2,500 years is enough time to have passed that there aren't any inconvenient Helots still around to ask difficult questions.
There isn't really much hint of that at the moment, although the spectre always lurks. I suppose China is a fairly strong example of how a 1-party state can achieve success.
Even then there is a pretty strong argument that their political organisation is one of the biggest things holding them back. The major strategic strength has been the program of encouraging and engaging with foreign investment and that doesn't require any particular political structure.
The first move in the Fascists playbook is destabilising and de-legitimising democracy. Suppression of dissent and centralising nationalist and unilateralist economic policies can only really come after the consolidation of centralised power.
Have we seen recent attempts to de-legitimise the democratic process in the US? Perhaps by someone willing to use state security forces to interfere in state policing of protests and escalate and provoke violence? Perhaps by a charismatic figure holding mass rallies in front of adoring worshipers of a cult of personality? Perhaps by someone encouraging militias and engaging in race baiting and nationalist unilateralism?
That's the playbook, but it starts with attacks on the democratic process. It's the key to everything else.
Evil clowns to the left, the Joker to the right, and I wish there was a middle to be stuck in.
You may go the "not a real scotsman" way here, but you don't even see a hint?
Here's the start of it: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
It's pretty fascinating stuff, though it can take a while to get through.
That celebration is an expression of a long-running thread of similarly abhorrent tendencies in Western intellectual tradition.
mostly but not exclusively pointing out that George R. R. Martin was not really familiar with them in using them as an inspiration for the Dothraki.
He says that the Mongols did have their own creativity and art (beyond the "conquest and administration" stuff). You might want to check that out, as it seems like our modern outsider cultural impressions of Mongols can be as limited as our impressions of Spartans!
What I think is going on is not that people like what Spartans actually did, people are simply enamoured by their honourable and majestic portrayal in popular culture. What youngster does not fantasise of being that small and determined band of soldiers that holds off the hordes of brutal barbarians, only with their shields, spears, courage and martial prowess? Who doesn't want to be part of that 250 men that defy a whole empire, _and succeed_, immortalised in songs and poems? (I mean they all die by the end, but they do kinda succeed in their mission).
The way I think about it is that for me there are two (or more even) Spartas. The historical "Sparta" that were brutal oppressors, like a case study how _not_ to structure a society, lots of lessons to learn from it. And the mythical "SPARTA!" one, full of honourable dudes and courageous women, that we can aspire to be, even if they were not real. No reason why they can't coexist in our minds, we just need to be careful which one we talk about.
When people say they "like Sparta" I don't immediately feel that they are silently singling that they will be ok with slavery and secret police, I think they want to be strong people fighting to protect their brethren, and that's generally OK with me.
Battle of Thermopylae was a loss, not success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Thermopylae
> Result Persian victory[a]
>Territorial changes Persians gain control of Phocis, Boeotia, and Attica[5]
In the Thermopylae case, they failed at their intended objective (defeat the Persian army on land) and wasted a good-sized force. The fact that the defeat was set in stone the moment they chose the place and time of the engagement doesn't make it any less of a defeat.
(Note that "the 300" is only counting the Spartiates i.e. citizens; there were a total of 1-2K Spartan soldiers, and many more forces from other Greek poleis.)
Anyway, even if you grant that they were just trying to buy time (they weren’t), dying to the man in exchange for an extra day or so accomplished nothing militarily.
The battle of Salamis where the Greek defeated the Persians was definitely considered a success at the time, not a failure because they didn't get to die heroically every last man!
But in case of a defeat it is common to spin it as some kind of moral victory. Just see how the British spun the defeat at Dunkerque in the beginning of WWII. But that does not mean they didn't care about winning.
The Greeks also had very different rules awarding time for sea combat and land combat (rooted in Homer). In land combat, the model was Achilles, and stratagems and tricks detracted from the time of a victory, while in sea combat, the model was Odysseus, and metis ruled, so strategems and tricks were in bounds, hence the glory of Themistocles.
ie people who want to reproduce the mythical Sparta often advocate the social structure of the real Sparta, thinking it will lead to those mythical benefits. And instead it leads to monstrosity.
In modern western society we can generally avoid looking that in the face, for the same reason we can buy packaged meat and separate ourselves from the mass slaughter of animals. But that doesn’t make that fact of life go away and at some level we all understand that.
I believe there's more romanticizing in this statement than evidence for it.
Ideas are subject to natural selection as much as individuals are. And for an idea to win this natural selection, it's not necessary to be useful for our species. Some ideas spread will because they give their carriers advantage over other people, like Science; some because they just resonate with our minds well and spread fast, like viral videos from Tiktok. Romanticizing of Spartans could easily fall into the latter category.
