toldinstone
Published 10 Sep 2022In this episode, Dr. Bret Devereaux (the blogger behind “A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry”) discusses the relationships between fantasy and ancient history – and why historical accuracy matters, even in fiction.
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September 12, 2022
The Lord of the Rings and Ancient Rome (with Bret Devereaux)
September 8, 2022
QotD: Pre-modern armies could not march much faster than 8-12 miles per day … on good days
Well, getting started ate quite a few hours, but at least we’re going to move at a constant speed all day right? Of course not. These are humans – they need to eat (lunch), drink and relieve themselves. Men will fall out of line because they are sick or because they sprained an ankle or because they’re tired of marching and faking it (many army guidelines put the medics at the back of the marching column for this purpose). To add to this, wagons get stuck in the mud, mules and horses get stubborn or lame (that chance may seem low, but remember we’re dealing with thousands of animals – small percentages add up fast when you have a few thousand of something).
For reference on how much time this can eat up, 1950s US Army marching regulations (this is again FM21-18 “Foot Marches”) suggest that “battle groups or smaller” (800 men or less, generally – so small, fast-moving infantry) can “under favorable conditions” (read: good, modern paved roads in good weather) make 15-20 miles in a continuous eight hour march. A forced march – marching longer than 8 hours and at a higher than normal pace – can cover more ground (c. 35 miles in a day in some cases) but such a pace will wear out an infantry force fast.
At the end of the day, the army needs to arrive at its planned camp site [early] enough to make camp. Cooking needs to be done. Food that was foraged by flanking units needs to get to the camp, be recorded and stored (or processed and eaten) – speaking of which, note that we haven’t even discussed flankers, scouts and foraging parties. Wages may need to be paid, paperwork needs to be done. In many armies, the camp will need to be fortified – the Romans built a wood-palisade fortified camp every night on the march. And then everyone goes to sleep around 9pm. And that, to be clear, is when everything works like clockwork – which it never does.
For a large army, the breaking camp, waiting to begin marching, waiting for the last man to arrive, dealing with pack animals and wagons slices a few hours off of that eight hour march routine. All of which is why a normal large body of infantry moves something closer 8-12 miles per day than the 24 miles (8 hours x 3.1mph) per day implied by Wikipedia’s Average Human Walking Speed.
Historians doing studies of campaigns thus tend to use these sorts of rule-of-thumb speeds without much feeling the need to explain why armies move so slow because I think they expect that most of their readers are either fellow historians or former soldiers and in either case, already know. These rules of thumb, in turn, derive from staff planning in the age when armies still mostly walked to war (especially the 1800s and early 1900s): those staff office planners would have (and presumably still do have) elaborate tables of how many men can move how fast over what sort of roads in what kind of weather – because bad staff work multiplied over massive armies can mean catastrophic logistics and timing failures (see: Frontiers, Battle of the (1914) for examples).
If anything, for a medieval army of conscripts, fresh from a successful battle, with a long supply-train moving off of the main roads, 12 miles per day is actually quite fast. Large armies with lots of wagons often strayed into single-digit marching speeds. And, to be clear, marching speeds are highly variable based on terrain and the rest.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How Fast Do Armies Move?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-06.
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September 4, 2022
QotD: Sparta’s fatal problem – oliganthropia
This is is the problem of oliganthropia (“people-shortage” – literally “too-few-people-ness”) in Sparta: the decline of the spartiate population. This is a huge and contentious area of scholarship – no surprise, since it directly concerns the decline of one of the more powerful states in Classical Greece – with a fair bit of debate to it (there’s a decent rundown by Figueira of the demography behind it available online here). What I want to note here is that a phrase like “oliganthropia” makes it sound like there was an absolute decline in population, but the evidence argues against that. At two junctures in the third century, under Agis IV and then later Cleomenes III (so around 241 and 227) attempts were made to revive Sparta by pulling thousands of members of the underclass back up into the spartiates (the first effort fails and the second effort was around a century too late to matter). That, of course, means that there were thousands of individuals – presumably mostly hypomeiones, but perhaps some mothakes or perioikoi – around to be so considered.
Xenophon says as much with Cinadon’s observation about the market at Sparta. Now obviously, we can’t take that statement as a demographic survey, but as a general sense, 40 homoioi, plus a handful of higher figures, in a crowd of 4,000 speaks volumes about the growth of Sparta’s underclass. And that is in Laconia, the region of the Spartan state (in contrast to Messenia, the other half of Sparta’s territory), where the Spartans live and where the density of helots is lowest.
This isn’t a decline in the population of Sparta, merely a decline in the population of spartiates – the tiny, closed class of citizen-elites at the top.
So we come back to the standard assertion about Sparta: its system lasted a long time, maintaining very high cohesion – at least among the citizens class and its descendants. This is a terribly low bar – a society cohesive only among its tiny aristocracy. And yet, as low of a bar as this is, Sparta still manages to slink below it. Economic cohesion was a mirage created by the exclusion of any individual who fell below it. Sparta maintained the illusion of cohesion by systematically removing anyone who was not wealthy from the citizen body.
If we really want to gauge this society’s cohesion, we ought to track households, one generation after the next, regardless of changes in status. If we do that, what do we find? A society with an increasingly tiny elite – and a majority which, I will again quote Xenophon, “would eat them raw“. Hardly a model of social cohesion.
