Quotulatiousness

February 27, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 4 – The Ancient Greeks: The Great Invasion

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024

This fourth lecture in the course deals with the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC, ending with the glory of Thermopylae and the burning of Athens.
(more…)

February 21, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 3 – The Ancient Greeks: Rising Tensions with Persia

Filed under: Greece, History, Middle East — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 18, 2024

This third lecture in the course deals with the rise of the Persian Empire, and the growing tensions between the Persians and the Greeks, culminating in an account of the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC.
(more…)

February 13, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 2 – Sparta and Athens: Contrasting Societies

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 11, 2024

This second lecture in the course contrasts Athens and Sparta, the two leading societies in Greece — one a commercial society with high levels of personal freedom and citizen participation, the other a militarised oligarchy.

[NR: Some additional information to supplement Dr. Gabb’s lecture:
“Citizenship” in the ancient and clasical world
Sparta had Lycurgus, while Athens had Solon … who at least actually existed
The Constitution of Athens
The Constitution of the Spartans
The Myth of Spartan Equality
Relative wealth among the Spartiates
Sparta’s military reputation as “the best warriors in all of Greece”
Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
Spartan glossary]
(more…)

February 6, 2024

Greek History and Civilisation, Part 1 – What Makes the Greeks Special?

Filed under: Greece, History — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

seangabb
Published Feb 1, 2024

This first lecture in the course makes a case for the Greeks as the exceptional people of the Ancient World. They were not saints: they were at least as willing as anyone else to engage in aggressive wars, enslavement, and sometimes human sacrifice. At the same time, working without any strong outside inspiration, they provided at least the foundations for the science, mathematics, philosophy, art and secular literature of later peoples.
(more…)

QotD: Sparta’s actually mediocre military performance

Sparta was one of the largest Greek city-states in the classical period, yet it struggled to achieve meaningful political objectives; the result of Spartan arms abroad was mostly failure. Sparta was particularly poor at logistics; while Athens could maintain armies across the Eastern Mediterranean, Sparta repeatedly struggled to keep an army in the field even within Greece. Indeed, Sparta spent the entirety of the initial phase of the Peloponnesian War, the Archidamian War (431-421 B.C.), failing to solve the basic logistical problem of operating long term in Attica, less than 150 miles overland from Sparta and just a few days on foot from the nearest friendly major port and market, Corinth.

The Spartans were at best tactically and strategically uncreative. Tactically, Sparta employed the phalanx, a close-order shield and spear formation. But while elements of the hoplite phalanx are often presented in popular culture as uniquely Spartan, the formation and its equipment were common among the Greeks from at least the early fifth century, if not earlier. And beyond the phalanx, the Spartans were not innovators, slow to experiment with new tactics, combined arms, and naval operations. Instead, Spartan leaders consistently tried to solve their military problems with pitched hoplite battles. Spartan efforts to compel friendship by hoplite battle were particularly unsuccessful, as with the failed Spartan efforts to compel Corinth to rejoin the Spartan-led Peloponnesian League by force during the Corinthian War.

Sparta’s military mediocrity seems inexplicable given the city-state’s popular reputation as a highly militarized society, but modern scholarship has shown that this, too, is mostly a mirage. The agoge, Sparta’s rearing system for citizen boys, frequently represented in popular culture as akin to an intense military bootcamp, in fact included no arms training or military drills and was primarily designed to instill obedience and conformity rather than skill at arms or tactics. In order to instill that obedience, the older boys were encouraged to police the younger boys with violence, with the result that even in adulthood Spartan citizens were liable to settle disputes with their fists, a tendency that predictably made them poor diplomats.

Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.

August 31, 2023

QotD: A typical polis

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Defining the polis (plural: poleis) is remarkably tricky, so tricky in fact that the Polis Center, after spending ten years inventorying every known polis, did not quite manage to settle on a single definition and instead inventoried poleis based on if they are called poleis in the sources or if they show signs of doing the things that a polis usually does (like building walls or minting coins). In Greek usage, a polis was a town, but it was also the political community of that town (which may or may not be an independent state, though the Greeks tended to think that poleis ought to be independent by nature) and the broader territory that political community controlled and also the body of citizens, the politai, who made up the community. These are connected definitions, of course, but there is a lot of give in these joints, yet the idea of a polis as a self-governing community centered on a single, usually fortified, town center is a strong one in Greek thought.

