Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
worldhistory.substack.com
worldhistory.substack.com
(Edit, the author is Bret C. Devereaux)
And a long-running series on the "Fremen myth", which is similar to the retro-spective glorification of/mythology around Sparta. https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
At any rate, that blog is a must read for any history-myth-debunker, especially around military. Also highly recommended is their analysis of the LotR battles and campaigns, which fare well historicaly, and the GoT, which ... doesn't.
He also does medieval game reviews!
You never HAVE to visit the site if you subscribe. I still DO, but that little fact is highly appreciated.
I do prefer to go to the blog because the blog handles footnotes better (hover works on desktop to show them in a popup, and tapping on them works correctly with the back button on mobile), and often the footnotes are really good.
To me the most surprising thing is that Deveraux considers Lord of the Rings more grounded on history than Game of Thrones, when GoT was "sold" to audiences as a grittier, more realistic take on medieval fantasy. But very little in GoT makes any "medieval" sense, it's almost entirely fantasy with a "grimdark" tone instead of a fairy tale/folklore tone.
(Which, like Devereaux points out, would be perfectly acceptable as artistic license ... if only GoT hadn't been sold to us as "more realistic" by George Martin!)
But I'll look at the article, I've read other ACOUP stuff and enjoyed.
For example, the city of Gondor seems like a giant fortress without any fields or farmers working outside its walls to sustain it. This even before any siege. So what do they eat?
Tolkien wouldn't have made this mistake, it's likely Jackson's. And I understand why: people want to see epic battles, farmers doing their thing are a low cinematic priority.
> IMO Game of Thrones has more "realism" in the behaviors of people vis-à-vis each other, and at least some semblance of feudal castes, at least in Westeros
Devereaux argues precisely the contrary, that LotR is more realistic than GoT at presenting faux-medieval societies and the feudal caste! Perhaps Tolkien simply did his research better... or that simply by taking medieval and ancient literature as his sources, he got it better.
He has quite a bit to say about the system of vassallage as depicted in GoT, as well as the relationship between the Church and both the common people and the nobles. Devereaux argues that the cynical take in GoT, i.e. that most nobles didn't believe in their religion and only cynically used it when it suits their purposes (which is the norm, not the exception in GoT!) is at odds with the real middle-ages.
Also, none of Deveraux's objections focus on obviously fantasy things like zombies or dragons, he's not trying to score cheap points, and he explicitly states he's living magic & dragons out of the equation. No realistic explanation could come out of them, anyway.
Again, none of this would be a problem if we accepted GoT as pure fantasy (as I do, by the way -- I'm a fan), but it was actually hyped as "more realistic"!
My memory of Lord of the Rings is that the Shire mostly makes sense, but outside of the Shire, the world doesn't totally add up. The Roharim seem like romanticized Ango-Saxon eorls, but basically on grass plains and without obvious agriculture, the elves kind of just magically subsist, Orthanc is populated with orcs going through a secret industrial revolution without a food supply, large stretches of the world are basically empty... Once out of the Shire I don't really remember there being serfs or peasants or churches or much agriculture. It's possible my memory is betraying me, though.
That said my view on why there's a perception of Game of Thrones as more realistic than "most fantasy" is that in the 1200s through 1600s there really was a ton of plotting and power seeking, and a ton of violence, and social status really was a huge determinant of who could do what and how much would be overlooked. And lots of fantasy pre GoTs had various kinds of chosen one narratives, with side of light overcoming obvious evil, with middle ages trappings being little more than window dressing on permutations of Luke Skywalker or just sort of pre modern alternative societies. While GoTs goes hard on the violence, corruption, actual class differences, and power struggle plotting, and mostly does so without basing those things on magical or spiritual alignments. So IMO it's got flaws and is not a fantasy retelling of the real middle ages, but just clears a low bar of not really romanticizing feudalism and having power struggles that are more people-driven.
I do think Tolkien is much more influenced by and matches way more pre-1200s stuff. And particularly things like the Hobbit, his outside LoTR writings, fit super well into what I'd label kind of the "Beowulf to Egil" sort of era/time period.
