Hey all. I've always been a big history nerd for ancient Greece and, like many others, I find the Spartans fascinating. I've read several times that when a Spartan child was born, he or she would be inspected for any disabilities that would make the child unable to contribute towards Sparta. If a disability was found, the child would be left to die. I was wondering if this has had an effect on modern day descendants of Spartans today. Do the people in modern day Sparta suffer from fewer ailments as a result, since genetic disabilities would not have been allowed to be past on? Thank you!
We do not know if the Spartans actually did this - most of the tall tales about ancient Sparta are derived from much later sources. However, even if they did, it's worth bearing in mind that they would only have done this with the children of full Spartan citizens. There were only ever about 9,000 adult male citizens at most; the number declined continuously throughout the Classical period and after, until around the end of the 3rd century BC there were only about 100 left. Their number would have been too small to change the nature of the Greek gene pool even in their own day, let alone two milennia down the line.
Epigenetics is more complicated than that, we all carry genes that are not apparent. Natural eugenics doesn't work either, eventually traits will reappear unless we can successfully edit or select genes.
A lot of groups, cultures, cities etc committed infantacide and when a child was abandoned for mental retardation or physical abnormalities it wouldn't have much of an effect on the current population because their parents and relatives still lived. If those relatives reproduced whatever genetic traits existed in the abandoned child would still exist in the future population so said trait would never permanently go away as some genes skip generations or reappear because of environmental factors.
u/tzuridis is correct, absolutely. I'd only like to add that even if that weren't true, there wouldn't be much impact seen in today's Greeks, since the Golden age of Sparta was so long ago and the genetics of todays Greeks are far from the genetics of Ancient Greeks, due to mixing with various other peoples such as the Slavs, Turks, Caucasians and basically anyone, since the modern era has really opened up the world to most people.
It's not exactly my area of expertise but what I can contribute is that according to the new book by Mary Beard: SPQR the practice of child abandonment seems to have been fairly common in Rome too. Not as part of an official policy, mind you, but generally as a means of getting rid of children that a couple could not finance, care for etc. She discusses for example that it was easy for Roman couples who could not bear children to basically just pick one up from a rubbel heap on pp. 315-316. I am not sure what the academic consensus is on this issue with other historians but it seems convincing from the narrative Beard tells.
Another approach/question: Even if disabled children were not forced to die, would they have been able to reproduce? I dont know how old they became back then nor how many disabled children have children, but this was my first thought. So would there even exist a measureable difference to other populations?