Could a modern special forces operator beat a spartan hoplite in a knife fight? Modern operator has an advantage in nutrition and workouts religiously while the hoplite lives his usual lifestyle (still probably does around 8 hours of physical work daily at a minimum from a very young age)
Trick question, they both die.
FPBP. A knife fight between two tough determined guys will just end with two dead bodies.
works out*
The hoplite has a lot more experience with hand to hand combat, is more likely to have killed with his hands before, and if Spartan (as pictured) he also works out and trains as a full time job since he was a little boy. So on balance, the hoplite.
>Could a modern special forces operator beat a spartan hoplite in a knife fight?
1 vs 1 is a gamble, but in larger groups, like 100 vs 100, I am sure the hoplites would gain the upper hand and win clearly more often just because thats the way they fight
>Could a modern special forces operator beat a spartan hoplite in a knife fight?
No. A modern special forces operator does not have anywhere near the same amount of training with melee weapons as an actual soldier specifically trained to use melee weapons to kill literally since he was a boy.
All your "advantage in nutrition and religiously working out" simply means that the spartan has a larger target to stick his knife in.
Did spartans train with knives specifically though or just spear/sword/shield
Greeks name their units by the shield they use, not weapon, Hoplon is the round one visible in OP pic
The shield is called an aspis, hoplon is more like "panoply," the full set of equipment.
Do you think it makes one bit of difference if the spartan has been training with a 5 inch blade or 12 inch blade?
I'd imagine the technique would be different yeah
knife fight is low-skill ceiling so the modern operator could easily get lucky.
I'd be more interested in seeing a fight where both of them are equipped with spears.
I mean I'd imagine the guy training to fight with a spear for 18 or so years would beat the guy that never trained to fight with a spear, knife fighting is a bit closer than that
even if the Hoplites train the modern special forces themselves in proper use of the weapon they're gonna get still trashed because the fighting itself will still be entirely different from what the modern guys are used to
Nobody today is even entirely sure how the hoplites fought -- whether spears were thrust overhand or underhand. Among historians, there is ongoing controversy over the way the hoplite actually used his weapons and shield.
So, yeah, the modern guys would get trashed.
more exciting than a roided up gay bumrushing the hoplite for a 50-50 chance of winning
Dont mind the speargay, they literally cannot help themselves butting into other threads because they've never once been able to have an interesting or long lasting thread of their own, while Swordchads have fun threads that hit bump limit regularly.
>I'd be more interested in seeing a fight where both of them are equipped with spears.
>a soldier who has trained his entire life with the spear
>vs
>a guy who has probably never even touched a spear before
Truly an exciting match up.
im gay
I'm pretty sure Spartans did minimal physical labor and instead enjoyed their time doing recreational activities. Wasn't farming and other such tasks reserved for the Perelokoi and Helots? I'm not well versed in the Greekoids.
by "recreational activities" they mean throwing sticks really far and lifting heavy rocks, poetry too but mostly physical stuff, especially for younger men
All special forces forces does is babysit Africans. The hoplite would handily win
>What is more beneficial for winning a melee fight, having been trained in melee fighting full time since birth and having participated and won several melee fights or having access to protein shakes and an elliptical machine?
IDK, it's a mystery.
If you scale it up it becomes more obvious. I think if you transported 30,000 modern soldiers back to antiquity and made them square off in one of Auerlian's campaigns the army would collapse before seeing battle. No one is prepared for having to walk from northern France to Syria in the elements, living off nothing but bread and forage, or drinking untreated water. They'd die in droves, which ancient armies also did, but they wouldn't be prepared for it.
my only objection is this: why the frick would you assume the modern day soldier has a nutritional advantage? Assuming that year wasn't an off chance famine, which didn't happen a lot in greece, that hoplite will have been eating absolutely everything, organically grown, no plastics or other bullshit to satiety every day. Freshly slaughtered pig and ox erry frickin day, all the proteins you need (including the ones swallowed from Thephaistions wiener last night). The only difference would be the supplements or whatever a modern person could use, but i'm very doubtful they actually do anything (roids excluded). How... ignorant are you?
Meat every single meal is very much modern thing, but also completely irrelevant to fitness as ancient and medieval people got plenty of protein even if they did eat meat more sparingly.
you are right, let's say goat cheese, but that chart does not compensate for population growth. You're still right about the amount of meat. I just wanted to give OP food for thought about nutrition back then compared to now. No processed shit whatsoever.
The modern soldier has the benefit of modern nutritional information to eat the proper foods in the proper quantities to be optimal in whatever way needed. I’m not saying Spartans would have been specifically malnourished, but being full doesn’t mean you are healthy. You could be full every day eating nothing but white rice, that’s going to be leagues different from someone fed on a more balanced diet.
