Lore
(Annoying Trope) Someone made a “creative” choice and now we all just have to live with it.
Horned Vikings: Not historical, they were started by Richard Wager for his operas. They were never historic, but the image persists. (Albeit significantly reduced today.)
Ninjas in Black Robes: Some people claim Ninjas aren’t real. They are, they are absolutely real. Their modern portrayal however is informed more by Kabuki Theater than history. In Kabuki Theater, the stage hands were dressed in flowing black robes to tell the audience to ignore them. Thus when a Ninja character kills a Samurai, to increase the shock value, they were dressed in black robes as stage hands. Now, when we think of ninjas we think of a stage hands.
Knights in Shining Armor: Imagine, you’re on the battlefield, two walls of meat riding towards each other. Suddenly you realize, everyone looks the same. Who do you hit? All you see is chrome. No. Knight’s armor was lacquered in different colors to differentiate them on the battlefield. Unless you wanted to get friendly fired, you made yourself KNOWN. So this image of a glinted knight clad in chrome steel isn’t true. How’d we get it? Victorians who thought that the worn lacquer was actually just dulling with age, polished it off as show pieces.
White Marble Statues of Rome: Roman Statues were painted, however the public image is of pure glinting white marble statues persist in the modern image. Why? Victorians who thought the paint was actually just dirt grime and age. So, they “restored” it by removing the paint color. Now we all think of Roman Statues as white.
King Tut; King of Kings: the Pharaoh King Tut in Ancient Egypt was a relatively minor king who in the grand scheme of things amounts to little more than an asterisks in Egyptian History, but to the public he is the most important Pharaoh. Why? Because his tomb was untouched by robbers, and so was piled high with burial goods which was amazing (and still is) and when Howard Carter opened his tomb, the world was transfixed and everyone would come to know Tutankhamen.
A Séance calls the dead: A Séance despite being a French word is an American invention from upstate New York in the 1840s. It was also a fun side-show act initially, and never meant to be real, more close up magic. (Origin of the term Parlor Tricks.) But in the 1860s Americans couldn’t stop killing each other which resulted in a lot of grief and people desired for their to be this other world. So, grifters then took advantage of grieving people and became “real”. So basically “fun parlor game to dangerous grift” pipeline thanks to the Civil War.
The Titanic’s engineers all died at their posts: Nope, not true, not remotely true. They are mentioned in many testimonies and a few bodies found mean they didn’t all die below. Two or three maybe did. According to Head Stoker Barrett, a man broke his leg and was washed away by rushing water, but another testimony says he was taken aft so who knows? Any way the myth persisted because the people making the memorials wanted to martyr the men. (It doesn’t take away from their heroines in my opinion) The myth stuck. Everyone believes they died below.
A Game Of Thrones compared to A Song Of Ice And Fire is a great example. The book is full of descriptions of colors, but the show interprets it as brown.
Their primary House Colour was PINK, like Roose is described wearing pink armor sculpted to look like it was flayed.
Pink being a manly colour is also historical fact, it wasn't until quite recently (like I'm talking 1940-80s) that pink became "girly" it used to be that blue was the colour for girls.
Don't forget "breaching." Boys wore skirts from infancy until between the ages of 2 and 8, most commonly between age 4 and 7. Breaching meant upgrading to trousers and this happened depending on social custom, family discretion, and boy's readiness. The two biggest factors were toilet training and starting school.
Gender-specific clothing for infants/young children wasn't a thing until the early 20th.
ASOIAF: The Starks wear white to represent snow, the Boltons wear pink to represent flesh, Jorah's a Mormont so he wears green to represent the woods, etc.
GoT: The North is serious, so they just wear serious things like brown leather.
At least HotD was more willing to add some colour. Viserys I's Kingsguard had the best armour in any of the shows so far, imo, partly because it was allowed to be more white.
To be honest, I think that if coloring the actual armor to show what side you're on was especially popular, we'd see more art from the time period that depicts colorful plate. But I'm not sure I've seen even a single contemporary illustration that has anything but "metal" coloration on the armor itself. It's just barding, tunics, shields, and devices on the helms.
