Sparta seems fantastic for men like them

June 1, 2021 11:19 AM

"Covering the whole sweep of Sparta’s presence in politics and popular culture would be a post series of its own, and that’s not what I’m here to do. I want to talk about the actual Greek polis of Sparta, not the city-state of our imagination (to get a sense of just how far off the popular conception is, let me note now that Sparta was not a city-state for the simple reason that it didn’t have a city – it had five villages instead)." Content warning: Violence, sexual violence.
posted by clawsoon (92 comments total)

If you visit Sparta today, you find that it's a town that was built in the 1830s to meet the expectations of King Otto of newly independent Greece (originally from Germany, like so many monarchs of the day), who had his own fantasies of what an ordered and logical city should be, and he imposed those fantasies on the locals. The center is built on a square grid, more like a town in the U.S. or Canada than like a typical Greek town, and very unlike the medieval wandering paths of the old town of Mystras on the nearby mountainside.
posted by gimonca at 11:31 AM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

Ah! This is Sparta.
posted by alex_skazat at 11:45 AM on June 1, 2021 [15 favorites]

Imagine Eton, but with swords....
posted by seanmpuckett at 11:55 AM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm still reading, but this:

I feel it is necessary to point out: it does not matter how ‘badass’ or trained you are, spending the night in freezing conditions in nothing but a loincloth will kill you. Hypothermia does not care how many reps you can do.

is fantastic.
posted by medusa at 11:57 AM on June 1, 2021 [20 favorites]

I’m an enthusiastic Patreon supporter of Bret D’s. ACOUP occupies a wonderful niche deeply investigating history topics that would normally be of interest to awful dark triad / 2A / sovcit fascists, but doing so in a way that neatly punctures most of the myth-building these topics usually support. He’s done similar excellent series on bread, iron, war, polytheism, and currently grand strategy games.
posted by migurski at 12:03 PM on June 1, 2021 [28 favorites]

Hmmm. I thought this had been posted a while back, but it must have been one of his other series. It's a well-written blog.
posted by GenjiandProust at 12:06 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

I want to add that we’re also dealing with survivor bias. The boys who died from undernourishment, or who were killed by the ritual beatings were not there to tell Xenophon about it. Men who failed in some way, who were broken by this system, were not in the very elite circles (remember, Xenophon is best-buds with one of the Spartan kings) to tell Xenophon how this system ruined their lives. The men who were there for Xenophon to talk to were the winners of this system – it should be no surprise that they defended it as valid. No one is more convinced of the fairness of a game than the man who won.

Holy shit this is such a good description of academia. (Probably also lots of other modern professions.)
posted by medusa at 12:11 PM on June 1, 2021 [71 favorites]

Imagine Eton, but with swords....

That was the first thing I thought, too.
Both my parents were sent to boarding schools when they were very young, and in each their way, it shaped them.
posted by mumimor at 12:16 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

It was linked in a comment before, and I’m delighted to see it as an FPP now.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 12:19 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

I feel it is necessary to point out: it does not matter how ‘badass’ or trained you are, spending the night in freezing conditions in nothing but a loincloth will kill you. Hypothermia does not care how many reps you can do.

There's a whole passage in the Odyssey where a warrior tells a story of having been persuaded by an evil spirit to go out on a night ambush around Troy without a cloak and realizing too late that he might well freeze to death. IIRC the story itself is a lie, but is treated as plausible.
posted by praemunire at 12:22 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

There was a previous post about this blog for their analysis of The Siege of Gondor. That whole series was really cool and thought provoking.

This also seems interesting, and I would appreciate a deconstruction of some of the romanticism around Sparta... that being said, I've never had a more viscerally negative reaction to a film than when I saw 300 in the theatre. Describing it as "profoundly irresponsible" is apt. I just couldn't take it in jest.
posted by Alex404 at 12:32 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'd like to see a similar series about the difference between the idealized temple-of-Democracy Athens that you get taught in school, and the actual Athens, which was a lot more of a mess, and which could fairly be characterized more for its imperialism than for democracy.
posted by thelonius at 12:37 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

I’m pretty sure I read Kathleen Freeman’s Greek City-States because a mefite recommended it, and I recommend it to you. "The organization, history, and diversity of the cultures of nine representative city states of Ancient Greece." Also how they mostly tore themselves and each other apart…
posted by clew at 12:48 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

Yay for Acoup.blog!

His work on the "Fremen mirage" and the "cult of the badass" says a lot about the kind of men who will never let that kind of analysis into their life. It's a blog I've read compulsively, including his analysis of the Dothraki -- and I've never even read or seen Game of Thrones.

Those seeking to memorialize the Confederacy have taken Sparta and its surrounding literature as a model. At Ole Miss, there is (or was when I was last there in 2000) a prominent Confederate memorial reading in Greek, "Go, tell the Spartans, thou who passest by / That here, obedient to their laws, we lie." This epitaph refers to the Spartan dead of Thermopylae, a tragic loss (at least in the Greek telling).

