{"id":69426,"date":"2023-01-19T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2023-01-19T06:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=69426"},"modified":"2023-09-20T11:07:16","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T15:07:16","slug":"qotd-did-sparta-achieve-its-strategic-objectives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/01\/19\/qotd-did-sparta-achieve-its-strategic-objectives\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Did Sparta achieve its strategic objectives?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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<\/a><\/em> and the perioikoi<\/a><\/em>. In practice \u2013 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.<\/p>\n

And yet Sparta’s failure here was perhaps the most complete of all. The collapse of the Spartiate<\/a><\/em> class did not abate after Leuktra; by the 230s, there were hardly any Spartiates<\/em> 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<\/em> in the first place.<\/p>\n

So, does Sparta achieve its strategic objectives<\/strong>? By and large, I think the answer here has to be “no”. Sparta \u2013 the supposed enemy of tyrants \u2013 by mismanaging its own leadership invited one foreign oppressor (Macedon) into Greece after another (Persia). As a state that seems \u2013 to me at least \u2013 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<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The one thing we may say for Spartan foreign and military policy is that it seems to have made the world safe for helotry<\/em><\/strong> \u2013 it preserved the brutal system of oppression which was foundational to the Spartan state. But consider just how weak an achievement that is<\/em> \u2013 we might, after all, make the same claim about North Korea: it has managed only to successfully preserve its own internal systems of oppression.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2019-09-27.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u2013 given Sparta’s desperate shortness of manpower (and economic resources!) and continued […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1526,7,41],"tags":[1527,1457,432,156,605,1151],"class_list":["post-69426","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-greece","category-history","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-diplomacy","tag-fail","tag-slavery","tag-sparta"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-i3M","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69426","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69426"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69426\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79384,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69426\/revisions\/79384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69426"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69426"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69426"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}