Agoge | Hacker News Reader

Agoge

en.wikipedia.org

The ACOUP blog (which comes up on HN sometimes) has a great series on Sparta where Agoge is discussed in detail

https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

It was a very eye-opening read, definitely at odds with the popular image of Sparta.

In short about Agoge, he says it was much less about training and more about child indoctrination through extreme trauma. He compares it to child soldier programs like the one by Lords Resistance Army in Africa. Rather than producing skilled soldiers, he argues, it produced broken dysfunctional people.

Thanks for posting this. A while back I saw his blog post about oaths and vows [0] linked here on HN and it was an excellent read. I wasn't fortunate enough to have a thorough or rigorous history education, so I never thought I liked it. His blog has definitely kindled an interest in the subject I never knew I had.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/06/28/collections-oaths-how-do-they-...

Given spartan relative military dominance in that era, it did produce skilled soldiers. But it's quite possible that the skills required to function well in a shield wall are compatible with being broken and dysfunctional otherwise. That's a common modern trope, e.g., with Vietnam vets.

Well, ACOUP also argues that sparta really never was very militarily dominant in the major wars (ie with persia/athens), and even in their local area, they largely dominated through their large population of helots (slaves), winning by number rather than military prowess or individual fighging capabilities

According to the article I quoted (specifically, part VI [1]), their military dominance is a bit of a myth, and was more based on reputation even at the time.

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Actually, one of the defining features of hoplite armies is that they didn't require a lot of skill. Hoplite armies were pretty much blunt force instruments. And yet, even within that context, Spartan armies were pretty bad on a tactical level.

>the skills required to function well in a shield wall are compatible with being broken and dysfunctional otherwise

Thebes, with their sacred band, would suggest that broken men gets trashed by men fighting for love.

The popular image of Sparta seems to have changed. When I grew up, west of the Curtain during the Cold War, the propaganda was 1st World ~= Athens, 2nd World ~= Sparta (and I suppose 3rd World would have been their various client states, which is apt in its own way). On the other hand, during the days of Empire, it seems the Brits had been stanning Sparta:

Underfeeding (with resultant theft[1]) is something Orwell recalled about his time at St. Cyprian's.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23825457

> "The food was not only bad, it was also insufficient. Never before or since have I seen butter or jam scraped on bread so thinly. I do not think I can be imagining the fact that we were underfed, when I remember the lengths we would go in order to steal food."

The Krypteia were also present:

> "The Sixth Form was a group of older boys who were selected as having 'character' and were empowered to beat smaller boys."

> "There was a boy named Johnny Hale who for some months oppressed me horribly. He was a big, powerful, coarsely handsome boy with a very red face and curly black hair, who was forever twisting somebody's arm, wringing somebody's ear, flogging somebody with a riding-crop (he was a member of the Sixth Form), or performing prodigies of activity on the football field. Flip loved him (hence the fact he was habitually called by his Christian name) and Sambo commended him as a boy who 'had character' and 'could keep order'. He was followed about by a group of toadies who nicknamed him Strong Man."

Is it any wonder Orwell would go on to write an infamous dystopia?

[1] It's unclear if his boarding school expected students to supplement their diet from private funds. Orwell mentions other schools where this was explicit, and he was at St. Cyprian's on half-price scholarship. For adults, the posher cavalry regiments made sure their mess dues alone were above official pay rates, to keep out professional soldiers. We know there are instances of people in the british army refusing promotions because they couldn't have afforded one. (Was the glass ceiling the Empire's way to get around the Peter Principle? How many militaries have had "mustangs"?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Such,_Such_Were_the_Joys

> Reaction from Contemporaries

> Of his contemporaries, Cecil Beaton wrote of the piece "It is hilariously funny, but it is exaggerated".[22] Connolly, on reviewing Stansky & Abraham's interpretation, wrote "I was at first enchanted as by anything which recalls one's youth but when I went to verify some references from my old reports and letters I was nearly sick... In the case of St Cyprian's and the Wilkes whom I had so blithely mocked I feel an emotional disturbance... The Wilkeses were true friends and I had caricatured their mannerisms (developed as a kind of ritual square-bashing for dealing with generations of boys) and read mercenary motives into much that was just enthusiasm."[32] Walter Christie and Henry Longhurst went further and wrote their own sympathetic accounts of the school in response to Orwell's and voiced their appreciation for the formidable Mrs Wilkes.[33][34] Robert Pearce, researching the papers of another former pupil,[35] made a comprehensive study from the perspective of the school, investigating school records and other pupils' accounts. While some features were universal features of prep school life, he concluded that Orwell's depiction bore little relation to reality and that Orwell's defamatory allegations were unsupportable.[15] Davison writes "If one is looking for a factual account for life at St Cyprian's, this is not the place to seek it."[36]

> On Orwell's claimed state of misery, Jacintha Buddicom, who knew him well at the time, also raised a strong challenge. She wrote "I can guarantee that the 'I' of "Such, Such were the Joys" is quite unrecognisable as Eric as we knew him then", and "He was a philosophical boy, with varied interests and a sense of humour—which he was inclined to indulge when referring to St Cyprian's in the holidays."[23]

Thanks for the viewpoint from the other side. Since I have very little interest in St. Cyprian's reputation, but some interest in what lay behind 1984, this makes me even more inspired to write one of Syme's war stories, related to his new Miniplen colleagues about the odd personalities back in his old office at Minitru.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24243240

(if we already suspect his author's narration, I have even more reason to believe Smith may be a less-than-reliable narrator.)