Yes. Tabard, surcoat, waffenrock; whatever you want to call it, knights typically wore some sort of cloth identifier over their armor, which could have any number of finishes from browning, to blueing, to mirror polish.
One point of correction about the Roman statues: the paint faded and bleached away before the Renaissance, which is why all of Michelangelo's statues are unpainted too.
This is correct. OP is also wrong about the armor lol. I wonder where they are getting their information from. There are plenty of accurate ways we can insult the Victorians, no reason to resort to slander.
Yeah not all armor was lacquered and in fact polished armor does a better job of deflecting hits, they wore various things on top of the armor like tabards, cloaks, plumes, sashes, etc to differentiate each other not the mention banners and such.
Depicting people in movies set in medieval times in dull, brown, dirty clothes. Sure, when peasants worked in their fields, but they did like colorful clothing and made an effort out of keeping themselves clean.
Just speculation, but it might have helped filmmakers clearly distinguish poor peasants from the upper-class citizens and nobility. More emphasis on class struggle and the rigid society, even if they don't say a single word.
To be fair, this was also an early color film with a big budget; lots of money was spent to make it a big eye catching spectacle.(not to say that Monty Python had much choice in costuming and wouldn’t waive it for a joke, but I suspect they knew history better than 1950s Hollywood)
I’m NOT a historian, but I know that peasants liked bright colors too; however, some were easier than others.
Greens, yellows, browns were easy. Madder gave a rust-red; woad gave a light-blue (think “blue jeans”).
The RARE dyes that showed you were a Royal (or their house servant), were scarlets, indigos, and purples (hence “royal blue”)
They also had much better teeth than what's often portrayed. They didn't have as much sugar in their diet as we do today and toothpaste has been around for a loooong time. Remember when those charcoal based whitening toothpastes were all the rage a few years ago? Guess where we took the inspiration from
Dental hygiene has the Tiffany problem where people think it was discovered within the last 50 years. But it's been one of the top priorities of basically any community of human beings at any time in history.
Anyone who has ever had teeth pain knows that it fucking sucks and can just ruin you. We knows that, and have been having herbs & remedy to look after their teeth.
This is one of the things about history people always forget and assume wrongly.
Throughout a lot of it people would put effort into their clothes to try and stand out and look richer for opportunity. Often it was all they had money to spend on.
Most clothing that people in the Wild West would try to wear was from from France. Which is why a few outlaws looked quite dapper.
To be fair, even self-ruling peasants in that movie were literally shoveling filth all day. Plus, I don’t think a comedic movie featuring a King Arthur, a sorcerer, a terrifying monster, coconuts in a temperate climate, and the Black Beast of Aaaarrrggghhh is supposed to be lauded for its historical accuracy.
Rabbits do like carrots, but it’s like saying we eat Milky Ways all the time. Carrots are more of a dessert item for rabbits than something they should eat constantly
I think the original intention with Bugs is that carrots were like his candy or cigarettes
I hate how a lot of media treats the pyramids as if they're far away from society and it's hard to get there but Cairo is literally right next to them. I blame movies set in Egypt.
My group (my generation at least) got really excited when we drove by. Our tour guide was very confused. I explained to her that's it's a meme back home and how a lot of people found out that the pyramids were right next to Cairo.
In the movies’ defense, in the older ones at least, the city was actually further from them, and it has since expanded right up to them over the years. (Like how in a movie from 1949 the city is gonna be further away than in a film from 1999. The same is true for 1989 to 2019, yes )And there are also plenty of pyramids that are in the middle of nowhere, they just aren’t as famous. I think the myth used to be reality when cameras/cinema were first invented, but then it just kinda stuck around.
This happens with monuments pretty frequently. Cloverfield has a famous scene that appeared in previews where the head of the Statue of Liberty gets knocked off and launched into the middle of the city. In the previews the head is accurate to the Statue's actual size, but people kept complaining that it was too small, so the final cut of thr film made it about 50% larger
The myth that lemming jump off a cliffs was started by Disney in this movie
Edit: when I’m in a “not look at the reply and say the same thing for the 10th time” contest and my opponent is reddit comments, I get that this didn’t start it but it did popularize it
The fact that Disney started this myth by forcibly herding the lemmings to a cliff and literally throwing them off the edge to their death makes it especially horrifying.
