with sex between adolescents and adults. Twinks aren’t canonically underage or in relationships with older men.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Iv 5y ago
Fixed title: Sparta was NOT an army of super warrior. From what I understand, it was a fantasy model heralded by conservative Greeks as an example for all but is as much based in reality than the golden past of the people calling to "make America great again". It is projecting into the past an ideal that never was.
LightG 5y ago
THIS. IS. SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Come on. Someone had to do it. Shields up)

82 points by oedmarap 5y ago

xqcgrek2 5y ago

The Spartans had a good marketing and merchandising department.

pbaka 5y ago
Branded loincloth ?
ldargin 5y ago
Good one!

neaden 5y ago

I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior, just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve in the same manner and have time for poetry, hunting, and the other activities that a proper Greek citizen should do.

ashtonkem 5y ago
That’s really more of a myth than reality. If you read actual reports of Spartan self reported history, they always report that they were equal in some mythical past, not that they are equal in the author’s current time. In reality there were pretty severe socio-economic differences even among the slave holding citizen class. The equality among the citizens is really propaganda, not reality.
- neaden 5y ago
  Sure that's true. I just think the military aspect of it is what gets focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
dragontamer 5y ago
The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man. And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon, distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society. Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't need to do anything wrong to "deserve" a beating. It was simply necessary to ensure that the Helots would never rise up against the aristocrats / Spartan elite. The whole "equality" thing is just a myth and whitewashing of history. Spartans were awful people living in awful times. > have time for poetry Much of we know about Spartans is from what Athenians wrote about them, because Spartans were largely illiterate (and prideful of that too). Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
- barry-cotter 5y ago
  > Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write. The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing. For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry > Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadžić, many of these epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral tradition, transmitted by bards and singers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing. Which makes it ripe for editorial changes whether intentional or not. Even if it was eventually canonized in print, it's still based on the recollections of generational hearsay. Most of history must be read with large grains of salt
  - chakkepolja 5y ago
    Another example is 'Vadakkan Pattukkal' (lit. northern ballads), in Indian state of Kerala.

bennylope 5y ago

If you like this there's a meaty seven part blog series by historian Bret Devereaux about the mythology surrounding Sparta. It offers an account of what Sparta and the Spartan military was really like as well as how the Spartan mythos evolved. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

arisAlexis 5y ago
Opinion is a big part of history. One historian's analysis is not fefinitive proof rather a view that may be close to the truth.
- Lazare 5y ago
  Yes, but... ...the analysis of one historian is just that. But the analysis of many historians is more likely to be true, and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely. Certainly more likely to be true than a popular conception primarily driven by comic books, Hollywood films, and popularizations written by non-historians. It's also worth looking at the historian's analysis, and questioning what sources they have, what they're claiming to know, and how plausible it is for them to make those claims. If your analysis, let's say, starts and ends with "Plutarch said it, and we should trust Plutarch", well, when Plutarch wrote about Sparta and its peak, he was writing about time as distant to him as Elizabethan England is to us, and with no more first hand knowledge.
  - dylan604 5y ago
    >and the consensus of the entire field, held for decades, is even more likely. Yes, but at one point, the widely held belief was that the earth was the center of the universe, the earth itself was flat, and the sun was a god being pulled through the heavens in a chariot of fire. So, sometimes consensus isn't right either. Just a bunch of people agreeeing because it is the path of least resistance.
    - 5y ago

ncmncm 5y ago

Or, much less than an army of super warriors. They did not win more battles than their rivals. I think of them as Greece's FARC, distinguished mainly by their abuse of their own children and everyone they depended on for their own survival.

