Bret Devereaux

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