5 ms·

acoup.blog has a much more in-depth look at ancient sparta. https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ https://acoup.blog

acoup.blog has a much more in-depth look at ancient sparta. 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... (Edit, the author is Bret C. Devereaux) And a long-running series on the "Fremen myth", which is similar to the retro-spective glorification of/mythology around Sparta. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-part-i-war-at-the-dawn-of-civilization/ https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-... At any rate, that blog is a must read for any history-myth-debunker, especially around military. Also highly recommended is their analysis of the LotR battles and campaigns, which fare well historicaly, and the GoT, which ... doesn't. He also does medieval game reviews!

CobaltFire 2y ago
I also want to give a highlight to the fact that if you subscribe to the blog the emails are the ENTIRE ARTICLE. You never HAVE to visit the site if you subscribe. I still DO, but that little fact is highly appreciated.
- lolinder 2y ago
  Same is true of the RSS feed! No summaries, just the whole thing. I do prefer to go to the blog because the blog handles footnotes better (hover works on desktop to show them in a popup, and tapping on them works correctly with the back button on mobile), and often the footnotes are really good.
- TheGRS 2y ago
  That's a nice throwback. Totally different subject matter but Matt Levine of Money Stuff on Bloomberg also continues to do that.
adeeshaek 2y ago
Double thumbs up for acoup.blog - it's what I fall back to reading if HN doesn't have anything interesting. His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject. His sparta series, and the fremen series are absolutely outstanding.
- throwup238 2y ago
  > His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject. That’s why I love his blog. His reading recommendations are almost all very approachable to non-historians and are always fascinating, especially the books that look at the nitty gritty details of warfare. I just read Waging War by Wayne E. Lee based off of his recommendation from his logistics/command collections and it’s been a great read start to finish about innovation in warfare (in the broadest sense).
OscarCunningham 2y ago
I like Devereaux's take on the Spartans, but I see people repeating it every time the Spartan's are mentioned. I worry that I'm only getting to see two perspectives on the Spartans: the naive glorification and Devereaux's takedown. Does anyone know of a good third source? Ideally another historian who would still be interesting to an amateur.
- bluGill 2y ago
  There are lots of sources, the article briefly covers many of them. They all share in common the fact that there is very little real information and so we can only read behind the lines at trying to find the truth. Devereaux is one of the few takes that admit to this problem, and for that alone is makes him my favored source. It quickly becomes clear if you read these that most takes on the Spartans are using the lack of information to read some favored angle. I'd be interested in another historian's take if different. I'm reasonably confident that they will be similar to Devereaux's take though, so I'm not looking.
- DylanSp 2y ago
  Take a look at the links and sources mentioned in his retrospective on the Sparta series: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r.... Devereaux mentions some different approaches that modern historians take towards Sparta, particularly Steven Hodkinson's arguments that Sparta was more typical and less unusual compared to the other Greek poleis; following up on that work would probably be a useful counterpoint.
- gadders 2y ago
  If you want a historian that tends right rather than left like Devereaux, you could try Victor David Hanson. https://newcriterion.com/article/the-spartan-way-of-war/ https://newcriterion.com/article/the-spartan-way-of-war/ I don't think he is that adrift from Devereaux in his assessment of Sparta though.
  - lolinder 2y ago
    > tends right rather than left like Devereaux I just feel the need to clarify that Devereaux is barely left-leaning. He keeps his politics pretty firmly out of his blogs for the most part, but when he does break out politics he's pretty clearly very close to the center relative to what we think today when we hear "left" and "right". As a historian (and, I believe, a good one), he seems to see the complexity of the current partisan dynamic too clearly to dogmatically pick a side.
the_af 2y ago
His take down of the "steppe nomadic warriors" nonsense in movies and TV shows, and especially of the Dothraki and how they don't make any sense, is also very interesting. To me the most surprising thing is that Deveraux considers Lord of the Rings more grounded on history than Game of Thrones, when GoT was "sold" to audiences as a grittier, more realistic take on medieval fantasy. But very little in GoT makes any "medieval" sense, it's almost entirely fantasy with a "grimdark" tone instead of a fairy tale/folklore tone. (Which, like Devereaux points out, would be perfectly acceptable as artistic license ... if only GoT hadn't been sold to us as "more realistic" by George Martin!)
- InDubioProRubio 2y ago
  GoT is basically Medieval War of Roses meets LoveCraft (especially obvious if you read up on the map the author published with cities not visited). The lovecraftian parts got pretty much cut to the bone. None of the moongrass, that is overgrowing the dothraki steppe. Barely any of the insanity that goes with wizzardry.
- Glyptodon 2y ago
  Not having read his takedown, IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros. But the more core systems of society and war aren't deeply thought through. When people say it's "realistic" it's more so in the sense of "yup, nobles and soldiers really would rape peasants," not in any tremendously larger sense. And they consider LOTR unrealistic not because the battles are unrealistic, but because the infrastructure of society is mostly invisible, especially outside of the Shire.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    You should read his articles. It will fairly quickly disabuse you of some preconceptions. In particular, the shire is a quite realistic portrayal of peasants and lords and such once you realize Bilbo is mostly nobility.
    - 2y ago
brenainn 2y ago
I read this previously and from memory it relies a lot on what Athens wrote about Sparta? I'm no historian but I was wondering if there's bias there, because they mostly despised each other and Athens kept records whereas Sparta didn't. It seems reasonable that you'd write a bunch of stuff about your enemies being inhumane and generally shit. Maybe the sometimes nicer things written about them coincided with periods of peace and alliance? Just spit balling, it's still an interesting and informative read.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- rossdavidh 2y ago
  Some of the discussion is exactly about which sources are even available, and what their background bias is.
- giraffe_lady 2y ago
  It's also been a while since I read it but he address some of those points in the extended series as they come up. IIRC the two main things are that one of the main athenian sources greatly admired sparta and wanted athens to be more like it, so was actually biased in the other way than you'd expect. And in the other sources it's clear that some degree of respect for sparta's history and military tenacity was common among at least the athenian elite whose views we have access to. Also in an extended conflict in a complex political environment involving other military powers, it can sometimes be to your benefit to acknowledge or even inflate the might of your enemy. A polity's regional stature is not improved by having a hard time defeating a weak opponent. So to some extent athenians probably contributed to sparta's enduring reputation as a formidable military power. So yeah the sources are biased but mainly in ways that an informed-enough reader can recognize and account for and still draw useful information from them, albeit carefully. Which, I learned from this blog, is a big part of the actual practice of the discipline of history.
subsubzero 2y ago
I like his spartan review but really don't like the Fremen mirage article. With Bret Devereaux he uses the classic ideal of - if all you have is a hammer then all your problems are nails. In this instance he is using the Roman history "hammer" to subdue all issues he disagrees with the Fremen mythology. I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology. As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed. I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.