Moreover, this system wasn’t that stable. The core labor force – the enslaved helots – are brutally subjugated by Sparta no earlier than 680 (even this is overly generous – the consolidation process in Messenia seems to have continued into the 500s). The austerity which supposedly underlined cohesion among the spartiates by banishing overt displays of wealth is only visible archaeologically beginning in 550, which may mark the real beginning of the Spartan system as a complete unit with all of its parts functioning. And by 464 – scarcely a century later – terminal and irreversible decline had set in. Spartan power at last breaks permanently and irretrievably in 371 when Messenia is lost to them […]
This is a system that at the most generous possible reading, lasted three centuries. In practice, we are probably better in saying it lasts just 170 or so – from c. 550 (the completion of the consolidation of Messenia, and the beginning of both the Peloponnesian League and the famed Spartan austerity) to 371.
To modern ears, 170 years still sounds impressive. Compared to the remarkably unstable internal politics of Greek poleis, it probably seemed so. But we are not ancient Greeks – we have a wider frame of reference. The Roman Republic ticked on, making one compromise after another, for four centuries (509 to 133; Roman enthusiasts will note that I have cut that ending date quite early) before it even began its spiral into violence. Carthage’s republic was about as long lived as Rome. We might date constitutional monarchy in Britain as beginning in 1688 or perhaps 1721 – that system has managed around 300 years.
While we’re here – although it was interrupted briefly, the bracket dates for the notoriously unstable Athenian democracy, usually dated from the Cleisthenic reforms 508/7 to the suppresion of the fourth-century democracy in 322, are actually longer, 185 years, give or take, with just two major breaks, consisting of just four months and one year. Sparta had more years with major, active helot revolts controlling significant territory than Athens had oligarchic coups. And yet Athens – rightly, I’d argue – has a reputation for chronic instability, while Sparta has a reputation for placid regularity. Might I suggest that stable regimes do not suffer repeated, existential slave revolts?
In short, the Spartan social system ought not be described as cohesive, and while it was relatively stable by Greek standards (not a high bar!) it is hardly exceptionally stable and certainly not uniquely so. So much for cohesion and stability.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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August 31, 2022
QotD: John Keegan’s The Face of Battle
Keegan’s first battle is Agincourt (1415). While famous for the place of the English longbow in it, at Agincourt the French advance (both mounted and dismounted) did reach the English lines; of this the sources for the battle are quite clear. And so the terror we are discussing is the terror of shock; not shock in the sense of a sudden shock or in the sense of a jolt of electricity, rather shock as the opposite of fire. Shock combat is the combat when two bodies of soldiers press into each other in mass hand-to-hand combat (which is, contrary to Hollywood, not so much a disorganized melee as a series of combats along the line of contact where the two formations meet). The advancing French had to will themselves forward into a terrifying shock encounter, while the English had to (like our hoplites above) hold themselves in place while watching the terrifying prospect of a shock engagement walk steadily towards them.
There is actually quite a bit of evidence that the terror of a shock engagement is something different from the other terrors of war (to be clear, not “better” or “worse”, merely different in important ways). There are numerous examples of units which could stand for extend periods under fire but which collapsed almost immediately at the potential of a shock engagement. To draw a much more recent example, at Bai Beche in 2001, a force of Taliban withstood two days of heavy bombing and had repulsed an infantry assault besides, but collapsed almost immediately when successfully surprised by a cavalry charge (yes, in 2001) in their rear (an incident noted in S. Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare”, Foreign Affairs 82.2 (2003)).
And so our sources for state-on-state pre-gunpowder warfare (which is where you tend to find more fully “shock” oriented combat systems) stress similar sequences of fear: the dread inspired by the sight of the enemy army drawing up before you (Greek literature is particularly replete with descriptions of teeth-chattering and trembling in those moments and it is not hard to imagine why), followed by the steady dread-anticipation as the armies advanced, each step bringing that moment of collision closer. Often in such engagements one side might break before contact as the fear not of what was happening, but what was about to happen built up. And only then the long anticipated not-so-sudden shock of the formations coming together – rarely for long given the overpowering human urge not to be near an enemy trying to stab you with a sharp stick. There is something, I think, quite fundamental in the human psyche that understands another human with a sharp point, or a huge horse rapidly closing on a deeper level than it understands bullets or arrows.
Which brings us to Keegan’s second battle, Waterloo (1815), defined in part by the ability of the British to manage to hold firm under extended fire from artillery and infantry. The French artillery in an 80-gun grand battery opened fire at 11:50am and kept it up for hours until the French cavalry advanced (hoping that the British troops were suitably “softened” by the guns to be dislodged) at 4pm. In contrast to Agincourt (or a hoplite battle) which may have ended in just a couple of hours and consisted mostly of grim anticipation, soldiers (on both sides) at Waterloo were forced to experience a rather different sort of terror: forced to stand in active harm for hours on end, as bullets and cannon shot whizzed overhead.
The difference of this is perhaps most clearly extreme if we move still forward to the Somme (1916) and bombardment. The British had prepared for their assault with a week long artillery barrage, in which British guns fired 1.5 million shells (that is about 148 shells fired a minute, every minute for a week). At the first sound of guns, soldiers (in this case, the Germans, but it had been the French’s turn just that February to be on the receiving end of a bombardment at Verdun) rushed into their dug-out bomb shelters at the base of their trench and then waited. Unlike the British at Waterloo, who might content themselves that, one way or another, the terror of fire would not last a day, the soldier of WWI had no way of knowing when the barrage would cease and the battle proper begin. Indeed, they could not see the battlefield at all, only sit under the ground as it shook around them and try to be ready, at any moment when the barrage stopped to rush back up to the lip of the trench to set up the machine guns – because if they were late to do it, they’d arrive to find British grenades and bayonets instead.
