Aristotle expounded on the fall of Sparta at the hands of their women. It’s brisk reading and, to CH readers, offers familiar theories about the sexes. The ancients knew more about the nature of women than do our modern, plugged in Wiki warriors with the world’s PC knowledge at their fingertips.
Again, the license of the Lacedaemonian women defeats the intention of the Spartan constitution, and is adverse to the happiness of the state. For, a husband and wife being each a part of every family, the state may be considered as about equally divided into men and women; and, therefore, in those states in which the condition of the women is bad, half the city may be regarded as having no laws. And this is what has actually happened at Sparta; the legislator wanted to make the whole state hardy and temperate, and he has carried out his intention in the case of the men, but he has neglected the women, who live in every sort of intemperance and luxury. The consequence is that in such a state wealth is too highly valued, especially if the citizen fall under the dominion of their wives, after the manner of most warlike races, except the Celts and a few others who openly approve of male loves. The old mythologer would seem to have been right in uniting Ares and Aphrodite, for all warlike races are prone to the love either of men or of women. This was exemplified among the Spartans in the days of their greatness; many things were managed by their women. But what difference does it make whether women rule, or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same. Even in regard to courage, which is of no use in daily life, and is needed only in war, the influence of the Lacedaemonian women has been most mischievous. The evil showed itself in the Theban invasion, when, unlike the women other cities, they were utterly useless and caused more confusion than the enemy. This license of the Lacedaemonian women existed from the earliest times, and was only what might be expected. For, during the wars of the Lacedaemonians, first against the Argives, and afterwards against the Arcadians and Messenians, the men were long away from home, and, on the return of peace, they gave themselves into the legislator’s hand, already prepared by the discipline of a soldier’s life (in which there are many elements of virtue), to receive his enactments. But, when Lycurgus, as tradition says, wanted to bring the women under his laws, they resisted, and he gave up the attempt. These then are the causes of what then happened, and this defect in the constitution is clearly to be attributed to them. We are not, however, considering what is or is not to be excused, but what is right or wrong, and the disorder of the women, as I have already said, not only gives an air of indecorum to the constitution considered in itself, but tends in a measure to foster avarice.
The mention of avarice naturally suggests a criticism on the inequality of property. While some of the Spartan citizen have quite small properties, others have very large ones; hence the land has passed into the hands of a few. And this is due also to faulty laws; for, although the legislator rightly holds up to shame the sale or purchase of an inheritance, he allows anybody who likes to give or bequeath it. Yet both practices lead to the same result. And nearly two-fifths of the whole country are held by women; this is owing to the number of heiresses and to the large dowries which are customary. It would surely have been better to have given no dowries at all, or, if any, but small or moderate ones. As the law now stands, a man may bestow his heiress on any one whom he pleases, and, if he die intestate, the privilege of giving her away descends to his heir. Hence, although the country is able to maintain 1500 cavalry and 30,000 hoplites, the whole number of Spartan citizens fell below 1000. The result proves the faulty nature of their laws respecting property; for the city sank under a single defeat; the want of men was their ruin.
Translated into New Shivvian:
“Hordes of pampered, ballcutting, materialistic, meddling, careerist, status whoring, slutty Spartan women riding the cock carousel and riding their hapless hounded hubbies, became self-sufficient property owners and heiresses of a few very wealthy aggrandizing men, thereby robbing Sparta’s beta males of the opportunity to establish affordable families of their own, leaving the city down the road with too few men to defend itself against invaders who themselves didn’t give a shit what proto-feminist Spartan women thought.”
CH is fond of recapitulating the axiom that women are perishable and men are expendable, and this is true in the whole and assessed over discrete blocks of time. But perturbations in the male population caused by long term fluxes in the expendability side of the equation will lead, as observed and noted by Aristotle, (a thinker so great you could jam the writings and wailings of all of history’s leading feminists and mangina suck-ups into a single fold of his cerebellum and it would scarcely amount to more than a fleeting musing in his daily mental output), to the ruin of a nation.
Biologically, men are indeed the expendable sex. A population group (i.e., a nation in the old timey sense of the word) can withstand short term shocks to its total number of men; it doesn’t take but one man to munch a few celery stalks and pop a few zinc tablets and carry on in his duty to impregnate an army of patriotic women and repopulate the countryside.
But given enough male expendability over time, and the first order axiom of fundamental sex difference starts to break down. For although a single man can, conceivably, star in a version of Boogie Years and spread his seed to the four corners of the country to rebuild a stricken population, that single man is also critically vulnerable to overrun by hungry barbarians who get word of a land where they can dine on honeydew and drink the milk of paradise for the low low price of one man’s scalp.
Feminists, equalists, open borders nutjobs, and assorted degenerate misfits ought to keep in mind that their beloved “progress” comes prepackaged with the seed of their destruction. CH (and Aristotle) will slap on the warning label; now it’s up to them to heed it.
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