I haven’t read the archeologist’s work. I did read the article. The archeologist claims that evidence across the Aegean and Athens particularly shows weak babies were cared for until death. That’s fine. However we’re not discussing Athenian nor general Aegean baby care. We’re discussing Spartan care. Nothing in the article (and I could have missed it) proved evidence, from digs, against the idea of infanticide by the Spartans.

> Nothing in the article (and I could have missed it) proved evidence, from digs, against the idea of infanticide by the Spartans.

Isn't the onus on the ones claiming that Spartans practiced systemic infanticide to provide the evidence that they did so?

There’s already evidence for it. There are contemporary accounts describing the practice.

These accounts aren’t perfect. Not necessarily first hand eye witnesses, but not rumor mongers either.

So anyone arguing that this didn’t happen needs to address an established consensus.

Lots of more recent research is attacking traditional ideas about the Spartans, so this is a welcome argument.

But saying “it’s on them to prove their point” isn’t really helpful.

The onus is on the people making claims in general. In this case someone (the journalist?) made a claim that "spartans didn't kill `weak' babies", so the onus is on them.

No, if the evidence for the area points to X, the folks claiming a deviation from the general evidenced trend need to provide evidence for that.

This paper isn’t making an argument. It’s summarizing specialized research.

A specialist in the area could just say “appeal to authority” and they’d be right. The actual peer reviewed articles and books would require evidence.

But those articles and books wouldn’t be accessible to the average reader.

So the journalist is summarizing those arguments, but in the process reducing them to an appeal to authority - which is completely fine.

We don’t really know anything about Sparta which wasn’t written by outside observers.

Where did the claim come from originally ? Could google but...

Either way, Sparta is not Athens. They were different political and cultural systems.

The "concept of 'onus'" applies to the writer or whoever is making a claim, not to the reader.

The preceding post did not claim otherwise.

Even within Sparta, proper Spartans didn't make up the majority of the population, so you'd still have to distinguish between Spartan infants and helot infants.

Helots were 85% of the population[1]. GP is pointing out that random skeletons don't come with residency papers describing which kind of residents they belong to.

[1] Source: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

Σπᾰρτῐᾱ́της is a perfectly fine greek noun and was used in antiquity to denote the ”homoioi” of spartan society, it is not a made up word by Bret Devereaux. Historical sources <em>do</em> consider helots to be spartans, just not citizens or ”homoioi”.

I would suggest reading the posted blog-post. The author <em>do</em> know what he is talking about and–in my opinion—quiet an engaging writer.

In turn, I would suggest not assuming that I haven't read the blog post.

"Σπαρτιάτης" is used in Greek (modern and ancient) to mean a (male) inhabitant of a place called "Sparta". What the blog author claims is that there are _two_ words, one of which means free citizens of Sparta and the other, helots. He says that one of those words is "Spartiate" and that the other is "Spartan".

This is a distinction that is impossible to make with a single word in Greek. The words he uses, "Spartan" and "Spartiate" are two Latin transliterations of the single Greek word "Σπαρτιάτης", that has one single meaning, as I explain it above.

Furthermore, the distinction between free and enslaved inhabitans of Sparta is, in all historical sources, made clear by using two words with different roots: "Spartan" for the free citizens of the city, "helot" for the enslaved people of the surrounding territories of the city-state. Nobody else than the author calls one "Spartan" and the other "Spartiate". That's entirely the blog author's made-up terminology.

So what I'm saying the blog author has made up is the distinct meaning of "Spartan" and "Spartiate". I do not claim that he has made up the word "Spartiate", as you seem to assume in your comment. Please correct me if I misunderstood your comment, and not you mine.

Apologies for seemingly misunderstanding your post and in turn not making my point very clear! But, surely “spartiate” (or rather Σπαρτιάτης) isn't a made up word? Also, as I understand your reply the classical sources exclusively use that word for the “homoioi”? If so I understand your original point and have learned something new today.

And a small edit: It was your last parenthesis that confused me, I would have written it as:

“or even "Spartiate", a term distinguished by the author of the blog as distinct from "Spartan"…”

Apology accepted. I'm not a native English speaker as you are not a native Greek speaker. Which btw should give you pause before trying to teach me a lesson about my language. I've deleted a comment that made that point more forcefully and I'll now leave it as an exercise to the reader to figure out how I know you're not a native Greek speaker.