It's fitting to reconceive Sparta not as a city of the fittest but as a load of Confederates and their sympathizers -- bloated ticks fattened on the blood of the people they enslaved, monstrous no matter how physically beautiful they aimed to be, not laconic and shrewd but cruel and stupid. And how sad is it to think about the helots, and how little we know of them? Their culture, their lives, their joys, all blotted out by Sparta?
posted by Countess Elena at 1:22 PM on June 1, 2021 [35 favorites]

It made me think of Eton, but also of residential schools for First Nations, which had all of the family separation and food deprivation and violence and abuse and emotional trauma but - unlike Eton or Sparta - none of the power for its graduates.
posted by clawsoon at 1:22 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

Need to know if the syssitia let you have any pudding if you didn’t eat your meat.

I’m guessing no, because there just wasn’t ever any pudding.
posted by Huffy Puffy at 1:26 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

I’m only on the second installment, but I’m glad to see him bringing in the antebellum southern United States in for comparison. It’s not a coincidence that both societies were rigidly stratified socially and very intolerant of dissent, with brutal treatment of slaves considered normal. This was interesting: “Societies where an absolute majority of persons are held in slavery are extremely rare...” Well, apparently South Carolina was one of those societies: “By 1720 there were approximately 18,000 people living in South Carolina – and 65% of these were African-Americans slaves.” And apparently the comparison wasn’t lost on the secessionists; the church I grew up in (and still remember fondly despite giving up on religion several decades ago, in part because both of my parents are buried there) is currently having a heated debate over what to do with a memorial to Episcopal bishop and confederate general Leonidas Polk.
posted by TedW at 1:28 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

(Apologies if he already made the selfsame point about the Confederacy that I did; I read the Sparta pieces a while ago.)

Max Miller recreated the Spartan black broth for his delightful historical food channel. Spoiler: it is not good!
posted by Countess Elena at 1:32 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

And how sad is it to think about the helots, and how little we know of them?

Someone (Orwell? Bertrand Russell?) wrote that it is really terrifying to think that, of all the slaves in the ancient world, we know the names of, what, five? A dozen?
posted by thelonius at 1:34 PM on June 1, 2021 [12 favorites]

Delightful to find out that the "Spartan" helmet that forms so much of right-wing/alt-right iconography is actually Corinthian, which I know mostly from Ricardo Montalban's commercials for the Chrysler Cordoba.
posted by Halloween Jack at 1:40 PM on June 1, 2021 [14 favorites]

List of businesses in my city (Ottawa) with Sparta in their name:

Spartan Pizzeria
Spartan Health
Spartan Bioscience
Spartan Collision
Spartan Construction
Spartan Sealing

List of businesses in my city with Athens in the their name:

Athenian Touch Massage
posted by storybored at 1:53 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

Now only at the middle of part two, but I can't wait to say this is brilliant writing, and thanks for posting.
Something I'm curious about, though: our classics teacher had written the standard high school text book here in Denmark on "The Athenian Democracy", largely a collection of sources with his critical comments. Of course we read other sources on other classical topics, it's just to say that he was an authority. And his opinion on the Spartans was bleak, very much like the one in these essays. So I have been rather confused by the positive image Sparta has in American (and to some extent English) culture. Question is, how did this come about, and why wasn't it challenged, or was it, after fascism rose to power?

There is actually one famous 20th century Danish author who wrote a play about Thermopylae, but he was a very complex figure who flirted with totalitarianism until he converted to nationalist resistance during WW2 and was martyred by the Nazis. Classics teacher was not a fan.

(Our classics teacher was also the history teacher, and he had also published the standard book on the French Revolution. Both books included all the bad parts, to put it bluntly. I guess he was really interested in democracy and the dangers it faces)
posted by mumimor at 2:01 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

I'd like to see a similar series about the difference between the idealized temple-of-Democracy Athens that you get taught in school, and the actual Athens, which was a lot more of a mess, and which could fairly be characterized more for its imperialism than for democracy.

I recommend trying to get hold of what I think is the most important book ever published about ancient Athens, The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens by Eva C Keuls:

At once daring and authoritative, this book offers a profusely illustrated history of sexual politics in ancient Athens.

The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy.
This is the first book to draw together all the elements that made up the "reign of the phallus"--men's blatant claim to general dominance, the myths of rape and conquest of women, and the reduction of sex to a game of dominance and submission, both of women by men and of men by men.

To say this book explores rape culture gone wild seriously understates its accomplishments; instead, it explores the long results when rape culture goes wild and then settles down to become the duly codified and institutional basis for an entire civilization.

Astonishingly, it's very well illustrated with vase paintings, though I wonder how most of those vases could have seen any public exhibition whatsoever since their acquisition.
posted by jamjam at 2:06 PM on June 1, 2021 [12 favorites]

So I have been rather confused by the positive image Sparta has in American (and to some extent English) culture.

