Not always the case. At the European company I work there are many rules and regs on who can legally access employees email, depending on the country of the employee. Luxembourg and the Netherlands can be really tricky for example and they are not the only ones.
It's not automatically solely owned by the company.
There's articles all over the Internet on how to remove/disable the speaker on airtags. Doesn't look to hard to do either, no hardware sensing if this is the case so it just keeps on working.
The AmigaOS ABI was really designed for the m68k, it leverages registers as much as possible. Pass variables in data registers, pointers in address registers. A4 for local data, A6 for the library pointer, results in D0.
That said, most library routines would then store the register contents on the stack and restore on return so not sure it's more efficient for memory access etc.
The m68k is the most CISC of ISAs I've seen, you have plentiful addressing modes and register orthogonality. It had adressing modes to do auto postincrements/predecrements, indirect indexed accesses and all sorts of fun.
I consider both licenses to be about freedom however they differ in the freedom involved.
MIT style licenses are about freedom for the programmer to do as they want, not code freedom.
GPL is all about the freedom of the code, at the cost of freedom for the programmer to do as they want.
I've gone the same route myself, from BSD style on earlier things to GPL on most things I do now. I'm still looking for a good license to apply to hardware projects though.
It would be interesting to know how they would classify modern "rented" software like the Adobe CS Suite or Office 365. They are installed on your machine but works like SaaS.
It's kind of a gray area for me at least, does it mean you own a copy or not? I'm sure it doesn't but I also know that legal system do not generally deal in shades, they are binary, either a or b.
If it legally means that you own a copy, this would in theory allow you to patch the online checking out of it to keep it running.
You can still decompile the binaries for Office products today, they are desktop products after all. Same for the Adobe CS suite, AFAIK.
What you can't do is decompile the server-side stuff. In case that stopped working somehow, you could find a way to remove the dependency on online stuffs from your desktop product, it's been done before, often in cracks.
If they fully move to web based SaaS and abandon desktop implementations completely, then yes, you'd be right, you'd no longer be able to modify it in any way.
I'm thinking of an analogy: Renting a house. If the house needs repair, I'd probably give the landlord a fair chance to fix it, but would also feel entitled to fix it myself if the problem interfered with the functioning of the house.
Same question goes for an unwanted FinFisher installation on your machine. After all, you're somewhat of a licensed user if a licensed user installed it lawfully on your machine. And since it has bugs in it, it should meet the criteria.
Even as a Commodore person who's never really owned a Sinclair computer, it can't be underestimated what an impact Sir Clive had on early home computing.
He truly showed that affordable computing is possible and in my mind also inspired the large home computer "cottage industry" in the UK.
I remember how I aspired to get a ZX81 and then my dad brought the Vic20 home (color! 5+8kb!) so I became a Commodore fanboy but hey, Sir Clive is my hero too.
That is a very biased article that is playing up all the aspects of Spartan society that modern audiences would find repulsive for internet likes. At the end of the day it is not unlike the film it criticises (300) except it's going all the way to the other end and painting a portrait of a grim, evil empire.
It is good to keep in mind that pretty much all ancient societies had norms and customs that we find repulsive today, from pederasty, to slavery, including sexual slavery, to killing of female children, to depriving women of all human rights and treating them as chattel. Sparta sounds particularly bad if one does not know much about the ancients. Otherwise they sound somewhat ordinary and only a bit more up themselves than others.
Iirc that series addresses this critique in some depth, pointing out that sparta was particularly awful even by the standards of other greek states. Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved. Since sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people, they relied on particularly brutal methods to keep down the regular slave revolts, making them considerably crueler than their contemporaries.
> Another interesting bit was how it's historically rare for slave-owning societies to have more than 50% of their population enslaved
Probably worth noting, then, that in 1860, South Carolina and Mississippi had over 50% population enslaved, and four more states over 40% population enslaved.
Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations, I'm curious whether Spartans were more or less like Americans in this regard. A glorious empire built on brutality and moral superiority.
> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations
Not as cruelly as Arab-owned slaves (the trans-Saharan slave trade started in 650 AD, which is pretty close to ancient). Despite importing as much or more slaves than both Americas, there is barely any Black presence in North Africa. Try to imagine why.
> Considering that American-owned slaves were treated much crueler on average than Ancient slave populations
I'd recommend you to actually read on the absolute horror the Helots had to go through
Only French Haití or Congo Free State can come to mind as being similar, the Helots were very different even from other Greek states, let alone Rome, Egypt or Cartage
Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom. Or a good portion of them did. Many (not majority) became citizens eventually (or their children did) and many in fact became quite prosperous. Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest. "Graduation" out of slavery was actually possible.
