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No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

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Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#121

Post by jcranmer »

robonerd wrote: post #112
jcranmer wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The better sentence I should have written is "Sparta is famous because it had a really, really good PR agency," as opposed to "for having". The general point is that Sparta lived much more on its reputation (fueled by the likes of Xenophon and Plutarch) than its actual historical record.

I'm not really sure what distinction you're making between "reputation" and "actual historical record". When examining the military reputations of the ancient world, primary sources seem few and far between. So yes, those that are well reputed are so reputed because other people wrote about them. Or rarely, because they wrote about themselves. The rare first hand accounts seem most suspect of them all; Julius Caesar'…

In the Classical world, the military success of Macedon and Rome are indisputable. Both of those empires were built on the backs of being able to consistently defeat their opponents in military battles. When you look at the Spartan success rate, even among the much smaller group of peer city states, Sparta doesn't look like a nigh-unstoppable military juggernaut the way that Macedon and Rome do.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#122

Post by [deleted] »

wolverine876 wrote: post #84

> In the mid-fourth century BC, an experienced Greek general decided to spend his retirement doing something different – writing a book sharing his expertise with the general public. In mid-fourth century BCE, was writing a book really sharing with the general public? They had no printing press. How many would read a book? Who was it really written for?

[deleted]

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#123

Post by dotancohen »

kkfx wrote: post #87
dotancohen wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting, thank you. I did not realize that Lebanon must import so much food. They have a very fertile country, possibly the most fertile percentagewise in the Middle East, I wonder why they must import so much food.

I don't know the details, but for instance, from a quick search https://www.weeportal-lb.org/news/lebanon-imports-85-its-foo... or https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/lebanon/2022/03/11/leba... https://asiatimes.com/2022/01/russia-ukraine-war-could-cause... I suppose they have big water issues due to constant droughts and bad irrigation systems, perhaps hyper-dense population and constant war-alike status also impac…

Thank you.

In fact, I did not consider the energy part. I am aware that much Lebanese agriculture, at least in the south, is still very manual.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#124

Post by earleybird »

Gollapalli wrote: post #96
blfr wrote: post #26

The almost unreasonable effectiveness of citizen-soldier over the ages is often underappreciated. It takes life-long dedication and a whole martial culture for professionals to keep the upper hand (medieval Europe, Sparta)

It's an incredibly strange thing, from a historical perspective to have any distinction between the term citizen and the term soldier. It was, for every definition of the term citizen until 1973 (or perhaps until 1920), an obligation of all citizens that they fight when their country (or cit-y) was at war. This is why they were male, why the bearing of arms was so important (because depending on the time, you'd bring…

see also Starship Troopers (R A Heinlein) - a short story aimed at a particular audience perhaps but makes explicit this concept.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#125

Post by watwut »

yonaguska wrote: post #82
watwut wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This one was not caused by west in any way. West joined way later. Oh, and you conveniently ignore Russian factor too - they were the ones targeting hospitals and ranking up civilian causalities as a strategy.

When you look at the role that the West played in the Arab spring movement in general, specifically Intel agencies destabilizing Libya, and supporting extremist movements, the rapid pull out of Iraq, when it was known that extremist factions were waiting for this to happen...the West had it's hands all over this. The West was involved from the beginning, just not in obvious ways.

Every time there are protests against a dictator, it is west doing. There is no way those dictatorships would had people protesting them when opportunity arises. It is all CIA opsec, whether Arab spring or Ukraine or anything. /s

Nah.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#126

Post by baybal2 »

robonerd wrote: post #116
baybal2 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were many more books historically than most people uninterested in history suspect up do deep antiquity. Books were very precious. A 5th century monthly salary of a scribe was enough to buy a house. Yet, 99%+ of written data from Greece, and Rome is lost. We lost both archival data, and literature. First to rot, second to book burning. Literature was state sponsored for most of classical period, and "casual" wr…

Luddites were not strongman elites. They were working class labor rights activists, protesting the grossly unfair balance of power induced by rapid industrialization.

You are bringing up a beautiful question.

Were Luddites pro-elite, or anti-elite? Factory technology was definitely something both hated, and intentionally propagated.

