Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise & Fall of Sparta

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Today, we trace the rise and fall of ancient Greece’s most formidable warrior society - Sparta. This society's militaristic culture and battlefield feats are the stuff of legend - but how much of its story is based on cold, hard fact?Joining us is Dr Andrew Bayliss, a professor of Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He separates the fact from the fiction, explaining how a brutal education system and unyielding discipline forged an elite military state, and eventually led to its downfall.Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday (including this one) here.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail].

Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. When they were asked to lay down their weapons by the King of Kings, the Lord of Asia, Xerxes of Persia, they simply replied, come and take them. And in the battle that followed, in that narrow pass in northern Greece, a legend was born. The legend of Sparta now longtime fans of this show will know that we loved a little historical myth busting we like to take the legends we like to look at the stereotypes that people might have got from novels and movies and popular culture and we like to give you the real history the cold hard facts because we believe that they're actually more engaging more astonishing and interesting and there is no

civilization no group no people more mythologized in history in fiction in film than the spartans today a generation of us knows them from the movie 300 a muscle muscle-bound Gerard Butler in his red cloak bellowing, this is Sparta. And he goes on to sell his life dearly at the Battle of Thermopylae. Turns out that that movie was the canary in the coal mine, the inciting instant, the start gun for the manosphere which washes around us at the moment. But actually, it's not just this generation that are obsessed with Sparta. Even in the ancient world, Sparta stood apart. Tourists flocked there in the centuries that followed Sparta's heyday to learn about this city that was shrouded in mystery. It was feared, it was admired for its militarism, its discipline. So how much of what we believe,

what their contemporaries believe, and those that followed, how much of all that is true? In this episode, we're going to try and answer that question. And there's no better person to sort out facts from friction than Dr. Andrew Bayliss. He's from the University of Birmingham and his wonderful book, The Spartans, does just that. This is your ultimate guide to the Spartans. And if you want to watch this interview and check out two chiseled dudes doing some intellectual heavy lifting, oiled up, you can check it out on our YouTube channel. The link is in the show notes.

Let's get into it. T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle coming on the podcast. Tell me about this world in which you have this tapestry of these little teeny little states,

all with quite different, well, potentially quite different systems of government. Yeah, that's a brilliant way to start. The thing I always grapple with trying to explain to people is ancient Greece isn't Greece. It's not just the modern nation of Greece. There are 1,200 different city-states scattered around the Mediterranean. My favorite fun fact is to tell people that Marseille was the Greek city of Massilia. I think that really illustrates how far-flung all the different Greek city-states were. So I keep on saying city-states, they call themselves a polis. We translate that as a city-state. And so it's people living in an

urban center surrounding countryside, and it's usually either demarcated by they live on an island, or there's a nice sort of geographical barrier like a mountain range, or they're in a valley, that kind of thing. And they're of very, very different sizes. So some of them are tiny. Sparta is one of the mega ones. It's about 8,500 square kilometers. Athens, another major city-state, is only 2,500 square kilometers. And then the rest are smaller and smaller and smaller, scattered around the Mediterranean and beyond. Before I ask you about how Sparta came to be Sparta because there's plenty of valleys and mountains in the Peloponnese which it could have easily been penned in by but people are looking out across all of those little statelets did they think at the time Sparta's a bit of an

outlier they're a bit weird were they as interested in Sparta as we are? Yes particularly their real rivals Athens there was a whole lot of people in Athens who were fascinated by the Spartans and even presented themselves as if they were Spartans. So they grew their hair long like the Spartans. They supposedly shunned baths like the Spartans and just wanted to be little Spartans. So it was quite a powerful brand even at the time. Absolutely. And that's one of the problems we have in trying to work out what they're like, because none of the primary sources were written by the Spartans themselves. They're all written by outsiders who are often real admirers of them,

who were then trying to paint them as this sort of amazing, radically different other that would explain why they were so amazing and why Athens should be more like Sparta or why Thebes should be more like Sparta and so on. How did Sparta come to be Sparta? So you mentioned it's enormous. Is that through conquest? It is through conquest. Now, initially, it's just a normal city. It grows into the surrounding countryside. They ultimately conquer the whole river valley where they are. That's the modern region of Laconia. It was called Laconia then.

