ThingsThatDontJustifyGenocide
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Feb 16, 2026 11:53 PM
ThingsThatDontJustifyGenocide
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spacerobot142
The Athenians defeated Spartans in battle on numerous occasions. And Spartans had culture and education. This is a stupid post
Urgalicity
People travel to modern Italy to see the marble, the blood washed away centuries ago.
CP3oh
Turns out a lot of what we "remember" about Sparta was from after it's collapse, when Rome basically turned it into a tourism destination.
Iamatinylittlebanana
Theban for the win
IceWeaselX
I've run across multiple Catholic schools whose mascots were Spartans. I went to one. It's really weird how much supposedly devout Christians idealize Spartans.
OperatorWay
> "...or else we risk losing our nation."
Losing it to who? The biggest threat to the nation is the people in charge of governing it.
...and they are nowhere near as tough as Spartans, & nowhere near as intellectual as Athenians.
Strength without wisdom reckless & disastrous.
Allrighty
Losing it to the "helots", of course - the 7/8 of the population that should have no citizenship and be kept in check by force and terror.
ThingsThatDontJustifyGenocide
Marble Arguments are more enduring than Forged Men
Skawomplious
And the Spartans weren't even as fearsome as their modern reputation suggests. They got their butts kicked by other city-states plenty of times.
Freeasabird2015
Those loonies are always dribbling about ancient history, its like they live in European 1500s. We are suppose to learn from the mistakes of the past not recreate them.
ThisIsNotTheBestUsername
Athenians did field a very strong and capable military force. Also the period of Sparta's hegemony over Greece didn't really go so well, mostly due to Sparta's own self made fuckups that actually decreased their own numbers. They think acting like Spartans will save the nation, history clearly shows that didn't work.
TheWombatStrikesAgain
Also Spartans weren't nearly the legendary warriors people think they were. They were great at the hoplite shield wall thing, but that was pretty much the only thing they could do. Whenever they encountered an enemy that could counter that, they didn't adapt, they lost.
newsguycraigevans
And their absolute insistence on maintaining tradition meant the couldn't adapt on the battlefield. Their enemies exploited this weakness.
HuruinaInu
Their only knowledge of Sparta is the Frank Miller movie 300
NeverDownvoteMelBrooks
They loved their bananas
YoungHeathen
They.. they do get that part of the point of that movie was the sheer unsustainability of that societal structure.
..right?
Or is this like when I learned some folks read Starship Troopers and get inspired to treat it like a utopic view of the future?
HuruinaInu
You're right in the second half of your post.
Same guys who watched Fight Club and thought "cool, I could do that"...
Nukls
fires burn out. marble remains
hyperchondriac
Until the skies rain acid anyway.
a2s2020
Have you ever tried to remove smoke damage from marble?!
(I haven’t either; I’m just being facetious)
Nukls
marble fireplaces would agree
AnonOmis1000
...marble very much does defend a city
Apeofdeath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonidas_I
According to Herodotus, Leonidas mother was not only his father's wife, but also his father's niece
CP3oh
So .... Leonidas was his own cousin?
MichikoTheJungleFox
The OG Alabama
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
That was not particularly uncommon in Greece, or honestly, many pre-modern cultures that had land ownership rules that gave at least some to the female line. Gotta keep the land in the family.
welluhwhatdoyouwantmetosay
Athenians were citizen soldiers who fought when necessary. Spartans were slave-owning soldiers who were afraid to go to war because an uprising may have occurred at home.
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
Just gonna point out, Athens was the largest slave trading port of the Ancient Greek world. And Spartans were also citizen soldiers. Sparta was worried about a slave uprising, while Athens was brutally expansionist just before the Peloponnesian War. There were no "good guys" in this fight. They both sucked.
BrentonCoppick
99% of you wouldnt know the true history that wasnt just 300 of anyone
ShearingBlizzard
Empires are a relic of the past and do untold damage to this day.
Selfinflictedwounds
Someone correct me is i am wrong, but wasn't Spartans really, really really big in to man-on-man sex? Not homosexual stuff, just man-on-man warrior sex. There is totally a difference as i am sure a great Manny Republicans will attest that
Skawomplious
Pederasty was a thing across all the Greek cultures of the time, but I think you're thinking of the Sacred Band of Thebes.