American slavery being built on "race" and white supremacy offered no such path. Even "mixed race" descendants suffered. Even after slavery was abolished, former slaves were (and often are) still treated abhorrently.
I recall a single incident from Roman history where Crassus crucified 6,000 slaves on the Appian Way. Things like this make me think you can't easily quantify which slavery was the worst. Perhaps it was easier, in some contexts in Rome, to earn freedom, but perhaps you were more likely to be crucified too.
> "Graduation" out of slavery was actually possible.
This is also true of American slaves.
> Their slavery wasn't based on racial status, but on class, and slavery wasn't considered genetically predetermined, but a product of status and conquest.
So is this. You think the child of a free black was enslaved?
Bullshit. By the 19th century (which is the century everybody talks about) it was almost legally impossible to free a slave in the American south (things like, say, a $200 tax in Florida... which was more money than most people saw in a year).
Even when possible it was essentially never done.
> So is this. You think the child of a free black was enslaved?
In many of the US slave states, if you were a free black person, regardless of who your parents were, you had to either leave the state within a fixed time, or you would be enslaved. So, yes.
> By the 19th century (which is the century everybody talks about) it was almost legally impossible to free a slave in the American south (things like, say, a $200 tax in Florida... which was more money than most people saw in a year).
Believe it or not, most slaves were owned by fairly wealthy people.
Slavery has always meant a kind of subjugationa and social death but slavery in continental North America was probably among the best ever in terms of material living conditions. Most slaves in agricultural societies were always agricultural, and were worked to death, like in the Caribbean. That's how plantation agriculture worked, from Roman latifundia onward. Black slaves in wht's now the US had enormous natural increase in their population, which is if not historically unprecedented, damn close. They were also taller and better nourished than all but the upper echeloons of European society. Obviously people prefer to be free but there are multiple axes of comparison and American and Roman slavery each look "better" on different axes.
Rome lasted for 2,100 years. I'm not sure you can generalize the quality of life of a free person, let alone a slave.
> Roman slaves at least had a path to freedom
You need to be specific. Are we comparing Connecticut in 1784 AD to Gaul in 50 BC? Or Connecticut in 1783 AD to Gaul in 59 BC? Because the two comparisons are very different.
OP speaks the truth. At least since the Roman empire, there has been no form of slavery in the Western world anywhere near as brutal as American slavery. (not to exclude the East or the Arab world, I just don't know enough to comment on them)
In the Roman empire, selling oneself as a slave was even seen as a last resort when capital was urgently needed (like when a debt repayment was ordered by a magistrate and a person didn't have enough money and fungible possessions to pay it). Slaves could also buy their freedom, and were sometimes even given their freedom as a gift.
Of course, there were cruel masters as well as kind ones. But prior to the African slave trade, the institution itself wasn't remotely as brutal or morally abhorrent, because it wasn't built on a social commitment to racism.
American racism was fueled in part by the abhorrent belief that Africans were of a separate race (i.e. subspecies) that was inferior in a Darwinian sense, thus dehumanizing them in people's minds. This sentiment appears sometimes in 1800s American literature. (And if I may say so, I think it bears a remarkable resemblance to some Nazi antisemitic propaganda.)
Roman slavery is one of the most romanticised things on the internet. The number of slaves who could buy their way free was miniscule. Most slaves were worked to death on the farms and mines, and had about a 5-year life expectancy after capture. Sure, life was better for a handful of slaves, particularly well-educated Greek slaves, but for most slaves life was brutal and short.
People seem obsessed with declaring the US south as having some sort of so-much-worse slavery, but they view the past with pretty rose-coloured glasses. 'But it's not racism!' is a meaningless moral alteration to the act of raiding other lands, dragging people back to your lands, and working them to death in under a decade.
As for Roman opinions on racism, no, they weren't racists in the sense of the modern term, but they were still intensely bigoted and committed more than a few genocides. Our friend Jules came home bragging of killing a million Gauls and enslaving a million more and got social cachet for that. They didn't see Gauls as a difference 'race' (that's a modern construct) but they definitely saw them as an outgroup that needed to be dominated.