"Homoioi" (όμοιοι) means "equals" or "peers". That's what Spartans considered each other and they'd use that word in context, but used the demonym "Spartan" to refer to their fellow free citizens of Sparta as did everybody else. The helots were called either helots or ..."the Spartans' slaves".

I'm only expanding on GPs point, so I'm not sure how my comment could be considered pedantic to them.

And as for the title point: Spartans seem to only be mentioned in the article coverage of the research. They are not the topic of the research itself. Sparta doesn't even appear in the abstract of the paper. Demonstrating that infanticide of disabled babies wasn't a widespread practice in Ancient Greece does not necessarily mean that it wasn't practiced by a group that only consisted of the elite class of one state.

Is there a name for being arbitrarily biased against a counterclaim? The simple fact that this is posed as a counterclaim itself seems to invoke skepticism, even when the original belief itself isn't even presented or has a poor basis itself.

A weak counterclaim does not imply the claim to be truth.

> A weak counterclaim does not imply the claim to be truth.

Yes. So? The options are not just that we accept whatever fact is presented, or accept whatever is the oposite of it. We can just say: “looks like we don’t know” and that is perfectly fine.

A claim or a counterclaim (is there even a distinction?) warrants the same amount of proof.

The abstract of the paper sounds like this isn't actually a counterclaim, it is only a questioning of the claim being made. The author isn't saying that the Spartans didn't systematically "kill weak babies." She is saying there doesn't appear to be much evidence that they did, and given evidence that it wasn't common in general in ancient Greece, the claim is suspect.

Sparta wasn't common like any of the contempory cities. Sparta has unique militaristic society. Hence the writer should have furnish proof within Sparta and not use proxies to generalize the same. Canada and Mexico are next to USA. The things happening in USA are hard to be extrapolated from Canada or from Mexico. You can't be reasonable to say American loves maple syrup and have cartel rampant running the drug trades simply because it is common in Canada or Mexico.

> A claim or a counterclaim (is there even a distinction?) warrants the same amount of proof.

Yes that is exactly what I was saying.

Then I don't understand you.

You wrote:

> Is there a name for being arbitrarily biased against a counterclaim?

Who is arbitrarily biassed against a counterclaim in your opinion here? Debby Sneed who wrote the study? Andrew Curry who wrote the science.org article about the study? gadflyinyoureye who wrote the comment your comment is responding to? Someone else?

> The simple fact that this is posed as a counterclaim itself seems to invoke skepticism...

As it should. I don't see the bias here. Are you saying that someone accepts claims without skepticism but not counterclaims? Who?

I may not have expressed myself properly. Instead of saying arbitrarily biased against the counterclaim, I should have said arbitrarily biased for the implied claim that is being countered.

I agree. Lately it seems that people who lay their ideas out and accept criticism are being destroyed by those who refuse to admit fault a priori

Lately? I don't think so.

Strong men never make mistakes. Never. Only weak men do. You know it's true. You've seen it. Cavemen have seen it. Probably true in some animal societies, too

Indeed, except for the comment about the spartan king with weak legs, none of that was Sparta specific evidence.

Did you see the part about the lame guy who was king pf Sparta?

> ...Christian Laes, a classicist at the University of Manchester. “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.”

I also see at least one comment here making this same argument.

The article covers the evidence against, including, that disabled ancient Greeks lived to adulthood.

The evidence cited in favor is Plutarch's assertion, and that "other societies" do it.

That last is particularly weak. Plutarch's assertion wasn't that parents who couldn't afford children would leave them exposed, but that the Ancients would by policy submit the babies to an examining council who would order that disabled babies be exposed.

So all we have in favor, really, is Plutarch's say-so. Given that he wrote this 700 years later, this evidence is pretty weak, too.

Table four from the Twelve Tables [1]:

> A father has the right to kill his deformed child.

These were laws in ancient Rome, not Greece, but the societies shared many beliefs and customs. Not that this is proof one way or the other about what was common practice, but people thought it was important enough to lay down in law. [[the father also had the right to kill any of his kids, so it's interesting they spell this case out explicitly]]

[1] https://historycooperative.org/the-twelve-tables/

In the Roman empire you had Pater Familias, doesn't mean those 'rights' were exercised.