In any case there certainly were a lot of them. The Polis Center’s inventory counts just over a thousand archaic and classical poleis (it does not extend into the Hellenistic period), of which probably around 800-900 existed at one time. Now our vision of these poleis is necessarily a bit skewed: most were very small and leave little evidence, while the two most prominent poleis in our sources by far, Athens and Sparta, were both very unusual in their size and governing structures. That said while most poleis were very small, it doesn’t follow that most Greeks lived in very small poleis; M.H. Hansen notes ((2006), 83) that by his estimates 80% of all of the poleis housed around 35% of the polis-living population, while the top 10% largest poleis housed roughly 40%.

But the smallest poleis could be very small. A touch over 200 poleis in the inventory had territories of less than 100km2. A small polis like that might have a total population of just a few thousand, with an even smaller subset of that population consisting of adult citizen males. On the other hand, very large poleis like Athens or Sparta might have hundreds of thousands of inhabitants, though as M.H. Hansen notes in the inventory these sorts of massive poleis with territories in excess of 1,000km2 were very rare: there are just thirteen such known.

But crucially for this survey, what we’re going to see is that there some fairly common and standard polis institutions, which seem fairly common regardless of size. Indeed, the language and thinking of our Greek sources is often informed by a sort of idea of an ideal or standard polis, from which every real polis deviates in certain ways. These little communities had institutions which resembled each other, to the point that the difference between “oligarchic” or “democratic” or even “tyranical” poleis could be surprisingly slight. So that’s what we’re going to look at here: a basic sense of what a polis notionally was. And we’ll begin by looking at the parts that comprised a polis, which is going to be quite important as we go forward, since the way one structures a government depends on how one imagines the component parts being governed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Polis, 101: Component Parts”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-03-10.

August 22, 2023

History Summarized: Sparta’s Finest Hour

Filed under: Europe, History, Humour, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 12 May 2023

It’s not Thermopylai.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
Constantine Cavafy, The Collected Poems. Translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou, Oxford University Press, 2008. – George Economou, On Translating C.P. Cavafy’s “Come, O King of the Lacedaimonians”. https://newohioreview.org/2013/09/02/… – Plutarch, Lives of Agis and Cleomenes. Translated by Bernadotte Perrin, W. Heinemann, 1968. – Polybius, Histories. Edited by F. W. Walbank and Christian Habicht. Translated by W. R. Paton, VI, Harvard University Press, 2012.
– For way the heck more about Kleomenes and Kratisikleia, you can also read my undergraduate Honors Thesis, Greekness in Peril: Cavafy and the Essence of Hellenism. 2018. https://www.academia.edu/44709355/Gre…
(more…)

July 27, 2023

History Summarized: The Cities of Ancient Sparta

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 14 Apr 2023

Is. This. Sparta???

SOURCES & Further Reading:
– “The Spartans” from Ancient Greek Civilization by Jeremy McInerney
– “The Greek Polis – Sparta” from The Foundations of Western Civilization by Thomas F. X. Noble
– “Dark Age and Archaic Greece” from The Greek World: A Study of History and Culture by Robert Garland
– “Being a Greek Slave” from The Other Side of History by Robert Garland.
The Greeks: A Global History by Roderick Beaton
The Greeks: An Illustrated History by Diane Cline.
– AskHistorians posts by u/Iphikrates “Is the Military Worship of the Spartans Really Justified?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
– “This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?” (https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorian…)
(more…)

May 25, 2023

The Hoplite Heresy: Why We Don’t Know How the Ancient Greeks Waged War

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The Historian’s Craft
Published 9 Feb 2023

Hoplites are probably one of the first things that come to mind when one thinks of “Ancient Greece”. Equipped with a bronze spear and wearing bronze armor or a linothorax, and hefting the aspis — the hoplite‘s bronze shield — they fought in phalanxes. The classic mode of fighting in this formation was the “othismos“, the push, with the aim being to disrupt the enemy phalanx and break their formation. But, over the past few decades, views on hoplite warfare have been called into question and seriously revised, because there are problems in the source material. So, what are these problems, and how do historians of Ancient Greece understand hoplite warfare?