1984 can almost be read not as a story about some future or present dystopia, but as fear as organizing principle of society/groups. Huddling is what we seem to do best at our worst.

How does that square with "The agōgē was prestigious throughout the Greek world, and many aristocratic families from other cities vied to send their sons to Sparta to participate in the agōgē for varying periods of time."?

As far as I can tell, this blog goes against expert consensus on Sparta [1], so I'm wary of trusting its conclusions, for fear it's cherry-picking evidence, and making arguments only persuasive to a layman, akin to [2].

[1] Given its military pre-eminence, Sparta was recognized as the leading force of the unified Greek military during the Greco-Persian Wars, in rivalry with the rising naval power of Athens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/06/03/repost-epistemic-learn...

To be very frank, if you go through the Sparta series, you'll see why he says what he does. Sparta's win/loss ratio is fairly average, and a detailed review of their battle strategies does show that they had but one strategy for everything. Their fearsome military reputation. If it didn't work, the Spartans were screwed.

Secondly, the agoge and the Spartan social system was responsible for the population of the Spartiates going down through the ages: there was no way of replenishing it. If you have a system which sowed the seeds for its own destruction extremely conclusively, then by definition it's a shit system.

You're right, Sparta was recognised as a pre-eminient military power. Even the blog doesn't argue against that. However, do keep in mind that the primary bunch of people the Spartans are compared to in that blog are the Romans, who were exponentially more successful by any metric you choose. In addition, the blog breaks down reasons why that might not be as true as the popular conception of Sparta today. Yes, Sparta was feared. But Sparta didn't really do much. In fact, the most successful Spartans (and no, I'm not counting Leonidas among them: he lost Thermopylae which was an absolute tactical disaster with no upsides for the war the Greeks were fighting) were ones who did not go through the agoge (I am thinking of Lysander as well as the hereditary Spartan kings, none of whom went through the agoge).

In short, try going through that series on Sparta and make your own mind up. The author is a trained historian and gives fantastic sources. You can also search up Sparta on AskHistorians and see what scholarly consensus has to say there. In particular, it would be wise to go through the third link I share below:

- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/search?q=agoge&restri...

- https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/g4oxut/what_...

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

I'll look through those sources, thanks. But I have to take issue with "Sparta's win/loss ratio is fairly average" (especially since another comment points out "Sparta was independent for over 500 years")

I would honestly expect this of any non-expansionist state (and on longer timescales, expansionist as well), no matter how excellent their military. An army will attack only if they think they have a (good) chance of winning, meaning battles are likely to be at least somewhat even, or at the attacker's advantage.

Sparta was an expansionist state. And it was fairly bad at being expansionist: there's a lovely description of Sparta's abysmal supply line management as opposed to Athens's at the same time. You should really go through that acoup blog: you're falling prey to something known to professional historians as the "Spartan Mirage".

Going through the acoup blog as well as the AskHistorians sources, Sparta's win/loss ratio is just around 0.5. They won as often as they lost battles. Indeed, some of their major victories required Persian/Macedonian help or were actually accomplished by people from outside the agoge. And you forget that while they were the largest power on their patch of Greece, they were only hegemonic over Messania, no other area. Again, as the AskHistorians link points out, Sparta was much larger than the other city-states of its time at the point from where we have evidence. That Sparta was unable to do much from this position is fairly telling about their lack of skill in much other than hoplite fighting.

In addition, go through the series to understand the makeup of Spartan society. It's easy to have strong, well-fed warriors when more than 80% of your population is chattel slavery (read helots) who were thought to be badly treated even by the standards of the Ancient Greeks (which, as you can very well imagine, were not very high. Slaves weren't treated well by those societies at all). It's easy to lionise Sparta when you become acquainted with the Theme Park version of it. It's hard to stomach the actual reality of what we do know about Sparta.

Regarding the content of this link, I can't verify it either way in the case of Sparta, but I am always skeptical of how modern critics characterize mentoring relationships between men as sexual. It is as if the criticism is designed to cast aspersions on that mentoring itself because, arguably, mentoring relationships between men are a threat to progress.

