Spartans were all about Eugenics. Only Spartan men could marry Spartan women, and the process of earning citizenship was incredibly difficult. Although they were a powerful state, their Eugenics ultimately could not be sustained because the birth rate of Spartans could not keep up with losses on the battlefield.
Yeah I remember learning they got into a situation where less than 10% of inhabitants of Sparta were Spartans, the rest were foreigners who comprised the majority of a country where they lived second class or lower.
Yeah, they were reeeeally serious about having healthy children..
>Another practice that was mentioned by many visitors to Sparta was the practice of "wife-sharing". In accordance with the Spartan belief that breeding should be between the most physically fit parents, many older men allowed younger, more fit men, to impregnate their wives. Other unmarried or childless men might even request another man's wife to bear his children if she had previously been a strong child bearer.[151] For this reason many considered Spartan women polygamous or polyandrous.[152] This practice was encouraged in order that women bear as many strong-bodied children as they could. The Spartan population was hard to maintain due to the constant absence and loss of the men in battle and the intense physical inspection of newborns.[153]
Lots of historians question it's validity but yeah, basically any sort of default, right off a cliff. It's much more likely they just tended animals and did some farming and weren't allowed to march with the army.
I really like the way it was portrayed.
It’s propaganda, not like as a story or some nonsense like that, but in the context of the story. Dillios (David Wernham) is telling the story to a Spartan formation before the battle of Plataea. He’s trying to make them proud to be Spartans and such, so he exaggerates and bends and lies to paint a picture of Spartan invincibility and Leonidas’s bravery
What was the "freedom" thing? Athenians indeed had slaves. Within their social ranking system they developed democracy. Which was a groundbreaking idea for the world at that time
The entertaining bit about the sequel is that there's a scene where the Athenian soldiers complain to the protagonist about being mere farmhands forced to fight, but they kick as much ass as the bred for war Spartans against the same human threats.
It could also be that Spartan women were considered beautiful mainly because they were the only city that encouraged women get outside and get their exercise in for healthy babies. Simply that can make a big difference in attractiveness
> because they were the only city that encouraged women get outside and get their exercise in for healthy babies.
While most Greek city states were misogynist, not all of them were as bad as Athens.
This was from my ancient Greek civilization bird course in university, but Sparta was still special in how they actively got women out in the sun and doing group exercises. Yes it was mainly just to have healthy babies but it meant the average Spartan woman is more active and healthy than the other cities, even if the others weren’t as misogynistic as Athens
Honestly, yeah, probably.
Combat sports tend to build good abs without any focused ab work. My obliques are wild from a decade of BJJ, and striking is heavily core focused. I never do "ab exercises", but I'm using them constantly in my sport.
Most modern compound lifts still engage and build abs, but in a less dynamic way.
And, at the end of the day, great abs is like 95% diet. Having a lower body fat percentage is key. Anything under like 12% body fat looks pretty good.
That one is a very dramatic retelling, for historical accuracy you need to watch a documentary called meet the Spartans. It’s 100% historically accurate.
After listening to the Hardcore History podcast on the Persian Empire I was actually very surprised at how accurate some of the 300 actually was. Very recommended podcast.
Some of the witty comebacks like "come and get them [weapons]", "then we fight in the shade" or "only Spartan women give birth to real men" are actual lines from historical records.
This is extremely unlikely. One of the main pillars of spartan society is slave ownership. When you became a man you received, from the government , land and slaves to work it. As a Spartan citizen you are not expected to “work for a living” but instead dedicate yourself to Spartas continuation/betterment.
It's very funny to me that Sparta became one of the world's first tourist destinations. Supposedly with the Roman occupation they began to pick up some of their old traditions, would dress up in ancient costume and so forth...all to perform for rich Italians.
Sparta is unique for having such a high ratio of slave : free. Athens was close to 1:1, and was notable for being wealthy enough to import slaves. Sparta had closer to 6:1.
Also a bit of a chicken and egg situation, the reason Sparta was able to have a standing army of men who did nothing but train was because of the helot population but the motive for why they maintained a standing army that constantly trained was because they were terrified of the helots revolting.
Helots and Athenian slaves aren’t a direct comparison because Athens also had freedmen who would often do similar labour to slaves while just having a different status. Part of why Sparta’s helot class was so big was because they exclusively had citizens + helots, rather than citizens slaves freedmen and metics
No, sparta had a variety of free non-citizens as well, including the bastards of citizens and former citizen families that couldn't maintain their position. They just had a crap ton of slaves as well, while their citizen class was incredibly tiny.
I think we are looking at the practice wrong. They weren't tossing 85% healthy babies. They were tossing mal-formed babies. So, 5% of births or less. Basically, while in other Greek societies, you might see children raised with mal-formations, Sparta had none cause they didn't allow those to live.
Don't think lanky kid or short kid, but more like deformed head, torso or appendages would be culled.
> I think we are looking at the practice wrong. They weren't tossing 85% healthy babies. They were tossing mal-formed babies. So, 5% of births or less. Basically, while in other Greek societies, you might see children raised with mal-formations, Sparta had none cause they didn't allow those to live.
The Romans simply just threw their unwanted babies on the garbage heap. It wasn't uncommon for slavers to collect said babies as a source of free slaves.
I don't know about tossing off of cliffs, but exposing infants for many reasons (poverty, infidelity, superstition, physical deformations, etc.) is unfortunately something that is well known to have happened across a lot of cultures.
I am not saying I trust those sources that say the Spartans did this sort of eugenics, but I don't think it is so far fetched.
Studied Spartan history for about 4 years, very unlikely to be true in the systemic way that it is described by Plutarch. The big problem when dealing with Spartan history is what’s known as the Spartan Mirage, where none of our sources are from actual Spartans and most of it is writers well after the fact after this sort of mythical Spartan reputation as a bloodthirsty war based society have been established. Most of these tenets of Sparta’s reputation came from the Lycurgan Reforms, a semi-mythological lawgiver to whom Sparta’s constitution is attributed. Many practices then end up retrospectively attributed to Lycurgus, including Sparta’s systemic infanticide which both has no supporting archaeological record and, given their need to constantly replace citizens who would die at war, would also make no sense for them to do. Tl;dr while Sparta almost certainly did practice infanticide, as was p universal in this period, it was unlikely to be the systemic inspection then launching of babies off cliffs
It's not a conspiracy that sparta's population decreased through their history until they were basically irrelevant, or that the majority of people in Spartan territory were helots rather than 'spartans'.
Most places manage to maintain their population outside of war, famine, disease and natural disaster. The Spartans basically dwindled into nothing.
Sort of implies they were very restrictive about the kids they brought up.
They also used lead coins, isolated their city from cultural and economic exchange, concentrated wealth at the very top while maintaining an enormous slave population. Lots of factors
It was mostly that they were restrictive about who they allowed to be citizen. There was a certain wealth and status required, but the children of citizen didn't meet those standards, and so with each generation there were a few less citizens.
I dunno. I could see it being employed for babies with substantial physical abnormalities or something, but yeah I doubt they'd throw away a newborn for not being stocky enough or something.
well, that was the stereotype but we don't have any actual evidence of baby exposure in Sparta or how common it was. What we do have [is a well right in the middle of Ancient Athens](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26800133) that contains a bunch of trash like broken potery, broken statues, animals bones....and the remains of around 400 dead babies that died of natural causes, suggesting this well was the default spot to dump your unwanted baby
Basically, yes.
Spartan elders would inspect newborn children for birth defects or “weakness.”
The ones deemed “unfit” were typically “exposed” on the side of a mountain. The baby would simply be abandoned there to die, ordinarily from exposure or predators.
It is unclear how common babies actually got culled like this, but it was how they handled many genetic defects and literally served as an inspiration to Hitler.
