Hey all, Fireside this week, as I look to take a bit of time to focus on getting some writing done and some syllabi written before the semester begins in earnest later this week.
Also before we dive in I want to note that it appears that Patreon has been having some trouble processing some patrons recently. I haven’t seen a big movement from this and reportedly Patreon is working to fix the issue, but I would suggest if you are supporting any creators on Patreon – myself or others – you may want to check and make sure that you haven’t been caught in the Great Payments Mess-Up and are still subscribed to everything you want to be subscribed to.
And because the semester is coming up, it seemed like a good time to do a musing on syllabus and course design. I find most students don’t think too hard about the design of their courses and that’s perfectly understandable. I certainly didn’t when I was an undergraduate student. A student taking, say, Roman History tends to think of that course as the Roman history course. They don’t tend to think about all other possible configurations of a Roman history course, because they’ll only ever take the one and they aren’t designing it in any event. But of course the professor designing the course is thinking about a range of possible Roman history courses, with different approaches, teaching methods and topical focuses, and any professor worth their salt is thinking pretty hard about those choices.
And for the students out there, it can actually be really quite valuable for you to think about why your professor made the decisions they did too. A good syllabus should tell you and that can help you plan your own approach to the course material. So let’s talk about how to read a syllabus (at least for a history or classics course).
Most professors have a standard syllabus format they use, but you’ll generally find the same basic elements in each of them. I’ve used the same standard format for my syllabi for years now, and it’s fairly typical and goes as follows. First, there is a block of raw information (course location, title, time, my contact information, TAs contact information, etc.), followed by a course introduction or description, which in my syllabi is usually a couple of paragraphs, but for some courses may just be a few sentences. That course description is actually one of the most useful parts of the syllabi but also one of the least read. After that, I place the list of required books. Then I have brief descriptions of the major assignments, followed by a breakdown of how the course should be graded.
It’s after this that I get to the ‘policies’ section, which deserves a few words. Universities increasingly require certain boiler-plate statements with specific information to be included in syllabi. Most students skip over these policies. I won’t say not to read them, because there is often useful information in these boiler-plate paragraphs, things like university policy on disability accommodation (important if you need an accommodation!), attendance policy or the honor code. But these chunks aren’t written by your professor, generally, so they don’t tell you much about the course; they instead tell you about some of the rules of the university.
Finally, there is usually some form of course schedule. Some professors are fairly vague and flexible with their course schedules, but I am not. My syllabi list every single reading and assignment and the day on which it is due right at the beginning. I do that because I know students have many classes and need to be able to plan ahead, so I want students to be able to see at the outset when the heavier and lighter weeks of the course will be, so they can strategize their workload. I strongly recommend students, when you get your syllabi for all your classes, place all exams and major assignments on a single calendar so you can see them all together. That way, if you have three papers due in a single week, you know months in advance and can space out that work.
But there’s more information you can pull out of a syllabus.
First, look to see if the syllabus is trying to signal course themes or focus. Any college course at the undergraduate level is bound to be an exercise in selection. I cannot, obviously, teach you everything about Roman history in a single semester, I am going to have to pick and chose what to focus on. Likewise, your Latin class obviously cannot cover everything in Latin literature or even in a single author. That course introduction paragraph is thus going to try to signal what the professor intends to focus on, what threads are going to tie the lectures, discussions and assignments together into a coherent whole.
For a skill-focused course, something like a Latin class, that may be very easy to spell out in an introduction. A course reading the speeches of Cicero with an aim towards improving students mastery of grammar and vocabulary – a fairly standard undergraduate Latin prose course structure – is going to be quite different from a course reading the same speeches with an eye towards Cicero’s rhetorical strategy (you’d be more likely to see this in an advanced or graduate course). And as a student that matters both because it is going to tell you what skills the course is building but – perhaps more practically – what skills the professor is interested in assessing.
Likewise, a course on Roman history has to pick the ‘threads’ it is going to follow. My own Roman History survey syllabus is pretty blunt that, “special attention will be paid to the political and military institutions of the Roman Republic…the strengths and limitations of Roman political institutions and the causes of their eventual collapse.” In short, my survey is structured as a political history, focused on institutions. One could easily teach the same course as a series of biographic sketches of key leaders or as a cultural history focused on Roman values and worldview.
Recognizing the kind of course and its focus can be a particularly major help in studying for exams, removing quite a bit of the guesswork in terms of what will be tested. That grammar-and-vocab Cicero course is probably going to test grammar and vocabulary, probably with a translation focused exam. By contrast, the Ciceronian rhetoric course is going to want you to be able to explain the rhetorical strategy of a passage; it might also ask you to translate, but most of the points are probably going to go into explaining what Cicero is doing rather than simply translating what he is saying.
Likewise, it should be no shock that the focus of the questions on my Roman history course’s midterm and final exams tend to follow the course themes. I vary my essay questions year-to-year, but things like assessing the effectiveness of Sulla’s political reforms, the degree to which the Roman republic was a democracy, the impact of Roman expansion on political institutions, the role of Roman institutions on motivating Roman militarism, the strengths and weaknesses of Augustus’ political settlements are all the sorts of things I ask. Those questions of course all orbit the course themes: they’re all questions about political institutions!
You might also be able to detect some of what a professor was thinking in terms of assignment design, because assignments too are likely quite intentional. In particular, there tends to be a spectrum from purely assessment based assignments to what I call pedagogical assignments. A pure assessment assignment might be something like a multiple choice exam: it doesn’t aim to teach anything, but is purely to check to see if you know things. A purely pedagogical assignment might be something like an ungraded in-class exercise; I am not assessing you but hoping that by having you do something you will learn something. Most assignments have a bit of both, but often not an even mix.
A classic form of pedagogical assignment is the de minimis reading quiz. What the professor wants is to make sure you carefully read that week’s reading assignment, but what most of us learn by experience is that a reading assignment with no attached assessment does not get read by many students. A quiz on the reading, even with a very small grade impact, will ‘keep students honest’ (which can in turn, improve performance on later exams; we aren’t assigning these readings to be mean, but because we think you’ll learn from them!). Even better, a quick quiz directly before a class discussion on the reading can help jog student’s memories of what they read, making for a better discussion. Even better, write the quiz questions so that they focus on the same topics as the discussion (want to be these connect to the course themes?) to really prime the discussion.
I will say for my own practice, I dislike purely assessment assignments and try to use them as little as possible. Even my final exam is designed to have some pedagogical impact. Students in my military history courses may recognize that the questions for the final exam’s big comprehensive essay tend to ask students to apply what they’ve learned to a contemporary security policy matter, for instance, because that’s one of the capstone skill the whole course has been trying to teach: to use military history to think about the security challenges today. The essay is a chance to practice that skill, one last time; to take just one step beyond the course material.
And if you are thinking, ‘man, his courses sound like they involve lots of writing,’ – well, yes! They do. Another thing presented in the syllabus is that I think writing is a very important skill and one that can be usefully honed and refined in the history classroom. Writing persuasively and well isn’t some in-born talent, but rather is a skill, developed through practice. The only way to ‘get good’ at writing is to write a lot with purpose. For my classes, my syllabus and paper prompts are clear that the main criteria for assessing paper writing are focused on argument structure (the nuts and bolts of making the point), the quality of evidence used and the clarity with which the argument is delivered. Which is to say I am more interested in getting students to nail down the basics of delivering a persuasive, logical, evidence-supported argument and much less interested in rhetorical flourish or stylistic excellence. I want the Willys Jeep of analytical writing, not a Rolls-Royce.1
So in all of this my final advice to students as the semester approaches: this year try to give a bit more thought to why your courses are structured the way they are. Doing so can tell you something about how to approach the course and reveal the ‘hidden’ skills you are actually supposed to be acquiring on the way through.2
On to the recommendations!
I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by recommending myself, writing a shortened version of my take on Sparta in Foreign Policy. This particular article went pretty wild, getting hundreds of thousands of views and sparking a lot of angry responses on social media from folks whose grasp of Greek history was often quite limited. But if it touched a nerve then that it good, that is what it was supposed to do. The whole point of placing articles like this in major public-facing publications is to reach a target audience through that publication. In this case, my goal – as with most things I write for Foreign Policy – was to reach the military/security policy community. Going by the response, I think I succeeded in that (while also upsetting a whole lot of people with vaguely or not-so-vaguely authoritarian politics).
For those of you trying to keep track of the War in Ukraine, Michael Kofman did a very informative podcast over at War on the Rocks with Ryan Evans looking back at the past few months, the current Ukrainian counter-offensive and some of the issues involved (and this one isn’t behind the paywall). Kofman’s analysis is useful in part because he’s giving a pretty unvarnished view of both sides, whereas a lot of the online commentary is not merely pro-Ukrainian but sometimes unwilling to consider that Ukrainians too can make mistakes, face challenges and experience setbacks. I think in some ways the heady successes of the early war has given a lot of folks a real aversion to admitting that sometimes things don’t go Ukraine’s way. That doesn’t mean they’re losing or going to lose, it means this is a war and the enemy gets a vote.
