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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
Anyway, that's the tweetstorm. Again, the last of the series (and links to the rest) is here: https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/ … Feel free to throw questions my way and please, if you thought this was good/interesting/useful - share it; we need a new pop-discourse on Sparta. end/23
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