On the topic of Spartan societey in general, a really good read is https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/ by Dr. Bret Deveraux.
Long read but well worth it for interested people.
Long read but well worth it for interested people.
It is good to keep in mind that pretty much all ancient societies had norms and customs that we find repulsive today, from pederasty, to slavery, including sexual slavery, to killing of female children, to depriving women of all human rights and treating them as chattel. Sparta sounds particularly bad if one does not know much about the ancients. Otherwise they sound somewhat ordinary and only a bit more up themselves than others.
Probably worth noting, then, that in 1860, South Carolina and Mississippi had over 50% population enslaved, and four more states over 40% population enslaved.
Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations, I'm curious whether Spartans were more or less like Americans in this regard. A glorious empire built on brutality and moral superiority.
Not as cruelly as Arab-owned slaves (the trans-Saharan slave trade started in 650 AD, which is pretty close to ancient). Despite importing as much or more slaves than both Americas, there is barely any Black presence in North Africa. Try to imagine why.
Source: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/atd-tcc-worldciv2/chapter/...
I'd recommend you to actually read on the absolute horror the Helots had to go through
Only French Haití or Congo Free State can come to mind as being similar, the Helots were very different even from other Greek states, let alone Rome, Egypt or Cartage
What?
American slavery being built on "race" and white supremacy offered no such path. Even "mixed race" descendants suffered. Even after slavery was abolished, former slaves were (and often are) still treated abhorrently.
This is also true of American slaves.
> Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest.
So is this. You think the child of a free black was enslaved?
Bullshit. By the 19th century (which is the century everybody talks about) it was almost legally impossible to free a slave in the American south (things like, say, a $200 tax in Florida... which was more money than most people saw in a year).
Even when possible it was essentially never done.
> So is this. You think the child of a free black was enslaved?
In many of the US slave states, if you were a free black person, regardless of who your parents were, you had to either leave the state within a fixed time, or you would be enslaved. So, yes.
Believe it or not, most slaves were owned by fairly wealthy people.
> Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom
You need to be specific. Are we comparing Connecticut in 1784 AD to Gaul in 50 BC? Or Connecticut in 1783 AD to Gaul in 59 BC? Because the two comparisons are very different.
In the Roman empire, selling oneself as a slave was even seen as a last resort when capital was urgently needed (like when a debt repayment was ordered by a magistrate and a person didn't have enough money and fungible possessions to pay it). Slaves could also buy their freedom, and were sometimes even given their freedom as a gift.
Of course, there were cruel masters as well as kind ones. But prior to the African slave trade, the institution itself wasn't remotely as brutal or morally abhorrent, because it wasn't built on a social commitment to racism.
American racism was fueled in part by the abhorrent belief that Africans were of a separate race (i.e. subspecies) that was inferior in a Darwinian sense, thus dehumanizing them in people's minds. This sentiment appears sometimes in 1800s American literature. (And if I may say so, I think it bears a remarkable resemblance to some Nazi antisemitic propaganda.)
People seem obsessed with declaring the US south as having some sort of so-much-worse slavery, but they view the past with pretty rose-coloured glasses. 'But it's not racism!' is a meaningless moral alteration to the act of raiding other lands, dragging people back to your lands, and working them to death in under a decade.
As for Roman opinions on racism, no, they weren't racists in the sense of the modern term, but they were still intensely bigoted and committed more than a few genocides. Our friend Jules came home bragging of killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more and got social cachet for that. They didn't see Gauls as a difference 'race' (that's a modern construct) but they definitely saw them as an outgroup that needed to be dominated.
So, you launch a massive generalization, and attempt to walk it back by opting out most of the world (Asia, the middle east/Arab World, but making no mention of Africa, or Oceania). While we broadly view slavery as a despicable practice, please don't practice selective historical revisionism to minimize the barbaric suffering experienced to this day in some countries, and the astronomical death rates in the sugar plantations.