> ...At least since the Roman empire, there has been no form of slavery in the Western world anywhere near as brutal as American slavery. (not to exclude the East or the Arab world, I just don't know enough to comment on them)
So, you launch a massive generalization, and attempt to walk it back by opting out most of the world (Asia, the middle east/Arab World, but making no mention of Africa, or Oceania). While we broadly view slavery as a despicable practice, please don't practice selective historical revisionism to minimize the barbaric suffering experienced to this day in some countries, and the astronomical death rates in the sugar plantations.
Examples from Historical Context: American Slavery in Comparative Perspective [1]
"Death rates among slaves in the Caribbean were one-third higher than in the South, and suicide appears to have been much more common. Unlike slaves in the South, West Indian slaves were expected to produce their own food in their "free time," and care for the elderly and the infirm."(
"The largest difference between slavery in the South and in Latin America was demographic. The slave population in Brazil and the West Indies had a lower proportion of female slaves, a much lower birthrate, and a higher proportion of recent arrivals from Africa. In striking contrast, southern slaves had an equal sex ratio, a high birthrate, and a predominantly American-born population".
"Slavery in the United States was especially distinctive in the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birthrate so low that slaves could not sustain their population without imports from Africa. The average number of children born to an early nineteenth-century southern slave woman was 9.2—twice as many as in the West Indies."
Additionally, you have ignored that slavery is still active in a number of countries [2], [3], [4], [5]
Slavery is a practice worthy of contempt, still practiced, and modern.
> Slaves could also buy their freedom, and were sometimes even given their freedom as a gift.
Again, this is not a difference between ancient slavery and American slavery. Why do you mention it?
> Of course, there were cruel masters as well as kind ones. But prior to the African slave trade, the institution itself wasn't remotely as brutal or morally abhorrent, because it wasn't built on a social commitment to racism.
Now it seems like you're specifically trying not to respond to the claim that American slaves received crueler treatment than ancient slaves did.
You're arguing that exceptions and rare occurrences in American slavery are equivalent to the norms in Rome and for some reason trying to make American slavery seem like it really wasn't all that bad.
Your style of responding also makes it seem like you're arguing the point that slavery wasn't all that bad in the US from a very specific view point
They're rare occurrences in American slavery and they're also rare occurrences in Rome.
As some other people have pointed out, if you look at objective indices of quality of life, the United States generally comes out as possibly the best place in all of history you could have been enslaved.
>there has been no form of slavery in the Western world anywhere near as brutal as American slavery
Absolutist statements like this rarely seem to hold true.[0]
American slavery is European slavery as well. Europeans (both countries and individuals) benefited extremely handsomely from enslaving people in Africa and bringing them to their colonies in America. And even after they had finally outlawed slavery for themselves just a few scant decades before the US did, they kept buying that affordable slave-produced cotton and sugar and coffee and etc. from the Americas.
Speaking specifically of Greeks and Romans. And in general, Ancient peoples did not consider slaves to be as animals, but American slave-owners often held the belief that they were sub-human and not more than talking beasts.
There was a class of Mycenaean slave that was close to a free man, who could own land and have status.
Greek slaves could be involved in every economic activity except politics. Slaves were bankers, craftsmen and tradespeople. Male slaves might be personal assistants, shield makers, cutlers, bedmakers, while female slaves would be textile weavers and bakers. Not only were slaves not seen as denegerate inferiors, they were expected to be able to take over their masters' business when needed. Some of the most famous and respected philosophers were slaves.
Slaves could earn wages, and use those wages to pay a fee to live and work alone, and even use their savings (or loans/gifts) to buy their freedom. Cretian slaves could own a house and livestock and pass it down to their family, which was also granted the same familial laws as freedmen.
Debt slavery was common until it was abolished; people basically could become serfs until they paid off their debts, and then become free again. Some slavery was limited to a period of time, and slaves had rights / could be involved in legal disputes, and so win freedom or other rewards.
Roman slaves perhaps were treated worse than Greek originally, and many more of them were used for agricultural labor, probably putting their experiences on par with American slaves. But as the Roman empire progressed, slaves gained many more rights.
Worth nothing also that a lot of Spartan "historical information" is more myth and bullshit than evidence-based. Spartans were masters of propaganda. Helots may have been treated like shit, but apparently a lot of the reputation was inflated or made up by later historical writers.
Helots could also be craftspeople, own land, raise crops, keep money, buy their freedom. They maintained family units and were less often dispersed than Greek slaves. Helot children born of Spartan citizen fathers would become members of the army as an intermediate rank.