> In theory at least, he held powers of life and death over every member of his extended familia through ancient right. In practice, the extreme form of this right was seldom exercised. It was eventually limited by law.[3]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pater_familias

Tacitus writes of the Jews that

"Still they provide for the increase of their numbers. It is a crime among them to kill any newly-born infant."

(http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%...)

Were it otherwise in the peoples around them, would Tacitus have thought this worth of mention?

I also found the evidence against the killing to be pretty weak. It certainly doesn't establish what percentage of disabled babies would be killed.

Intuitively, to me, given how dangerous birthing was for the mother, I imagine only seriously disabled babies - that would never be autonomous as an adult - would be killed.

But I guess we'll never know.

From Plato's Republic:

"The proper officers will take the offspring of the good parents to the pen or fold, and there they will deposit them with certain nurses who dwell in a separate quarter; but the offspring of the inferior, or of the better when they chance to be deformed, will be put away in some mysterious, unknown place, as they should be."

This was just a hypothetical, but Plato was thought to be influenced by Sparta. He's very explicit about the eugenic principles behind this idea.

> “But absence of evidence does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent.”

If you believe things for which you have no evidence, you're liable to believe everything.

I've seen this form of argument a lot lately. It's epistemologically unsound.

Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence. Insufficient evidence leads solely to the conclusion "We do not know with any confidence whether Spartans did this or not." You cannot just assume that one of the affirmative positions is true because the other one lacks sufficient evidence.

> Both the claim "Spartans did this" and "Spartans did not do this" are affirmative claims that require evidence.

Hmm. That is an interesting perspective, but I do not agree.

Isn't "Spartans did not do this" actually a negative claim? And aren't negative claims notoriously difficult to prove?

What if this were consorted with extraterrestrials or some other random claim? Then it's easy to dismiss lack of evidence with "does not mean the phenomenon itself was absent".

Do we really need to find evidence that Spartans did not do this for every claim? Or rather, perhaps we should insist on proving the negative only of claims for which the evidence is strong in the first place.

Shouldn't we take as the null hypothesis "Spartans did not do this" and then evaluate evidence that they did?

In this specific instance, because of 2000 years of tradition, the unchallenged null hypothesis has been "Spartans suffered only healthy, well-formed children to live". This is the only reason people are saying anything like "We need more evidence they did not" despite the weakness of the evidence for its being true.

Null hypothesis should be: we don't know!

Well, sure, we don't know for sure that they did not kill deformed newborns, but we also don't know for sure that Spartans were not magical invisible goats, either. After all, there's no proof they weren't, am I right?

Confidence is a scale, not binary. What does "sure" mean for you and how much of it do you need to be convinced? Does it depend on the situation? For example, how sure do you need/want to be when you cross the street?

Before I consider that, you'd have to show that magical invisible goats (can) exist.

That's true but as you see, whether or not the other party argues from that understanding is difficult to identify from a single sentence. I understand that it being convinced of something or not is a false dichotomy. However, there's a difference between objective reality and knowledge: Either the phenomenon was absent or not -- that's a fact. Whether or not we are convinced of it being absent or not is the other question.

There's always inference.

As far as I can tell, infanticide was accepted in ancient Greece and Rome at a lot of points. Ancient historians did have a habit of making assumptions that previous societies, they might have assumed that infanticide was common in Sparta because to a later ancient Greek that would have been how they would think weeding out weakness would be done (and Spartans liked to give the impression that they have always been the toughest society ever), and the stories go that Spartans made a lot of decisions communally, so it would make sense for a council to inspect babies.

The article doesn't prove exposure never happened, just that it didn't always happen. I'm guessing that it would be most likely to occur in times of famine.

When we're talking about Spartans, we're talking about the Spartan aristocracy, no?

Halo's Spartans make sense if you think about them as a traumatized and brutalized society.

> When we're talking about Spartans, we're talking about the Spartan aristocracy, no?

I am pretty sure you are right. To the ancient writers, slaves were all but invisible, except perhaps as a measure of a slave-holder's wealth, or when, like Spartacus, they upturned the 'natural order' of society, and lesser nominally-free persons were not much more thought of. A slave's child was a return on a slave-holder's investment (Thomas Jefferson wrote about his own slaves in these terms), and if they weren't useful for anything better, they could be used as beasts of burden until they died.

I don't know how the Spartans are portrayed in Halo, but Brett Devereaux make an interesting case (at least AFAIK, which is not much) that the Spartan aristocracy operated like a modern-day cult [1] (and he seems to accept that infanticide was part of that cult, though he does not have much to say about it.)