Examples from Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective [1]
"Death rates among slaves in the Caribbean were one-third higher than in the South, and suicide appears to have been much more common. Unlike slaves in the South, West Indian slaves were expected to produce their own food in their "free time," and care for the elderly and the infirm."(
"The largest difference between slavery in the South and in Latin America was demographic. The slave population in Brazil and the West Indies had a lower proportion of female slaves, a much lower birthrate, and a higher proportion of recent arrivals from Africa. In striking contrast, southern slaves had an equal sex ratio, a high birthrate, and a predominantly American-born population".
"Slavery in the United States was especially distinctive in the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birthrate so low that slaves could not sustain their population without imports from Africa. The average number of children born to an early nineteenth-century southern slave woman was 9.2—twice as many as in the West Indies."
Additionally, you have ignored that slavery is still active in a number of countries [2], [3], [4], [5]
Slavery is a practice worthy of contempt, still practiced, and modern.
[1] Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-res...
[2] https://www.mic.com/articles/82347/the-world-s-worst-countri...
[3] https://face2faceafrica.com/article/slavery-africa-today/3
[4] https://www.theclever.com/15-countries-where-slavery-is-stil...
[5] https://www.latimes.com/world/la-xpm-2013-oct-17-la-fg-wn-sl...
My knowledge of world history outside the West is scant. That's why I restricted my statements to the Western world.
Again, this is not a difference between ancient slavery and American slavery. Why do you mention it?
> Of course, there were cruel masters as well as kind ones. But prior to the African slave trade, the institution itself wasn't remotely as brutal or morally abhorrent, because it wasn't built on a social commitment to racism.
Now it seems like you're specifically trying not to respond to the claim that American slaves received crueler treatment than ancient slaves did.
Your style of responding also makes it seem like you're arguing the point that slavery wasn't all that bad in the US from a very specific view point
As some other people have pointed out, if you look at objective indices of quality of life, the United States generally comes out as possibly the best place in all of history you could have been enslaved.
Absolutist statements like this rarely seem to hold true.[0] American slavery is European slavery as well. Europeans (both countries and individuals) benefited extremely handsomely from enslaving people in Africa and bringing them to their colonies in America. And even after they had finally outlawed slavery for themselves just a few scant decades before the US did, they kept buying that affordable slave-produced cotton and sugar and coffee and etc. from the Americas.
There was a class of Mycenaean slave that was close to a free man, who could own land and have status.
Greek slaves could be involved in every economic activity except politics. Slaves were bankers, craftsmen and tradespeople. Male slaves might be personal assistants, shield makers, cutlers, bedmakers, while female slaves would be textile weavers and bakers. Not only were slaves not seen as denegerate inferiors, they were expected to be able to take over their masters' business when needed. Some of the most famous and respected philosophers were slaves.
Slaves could earn wages, and use those wages to pay a fee to live and work alone, and even use their savings (or loans/gifts) to buy their freedom. Cretian slaves could own a house and livestock and pass it down to their family, which was also granted the same familial laws as freedmen.
Debt slavery was common until it was abolished; people basically could become serfs until they paid off their debts, and then become free again. Some slavery was limited to a period of time, and slaves had rights / could be involved in legal disputes, and so win freedom or other rewards.
Roman slaves perhaps were treated worse than Greek originally, and many more of them were used for agricultural labor, probably putting their experiences on par with American slaves. But as the Roman empire progressed, slaves gained many more rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Greece https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome
Worth nothing also that a lot of Spartan "historical information" is more myth and bullshit than evidence-based. Spartans were masters of propaganda. Helots may have been treated like shit, but apparently a lot of the reputation was inflated or made up by later historical writers.
Helots could also be craftspeople, own land, raise crops, keep money, buy their freedom. They maintained family units and were less often dispersed than Greek slaves. Helot children born of Spartan citizen fathers would become members of the army as an intermediate rank.
Which makes this
"painting a portrait of a grim, evil empire."
quite accurate.
I cannot find much noble ideals in the "glorious" spartans.
