Republics and Racism
Ancient Sparta was one of the first republics known to the Western world, but viewed through the lens of contemporary political and moral norms, it was about as far from Utopia as you could get. If the contemporary accounts of fellow Greeks are to be believed, Spartan society embodied what we can only now regard as an unrivaled panoply of dystopian horrors. They practiced infanticide with eugenic aspirations, they rigidly excluded foreigners from their shores, sent their boys to military school at age seven, and exploited a subjugated population of peasant-farmers, known as Helots, through what was probably the most brutal system of slavery in the ancient world. Helot slavery had the rare (at the time) distinction of being institutionalized and hereditary, foreshadowing some of the innovations of American slavery. The "crypteia" was Sparta's crowning depravity. Each autumn, bands of adolescent Spartans-in-training became men by randomly hunting down and murdering Helots b
