School of War - Ep 55: Myke Cole and the Spartan Myth

Episode Date: January 3, 2023

Myke Cole, author of The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy, joins the show to discuss what most people get wrong about Sparta, arguing that Spartan warriors were neither more deadly, nor more successful in war, than other Greeks of their day. ▪️ Times  • 01:09 Introduction • 05:13 “Not especially tough” • 09:17 Getting it right, not being right • 10:48 What is the “Bronze Lie”?  • 16:57 Captured by politics • 23:23 Who were the Spartans? • 30:11 Spartan slavery  • 34:09 The Greco-Persian Wars  • 37:00 Thermopylae • 41:32 Sparta and soft power • 45:30 “Making the time”

The invincibility of the ancient Spartan warrior in his military organization is an established fact. Or is it? Today, we are going to take a critical look at Sparta and see what remains in the aftermath and discuss historical methods in the nature of perceived wisdom along the way. It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of the way. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infinite. The bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran.

We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron Plain. Thanks for joining the School of War. Delighted to be joined today by Mike Cole. Mike is the author most recently of the Bronze Lie,

shattering the myth of Spartan warrior supremacy. And you've had a kind of fascinating and as you put it in the bios from colorful background. Mike, first of all, thanks for joining the show. And second of all, tell us a bit about yourself. Thanks so much for having me. I think the publisher used the term colorful. I don't want to come across as an egotemic, at least more than I should legitimately cop to. Yeah, my background is pretty all over the place.

But it's sort of standard for a lot of the people you know down there in D.C. Aaron, it's the military intelligence and law enforcement kind of curse us anorum to use the Roman Latin term. And it included service in Iraq and included a lot of disaster response for the U.S. Coast Guard. It included time in the intelligence services, not far from where you live. And then I'd always had a dream to be a fantasy writer. And when I got my first deal with that, I moved up to Brooklyn and sort of did that for a while, living in the bohemian life. in a department's lap and writing full-top. And when I discovered that being broke was, you know, not good for my anxiety. I kind of sniffed in the direction of the NYPD. They picked me up. And I also went background as, you know, in control law enforcement prior to that. So I wound up doing defense and computer crime, basically working collars that were hackers attack the NYPD.

So if someone robs a bank, you know, I probably didn't care about that. I only cared it. Came back with the NYPD. And that eventually led me into the private sector. But as I was doing fantasy and science fiction, there's a lot of overlap with history, right? When you're writing about medieval warfare, when you're writing about or at least medieval influence warfare, which we see in Tolkien and a Game in Thrones and stuff like that, obviously you study the history.

And of course, gaming is a huge thing in fantasy and science fiction, board gaming, tabletop gaming, video gaming. And that led me into historical war gaming. And that led me into war gaming, Hellenistic battles between the Roman Legion and the Hellenistic phalanx. People like to say to Greek phalanx, but it's important remember that Alexander and the successors were, they're really Balkan peoples. And I looked for literature on those battles between the legion and the phalanx. These sort of Batman versus Superman, you know, X-1 versus tie fire. He's really like disparate, but similar and products of their own culture, military formations

that were clashing. And there wasn't one. There just wasn't. There was blog posts and there was, chapters in books, but there wasn't a book on it. And more importantly, there wasn't a book, and I want to be clear here, I love the academy. I consume so much material from the academy, but that's not how I enjoy reading. And the audience that I want to reach are autodidact amateur-anthus enthusiasts like me. And those people certainly have access to literature out of the academy, but it's not how they communicate. So I decided I was going to write the book. And my agent at the time told me I couldn't do it because I didn't have a PhD. And man, I love of them people tell me what I can't do. That's just good luck with that, man. So I taught myself Latin

and Greek, and I was very lucky in that I got as a mentor, Dr. Michael Livingston, and through him, Dr. Kelly DeVries. And if you are following medieval warfare, those two guys are, am I allowed to curse on this podcast? You sure can. Okay, those two guys are big swinging dicks in the field on that. And they took me under their wing and held my hand and taught me a lot. I already had a master's in history. So I had some background in historiography and how to do research, but they really, they really took me to the next level and continue to. In fact, I'm co-authoring a book with Dr. Livingston now, which will be coming out next year on all of the battles of Thermopy. So not just the one in 40 BC that the Somme 300 was about.

So that was Legion versus Phalanx. I got that did well. And then when Osprey came back to me, this was right around when Trump was rising to power. And I became really concerned about the rise on the right around the world. And I realized that they were using the Spartans and had been throughout history as this sort of galvanizing symbol for far right extremist movements. And anyone who looks at the sources can see immediately that the Spartans were, were normal. They were not especially tough. They weren't even specially military.

and that this is a bullshit story we tell to inspire ourselves. So I dove into that with the Browns Lives just came out in September and sort of defanged or tried to defang that myth. And then I mentioned I'm working on this book with Mike on all of the battles of Thermopylae, but I always wanted to have range. So I don't know if you're familiar with Tom Holland, who's one of my favorite story.

He's got Persian fire on the Greco-Persian Wars. He's got Rubicon on Caesar Proustic. He's got a book on the Crusades and the Development of Islam. He's got a book on Anglo-Saxon and Christianity. I mean, like, his range is just amazing, and I've always wanted to do that. So I love the 17th century because I love this transitional period where you have both medieval and modern forms of warfare on the same battlefield. And so I, there's a specific unit that are nicknamed the Lobsters, Sir Arthur Hessel-Read's

Regiment of Orson, 1642, and they were the last reginald, and they were the last regent possibly in the world, but certainly in England, to wear full armor, like knights in arbor, except they had guns instead of lances. And the visual badassery of this. And their story is just amazing. And the fact that they only existed in this form for a month was like this incredible flash in the pan story. So I pitched a book called Steel Lobsters, The Last Nights in England, at Bloomsbury.