CobaltFire 2y ago

I also want to give a highlight to the fact that if you subscribe to the blog the emails are the ENTIRE ARTICLE. You never HAVE to visit the site if you subscribe. I still DO, but that little fact is highly appreciated.

lolinder 2y ago
Same is true of the RSS feed! No summaries, just the whole thing. I do prefer to go to the blog because the blog handles footnotes better (hover works on desktop to show them in a popup, and tapping on them works correctly with the back button on mobile), and often the footnotes are really good.
TheGRS 2y ago
That's a nice throwback. Totally different subject matter but Matt Levine of Money Stuff on Bloomberg also continues to do that.

adeeshaek 2y ago

Double thumbs up for acoup.blog - it's what I fall back to reading if HN doesn't have anything interesting. His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject. His sparta series, and the fremen series are absolutely outstanding.

throwup238 2y ago
> His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject. That’s why I love his blog. His reading recommendations are almost all very approachable to non-historians and are always fascinating, especially the books that look at the nitty gritty details of warfare. I just read Waging War by Wayne E. Lee based off of his recommendation from his logistics/command collections and it’s been a great read start to finish about innovation in warfare (in the broadest sense).

OscarCunningham 2y ago

I like Devereaux's take on the Spartans, but I see people repeating it every time the Spartan's are mentioned. I worry that I'm only getting to see two perspectives on the Spartans: the naive glorification and Devereaux's takedown. Does anyone know of a good third source? Ideally another historian who would still be interesting to an amateur.