>modern nutritional information
lmaooooooo
Yo the average American is prediabetic and overweight. A huge fraction are obese. Most SOF are skinnyfats or roiders with bloat and purple skin.
Apart from knowledge on vitamins and minerals, to prevent acute disease, modern nutritional information is objectively worse to what they had back then.
Spartans were nutters, by any definition. A knife fight means grappling distance. I'm putting a lot more money on the guy whose training has comprised of wrestling a lot more than the other.
I'll vote for the psychotic religious warrior with no fear of death and a lifetime of melee training.
>The education that Spartan children received was obviously of paramilitary type, which in some cases was clearly oriented to guerrilla war in the mountains and forests for the child to fuse with nature and feel like the king predator. [...] It was infinitely harder than any military training of the present because it was far more dangerous, lasting (thirteen years), exhausting, and because the tiniest faults were punished with huge doses of pain—and because the ‘recruits’ were children of seven years.
>Immediately after entering the Agoge, the first thing done to the kids was shaving their heads. Certainly that was the most convenient for those who were destined to move through dense vegetation, bite the mud and fight each other. But the sacrifice of the hair implied a kind of ‘mystical death’: waived possessions, decorations, individuality and beauty were renounced, even one’s welfare was neglected (the hair is important for physical and spiritual health). The ‘recruits’ were homogenised and given a sense of nakedness, loneliness, helplessness and of a beginning (babies are born bald), a ‘start from scratch’ throwing them sharply to a world of cruelty, pain, resignation and sacrifice.
>After shaving the head, children were organised by Agelai (hordes or bands) in paramilitary style. The hardest, fiercest and most fanatical children were made horde chiefs as soon as identified. In the area of doctrine and morals, the first thing was to inculcate the recruits love for their horde: holy obedience without limits for their instructors and their bosses, and make it clear that the most important thing was to show immense energy and aggressiveness. For his brothers his relations were perpetual rivalry and competition.
>Children were taught to use the sword, the spear, the dagger and the shield, and they marched in close formation even in rough terrain, making the movements with precision and perfect timing. A hardening, physical processes prevailed and they were delivered to many physical exercises designed to encourage the development of their strength and their latent warlike qualities: running, jumping, javelin and disc hurling; dancing, gymnastics, swimming, wrestling, archery, boxing and hunting are some examples. To promote competitiveness and fighting spirit, and to accustom them to violence and teamwork, hordes of Spartan children were made to compete with each other in a violent ball game which was a variant, much freer and brutal, of rugby. The players were called sfareis (ballplayers). We can imagine those little-shaven heads delivering each other wild jolts in every possible way, colliding, dodging and trying to fight for coordination, obtaining possession of the ball and taking it to the agreed target, beyond the opponent’s territory and over the bodies of the opponent. We almost can, also, hear the thuds, the screams, the coordination signals, the creaking of the elbows, knees, punches, the headers, the tackles and sprains there must have happened in that game that transformed characters and personalities and leaders as a smith.
>In the sanctuary of the goddess Artemis took place many melees fighting rituals among the very young Spartans. They were also faced without further ado horde against a horde, child against child or all against all, in fierce fights tooth and nail and clean punches to stimulate aggression, competition and an offensive spirit, to develop their sense of mastery in the chaos of struggles and to build hierarchies. It is easy to imagine the chipped teeth, crushed noses and cheekbones, bloody faces and hands, fainting and open heads in those fierce children fights. In addition, instructors were responsible for setting them on so that they measured the forces between them, provided it was only for competition and desire to excel, and when they saw the foaming of hatred to emerge, the fight was stopped.
>Besides boxing and wrestling the Spartans also exercised other popular martial art in Greece: the pankration. It consisted of a mix of boxing and wrestling, similar to the modern disciplines of mixed martial arts and vale tudo, but more brutal: participants could incorporate into the bands of their fists the accessories of what they believed was suitable to increase their offensive power: some added pieces of wood, tin foil and even lead plates. The rules were simple: everything was allowed but biting, poking in the eyes, nose or mouth of the adversary. It was also forbidden to deliberately kill the opponent, but yet many were those who died in this bloody sport. In those combats if you could not proclaim a winner before sunset they resorted to klimax, a solution equivalent to tie on penalties in soccer games.
>In all the struggles, battles, competitions and games, the instructors placed great attention to distinguish whether each child’s screams were of anger, stress or aggression; or of pain and fear in which case they were punished. If a boy complained to his father that he had been hit by another child, his father gave him a beating for snitching and failing to seek life: ‘Complaining is of no use at all: it is something that comes from weakness’. And that weakness, in a Spartan, was unacceptable. As said, all citizens had the right to reprimand the children, so that parents had authority over their own children and those of others. Thus, each parent treated other children as he wanted others to treat his, as Xenophon observed. If a child, then, complained to his father that a citizen had given him lashes, the father whipped him even more. In Sparta all was this rotund, blunt, brutal and simple. Indeed, every Spartan child called ‘father’ any adult male, similar to when today we respectfully call ‘old man’ an elderly stranger.
