Your reminder that the Persian Empire was amazing.
See also: a ton of female commanders, generals, admirals, and empresses.
So of course Frank Miller made them scary degenerate barely-human brown people and that’s the version that sticks in people’s minds today.
Well, not that I have any interest whatsoever in being fair to Frank Miller, who is a wretched bigot, but the first people to make them into scary degenerate foreigners were the Greeks.
Honestly, the Greeks were terrible. The only reason we like them is A) we’re sort of culturally descended from them, B) we like the idea of democracy and haven’t paid much attention to the fact that their democracy wasn’t actual democracy, it was upper-class-white-dudes-sitting-around-their-club-and-voting-on-what-happens-to-everyone-else “democracy,” C) we love to root for the underdog and by definition whoever’s fighting something called an empire is the underdog, and D) the Greeks had better propagandists.
The cruel, oppressive, villainously-queer, asshole culture given to the Persians in 300? THAT WAS WHAT THE SPARTANS WERE ACTUALLY LIKE.
If a Spartan baby wasn’t judged a perfect enough physical specimen, THEY THREW IT OFF A CLIFF. The Spartans encouraged children to bully each other in their military training programs. They flogged teenage boys–sometimes to death–as an endurance test. They conquered and enslaved another population (the helots), whom they ritually abused, humiliated, and murdered annually.
The Persian Empire was around for a long time, and went through all kinds of different stages, and hey, nice people don’t really build empires. But as ancient world empires went, they were pretty much the least terrible: their subject peoples had considerable autonomy, they did a much better job of reducing casualties among their soldiers than the Greeks, they banned slavery, they were the source of the first known declaration of human rights, they had numerous female generals, commanders, and other leaders, they provided workers working for the state with free clothing and seeds to grow their own food, etc.
Again, they were around for a long time, and life under their rule varied depending on when you’re talking about, but if you’re comparing them to the Spartans, well, there’s no comparison. The helots, women, children, and every non-physically-perfect Spartan male would have been a HUNDRED TIMES BETTER OFF under Persian rule.
OH MAN WE SHIT TALKING SPARTA?! CUZ I LOVE SHIT TALKING SPARTA!
First off, while still an expansionist Empire, The Persians were often fairly amicable to people post conquest, helping to rebuild and keeping local leaders in power (Even if these leaders now had to answer to the Perisans) and were big on things like Truth and religious freedom.
The Spartans meanwhile…weren’t terribly well liked, even by the other Greeks. While yes, The Spartans raised a society of skilled warriors, in what should be no one’s surprise, thier society wasn’t sustainable in anyway way, shape or form. Slave uprisings were common due the poor treatment of slavesand the fact Spartans had to do practically everything, because they worshiped the ideal warrior over everything else. The common reaction from the Spartans to these uprisings was “Kill everyone, then get new slaves.” which did not exclude other Greek cities.
And even being “Badass warriors” which they were, showed how shortsighted the Spartans were. They trained excellent Hopites/Heavy Infantry and…that was it. They had no Navy to speak of, and while thier Hopites were the best they had only one kind of soldier most of the time, which greatly limited the kind of warfare and maunaevers the Spartans could actually pull off. And anyone’s who’s played Civ knows that building your army around one type of unit and trying to conquer everyone else is an awful idea.
So yeah the SPartans were only good at raising one type of soldier, and even as warrior, they weren’t THAT GOOD EITHER.
Come to my blog for the random Paizo stuff, stay for SHIT-TALKING SPARTA
Mooncustafer 