Hacker News Reader

Comment by fmajid | Hacker News Reader

Sparta was a totalitarian state well beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler or Stalin. Bertrand Russell does an excellent job The History of Western Philosophy of showing how depraved they were (as does Devereaux), how they influenced Plato (himself a disgruntled Athenian aristocrat who resented his social class' loss of power when Athens became a democracy, then collaborated with the Spartan occupation of Athens after the latter lost the Peloponnesian War).

View on HN

According to the histories levied by the Athenians.

The Spartans left no written record and hardly any archeology.

> The Spartans left no written record and hardly any archeology.

Which also suggests they kind of sucked.

Or that they oriented their society towards war rather than writing things down. Sparta was a state of total war before total war was even defined.

Just like we look to Somalia and Uganda today for the highest calibre soldiers.

Total war is distinct from civil war or regional conflict - none of the parties you mentioned are completely committed at every level possible to victory (or at least the other side losing). Britain and Germany can both be thought of as being in states of total war at varying times during WW2.

If you draw this distinction it doesn't apply to Sparta either.

They are not drawing the distinction, this is a specific definition that you decided to take offense to for some reason: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war

It's not some political statement, all that was meant was that their whole society participated in the war effort and their education centered on fighting and survival rather than writing things down.

> their whole society participated in the war effort

Right, and this is untrue of Sparta.

I probably don't know enough about Sparta then. From what I thought I knew before your comments, I learned that they took the "teach kids to be fighters" to the extreme and they had the longest "education" period of any city states around them, mostly focused on skills for battle. Supposedly the old men were involved in this education, the kids were training, the men were fighting, and the women were supporting all of this. So that's what I was basing the thought of this type of society probably making it less likely that you have a bunch of scribes or other types of jobs being done that would be more likely to leave stuff written down.

Congratulations! You are a total victim of this Spartan myth that the article author has often debunked.

Problem is, they taught only citizen kids to be fighters (skipping over what did they actually teach). When 80%+ of your society is not-citizens, then this has little relation to what the society is actually focused on.

> Which also suggests they kind of sucked

The Spartans were paranoid and insular. More likely than their being illiterates is that they destroyed their own records.

> The Spartans were paranoid and insular.

Which also suggests they kind of sucked.

I suppose one has to ask the question, what is the definition of "suck"? For whom? When? Did the Spartans have an obligation to peoples unknown thousands of years in the future to write down what they were doing?

> Their city is not built continuously, and has no splendid temples or other edifices; it rather resembles a group of villages, like the ancient towns of Hellas, and would therefore make a poor show

Thucydides.

> Sparta was a totalitarian state well beyond the wildest dreams of Hitler or Stalin

It was also a polis with rudimentary constitutional checks on its dyadic monarchy and a public ekklesia that notionally approved legislation.

> a disgruntled Athenian aristocrat who resented his social class' loss of power when Athens became a democracy

This is true. He also had prescient complaints about direct democracy as Athens practiced it. Of course, at that time we didn't know direct democracy doesn't work--it careens towards partisan overdrive and ricocheting majoritarianism.

Why do you cite Russel's philosophy book written for a lay audience and that has received criticism (see wikipedia), rather than, say, a classical scholar?

Here's a good article by a classical military scholar which covers many of the same topics:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/sparta-popular-culture-...

It's the same author, historian Bret Devereaux, better known for his geeky blog "A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry" (acoup.blog)

Because classical scholars tend to brush this under the carpet out of misplaced deference or reverence for Plato (or perhaps because they quite enjoy the conceit of the philosopher-king). You have to go to Russell or Popper for an explanation of how evil Plato's ideology is, even though it is there black on white in The Republic:

- "noble lies" and propaganda as the basis of the state

- strict separation of the population into castes

- taking children away from their parents and brainwashing them

- killing of political dissidents

Even in Orwell's 1984 parents kept their children, even if they were indoctrinated into squealing on their parents. If anything, it looks more like John Boorman's Zardoz.

Let me repeat your argument back to you. You are saying that classical scholars, purely out of deference for Plato, cannot be trusted to investigate properly just how depraved Spartan society was; and hence Russell is a better authority?

Classics is not the same as history and no serious historians dispute what Sparta was, it’s philosophy or Ancient Greek ones. I suppose since you have Holocaust denier “historians” like you have British Empire revisionists, there must be some Sparta fans lurking under a rock somewhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com