Bret Devereaux

Xenophon is pretty clearly pro-oligarchy in his writings, so it's no surprise that he loved himself some Sparta (where, to be fair, he got to live in luxury as the guest of the king while he wrote his many, many books in very un-Spartan fashion). 5/20

But the others aren't so uncritically positive about Sparta (but they're not quite negative either). Thucydides often ends up more pro-Spartan in the reading than in the writing. I think a lot of students read him and - because they already know how the story ends... 6/20

End up reading his history as "Sparta Good; Athens Bad." But Thuc. is smarter than that and his histories are as full of Sparta making stupid decisions as Athens - where Athens is fickle and impetuous, Sparta is sluggish and thoughtless. 7/20

If we had to boil down Thuc's message, I think it'd be, "All y'all are dumbasses" - with just a few exceptions for enlightened and foresighted leaders (Archidamus, Pericles) and generals (Brasidas). 8/20

Plutarch and Aristotle are more complicated. Both present Sparta as an 'ideal' state, but are willing to note flaws. Plutarch, especially, has a habit of explaining away flaws in the Spartan state as later failures to maintain the ideal constitution of Lycurgus... 9/20

Which is pretty clearly nonsense (we'll talk about that a lot more in later posts). A lot of the things he assumes were late devolutions of the Spartan system seem to have been present from day 1. 10/20

I'll also tip my hand here to say I don't tend to think that Lycurgus was a real person who existed and I don't think the Spartan system was as old as Plutarch or Xenophon think - we'll look at the evidence for that in a couple of weeks. 11/20

One thing that is true of ALL of these guys is that they care mostly about citizen (spartiate) men, a little bit about spartiate women, almost not at all about helot men, and literally never mention helot women (= most of the women in Sparta) at all. 12/20

I debated with myself when I wrote this post if I wanted to go for such a grim topic as the agoge so early - trying to pull readers in vs. just leading with the bucket of cold water. In the end, I decided cold water, early, often and as cold as can be managed. 13/20

One of the things I want to do in these posts is shift the context in which we talk about Sparta. A lot of it tends to be very bloodless "well this is bad but..." and I want to put the blood back in: "this is bad" - yes it is, let's talk about it. 14/20

Let's imagine the victims in this society, let's think about how they would feel. Let's dwell on the bad for more than half a second before moving on the supposed "achievements." I've seen too many things-even college textbooks and courses-just gloss over the horror of it. 15/20

For the agoge - which seems so strange and ancient and foreign to most modern students - I felt that the bucket of cold water required a modern context, so I started looking at and asking around about the literature on child soldiers to see if I'd find parallels. 16/20

I mentioned this in the post, but reading the literature on modern child soldiers was some of the toughest reading - emotionally - I've done. And, I mean, I study ancient war. But honestly, when I started reading, I expected... 17/20

...the parallels to be there, maybe a bit strained, maybe a bit stretched. Instead, I ended up at nearly one-to-one correlation, each practice neatly - terribly - mirrored by one or more groups of awful human rights abusers. 18/20

I hope this post inspired a bit of empathy with the boys thrown into this inhuman system, just like I hope the next few (one each week) will get people to think about this society from the perspective of its other victims, who far outnumbered its citizens. 19/20