And I have an offer on that that my agent is still negotiating. And I'm working on that on the side. And then the last thing I'll tell you, I know this is very long winded. I'm a firefighter up here at the Hudson Valley, which I love because, look, when your law enforcement and military service all involve easing violence against other humans. And no matter how just you think your cause is, that's an incredibly morally fraught thing. And facing that moral fraughtness has done a lot of damage to me over the years. And being a firefighter's got none of that. You just blow through walls and save people.

And I love it. And I wish I'd discovered it when I was younger. I guess it's pretty uncommon that people are unhappy to see the fire department show up. Well, I mean, as opposed to the police. Some people are. Well, we're associated with law enforcement, right? So, you know, we're sort of two sides of the same coin. There's such intimacy between those communities that folks who don't like cops,

usually don't like us. And there are some people where we get rocks thrown at us and we roll into them. But it's just a different game, and I love it so much. I like your focus in your research and your work on these sort of transitional moments. these strange moments that are sort of between things. I just sort of random response here, but over the weekend was watching The New World, which is the sort of trippy Terrence Malick movie

about John Smith and Pocahontas and everything. And there's this amazing shot in the movie. I think it's based on like a Thomas Cole painting or something. I need to go look it up. But it's an amazing shot of Colin Farrell playing John Smith, creeping through the swamps of, you know, somewhere off the James River or something. And he's dressed in what would have been

the traditional warfifference. fighting gear of the time. He has armor on. He's got a sword drawn. I mean, he looks like what he is, which is a Renaissance, late Renaissance, early modern warrior who fights with a sword. But he's surrounded by the Virginia woods and swamps. And he's about to, you know, be captured by a bunch of Native Americans. And it is just jarring. It's a very jarring visual because it's, it looks like he's walking on the moon, right? It looks like he's completely out of place in time. But it basically happened. You know, It's actually this real transitional moment in history. We've actually had Dr. Livingston on the show.

The episode hasn't gone up yet, but he came out to talk about his crazy book. Oh, wonderful. As you know better than I, he has this sort of contrarian revisionist sort of zeal. Oh, well, I wouldn't, I don't want, I think you would object to that. Okay. Very new revisionist. One of the, of the, look, my love for Michael Livingston is boundless, both personally and professionally.

he isn't just a friend to me. He's a mentor and an inspiration. So you'll forgive my work in full tone. But one of the slogans that he has for how you tackle history, which I just, you know, I think it's the most important aspect of it is that the trick is got to be committed to getting it right, not being right. So I wouldn't say that's contrarian. Mike is relentlessly committed to the truth, including to the point of, of being willing to, and in fact, eager to look at his own password and be like, oh,

well, nope, I got that one wrong, you know. So I just wanted to. You know, to be clear, I didn't mean that I didn't mean it pejoratively. You know, most people most of the time are wrong. Most of us, I should say most of us most of the time are wrong. So a certain degree of skepticism, I think is a very healthy thing intellectually. But I mean, the reason why I raise it, we can phrase it however you want. But obviously the crazy book is about how previous accounts.

of the battle are essentially incorrect, and he has a new account. And so this sort of leads me to the Sparta book that you've just published, which is, I'll use another term maybe you would object to, but it's not a style of writing one frequently comes across in classical history, which has struck me as polemical. This was a kind of attack on the Spartans. As I was paging through it, I thought, well, gosh, what did the Spartans ever do to Mike Cole? And you gave a bit of an almost sort of political account in your intro about why you decided to write the book or write the book and the way you did. But, you know, what, what is, let me ask it this way.

What, what is the bronze myth, the bronze lie? Sure. Where does it start? What is its content? Right. So I do want to, before I answer that question, and I hope I don't piss you off, Aaron, I'm a difficult guy to interview because I turn questions to how I want it off. Before I answer that question, I do want to say this, I have evolved personally between the time

in which I began the project and the publication of the project. When I began the bronze lie, It was absolutely a relentless and committed leftist revisionist history, military history of Sparta, with the aim of removing the Spartans as an icon that the far right could use to galvanize support. And since that time, I have become just as horrified, if not more horrified by the same excesses on the left in the United States and also around the world. I am absolutely a committed leftist. I make no bones about that. but there is a sickness in leftist discourse in the world. And unfortunately, the bronze lie has sort of was founded in that before my views changed and is used by that community often to kind of

clutter our right way or is over the head with. And I deeply regret that position. And in fact, one of the things that I kept saying when I go onto Twitter, which I don't really do anymore, in fact, what social media entire is saying that I'm not here to say, slam the Spartans, I'm here to see them, and that the goal of the bronze line now, which I look, I stand by that book, I'm very proud of it, but the goal of that book is to engage with the humanity, the flawed humanity and the reality of the Spartans, to reckon them as real people in their nuances, and to understand them. And I do say this in the book, because they are both not what we say they are, and also wonderful and glorious for all that. And in their flawed

humanity, we can see our own flawed humanity and then be inspired by it. Because, you know, what was that quote from Amadeus that, oh, I forget who the after is, he says, he only write poems about Greek gods that are so lofty. They seem like they shit marble. You know, nobody, nobody can get inspired by them. So I wanted to say that. Now, to your question, the bronze lie is really, really simple. And I believe its origin is from propaganda, likely circulated by Phamisocles on the Athenian side, right at 480 BC. In the horror of the absolute disaster that was the Battle of Thermopylae because it was an absolute disaster. You know, how do we shore up Greek morale?

