Bret Devereaux

Xenophon was an Athenian - a student of Socrates - and a prolific writer. He served as a Greek mercenary in a Persian civil war and ended up a general in that army (the famous 10,000), winning major military glory. He then retired - not to Athens, but to Sparta. 4/20

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