History Lessons: Ancient Sparta (Part II)

If you haven't already, make sure to check out the first part to this lesson on Ancient Sparta.

Work ethic

The Spartan appetite for hard work was legendary and ferocious. They were universally tireless slave owners, a breed apart from the gin-sipping, porch-sitting slaver of the American colonies, a stereotype sadly responsible for giving slavery a bad name. Their workers were a race known as the helots, although the term “race” is misleading. The helots were Caucasian, as city elders determined it uneconomical to first discover and then trek all the way to Sub-Saharan Africa to capture some blacks.

In an interesting case of foreshadowing, the helots staged their own civil rights movement in the form of a violent rebellion, but were unsuccessful due to the lack of underground railroads, airplanes, or buses on which to stage protests.

Take note: if you’re planning a civil rights movement, center it around a mass transit system

The complete lack of moral philosophy in Spartan culture may also have played a role.

 

Equality

While Sparta might not be remembered as the great democracy that Athens was, it was undeniably egalitarian. Equality was ensured through a complex system of taxation, stringent rules on property ownership, and a rigorous policy of infanticide to weed out the weak and crippled.

This policy was enforced on the battlefield with the expectation that every soldier would profit from a campaign in equal proportion to the others, or as happened more frequently, suffer an equally brutal death.

Sparta was however notoriously backwards as regards education, in that their girls received some. Unfortunately, the decision to educate women predated the cliché that “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” The influential role of women in Spartan society and their limited vocabulary of “fight,” “war,” and “stabby-stabby” are thought to have been largely responsible for much of Sparta’s constant campaigning.

Whoever educated Condoleezza Rice has a lot to answer for

Whoever named her, even more so

 

Battle

The policy of Fight, War, Stabby-Stabby was put into effect in the Spartans’ infamous stand at Thermopylae in 480 BC. Several months prior, Emperor Xerxes (Sexrex, really?) of Persia had crossed into Europe with an army some say was a million strong,  though fully a fifth of these were nubile young nymphs used for servicing the Emperor’s prodigious, sexy appetite. And some of these were female.

Three hundred Spartans, their helot attendants, and several thousand Peloponnesians met the Persians at Thermopylae, a narrow mountain pass overlooking the sea which trapped the advancing Persian army in a bottleneck. Several days of vicious fighting ensued, resulting in the eventual destruction of the valiant Greeks. The heavy cost in men and great delay taught Xerxes a valuable lesson: candlelight and oiled skin really help to take the edge off morally ambiguous child sex. Ok, well Xerxes wasn’t paying attention. But everyone else learned this: a rocky cliff is a dangerous place to have a battle.

Following the Persian victory at Thermopylae, the Greeks staged their last ditch defense at Plataea. Its unremarkable, gradual, downhill slope was calculated to recall in the Persians their fear of geographic features. With an army now staffed almost entirely by short-legged child prostitutes, the shallow incline was precisely the minor setback the Persians could have done without. While Plataea was a decisive victory for the Greeks, it wasn’t until legislation raised the age of sexual consent to sixteen, effectively outlawing the only thing the Persians were good at, that they finally decided to head home in defeat.

 

---

If you like the idea of more history lessons, please, do let me know, and if you have any suggestions of particular events, epochs, or civilizations, I’d love to hear them. 

History Lessons: Ancient Sparta (Part I)

I’ve decided to try out a new type of article. It dawned on me that there are three things that everyone loves: history, ice cream, and things that comes in threes (sorry about the padding). Not only does everyone love history, but combined with a bit of creative re-imagining, it can serve to inspire and lead by its own example.

So today we’ll be hitting the history books and going back to Ancient Sparta, and hopefully, if we’re lucky, taking one or two lessons home with us. Think of it like a trip to the Creation Museum.

Since Frodology has recently experienced an influx of SMRTies who may not be used to the evidenceless-based learning we engage in here, this could be a great place to start. So, again, a trip to the Creation Museum.