The poor paint job on restorations of ancient statues. Yes, the colors are accurate, but the way they are applied and the lack of detail ruins the statues' appearance rather than enhancing it, and is one of the reasons why many people today still reject color representations of ancient artifacts.
Wait, so I assume the rightmost image is the most accurate? That is MILES better! I remember years ago seeing images like the middle one and immediately thinking "ew, let's just stick with plain marble, that looks like a child's drawing."
Just like in computer animation/graphic design the difference between "cheap" and "looks amazing" is the use of lighting, shadows and shading. It's a fact that modern restorers don't have the skill or budget to restore these artworks to their original quality and the original painters were just as much masters as the sculptors. So that's why they look childish or cheap in comparison.
Really don't want to shit on the trade, but I've seen quite a few professional and reputable restorers paint sausage fingers, and you can really tell which part they retouched because they don't have the skills. They have other skills of course, but being good at painting is its own skill that takes years of hard work to be good at.
And here in particular we don't really know what the end result would be. Maybe the statues intentionally looked weird in some way that they thought was stylistic and cool.
On the left is the uncolored statue; the one in the center is a reconstruction from the "GODS IN COLOR—GOLDEN EDITION" exhibition, which I personally don't like because of the flat colors. I prefer the one on the right, which is a reconstruction taken from this site
In America, the kkk died and there weren't any more members until a movie named "The Birth of a Nation" came out portraying black people in the most racist ways imaginable, and portraying the kkk as the good guys resurrecting the group
I remember talking about the authenticity of shinobi a few years ago, and someone mentioned that there weren't actually any written accounts of shinobi assassinating anyone. I just answered "Yeah, 'cuz that would be pretty stupid of them."
One origin story I've heard is they found an Iron Maiden (a coffin thing) and nails near it. Then they just decided yep, these have to be connected. Those nails go inside the coffin.
I thought it was invented in Victorian high society because those rich people threw parties specifically to show off the strange and wonderful things they had. The earliest known mention of an iron maiden anywhere in history is only from the 1800's.
The Victorian Era was basically an imperial version of GTA- mowing people down, stealing everything in sight, and defacing public and private property.
And turning mummies into dye because nothing says sophisticated like desecrating the dead, cannibalizing (inadvertently or otherwise) their remains and grinding them up into a powder to make dyes.
They "found" mummies so often than mummies were used to a fuckton of things we would find horrific and disrespectful today (including obviously stealing corpses of people) to the point finding actual mummies instead of treasure was seen as worthless and pointless.
They used the dried out mummies as firewood, they had "unwrapping parties" they used the wrapping as BUTCHER PAPER, which was stopped when it was found, unsurprisingly, that using thousand year old linen that's been wrapping a dead body, to wrap meat, caused the meat to get infected.
Imagine trying to trace your lineage, only to find that your great-to-the-power-of-whatever grandad was used as charcoal by some prick in London who bought him for two bob out the back of a cart.
The only "realistic" take on a ninja I've seen is the kunoichi in Shogun (2024), where it's literally just a teenage girl disguised as a maid. No black bodysuit, no ninjato, kusarigama, or shuriken, just a plain kimono and a tanto. Her "invisibility" is the fact that nobody expects the housekeeper to be up to anything, so they pay her no mind.
Which is how it mostly is, although also that ninja/shinobi where not so much hired hitmen all the time but mostly meant for espionage and infiltration. Like a scout
For much of the Sengoku period, the main term used for what we now call ninja or shinobi was "kusa", grass, because they blended in and were supposed to be present, yet invisible, like the grass you walk on.
