https://www.m9.news/social-media-viral/viral-microsoft-caste...

Unless the technology is glued together with ad-hoc systems using email, slack, Dropbox, and the like. At least that’s my experience in small businesses.

Then Sparta started believing their propaganda and setting up a huge warrior caste, which sucked up resources for decades without ever really accomplishing anything. Then Philip rocked up and annihilated the whole place, their much-vaunted warrior caste had no chance against the Macedonians.

And fittingly enough, a good description of what Sparta was actually like and the myth of their warrior prowess is the same blog series as the original post: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/16/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...

The problem was that citizenship or social class was based on inheritance and it was essentially a closed system. At a time when infant mortality was so high and being in the military was risky, this meant that the ruling class diminished over time.

The author of this piece touches on how most soldiers had to bring their own gear. That's fair because they're talking about why people fight not how but it's important. So in Rome, you were cavalry if you could bring your own horse. Only the wealthier people could do this. This was a later reform. The very early Roman cavalry were a closed class. We don't know a lot about this other than legends because records were lost, most notably when Rome was sacked by the Gauls in 390 BCE.

Anyway, so "equites" were a higher social class but were a mix. Some of them were patricians (probably descended from the original heavy cavalry that protected the pre-Republic King, allegedly). Also, some patricians weren't equites.

In the early Republic there were 40-45 Patrician families. They held all the political power and offices. By Caesar's time it had dwindled to ~12, so much so that some plebeian families got elevated.

Sparta was what we'd now call an ethno-state requiring a full bloodline for citizenship. AFAIK Sparta never evolved away from that and all such closed societies die, just like the original Roman patrician families.

Rome took a different approach that bears some similarity to "whiteness" in the modern world. Race is an invented social construct (and, in the case of whiteness, was invented to justify slavery). But what has made whiteness resilient is that definition of who is white keeps evolving as necessary to maintain the in-groups.

For example, Ben Franklin didn't consider Germans "white" (famously describing them as "swarthy" [1]). Through different waves, different European ethnic groups became "white". The Irish didn't become "white" in the US until 100-150 years ago. Arabs became "white" in 1915 [2].

I just want to stress how made up this all is. Anyway, back to Rome.

Rome was famous for taking over an ethnic group (usually quite violently) but then making them Roman. Many people on the periphery of the empire aspired to become Roman. We have a term for it: Romanization

[1]: https://medium.com/@cailiansavage1/why-benjamin-franklin-did... (or Latinization). There's historical record of this everywhere from Eastern Europe to Northern Africa ro Britannia. Britannia was a funny one because there are Latin inscriptions describing a very Roman life from people who unsuccessfully rebelled against Rome in the early occupation a century earlier.

So I guess I'm saying is that yes, Sparta atrophied as all purity-based ethnicities always do whereas Rome survived much longer with an expanding concept of "Roman-ness", which isn't too dissimilar from what we recognize as "whiteness" today.

[2]: https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1999

In my country, any political problem real or perceived, and part of the population are already asking for the military to attempt a coup and fix things.

There's a famous quote attributed to the Italian military commander Gian Giacomo Trivulzio in 1499.

When asked by King Louis XII of France what preparations were needed to invade the Duchy of Milan, Trivulzio responded: "To carry out war, three things are necessary: money, money, and yet more money."

> The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle.

"the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status)" and

the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job.

Close enough.

> and that should probably be reason #1

Article goes on to explain that:

it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’

Which makes sense: humanity's history of picking fights with fellow humans goes back much further than the history of money itself. And even where they overlap, there's other reasons for recruits to enter an army.

Much of pre-modern societies were organised around master-servant, slavery, nobility, family clans & related concepts. Free market economies with individuals striving to maximize the amount of gold nuggets in their pouch, is a relatively recent concept.

Does that make him infallible? Of course not. But it does mean I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here.

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...