til heckin throwin babies off cliffs isnt protofascism
also i feel like the whole 300 analogy is dumb as fuck. my us history lesson was all like 'athens is democracy like america so athens good. sparta communism like evil russia so sparta bad.' thebes? we dont talk about the sacred band of thebes
til heckin throwin babies off cliffs isnt protofascism
Of course it isn't. Having 7 slaves for every free citizen isn't protofascism either
and that's the bottom of the historical range, it was probably between 8 to 1 and 9 to 1
Oh fuck. I didn't know it was somehow worse than 7:1. At that point I'm honestly shocked that you could somehow have a functioning society that looked like that
I'm just going by my memory of what the acoup blog says, I might be misremembering
It's worse than even that, not only were at least 7 out of 10 people in the Spartan territories Slaves who were literally killed for fun and ritual (though arguably only during a 50 year period at the end of Spartan dominance), A majority of the rest were citizens of occupied client city states who acted as their proletariat and Merchant class under threat of being enslaved. There were probably never more than 10,000 "True" Spartans, and possibly never more than 3000.
On the other hand, Athens had fuck tons of slaves, treated its client states pretty much as slaves ("the weak suffer what they must" is an Athenian phrase) and treated their women, even upper class in a nightmare fuel way.
The only class that seemed to really enjoy being Spartan was the Upper Class Women, who due to the high male death rate and the free inheritance laws ended up ruling most of the land and openly defying the Kings and male nobility.
As an aside, there are only two Spartan poets of note, both from centuries before the Persian Wars when Sparta was more chill. One is terrible and full of chud imagery. The other, Alcman, is rumoured to be a freed slave, some scholars even say they were a woman, mostly due to fragments like this one, about a girl in a chorus at a festival being very, very horny about two of her associates.
And I sing 40 the radiance of Agido, seeing her as the sun, which for us is shown by Agido—she is the eyewitness to shine [phainein] with its sunlight. But for me to praise [ep-aineîn] her or to blame [mōmēsthai] her is not allowed by the glorious [kleenna] leader of the chorus [khorēgos = Hagesikhora] 45 No, she does not allow me. For that one [Hagesikhora] appears radiantly to be outstanding, as when someone sets among grazing cattle a horse, well-built, a prize-winner, with thundering hooves, something from out of those dreams that happen underneath a rock. 50 Don’t you see? One is a racehorse from Paphlagonia. But the mane of the other one, my kinswoman Hagesikhora, blossoms on her head like imperishable gold. 55 And the silver look of her face— what can I tell you openly? She is Hagesikhora. But whoever is second to Agido in beauty, let her be a Scythian horse running against a Lydian one.
the funniest part to me is 300 refers only to the number of spartiates, they had a few thousands literal slaves with them to act as light infantry. then they pretend there were only 300 of them fighting
Never forget that it wasn’t just 300 Spartans at the pass. But it WAS 300 gay lovers that beat the entire Spartan army suck it modern narratives also Persia was like THE most progressive and least oppressive ancient state.
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https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
has some libshit but methodically destroys the myth of Sparta
Didn't Sparta get 300 Spartiates killed at Thermopylae and then coast off of that until the collapsed due to their contradictory society?
Yeah, that's a great series but he desperately keeps trying to compare Sparta to North Korea, and the whole time I'm reading, I'm like "no dude, the US is clearly the modern equivalent and we basically treat the global south as our helots." The shit about them stalking and killing the helots throughout their rural countryside was basically just ancient Contra-type shit like we've supported throughout Latin America.
While browsing that blog I found this:
I want to pause here. I am being a bit bloodless talking about this, because I want my point to be clear. But just so we understand each other: using barrel bombs against civilians is monstrous. Using poison gas at all is monstrous. Assad is a monster.
:who-must-go:
and there are five OPCW whistleblowers who say the Douma gas attack was a fabrication
When I read that second tweet, my brain skipped over the word "resisting" and was like, "yeah, this guy's right; baby-murdering, slave-owning Spartaite fucks! Why is he in the dunk tank?"
Then I re-read it, and :yea:
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/
Thanks I was gonna link this. The guy is a massive lib, but this series of posts is top notch.
