Peculiar that nowhere is this lenghty piece, so lavish in its praise for the Spartans, is there any mention of the enslaved Helot population upon whose backs the supposedly laudable Spartan culture was so brutally perched.
Everyone had slaves back then. What’s important about a civilization is not things it has in common with everyone else, it’s what’s different about it, for good or bad.
I read the book, it was pretty good. But I highly recommend Pressfield’s “The Afghan Campiagn” about Alexander the Great’s war there. It really is very relevant to today, and helps understand a lot about Muslim tribal culture which was there long before Islam codified it under Sharia.
IIRC, the Spartans, in the end, threw in with the ancient enemy, the Persians, the same enemy we face today.
Didn’t the Athenians own slaves too? Almost every nation on earth had slaves, it was normal at the time and they were not all black of course..but thats another conversation.
They certainly knew how to make war, in their time, and the focus on courage is a mirror of their study of Phobos/Fear, how to master it in themselves and produce it in others. Excellent book.
As manhood-affirming alien warrior societies go, I might prefer this one ;)
I don’t know much about this era. Were the Spartans the only culture that bad slaves or was it a fairly common thing?