Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues • Hacker News Board

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#71

Post by bivargen » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:42 PM UTC

YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #52

akkartik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Σπᾰρτῐᾱ́της is a perfectly fine greek noun and was used in antiquity to denote the ”homoioi” of spartan society, it is not a made up word by Bret Devereaux. Historical sources do consider helots to be spartans, just not citizens or ”homoioi”.

I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author do know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#72

Post by akerl_ » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:45 PM UTC

Did the title of the article change after this was posted? Or was the title modified by the poster?

Article title says “Greeks”, not “Spartans”, which would make a lot more sense (and avoid the need for half of the arguing in the comments).

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#73

Post by mannykannot » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:50 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #14

mannykannot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we're talking about Spartans, we're talking about the Spartan aristocracy, no? I am pretty sure you are right. To the ancient writers, slaves were all but invisible, except perhaps as a measure of a slave-holder's wealth, or when, like Spartacus, they upturned the 'natural order' of society, and lesser nominally-free persons were not much more thought of. A slave's child was a return on a slave-holder's invest…

> the Spartan aristocracy operated like a modern-day cult "Cult" isn't the word I'd use for it. The main point of that particular post is comparing the written sources' description of Spartan agoge to modern child soldiers... and our sources' description of the Spartan agoge read rather like how someone would write about modern child soldiers if they thought it were a good thing.

Interesting - I have a strong recollection of someone making a comparison of the agoge to the methods of modern cults (I do not think it is something I would have come up with myself) and I thought it was somewhere in this series, but I see it is not. Maybe I heard it from Dan Carlin?

Not that you have to agree with the comparison, of course!

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#74

Post by xwolfi » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 12:58 PM UTC

Ansil849 wrote: post #19

gadflyinyoureye wrote: post #2

I haven’t read the archeologist’s work. I did read the article. The archeologist claims that evidence across the Aegean and Athens particularly shows weak babies were cared for until death. That’s fine. However we’re not discussing Athenian nor general Aegean baby care. We’re discussing Spartan care. Nothing in the article (and I could have missed it) proved evidence, from digs, against the idea of infanticide by the…

> Nothing in the article (and I could have missed it) proved evidence, from digs, against the idea of infanticide by the Spartans. Isn't the onus on the ones claiming that Spartans practiced systemic infanticide to provide the evidence that they did so?

Where did the claim come from originally ? Could google but...

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#75

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:17 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#76

Post by okl » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #67

okl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.” If you believe things for which you have no evidence, you're liable to believe everything.

I've seen this form of argument a lot lately. It's epistemologically unsound. Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence. Insufficient evidence leads solely to the conclusion "We do not know with any confidence whether Spartans did this or not." You cannot just assume that one of the affirmative positions is true because the other one lacks sufficien…

That's true but as you see, whether or not the other party argues from that understanding is difficult to identify from a single sentence. I understand that it being convinced of something or not is a false dichotomy. However, there's a difference between objective reality and knowledge: Either the phenomenon was absent or not -- that's a fact. Whether or not we are convinced of it being absent or not is the other question.

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#77

Post by dustintrex » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:19 PM UTC

jcranmer wrote: post #14

mannykannot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When we're talking about Spartans, we're talking about the Spartan aristocracy, no? I am pretty sure you are right. To the ancient writers, slaves were all but invisible, except perhaps as a measure of a slave-holder's wealth, or when, like Spartacus, they upturned the 'natural order' of society, and lesser nominally-free persons were not much more thought of. A slave's child was a return on a slave-holder's invest…

> the Spartan aristocracy operated like a modern-day cult "Cult" isn't the word I'd use for it. The main point of that particular post is comparing the written sources' description of Spartan agoge to modern child soldiers... and our sources' description of the Spartan agoge read rather like how someone would write about modern child soldiers if they thought it were a good thing.

By and large ancient sources seem to also have thought that the Spartans were nuts. There are virtually no sources where Spartans write about themselves though, since they were not exactly keen on intellectual pursuits.

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#78

Post by rendall » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:35 PM UTC

torstenvl wrote: post #67

okl wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.” If you believe things for which you have no evidence, you're liable to believe everything.

I've seen this form of argument a lot lately. It's epistemologically unsound. Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence. Insufficient evidence leads solely to the conclusion "We do not know with any confidence whether Spartans did this or not." You cannot just assume that one of the affirmative positions is true because the other one lacks sufficien…

> Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence.

Hmm. That is an interesting perspective, but I do not agree.

Isn't "Spartans did not do this" actually a negative claim? And aren't negative claims notoriously difficult to prove?

What if this were consorted with extraterrestrials or some other random claim? Then it's easy to dismiss lack of evidence with "does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent".

Do we really need to find evidence that Spartans did not do this for every claim? Or rather, perhaps we should insist on proving the negative only of claims for which the evidence is strong in the first place.

Shouldn't we take as the null hypothesis "Spartans did not do this" and then evaluate evidence that they did?

In this specific instance, because of 2000 years of tradition, the unchallenged null hypothesis has been "Spartans suffered only healthy, well-formed children to live". This is the only reason people are saying anything like "We need more evidence they did not" despite the weakness of the evidence for its being true.

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#79

Post by helsinkiandrew » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:39 PM UTC

Sparta was at its peak for a few centuries - aren't customs likely to have changed significantly over that time. The baby killing period could have been during a particular leader, or a bad couple of winters or under some other crisis.

Re: Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues

#80

Post by beebeepka » Sun, Dec 12, 2021, 1:51 PM UTC

hsod wrote: post #29

colordrops wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a name for being arbitrarily biased against a counterclaim? The simple fact that this is posed as a counterclaim itself seems to invoke skepticism, even when the original belief itself isn't even presented or has a poor basis itself. A weak counterclaim does not imply the claim to be truth.

I agree. Lately it seems that people who lay their ideas out and accept criticism are being destroyed by those who refuse to admit fault a priori

Lately? I don't think so.

Strong men never make mistakes. Never. Only weak men do. You know it's true. You've seen it. Cavemen have seen it. Probably true in some animal societies, too