It may have meant mentor in ancient greek, but the word Plutarch uses (Lycurgus ch. 17) is ἐρασταὶ.

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...

Every time I read about something like that, I can't help but think about High Theory Of Education in Strugatsky bros' fictional Noon Universe[1][2]. In that universe all children are taught by professional mentors-teachers, one for every group of 3–7 children, in what are essentially boarding schools. These mentors go through a thirty-year rigorous training and a thorough psychological screening, since they essentially decide the future of the children they're educating, and thus the humanity and the universe.

[1] (in Russian) https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%92%D1%8B%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%BA...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon_Universe

> Главной задачей учителя является — обнаружить и развить в ребёнке его главный талант, то, что он умеет лучше многих

This sentiment reminded me of the Pyongyang "Children's Palace": http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.com/2009/04/pyongyang-metro...

> "I asked whether children can choose what they want to do. The answer was, that there is a test, to find out about the talents of the children, and according to that the options, which they have, are decided."

Was this talent testing ("All Student Vocational Aptitude Battery"?) also the practice at the russian Дворец пионеров?

(does the motto "научился сам — научи товарища" mean "learn yourself, teach your friend"?)

I don't think I understand your first question, as I am unaware of any mottos like that.

“Научился сам — научи товарища” is probably closer to “After learning [something yourself], teach [your] comrade!”. You generally should not translate “товарищ” as “friend”, as the former is something more formal.

Thanks for the correction[1]. The first question was about the High Theory of Education, namely that the chief task of the educator is to find the child's unique talent, what it can do better than most. Did Pioneer Palaces attempt anything similar[2]?

[1] I guess friend would have been друг?

"Друг всегда с тобой / если ты бухой"

[2] as their DPRK equivalents seem to, via explicit testing?

The Pioneers were a youth organisation of the CPSU, so their officially stated goal was making sure that the youth has the “correct” ideological upbringing. But from a lot of people I've heard an opinion, that the actual purpose of the organisation was to free up some time for the parents, heh. The Pioneers did have a large network of what were essentially hobby clubs, where children could learn new skill from older kids and counsellors, so they did help children to pursue their interests and talents in a way. Besides that, as far as I know, they weren't that different from Northamerican Boy/Girl Scout organisations.

Sorry for the late reply, just ran across an illustrator who obviously fondly remembers his Pioneer days: https://raven-yellow.livejournal.com/96620.html

(the biggest difference between scouts and pioneers having been mixed groups?)

"Держи дистанцию" is now true again: it's just expanded to 2 metres.

While historically interesting I don't think there is one ounce of useful wisdom in the Spartan education system that we can use to day. We can learn from their propaganda though - still known as the greatest warriors ever, even though they don't really have much to show for it.

The best lesson from Sparta is that fascism is ineffective. Secret police don't suppress slave rebellions. Myths alone can run a society, but mostly just run it into the ground. Legislators should be selected by the populace, not appointed based on being an old angry man. Estate taxes are central to preventing austerity.

Mostly, though, fascism is ineffective.

Sparta was independent for over 500 years, and one of the most powerful cities in the Hellenic world for most of that time. If the US is that ineffective it will do very well and the US has the second longest run of unbroken self rule among extant states behind the UKGB&NI, counting England as its progenitor.

There has been one successful slave revolt in recorded history and it wasn’t in Sparta. Legislators can be selected any way that leads to state survival in the end. Estate taxes have bugger all to do with austerity.

The Spartans aren’t pawns in our current political drama. They existed for themselves not for us. A great deal in how they lived was odious but they were no more fascist than they were Christian.

Congratulations, you've fallen for ancient propaganda. Educate yourself [0][1][2] and don't have weird links in your profile.

[0] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots

The commenter you are replying to was probably referring to the Messenians, which were Spartan helots for a long time, but not forever.

I don't really like your "one successful slave revolt" statement, because it depends on the meaning of "successful" and "slave", so it seems interesting at first, but it is not really possible to think or argue about it without restating it in a clarified form first (even though there is some truth in the statement). I suppose you were thinking about the Haitian Revolution?

I think Sparta does have an important lesson to teach our society, summarized: "The wealthy, if left unchecked, will suck society dry even as it crumbles around them. Even if the evidence society is crumbling is plainly obvious to everyone, they'll just keep right on sucking until there's nothing left."

Generation after generation the Spartiate class was shrinking, and the Spartan rulers did nothing to stop it. "Why?" is the question we should be asking, it's obvious that when you're part of an elite class dominating society, and the number of fighting age men your class can field is declining from thousands to hundreds, that that's going to be a problem some day... Yet they did nothing to stop it until the whole system crashed.

That's the lesson we should be learning from Sparta.

Barbarism.

Technically not correct, since both the Romans and the Greeks did that [1]. Agoge is one of the too roots of the word pedagogy.

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/barbarian

Reply on news.ycombinator.com