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.

 

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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

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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...

Frodologist Founding Fathers – Special President’s Day edition!

As we celebrate the birth of the first man to get away with owning slaves while running the United States, it is important to remember not to believe everything you read. There are certain myths pervading American folklore about the Founding Fathers, and today seems like the perfect opportunity to add to the canon by dispelling them. Or, wait, what?

Part I - Filthy, backstabbing, unpatriotic heathens

General George Washington

It is generally accepted that the nation’s first president was a worthy general, but whoever accepts that is a total idiot. Let us reexamine the circumstances under which the General secured victory over Great Britain.

1. Washington won on home ground. Sports fans know that it is much harder to win an away game than it is a home game. Maybe it has something to do with the feel of the grass, or maybe it’s the different atmosphere. It could even be the racial slurs and unbearably ugly foreign spectators. Sports fans also know that nothing riles a sports fan like the allegation that he’s not a true sports fan. With that in mind, all true sports fans know that Washington’s victory would have been much more sensational had he beat the British in, say, Britain.
2. Washington cheated. Rebels admire other rebels who don’t play by the rules, but only when it leads them to a poetic, early death. Had James Dean gone on to vanquish conservative American values, his place would not be in our hearts, but on Hollywood Squares. So by all means, hide in the woods like a pansy, but make sure you’re not around after the battle to answer probing questions like “why couldn’t you fight like a man?”
3. Washington prayed. By 18^th Century rules of war, clashing armies were forbidden from praying for victory due to the unfair advantage it gave them on the battlefield. Since it is well known that God cannot choose between conflicting prayers, he answers those who beseech his Grace first. Since Britain’s General Cornwallis was a pacifist Quaker, we know that he would not have prayed for victory, and as such, was unfairly handicapped by Washington’s backstabbing.

In consequence, Frodologists are proud not to count General Washington amongst their numbers.

 

James Madison

While contemporary evidence indicates that James Madison, the 4^th President of the United States, may have started life as a Frodologist, historians interpret several events as confirming his fall from Frodo’s Graces.

The first was Madison’s marriage to his wife Dolley. Scholars believe that Frodo was foremost angry with her porn star-like name, and only got madder when she proceeded to name their three children Traci, Trixi, and Trish. Second, Madison arguably failed in his role as defender of the country when he allowed Brits and Canadians to march into the nation’s capital and burn it down. After this, historians believe that Frodo became bored with Presidents, much like the world stopped caring about moon landings after Apollo 11.

 

Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s 3^rd President, is often hailed for his contributions to the Declaration of Independence and the growth of the United States. Yet his achievements warrant a more sober assessment.

First, he is widely credited with declaring that all men are created equal, and yet hypocritically owned slaves and failed to secure the freedoms of ethnic and sexual minorities within the US. Clearly, if he had declared that white men are created equal and everyone else can fend for themselves, he would have saved the country centuries of bitter disagreement and a civil war. Nice job, Jefferson.

Second, it was Jefferson who engineered the Louisiana Purchase, an allegedly excellent deal in which the US acquired 828,000 square miles of land in consideration of $15,000,000 to France. The total area purchased extends from most of present day Montana all the way to New Orleans. A shrewd deal, certainly, and yet historians forget one crucial thing: Americans probably would’ve just taken it anyway. For free. This is doubly so since the only things that would have been standing in their way were the French, a people renowned for taking naughty photos into battle instead of guns.

Plus, imagine how many more slaves Jefferson could have bought with $15 million.

 

Part II - Founding Fathers who were Frodologists

Abigail Adams

The only first lady to be counted as a Frodologist Founding Fatheress, Abigail Adams would likely have been looked over had it not been for the dispelling of her husband John Adams. It is said that when the Continental Congress convened to draft the Declaration of Independence, he responded to Jefferson’s request that Adams write the document by saying, “you can write ten times better than I can.” Since Frodologist historians agree that this sounds like the kind of thing a twelve year old would say, Adams is thought to have been too ignorant to worship Frodo.

