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One of these things is not like the others - the Spartans were slightly less patriarchal than other Greek city-states, and Devereaux acknowledges this. But yes - the whole point of the Sparta series is to make it clear just how badly Sparta sucked. What else is there to say about Sparta? The Spartans themselves were clear that they didn't even try to not suck off the battlefield. Once you establish that Spartan troops have a mediocre win-lose record against peer competitors (and were not worth shit against Macedonians, despite the equal tech level) the only remaining interesting questions are
Both of which Devereaux offers answers to, although not particularly thought-out ones - as you say, he is far more interested in explaining just how badly Sparta sucked. Most of this is drumming in what the facts you used to learn in prep school classical studies actually imply - just how much suckitude (even relative to the baseline of pre-modern suckitude due to the lack of antibiotics and steam engines) is implied by the abusive nature of the agoge or a society with 80+% slavery. Neither of these facts is a secret, but classics teachers don't encourage you to stop and think about them.
If you think Spartans are cool, then you are wrong. Pop quiz - name a famous Spartan military victory not involving an alliance with Persia. Not a pop quiz - you can't name something other than military victories that is plausibly cool about Sparta. Devereaux wrote that many blog posts because he thinks that making people like you less wrong is important.
A big part of Devereaux's project is to push back against a specific wrong idea of martial virtue - what he calls the "cult of the badass" - of which Sparta is the ur-example, and Pete "Leaking war plans to journalists doesn't matter if you look as good shirtless as I do" Hegseth is the MAGA-era personification. In so far as acoup.blog has a political message rather than being a fun place to laugh at bad movie military history, that message is that you don't need to trade off the creature comforts of civilisation in order to build badassitude, because civilised beats badass on the battlefield more often than not. A number of other posts in the thread are asking about the question of "why did someone who is obviously not a conventional left-idiotarian humanities scholar get so rabidly anti-Trump?" and I think this is the answer - MAGA assumes that the pre-requisite to making America great again is to make America badass (or at least to put people who embody badassitude in charge with no consequences for testosterone-fuelled misbehaviour). Devereaux thinks that this involves giving up things that matter and not getting any strategic advantage in exchange.
I'm British, so I have the luxury of admiring the fuzzy-wuzzy's martial virtue from my armchair after my compatriots kick his arse. A lot of former world leaders who were gay for Leonidas looked at the British and thought "they may have the men, ships, and money, but we have higher testosterone so we can beat them". It is one of the ways world leaders become former.
If you want to judge the Spartans as "they suck" because you don't agree with them, you're not really engaging with the spirit of history. Your assessment of the Spartans doesn't tell us anything about Sparta, it tells us about your particular modern ideas. You might as well as not be doing history, you're not doing history, your assessment of the Spartans was pre-determined from your moral priors. What about this strikes you as worth doing? You already know what you think.
Look I don't want to be mean but this style of writing codes to me as so decidedly unserious that I'm not actually sure what you think you're doing. It conjures up to me a whole stereotype of ironic millennials can't say what they mean because the style is more important than the substance. This attitude often exists in a discourse where arguments are not even considered as arguments but as exercises in taste, you're not just wrong if you don't like Obama or Vietnamese food or Black Lives Matter, you're a bad person. Maybe that's just me projecting something onto you of which you are totally unrelated. But I feel the need to explain this because, again, it's hard for me to otherwise model the mental universe of someone professing to discuss history seriously while using concepts like "suckitude" and "badassitude".
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Look, I get that Sparta hecking sucks and Lysander was a freaking pissbaby chud. But Devereaux just can't accept that the ancient world had fundamentally different values from ours, and their best men admired Sparta for reasons which would get them instantly banned from /r/Hellas.
Sorry bro the agoge was metal. As for battles, there are three aspects to this. The first is the battle of Sardis, if you need an answer to your quiz. The second is that asking for a Spartan victory, or even battle, not involving Persia is like asking for a French battle not involving England (actually, to torture the metaphor, the typical relationship was something closer to Persia's Britain and Sparta's Prussia. Persia had fingers in every pie, and even victories against them usually had some element of deal-making. The third is that the whole neatly-counterintuitive anti-Spartan reading of the Peloponnesian War fundamentally misunderstands Spartan strategy. Sparta had a high-quality army that they knew was very difficult to replace. This led them to essentially adopt a sea command/fleet-in-being strategy on land. The Spartan army could go where it wanted and do what it wanted as long as it didn't commit to a protracted siege or risky battle, and, since they didn't want to give battle either, the Athenians were reduced to a naval strategy which ended up overextending and destroying them at Syracuse and Aegospotami. Devereaux is on firm ground when he claims that Spartan society is unacceptable to modern sensibilities, and that the Spartan setup was fundamentally unsustainable because of their inability to absorb casualties in pitched battles, but he'd have to be a much better historian to "well ackshually" Thucydides and Xenophon.
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Spartans were the eminent military power in greece for some time, whatever they did certainly wasn't just sucking. Other groups certainly did it better, and that's why the spartans are gone now, but that doesn't mean they specifially sucked at fighting.
In fact saying "peer competitors" is already loaded because all of those cities that sparta kicked the ass of aren't considered peer compwtitors anymore.
And look at your empire now. It's certainly a prime example of how weak men have created hard times.
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This seems like an odd take to me? We have very few surviving writings from Sparta itself, because the Spartans did not esteem writing, but if we look at classical admirers of Sparta, it is very rarely the case that they admire Spartan merely for being militarily successful. Plato's admiration of Sparta is not for military strength alone. The case for Sparta is merely that they won all the time, particularly because they demonstrably did not, but that Sparta was in some way a uniquely virtuous society.
It should go without saying that we're not talking about a concept of virtue that a modern Westerner would wholeheartedly endorse, or that most people after the Christianisation of Rome would endorse, but it is nonetheless something that Sparta's contemporaries admired. It was the Spartan constitution and set of laws. Lycurgus was not praised for victory alone. It was the discipline of the spartiates themselves. It involved art and poetry - Tyrtaeus was highly lauded! One of our primary sources for Sparta is Xenophon's Constitution of the Lacedaimonians, which is extremely complimentary, and not focused entirely on military conquest. He praises the moderate appetites of the Spartans, their civic duty, their lack of greed or hedonism, their educational system, and so on. Xenophon is the one who tells us that the Spartans, unlike most poleis, lacked the institution of pederasty, and this is presented as a sign of the Spartans' virtue in valuing boys for their moral character, rather than in fleshly terms.
Should we take that all at face value? Probably not. Much of Xenophon's work is likely a veiled criticism of Athens itself, holding up a semi-imagined Spartan history in order to indict his present society. My point is just that it's plainly not true to say that the only thing Sparta was lauded for was its military record.
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