And if Sparta had stopped there, it would have actually been quite a big city-state. But they then conquered their nearest neighbours, the Mycenaeans, and enslaved them. That turned them into a mega polis. And is it because of that enslavement they're able to think of different ways to live? If they've got these slaves working for them, they can build an elite culture that feels a bit different to other people? a lot of slaves and has a huge amount of land. It's a very high bar for citizenship in Sparta. Every single Spartan citizen would have been very, very wealthy by ancient Greek standards. So they have the time and leisure to do what they want to do.

And what do they decide they want to do? Well, what they decided they want to do depends on how you view them. So when I was young, depends on how you view them. So when I was young, everyone cast Sparta as this military state, a society that decided to turn themselves into super soldiers. But really, what they do is spend their time doing aristocratic ancient Greek activities. So anyone who's read the Iliad knows that Homer's heroes were warriors, but they were also men who engaged in sport. They hunted, and that's essentially what the Spartans did. They spent their time being gentlemen of leisure. So, that might mean sport, it might mean going off into the countryside, or it might mean putting on heavy armour and going off and fighting other people. It does imply that they've got a bit more time to put in for that militia practice on the town

square. Yeah, they must have done. Now, there is not a single primary source that describes the Spartans doing that practice, but they have to have done. They're described by people who knew what they did as doing maneuvers that military instructors found difficult. Now, to do that kind of thing, they have to have been practicing. But a lot of their leisure activities would have been useful in that kind of way. So, a lot of the sport, they do team sports. That's all about coordinated movement. They do a lot of song and dance. And a lot of their dancing was done in full armor. So, that kind of thing is just going to make them better and stronger. And when it comes to hoplite warfare,

if you're fighting for hours and hours and hours wearing 35 kilos of bronze armour and carrying a big, big wooden shield that's faced with bronze that's just going to be heavy, the stronger you are, the more endurance you have, that's just going to make you more likely to win. So they're not a sort of complete world apart, they just happen to be a bit better than everyone, enough better than everyone else.

Yes. And at the height of their citizen numbers, they can put together an army that's as big as any other Greek city-state, made up entirely of men who don't need to do anything else to earn a living. So they just will be spending their time exercising and just getting to know each other

and hanging out with each other and hanging out with each other. They have what must be what sociologists would call an in-group, like a really strong in-group. So you instinctively know you're hunting together, whereas poor old Thebans might be busy, you know, flogging wine half the time and off on trading journeys or things like that. Yeah, exactly. So if you're not actually needing to travel abroad to earn your money, you can spend your time just hanging out with your fellow citizens. And to reflect their comparative equality, they call themselves

the homoioi, which sometimes gets translated as equals, but it's probably better described as similars. But they all wear the hair long, they dress the same, they have a really obvious brand. And how are they governed? How are they ruled? Is that similar? Is it reflected in a kind of rugged democracy like Athens, or does everyone do what the king says? Every Greek city-state has a citizen assembly, and Sparta is no different from that. Sparta has a governing council that's called the Gerousia, which means the old men, and it's made up of 28 men aged over 60, plus their two kings. And that's the real oddity about Sparta. They don't just have kings, they have two of them. I always say to people, name another diarchy. And people frantically

scroll around on Google trying to find it. And it's really hard to find another actual diarchy with two different royal houses. So there are kings who tell them what to do, but the king's powers are moderated by the ruling council, by the citizen assembly, and there are five annually elected officials known as the ephors, which literally means overseers. And ancient Greek commentators like Plato and Aristotle saw that as a measure of democracy. Okay, so there is a flavor of democracy there, but not, of course, when it comes to the gigantic number of enslaved people that they rule over. Yes, it's very hard to call Sparta a democracy, although oddly, in the Enlightenment period, some people suggested Sparta would be a good role model for a modern democracy.

But that made you question their vision of the world. So there are very hard to pin down exactly how many helots there were who were the Spartan slaves, but there were probably 150,000 of them being ruled over by no more than 8,000 or 9,000 Spartan citizens. So it's a very unequal society when you bring the whole of the population of their region together. And that domination is underpinned by ferocious funds. Absolutely. The life of the helots is, by any standards, terrible. They are mistreated by the Spartans. There's talk of floggings, regardless of whether they've done anything wrong or not, having to wear degrading uniforms like dog skin hats and animal skins as their clothing.