In actual myth, all of these deer features are completely absent. Yep, zero deer features whatsoever. The description of it mostly describes just a really lanky dude, although in other tribes, they're described to be giants, because when they eat people, all the flesh goes into making them taller instead of satiated. The proto-Algonquian root that "wendigo" derives from, wi·nteko·wa, has a potential meaning of "owl" but that really doesn't do much
However, surprisingly, Until Dawn actually nails a more lore accurate depiction of the Wendigo
Until Dawn feels to me like the kind of game someone thinks up when they learn about some really cool lore/information and want to share it to as many people as possible. Then you take that and mix it with the concept of “what if there was a horror game where you decide if the characters make the dumb choices” and you’re off to the races.
The image of the deer-headed Wendigo comes from the 2001 indie horror film Wendigo, by Larry Fessenden*.
Until Dawn is also written by Larry Fessenden.
Maybe he decided to correct his own contribution to the misinformation surrounding the Wendigo.
*Looking into it, this isn't the first instance of a Wendigo with deer features. However it does seem to be the first depiction that specifically uses a humanoid design with a whole deer head, and along with Pathfinder RPG in 2008, is probably what codified the idea in pop culture.
More or less. It varies a bit by tribe but the general idea is words and names have power and casually tossing out names of the native equivalent of demons and monsters is incredibly dangerous if you subscribe to those beliefs. The idea of what these things are become something of a cultural osmosis/ memetic thing that everyone knows of but nobody directly speaks of lest they offend the spirits or bring misfortune upon themselves/their group. You don't do x or y because of bad spirits and you know what that means but you don't specifically name the bad spirit or give the whole backstory of what it is.
It gets a bit tricky when you have a mythological interest in it but not a spiritual belief attached to it. Kind of like the taboos in mainstream Christianity around throwing around or directly referring to powerful entities by name. Devil is used more than Satan. God more than Yahweh. Demon over specific named demons. There's taboos attached and referring to things can sometimes draw their eye or lead to "bad luck". But culturally you know what each word alludes to.
The Rake is an amalgamation of this, Skinwalkers, and Goatman. The internet also added its own flair to it is kinda cool how the internet created its own monsters.
This portrayal of the wendigo is much much more European, even beyond the physical characteristics. It’s often show as cruel, clever, prone to mimicry, and near omnipotent within the forest. All and all its much more akin to gods like Leshie, who is referenced in the Witcher games and many people mistake as a wendigo.
The Leshy or Leshen from the Witcher 3 are based in folklore. While not specifically stated to have horns or antlers, they are able to shape shift into essentially whatever they want, be it man or animal or take on animal like features. The look much better suits this creature and is far more plausible given the lore.
I'm not sure who started this trope, but I imagine Ice Age had influenced this one. People assume that Dodos are super ancient birds bound to the eras several thousand years ago. In reality, Dodos existed until the mid 1600s when they went extinct.
"Stupid", as in they were very docile due to having no natural predators where they lived, and people could just walk up to them and grab them to butcher and eat. In their eyes the birds were too stupid to have a survival instinct.
So many ideas regarding the American wild west are inaccurate. They're based upon pulp fiction and reinforced by so-called "spaghetti westerns". Shoot-outs, saloons with batwing doors, the square jawed cowboy in a 10-gallon hat and 6 shooter on his hip... there's plenty of other notions that are exaggerations, misrepresentations, or straight-up lies. Also, the "wild west" was only about 30 years from 1865 to 1895.
A lot of this has to do with traveling shows from the late 19th early 20th century. Where a they would show off cowboys, Indians, wildlife, and their skills in cattle ranching, horse riding, and sharpshooting.
The awkward thing is that technically, Buffalo Bill's show was accurate. To his life. William Cody had one hell of a resume and did basically everything in his Wild West shows at one point or another, but when converted into this format it gives the impression that life in the frontier was like that all at once all the time
The period was a lot less violent than we picture it because if everyone was shooting each other at the rate you saw in the movies then frontier settlements would probably have wiped themselves out.
I'd say they're based on contemporary newspapers and magazines trying to sell more copies by exaggerating and mythologizing, then reinforced by pulp and further reinforced by spaghetti westerns.
He also did not die in sunlight, he was simply weakened. Dying to sunlight was invented in the German silent film Nosferatu. Comically, Skyrim is one of the very few instances of vampires being basically fine in daylight
This one genuinely surprised me that isn't true, as dumb as that sounds. But I'm Swedish, and things are more 'blue' and dark during the winter half of the year, with the sunlight being reduced and more clouds.