The idea that "Sparta" was close to "80% enslaved people" is confused and I hold
the author of the linked article responsible for not clarifying the confusion.
"Sparta" is the name of the principal city of the city-state of Lacedaemon,
which comprised the regions of Laconia and Messinia in the Peloponnese. The
inhabitants of the city of Sparta are in ancient sources referred to as
Lacedaemones ("Λακεδαίμονες") and are the people we, in the modern day, know as as
Spartans or Spartiates ("Σπαρτιάται").
The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the
inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to
in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred
to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply,
as the Spartans' slaves. Any reference to those people as "Spartans", let alone
"Lacedaemones" is a modern invention and only serves to deepen the confusion I
highlight here. In fact, I am only aware of a single modern "source" that
commits this confusing error: the blog post linked above. If we were to give
those people a modern name devoid of political connotations, that would be
"Lacones" ("Λάκωναι") or "Messinians" ("Μεσσηνοί"), the inhabitants of the
regions of Laconia and Messinia.
So it makes no sense to say that "Sparta" was "80% enslaved people" or the other
errors committed in the linked article. It might make sense to say that "Laconia
and Messinia (resp. Lacedaemon) was 80% enslaved people", although that would
greatly weaken the intended invective against Spartans. It would certainly
make sense to point out that Spartans, i.e. the inhabitants of the city of
Sparta, had a huge number of slaves in proportion both to their own numbers and
in comparison to the number of slaves of other Greek city-states of the same
historical period(s), but again that would not be a proper attack on the myth of
Sparta, which is what is intended. Of course it makes every sense to point out
the cruelty of Spartans, but in that case, if we call the helots "Spartans",
also, the confusion only deepens.
All such nuance is left out of the article linked above which makes it very,
very misleading and confuses people who are used to getting their knowledge of
history from second- third- and further- hand accounts, like the one in the
linked article, or the movie 300, etc. Unfortunately once something is elevated
to mythical status there is nothing more profitable than to tear it down, even
if this tearing down is based on the same poor knowledge of history that allowed
it to be elevated in the first place.
>The idea that "Sparta" was close to "80% enslaved people" is confused and I hold the author of the linked article responsible for not clarifying the confusion.
...
>The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves.
He's referring to the entire Spartan state, which at that time included Messinia. It's accurate to say it was composed of ~80% enslaved people. That's clear if you read the article. The fact that most helots were from other ethnic groups doesn't change the fact that they were living under the rule of the Spartan state.
There is no such thing as "The entire Spartan state". There is (well, was) the city-state of Lacedaemon and the city of Sparta. The two are confused because Lacedaemon is often synechdochically called "Sparta" and the people of the city of Sparta are usually called "Lacedaemones" in ancient sources. But the people in Laconia and Messinia (not just Messinia) were "helots", not "Spartans", not "Lacedeaemones" and not anything else.
So if you want to say that the people who lived in Laconia and Messinia were the slaves of the Spartans, which we call the helots, and that there many more times more helots than there were Spartans, then you're welcome, because that is accurate. But to say that "Sparta was closer to 80% enslaved people" as the OP says, is false.
Yes, synecdochically and when it's clear from the context which one is meant. But when you say something like "Sparta was 80% slaves" it's not clear from the context and you have to clarify which one you mean, the city or the city-state. Otherwise you are only spreading confusion, just like the series of blog posts above.
And it is still the case that the helots were the slaves of the Spartans, that nobody called the helots "Spartans", and that nobody thought that "helots" were Spartans, not in any ancient source and not in any modern source I'm aware of outside the linked series of blog posts.
If you (or, you know, others) think this is wrong, you're welcome to show me where, in modern or ancient texts it says that "helots were spartans" and "sparta was mostly populated by slaves", or something similar -except of course for the scandalously revisionist blog posts we're discussing.
It's still the case that 80% of the population of the Spartan state was slaves. That's what's relevant to this conversation; the rest is just sophistry.
No, it's not sophistry and I don't appreciate you insulting me by saying I engage in sophistry. I am sick and tired of random people on the internet accusing me of intellectual dishonesty because they have no idea what I'm talking about because they haven't any knowledge relevant to the subject at hand, other than having read a blog post or two.
As to the "the case" that "80% of the population of the Spartan state were slaves", that is an acceptable turn of phrase, but it is not what the blog author says. He says that the majority of the people of "Sparta" were slaves. This is calculated to come across as a tear down of the myth of "noble" Sparta because it makes no distinction between the free citizens of Sparta who are the ones elevated to mythical status by ignorance of history, and their slaves, who are never and under no circimstances considered to be part of the "noble warriors of Sparta" or what have you.