[1] https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

> the Spartan aristocracy operated like a modern-day cult

"Cult" isn't the word I'd use for it. The main point of that particular post is comparing the written sources' description of Spartan agoge to modern child soldiers... and our sources' description of the Spartan agoge read rather like how someone would write about modern child soldiers if they thought it were a good thing.

By and large ancient sources seem to also have thought that the Spartans were nuts. There are virtually no sources where Spartans write about themselves though, since they were not exactly keen on intellectual pursuits.

Interesting - I have a strong recollection of someone making a comparison of the agoge to the methods of modern cults (I do not think it is something I would have come up with myself) and I thought it was somewhere in this series, but I see it is not. Maybe I heard it from Dan Carlin?

Not that you have to agree with the comparison, of course!

I enjoyed reading this, thanks for posting

Yeah Spartans were the aristocracy, then there were peasants (free but not citizens, Perioikoi) and serfs (Helots) below them. IIRC the Spartan aristocracy were originally Doric invaders who most likely created the rigid rules because they wanted to stay seperate and in charge of the conquered Helots (in kind of a caste system).

Well Roman laws contained fairly severe penalties for infanticide [1], while the practice was common it was certainly frowned up.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide

From that page:

- “The practice was prevalent in ancient Rome, as well”

- “Infanticide became a capital offense in Roman law in 374, but offenders were rarely if ever prosecuted”

374 is fairly close to the fall of Rome, which Wikipedia sets at 395-476 AD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_the_Western_Roman_Empi...), so from that page, it doesn’t seem it was that severely punished during most of th years the Roman Empire existed.

Often, you'll find that taboos or prohibitions in one society often correlate with prevalence of the practice among neighboring states. "They do that, we do not" is not uncommon even today, and during antiquity was important enough to codify into law.

Roman laws (Twelve tables from 449 BC) explicitly granted the right to infanticide - as the link states, it was banned only in 4th century (at the split of the Rome, and near the end of Western Roman Empire) but was allowed throughout all the 800+ years of the iconic "Ancient Rome".

> And the ancient historian’s own account mentions another Spartan king who was unusually short and “impaired in his legs” but still a good leader.

The Spartan kings (supposedly) come from two lines of descendants of Heracles, Eurysthenes and Procles, who are said to have come to and conquered Sparta (the Spartans did not think they were native to the land). To kill one at birth would probably be a laughable idea to a Spartan.

Let's be honest, 99% of the average American's knowledge about Spartan society is from the movie "300". But it never stops being amusing when Americans have their "wait, those Hollywood movies are not even 1% historically correct??" moments.

Give it 20 years, people will think World War Two was fought by women of color with space age technology.

Historical fiction is a very loosely respected genre of entertainment. We pick and prod what we want and let fantasy live out in historical dressing. We inundate media with it, and create an ethos to summarize complex ideas into puerile, milquetoast thoughts. Civilizations get washed down, historical figures rewritten, and modern sensibilities injected where appropriate.

And we don't really think much about it. Because after all, it's entertainment. Entertainment has no responsibility to inform or educate. But through it all, children will grow up and absorb it. And suddenly a whole generation starts believing that Ancient Greece was a multi-ethnic civilization (by today's standards) and that Spanish Moors were Sub-Saharan Africans.

You mean like this? https://pbfcomics.com/comics/now-showing/

I don't think they will. WW2 media is still dominated by things other than (say) BF:V

They will have no sense of the Soviet contribution to the war, because that media will be American.

There’s plenty of incentives to conform, but no actual requirements. For example the DoD subsidizes war movies it agrees with. When the goal is to make money, that’s hard to turn down.

The propaganda goes far far beyond explicit DoD subsidies.

In 3000 years archeologists will think we practiced Purge and Hunger Games. But Cold War was obviously a religious metaphor for climate warming.

Dude get your facts right - the USSR and USA leaders were trying to bring global nuclear winter to thwart the global warming. They were willing to put humanity through suffering to save it. But their efforts were cut short by the deep state.

Which lead to the events in the documentary mad max.

Mad Max only tells part of the story, they left out the hybrid human-kangaroo soldiers, as documented in Tank Girl.

Sparta was at its peak for a few centuries - aren't customs likely to have changed significantly over that time. The baby killing period could have been during a particular leader, or a bad couple of winters or under some other crisis.

