[HN Gopher] Sparta Was Much More Than an Army of Super Warriors
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Sparta Was Much More Than an Army of Super Warriors
Author : oedmarap
Score : 40 points
Date : 2021-09-30 20:26 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.smithsonianmag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.smithsonianmag.com)
| ncmncm wrote:
| Or, much less than an army of super warriors. They did not win
| more battles than their rivals. I think of them as Greece's FARC,
| distinguished mainly by their abuse of their own children and
| everyone they depended on for their own survival.
| anonporridge wrote:
| Do you have a source that dives more into this? Specifically
| breaking down how they weren't actually more effective,
| contrary to what might be considered common belief.
| dingoegret12 wrote:
| It's not popular belief, it's popular culture. The onus is on
| the myth makers to substantiate their claims. The idea of
| super soldiers is anthological comedy. It's fantasy.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28711149
|
| Specifically, part VI and VII of that series.
|
| > In short: Sparta's overall military performance is
| profoundly average over the Classical period. They don't even
| manage a winning record!
|
| > It is hard to avoid the conclusion that while Spartan
| tactics may have been modestly better than most other Greek
| states, Spartan operations were dismal, placing severe limits
| on how effectively the Spartan army could be utilized.
| labster wrote:
| But they did have a winning record. Every year they
| declared war on the helots and every year they won!
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I think Sparta was overrated militarily, but logically, a
| great army may still have a losing record, because the only
| people who would even dare fight them are ones who think
| they can actually win. Imagine all of the wars which were
| _never even fought_ , because their enemies were scared of
| their army.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The (long, but worthwhile) series goes through that
| concept.
| igorkraw wrote:
| A sister comment linked to this wonderful takedown of the
| brutal misery that was Sparta
|
| https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-
| sparta-p...
| myfartsarefoul wrote:
| Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they had
| great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they have fought
| poorly matched battles for the sake of conserving resources,
| etc?
|
| I don't care about Sparta one way or another. But simply
| "looking at numbers" can be deceiving.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| I don't understand the point of the article. In quantitative
| terms one can say that Y was better than X. Like: Usa in the 20th
| century was better at creating technology. Why does the author
| need to emphasize that Spartans were no better than other Greeks
| as warriors as it's a bad thing? It's not discimination or racism
| or whatever. I think it's because in modern times saying Y is
| better than X is bad. Except for in sports. Weird.
| zardo wrote:
| >Why does the author need to emphasize that Spartans were no
| better than other Greeks as warriors as it's a bad thing?
|
| It's a popular trope, and it's not true.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Well I am Greek and had read a lot of stuff also at school
| about it. In ancient Greece they were considered as such. How
| do you know it's a trope? Statistical data?
| AmateurAtMost wrote:
| Yes, statistical analysis of their victories and defeats.
| It's an excellent book. I'd recommend it.
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Book name?
| myfartsarefoul wrote:
| Are the battle outcomes fair comparisons? What if they
| had great warriors but poor decision makers? Could they
| have fought poorly matched battles for the sake of
| conserving resources, etc?
|
| I don't care about Sparta one way or another. But simply
| "looking at numbers" can be deceiving.
| dragontamer wrote:
| It doesn't matter how "tough" Spartans were. They were
| largely illiterate and terrible at logistics. Its hard to
| win battles when you're terrible at supply lines. And its
| hard to keep track of supplies if you don't know how to
| read or write.
|
| ----------
|
| I've commonly heard that Spartans were good at fighting
| but bad at war. Turns out that a band of illiterate
| warriors is largely a bad idea for an army composition.
| If the war goes on too long, they simply run out of
| supplies and leave (Or, if they're forced to fight, they
| run out of supplies and lose)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ever since decisive battles stopped being a thing with
| industrialization, I know one European country that
| started and lost two world wars due deficits in strategy,
| operations and supply. Tactically it wasn't too bad so.
| [deleted]
| LanceH wrote:
| This reminds me of my relatively new pet peeve when watching any
| military element in a movie. Every time they gather in a room,
| the soldiers arrange themselves at attention as scenery. I get
| that it's mostly symbolic of how organized and dedicated they
| are, but having been in the military, the last thing a soldier is
| looking to do is stand at attention.
|
| Movie soldiery (wide term to include knights, personal
| bodyguards, etc...) have this innate knowledge on how to form
| ranks and break ranks in perfect unison with no commands.
|
| The professional military is relatively rare throughout history,
| but is somehow idealized and projected onto those factions which
| did well militarily. Realistically the Spartans only had to be a
| little better man for man than those around them in order to be
| the best in the world.
