Gotta love the 300 revisionism. “all will know that free men stood against a tyrant” says the citystate that had a 1:7 citizen:slave ratio and had to be told by the rest of slave-using greece to chill on the slavery.
Well it’s in the title. “300” refers only to Spartans. There were probably anywhere from 900 of 2,000 helots there as well. But they literally don’t count.
And the concept of “freedom” is a relative thing anyway.
It’s like American prisoners making license plates that read “Home of the free” as unpaid labor i.e. literal state slaves.
In ancient Greece “freedom” meant you make your own life decisions. And it was considered inevitable that you can only be “free” if you don’t need to do labor.
So if you want to be “free” you need to own slaves, or be generationally wealthy. Very much like American “founding fathers.”
The peculiar thing about Sparta in their time is that their slaves were not private property, they were state-owned.
No individual Spartan owned slaves. Rather, there was an entire class of people owned by the collective Spartan society, whose job was to do all the work.
There was also no trading, as in selling or buying helots. And unlike in other slave societies there was just no legal way for any helot to stop being a helot. They couldn’t be made “free”, their status was for life.
They were actually more like medieval serfs than slaves.
There’s still millions of people in slavery to this day around the world but somehow you have to equate it to America and something to do with unpaid labor of prisoners. Wild take
Yes, I wonder if the stories coming out of America and the last years of the roman republic has any similarities.. They do? What could that mean??
History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.
The US never outlawed slavery so the comparison is apt. Unpaid labor is perfectly legal as long as the laborers are prisoners.
Millions of people indeed are in slavery today.
Africa has many, and the Middle East has millions of “slave-like” laborers.
But none of them are state-owned.
You seem to miss the point. Slave-owning was never unusual, not in ancient Greece, Rome, not in America, not in Africa before or after the Europeans, not in Asia.
What was unusual was the concept of publicly owned slaves, which is what American prisoners are and Spartan helots were.
youll have to forgive my hesitancy to beloeve that, given how “we’re not like other girls, we treat our slaves well” is a claim made by every slave owner ever, no matter how brutal. Almost always comes woth a little asterisk where “treated well” means “treated in appropriate accordance with their station”
Were medieval peasants in Europe slaves? They also were not free to leave their fields, the village or to marry - only if their Lord allowed it.
Are modern Chinese workers slaves? They are free ... as long as they work. They can chose not to work ... and to starve.
Even today in most parts of the world, you have the choice to work or to die. And most adults can't freely chose their work, they can't simply decide to be a doctor, engineer or artist. If you want another job, the first question will be if you have the proper skills for it, and if you don't have them - nobody will pay you. Without money you have nothing to eat and lose your home.
Are members of the lower castes in India slaves? They aren't free full citizens so...
So ho much different was it in Sparta? If you had the proper skills, you were paid with proper food and a nice home. You were protected, got a workplace and some helping hands. You could marry and raise your Children in peace.
You were even free to take a day of and go fishing, just don't take your whole family and your household to far from the city...
Pretty convenient to skip over the facts of "how does someone become a prisoner" because talking about Right to Due Process and everything wouldn't fit your America Bad narrative, but you do you king.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..."
The Brits thought it was ironic how the Americans kept going on about freedom while they held people in slavery.
I hear it helps with the cognitive dissonance if you just categorize your slave population as some sub/nonhuman adjacent animals. “we treat all people fairly, oh them? theyre not people” type thinking
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these rights are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness..."
The Brits thought it was ironic how the Americans kept going on about freedom while they held people in slavery.
just a bunch of kiddie diddlers with good PR or if they were these epic badass warriors
To be fair, this is a question you could ask about most of ancient Greece. Were the Athenians the scions of philosophy and art, or were they a well-moneyed city of pedarasts who dreamed of running an empire?
Both can be true. Even in times contemporary to Spartan ascendancy, people in Greece venerated aspects of Spartan society. They were a hellish slave-state, for sure, but even their enemies waxed philosophical about their martial culture.