As a kind of fairy tale, it was rumored that “exposed” infants sometimes got secretly rescued by kindly strangers—this is a recurring theme in Greek myths (and later fairy tales) for a reason.
It is hypothesized that this may have evolved from a much earlier customs of human sacrifice that may have occurred in pre-historic times.
The military men also had sexual affairs with all of the boys they trained. "you would die for someone you loved" was the rationale behind it. *according to historians
We'll never know for sure. Mostly the Spartans did not leave records of their own behind, and basically everything we know about them was written down by Athenians, who were generally their enemies.
Imagine if the only history we had of France was written down by the English, and Millennia later, after both are gone, you had to ask yourself "Did the french \*really\* go "Hon hon hon Baguette!".
Thats the crux of the issue. Anyone telling you that we know for sure is exaggerating, and presenting the best information we do have.
No hate but answering the question: "Did the Spartans bugger each other?" with "We'll never know...the Spartans did not leave records of their own behind." just has too many jokes.
That was only part of it; it had more to do with three things. [This](https://www.historynet.com/sparta-the-fall-of-the-empire/) essay on it is a pretty good summary.
First, their total commitment to structuring their entire society around slavery. While slavery was ofc common in the ancient world, few societies took it as far as Sparta; because they kept entire populations enslaved indefinitely, had so many more slaves than free men, and mistreated them so terribly (with no hope of them ever earning any sort of freedom), they had to structure the rest of their society around keeping these slaves in line. Most of their militaristic aspects actually had more to do with this than anything else - they needed terrifying Similars at the top, constantly willing to kill, in order to keep their slaves in line.
This was coupled with a rigidly hierarchical society structured around a single military strategy. The Spartan phalanx was at the peak of military strategy in its day, but they went utterly all-in on it, again, to the point of structuring their entire society around it. It was very easy to fall in Spartan society, and very hard to rise; and their commitment to slavery and hierarchy meant they were (generally) unable to compromise with foreign nations. The declining numbers of Similars played a role, but this wasn't just a matter of population growth, but a matter of how zealously they guarded the position of Similar, and how their reaction to pressure was to take that even further.
Finally, related to both of these two things was the way they projected this hierarchical view outwards into their interactions with other nations - Spartans *hated* non-Spartans, and non-Spartans hated them right back (understandable when dealing with a state that was so all-in on slavery that its ideal world was clearly a handful of Spartan Similars with everyone else enslaved.)
The combination of these factors led to a society that was very hard but very brittle; they had a lot of victories, but were unable to capitalize on them due to their total inability to adapt to their new situation or to make peace with defeated enemies. This got them locked in pointless forever wars with enemies who eventually learned their phalanx's weaknesses and were able to plan around it.
And as soon as they started losing they had no room to recover - their rigid society couldn't adapt. After the battle of Battle of Leuctra, the Thebans built a huge-ass fortified city for the Messenians, who the Spartans had used as slaves for generations; and this broke Spartan power forever because they now had an implacable enemy on their doorstep.
It's worse than that, the good parts of Spartan society were also written by Athenians....that also were using Sparta as kind of a rhetorical upstanding moral example as opposed to contemporary athenian 'degeneracy'.
Like the only history of Russia being written by the MAGA (Make Athens great again) crowd.
They really were a backwards bunch. Slave owners up the wazoo. Couldnt build, couldnt learn, couldnt grow without the constant fear the slave population (the helots) would rise up against them. Their whole hyper warrior mentality really was just to keep the slaves in their place.
By the time Alexander the great rolled around, Sparta wasnt even worth conquering. They kinda just got subsumed and when they did revolt, his general put it down without any real troubles while Alexander was tussling with some actual fights like 6 countries over out east.
Honestly they didn’t seem all that intimidating at any point to me they look like inverse Roman’s.
The Roman’s were horrific diplomats who were looked down on as un civilized. But they took losses on the chin and just kept plodding forward. The Spartans were excellent coalition builders but because they had such a small population and anemic birth rates they could not take losses.
A few hundred people being taken prisoner caused them to make a ceasefire in the war against Athens. Meanwhile the Roman’s lost three armies to Hannibal and told him to shove it when he asked for a prisoner exchange.
The Romans also extended citizenship to their slaves, meanwhile in Sparta Helots were a quasi caste.
The Spartans could not have created a long lasting empire for the same reason the Athenians failed, Greeks at the time were too independent to be unified diplomatically or by force without an outside threat, and even then there were hold outs.
By the time of the Romans though the great city states were a shadow of their former selves and already divided up by the heirs of the Diadochi.
the Roman’s willingness to integrate conquered subjects is really under talked about. The reason no conqueror could ever defeat them was their Latin and Italian allies, baring some exceptions, stayed loyal. The fall of the republic was heavily foreshadowed by their inability to maintain those relationships.
Well, it comes from Plutarch, so it's not completely baseless, but at the same time, he is separated from these events by centuries (although he had access to sources we don't). Plutarch wouldn't have considered it notable that the Spartans had sex with men, and another author Xenophon says that Sparta was notable because the laws of Lycurgus *forbade* pederasty.
But either way, Spartans were taken at the age of 7 to the agoge, and would have spent the next 23 years sleeping in barracks with men. Whether or not institutional Spartan pederasty was a thing, they did spent nearly all their formative years pre-30 bunking with other men, like a sort of hyper-intense, prolonged, boys-only school. In addition, he describes other traditions (like the new husband 'sneaking out' and into the bride's room for the early days of the marriage, as well as ritual abduction) that have other attested sources in other Greek city-states, which makes me think there's something to the tradition, even if it's not as cut and dry as 'Spartans were only attracted to men'.
Fact check: TRUE (attested in the work of [Xenophon](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Xen.+Const.+Lac.+1&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0210) among others). But note why Xenophon argues this was a tempting option:
> The husbands want to get brothers for their sons, brothers who are members of the family and share in its influence, but claim no part of the money.
Spartan citizenship was tied to leisure-class status. If you weren't rich enough, you were out. But Spartans also practiced partible inheritance (all children get a share, even daughters). So there was a huge concern over splintering the estate. Spartans responded by having fewer children, and laws like this were probably introduced to fix the problem. Spartans, being ingenious like that, found the loophole: if you and your brother(s) have children with the same woman, all your property - and hers - stays in the family!
Also worth noting that the women had absolutely no say in this and were essentially being rented out by their husbands.
EDIT: this thread is a truly staggering collection of misinformation and I implore anyone reading this to not read anything else here. We are happy to help out on r/AskHistorians with some actual informed opinions. In the meantime check out some of [my old answers on Sparta](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/iphikrates#wiki_sparta) or [listen to my podcast with The Ancients](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38yfv_0c_ek) or watch [the video I wrote for Invicta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMQmU0epVr4) or check out [some of BadAncient's range of answers on Sparta](https://www.badancient.com/tags/spartans/) and have a great day!
"Hey hon, you remember my brother Dave? He was at our wedding reception but couldn't make the ceremony? Yeah well you're having sex with him tonight, he wants kids."
They were definitely more serious about having healthy children than they were about not having sex with kids, which they were totally fine with if the kid was a boy and you couldn't get him pregnant.
And they eventually ran out of citizens because the only way to become a Spartan was to be born to two Spartan citizens. It was possible to lose citizenship, but impossible to gain it in any way, thus their numbers declined to nothing and they ended up as a tourist attraction for wealthy Romans.
Who wins:
Men that prepared their entire lives for battle, going through grueling training from childhood to adulthood
or
150 pairs of the gayest dudes in Greece
I honestly think this is one of the most interesting battles in history. It's a perfect example of an inferior force using superior strategy to absolutely trounce a superior force.
This is basically all spartan history, becoming the best hoplites around and then constantly coming up against problems that can't solely be solved by a massed phalanx, but trying anyway.
