Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

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Sparta is famous for having a really, really good PR agency. It's telling that their most famous military operation is fighting a rearguard action where they comprised less than 10% of the total forces. Their famous martial discipline and military life style? Our contemporary sources wax poetical about these... before footnotes saying that's what it should be and used to be, but isn't actually anymore.

It should be noted that, when you compare the descriptions of Spartan military education with modern studies of child soldiers, you realize that's exactly what Sparta was: a society of child soldiers. It's the same procedures of indoctrination and ritual initiation. You want to extol their military life, go to the Lord's Resistance Army or similar counterparts today.

Strip away the romanticism of Sparta, and you're left with a slave society whose military is based on child soldiers that struggles to fight battles next door, which is curb-stomped by next major military force to sweep in (the Macedonians), produced nothing of note in lasting cultural artifacts... but has the best publicists of the ancient world!

> Sparta is famous for having a really, really good PR agency.

This is a very figurative claim, yes? It seems untrue otherwise. I've never heard of Sparta having a propaganda organization, least of all an outward facing one. Obviously their social structure indoctrinated their own into itself, but that's not the same thing as having a PR agency. As far as I'm aware, everything known/believed about the Spartans today comes from people who weren't Spartans, like Xenophon and Plutarch. The Spartans didn't write about themselves, or if they did, those writings didn't survive.

The better sentence I should have written is "Sparta is famous because it had a really, really good PR agency," as opposed to "for having". The general point is that Sparta lived much more on its reputation (fueled by the likes of Xenophon and Plutarch) than its actual historical record.

I'm not really sure what distinction you're making between "reputation" and "actual historical record". When examining the military reputations of the ancient world, primary sources seem few and far between. So yes, those that are well reputed are so reputed because other people wrote about them. Or rarely, because they wrote about themselves.

The rare first hand accounts seem most suspect of them all; Julius Caesar's [ghostwritten?] Commentaries on the Gallic Wars is flagrant propaganda. PR in the truest sense possible.

On the other hand you have Scipio Africanus, who like Julius Caesar has a reputation for being one of the greatest generals ever. But anything he wrote about himself is long gone; his reputation was built by other people writing about what they think he said or did. The archeological record (the 'actual historical record'?) backs up some basic facts about the Second Punic War, but doesn't say much specifically about Scipio Africanus.

Which ancient men with lofty reputations can be said to have their reputations without "PR"?

In the Classical world, the military success of Macedon and Rome are indisputable. Both of those empires were built on the backs of being able to consistently defeat their opponents in military battles. When you look at the Spartan success rate, even among the much smaller group of peer city states, Sparta doesn't look like a nigh-unstoppable military juggernaut the way that Macedon and Rome do.

It's more that authoritarian elites in other city-states liked to write about how awesome Sparta was, than that Sparta had a good PR organization.

[EDIT] Now that I think about it, it's got some parallels with some American and British elites' infatuation with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, at least until the wars started and/or the news of atrocities became irrefutable (and sometimes, even after that)

> It's more that authoritarian elites in other city-states liked to write about how awesome Sparta was, than that Sparta had a good PR organization.

Yes, that's my take as well. Xenophon particularly stands out in this regard. Xenophon's laconophilia was the result of his personal experience with the Spartans, not the product of Spartan propaganda.

> Now that I think about it, it's got some parallels with some American and British elites' infatuation with Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia

Some parallels, however there is ample evidence that Nazi Germany did have an aggressive propaganda campaign (the Spartans may have, but there's no evidence for it.) The degree to which American/British nazi sympathizers were influenced by Nazi produced propaganda rather than their personal experiences with nazis is hard to ascertain. I think it was probably a mix of both.

It makes sense to talk up the guys you beat, since it amplifies your own achievements. Did the victors write about the Spartans?

Neither Xenophon nor Plutarch beat Sparta, nor were beat by Sparta. Plutarch was writing about things the Spartans had supposedly said or done a thousand years before. Xenophon was an Athenian mercenary and military commander who fought alongside the Spartans, not against them, and became a Laconophile from the experience. The perception of his alignment with Sparta (and his association with Socrates) severely harmed his reputation in Athens. He was eventually banished by Athens after being on Sparta's side at the Battle of Coronea.

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