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
The answer is: sorta. So, the problem with talking about Sparta is that they somewhat famously didn't write anything down. So we have to judge based on outside texts, which leaves a lot of weird contradictions. For example, the krypteia has about 4 different meanings. Anyway, what we know is that Sparta had a system where an older man was paired with a younger man as something of a teacher and guardian. Now, most Athenians claimed they were inherently sexual relationships. However, Xenophon who>
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
was a student of Socrates and also basically Sparta's number 1 fan, who went to live with them and sent his son to school with them, claimed that it wasn't sexual... necessarily. It could happen, but only if it was about mature things like love and respect and not just lust. If it was just lust then it was abominable. This leads to some interesting issues. On the one hand, Xenophon is clearly biased. On the other, he's also probably our best single source.
rossimus
Spartas warmongering led to the deterioration of Greek power and influence more broadly and allowed space for Macedon to conquer all of Greece. It fought battles, it's only real quality, and its most famous battle (Thermopylae) was a defeat.
peedrinkingcrapface
different as they were, both Athens AND Sparta had systemic pederasty, corrupt oligarchs, and slave labor.
itrytoonlysaypositivethings
Fun fact about Spartans: their combat prowess is severely overstated. Whenever it was time to fight, Spartans tended to be conveniently busy with other matters.
rshini
not to mention their women were trained to fight, and Spartans rarely ventured out of their territory to fight because of the fear of slave revolts were so high.
GrenithTheSkald
Athens: Famously known for contributions to science, philosophy. Is modern day capital of Greece, population 3,155,000 people.
Sparta: A pseudo homoerotic fan-fic movie made about them fighting sweaty and practically naked, and white supremacists thought it was cool and somehow "totally not gay in anyway bro!". They were also literally beaten so badly by Thebes that they never recovered, and spent the rest of their history in decline. Modern day city of only about 32,000 people.
sevenfingerman
The Spartans weren’t nearly as bad ass as the they are made out to be. Most of their reputation as their own propaganda. They were absolutely terrified that their slaves, the Helots, would rise up and destroy them. This led to an intense purity culture were the number of “true” Spartans dwindled down as more and more requirements were made up. Eventually they legislated themselves out of existence
eathotdog
Your not going to um actually them out of this, just like norse myth its just "badass" iconography to wrap themselves in while being a fascist
RufusPimperton
Sparta was kinda bad at everything. They only won the Peloponnesian War because Athens drank stupid juice after years of Sparta not being a credible threat (and their victory was shorter lived than the Confederacy). Hell, arguably their most bad ass moments we're because of cool one liners that they couldn't live up to. "Molan labe" isn't quite as cool when you remember that Persia, in the end, labed.
blooocean
Spartans had secret police that would secretly kill certain slaves they deemed dangerous and would “declare” war annually on Helot so their murdering was justified. Also bunch of spartans diddled with younger teenage spartan boys.
wolfbro86
When Philip of Macedon made diplomatic overtures with Sparta, he told them that he could come as a friend or an enemy. The Spartans told him not to come at all. Philip reiterated that if he were to come to Sparta, he would raze it to the ground. The Spartans replied with one word: "If."
wolfbro86
Philip of Macedon then proceeded to later invade the everliving f*ck out of Spartan territory and roundly hand them their asses.
Legomaniac91
Sparta: Daniel. Macedonia: The Cooler Daniel.
Filanwizard
I am going to guess he understood logistics, Sparta did not.
wolfbro86
He certainly understood the 256-man Macedonian phalanx and Sparta did not.
RufusPimperton
He fucked Sparta so hard that by the time Rome conquered Hellenes, Sparta was an "in name only" joke of a power thar wasn't even located in the original city state.
LtRooney
It gets better, because the Romans were the Romans, they did a regular census in all their territories, which they published. You can read the census records and watch the Spartans inbreed themselves to extinction.
wolfbro86
LOL I love so much that everyone remembers the "laconic" wit of Sparta telling Philip "if," but everyone seems to forget that the next part happens. Which turns it from a story where Sparta is so badass to a FAFO scenario roflmao
ratfvcker95
Are they unaware that Spartan men were encouraged, even expected, to have male lovers?
TheWombatStrikesAgain
They also weren't supposed to be too attached to their spouses, their only loyalty was expected to be to the state.
YoungHeathen
Reading history is for nerds. ( /s )
TheMightyMollusk
Considering how Grindr overloads whenever there's a Republican convention in town, yeah, I'm pretty sure they know.
RevolutionOnHerLips
it's not gay if you scream "FOR SPARTA!" first
Navrodel
Are they aware that everything we think of as Greek - the enduring legacy of the classical Golden Age comes from Athens, not Sparta?
Do they really want their enduring legacy to be brutish strength that only served to crash economic prosperity and the interconnection of a thriving empire?
They literally only ruled over Athens for a year before a democratic revolt kicked them out! Why would you want that to be your legacy?
