As one of the main critics to whom Bret addressed his retrospective, I should address his post first, and then briefly return to your question at the end.

The retrospective strikes me as a good example of how to process criticism against a substantial piece of work. It sticks to its guns without coming across as stubborn or deaf to alternative views. It shows where the author's thoughts have developed and signals where his limitations are. It never descends to mudslinging. Two of its main points are very helpful for anyone to bear in mind when they read about history, since they don't just apply here but almost everywhere:

• The evidence allows for different interpretations and it is rarely possible to say with certainty that any of them are definitely wrong and should not be considered.

• Like many other fields, scholarship is driven by innovation and excited by novelty, but (in line with the above) the existence of new theories doesn't necessarily mean that older work is consigned to the scrapheap.

It follows from these two points that the way you interpret Sparta is to some extent down to which views you find more persuasive. It will never be possible to get every expert to agree on any part of ancient history, and even if it were, that point would almost certainly become the focus of concerted effort to find a dissenting view. I can say as often as I like that Bret's views on aspects of Spartan society and Greek warfare are behind the scholarship, but I cannot thereby convince him, and indeed if he is behind the scholarship that still doesn't have to mean that he is wrong.

That said, I am a firm believer in the idea that modern historians are not just producing endless reinterpretations of equivalent merit. I believe we have reason to claim that we are better at making sense of the evidence than we used to be, and that our picture of the past is more complete than it used to be. Bret's own blog series (and the retrospective) are themselves a good example of this: his righteous effort to force us to consider the helots is a sign that we are no longer satisfied merely to write the history of the socio-political elite. A history of Sparta centered on the forgotten majority is a better one (because it offers a more honest reflection of the history of a greater number of people) than one that ignores them and talks only about Spartiates.

In that spirit, I don't think Bret is right to prefer Cartledge over Hodkinson, and I don't think it is a very strong argument that Cartledge himself is not persuaded by Hodkinson's views (of course he isn't, you're talking about his life's work!). In reality there are really only two people left publishing on the "old" version of Sparta (Cartledge and Millender), which is itself already a significantly more critical view of Sparta than the one that used to be current before them. The "new" Sparta isn't persuading people purely on the strength of its novelty. It is the result of some incredibly meticulous scholarship, much of it unprecedented, and it is connected to wider trends in our understanding of ancient Greece. Again, it is fine to say you're not persuaded, but as the weight of the argument grows, this will appear to be based more and more on prior assumptions rather than a critical analysis of the most informed works available.

But Bret notes that one reason for him to prefer Cartledge was that it suited his specific purposes in writing the blog, and that's one aspect of this exchange where debates about the correctness of scholarship are largely irrelevant. As I wrote in my previous post about the blog series, Bret had a very particular aim in writing it, and chose an approach that suited that aim. As he says here, he did not intend to write the latest textbook on Sparta, but to counter the modern pop-culture image of Sparta. That's fair enough. And when I criticise some of his claims, it is because my aims as a flair here are different (namely, to provide our users with the latest scholarly views on the topic). My views, though, are in no way meant to align with the pop-culture image, and I'm sure he is aware of that. His characterisation of Hodkinson's theory as seeking a way to "save" Sparta (for the Sparta Bros?) is strange; Hodkinson is one of the foremost critics of the militarised pop-culture image of Sparta, and no part of his work seems to have the effect of glorifying Sparta or restoring it to some perceived utopian status. He certainly does not gloss over the helots. Both Cartledge and Hodkinson have tried, each in their own way, to historicise Sparta. It matters to me that Hodkinson et al have done so more comprehensively, critically, and persuasively; but when Bret's blog is seen in context it makes sense that this did not matter as much to him as getting the message across that Sparta is indeed a historical society (with very serious flaws).

The retrospective is muddled a bit by a lack of clarity about which critic is being addressed; criticisms bleed into each other and counterpoints clearly don't apply to all critical views. For instance, Bret (rightly) takes issue with those who would euphemistically refer to helots as "serfs" - but Cartledge still does this, whereas Hodkinson is one of the main scholars to prove and propagate the fact that they were effectively chattel slaves. Bret's main point here is that the pop culture image of Sparta ignores the helots to its detriment, but all critics of his work are lumped together as being guilty of that tendency, when in fact some of those critics (myself included) have neither downplayed the significance of the helots nor referred to them as anything but slaves. He cites Hodkinson as the one who argued that helotry was not unusual in form in the ancient Greek world, but the actual argument was made by Hans van Wees (2003), and so on.

As for Greek warfare, I don't think I will ever agree with Bret on this, but it is good to be explicit about where we stand, and why. I have written an entire book to update the Wheeler chapter he cites; apparently he did not find that book very persuasive (I can assure him that neither did Wheeler). To some degree our disagreements lie in parts I did not cover, but for the rest any claim I can make in the span of one short post or twitter thread is going to come across as a vain appeal to my own authority. I don't think it will do much good to go down that route.

So, to return to the actual question: How awful was Sparta really? While Bret is right to summarise Hodkinson's theory as an attempt to show that Sparta was not really that different from other Greek states, I think it would be disingenuous to argue that this amounts to saying Sparta wasn't really that awful. The view I would say I have expressed on this sub over the years is that Sparta was indeed often comparable to other Greek states - because those states were also awful. All these states, after all, were run by xenophobic, misogynist enslavers, who thought nothing of committing genocide against their enemies and embraced the physical and sexual abuse of their social inferiors as a matter of course. Far more telling than the supposed awfulness of Sparta - and Bret has certainly done a great job summing up what the sources seem to tell us - is the fact that other Greeks praised it for allegedly being like that, and urged people in their own states to become more like Spartans. This tells you all you need to know about the Greek world more generally. We shouldn't really need to turn the Spartans into bogeymen to stop people worshipping them; we should revisit our entire understanding of the ancient Greeks, and become more honest about what kind of societies they formed and idealised.