One thing I cannot believe I have not yet included on a recommendation list is a wonderful tool that has been around for a long time, Stanford’s ORBIS, a geospatial model of the Roman world. ORBIS is a fantastic tool both for the scholar of the ancient world but also for anyone looking to get a handle on pre-modern travel times and the different kinds of connectedness you can have. The website lets you calculate travel routes between major cities in the Roman Empire, estimating cost and travel time. All of the estimates are necessarily very approximate, but rooted in evidence and careful modeling; they are not ‘made up,’ even if they may be based on educated guesses. You can also calculate network paths and flows to get a sense of how movement to or from an individual site would propagate through travel networks. It is a very neat tool you can spend some time playing around with to get a sense of how goods and people moved around the ancient world or which you can use to game out travel times on specific routes.
Finally, for this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend James M. McPherson’s For Cause & Comrades: Why Men Fought in the Civil War (1997). This is one of those classics of military history sufficiently well known that I keep double-checking to make sure I haven’t actually already recommended it and just forgotten. Rather than a narrative history of the American Civil War, McPherson in Cause and Comrades is focused on the more narrow question of the title, ‘why did men fight?’ He takes a ‘Face of Battle‘ approach to the question and I’d generally say this is one of if not the best application of that ‘Face of Battle’ approach (in part because it is more flexible than some of the other too-rote-by-half applications of the method).
What McPherson has that other applications of the approach might lack is his enormous evidence base, where he relies on the writings – letters, diaries and memoirs – of 1,076 soldiers who fought in the war. It’s a staggering corpus of the sort historians of previous periods can only dream of, but it provides McPherson a ‘representative sample’ (he even has tables in the back comparing his sample to the geographic distribution of actual soldiers; one note is that his sample is tilted in favor of officers over enlisted men and men from professional backgrounds over farmers and other blue-collar workers, though the latter groups are not wholly absent from the sample either). Of course McPherson cannot put everything all 1,076 soldiers wrote in the book; on some level he is asking the reader to trust that the quotes and excerpts he provides do reflect the larger corpus. But he lets the soldiers themselves ‘do the talking’ for the most part.
The collection is not, however, aimless; McPherson is building a few key arguments, which really are neatly reflected in the title. McPherson wants to outline first ‘the cause,’ by which he means the reasons soldiers actually cite in their writings as to why they have gone to war. The controversial part of this argument is going to be McPherson’s contention that confederate soldiers by and large understood themselves to be fighting for slavery and he piles up quote after quote to make the point that these men knew full well they were fighting for slavery. At the same time what soldiers understood as ‘the cause’ ranged widely: slavery, abolition, a sense of duty, the need to live up to the example of the revolutionary generation.
Beyond this, McPherson argues, however, that the ’cause’ was often insufficient to steel men against the terror of battle, and this is where the ‘comrades’ come in. McPherson details how soldiers expressed what modern military theorists would describe as ‘group cohesion’ and how it held men in the fight: the need not to let down their comrades, or to be seen as a coward by their buddies. McPherson’s view, which I’ve largely adopted, is that ‘the cause’ is sufficient to get men to the battle, but not to hold them in the fight and that it was the ‘comrades’ which kept men in the line when the shooting started. It’s possible to over-stress the distinction. Somewhat ironically, it is McPherson’s focus on ‘the cause’ which was a break from the scholarship of the book’s time, which had tended to prioritize group cohesion over patriotism or ideology, a trend which I find continues in the popular culture, despite ample evidence that patriotism and ideology do matter.3
Next week we’ll be back to our look at the Roman Republic, specifically its magistrates.
- To be honest, most undergraduates who attempt an elaborate or rhetorical style end up hurting themselves, producing mangled, over-complicated sentences full of misused words. To be even more honest, most academics who do the same are merely cowering in obscurantism.
- And academics: make those hidden skills explicit. If you are assigning a lot of writing to make students better writers, say that to them.
- I call this the Saving Private Ryan school of military motivation, where the mission is pointless and the cause doesn’t matter and soldiers only stay in it out of loyalty to themselves. I think, to be blunt, this is a cynical and short-sighted view of military motivation, heavily influenced by the American memory of the Vietnam War. But when one reads the writings of soldiers of the past, or talks to soldiers of the present, it is really readily apparent that the cause does matter. Talking to folks who served in the Global War on Terror, I’ve generally found they believed in the mission more and longer than most folks on the ‘homefront.’
Ollie is a good, conscientious cat. Mine spends his time shedding on all available seating too. It’s part of the job.
But is Ollie doing it out of duty, or belief in the cause of fur-covered seating?
Probably out of the shared _mentalite_ of 21st-century domestic felines.
ORBIS is fun both for planning preposterous trips, as well as a reminder of cheap it is to travel by sea rather than land. 1832 Denarii for a 62-day, nearly 7000 kilometer trip from Londinium to Pantikapion (IE from southern England to Crimea in the Black Sea). Basically the same amount if I wanted to take a 1611-kilometer trip from Augusta Trevorum to Rome using just roads and rivers (it also takes 44 days).
But it could be worse. If I had to travel by land and river from Constantinople to Rome, it’s about 3000 Denarii for that carriage ride.
No wonder the right to use the cursus publicus was bestowed on senior civil servants as a mark of respect.
Interesting subject. I can say that I’ve never actually thought about my academic syllabi all that much before. I will say though, that I went to what I am assured by ratings was a good university (YU) and I never had a syllabus that explicitly laid out information in that detail; tests dates were usually on them, but not the reading assignments. Is this something that’s a relatively recent pedagogical development? Because I must say, I’m struck by how simple and effective it is and how much effort it would have saved me back when I was an undergrad.
Also, what do you do if things get off schedule? At least in my experience, that did happen relatively frequently, admittedly more in the seminar classes than the lecture based classes. Would you send out a revised syllabus or just make notes given in class and expect the students to reconcile things?
Lastly, Kitteh!
I didn’t put all that much thought into my syllabus when I was teaching (as a GTA), grading methods and office hours and the like, and an exhortation to always check your work.
Once I realized that there were college math students who’d never noticed that most math texts have the answers to all the odd numbered questions in the back, I started putting a note on this in the syllabus with advice that the answer in the back is only almost always correct, but that if I assigned an odd numbered question it meant I had no problem with them using that to check their work.
I think one of the main differences between teaching a history course (as per Bret’s description) and teaching mathematics (which is my field) is that, as I understand it, to correctly teach history, one must be aware of the current historiography relating to the course subject. So, to teach a Roman history course, he must know what historians working on Roman history are doing, and might even have his students read excerpts from published research about Roman history. While in mathematics, it’s only when one gets to very advanced graduate-level courses that the subject matter may start touching on current research. Much of what one would see in an undergraduate-level mathematics course has been developed from the 17th century (calculus) to the 19th century (linear algebra, abstract algebra, analysis), with some from the 20th century (statistics, linear programming), but does not require the instructor to be very much abreast with current mathematical research.
Also, many undergraduate-level mathematics courses are very much standardized and do not necessarily require what Bret describes as the reflection he has to have about “what Roman history class he will teach”. Now, there is a level of reflection to have on pedagogical methods, and on how to organize the matter. For example, while calculus is typically taught with differential calculus first, and then integral calculus, some people think integral calculus should be taught first instead, either for historical or for pedagogical reasons. But I would say this debate is more of the purview of “mathematics education” than mathematics itself, and mathematics education is a field both very different from mathematics (and somewhat ignored by mathematicians, who maybe should have paid more attention to it) and wihch unfortunately tends to suffer from low-quality research, like education in general.
Now, of course there are also nonstandard mathematics courses that require the sort of reflective practice Bret describes. I have taught in the past a non-Euclidean geometry course for future high school mathematics teachers, which was a challenge because I knew next to nothing about geometry. I had to juggle the requirements of the target student population, which necessitated using an elementary approach (very different from how geometry is typically taught today in universities), as well as the fact that the course is seen mostly as a “culture” type course (giving students an initiation to the concept of different geometries obtained through different sets of axioms), while also teaching subject matter that is “evaluable” and can be put on a test. I’m not convinced the result was entirely satisfying, but at the end I’m proud of what I managed to do.
Interesting comparison. I’m going back to college this fall and taking Intro Comp Sci, which obviously isn’t from the 17th century, but also maybe doesn’t really require the instructor to be abreast of current scholarship. I will read the syllabus more carefully, or at least differently, than I would have absent Bret’s article.
