Bret Devereaux

...and, not to be flip, but all of those complaints skip right past the core argument and why I *do*not*care.* See, depending on when and how you estimate, the Spartiates were, like, c. 5-10% of households under the Spartan state... 2/14

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