"Sparta" is the name of the principal city of the city-state of Lacedaemon, which comprised the regions of Laconia and Messinia in the Peloponnese. The inhabitants of the city of Sparta are in ancient sources referred to as Lacedaemones ("Λακεδαίμονες") and are the people we, in the modern day, know as as Spartans or Spartiates ("Σπαρτιάται").
The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves. Any reference to those people as "Spartans", let alone "Lacedaemones" is a modern invention and only serves to deepen the confusion I highlight here. In fact, I am only aware of a single modern "source" that commits this confusing error: the blog post linked above. If we were to give those people a modern name devoid of political connotations, that would be "Lacones" ("Λάκωναι") or "Messinians" ("Μεσσηνοί"), the inhabitants of the regions of Laconia and Messinia.
So it makes no sense to say that "Sparta" was "80% enslaved people" or the other errors committed in the linked article. It might make sense to say that "Laconia and Messinia (resp. Lacedaemon) was 80% enslaved people", although that would greatly weaken the intended invective against Spartans. It would certainly make sense to point out that Spartans, i.e. the inhabitants of the city of Sparta, had a huge number of slaves in proportion both to their own numbers and in comparison to the number of slaves of other Greek city-states of the same historical period(s), but again that would not be a proper attack on the myth of Sparta, which is what is intended. Of course it makes every sense to point out the cruelty of Spartans, but in that case, if we call the helots "Spartans", also, the confusion only deepens.
All such nuance is left out of the article linked above which makes it very, very misleading and confuses people who are used to getting their knowledge of history from second- third- and further- hand accounts, like the one in the linked article, or the movie 300, etc. Unfortunately once something is elevated to mythical status there is nothing more profitable than to tear it down, even if this tearing down is based on the same poor knowledge of history that allowed it to be elevated in the first place.
...
>The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves.
He's referring to the entire Spartan state, which at that time included Messinia. It's accurate to say it was composed of ~80% enslaved people. That's clear if you read the article. The fact that most helots were from other ethnic groups doesn't change the fact that they were living under the rule of the Spartan state.
So if you want to say that the people who lived in Laconia and Messinia were the slaves of the Spartans, which we call the helots, and that there many more times more helots than there were Spartans, then you're welcome, because that is accurate. But to say that "Sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people" as the OP says, is false.
And it is still the case that the helots were the slaves of the Spartans, that nobody called the helots "Spartans", and that nobody thought that "helots" were Spartans, not in any ancient source and not in any modern source I'm aware of outside the linked series of blog posts.
If you (or, you know, others) think this is wrong, you're welcome to show me where, in modern or ancient texts it says that "helots were spartans" and "sparta was mostly populated by slaves", or something similar -except of course for the scandalously revisionist blog posts we're discussing.
As to the "the case" that "80% of the population of the Spartan state were slaves", that is an acceptable turn of phrase, but it is not what the blog author says. He says that the majority of the people of "Sparta" were slaves. This is calculated to come across as a tear down of the myth of "noble" Sparta because it makes no distinction between the free citizens of Sparta who are the ones elevated to mythical status by ignorance of history, and their slaves, who are never and under no circimstances considered to be part of the "noble warriors of Sparta" or what have you.
In short, the author is making a very clear attempt to exploit the confusion caused by the synecdochical use of "Sparta" to mean both the city and the city-state, to make a point that ultimately only serves his vanity, and is not really informative. To say that "most people of the city state of Sparta were slaves" is only revelatory to those who have no idea of ancient history.
To give you an analogy, it's like someone making a huge todo about how "Black holes are not really black". This can only be news to people who don't know what black holes are and what is meant by "black" in their name. Then instead of trying to clarify the meaning of the word "black" in "black hole" the author launches into a tirade about how black holes have been glorified as being the blackest bodies in the universe when in reality they are not even black and most of their mass is invisible because it's hidden behind the event horizon and Oh Gods! All you 've ever been told about physics, it's all wrong! You've been worshipping a black body that is not even black and is not even all there!
