On Sparta
Plutarch here provides a fascinating account of the everyday lives and customs of the Spartan people, the famous warriors who gave their name to a way of life. A life of constant and rigorous training, self denial and hardship.
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3recommend
9mentions
7people
2020–2024years
33% recommend44% neutral22% critical
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What Hacker News says
- The article you link is the worst kind of telling of history: overflowing with bias, preaching and pontificating and making moral judgments left and right about things that happenned more than 2000 years ago. It is an internet rant, designed to provoke clicks and outrage, and its only reason of existence is the existence of the film, 300, a fantasy, that presents a fantastical image of Sparta, that the author then proceeds to deconstruct as if it were reality, or as if anyone claimed was reality. It is one gigantic straw man.
Instead of consuming one person's opinion, second-hand, why not read the original historical sources?
For example:
The Polity of the Athenians and the Lacedaemonians, by Xenophon
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1178
The History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142
History, by Herodotus
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2707 (Volume 1) https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2456 (Volume 2)
On Sparta, by Plutarch
https://www.amazon.com/Sparta-Penguin-Classics-Plutarch/dp/0...
And so on. Read history; and make up your own mind.
- On Sparta by Plutarch is an amazing book about the Spartan civilization
- The series on Sparta here is worth reading.
- I tried reading Devereux's blog posts on Sparta but bounced off of them. Watching this I remember why. He's punching so hard against a popular image of Sparta as invincible warriors that he sometimes starts painting his own opposite-world parody of Sparta.
For example: After 19:40, not finding it enough to say that Thermopylae was maybe a one-off and that there are multiple examples of Sparta surrendering instead of fighting to the last man, he has to exaggerate:
> Spartans surrender all the time.
Still an informative interview, though.
- This is why there are forums and places like Reddit (RIP?) and Quora (RIP).
I come from a really small town and made it further than anyone I know in that town in tech. (Not in terms of money, though)
Just Google: "best books on Sparta reddit". You will find 10 threads, and on those threads if you look at top-k, you will see some entries recurring. And two-three lines of explanation.
Read a non-trivial amount of sections to know whether it is what you are looking for. Library is a good place. You can also check Google Books or pirate before buying.
Not only about books but about MOOCs, YT playlists, and so on.
I have used this method since Junior year in High School, straight up to Master’s degree. I always got good grades, many times topped the class.
- > If you want to learn about Sparta, it's pretty easy to find
Oh god. Why Sparta? Why this particular historiographical can of worms, where the history of the history is far more convoluted than the history of Lacedaemon itself?
No. Someone without a pretty solid knowledge of Ancient Greek history and historiography and the skills to be able to track the changes in the research literature is going to have a damn hard time finding the best book on Sparta.