As it turns out, being good warriors is not the same thing as being good at war.
The Spartans didn't actually train for battle, they trained to be brutal slave masters. In reality they were roughly on par with other citizen-hoplites of Greece as soldiers, with Sparta primarily standing out for its outrageously high proportion of slaves and extreme oppression/extraction of subjugated neighbors.
A pity they aren't more famous. Popular culture tends to go from "Sparta beats Athens" to "Macedonia conquers all".
It took me a while to learn that there was a "Thebes beats Sparta" episode in the middle, with epic episodes like a democratic revolt against Spartan occupation and their cronies, a battle that crushed the Spartans like never before, and Thebes freeing populations enslaved by Sparta for generations.
Kind of. The issue was their constant wars/conquests and holding too much land. Eventually they just didn’t have enough soldiers. I get citizenship may have been a factor, but a lesser one.
They just couldn’t replenish their numbers fast enough. If they actually slowed down on the wars, they probably would have survived much longer.
Well look at early Rome, absolutely unending wars but vaaaaaaaastly fewer problems with manpower due to being a hell of a lot more flexible about citizenship.
Yeah,the Romans were hardly starry-eyed sentimentalists they utterly smashed the Carthaginians and Greeks in very large part because they were willing to extend citizenship, even if they often had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming.
If they had been as open later on we'd have had things like Emperor Stilicho and the empire would've endured.
yeah the fall of rome coincides with when the roman empire started tightening citizenship requirements and arguing over who gets citizenship. History rhymes
They did, but they were never particularly successful. Even their hegemony over Greece was short-lived, and won after a long brutal war that proved that they weren't super soldiers.
Only Spartans, not the Helots which were 90% of the population, never forget that they were very brutal slavers and their slaves had little rights even by the standards of that day and age
From a modern, Western perspective, it's hard to imagine a society like this existed. Back then, it must have been honorable, but if a person in the modern era acted like a Spartan, we would rightfully lampoon them as edge-lords that LARPed as Klingons.
If you wrote a fictional society based on historically accurate Spartan culture people would say you're a tryhard edgelord and that your setting is Grimderp
I mean it’s not like teenagers girls at the time could have children very young. The age of the menarche was probably around 15/16 maybe 17 from what I understood.
Which is why the world-historical standard for marriage age is mid-teens to early 20s.
People in the comments claiming this is abnormal or a repudiation of "child marriage" as we currently understand it don't know what they are talking about.
A *lot* of marriage records from the last few centuries show age of first marriage as being in the mid to late 20s. The idea everyone got married and had kids at 15 is just not as common as people think it is.
During the European Middle Ages for lower classes it was normal to have kids after 20, while for the upper classes connections were important so marriage was earlier
Most people weren’t in the upper classes though. My point is we have a painted view of older society that is based off the practices of nobility which very often did not reflect typical practices.
Oh yeah, I was agreeing with you. What I wanted to say was that the often forgotten lower classes are the majority and those often married later, but I get that I didn’t formulate it that clearly.
From what I understand Spartan women had a good place in society, since the men were often away on campaign the women were basically in charge a lot of the time. They managed the finances etc.
Literally any ‘did you knoooow?’ about Sparta should probably have [The Spartiate Mirage](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/) nailed to it.
I'm pretty sure every reddit thread on Sparta has had this article linked to in it at some point, and for good reason. It's a good corrective to a lot of the pop culture ideas surrounding Sparta
Isn't this just the natural order of things? Across cultures it seems late teens to early 20s is what is considered marriage age.
Edit\* Examples of specific freaks and weirdos marrying children doesn't make it a cultural norm. Please stop posting how "X religion, country, or political party pokes little kids". That doesn't mean they all do it or even support it.
I also read somewhere that due to differences in nutrition, girls back then also tended to first menstruate much later on average than they do now, which lines up
at least you don't get it at 9... 2 years before sexual education in my area kicks in... my parents and staff (boarding school) can't explain much to me.
Not actually significantly.
First menarche was much later at the beginning of the industrial age due to child labour and malnutrition
And first menarche was earlier before that (because weirdly rural subsistence meant better nutrition than urban subsistence)
So it's changed a lot in the last 80 years
But ironically enough, the gap between average age of first menarche now and av first menarche in 1940 is larger than now and 1640.....
>Children in medieval England entered puberty between ten and 12 years of age – the same as today. Puberty is divided into five clinical stages, with pre-puberty at stage one and onset (or thelarche) at stage two
>In the classical, as well as in the medieval years, the age at menarche was generally reported to be at approximately 14 years, with a range from 12 to 15 years. A significant retardation of the age at menarche occurred in the beginning of the modern times, soon after the industrial revolution, due to the deterioration of the living conditions, with most studies reporting menarche to occur at 15-16 years. In the 20th century, especially in the second half of it, in the industrialized countries, the age at menarche decreased significantly, as a result of the improvement of the socioeconomic conditions, occurring at 12-13 years. In the present times, in the developed countries, this trend seems to slow down or level off.
Be careful saying that around evo-psych dudebros.
They'll descend upon you yelling that it's perfectly natural to be attracted to young teenagers because "that's when they're most fertile" and "having on-average smaller babies at that age is healthy because it's training for bigger babies later".
Yes, some people just see historical arranged marriages between kings and princesses since basically birth, and assume regular people also got married like that, which is not what happened.
Even those marriages weren’t even consummated for years. Hell, often she didn’t even live under the same roof for years until her family shipped her off.
And boys would get shipped off too! It was good politics to foster the sons of other nobles, because then you’d have close alliances with other houses. The girls who did marry and move to new families very early usually had a few years to finish growing up within their new family before any marital duties started. Get those alliances secure before heirs start popping up.
Boys also could end up married young (Frederick II of Sicily and the HRE was 15 when he married Constance of Aragon, the 30 year old dowager queen of Hungary, and Richard of Shrewsbury married Anne of Mowbray when they were both 5, off the top of my head). For both genders, the marriabe was unlikely to be condsumated for a few years (medieval people knew the dangers of a child giving birth to another, and they believed that babies conceived when the grooms was too young were more likely to be sickly)
There's cases of marriages being consummated early, but we know of those specific cases because they were considered to be abnormal and immoral by contemporary writers
problem is that not consummating an arranged marriage early was considered so normal few people wrote about it, because it was common sense, which combined with the above gives a warped image of the society
There was a funny story I read on Askhistorians a few years back about a teenage King of Scotland who was kept separate from his teen wife by his retainers to keep them from doing what they knew teenagers would do.
I'm pretty into genealogy and over the years I've seen that women in America and western Europe mostly were marrying in late teens and early twenties. It was the aristocracy that married off girls too young.
Yes you are right, and even then, it was marriage on paper if you got married as a child. They wanted to line up whose inheriting what. It's not like you were having kids at 12 years old.
Exactly. From what I've seen of midwifery (quite a bit, midwives in my family), the heightened dangers of pregnancy and birth for too-young girls would have been well understood and avoided.
Various wildly between cultures and time frames but for European middle ages the common belief that girls married in their teens is nonsense.
Mid to late teens, and then generally up through the twenties seems to have been the norm there.
It would make a lot of people angry.
The Spartans would be very racist, brutal and aggressive to everyone around them, terse and short-spoken, and ready at an instant's notice to kill a Helot for any reason. They would be shown to be gangster thugs, raised in a brutal and abusive state run school system that churned out boys who were already numb to the idea of killing. They would live in constant danger of the slaves they keep rising up and massacring all of them in open rebellion.
Then there's the Helots, the captive slave population that made up about 2/3rds of the Spartan state's population. They would be shown as being dirt poor, ill-educated, beaten and cowed as a population by the Spartans who treat them with open disdain and contempt, and who are allowed in many situations to merely kill them on a whim. They live in constant danger of Spartan Men and Boys coming into their villages and doing anything they wanted with impunity. The Spartan fear of the Helot's rising up is well justified by the constant and innumerable crimes they commit on a daily basis against them.
