For anyone interested in this, I'd highly recommend /u/Iphikrates' three-part summary of the Spartan reputational mirage on /r/AskHistorians a couple of years ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6rvusy/is_th...

Sparta was like North Korea of Ancient Greece.

- Isolationist country.

- Young are indoctrinated in rigid militant ideology (agoge).

- Weak economy. Little to no valuable goods were produced. People not allowed to have valuable money, just worthless tokens.

- The main job of the spartan army was to suppress helots and protect the old rulers. People serve the military and the state, not the other way around.

- No creativity in warfare. Incompetents and arrogant leaders just attack with hoplites until they run out of food and have to retreat.

I love it when classical history is discussed on HN! When we realize our civilization is thousands of years old, it is easier to imagine it lasting thousands more years.

I highly recommend that people make use of original source material when making an argument so that you can contribute constructively. The original sources are FUN to read -- we are lucky that the internet makes this so accessible.

I like the Perseus project, because it has almost everything. http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/

I like an analysis that includes operations and logistics, which is how long or large campaigns are won or lost.

>It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits on how effectively the Spartan army could be utilized. You may have the best soldiers – and again, Sparta does not appear to have always had the best soldiers – but they are of no use if you cannot get them to the fight, with the equipment (e.g. siege tools, ships) they need to win the fight.

Would love to see the same for Athens. An amazing place but popular culture doesn’t reflect how profoundly alien their culture was: more of an honor-killing kind of place rather than some paradise of erudition.

Isn't the military might of Sparta an example of history written by the losers? I mean one important source for the Peloponnesian War was Thucydides, who was on the losing side of the war. And when writing his book, he might have wanted to cast himself in the best light possible, by depicting his victorious opponents as the best military in Greece?

Thanks for stealing most of my day with your interesting articles.

There was a submission from the same blog on the front page yesterday, which I assume is what led OP to discover this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21382247 (about war elephants)

https://sententiaeantiquae.com/2016/12/21/it-was-all-so-unim...

After reading the first one, "on spartan schooling" I'm a little sad. I understand the point of casting a more clear light on the alien and brutal practices of ancient civilizations, but the distaste and condemnation that the author uses evokes British colonizers talking about their subjects, combined with a tinge of social justice history revisionism. One of the central concepts of anthropology (and I think, by extension, history) is that you don't judge other people disjoint from you in space and time with your cultural norms.

History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too. I think it's wrong that this means we shouldn't admire the more interesting parts of history.

When did historians finally strip Sparta of its great image? When Roman Stoics praised Spartans, did they treat them as perfect role models or as a cruel people who had certain qualities to emulate?

The only reason Sparta lasted as long as it did was because it was a valueless minor city-state not worth the effort of conquering until the point that conquering and absorbing it was so effortless that it was done almost as an afterthought.

It was a sick and broken society populated by fanatics, that was quickly (on a historical timescale) out-advanced by its neighbors.

Imagine if a casino-less (Mormon Fort-era) Las Vegas, NV was full of militiamen and religious zealots and got involved in a war with the surrounding area and it managed conquer all of Clark County, the county that surrounds it, and control it for about 30 years by implementing a cruel system that enslaved most of its population.

And then that short-lived city-state collapsed after the rest of the Nevada developed over the decades to the point that a coalition of other small counties quickly steamrolled the now-decrepit and hollow Clark County city-state.

Like, super steamrolled. Like the rest of Nevada had developed tanks and artillery and the "Vegans" still fought with Mormon Fort-era weaponry.

That's Sparta.

I don't get why Sparta seems to be so fetishized, particularly by people who are not pleasant to be around.

This article is laughably bad. I don't think the author put any effort into understanding the culture. No attempt is made to understand why the Spartans made certain decisions. The perspective seems to be, 'they didn't make decisions like us modern smart people would, so they were dumb and mean.' Lines like "because Sparta produced so little of value" do well to reveal this. So little of value to who?

"...essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the periokoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system..."

So much for Hegel.