Because our army just got steamrolled in three days and didn't delay the Persians at all, which was their goal. And we're about to, we're abandoning Athens, you know, in a mass panic as the Persians rural south. What story do we tell to keep the entire, you know, Greek population from to stop them from surrendering to Persia, which is what obviously the, you know, Thebes had done it. And, you know, the Allude clan up and Thessaly had done it, you know, Let's keep Athens for doing it.

So we tell this story that the Spartans didn't lose. They died gloriously. And they died gloriously because they are a military culture dedicated solely because they are super warriors that don't want wealth and don't want comfort and don't drink alcohol and don't, you know, don't have too much sex and, you know, are willing to die and endure any discomfort and never surrender. and this is just hot butter bullshit. And anyone who takes two sessions to read any ancient source can look at that and be like, nope, that's not true.

But people love those stories. People love essentialism. And in fact, that essentialism, which has poisoned global political discourse and led us to the toxic soup in arts and letters that we live in, this thing that I described is maybe your grab my motivations for writing the bronze lie. That very impulse is present in our lionization of the ancient Spartanus. Instead of engaging with their complexity or flawed humanity, the fact that like anyone else, they have good days and bad days, and sometimes they act heroically and sometimes they

completely shit the bed, we boil them down to one thing. They are this. And that legend inspires us and also makes us feel inadequate, which, I don't know, that insecurity makes us go to the gym, it makes us, you know, I don't know, would not put on a coat when we're outside, not complain about the cold, these behaviors that we consider to be stoic, although I think that's a misapplication of the term. We love that stuff, man.

We love it. And that legend has grown and grown and grown from 480 BC to 2023, and it's still with us now. There's a lot there to ask you about, and I want to get to your actual account of the Spartans. But before we dive into the real need of the thing, just sticking with motivations for a second. I'm struck by, you know, your identification of, or your sense that the far right is using

some notion of Spartan supremacy for its own purposes. And I'm not sure. And then I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean about the left also sort of abusing or abusing the legacy of the Spartans in some way. Maybe you could say more about that. When you talk about the right, I was surprised when I saw it in the book because just going off my own experience is reading things as an undergraduate, essentially, a long time ago. I remember reading Plutarch as an undergrad with a class we read Lucurgus, and then we read

Solon, so, you know, the obvious purpose being talk about Sparta, then talk about Athens. And this is 20 years ago, so, you know, we have to correct a bit for that. But the universal response to the class to reading the sort of classic account of the Spartan regime on the one hand and then this classic account of the Athenian regime on the other was to immediately identify we as Americans, rather than sort of politically left or right, to immediately identify with Athens, which seemed more like us, right?

And to be hostile to the Spartans who seemed not like us, and not like us in a way, this is only 10 years after the end of the Cold War. So not like us in a particularly kind of left-wing way, in a particularly kind of communist way. I mean, obviously the differences are vast, but you also know what I'm pointing to

in terms of the similarity. So I was sort of struck by your, assignment of the Spartan legacy of something captured by the right? Just say a little bit more about this whole like kind of web of associations and abuses that are driving. So I think, I just think it's undeniable that it's been captured by the right. Look, that Cold War comparison is well known. And scholars have spilled a lot of ink identifying that. So I perfect, I think you're absolutely right, Aaron, is that the Cold War dichotomy of absolutely recast the Peloponnesian War with Athens as the United States and democracy. And Sparta as an oligarchic Soviet Union, and it's also nonsense.

Athens was just, you know, maybe in some cases, worse, you know, the accounts, we talk about the Spartan Pellip caste system and we ignore the, you know, the Athenians, you know, forcing these slaves into silver minds. Like, it's just, it just ain't so. It's this really backward looking revisionist look. But I do think it's in our agreeable that the far right does use it as galvanizing symbol. And not just the Spartans, but specifically the legend of Thermopyla. And that really, I think that really comes to fruition because right now we're living in an era of globalization and migration. And Thermopylae is essentially an anti-immigrant tale, right? You have muscular white Europeans outnumbered holding back a brown skin Asian hoard that is

pouring in to impose its culture, right? And you can see how that narrative is tailor-made to fit nationalist fear of immigration that is really a new thing now. And you have this all over the world. You have it in the United States with Mexico. You have it in England with Eastern European immigrants. You have it with Greece, Greek and Turkish interfaces. And it ain't going away because the world is becoming smaller. And that kind of reaction is. So here we have this Taylor May story that speaks to that in a very, very polarized way. And this sort of tragically horrendous. And you see it, I mean, Generation Eindentatira, which is a right-wing French youth group, they use the, their symbol is the Lama, it's the Spartan Shield.

You know, I talk about the Sons of Odin USA, you know, all of this come and take it, come and get it, which comes, of course, from the Molin-Lawbe slogan. That Qutarch attributes to Leon, certainly apocryphly. You know, there's just so much of this iconography on the right. I mentioned, I think, in an article I did for The Daily Beast, this video, which casts the film 300, except it's like Trump's head glued onto the far. Yeah, I've seen it.