It really depends. As a TA, I had success explaining linear algebra to undergrads by invoking category theory. Of course I wasn’t using the expression “category theory” or “category” or “morphism,” but I was using categorical insights to explain to students who had just finished calc 1 and 2 what the point of linear algebra was, through drawing analogies. (The idea is that we study spaces by studying their morphisms: in calculus, we study the real numbers with their metric properties by studying continuous and differentiable functions, and in linear algebra we study vector spaces with their linear properties by studying linear transformations.)
Unless you sign up with your friends, group cohesion is unlikely to start out as your reason to fight. Basic training is also unlikely since from what I can tell, you may not see these guys ever again after you finish.
Only when you actually join your unit would group cohesion start to become a factor.
Historically, you get stories of everyone in a village signing up for the same unit. This would likely have been the case for things like the American Civil War or the Napoleonic wars where many units were raised from a locality. I think the first World War would have changed this somewhat as there are stories of e.g. all the men in a village dying from a unit getting killed off in a battle.
I think the “group cohesion is all over patriotism” view is based largely on the idea that patriotism is more or less dead, so how can it motivate people? I think it may say more about the world view of the people studying this than anything about the subject.
There are also other factors, talked about in For Cause and Comrade. Honor and duty — the letters mention duty more in the Northern side than the Southern, and oddly enough while honor is more common in the Southern it’s also concentrated in the officers’ letters. Northern officers and soldiers were equally likely to mention it.
There are other interesting twists. Native-born soldiers are more likely to mention they owe it to the Founding Fathers. Foreign-born ones, to cite the US as an inspiration to the world.
I think Bret’s right to identify that view especially with Vietnam. Having read a fair number of Vietnam vets’ accounts, nobody there seems to have thought they were there for any good reason at all.* So the units that were able to maintain a high level of morale and effectiveness were those with other reasons to fight. Group cohesion and unit pride are two of the more likely options (along with personal loyalty to a commander).
*That’s not to say they were all peaceniks, but an awful lot of the more hawkish accounts give reasons that are fairly obviously post-facto (and frequently nonsense), like claims about hippies or POWs. I suspect that even most of the vets who later claim the war had a purpose didn’t believe that when they were in-country, but rather came to need it to have meant something and so retroactively assigned one.
Almost the only such memoir I have read was A Rumour of War, by Philip Caputo. IIRC, Caputo at one point noted that casualty rates in the most intense areas were beginning to approach those of a quiet sector of the Western Front in WW1. As it happens, I read Nothing of Importance, about Bernard Adams’ experiences on such a sector, at about the same time, and they made an interesting comparison.
Caputo certainly sounded like someone disillusioned by experience. And Adams did not. He started off thinking he was fighting to free Belgium from German occupation, he thought that when he was invalided out of the war, he was probably still thinking that when he was killed after returning to it.
(And then you read something like Commando by Deneys Reitz about the 2nd Boer War, and it’s like something from the Boys Own Paper. Especially interesting coming from someone writing in exile after his homeland was conquered. So there is quite a bit of variation from war to war.)
Bit hard to filter out “war to war” when factoring “soldier to soldier” especially considering that even the same soldier may be quite different from war to war.
True enough, but Devin seems not to have found any Vietnam memoirists that sound more like Adams or Reitz than like Caputo.
And Churchill, who was on the other side of Reitz’s war, sounds very like him.
But if one’s *only* motivation is to protect the unit, the best way to do that is to stay out of combat – as some units tried to do in Vietnam, even fragging officers. Going to war is not good for the soldiers.
We Finns put a lot of emphasis on group cohesion during conscription: the company goes through the conscription together: beginning from the basic training, the unit trains to become a cohesive fighting unit, going through all phases of training with the same composition. The unit is demobilised as a whole, and will be reactivated for refresher exercises or mobilisation with the people in the same positions where they served during conscription. This maximises the unit cohesion. There are costs, though: the platoon sergeants of the resulting unit are usually conscripts with just a year’s experience, just like the platoon leader, as these are also trained as part of the unit. So, the platoon leader cannot rely on an older, experienced NCO. (Typically, only the company commander, if even he, is a career officer.)
The IDF is a compromise between what you describe and the more usual system. Within each infantry battalion, one of the companies is a young company, comprising conscripts who trained together; after some time, I think a year, the company is dispersed across the unit’s other companies, at which point there’s enough cohesive loyalty to the brigade (which in IDF infantry has the characteristics of a British regiment) that it works fine.
In Singapore as well, though we do it at battalion scale. I was a medic slotted in to a platoon about halfway through their two year conscript term as a replacement and never quite gelled as well with the others. I was also from a different socio-economic stratum from them (I was more upper-middle class, they were more working class) which didn’t help. Afterwards I got split off from them and sent elsewhere, but even now after they’ve completed their ten year refresher training cycle I still see postings of some of them making group trips and meetups on social media.
The Geerman army joined new people to the group as soon as possible. After basic training you were assigned to a regiment, and joined the reserve formation for that unit and then went to the front with other members returning from leave or hospital. It was one factor in their superior combat performance (at the tactical and operational level – they were lousy at strategy and much else).
I suspect that black Union volunteers are very under-represented in the sample – and most likely to be there for the cause.
Patriotism is a very broad tent – it helps to narrow it down to what aspects of ‘the nation’ one is inspired by – and these can be very different for different groups.
I think it’s a false dichotomy to say that it’s either cause or comrades. From personal experience, a lot of motivation comes from wanting to take pride in yourself – you do a good job as a soldier not (or not just) because this will further the cause of democracy, and not (or not just) because doing a good job will help keep your comrades alive, but because you will feel better about yourself if you know you’ve done a good job.
(And of course instilling this kind of self-motivating attitude is a key aim of military training)
Some corrections:
want to be → want to bet
capstone skill → capstone skills
then that it good → then that is good
Study these carefully, because they WILL be on the test!!!
Thank you for the heads-up on the Patreon issues!
I’m curious to know how non-slaveholders in the South felt about fighting for the cause of slavery. Neo-Confederates sometimes argue the that the Civil War can’t really have been about slavery because otherwise non-slaveholders wouldn’t have fought, which is obvious nonsense, since there are plenty of historical examples of average schmucks being dragged into wars that seem to have no upside for anyone but the elite. But a corpus of letters like McPherson’s seems like it could shed a lot of light on how that happens. Does he go into that at all?
Because, simply put, the Confederate soldier came from slaveholding families and communities. It was irrelevant if the soldier (who was usually too young to own slaves himself, because the vast majority of Confederate solders were under 25, and a significant minority teenagers. Owning slaves is expensive, and for mature men, heads of families, not potential or actual soldiers.)
Their entire social milieu was inextricably bound up with slavery not only as an economic or financial reality, but as a mechanism for ensuring the norms of the community and the South. Even non-slaveowners had a very real stake in maintaining slavery, because the alternative is unthinkable.
It’s been some time since I read McPherson, but my recollection is that a number of soldiers talked about how they were fighting for the structure of the society that they live in. Even if you’re not a slave owner, a white man is still living in a society where many goods are cheaply produced by slaves and where that man can know that he’s not on the bottom of society.
I don’t have any letters at hand though, so I’d appreciate if someone else could provide some actual sources.
The “no upside for anyone but the elite” line is Leninist cope. In the Civil War specifically, the Confederacy was fighting to expand slavery to new territories, which would have enabled white Southerners who were not from established slaveowning families to colonize new land and bring slaves there. They ended up not benefitting from this, but only because they lost – and the elite ended up losing the most from choosing to start the war, and it would have ended up completely destroyed if Reconstruction had run its course.
In the parts of the South where slavery wasn’t so embedded and people weren’t either slaveowners or wannabe slaveowners, people stayed loyal to the Union – hence the formation of West Virginia, or the support for the Republican Party in East Tennessee.
Maybe there’s a better way to view the cause of the Confederate enlisted men: most of who had no tangible personal benefit from the institution. Their cause, perhaps, was not so much slavery as it was white supremacy, from which they did benefit. Note that Appalachia–although just as racist as anywhere else–tended to be pro-Union. There weren’t many black people in Appalachia: nobody to lord it over. It also explains the intensity and persistence of the Lost Cause, even as it accepted the formal abolition of slavery. Caste status is a helluva drug, especially for those with little other status.
“most of who had no tangible personal benefit from the institution”
Notes from past research:
1 in 20 whites personally owned slaves
1 in 10 Confederate soldiers did
1 in 4 white families owned slaves
1 in 2 soldiers came from slaveowning households
also https://archive.is/4RA0
Wasn’t it like a majority of white families owned at least one slave in Mississippi?
“Neo-Confederates sometimes argue the that the Civil War can’t really have been about slavery because otherwise non-slaveholders wouldn’t have fought”
I’m inclined to run this argument backwards: No one says the Union soldiers can’t have been motivated by opposition to slavery just because they themselves were not slaves. It is presumed they could still be motivated by an ideal, even if they themselves did not stand to benefit from it. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that was true of Confederate soldiers as well.