In short, the author is making a very clear attempt to exploit the confusion caused by the synecdochical use of "Sparta" to mean both the city and the city-state, to make a point that ultimately only serves his vanity, and is not really informative. To say that "most people of the city state of Sparta were slaves" is only revelatory to those who have no idea of ancient history.
To give you an analogy, it's like someone making a huge todo about how "Black holes are not really black". This can only be news to people who don't know what black holes are and what is meant by "black" in their name. Then instead of trying to clarify the meaning of the word "black" in "black hole" the author launches into a tirade about how black holes have been glorified as being the blackest bodies in the universe when in reality they are not even black and most of their mass is invisible because it's hidden behind the event horizon and Oh Gods! All you 've ever been told about physics, it's all wrong! You've been worshipping a black body that is not even black and is not even all there!
It's a lot of noise for nothing but internet likes and an utter appeal to ignorance that does not improve the reader's knowledge one bit. And it is many peoples' first point of entry into the subject of not only Sparta, but ancient history in general. If that first point of entry is not 300 instead, which to be sure is even worse but without which the author's blog post would not even exist, because it has nothing to say other than "300 sucks, man".
300 has Persians throwing incendiary grenades. Their king is a giant. He's carried to battle on a golden throne, like a Warhammer figure. But the author saw fit to attack 300's realism by picking apart its mythologising of "noble" Spartan warriors, which nobody has ever believed other than people who learn their history from comics and movies. This is how much the author of the blog post is interested in historic truth.
I appreciate your post and i thought it was informative.
That being said i do think you could have made your point more succinctly.
For a while, it seemed like you were arguing semantics vs actually informing the reader.
Your point is valid. I'm not sure how to present it better, but I'd posit:
"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"
>"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"
Except, as the author points out, the Spartan system that he's criticizing requires the Spartiates to have a plantation of helots to support them so they can spend all their time training for battle. A man in ancient Sparta could only be a Spartiate if they had a plantation of helots (if they lose their plantation they lose their status as a citizen), so the helots were just as much a part of Spartan society as they were.
Thanks and you're right that I could have made my point more concisely. The series of comments I made in this conversation were not my most well-written ever.
The author is addressing the perception of Sparta as it exists in popular culture today. Which is to say - the perception that is fueled by movies like 300, and the military culture that adopted that perception to glorify itself by proxy. Because of that, the vast majority of people are not aware that Spartans were a tiny minority of the residents of Sparta (the state), or that most residents were slaves. If you do, great - but your assertion that the article "does not improve the reader's knowledge" is not grounded in reality.
"Spartans can't be 80% slaves because the Spartans didn't consider their slaves to be Spartans" is perhaps a linguistic truth, but it requires an absurd literalism to keep banging that drum instead of understanding that he's talking about the society the Spartans built, which includes the helots. The Spartans owned the helots!
>> "Spartans can't be 80% slaves because the Spartans didn't consider their slaves to be Spartans"
That is not what I said. Why do you misquote me? This is what I said:
>> The people inhabiting the greater area of the Lacedeamonian city-state, the inhabitants of the settlements in Laconia and Messinia, were never referred to in any ancient text as "Spartans" or "Lacedaemones" and they were only referred to, to the extent they were ever mentioned, as "helots" ("είλωται") or, simply, as the Spartans' slaves.
Nobody in ancient times considered the helots to be "Spartans". This is in the same way that nobody in ancient times considered the slaves of the Athenians to be "Athenians" or the slaves of the Romans to be "Romans". And no historian in modern times does so, either. When speaking of the Gauls, subjugated by the Romans [1], no author, ancient or modern, cals them "Romans". For any ancient or modern culture that had slaves, the distinction is always there: the People of X on the one hand, and their slaves on the other.
Yet the author is deliberately muddying the waters playing on the confusion between "Sparta" the city-state and "Sparta" its capital city, and even invents new terms to refer to them: he calls "Spartiates" the free citizens of the capital city, and "Spartans" everyone else, a distinction impossible in the Greek language and unused by anyone except the author as far as I can tell.
All these deliberate confusions are the result of a perverse reading of history, clearly aimed at making an impression to people who are not familiar with the history of Sparta outside its depiction in popular media and it is clearly calculated to draw internet attention to the author's blog by riding on the coattails of the success of such popular media, and not to inform about history.