You know, it was watched five million times at the time I wrote the article. I just think it's undeniable that Spartan symbology and particularly the symbology around Thermopy, the anti-immigrant imagery, is used. Now, on the left, I wouldn't say that the left is misusing the Spartans, but what they are doing is engaging

in equivalent degrees of essentialism and misinformation. as the Trump side is. It really is an equivalency, which is, and that idea that it's not an equivalency is a sort of essential principle of leftist discourse in the United States and the world. And I know because I was a part of it and I agreed with it until I got kind of woken up. So what I found them doing was taking the bronze lie and being like, fuck, as far as you know, they were all gay, right, you know, as they tweet at right-wing provocateurs.

and I'm like, well, no, that's false too. They weren't all gay. No, no, no. They weren't good at war. They fucking suck, man, you know. And I'm like, no, they were good sometimes. You know, and I realized, holy shit. Holy shit.

You know, I handed a piece of misinformation to what I thought was my own side to be misused. And I can't tell you how deeply I regret that. And the sick horror in my stomach of realizing, holy shit, like, I contributed to this discourse. I did this, you know, and it resulted in intense soul searching. And unfortunately, that neutrality, maybe not neutrality, but that commitment to nuance, it's deadly to a literary career, Aaron. It's deadly to an arts career. Good fucking luck.

or making your way, especially for what I do, which is a popularizer, right? Making your way in that field, if you want nuance and if you're not going to tolerate essentialism, which is what dominates publishing, it's what dominates academia, it's what dominates journalism. I've often said these days in 2023, there's no such thing as journalists and more of those only activists. And so it's, look, I'm really committed. I'm glad that I had this experience because it's helped me understand what my beliefs are. and I'm now committed to my positions, but, you know, who knows what it's going to do for my

scholarship career. Another memory from my undergraduate days is that Socrates in the phagris. Plato has him make the case that, you know, you probably shouldn't write books. Those are a bad idea. Writing is a bad. Actually, I think it's actually writing. You shouldn't write. Writing is a bad idea.

Right. Because it is actually a kind of interesting argument. It goes to the heart of what you're saying. Because once you write something, it goes off on the world and you lose it. you lose control of it. And it says whatever it's going to say over and over again, as interpreted by the people who are reading it, as opposed to spoken argument, which you can modulate and control and shift from one audience to another.

And it's sort of alive with you. It is more manageable. It could be more manageable. But unfortunately, I think one of the things that social media, the intersection of social media and this essentialist toxicity that dominates world discourse at this point is that you can rely on the worst faith interpretation of whatever argument you present that is almost deliberately dishonest to the point where I think it was, I don't know if you're a fan of Sam Harris, but he just quit Twitter, I think, a few days ago.

And he has a wonderful, I think, 20-minute discourse in the beginning of his latest episode of his Making Sense podcast where he explains why. And one of the things he explains is there is no point in me saying anything on Twitter because I can rely. No one will stipulate my argument. You know, they will, they will, it's just straw men all the way down. And I think there's a lot of truth to that. Yeah. Well, let's let's talk about the Spartans then. What is the, what is the truth about the Spartans? What's the sort of down the middle account you would give? We can start with,

I mean, we have a, we have a half hour here and there's a lot of material to cover. But maybe let's start with the origins of the thing, with the archaic period. You know, what is this strange Spartan constitution that, you know, at the time other, other Greeks did, did think of, right? As, as, a bit unusual, certainly from the Athenian perspective of strength. The thing is we don't know. We don't know. And that's the thing that no one wants to admit. We have no idea, right?

We have basically so much of what we think is the Constitution of the Spartans. Comes from Plutarch. He's this Hellenistic writer, you know. It's this hundreds of years later. He has no idea. And he's not even in a story. And Lee Serodotus for all of his problems comes out and says, I'm trying to engage in an objective inquiry about what actually

happen. Kutark's not doing that. Plutarch's trying to build your moral character, right? So the truth is, we don't know. And we, and historians hate to say that. And we hate to say that because if we say it enough and we say it to the degree that it's actually true, I mean, look, this book I'm writing now, Aaron, it's about 1642. It's post-printing press. Like, I'm grounding in source material. And even there, I'm having to say, I have no idea of weapons these guys were carrying. I have no idea if the battle went this way or this way. I have no idea if this person I'm writing about was there or no. The sources simply don't support that. And if you say that enough, the stories are terrified. The audience is going to say, what the fuck do we need you for? You know, like, what do you do? You don't know.

Why are we even asking you? But of course, let's go back to Mike Livingston's axiom. We have to be committed to getting it right, not being right. We have to. We have to. We have to. And so the answer is, we don't know. The reality of it is that we have no literature. We have a little bit epigraphygraphy, but we have no literature from the Spartans themselves, describing who they were, they are as opaque to us as the Celts. We don't know. What we do know is that they engaged in warfare. We do know that they had a heavy infantry, a hop-like component that was successful in certain major battles, although ironically not the ones like Thermopylae that they're credited for. But we do know that we had here a socially conservative culture, right, that was slow to change.

We do know that we had an insular one that was suspicious at outsiders. We do know that we had unusual liberties for women by compared to Greek standards. We do know that there was a caste-based slave system, which is almost unique. The Thessalians had the pen-fessileia, which are similar to the Hellets. We do know that the idea of conquering adjacent communities as opposed to sending out colonies, although the Spartans certainly did that as a way of ensuring land inheritance rights for young men so that they wouldn't overthrow society is unusual. So those things we know about.

And so we can certainly say Spartans were unusual. But the one thing we cannot say, which is the one thing that has always said, is that the Spartans were in any way excessively military. There is no evidence for that at all. What we have is, and Aristotle has this wonderful quote, which I put out in the bronze library, he says, it isn't that the Spartans train particularly hard, except they train it all. Because hop-like warfare and classical Greece is this essentially reservist affair with everybody working their farm or their artisan shop.