TheWombatStrikesAgain
They don't think that far. They cherry-pick some elements from historic entities, blindly glorify them, and have no idea about the system in which these entities existed and how it functioned.
Expecting the right to know about the politics of Sparta is like expecting Neo-Nazis to know why the economy of Nazi Germany was doomed to collapse, even if they had won.
MirroredImage
That's literally what they wrote a whole plan about doing. They want to do and are in the process of doing exactly that. They do that each time they gain power
You're thinking of it in terms of social progress & the benefit of all. They specifically dislike others benefiting. They're the kid who likes kicking sandcastles, all grown up. And nothing bad happens to them when they destroy the economy. They not only enjoy harming others more than anything else, they benefit from destroying things
FreePalestineAndTheWorldFromIsrael
Agreed. Same with the obsession over Vikings too.
enjeruluca
Yeah but Viking lore couldn’t be more further than Spartan culture.
LtRooney
Unlike magats, the Vikings were known for their personal grooming habits.
FreePalestineAndTheWorldFromIsrael
...and the rapes, raids, murder, stuff like that.
LtRooney
Magats love all that stuff, it's the regular bathing they object to.
Imadethisaccounttopost
Both Sparta and Athena were gods of war
Sparta was combat, Athena was strategy.
Jinxer13
Sparta a god? You mean Ares?
Imadethisaccounttopost
Bleh, thank you!
Yes I meant Aries, who was the god of Sparta.
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
Other fun fact, no he wasn't. At least, not much more than Ares was a god for all of Greece. Sparta's primary deities were Apollo, Athena, and Artemis. They did have a statue of Ares in chains, but that was a symbolic thing that was decently common in Greek cities. Athens, for example, had a statue of Nike in chains. As sort of a way to indicate the desired aspects of the god would never leave the city.
Jinxer13
Cool fun fact, Ares= god, Aries = zodiac. Now Aries is the sign of Mars which is basically the latin name of Ares but the funny thing is Aries is a latin word for "ram" that actually has no etymological ties to Ares and is coincidental! Isn't that kinda weird?
canigifinpaint
Spartans only made up around 15% of the population, the rest were slaves. Oh, and Spartans were allowed to kill any of the slaves for any reason at any time. That's the exact society MAGA has always wanted, and before them The Tea Party, and before them NeoCons, and before them all the people that waved The Confederate Flag.
jesuisgur
And yet Sparta didn't leave anything behind: no art, no monuments, no philosophy or science, not even their own fucking city: the current one resides quite some distance away.
cgt9803
So basically any of the Gulf states - Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait
Affray
1)Spartan slaves could own personal property, have families and amass wealth to buy their freedom, which was a better deal than Athenian
Loveshead2
The Helots couldn’t buy their freedom. They were essentially slaves that performed agricultural and household duties, leaving the male Spartans, that were not subject to infanticide, to focus on their military service.
They were slaves belonging to Sparta itself not individual owners. Similar to Slavery in the American South, they outnumbered the non-slave population and caused constant fear of a slave revolt.
Sparta’s enemies often tried to recruit the Helots offering them freedom.
SchizoidPanda
You're mixing up perioikoi, mothakes and the other non-citizens with helots. As someone else pointed out, helots were generally worse off than many other slave classes in antiquity.
Affray
2)slaves at the time and a much more humane (but obviously not humane) situation than MAGA C.H.U.Ds would allow in their dream regime.
blooocean
Spartan slaves were more oppressed serfs, also Spartans had secret police and would have annual declaration of war on slaves so it wasn’t considered pure murder. Also when Spartan King Cleomenes III offered the Helots (slave class) can buy their freedom, his reign was the beginning of end of Ancient Sparta dynasty.
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
So, fun thing, the secret police is the krypteia. Here's the problem, we don't know exactly what the krypteia was. Sparta, famously, didn't write shit down. So everything we know about them comes from others talking about them. Athens wrote a lot of shit down. And they talked about Sparta quite a bit during the time when they were trying to show everyone how terrible Sparta was. See the Helots weren't like Athenian slaves who were the poor or outsiders, oh no. They had been normal Greeks first.>
SometimesISayHistoryStuff
Some of them were even from wealthy families before Sparta conquered them. The monsters. Anyway, because of Sparta's inability to write shit down, we have a lot of contradictory views of what things are. For example, the krypteia. There are 4 versions that I am aware of. 1) The one you mentioned, the secret police of Spartans who would spy on the helots and kill anyone with a whiff of rebellion. 2) A ritual where a young Spartan would go out and murder a helot, just because they could. 3) A >