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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2216634" data-attributes="member: 4937">Concerning Sparta, that would be the best example of a slave holding society which developed an outlook with regards to slavery (and hetrosexual sex and alot of other things for that matter) which was fundamentally economically and socially untenable.  Sparta's Helot system was one of the harshest examples of a serf system in world history.  Sparta increasingly held the life of its helots as cheap, the famous stories about initiation into manhood, being just one example and since its possibly apocryphal its maybe not the most important.  The Spartan's were also said to annually declare ritual war on the Helot population in order to keep it intimidated and subdued.  Essentially, the Spartans lived in terror of thier own serfs, and in responce terrorized them.  The problem was, Sparta's primitive wheat based agricultural system couldn't produce enough output to sustain a birth rate that allowed a society to hold life to be cheap.  The more lightly the Spartan's regarded the lives of the helots, the more the enconomic value of the helot's was actually rising.  The Spartans were slowly and inexcurably killing off the helots faster than the helots could reproduce, and in turn, since the Spartans were a military aristocracy that depended on having the labor of dozens of helots in order to field a single hoplite, the Spartans were slowly cutting thier own throats.  Spartan faced a long term population crash.  In the good years, the helots could produce enough food to keep the health of themselves and the society high enough to replace thier loses at the hands of thier cruel masters.  But in lean years, the city would slowly depopulate.  Sparta massed at the height of its power some 8,000 of the finest infantry the world has ever seen.  By the time of thier first defeat in battle, there where only 1,000.    Sparta went from virtual mastery of Greece, to by the battle of Leuctra being unable to mass enough hoplite's from thier depleted aristocracy to face off against thier enemies.  Faced with extinction, Sparta did its best to knockdown its own suicidal culture (even going so far as to pass laws that made it illegal not to have sex with your wives), but it was too deeply entrenched.  Simply adopting more helots as citizens might have saved them, but even when they promised this reward to helots for thier service in battle, they frequently assassinated them after the battle was won.  Sparta ended up by the Roman era being an empoverished tourist trap where wealthy people would go to gawk at the quaint natives.The lessons in that that could be applied to say the economic system of the Soviet Union, or the present population crash of Western Europe, I leave to the interested reader.Just by way of contrast, feudal Japan was probably the closest you could come to Sparta in culture - for example the tradiation of testing the worthiness of a new sword by beheading the nearest peasant - but managed to avoid the sort of collapse that befall Sparta in part simply because rice is a phenomenally productive crop, Japan is an island with limited agricultural land, and they could just economically afford to hold life abit more cheaply.  Which isn't to say that that sort of life wasn't equally horrible for the peasants.</blockquote>

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