And then, you know, the balloon goes up and you grab your rusty sphere out of the olive shed and show up in formation. And in fact, the Greek phalanx is designed to be idiot-proof. What do you do? why not back to this dude, walk that way and shove, right? I am a traditional alchisimus guy. That's a thing that's under debate, but I believe they shoved. And the Spartanists clearly have a degree of disciplined

an organization that exceeds that of other Greek city states, but we don't know by how much. And it's also likely that the reason that that discipline and organization is able to exist is that you have an apartheid aristocratic society where the homoioi, the knights, people get mad at that term, but I love it, it's very useful because it shows the hearer that this is an aristocratic society of ennobled warriors, much like the night of the Middle Ages. They have the time to engage in some degree of drill. But I want to point out that we have no evidence that they engage in military drought. We have evidence that they engage in sports and athletic competition.

We have descriptions of the kinds of drills largely from Xenophon and from Kiddadi's. that they engaged in battlefield maneuvers, but we don't have anyone saying, here they were practicing in formation, here they were practicing fighting. And in fact, at the end of the archaic period, we have the poetry of Tertes. The fragments of Tertes,

who was supposedly this great Spartan poet who galvanized them, and in fact there's plenty of evidence that he wasn't a Spartan at all. But he's telling them Spartans, you know, warriors, go shield to shield, chest to chest, helmet to helmet, you know, don't stand back out of missile range.

and the one point I make in the bronze lies, why is he saying this? If he's exhorting Spartans to do those things, well, then that means they're not doing those things, right? Because if they were doing those things, he would be celebrating they're doing them or he just wouldn't be saying anything at all because it would have been considered to be normal behavior.

The fact that he's writing a poem to try to convince them to do it tells you that they're not. And that, so there's just basis from the very beginning that what you see in Sparta and ancient Sparta is an aristocratic society supported by a slave caste and also second-class free citizens, the periiqui, these dwellers around who do the artisan work, but also serve in the hot-led families, that had some military success and an unusual way of projecting policy through conquest and subjecting neighbors into halogens that was different from ancient Greeks.

but what you don't have at all is any evidence of a hyper-militarized society that loved, that hated luxury and trained harder than other people and, you know, engaged in self-denial at the reduction of the individual in the face of the state to an extent that was definitely from other ancient existence. Talk a bit more, if you would, about the significance of the unique kind of slave culture that existed at or for Sparta. Because as you point out, slavery widespread, Athenians had some. slaves, more or less everyone had slaves, but there's something unusual and unique about the Spartan

institution. And I think, right, and Chris, know, your view here, it affects their policy and their foreign policy. But speak to the culture, would you? So it's just, it's unusual in the respect, one that it's cast-based, as opposed to chat of slavery. And the other thing, too, is that you see, I mean, certainly not monolithic, but you see another Greek city states that when someone is enslaved, it's their, they're, they're not, you know, they're not the dude next door, right? You know, it's not that thing. There's someone you captured an honorate or something like that. But that's not how Sparta works.

They are conquering entire adjacent populations, right? And reducing them for eternity into slave status. That is unusual and very shocking to the ancient Greeks. So we can get that from the sources. But again, very little is understood beyond that. There are stories, one of the most famous stories, and I think it's from Plutarch, is the cryptaea, this idea that when Spartan, I think when they hit 18 or 20, they go out into the domains of the helots and hide and then

wreak havoc among them, murdering them, you know, terrorizing them to make sure that they understand their place, but also to train these youths in subterfuge and assassination and all of these things. That story smells a bullshit to me because it's like something out of a John Michael Bay movie or, you know, it's just like a little too crazy for me. But, you know, and again, I really doubt Hellenistic backward looks onto it. But certainly that caste system and that idea of eternal slavery for entire groups of people was unusual in the time. One thing you had mentioned was how it affects foreign policy. The tiger, we call us the tiger by the tail notion, which is that to keep that big a population of people down at all times requires a tremendous permanent

military presence that is internally focused at all times. And there are plenty of examples where we at least think that Sparta's decision to March or not March was governed by their need to be at home. And in fact, there were three Messanian wars, one of them triggered by an earthquake, which, you know, they rose up the second they had a shot, right? And in fact, one of the big death blows that Sparta received is the founding of Megalopolis by Thieves, which is a city that allows the Messanians. This is one of the first people, Spartans copper, reduced to hellage to have a city state again and to oppose them. And so that certainly that fear of slave uprising absolutely shaped Spartan policy. And what's fascinating about it is as, so there's another thing we talk of called the Oligansopoea, which is this, to serve in the Spartan phalanches, Homoio, you had to have certain property qualifications,

much like the British officer's mess under Duke, under the Duke, Arthur, Wellington, in that period of time. And as there's some evidence that due to wealth inequality, which is opposite, of the Spartan myth that everybody's equal, that more and more people lost the citizen franchise and could the serve in that capacity. And you see toward the end of the Peloponnesian War of the Spartans creating these Neo-Damodeus, which are the new men, new citizens, which are pellets, their slaves, that they're equipping and arming as hoplides because they need the manpower, and a lot of them are serving very ably in battles and moving forward. So this is a good way,