I agree that being able to defeat (and possibly kill) your enemies was important for us throughout history, but I doubt that being a stereotypical Spartan helps one do that. In the next parts of the linked post on Spartans, acoup says that they weren't as strong army as they were believed to be. Their greatest strength was their badass fame advertized by Socrates.
It ist only the distance you mention that even allows you to glorify the ultimate dehumanizing act.
That it is even romantice in the context of child soldiers speaks volumes.
Killing is abnormal. Whenever someone is intentionally killed, it is a failure of society and an incredible tragedy.
For the victim of killing, there's no difference between "being killed" and "dying". It's not that your life gets less valuable or your pain gets eased if you die from natural causes. And eventually we all die, death itself is not abnormal, then what's the big deal about killing?
Killing is not a tragedy. Dying early if you could live longer is a tragedy.
Taking someone like that out with a bullet or a drone is much less risky operationally. They also avoid the additional geopolitical complexity of needing occupying forces in the relevant country.
Maybe there should be some pre-operation due process rights, but it seems callous in other ways to insist on non-violence in all cases. Especially in response to catastrophic violence.
A couple of centuries ago violence, wars and killing were a way bigger part of human lives, and it has been like that throughout the whole history.
I don't like glorifying violence, but I want to acknowledge that it's a natural part of life. Some can afford not to deal with it, some cannot.
A lot of violence that went on in Sparta was fundamentally selfish. And quite often it had nothing to do with protecting yourself. And also, quite a lot of it was not brave at all - the treatment of helots or pretty much anyone who was lower in social standing then you was violent but not brave at all. It was violence simply against people with zero chance to defend themselves intended to keep things that way.
There is that odd thing where people kneed jerk assume that violence of the past must have been well reasoned, noble and form of self sacrifice. Pretty often, it is simply not a case.
Judging a historical civilization by how much it has affected the present is also a bit myopic.
The religious tolerance of the Mongols in comparison to their contemporaries is well-established.
> As Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and waged war on most of Asia he became known as one of the most ruthless and brutal warlords of all time. However, one hallmark during his military conquest was his tolerance of all religions. He embraced diversity and decreed religious freedom for everyone.[17] Genghis Khan’s tolerance proved to be beneficial for him. Genghis continued to use religious persecution to his benefit. He would use suppressed people as spies in cities such as Baghdad and then take the land, assimilating all those willing.[18] In Amy Chua's book Day of Empire, she claims that “... the Mongols were more religiously open than any other power in the world.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Mongol_Empir...
We should also be very aware that most of the writing we have on the Mongols comes from their enemies. It is almost certainly biased and likely over-exaggerates certain things.
Who exactly are you preaching all this righteousness to?
Of course, I don't mean that it isn't necessary to take into account what background situation they are in, and what the consequences of different policies would be.
Perhaps gluttony is always bad, but the amount and types of harm it causes depends on the food supply. And similarly, perhaps slavery is always wrong, but different cultures have practiced different forms of it, which had varying degrees of wrongness, perhaps some of which could even have been less wrong than our prison labor system.
We do not judge someone who is struggling to pay for their own food much for neglecting to provide food for the homeless they pass by, at least not compared to someone who is very wealthy passing by the same person. In the same way, perhaps we could speak about our current society having much greater wealth and resources than the society of the past, and therefore is able to afford to do more, and therefore has more of an obligation to do more, but none of this should change the truth that good is good and bad is bad, and the nature of the good is the same throughout time.
At least peoples' perception of good and bad changes a great deal between societies and across time.
Not just our society, but every society, sees their perception is correct and everyone else's is wrong.
I don’t claim that all things our society says is bad which past societies said was good (or visa versa) , that ours is the correct one, nor always that theirs was the correct one.
Im just saying that there is a correct view (for at least almost all practically relevant and well-defined moral questions), and people across time should all strive to have the correct view, even if it clashes with views of the past or views of the future (though it may be wise to consider why people in the past had whatever view and why people in the future might have whatever view, and take these into account when trying to have the correct view)
We also celebrate historical people quite a lot - and we praise them and put them on pedestal as good examples it would be biased to not talk about flaws too.
> it would be biased to not talk about flaws too
Frankly we are obsessed about finding flaws in historical people. For example, Einstein treated his wife not so well. I don't feel any compulsion to bring that into a discussion of his achievements. It doesn't diminish his achievements.
Which is fine and so what. Had Hitler won or Stalin won, I would be perceived and lesser and bad. So what?
Executions have a lot of opposition now. Various warfare has a lot of opposition now. People now judge both prosecutors and politicians that cause all that war related suffering.
> Frankly we are obsessed about finding flaws in historical people.
