The Spartans had a good marketing and merchandising department.
Branded loincloth ?
Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
21–30 of 135 posts
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source that dives more into this? Specifically breaking down how they weren't actually more effective, contrary to what might be considered common belief.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711149 Specifically, part VI and VII of that series. > In short: Sparta’s overall military performance is profoundly average over the Classical period. They don’t even manage a winning record! > It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits on how eff…
I think Sparta was overrated militarily, but logically, a great army may still have a losing record, because the only people who would even dare fight them are ones who think they can actually win. Imagine all of the wars which were never even fought, because their enemies were scared of their army.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#23Or, much less than an army of super warriors. They did not win more battles than their rivals. I think of them as Greece's FARC, distinguished mainly by their abuse of their own children and everyone they depended on for their own survival.
Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources, etc?
I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#24The Spartans had a good marketing and merchandising department.
Good one!
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#25I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior, just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve in the same manner and have time for…
The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man.
And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon, distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society. Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't need to do anything wrong to "deserve" a beating. It was simply necessary to ensure that the Helots would never rise up against the aristocrats / Spartan elite.
The whole "equality" thing is just a myth and whitewashing of history. Spartans were awful people living in awful times.
> have time for poetry
Much of we know about Spartans is from what Athenians wrote about them, because Spartans were largely illiterate (and prideful of that too). Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#26I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.
Twink and bear has a long history.
> The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the passive (or ‘receptive’, ‘subordinate’) partner in a homosexual relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient Greece.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711149 Specifically, part VI and VII of that series. > In short: Sparta’s overall military performance is profoundly average over the Classical period. They don’t even manage a winning record! > It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits on how eff…
I think Sparta was overrated militarily, but logically, a great army may still have a losing record, because the only people who would even dare fight them are ones who think they can actually win. Imagine all of the wars which were never even fought , because their enemies were scared of their army.
The (long, but worthwhile) series goes through that concept.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#28I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior, just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve in the same manner and have time for…
The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man. And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon, distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society. Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't need to d…
> Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read / write.
The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally oral thing.
For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry
> Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation. With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadžić, many of these epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral tradition, transmitted by bards and singers.
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well I am Greek and had read a lot of stuff also at school about it. In ancient Greece they were considered as such. How do you know it's a trope? Statistical data?
Yes, statistical analysis of their victories and defeats. It's an excellent book. I'd recommend it.
Book name?
Re: Sparta was more than an army of super warriors
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have a source that dives more into this? Specifically breaking down how they weren't actually more effective, contrary to what might be considered common belief.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711149 Specifically, part VI and VII of that series. > In short: Sparta’s overall military performance is profoundly average over the Classical period. They don’t even manage a winning record! > It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits on how eff…
But they did have a winning record. Every year they declared war on the helots and every year they won!