@stephthearchaeologist: Apologies I only posted this here as I needed the video for insta so here is the insta caption! The rich get richer and the poor get poorer - Before I read this book, Sparta: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Superpower by Andrew Bayliss, I definitely thought that Sparta was okay for women (for the ancient world). Obviously by modern standards not amazing but for the time pretty okay because women could own property. - Sparta had a birthrate problem. They had pretty strict citizenship rules which boil down to only wealthy people could be citizens. If you had multiple children then you would have to split your land between them which could put them at risk of losing citizenship. So birthrates drop with men staying bachelors to avoid losing their wealth. Now instead of relaxing the laws around citizenship and making it not contingent on the amount of land you own or idk letting non-citizens become citizens they had the brilliant idea to let men try and get any woman pregnant as long as he had her husbands permission. No, we don’t have evidence that he needed the woman’s consent to impregnate her. Some sources suggest the Spartans practiced polyandry with 3-4 poorer Spartans sharing a wife meaning the family could share land resources which offspring could inherit preserving their citizenship. Yes women could own property in Sparta but this would mean that she would have her own land to bring into a marriage. Maybe if a woman had more land there was more pressure for her to have multiple husbands? Polyandry wouldn’t have helped increase the population as you still have the same problem of more children = more divided land. - It is important that we don’t judge the past by today’s moral and ethical standards but I cannot help but be horrified. Can you imagine living in a country where your body not your own? Just an incubator to have as many children as possible because nothing could be worse than letting poor people and foreigners become citizens… #ancienthistory #History #historytok #archaeology #LearnOnTikTok

stephthearchaeologist

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Monday 22 September 2025 13:48:29 GMT