Austrian here, no Sparta glorification in my schooling either. My first associations with Sparta are always that "Come back with your shield or on it"-business (in my memory it's a mother saying it to her son) and the short story by Böll, about a dying soldier brought to a make-shift military hospital which turns out to be his old school he left just some months ago, with his own handwriting "Stranger bring word to the Spartans we..." still on the blackboard. I was left with the distinct impression our take-away should be that all that senseless/sociopathic bravado/glorification of killing is some proto-Nazi bullshit.
posted by sohalt at 2:11 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

So I have been rather confused by the positive image Sparta has in American (and to some extent English) culture. Question is, how did this come about, and why wasn't it challenged, or was it, after fascism rose to power?

It's been part of Western culture since antiquity, and has been passed on thanks to the Western canon.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:26 PM on June 1, 2021

Steven Pressfield’s Gates Of Fire is probably the best text for understanding America’s love for Sparta. It’s no accident that the book is assigned to officers training for both the Navy and the Marines. GoF is an uncritical hagiography of Leonidas at Thermopylae, a rose-tinted look at the value of Spartan-style military education, and a very fun read that I can no longer recommend without accompaniment by the essay series in this post.
posted by migurski at 2:30 PM on June 1, 2021 [19 favorites]

Not surprising that this reminds people of places like Eton, as the culture of British public schools in the 19th and early 20th centuries was not only inspired by the Classical education that was their main focus, but also in that the primary objective of these schools was to train a brutal colonial administrative class.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 2:34 PM on June 1, 2021 [25 favorites]

You might also like this excellent AskHistorians post from a few years ago that makes many of the same points as the FPP. Sparta seems like an early example of the power of PR, coasting on some actual past success combined with excellent selling of bullshit mystique.
posted by star gentle uterus at 2:36 PM on June 1, 2021 [4 favorites]

Also if you search ACOUP for “badass” you’ll catch most of the author’s opinions on America’s obsession with Sparta, the Fremen, etc.
posted by migurski at 2:37 PM on June 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's been part of Western culture since antiquity, and has been passed on thanks to the Western canon.
Are you telling me that Denmark is not part of Western Civilisation?
Canons are always on the move. What was canon in 1800 was not in 1850 or in 1900, and not at all in 1980 when I got my A in classics. I think it is Bret Devereaux, the author of these essays, who pointed out that all of the literary sources on classical history can be held in a couple of not very big book cases, and while I haven't read all of them, I'm not a total ignoramus.
Most of classics is interpretation and it seems that at least in some countries, there has been a reckoning with the interpretation of Sparta's role in classical Greece, at least after WW2. It is interesting that some countries have not felt the need for such a reckoning.
posted by mumimor at 2:37 PM on June 1, 2021 [15 favorites]

So Sparta had only average military success - how were they at the Olympic Games?
posted by clew at 2:44 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I seem to recall that some of the articles in the blog cover the topic of how Sparta got the reputation it has, at least in passing. It mostly came down to later writers creating a historical example to contrast the supposed weakness of their own states. Which I'm sure is something that no one in the US can relate to at all.
posted by eruonna at 3:00 PM on June 1, 2021 [9 favorites]

Someone (Orwell? Bertrand Russell?)

Orwell. Though I think that's a bit of an undercount. (I doubt he even had American slaves in mind.)
posted by praemunire at 3:03 PM on June 1, 2021

→ later writers creating a historical example to contrast the supposed weakness of their own states

And yet, even near-contemporary writers about Sparta said that Spartans were nowhere near as badass as they used to be. I wonder if it's centuries-old running joke, a bit like Viz comic claiming they're not as funny as they used to be.
posted by scruss at 3:26 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

And yet, even near-contemporary writers about Sparta said that Spartans were nowhere near as badass as they used to be.

That comes up in the blog's discussion of Spartan equality, too. Ancient author: "One hundred years ago, Sparta was totally equal." Author from one hundred years before: "One hundred years ago, Sparta was totally equal." Author from one hundred years before that: "One hundred years ago..."
posted by clawsoon at 3:36 PM on June 1, 2021 [7 favorites]

This video looks at the military performance of Sparta relative to its peers and explains that they were pretty average in terms of their actual results
posted by interogative mood at 4:05 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

“Sounds like Athens has got a discipline problem…” 
posted by migurski at 4:18 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

So I have been rather confused by the positive image Sparta has in American (and to some extent English) culture. Question is, how did this come about, and why wasn't it challenged, or was it, after fascism rose to power?

Mmmmm. Put it this way, I don't think Devereaux is wrong for going after the movie (and by inference the graphic novel it's based on) 300 pretty hard - I think that flick had a lot to do with the current prominence of "Sparta" in US (especially conservative/right-wing) culture.

I mean, my own simple & vague ancient history lessons - in the 70's & 80's - went something along the lines of, "Western civilization is rooted in Ancient Greek civilizations. There were two main city-states, Athens and Sparta. Athens was the thinkers and philosophers and early scientists, Sparta was the disciplined citizen-warriors. Western civilization pulled from the best of both approaches, and because Sparta fell first, the Athenian approach had a little more influence. The US founding fathers specifically referenced both Athens and Sparta when creating the US."

And the Sparta citizen-warriors idea resonates in the US because our own mythology says that the American Revolution was a bunch of ordinary folks taking up arms to gain freedom from the British. Citizen warriors, in other words. (Although of course the reality was far more complex.)