I think, to transition to the Persian wars. This question of whether the Spartans march or don't march, they certainly spend a lot of time not marching in the Persian wars. So talk a bit about, I mean, there's two, you know, sort of major phases here. Talk a bit about Spartan performance overall in these wars, which I guess is distinguished. On the one hand, they are, you know, certainly initially one of the few Greek city states to resolutely, you know, not submit, right, to the Persians. On the other hand, I see, I see you're going to disagree, but on the other hand, any semi-positive thing I'm going to say you're going to disagree with. On the other hand, they are, if you like, privileged with their, I mean, they are less physically threatened, considering where they are on the Greek peninsula,

and that obviously affects their decision-making about what to do or not do to support their fellow Greeks. So how do they do overall? And then we want to get into some of the specifics. We definitely want to get into Thermopyla. Right, sure. So, I mean, look, the Greco-Persian war slices off a very small period of Greek-Persian relations, which, and we kind of think that with the defeat of the Persians at Plet and four seven years, you see, that's, that's the end of the warrants. And you see, that's the end of the story. It ain't. You know, like Greece and Persia continue and lost that all the way through for hundreds of years to come. And in fact, I guess the Lassas campaigns over there is a big piece of the Spartan story, which isn't really rapid. And of course, Sparta wins, Peloponnesian War and

Agnes in 404 BC because of Persian money and a Persian fleet. And that's just not negotiable, right? That's why they won. So they don't like the Persians until they dude, the reality of it is is this idea. And again, this is a backward-looking projection, right? We talk about the freedom of the Greeks. And we talk about Greece as this holistic almost post-Westphalian state. And that's a very moderate conception. Not all the Greeks saw them's films, right? Certainly they shared language, they shared religious traditions, they shared culture. You were going to be heck of a lot more comfortable. If you were a Spartan with a thievian or an Athenian, then you would have been with someone from Souser,

Prasapalus. But you're still a Spartan and they're still a thieving. They're still, you know, foreign to you. And your allegiance, you know, would have been first to Sparta and then to the, you know, the Peloponnese around you. And in fact, we see a lot of Sparta sort of seeing their sphere of interest as south of the business of Peretz, you know, as an important part of it. So their performance in the Greco-Persian wars, I'd say, was pork, really poor. Thermopylae is an untrammeled disaster. And that is an argument I had been making since the beginning. It didn't achieve strategic objectives. It didn't achieve its tactical objectives. And our lionization of it, as in that poem by Mub's View on Cannibals, as a defeat more glorious than any victory is,

it's just not true. And the evidence, I think, really builds that. And in fact, Dr. Livingston and I will have a book coming out next year called A Killing Ground, a biography of Thermopyla, where we really go into that. But we will make our argument as clear as possible. And I think it's pretty unimpeachable, although I am certainly, again, commitment is to get it right, not to be right. I'm happy to have it impeached and welcome people to do so. So could I interject real quick? Because let's just linger on this. Let me, let me trace for a moment, what I take to be the sort of generally accepted popular view of Thermopylaid, that its strategic objective was to serve as some sort of delaying action, a small force against a much larger force to buy time. And,

And so it succeeded in delay. Then ultimately later, of course, the Spartans were defeated. What's wrong with that? Because the goal, three days is not a delay. First of all, Mike and I come down at the person who would be around $100,000, which is enormous. Yeah, if it's the myriad that Herodotus describes three days is a delay. But the truth is, it's not. And it did not, we have no evidence that it provided a significant logistical impact on Zerick's disability to operate in Greece.

It just didn't. And in fact, when we look at Thermopylae, we see it as this land battle. We don't consider the naval battle at Arramesian, which is if anything more important. And in the end, what happens? Athletes has abandoned. The Acropolis is taken and burned. So Xerxes achieves his strategic objective. This is an abject failure.

And it's almost complete annihilation. The defense even falls apart with the 7,000 troops that were in that past, not 300, 7,000, being like, this is, what are we doing here? This is useless. And they take off. And these are all arguments. I will lay off my book. Sure. Well, and from what you said earlier in our discussion, you cited, tell us what the mystically is, and you cite him as the source of this bronze myth, bronze lie. And you put it right around this point in time. So who was the mysticles and what's your theory about his relationship to later interpretations of Spartan behavior? Yeah. So I want to be clear here. I'm, this is not an original idea to me. Tom Holland publishes a review of the film 300 where he

goes into it. I encourage people to Google that and read it, where he, Themistically, this sort of the main figure in Athens during the Greco Persian Wars. And even after, just this incredible figure and known as a master spin doctor, an incredible propagandist and just a shaper of stories. And Holland looks at that and sort of thinks, okay, you know, this is a really strong theory of the story he was trying to tell. And there's the Themistakian Decree, which we talk about in the book that Mike Litturistan and I are coming out, which really, I think, explains what the Athenian plan is, which is for Lianodas and his army of Allied Greeks to hold the Persians in place, not just long enough to starve them, but long enough to give Athens a chance to evacuate and also a Boeotian army to march to their relief. And three days just ain't enough time to pull that off. Interesting. So on balance, you give the laurel to the Athenians, more than on balance, overwhelmingly you give the laurel to the Athenians in terms of resisting the Persians. Or is it more complicated than that. I mean, yeah, this is the thing is, I'm a frustrating guy to interview because I don't

give the laurel to any. I'm not frustrated at all. I'm curious to know you're, I asked the questions in these sort of black and white ways, but your answers obviously don't. I'm not, I'm not, I don't need black or white answers. Well, good. Well, because there aren't any, right? The reality of it is is that Leanna Das is planned the whole Thermopyla is a really smart. one, but he gets out general. And also, war is chaos and things evolve around him, right? Like, I'm not slamming Leonidas. I'm not slamming the Spartan effort. It's a real good faith effort based on a really strong plan, but it just doesn't work. And then you have this backward-looking story on Thermopylate, which basically says, he meant to do that, you know, like, no, no, he didn't

