If you’re interested in Prof. Devereux’s work on Ancient Greece you should check out this podcast he was on where he discussed his views on misperceptions of Sparta
Interviewer: "We have no data point supporting this view"
Brad: "We have this one [name and number]"
Interviewer: "But do we have any one but this one?"
Brad gives two more
Interviewer: "Ok, but that's just three data points."Of course you should read the article as well, but the interview is invaluable. His blog is shared on HN a lot, but this was the first time I ever saw the man himself asked to actually account for why he believes the evidence supports his conclusions.
Also the article in question, from the interview, was this one https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/07/22/sparta-popular-culture-... but they edited the title after he did that podcast. It used to be “Spartans Were Losers: The US Military’s Admiration of a Proto-Fascist City-State is Based on Bad History.”
Not an expert, but my understanding is that Soviet education & propaganda idealized Sparta.
Edit: I was unaware of the US military admiring Sparta...but developing an admiration for the ideals of your previous #1 Enemy, whose nation collapsed from within...yeahhh. Perhaps a few service academy instructors need to further explain "Do Not Copy Losing Strategies" to their Military Thinking 101 classes?
Not really, the Spartakiad was named after Spartacus, not Sparta.
From a few quick searches, I'm not getting anything about Soviet views on Sparta - just crap about the US-based "Sparta vs. Athens" Cold War analogy, or Soviet takes on (modern) Greek communism, or Eastern Orthodox ties between Greece and Russia, or Imperial Russian views on the Greek War of Independence, or ...
This being HN - there is probably someone who either knows, or is fluent in Russian to be able to effectively search on the topic.
(I had wondered why there was a "Star City" filmstrip included in the search results; it appears to be because of a cosmonaut using a Spartacus-named fitness machine: https://diafilmy.su/uploads/posts/2015-04/1429074979_08.jpg )
Someone with better cultural knowledge will do better than I, but I'm getting the feel that the closest approach to Sparta was that the Soviets didn't gender-separate their scouting programs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvrS6z4tUtI
The Soviet economic system is a sufficient explanation for their collapse. I don't think their admiration for (a made up, idealised) Sparta made a difference one way or another. And even if it did, we can't tell; no one ran a controlled experiment, and it's at most a very small factor.
Compare: the Soviets also ate potatoes. But you'd be hard pressed to say that we should avoid eating potatoes.
So I'm a bit confused, because, well, _is_ that the traditional image of them? Like, maybe if your only context on them is that one film, but even the traditional/old-fashioned _historical_ view of them wasn't _particularly_ complementary.
IMHO that's really not how you should approach an interview with a highly educated/knowledgably professional as a lay person. Also focusing way too much on semantics and getting stuck in relatively minor details while mostly ignoring the bigger picture. Must have been pretty annoying for the interviewee to sit through...
For example: After 19:40, not finding it enough to say that Thermopylae was maybe a one-off and that there are multiple examples of Sparta surrendering instead of fighting to the last man, he has to exaggerate:
> Spartans surrender all the time.
Still an informative interview, though.