[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> There are many types of history. Herodotus was not writing from any sense of a modern 'academic historical text'.

Sure. So read modern academic historical texts, if you prefer- but don't take your knowledge of history from a blog rant on the internets.

The passages you quote make it clear that the author of the blog posts is commenting on sources commenting on Herodotus. He cites Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, etc, but there's nothing easier than copying citations one hasn't read.

And how can I know that he hasn't read the citations he cites? I can't, but I can know that he's untrustworthy because he makes things up as he sees fit.

For example, there's the case of the Spartiate/Spartan divide. From memory (because that's a long rant and I don't have the patience to read it again) the author is making a distinction between free "Spartiates" and enslaved "Spartans", as if there were two different words with these two different meanings. That is a complete fabrication: the Greek language, both ancient and modern, has one word for "inhabitant of Sparta", "σπαρτιάτης" (female: "σπαρτιάτισσα"). "Spartiate" and "Spartan" are simply different latinisations of the same Greek word, rather than sub-categories of the concept of "inhabitant of Sparta" with slightly different meanings.

At the very least, the author of the blog posts should have made it clear that the distinction between free "Spartiates" and enslaved "Spartans" is his own, but he fails to do so. A reader who doesn't know the Greek language, or the subject of the blog posts, will come away thinking that this is some kind of standard terminology, not something the author made up for his blog posts.

Again, this should give pause. The author straight up made stuff up to put in his blog rant. What else has he made up? Can you say? Can anyone, who takes their knowledge of Sparta and ancient Greece from sources like that blog post, only?

[deathcakes]

To this particular point, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spartiate would seem to suggest (admittedly poorly cited) that there was in fact a distinction made within Spartan society between free and enslaved Spartans.

The only reference it sources is confusingly Xenophon, who you have admonished others for not reading - I confess I haven't myself, so will do some digging!

[YeGoblynQueenne]

A distinction was certainly made between free citizens of Sparta and their slaves! Just to be perfectly clear, I don't disagree with that.

What I point out is that this distinction was not made by using different words that both meant "inhabitant of Sparta", in particular not "Spartiate" and "Spartan". As far as I can tell, the slaves of Sparta were only known as "helots".

The general point is that the ancients didn't think of the slaves living in a city as "citi-z-ens" of that city, probably because they were not actually citizens, in the legal sense, according to the laws of the era. For example, you will find no ancient source, and I believe no modern source either, calling the slaves living in Athens, "Athenians". They were the Athenians' slaves, they lived and worked in Athens, but they were not "Athenians".

This is not completely unlike modern times. For example, I live and work in the UK, but I'm by no means "British" and nobody would refer to me and others like me as "British", simply because we live and work in Britain. Rather, "British" is reserved for, well, citizens of the United Kingdom. The rest of us that have the malfortune to be domiciled on the British Isles are "immigrants" (or "bloody foreigners"), in any case there are different words, with different roots, to describe us.

I'm happy to clarify this further if there is still confusion. I blame the author of the blog posts for the confusion, btw.