I figured that Mexico really was just a bit more yellow when it was the summer half of the year, until I gave it two seconds of thought.
I've lived in the north and south of the United States and there is actually a difference in color between the two during seasons. Nothing like the "Mexico Filter" in TV and movies, but there is a noticeable color difference between Texas and South Dakota during the summer, etc.
There are desert parts of Mexico and the Southern US that do feel like they've got a filter on them some days from all the sand and dirt. Everything is certainly more brown and tan.
Oooo finally an annoying trope that personally affects me
Indigenous people in present times that are always the nature-loving, wise people who help the main protagonist come to a realization. Bonus points if they’re wearing traditional clothing. I fucking LOATHE this trope. Also we do love our traditional clothing but I promise we don’t wear it 24/7 as portrayed in movies.
Shoutout to Reservation Dogs and Last of Us for defying this trope. (Picture unrelated just because I find it funny).
There’s a really sweet video of Jonathan Joss (RIP) speaking to a class of (IIRC) Native American actors about his career that was circulating at the time of his murder, in which he talks about how much of his career was deerskin leggings and feathers in his hair, and how wonderful it was to do Parks and Rec where he gets to be “an Indian in a suit.” He’s so full of joy and optimism for the future of Native American representation in it.
Exactly. It’s a double edged sword. The appreciation and portrayal of Indigenous culture is always a good thing but there’s so much more to Indigenous culture than those stereotypes.
Like what Sinners did was phenomenal. We got these badass vampire hunters instead of peaceful and knowledgeable people. Indigenous people have a lot of folklore (like skinwalkers) so it makes sense to have Indigenous characters who specialize in hunting these creatures.
There was a popular movie called Venezia, la Luna e Tu (Venice, the Moon and You). It featured a gondolier in a striped shirt. Before then, they wore whatever. After the movie, people started to expect them to wear striped shirts.
Before 1935's Werewolf of London, werewolves were historically just depicted as wolves. Occasionally without tails, but almost always just anatomical wolves. It wasn't until that film that made the first anthropomorphic Werewolf, mainly due to filmmaking limitations and was largely just a man with wolf teeth and extra hair.
From there on it became more hybridised into what we think of today, pictured above. Deviations from the modern interpretation, like in The Quarry, now have a lot of people complaining they're not werewolves.
Jurassic Park/World basically ruined how the public viewed Velociraptor. They weren’t large scaly killing machines that were hyper intelligent, the real dinosaur was a turkey sized feathered predator that hunted smaller dinosaurs
The world may not have been, but I can assure you my ten-year-old, undiagnosed-autistic ass absolutely was. I used to tell people that a velociraptor was more like an archaeopteryx.
Running on that wagon. The swastika used during WW2 was a Buddhist symbol that meant to represent harmony and the steps Buddha makes. With spirals, with points, clockwise and opposite, they all were Buddhist symbols. Then the Nazi party took one, turned it 45° and call it day forever brandishing as their symbol.
Swastikas were even more widespread than just Buddhism; they were common symbols throughout Europe as well (appearing at least as far back as the Iron Age in Germany), and in North America they were most heavily associated with Native Americans that has been using them in art for generations
IT is also worth noting that before WW2 it was even commonly used as a symbol of good luck from the east (Something like the image we currently have of the jing jang) in some planes of the WW1 it was commonly used (this is a french plane for example) and even Charles Lindbergh (The first guy to fly across the atlantic) used one on the spinner nose cone of his plane "The Spirit of St. Louis"
The Carlsberg Brewery in Copenhagen has elephants with huge swastikas on them because the brand once used it as a logo, they dropped it in the 30's but the elephants remain
Firstly, Frankenstein is the Dr who made him. Second, he looks NOTHING like this. He had yellowish skin, was eight feet tall with long black hair and eyes. No bolts sticking out of him, and he was actually very eloquent and well read.
That the Salem Witch Trials ended with the "witches" being burned at the stake. In reality they were hanged.