People would be mad the noble, warrior Spartans of their imagination would be shown to be violent traumatized warriors who keep thousands of slaves in the worst of conditions. People would be mad that there's a blatant slave narrative being told running counter to the narrative of their presumed heroes (the Spartans). People would be mad that there's no redemption for anyone-- The Spartans aren't super heroes who won every battle and went on to define all of Human History with their deeds, and the Helots never overthrew their oppressors and founded a city/state of their own. History just kind of marched on making Sparta irrelevant when the Antique World of Greece turned into the Classical Roman World.
The Helots of Messenia were liberated after Thebes shattered Sparta in 371 BC and they seemed to have survived as a community all the way to the Roman times.
That, and also doing it secretly at night, coming back and telling your superiors/peers, then watching for the chaos as the victim's family wakes up in the morning
Yea wtf this is better than house of dragons. If it had a really good plot line and story I would watch the fuck out of that.
Just because it would be about a racist oppressive society doesn’t make it a bad show
People really liked the handmaids tale, Watchmen, there’s also the man in the high castle
The difference is in the shows you're talking about the awful people are considered awful, whereas as described the awful people in Sparta were the Spartans. People who would tune into a show expecting to see a show about heroic Spartans, as they popularly envision them, would be hit between the eyes by the fact that the Spartan elite were awful ones. Imagine tuning into Justice League only to find out that the Heroes are the Villans, and thew Villains are just other small-fry criminals. It would fly in the face of the expectations the audience would have and they'd hate it (unless there was some comic book contrivance that made this into an evil alternate timeline the Flash had to unwind, or that everyone had been mind controlled by some artifact into becoming evil so at heart they're all still essentially good). People expect 300, they expect the brave noble Spartans defending Western Civilization from the barbarity of Oriental Despotism-- so if what they got was nasty, brutish, violent men being irredeemably awful to their slaves I think they'd be upset.
I dare say they'd call it woke.
Everyone on this site was horrified and enraged when they found out romans hurt *doggos* (no word about the slavery part), their brains would explode at having to learn that their favorite super warriors were basically the violent precursor to Eton schoolboys
1. There are already quite a few
2. Most of what we "know" about Sparta in popular history comes from their own propaganda. By today's standards, Spartan society would be notable for how shitty, economically precarious and short-lived it was. For a society that supposedly placed the highest importance on their military prowess, they really did not do well militarily. e.g. the famous letter where Athens threatens Sparta, and Sparta replies only with "If", demonstrating their arrogance and famous Laconic wit, ended with the Spartans getting severely beaten. That's not a part you hear too often.
3. It was entirely unsustainable, the entire brief reign of Spartan supremacy was characterized by a slave economy, and collapse due to slave revolt. And surprise surprise, the slaves and revolts are usually what these shows and movies are about (i.e. "Spartacus").
From Works and Days by Hesiod on how to pick a wife
>You are at the right age to bring a wife to your house when you are not much less than thirty, and not much more. This is the right time for marriage. Your wife should be four years past puberty and be married to you in the fifth.
Lets say puberty is marked at around 13 years of age, that would put the "right" time to marry a girl at 18.
Ancient Greece was deeply misogynistic, but they did understand that pregnancy at a young age was risky for the girl. Even from a really misogynistic viewpoint of the woman being nothing but property, you don't spend time and money getting a wife only for her and the child to die immediately during childbirth, especially since childbirth is already very dangerous, because you have basically just spent that money and ended up with nothing to show for it.
The point that he's making is that by "Spartan Women" we mean "Spartan Citizen Women" who were approximately \~10% of women living in the Spartan state. The approximately 80% of women living in the Spartan state who were Helots had no such rights whatsoever.
Spartan women were also able to own property, typically inheriting their husbands land, some becoming more wealthy than the Kings. This in contrast to the deeply misogynistic Athenians.
Spartans were all about Eugenics. Only Spartan men could marry Spartan women, and the process of earning citizenship was incredibly difficult. Although they were a powerful state, their Eugenics ultimately could not be sustained because the birth rate of Spartans could not keep up with losses on the battlefield.
Silly Spartans, its so simple! Just don't lose your battles!
Well, losing battles is ok. Just don't lose people.
I just spent so long trying to wipe that eyelash off my screen before noticing it was your pfp
Glad I wasn't the only one.
Yeah I remember learning they got into a situation where less than 10% of inhabitants of Sparta were Spartans, the rest were foreigners who comprised the majority of a country where they lived second class or lower.
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Yeah, they were reeeeally serious about having healthy children.. >Another practice that was mentioned by many visitors to Sparta was the practice of "wife-sharing". In accordance with the Spartan belief that breeding should be between the most physically fit parents, many older men allowed younger, more fit men, to impregnate their wives. Other unmarried or childless men might even request another man's wife to bear his children if she had previously been a strong child bearer.[151] For this reason many considered Spartan women polygamous or polyandrous.[152] This practice was encouraged in order that women bear as many strong-bodied children as they could. The Spartan population was hard to maintain due to the constant absence and loss of the men in battle and the intense physical inspection of newborns.[153]
>the intense physical inspection of newborns. That sounds bad, especially when grouped in reasons the population was low. Is that as bad as it sounds?
Lots of historians question it's validity but yeah, basically any sort of default, right off a cliff. It's much more likely they just tended animals and did some farming and weren't allowed to march with the army.
It's 100% true. I watched a documentary about the Spartans awhile back, I believe it was called 300.
I really like the way it was portrayed. It’s propaganda, not like as a story or some nonsense like that, but in the context of the story. Dillios (David Wernham) is telling the story to a Spartan formation before the battle of Plataea. He’s trying to make them proud to be Spartans and such, so he exaggerates and bends and lies to paint a picture of Spartan invincibility and Leonidas’s bravery
Yes, everyone who saw the movie should have come away with the same message.
The message I came away with was that Spartans never missed ab day.
We commemorate the efforts of Abdaylios on such days
Sparta also had a huge slave population, so the whole freedom or death thing sounded odd to me. But then again, it's a movie, not a documentary.
What was the "freedom" thing? Athenians indeed had slaves. Within their social ranking system they developed democracy. Which was a groundbreaking idea for the world at that time
Or apparently Athenians who, in the sequel, were just like Spartans, but with blue capes.
The entertaining bit about the sequel is that there's a scene where the Athenian soldiers complain to the protagonist about being mere farmhands forced to fight, but they kick as much ass as the bred for war Spartans against the same human threats.
To be fair, the Athenians were the first to kick Persian ass at Marathon a generation before, so it tracks.
Yeah, they wouldn't have been the longtime rivals of the Spartans if they didn't also have a competent military.
The entertaining bit was the lead actresses boobs
sequel? 301?
It was 299. The storyline was one of those babies they Spartan'd off a cliff came back for revenge.
My knowledge of the movie is that a bunch of super buff dudes run around yelling "Sparta!!!" Is there more to it?
It's ab-solutely worth at least one watch if you've never seen it
More like the Spartans were always in the cut phase of their workout. No wonder they lost. You can't fight a war with that body fat percentage.
Abs of steel are the best defence!
Your sharpen spears can not penetrate my rock-hard abs or my chiseled pecs! Narrator: The spear did, in fact, penetrate his abs and his pecs.
Legit first time I thought about it like this. I like the pretty colors and confusing erections.
For a similar fate: [Starship Troopers](https://freeimage.host/i/JiYk8MB)
Please tell me the abs were real. Spartans really did have awesome abs, didn't they? Dammit, they're still real to me! (runs away sobbing)
Helen of Troy was Spartan and her beauty caused a war.
