Sparta was the antebellum South of the Mediterranean.

No matter how you tune up it’s history, it’s existence was constantly bent by the concern for slave rebellion, resulting in a stagnating society in which even the “citizen” class was brutalized in order to make them effective overseers. They weren’t Greek patriots…nationalism didn’t meaningfully exist…they were reactionaries bending to whatever political wind protected what they held: repulse the Persians, take Persian backing…the underlying principle was simply “prop up the existing hierarchy”

But that’s the appeal to American reactionaries, who are, again, self-reporting. They don’t just want a society of endless non-citizens, tiered in how they can be abused, but a “citizen” class that is also controlled, penned, and punished so that they can only fulfill a function as overseers.

And the military uplifting Spartans…well, let’s all take a hard look at how you convince a near-child to die in a trench, because it’s a very simple, emotional formula that repeats over and over and there’s countless examples…but it’s specifically a product of the reconstruction of historical narratives to make Greeks the protagonists and (ironically) both the originators of nationalism and heroic individuals. To achieve this task you simply have to make all other societies in friction with the Greeks less people, such that things like Greek settler colonialism, or Greek imperialism, or Greek mercenary labor, are rinsed away by a dichotomy of “civilized West” versus “decadent East” such that conflict is inevitable and victory is assured…both lies that are very convenient if you’re trying to maintain an empire through conquest and terror. You want your soldiers to believe in an abstraction stronger than what is visibly true, that the “other” are just fucking people…that facade has to exist until the first truly bloody exchange, at which point you can point young men towards more base motives like revenge and the collective guilt of the brutish other.

Like, that’s a great historical debunking, but it misses the point that there are active liars setting the parameters of the discussion of history.