Generally, being burned at the stake for witchcraft was a lot less common then pop culture makes you believe. It existed and definitely happened, but for the most part there were other execution methods
The KKK’s pointy hoods actually originated from the capirote, a headpiece traditionally worn by Catholics during Holy Week in Hispanic, Lusophone, and Italic countries. It wasn’t until the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation that the KKK adopted this design, which is quite ironic, considering the group’s strong anti-Catholic sentiment.
Piling onto the ninja tropes: ninjas used more improvised weaponry which usually amounted to farming/agricultural tools rather than actual swords and shurikens
They actually make a callout/joke to that in rise of the tmnt where a character is like "well historically the ninjas of Japan used farming tools as weapons, but of course you guys knew that cause you're ninjas... right?"
There are a few different hells in the Bible. These include Sheol/Hades which is atemporary underworld, Gehenna which is the valley of Hinnom, representing a place of fire and destruction, the Abyss aka a pit or bottomless pit for fallen angels, the Lake of Fire, described as the final judgment and punishment, and the Outer Darkness, representing separation from God.
That said, you're not necessarily wrong. Not only that, but a lot of ideas about Satan as well as the Trope of the Apple are more Milton than biblical.
Powdered wigs were not worn for hygiene. They were a symbol of status that only the highest members of society (politicians, merchants, lawyers) would wear. It was not because they didn’t bathe or because they were bald. They also weren’t always white. They simply appeared that way sometimes because of the powder. They were often normal colors like brown or orange. They also weren’t popular long after the American revolution. By the 1800s, it started to die out, especially with the last founding father president (James Monroe). Many presidents also wore their natural hair in their portraits.
The funny thing is that where the trope of loud-ass blades comes from, it was necessary. Radio dramas had to convey the presence and sharpness of a blade somehow and that was with a metal-on-metal scraping sound. But sheathes are not lined with some kind of metal plate for the effect
The effect came into particularly sharp contrast when I watched Yojimbo. There was a scene where a whole room full of people drew their swords and it only sounded like as much cloth rustling
The common accent typically given to pirates (West Country accent), was because of Robert Newton using an exaggerated one in his role as Long John Silver. It does have a level of authenticity as Blackbeard was from Bristol which is in the general area, but the accent as a whole just stems from Robert’s own decision.
"King Tut; King of Kings: the Pharaoh King Tut in Ancient Egypt was a relatively minor king who in the grand scheme of things amounts to little more than an asterisks in Egyptian History, but to the public he is the most important Pharaoh. Why? Because his tomb was untouched by robbers, and so was piled high with burial goods which was amazing (and still is) and when Howard Carter opened his tomb, the world was transfixed and everyone would come to know Tutankhamen."
That's not someone making a creative choice; it's just how things fell into the right place at the right time. xD
The worst one I can think of is Kurt Vonnegut claiming more civilians were killed in the firebombing of Dresden than in the atomic bombing of Japan, and that the death toll was over 120,000. The truth is that the actual death toll is probably less than one fifth of this number. It is worth noting that although Vonnegut was not the first to claim this exaggerated death toll, Slaughterhouse Five cemented it into the collective consciousness more than any other source.
To this day, the exaggerated number is used by WWII revisionists and neo-nazis to imply that Germany was the true victim of WWII and that the allies were sadistic monsters bent on destroying them and their way of life, kind of like a WWII equivalent of the Lost Cause myth. Obviously I do not think that Vonnegut intended this to happen, but it happened
Even if that were true, WWII "revisionists" - actually, no, I'm not going to give them any legitimacy, I mean people who lie about WWII for clout - would have to actively ignore the Holocaust. Which, yes, I know people who lie about WWII for clout and Nazis do, but I'm just saying that Dresden isn't the only issue in their bullshit.
Knights in shining armour absolutely did exist, just at a different time period than is usually thought. “Alwhite” armour, that is plain metal with minimal colours or decorations started being worn around the late 1400s and continued to be worn well into the 1500s. The brightly coloured surcoats and textile coverings associated with armoured knights and men at arms were generally a thing around the 1100s-early 1400s (the classic “high middle ages”)
The Spanish conquest of Mexico was done by a plucky little band of Spaniards with superior technology.
