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> Being asked by a woman from Attica, "Why is it that you Spartan women are the only women that lord it over your men," she said, "Because we are the only women that are mothers of men."
The Spartan culture perished.
> One woman, observing her son coming towards her, inquired, "How fares our country?" And when he said, "All have perished," she took up a tile and, hurling it at him, killed him, saying, "And so they sent you to bear the bad news to us!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
When the gangsters keep the papers of the workers, the lines do indeed get blurry. But it is still quite a difference between exploiting someone weaker and actually owning a person and be legally able to do anything with him or her.
I would say that one is de facto slave if their superiors can rape or kill them without legal repercussions.
They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc.
A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
An awful lot of those sayings are extolling "willingness to commit violence" as a virtue. That's not the sort of society I think we should emulate.
Hm, all most all of them are horrible. It's so impressive to me that we still proclaim Sparta as something worthwhile of praise when it was an awful inhumane culture and society that didn't even last that long.
Do we? I thought it was fairly well-known to be extremely nasty.
It’s worth mentioning that Spartan women held huge amounts of wealth due to the violence within their society (men’s wealth would be inherited by their wives who would then remarry). According to Aristotle (who is very biased) the women lived lives of luxury. The point of this is that the women who extol the violence of men have a material self interest in the deaths of their men (minimally as a class, potentially in…
Their sayings do have a rather "disposable" view of their sons. I suppose it is the equivalent of that loathsome White Feather movement, which had a too-significant overlap with the Suffragettes of the time.
I don’t think Sparta was as cruel and callous as portrayed. I think our view of Sparta is influenced by two main things: 1. Spartan propaganda. It was in Sparta’s interest to portray themselves as crazy, devoted warriors who relished the thought of dying for their country. How would you feel going up against a bunch of guys who would rather die on the field of battle than go home in defeat and have their own mothers…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sparta was good at fighting, but bad at war! Spartans were known to have terrible logistics, they couldn't field an army for more than a year. Back then, most armies needed to live off the fat of the land and/or have huge supply trains to remain effective, and Spartans had neither skillset. (When talking Bronze age tactics: this was the key advantage of slingers, who could craft their sling-bullets from clay and rock…
Makes sense. It's like a perfect metaphor for imbalances between individualism and collectivism. Seems like Sparta internalized personal valor so intensely that the only collective good they could possibly understand, was to project the whole country as an imagined heroic individual, and then try to individually triumph in the name of that country. Meanwhile, there's a lot of countries out there with more of an inter…
There's nothing wrong with the Marines being the modern Sparta, because the Marines are just one team in our team-of-teams of the military. Marines + Army work on the same projects together, so the Marines can be the "unsustainable elite fighting force", while the Army can hold the zones after the Marines have done initial combat.
From this perspective, individuals glorifying combat works in the context of the Marines. If the Marines were alone, they'd fall just like Sparta did way back in the Greek days: but that's not really an issue today. The Army will inevitably help out whatever conflicts the Marines get into.
So the "different cultures", the different stories that these communities have, work out in the context of the team-of-teams that make up today's military.
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Society has advanced a lot in the last 3000 years. We know that we can build a community similar to the Spartans. The questions we have today aren't "good vs bad", but more about "where is the proper place this philosophy should be in our greater society?".
I don't understand the point of changing words like "many" to "mony" or "man" to "mon". I mean if you're anyway writing the entire thing in modern day English then why do this. Is it just for the effect of it I.e., making it look sophisticated? or is it some kind of attempt at retaining the originality/authenticity?
I figured those were OCR errors or something. How would this help maintain originality?
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/plutarch-moralia_sayings_s...
There's a footnote on that part "Cf. the note on Moralia, 190 B, supra", but I'm not sure what that's referencing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.
Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor. Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigr…
I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work.
The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races.
Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.