First, you made up obsession. Second, what you call historical flaws were pretty often subject of massive criticism of contemporaries. They were pretty often not really the norm.
Third, when you praise values or behavior of back then, the bad side of it is completely fair game. Because the wins are often related, facilitaded by or directly caused the ugly side.
> For example, Einstein treated his wife not so well. I don't feel any compulsion to bring that into a discussion of his achievements. It doesn't diminish his achievements.
And if you was taking about his relationship advice, his marriage behavior would suddenly matter.
If you talked about why women in past did not had same achievements as men, his wife history is very nice example to be used.
If anything, Greek culture and armies gradually assimilated over the centuries into native cultures.
https://carnegiescience.edu/news/war-plague-no-match-defores...
That is a question to ask the Spartans and perhaps their contemporaries. Not people from 2,000 years in the future.
I think the article and your comment both make a mistake, the same mistake: complaining that an ancient civilisation did not hold itself up to our modern morals.
Contemporary Europe has a lot of unrest in close proximity (Niger, Syria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine) and mass movements of people. Mr. Erdogan ruling the same Asia Minor where Persian armies once came from* is very clearly not our friend nor good neighbour. At the same time, most European militaries are chronically underinvested.
That will lead some to escapism and search for possible heroes, which isn't really history, but mythology.
* I know that the bulk of Persian empire was further east, but Asia Minor was still the staging region for invasions into Europe. Logically so, the geography is clear.
It was customary for big religions to stage such debates when trying to convert a pagan society. Check the history of Cyril and Methodius and their khazar mission which is 4-5 hundreds years prier.
I recommend reading Genghis Khan and the Quest for God if you want further information.
https://www.amazon.com/Genghis-Khan-Quest-God-Conqueror/dp/0...
> Spartan women also enjoyed considerably more rights and equality with men than elsewhere in classical antiquity.
And Sparta has a higher share of helots than any other polis. If you are a woman in Sparta, almost sure that you are a helot (as many rights as a cow). Remember also that Spartiates regularly went to war against the helots, and Plutarch even remarked how cruel and harsh they were with the slaves.
So Sparta was arguably at least as bad as any other polis to be a woman unless you win the birth lottery as a spartiate.
For a modern example, I've lived 15 years in Britain (i.e. the UK) and I'm legally resident in the country but I am not, in any meaning of the term, "British".
Perhaps there is a confusion between the term "spartan" (which you render with a small "S") and "Spartiate"? In Greek there is only one word, "Σπαρτιάτης" ("Spartiates"). I believe the use of the term "spartan" to distinghuish between citizens of Sparta and e.g. helots or perioikoi, is a modern habit. As in very modern- as a young Greek I was fascinated with the ancient era and so I read a lot on ancient Greece but I don't remember such a distinction anywhere in the (Greek-language) sources I studied.
Indeed, if I try to translate "spartan" in Greek so that it sounds like a different word to "spartiates", I'd have to say something like "Σπαρτινός". But that is not a word I've ever heard spoken in Greece, nor, dare I say, has anyone else.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
TL;DR: Spartan elite women were slightly freer than Athenian women, mostly because all their housework was outsourced to an army of slaves. But they were not citizens, could not choose who to marry, and were by and large treated as property, up to and including lending to other men.
The 95+% of Spartan women who were not in the elite, on the other hand, led lives that were miserable even by the low standards of antiquity, including random rape and murder during the yearly crypteia purges.
> But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers.
e.g. The Siege of Tyre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tyre_(332_BC)
Edit: Mind you the Mongols do seem to have been quite methodical about it:
"On the first night while laying siege to a city, the leader of the Mongol forces would lead from a white tent: if the city surrendered, all would be spared. On the second day, he would use a red tent: if the city surrendered, the men would all be killed, but the rest would be spared. On the third day, he would use a black tent: no quarter would be given."
Socrates was killed for being a Sparta supporter in Athens (also for being a formidable troll). His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing. Make of that what you want, but for anybody who knows some history, your sentence will sound pretty confusing and contradictory. The celebration of Sparta is not some decadent modern fad; it lies at the very root of our civilization! We are defined by being Sparta supporters.
I think Socrates' admiration for Sparta is questioned by some scholars. Since the man himself didn't leave behind any written work, all we know of him we know indirectly, mostly from Plato. Popper for example considers that a lot of the more authoritarian ideas ascribed to Socrates were actually Plato's views [1]. The general problem of figuring out what exactly Socrates thought, how he acted etc. is actually a significant sub-field of scholarship [2].