got his ass kick. No, I don't give the laurel to anyone. I think everybody, you know, did their, did their level best. And but Sparta's performance throughout the Greco-Bersian War, it ain't great. At Pleitea, you know, Pausaniacens, and I write about this, book, write about this in the book, he shows cowardice, he shows indecision, he shows hesitation, we have that. He's taking Olens again and again and again and refusing to march until the Degans. They're like, screw this. We're not going to sit here and get shot up by arrows. And they go ahead. And we have this delayed Spartan advance at Nicolay, where they sort of show up in time to raid the camp and break an already broken enemy. And what's so incredible is,

is that they are, this is the war that built their reputation. And I don't think you can look seriously and dispassionately at the sources and come to that conclusion. So Spartan underperformance and Athenian overperformance in resisting Persia sort of lays the groundwork sets the conditions for the dawn of what becomes Athenean imperialism, right? Athens throughout the 5th century is a, I welcome, I welcome, I welcome. I'm just sort of reciting what I take to be the conventional view. Athens becomes much more prominent in the 5th century than it was in the 4th. that presents a challenge to Sparta.

They fight actually a series of big wars to include one that's really before the main text of Thucydides. Sparta, you know, wins. It wins in the end. Athens is defeated at the end of the 5th century. But again, what are we, what is the conventional view of these things missing? Well, so it's more that Spartan win, but Athens lost. And this is a point I made in the bronze lie.

The best example I can give of that is the Syracusean expedition. and the disenfranchisement of Alcabaiis. Like, it's just Sparta had nothing. The Athenians picked it, you know, and they face-planaded so badly that Sparta was able to send one Moe Thaks to Syracuse with a bunch of these Neo-Davideas I'm describing, and then galvanized resistance to the point where it just was a disaster from which the Athenians couldn't recover.

And also this, Sparta, one of the things I also point out in the book is that Sparta is possibly credited for these field battles and military victories, and everyone ignores their incredible, facility with soft power and their great diplomacy and relationship building, you know, because that doesn't fit the bronze lie, right? If you're super warriors, you're not sending ambassadors, right? But if you look at Spartan's cultivation of relationships with Persia, to ensure gold, to ensure the kind of combined arms capability that they lacked, particularly naval forces, that they lacked on their own, in there, you see the roots of their victory

over Athens as a victory, partly of soft power, but also partly to take very, very clever. and canny advantage of Athenian error. But what that is not an example of is battlefield supremacian. Yeah. And talk a bit about, you know, I think, I think sort of fourth century Greece gets less attention than fifth century Greece, probably because there is no Herodotus or Thucydides, or I should say there are great chroniclers of the events of the fourth century, but they, for whatever reason, they do not have the hold on the public consciousness that Thucydides and Herodotus do to the extent that they do. So what, what is, as it were, the rest of the of the story. Athens doesn't just go away, does it? It's a pretty significant factor in the

4th century. And what do the Spartans get up to? In fact, the Spartans, in fact, as soon as Athens just defeated, there's a rebellion. And Spartans' yoke is thrown off and democracy is restored death. It's like, one of the points I've made in the book is like they won the Peloponnesian war for 30 seconds. You know, like Sparta remains a regional power in the Paloponnese. And what's so funny is, is that, look, they certainly project policy. And I've mentioned all of these Purrific campaigns that are really important remember. But if you skip forward, you know, we don't talk about. If you skip forward another hundred years as to the dynasty of Cleomenese and third,

which is this moment, like if you're looking for a muscular and resurgence, Sparta that's winning in the field of battle, you know, this is a period in the Hellenistic age where they were really doing it and showing great adaptability, overcoming their social conservatism and taking on the Macedonian, I'm sorry, Macedonian, I mean, it's a Kappa, so I use the heartache, phalanx with these pike-arm phalanx. and using combined arm. In fact, Lutarch tells us in his life of Cleonononies the third that the Spartans are arming their trips

in the Macedonian manner, right? So they're showing adaptability. And there's this period of Spartan revival under a single king there. No one talks about. No one talks about it. I try to hit it in the bronze line. But if you really want an example of Spartan glory,

it's there in the Hellenistic age. And people mess it. But ultimately, I think Sparta's legacy, at least in this period, the third century into the second, is as a strong regional power that is dealing with a declining Athens and a rising heaves, really, and by ocean power is sort of the main, and then eventually arising in Achaia, right, in the northern, north of Arcadia, and it's sort of serving as a counterbalance to them. And who knows where Sparta might have gone, if not for the for the rise of Macedon and then eventually Rome, which really, the access between Rome and

okay, I really just put paid to Sparta as a political entity at all. Let me ask you a more personal question. You've become this classical scholar and historian here in your maturity. This is your second book on the general subject matter. You've got a third coming. What have you learned in your studies here that you wish you would have known or might have found useful as a young security professional? Wow, that's a great one.

I think it goes back to what I talked about in the beginning of this, which is that lack of patience and essentialism and this instinctive, almost biological need we as humans have to reduce other humans to single characteristics to make our world small and less scary. And we are certainly programmed to do this, right? Because if everything has nuance, you can't get anything done, right? And you're not going to know to run away from the bear

when it comes out of the woods at you, right? So I think we're programmed to this. But that instinct is quite possibly the most destructive, the most wicked impulse that human beings have. It's funny. I was talking to one of my friends and a firefighter up here, and they're all Trump. It's Trump country, like root and branch. And you will not find somebody more anti-Trump than me. And I love these guys, right?

