cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

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We haven't had a new post since before December 25, so obligatory Yuletide link to this hilarious story of Frederick the Great babysitting his bratty little brother, with bonus Fritz/Fredersdorf!

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From:

luzula

they are closest nation to my favorite ancient governments (Sparta 4ever!)
OMG, Sparta was his favorite ancient government? The place that had a high proportion of slaves, with brutal repression of them?

Perhaps a good outcome would be if your neighbors took over parts of your country and made it smaller.
Ha ha!

From:

selenak

Re: Sparta, I think a lot of people were and are in denial about the Helotes and had/have no deeper knowledge of the Spartans than "Termophylae fuck yeah! They died for Greek liberty! Tough Warriors! Women were into athletics, too!" Not to mention that being into the Spartans in the pre Revolutionary 18th century was often a way to present yourself as a rebel against the ancient regime Rokoko pomp (which gets inevitably coded as Athenian).

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, that's extremely common. People admired the austere lifestyles of the Spartans, and how individuals sacrificed themselves for the states. Rousseau's far from an outlier here. There's a lot of overlap between that and the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic.

You were LUCKY if you could get someone in our period to pay lip service to "slavery is bad", never mind do more than pay lip service, never mind be consistent in applying that to which governments they admired!

When it comes to the helots: no1curr.

ETA: I opened the document to see if there was an answer to Selena's question, and the page that I opened to landed me on the author calling Rousseau out:

One gets the impression, however, that Rousseau, like other eighteenth-century admirers of ancient republics, lamented this situation quite moderately, and that essentially he passed quickly over the fact of slavery; the thought of it did not disturb his exalted raptures over the liberty, virtues and patriotism of the Spartans and Romans. Similarly, writing dithyrambs in honour of Geneva, that is, the privileged group of its citizens, to which he was evidently proud to belong, he passed over in indiferent silence the fact that three quarters of the state’s population were deprived of political rights and faced economic disadvantages. Since Spartan society, co-existing with the helots’ slavery, and since Genevan society, ruled by a privileged minority (and in essence by a still narrower oligarchy) aroused his fervent admiration, so the liberty-loving society of the Polish nobility, even before it had emancipated other estates and had combined with them in one body, could be a positive phenomenon for Rousseau.

This is Jerzy Michalsky, "Rousseau and Polish Republicanism," translated from the Polish by Richard Butterwick (several of whose works I own).

Edited Date: 2024-02-15 11:57 pm (UTC)

From:

cahn

I, uh, learned about the Helots etc. last year (when someone linked me to Bret Devereaux's discussion of Sparta), so, yeah, my chief association with Sparta for quite a while was "tough warriors!" and "self-denial!" and stuff like that. *ducks*

From:

selenak

Honestly, given his intense dislike for ancient history and for his ancient language lessons, I would be very surprised if FW knew more about the Spartans than you did. Mind you, being FW, he might have liked them even if he did know a bit more, but as it is….