Comment of the Day: Eric Lund: "It's not just wrong, it's...

Comment of the Day: Eric Lund: "It's not just wrong, it's a fetish passing for scholarship, and there's far too much of it out there. While I am by no means a classicist, it seems to me that a casual eye on the new books carousel at your university library would rescue from any temptation to indulge this kind of nonsense. Nino Luraghi's Ancient Messenians: Constructions of Ethnicity and Memory (2008) will lead to Hodkinson and Powell, eds. Sparta: New Perspectives, which, even if you are as lazy as a certain blog commentator and content yourself with the Bryn Mawr review up on JSTOR, you would be quickly led to a pdf posted by H. W. Singor https://delong.typepad.com/files/5_041_036.pdf... and to the chastening realisation that the scenario Our Host describes was first laid out by Aristotle in the Politics. This ain't exactly cutting edge revisionism, folks...

...[Singor:] In a stable population with a high death rate for young children and a
correspondingly high birth rate of on average 5.5 children per family it is in
less than 40% of the families that at least one son will survive his father; in
about 25% two or more sons will survive; in slightly less than 25% it is only
one or more daughters that inherit, and in nearly 15% there are no heirs at
all.

Consequently in each generation more than half of all landholdings is
either divided between heirs or assigned to heiresses and their (prospective)
husbands, or to further relations in case the deceased leave no children at
all. So concentration and/or fragmentation of property affect more than
60% of all land lots at the change of one generation to the next.

Hodkinson presents a table showing family composition
distribution in a model population. On the basis of his
figures one can assess the percentage of, for
example, inheritances in which a son receives less than one third of the
parental property at slightly more than 10 percent. In most cases one may
assume that such an inheritance would be insufficient for the heir to keep
up the standard of living of his father; unless he married a bride with
enough land of her own to make up for the deficit the prospects for the heir
being able to sustain his father's status looked grim. Perhaps in half of the
cases, say 5% or a little less, he did not succeed. Even so, a steady outflow
of impoverished heirs in one out of twenty cases must in a stable (!) population have produced...

Singor, it seems, is far too credulous with our sources for the earliest Spartan history. Tantalising revisions of traditional chronologies suggest moving the date of the conquest of Messenia, and the introduction of the Spartan system, to an astonishingly late date, perhaps within the living memory of the parents of the Spartiates who fought at Plataea. This doesn't have much to do with refuting the toxic nonsense that the Spartans were engaged in a eugenics project, but it does suggest that the Spartan system was even less stable than the ancient sources suggest...

#commentoftheday