Reddit mentions of Men of Bronze: Hoplite Warfare in Ancient Greece

> Turns out it wasn't built for dwarves.

Indeed, dwarfs top out at 147cm. According to Kagan and Viggiano, anthropological evidence suggests Spartans were 160-165cm. [1]

> Asian people must've been damn near 3 feet two thousand years ago hahaha.

I doubt it, though I don't know enough to dispute it, but certainly they were shorter than us too. Evidence suggests how you lived plays a factor in body type as well as when, and both of those seemingly directly correlate to height. Moreover, when you lived correlates to how you lived and how you lived (meaning your socioeconomic status) correlates to the availability of better nutrition and water. This can actually be observed today even when comparing the average height between the two Koreas.

> by your rudimentary logic...

I never said human height was completely linear, though if you were to graph it the trend would be upward. I simply said that we are quite a bit taller today than we were a century and a half ago, and they were taller in the middle ages than Classical Antiquity. [2]

> though it was not specific about Spartan diet

It definitely was. [3] Plutarch was specifically talking about Spartans. If you wanted to question this source, you could on the grounds that Plutarch lived a few centuries after Sparta's pinnacle, but the translation doesn't indicate when Plutarch is talking about and other contemporary sources are pretty scarce on the subject.

> nor did it say that they ate less protein, or less varied, than a knight would

That is correct. There is no way Plutarch could have known that and furthermore, John Dryden who translated the source wasn't making the comparison. What we have to do is take two separate sources [4] that describe what was eaten by the two groups then deduce that X is more than Y when X=8 and Y=4. Perhaps maybe you are discussing post-plague Europe when apparently less meats were consumed?

> And if you knew much you would know they had iron swords

I literally just said both were present, but you keep talking about iron as if it was an advantage over bronze. Bronze (as an alloy) is about three times harder (based on the Vicker scale, not mine) than iron and holds a better edge, ergo makes better weapons. You said before that his weapons were "bronze or iron," are you changing that to exclusively iron, because I wouldn't. If you want Sparty to go into battle with iron weapons it will be a hindrance more than anything.

> which according to you they would only have one of

No. I never gave a number of weapons. You initially gave the edge to the "Spartan with his spear" meaning singular, so I have been going off of that the whole time. I suppose he can bring a whole bundle if he wants but surely will only be able to hold one in his hand with shield in the other, right? Besides, now you are making a lot of assumptions about the Spartan that you aren't about the knight. We took away the knights horse because only one of the Rutgers mascots is actually mounted, yet you added his retinue that would hold him back. Then we gave Sparty not one, but multiple spears despite never being shown to own any. But I digress, yes I will admit I am assuming the Spartan is only fighting with one spear and the knight is no longer mounted or fighting with his retinue (which would probably be less fair since that would make the odds uneven).

> It sure wasn't hard to toss aside a few light wiki pages and fan made articles as sources though

I noticed, even though exponentially more than you sourced, these aren't the tossed aside sources I was talking about. You continue to ignore the main researched publications that I linked for you. Here are the latter two again (as the previous two were already cited in this response again); [5], [6].

> you think museums let you try on artifacts

Ha, I didn't know we were pretending to not pick up sarcasm now. Noted.

> I love how you keep bringing up Thebes too, while handily discounting any enemies that they defeated who were better equipped (at the very least, especially regarding armored mounts), trained, conditioned...

I don't know who you are talking about. Are you still talking about Thebes? If you are then I will admit I am not privy to other great victories they had than those over Sparta. If you were talking about Sparta then you're saying that they faced armies that were better equipped, trained and conditioned in their own time, but wouldn't face such a foe 1500 years later? Then yeah, I guess I have no choice but discounting them in such regards because you won't cite anything. Other than the Greco-Persian wars (where they had no choice but to fight against the odds), the Spartans were famous for not fighting any battles they were unsure they could win. Not that it is a bad thing, but they were seldom out- numbered, trained, equipped in their own time. Sure, they did well in the Greco-Persian Wars, but that's why they are called "Greco-Persian" and not Sparta-Persian, because they had a lot of help from their friends...even at Thermopylae. And if it is the Persian cavalry you are regarding the Spartans to have fared well against, J.F. Lazenby argues that the Persian cavalry probably fought as lightly armed missile cavalry, and not the heavy shock troops they became.

> It's all straw men arguments for you

Those aren't strawmen, they are analogical arguments. You would be better served attempting to demonstrate false analogies which still doesn't really apply. Besides, not sure how one argues hypotheticals like this without a few informal fallacies. You sure couldn't.


In the end, that's what this is, a hypothetical argument with no right or wrong answer. All I did was take the best information available, I'm not talking the wiki links or whatever but the actual peer reviewed published materials, and formed a personal opinion based on said information provided from what we should consider experts in their field. None of the information provided was mine personally. If you choose to continue to discredit the work done by these researchers and replace the information with your own baseless wisdom, that is your right to do so. I read that medieval knights were, as a whole, larger than Spartans (regardless of diet, which is merely a corollary anyway); I read that knights were equipped with steel weapons (take your pick; sword, hammer, morningstar, halberd, pike, etc.) and armor as opposed to bronze, or worse, iron; I see that knights were often trained beginning at an age similar to the Spartan and trained in a wider range of weapons and skill-set; I read that Spartans were out-classed by Thebans pretty early on, who were later outclassed by the Macedonians, who were later outclassed by the Romans, who were later outclassed by "barbarian hordes," who later evolved into Western European Kingdoms with peasant armies, and finally into standing professional armies (with conscripts and mercenaries still, of course). These are the facts and they currently are not disputed. Finally, I use all of this information gathered from others to infer that a larger human being with superior technology, and at minimum equal training (though I would argue against this since surely Spartan tactics and combat techniques would be well known and evolved from by the mid-late Middle Ages), would win in single combat.

P.S. I would go so far as to say that even if the Spartan formed up in a phalanx with his buddies, they would have a better chance but still be run right over, but that is for another time.

TL;DR: This is my opinion and you disagree, that is OK. Leave it at that and this requires no further response.