Ancient Spartans didn’t kill ‘weak’ babies, new study argues
science.org
science.org
[1] Source: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author <em>do</em> know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.
"Σπαρτιάτης" is used in Greek (modern and ancient) to mean a (male) inhabitant of a place called "Sparta". What the blog author claims is that there are _two_ words, one of which means free citizens of Sparta and the other, helots. He says that one of those words is "Spartiate" and that the other is "Spartan".
This is a distinction that is impossible to make with a single word in Greek. The words he uses, "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are two Latin transliterations of the single Greek word "Σπαρτιάτης", that has one single meaning, as I explain it above.
Furthermore, the distinction between free and enslaved inhabitans of Sparta is, in all historical sources, made clear by using two words with different roots: "Spartan" for the free citizens of the city, "helot" for the enslaved people of the surrounding territories of the city-state. Nobody else than the author calls one "Spartan" and the other "Spartiate". That's entirely the blog author's made-up terminology.
So what I'm saying the blog author has made up is the distinct meaning of "Spartan" and "Spartiate". I do not claim that he has made up the word "Spartiate", as you seem to assume in your comment. Please correct me if I misunderstood your comment, and not you mine.
And a small edit: It was your last parenthesis that confused me, I would have written it as:
“or even "Spartiate", a term distinguished by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan"…”
"Homoioi" (όμοιοι) means "equals" or "peers". That's what Spartans considered each other and they'd use that word in context, but used the demonym "Spartan" to refer to their fellow free citizens of Sparta as did everybody else. The helots were called either helots or ..."the Spartans' slaves".
And as for the title point: Spartans seem to only be mentioned in the article coverage of the research. They are not the topic of the research itself. Sparta doesn't even appear in the abstract of the paper. Demonstrating that infanticide of disabled babies wasn't a widespread practice in Ancient Greece does not necessarily mean that it wasn't practiced by a group that only consisted of the elite class of one state.
Isn't the onus on the ones claiming that Spartans practiced systemic infanticide to provide the evidence that they did so?
Each reader can decide for himself how much evidence he needs to be persuaded.
A specialist in the area could just say “appeal to authority” and they’d be right. The actual peer reviewed articles and books would require evidence.
But those articles and books wouldn’t be accessible to the average reader.
So the journalist is summarizing those arguments, but in the process reducing them to an appeal to authority - which is completely fine.
These accounts aren’t perfect. Not necessarily first hand eye witnesses, but not rumor mongers either.
So anyone arguing that this didn’t happen needs to address an established consensus.
Lots of more recent research is attacking traditional ideas about the Spartans, so this is a welcome argument.
But saying “it’s on them to prove their point” isn’t really helpful.
A weak counterclaim does not imply the claim to be truth.
Strong men never make mistakes. Never. Only weak men do. You know it's true. You've seen it. Cavemen have seen it. Probably true in some animal societies, too
Yes. So? The options are not just that we accept whatever fact is presented, or accept whatever is the oposite of it. We can just say: “looks like we don’t know” and that is perfectly fine.
A claim or a counterclaim (is there even a distinction?) warrants the same amount of proof.
Yes that is exactly what I was saying.
You wrote:
> Is there a name for being arbitrarily biased against a counterclaim?
Who is arbitrarily biassed against a counterclaim in your opinion here? Debby Sneed who wrote the study? Andrew Curry who wrote the science.org article about the study? gadflyinyoureye who wrote the comment your comment is responding to? Someone else?
> The simple fact that this is posed as a counterclaim itself seems to invoke skepticism...
As it should. I don't see the bias here. Are you saying that someone accepts claims without skepticism but not counterclaims? Who?
I also see at least one comment here making this same argument.
The article covers the evidence against, including, that disabled ancient Greeks lived to adulthood.
The evidence cited in favor is Plutarch's assertion, and that "other societies" do it.
That last is particularly weak. Plutarch's assertion wasn't that parents who couldn't afford children would leave them exposed, but that the Ancients would by policy submit the babies to an examining council who would order that disabled babies be exposed.
So all we have in favor, really, is Plutarch's say-so. Given that he wrote this 700 years later, this evidence is pretty weak, too.
> A father has the right to kill his deformed child.
These were laws in ancient Rome, not Greece, but the societies shared many beliefs and customs. Not that this is proof one way or the other about what was common practice, but people thought it was important enough to lay down in law. [[the father also had the right to kill any of his kids, so it's interesting they spell this case out explicitly]]
> In theory at least, he held powers of life and death over every member of his extended familia through ancient right. In practice, the extreme form of this right was seldom exercised. It was eventually limited by law.[3]
If you believe things for which you have no evidence, you're liable to believe everything.
Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence. Insufficient evidence leads solely to the conclusion "We do not know with any confidence whether Spartans did this or not." You cannot just assume that one of the affirmative positions is true because the other one lacks sufficient evidence.
Hmm. That is an interesting perspective, but I do not agree.
Isn't "Spartans did not do this" actually a negative claim? And aren't negative claims notoriously difficult to prove?
What if this were consorted with extraterrestrials or some other random claim? Then it's easy to dismiss lack of evidence with "does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent".
Do we really need to find evidence that Spartans did not do this for every claim? Or rather, perhaps we should insist on proving the negative only of claims for which the evidence is strong in the first place.
Shouldn't we take as the null hypothesis "Spartans did not do this" and then evaluate evidence that they did?
In this specific instance, because of 2000 years of tradition, the unchallenged null hypothesis has been "Spartans suffered only healthy, well-formed children to live". This is the only reason people are saying anything like "We need more evidence they did not" despite the weakness of the evidence for its being true.