The only antitode I know against fudging and misdirection like this is to make language precise and clear.
I thought so at first. I think poster got so caught up in explaining the Greek that he forgot to make his point.
For a while, it seemed like poster was arguing semantics vs actually informing the reader on why author could be wrong.
I'm not sure how to present it better, but I'd posit:
"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"
I read the entire series and can't agree with your assessment at all. Yes he was very critical of Spartan society, but I feel he very clearly demonstrates through various sources why he has these views, e.g. highlighting that most of what we hear, see and might admire about Sparta is true only for 3% of the population (spartiates), while the vast majority are lower classes and in particular slaves (helots). And even those 'good things' might not be true.
I'd be interested where you disagree on substance.
Note that this is from memory but, for example, the author of the linked blog
posts makes an outrageous distinction between the free people of "Sparta", which
he calls "Spartiates" and all "Spartans" which includes the helots. This is were
your expression "3% of the population (spartiates)" comes from.
That is an outrageous distinction that is not found in any ancient or modern
source. It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order
to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta.
First, there is no way to make a distinction between "Spartan" and "Spartiate"
in the Greek language. In Greek, ancient and modern, a person who lives in, or
is from, a place called "Sparta" is a "Σπαρτιάτης", i.e. "Spartiate".
"Σπαρτιάτης" is most commonly latinised as "Spartan", sometimes as "Spartiate",
but there is no semantic difference between the two.
Second, there is no modern source I'm aware of, other than the linked series of
blog posts, and certainly no ancient source that refers to the helots as
"Spartans", "Spartiates", "Lacedaemons", or anything else but "helots", or
simply the slaves of the Spartans. This is because ancient authors only ever
refer to helots when they want to point out how cruel were the Spartans (which
obviously must exclude the helots themselves from the group of "Spartans") and
don't really care about them, or their fate, otherwise. So the idea that the
population of "Sparta" was mostly made up of slaves is a figment of the author's
imagination.
It is true that the slaves of the Spartans were (many) more than the Spartans,
but this is also true of most other Greek city-states, where manual labor was
performed by slaves and many citizens owned more than one slave. In fact, other
Greeks did not treat their own slaves with any less cruelty than the Spartans.
For example, the main source of richess of classical Athens was the silver mined
from the mines of Lavrion where thousands of slaves, including children, were
made to work in conditions that we would, today, rightly find revolting.
From memory again, there were other errors, all of which were the result of the
author trying to play up historical themes for clicks, but I would have to
re-read the series of posts to remember. In any case my recommendation is to
turn to primary sources if one is interested in the history of Sparta. Read
Thucydides, read Plutarch, read Xenophon, read Plato, read Aristotle, read
Herodotus even, but keep in mind that everyone who wrote about Sparta had a
political affiliation, either to Sparta, or to the enemies of Sparta, and in any
case ancient historians were not always 100% accurate.
> It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta.
The author addresses this VERY directly and at length in a "Conclusions: Who Matters?" section of one of the posts. For example (though the whole section is worth a read):
> All too often, I see students read the Greek contempt for the poor man, the non-citizen, or the slave with horror but then immediately turn around and replicate those patterns of thought in their own thinking about these societies (well of course the ‘mob’ cannot be trusted to rule – Thucydides and Xenophon said so – to which I am endlessly responding, ‘yes, but should you believe them?‘).
> Indeed, this credulous approach to the source tradition – accepting not only the facts they give, but also their guesses about what is to them the distant past and their judgments about the moral worth of a Sparta that probably never existed – is so common that it has had a name since the 1933, le mirage spartiate, coined by Francois Ollier. Rousseau and Jefferson had an excuse for their gullibility – we do not.
The passage you quote does not address the distinction between "Spartiate" and "Spartan" that the author is attempting to make, and which is the subject I discuss in my comment above (in fact, that is the subjec of the "it" in "it appears" in my comment).
The author of the blog posts has basically made up the idea that "Spartiate" and "Spartan" are two different words with different meaning. "Spartan" or "Spartiate" on the one hand, and "Helot" on the other hand are two different categories, but "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are different Latinisations of the same Greek word, Σπαρτιάτης and not similar-sounding words with subtly different meaning, ast he author claims. This claim, that "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are different words representing different categories of people is the revisionism that I am commenting on.
Can you quote a passage from the linked series of blog posts that directly addresses this revisionism?