Abigail had an excellent sense of humor, campaigning for the abolition of slavery and emancipation of women all the while knowing that the accomplishment of these lofty goals was decades away at best.  Certainly an erudite woman, she also recognized that she was no looker, and is praised by Frodologists for imposing neither of these vices upon her husband.

Benjamin Franklin

Ben Franklin had a keen respect for the sciences, which is something Frodologists can always relate to, especially as we believe he had no idea what he was doing. Franklin is said to have invented the lightning rod, confirming once and for all that the sky gets angry when you jab a pole at it. Though many others tried his experiment and died from electrocution, the exercise was ultimately for the greater good, as it motivated scores of budding scientists to abandon flying kites in lightning storms, and instead simply to pull their desks away from the wall to find a power socket.

It’s of course fortunate that Franklin was such a prodigious inventor, because he also created the concept of “pay it forward”, a responsibility which would earn anyone else the wrath of thousands of disappointed moviegoers.

 

Alexander Hamilton

Among Frodologists, Alexander Hamilton is chiefly known for two things: founding the Mint, and duelling. This makes him some kind of Enlightenment playboy in our eyes, which is about as badass as it gets. Also, as his eldest son had been killed on the same spot three years prior to Hamilton’s duel with Burr, he demonstrates another key Frodologist virtue: refusing to learn from your mistakes. It’s why we keep praying century after century!

Of course, some criticize Hamilton for urging Congress to adopt legislation which taxed American producers of whiskey. Though whiskey distillers strongly opposed the measure, even to the extent of rebelling in 1794, it is thought that most were simply smart enough to drop the ‘e’ and call it whisky, thereby averting the tax.

Happy President's Day!

Misogyny Meter for this article, a mediocre 4/10, boosted slightly by a
Racism Rank of 5/10

Man – the Last 10,000 Years

The year two thousand oh-nine is an auspicious one, and accordingly it seems fitting that it should be chosen as the year in which to review man’s accomplishments of the past ten millennia. These twelve months will indeed be momentous, featuring nothing less than the inauguration of America’s first black President, the inauguration of America's first Christian President that half the nation thinks is Muslim, and the publication of a seminal history of the past ten thousand years.

Let us then join hands in a creepy born-again Christian way, and journey back…

Ca. 8,000 BCE – Significant quantities of ice make domesticating animals and crops difficult. Man takes succor from promise of imminent global warming and delights in mass extinctions as fauna fails to adapt to warmer climes. Even at this early stage, man is such a bastard.

Ca. 7,400 BCE - Man successfully kills off his foe, the wooly mammoth. The role of largest hairy land mammal is assumed by primitive Armenians.

Ca. 7,000 BCE – Man domesticates plants and animals thereby developing agriculture. His invention of the tractor and narrow country lanes infuriates non-farming man for the rest of human history.

Ca. 6,311 BCE – Invention of written language makes early caveman think history is accelerating. Throg of Lower Boulderia first coins ‘synergy’ and ‘paradigm shift’. Man nostalgic for wooly mammoth.

5,081 BCE – Man invents wheel.

5,080 BCE – Man invents intellectual property law. Suicide invented by creator of wheel.

Ca. 2,500 BCE – Pyramids of Giza represent great achievement in architecture by early man until later man discovers they were constructed by digging away the desert around them.

Ca. 1,000 BCE – Book of Genesis written, demonstrating man has evolved sufficient intelligence to draw entirely the wrong conclusion as to his origins.

490 BCE – Athenian Pheidippides runs 26 miles to Athens after Battle of Marathon to announce Greek victory over Persia and dies on the spot. Recreational runners confident the 150 miles he ran over the previous two days were more likely to have killed him.

216 BCE - Hannibal of Carthage leads army across Alps with aid of elephants to crush Roman forces at Cannae. Romans in particular miss the wooly mammoth.

0 – ‘BCE’ becomes ‘BC’ for the next 2,000 years or so, until it is finally reunited with ‘E’, to the great jubilation of some.

Ca. 400 – St. Augustine of Hippo becomes pre-eminent scholar in Christendom after divining the doctrine of Original Sin out of what looked like thin air to everyone else, but which he guaranteed was actually divine revelation. He goes on to discover the vagina, but is largely unimpressed.

