korrents

korrents · piece

Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospective

Bret Devereaux · 19 Aug 2022 · acoup.blog ↗

2 korrents from this piece

Bret Devereaux did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

  1. Our reading

    However normal the rest of Sparta is argued to have been, its enslaved majority is not: no reconstruction of the population makes Sparta anything but extraordinarily enslaved.

    Their wordsConsequently if everything else about our understanding of Sparta is made less exceptional, is made more like a normal Greek polis, we are still stuck with this absolutely wildly high percentage of enslaved persons in this society.
    Interesting

  2. Our reading

    Sparta is a cautionary tale rather than a model: an over-militarised, paranoid state that added only oppression to human experience.

    Their wordsSparta 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.
    Interesting