Which doesn't sound that bad, until you realise that "Helots" were the Spartan slave class. Since it's all foggy, there's no need to include other interesting demi-facts about the Spartans, such as the institutionalised homosexuality in Spartan Phalanx barracks or that they actually had a whole month of an open-hunting season on Helots. Against them, we have Greece (cradle of civilisation) and Sparta (its brave defenders, who defeated millions of Persians with three soldiers and a piece of string). It's harder to get away with this with Rome, because we know too much about them - in Spartan's case, Rome is re-created as the fascist bad-guys (which is exactly what they were). In short, they're a hard-man Tabla Rasa for developers to play with. Which turns the historical records we have on Sparta into the equivalent of basing our knowledge of working class London culture on Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. They admired the Spartans because they thought their own culture a little too soft. In fact, the Athenian historians who did write about them tended to actually be sympathisers with the culture - or, rather, fetishisers. At which point, anyone who did GCSE history will be tutting about bias in the sources. That is, their main political and martial rivals. The only records we have are from other cultures looking in.
And that's about it, with any certainty.īecause the Spartans weren't big readers, so didn't write down anything themselves. well, we know absolutely sod all about them. But the real reason why we're all going crazy over the Spartans is. And obviously, Greece is the founding culture of western society. Obviously, it's been in loads of films and books, so its imagery we're all familiar with. I'll tell you the real reason why people are constantly taking great joy over reprocessing Ancient Greece in videogames, and the Spartans specifically. well, it's looking kinda like a movement. When two take from the same period then apply it to the same genre. Because when one game takes from a period and applies it to a genre, it's a singular thing. With the review out of the way, there's plenty of time for a detour into an examination of the postmodernist re-imagining of ancient Greece in modern videogames (a.k.a.
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