1000 – Inhabitants of the developed world run riot as Y1K bug strikes, wiping out crops and resetting sundials. The Jews are blamed.

1099 – Europe introduces itself to Muslimdom via 'faith enforcement action'. Eight crusades later and Vatican abandons policy of armed antagonism with hastily scrawled note reading ‘just kidding!’

1220s – Genghis Khan subdues all of Asia before his empire quickly collapses back into Mongolian obscurity, rivaling only Alexander the Great and his native Macedonia for anti-climatic conquests.

1405 – Chinese navigator Zheng He comprehensively sails the Indian Ocean all the way to Africa. He does this without testicles.

Ca. 1450 – Man invents early firearms hundreds of years after Chinese man invents gunpowder to eventual dismay of the latter. Fashionistas rue the decline of shiny suits of armor. Military chic eventually makes a return in the 20th Century when Michigan Militia begins selling range of camouflage maternity wear.

1453 – Muslimdom introduces itself to Europe, which belatedly discovers the rest of the world does not share its sense of humor.

1506 – Leonardo da Vinci paints the Mona Lisa and his lack of talent is mistaken for artistic genius when he fails to paint a woman-like woman. Critics debate the issue for nearly five centuries until a wildly popular novel convinces them never to mention it again. Ever.

1513 – Italian political theorist and self-help guru Machiavelli writes early piece of political satire. He spends the rest of his career wishing he hadn’t.

1536 – King Henry VIII reads St. Augustine’s opinion on vaginas and makes himself an unpleasant husband to several women.

1642 – English man throws off the shackles of monarchy in the English Civil War.

1660 – English man changes his mind, apologizes, and promises never to do it again.

1687 – Man discovers gravity. Subsequent generations think ‘no fucking kidding.’

1744 – Historians discover the past tense. They did not think much of it.

1789 – French Revolution sees man willing to die for liberté, equalité, fraternité and bestialité. Rest of Europe convinced it’s ‘just a phase’ from nation famous for fops and dandies. Rest of Europe soon conquered by Napoleon. French jokes invented by conquered rest of Europe in retaliation.

1825 – John Quincy Adams voted United States’ 6th President setting unfortunate precedent of electing former Presidents’ sons to nation’s highest office.

1860 – Forced labor enthusiasts naively instigate war against industrialized countrymen and lose, despite fetching uniforms and charming accents.

1920 –  Vaginas enter mainstream when they entitle certain persons to vote in the United States.

1937 – Man thinks he has invented the hobbit. He would later prove incorrect, and learn a valuable lesson in hubris in the process.

1939 – Man empowered by goofy moustache to conquer much of Europe.

1941 – United States collectively realizes ‘oh yeah, there’s a war on…’

1945 – Man betrayed by goofy moustache.

1973 – ‘Golden Age’ of pornography determines Augustine to be wrong in his estimation of the vagina. Found by critics to be ‘really, really awesome’.

1984 – Apple Computers releases the landmark Macintosh personal computer. Sales of the device soar thanks to wide range of accessories, including mice, printers and the wildly popular slouch.

1993 – Jurassic Park proves cinema has plateaued, with all subsequently released films being unoriginally derivative: King Kong is Jurassic Park with a giant ape; The Day After Tomorrow is Jurassic Park with  a terrible plot; The Shawshank Redemption is Jurassic Park with a prison.

1995 – Starbucks moves coffee into the mainstream and deceives 1-in-3 customers into thinking he can be a successful writer.

2001 – Wikipedia launches and adds exciting new element of uncertainty to learning process. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.^[28]

2004 – Google becomes first search engine to eponymously verb itself.

2006 – Publication of The God Delusion causes ripples in the literate world. Man accused of making himself god by theists, and temporarily disappears from existence when atheists profess lack of belief in him.

2008 – First black man voted President of United States only 13 years after first black man votes. Leaders of undeveloped, corrupt African nations wonder what the big deal is.

2009 – Man wonders how history can be accelerating when later centuries take much longer to read through. Man hopes to breed wooly mammoth from reonstructed DNA, but scientists skeptical it will be much more than Jurassic Park with M. primigenius.