GenocideHeart said:
I'm pretty sure that from the Spartans' point of view our 'culture' is barbaric and revolting too. Unfortunately these things are like asses = everybody has one and nobody thinks theirs stinks.
...
They'd be contemptuous of our lifestyle, I suspect.
Doesn't mean they'd be
right. Frankly, cultural relativism only goes so far. There's stuff that can be chalked up to "different culture, can't really judge", but absolute cultural relativism has... problems. For instance, advocating new social values is always ethically wrong. And, if you'll forgive a little reducto ad Hitlerum, it means you can't say "The Holocaust was wrong". How dare you judge the German people for their cultural belief that Jews are less than human? The question isn't "can you judge other cultures", the question is what aspects can be judged, and how harshly.
Also, you're reading the life expectancy wrong. A life expectancy of 30 years doesn't mean people drop dead at thirty, it means that a disturbingly large percentage of newborns don't make it to age ten, but the ones who do have a good chance of making it to their fifties. It averages out to 30 years, but that doesn't mean, "gee, we'd better start having kids when we're ten". (Which is biologically impossible in almost all cases, anyway.) Mind you, people were considered adults at a much younger age than they are today - the Jewish Bar Mitzvah, which traditionally marked the start of adulthood, occurs at 13, for instance. A quick <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece' target='_blank' rel='nofollow'>wiki walk</a>, however, indicates that the Greek youths in question probably
were considered children, at least at the start of the relationship.