Thoughts on Sparta. One bit of push-back I've gotten on the series I wrote (https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/ …) is that I didn't sufficiently weight this or that thing about the lives of the Spartiates - military performance, militarization, property holding, whatever... 1/14
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And I bring up textbooks both because I see those passages in them, but also because that's what gets taught and so that's what enters the public consciousness, and so we get this narrative (that I see espoused in comments, etc) that Sparta was a better place to be female 11/14
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...and, sure, if you were a spartiate, it probably was! Being rich is pretty swank in any society! Wealth afforded women in many patriarchal societies opportunities that would have otherwise been closed to them. Why should Sparta alone get credit for that? 12/14
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...but the life of the average Spartan woman was probably pretty grim, because the life of the average helot was pretty grim and the average Spartan woman was a helot. Our sources don't talk helots a lot, but when they do, they're clear: being a helot was pretty awful. 13/15
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So just like there is pretty much nothing you could tell me about the all-millionaire-USA that alter change my view on *actual* USA (which, FWIW, I am quite fond of), there is pretty much nothing about the Spartiates which fundamentally changes my argument on Sparta... 14/15
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...save, I suppose, on their military performance (but even then, focus on *strategic objectives* - clever tactics and winning battles doesn't mean anything if you don't achieve strategic objectives!). If you want to change my mind on Sparta, tell me about the helots. end/15
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Just a note that helots were not owned by the state but were the only somewhat circumscribed property of individual Spartiates
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Yes, absolutely! I didn't want to get deep into that debate here. Honestly, I think the debate of state-owned vs. spartiate-owned and what that means is mostly an artifact of us moderns trying to shove our modern categories of ownership on a distinctly premodern institution.
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