It's a lot of noise for nothing but internet likes and an utter appeal to ignorance that does not improve the reader's knowledge one bit. And it is many peoples' first point of entry into the subject of not only Sparta, but ancient history in general. If that first point of entry is not 300 instead, which to be sure is even worse but without which the author's blog post would not even exist, because it has nothing to say other than "300 sucks, man".
300 has Persians throwing incendiary grenades. Their king is a giant. He's carried to battle on a golden throne, like a Warhammer figure. But the author saw fit to attack 300's realism by picking apart its mythologising of "noble" Spartan warriors, which nobody has ever believed other than people who learn their history from comics and movies. This is how much the author of the blog post is interested in historic truth.
That being said i do think you could have made your point more succinctly.
For a while, it seemed like you were arguing semantics vs actually informing the reader.
Your point is valid. I'm not sure how to present it better, but I'd posit:
"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"
Except, as the author points out, the Spartan system that he's criticizing requires the Spartiates to have a plantation of helots to support them so they can spend all their time training for battle. A man in ancient Sparta could only be a Spartiate if they had a plantation of helots (if they lose their plantation they lose their status as a citizen), so the helots were just as much a part of Spartan society as they were.
That is not what I said. Why do you misquote me? This is what I said:
>> The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves.
Nobody in ancient times considered the helots to be "Spartans". This is in the same way that nobody in ancient times considered the slaves of the Athenians to be "Athenians" or the slaves of the Romans to be "Romans". And no historian in modern times does so, either. When speaking of the Gauls, subjugated by the Romans [1], no author, ancient or modern, cals them "Romans". For any ancient or modern culture that had slaves, the distinction is always there: the People of X on the one hand, and their slaves on the other.
Yet the author is deliberately muddying the waters playing on the confusion between "Sparta" the city-state and "Sparta" its capital city, and even invents new terms to refer to them: he calls "Spartiates" the free citizens of the capital city, and "Spartans" everyone else, a distinction impossible in the Greek language and unused by anyone except the author as far as I can tell.
All these deliberate confusions are the result of a perverse reading of history, clearly aimed at making an impression to people who are not familiar with the history of Sparta outside its depiction in popular media and it is clearly calculated to draw internet attention to the author's blog by riding on the coattails of the success of such popular media, and not to inform about history.
The only antitode I know against fudging and misdirection like this is to make language precise and clear.
>> The Spartans owned the helots!
Who said they didn't?
___________
[1] OK, not all of them.
Also, Sparta wasn't just Spartiates and helots, you're forgetting about mothakes and perioikoi.
For a while, it seemed like poster was arguing semantics vs actually informing the reader on why author could be wrong.
I'm not sure how to present it better, but I'd posit:
"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"
I'd be interested where you disagree on substance.
That is an outrageous distinction that is not found in any ancient or modern source. It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta.
First, there is no way to make a distinction between "Spartan" and "Spartiate" in the Greek language. In Greek, ancient and modern, a person who lives in, or is from, a place called "Sparta" is a "Σπαρτιάτης", i.e. "Spartiate". "Σπαρτιάτης" is most commonly latinised as "Spartan", sometimes as "Spartiate", but there is no semantic difference between the two.
Second, there is no modern source I'm aware of, other than the linked series of blog posts, and certainly no ancient source that refers to the helots as "Spartans", "Spartiates", "Lacedaemons", or anything else but "helots", or simply the slaves of the Spartans. This is because ancient authors only ever refer to helots when they want to point out how cruel were the Spartans (which obviously must exclude the helots themselves from the group of "Spartans") and don't really care about them, or their fate, otherwise. So the idea that the population of "Sparta" was mostly made up of slaves is a figment of the author's imagination.
It is true that the slaves of the Spartans were (many) more than the Spartans, but this is also true of most other Greek city-states, where manual labor was performed by slaves and many citizens owned more than one slave. In fact, other Greeks did not treat their own slaves with any less cruelty than the Spartans. For example, the main source of richess of classical Athens was the silver mined from the mines of Lavrion where thousands of slaves, including children, were made to work in conditions that we would, today, rightly find revolting.
