Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, but Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. https://t.co/jxKsLpX5FR
— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) July 26, 2023
But they had such a KEWL saga / movie / video game!… A historian explains, for those aspiring authoritarians who imagine themselves as the citizen elites ruling over dozen, nay hundreds, of faceless broken slaves — “Spartans Were Losers”:
The Athenian historian Thucydides once remarked that Sparta was so lacking in impressive temples or monuments that future generations who found the place deserted would struggle to believe it had ever been a great power. But even without physical monuments, the memory of Sparta is very much alive in the modern United States. In popular culture, Spartans star in film and feature as the protagonists of several of the largest video game franchises. The Spartan brand is used to promote obstacle races, fitness equipment, and firearms. Sparta has also become a political rallying cry, including by members of the extreme right who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Sparta is gone, but the glorification of Sparta—Spartaganda, as it were—is alive and well…
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other,” a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.
To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War—but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.
Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth…
Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.
But while Sparta’s military performance was merely mediocre, no better or worse than its Greek neighbors, Spartan politics makes it an exceptionally bad example for citizens or soldiers in a modern free society. Modern scholars continue to debate the degree to which ancient Sparta exercised a unique tyranny of the state over the lives of individual Spartan citizens. However, the Spartan citizenry represented only a tiny minority of people in Sparta, likely never more than 15 percent, including women of citizen status (who could not vote or hold office). Instead, the vast majority of people in Sparta, between 65 and 85 percent, were enslaved helots. (The remainder of the population was confined to Sparta’s bewildering array of noncitizen underclasses.) The figure is staggering, far higher than any other ancient Mediterranean state or, for instance, the antebellum American South, rightly termed a slave society with a third of its people enslaved…
Gosh, I wonder if this Peculiar Institution might have anything to do with the Spartan-tastic fantasies of our modern American… authoritarians?
(It’s been almost sixty years, but my first memories of reading about Sparta involved my mother’s battered 1930s edition of Hendrik Willem van Loon‘s The Story of Mankind. As I remember it, van Loon kinda stressed that the British Empire had its reasons for promoting the glory of an ancient culture where a tiny minority of institutionally-reared elite males ‘righteously’ ruled over a vast expanse of lesser, uncultured tribalists. These reasons, he pointed out, did not particularly translate to a democratic global culture, especially in a place like America. But of course van Loon was writing in a time where a different European society’s political theories also bent towards Sparta worship.)
Guy with 14.4K followers responds to Professor Devereaux:
“Spartans were losers, Romans were fascists, Knights sucked, Vikings were lame, & the Founding Fathers were evil.
…wait why doesn’t anybody want to study history anymore?”
– Modern historians pic.twitter.com/viNtYIQni3
— Roman Helmet Guy (@romanhelmetguy) July 26, 2023
the replies on this are so fucking funny, just so many people enraged that someone is coming for their poorly constructed historically inaccurate imagination of some Tough Guys™ https://t.co/u6l7hywsnf
— Rosencreutz (alleged youtuber) (@KRosencreutz) July 26, 2023
It is a response which, in its unrefined passion, is rather at odds with the ideology they claim to be defending and expressing.
A Spartiate wouldn't whine on Twitter about the failure of their state, they'd be too busy being killed by the Theban Sacred Band.
— Bret Devereaux (@BretDevereaux) July 26, 2023