Guardian of Nekops said:
Right. Obviously the correct solution for them there would have been more breeding, rather than doing their own gardening so they could not enslave and enrage so many people.
Well... if by "correct" you mean the
morally acceptable solution, then sure. Obviously from the standpoint of contemporary values we would say that the morally correct option would be to abandon slavery. Of course, we have no need for slavery these days either, so it hardly merits discussion. Of course, things were different back then. It is perhaps questionable whether complex empires could have developed beyond a certain point without the use of some form of forced labor. I tend not to judge history too harshly by my own standards. We are fairly spoiled by our living conditions. I'm cynical as to whether anyone with a bleeding heart could remain as such if they had to live under the same conditions as those they criticized. If in two hundred years technological innovations had solved all the world's major problems and allowed everyone to live in comfort and safety, those people may look down on us now as complete and total scum for spending our money on luxury items such as televisions or iPhones instead of sending aid to third world countries. Then again, there are people who feel that way now.
Zachary Amaranth said:
However, homosexuality was not the downfall of the Spartans. It wasn't really a breeding war so much as their rigid cultural and class system that ended up boning them.
...Errr..No pun intended.
Well, it was a combination of several different things, yes. Another large part of it was that their enemies adapted to their military strategies, which pretty much remained the same over time, and thus they lost some of their military advantage. But you still can't have a giant population of slaves that outnumber you. One fairly obvious solution is to not have slaves, another is to sell off your slaves if they start to outnumber you. It's debatable whether it was really homosexuality that hurt the Spartan population, there were military losses, stringent social hierarchies that prevented people from moving up, and of course their primitive form of Eugenics. But whatever the case may be their population was definitely a problem. But I don't think it's that controversial to say that widespread homosexuality, if true,
would have had a negative affect on their population growth.
People just get their backs up on this particular historical issue because they perceive homophobia on the part of the person who suggests that homosexuality might have played a role in the Spartan's decline. But that's ultimately irrational. Not wanting to copulate with the opposing sex definitely limits one's propensity to reproduce (though it obviously does not eliminate it completely either). That doesn't mean that homosexuality is wrong or bad, it's just a fact.
