[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
Thebes, with their sacred band, would suggest that broken men gets trashed by men fighting for love.
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...
Underfeeding (with resultant theft[1]) is something Orwell recalled about his time at St. Cyprian's.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457
> "The food was not only bad, it was also insufficient. Never before or since have I seen butter or jam scraped on bread so thinly. I do not think I can be imagining the fact that we were underfed, when I remember the lengths we would go in order to steal food."
The Krypteia were also present:
> "The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys."
> "There was a boy named Johnny Hale who for some months oppressed me horribly. He was a big, powerful, coarsely handsome boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was forever twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging somebody with a riding-crop (he was a member of the Sixth Form), or performing prodigies of activity on the football field. Flip loved him (hence the fact he was habitually called by his Christian name) and Sambo commended him as a boy who 'had character' and 'could keep order'. He was followed about by a group of toadies who nicknamed him Strong Man."
Is it any wonder Orwell would go on to write an infamous dystopia?
[1] It's unclear if his boarding school expected students to supplement their diet from private funds. Orwell mentions other schools where this was explicit, and he was at St. Cyprian's on half-price scholarship. For adults, the posher cavalry regiments made sure their mess dues alone were above official pay rates, to keep out professional soldiers. We know there are instances of people in the british army refusing promotions because they couldn't have afforded one. (Was the glass ceiling the Empire's way to get around the Peter Principle? How many militaries have had "mustangs"?)
> Reaction from Contemporaries
> Of his contemporaries, Cecil Beaton wrote of the piece "It is hilariously funny, but it is exaggerated".[22] Connolly, on reviewing Stansky & Abraham's interpretation, wrote "I was at first enchanted as by anything which recalls one's youth but when I went to verify some references from my old reports and letters I was nearly sick... In the case of St Cyprian's and the Wilkes whom I had so blithely mocked I feel an emotional disturbance... The Wilkeses were true friends and I had caricatured their mannerisms (developed as a kind of ritual square-bashing for dealing with generations of boys) and read mercenary motives into much that was just enthusiasm."[32] Walter Christie and Henry Longhurst went further and wrote their own sympathetic accounts of the school in response to Orwell's and voiced their appreciation for the formidable Mrs Wilkes.[33][34] Robert Pearce, researching the papers of another former pupil,[35] made a comprehensive study from the perspective of the school, investigating school records and other pupils' accounts. While some features were universal features of prep school life, he concluded that Orwell's depiction bore little relation to reality and that Orwell's defamatory allegations were unsupportable.[15] Davison writes "If one is looking for a factual account for life at St Cyprian's, this is not the place to seek it."[36]
> On Orwell's claimed state of misery, Jacintha Buddicom, who knew him well at the time, also raised a strong challenge. She wrote "I can guarantee that the 'I' of "Such, Such were the Joys" is quite unrecognisable as Eric as we knew him then", and "He was a philosophical boy, with varied interests and a sense of humour—which he was inclined to indulge when referring to St Cyprian's in the holidays."[23]
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24243240
(if we already suspect his author's narration, I have even more reason to believe Smith may be a less-than-reliable narrator.)
[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-...
As far as I can tell, this blog goes against expert consensus on Sparta [1], so I'm wary of trusting its conclusions, for fear it's cherry-picking evidence, and making arguments only persuasive to a layman, akin to [2].
[1] Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the rising naval power of Athens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta
[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...
Secondly, the agoge and the Spartan social system was responsible for the population of the Spartiates going down through the ages: there was no way of replenishing it. If you have a system which sowed the seeds for its own destruction extremely conclusively, then by definition it's a shit system.
You're right, Sparta was recognised as a pre-eminient military power. Even the blog doesn't argue against that. However, do keep in mind that the primary bunch of people the Spartans are compared to in that blog are the Romans, who were exponentially more successful by any metric you choose. In addition, the blog breaks down reasons why that might not be as true as the popular conception of Sparta today. Yes, Sparta was feared. But Sparta didn't really do much. In fact, the most successful Spartans (and no, I'm not counting Leonidas among them: he lost Thermopylae which was an absolute tactical disaster with no upsides for the war the Greeks were fighting) were ones who did not go through the agoge (I am thinking of Lysander as well as the hereditary Spartan kings, none of whom went through the agoge).
In short, try going through that series on Sparta and make your own mind up. The author is a trained historian and gives fantastic sources. You can also search up Sparta on AskHistorians and see what scholarly consensus has to say there. In particular, it would be wise to go through the third link I share below:
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=agoge&restri...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4oxut/what_...
- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_th...
I would honestly expect this of any non-expansionist state (and on longer timescales, expansionist as well), no matter how excellent their military. An army will attack only if they think they have a (good) chance of winning, meaning battles are likely to be at least somewhat even, or at the attacker's advantage.
Going through the acoup blog as well as the AskHistorians sources, Sparta's win/loss ratio is just around 0.5. They won as often as they lost battles. Indeed, some of their major victories required Persian/Macedonian help or were actually accomplished by people from outside the agoge. And you forget that while they were the largest power on their patch of Greece, they were only hegemonic over Messania, no other area. Again, as the AskHistorians link points out, Sparta was much larger than the other city-states of its time at the point from where we have evidence. That Sparta was unable to do much from this position is fairly telling about their lack of skill in much other than hoplite fighting.
In addition, go through the series to understand the makeup of Spartan society. It's easy to have strong, well-fed warriors when more than 80% of your population is chattel slavery (read helots) who were thought to be badly treated even by the standards of the Ancient Greeks (which, as you can very well imagine, were not very high. Slaves weren't treated well by those societies at all). It's easy to lionise Sparta when you become acquainted with the Theme Park version of it. It's hard to stomach the actual reality of what we do know about Sparta.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
It was a very eye-opening read, definitely at odds with the popular image of Sparta.
In short about Agoge, he says it was much less about training and more about child indoctrination through extreme trauma. He compares it to child soldier programs like the one by Lords Resistance Army in Africa. Rather than producing skilled soldiers, he argues, it produced broken dysfunctional people.