The Spartan practice wasn’t exposing, it was throwing the children to their deaths. One could argue that it was more merciful to implement immediate death. Of course, mandatory pederasty, fetishistic “marriage by capture”, the communal rearing (ahem) of children to ensure that they grow up twisted elitist killers takes a little of the shine off that.
Yup. I have never quite understood the fascination some Americans have with the Spartans. They had many admirable traits, of course. Courage, honor, military prowess.
They were also the world’s first and arguably most total ever totalitarian society. The Spartans, as such, were a democracy. But it was a democracy in which all individual choice and freedom was utterly subordinated to the group. And that group itself survived only by tyrannizing in the most appalling ways over other groups and individuals.
They were in most ways history’s first and most extreme fascists.
My earlier point was that infanticide was ubiquitous in the ancient world, as was slavery. I have seen a surviving fragment of a letter written from a Greek merchant in Cyprus back to his pregnant wife in Egypt. Around 100 BC or so.
It instructs her to keep the child if a boy, but expose it if a girl. The tone of the letter is similar to a discussion about picking out curtains.