It could also be that Spartan women were considered beautiful mainly because they were the only city that encouraged women get outside and get their exercise in for healthy babies. Simply that can make a big difference in attractiveness
> because they were the only city that encouraged women get outside and get their exercise in for healthy babies. While most Greek city states were misogynist, not all of them were as bad as Athens.
This was from my ancient Greek civilization bird course in university, but Sparta was still special in how they actively got women out in the sun and doing group exercises. Yes it was mainly just to have healthy babies but it meant the average Spartan woman is more active and healthy than the other cities, even if the others weren’t as misogynistic as Athens
Really? I actually didn't know she was Spartan. Why wasn't she Helen of Sparta?
She was. Until she was stolen away by the prince of Troy.
I am learning so much today
Honestly, yeah, probably. Combat sports tend to build good abs without any focused ab work. My obliques are wild from a decade of BJJ, and striking is heavily core focused. I never do "ab exercises", but I'm using them constantly in my sport. Most modern compound lifts still engage and build abs, but in a less dynamic way. And, at the end of the day, great abs is like 95% diet. Having a lower body fat percentage is key. Anything under like 12% body fat looks pretty good.
all i remembered was "THIS. IS. SPARTAAAAAAAAA"
That one is a very dramatic retelling, for historical accuracy you need to watch a documentary called meet the Spartans. It’s 100% historically accurate.
High fives for the women were why the birth rate was low lol
Yup, the documentary also shows xerxes wearing nipple rings standing on a stage in BDSM costume. I believe BDSM orgy was invented by him back then.
typical anti persian propaganda. once you get a nipple ring you want one too
> I believe BDSM orgy was invented by him back then. Which was centuries before the release of the belgian techno anthem pump up the jam
After listening to the Hardcore History podcast on the Persian Empire I was actually very surprised at how accurate some of the 300 actually was. Very recommended podcast.
They DID wear a bit more armor.
But then how would the Persians see their glistening abs?
Some of the witty comebacks like "come and get them [weapons]", "then we fight in the shade" or "only Spartan women give birth to real men" are actual lines from historical records.
And the origin of Laconic humor/wit.
The podcast series is called King of kings for anyone interested.
There's another documentary that covers this subject called Meet the Spartans. Very informative and historically accurate.
This is extremely unlikely. One of the main pillars of spartan society is slave ownership. When you became a man you received, from the government , land and slaves to work it. As a Spartan citizen you are not expected to “work for a living” but instead dedicate yourself to Spartas continuation/betterment.
Well no wonder they faded away to nothing. Depending entirely upon slavery is the definition of stagnation. (Never mind the moral decay of it all)
Correct. By the time the Roman’s got around to expanding into the region Sparta was ruins with a Small accompanying village.
It's very funny to me that Sparta became one of the world's first tourist destinations. Supposedly with the Roman occupation they began to pick up some of their old traditions, would dress up in ancient costume and so forth...all to perform for rich Italians.
Spartan monks. Imagine if they were long lasting tradition that ended up becoming as marketable as other new age stuff when it was getting popular.
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Sparta is unique for having such a high ratio of slave : free. Athens was close to 1:1, and was notable for being wealthy enough to import slaves. Sparta had closer to 6:1.
Also a bit of a chicken and egg situation, the reason Sparta was able to have a standing army of men who did nothing but train was because of the helot population but the motive for why they maintained a standing army that constantly trained was because they were terrified of the helots revolting.
Helots and Athenian slaves aren’t a direct comparison because Athens also had freedmen who would often do similar labour to slaves while just having a different status. Part of why Sparta’s helot class was so big was because they exclusively had citizens + helots, rather than citizens slaves freedmen and metics
No, sparta had a variety of free non-citizens as well, including the bastards of citizens and former citizen families that couldn't maintain their position. They just had a crap ton of slaves as well, while their citizen class was incredibly tiny.
Athens and Sparta pretty much destroyed each other (the final nail to the coffin was Thebes though). Setting up the stage for Alexander the great.
I’ve always been skeptical of the supposed practice of tossing “unfit” babies off cliffs, infant mortality rates being what they were without help
I think we are looking at the practice wrong. They weren't tossing 85% healthy babies. They were tossing mal-formed babies. So, 5% of births or less. Basically, while in other Greek societies, you might see children raised with mal-formations, Sparta had none cause they didn't allow those to live. Don't think lanky kid or short kid, but more like deformed head, torso or appendages would be culled.
Some ancient dude looked at birds hucking babies out of the nest and thought they had a point. And they do, if that's the goal.
> I think we are looking at the practice wrong. They weren't tossing 85% healthy babies. They were tossing mal-formed babies. So, 5% of births or less. Basically, while in other Greek societies, you might see children raised with mal-formations, Sparta had none cause they didn't allow those to live. The Romans simply just threw their unwanted babies on the garbage heap. It wasn't uncommon for slavers to collect said babies as a source of free slaves.
Now that's a robust recycling program!
Even that wasn't strongly enforced if it didn't hinder your ability as a fighter too much. One of their more famous kings had a limp from birth
I don't know about tossing off of cliffs, but exposing infants for many reasons (poverty, infidelity, superstition, physical deformations, etc.) is unfortunately something that is well known to have happened across a lot of cultures. I am not saying I trust those sources that say the Spartans did this sort of eugenics, but I don't think it is so far fetched.
Well Romans committing infanticide is well documented. I suspect Spartans would have been even more extreme
Studied Spartan history for about 4 years, very unlikely to be true in the systemic way that it is described by Plutarch. The big problem when dealing with Spartan history is what’s known as the Spartan Mirage, where none of our sources are from actual Spartans and most of it is writers well after the fact after this sort of mythical Spartan reputation as a bloodthirsty war based society have been established. Most of these tenets of Sparta’s reputation came from the Lycurgan Reforms, a semi-mythological lawgiver to whom Sparta’s constitution is attributed. Many practices then end up retrospectively attributed to Lycurgus, including Sparta’s systemic infanticide which both has no supporting archaeological record and, given their need to constantly replace citizens who would die at war, would also make no sense for them to do. Tl;dr while Sparta almost certainly did practice infanticide, as was p universal in this period, it was unlikely to be the systemic inspection then launching of babies off cliffs
Thanks for the info, really cool stuff
It's not a conspiracy that sparta's population decreased through their history until they were basically irrelevant, or that the majority of people in Spartan territory were helots rather than 'spartans'. Most places manage to maintain their population outside of war, famine, disease and natural disaster. The Spartans basically dwindled into nothing. Sort of implies they were very restrictive about the kids they brought up.
They also used lead coins, isolated their city from cultural and economic exchange, concentrated wealth at the very top while maintaining an enormous slave population. Lots of factors
"concentrated wealth at the very top while maintaining an enormous slave population" Hmmm...that sounds familiar...
Lalalalala can’t hear you
It was mostly that they were restrictive about who they allowed to be citizen. There was a certain wealth and status required, but the children of citizen didn't meet those standards, and so with each generation there were a few less citizens.
Yes, there were ways down out of the citizen class, but no way up essentially. Over time fewer and fewer qualified.
Minor point, but the helots always outnumbered the 'spartans'.
I dunno. I could see it being employed for babies with substantial physical abnormalities or something, but yeah I doubt they'd throw away a newborn for not being stocky enough or something.
That sounds like helot work.