They would be sometimes brought into the common messes where Spartan citizens dined so that young Spartans could see. They'd make them drink unmixed wine so they'd get roaringly drunk, and then young Spartans could see the perils of alcohol. They were subject to a brutal example of state terror, an institution known as the cryptaea, which basically means the secret service. Young Spartan men were given basic supplies, a knife, and told to go out into the countryside and kill the largest, most threatening-looking helot or any helots they found on the roads at night. So the Spartans' treatment of the helots is just plain terrible. And I think the best illustration of that is one of the rare

primary sources we have that was written by a Spartan. It's the war poet Tetaeus who describes them as like donkeys exhausted under great loads, being broken down by the amount of labour they have to do for their Spartan masters. Meanwhile, those Spartan masters are able to enjoy the benefit of the leisure time, the wealth that they've derived from that. There's a sense in some of the literature that those Spartans chose with that leisure time to act in a more Spartan fashion. So they didn't go in for finery in a way that you see in some ancient cultures. Where do we get that sense of their rugged simplicity, or is that just a myth? It's not just a myth. It's amplified by our primary sources. We often talk about austerity in Sparta when we're talking amongst ourselves as Sparta researchers. The idea is that the Spartans

shunned luxury. They shunned the lifestyle that other ancient Greeks had, so they weren't interested in literature. They were notoriously barely literate and barely numerate. They had functional literacy, but they're not writing great works of poetry or drama or history. They're not interested in those kind of things. They spend their time doing rough masculine activities. There's a suggestion in the sources that they're not allowed to dress extravagantly. They're not allowed to have

dyed clothing inside Sparta. Outside of Sparta, they wear dramatically red dyed clothing, but in Sparta, it's just undyed plain clothing. Everyone kind of looks the same. So there's a sense of it being quite a drab society in that way. And they are required to dine together every night in communal messes that was supposedly very abstemious, very temperate. But when you actually look at the amount of food they had available to them, it's actually a huge amount of calories and a huge amount of wine. So So it's maybe more about not being seen to overindulge rather than not actually indulging.

So they come together and would women be allowed in those spaces? No, they're very much man-only spaces. The Spartan common messes were probably like drinking clubs of men in other Greek city-states, but just done in a very Spartan kind of way. Or perhaps a little bit like the British elite going to their gentleman's clubs in the 19th century in London. Probably not unlike that. Interesting. So what about the place of women in that society? Well, women in Sparta had a very visible place, which marked them out in ancient Greece. And

other ancient writers like Aristotle, for example, was very troubled by how much authority Spartan women had. He actually went as far as to describe Sparta as a gunecocracy, a place where women held power. Part of that was because they had a lot of wealth. Spartan women were able to inherit property alongside Spartan men. There's even a suggestion that they might have inherited equally alongside men. So by the time Aristotle was writing, two-fifths of Spartan land was owned by women. And were they able to take part in, therefore, the politics of Sparta? Not formally. So we have some wonderful stories of royal women having their say. Most, I think, of royal women having their say. Most, I think, famously, Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae. She has five recorded sayings, and the most famous one of hers is an Athenian woman

asked why Spartan women were able to rule men, and her response was because they were the only ones who gave birth to men. You get the impression in Spartan culture that you better treat women well because they are bearing the next generation of Spartans. Yes, absolutely. They are mothers of the next generation of Spartan citizens, and they are taken seriously as a result of that. And they have a really obvious voice, which is usually directed towards their sons, telling them how to behave. So there's a lot of sayings of Spartan women criticizing their sons for not being brave enough or actually killing their sons because they have shown cowardice in battle. Right. So the idea of them as supersolid, it's a militaristic culture.

There is a massive modern debate about this, but you are dealing with a culture where every single citizen is going to fight as a heavily armed infantryman. So that is his one function in life beyond having this lifestyle of gentlemanly leisure. So Xenophon, who knew Sparta quite well, he was an Athenian and he traveled there and he was friends with the Spartan king, Agesilaus. He said that the only thing Spartan men were allowed to do in terms of their sort of career, for want of a better way of putting it, was activities that contributed to the freedom of the polis. And the obvious thing when you think about that, what's going

to contribute to the freedom of the polis? It's actually fighting to defend the polis. That's so fascinating. Do we know how that culture emerges? There is a long-going debate about how this comes about. So it was often thought that the conquest of the helots was the reason why they developed a seemingly militarized society, that they enslaved thousands and thousands of men who outnumbered them so they needed to turn themselves into soldiers to defend themselves against the helots. soldiers to defend themselves against the helots. But a lot of the idea we get about Sparta being quite austere and militarized actually comes from much later. So it's not clear exactly when and why they chose to do things this way. It's perhaps more than anything else in the 6th century BCE. There was a lot of social dislocation throughout the Greek peninsula and in other city-states that led to quite serious civil disputes, civil wars. Sparta may have developed its quite strong culture of similarity to try and avoid that kind of problem.

