Not long ago, the President’s Office made a statement saying, “Sparta in ancient Greece collapsed because of low birth rates. That’s why low birth rates are such a serious social problem.”
Because of this remark, stories related to Sparta became a hot topic on the domestic Internet, so I am taking this opportunity to write what I had planned to write before.
The movie 300 was released in the United States in 2006 and in Korea in 2007 and was very popular. This film tells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae, in which Spartan King Leonidas and his 300 guards were annihilated while fighting in the Thermopylae Gorge against a large army of 5 million men led by Xerxes, the emperor of Persia (now Iran) who invaded Greece in 480 BC. This is the topic.
Although it was exaggerated in the movie 300, it is true that the Spartan soldiers fought bravely. In the book
Although the Battle of Thermopylae ended in the annihilation of the Spartan army when the Persian army surrounded the Spartan army with the help of a Greek traitor who taught them a side road, the image of ‘the Spartan warriors who fought to the last and died bravely for the freedom of Greece’ It left such a deep impression that it has been widely passed down not only at the time but even 2,000 years later.
And in the Battle of Plataea (479 BC), which took place after the Battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan army defeated the Persian army, thereby avenging and winning the Battle of Thermopylae. This battle made it impossible for Xerxes to conquer Greece. Realizing this, they withdrew to Persia, ultimately creating an opportunity for Greece to win the war against Persia.
However, when Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, a civil war in the Greek world that followed, over its rival Athens, a huge amount of money flowed into Sparta from outside. In this process, some of Sparta’s great nobles gained great wealth and increased their wealth by purchasing land indiscriminately, but many Spartan citizens who could not afford to do so sold their land to the great nobles at low prices and suffered from poverty.
As the gap between rich and poor grew, Sparta suffered from population decline. For example, between 400 BC and 250 AD, the population of Sparta decreased from 3,000 to 700, of whom only 100 owned their own land. Except for these 100 people, the rest were extremely poor, without homes or property, and naturally had to give up on starting a family and having children.
Thus, in 146 BC, Sparta was unable to offer any resistance to the Roman army that attacked from the west and surrendered helplessly. This was not because Rome was more powerful than Persia in the past, but because Sparta was unable to fight against Rome due to severe population decline.
In conclusion, it is true that Sparta fell because of the low birth rate. However, the cause of the low birth rate was not because the Spartans were selfish or foolish and did not have children, but because of the social structure in which they could not have children even if they wanted to. And such a social structure was created due to the deepening polarization (gap between rich and poor) caused by real estate speculation by the rich.
It seems that someone working in the President’s Office had picked up something about Sparta and the low birth rate and relayed it to the President’s Office. Instead of saying that the cause of the problem was real estate speculation or deepening polarization, he did not say that it was probably due to low birth rates. It is believed that it is.
This is because the current president and the people around him are all involved in real estate speculation, and he would not have dared to say to such people, “Sparta suffered a low birth rate and went bankrupt due to real estate speculation and polarization intensifying.”
Moreover, most of the people who support the current government are real estate speculators or are strongly connected to them, and it is questionable whether these people are qualified to say that Sparta was ruined due to the low birth rate. If they really have the will to improve the serious low birth rate phenomenon in Korean society, they should first try to curb real estate speculation, but the reality is quite the opposite, and they will instead abolish the comprehensive real estate tax that even the Constitutional Court recognized as legal, which will somehow continue to fuel real estate speculation. I’m trying hard to put it together.
So how does the current government plan to improve the low birth rate while leaving real estate speculation as is? I don’t know either. Perhaps, like they did not long ago, they would gather together post-menopausal women and do Kegel exercises to increase the birth rate.