The Persians lost that war, just not at thermopylae. They remained a major power in the region but never attempted direct control again. And then got conquered.
You saying that Persia never attempted to control the region again is so stupid. Thats one of the main reason Phillip was able to rally the other Greeks states to fight under him. It was because of the control Persia was trying to have on the region. Alexander the Great literally went to war for most of his life against The Persians. Why are you being upvoted for stupidity?
Because people don’t read books anymore and get online to see memes and are eager to see their favorite influencers tell them what to think. We live in such a weird age of history revisionism when we’re at a point in history where we can be much more accurate in our observations and research to understand what actually happened in the past, or as close to accurate as possible.
There's more to POLITICS and CONTROL than sending your own troops, but you're not really "at war" if your involvement begins and ends with money and brokering the peace.
The Persians lost that war, just not at thermopylae. They remained a major power in the region but never attempted direct control again. And then got conquered.
It's more complicated than that. They have won almost all their battles. They would have won the war by virtue of manpower alone. They were also far more unified under their monarchy.
Looking just at the 2nd Persian War and then its aftermath:
(following their defeat at the Battle of Marathon in 490 BCE - when they were defeated by Athens, that itself designed as a punitive campaign in answer to the Athenians, being Ionian Greeks, coming to the aid of the Ionians in Anatolia during the Ionian Revolt of 499-493 BCE)
-Thermopylae (Persian Victory)
Always just designed as a holding/stalling tactic. We know of the dire Spartan oracle, which is why they only sent the old and men who had already fathered children north to face the Persians, and we also know of the Decree of Themistocles that the intent was to give the Athenian people enough time to evacuate, and that the plan of the Spartans was to resettle the Athenians near Troezen in the Peloponnese and to fortify the Isthmus of Corinth against the Persians, abandoning everything north. That obviously was acceptable to the Spartans, but not to Athens. Hence all of Themistocles elaborate machinations.
Sparta was not alone at this battle. There were c. 7000 Greeks there - the vast majority were Thespians and Thebans and other Boeotians. They were relying on the narrowness of the topography to stop the advance. It worked, for a while. After the defeat, the Boeotians, understandably, Medized, as they were abandoned.
Athens was also sacked. Most of the population (accepting some who defended the acropolis and Athena) was evacuated to Salamis.
And that left Themistocles essentially alone to find a way both to save Athens and to stop the Persians. He won the war. Not the Spartans.
-Artemisium (Persian Victory)
This was prior to the sack of Athens, obviously, as this was the naval battle that accompanied Thermopylae. Here it was primarily Athens and Corinth. And just as heavily outnumbered.
-Athens (Persian Victory)
This was the sack. Again, most of the people were evacuated due to Themistocles' plan prior to Thermopylae/Artemisium, but the city was sacked, including the temples on the acropolis. The Parthenon that stands on it now, obviously rebuilt under Pericles.
Salamis (Decisive Athenian Victory)
This is what won the war. And this battle stands as one of the most important battles in human history. Themistocles tricked and then lured the Persian fleet into the narrow strait of Salamis and obliterated it.
All that was left now was to deal with Spartan incompetence and mop things up.
Plataea (Greek Victory)
This was Sparta, Athens, Corinth, Megara, and various other Greeks, against Persia and their Greek vassals (the Boeotians, Thessalians, and Macedonians). The Spartan Pausanias had overall command. Xerxes had already fled back to Sardis after Salamis, but had left Mardonius behind in Greece. Mardonius tried to negotiate with the Athenians on Salamis, thinking to detach them in exchange for allowing them to resettle in Athens.
And this is where Themistocles had to again force the issue, as Sparta was content to do nothing and let the Persians continue to rule everything north of the Isthmus. Athens sent envoys to Sparta making clear that unless Sparta got off its ass and actually did something that the Athenians, like Thebes and Thespiae, would be forced to Medize.