It’s just that different people can have incompatible ideals.
I’ve recently gotten into collecting Roman coins and was wondering how they circulated back in the day. For instance, I have one Republican denarius that weights 4.2 grams, and a later imperial denarius that is 3.4 grams. If I went to the market to go buy some bread with a price of two denarii, would I get change back from my heavier Republican denarius/would I get more bread paying with it? And if so, would each coin be weighted and assayed, how would that work?
Or on the other hand, would it be like money today, where the nominal face value is what counts, and every denarius would be treated equally?
On the third hand, maybe Gresham’s law would have meant that only the smallest lightest most impure denarii ever circulated, but even then, when someone really needed to spend a heavier denarius how would that have been handled?
And finally, did people back then collect the different coins, like would someone have known or cared to have a collection of As from each Emperor?
Hypothesis:
This sounds like something that would have been covered by a lot of haggling and informality. At the marketplace, you might argue that a bigger, fatter denarius or one widely known to be purer is worth an as or two more, for instance. Or it might be negotiating leverage: “I’ll pay for these loaves of bread with the good coin if you agree to throw in an extra loaf” or something like that.
Meanwhile, the actual government is collecting taxes and paying for things in whatever currency is out there, but only issuing the currency it wants to. From their point of view, the ideal situation is that they’re gathering taxes denominated in the big pure old coins while making their payments in the small debased new coins, allowing them to melt down old coins and convert them into a greater number of new ones.
We don’t AFAIK have that level of knowledge about Roman trading. In mid-medieval France, the currency was recalled and re-issued with a lower purity quite frequently, but coins were accepted at face value regardless, not was there significant inflation. The alternative, for the crown, was taxation, which was slow, cumbersome and disliked, so the devaluation was accepted as a least worse alternative. By contrast, in England the tax system was quick, efficient and higher than in France.
A couple of the later Shardlake novels, set when Henry VIII’s England was monkeying around with debased currency depict this tension in, IMHO, convinging-seeming ways, with traders refusing to pay full change for transactions with newer shillings, food quality going down (smaller loaves of bread), and a few fights/minor riots as customers and merchants squabble over payment at face value vs silver content. Given that debased currencies tend to be a symptom of economic trouble as well as a cause in themselves, I would also imagine that whatever other manifestations of that trouble would also be impacting upon how people dealt with these exchanges.
I would guess that it was like what you find now in border regions, where you can haggle with the cab driver in Toronto (say) about what the fare should be in American dollars. (He’ll start by suggesting a one-for-one exchange rate, haha.)
ORBIS is fantastic. It’s level of detail (I liked how it included seasons in there too) is great, and it’s fun to plan things out. I noticed that you could get to an awful lot of places from Rome within a months worth of travel, which is pretty cool. One of the things that did have me wondering though is the safety of routes. Presumably how likely you were to be taken by pirates, or attacked on the road would have been a significant part of the route making decision back then.
What’s the historical motivating factor for soldiers serving in imperial armies where the ruling country is not “theirs”? Like, e.g. Sikhs or Gurkhas in the British Army?
One common one seems to be a cultural view of military service as inherently honourable and prestigious, rather than (as in most modern western countries) a necessary evil which one does for the good of one’s country.
In a lot of cases, these are minorities in the colonized country, for whom the European rulers aren’t any more imperialistic than the local ethnic majority. This was the case for hill tribes in Southeast Asia, like the Hmong – if you’re Hmong, the US isn’t any more of a foreign occupier than the Vietnamese lowlanders.
This, in turn, is encouraged by the colonizer, which likes such groups as additional local soldiers and interpreters. For example, in Israel, Druze men are conscripted into the IDF. The Druze community did not support the Palestinians in 1948, and after the war was conflicted about how loyal to be to the new state (whereas the Arabs writ large were not conflicted about this at all), so the state encouraged the more accommodationist elements and per their advice conscripted Druze men. This, in turn, is wrongly viewed in Israel as some timeless Druze loyalty to the state; in fact, the Druze in the Golan Heights have no such loyalty to Israel.
This arrangement is then maintained through status. There are leftist Druze who do not want to be so associated with the state and oppose IDF service, but because service brings the Druze a modicum of rights and respect from the Jewish majority, they keep serving.
In a lot of cases, these are minorities in the colonized country, for whom the European rulers aren’t any more imperialistic than the local ethnic majority. This was the case for hill tribes in Southeast Asia, like the Hmong – if you’re Hmong, the US isn’t any more of a foreign occupier than the Vietnamese lowlanders.
This betrays a certain amount of confusion about the politics of the Vietnam war; RVN was not colonised by or occupied by the US, but was an independent country.
I think you are misreading the comment.
In addition to pride and status, they are often given simple material benefits: This doesen’t come up much in the ACW for obvious reasons but in a lot fo times and places being a soldier isn’t neccessarily a bad gig.
Local rivalries can also play a part (being able to lord it over your neihgbours as “settling the score” fo rthem lording over you)
My sense is that “local rivalries” (in particular with respect to their Muslim neighbors) was a big factor for the Sikhs in particular, especially in explaining why they stayed loyal to the Brits during the 1857 rebellion. I was more wondering if we have these kinds of first hand sources- diaries, memoirs, etc.- that might cast light on it.
Orwell, despite his passionate opposition to imperialism, had real qualms when noticing how minorities preferred empire to being ruled by the majority ethnic group.
I’m sure this is, and was, true in some places, times and circumstances, but I don’t think it’s true as a general rule.
There are lots of religious, social, and ethnic minority groups in India today who may not be that enthused about belonging to a unified Indian state, but I don’t think very many of them actually want the British back. Neither do people in Africa, in general. Maybe other former British colonies might be a different story.
On what grounds do you make that assertion?
“On what grounds do you make that assertion?”
On the grounds that I’ve never seen any public opinion survey indicating nostalgia in India or Africa for British rule. I have seen a survey indicating that a lot of Jamaicans express nostalgia for the British empire, which is why I said “maybe things are different elsewhere”.
Irrelevant. You would at least need to cite a survey that shows its absence.
” they are often given simple material benefits: This doesen’t come up much in the ACW for obvious reasons”
Bounty men who were paid to enlist were in a minority, but they were not insignificant in number. Chester county put the bounty records online and in this one county thousands of men received bounties.
https://www.chesco.org/1703/Civil-War-Bounty-Records-1862-1865
One is money: Gurkhas come from a quite poor part of the world. There may also be cultural pressures placing high value on military service, but I suspect money is a much stronger motivator.
Going into less recent history, soldiers were actively encouraged to loot and pillage, both dead enemies and any conquered civilian areas they went through. While this is usually deprecated with modern armies, it was policy with, for example, German forces in Eastern Europe, and seems to be endemic with the Russian forces currently invading Ukraine.
Southerners during the [American] Civil War were not monolithic, with some fighting for the United States (iirc, every secessionist state sent white volunteers to fight for the US), some fighting explicitly to maintain slavery and some fighting because against “outsiders.” Some northerners also went south, supporting the secessionists for various reasons, most likely in support of slavery.
I view the “states’ rights” reasoning of the “lost cause” lie to be just about entirely specious: the the secessionists were adamantly opposed to states banning slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act (possible more accurately termed “An Act to Permit Kidnapping Random People of Color”) was completely antithetical to the concept of “nullification” so prized by many of the “states’ rights” advocates
A minor correction: as I recall, South Carolingians claimed that not a single (white) state resident fought for the Union. South Carolina of course does not have any real upland region, where Union supporters tended to hail from in the other states.
I don’t doubt that they made that claim. And I don’t doubt that they had fewer white Union supporters than more mountainous states. But literally zero? And how would those making the claim even know? It’s not like a Union supporter from South Carolina is going to go around telling everyone.
“One is money: Gurkhas come from a quite poor part of the world. There may also be cultural pressures placing high value on military service, but I suspect money is a much stronger motivator.”
I think you would change your view if you had a chat with an actual Gurkha.
Yes, the money’s good, especially in a poor country, but these guys take tremendous pride and gain tremendous status from being soldiers. Until fairly recently, too, they *weren’t* actually very well paid – their pay was limited by treaty to the same as they would receive in the Indian army, to stop the British army poaching all the best recruits.
“to stop the British army poaching all the best recruits.”
I wish western countries had those same ethical qualms when it came to non-military professions, but I guess that’s too much to ask.
The people who need ethical qualms are those who would force people to work for less because of their national origin.
“The people who need ethical qualms are those who would force people to work for less because of their national origin.”
depends on your ethical principles, I suppose.
Yes, there are people who do not object to slavery, but I’m not one.
