alt Hacker NewsSparta, their entire civilization basically atrophied because of it.
Replies
Sparta was built on slavery, their obsession with war was necessary to keep their slaves in check and deal with constant uprisings, it was very practical for their way of life.
No, it was because of the low fertility rate. Most powerful class in Sparta were rich widows, even kings had to borrow money from them.
Its also because they built it entirely on slaves and refused citizenship to most. 300 was an entertaining movie but it left out the slavery that was central to Sparta.
Sparta and Rome suffered from the same problem, actually. They approached it differently. Rome survived. Sparta didn't.
The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.
The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.
Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.
In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.
Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.
Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.
For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].
I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.
Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization
[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.
So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.
Sparta never really kicked butt, they just propagandized themselves as having done so in the past, even though their performance is pretty average compared to other city states (and very dependent on their tributaries and slaves, at that).
Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.
And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...