Bret Devereaux

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