I do agree that the relationship of religion and behavior in the middle ages is very hard to understand from a modern perspective - and I don't think it's some GoTs even tries at. (Though obviously we did eventually get the reformation because the divide between the Bible and the Church grew too large and too obvious, but it's also not very likely the case that those precipitating the reformation disbelieved.)
They enter into popular culture, get mythologized, and all nuance flies out the window.
His work is also really well sourced, so it's a great jumping off point if you are looking for more work on the subject.
His sparta series, and the fremen series are absolutely outstanding.
That’s why I love his blog. His reading recommendations are almost all very approachable to non-historians and are always fascinating, especially the books that look at the nitty gritty details of warfare.
I just read Waging War by Wayne E. Lee based off of his recommendation from his logistics/command collections and it’s been a great read start to finish about innovation in warfare (in the broadest sense).
But, we should keep in mind the stakes, right? He provides a compelling argument that, actually, Sparta was not even that great at marshaling up a bunch of guys with big spears. That’s a nice beachhead in the conversation as to whether Spartan values are valuable, if you think they aren’t.
But even if he is wrong, what does it mean? Big groups of guys with spears don’t win wars nowadays anyway so even if we think a value system’s ability to win wars is very important (pretty questionable!) spartan-ism is obviously much worse than something like liberal democracy, which produced nukes and stealth bombers which could kill, like, endless numbers of spear guys (however good they are at lining up).
That's exactly what happened with South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan: as soon as we pulled out "victorious", the newly-established allied regime was unable to defend itself against North Vietnam / ISIS / the Taliban (respectively).
The US can destroy anyone by one guy pressing a button.
On the other hand, to win a non-nuclear war in the modern age, you need clever political positioning and a realistic end goal as well as battlefield results. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 2.0 were all unwinnable no matter how well you fought.
I'd be interested in another historian's take if different. I'm reasonably confident that they will be similar to Devereaux's take though, so I'm not looking.
https://newcriterion.com/article/the-spartan-way-of-war/
I don't think he is that adrift from Devereaux in his assessment of Sparta though.
I just feel the need to clarify that Devereaux is barely left-leaning. He keeps his politics pretty firmly out of his blogs for the most part, but when he does break out politics he's pretty clearly very close to the center relative to what we think today when we hear "left" and "right".
As a historian (and, I believe, a good one), he seems to see the complexity of the current partisan dynamic too clearly to dogmatically pick a side.
He wrote a hysterical philippic [1] just before the election calling Trump a fascist, which was written with about the same level of historical rigour as the Paul Krugman's rants exhibit for economics.
You may argue that "Trump is a fascist" and you are entitled to that view, but that is not a centrist view, and is at odds with the majority of the US population, which voted for Trump.
[1] https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...
The majority of the US population did not vote for him. Only a portion could vote, and only a portion of those voted, and out of those 49.9% voted for him.
What was the participation? 60% or so? I think so. So maybe 30-35% of the people who could have voted for him actually did. In the US population large portions are unable to vote. You correctly pointed out the very young, but also the pre-adolescent young, the disobedient, the non-citizen, the precarious worker, the infirm and so on should also be included.
So the majority you had in mind is rather small compared to what you literally compared it to. I'm guessing the result feels like 'the will of the people' to you anyway? Do you feel like most usians approved of the current regime? Do you also think that 'the will of the people' is inherently democratic? Inherently good, even?
The result feels as much the will of the people as any other US election result.
I thought I did. But now I'm learning that 49-something percent is a majority, so I'm questioning all my beliefs.
There have only been a couple of posts where he discusses current politics, so that is all I have to go on.
However, from reading his material, I think it would be fair to say he is against the "great man of history" theory, which tends to be a more left wing interpretation.
¹ Not to me, I won't read it. I don't care and I've heard enough fascism apologetics on HN in the last few years.
