[IG_Semmelweiss]

I appreciate your post and i thought it was informative.

That being said i do think you could have made your point more succinctly.

For a while, it seemed like you were arguing semantics vs actually informing the reader.

Your point is valid. I'm not sure how to present it better, but I'd posit:

"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"

[spaced-out]

>"Sparta, the city, was not 80% slaves. That stat only true about the state. This distinction only matters because the author is critizing sparta society on the basis that Sparta's seat of power was slave-cornucopia. But this is false. Sparta the city is mostly spartan citizens, making the author's criticism-by-sleight-of-hand dishonest"

Except, as the author points out, the Spartan system that he's criticizing requires the Spartiates to have a plantation of helots to support them so they can spend all their time training for battle. A man in ancient Sparta could only be a Spartiate if they had a plantation of helots (if they lose their plantation they lose their status as a citizen), so the helots were just as much a part of Spartan society as they were.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thanks and you're right that I could have made my point more concisely. The series of comments I made in this conversation were not my most well-written ever.