We will get into wounds, both physical and mental, next week, but it is striking to me that repeatedly there are reports after such barrages of soldiers so mentally broken by the strain of it that they wandered as if dazed or mindless, apparently driven mad by the bombardment. Reports of such immediate combat trauma are vanishingly rare in the pre-modern corpus (Hdt. 6.117 being the rare example). And it is not hard to see why the constant threat of sudden, unavoidable death hanging over you, day and night, for days or in some cases weeks on end produces a wholly different kind of terror.
And yet, to extend beyond Keegan’s three studies, in talking to contemporary veterans, it seems to me this terror of fire – being forced to stand (or hide) under long continuous fire – is not always quite the same as the terror of the modern battlefield. Of course I can only speak to this second hand (but what else can a historian generally do?), but there seems to be something different about a battlefield where everything might seem peaceful and fine and even a bit boring until suddenly the mortar siren sounds or a roadside IED goes off and the peril is immediate. The experience of such fear sometimes expresses itself in a sort of hypervigilance which seems entirely unknown to Greek or Roman writers (who in most cases could hardly have needed such vigilance; true surprise attacks were quite rare as it is extremely hard to sneak one entire army up on another) and doesn’t seem particularly prominent in the descriptions of “shell-shock” (which today we’d call PTSD) from the First World War, compared to the prominence of intense fatigue, the thousand-yard-stare and raw emotional exhaustion. I do wonder though if we might find something quite analogous looking into the trauma of having a village raided by surprise under the first system of war.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIa: The Many Faces of Battle”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
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August 27, 2022
QotD: The key functions of cities in pre-modern economies
The role of infrastructure is also different. We are also used to cities as the center-point lynch-pins of infrastructure networks – roads, rail, sea routes, fiber-optic cable, etc. That isn’t false when applied to pre-modern cities, but it is much less true, if just because modern infrastructure is so much more powerful than its pre-modern precursors. Modern infrastructure is also a lot more exclusive: a man with a cart might visit a village where the road does not go, but a train or a truck cannot. The Phoenician traders of the early iron age could pull their trade ships up on the beach in places where there was no port; do not try this with a modern container-ship. Infrastructure is largely a result of cities, not their original purpose or cause.
So what are the core functions of a pre-modern city? I see five key functions:
- Administrative Center. This is probably the oldest purpose cities have served: as a focal point for political and religious authorities. With limited communications technology, it makes sense to keep that leadership in one place, creating a hub of people who control a disproportionate amount of resources, which leads to
- Defensive/Military Center. Once you have all of those important people and resources (read: stockpiled food) in one place, it makes sense to focus defenses on that point. It also makes sense to keep – or form up – the army where most of the resources and leaders are. People, in turn, tend to want to live close to the defenses, which leads to
- Market Center. Putting a lot of people and resources in one place makes the city a natural point for trade – the more buyers and sellers in one place, the more likely you are to find the buyer or seller you want. As a market, the city experiences “network” effects: each person living there makes the city more attractive for others. Still, it is important to note: the town is a market hub for the countryside, where most people still live. Which only now leads to
- Production Center. But not big industrial production like modern cities. Instead it is the small, niche production – the sort of things you only buy once-and-a-while or only the rich buy – that get focused into cities. Blacksmiths making tools, producers of fine-ware and goods for export, that sort of thing. These products and producers need big markets or deep pockets to make end meet. The majority of the core needs of most people (things like food, shelter and clothes) are still produced by the peasants, for the peasants, where they live, in the country. Still, you want to produce goods made for sale rather than personal use near the market, and maybe sell them abroad, which leads to
- Infrastructure Center. With so much goods and communications moving to and from the city, it starts making sense for the state to build dedicated transit infrastructure (roads, ports, artificial harbors). This infrastructure almost always begins as administrative/military infrastructure, but still gets used to economic ends. Nevertheless, this comes relatively late – things like the Persian Royal Road (6th/5th century BC) and the earliest Roman roads (late 4th century BC) come late in most urban development.
Of course, all of these functions depend, in part, on the city as a concentration of people, but what I want to stress […] is that in all of these functions the pre-modern city effectively serves the countryside, because that is still where most people are and where most production (and the most important production – food) is. The administration in the city is administering the countryside – usually by gathering and redistributing surplus agricultural production (from the countryside!). The defenses in the city are meant to defend the production of the countryside and the people of the countryside (when they flee to it). The people using the market – at least until the city grows very large – are mostly coming in from the country (this is why most medieval and ancient markets are only open on certain days – for the Romans, this was the “ninth day”, the Nundinae – customers have to transit into town, so you want everyone there on the same day).
(An aside: I have framed this as the city serving the economic needs of the countryside, but it is equally valid to see the city as the exploiter of the countryside. The narrative above can easily be read as one in which the religious, political and military elite use their power to violently extract surplus agricultural production, which in turn gives rise to a city that is essentially a parasite (this is Max Weber’s model for a “consumer city”) that contributes little but siphons off the production of the countryside. The study of ancient and medieval cities is still very much embroiled in a debate between those who see cities as filling a valuable economic function and those who see them as fundamentally exploitative and rent-seeking; I fall among the former, but the latter do have some very valid points about how harshly and exploitatively cities (and city elites) could treat their hinterlands.)
Consequently, the place and role of almost every kind of population center (city, town or castle-town) is dictated by how it relates to the countryside around it (the city’s hinterland; the Greeks called this the city’s khora (χώρα)).
Bret Devereaux, Collections: The Lonely City, Part I: The Ideal City”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-12.