I don't think his fremen analogy of tying fremen to contemporary Roman era barbarian tribes works well at all. If you read Dune and know alot about it(I do) fremen would not be a good analogy for alot of the barbarian tribes Rome encountered during its empire formation. For one the whole timeline on the encounter is quite wrong. With Rome you have a very large and technologically superior civilization that encounters and conquerors tribes relatively quickly. After the tribe is subdued they are now part of the empire and must pay tribute through taxes and military service. They do get the added benefits of Roman protection and those that defy the empire and put down quickly and brutally. Aside from this you have religion and technology. The tribes do not have a unified religion and after conquest stuck to their beliefs for the most part but slowly took on the occupiers beliefs. As for technology you have a vastly superior technology(iron age) in Rome meeting bronze age technology which was defeated by iron age Roman technology.
As for the Fremen they are a society apart from the empire and house Atreides and Harkonnen. They live on the world Arrakis in great numbers but do not need to pay any tribute or taxes and are viewed with suspicion by the leaders of both houses(brutally by the Harkonnens). The houses and the empire just want the spice melange and do not really care about integrating the fremen peoples into the empire and using them in other worlds for various jobs. The houses controlled Arrakis for at least 1 thousand years(unsure exactly how long) and there is a quite distinct culture between the occupiers and occupied. With religion you have a unified religion that the Fremen adhere too(discretley influenced by the Bene Gesserit), and fremen technology it is not all about knives and fists. The Fremen control sandworms using hooks and ropes(no other people in the universe know or can do this) and also Paul Atreides introduces the fighters to the sound weapons his house has developed.
I think the more apt comparison of the Fremen is the peoples of Afghanistan. Here you have a people that have never really been conquered, they all tried: (Alexander the great, Soviets, USA) that have a unified religion(Islam) and use contemporary technology(ak-47, missile launchers etc) to achieve stunning military victories against a much larger more powerful foes and occupiers. So the Fremen ideal is not a mirage you are just looking at the wrong cultural comparisons.
IIRC the two main things are that one of the main athenian sources greatly admired sparta and wanted athens to be more like it, so was actually biased in the other way than you'd expect. And in the other sources it's clear that some degree of respect for sparta's history and military tenacity was common among at least the athenian elite whose views we have access to.
Also in an extended conflict in a complex political environment involving other military powers, it can sometimes be to your benefit to acknowledge or even inflate the might of your enemy. A polity's regional stature is not improved by having a hard time defeating a weak opponent. So to some extent athenians probably contributed to sparta's enduring reputation as a formidable military power.
So yeah the sources are biased but mainly in ways that an informed-enough reader can recognize and account for and still draw useful information from them, albeit carefully. Which, I learned from this blog, is a big part of the actual practice of the discipline of history.
Woof. The Spartans were famous for their disdain for flowery words. Herodotus discussed it explicitly, and Thucydides reflected it when writing Spartan dialogue. They preferred to speak plainly and get straight to the point. This common understanding of spartan speech is even enshrined in the English language, via the word 'laconic', meaning "using few words".
Before sharing your insights with the world, do try to make sure you know what you're talking about.
Molon Labe, as it is used in popular culture today, is not being used as a stealth call to go back to the popular understanding of Spartan virtues, let alone secretly a call to go back to real Spartan organization.
It just means don't take my guns, and a vague threat of violence if you try. Nothing more.
> As a new generation of people adopts the Spartans as historical role models, we should understand that they’re probably telling us more about themselves than the actual people who lived in Sparta more than two millennia ago.
Nobody is actually invoking anything beyond the absolutely most superficial "Spartanness" and going deep into "Well, actually, the Spartans were not nice people if you dig deeply into the truth" is not relevant when nobody else is digging that deeply. To a first approximation nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess".
Despite all the sensitivity in the university system in the past 5-10 years, I've never even heard a whiff of a suggestion that Michigan State University needs to change its mascot... because nobody, not even the educated and politically sensitive, thinks anything about Spartans beyond "vaguely Grecian" and "good warriors I guess". If anyone had any sort of real knowledge about the situation it would have been considered extremely extremely insensitive... but nobody thinks about these things. Hard to get much more proof than that.
> "nobody knows anything about the Spartans beyond.."
