How did the Spartans really train?

in addition to their training, they were gay. very, very, gay. you will protect your lover much more then you will a friend/buddy.

on their wedding night the bride would dress as a man (so as not to shock the groom) and be in a dark room. the groom would be at a party, excuse himself, consummate the marriage, then return to the party.

they practiced pederasty, which is where an older male would adopt a younger male to train in return for "favors".

i bring this up because i see a lot of "manly" men proclaim to be spartans, with molan labe all over the place, mostly homophobes, and i snicker to myself "if they only knew history and not movies".

a reply to: stormson

This is completely out of context to what they did and why. If you don't understand the why I don't really know what to say

originally posted by: Guyfriday
a reply to: stormson

This is completely out of context to what they did and why. If you don't understand the why I don't really know what to say

3rd sentence, 1st paragraph is the why they did it.

a reply to: halfoldman

I would guess they trained over the terrain around them, so if there were rocks, they climbed the rocks as they came to them. Rather than it being a systematic attempt to train rock climbing, it was just a matter of fact part of a distance march for the day.

There were rocks; we had to deal with them to achieve our goals.

Incidentally (to poke every strange ancient custom), the Spartans also probably wore their hair in dreadlocks.

Oh but white people never had dreadlocks, and it's all appropriated because "Caucasian hair" doesn't grow that way ...

Utter nonsense.
All hair grows like that if you leave it:

In Ancient Greece, kouros sculptures from the archaic period depict men wearing dreadlocks[12][13] while Spartan hoplites[14] wore formal locks as part of their battle dress.[15] Spartan magistrates known as Ephors also wore their hair braided in long locks, an Archaic Greek tradition that was steadily abandoned in other Greek kingdoms.[16]

en.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: stormson

That was not why they did this. During that time in history people didn't view sexuality in restrictive ways such as gay or strait. Doing a homosexual act isn't the same as gay. Men were expected to take a wife and produce strong healthy children.

a reply to: Guyfriday

Ja, I was interested more in the fitness aspects.

So, Hannibal the Great was a Phoenician from Carthage, who (and I saw a whole documentary on this) practiced child sacrifice.

And the Mayas did this, and the Maoris did that, and the Africans were so cruel, and the aboriginals, never mind the Aztecs and Incas ...

If biased morality should dictate what we can draw from cultures, then ours is a dead-end.

Not even going to start with the Old Testament, or some of the Shastras.
That is, if we are going to dismiss entire ancient cultures due to modern customs, then none of them have any value.

a reply to: halfoldman
You are starting a new thread now.. Phoenecians, Carthage, and Crete...VERY DIFFERENT STORY

Dont get me wrong..its my favorite topic

a reply to: BlueJacket

No, not my intention to shift the thread, I was just defending the "Spartan thread" in light of posters who went way beyond ancient training to their other habits. That is assuming those allegations were true, because the Victorians were repressed people who reinvented the ancient world to live up to their practices (like the "fagging" system at Eton, and other 19th century British boarding schools).

So what happened to the Spartans?

Apparently they remained a Greek city state well into AD (after Christ).

The Romans conquered them but declared them a "free city".
In fact, the Romans considered Sparta a tourist attraction.


That's actually an amazingly long run, from the ancient to the almost modern world.

They only disappeared when conquered with other parts of Western Rome under the Visigoths.