From memory again, there were other errors, all of which were the result of the author trying to play up historical themes for clicks, but I would have to re-read the series of posts to remember. In any case my recommendation is to turn to primary sources if one is interested in the history of Sparta. Read Thucydides, read Plutarch, read Xenophon, read Plato, read Aristotle, read Herodotus even, but keep in mind that everyone who wrote about Sparta had a political affiliation, either to Sparta, or to the enemies of Sparta, and in any case ancient historians were not always 100% accurate.
The author addresses this VERY directly and at length in a "Conclusions: Who Matters?" section of one of the posts. For example (though the whole section is worth a read):
> All too often, I see students read the Greek contempt for the poor man, the non-citizen, or the slave with horror but then immediately turn around and replicate those patterns of thought in their own thinking about these societies (well of course the ‘mob’ cannot be trusted to rule – Thucydides and Xenophon said so – to which I am endlessly responding, ‘yes, but should you believe them?‘).
> Indeed, this credulous approach to the source tradition – accepting not only the facts they give, but also their guesses about what is to them the distant past and their judgments about the moral worth of a Sparta that probably never existed – is so common that it has had a name since the 1933, le mirage spartiate, coined by Francois Ollier. Rousseau and Jefferson had an excuse for their gullibility – we do not.
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/23/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
The author of the blog posts has basically made up the idea that "Spartiate" and "Spartan" are two different words with different meaning. "Spartan" or "Spartiate" on the one hand, and "Helot" on the other hand are two different categories, but "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are different Latinisations of the same Greek word, Σπαρτιάτης and not similar-sounding words with subtly different meaning, ast he author claims. This claim, that "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are different words representing different categories of people is the revisionism that I am commenting on.
Can you quote a passage from the linked series of blog posts that directly addresses this revisionism?
> That is an outrageous distinction that is not found in any ancient or modern source. It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta.
Terms like "Spartiate" are standard.
That is not standard.
We do talk about contemporary totalitarian societies and near part totalitarian societies.
The expectation that we will heroise past society, to feel good, to make them sound awesome, is on itself a bias.
A wife was a chattel, as per law, up until the 20th century in a number of European countries.
The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.
How the history repeats itself, this time among hi-tech skyscrapers.
But it is still quite a difference between exploiting someone weaker and actually owning a person and be legally able to do anything with him or her.
They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc.
A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
Is it really a deterrent, though? You said yourself that it'd be scapegoated and its not like they depend on good PR to keep their goodies, they own the country after all.
Also I can't help but wonder what these people talk about behind closed doors, do they really play by the same rules you and I would be held accountable to behind closed doors?
They still need good relationships with the west. Open slavery would not be tolerated.
Humans are amazing at justifying actions. There's a whole school of ethical thought devoted to it (utilitarianism).
Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.
Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that.
Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio.
> That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien?
Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.
I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work.
The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races.
Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.
I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.
That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well.
(My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.)
0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called.
1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is.
2: Really, believability versus any extreme.
> My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent".
I mean, that's up there in the evil stakes. But also, the Draka were a lot more... messed up. Both had deeply alien (and arguably rather Spartan, to go back on topic for a second) value systems, but by the time Nazi Germany fell, the vast majority of the population had only had Nazi values inflicted on them for about 15 years; the Draka social system was _centuries_ old.
https://www.econtalk.org/bret-devereaux-on-ancient-greece-an...
If you look at Deveraux's list of military victories and defeats, you will see a lot of the defeats came after the Peloponnesian war. I believe even Greek sources talked about how Spartan society became softer after winning the Peloponnesian war.
Also, the Spartans were famous for their army not their navy.
If you take the list and remove naval battles and battles fought after the Peloponnesian War, you end up with something like 12 victories and 4 defeats with is a 75% win rate which is likely pretty impressive all things considered.
I wonder if he's ever considered publishing that or some of his other long reads. A low estimate has This Isn't Sparta at 130 pages. Images take that higher.