(more…)

March 25, 2023

QotD: Sparta’s fate

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

What becomes of Sparta after its hegemony shatters in 371, after Philip II humiliates it in 338 and after Antipater crushes it in 330? This is a part of Spartan history we don’t much discuss, but it provides a useful coda on the Sparta of the fifth and fourth century. Athens, after all, remained a major and important city in Greece through the Roman period – a center for commerce and culture. Corinth – though burned by the Romans – was rebuilt and remained a crucial and wealthy port under the Romans.

What became of Sparta?

In short, Sparta became a theme-park. A quaint tourist get-away where wealthy Greeks and Romans could come to look and stare at the quaint Spartans and their silly rituals. It developed a tourism industry and the markets even catered to the needs of the elite Roman tourists who went (Plutarch and Cicero both did so, Plut. Lyc. 18.1; Tusc. 5.77).

In term of civic organization, after Cleomenes III’s last gasp effort to make Sparta relevant – an effort that nearly wiped out the entire remaining Spartiate class (Plut. Cleom. 28.5) – Sparta increasingly resembled any other Hellenistic Greek polis, albeit a relatively famous and also poor one. Its material and literary culture seem to converge with the rest of the Greeks, with the only distinctively Spartan elements of the society being essentially Potemkin rituals for boys put on for the tourists who seem to be keeping the economy running and keeping what is left of Sparta in the good graces of their Roman overlords.

Thus ended Sparta: not with a brave last stand. Not with mighty deeds of valor. Or any great cultural contribution at all. A tourist trap for rich and bored Romans.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

January 19, 2023

QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The final objective we can be quite certain about is that Sparta aimed to protect the internal social and political order of Sparta, which essentially amounts to a strategic objective to be able to continue mistreating the helots and the perioikoi. In practice – given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued unwillingness to revisit the nature of its oppressive class system, we may say with some confidence that Sparta effectively sacrificed all other objectives on the altar of this one.

And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates left. Meanwhile, the transition of Messenia from a group of subject communities supporting Sparta economically to an active and hostile power on Sparta’s border essentially represented the end of the Spartan social order as established in the seventh century with the reduction of Messenia to helotry in the first place.

So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta – the supposed enemy of tyrants – by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems – to me at least – to have considered itself the natural and rightful leader of all of the Greek states, Sparta, routinely and comprehensively proved itself unworthy of the position.

The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry – it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is – we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

January 3, 2023

QotD: Spartan dominance over the Peloponnese

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Sparta initially seems to have attempted (Hdt. 1.66-8) to have extended its treatment of Messenia to other parts of the Peloponnese (namely Tegea) in the mid sixth-century – the failure of this policy led to a more measured effort to subjugate the Peloponnese more loosely into a Spartan-lead military league (the Peloponnesian League). This project was never fully completed: Argos – the next largest power in the Peloponnese proper, but a solidly second-tier power compared to Athens, Corinth, Sparta or Thebes – successfully resisted Spartan efforts to dominate it throughout the period. But on the whole, by the late 6th century, Sparta did exert a (perhaps somewhat loose – the trend in scholarship lately has been to stress the plastic and fairly loose organization of the Peloponnesian League) kind of dominance over the Peloponnese.

The core of this control lasted until 371, when Spartan defeat at the Battle of Leuktra shattered this control. Epaminondas, the Theban commander, used the opportunity to free the helots of Messenia and reform them into a polis to provide a local counter-weight to Sparta, while Arcadia and Elis split off from Sparta’s alliance to form their own defensive league against Sparta and, to top it off, a number of the perioikic communities – including the Spartans’ elite light infantry scouts, the Skiritae – along with various borderlands also formed the new polis of Megalopolis on the northern Spartan border – it promptly joined the Arcadian league (this polis would later give us the historian Polybius; his anti-Spartan stance comes out clearly in how he treats Cleomenes III). Sparta, surrounded now by hostile poleis who had once been allies, would spend the rest of Antiquity as a political non-entity, save for one brief effort to restore Spartan greatness in the 220s, crushed by the Macedonian Antigonids who were in no mood to entertain Spartan delusions of grandeur.

