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Comment by gorgonical | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

But if you only admire the interesting parts, you get a horribly inaccurate picture. Indeed, because the study of history traditionally relied on the surviving written accounts, and there was little, if any, consideration of their potential bias, we have a rather jaundiced view of most of history that is passed into popular culture and knowledge. It is only quite recently--late 20th century--that the field itself has started to point out that, for example, given that all we know of Caligula is written by his enemies, maybe the accounts of his sex orgies is about as accurate as discussions of Clinton's pizza parlor sex ring (which is to say, a complete and utter fabrication).

For writers targeting a popular audience, there is generally a greater tendency to balance the horrible inaccuracies that circulate in popular thought (partially driven, sadly, by school curricula which are very slow to accept that "traditional" history is often completely and totally wrong) by focusing on the aspects that most directly contradict what the audience assumes. And that's what the author here is doing.

> "But if you only admire the interesting parts, you get a horribly inaccurate picture."

I don't think that's how admiration generally works. I admire Steve Jobs on many things, but he was a cruel human being to some. When I see a sports star, I don't need to know 'the whole picture' to admire their amazing catch or dedication to training. That doesn't make it 'horrid'.

But only focusing on the good is definitely a trend that happens a lot--it's called romanticizing. And the ultimate thesis here is that Sparta has been heavily romanticized in modern culture: to modern people, Sparta is the epitome of a proud, independent, martial ethos, when in actuality it was a society led by indoctrinated child soldiers whose military prowess was middling at best and whose military reputation was overrated, even contemporaneously.

> "But only focusing on the good is definitely a trend that happens a lot--it's called romanticizing."

It doesn't appear that way to me at least. The tired trend I see "hey, you see that thing you like, here let me rub shit all over it. Why do you like it? stop fantasizing, cant you see that I found something bad in it so you are obligated to hate the whole thing". Case in point.

"Plutarch relates the saying that “in Sparta the free man is more free than anywhere else in the world, and the slave more a slave” (Plut. Lyc. 28.5). He can only be referring to the helots here. Indeed, Plutarch’s statement is telling – the helots were treated poorly by the standards of ancient chattel slavery, which is, I must stress, an incredibly low bar."

"The absence of any taboo – legal or religious – against the killing of helots marks the institution as uncommonly brutal not merely by Greek standards, but by world-historical standards."

"Given how very little our sources care for the lives and experiences of any enslaved people, the unanimity of their testimony that life as a helot was awful is nothing short of astounding. This is an institution that shocks the conscience of ancient slaveholders."

These are all from the second post in the series. You should try reading more than just the first one.

> social justice history revisionism

Couldn't find a good way to work "virtue signaling" in there as well?

The first post also has parts where he explains how even by contemporary standards it was cruel. That doesn't excuse the attitude that we often hold, that we are the most morally evolved and have the right to judge.

I don't think the implied ad hominem is necessary or useful here. I meant what I said and I don't think there's any overt virtue signaling. The author was awarded a PhD in 2018 on Roman history so I think the author is well-versed and strongly opinionated, no virtue signaling there.

The sibling comment about admiration I think has an important point. We don't need a universe that's perfectly in balance, which is to say that if Sparta is romanticized I don't think it's necessary that we demonize them to balance the scales. Of course it's important to understand what they did and know the whole story, and what the author does to disillusion about 300 is good work. However, at least this first article is written in a persuasive way rather than an informative one, the author clearly wants us to be on his side about how awful the Spartans were rather than just inform us so we understand what we might be admiring. Another sibling comment said that the outrageism goes down in later articles, so maybe they're different and worth a good read.

> I don't think the implied ad hominem is necessary or useful here

Sorry I guess I was unclear. I didn't mean to imply you were virtue signaling. It's just I tend to notice that when someone uses the phrase "social justice <anything>" the phrase "virtue signaling" isn't too far behind. It was still an unkind comment from me, just not in the way you thought. My apologies.

> History has been awful and brutal every year since we began writing it down, and well before that, too.

If you actually read the series, you'll learn that Sparta was horrifying even by the standards of its own time.

When you admire the more interesting parts of history, without taking into account the ugly, nasty side of them, you get shitty political movements (It is incredibly popular among xenophobic nationalist assholes to admire the Roman Empire, the Crusaders, the Spartans, the Vikings, as some kind of cultural ideals that we should aspire to...)

For some reason, though, they always envision themselves as being warrior-kings, or some equivalent thereof in such societies, instead of members of a slave caste...

I agree and in one of my replies I acknowledge that. It's okay to admire but you have to understand what you are admiring and its context. A very good recent example is that the Nazis were the first government to acknowledge that smoking is bad, and they had strong animal rights positions as well as decent policies on environmentalism.

Nobody would argue that these footnotes mean we can overlook what they did, but what they did doesn't invalidate (emphasis) the good they did. It definitely outweighs it!

If we weren't allowed to admire then what do we do? Even saintly figures have blemishes.

Maybe you don't need to admire historic figures to acknowledge good policies? This doesn't seem very complicated.

We constantly try to abstract good decisions into "good people" and that seems like a mistake.

Although the author is knowledgeable, I too find it incredibly frustrating to read his writing. An opposing viewpoint is fine but the sheer amount of bias, outrageism (note the number of times he mentiones how "sickened" he was during his research), and condemnation made it impossible for me to read any further than the first post.

Reading the first and last two posts, the outrageism is definitely far less present in the latter than the former. You should at least read the sixth post as well, which evaluates how deserved Sparta's military reputation was (spoiler alert: it wasn't).

I found it hard to consider them knowledgeable when they kept comparing them to armies/people/etc hundreds of years in the future.

You should try reading the second post, where they relate what contemporary Greeks of other states thought of Spartans' treatment of helots. It's not bias.

It's primarily a criticism of modern perception of Sparta, particularly "300". I don't see why it need be any more fair than it is.

> comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state

On these and maybe other measures you might prefer Prof. Donald Kagan's lectures on Sparta. (Granted, the following account's purpose and context are different from the parent article's.)

[Video Part 1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuJ7lGZVUl4

[Video Part 2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP1POpsqin4

His whole Greek history course at Yale is on YouTube and is quite good.

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