"Sparta" is a "symbol" in our culture's "language of symbols" which stands roughly for "brutal and effective masculine warrior ethic, worthy of respect and fear". It is probably the single most unambiguous symbol available for this kind of thing, and is therefore used constantly—when somebody wants to make an argument like "might makes right", or "what if we didn't care about other people", or "men must be strong, austere, and violent to be worthy of respect", a reference to Sparta is never far away. Even when they don't make explicit reference to Sparta, it lends credibility to these sorts of ethics. It acquires its power from the fact that it actually existed in history and was seemingly successful, that it lives on with a generally admiring connotation, that it stands for the pinnacle of achievement in a certain sense.
The point of an attack on the historical accuracy of the symbolic Sparta is to weaken the power of the symbol to be used for evil. It did not exist as remembered, nor for all that long, it was not particularly effective, the admiration of Sparta has been concocted after-the-fact by commentators trying to fit it into their agendas, it was not as brutal as it is imagined to be, nor was it particularly important in history. It was just a weird and particularly unpleasant culture that existed at one point.
These are attacks on the structural integrity of a whole set of ideas which are regularly used to justify cruelty, abuse, and violence, and which mislead people—young men especially—as to the nature of virtue.
That it is sometimes used harmlessly doesn't have much to do with this at all.
Words mean what they mean as intended by the people who use them, but they also have history. Also and especially, phrases have history. Keeping not only the original language but also the original alphabet/script/glyphs/characters strongly call back to that history.
> [A Spartan mother], as she handed her son his shield, exhorted him, saying, "Either this or upon this."
The Loeb editor comments: "[Attributed] to Gorgo by Aristotle in his Aphorisms, as quoted by Stobaeus, Florilegium VII.31, but it is often spoken of as a regular Spartan custom. Cf., for example, the scholium on Thucydides II.39. Ancient writers were not agreed whether the second half meant to fall upon the shield (dead or wounded) or to be brought home dead upon it. In support of the second (traditional) interpretation cf. Moralia 235A, and Valerius Maximus II.7 ext. 2."
Valerius Maximus II.7 ext. 2 is "maternarum blanditiarum memores, quibus [...] monebantur ut aut vivi cum armis in conspectum earum venirent aut mortui in armis referrentur" — "remembering their mothers' admonition [...] that they should next be seen alive with their armor or reported dead in it."
Plutarch's Moralia 235A, in the Sayings of Spartans, is a verse attributed to Dioscurides: "Lifeless to Pitane came, on his shield upborne, Thrasybulus..."
Moralia 235B supplies my new favorite laconism:
> When Philip of Macedon sent some orders to the Spartans by letter, they wrote thus in reply: "As to what you wrote about: No."
"I just bet those Spartans would be coal rolling me in their diesel Ford F-350's with their lifted tires and MAGA bumpter stickers today if they could!"
It wasn't just about being tough. The Mongols had good operational doctrine. Here's a modern evaluation by a U.S. Army officer.[1] They used intelligence and mobility to dominate the battlefield with smaller forces than their opponents. They had a good system for selecting leaders with a track record of winning. They were surprisingly good at planning, and at coordinating large units. That's how you win wars.
The Mongol Empire collapsed due to internal political problems. No external enemy could take them down.
[1] https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/Dir...
I am Spartan. I grew up in Sparta, Greece. I am in my "ancient Sparta" reading phase for some months now, I read everything from (modern) Greek, Foreign authors and researchers, as well as ancient texts with references to Sparta (even books/scrolls about "Helen of Troy" or as we call her in Greece/Greek "beautiful Helene" - Ωραία Ελένη.
There is SO MUCH to know about (Ancient) Sparta.
Two Kings? - Check
City without Walls? (who would be crazy enough to attack?) - Check
Simple legislation? (one written Law - Lycurgus) - Check (debatable - depends on the book/scroll)
One prison cell - 4 walls, no ceiling, you stay in until some other criminal is convicted and replaced you (not much crime back in the day) - Check
Anyway.. for anyone who hasn't read about Ancient Sparta, it is one of the 'things' that reading it will fulfill you.
