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Comment by blfr | Hacker News Reader

The almost unreasonable effectiveness of citizen-soldier over the ages is often underappreciated. It takes life-long dedication and a whole martial culture for professionals to keep the upper hand (medieval Europe, Sparta)

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Overall the Spartans weren't even much more effective. They took some losses battling other Greek city-states. Their martial prowess has been somewhat exaggerated.

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

>Their martial prowess has been somewhat exaggerated.

That straight wins/losses analysis leaves something wanting. Which were defensive battles and which were offensive ones? Could their reputation have prevented defensive battles which they would have otherwise subsequently won? And maybe more important, if it would have prevented battles they would have lost. The "If" reply being of course the famous example.

I think the straight win/loss ratio underestimates them a bit, but it's more to show they're nowhere near the 100% dominant force their reputation leads one to expect. The author's overall take is they were likely the best among Greece at the time, but not by a ton.

I think that their martial discipline and military life style is what they are famous for. Again, I think that the failure of the effectiveness of their of their military training simply shows that in war there are a lot of factors. Sth that can be seen even in our times, the US effectively lost in Vietnam or Iraq even though their military was far superior.

You take for granted that the Spartans were good at war, and reconcile "Spartans good at war" and "Spartans lost to other city-states" by concluding that there are "a lot of factors". Why not revise your assumption that Spartans were good at war?

Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, even though it relied on making major social and military changes (building a navy, relying more on auxiliary troops than core elite troops) to accomplish that. The other bit is that if one ais trying to draw a distinction between Athenian reliance on citizen-soldier hoplites and the reliance on crack troops reliant on masses of helots, that distinction was muddled during the Peloponnesian War as heavy infantry combat became much less relevant on all sides as naval warfare (manned by masses of both slaves and paid troops) became much more important.

It also doesn't really make much sense to say that Sparta's reliance on its elite core lead to its eventual subordination to Macedonia. Macedon under Philip and Alexander was also built around an elite core -- the Companion Cavalry supported by the sarissa-armed infantry, which were relatively lightly armored compared to traditional Athenian/Spartan heavy infantry. It also doesn't really make that much sense to try to draw clear ethical distinctions between the Macedonians and the Spartans. One of the most common lines to read in the Campaigns of Alexander is "all the men remaining in the city were killed, and then the women and children were sold into slavery."

What's clear is that Spartans gained the reputation for having the most elite heavy infantry during the time period, at the time when heavy infantry proved to be the most important type of fighter on land. Then, in a generation or two, elite heavy infantry became a lot less important, and Sparta had demographic difficulties in replenishing its numbers, particularly of its core elite fighters. Light infantry with significantly less training became more important, as did light cavalry (no stirrups invented yet). Naval fighting became a lot more important also. So, what they were the best at became of decreasing relevance, and also their intensive training methods abetted by extreme social stratification didn't scale to the intensity of the conflict during the Peloponnesian War. To win, they had to make a bunch of massive adaptations and ally with the Persians.

I don't think Sparta's victory in the Peloponnesian War proves they were better at war. The war was a stalemate on land between Sparta and Athens. Athens ruled the waves but couldn't parlay that into victory. Athens committed a major blunder in its invasion of Sicily and that allowed Sparta to win.

They were certainly quite good at least at keeping numerically dominant helots down.

Plenty of places in ancient times used terror successfully to keep large slave populations in their place. But if you count up Sparta's win/loss record in known battles against other armies, they're almost exactly 50%. And they were 0-2 against the Macedonian phalanx.

Kind of the opposite to Napoleon. Sparta fought one famous battle and is seen as invincible, Napoleon won almost all his battles, lost one decisive battle at Waterloo (incredibly close) and since then is seen as a looser. Propaganda is powerful tool.

Being good at war and being capable of keeping enslaved population via massive brutality and control are not the same thing.

Sparta is famous for having a really, really good PR agency. It's telling that their most famous military operation is fighting a rearguard action where they comprised less than 10% of the total forces. Their famous martial discipline and military life style? Our contemporary sources wax poetical about these... before footnotes saying that's what it should be and used to be, but isn't actually anymore.

It should be noted that, when you compare the descriptions of Spartan military education with modern studies of child soldiers, you realize that's exactly what Sparta was: a society of child soldiers. It's the same procedures of indoctrination and ritual initiation. You want to extol their military life, go to the Lord's Resistance Army or similar counterparts today.

Strip away the romanticism of Sparta, and you're left with a slave society whose military is based on child soldiers that struggles to fight battles next door, which is curb-stomped by next major military force to sweep in (the Macedonians), produced nothing of note in lasting cultural artifacts... but has the best publicists of the ancient world!