But, yeah, until we got CGI-buff Gerard Butler battling the feminized Persians, the general approach was more "Athens + Sparta as equal influences, with maybe Athens being a little more equal."
posted by soundguy99 at 4:31 PM on June 1, 2021 [9 favorites]

Orwell. Though I think that's a bit of an undercount. (I doubt he even had American slaves in mind.)

Thanks. The passage I was trying to recall was about the ancient world specifically, I think. So Spartacus, Epictetus,....Meno? Or was the enslaved person unnamed in that dialogue, and Meno was the slaver? There are a few more, not many.
posted by thelonius at 4:41 PM on June 1, 2021

Thoroughly enjoy Devereaux's blog.

The discussion of Sparta and its military training is especially on point given the slow seeping out of the more ignoble details of the war in Afghanistan.
posted by Barbara Spitzer at 4:59 PM on June 1, 2021

"How do we get the guys to beat up those other guys so we can take their stuff? It seems like they don't want to. What if we just round up all the boys and kick the shit out of them? Then they'll do it." The logic is inescapable that's why this keeps happening.
posted by bleep at 5:28 PM on June 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

Nobody ever seems to talk of Corinth, though. The city of capitalism and hedonism (sacred city of Aphrodite), central to trade between the Aegean and the Saronic Gulf. Luxurious and with their own set of aesthetics and styles.

And yet, when the Romans conquered, they annihilated Corinth. And their descendants did not revere it.

So is there a lesson? That fascism and democracy can be fashioned into eikones, endlessly debated politically by the barbarians? Whilst ordinary capitalistic Corinth is consigned to obscurity?

I don't know if there's a lesson there. But as someone with an education in the classics, I think I'd find Corinth a preferable polis to the poverty of Sparta and the strife of Athens.
posted by LeRoienJaune at 5:34 PM on June 1, 2021 [6 favorites]

We don't know the names of many of the slaves from Classical Greece, but we know plenty of names of Roman slaves. Manumission was much more common in Roman society, and we know plenty of the names of freedmen from texts and funerary inscriptions.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 5:37 PM on June 1, 2021 [7 favorites]

Nobody ever seems to talk of Corinth, though. The city of capitalism and hedonism (sacred city of Aphrodite), central to trade between the Aegean and the Saronic Gulf. Luxurious and with their own set of aesthetics and styles.

I heard they had some nice columns.

(No, I have no idea if the origin of the architectural descriptor lies with the city.)
posted by eagles123 at 5:43 PM on June 1, 2021

not laconic and shrewd

I think it's at least safe to say that the ancient Spartans were laconic.
posted by ultraviolet catastrophe at 5:59 PM on June 1, 2021 [13 favorites]

nobody seems to revere Corinth, and especially nobody seems to revere Thebes (of the sacred band of Thebes) who were an actually successful military force of ancient Greece
posted by ivan ivanych samovar at 6:05 PM on June 1, 2021 [5 favorites]

To avoid a complete derail about the names of enslaved people in the ancient world, what Orwell wrote was:

When I think of antiquity, the detail that frightens me is that those hundreds of millions of slaves on whose backs civilization rested generation after generation have left behind them no record whatever. We do not even know their names. In the whole of Greek and Roman history, how many slaves' names are known to you? I can think of two, or possibly three. One is Spartacus and the other is Epictetus. Also, in the Roman room at the British Museum there is a glass jar with the maker's name inscribed on the bottom, 'FELIX FECIT'. I have a mental picture of poor Felix (a Gaul with red hair and a metal collar round his neck), but in fact he may not have been a slave; so there are only two slaves whose names I definitely know, and probably few people can remember more. The rest have gone down into utter silence.

Which seems reasonable and accurate.
posted by howfar at 6:10 PM on June 1, 2021 [24 favorites]

Nobody seems to revere Thebes

Hence the old saying "there's no honour amongst Thebes".
posted by howfar at 6:19 PM on June 1, 2021 [38 favorites]

Is it possible that the relative popularity of Sparta and Athens lies not in any objective superiority vs., say, Corinth, but because the contemporary texts that happened to survive to become part of the Western Canon just, by sheer luck, happened to be histories of those states?

I mean, would we really care about Sparta if Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War hadn't survived? And if, instead of Thucydides' account, we had some Corinthian general's version of the battles they deemed important instead? Or even if Thucydides had just been a crappier writer, and his work less popular, his account might not have been preserved.
posted by Kadin2048 at 6:20 PM on June 1, 2021 [8 favorites]

Sparta, no; Athens, yes. That's not a value judgement, it's just not possible to imagine "us" at all, without either the specific historical events that led from Athens to the Hellenistic Mediterranean to the Roman world onward, or the influence of Athenian thought and writing on European culture, particularly by way of Christianity.
posted by howfar at 6:51 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Which seems reasonable and accurate.

There are a number of freedmen attached to the imperial family who were important political figures in the early Imperial period, like Narcissus and Pallas. There's even a quite interesting first-century funerary monument to a possibly Jewish freedman and his family.