Violent conflicts were fought by different stacking frame manufacturers for making them cheaper, and more efficient than one other.

Similarly Saddam attacked Kuwait on the premise of selling oil cheap, and diluting his power.

Knowledge, sophistication, and culture was an alternative to "eliteness" given by having the biggest stick around.

What Greek, and Roman elites realised naturally 2000 years ago, and what we do not now is that knowledge, and culture were power, and that power must be prevented from being monopolised.

Scholars, historians, artisans, and scribes were patronised by the state to prevent "eliteness" being monopolised by clans, and powerful families.

A good way to prevent a man with the biggest stick from seizing power is to give more sticks to other people. And similarly "cultural eliteness" was kept accessible to foreign gentry to drag them into Greek society, so they don't try to reach "elitness" by swinging the stick.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#127

Post by bergenty »

hutzlibu wrote: post #74
bluedino wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The army in Switzerland does exactly this. They can mobilize faster with the guns and ammo at home.

They have their weapons at home, but not anymore the ammunition.

What is the point of keeping the weapons then? Is it easy to buy your own ammunition?

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#128

Post by pradn »

mountainb wrote: post #83
jean_tta wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You take for granted that the Spartans were good at war, and reconcile "Spartans good at war" and "Spartans lost to other city-states" by concluding that there are "a lot of factors". Why not revise your assumption that Spartans were good at war?

Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, even though it relied on making major social and military changes (building a navy, relying more on auxiliary troops than core elite troops) to accomplish that. The other bit is that if one ais trying to draw a distinction between Athenian reliance on citizen-soldier hoplites and the reliance on crack troops reliant on masses of helots, that distinction was muddled during the Pelopon…

I don't think Sparta's victory in the Peloponnesian War proves they were better at war. The war was a stalemate on land between Sparta and Athens. Athens ruled the waves but couldn't parlay that into victory. Athens committed a major blunder in its invasion of Sicily and that allowed Sparta to win.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#129

Post by nescioquid »

baybal2 wrote: post #126
robonerd wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luddites were not strongman elites. They were working class labor rights activists, protesting the grossly unfair balance of power induced by rapid industrialization.

You are bringing up a beautiful question. Were Luddites pro-elite, or anti-elite? Factory technology was definitely something both hated, and intentionally propagated. Violent conflicts were fought by different stacking frame manufacturers for making them cheaper, and more efficient than one other. Similarly Saddam attacked Kuwait on the premise of selling oil cheap, and diluting his power. Knowledge, sophistication,…

Human civilization depends on cooperation, which can be obtained through numerous mechanisms -- everything from violent coercion to mutual aid to shared ideals. The more effective forms of cooperation depend on a shared imaginary space (culture). I especially appreciate what you've written about the danger of monopolization of this imaginary space.

Today, we talk about "information bubbles", but it seems the effect is that we've simply carved up this imaginary space into little city states so that two people of the same age from the same town can disagree on who won the last presidential election.

Re: No Army? No Problem: Defending the Home Front in Ancient Greece

#130

Post by ClumsyPilot »

watwut wrote: post #73
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "hence the title of "the evasive neutral", showing it's opportunism." Imagine you are in charge of a struggling nation, somewhat behind technologically, close to Germany and Italy, during the most destructive war in history. In that situation, would you be eager to declare war on the axis powers, and condemn your people to suffering? Even US wasn't keen to get involved untill war came to them - and they had technol…

China itself is colonial power - to these days. > You also have to realise that To non-europeans, for example folks in China, Nazi germany didn't look like 'absolute evil', it looked like a yet another war between colonial powers. China land was literally occupied by Japanies who fought on the German side and joined the allies. China fought in that war and lost quite a lot of people in that war. Ad Turkey: It is one…

> Those other corners don't get to lie about places away from them or history while ranking up own aggression.

This is pot / kettle black. It's not like none of this happens over here.

If you open a typical British or US history textbook, it omits or glances over most of the atrocious and dark parts of it's history.

As a result most population is unaware of their scale, or sometimes unaware of them at all. That's how you get false narratives in politics, usually nationalist ones. In my experience a typical brexit supporting person has never heard of half the stuff that was going on in the colonies.

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