> outrageous distinction between the free people of "Sparta", which he calls "Spartiates" and all "Spartans" which includes the helots
> That is an outrageous distinction that is not found in any ancient or modern source. It appears to be something that the author completely made up in order to support his revisionist interpretation of the history of ancient Sparta.
"Spartiate" is used to mean the free citizens of Sparta, as is "Spartan", but the author claims that one means the free citizens and the other the helots.
Yes, the ancients were very different from us. But Sparta was special even to contemporaries. And it was special ways that are especially appalling to modern sensibilities. It’s dishonest to ignore that.
Great series! I came out with the feeling that the Spartans were like the genteel Antebellum plantation owners of Greece: seemingly noble and stoic, but in reality terribly cruel, corrupted, and decadent.
He recently appeared in the EconTalk podcast and its worth hearing too (will find the link). But they touched on Sparta and the thing that struck me was just how unequal - something like 5% or less of the population of Sparta (and it was a big state by Greek standards), only 5% were "free" - everyone else was a Slave.
The level of violence to stop that becoming an uncontrolled uprising must have been huge.
Modern Gulf emirates have a similar ratio of citizens to guest workers. Western profesionnals are treated with respect, but manual workers from India or Philippines are basically slaves in everything but name.
How the history repeats itself, this time among hi-tech skyscrapers.
They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it - and some superior needs a scapegoat to punish, because everyone here respects human rights etc.
A legally owned slave, was legally OK to be raped or killed. And ok to proudly tell everyone about it.
>They still would have to fear, that someone leaks the video of it
Is it really a deterrent, though? You said yourself that it'd be scapegoated and its not like they depend on good PR to keep their goodies, they own the country after all.
Also I can't help but wonder what these people talk about behind closed doors, do they really play by the same rules you and I would be held accountable to behind closed doors?
But it is already. Lots of otherwise heinous activities are tolerated just fine by the West. When was the last time the name Khashoggi found its way into Western mainstream media?
I had been thinking about fantasy stories and what the maximumly evil evil empire you could write in a story and still have it somewhat believable. After reading that, I think Sparta is probably it, if not a little beyond it.
Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor.
Yet something about Sparta seemed worse. Maybe because they maintained a kind of stability of oppression for so long, or maybe it's my own biases and the fact that oppressed and oppressor were both white and more-or-less of the same culture. Or is it inevitable that this kind of oppression also must be supported by ideologically denigration of the oppressed? But is denigration even enough, do you also need separation, the sense that the oppressed are a different people? That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien? If so then the class differences may have had all the same attributes as race and racism but without skin color differences.
Very few other slave societies _had kids ritualistically kill the slaves as part of their education_ (there's maybe some wiggle room on whether this actually happened or was mythical, but it's _definitely_ part of the popular view), so there's that.
Sparta was also an oddity just in the sheer size of the slave class; under 5% of the population was fully free. Few if any other slave societies had that sort of ratio.
> That is, did the Spartan ruling class look down on the helots as not just inferior but alien?
Yes; they were 'foreigners' (they were originally, at least mythically, inhabitants of a neighboring city state). They also had a separate discriminated class for Spartans who'd been stripped of civil rights; these weren't viewed as the same.
> Honestly a lot of colonial rule feels pretty awful too, and with a similar flavor.
I suspect what makes colonialism feel less shocking is that most of the cruelty happens "out there" and the day-to-day activities that promulgate it were usually done with native man-power in those regions. Like one faction there that was elevated above the others and made to do the dirty work.
The primary beneficiaries aren't forced to see and live with it and very few of them ever have to go and get their hands dirty. This is all sustained by a set of narratives and beliefs back home that sanitize these activities and depict the foreign populations as being not sophisticated enough for self-government or appeals to reason. They were either childlike and ignorant or inherently violent martial races.
Sparta, in contrast, had a hereditary elite that does its own dirty work up close and didn't seem to be engaged in any self-deception about the moral status and intellectual capabilities of their slaves.
SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire, borrowed quite a lot from the Spartans, presumably for this reason. Though they were a lot more competent, which was always one of Sparta's major failings.
> SM Stirling's Draka, an attempt at a maximally evil empire
I was under the impression that Stirling was optimizing more for maximal believability than maximal evil. (If he was optimizing for maximal evil then I may need to find some beer for him to hold.)
I wouldn't have thought it was at all believable by alternate history standards (and I think Stirling has actually acknowledged that?)