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August 23, 2022
QotD: The fate of suddenly poor Spartiates
First, we need to reiterate that a “poor” spartiate was still quite well off compared to the average citizen in many Greek poleis – we talk about “poor” spartiates the same way we talk about the “poor” gentry in a Jane Austen novel. None of them are actually poor in an absolute sense, they are only poor in the sense that they are the poorest of the rich, clinging to the bottom rung of the upper class.
Nevertheless, we should talk about them, because the consequences of falling off of that bottom rung of the economic ladder in Sparta were extremely severe because of the closed nature of the spartiate system. Here is the rub: membership in a syssition was a requirement of spartiate status, so failure to be a member in a syssition – either because of failure in the agoge or because a spartiate could no longer keep up the required mess contributions – that meant not being a spartiate anymore.
The term we have for ex-spartiates is hypomeiones (literally “the inferiors”), which seems to have been an informal term covering a range of individuals who were (or whose family were) spartiates, but had ceased to be so. The hypomeiones were, by all accounts, mostly despised by the spartiates and the hatred seems to have been mutual (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6). Interestingly in that passage there – Xenophon’s Hellenica 3.3.6 – he lists the Spartan underclasses in what appears to be rising order of status – first the helots (at the bottom), then the neodamodes (freed helots, one step up), then the hypomeiones, and then finally the perioikoi. The implication is that falling off of the bottom of the spartiate class due to cowardice, failure – or just poverty – meant falling below the largest group of free non-citizens, the perioikoi.
Herodotus gives some sense of the treatment of men who failed at being spartiates when he details the two survivors of Thermopylae – Aristodemus and Pantites. Both had been absent from the battle under orders – Pantites had been sent carrying a message and Aristodemus had suffered an infection. When they returned to Sparta, both were ostracized by the spartiates for failing to have died – Pantites hanged himself (Hdt. 7.232) while Aristodemus was held to have “redeemed” himself with a suicidal charge at Plataea which cost his life (Hdt. 7.231). And as a side note: Aristodemus is the model for 300’s narrator, Dilios – so when you see him in the movie, remember: the Spartan system drove these men to pointless suicide because they followed an order.
But my main point here is that falling out of the spartiate system meant social death. Remember that the spartiates are a closed class – failing at being a spartiate because your kleros is too poor to maintain the mess contribution means losing citizen status; it means your children cannot attend the agoge or become spartiates themselves. It means you, your wife, your entire family forever are shamed, their status as full members of society forever revoked and your social orbit collapses on you, since you are cut off from the very ties that bind you to your friends. No wonder Pantites preferred to hang himself.
In essence then, the core of the problem here is not that these poor spartiates were poor in any absolute sense – they weren’t. It was that the difference between being rich and being merely affluent in Sparta was a social abyss completely unlike any other Greek state. And that abyss was completely one way. As we’ll see – there was no way back.
Our sources are, unfortunately, profoundly uninterested in answering some crucial questions about the hypomeiones: did they keep their kleroi? What happened to the status of their children? What happened to the status of the women in their families? We can say one thing: it is clear that there was no “on-ramp” for hypomeiones to get back into the spartiate system. This is made quite clear, if by nothing else, by the collapsing number of spartiates (we’ll get to it), but also at the inability of extremely successful non-Spartan citizens – men like Gylippus and Lysander – to ever join the homoioi. Once a spartiate was a hypomeiones, they appear to have been so forever – along with any descendants they may have had. Once out, out for good.
All of that loops back to the impact of the great earthquake in 464. It is likely there were always spartiates who – because their kleroi were just a bit poorer, or were hit a bit harder by helot resistance, or for whatever reason – clung to the bottom of the spartiate system financially, struggling to make the contributions to the common mess. When the earthquake hit, the death of so many helots – on whom they relied for their economic basis – combined with the overall disruption seems to have pushed many of these men beyond the point where they could sustain themselves. Unlike in a normal Greek polis, they could not just take up some productive work to survive and continue as citizens, because that was forbidden to the spartiates, so they collapsed out of the class entirely.
(As an aside – the fact that wealthy spartiates, as mentioned, seemed to prefer each other’s company over the rest probably also meant that the social safety-net of the poor spartiates likely consisted of other poor spartiates. Perhaps in normal circumstances they remained stable by relying on each other (you help me in my bad year, I help you in yours – this is very common survival behavior in subsistence agriculture societies), but the earthquake – by hitting them all at once – may well have caused a downward spiral, as each spartiate who fell out of the system made the remainder more vulnerable, culminating in entire social groups falling out.)
As I said, our sources are uninterested in poor spartiates, so we can only imagine what it must have felt like, clinging desperately to the bottom of that social system, knowing how deep the hole was beneath you. One imagines the mounting despair of the spartiate wife whose job it is to manage the household trying to scrounge up the mess contributions out of an ever-shrinking pool of labor and produce, the increasing despair of her husband who because of the laws cannot do anything but watch as his household slides into oblivion. We cannot know for certain, but it certainly doesn’t seem like a particularly happy existence.
As for those who did fall out of the system we do not need to imagine because Xenophon – in a rare moment of candor – leaves us in no doubt what they felt. He puts it this way: “they [the leaders of a conspiracy against the spartiates] knew the secret of all of the others – the helots, the neodamodes, the hypomeiones, the perioikoi – for whenever mention was made of the spartiates among these men, not one of them could hide that he would gladly eat them raw” (Xen. Hell. 3.3.6; emphasis mine).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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August 19, 2022
QotD: How pre-modern polytheistic religions originated
This is exactly backwards for how the ancients, practicing their practical knowledge, learn about the gods. The myths, philosophical discussions and well-written treatises are not the foundation of the religion’s understanding of the gods, but rather the foaming crest at the top of the wave. In practice, the ruminations of those philosophers often had little to do the religion of the populace at large; famously Socrates’ own philosophical take on the gods rather upset quite a lot of Athenians.
