"This. Isn’t. Sparta.” by historian Bret Devereaux argues that Sparta was a horrible place to live, had poorly educated citizens, was militarily mediocre, culturally stagnant, and was ruled by elites who were pretty crappy too. Anything inaccurate in that assessment?

Dr Bret Devereaux' blog series did not come out of nowhere. It builds on a trend in scholarship that began in the early 1990s, became dominant in academia around the early 2000s, and is now starting to make its way into the mainstream. In fact I'm certain that his series was at least partly inspired by my own posts on Sparta on this sub, and particularly this answer on the Spartan military reputation from 2 years before he started his series.

The core of the trend is to debunk the ancient "Spartan mirage": the notion of Sparta as a uniquely well-ordered society of noble and selfless citizens, raised in an exemplary education system to pursue a life of austerity and military excellence. Apart from the obvious assertion that ideals do not equal reality, most of this scholarship argues that Sparta was not really that unique. In most ways, it was much more like other Greek states than the Greeks themselves liked to claim. Sparta was othered, sometimes to be criticised, more often to be praised as the superior alternative to the way things were done elsewhere. But in reality, Sparta's education system, social stratification, political organisation, laws, and morality all had their parallels across the Greek world. There were only a few ways in which Spartan practices were recognisably different from those of other Greeks (some of which I highlighted in the post linked above).

Bret's blog takes these points a step further, arguing that Sparta was actively worse in many respects than other Greek states. Some of this may be due to sensationalism; it takes no more than a glance at the key work of the 'new Sparta', Stephen Hodkinson's Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000), to know how dry and difficult real history can be, and the blog rightly chooses to present the material in a more vivid and engaging style. But much of it is also due to the choice to present the new scholarly consensus in contrast to the recent, immensely popular image of Sparta from the movie 300. This movie is so extreme in its glorification of a particular (and outrageously incorrect) version of Sparta that it naturally polarises the argument. Pointing out that most of Spartan life was fairly ordinary and most of the cruel excesses we hear about date to the Roman period doesn't really feel like it does enough to defuse what amounts to fascist propaganda about an imagined society of super-soldiers. As a result, the focus of the blog series is very much on the negative. Many of these points are valid in themselves, but they give an overall impression that is probably more severe and radical than any single piece of scholarship would present. On the Spartan education in particular, Bret is clearly too negative, reflecting outdated scholarly views, as I explained at the time the blog was written (thanks /u/76vibrochamp for reminding me of this post).

Bret should be praised, though, for his recognition of the fact that the average Spartan was not, and could never become, one of the male Spartan citizens who populate the set of 300. The Spartan population consisted overwhelmingly of people with few to no legal or political rights. The majority of the population were helots: enslaved people whose exposure to routine violence from their enslavers was as lethal as it was inescapable. In this sense Bret is absolutely right to argue that for the average person in Sparta - just like the average person in ancient Greece more broadly - it was a horrible place to live. The Spartans also maintained a systemic cruelty to women, installed oppressive regimes among their subject allies, inflicted corporal punishment on anyone they didn't like, and so on. Many of these things may not have been unique to Sparta, but the critical point here is that the modern worship of Sparta is unique to Sparta; it is therefore essential to keep the facts clearly in view. We can then bicker over the veracity of the claim, already made by some ancient authors, that the fate of enslaved people in Sparta was uniquely awful, more so than it was elsewhere.

Bret, it should be noted, is not a historian of ancient Greece. His PhD is in Roman military history. His knowledge of Sparta is clearly derived from extensive reading in sources and modern scholarship, but there are no doubt many conclusions that experts of the state and its history would quibble with, or that have since been overtaken by more recent scholarship. I myself had many issues with the part of the blog that deals with Spartan warfare, in which Bret commits a number of basic errors and often expounds outdated views. I wrote these up in a thread on twitter which also includes some further discussion between Bret and myself; on some points we simply do not agree. I don't think this is in any sense enough to discourage anyone from reading his blog. There is no single certain truth on many of these points. But a historian always takes a risk when writing outside of their wheelhouse, and the further outside that wheelhouse they venture, the more likely it is that a subject expert would write something very different.