We might then say that Sparta is successful – though not entirely so (Argos!) – in establishing a hegemony over the Peloponnese, but only maintains it for c. 175 years. That’s not a bad run, but for the record of a larger state dominating its backyard, it is not tremendously impressive either.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

December 22, 2022

QotD: Sparta as the pre-eminent foe of tyranny

One of the ways that Sparta positioned itself was as the state which championed the freedom of the Greeks. Sparta had fought the Persian tyrant, had helped to oust tyrants in Athens and had later framed Athens itself as a “tyrant city”. Sparta itself had never had a tyrant (until Cleomenes III seized sole power in the 220s). On the flip side, Spartan hegemony was, apparently, little better than Athenian hegemony, given how Sparta’s own allies consistently reacted to it and Sparta would, in the end, do absolutely nothing to stop Philip II of Macedon from consolidating sole rule over Greece. When the call went out to once again resist a foreign invader in 338, Sparta was conspicuous in its absence.

It also matters exactly how tyranny is understood here. For the ancient Greeks, tyranny was a technical term, meaning a specific kind of one-man rule – a lot like how we use the word dictatorship to mean monarchies that are not kingdoms (though in Greece this word didn’t have quite so strong a negative connotation). Sparta was pretty reliable in opposing one-man rule, but that doesn’t mean it supported “free” governments. For instance, after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta foisted a brutal oligarchy – what the Athenians came to call “The Thirty Tyrants” – on Athens; their rule was so bad and harsh that it only lasted eight months (another feat of awful Spartan statecraft). Such a government was tyrannical, but not a tyranny in the technical sense.

But the Spartan reputation for fighting against tyrannies – both in the minds of the Greeks and in the popular consciousness – is predicted on fighting one very specific monarchy: the Achaemenids of Persia. […] This is the thing for which Sparta is given the most credit in popular culture, but Sparta’s record in this regard is awful. Sparta (along with Athens) leads the Greek coalition in the second Persian war and – as discussed – much of the Spartan reputation was built out of that. But Sparta had largely been a no-show during the first Persian war, and in the subsequent decades, Sparta’s commitment to opposing Persia was opportunistic at best.

During the late stages of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta essentially allied with Persia, taking funding and ships first from the Persian satrap Tissaphernes and later from Cyrus the Younger (a Persian prince and satrap). Sparta, after all, lacked the economic foundation to finance their own navy and the Spartans had – belatedly – realized that they needed a navy to defeat Athens. And of course the Persians – and any Spartan paying attention – knew that the Athenian navy was the one thing keeping Persia out of Greek affairs. So Sparta accepted Persian money to build up the fleets necessary to bring down the Athenian navy, with the consequence that the Ionian Greeks once again became subjects to the Persian Empire.

Subsequent Spartan diplomatic incompetence would lead to the Corinthian War (395-387), which turned into a nasty stalemate – due in part to the limitations of Spartan siege and naval capabilities. Unable to end the conflict on their own, the Spartans turned to Persia – again – to help them out, and the Persians brokered a pro-Spartan peace by threatening the Corinthians with Persian intervention in favor of Sparta. The subequent treaty – the “King’s Peace” (since it was imposed by the Persian Great King, Artaxerxes II) was highly favorable to Persia. All of Ionian, Cyprus, Aeolia and Carnia fell under Persian control and the treaty barred the Greeks from forming defensive leagues – meaning that it prevented the formation of any Greek coalition large enough to resist Persian influence. The treaty essentially made Sparta into Persia’s local enforcer in Greece, a role it would hold until its defeat in 371.

