Bret Devereaux

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