myfartsarefoul 5y ago
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc? I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
- p_l 5y ago
  The already linked few times blog post series goes into that topic as well. It is really thorough and I heartily recommend it.
- Lazare 5y ago
  I highly recommend the linked series; it's accessible and fascinating. The upshot though is: Think of battle at the time as being a little bit like some sort of bizarre college sport where everyone lines up, locked arms, and then smashes into each other. With, yes, weapons, but fatality rates were not enormous. Spartiates - the tiny warrior elite of Sparta - are a bunch of very rich asshole frat boy jocks who are far too cool to train or anything, but that was fine because training doesn't really matter for a glorified shoving match, and nobody else was bothering to train either. What matters a bit more is that they spend every day living together, eating lots of meat, getting drunk, raping and torturing slaves, and if they feel like it, going hunting, so they're all beefy, well fed, fit, and can afford the very best gear. Also they have excellent cohesion thanks to all that bonding while drinking and/or torturing slaves, so man for man, they're pretty effective. Of course, these battles/shoving matches are big enough that they have to drag along a bunch of non-citizens and slaves and allies from other Greek city states to pad out the numbers, so that undercuts their advantage. Although note that Spartiates are by far the most prestigious, and there's a strict rule that both teams line up with the most prestigious on the right side, facing the enemies left side (where the weakest, poorest, and least prestigious units are slotted in). So yes, individually, Spartiates were...well, not great warriors, but man for man they were the most effective fighters on the field, especially since they consistently faced the weakest opponents. But Spartan armies were not unusually effective, and Sparta as a polity failed to achieve its strategic objectives. History is full of glorious defeats where Spartiates lost impressively; so much so that in one famous instance where a bunch of Spartiates were captured by Athenians, they had to confirm that they were actually Spartans - not because they lost (that wasn't unexpected) but because they were expecting a doomed fight to the end. So yes, Sparta was let down by truly horrible logistics and diplomacy, but their military record wasn't much better. Quite good at beating up their slaves and/or the weakest unit on the opposing army though, so there's that?

arisAlexis 5y ago

I don't understand the point of the article. In quantitative terms one can say that Y was better than X. Like: Usa in the 20th century was better at creating technology. Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's not discimination or racism or whatever. I think it's because in modern times saying Y is better than X is bad. Except for in sports. Weird.

zardo 5y ago
>Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's a popular trope, and it's not true.
- arisAlexis 5y ago
  Well I am Greek and had read a lot of stuff also at school about it. In ancient Greece they were considered as such. How do you know it's a trope? Statistical data?
  - AmateurAtMost 5y ago
    Yes, statistical analysis of their victories and defeats. It's an excellent book. I'd recommend it.
    - myfartsarefoul 5y ago
      Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc? I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
      - kelnos 5y ago
        Does it matter, though? A loss is a loss. It doesn't matter if they lost because their warriors were weak, or if their leaders were poor strategists. They still lost, and a big part of the mythos around Sparta (at least to me) is that they were a city of strong warriors who won most of their battles.

LanceH 5y ago

This reminds me of my relatively new pet peeve when watching any military element in a movie. Every time they gather in a room, the soldiers arrange themselves at attention as scenery. I get that it's mostly symbolic of how organized and dedicated they are, but having been in the military, the last thing a soldier is looking to do is stand at attention. Movie soldiery (wide term to include knights, personal bodyguards, etc...) have this innate knowledge on how to form ranks and break ranks in perfect unison with no commands. The professional military is relatively rare throughout history, but is somehow idealized and projected onto those factions which did well militarily. Realistically the Spartans only had to be a little better man for man than those around them in order to be the best in the world.

hef19898 5y ago
My pet peeve are troops holding positions and ranks (who would fight rank and file on a modern battle field?), only to break formation and charge (at running speed as if sprinting increases damage by 1D10 in real life) the enemy, screaming heroically. Hotzendorff and Codorna would be proud.

pmcpinto 5y ago

On Sparta by Plutarch is an amazing book about the Spartan civilization

ldbooth 5y ago

I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lrem 5y ago
Wasn't that all of ancient Grece?
barry-cotter 5y ago
Twink and bear has a long history. > The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the passive (or ‘receptive’, ‘subordinate’) partner in a homosexual relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient Greece. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos
- foldr 5y ago
  ‘Twink’ doesn’t really connote a passive role though (you can be a twink and a top). Similarly for ‘bear’. Twinks can also be post-adolescent. So I don’t think ‘twink’ and ‘bear’ are very good translations of these terms, which are based on quite a different conception of gay relationships than the one we have now.
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    Happy to concede that it's more vague gesturing at "Look, a similar thing was happening 3,000 years ago and is happening today" than the same thing but it's not like it's unrecognisable.
    - foldr 5y ago
      I wouldn’t connect gay ‘tribes’ with sex between adolescents and adults. Twinks aren’t canonically underage or in relationships with older men.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Iv 5y ago

Fixed title: Sparta was NOT an army of super warrior. From what I understand, it was a fantasy model heralded by conservative Greeks as an example for all but is as much based in reality than the golden past of the people calling to "make America great again". It is projecting into the past an ideal that never was.

LightG 5y ago

THIS. IS. SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (Come on. Someone had to do it. Shields up)