| hef19898 wrote:
| My pet peeve are troops holding positions and ranks (who would
| do fight rank and file on a modern battle field?), only break
| formation and charge (at running speed as if sprinting
| increases damage by 1D10 in real life) the enemy, screaming
| heroically. Hotzendorff and Codorna would be proud.
| pmcpinto wrote:
| On Sparta by Plutarch is an amazing book about the Spartan
| civilization
| xqcgrek2 wrote:
| The Spartans had a good marketing and merchandising department.
| pbaka wrote:
| Branded loincloth ?
| ldargin wrote:
| Good one!
| ldbooth wrote:
| I was surprised to learn spartan society had pedophilia built in
| similar to a mentor system. Will Durant wrote about it, but I
| never hear anything in pop culture except the warrior bit.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Twink and bear has a long history.
|
| > The word eromenos describes an adolescent boy who is the
| passive (or 'receptive', 'subordinate') partner in a homosexual
| relationship (usually between males), opposite to the word
| erastes (to love, the older and active partner) in Ancient
| Greece.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eromenos
| foldr wrote:
| 'Twink' doesn't really connote a passive role though (you can
| be a twink and a top). Similarly for 'bear'. Twinks can also
| be post-adolescent. So I don't think 'twink' and 'bear' are
| very good translations of these terms, which are based on
| quite a different conception of gay relationships than the
| one we have now.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Happy to concede that it's more vague gesturing at "Look, a
| similar thing was happening 3,000 years ago and is
| happening today" than the same thing but it's not like it's
| unrecognisable.
| foldr wrote:
| I wouldn't connect gay 'tribes' with sex between
| adolescents and adults. Twinks aren't canonically
| underage or in relationships with older men.
| lrem wrote:
| Wasn't that all of ancient Grece?
| neaden wrote:
| I think a big thing people miss with the Spartans is that they
| didn't see themselves as the ideal warriors, they saw themselves
| as the ideal Greek citizens. Part of that was being a warrior,
| just as part of being a citizen in Athens was doing your military
| service. But because of the enforced equality among the (slave
| and land owning) citizen class, they were all expected to serve
| in the same manner and have time for poetry, hunting, and the
| other activities that a proper Greek citizen should do.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| That's really more of a myth than reality. If you read actual
| reports of Spartan self reported history, they always report
| that they _were_ equal in some mythical past, not that they
| _are_ equal in the author's current time.
|
| In reality there were pretty severe socio-economic differences
| even among the slave holding citizen class. The equality among
| the citizens is really propaganda, not reality.
| neaden wrote:
| Sure that's true. I just think the military aspect of it is
| what gets focused on to the exclusion of everything else.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The Helots of Sparta were ritually slaughtered every year by
| the Spartanite upper-class. That was how one graduated from the
| Crypteia "school" of Sparta and became a man.
|
| And needless to say: when the Helots weren't part of a ritual
| slaughter by the upper class, they were looked down upon,
| distrusted, and scapegoated as the ills of Spartan society.
| Beatings of the Helots were ritual in nature: Helots didn't
| need to do anything wrong to "deserve" a beating. It was simply
| necessary to ensure that the Helots would never rise up against
| the aristocrats / Spartan elite.
|
| The whole "equality" thing is just a myth and whitewashing of
| history. Spartans were awful people living in awful times.
|
| > have time for poetry
|
| Much of we know about Spartans is from what Athenians wrote
| about them, because Spartans were largely illiterate (and
| prideful of that too). Hard to have time for poetry if you
| didn't have time in your youth to even learn how to read /
| write.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| > Hard to have time for poetry if you didn't have time in
| your youth to even learn how to read / write.
|
| The Illiad and Oddyssey were composed and passed down by
| illiterate bards. Epic poetry has always been a fundamentally
| oral thing.
|
| For examples of this see Serbian epic poetry
|
| > Many of the epics are about the era of the Ottoman
| occupation of Serbia and the struggle for the liberation.
| With the efforts of ethnographer Vuk Karadzic, many of these
| epics and folk tales were collected and published in books in
| the first half of the 19th century. Up until that time, these
| poems and songs had been almost exclusively an oral
| tradition, transmitted by bards and singers.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_epic_poetry
| bennylope wrote:
| If you like this there's a meaty seven part blog series by
| historian Bret Devereaux about the mythology surrounding Sparta.
| It offers an account of what Sparta and the Spartan military was
| really like as well as how the Spartan mythos evolved.
|
| https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
| arisAlexis wrote:
| Opinion is a big part of history. One historian's analysis is
| not fefinitive proof rather a view that may be close to the
| truth.
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(page generated 2021-09-30 23:00 UTC)