You never HAVE to visit the site if you subscribe. I still DO, but that little fact is highly appreciated.

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.

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.

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).

But, we should keep in mind the stakes, right? He provides a compelling argument that, actually, Sparta was not even that great at marshaling up a bunch of guys with big spears. That’s a nice beachhead in the conversation as to whether Spartan values are valuable, if you think they aren’t.

But even if he is wrong, what does it mean? Big groups of guys with spears don’t win wars nowadays anyway so even if we think a value system’s ability to win wars is very important (pretty questionable!) spartan-ism is obviously much worse than something like liberal democracy, which produced nukes and stealth bombers which could kill, like, endless numbers of spear guys (however good they are at lining up).

That's exactly what happened with South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: as soon as we pulled out "victorious", the newly-established allied regime was unable to defend itself against North Vietnam / ISIS / the Taliban (respectively).

The US can destroy anyone by one guy pressing a button.

On the other hand, to win a non-nuclear war in the modern age, you need clever political positioning and a realistic end goal as well as battlefield results. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 were all unwinnable no matter how well you fought.

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.

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.

He wrote a hysterical philippic [1] just before the election calling Trump a fascist, which was written with about the same level of historical rigour as the Paul Krugman's rants exhibit for economics.

You may argue that "Trump is a fascist" and you are entitled to that view, but that is not a centrist view, and is at odds with the majority of the US population, which voted for Trump.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...

There have only been a couple of posts where he discusses current politics, so that is all I have to go on.

However, from reading his material, I think it would be fair to say he is against the "great man of history" theory, which tends to be a more left wing interpretation.

The majority of the US population did not vote for him. Only a portion could vote, and only a portion of those voted, and out of those 49.9% voted for him.

I thought I did. But now I'm learning that 49-something percent is a majority, so I'm questioning all my beliefs.

What was the participation? 60% or so? I think so. So maybe 30-35% of the people who could have voted for him actually did. In the US population large portions are unable to vote. You correctly pointed out the very young, but also the pre-adolescent young, the disobedient, the non-citizen, the precarious worker, the infirm and so on should also be included.

So the majority you had in mind is rather small compared to what you literally compared it to. I'm guessing the result feels like 'the will of the people' to you anyway? Do you feel like most usians approved of the current regime? Do you also think that 'the will of the people' is inherently democratic? Inherently good, even?

The result feels as much the will of the people as any other US election result.

¹ Not to me, I won't read it. I don't care and I've heard enough fascism apologetics on HN in the last few years.

But you won't see this, as you have chosen self righteousness over knowledge. And no-one is apologising for fascism because he isn't one.

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.

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!)

But I'll look at the article, I've read other ACOUP stuff and enjoyed.

For example, the city of Gondor seems like a giant fortress without any fields or farmers working outside its walls to sustain it. This even before any siege. So what do they eat?

Tolkien wouldn't have made this mistake, it's likely Jackson's. And I understand why: people want to see epic battles, farmers doing their thing are a low cinematic priority.

> 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

Devereaux argues precisely the contrary, that LotR is more realistic than GoT at presenting faux-medieval societies and the feudal caste! Perhaps Tolkien simply did his research better... or that simply by taking medieval and ancient literature as his sources, he got it better.

He has quite a bit to say about the system of vassallage as depicted in GoT, as well as the relationship between the Church and both the common people and the nobles. Devereaux argues that the cynical take in GoT, i.e. that most nobles didn't believe in their religion and only cynically used it when it suits their purposes (which is the norm, not the exception in GoT!) is at odds with the real middle-ages.

Also, none of Deveraux's objections focus on obviously fantasy things like zombies or dragons, he's not trying to score cheap points, and he explicitly states he's living magic & dragons out of the equation. No realistic explanation could come out of them, anyway.

Again, none of this would be a problem if we accepted GoT as pure fantasy (as I do, by the way -- I'm a fan), but it was actually hyped as "more realistic"!

My memory of Lord of the Rings is that the Shire mostly makes sense, but outside of the Shire, the world doesn't totally add up. The Roharim seem like romanticized Ango-Saxon eorls, but basically on grass plains and without obvious agriculture, the elves kind of just magically subsist, Orthanc is populated with orcs going through a secret industrial revolution without a food supply, large stretches of the world are basically empty... Once out of the Shire I don't really remember there being serfs or peasants or churches or much agriculture. It's possible my memory is betraying me, though.

That said my view on why there's a perception of Game of Thrones as more realistic than "most fantasy" is that in the 1200s through 1600s there really was a ton of plotting and power seeking, and a ton of violence, and social status really was a huge determinant of who could do what and how much would be overlooked. And lots of fantasy pre GoTs had various kinds of chosen one narratives, with side of light overcoming obvious evil, with middle ages trappings being little more than window dressing on permutations of Luke Skywalker or just sort of pre modern alternative societies. While GoTs goes hard on the violence, corruption, actual class differences, and power struggle plotting, and mostly does so without basing those things on magical or spiritual alignments. So IMO it's got flaws and is not a fantasy retelling of the real middle ages, but just clears a low bar of not really romanticizing feudalism and having power struggles that are more people-driven.

I do think Tolkien is much more influenced by and matches way more pre-1200s stuff. And particularly things like the Hobbit, his outside LoTR writings, fit super well into what I'd label kind of the "Beowulf to Egil" sort of era/time period.

I do agree that the relationship of religion and behavior in the middle ages is very hard to understand from a modern perspective - and I don't think it's some GoTs even tries at. (Though obviously we did eventually get the reformation because the divide between the Bible and the Church grew too large and too obvious, but it's also not very likely the case that those precipitating the reformation disbelieved.)

They enter into popular culture, get mythologized, and all nuance flies out the window.

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.

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.