> Going by the response, I think I succeeded in that (while also upsetting a whole lot of people with vaguely or not-so-vaguely authoritarian politics).
I think this points to the biggest reason you are getting so much pushback. I appreciate the history. I think it’s important for people to learn the facts and separate the myth from the reality, and obviously this is something I want to do for myself or I wouldn’t be here (and I think This Isn’t Sparta is one of your best series). But the implication being made with statements like “upsetting a whole lot of people with vaguely or not-so-vaguely authoritarian politics” is that the people who admire Sparta are themselves “proto-fascist”. This is not a description very many people want applied to them, so the reaction you get is wrong-headed, defensive arguments against the history you present.
I also think it’s just a wrong implication/inference to make. As you have noted the reality is very different from the myth. The admirers are admiring the myth, not the reality. That’s all they know! It’s wrong to assume that they admire the things about Sparta they don’t even really know or acknowledge. Sure, if you find someone saying “Sparta is great, look at all the helots they massacred!” then that person has some serious character flaws. But someone who just thinks “wow, what impressive warriors” (even if he’s factually wrong), or “sweet, Laconic phrasing!” (even if those responses never happened in reality) is not displaying those same flaws. Furthermore, there’s a decent amount of dissonance to the suggestion based on directly expressed values. A person who imagines herself saying “come and take them” to the State is expressing rather the opposite of authoritarian politics.
So all in all I think that implications and innuendo about present day people and their appreciation of Sparta myth and history does a disservice to the people you are referring to and makes it much harder to reach them with your real lessons.
Another, more minor point is that the takedown is limited to the Sparta of Lycurgus and Leonidas. I think as significant in public consciousness is the Sparta of Menelaus and Helen, which is a very different polity. And sure you may say that Menelaus and Helen are at best highly mythologized, but then so are Leonidas and Lycurgus.
“I think as significant in public consciousness is the Sparta of Menelaus and Helen”
I think that’s a bizarre idea. I don’t think that that Sparta _has_ public consciousness. What’s to admire? They show good hospitality to Telemachus in the Odyssey — that’s nice, but that’s all there is. There’s no connection to classical Sparta other than the name. No one’s naming their sports team “the Spartans” because of Menelaus.
“Public consciousness” doesn’t have to mean “admiration”, but I can easily imagine people admiring Helen’s beauty, Menelaus’s tenacity, or Penelope’s faithfulness. Anyway I mean that tellings of The Iliad and The Odyssey are pretty common, aren’t they? At least as well known as Thermopylae? The war at Troy was a Spartan husband chasing after a fled (or kidnapped (or both)) Spartan wife, so Sparta figures at least moderately prominently in that tale.
Anyway I acknowledge that the article and blog series are entirely not about that iteration of Sparta.
> No one’s naming their sports team “the Spartans” because of Menelaus.
Aren’t they? I mean when someone names their team “The Trojans” I assume they’re thinking Hector et. al, and from the customary point of view those guys are the antagonists. I don’t see why “Spartans” wouldn’t refer to the protagonists of that same story. Though I will acknowledge I don’t know of any teams called “The Achaeans” or “The Myceneans”. On the other hand people do uncommonly adopt “Myrmidons” as a group name.
The Greeks are supposed to be the protagonists, but I don’t think I’m the first to think that they’re actually the bad guys. When the Romans claimed descent from a hero of the Trojan war, they picked a guy from the Trojan side.
TBF, they also had to have an answer to “Okay, so why aren’t we Greek?” (An answer: Because he wasn’t Greek either!)
I’m partial to how Jonathan Shay puts it in Achilles in Vietnam:
Perhaps this seems strange to us only because we have grown up on Judeo-Christian-Islamic, i.e., biblical, culture, which insists on turning every story into a war of good and evil and a drama of blame and punishment.
Medieval and early modern Europeans were quite capable of recognising nobility in their opponents (e.g., Kipling wrote an entire poem in praise of Britain’s “Fuzzy-Wuzzy” Sudanese enemies). The tendency to turn every conflict into a black-and-white, good vs. evil struggle is more recent, stemming originally from the greater destructiveness of modern warfare and the need to keep soldiers nevertheless motivated to fight, and more recently from the idea that fighting wars in the national interest is inherently illegitimate and that only abstract principles such as freedom or democracy are worth fighting for.
What it comes down to is that if you actually go out there looking for people talking about “Spartans,” you’re going to find a lot of references to classical Sparta per reference to Bronze Age Sparta. This is even more true if you look for the kind of glowing references that cause people to name sports teams after you two thousand years later.
I’d bet real money that out of all examples of someone praising Bronze Age Sparta in writing, the majority of them are mistakenly projecting the customs of classical Sparta onto the earlier time period and then praising the anachronism.
But if you don’t believe me, that’s fine. Go out and look.
The vast majority of Spartan references in popular culture – 300, the Steven Pressfield corpus, the expression molon labe, the names of military vehicles, even the traditional teaching of Plato in college philosophy classes – come from the Sparta of Leonidas and the Peloponnesian Wars. Even the meme circulating on social media saying Sparta rebuked Philip II with the one-word answer “if” really comes from the 5th century; by the 330s, Sparta had been reduced to insignificance thanks to its oliganthropia, and when it did bother the Macedonians, they invaded it with ease.
So it matters that what people worship is a state that probably never existed outside the imagination of elite Athenians who wished to be able to beat slaves with impunity. Cartledge’s Sparta – the one that didn’t really exist but that Plato, Xenophon, and others wished did exist – was a Haiti-grade slave state. People don’t let themselves believe that a state that was reduced to insignificance by the 330s was a timeless protector of freedom because of Menelaus, not when their positive references to it are steeped with (made up) stories about the greatness of the agoge system. They do this because they wish to be petty tyrants and slaveowners. In this context, the expression “molon labe” has as much to do with anti-authoritarianism as neo-Nazi parties that call themselves “freedom parties.”
Annnnnnnnd you’re making the same mistake here. Again, most of the people who admire Sparta don’t know about the darker aspects of Sparta. All they know about Sparta is Thermopylae and some really pithy quotes.
To put this in another context, if someone said they thought the grim determination of the Soviet Union during World War II was something to be emulated, I might think that they were clueless, but I wouldn’t automatically assume that they wanted to do gulags or the Holodomor.
Actually… usually people who overly praise the USSR’s record in WW2 tend to be on the tankie spectrum. If they get angry with you when you point out Molotov-Ribbentrop or Lend-Lease, it’s almost guaranteed. People with only passing interest in something fold to an informed historical account rather than getting angry. If a historian writes an article about Soviet crimes, and points out that the reason many of them weren’t well-known is that Sidney Webb and other useful idiots wrote Stalinist propaganda to cover them up, and then people in comments act like this is a personal attack on them, then you should be confident in dismissing those commenters as Stalinists and tankies.
Well yes, in that case. The thing is, I’ve never had a discussion with an admirer of Sparta in person where they get angry with me when I point out the helotry and the pederasty and the whatnot. Usually, the reaction is along the lines of “Really? They didn’t mention that in 300/Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.”
It also helps that, in the process of pointing out that the real Sparta was not admirable, I go out of my way to avoid implying that they are terrible people for having liked the sanitized version of Sparta.
Yes. But if we’re discussing the kind of person who leaves angry reviews on an article saying “Sparta had some really bad stuff going on,” then we’ve already excluded the ones who react to that by going “huh, I didn’t know about that” and just adding it to their mental universe.
What’s left are people who either (1) know the whole story but are opposed to having society think and discuss about the bad side of Sparta, or (2) have a very, very deep ego investment in Sparta being the sacred center of the Cult of the Badass and so resent any attempt to make it look bad.
People who fall under (1) are actively trying to control the historical narrative to whitewash authoritarian societies. These are the ones who are most likely to say “we need a modern Sulla,” or something like that, by which they mean “I want someone to use a lot of violence to force everyone else to follow rules I approve of, even if it completely blows up the customs and institutions of my democratic state.”
People who fall under (2) are not necessarily consciously fascist, but if you’re that deep into the hypermasculine CULT OF THE WARRIAH stuff, well… you may not be thinking like a fascist as such, but you’re already halfway down their rabbit hole and likely to fall to them.
Yes. But if we’re discussing the kind of person who leaves angry reviews on an article saying “Sparta had some really bad stuff going on,” then we’ve already excluded the ones who react to that by going “huh, I didn’t know about that” and just adding it to their mental universe.
The article doesn’t just say “Sparta had some really bad stuff going on”, it very strongly insinuates that people who like Sparta are a bunch of fascists. You’re misrepresenting what it actually says in order to make your outgroup seem more extreme and unreasonable.
@GJ: In fairness, most of that insinuation comes from the subtitle, which might have been the work of the editor; the article itself doesn’t do a lot of editorializing.