Or even if Thucydides had just been a crappier writer, and his work less popular,

Thucydides is notorious as having possibly the most difficult language of all surviving Attic Greek writers. He was always an elite text.
posted by praemunire at 7:11 PM on June 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

I loved this and just spent seventy-five minutes reading it. Thank you for posting.

Growing up in the U.S. just as the Cold War was ending I was taught more or less that Athens was a bit like the U.S. and Sparta was a bit like the U.S.S.R., and while analogies like that always have serious limits this set of blog posts, with the closing comparison to North Korea, makes me think that the comparison kind of works.

It's poignant for me to think about authors I admire--Montaigne is the one who really comes to mind--whose curiosity and gentleness are, on Devereaux's persuasive account, utterly un-Spartan, but who nevertheless found their own reasons to admire Sparta.
posted by sy at 7:22 PM on June 1, 2021 [2 favorites]

Tentative: Maybe Sparta is more of a big deal in Anglophone cultures? Or specifically those closest to England?
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 7:23 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

Most men would not survive one week training as a boxer in 20th century America.
posted by Caxton1476 at 7:29 PM on June 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

The first thing I learned about Sparta as a child was the story of the Spartan boy and the fox. The story, as told to little British boys to inspire them in days of the British Empire, was that spartan boys training to learn to live off the land were underfed, and this meant that they were constantly scrounging for food, mainly by stealing it. This one boy was able to catch a fox. He caught it alive. It was in fact, the pet of the man who caught him with it. But the boy was able to hide it under his cloak and hide the fact that there was a frantic enraged fox under the garment tearing at his belly.

The boy died from the injuries the fox inflicted while he was talking to the man. The boy was so tough he was able to conceal what was going on even though it killed him.

While we were supposed to respect the toughness of the Spartan Boy, we were also able to regard his death as futile heroism in the face of abuse.

I have read (sometime in the last ten years) and cannot document, that in the Antebellum South, slaves who worked as labourers on large estates were similarly deliberately underfed, and similarly scoured the countryside in the dark for anything that would potentially lead to food, after their days work was done. They mainly stole from the non-slave owning white farmers around the estate where they lived, making it impossible for those farmers to rise above subsistence level. If they got something edible they ate it, but quite often they got plunder that was not edible, and sold it to white men who bought it at a steep discount under actual value.

The non-slave owning whites hated the slaves for stealing from them, and patrolled at night to try to protect their livelihoods at the same time as some of their number managed to do better than most by reselling the stolen goods. The angry patrols attempting to prevent the thefts morphed easily into slave catching and lynching. The most successful men in the society were those who profited from this system either as slave owners or fences, so they had incentive to continue with it. The poor whites turned their rage at the blacks whose successful survival ensured their misery.

I suspect the policy of underfeeding the slaves to ensure they scoured the country and robbed the neighbours was part of the Classical theme the slave owners were so fond of.

Again, I cannot document this and am not an expert, just recounting something I read somewhere while trying to better understand the roots of the racial mess in the US.
posted by Jane the Brown at 8:00 PM on June 1, 2021 [17 favorites]

The phallus was pictured everywhere in ancient Athens: painted on vases, sculpted in marble, held aloft in gigantic form in public processions, and shown in stage comedies. This obsession with the phallus dominated almost every aspect of public life, influencing law, myth, and customs, affecting family life, the status of women, even foreign policy.

So you're telling me that Athenian society was built on dick pics?
posted by medusa at 9:01 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

Odysseus forgets to bring his own cloak, so he tricks one of the more gullible soldiers into making a long run to Agamemnon in the middle of the night so he can have the man's cloak.

No, Odysseus is telling the story, but as if he were another person with Odysseus in the lochos who was "misled by a daimon" into coming unprepared. And then Odysseus-in-the-story sends the runner back to communicate with Agamemnon, saving the "other guy"'s imaginary life. The whole thing's a fiction.

Worth noting to the alt-right that Menelaus, traditional king of Sparta, is kind of the original cuckold.
posted by praemunire at 10:21 PM on June 1, 2021 [3 favorites]

There are a number of freedmen attached to the imperial family who were important political figures in the early Imperial period, like Narcissus and Pallas

And how many people have heard of more than 2?
posted by howfar at 1:47 AM on June 2, 2021

I mean, you try to avoid a derail by giving Orwell's own words, which make clear that he is talking about popular awareness of enslaved people among his educated peers and someone has to jump back in to point out that a thing not being asserted isn't true. Fucking Metafilter.
posted by howfar at 1:52 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

I'm halfway through the third installment of this series and it is getting better and better.

Sadly, I have to give it up for the night. But thank you clawsoon for posting this -- flagged as fantastic!
posted by darkstar at 1:58 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

...especially nobody seems to revere Thebes (of the sacred band of Thebes) who were an actually successful military force of ancient Greece

Also it was the Theban Sacred Band who decisively defeated the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra.

Later in the same war they permanently broke Spartan power by liberating their slave territories.

Also the Sacred Band was literally a gay army made up of 150 pairs of male lovers.