Was it families that turned young Spartan boys into these warriors or was that education, that training take place communally? There is obviously some reinforcing of Spartan values coming from the family, but at age seven, Spartan boys were essentially separated from their families and put through a state-organized upbringing. And both admirers of Sparta and critics of Sparta from ancient Greece are pretty unanimous in explaining that this is a communal experience that everyone has to go through, regardless of wealth. And the only exception to that is the immediate heir to both thrones. So as long as you're a citizen, if you pass that high bar, there's an equality to their upbringing. Yeah, absolutely. So there will be some Spartans are quite wealthy. Some of them

will be staggeringly wealthy. They're all going through exactly the same system. At age seven, they're divided into herds. They're overseen by an official whose title translates as the boy herder. He's given a staff of young men armed with whips who will mete out punishments for infractions by Spartan boys. And if neither the official overseeing it or the whip bearers that are around any random Spartan father would oversee the activities of the boys, there was always someone to keep an eye on them. They were being watched very closely. I always think the proof of the pudding, though, is if you look at the great Spartan generals and leaders that we know about, do they tend to come from the same sort of families or are they drawn really widely

from this wider pool of citizens? So when there's a big Spartan army, it will be a king in charge of that. So in theory, that should be therefore a man who hasn't gone through this system, but the big names actually did go through the system. So I mentioned, I guess, the big names actually did go through the system. So I mentioned, I guess, Aelaus earlier, who was friendly with Xenophon. He definitely went through the upbringing because we're told this by Plutarch, who wrote a biography of him. And he went through the upbringing because no one would ever imagined he was going to become the king because he was a younger brother of the king. So there was no reason for him to ever become the king. And that definitely had an impact on how he was perceived

by other Spartans and his entire way of approaching leading an army. But the obvious other king who must have gone through the upbringing is Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae, because he wasn't just not the immediate heir to the throne, he was the third brother. So he was an extremely unlikely king. What about the Spartans on the battlefield? Because you could be forgiven for thinking in books and movies that they were somehow superhumans, they fought differently. Are you saying they fought in the same manner as other Greeks, but they were just the best at it? They do fight in exactly the same formation as any other ancient Greek city-state. So when we're looking at classical Greece, Spartans fight in a phalanx,

state. So when we're looking at classical Greece, Spartans fight in a phalanx just like any other Greek city. So packed together side by side with long spears. Yeah, long spears, eight feet long, shield 90 centimetres round, bronze armour on their chest, bronze helmet, probably bronze armour on their legs. They're not going to look dramatically different from others except for their uniformity. So all wearing the red uniforms, all with their long hair. And there is a suggestion in the sources that they actually had an elf, a Lachedemon, emblazoned on their shields as well. So, they would have had a uniformity that the others didn't have, which might have seemed quite intimidating. They were trained to march into battle slowly to the tune of pipe players. They would go into battle reciting marching songs written by the Spartan war poet, Tateus,

and that probably would have been quite intimidating as well. But they're just a better version of this at the height of their military prowess and at the height of their citizen numbers as well. When there's enough of them to go around, they just are better. And for example, when the enemy run away, rather than everyone charging after them to loot the camp, they will retain their discipline and can pivot around, attack a different part of the enemy army or something like that. Yes, exactly. And when it goes wrong, they are actually better than other Greeks at responding to that. So there's a few examples

where the battle in the initial phases went a little bit wrong for them and actually some of their allies ran away, but they were actually able to regroup, wheel around and attack the seeming victors as they were returning and wipe them out. So they were very good at fighting in disorder. That's one of the things that Xenophon picks out about their excellence. Yeah, because other armies, once panic sets in, you can be transformed into a fleeing rabble. Exactly. And one of the things that we know about them as well, they didn't pursue too aggressively when their opponents ran away. And I tend to wonder whether that was actually a deliberate strategy to encourage the others to run away. So they knew that, oh, it's going to be pretty dangerous to fight against these guys.

