Current Events > Why were ancient people more tough than today's people?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Ancient Spartan boys would run 10 miles barefoot with a mouth full of water

They weren't allowed to drink it and had to spit it out at the finish line

It was a test

Modern day boys are addicted to video games and can't run around the block

What happened?

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in the future we evolve in to tiny gray aliens with no sex organs.

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Me, personally, I think video games are better.
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Fossil fuels being burned and lack of mental strength

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Because there's no reason for anyone to do that, even back then

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Survival of the fattest

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Can these stories even be confirmed?

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They then had to do 50 one-handed pushups while balancing a bowl of water on their head.

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Villain posted...

Can these stories even be confirmed?

We have surving sources on the Spartans from various eras. For classical Sparta our best source would be Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaemonians who lived among the Spartans, had his son go through the agoge and was also good friends with King Agesilaus and wrote about him as well.

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HannibalBarca3 posted...

We have surving sources on the Spartans from various eras. For classical Sparta our best source would be Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaemonians who lived among the Spartans, had his son go through the agoge and was also good friends with King Agesilaus and wrote about him as well.

sounds like an unbiased source

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solosnake posted...

sounds like an unbiased source

It should be noted that most of what is written about the "Spartans" is a pretty elaborate PR campaign from ancient sources. Not even a joke. There was probably a fairly brief period of time where they did have a pretty rigorous training regime for their youth, but aside from that they were mostly just slave-owning aristocrats who were good at politics and had the free-time to study things like generalship because their slaves did all their work for them.

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the comforts of mass production and mass consumption, never mind pathological urbanism, has destroyed our dependence upon our own bodies as the means to enduring and indeed thriving within our environmental context

so the proverb goes, the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race

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SeraphMetatron posted...

Modern day boys are addicted to video games and can't run around the block

What happened?

Spartans didn't have videogames. That's what.

We also know that sources like Xenophon and Herodotus were notorious liars who didn't give a shit about recording the truest accounts of the times and instead usually wrote down the most incredible accounts they could find.

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SeraphMetatron posted...

Ancient Spartan boys would run 10 miles barefoot with a mouth full of water

They weren't allowed to drink it and had to spit it out at the finish line

It was a test

Modern day boys are addicted to video games and can't run around the block

What happened?

i saw that Twitter post, multiple historians told him that he is wrong

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solosnake posted...

sounds like an unbiased source

We take what we can get, especially since the Spartans of the Classical era didn't leave us any surviving written work. Even so Xenophon had his biases, and so did all the writers of the classical era when it came to Sparta's government, because all of our surviving writers were rich men who admired the Spartan system of government because it was one that benefited them. Still he is our best source on Sparta since he actually lived among them and a lot of other contemporary works had a lot of propaganda in them and even more dire is later sources are infested by centuries of Spartan propaganda. Some supposed traditions would be the land distribution attributed to Lykorgos of Sparta by Plutarch but such thing is not mentioned by Xenophon, Thukydides or Herodotos. It's very likely it was an invented tradition by King Cleomones II in order to legitimize his own land reforms. Other things like a ritual described by Xenophon with kids encouraged to steal cheeses and getting whipped if caught becomes a sadistic ritual where children are whipped until they're exhausted at the temple of artemis by the Roman era.

Scholars like Stephen Hodkinson, the leading expert on Sparta, leans heavily on Xenophon simply because he's our best source on classical sparta and later sources are tainted by centuries of heavy spartan propaganda.

Here's a cool blog post going briefly on Sparta if you're interested in learning more:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/this-isnt-sparta/

Also edu profile for Stephen Hodkinson including free papers:
https://nottingham.academia.edu/StephenHodkinson

Brief overview on contemporary spartan studies:
http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/32475/2/Hodkinson.%20Transforming%20Sparta%20Ancient%20History%20Resources%20for%20Teachers%2041-44%202011-2014.pdf

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Questionmarktarius posted...

Spartans didn't have videogames. That's what.

Not an excuse

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eston posted...

Because there's no reason for anyone to do that, even back then

There were many reasons to be in phenomenal shape during ancient times, being able to escape predators in the wild and fight other hostile humans being the most obvious examples.

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The prevalence of soy

I'm alive and they're not. Doesn't really matter how tough they were.

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KStateKing17 posted...

I'm alive and they're not. Doesn't really matter how tough they were.

I sincerely hope you're not serious with this post.

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imagine comparing modern america to a warrior society 2000 years ago
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The-19th-Sparta posted...

I sincerely hope you're not serious with this post.

Of course not

E32005 posted...

imagine comparing modern america to a warrior society 2000 years ago

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Those guys would break into tears trying to send an email.

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I too stay in phenomenal shape by not drinking water

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They were 50% closer to apes than us, they were larger and had strong muscles of apes but also made weapons.

They culled their young.
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RoadsterUFO posted...

They werent sitting around snacking every fucking hour on donuts, hamburgers, and all that other carb and sugar heavy crap drenched and or made with vegetable oil as one of its ingredients.

They did have sapa though, which was full of delicious lead acetate.

RoadsterUFO posted...

Poor people werent fatasses in mass back then suffering from clinic obesity sitting around all day watching Netflix, playing video games, eating Doritos and Twinkies, and chugging soda and beer.

and?
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That story is unrealitic. You cannot run 10 miles with just your nostrils.

But ancient people were tougher because they had to work in the hot sun and walk everywhere.

They also had to know all sorta of skills we don't today.
For instance, you ruin a shirt, you just go buy a new one. They couldn't really do that. They had to either make a new one or fix the ruined one. Most people only had one or two outfits.

And to get water, there was no faucet. You had to go get it, aka walk more and carry heavy buckets.

Spartan society was very short lived because of how unsustainable it was. It turns out forcing every person in your country to be a badass (and killing them if they're not) is a sure way to have your society collapse.

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Also keep in mind that they didn't sleep on a matress and have a soft pillow.

The poor used rocks for a pillow.

M_Live posted...

We have no reason to run 10 miles barefoot with a mouth full of water, for starters.

dumbass youtube "challenge" in 3...2...