Our troubled world needs historical perspectives. Sparta offers a good perspective. The Spartans were ferocious and well-disciplined fighters. Some know that 300 Spartan fighters were the core of a Greek force that held off a much larger Persian army at the famous battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. The much larger Persian force eventually overcame them, but their heroic stand, somewhat like that at the Alamo, became a legendary event, and stimulated a subsequent victory against the powerful Persian empire. Fewer know that Spartan power, like that of the Confederate South, rested on the exploitation of a more numerous slave class, the Helots. The Spartans defeated the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War, but fell when the Helots, first the Messenian Helots and later those from Laconia overthrew their masters and ended the Spartan era.
↧