Odd how the people who worship the Spartan Warriors don't want to be the Sacred Band instead. In terms of who actually won the Sacred Band must have been better...
posted by TheophileEscargot at 2:05 AM on June 2, 2021 [14 favorites]

avoid a derail

A lot of things are topical with a subject this broad. Contemplating enslaved persons in Greece is certainly so, as the post's articles discuss the helots extensively. My comment was in response to someone else's remarks on this. The tag used to say "weblog as conversation". Well, that's a conversation.
posted by thelonius at 2:14 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

For what it's worth, in Poland we get a lot of Greek history in school and I definitely got the impression that the Spartans were a bit over the top, but without quite this series' focus on just how many slaves they had and how cruel it all was. It might correlate to how much one's culture reveres hopeless last stands.
posted by I claim sanctuary at 2:23 AM on June 2, 2021 [8 favorites]

In school we only learned that Sparta was tough and that they called their slaves helots, so most of what I knew about Sparta before college came from Larry Gonick's excellent Cartoon History of the Universe Vol I-VII.

I did have a Western Civ. professor who described infatuation with Sparta as a "dangerous and worrisome" development for any society (this was around 2002) whether it's ancient Rome or our modern era and basically characterized it as a darkness which lurks in the shadows of civilization.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 4:30 AM on June 2, 2021 [10 favorites]

My first in-depth introduction to Sparta was also Larry Gonick! He doesn't paint a pretty picture.
posted by biogeo at 5:46 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

Er, I mean, he's a cartoonist, not a painter, but... Ah, you know what I mean.
posted by biogeo at 5:47 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

And how many people have heard of more than 2?

Impossible to know. But if you're looking for names of former slaves in ancient Rome at least, they're legion. Tyro (Cicero's secretary), Caenis, (Antonia Minor’s secretary), Epictetus (stoic philosopher)- the list goes on. Plenty of grave markers reference freedmen. Manumission was common in Rome, and freed slaves could rise to considerable heights (satirized by Petronius in the character of Trimalchio). There's considerable literature on the subject. (On the other hand, there's always Spartacus.)

Nor just Rome. Even in Sparta, in times of war, Helots had the possibility of manumission for logistical acts of bravery. (See Thucydides (IV, 26, 5))

But it’s kind of an absurd observation, Orwell’s. In two thousand years, how many ordinary workers (let’s call them wage slaves why not) are going to be household names?

(As to famous non-helot Spartans, Leonidas is the only household name, and I suspect not so many households at that. (Well, okay, Menelaus- but he wasn't native born, only Spartan by marriage to Helen of Troy. But by that time, we're getting into a fussy fuzzy area. Personally, if offered the crap choice of Spartan or helot, I'd have to go with helot.)
posted by BWA at 6:57 AM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Even in Sparta, in times of war, Helots had the possibility of manumission for logistical acts of bravery.

Sometimes just another excuse for more Spartan fuckery:

They caused proclamation to be made that as many of them as claimed the estimation to have done the Lacedaemonians best service in their wars should be made free; feeling them in this manner and conceiving that, as they should every one out of pride deem himself worthy to be first made free, so they would soonest also rebel against them.
And when they had thus preferred about two thousand, which also with crowns on their heads went in procession about the temples as to receive their liberty, they not long after made them away; and no man knew how they perished.

Thucydides, IV, 80
posted by thatwhichfalls at 7:27 AM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

But it’s kind of an absurd observation, Orwell’s. In two thousand years, how many ordinary workers (let’s call them wage slaves why not) are going to be household names?

This is a true case of understanding the words, but not their meaning.
posted by Think_Long at 7:49 AM on June 2, 2021 [7 favorites]

which make clear that he is talking about popular awareness of enslaved people among his educated peers

Many of Orwell's educated peers would have read Tacitus (in the original, unlike us schmucks) and thus be familiar with the famous freedmen of the early Imperial period, who play important roles at various points. I have a lot of respect for Orwell, who read widely on his own, but he never went to university, yet he shared his class's tendency to overestimate how much they knew about a subject and make overbroad pronouncements.

In the Emily Wilson translation, there's no definite divine intervention. Odysseus's "friend" is without a cloak. "Friend" claims a spirit tricked him

Well, that's why I put it in quotes--it does seem to a modern eye like a classic "let me try to play off what a dumbass I was by blaming outside forces" line. (Earlier on in the narrative "he" says that "he" left it behind foolishly.) But I don't need to rely on a translation. He really (within the framing) does say to Odysseus that "he" was fooled by a daimon:

"οὐ γὰρ ἔχω χλαῖναν: παρά μ᾽ ἤπαφε δαίμων
οἰοχίτων᾽ ἔμεναι: νῦν δ᾽ οὐκέτι φυκτὰ πέλονται."

[For I have no cloak; a spirit/impulse deceived me
to be lightly-clad; and now there is no escape.]

It would be quite out of character for wily Odysseus to go on an ambush-party without a cloak when it was cold enough that everyone else thought to bring one, but also, at that time, unlike at the moment he's telling the story, he wouldn't need to fake somebody out to get their cloak without loss of prestige.