Most of the modern average life expectancy gains come from drastically improving infant survival. I doubt many 'weak' babies were around that nature did not kill first.

Infants with defects would suffer considerably more early mortality, even with the best care parents could give in ancient times.

Well, if we were to look at this with different eyes, the Spartans, while having to deal with the urgencies of Battle would probably do it.

But really, do we do any differently???

Think about it -- "weak" children are set aside from society into a room upstairs, or a care home, or some kind of environment where they are not exposed to the harshness of the real world.

The same goes for adults too.

Even if the spartans never did it, they probably put the weaker children and adults into a situation where they would never come into contact with battle or even slow a community for doing normal everyday duties.

Which is exactly the same as we do.

We put slower children into special classes. Put them on special buses, send them to special psychological and physical practitioners. For adults we put them into care homes. Or keep them at home and the government generally cares for them with special provisions.

And we accept that.

Putting infanticide aside -- are we any different from ancient cultures??

Rich countries, predominantly western Europe, especially I.e. Denmark and Iceland, abort nearly 100% of babies when a prenatal screening tests positive for Down's syndrom.

I don't think we are any different at all. Sadly, the worlds countries that are best able to provide a good life for such people are the quickest to prevent them from existing.

I recently read the Lycurgus chapter of Plutarch's "Lives" and I guess I missed the baby killing part? Very little emphasis compared to there being no such thing as adultery in Sparta, or effectively getting rid of Money.

You missed it, or maybe your translation left it out? Search for 'Apothetae':

> Nor was it in the power of the father to dispose of the child as he thought fit; he was obliged to carry it before certain triers at a place called Lesche; these were some of the elders of the tribe to which the child belonged; their business it was carefully to view the infant, and, if they found it stout and well made, they gave order for its rearing, and allotted to it one of the nine thousand shares of land above mentioned for its maintenance, but, if they found it puny and ill-shaped, ordered it to be taken to what was called the Apothetae, a sort of chasm under Taygetus; as thinking it neither for the good of the child itself, nor for the public interest, that it should be brought up, if it did not, from the very outset, appear made to be healthy and vigorous.

http://classics.mit.edu/Plutarch/lycurgus.html

Thanks. I just remembered the emphasis of Children belonging/being raised by the community. Still don't necessarily think it's right to interpret those few sentences as evidence there was rampant child sacrifice like Carthage.

Did the title of the article change after this was posted? Or was the title modified by the poster?

Article title says “Greeks”, not “Spartans”, which would make a lot more sense (and avoid the need for half of the arguing in the comments).

Abortion is not infanticide even if you happen to think it's exactly as evil. It's useful to have specific words mean specific things, otherwise you'd still need to invent a new word for non-abortion infanticide and what's the point of that?

I’m reminded of a similar archeological controversy, that of child sacrifice in ancient Carthage. It was interesting because it demonstrated the way that the political concerns of our time shape our understanding of the ancient past.

Beginning in the seventies, scholars were motivated to revise the allegations of Carthaginian child sacrifice, claiming that it was racist Roman propaganda designed to abuse the memory of an enemy power (even though the same claims can be found in Greek sources from the time of Alexander the Great). It’s not hard to detect the influence of black emancipation and the Vietnam War in these efforts. For decades, this interpretation held sway until recently, when archeologists revisited the question and found that no, in fact the Carthaginians really had been sacrificing children all along.

This article informs us that Spartan eugenics inspired the Nazis, quoting a scholar who says that “It’s gotten used for some pretty nefarious ends”. One can easily see how our revulsion towards such atrocities could motivate our search for reasons to discredit the precedents that have been used to justify them.

I really doubt spartans or other groups of people from ancient times in southern europe behaved like this.And for me the reason is simple: it would have been seen barbaric.For example circumcision was seen barbaric, everything that imposed the idea of man-made modifications to the innocence of a baby also skews more with this idea compared to what (at the time,and even compared to now) were very humanistic societies: greeks, romans, etc.

Obviously that doesn't account for proof, but when you take into account the fact that "history is written by the victors" and simple examples like salem trials, or any other group who was been later found to be relatively innocent of their actions by their accusers, it makes you wonder if these "rumors" were spread just to make spartans less popular.From what i recall spartans were also composed from largely slaves,gladiators,foreign people, and usually those people are not keen towards tyranny.