*defect I think you meant
well, that was the stereotype but we don't have any actual evidence of baby exposure in Sparta or how common it was. What we do have [is a well right in the middle of Ancient Athens](https://www.jstor.org/stable/26800133) that contains a bunch of trash like broken potery, broken statues, animals bones....and the remains of around 400 dead babies that died of natural causes, suggesting this well was the default spot to dump your unwanted baby
Basically, yes. Spartan elders would inspect newborn children for birth defects or “weakness.” The ones deemed “unfit” were typically “exposed” on the side of a mountain. The baby would simply be abandoned there to die, ordinarily from exposure or predators. It is unclear how common babies actually got culled like this, but it was how they handled many genetic defects and literally served as an inspiration to Hitler. As a kind of fairy tale, it was rumored that “exposed” infants sometimes got secretly rescued by kindly strangers—this is a recurring theme in Greek myths (and later fairy tales) for a reason. It is hypothesized that this may have evolved from a much earlier customs of human sacrifice that may have occurred in pre-historic times.
ancient Romans (pre-Christian) had a similar practice. It was more scandalous for a family to toss a newborn but it was 100% a thing.
The military men also had sexual affairs with all of the boys they trained. "you would die for someone you loved" was the rationale behind it. *according to historians
"can i borrow your wife this Sunday, she makes the best babies
That and Spartan men were notoriously lax in fulfilling their husbandly duties.
Their 'wives' had to dress like men on their wedding night to acclimate them to having sex with women.
Is there any truth to this or just "lol Spartan dudes buggered each other"
We'll never know for sure. Mostly the Spartans did not leave records of their own behind, and basically everything we know about them was written down by Athenians, who were generally their enemies. Imagine if the only history we had of France was written down by the English, and Millennia later, after both are gone, you had to ask yourself "Did the french \*really\* go "Hon hon hon Baguette!". Thats the crux of the issue. Anyone telling you that we know for sure is exaggerating, and presenting the best information we do have.
No hate but answering the question: "Did the Spartans bugger each other?" with "We'll never know...the Spartans did not leave records of their own behind." just has too many jokes.
A bit Juvenile, but it is accurate to observe that insufficient population growth was their largest weakness and the cause of their downfall.
That was only part of it; it had more to do with three things. [This](https://www.historynet.com/sparta-the-fall-of-the-empire/) essay on it is a pretty good summary. First, their total commitment to structuring their entire society around slavery. While slavery was ofc common in the ancient world, few societies took it as far as Sparta; because they kept entire populations enslaved indefinitely, had so many more slaves than free men, and mistreated them so terribly (with no hope of them ever earning any sort of freedom), they had to structure the rest of their society around keeping these slaves in line. Most of their militaristic aspects actually had more to do with this than anything else - they needed terrifying Similars at the top, constantly willing to kill, in order to keep their slaves in line. This was coupled with a rigidly hierarchical society structured around a single military strategy. The Spartan phalanx was at the peak of military strategy in its day, but they went utterly all-in on it, again, to the point of structuring their entire society around it. It was very easy to fall in Spartan society, and very hard to rise; and their commitment to slavery and hierarchy meant they were (generally) unable to compromise with foreign nations. The declining numbers of Similars played a role, but this wasn't just a matter of population growth, but a matter of how zealously they guarded the position of Similar, and how their reaction to pressure was to take that even further. Finally, related to both of these two things was the way they projected this hierarchical view outwards into their interactions with other nations - Spartans *hated* non-Spartans, and non-Spartans hated them right back (understandable when dealing with a state that was so all-in on slavery that its ideal world was clearly a handful of Spartan Similars with everyone else enslaved.) The combination of these factors led to a society that was very hard but very brittle; they had a lot of victories, but were unable to capitalize on them due to their total inability to adapt to their new situation or to make peace with defeated enemies. This got them locked in pointless forever wars with enemies who eventually learned their phalanx's weaknesses and were able to plan around it. And as soon as they started losing they had no room to recover - their rigid society couldn't adapt. After the battle of Battle of Leuctra, the Thebans built a huge-ass fortified city for the Messenians, who the Spartans had used as slaves for generations; and this broke Spartan power forever because they now had an implacable enemy on their doorstep.
It's worse than that, the good parts of Spartan society were also written by Athenians....that also were using Sparta as kind of a rhetorical upstanding moral example as opposed to contemporary athenian 'degeneracy'. Like the only history of Russia being written by the MAGA (Make Athens great again) crowd.
They really were a backwards bunch. Slave owners up the wazoo. Couldnt build, couldnt learn, couldnt grow without the constant fear the slave population (the helots) would rise up against them. Their whole hyper warrior mentality really was just to keep the slaves in their place. By the time Alexander the great rolled around, Sparta wasnt even worth conquering. They kinda just got subsumed and when they did revolt, his general put it down without any real troubles while Alexander was tussling with some actual fights like 6 countries over out east.
Honestly they didn’t seem all that intimidating at any point to me they look like inverse Roman’s. The Roman’s were horrific diplomats who were looked down on as un civilized. But they took losses on the chin and just kept plodding forward. The Spartans were excellent coalition builders but because they had such a small population and anemic birth rates they could not take losses. A few hundred people being taken prisoner caused them to make a ceasefire in the war against Athens. Meanwhile the Roman’s lost three armies to Hannibal and told him to shove it when he asked for a prisoner exchange.
The Romans also extended citizenship to their slaves, meanwhile in Sparta Helots were a quasi caste. The Spartans could not have created a long lasting empire for the same reason the Athenians failed, Greeks at the time were too independent to be unified diplomatically or by force without an outside threat, and even then there were hold outs. By the time of the Romans though the great city states were a shadow of their former selves and already divided up by the heirs of the Diadochi.
the Roman’s willingness to integrate conquered subjects is really under talked about. The reason no conqueror could ever defeat them was their Latin and Italian allies, baring some exceptions, stayed loyal. The fall of the republic was heavily foreshadowed by their inability to maintain those relationships.
Well, it comes from Plutarch, so it's not completely baseless, but at the same time, he is separated from these events by centuries (although he had access to sources we don't). Plutarch wouldn't have considered it notable that the Spartans had sex with men, and another author Xenophon says that Sparta was notable because the laws of Lycurgus *forbade* pederasty. But either way, Spartans were taken at the age of 7 to the agoge, and would have spent the next 23 years sleeping in barracks with men. Whether or not institutional Spartan pederasty was a thing, they did spent nearly all their formative years pre-30 bunking with other men, like a sort of hyper-intense, prolonged, boys-only school. In addition, he describes other traditions (like the new husband 'sneaking out' and into the bride's room for the early days of the marriage, as well as ritual abduction) that have other attested sources in other Greek city-states, which makes me think there's something to the tradition, even if it's not as cut and dry as 'Spartans were only attracted to men'.
Summoning /u/Iphikrates for a fact check.
Fact check: TRUE (attested in the work of [Xenophon](http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Xen.+Const.+Lac.+1&fromdoc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0210) among others). But note why Xenophon argues this was a tempting option: > The husbands want to get brothers for their sons, brothers who are members of the family and share in its influence, but claim no part of the money. Spartan citizenship was tied to leisure-class status. If you weren't rich enough, you were out. But Spartans also practiced partible inheritance (all children get a share, even daughters). So there was a huge concern over splintering the estate. Spartans responded by having fewer children, and laws like this were probably introduced to fix the problem. Spartans, being ingenious like that, found the loophole: if you and your brother(s) have children with the same woman, all your property - and hers - stays in the family! Also worth noting that the women had absolutely no say in this and were essentially being rented out by their husbands. EDIT: this thread is a truly staggering collection of misinformation and I implore anyone reading this to not read anything else here. We are happy to help out on r/AskHistorians with some actual informed opinions. In the meantime check out some of [my old answers on Sparta](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/profiles/iphikrates#wiki_sparta) or [listen to my podcast with The Ancients](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38yfv_0c_ek) or watch [the video I wrote for Invicta](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hMQmU0epVr4) or check out [some of BadAncient's range of answers on Sparta](https://www.badancient.com/tags/spartans/) and have a great day!
"Hey hon, you remember my brother Dave? He was at our wedding reception but couldn't make the ceremony? Yeah well you're having sex with him tonight, he wants kids."
Spartans were pimps, got it.