If Sparta held the objective of excluding Persian influence or tyranny from Greece, it failed completely and abjectly. Sparta opened not only the windows but also the doors to Persian influence in Greece – between 410 and 370, Sparta probably did more than any Greek state had ever or would ever do to push Greece into the Persian sphere of influence. Sparta would also refuse to participate in Alexander’s invasion of Persia – a point Alexander mocked them for by dedicating the spoils of his victories “from all of the Greeks, except the Spartans” (Arr. Anab. 1.16.7); for their part, the Spartans instead tried to use it as an opportunity to seize Crete and petitioned the Persians for aid in their war against Alexander, before being crushed by Alexander’s local commander, Antipater, in what Alexander termed “a clash of mice”.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

November 16, 2022

QotD: Did Sparta actually aspire to supremacy in Greece?

It is hard to say to what degree Sparta ever really pursued this goal. Several Spartan leaders – kings like Cleomenes I, the regent Pausanias, Agesilaus II, along with men like Lysander – once on campaign outside Sparta seemed to have envisaged a much wider sphere of Spartan control over Greece and worked to achieve it. At the same time, the ever cautious Gerousia (along with the Ephors) almost always worked to restrain and eventually destroy such men. This should remind us that no state – not even Sparta – is really a unitary entity with one set of goals held by everyone; within the state there is a complex set of competing interests. For the Spartan kings and influential commanders, success outside of Sparta was an alluring way to potentially build power outside of the systems which restricted them within Sparta; for the Gerousia and the Ephors – who were that system – success abroad was a threat to stability at home.

Given Sparta’s inherent resources, the goal was not unrealistic: Sparta was by land area, if not by population, the largest polis in Greece. But Spartan hegemony lasted less than a decade, primarily because of the ineptness of Spartan diplomacy. While victory over Athens in 404 BC made Sparta the preeminent Greek state, the mistakes started almost immediately: the occupation/collaboration government (the “Thirty Tyrants”) in Athens was so cruel and unpopular that Sparta was forced to acquiesce to its removal after just eight months. Meanwhile, Spartan imperiousness – including a refusal to share the spoils of victory, as well as military activity against little Elis and big Persia unsanctioned by the Peloponnesian League – turned Sparta’s allies against them. Sparta’s efforts to restore their alliance militarily led to the Corinthian War in 395, which would prove that while Sparta was still strong, it was not strong enough to enforce its alliances by force of arms. If any of the Spartans ever aimed for hegemony or preeminence among the Greeks, it is safe to say they failed.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

November 1, 2022

QotD: Spartan strategy during the Persian wars

Filed under: Europe, Greece, History, Middle East, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

At the core of strategy is deciding on strategic ends and then coordinating the right means which will actually achieve those goals. For instance, if the strategic goal is to gain control of a key economic population center (read: a city), you don’t want to try to achieve that by, say, carpet bombing – you’ll destroy the very asset you wish to gain even if you win. In this respect, Sparta’s strategic thinking is straight-jacketed to a very narrow model of warfare. Sparta is the fellow in the aphorism that “when all you have is a hammer” but placed in a world of screws.

The hammer Sparta has, of course, is hoplite battle. Sparta seeks to solve almost all of its issues by applying a hoplite phalanx to the problem, regardless of if the problem can be solved by a hoplite phalanx. Spartan strategic thinking is thus marred by both a failure to consider military solutions that did not consist of traditional hoplite battles, as well as an inability to consider or execute non-military solutions at all.

We can see the former weakness in Spartan planning in the Persian Wars. Spartan planning is both direct and unrealistic: find a choke-point, fortify it and hold it indefinately with a hoplite army. Attempted at Thermopylae this plan fails; the Battle of Thermopylae is often represented in popular culture as an intentional delaying action, but it was nothing of the sort – Herodotus is clear that this was supposed to be the decisive land engagement (Hdt. 7.175; Cf. Diodorus 11.4.1-5). The Spartans then attempt to recreate this plan at the Isthmus of Corinth and have to be rescued from their strategic stupidity by the Athenians, who threaten to leave the alliance if the plan isn’t abandoned (Hdt. 8.49-62). A blockade at the Isthmus would be easy for the Persian army to bypass – assuming it didn’t simply defeat it with generally superior Persian siegecraft – and worse yet was a diplomatic disaster given that it meant essentially writing Athens off as a loss, when the Athenian navy provided the bulk of the ships protecting the Isthmus.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress