just a heads up that i’ve put all my works on ao3 as only visible to users. if you’d like to read any of my work but don’t have an account, you can message me (although i do recommend having an account, it is great)
losing my mind what do you MEAN mr. brightside is 20 years old
WHAT DO YOU MEAN 2003?????
i just can't look, it's killing me 😔
Sometimes I'll be trying to fall asleep and "smork alam" will just pop into my head and I start giggling.
And Sparta was not militarily excellent. Its military was profoundly mediocre, depressingly average. Even in battle, the one thing they were supposed to be good at, Sparta lost as much as it won. Judging Sparta as we should – by how well it achieved strategic objects – Sparta’s armies are a comprehensive failure. The Spartan was no super-soldier and Spartan training was not excellent. Indeed, far from making him a super-soldier, the agoge made the Spartans inflexible, arrogant and uncreative, and those flaws led directly to Sparta’s decline in power.
And I want to stress this one last time, because I know there are so many people who would pardon all of Sparta’s ills if it meant that it created superlative soldiers: it did not. Spartan soldiers were average. The horror of the Spartan system, the nastiness of the agoge, the oppression of the helots, the regimentation of daily life, it was all for nothing. Worse yet, it created a Spartan leadership class that seemed incapable of thinking its way around even basic problems. All of that supposedly cool stuff made Sparta weaker, not stronger.
This would be bad enough, but the case for Sparta is worse because it – as a point of pride – provided nothing else. No innovation in law or government came from Sparta (I hope I have shown, if nothing else, that the Spartan social system is unworthy of emulation). After 550, Sparta produced no trade goods or material culture of note. It produced no great art to raise up the human condition, no great literature to inspire. Despite possessing fairly decent farmland, it was economically underdeveloped, underpopulated and unimportant.
Athens produced great literature and innovative political thinking. Corinth was economically essential – a crucial port in the heart of Greece. Thebes gave us Pindar and was in the early fourth century a hotbed of military innovation. All three cities were adorned by magnificent architecture and supplied great art by great artists. But Sparta, Sparta gives us almost nothing.
Sparta was – if you will permit the comparison – an ancient North Korea. An over-militarized, paranoid state which was able only to protect its own systems of internal brutality and which added only oppression to the sum of the human experience. Little more than an extraordinarily effective prison, metastasized to the level of a state. There is nothing of redeeming value here.
Sparta is not something to be emulated. It is a cautionary tale.
https://acoup.blog/2019/09/27/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-vii-spartan-ends/
at their communal tables, spartans ate nutritious but bland food, sometimes described as soup or gruel. asimov relates there was a contemporary greek joke, of course spartans don’t fear death, if all you have to look forward to is gruel every day, death seems preferable.
i posted similar thoughts on livejournal back in the day, i watched 300 and laughed out loud in the theater.
I think it’s only fair that two thousand years of idolising the Spartans is followed by two thousand years of roasting them to heck.
This.