bluGill 2y ago
There are lots of sources, the article briefly covers many of them. They all share in common the fact that there is very little real information and so we can only read behind the lines at trying to find the truth. Devereaux is one of the few takes that admit to this problem, and for that alone is makes him my favored source. It quickly becomes clear if you read these that most takes on the Spartans are using the lack of information to read some favored angle. I'd be interested in another historian's take if different. I'm reasonably confident that they will be similar to Devereaux's take though, so I'm not looking.
DylanSp 2y ago
Take a look at the links and sources mentioned in his retrospective on the Sparta series: https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-retrospective/ https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r.... Devereaux mentions some different approaches that modern historians take towards Sparta, particularly Steven Hodkinson's arguments that Sparta was more typical and less unusual compared to the other Greek poleis; following up on that work would probably be a useful counterpoint.
gadders 2y ago
If you want a historian that tends right rather than left like Devereaux, you could try Victor David Hanson. https://newcriterion.com/article/the-spartan-way-of-war/ https://newcriterion.com/article/the-spartan-way-of-war/ I don't think he is that adrift from Devereaux in his assessment of Sparta though.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > tends right rather than left like Devereaux I just feel the need to clarify that Devereaux is barely left-leaning. He keeps his politics pretty firmly out of his blogs for the most part, but when he does break out politics he's pretty clearly very close to the center relative to what we think today when we hear "left" and "right". As a historian (and, I believe, a good one), he seems to see the complexity of the current partisan dynamic too clearly to dogmatically pick a side.

the_af 2y ago

His take down of the "steppe nomadic warriors" nonsense in movies and TV shows, and especially of the Dothraki and how they don't make any sense, is also very interesting. To me the most surprising thing is that Deveraux considers Lord of the Rings more grounded on history than Game of Thrones, when GoT was "sold" to audiences as a grittier, more realistic take on medieval fantasy. But very little in GoT makes any "medieval" sense, it's almost entirely fantasy with a "grimdark" tone instead of a fairy tale/folklore tone. (Which, like Devereaux points out, would be perfectly acceptable as artistic license ... if only GoT hadn't been sold to us as "more realistic" by George Martin!)

InDubioProRubio 2y ago
GoT is basically Medieval War of Roses meets LoveCraft (especially obvious if you read up on the map the author published with cities not visited). The lovecraftian parts got pretty much cut to the bone. None of the moongrass, that is overgrowing the dothraki steppe. Barely any of the insanity that goes with wizzardry.
Glyptodon 2y ago
Not having read his takedown, IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros. But the more core systems of society and war aren't deeply thought through. When people say it's "realistic" it's more so in the sense of "yup, nobles and soldiers really would rape peasants," not in any tremendously larger sense. And they consider LOTR unrealistic not because the battles are unrealistic, but because the infrastructure of society is mostly invisible, especially outside of the Shire.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  You should read his articles. It will fairly quickly disabuse you of some preconceptions. In particular, the shire is a quite realistic portrayal of peasants and lords and such once you realize Bilbo is mostly nobility.
  - 2y ago

brenainn 2y ago

I read this previously and from memory it relies a lot on what Athens wrote about Sparta? I'm no historian but I was wondering if there's bias there, because they mostly despised each other and Athens kept records whereas Sparta didn't. It seems reasonable that you'd write a bunch of stuff about your enemies being inhumane and generally shit. Maybe the sometimes nicer things written about them coincided with periods of peace and alliance? Just spit balling, it's still an interesting and informative read.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
rossdavidh 2y ago
Some of the discussion is exactly about which sources are even available, and what their background bias is.
giraffe_lady 2y ago
It's also been a while since I read it but he address some of those points in the extended series as they come up. IIRC the two main things are that one of the main athenian sources greatly admired sparta and wanted athens to be more like it, so was actually biased in the other way than you'd expect. And in the other sources it's clear that some degree of respect for sparta's history and military tenacity was common among at least the athenian elite whose views we have access to. Also in an extended conflict in a complex political environment involving other military powers, it can sometimes be to your benefit to acknowledge or even inflate the might of your enemy. A polity's regional stature is not improved by having a hard time defeating a weak opponent. So to some extent athenians probably contributed to sparta's enduring reputation as a formidable military power. So yeah the sources are biased but mainly in ways that an informed-enough reader can recognize and account for and still draw useful information from them, albeit carefully. Which, I learned from this blog, is a big part of the actual practice of the discipline of history.

subsubzero 2y ago

I like his spartan review but really don't like the Fremen mirage article. With Bret Devereaux he uses the classic ideal of - if all you have is a hammer then all your problems are nails. In this instance he is using the Roman history "hammer" to subdue all issues he disagrees with the Fremen mythology. I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology. As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed. I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.