“The article doesn’t just say “Sparta had some really bad stuff going on”, it very strongly insinuates that people who like Sparta are a bunch of fascists.”
GJ, people who like the people who did evil things are often suspected of supporting evil. Try telling people you like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot and see how popular you become. It really is so unfair.
Your argument is perfectly circular.
One could equally attack what you said by saying the people who furiously attack evils of the past are often very supportive of evils of the present because they think they have done enough good by attacking the evils they don’t profit from.
@ 60guilders:
@GJ: In fairness, most of that insinuation comes from the subtitle, which might have been the work of the editor; the article itself doesn’t do a lot of editorializing.
Given Brett’s comments both here and on Twitter, I don’t think it’s an insinuation he’s averse to, even if he personally didn’t put it into the article.
@ ad9:
GJ, people who like the people who did evil things are often suspected of supporting evil. Try telling people you like Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot and see how popular you become. It really is so unfair.
You’re making the same mistake as Brett and Alon Levy. The people who support Sparta by and large don’t know about the evil things, because these aren’t really mentioned in pop culture.
If the pop culture portrayal of Hitler and the Nazis was limited to “Wanted to restore German self-respect after Versailles, also organised some really neat parades,” accusing anybody who liked Hitler of supporting genocide would be fallacious and self-defeating.
Bret goes beyond just telling people “well, actually the Spartans were a bunch of slavers and losers,” and connects the popularity of Pressfield and 300 with modern militarism. (He is too Cartledgian to do so, but the more common Hodkinsonian view is that Athenian elites made up the Sparta that we all know for exactly the same reason – distaste for democracy.) This is completely standard in history; for Bret to fail to do so would be like to write about why the Holodomor isn’t well-known without ever mentioning the Webbs or Walter Duranty’s propaganda, or to write about the Clean Wehrmacht myth without ever mentioning how surviving high-ranking Nazis promoted it right after the war with the full support of CDU as it was going for the Wehrmacht veteran vote.
” The people who support Sparta by and large don’t know about the evil things, because these aren’t really mentioned in pop culture.”
Then you must be pleased that our host has devoted such efforts to enlightening them. And suspicious of all those who claim to be well-informed about it, yet fail to warn people about these significant details.
@ ad9:
Then you must be pleased that our host has devoted such efforts to enlightening them.
I would be, if he didn’t undermine his own efforts with gratuitous political swipes which not only make his audience of Sparta bros less likely to listen to him, but also less likely to listen to anyone else trying to enlighten them.
This is why the concept of target audience matters. Brett didn’t direct these comments at random people; the people he was communicating with where military historians and people interested in security policy. He said:
“In this case, my goal – as with most things I write for Foreign Policy – was to reach the military/security policy community.”
The level of knowledge expected of such people is much, much higher than for the general public when they advocate policies or praise an organization. Quite frankly it’s their job to understand the implications of the ideas they’re advocating, especially when those implications could have profoundly detrimental effects on society (this is particularly true of the security policy community). To advocate for a policy without bothering to do a minimum of research into the mid- and long-range effects of it, because it looks cool on TV, is no different from a doctor prescribing you a drug without regard for the side effects merely because the ad on TV looked fun. If people in these communities stop thinking and investigating at the pop culture image they’re not merely advocating proto-Fascism (even if unintentionally), but are actually incompetent.
Which means your argument against Brett’s statement is, essentially, “These people are too incompetent for us to take seriously.” Which….isn’t a defense. The incompetent have no more business in these fields than those who would openly advocate for fascism.
(On the other hand, USE of the Spartan image in pop culture is justifiable. You can’t expect newly-enlisted grunts to know the nuances of history, but you can expect that they’ll respond to bad-ass imagery. You just have to keep it in check. Fire can be useful and fun, but you don’t burn your house down to keep warm.)
I think you’re misunderstanding our host’s comment about pissing off authoritarians.
It’s not that anyone who likes Sparta is an authoritarian. It’s that it’s interesting that, when presented with evidence that Sparta is not a place that should be emulated, the ones who are extremely insistent that the Spartans are a society who should be admired seem to be people whose other writings make it clear that they think authoritarian government structures are better than democratic ones. I’d have said it’s mysterious, but it’s hard to make it that clear in text just how deep the sarcasm would be there.
I’ve lived in places with plenty of “molon labe” bumper stickers, myself. Admiration of Sparta became a cultural marker among reactionary Americans after the film “300”. I dare say those folk now well outnumber the thoughtful classicists that I assume you’re referring to.
I had kind of the opposite reaction to the remark actually (which is to say, I disagreed with it, but for opposite reasons).
The world isn’t divided between “liberals” on the one hand and “authoritarians” on the other. I mean, you can certainly divide the world up that way, but it wouldn’t be a great idea, almost as dumb as dividing the world into “Christians” and “Heathens”. Liberal democrats all resemble each other when it comes to the basic political questions, but there are lots of different types of authoritarians that have almost nothing in common with each other- they differ on basic questions of which group should exert authoritarian power, what they should do with it, how it should be exercised, where it comes from, etc.. Liberals (in the broad, small-L liberal sense) are a small group with very specific answers to these questions, authoritarians comprise all manner of groups (socialists, communists, nationalists, monarchists, clerical authoritarians, military authoritarians, etc.) who have very different answers to them.
Sparta (assuming Bret’s description of them is correct, and I have no reason to doubt his description of the facts, since he cites his sources) seems like it was a very specific, kind of weird and unusual type of authoritarian society and there’s no reason to think that other flavors of “authoritarian” are going to find them appealing or sympathetic. (The idea of a society that glorified leisure and mocked people who had to work for a living is certainly not going to appeal to, say, a communist or socialist authoritarian, or probably even to most nationalists).
“I strongly recommend students, place all exams and major assignments on a single calendar so you can see them all together. That way, if you have three papers due in a single week, you know months in advance and can space out that work.”
That’s precious, absolutely precious.
Speaking from personal experience students are rarely that well organized or disciplined.
The sanitized version of Sparta is the problem, and it is this version that Dr. Devereaux is addressing. I don’t know what is hard to grasp here.
The part where enlightening the ignorant is assisted by calling them names?
It is awfully precious how many people here are becoming offended on behalf of a bunch of Spartan fanboys.
I really hope that you are never put in charge of teaching or training people.
If by fanboys, you mean serious defenders of Sparta as a model for other polities, I don’t think there are any in the modern world, and I have no brief on their behalf. If you mean people who say “Molon labe” because they think (i) it recalls an inspiring story and (ii) it is a pithy response to their political opponents, I say “Good for them.” I don’t think any of them falls into the first category I mentioned, just as people who quote “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers” are not in fact defenders of Henry V’s dynastic claims to the French throne: they are recalling (fictional) inspiring rhetoric from an inspiring event (an underdog victory won by lower-class soldiers) in the past.
“I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t start by recommending myself, writing a shortened version of my take on Sparta in Foreign Policy.”
I would have thought that the things Sparta was most famous for were a Glorious Last Stand at Thermopylae, and the Peloponnesian War against Athens. Glorious Last Stands are not that unusual (Texas has the Alamo, but I imagine most people in the world who think of Texas would be more likely to thing of Cowboy boots than warfare).
So I have always assumed that people who claim to really like Sparta have a not-so-secret hatred of Athens, and that thing about it founding most of Western Civilization.
I would have thought that the things Sparta was most famous for were a Glorious Last Stand at Thermopylae, and the Peloponnesian War against Athens. Glorious Last Stands are not that unusual (Texas has the Alamo, but I imagine most people in the world who think of Texas would be more likely to thing of Cowboy boots than warfare).
Thermopylae is one of the most famous last stands in western history. People tend to like famous last stands and admire those who make them. These two facts on their own explain most of the Sparta-fanboyism out there, without needing to get into Straussian theories about how Sparta fans secretly hate western civilisation or whatever.
“Thermopylae is one of the most famous last stands in western history.”
But why is this one famous, when there are so many others? If it is because the Spartans fought it, it can not itself be the reason Sparta is famous. And the Spartans only ever did one other thing to make themselves famous.
But why is this one famous, when there are so many others?
Because the Persian invasion of Greece was kind of a big deal to the ancient Greeks, and the ancient Greeks in turn were kind of a big deal for the development of western civilisation. Hence the Persian invasion of Greece is one of the best-known historical wars for western people, and the Battle of Thermopylae, which was part of the Persian invasion of Greece, is one of the best-known last stands.
And the Spartans only ever did one other thing to make themselves famous.
You mean defeating the Persians at Plataea?
“You mean defeating the Persians at Plataea?”
No. Because most of the army that did that were not Spartans. Although the Athenians did all by themselves defeat the Persians at Marathon a generation before.
And the Spartans did all by themselves ally with Persia to conquer Athens and reimpose Persian rule over the easternmost Greek cities. Someone who genuinely thought the Persians were the big threat to western civilization might hold that against the Spartans.