...Anyway, regardless of all this, the whole story makes no sense if it's not believable that a warrior could come to very grievous harm spending the night outside without a cloak.
posted by praemunire at 8:43 AM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

Also it was the Theban Sacred Band who decisively defeated the Spartans at the Battle of Leuctra.

I guess they weren’t the Scared Band...
😎
posted by Huffy Puffy at 11:10 AM on June 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

But the boy was able to hide it under his cloak and hide the fact that there was a frantic enraged fox under the garment tearing at his belly. The boy died from the injuries the fox inflicted while he was talking to the man. The boy was so tough he was able to conceal what was going on even though it killed him.

Oh wow, Jane the Brown, I am genuinely grateful for this comment in a reverse-dictionary-of-childhood-cultural references way. As a normal, emotionally expressive child, I remember being told that stoic children were so "good" that they didn't cry or annoy their parents at all, even when they were being eaten by wolves, with the implication left to the reader that perhaps I should be like that. Either I or my mother must have merged the Spartan fox story with Romulus & Remus, but it's very satisfying to get that "I'm not crazy! It really exists!" feeling.

More generally, I'm also grateful for how this article draws a direct line between "...and I turned out FINE!" parenting discourse and survivorship bias. Which disability activists and child psychologists have been doing for aeons, but apparently I needed it to be dressed up in a chiton and sandals for it to really click.
posted by All hands bury the dead at 12:15 PM on June 2, 2021 [5 favorites]

Many of Orwell's educated peers would have read Tacitus (in the original, unlike us schmucks)

So would have Orwell. He was a King's Scholar at Eton, and Tacitus would have been part of the Latin curriculum there.
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:11 PM on June 2, 2021 [2 favorites]

The right wing fetishizes the NAZI’s, the Spartans and other authoritarian / militaristic societies; but they seem unaware of the fact that those societies all lost. Their fighting ethos doesn’t work to build anything that lasts.
posted by interogative mood at 3:03 PM on June 2, 2021 [11 favorites]

Spartakiad was a really big youth-rally mass-gymnastics event in Soviet-era Czechoslovakia (where teens might have the opportunity to meet and hook-up within the culture according to my Ex's mom who was there). The "Sparta-prefix" was a thing in the East Bloc.

Loosely applying Peloponnesian War metaphors to those old Cold-War conflicts between the grumpy Spartan East and the free-wheeling Athenian West was a funny thing in those simpler times...
posted by ovvl at 5:34 PM on June 2, 2021 [3 favorites]

Thank you for sharing Clawsoon. I am only two posts in, but really enjoying it.

Quick question for anyone who can answer.... Dates are still posted in B.C./A.D. It's been almost been a quarter century since I was in college and most professors I had, were using BCE and CE. Only one of those classes was a history class.

Does anyone know why the author continues that style of dates? I am pretty sure I have seen some of their stuff here before, so guessing maybe someone has seen him say something about it?
posted by a non mouse, a cow herd at 6:54 PM on June 2, 2021

I remember a kid's history book I had in Greece about Athens and Sparta ended with the observation that that Sparta was organized around war and may have won the conflict with Athens, but Athens did well on that front too and left behind architecture, philosophy, theatre, music and what have you. As a kid I thought that makes sense.

In the Greek history books of my time we got a mix of Athens, Sparta, other cities like Corinth/Eretria/Argos, and then Thebes, the Macedons and the Hellenistic era. They were kinda rah rah although all books have been rewritten since. To an extent this focus on wars and (city-) states was counteracted by reading the full texts of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Antigone, Anabasis and the Melian Dialogue.

On the topic of Pressfield's Gates of Fire I thought it was his worst due to lack of nuance. I remember the one about Alcibiades being better, but it's been ages since I read it.

In any case I think it's telling that the bit about Spartans returning with their shield or on it is better known than the lines of Archilochus (I paraphrase frommemory):

My shield lies beneath the bushes where I dropped it as I fled
And an enemy is enjoying it
Let him have it
I can always get a better one

Cincinnatus was considered a great example of a ruler.

Nowadays we prefer Incitatus.
posted by ersatz at 1:52 AM on June 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

The right wing fetishizes the NAZI’s

“Nazi” isn't an acronym, but a (now disused, for obvious reasons) diminutive form of Ignatz, a name given in turn-of-the-20th-century German jokes to a unworldly, very Catholic rube from some small Alpine village, which fortuitously happened to be shoehornable into the German for “National Socialist” with a bit of effort.
posted by acb at 6:49 AM on June 3, 2021

So, I finally made it to the end, and I strongly recommend. I did not read all the comments, though a lot of them seem really interesting.
It is clear that history does not repeat itself, but we can learn from history, and we need to.

My immediate reaction is that (like my old teacher said) the Spartans were incurious and unimaginative, and that is not just boring, it is dangerous. I think our societies today give far too much leeway to lack of curiosity. It should be a deadly sin.

