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Sayings of Spartan women

penelope.uchicago.edu

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Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#201

Post by int_19h »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #89
jacknews wrote: post #30

The Spartan culture perished.

How many cultures from that era still remain? I'm thinking Jewish culture (though it's not monolithic), that's about the only one I can think of whose customs, traditions, etc. still remain today.

The Jewish culture was very different in that era. At the time Spartans conquered the Messenians (establishing the Spartan culture as we know it), Israel and Judea were still in their First Temple period - a Yahwist monolatry. The hardline monotheism that is one of the defining features of Judaism today would not appear until a century later.

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#202

Post by int_19h »

xgb84j wrote: post #33
emadabdulrahim wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't it depends on the context? Defending an elderly from assault or protecting one's family from a reckless person is violence in the name of virtue.

While violence is sometimes justified, I think it's still better to build a society that tries to solve its problems without violence or prevents problems that can only be solved with violence. When you have reckless people attacking the elderly you need better psychological healthcare and a better social system to prevent that. I understand your point and in a narrow context it's definitely true, but in a larger con…

I think we need to distinguish between violence and capacity for violence. Yes, we should strive towards a society that tries to solve its problems without violence as much as possible. But new problems appear every now and then, and not all of them can be solved without violence, unfortunately. So we still have to be able to resort to it when needed.

Something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pLb_uc0bo8

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#203

Post by klipt »

jcranmer wrote: post #177
klipt wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't "all their opponents were weaker" just another way of saying "Sparta was unusually strong"?

What was pointed out was that the way the Greeks organized their battle formations, the strongest of their formation would generally face the weakest of their opponents' formation. Since Spartans were usually seen as the strongest, this meant they faced generally those seen as the weakest. And he also points out that when this general model is explicitly broken, the Spartans really suffer in their documented military…

That's pretty interesting. So it was basically confirmation bias: people thought they were strong, so they were put in positions where they performed well, which perpetuated the idea that they were strong?

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#204

Post by suifbwish »

throwaway20371 wrote: post #126
fishtoaster wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc that series addresses this critique in some depth, pointing out that sparta was particularly awful even by the standards of other greek states. Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved. Since sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people, they relied on particularly brutal methods to keep down the regular slave revolts, making…

> Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved Probably worth noting, then, that in 1860, South Carolina and Mississippi had over 50% population enslaved, and four more states over 40% population enslaved. Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations, I'm curious whethe…

I thought we were talking about Sparta. Why not bring up other unrelated stuff while you are at it.

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#205

Post by rsynnott »

a1369209993 wrote: post #183
rsynnott wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.

> SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)

I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?)

I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#206

Post by [deleted] »

ianbicking wrote: post #20
herio wrote: post #7

On the topic of Spartan societey in general, a really good read is https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ by Dr. Bret Deveraux. Long read but well worth it for interested people.

Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in reality terribly cruel, corrupted, and decadent.

[deleted]

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#207

Post by WelcomeShorty »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #72
ianbicking wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in reality terribly cruel, corrupted, and decadent.

He recently appeared in the EconTalk podcast and its worth hearing too (will find the link). But they touched on Sparta and the thing that struck me was just how unequal - something like 5% or less of the population of Sparta (and it was a big state by Greek standards), only 5% were "free" - everyone else was a Slave. The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.

https://www.econtalk.org/bret-devereaux-on-ancient-greece-an...

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#208

Post by listless »

> “ "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."

Feels like 2021 could maybe use this sentiment.

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#209

Post by throwaway20371 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #132
throwaway20371 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved Probably worth noting, then, that in 1860, South Carolina and Mississippi had over 50% population enslaved, and four more states over 40% population enslaved. Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations, I'm curious whethe…

> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations What?

Speaking specifically of Greeks and Romans. And in general, Ancient peoples did not consider slaves to be as animals, but American slave-owners often held the belief that they were sub-human and not more than talking beasts.

There was a class of Mycenaean slave that was close to a free man, who could own land and have status.

Greek slaves could be involved in every economic activity except politics. Slaves were bankers, craftsmen and tradespeople. Male slaves might be personal assistants, shield makers, cutlers, bedmakers, while female slaves would be textile weavers and bakers. Not only were slaves not seen as denegerate inferiors, they were expected to be able to take over their masters' business when needed. Some of the most famous and respected philosophers were slaves.

Slaves could earn wages, and use those wages to pay a fee to live and work alone, and even use their savings (or loans/gifts) to buy their freedom. Cretian slaves could own a house and livestock and pass it down to their family, which was also granted the same familial laws as freedmen.

Debt slavery was common until it was abolished; people basically could become serfs until they paid off their debts, and then become free again. Some slavery was limited to a period of time, and slaves had rights / could be involved in legal disputes, and so win freedom or other rewards.

Roman slaves perhaps were treated worse than Greek originally, and many more of them were used for agricultural labor, probably putting their experiences on par with American slaves. But as the Roman empire progressed, slaves gained many more rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome

Worth nothing also that a lot of Spartan "historical information" is more myth and bullshit than evidence-based. Spartans were masters of propaganda. Helots may have been treated like shit, but apparently a lot of the reputation was inflated or made up by later historical writers.

Helots could also be craftspeople, own land, raise crops, keep money, buy their freedom. They maintained family units and were less often dispersed than Greek slaves. Helot children born of Spartan citizen fathers would become members of the army as an intermediate rank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots

Re: Sayings of Spartan women

#210

Post by a1369209993 »

rsynnott wrote: post #205
a1369209993 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)

I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?) I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stori…

> particularly the later stories.

That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well.

(My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.)

0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called.

1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is.

2: Really, believability versus any extreme.

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