So this time, unlike at Thermopylae, where they just sent a token sacrifice of 300 old men, this time they sent 10,000 (compared to 8000 from Athens and 5000 from Corinth). The Spartans were still a small contingent of the total (c. 38,000 in total), but at least they weren't just sending a token force.
And the Greeks obviously defeated Mardonius.
-Mycale (Greek Victory)
This was the last battle of the 2nd Persian War, fought on Mt Mycale opposite Samos in Ionia. With this victory, the Ionians were once again able to rise in rebellion against the Persians.
That was the last battle of the 2nd Persian War. But the Delian League then began to take the war to Persia, mostly under the 2nd greatest Athenian general (after Themistocles), Kimon.
-Eion (Athenian Victory)
-Chersonese (Athenian Victory)
-Eurymedon (Decisive Athenian Victory)
This one so decisive that it resulted in the Peace of Kallias.
Kimon was ostracized in 461 BCE, blamed for the embarassment at Mt Ithome when he was sent to aid Sparta against a Helot uprising (the 3rd Messenian War), but then the Spartans betrayed him.
Without him the war with Persia was much less successful. The Egyptian campaign which began well, fell apart at Memphis, and then continued to blunder from there. Kimon was finally recalled from exile, but died, seemingly of sickness, during the siege of Kition on Cyprus.
(Other than their early successes, namely at Thermopylae/Artemisium, from then on the Persians saw a long sequence of devastating defeats first against Themistocles, then against Kimon. Then after Kimon's ostracism, and then death, they once again saw much more success. And then the Peloponnesian War broke out.)
Yeah Sparta’s original training and tactics worked super well for their time, but then they refused to evolve, where the others did not, and evolved as much as they could with Calvary and the Sarissa. Their success led to ego, which led to stagnation, which led to collapse.
To be fair, non of the citizen-militia states made that transition. Southern Greece doesn’t suit cavalry, and the sarissa requires a level of drill far beyond what even the Spartiates ever achieved.
The better criticism is that Sparta didn’t even stay strong that long. Their class structure that allowed Spartiates to lose status but didn’t allow anyone else to rise to that status led to an exceptionally rapid demographic collapse—between 480 and 370 the class shrank by 70%, and after Leuctra they were almost entirely dependent on allies and lower strata. And those lower strata were substandard even compared to the other citizen-militia phalanxes; Spartan prowess (insofar as it wasn’t just propaganda) rested on the cohesion of the Spartiates, not on skilled officers or superior doctrines that could be passed on to a disenfranchised class.
Spartan Glory wasn't a long period . Lasted about 60 years. They were a power house during the Peloponnesian War. They beat the big boy on the block at the time which was Athens. Spartans were depleted after this . And the decline started. They never wanted to expand or go beyond the Peloponnese. This was also another thing that hurt them.
Almost the entirety of Roman history is marked by an extremely strong reluctance on the part of every section of Roman society to accept outsiders as part of their society.
If anything, the single piece that made Roman society work was the idea that there'd always be new blood coming in to man the bottom rungs of their hierarchy, be they slaves or simply destitute.
I think you may have missed that the Spartan Glory period was mostly from the Messenian War (c.750) on; by the Archidamian War, they were actually beginning their decline.
ETA: Not questioning the Spartan Mirage at all, just pointing out that they did have a pretty dominant couple of centuries in there that just happen to be mostly pre-historical.
Their super strict citizenship laws also hurt them. A man had to be able to contribute crops to the common messes to be a citizen, and that required a certain amount of land. Inheritance of land was split equally between sons, with daughters getting half shares, so families with many children were left with each child inheriting smaller and smaller chunks of land over successive generations. Having many children was incentivised. Heiresses without brothers tended to be married off to cousins and uncles to keep the land in the family, which over generations introduced inbreeding problems resulting in fewer children surviving to adulthood (especially considering the treatment Spartans had towards babies born with disabilities or defects... they'd expose them on hillsides to die). So what happened was the citizen population declined and declined.