Instead of beginning with a theory of the divine and working forwards from that, the ancients begin with proven methods and work backwards from that. For most people, there’s no need to know why things work, only that they work. Essentially, this knowledge is generated by trial and error.
Let’s give an example of how that kind of knowledge forms. Let’s say we are a farming community. It is very important that our crops grow, but the methods and variations in how well they grow are deep and mysterious and we do not fully understand them; clearly that growth is governed by some unseen forces we might seek the aid of. So we put together a ritual – perhaps an offering of a bit of last year’s harvest – to try to get that favor. And then the harvest is great – excellent, we have found a formula that works. So we do it next year, and the year after that.
Sometimes the harvest is good (well performed ritual there) and sometimes it is bad (someone must have made an error), but our community survives. And that very survival becomes the proof of the effectiveness of our ritual. We know it works because we are still here. And I mean survival over generations; our great-great-grandchildren, for whom we are nameless ancestors and to whom our ritual has always been practiced in our village can take solace in the fact that so long as this ritual was performed, the community has never perished. They know it works because they themselves can see the evidence.
(These sorts of justifications are offered in ancient works all the time. Cicero is, in several places, explicit that Roman success must, at the first instance, be attributed to Roman religio – religious scruples. The empire itself serves as the proof of the successful, effective nature of the religion it practices!)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.
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August 15, 2022
QotD: Sparta – the North Korea of the Classical era
But Sparta was not equal, in fact it was the least equal Greek polis we know of. It was one of the least equal societies in the ancient Mediterranean, and one which treated its underclasses – who made up to within a rounding error of the entire society by the end – terribly. You will occasionally see pat replies that Sparta was no more dependent on slave labor than the rest of Greece, but even a basic demographic look makes it clear this is not true. Moreover our sources are clear that the helots were the worst treated slaves in Greece. Even among the Spartiates, Sparta was not equal and it never was.
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[BC], 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.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
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August 11, 2022
QotD: Logistical limits to Spartan military action against Athens
During the first phase of the Peloponnesian War, called the Archidamean war, after the Spartan king who conducted it, Sparta invaded Attica functionally every year in an effort to inflict enough agricultural devastation that the Athenians would be forced to come out and fight […] The core problem is that it just isn’t possible to do a meaningful amount of damage in the short campaigning season before the army has to go home.
And I want to be clear just how long they bang their head against this rock. The Spartans invade in 431, besiege a minor town, accomplish nothing and leave (Thuc. 2.18-20), and in 430 (Thuc. 2.47), in 429, because of a plague in Athens, they instead besiege tiny Plataea (Thuc. 2.71ff) and then leave, but in 428 they’re back at it in Attica (Thuc. 3.1), and in 427 (Thuc. 3.26), and in 426 but turn back early due to earthquakes (Thuc. 3.89). But they’re back again in 425 (Thuc. 4.2), leaving each time when supplies run out. Sparta mounts no attack in 424 because Athenian naval raiding forces them to keep the army at home (Thuc. 4.57); in 423 they have a year-long truce with Athens (Thuc. 4.117). They only finally suggest the creation of a permanent base in Attica in 422/1 (Thuc. 5.17) but the war ends first (they’ll actually fortify a small outpost, Decelea, only when the war renews in 413).
Thucydides is in several cases (e.g. Thuc. 3.1.3) explicit that what causes these armies to fail and disperse back home is that they run out of supplies. They are two days – on foot! – from a major friendly trade port (Corinth), and they run out of supplies. Their last invasion was six years after their first and they still had not resolved the logistics problem of long-term operations in what is effectively their own backyard.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
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August 7, 2022
QotD: The post-WW1 experiment in banning chemical weapons
Now, when I was in school – this was a topic I was taught about in high school – the narrative I got was fairly clear: we didn’t use chemical weapons because after World War I the nations of the world got together and decided that chemical weapons were just too horrible and banned them, and that this was a sign of something called “progress“. In essence, the narrative I got was, we had become too moral for chemical weapons and so the “civilized” nations (a term sometimes still used unironically in this context) got together and enforced a moral taboo against chemical (and biological) weapons. And, we were told (this was, I should note, the late 90s and early aughts, long before the Syrian Civil War) that this taboo had mostly held.
Which was important, because in this narrative as it was impressed upon that younger version of me, the ban on chemical weapons showed the path towards banning all sorts of other terrible weapons: landmines, cluster-munitions and of course most of all, nuclear weapons. All we would need to do is for the “civilized” nations of the world to summon the moral courage to abandon such brutal weapons of war. Man, the end of history was nice while it lasted! But the example of the “successful” ban on chemical and biological weapons was offered as proof that the dream of a world without nuclear weapons was possible, if only we showed the same will.
When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put away childish things. But what was my teacher’s excuse? I guess the end of history was a hell of a drug.
[…] all three of these answers (including my high school answer) actually miss the point, because they all assume something fundamental: that chemical weapons are effective weapons, and so the decision not to use them is fundamentally moral, rather than practical.
Quite frankly, we don’t use chemical weapons for the same reason we don’t use war-zeppelin-bombers: they don’t work, at least within our modern tactical systems.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-03-20.
