Bret Devereaux

The pop-culture view on Sparta is very positive, almost maniacally so. The spartiates are always the protagonists, their victims always invisible (or the bad guys) and that treatment then gets mobilized in military and fitness culture as some Adonis ideal. 3/23

But even the survey-course/textbook Sparta is often crushingly naive too. I referred to this a few times - I didn't want to call anyone out on the mat specifically - but textbooks tend to forgo the bucket-of-cold-water in favor of a both-side-ism Athens/Sparta contrast. 4/23

Which leads to students coming away w/ "well Athens used slave labor as much as Sparta" (a equivalence I've seen more than a few times), a statement which falls apart instantly under even a moment's inspection when you consider the demographics of it. 5/23

Part of this is just the nature of the evidence. It's *hard* in a textbook to talk about the helots. AFAIK, we do not know the name of a single helot - male or female - from any period. But that's not an excuse to ignore them, it's a testament to their mistreatment! 6/23

So I wanted to deliver this series as a bucket of cold water to the whole idea of Sparta worship and also to have it out there as a resource for folks who run into the Cult of Sparta and want to respond, but haven't wasted a decade of their life mastering the material. 7/23

What I didn't say: I didn't talk much about Spartan stability because I don't see it as much of a virtue. I'm sure I'll get dragged for this on Reddit (love you guys), but I didn't talk about it very much because I don't care. 8/23

Sparta is, for the record, very stable. That's why it collapses: it fails to adapt to changing times to a truly astonishing degree. That's why Corinth and Athens are still important cities in 200 A.D., whereas Sparta is a theme-park for rich, bored Romans. 9/23

But it is very stable. But the stability in Sparta is like the stability of North Korea. Hyper-oppressive, controlling societies that are willing to compromise external competitiveness to maintain internal oppression are *really* stable. That's not GOOD. 10/23

But I should say - it's not clear that the helots were always chomping at the bit to revolt. There are some big revolts, like in 464, but at other times - like when Athens tries to encourage helot defection - they are surprisingly inactive. 11/23

This shouldn't be taken as a sign that everything was fine, I think, but as a testament to the extent of the oppressiveness of the Spartan system. The evidence that it was nasty - and that the non-spartiates in it hated it - is too extensive to ignore. 12/23

But a terrible thing about massive internal oppression applied over generations is that it works, and begins to be accepted as normal; learn to keep their heads down assuming that change is impossible. Those systems can be very stable - until they suddenly aren't. 13/23

And I don't see that stability as a virtue. A good thing is better by being stable. But a bad thing is *worse* by being resistant to change. As I hope I show, Sparta was - even for its day - a uniquely abhorrent system. The stability of evil was just one more vice. 14/23

This same thing is why I dwelt so much on military performance. I know there is a sort of Spartan-fan (the 'Sparta-bro') for whom all of the deprivation becomes a virtue if it produces better soldiers. "Pain builds character" sort of thing... 15/23

...So I wanted to be very clear, at all levels of military analysis, that it doesn't. This is a lit trope - horrible societies are vindicated b/c they produce the best warriors. Frank Herbert's Dune - a book I adore despite its problems - is the modern trope codifier... 16/23

...and first, real societies do not work this way. Sure, you have your hard-life/hard-warrior Mongols, but the Han and the Romans were super-civilized in their imperial periods and still *very* good at winning wars. Today's superpower is the Land of the Laz-E-Boy. 17/23

For all of Sparta's horror and deprivation, it produces *mediocre* soldiers - decisively outperformed by Macedonian and Roman peasants. So all of that austerity, all of that brutality - it was for nothing and no one....18/23

More to the point, it meant Sparta lacked the resources, expertise and vision to adapt to innovations in warfare happening around it. All the 'badass' stuff weakened Sparta, it didn't strengthen it. For a state utterly devoted to military virtue, Sparta was awful at it. 19/23

The Pop Culture Hook: I didn't end up delivering as much of a 300 critique (never my main target). The ironic problem is that talking honestly about Sparta through pop culture - even as a critique - is almost impossible, because what you need isn't there...20/23

...films and games favor the spartiates so heavily and they erase everyone else so completely, that you end up - like here - with huge gaps where there is simply *no* pop culture reference point. 90+% of Spartans simply do not appear in films like 300. 21/23

I hope this series, taken together, does something to stress the importance of that massive majority of people who made up the Spartan state. A society ought to be judged by the life it makes possible for all of its people, not just its elites. 22/23