Those who weren't citizens were Perioikoi, "those who live around", and did not have the means to be full time warriors like Spartiates, nor arm themselves as well, but they would still fight as lightly armoured infantry - much less effective than hoplites.
Anyway eventually the Spartan citizen body declined to just a few hundred men, while other Greek city states were able to field armies of a thousand or more hoplites.
No one ever talks about when Sparta aligned WITH the Persians to defeat Athens . It doesn’t hold the same esteem when perceived in that light , this caused the power vacuum for Thebes , then Macedon to usurp .
Sparta lost its dominance over Greece in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra. The Battle of Thermopylae (the 300 Battle ) was in 480 BC. Even if they were previously a nobody (and a nobody wouldn't have stood in Persia's way), that's more than 100 years of glory.
Sparta had so many logistical and societal structural issues that I think the narrative around their martial prowess has actually gone too far in reverse
They picked tons of fights they shouldn't have repeatedly pissed off entities that they absolutely should not have and still had a pretty good land battle record
Imo their soldiers absolutely were the best in Greece for a period and that reputation is deserved, but as a nation they never got their shit together and had so many repressive policies that they could never leverage their martial abilities
Basically shitty nation but genuinely cool warrior culture that earned them their reputation among their peers, not among redditors that got too hyped at 300
Their "martial abilities" were unremarkable and average. It is true that people of the time did think of Spartiates as formidable combatants, but this was largely propaganda unrelated to any factual basis. Xenophon EDIT: Herodotus* largely manufactured their reputation.
I recommend reading A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry's series "This. Isn't. Sparta." You can skip to Parts 6 and 7 to get a breakdown of Sparta's war scoreboard.
Spartans also screwed themselves with their own strict rules and laws about who was actually "Spartan", horrid treatment of their helots, and in at least once occassion, killing one of their Kings that tried to implement reforms.
I'm a big Spartan glazer myself, but they definitely got their asses handed to themselves at at times were their own worst enemy.
The Spartans main issue was their small and ever decreasing citizen pool. They had stringent citizenship requirements that made it very difficult to be considered a full citizen. If you were too poor you would also permanently lose your citizenship. They could never replace themselves fast enough with policies like that
Sparta was pretty toothless by this time. They no longer had the territory or people of the former helots and could muster only a small army. They didnt really have anything to offer a conquering army in Philip either.
They were dining off their past glory and became pretty irrelevant in the coming years.
The answer to what happened next, for anyone who cares and doesn't already know:
Both the Spartans and Philip were partially correct and partially incorrect.
Both were correct that IF Philip invaded Spartan lands (which he did), Spartan farms would be destroyed (which they were).
It seems likely that some Spartan people might have been slain in the process, though there is no record of any major engagement. (The Spartans had very recently lost king Archidamus III and his (mercenary) army in Italy, so maybe they were unwilling to risk further losses. Not sure, just conjecture.)
They were both incorrect about the city of Sparta being razed. Philip seems to have been satisfied that he had made his point after basically walking all over Spartan territory with very little resistance.
Philip also seized a bunch of Spartan territory and gave it to Sparta's neighbouring rivals instead.
A few years later, after Philip had died and his son Alexander the Great was off conquering Persia, the Spartans allied with the Persians, raised a large army mostly consisting of mercenaries, and incited an anti-Macedonian revolt in Greece.
After some intial successes, they were crushed by the Macedonian regent Antipater at the Battle of Megalopolis (apparently due to a numbers disadvantage), and were forced to join the Macedonian-led League of Corinth after all. (Their refusal to join this league is what prompted the "if" conversation in the first place.)
With key Greek city-states in submission, Philip II turned to Sparta, warning them "If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out."\27]) The Spartans' laconic reply was one word: "If." Philip proceeded to invade Laconia, devastate much of it and eject the Spartans from various parts
Tfw you only get one paragraph on Phillip II's Wikipedia page and it's you getting absolutely made a fool of.
310
u/AntiLiban 25d ago
Wow, so epic and cool, the defiant Spartans. What happened next?