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August 3, 2022
QotD: Relative wealth among the Spartiates
It is important to begin by noting that the sheer quantity of food the spartiates were to receive from their kleros would make almost any spartiate wealthy by the standards of most Greek poleis – spartiates, after all, lived a live of leisure (Plut. Lyc. 24.2) supported by the labor of slaves (Plut. Lyc. 24.3), where the closest they got to actual productive work was essentially sport hunting (Xen. Lac. 4.7). If the diet of the syssition was not necessarily extravagant, it was also hardly … well, Spartan – every meal seems to have included meat or at least meat-broth (Plut. Lyc. 12.2; Xen. Lac. 5.3), which would have been a fine luxury for most poorer Greeks. So when we are talking about disparities among the spartiates, we really mean disparities between the super-rich and the merely affluent. As we’ll see, even among the spartiates, these distinctions were made to matter sharply and with systematic callousness.
Now, our sources do insist that the Spartan system offered the Spartiates little opportunity for the accumulation or spending of wealth, except […] they also say this about a system they admit no longer functions … and then subsequently describe the behavior of wealthy Spartans in their own day. We’ve already noted Herodotus reporting long-standing wealthy elite spartiates as early as 480 (Hdt. 7.134), so it’s no use arguing they didn’t exist. Which raises the question: what does a rich Spartiate spend their wealth on?
In some ways, much the same as other Greek aristocrats. They might spend it on food: Xenophon notes that rich spartiates in his own day embellished the meals of their syssitia by substituting nice wheat bread in place of the more common (and less tasty) barley bread, as well as contributing more meat and such from hunting (Xen. Lac. 5.3). While the syssitia ought to even this effect out, in practice it seems like rich spartiates sought out the company of other rich spartiates (that certainly seems to be the marriage pattern, note Plut. Lys. 30.5, Agis. 5.1-4). Some spartiates, Xenophon notes, hoarded gold and silver (Xen Lac. 14.3; cf. Plut. Lyc. 30.1 where this is supposedly illegal – perhaps only for the insufficiently politically connected?). Rich spartiates might also travel and even live abroad in luxury (Xen. Lac. 14.4; Cf. Plut. Lyc. 27.3).
Wealthy spartiates also seemed to love their horses (Xen. Ages. 9.6). They competed frequently in the Olympic games, especially in chariot-racing. I should note just how expensive such an effort was. Competing in the Olympics at all was the preserve of the wealthy in Greece, because building up physical fitness required a lot of calories and a lot of protein in a society where meat was quite expensive. But to then add raising horses to the list – that is very expensive indeed (note also spartiate cavalry, Plut. Lyc. 23.1-2). Sparta’s most distinguished Olympic sport was also by far the most expensive one: the four-horse chariot race.
In other ways, however, the spartiates were quite unlike other Greek aristocrats. They do not seem to have patronized artists and craftsmen. The various craft-arts – decorative metalworking, sculpture, etc – largely fade away in Sparta starting around 550 B.C. – it may be that this transition is the correct date for the true beginning of not only “Spartan austerity” but also the Spartan system as we know it. There are a few exceptions – Cartledge (1979) notes black-painted Laconian finewares persist into the fifth century. Nevertheless, the late date for the archaeological indicators of Spartan austerity is striking, as it suggests that the society the spartiates of the early 300s believed to have dated back to Lycurgus in the 820s may well only have dated back to the 550s.
The other thing we see far less of in Sparta is euergitism – the patronage of the polis itself by wealthy families as a way of burnishing their standing in society. While there are notable exceptions (note Pritchard, Public Spending and Democracy in Classical Athens (2015) on the interaction and scale of tribute, taxes and euergitism at Athens), most of the grand buildings and public artwork in Greek cities was either built or maintained by private citizens, either as voluntary acts of public beneficence (euergitism – literally “doing good”) or as obligations set on the wealthy (called liturgies). Sparta had almost none of this public building in the Classical period – Thucydides’ observation that an observer looking only at the foundation of Sparta’s temples and public buildings would be hard-pressed to say the place was anything special is quite accurate (Thuc. 1.10.2). There are a handful of exceptions – the Persian stoa, a few statue groups, some hero reliefs, but far, far less than other Greek cities. In short, while other Greek elites felt the need – or were compelled – to contribute some of their wealth back to the community, the spartiates did not.
Passing judgment on those priorities, to a degree, comes down to taste. It is easy to cast the public building and patronage of the arts that most Greek elites engaged in as crass self-aggrandizement, wasting their money on burnishing their own image, rather than actually helping anyone except by accident. And there is truth to that idea – the Greek imagination has little space for what we today would call a philanthropist. On the other hand – as we’ll see – a handful of spartiates will come to possess a far greater proportion of the wealth and productive capacity of their society. Those wealthy spartiates will do even less to improve the lives of anyone – even their fellow spartiates. Moreover, following the beginning of Spartan austerity in the 550s, Sparta will produce no great artwork, no advances in architecture, no great works of literature – nothing to push the bounds of human achievement, to raise the human spirit.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part IV: Spartan Wealth”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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July 30, 2022
QotD: The advent of horses and firearms on the North American plains
Horses arrived in the Great Plains from the south via the Spanish and moving through Native American peoples west of the Rocky Mountains by both trade and eventually raiding in the early 1700s. Notably firearms also began moving into the region in the same period, but from the opposite direction, coming from British and French traders to the North and West (the Spanish had regulations against trading firearms to Native Americans, making them unavailable as a source). Both were thus initially expensive trade goods which could only be obtained from outside and then percolated unevenly through the territory; unlike firearms, which remained wholly external in their supply, horses were bred on the plains, but raiding and trade were still essential sources of supply for most peoples on the plains. We’ll get to this more when we talk about warfare (where we’ll get into the four different military systems created by this diffusion), but being in a position where one’s neighbors had either the horse or the gun and your tribe did not was an extreme military disadvantage and it’s clear that the “falling out” period whereby these two military innovations distributed over the area was very disruptive.