Whatever the pro-Spartans of any era may have cared about, it was presumably not defending western civilization against the oriental hordes.
No. Because most of the army that did that were not Spartans.
But most of the troops who were actually engaged were. Plus the commander-in-chief of the army was a Spartan, and the Spartans were ranged against the ethnically Persian troops in the opposing army. Plataea very much was a Spartan achievement, even if it wasn’t an exclusively Spartan one.
Although the Athenians did all by themselves defeat the Persians at Marathon a generation before.
Not quite — they had Plataean allies with them as well.
And the Spartans did all by themselves ally with Persia to conquer Athens and reimpose Persian rule over the easternmost Greek cities.
So did Athens and Thebes at various points. Allying with Persia to try and make yourself hegemon of Greece was very much en vogue during this period.
Someone who genuinely thought the Persians were the big threat to western civilization might hold that against the Spartans.
I suppose so.
Whatever the pro-Spartans of any era may have cared about, it was presumably not defending western civilization against the oriental hordes.
So I take it you agree with me that any hypothetical article which insinuated that fans of Sparta are all a bunch of racists would be wrong to do so.
“any hypothetical article which insinuated that fans of Sparta are all a bunch of racists would be wrong to do so.”
The argument to this effect would seem to be that fans of Sparta cannot be racists, for it allied with Persia against Athens.
This argument would appear to rely on the implicit assumption that Athenians were white and Persians were not. A person who made this assumption would presumably also believe that Americans are white and Japanese are not.
So you should argue with equal conviction that fans of Nazi Germany cannot be racists, for it allied with Japan against America. Do you really feel this argument to be convincing?
In any event, Brett’s article suggested that fans of Sparta are fans of authoritarianism, and you don’t dispel that suspicion by defending oligarchic Sparta’s alliance with autocratic Persia to destroy democracy in Athens.
You told me above that most people who are fans of Sparta do so because they are ignorant about it, not because they are fans of authoritarianism. I begin to wonder if this is based on personal experience of being a fan of Sparta. If so, it might be simpler if you explicitly gave your reasons for doing so.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. Racism may even be orthogonal to the view.
The argument to this effect would seem to be that fans of Sparta cannot be racists, for it allied with Persia against Athens.
I was merely accepting your claim that “Whatever the pro-Spartans of any era may have cared about, it was presumably not defending western civilization against the oriental hordes.” Since most racists tend to be quite in favour of defending western civilisation against the oriental hordes, your claim suggests that pro-Spartans aren’t racist.
In any event, Brett’s article suggested that fans of Sparta are fans of authoritarianism, and you don’t dispel that suspicion by defending oligarchic Sparta’s alliance with autocratic Persia to destroy democracy in Athens.
I thought we were concerned with historical accuracy rather than political talking points? Or does that only apply when it’s the outgroup’s talking points under discussion?
You told me above that most people who are fans of Sparta do so because they are ignorant about it, not because they are fans of authoritarianism. I begin to wonder if this is based on personal experience of being a fan of Sparta. If so, it might be simpler if you explicitly gave your reasons for doing so.
I’m certainly not a fan of Sparta. However, I don’t think that not being a fan of Sparta requires trying to turn literally everything the Spartans did into an example of how sucky they were. There are plenty of reasons to object to Spartan society without pretending that they were a bunch of uniquely traitorous pro-Persian quislings or that their military reputation was solely due to propaganda.
The Spartans are famous for being a militaristic slave society with ritual murder of helots. I knew about it before I was 10. From children’s books available in the early 1980s.
“ I don’t think that not being a fan of Sparta requires trying to turn literally everything the Spartans did into an example of how sucky they were. There are plenty of reasons to object to Spartan society”
Our hosts example of their doing something he considered sucky was the fact that an uncommonly large majority of their subjects were reduced to the status of slaves who they ritually declared war on every year, routinely murdered (and raped) and never, under any circumstances freed.
And he thought its military reputation over-rated.
My example of their doing something sucky was their alliance with Persia to destroy the most notable democracy in Greece and install an oligarchic regime which launched a famously bloodthirsty reign of terror.
Neither of us really condemned it for anything else, so presumably you don’t think those are sucky. There is nothing else we can have been wrong to call sucky.
What did it do that you do object to?
@mindstalko: And I knew that Sparta was a grungefest by the time I was in middle school. However, I also remember that most people don’t read history books for fun, even children’s ones. And pop culture doesn’t really go into the Peloponnesian War. (In fact, the only piece of recent pop culture I can think of that goes into the Peloponnesian War is Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, which sanitizes Sparta almost as badly as 300 does.)
So yes, it is entirely plausible for someone’s entire knowledge of Sparta to be “those guys who held Thermopylae against overwhelming odds for days.” Which, y’know, was an admirable thing to do, even though half the reason why they lost was that Sparta refused to send enough troops north because they were terrified of a slave revolt. (Which is something that rarely gets mentioned when talking about Thermopylae.)
The problem here is that there does seem to be a tendency to treat people who think the whitewashed version of Sparta seems kind of cool like they know about all of the horrible things Sparta did and like it anyway.
What did it do that you do object to?
Helotry and the Agoge.
My example of their doing something sucky was their alliance with Persia to destroy the most notable democracy in Greece and install an oligarchic regime which launched a famously bloodthirsty reign of terror.
The “most notable democracy in Greece” was also its most notable imperialist power, which installed puppet regimes in its subject cities, massacred enemies, and tried to form an alliance with Persia to destroy their Spartan enemies. Basically, in terms of foreign policy, Athens did the exact same things as Sparta, but less successfully. And by criticising the Spartans as a bunch of bloodthirsty quislings whilst giving the Athenians a pass, you are indeed making an ahistorical claim that the Spartans were uniquely sucky.
GJ, If you object to Helotry and the Agoge so strongly, why did you complain about about our host condemning them?
If you object to them so strongly, why do you not think that the Spartans reducing their neighbours to helotry makes them worse than the Athenians, who reduced their vassal cities to tributary status, but not helot status?
And as someone who does not have objection to the Spartans trying to obliterate democracy in Athens in favour of a bloody oligarchy, do you think I was right to suppose fans of Sparta mostly hate Athens?
GJ, If you object to Helotry and the Agoge so strongly, why did you complain about about our host condemning them?
I don’t complain about him condemning them, I complain about him pretending that the Spartans were bad in literally every single way (“The Spartans were losers” etc.).
And as someone who does not have objection to the Spartans trying to obliterate democracy in Athens in favour of a bloody oligarchy, do you think I was right to suppose fans of Sparta mostly hate Athens?
No, because most fans of Sparta probably don’t know anything about the Thirty Tyrants.
“I complain about him pretending that the Spartans were bad in literally every single way”
As I recall, he explicitly stated they treated citizen women better than Athens.
“most fans of Sparta probably don’t know anything about the Thirty Tyrants.”
You do. And you haven’t even hinted you object to Sparta obliterating democracy in Athens and imposing a bloodthirsty tyranny over it.
As I recall, he explicitly stated they treated citizen women better than Athens.
But he also qualified that by saying that citizen women were a tiny portion of the population, and so don’t figure all that much in assessing the Spartan state.
Though since the main thrust of his takedown is saying that the Spartans weren’t good at fighting, I’ll say that his arguments for this claim are fallacious, and that his contention that Herodotus created the Spartan reputation for ideological/propaganda reasons is wildly implausible.
You do. And you haven’t even hinted you object to Sparta obliterating democracy in Athens and imposing a bloodthirsty tyranny over it.
The Spartan treatment of Athens wasn’t at all harsh or bloodthirsty by the standards of ancient Greece. Recall that, when the Athenians conquered Melos, they ethnically cleansed the population (men executed, women and children sold off into slavery) and replaced them with their own colonists. Recall, too, that several of the anti-Athenian city-states wanted to do the same thing to Athens, but were stopped by the Spartans. So no, I don’t really object to the Athenians getting a (pretty mild, really) dose of their own medicine.
Because Herodotus choose to write about them. Not the most reliable source, and he may have had an agenda, as some claim that his works were among the earliest promoting a unified vision of Greece. That his writings became popular may tell us something about his readership.
Why is Thermopylae famous? The same reason as the charge of the light brigade. Remember who are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.
There is a close connection between an insistence on defending Western Civilisation and the more intellectual sides of authoritarianism and current reaction. After all, that side of politics is very concerned at what is perceived to be threats to WC as they conceive ot it (and this is true not just in the US but also in Britain, Australia and France). That, at less intellectual levels, this connects to admiration for an imaginary Sparta is also obvious. The overlap is not total, but I don’t think there is a large group sporting ‘Molon Labe’ bumper stickers whose admiration is founded on celebration of courage alone. I would at least want more evidence than has so far been offered, while evidence to the contrary is everywhere – eg the confederate flag and Trump stickers typically next to it.