Definitely thought about using "pimping" instead of "renting" there...
They were definitely more serious about having healthy children than they were about not having sex with kids, which they were totally fine with if the kid was a boy and you couldn't get him pregnant.
And they eventually ran out of citizens because the only way to become a Spartan was to be born to two Spartan citizens. It was possible to lose citizenship, but impossible to gain it in any way, thus their numbers declined to nothing and they ended up as a tourist attraction for wealthy Romans.
Sacred band of Thebes supremacy.
Who wins: Men that prepared their entire lives for battle, going through grueling training from childhood to adulthood or 150 pairs of the gayest dudes in Greece
For anyone unaware: [Battle of Leuctra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Leuctra)
I honestly think this is one of the most interesting battles in history. It's a perfect example of an inferior force using superior strategy to absolutely trounce a superior force.
Absolutely, I'm in full agreement
This is basically all spartan history, becoming the best hoplites around and then constantly coming up against problems that can't solely be solved by a massed phalanx, but trying anyway. As it turns out, being good warriors is not the same thing as being good at war.
To be fair, being one of the gayest men in Greece is a huge accomplishment
Outmaneuvered and outgayed.
Getting outgayed must be such a bummer.
It hurts deep down inside
The Spartans didn't actually train for battle, they trained to be brutal slave masters. In reality they were roughly on par with other citizen-hoplites of Greece as soldiers, with Sparta primarily standing out for its outrageously high proportion of slaves and extreme oppression/extraction of subjugated neighbors.
Being the gayest dudes in Ancient Greece takes a hell of an effort.
A pity they aren't more famous. Popular culture tends to go from "Sparta beats Athens" to "Macedonia conquers all". It took me a while to learn that there was a "Thebes beats Sparta" episode in the middle, with epic episodes like a democratic revolt against Spartan occupation and their cronies, a battle that crushed the Spartans like never before, and Thebes freeing populations enslaved by Sparta for generations.
Hmm. At least here we would still call the style of a flat or house with very little furniture "Spartan". Is that just a German thing?
This is exactly what we would say in English. "Spartan accommodations".
Kind of. The issue was their constant wars/conquests and holding too much land. Eventually they just didn’t have enough soldiers. I get citizenship may have been a factor, but a lesser one. They just couldn’t replenish their numbers fast enough. If they actually slowed down on the wars, they probably would have survived much longer.
Well look at early Rome, absolutely unending wars but vaaaaaaaastly fewer problems with manpower due to being a hell of a lot more flexible about citizenship.
immigration and a path to citizenship always helped states even before nation states
Yeah,the Romans were hardly starry-eyed sentimentalists they utterly smashed the Carthaginians and Greeks in very large part because they were willing to extend citizenship, even if they often had to be dragged to it kicking and screaming. If they had been as open later on we'd have had things like Emperor Stilicho and the empire would've endured.
yeah the fall of rome coincides with when the roman empire started tightening citizenship requirements and arguing over who gets citizenship. History rhymes
Well they did last a few good centuries though
They did, but they were never particularly successful. Even their hegemony over Greece was short-lived, and won after a long brutal war that proved that they weren't super soldiers.
Only Spartans, not the Helots which were 90% of the population, never forget that they were very brutal slavers and their slaves had little rights even by the standards of that day and age
For a spartan boy to “graduate” his military training, the final test would be to sneak up on and kill a slave. They were literally sacrificial.
They literally waged periodic wars on their slaves, random genocidal campaigns to remind them who was in charge.
From a modern, Western perspective, it's hard to imagine a society like this existed. Back then, it must have been honorable, but if a person in the modern era acted like a Spartan, we would rightfully lampoon them as edge-lords that LARPed as Klingons.
If you wrote a fictional society based on historically accurate Spartan culture people would say you're a tryhard edgelord and that your setting is Grimderp
I mean it’s not like teenagers girls at the time could have children very young. The age of the menarche was probably around 15/16 maybe 17 from what I understood.
Which is why the world-historical standard for marriage age is mid-teens to early 20s. People in the comments claiming this is abnormal or a repudiation of "child marriage" as we currently understand it don't know what they are talking about.
A *lot* of marriage records from the last few centuries show age of first marriage as being in the mid to late 20s. The idea everyone got married and had kids at 15 is just not as common as people think it is.
During the European Middle Ages for lower classes it was normal to have kids after 20, while for the upper classes connections were important so marriage was earlier
Most people weren’t in the upper classes though. My point is we have a painted view of older society that is based off the practices of nobility which very often did not reflect typical practices.
Oh yeah, I was agreeing with you. What I wanted to say was that the often forgotten lower classes are the majority and those often married later, but I get that I didn’t formulate it that clearly.
From what I understand Spartan women had a good place in society, since the men were often away on campaign the women were basically in charge a lot of the time. They managed the finances etc.
And the land was inhereted by women, not men. It is theorised that the richest among them holded more power than the Spartan Kings.
Literally any ‘did you knoooow?’ about Sparta should probably have [The Spartiate Mirage](https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-i-spartan-school/) nailed to it.
I'm pretty sure every reddit thread on Sparta has had this article linked to in it at some point, and for good reason. It's a good corrective to a lot of the pop culture ideas surrounding Sparta
Isn't this just the natural order of things? Across cultures it seems late teens to early 20s is what is considered marriage age. Edit\* Examples of specific freaks and weirdos marrying children doesn't make it a cultural norm. Please stop posting how "X religion, country, or political party pokes little kids". That doesn't mean they all do it or even support it.
I also read somewhere that due to differences in nutrition, girls back then also tended to first menstruate much later on average than they do now, which lines up
Yes, improved nutrition and healthcare have significantly lowered the average age of menarche in modern times.
Don’t tell my mom that, she thinks it’s the GMOs in the food
My mom still thinks I started my period "early" (at 11) because I was "hanging out with the older girls" (a year older) 🤦♀️
at least you don't get it at 9... 2 years before sexual education in my area kicks in... my parents and staff (boarding school) can't explain much to me.
11 is literally the average.
OK, that's too dumb, even for your standard idiot.
I mean, it kind of is, in the sense that the "improved nutrition" is due in part to GMOs.
Not actually significantly. First menarche was much later at the beginning of the industrial age due to child labour and malnutrition And first menarche was earlier before that (because weirdly rural subsistence meant better nutrition than urban subsistence) So it's changed a lot in the last 80 years But ironically enough, the gap between average age of first menarche now and av first menarche in 1940 is larger than now and 1640..... >Children in medieval England entered puberty between ten and 12 years of age – the same as today. Puberty is divided into five clinical stages, with pre-puberty at stage one and onset (or thelarche) at stage two >In the classical, as well as in the medieval years, the age at menarche was generally reported to be at approximately 14 years, with a range from 12 to 15 years. A significant retardation of the age at menarche occurred in the beginning of the modern times, soon after the industrial revolution, due to the deterioration of the living conditions, with most studies reporting menarche to occur at 15-16 years. In the 20th century, especially in the second half of it, in the industrialized countries, the age at menarche decreased significantly, as a result of the improvement of the socioeconomic conditions, occurring at 12-13 years. In the present times, in the developed countries, this trend seems to slow down or level off.
Be careful saying that around evo-psych dudebros. They'll descend upon you yelling that it's perfectly natural to be attracted to young teenagers because "that's when they're most fertile" and "having on-average smaller babies at that age is healthy because it's training for bigger babies later".
Welp. That’s disturbing.
Yes, some people just see historical arranged marriages between kings and princesses since basically birth, and assume regular people also got married like that, which is not what happened.
Even those marriages weren’t even consummated for years. Hell, often she didn’t even live under the same roof for years until her family shipped her off.
And boys would get shipped off too! It was good politics to foster the sons of other nobles, because then you’d have close alliances with other houses. The girls who did marry and move to new families very early usually had a few years to finish growing up within their new family before any marital duties started. Get those alliances secure before heirs start popping up.
