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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. Par
by 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 agoThat’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 agoSure that's true. I just think the military aspect of it is what gets focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
- dragontamer 5y agoThe 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 agoAnother example is 'Vadakkan Pattukkal' (lit. northern ballads), in Indian state of Kerala.