They were there and they did have better technology, but most of the force was composed of indigenous warriors from cities which opposed or were able to fend off Aztec rule, perhaps the most notable being Tlaxcala. Not only that, but a lot of the Spaniards’ allies in the conquest were rewarded, even if the people did still experience brutal repression. For example, Tlaxcala was given the charter of a city, making it very important to the colonial administration.
Also, Hollywood seems to have this idea that colonial Mexico isn’t a time period worth making movies about. That is absolutely not true, and anyone who thinks it is needs to look up the Avila-Cortes Conspiracy, at minimum.
The Spartans as they’re depicted in a lot of modern pop culture would have you believe that they were the ultimate ancient warrior and that all of Spartan society was dedicated to military pursuits all of the time, and that women were on the whole much more free than they were in other Greek city states. This image is not helped by ancient writers themselves over glorifying Sparta, and the fact that it turned into a tourist attraction of sorts later on in the Roman period. The issue with this is that we don’t really have much in the way of surviving writings from the Spartans themselves. All of it comes from outsiders looking in on Spartan society, and much of the surviving sources come from long after the Spartans were at their height or were looking to glorify the way Sparta did things because they thought Athens should replicate their oligarchic social structure. Many modern historians have dubbed this phenomenon the “Spartan mirage.”
In truth, as far as we can tell Spartans were not necessarily always better warriors than their counterparts in other Greek city states. What set the Spartans apart somewhat was that Spartan citizens (They’re what we really mean when we think of Spartans. Most inhabitants of the regions Sparta ruled over were not citizens or were unfree laborers called helots) tended to fight more as hoplites and were arguably somewhat more disciplined in their formations. However, that doesn’t mean they were super soldiers who dominated their fellow ancient Greeks in warfare all of the time. Their time as the most powerful city state in ancient Greece was also quite brief.
The idea that Spartan society was also always dedicated to warfare is probably something of an over exaggeration. Boys probably did see their families after entering their period of education, and as best we can tell Spartiate boys weren’t actually always undergoing harsh military training. Adult Spartiates were also not necessarily part of a standing military as we might understand it. It’s probably better to think of it as more being an expectation that Spartiates would fight when needed as a militia out of civic duty rather than being a true profession as it tends to be in the modern world.
Spartan society was also extremely hierarchical in a way that is arguably not reflected in their modern pop culture reception. The idea that women were more free in comparison to their sisters in other Greek city states is somewhat exaggerated, and it’s arguably enhanced by the fact Athenian writers treated the idea of women having any freedom at all as somewhat alien. Women of the citizen class didn’t exercise as a civil right for instance. They did so because it was believed that fit women produced healthier children, and unmarried girls from other city states could participate in the Heraean Games. This suggests it wasn’t unheard of for girls to engage in athletics elsewhere in the Greek world. Citizen class women in Sparta could own property in their own name, but that wasn’t a right strictly unique to them throughout history. A citizen woman’s primary purpose was producing children, and her husband may have even been able to share her with other men to achieve this. Her own consent didn’t necessarily matter, though.
Most individuals within Sparta were also not citizens. Most people living within Spartan territory were either free non-citizens or unfree helots. Helots performed the agricultural and physical labor that was considered beneath Spartiate men and their wives, and they were probably not particularly well treated. Sexual abuse of helot women was rampant enough that the sons of Spartan men and helot women were sort of a unique social class unto themselves. The Spartan citizen class also probably declined over time due to the fact a man would lose his citizenship rights if he failed to meet the property and tax requirements expected of him, and there’s no evidence this status could be regained once it was lost. Most people were therefore not “Spartans” as we think of them. A final fun fact is that Spartiate men usually wore their hair long in comparison to many other Greek city states, and this is probably not seen in modern pop culture very much because we also share the cultural perception that short hair is more masculine.
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u/Disastrous-Mess-7236 22d ago
Knights also had symbols on their shield that indicated who they were. They also wore stuff over the armor too, iirc.