Before I consider that, you'd have to show that magical invisible goats (can) exist.
Intuitively, to me, given how dangerous birthing was for the mother, I imagine only seriously disabled babies - that would never be autonomous as an adult - would be killed.
But I guess we'll never know.
"The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be."
This was just a hypothetical, but Plato was thought to be influenced by Sparta. He's very explicit about the eugenic principles behind this idea.
"Still they provide for the increase of their numbers. It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant."
(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...)
Were it otherwise in the peoples around them, would Tacitus have thought this worth of mention?
The article doesn't prove exposure never happened, just that it didn't always happen. I'm guessing that it would be most likely to occur in times of famine.
Halo's Spartans make sense if you think about them as a traumatized and brutalized society.
I am pretty sure you are right. To the ancient writers, slaves were all but invisible, except perhaps as a measure of a slave-holder's wealth, or when, like Spartacus, they upturned the 'natural order' of society, and lesser nominally-free persons were not much more thought of. A slave's child was a return on a slave-holder's investment (Thomas Jefferson wrote about his own slaves in these terms), and if they weren't useful for anything better, they could be used as beasts of burden until they died.
I don't know how the Spartans are portrayed in Halo, but Brett Devereaux make an interesting case (at least AFAIK, which is not much) that the Spartan aristocracy operated like a modern-day cult [1] (and he seems to accept that infanticide was part of that cult, though he does not have much to say about it.)
[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
"Cult" isn't the word I'd use for it. The main point of that particular post is comparing the written sources' description of Spartan agoge to modern child soldiers... and our sources' description of the Spartan agoge read rather like how someone would write about modern child soldiers if they thought it were a good thing.
Not that you have to agree with the comparison, of course!
- “The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well”
- “Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374, but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted”
374 is fairly close to the fall of Rome, which Wikipedia sets at 395-476 AD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...), so from that page, it doesn’t seem it was that severely punished during most of th years the Roman Empire existed.
And now we got all the way to anti-abortionists claiming that killing the child even after any signs of pregnancy is illegal.
The Spartan kings (supposedly) come from two lines of descendants of Heracles, Eurysthenes and Procles, who are said to have come to and conquered Sparta (the Spartans did not think they were native to the land). To kill one at birth would probably be a laughable idea to a Spartan.
Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewritten, and modern sensibilities injected where appropriate.
And we don't really think much about it. Because after all, it's entertainment. Entertainment has no responsibility to inform or educate. But through it all, children will grow up and absorb it. And suddenly a whole generation starts believing that Ancient Greece was a multi-ethnic civilization (by today's standards) and that Spanish Moors were Sub-Saharan Africans.
They will have no sense of the Soviet contribution to the war, because that media will be American.
Which lead to the events in the documentary mad max.
But really, do we do any differently???
Think about it -- "weak" children are set aside from society into a room upstairs, or a care home, or some kind of environment where they are not exposed to the harshness of the real world.
The same goes for adults too.
Even if the spartans never did it, they probably put the weaker children and adults into a situation where they would never come into contact with battle or even slow a community for doing normal everyday duties.
Which is exactly the same as we do.
We put slower children into special classes. Put them on special buses, send them to special psychological and physical practitioners. For adults we put them into care homes. Or keep them at home and the government generally cares for them with special provisions.
And we accept that.
Putting infanticide aside -- are we any different from ancient cultures??
I don't think we are any different at all. Sadly, the worlds countries that are best able to provide a good life for such people are the quickest to prevent them from existing.
> Nor was it in the power of the father to dispose of the child as he thought fit; he was obliged to carry it before certain triers at a place called Lesche; these were some of the elders of the tribe to which the child belonged; their business it was carefully to view the infant, and, if they found it stout and well made, they gave order for its rearing, and allotted to it one of the nine thousand shares of land above mentioned for its maintenance, but, if they found it puny and ill-shaped, ordered it to be taken to what was called the Apothetae, a sort of chasm under Taygetus; as thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up, if it did not, from the very outset, appear made to be healthy and vigorous.
Article title says “Greeks”, not “Spartans”, which would make a lot more sense (and avoid the need for half of the arguing in the comments).
Erm... infanticide is an epidemic in our society! There's nothing occasional about it.
Beginning in the seventies, scholars were motivated to revise the allegations of Carthaginian child sacrifice, claiming that it was racist Roman propaganda designed to abuse the memory of an enemy power (even though the same claims can be found in Greek sources from the time of Alexander the Great). It’s not hard to detect the influence of black emancipation and the Vietnam War in these efforts. For decades, this interpretation held sway until recently, when archeologists revisited the question and found that no, in fact the Carthaginians really had been sacrificing children all along.
This article informs us that Spartan eugenics inspired the Nazis, quoting a scholar who says that “It’s gotten used for some pretty nefarious ends”. One can easily see how our revulsion towards such atrocities could motivate our search for reasons to discredit the precedents that have been used to justify them.
Obviously that doesn't account for proof, but when you take into account the fact that "history is written by the victors" and simple examples like salem trials, or any other group who was been later found to be relatively innocent of their actions by their accusers, it makes you wonder if these "rumors" were spread just to make spartans less popular.From what i recall spartans were also composed from largely slaves,gladiators,foreign people, and usually those people are not keen towards tyranny.
> rom what i recall spartans were also composed from largely slaves,gladiators,foreign people, and usually those people are not keen towards tyranny
Slaves are living in tyranny by definition. There is no slavery if there is no tyrant. The majority of Sparta were slaves, the minority was keeping them slaves via violence. The decisions were made by slaveholders.
Sparta was not a place where escaped slaves would seek refuge nor a place where they would made decisions.