But unlike guns, which seem to have had massive military impacts but only minimal subsistence impacts (a bow being just as good for hunting bison as a musket, generally), the arrival of the horse had massive subsistence impacts because it made hunting wildly more effective. But the key thing to remember here is: the horse was introduced to the Great Plains no earlier than 1700, horse availability expanded only slowly over the area, but by 1877 (with the end of the Black Hills War), true Native American independence on the Great Plains was functionally over. Consequently, unlike the Steppe, where we have a fairly “set” system that had already been refined for centuries, all we see of the Plains Native American horse-based subsistence system is rapid change. There was no finally reached stable end state, as far as I can tell.
Though there is considerable variation and also severe limits to the evidence, it seems that prior to the arrival of the horse, most Native peoples around the Great Plains practiced two major subsistence systems: nomadic hunter-gathering on foot (distinct from what will follow in that it places much more emphasis on the gathering part) on the one hand and a mixed subsistence system of small-scale farming mixed seasonally with plains hunting seems to have been the main options pre-horse, based on the degree to which the local area permitted farming in this way (for more on those, note Isenberg, op. cit., 31-40). Secoy (op. cit.) notes that while there is some evidence that the Plains Apache may have shifted through both systems, being hunter-gatherers prior to the arrival of horses, by the time the evidence lets us see clearly (which is shortly post-horse) they are subsisting by shifting annually between sedentary agricultural racheirias (from the Spring to about August) and hunting bison on the plains during the fall. Isenberg notes the Native Americans of the Missouri river combining corn agriculture with cooperative bison hunting in the off-season (in that case, in the summer). Meanwhile, the Comanches and Kiowas seem to have mostly subsisted on pedestrian bison hunting along with gathering fruit and nuts, with relatively little agriculture, prior to going fully nomadic once they acquired horses. Bison hunting on foot required a lot of cooperation (so a group) and it seems clear that it was not enough to support a group on its own and had to be supplemented somehow, at least before the arrival of the horse. Some mix of either bison+gathering or bison+horticulture was required.
Isenberg argues (op. cit.), that at this point the clear advantage was to what he terms the “villagers” – that is the farmer-hunters who lived in villages, rather than the nomadic hunter-gathers. These horticulturists were more numerous and seem quite clearly to have had the better land and living conditions. Essentially the hunter-gatherers stuck on marginal land were mostly hunter-gatherers because they were stuck on marginal land, which created a reinforcing cycle of being stuck on marginal land (the group is weak due to small group size because the land is marginal and because the group is weak, it is only able to hold on to marginal lands). That system was stable without outside disruption. The horse changed everything.
A skilled Native American hunter on a horse, armed with a bow, could hunt bison wildly more effectively than on foot. They could be found more rapidly, followed at speed and shot in relative safety. It is striking that while pedestrian bison hunting was clearly a team effort, a hunter on a horse could potentially hunt effectively alone or in much smaller groups. In turn, that massively increased effectiveness in hunting allowed the Native Americans of the region, once they got enough horses, to go “full nomad” and build a subsistence system focused entirely on hunting bison, supplemented by trading the hides and other products of the bison with the (increasingly sedentary and agrarian) peoples around the edges of the Plains. Many of the common visual markers of Plains Native Americans – the tipi, the travois, the short bow for use from horseback – had existed before among the hunter-gathering peoples, but now spread wore widely as tribes took to horse nomadism and hunting bison full time. At the same time, Isenberg (op. cit. 50-52) has some fascinating paragraphs on all sorts of little material culture changes in terms of clothing, home-wares, tools and so on that changed to accommodate this new lifestyle. The speed of the shift is quite frankly stunning.
We’ll come back to this later, but I also want to note here that this also radically changed the military balance between the nomads and the sedentary peoples. The greater effectiveness of bison hunting meant that the horse nomads could maintain larger group sizes (than as hunter-gatherers, although eventually they also came to outnumber their sedentary neighbors, though smallpox – which struck the latter harder than the former – had something to do with that too), while possession of the horse itself was a huge military advantage. Thus by 1830 or so, the Ute and Comanche pushed the Apache off of much of their northern territory, while the Shoshone, some of the earliest adopters of the horse, expanded rapidly north and east over the Northern Plains, driving all before them (Secoy, op. cit., 30-31, 33). Other tribes were compelled to buy, raise or steal horses and adopt the same lifestyle to compete effectively. It was a big deal, we’ll talk about specifics later.
Bret Devereaux, “That Dothraki Horde, Part II: Subsistence on the Hoof”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-12-11.
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July 26, 2022
QotD: The nothoi class of Sparta
But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers. There is a strong reason to believe that these are the same as the mothakes or mothones which begin appearing with greater frequently in our sources. Several of these mothakes end up being fairly significant figures, most notably Lysander (note Plut. Lys. 2.1-4, where Plutarch politely sidesteps the question of why Lysander was raised in poverty and seemed unusually subservient and also the question of who his mother was).
We’ll get to the Spartan free-non-citizen-underclasses next week when we talk more about the Spartan manpower shortage, but for now, I just want to underline and bold something very clearly here: there was so much spartiate rape of helot women in Sparta that it created a significant, legally distinct underclass. And, just so we’re clear: yes, I am classifying all of that contact as rape, because sexual consent does not exist in master-slave relationships where one human being has the literal power of life and death over the other human being and her entire family. We may suppose that some helot women, trapped in this horrific and inhuman circumstance, may have sought out these relationships – but that does not change the dynamics of violence and compulsion permeating the entire system.