It’s strange how somehow in these groups, ‘defending Western Civilization’ never seems to extend to defending the liberal intellectual tradition, or natural law philosophy, or democratic self-government. Which is strange, given that these are all hallmarks of the European political and intellectual tradition.
Seeing as how the liberal tradition was in many ways founded upon an explicit rejection of the previous natural law tradition, it would be quite hard to defend all those things you list simultaneously.
Depends on which part of the liberal intellectual tradition. Many right-wingers can rightfully point out that they are the only one defending it.
It’s strange how fire is wet and water burns?
I’ve seen many passionate defenses of all of those against the Left.
I think you’ve been spending too much time in Twitter, which was terrible even before Musk took over. The “defend Western Civ” crowd is usually fairly fond of those three things.
They just see the main threats to them as coming from different places than you do.
Most activists on the right are all in favor of democratic self-government when it comes to say, local schools, and see the real threat as coming when the liberal intelligentsia sics the unelected Attorney General on speakers at local school board meetings.
The plain fact is, we are all liberal democrats. American conservatives are Whigs, who venerate the Revolution, celebrate the defeat of Communism, and value fundamental rights, although their definition of what is fundamental has more historical basis than that of most progressives.
Because I’ve seen Molon Labe stickers without Confederate flag decals or Trump stickers next to them. You should probably get out more.
One notes that in an age where there is frequent insistence on people giving up their arms, that slogan can stand on its own.
Let us note that Athens was also a slave society, and that its empire was described by contemporaries as a tyranny. Generally, all past societies can furnish us with lessons, and many can furnish us with particular features to admire, but none is truly righteous. I think the biggest lesson of all may be that there are features of our society that our great-great-grandchildren will find abhorrent and offensive, yet that we have no idea what they are.
This is true, but it also seems fair to say Athens had some achievements to its credit. What did Sparta achieve, except crushing democracy in Athens?
And even that achievement didn’t last.
The issue isn’t that Athens is not, by our standards, a pretty shitty society. Bret spent a significant amount of time in his how to polis series talking precisley about how it was a pretty darn shitty society.
It’s just that by pretty much any metric it did better than Sparta *unless* the metric you’re using is authoritarianism.
Athens wasn’t perfect either, by any means. I based the culture of an imaginary race of lycanthropes on the Spartan mirage. They are mercenaries supported by a rich city state for its defense. I do not admire Sparta but I find some aspects of it’s culture interesting.
” I think, to be blunt, this is a cynical and short-sighted view of military motivation, heavily influenced by the American memory of the Vietnam War.”
IIRC there was an incident, recounted in Max Hastings book about the Vietnam War, in which the SAC crews bombing Hanoi mutinied and refused to keep attacking it. Admittedly, it was a much more dangerous target than anything America has bombed since. OTOH, it was still safer than bombing Germany in an earlier war, and I don’t know of any such event then.
It’s easy enough to explain if you think the 8th AF crews believed they were doing something of use to a cause they cared about, and the SAC crews did not. If you don’t believe that, the difference seems a lot more bizarre.
So glad you shared your ideas about making a syllabus and its purposed for the class. It is one of those things that needs to be demystified for both the college students and the general public. I’ve seen people compare the comprehensive ten page (plus) syllabus with class schedule and detailed university policies to the end user agreement for software. I set my syllabus up like a “quick start” guide for the class. It’s one page double sided and summarizes everything you mention in your post.
One reason I can do this is because the university includes all of the institutional boilerplate in the Course Page for Brightspace/D2L which the students are expected to use. I also part my own class policies document there with a detailed reading schedule. The schedule is also baked into the Course Page so that the assignments will come up in the student’s calendar if they use the one in D2L. This covers a lot of the same ground as the comprehensive syllabus, but does not kill a lot of trees.
I also give the students a quick ten question syllabus quiz on the second day of class. They can use the syllabus to find the answers so the students who just added the course can complete the quiz for full credit. The first seven questions show they can identify my name, email, office hours, and the major course assignments, along with the books required for the class. The last three are all qualitative questions where I ask them what they are interested in learning about in the class, if they have prior experience with the subject, and if there is anything going on in their lives that might make it hard for them to complete the coursework. I’ve found the qualitative questions help me humanize the course a little more. I have also been able to identify students who might need an extra nudge.
Thanks for your excellent work with this blog! I’ve followed it for a little while and really enjoy your writing and insights into Ancient Greece and Rome as well as the discipline of History.
Ollie is cuteness personified. Or felinified.
He is almost as pretty as my Timmy 😁 Percy is adorable too.
If we’re gonna attack sports teams named “Spartans,” it would only be fair to criticize those named “Vikings” as well. Sea raiders feared by settled folks all across Europe (and beyond) for a couple of centuries — thieves, rapists, killers. But now they’re cartoon characters and Halloween costumes and sports teams. Makes me wonder, in a thousand or so years, will we have sports teams named after the Waffen SS? (“Dude, really cool black uniforms and silver lightning bolts, awesome!!”)
Bret already wrote a long post tearing down the Vikinganda in Assassin’s Creed Odyssey so there’s that. And no doubt future historians will be writing editorials about how people shouldn’t admire the Nazis because they were fascist genociders. We’ll probably also have future comments section complaints about calling people names.
If we only choose symbols for sports teams that are 100% non-controversial and perfectly in line with today’s values, our list will be rather sparse. I think as long as we acknowledge that we’re referencing the myth, and acknowledging that the reality is far more complex, it’s fine to use symbols of the past in such a way. WWII symbols are another matter; for one thing, there are still people alive who suffered at the hands of the Nazis. Confederate symbols are also more problematic, particularly for Americans (I imagine other nations hold the same views, but since it wasn’t their nation ripped apart by that event I don’t expect them to have the same level of distaste).
As for costumes, I find the argument against children wearing such costumes to be deeply flawed. The issue isn’t the kids, it’s the adults. Kids by their nature imitate things they like, enjoy, and admire. I’m not a huge fan of evo-psych, but this is one case where I think there’s sound evidence: Specifically, a number of the Great Apes do this. It’s how apes learn how to be apes, and humans are not significantly different in this regard. Where we do differ is that we can take it further. A child dressing up as, say, a Native American is in fact expressing interest in that topic. Rather than smacking them down and punishing them for a perfectly normal, indeed biologically driven behavior (which is how they’ll see “Don’t dress like that”, and remember, communication is what the listener does), it would be FAR better to take the opportunity to help the child explore the topic. Sure, a lot of it is going to be sugar-coated to start with–they’re kids, and there is such a thing as being age-appropriate–but it is entirely possible to tread the line between age-appropriate information and factual information. Kids playing dress-up represent an educational opportunity, and to squander that is reprehensible. There are many, MANY resources today that are produced by either people knowledgeable on the topic (like our good host is on military history) or are members of the group in question that can be used to educate children on these marginalized groups.
Adults are another matter, of course. Living history and experimental archaeology are important ways to learn about the past (if done properly), but at the same time we’re supposed to be more mature and nuanced than a child. This gets back to the Confederate thing…I would find a team that used the symbolism of the Confederacy offensive, but a Civil War re-enactor dressed in Confederate garb wouldn’t be to me. The intent is different. The mythos of the Confederacy is by its nature vile (as are the facts), so naming a team would be to embrace that vileness. But not including it in a re-enactment or educational setting is white-washing the past, which is extremely problematic as well.
What I find interesting is that these kind of warrior-aristocracies often tend to have a bit more of a nuanced depiction within the societies they descend from, I presume this is partially a class basis: A bit of folk memory of what it was actually living with those kinds of guys. (or at least people who claimed ideological or actual descent from them)
I’m reminded of how while japanese samurai movies, while often wistful in their own ways, often tend to be far more cynical about the ability of the warrior-class to actually live up to it’s ideals (ore ven if those ideals are worth living up to) compared to many western ones.
I suspect that the Japanese have a more realistic view of samurai than Europeans do of knights because samurai are more recent. They were around as recently as the 1870s, and there were samurai movies in the 1920s.
Realistic or cynical? Because the two concepts aren’t the same.
I’ve read a few Medieval stories about knights, and those stories at least didn’t show knights as universally pure and good. Even the good ones were rather rough, reflecting values very alien to our current culture’s. No one pretended knights lived up to the ideals of chivalry, only that they were supposed to do so.
Unrelated to any current discussions here, I kind of wonder by which standards our host decides which posts get called “collections”, or “firesides”, or whatever else.
He’s explained in the very first post (except firesides, which were introduced later and defined there): https://acoup.blog/2019/05/03/blog-overview-a-collection-of-unmitigated-pedantry/
Have you read “the practical guide to evil”? can we have your opinions on the war efforts in those books?