Fun fact for the movie 300. The producers sent photographers and photographed the valley, mountains, made an actual scenery of the landscape. I remember watching the movie and understanding where EXACTLY they had placed their cameras from the angle of the mountains, etc. I later asked around and they verified my suspicion. One issue though.. they they started "marching north" towards Thermopylae, in reality/in the real landscape they walked to the SOUTH, and I remember watching the movie in Athens, and apparently it was me and some other Spartan in the audience, so we both yelled at that point "hey malakes, you are going the wrong way"
One last thing. Perhaps for the foreigners the most famous phrase is "μολων λαβε". For Greeks (I bet you!) is "ή ταν ή επί τας" which literally translates to "either THE or ON THE", which means "I will either walk back CARRYING my/THE shield, or I will be brought back dead CARRIED ON my/THE shield" (apologies for the caps)
I was primed to agree with the article's premises, until...
> Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack?
...is this really the moral of the story here? That the Spartans should've just surrendered? That the proper response to a superior force (of another oligarchical, slave-dependent society) wanting to subjugate you into said oligarchical, slave-dependent society is to... simply roll over and let it happen?
That's the real irony here about the Moron Rubes. They envision themselves as Spartans defending Greece from the Persian onslaught, but they have much more in common with Ephialtes.
The best and most recent example of that, for a modern American, would be the USSR. You do come across similar processes with, say, Chinese or Arabs, but they're not explicit enemies, and there's more cultural integration and exchange in those cases.
My interest in Sparta is that it exemplifies how elite a group of people can become when they focus on one thing. As mentioned in the article, Sparta beat Athens in the Second Peloponnesian War. Athens was the naval and intellectual powerhouse of the area at the time, yet the unsophisticated specialized warmongers won. It illustrates that in life hyperfocusing can yield results. I do not forget that Sparta was an oppressive and brutal society that I in no way would want to live in. I do not idealize their caste culture or slaveholding, but sometimes the bad guys win, and Sparta is a colorful example of that.
> Leonidas’ 300 men made a brave stand in the mountains, and a superior Persian force wiped them out. You can see it like the Nazis did and the guys in the ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ T-shirts do, as a glorious battle in which an honorable band of brothers sacrificed their lives for their principles. Or you can see it as a tragedy in which the leaders of an oligarchical, slave-dependent society threw away their finest soldiers’ lives, and for what? To briefly delay the Persian Army while failing to achieve their goal of protecting Athens and the rest of northern Greece from the Persian attack?
Interestingly, the Greeks did end up fending off the Persian invasion due to the victory at the Battle of Salamis where the Athenian navy crushed the Persian navy. The Spartan stand at Thermopylae was critical to delay the invasion though, let's not pretend like those deaths were futile.
Except they weren't particularly elite. As (already mentioned) A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry author Bret Devereaux points out[1]: "Instead, what we might say is that the Spartans phalanx was, in most respects, just like every other Greek hoplite phalanx, with the addition that Spartan command and coordination was somewhat better, but hardly excellent by the broader standards of antiquity."
And, as he also observes, any Spartan superiority didn't manifest on the battlefield:
Spartan Victories: 18.5, Spartan Defeats: 18, Draws: 1.5, Spartan Batting Average (victories/battles): 0.486
1. https://acoup.blog/2019/09/20/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
Does Thermopylae count as a loss by this definition? As I'm sure it does, that doesn't dispel much of the myth of the prowess of the individual Spartan warrior, which is really what I find intriguing about the whole thing.
One of the Spartan losses is when they decide to pretend to not be Spartan so they can surprise their opponents with their skill, but they turn out instead to be utterly wrecked by their opponents. The Spartans really do seem to be mediocre fighters (not good, but not bad either) with a stellar PR agency.
There are better examples of forces that were actually good, even if they are less flattering in pop culture. For example, there is a reason why the Romans ended up controlling the Mediterranean and not the Spartans.
What do you emulate from King Leopold's "colorful" subjugation of the Congo? How do you coach subordinates to follow the example of the conquistadors who plundered Latin America?
Are we so short of winning "good guys" that we must plumb the depths of evil for role models?
> The very structure of their thought has been conditioned by the contradictions of the concrete, existential situation by which they were shaped. Their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors. This is their model of humanity.
— Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Why not? There's a saying about babies and bathwater or something.