Recently, I’ve been watching that ABC Family Show Greek on Netflix Streaming. When you search for Greek, the next result that comes up is The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization from PBS (1). I decided that it sounded interesting and watched that too. The part that inspired this blog is when they started talking about Sparta.
To start with they talk about the great military might of Sparta and how it was the major threat to Athens. My history class in college was Ancient Western History (part 1), and so I know a small amount about Sparta that doesn’t come from movies. I remembered that Sparta was comprised of two main groups of people, the Spartans and the Helots. Helots was the name for Spartan slaves. The actual citizens of Sparta were the slave masters (2).
It seems that portrayal of Spartans in our current culture is rather favorable: totally bad ass warrior dudes with amazing six packs. However, this PBS documentary started talking about how every male Spartan citizen was taken away from their families early on to be raised in the barracks because being a solider was mandatory. Apparently, they also lived on the move a lot, traveling from one battle to another with pretty much only one change of clothes. According to other Greek cultures, their food was also horrible. One Greek man is said to have written that, after eating their, food he realized that they were so fearless in battle because nothing they faced there would be as bad as having to eat the army rations.
If Sparta was so powerful, why did they have crappy foods and required military services? Well, let me tell you my theory and understanding of that. Sparta conquered a neighboring community (possible named Helot, which may be where their word for slave came from). They had people to tend their crops, so the actual citizens could focus their attention elsewhere. They conquered more people, and had more slaves, which gave them more time to do things other than feed themselves. But they also had a large slave population, and slave generally don’t like being slaves. Historians think that Helots outnumbered Spartans seven to one (2). In order to continue their oppression of the slaves, Spartans had to have every available man able to fight, which required being separated from their families as boys and forced into military service. According to Wikipedia, Thucydides wrote that “most Spartan institutions have always been designed with a view to security against the Helots.” They were on top, but being on the top required a lifestyle of intense fighting and oppression.
It also caused intense cruelty to become the norm. Once a year, they would cull the Helots and during the rest of the year brutal beatings and subjugation was the norm. To learn more about that, watch the second episode of the PBS documentary. But why am I writing this and why should anyone care at all?
We should care because Sparta is just the oldest example I can come up with of the cost of oppression that continues to perpetuate every culture bent on empire. Here’s a small example from today in America. Last year, I was a therapist for an teenage boy, who was telling me about his very homophobic world view. I didn’t know how to respond because I felt I had a duty to say something about how homophobia is bad, but I was also there as his therapist needed to maintain an alliance with my client for both our sakes. I asked about it in class. My white, elderly professor (conservative by social work standards, which means not uber liberal) had an answer that really surprised me. His response was that he would intervene to address homophobic talk, but not because wanted to assert his views or felt an obligation to help the oppressed (in this case). He would step in because to not do so would be a disservice to the client. His words went like this, “I would worry about the part of himself he is harming by denying the humanity in another person. To deny someone else’s humanity is to hurt yourself.”
I can’t really put it any better myself. From the Spartans to the modern debates about marriage equality that are causing red and pink = signs to take over facebook today, there is not a single person in the community that is not in some way harmed by oppression and the denial of others humanity. End blog.
Social Justice Ninja 