Bret Devereaux

Just imagine if we compared the all-millionaire-USA against the real statistics for every other country! (as a side note, this is *often* what happens when US education is compared to ed. in tiered systems abroad; the whole US system gets compared to the top tier, it's BS). 6/14

But that's what just about every textbook I've read on Sparta does - a direct comparison of the *spartiates* with, say, your average Athenian thetes! It's a nonsense comparison, exactly like the all-millionaire-USA comparison. The phrase 'Average Spartiate' should... 7/14

...sound to you exactly like saying the 'Average American Millionaire.' Does that mean we don't study these fellows? Of course not - they have a big impact in the culture, war and politics of Greece more broadly! I'm not at all bagging on the specialist lit. focus here. 8/14

But it is *not enough* when writing, say, a textbook chapter on Sparta, to have a few lines or a page about the helots and then another 50 pages on the spartiates which acts like the helots don't exist. The worst offenders are sections on 'Spartan women' which are only... 9/14

...about *Spartiate* women. "In Sparta, women could inherit property!" No! Stop writing this! In Sparta, a *tiny elite* of women could inherit property, but most women WERE property, owned by the state, because *most*Spartan*women*were*helots!* 10/14

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

...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