>All aspects of the Spartan child’s life were regulated to increase his insensitivity to suffering and aggression. You will be put under a ruthless discipline that requires you to learn to control pain, hunger, thirst, cold, heat, fear, fatigue, disgust, discomfort and lack of sleep. You will be taught survival skills in the field including tracking, guidance, hunting, water extraction and knowledge of edible plants. This will reduce your dependence on civilization and you will be put in touch with the tradition of our hunter-gatherer ancestors of more primitive times. To achieve all this, the strict and unscrupulous instructors used any means possible to their reach. Wear situations imposed on the young were so intense that they would probably come to a state very close to dementia, with the presence of hallucinations induced by lack of sleep and food. The mastigophora (carriers of the whip) were charged to brutally beat and even torture anyone who failed, complained or moaned in pain, so that the tasks came up perfect.
>Sometimes children were whipped for no reason, only to harden them, and the Spartan boys would rather die than groan and ask why they were whipped. Spartan philosophy coincided with Nietzsche’s when they thought ‘Blessed is what hardens us!’ There even were competitions to see who could hold the most numerous and intense lashes without shouting. This was known as diamastigosis. Sometimes the priestess of Artemis ordered that, in her presence and before an image of the goddess, some children were chosen by her to be whipped. If the ceremony-torture was not liked by the priestess she ordered the whipping intensified. These children not only had the obligation not to show pain, but to show joy. The macabre winner of the competition was he who endured longer without complaint. It happened that some died without groaning
A reminder that it was not the Christians who invented whipping yourself for God.
>Compassion was the worst poison for Sparta, because it preserved and prolonged the life of all weak and dying whether it was compassion towards themselves, their peers or the enemies. [...] To suffer and endure pain without complaining was part of the Spartan idiosyncrasy. Boys were proud of the amount of pain they could endure through clenched teeth. It is understandable that this kind of stoicism is interpreted as a masochistic cult of suffering, but we must avoid falling into this error of interpretation. In Sparta the suffering was a means to awaken the fighter’s instincts of a man and to liaise with his body and with Earth itself. Suffering was not meekly accepted with the head down: it was struggled to dominate it, and everything was intended to achieve indifference to suffering.
>As mentioned, obedience was also paramount in the instruction, but to what extent was such obedience fulfilled? The
answer is: it had no bounds. It was put to the test every day. A Spartan boy could be ordered to kill a Helot child or provoke a fight with a partner and it was assumed he would not ask questions but obey quietly and efficiently. He could be given seemingly absurd or unworkable orders to test him but the important thing was that, without hesitation, he blindly and unquestioned sought the obedience of such order. Obeying was sacred and basic, because the higher knows something the subordinate does not know. In the Army it is said, ‘He who obeys is never wrong’. Young Spartans were constantly tested. If a Spartan boy were told to jump off a cliff, he probably would not have hesitated and would throw himself without blinking and furious conviction.
>The instruction was outdoors. The Spartan boys were always immersed in Nature: in nature’s sounds, vibrations, landscapes, animals, trees, changes, cycles and nature’s will. They learned to join their homeland; know it, love it and consider it a home. They were forced always to walk barefoot and directly touch the earth. [...] Walking bare feet hardened the feet as wood, and eventually the young Spartans moved more lightly on the land than those who had softened their feet with shoes, as feet are designed for that, and if presently this does not work is because we did not develop them, nor tanned them as would be natural. In winter, Spartan children had to take baths in the icy river Eurotas. They dressed alike in winter than in summer, and slept outdoors on hard reeds torn by the river and cut by hand. The manoeuvres and marches they carried out were exhausting, and would kill almost any man of our day—in fact some Spartan boys died of exhaustion. Gradually, the bodies of the boys grew accustomed to cold and heat, developing their defence mechanisms. Gradually, they became increasingly harder, stronger and more resistant.
And it goes on and on. People severely underestimate how hard pre-modern soldiers and warrior-aristocracies could train themselves.
A lot of it reads like bad Victorian/19th-century fan-fiction, though.
> Young Spartans were constantly tested. If a Spartan boy were told to jump off a cliff, he probably would not have hesitated and would throw himself without blinking and furious conviction.
lmao sure.
They were tough as nails, tougher than most other pre-moderns, but they weren't half-superhero/half-lemming as the excerpts make it seem.
I mean, all of this is sourced from actual Greek sources, not from 19th century sources. From non-Spartan Greeks, mind you. The Spartans themselves didn't bother writing this stuff down. So who knows how much of it was legit or just Greeks fanboying over another city-state.