> Sparta is famous for having a really, really good PR agency.

This is a very figurative claim, yes? It seems untrue otherwise. I've never heard of Sparta having a propaganda organization, least of all an outward facing one. Obviously their social structure indoctrinated their own into itself, but that's not the same thing as having a PR agency. As far as I'm aware, everything known/believed about the Spartans today comes from people who weren't Spartans, like Xenophon and Plutarch. The Spartans didn't write about themselves, or if they did, those writings didn't survive.

The better sentence I should have written is "Sparta is famous because it had a really, really good PR agency," as opposed to "for having". The general point is that Sparta lived much more on its reputation (fueled by the likes of Xenophon and Plutarch) than its actual historical record.

I'm not really sure what distinction you're making between "reputation" and "actual historical record". When examining the military reputations of the ancient world, primary sources seem few and far between. So yes, those that are well reputed are so reputed because other people wrote about them. Or rarely, because they wrote about themselves.

The rare first hand accounts seem most suspect of them all; Julius Caesar's [ghostwritten?] Commentaries on the Gallic Wars is flagrant propaganda. PR in the truest sense possible.

On the other hand you have Scipio Africanus, who like Julius Caesar has a reputation for being one of the greatest generals ever. But anything he wrote about himself is long gone; his reputation was built by other people writing about what they think he said or did. The archeological record (the 'actual historical record'?) backs up some basic facts about the Second Punic War, but doesn't say much specifically about Scipio Africanus.

Which ancient men with lofty reputations can be said to have their reputations without "PR"?

In the Classical world, the military success of Macedon and Rome are indisputable. Both of those empires were built on the backs of being able to consistently defeat their opponents in military battles. When you look at the Spartan success rate, even among the much smaller group of peer city states, Sparta doesn't look like a nigh-unstoppable military juggernaut the way that Macedon and Rome do.

It's more that authoritarian elites in other city-states liked to write about how awesome Sparta was, than that Sparta had a good PR organization.

[EDIT] Now that I think about it, it's got some parallels with some American and British elites' infatuation with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, at least until the wars started and/or the news of atrocities became irrefutable (and sometimes, even after that)

> It's more that authoritarian elites in other city-states liked to write about how awesome Sparta was, than that Sparta had a good PR organization.

Yes, that's my take as well. Xenophon particularly stands out in this regard. Xenophon's laconophilia was the result of his personal experience with the Spartans, not the product of Spartan propaganda.

> Now that I think about it, it's got some parallels with some American and British elites' infatuation with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia

Some parallels, however there is ample evidence that Nazi Germany did have an aggressive propaganda campaign (the Spartans may have, but there's no evidence for it.) The degree to which American/British nazi sympathizers were influenced by Nazi produced propaganda rather than their personal experiences with nazis is hard to ascertain. I think it was probably a mix of both.

It makes sense to talk up the guys you beat, since it amplifies your own achievements. Did the victors write about the Spartans?

Neither Xenophon nor Plutarch beat Sparta, nor were beat by Sparta. Plutarch was writing about things the Spartans had supposedly said or done a thousand years before. Xenophon was an Athenian mercenary and military commander who fought alongside the Spartans, not against them, and became a Laconophile from the experience. The perception of his alignment with Sparta (and his association with Socrates) severely harmed his reputation in Athens. He was eventually banished by Athens after being on Sparta's side at the Battle of Coronea.

It's an incredibly strange thing, from a historical perspective to have any distinction between the term citizen and the term soldier. It was, for every definition of the term citizen until 1973 (or perhaps until 1920), an obligation of all citizens that they fight when their country (or cit-y) was at war. This is why they were male, why the bearing of arms was so important (because depending on the time, you'd bring your own), and why civic spirit is high in such societies. Citizen societies embrace the cameraderie of a war band, whose freedom is guaranteed by their own hands. This is why the disjunction between citizen and slave existed, because citizens were those people, or the descendents of those people who guaranteed their freedom, and their property (land, cattle, etc.) by force of arms.

Now it's just a little blue passport book.

see also Starship Troopers (R A Heinlein) - a short story aimed at a particular audience perhaps but makes explicit this concept.

Is it citizen-soldier vs professional, or is it a case of defense vs attack? Given an equivalent foe, how would they square up in defending their homelands?

It's citizen-soldier. Roman farmers took over a good chunk of the ancient world before having a professional army, American clerks and tradesmen landed in Normandy.

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