Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wish you to feel the same joy when you consider your own failings.
Why do you assume to know whether they would?
Did I? Where?
Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
51–60 of 114 posts
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty pedantic. I think we can agree that since the title and parent comment mention "Spartans", they are talking about the Spartans and not other residents.
Helots were 85% of the population[1]. GP is pointing out that random skeletons don't come with residency papers describing which kind of residents they belong to. [1] Source: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
"Sparta" is commonly understood to mean the city of Sparta as a political entity and "Spartans" its free inhabitants. Only in the blog you quote is the term "Sparta" used to refer to the wider city-state of Sparta that encompassed subjugated settlements outside of Sparta. Historical sources, ancient as well as modern, do not consider the helots to be "Spartan" (or even "Spartiate", a term made up by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan", a distinction grammatically impossible in the Greek language).
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#53> ...Christian Laes, a classicist at the University of Manchester. “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.” I also see at least one comment here making this same argument. The article covers the evidence against, including, that disabled ancient Greeks lived to adulthood. The evidence cited in favor is Plutarch's assertion, and that "other societies" do it. That last is particularly w…
I also found the evidence against the killing to be pretty weak. It certainly doesn't establish what percentage of disabled babies would be killed.
Intuitively, to me, given how dangerous birthing was for the mother, I imagine only seriously disabled babies - that would never be autonomous as an adult - would be killed.
But I guess we'll never know.
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#54Let's be honest, 99% of the average American's knowledge about Spartan society is from the movie "300". But it never stops being amusing when Americans have their "wait, those Hollywood movies are not even 1% historically correct??" moments.
Give it 20 years, people will think World War Two was fought by women of color with space age technology.
Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewritten, and modern sensibilities injected where appropriate.
And we don't really think much about it. Because after all, it's entertainment. Entertainment has no responsibility to inform or educate. But through it all, children will grow up and absorb it. And suddenly a whole generation starts believing that Ancient Greece was a multi-ethnic civilization (by today's standards) and that Spanish Moors were Sub-Saharan Africans.
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#55Let's be honest, 99% of the average American's knowledge about Spartan society is from the movie "300". But it never stops being amusing when Americans have their "wait, those Hollywood movies are not even 1% historically correct??" moments.
Give it 20 years, people will think World War Two was fought by women of color with space age technology. Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewr…
Hollywood is the propaganda machine first i.e., a movie may be not especially entertaining but it must conform.
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#56Let's be honest, 99% of the average American's knowledge about Spartan society is from the movie "300". But it never stops being amusing when Americans have their "wait, those Hollywood movies are not even 1% historically correct??" moments.
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Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Give it 20 years, people will think World War Two was fought by women of color with space age technology. Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewr…
Hollywood is the propaganda machine first i.e., a movie may be not especially entertaining but it must conform.
There’s plenty of incentives to conform, but no actual requirements. For example the DoD subsidizes war movies it agrees with. When the goal is to make money, that’s hard to turn down.
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#58Let's be honest, 99% of the average American's knowledge about Spartan society is from the movie "300". But it never stops being amusing when Americans have their "wait, those Hollywood movies are not even 1% historically correct??" moments.
Give it 20 years, people will think World War Two was fought by women of color with space age technology. Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewr…
You mean like this? https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#59Archeologists are not scientists. They are like kids who get to grade their own homework. Everything is a legend and myth. All buildings are temples or tombs.
Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well Roman laws contained fairly severe penalties for infanticide [1], while the practice was common it was certainly frowned up. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
From that page: - “The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well” - “Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374, but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted” 374 is fairly close to the fall of Rome, which Wikipedia sets at 395-476 AD ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi... ), so from that page, it doesn’t seem it was that severely punished during most of th years the Rom…
/irony
And now we got all the way to anti-abortionists claiming that killing the child even after any signs of pregnancy is illegal.