This Isn't Sparta
acoup.blog
acoup.blog
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26499528
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21398893
Edits:
Link to the retrospective (which seems pretty good to me, as a summary of the original 7+-part series) - https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...
Bottom line, for those not as fond of rather-long, scholarly history as I as...
> And so I reiterate my [prior] closing judgement:
> Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
> Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/crl0j5/the_s...
[0] https://acoup.blog/2022/08/19/collections-this-isnt-sparta-r...
The Spartiates lived in constant fear of invasion and revolt, which caused them to build their society in a way that could not persist over time. But their military inspired fear well beyond the Peloponnese during the later part of the archaic age and through the classical period. They were staunch supporters of Oligarchy over Democracy, and that is one of the primary sources of modern disdain.
They lost their relevance because their way of life wasn't sustainable and they ran out of spartiates...finally suffering humiliating defeat shortly before the Hellenic period.
And the agoge of the classical period impressed Athenian leaders so much that some of them sent their children to participate.
The Spartiates and the spartan King who held Thermopylae deserve the accolades, but so do the thesbians and helots who filled the rear ranks of the phalanx, allowing the spartiates to form the front rank.
The spartiates always filled the front ranks. Something else the author glossed over. Admittedly, I only read the first article, but he talked about their frequent losses. This is really an oversimplification. They rarely ever committed a spartiate army to combat. Normally, there was a small detachment of spartiates with an ally (more like vassal) army. They made the military decisions, and they filled the front ranks of the phalanx. More often than not, the failure of these expeditionary forces was due to the rear ranks (non spartiates) failing to hold the line, allowing the front ranks to be overrun.