I'm struggling to think of _any_ nastier fictional society, though. The closest might be alternate history portrayals of a late 20th century Nazi Germany, which are usually pretty awful, but they usually fall down a bit on sheer horror vs Stirling's Draka, particularly the later stories.
That might be the issue; I never really got around to reading the whole series. Though my impression was that the later stories were not alternate history but more semi-hard 'science'[0]-fiction, which opens more leeway for making whatever the author is trying to build believable[1], and there's a tradeoff between believability versus evil[2], so having more leeway on the former lets you increase the latter as well.
(My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent". I suppose, given real-world observations, that I probably should find competence a detriment to believability, especially in villians, so that's also a possibility.)
0: I have unrelated issues with that term, but it's what the genre is usually called.
1: On the extreme end, you have a fantasy setting where the laws of nature outright enforce cliches like good-always-wins-in-the-end or evil-can-never-truly-be-stopped-only-delayed, and how evil the empires is is mostly a function of how those effects interact. In more 'realistic' settings it's things like how easy mass surveilance versus jailbreaking is.
The issues with believability in the first book are mostly just around the backstory; the history of the Draka makes no sense at all.
> My impression of the early books was broadly on the evilness level of "Nazi Germany, but less incompetent".
I mean, that's up there in the evil stakes. But also, the Draka were a lot more... messed up. Both had deeply alien (and arguably rather Spartan, to go back on topic for a second) value systems, but by the time Nazi Germany fell, the vast majority of the population had only had Nazi values inflicted on them for about 15 years; the Draka social system was _centuries_ old.
It is a very interesting series. However, I think he understates classic Spartan military prowess.
If you look at Deveraux's list of military victories and defeats, you will see a lot of the defeats came after the Peloponnesian war. I believe even Greek sources talked about how Spartan society became softer after winning the Peloponnesian war.
Also, the Spartans were famous for their army not their navy.
If you take the list and remove naval battles and battles fought after the Peloponnesian War, you end up with something like 12 victories and 4 defeats with is a 75% win rate which is likely pretty impressive all things considered.
He also points out that the Spartans fought primarily against much weaker opponents, making their military prowess not so impressive. If I constantly pick fights against children, my win rate would be quite high as well.
What was pointed out was that the way the Greeks organized their battle formations, the strongest of their formation would generally face the weakest of their opponents' formation. Since Spartans were usually seen as the strongest, this meant they faced generally those seen as the weakest. And he also points out that when this general model is explicitly broken, the Spartans really suffer in their documented military effectiveness.
That's pretty interesting. So it was basically confirmation bias: people thought they were strong, so they were put in positions where they performed well, which perpetuated the idea that they were strong?
Been meaning to turn this one into a PDF to read on the train.
I wonder if he's ever considered publishing that or some of his other long reads. A low estimate has This Isn't Sparta at 130 pages. Images take that higher.
From a non US outsiders perspective I do have to say that it looks like the US civil war never really ended. The country is still largely divided along the same lines (with maybe California as a third entity) and I don't really see it reconciling any time soon.
Kind of like Belgium over here in Europe, which is usually say is not so much a country as it is a cold civil war :)
The geographic lines of division today have changed tremendously since the Civil War. The divide is now more rural versus urban rather than north versus south. In the last presidential election rural California was mostly "red" while southern cities were mostly "blue".
I thought this too until I looked at US presidential electoral maps for the past century, and then ran across a study of political division in the US that showed a dramatic increase beginning around 1980. (Don't have a link handy unfortunately.) It seems the degree and nature of division in the US really has changed in a fundamental way.
You'd be surprised how flexible some of the GUI toolkits on the Amiga actually were. MUI is based on the concept that layout is dynamic and flexible.
It would dynamically calculate a minimum window size based on the components inside and you could then resize the window as you wanted with things calculating and resizing as you go, adapting to font selections and themes.
The actual implementation is archaic by todays standards but it did use attributes on UI objects to determine min/max sizing and other things, similar to CSS in concept.
Sadly no font sensitivity on display (possibly because Amiga owners take it so much for granted that they don't think of it as special), but it shows what MUI can do in terms of GUI elements, window resizing, etc.
After leaving the Amiga for Windows, the three biggest things I hated about its GUI were all those endless non-resizeable windows, the complete lack of font sensitivity, and the horrible scrollbars that didn't show your actual content size (and that snapped back if you moved out of some invisible box). And here we are, twenty years later, and nothing has improved at all...
It's not automatically solely owned by the company.