Sparta
Article
Sparta is a recurring place in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between March 03, 2023 and January 10, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine”; “This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence”; “This reminded me of Sparta”. It most often appears alongside Assyria, Babylon, China.
Metadata
- Category: Places
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: March 03, 2023
- Last seen: January 10, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Assyria (2 shared issues)
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- Babylon (2 shared issues)
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- China (2 shared issues)
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- Egypt (2 shared issues)
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- Persia (2 shared issues)
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- Rome (2 shared issues)
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- Thebes (2 shared issues)
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- 1700s Great Britain (1 shared issues)
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- Acropolis of Athens (1 shared issues)
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- Against The Grain (1 shared issues)
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- Alexander the Great (1 shared issues)
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- Amazon (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The Acropolis of Athens is 150m above sea level, and would be preserved for future archaeologists. Sparta (200m) and Thebes (250m) would also be fine.
This reminded me of Sparta, which might not be a coincidence. Most of what we know of Spartan society, we know from . . . Xenophon, who in addition to spending time in Persia spent time in Sparta and wrote about them too. Maybe Persian society and Spartan society were similar in ways. Or maybe Xenophon just had a virtuous-military-education fetish that he applied to whatever society he was writing about, sort of like what his colleague Plato did in The Republic.
Xenophon’s Cyrus is constantly giving speeches on the virtues of simple living. He is half-Mede, half-Persian, and alternates between the almost-literally-spartan Persian court and the luxurious Median court; in the latter, he monologues about how all of the Medes’ fancy foods and wines are less satisfying than simple bread well-earned after a day of hard labor. “Hunger is the best relish” is practically his catchphrase.