> His loving pupil Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing
This is silliness. While the tremendous importance of Classical Greece can't be denied, the idea that there is a monolithic thing called 'Western Civilization' that has a clear start is extremely simplistic. Are the Egyptians, the Phoenicians, the Etruscans, the Minoans, the Hittites etc. not part of 'Western Civilization'? How about the Christians that spent many centuries actually destroying and forgetting the works and achievements of the ancient world [3]?
> The celebration of Sparta is not some decadent modern fad; it lies at the very root of our civilization! We are defined by being Sparta supporters.
This is even more silliness. By the same token you could say that slavery or infanticide lie at the very root of 'our civilization'. We (who exactly is we in this case? Americans? Europeans? people of the Levant or North Africa?) are defined by our actions and beliefs, not by some supposedly sacred historical heritage that should never be questioned or relinquished lest that leads to the collapse of our current society.
[1] 'Contrary to major Plato scholars of his day, Popper divorced Plato's ideas from those of Socrates, claiming that the former in his later years expressed none of the humanitarian and democratic tendencies of his teacher. In particular, Popper accuses Plato of betraying Socrates in the Republic, wherein Plato portrays Socrates sympathizing with totalitarianism' in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemi...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem
[3] See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Darkening_Age
This is apparently a myth. See: https://historyforatheists.com/2020/03/the-great-myths-8-the...
At one point the degree of callousness was so high that they even stripped the roof of the Pantheon in Rome for copper [1]. Things like this bring up images of Isis blowing up Palmyra, not the idea of a smooth and enlightened preservation and continuation of the classical Greco-Roman world.
What you mean by that?
> We are defined by being Sparta supporters.
Even if you assume that "Plato went on to start the whole "Western civilization" thing." then it does not mean that we are defined by what his mentor supported.
I was thinking about a celebrated quotation by A.N.Whitehead: "The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato."
> it does not mean that we are defined by what his mentor supported
Plato's entire written corpus consists in Socrates speaking. If you accept Plato's great influence, you have that.
That is an absurd claim! Plato is perhaps the most important philosopher, but other creations of Greek culture like tragedy, comedy, epics, history, sculpture, architecture, democracy, geometry predates Plato.
Plato actually hated a lot of the things we consider civilization like poetry, acting and democracy.
Socrates hated democracy, we are trying to be one. Socrates got executed and the further developments went without him.
That's a really big tradeoff, how did you arrive at your conclusion?
I think you picked-up a skewed version of History.
Sparta, the first democracy in recorded history, was one of the few Grecian areas where women could go to school, own property, and engage in sports. Throughout the rest of Greece, most women were illiterate. The Spartan constitution is the first known to have an Assembly composed of all citizens.
Plutarch said, "devotion to the intellect is more characteristic of Sparta than love of physical exercise."
Socrates said, "the most ancient and fertile homes of philosophy among the Greeks are Crete and Sparta, where are found more sophists than anywhere on earth."
The oldest recorded heterosexual love poem was the work of a Spartan poet praising Spartan maidens.
Most women in Sparta were illiterate too.
Note, all this was 2,000 years ago.
They produced no literature, goods, art or bequeathed anything to posterity other than their notoriety as a brutal martial society even that is being questioned. The messy Romans were far better and interesting through their start as a monarchy, transitioning through republic and empire to end as a theological autocracy.
The nearest thing to Spart might be Genghis Khan's Mongols. They Mongols were true nomads whose capital was a tent city. They left no trace of Empire but were secular and bequeathed many important technologies to the world - none of which were their invention. They neither created anything on their own nor built any civilizations but their fame for conquest and administration.
What did the Spartans accomplish?
Edit: Quite a few folks downthread are chiding me for being unaware of the Mongol's contribution to our present society. First, I am comparing them favorably to the Spartans. Second, I have actually been to Ulan Bataar and worked in their cultural institutions preserving Mongol "artefacts" . I have also studied with Mongol teachers and count Mongols as friends. I counsel those counselling me based on books they have read or secondary/tertiary source material on the internet to reconsider their assumptions. Your advice might be well intentioned but off the mark.
The Mongols were tremendous administrators. They were also ruthless nomads who loathed cities, civilization and all its trappings. There is no sign of Genghis' Khan's empire anywhere on this planet. Why? His court was a tent just like his city was a tent city. He also sacked Baghdad and almost every city they came upon including killing the men and raping millions of women and burning their libraries. Yes, they imported postal systems, bureaucracy, paper and whatever else to the world but they also killed 50-100MM people and burned down cities across the middle east for no reason because they did not like them. The descendants of Genghis Khan like Taimur Lame single handedly destroyed vast swaths of Persia, Georgia, Iraq and laid waste to Northern India raising mountains of skulls along the way.
You can keep your postal systems and secular courts, I would like to get some of the cities they sacked and their libraries back.