They would die for me. And they would also die for black people and gay people, you know, the people, their Trump supporters. Well, you must be a racist another. they will go into fire and die without even thinking about it. And unlike a lot of my leftist friends in the salon art scene in New York, they don't sign their name to it, right? They don't send that from a viral, from a verified Twitter account. They put on a mask so no one knows who they are, and they go in and do these things. And when I love them, and I'll die for them, as they will for me, despite being militarily opposed to their political candidate.

And when I talk to my, you know, salon friends, salon set in Brooklyn, and, you know, how can you do that? You're normalizing them. You're, you know, you're not holding them to account. And I'm like, you know, I'm getting to know them. You know, if you want to know why these people voted for Trump, you need to ask them. And then you need to listen because they all have different reasons. And then you have to engage with them in conversation to try to convince them. And the uniform answer I get back from my leftist friends is, well, who has time?

for that. And that answer, it makes my stomach twist. Because if you can't make the time to engage with another person's humanity, then you better not make the time to denigrate them based on a straw man that you've constructed. And I think if I've known that and writing this book really helped reinforce that a long time ago, I would have grown in, God, I mean, I would have been a completely the different person who knows if I'd even entered into a security career. Because so much of what I've done is, you know, security at its heart is judging, right? Quickly, you know, we don't have time to think, to sympathize with the criminals we harassed or the enemy that we engage on a battlefield.

You just judge them and go. So it really has been a growth project for me. And what's so amazing is now that I'm writing this book on the English Civil War, and I'm dealing with the sort of parliamentarian puritan opposition to high Anglican crypto-Catholic royalism, and I'm able now to engage with both sides in a completely more nuanced and sympathetic way than I would have before. Yeah, I just, I want to commend you for doing something that I'm not sure I've come across before, and maybe I'm missing it, and you'll tell me others who are out there doing this, but I'm used to sort of the craft

of history being divided in certain predictable ways, and one of them is, and by the way, there are plenty of maladies in academic history, and I'm familiar with most of them, but there is a very fine and noble form of the craft that tends to exist at universities, that is this, you know, source critical, extremely serious inquiry into truth as best as that truth can be pursued. I got to know a group of scholars when I was in graduate school. I was not a historian, but essentially folks working down the hall were doing early Islamic history and engaged on a, you know, a kind of daring, source critical project that was very exciting to kind of be on the fringe of and learn about and talk about what they were doing trying to figure out what had actually happened to

the extent that anyone could in the seventh century, you know, in the foundational period of Islam. But, of course, what they wrote, sort of of necessity, I would have thought and argued at the time was extremely abstruse and, like, very hard. I mean, you know, essentially you had to be, you had to be an Arabic reader and it would be helpful if you also knew Greek and Middle Persian to have to even begin to understand what they were writing or to participate in their conversations. And so that was, that's sort of, in my view, a kind of academic history at its best. And then you have popular history, which, which has many wonderful, uses and I'm a consumer of it and I love popular history and popular historians, but it tends to be

exciting recitations of whatever is conventionally accepted, sort of told, told compellingly for new audiences. And you, and I don't, maybe there are others, but I'm not sure I've actually ever come across somebody who is writing popular history in a serious way, so serious, in fact, that you actually are engaged in these sort of source critical, you know, actually. pushing hard at the notion that, look, there's a lot we don't know. And that's actually at the heart of the enterprise. That's the heart of the enterprise. I think that's enormously gratifying to hear it's certainly my goal. And of course, it's not going to shock me. It's Michael Livingston, right? He's doing this whole approach I got from him, right? Well, I mean, because I kind of made it

my own, too. But like, yeah, he's out there doing that for sure. So I would certainly encourage your your listeners to listen to him. Hey, one more thing I did want to say on that, because I do have a heart stop, unfortunately. Sure. Is, look, so much of this idea of activist history comes from Mark Block in the Annals School. And I'd really encourage your listeners to read a life in history, which is a biography of Mark Block. And, you know, he was executed by the Nazis.

You know, his last words, I think, were Vigla France as he comforted this little boy. In fact, Mike Livingston wrote a wonderful viral Twitter thread on it. So I would encourage people to go beat that. Look, I hate Twitter, but sometimes it's good. And that Twitter thread is definitely Twitter at its best. But that idea that the in all school perpetuated is that historians are not passing the quarters of history, but active participants in it is wonderful and a certain part of what animates my work.

But there's a downside, man. It's like I said about there's no more journalists in 2023. There's only activists. I think that there's a real threat of that in history too, especially now with social media. Look, being a popular historian, it ain't nerdy anymore, right? You got Dan Snow. You got Merrick Beard. You know, like, that's a lot of money and a lot of people telling you how great you are.

And that's really seductive. And if you know that you write, look what happened to Naomi Wolf, right? She went out on a political limit. It got sought off behind her. And look, I'm not a big fan, but I felt awful for the total destruction that followed. It's real tempting. Played that reward. And I am the first person who met I've done it.

Look, I did it in the genesis of this book. But I see it now. And now that I see it, I can't unsee it. And I'm never going back to it. Mike Cole, author of The Bronze Lie, Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy, thank you so much for making the time. And I hope you'll come back as you keep writing. Yeah, thank you so much, Aaron.

This is great questions. I really appreciate it. I'd love to come back. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.