Sparta was more than an army of super warriors

counterpoint: a lesbian is able to have sex with a man but that doesn't make her straight either.

No, it wasn't. It had a broadly similar population; it's just that most of that population were slaves. And they did have slave auxiliaries, so it wasn't necessarily a manpower issue.

It's true that historians have been talking about the myth of spartan excellence for over a century, with one of the key works being Le Mirage Spartiate, published 1933.

It's true that there is extensive scholarship analysing what is (and is not) known about Sparta and the Spartiates, and it's not positive for the Spartans.

It's true than Sparta has very few defenders among professional historians, in large part because the historical record to support such a defence is so limited.

And it's certainly true that despite all that, the consensus could be wrong! As you note, other consensus views have been shown to be wrong and have been overturned. But what is also true is that doing so took evidence.

Such evidence was readily available for showing that, eg, the earth is not the center of the universe, the sun does not revolve around the earth, and the earth is not flat. Such evidence is not going to be readily available about Sparta. We're talking about things that occurred ~2500 years ago; and in truth we likely have the bulk of all the evidence we'll ever have about Sparta. All that's left is to interpret it, and such interpretations seem fairly clear cut.

I wouldn't hold my breath for a major re-assessment.

I think it’s important to distinguish between the widely held beliefs of a populace as a whole and the widely held beliefs of experts in a field. I’ll leave aside the point that fields have often gotten narrower as they have gotten deeper. But I will point out that Aristarchus of Samos posited a heliocentric model since some time between 300 and 200 BC and Eratosthenes of Cyrene calculated the circumference of the earth to within the order of 1% error at roughly similar times.

A tangent: is it important what the widely held beliefs of members of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes society believed? I’m not sure. Many members of their society didn’t have access to information or skills that would let them come to these more accurate conclusions. And if they did, there’s nothing particularly actionable for them; imagine a farmer: is knowing the earth isn’t the center of the solar system something that could help them more efficiently grow crops? In this sense, the truth doesn’t have any direct value for them whereas there are potential negative social implications for minority beliefs.

But bottom line: it’s not about consensus itself; it’s about consensus evolving as the most likely scenario given the data available. People in a field will generally have access to more information and the tools to integrate that information into hypotheses than the population as a whole. But certainly experts can still get things wrong. I would just tend to expect better from them than the populace as a whole.

And even if the consensus opinion is wrong, that doesn't make the non-consensus opinion correct, it just makes it another unverified, poorly-sourced possibility.

I explicitly quoted you, not trying to put words in your mouth. I do think that "read [sources], and make up your own mind" is exactly the same as "do your own research". I can't see any difference in meaning there.

My commentary was on the trend to dismiss authorities in favor of, literally, "making up your own mind". Reading the sources is not enough. They need putting into context, and understanding the positions of the historical authors. I could read original sources all day and come out with an invalid understanding.

Again, I'm not saying this article is correct. I'm saying a layman should read experts instead of interpreting sources themselves if they want to understand better.

> I never used the words "do your own research" and I will very please ask you to not quote me as saying words I didn't actually say.

Here, let me remind you:

>>> Read history; and make up your own mind.

Wow, huuuge difference.

> Further, "do your own research" is what conspiracy theorists say.

Exactly. And if you want to be taken for someone almost exactly like them, don't sound almost exactly like them.

I mean, obviously reading more is better. But this is a perfectly fine resource and links to lots of further reading. This blog is a far better thing for a normal person to read than the stuff you linked; it basically represents current understanding, whereas some of what you linked, while important sources _because we don't have all that many sources_ (historians have to take what they can get; for an extreme example see the Historia Augusta...) are bordering on fanfiction.

This is the reason we have historians. To help analyze those sources. The end result often winds up as a book… or an article series. Like this one.

The evidence is, contrary to what you write, that the author of the series of posts directly comments on Herodotus, and uses Herodotus as a primary source. Eg, in https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

> Which brings us back to Herodotus (remember, way back in the first of these, I said we'd talk about Herodotus?) because he isn't just observing the Spartan reputation, Herodotus is manufacturing the Spartan reputation. Herodotus is our main source for early Greek history (read: pre-480) and for the two Persian invasions of Greece. Herodotus' Histories cover a range of places and topics - Persia, Greece, Scythia, Egypt - and contain a mixture of history, ethnography, mythology and straight up falsehoods. But - as François Hartog famously pointed out in his The Mirror of Herodotus (originally in French as Le Miroir d'Hérodote), Herodotus is writing about Greece, even when he is writing about Persia - those other cultures and places exist to provide contrasts to the things that Herodotus thinks bind all of the fractious and fiercely independent Greek poleis. And he is perfectly willing to manufacture the past to make it fit that vision.

> ... for Herodotus, Sparta is the expression of an ideal form of `Greekness' and in Herodotus' logic, being well-governed (eunomia is the Greek term) results primarily in military excellence. For the story Herodotus is telling to work, Sparta - as one of the leading states resisting Persia - must be well governed and it must be military excellent. That's what will make a good story - and Herodotus never lets the facts get in the way of a good story. ..

> Herodotus ...does show up in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, where he is treated as a famous historian who knows many things. Which is a bit funny, given that the historian of that period, Thucydides, takes a dim view of him.

> And so, Herodotus - the myth-maker - talks up the Spartiates at Thermopylae (you know, the brave 300) and quietly leaves out the other Laconians (who, if you scrutinize his numbers, he knows must be there, to the tune of c. 900 men), downplaying the other Greeks. Spartan leadership is lionized, even when it makes stupid mistakes (Thermopylae, to be clear, was a military disaster and Spartan intransigence nearly loses the battle of Plataea, but Herodotus represents this as boldness in the face of the enemy; even more fantastically inept was the initial Spartan plan to hold on the Isthmus of Corinth as if no one had ever seen a boat before).

> The spin worked. Herodotus' work was well known, even in antiquity, and he set the tone for all subsequent retellings of the Persian wars (despite the frequent complaints by later ancient authors that Herodotus' reliability was - let's say, complicated. I don't want to give the wrong impression: Herodotus is a valuable source, just one that - like all sources - has his own agenda at play).

The blog post series does link to its references, like The Mirror of Herodotus, as well in-line citations like "Hdt. 9.35.2" (one of several explicit Herodotus references), as well as "Thuc. 4.40.2", "Xen. Lac. 4.5, 5.9", "Plat. Lach. 182d-183a.", and many more.

It means if they were, it wasn't necessarily about attraction. (We see this phenomenon in many rapists, incidentally.)

----------

I've commonly heard that Spartans were good at fighting but bad at war. Turns out that a band of illiterate warriors is largely a bad idea for an army composition. If the war goes on too long, they simply run out of supplies and leave (Or, if they're forced to fight, they run out of supplies and lose)

I don’t care about Sparta one way or another. But simply “looking at numbers” can be deceiving.