To recap quickly: poor peasant life in ancient Greece was already hard for anyone. Women in farming households had difficult, but extremely important jobs for maintaining themselves, their families and their society. To these difficulties, the Spartan state added unnecessary, callous and brutal conditions of poverty, malnutrition, violence, murder and rape.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part III: Spartan Women”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.
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July 22, 2022
QotD: Spoiler – there was no technological solution to trench warfare in WW1
All of which is to say, again, that the problem facing generals – German, French, British and later American – on the Western Front (and also Italian and Austrian generals on the Italian front) was effectively unsolvable with the technologies at the time. Methodical Battle probably represented the best that could be done with the technology of the time. The technologies that would have enabled actually breaking the trench stalemate were decades away in their maturity: tanks that could be paired with motorized infantry to create fast moving forces, aircraft that could effectively deliver close air support, cheaper, smaller radios which could coordinate those operations and so on. These were not small development problems that could have been solved with a bit more focus and funding but major complexes of multiple interlocking engineering problems combined with multiple necessary doctrinal revolutions which were in turn premised on technologies that didn’t exist yet which even in the heat of war would have taken many more years to solve; one need merely look at the progression of design in interwar tanks to see all of the problems and variations that needed to be developed and refined to see that even a legion of genius engineers would have required far more time than the war allowed.
It is easy to sit in judgement over the policy makers and generals of the war – and again, to be fair, some of those men made terrible decisions out of a mix of incompetence, malice and indifference (though I am fascinated how, in the Anglophone world, so much of the opprobrium is focused on British generals when frankly probably no British commander even makes the bottom five worst generals. Most lists of “worst generals” are really just “generals people have heard of” with little regard to their actual records and so you see baffling choices like placing Joseph Joffre who stopped the German offensive in 1914 on such lists while leaving Helmuth von Moltke who botched the offensive off of them. Robert Doughty does a good job of pointing out that men like Haig and Foch who were supposedly such incompetent generals in 1915 and 1916 show remarkable skill in 1918).
But the problem these generals faced was fundamentally beyond their ability or anyone’s ability to solve. We didn’t get into it here, but every conceivable secondary theater of war was also tried, along with naval actions, submarines, propaganda, and internal agitation. This on top of the invention of entirely new branches of the army (armor! air!) and the development of almost entirely new sciences to facilitate those branches. Did the generals of WWI solve the trench stalemate? No. But I’d argue no one could have.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: No Man’s Land, Part II: Breaking the Stalemate”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-09-24.
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July 18, 2022
QotD: The basis of belief in pre-modern polytheistic societies
For the Roman (or most any ancient polytheist) there is never much question of if the gods exist. True atheism was extremely rare in the pre-modern world – the closest ancient philosophy gets to is Epicureanism, which posits that the gods absolutely do exist, but they simply do not care about you (the fancy theological term here is immanence (the state of being manifest in the material world). Epicureans believed the gods existed, but were not immanent, that they did not care about and were little involved with the daily functioning of the world we inhabit). But the existence of the gods was self-evident in the natural phenomena of the world. Belief was never at issue.
(This is, as an aside, much the world-view we might expect from a universe – as is often the case in speculative fiction or high fantasy – where divine beings are not merely immanent, but obviously so, intervening in major, visibly supernatural ways. The point at which this or that supernatural, divine being brings someone back to life, grants them eternal youth or makes swords light on fire ought to be a pretty substantial theological awakening for everyone there. Even for other polytheists, such displays demand the institution of cult and ritual.)
This, of course, loops back to one of my favorite points about history: it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion. Which is to say that polytheists genuinely believe there are many gods and that those gods have power over their lives, and act accordingly.
In many ways, polytheistic religions, both ancient and modern (by modern polytheisms, I mean long-standing traditional religious structures like Hinduism and Shinto, rather than various “New Age” or “Neo-pagan” systems, which often do not follow these principles), fall out quite logically from this conclusion. If the world is full of gods who possess great power, then it is necessary to be on their good side – quite regardless of it they are morally good, have appropriate life philosophies, or anything else. After all, such powerful beings can do you or your community great good or great harm, so it is necessary to be in their good graces or at the very least to not anger them.
Consequently, it does not matter if you do not particularly like one god or other. The Greeks quite clearly did not like Ares (the Romans were much more comfortable with Mars), but that doesn’t mean he stopped being powerful and thus needing to be appeased.
So if these polytheistic religions are about knowledge, then what do you need to know? There are two big things: first you need to know what gods exist who pertain to you, and second you need to know what those gods want.
Two things I want to pull out here. First: the exact nature and qualities of the gods do not really matter, because remember, the goal is practical results. Crops need to grow, ships need to sail, rain needs to fall and the precise length of Zeus’ beard is profoundly unimportant to those objectives, but getting Zeus to bring storms at the right times is indispensable. The nature of the gods largely does not matter – what matters is what you need to do to keep them happy.
Second, you may be saying – you keep ramming home the idea that you have to cultivate all of the gods – what is this “pertaining to you” business? What I mean by this is that while the polytheist typically accepts the existence of vast numbers of gods (often vast beyond counting), typically only a subset of those gods might be immediately relevant. Some gods are tied to specific places, or specific families, or jobs, or problems – if you don’t live in that place, belong to that family, hold that job, etc., then you don’t need to develop a relationship with that god.
Nevertheless, everyone typically needs to develop a relationship with the big gods – the sort whose name you know from a high school or college class – that control big parts of life we all share, along with a bunch of smaller gods which pertain to smaller parts of our lives or perhaps only to select groups of people (we’ll talk more about these “little” gods later in this series, because they are fascinating).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Practical Polytheism, Part I: Knowledge”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-10-25.
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