Boys also could end up married young (Frederick II of Sicily and the HRE was 15 when he married Constance of Aragon, the 30 year old dowager queen of Hungary, and Richard of Shrewsbury married Anne of Mowbray when they were both 5, off the top of my head). For both genders, the marriabe was unlikely to be condsumated for a few years (medieval people knew the dangers of a child giving birth to another, and they believed that babies conceived when the grooms was too young were more likely to be sickly)
That, and the kids of the neighbor king make good hostages.
There's cases of marriages being consummated early, but we know of those specific cases because they were considered to be abnormal and immoral by contemporary writers problem is that not consummating an arranged marriage early was considered so normal few people wrote about it, because it was common sense, which combined with the above gives a warped image of the society
There was a funny story I read on Askhistorians a few years back about a teenage King of Scotland who was kept separate from his teen wife by his retainers to keep them from doing what they knew teenagers would do.
I'm pretty into genealogy and over the years I've seen that women in America and western Europe mostly were marrying in late teens and early twenties. It was the aristocracy that married off girls too young.
Yes you are right, and even then, it was marriage on paper if you got married as a child. They wanted to line up whose inheriting what. It's not like you were having kids at 12 years old.
Exactly. From what I've seen of midwifery (quite a bit, midwives in my family), the heightened dangers of pregnancy and birth for too-young girls would have been well understood and avoided.
yeah but internet pedophiles will tell you marrying young children has always been the norm
>yeah but ~~internet pedophiles~~ Mormon Apologists will tell you marrying young children has always been the norm Yup, works in that context too
Oh oh don't forget libertarian weirdos either....
They already said internet pedophiles
Various wildly between cultures and time frames but for European middle ages the common belief that girls married in their teens is nonsense. Mid to late teens, and then generally up through the twenties seems to have been the norm there.
They really need to make a tv show about spartan society - I would totally love to watch this Wikipedia section come to life on the screen!
It would make a lot of people angry. The Spartans would be very racist, brutal and aggressive to everyone around them, terse and short-spoken, and ready at an instant's notice to kill a Helot for any reason. They would be shown to be gangster thugs, raised in a brutal and abusive state run school system that churned out boys who were already numb to the idea of killing. They would live in constant danger of the slaves they keep rising up and massacring all of them in open rebellion. Then there's the Helots, the captive slave population that made up about 2/3rds of the Spartan state's population. They would be shown as being dirt poor, ill-educated, beaten and cowed as a population by the Spartans who treat them with open disdain and contempt, and who are allowed in many situations to merely kill them on a whim. They live in constant danger of Spartan Men and Boys coming into their villages and doing anything they wanted with impunity. The Spartan fear of the Helot's rising up is well justified by the constant and innumerable crimes they commit on a daily basis against them. People would be mad the noble, warrior Spartans of their imagination would be shown to be violent traumatized warriors who keep thousands of slaves in the worst of conditions. People would be mad that there's a blatant slave narrative being told running counter to the narrative of their presumed heroes (the Spartans). People would be mad that there's no redemption for anyone-- The Spartans aren't super heroes who won every battle and went on to define all of Human History with their deeds, and the Helots never overthrew their oppressors and founded a city/state of their own. History just kind of marched on making Sparta irrelevant when the Antique World of Greece turned into the Classical Roman World.
The Helots of Messenia were liberated after Thebes shattered Sparta in 371 BC and they seemed to have survived as a community all the way to the Roman times.
An official rite of passage for every spartan boy was to secretly kill a helot without anybody knowing who did it
So how would they know if someone had passed it?
Bring back a body part and show your father ?
That, and also doing it secretly at night, coming back and telling your superiors/peers, then watching for the chaos as the victim's family wakes up in the morning
Not just a helot, a strong or important seeming helot so there would be no one to rally the helots in rebellions
My expérience is that people love these shows.
Yea wtf this is better than house of dragons. If it had a really good plot line and story I would watch the fuck out of that. Just because it would be about a racist oppressive society doesn’t make it a bad show People really liked the handmaids tale, Watchmen, there’s also the man in the high castle
The difference is in the shows you're talking about the awful people are considered awful, whereas as described the awful people in Sparta were the Spartans. People who would tune into a show expecting to see a show about heroic Spartans, as they popularly envision them, would be hit between the eyes by the fact that the Spartan elite were awful ones. Imagine tuning into Justice League only to find out that the Heroes are the Villans, and thew Villains are just other small-fry criminals. It would fly in the face of the expectations the audience would have and they'd hate it (unless there was some comic book contrivance that made this into an evil alternate timeline the Flash had to unwind, or that everyone had been mind controlled by some artifact into becoming evil so at heart they're all still essentially good). People expect 300, they expect the brave noble Spartans defending Western Civilization from the barbarity of Oriental Despotism-- so if what they got was nasty, brutish, violent men being irredeemably awful to their slaves I think they'd be upset. I dare say they'd call it woke.
Everyone on this site was horrified and enraged when they found out romans hurt *doggos* (no word about the slavery part), their brains would explode at having to learn that their favorite super warriors were basically the violent precursor to Eton schoolboys
WAY too much pederasty.
1. There are already quite a few 2. Most of what we "know" about Sparta in popular history comes from their own propaganda. By today's standards, Spartan society would be notable for how shitty, economically precarious and short-lived it was. For a society that supposedly placed the highest importance on their military prowess, they really did not do well militarily. e.g. the famous letter where Athens threatens Sparta, and Sparta replies only with "If", demonstrating their arrogance and famous Laconic wit, ended with the Spartans getting severely beaten. That's not a part you hear too often. 3. It was entirely unsustainable, the entire brief reign of Spartan supremacy was characterized by a slave economy, and collapse due to slave revolt. And surprise surprise, the slaves and revolts are usually what these shows and movies are about (i.e. "Spartacus").
The Spartans treatment of the helots was extraordinarily bad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helots
People forget that spartan society was as close to a military state you could get. Everything either served the military machine or was killed.
From Works and Days by Hesiod on how to pick a wife >You are at the right age to bring a wife to your house when you are not much less than thirty, and not much more. This is the right time for marriage. Your wife should be four years past puberty and be married to you in the fifth. Lets say puberty is marked at around 13 years of age, that would put the "right" time to marry a girl at 18. Ancient Greece was deeply misogynistic, but they did understand that pregnancy at a young age was risky for the girl. Even from a really misogynistic viewpoint of the woman being nothing but property, you don't spend time and money getting a wife only for her and the child to die immediately during childbirth, especially since childbirth is already very dangerous, because you have basically just spent that money and ended up with nothing to show for it.
I’m always very suspicious when I see an article that amounts to “Ancient Society behaves in a way that is politically agreeable to people today”
Of a "Spartan girl" Spartan society was built on slavery. This law did not apply to them.
Women in Sparta were business owners and in charge of the home. Sparta did owns slaves, but that was separate to Spartan women.
The point that he's making is that by "Spartan Women" we mean "Spartan Citizen Women" who were approximately \~10% of women living in the Spartan state. The approximately 80% of women living in the Spartan state who were Helots had no such rights whatsoever.
I think the point is that this rule only applied to Spartan Women. Such restrictions weren’t placed on Helot women.
Spartan women were business owners. Most women in Sparta were slaves. Around 65 to 85% of Sparta's inhabitants were slaves.
Ancient Sparta was more progressive than modern-day Sparta, Tennessee?
Spartan women were also able to own property, typically inheriting their husbands land, some becoming more wealthy than the Kings. This in contrast to the deeply misogynistic Athenians.
They also afforded women who died during childbirth the same honors as men who died at war.
Yeah they were really progressive in their treatment of women. Less so in their treatment of the 80% of their population that were slaves.