Today at work we were talking about how our current age resembles the times between the two world wars with radicals on both sides making a lot of noise and no clear voices for democracy, and how we as an institution can contribute to avoid the chaos. I mentioned Popper, as opposed to Strauss, and how they both used classical literature as their ammunition. This collection of essays has given me a lot to think about and somehow I will apply it in my work. So thanks again for posting this, clawsoon.
posted by mumimor at 9:46 AM on June 3, 2021 [5 favorites]

This is fascinating, clawsoon. Up to part three so far and will definitely read through to the end. Thanks for posting!
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 7:35 PM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

No major comments to make other than to note my thanks for posting! This is super fascinating and so well written!
posted by R343L at 8:32 PM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I've got to join the chorus. This was an excellent read. Best of the web, thanks for finding it for us.
posted by biogeo at 9:43 PM on June 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

I had, semi recently, watched a video lecture which did attribute Sparta's fixation on being battle-ready with helot revolts. The myth of Sparta is always about them fighting outsiders, not suppressing their own underclass.

I like the case he makes in part 2 that the people typically described as "Spartans" are more akin to hereditary nobility.
posted by RobotHero at 5:21 AM on June 4, 2021 [2 favorites]

This is such a good thing to read. Thank you for sharing.
posted by rrrrrrrrrt at 11:55 AM on June 4, 2021 [1 favorite]

interogative mood noted: "but they seem unaware of the fact that those societies all lost."

Yeah - I read this series not long after Devereaux published it, but on this reread, I was struck by his point about abusive military practices:

Put in more blunt language: armies that abuse and beat recruits or junior soldiers in training and in peacetime will tend to abuse and murder civilians in occupied territory and in wartime. Violence also rolls downhill, it turns out. Soldiers who are abused by their superiors tend in turn to abuse their subordinates, both as a learned behavior, but also as a transference mechanism (they repair the humiliation of receiving violence by inflicting it on someone even more powerless than them). This relationship is best documented in the Imperial Japanese military (e.g. S. Ienaga, The Pacific War (1978), 46-54); but also observed in the German Imperial Army (I. Hull, Absolute Destruction (2006), 93-103 ...) – and hey, what do you know, two other armies that somehow gained a reputation for ‘badass’ military effectiveness despite a comprehensive inability to achieve strategic objectives resulting in the complete annihilation of the state they were supposed to defend. It’s almost like we have a pattern.

That last bit.

It is reallllllly easy for lots of people -- and I am, I'm sure, no exception -- to mistake cruelty for strength. And, furthermore, people can perceive the temporary domination of cruelty and find something terribly gorgeous in it, think it an enduring model worth emulating. I knew that on some level already, but Devereaux pointing out this particular instance of it has gotten through to me in a different way.
posted by brainwane at 6:33 PM on June 4, 2021 [13 favorites]

The last sentence in this bit (from Part III) really got to me:

While the murdered are men, we need to also think of the survivors: the widowed wives, orphaned daughters, grieving mothers. This must have been part of the pattern of life for helot women as well – the husband or brother or cousin or father or son who went out to the fields one day and didn’t come back. The beautiful boy who was too beautiful and was thus murdered by the spartiates because – as we are told – they expressly targeted the fittest seeming helots in an effort at reverse-eugenics.

Reading this, I had such a strong image in my mind of an actual, individual woman experiencing this. Just too terrible and heartbreaking.
posted by mydonkeybenjamin at 2:23 AM on June 5, 2021 [5 favorites]

“Nazi” isn't an acronym, but a (now disused, for obvious reasons) diminutive form of Ignatz

I think it seems more likely that the word was formed by analogy with the established use of "Sozi" for "Sozialist".

My understanding is that the Ignatz/Naczi/Nazi connection likely had some influence on spread and use, particularly its lack of use by Nazis themselves. However, it does seem to be in a category of words people don't tend to use about themselves, e.g. a communist is unlikely to use "commie"/"Kozi" as a self-descriptor except ironically.
posted by howfar at 2:46 AM on June 5, 2021 [1 favorite]

This is a true case of understanding the words, but not their meaning.

That sounds clever, but I think could kick off an entirely different discussion on what words mean over long periods of time and place. Which I am not inclined to get into, not least because even now the subject creates more heat than light.
posted by BWA at 6:25 AM on June 7, 2021

He's posted the first part of a new series on The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? today.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 5:08 AM on June 11, 2021 [5 favorites]

It's taken me until now to read the whole series, but it was worth reading and I've been recommending it to others.

One thing that stands out as surprising and telling to me: Spartan society was so indifferent toward study and learning that they were unable to produce a decent historian to account for themselves. That's really falling short of the assumptions we make about any culture that we call a "civilization."
posted by Western Infidels at 1:13 PM on June 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

I was listening to an old podcast episode lately ("Ancient Warfare Magazine") and they reckoned that Xenophon was hugely biased towards his Spartan buddies in his histories, and he didn't like the Thebans and downplayed the Sacred Band. They think that's one of the reasons the Spartans are so famous today.

So despite not having their own historians, the Spartans ended up with a good write-up anyway.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 1:53 AM on June 18, 2021

It took me a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed this read, as sobering as it was. Oh he's the Siege of Gondor guy too, I enjoyed that one.

Thanks, clawsoon.
posted by freethefeet at 3:39 AM on June 30, 2021