 

Humble beginnings

In its earliest days, Sparta’s politics were dominated by the softer sex, but it wasn’t long before women muscled their way into power and set the militaristic tone of government by which it would forever be remembered.

This fun new policy of fighting kicked off with the Trojan War, a protracted conflict for which we should actually credit the Mycenaeans, the Spartans' progenitors.

Fun fact! ‘Progenitor’ means ‘in favor of genitals’ in English. 

Legend has it that the war started when Prince Paris of Troy eloped with Helen of Sparta, the betrothed of its King Menelaus. Apparently she was comely enough to warrant the launching of 1,000 ships, though this was likely inflated by hyperbole, not be confused with a hyperbola, a really bad case of Ebola; or with Hyperbowl, my local 10-pin lanes.

The Spartan army landed on the beach outside Troy and promptly fell in love with the scenery, quickly forgetting all about Helen. With the Spartans stuck outside the city gates for the better part of a decade, Troy looked impregnable, unlike the bitchin' hot Helen. Unfortunately, the dispute flared up again following a quarrel with a greedy Trojan beach vendor. Things quickly went sour for Troy when a seer in the employ of King Priam prophesized that Paris would be portrayed by the particularly effeminate Orlando Bloom in a retelling of the event three millennia later.

The news must have been shocking, because the Trojan troops opened the city gates to the Mycenaean army, captained by a large, wheeled stray horse, in a bid to hasten their own destruction and end the ignominy. The city was promptly sacked and its population enslaved.

Fun fact! The term ‘sacking’ originates from the ancient practice of placing an entire captured city inside a burlap sack as plunder. Of course, cities were much smaller then.

A version of the story has survived in the form of the Biblical telling of the Rape of Dinah. There are of course some differences, the chief one being that Dinah is thought to have been far more attractive than Helen, as thousands of adult men were willing to be circumcised merely to live in the same city as her.

 

Gender bender

Sparta was quick to incorporate its hard-earned lessons into a largely pragmatic legal system. They rightly concluded that the conflict was entirely the fault of the harlot Helen, and absolutely nothing to do with trade routes, greed and geopolitics.

This conclusion led to the curious marriage ritual of shaving the bride’s head and dressing her in a man’s tunic, obviously an attempt to ensure no escaping woman would be worth chasing after. This tradition has survived today, in the sense that Greek women still aren't attractive enough to be put on film. When attractive foreign actresses aren’t available, movies about Greece simply aren’t made.

Fun fact! The beautiful women in these films were not Greek: Alexander, Troy, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, The 300, For Your Eyes Only, Mamma Mia!

Sad fact! My Big Fat Greek Wedding had dozens of Greek women. 

 

Family life

In Sparta, military service took precedence over all other areas of life. While men married around age 20, they stayed in barracks until they could live with their families at age 30. Frodologists call this “not having to live with your family until age 30.” The difference is subtle, but telling.

From an early age, Spartan boys took part in vigorous military training, called the agoge. As far as historians can determine, this was just a funny-sounded word with no actual meaning. The training was long and grueling, and if you were going to depict it in a film, I imagine you’d make an uncomfortable-to-watch montage of half-clothed boys, caked in mud and soaked with sweat, tumbling with each other on a river bank. To round out the queasy vision of youthful innocence, everyone would look like male versions of Dakota Fanning.

Oscar-worthy stuff.

But it wasn’t all hard work. Spartans knew how to love too…

 

Pederasty

Military philosophers of the time believed that a bond of love between an experienced warrior and a novice would make soldiers far more willing to fight for each other (known as “giving”), and also prepared to take a fatal blow meant for the other (“receiving”). It also engendered trust, a vital ingredient in hoplite warfare, as each man was responsible for protecting the man to his left with his own shield (known as a “reach around”).

Fun fact! Sparta’s impressive phalanxes were easily wiped out when tackled from left to right

The reach around leaves your flank exposed

---

Blog reader attention spans being what they are, I'm going to stop here for today. Check back in a couple of days to learn more about exciting events which may have (but probably didn't) happen, and the juicy details of 5th Century BC agricultural reform.

Carry on to Part II...