If we do actually run away, they're not going to pursue us too far. So it might have planted that little bit of a seed of, actually, we can get out of this if we just don't fight them. Listen to Dan Snow's history, talking about the Spartans all coming up. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human

history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit

wherever you get your podcasts. Clearly, the Spartans have been busy for generations. They've carved out this big empire. They maintain this sort of slave state. But for many people, their sort of prominence begins with the battle against the Persians, the Greco-Persian wars of the 5th century BC. Yeah. Well, everyone encounters the Spartans for the first time, I think,ersian Wars of the 5th century BC. Yeah, well, everyone encounters the Spartans for the first time, I think, in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae. That was literally the first thing I knew about the Spartans. I was 12 years old. We had a 40-minute history class, and it was 300 guys fought against 3 million Persians and fought to the death. And it's just such a glorious story. There is a kernel of truth within that glorious story. The reality is at that stage, Sparta has developed a very strong alliance system with the neighboring people in the Peloponnese. Modern scholars tend to call it the Peloponnesian League, which is an inaccurate title for two reasons. It's not based entirely in the Peloponnese, and it's not really a league. It's a series of different alliance systems where the Spartans are allies with Corinth and they're allies with Tadgea and they're allied with Aeolus. And

because they're all allied to Sparta, those other city-states then tend to follow the Spartans wherever they go. And at some point in history, the Spartans actually bound those allies to an oath where they actually swore that they would follow the Spartans whithersoever they might lead. So they do have to follow the Spartans into battle. So when the Persians invade Greece in 480 BCE, the Spartans are the natural leaders against the Persians because they already have this very strong alliance network. And we should talk about Greece there. You've mentioned it's not a modern nation state, of course, but there's a sense in which the Spartans realise this is a threat to the entire Greek cultural solar system, is there? Yeah, absolutely. And it's not just the Spartans who've spotted this,

other Greeks have spotted this. The Persians have been on the rise since the middle of the 6th century. They have conquered the kingdom of Lydia, which is most of modern-day Turkey. Various Greek city-states of southern coast of Turkey had been allied or subject to Greece as the king of Lydia, depending on what their relationship was. They were absorbed into the Persian kingdom. The Persians have crossed into Europe. They have conquered the kingdom of Macedon. So mainland Greece is next. And when this is coming, the Spartans seek allies from other parts of the Greek-speaking world as well. They travel to Sicily and they warn Gilon,

the tyrant of the city of Syracuse, that if the Greeks in mainland Greece go down, he's going to be next. So they are aware of the big picture. Because there's obviously sort of antagonism between these groups within the Greek world. Is there a sense that the Persians are such a threat that they kind of come together, resolve some of their differences to fight alongside fellow Greeks? Or am I being a bit modern there? You're not being too modern. The reality is that this Persian invasion is a moment when the Greeks start to realize that they really do have a common identity that they haven't necessarily been following so much as well. We call them Greeks because they were descended from the mythical figure Helen. They called

themselves Helenes, hence ancient Greece was actually called Hellas. They all have this common ancestry, but they actually have different tribal ancestry. So, the Spartans were Dorians, the Athenians were really technically Ionians, the Thebans were Iolians. But the Persian invasion starts to create a sense where they realize that there's more than being just Spartans and Athenians and Thebans and Corinthians, that they actually have a common identity. And so, the Spartans send a small force up to block this very narrow pass into the north of Greece, Thermopylae, the hot gates. They're not by themselves though, are they? No, they're not. And that's not actually their first attempt to try and bottle the Persians up.

They try a narrow pass further north in Thessaly called the Valley of Tempe, which is similarly narrow. They have 10,000 hoplites and marines, but when they're there, they're warned that they can be surrounded too easily, so they withdraw. So this is a second attempt, and they have a small number of their own soldiers, but there's around 6,000 or 7,000 other Greek hoplites with them. of their own soldiers, but there's around 6,000 or 7,000 other Greek hoplites with them. And so they withdraw to Thermopylae. What's the plan? Do they think they can defeat the mighty Persian horde there? It would be brilliant to actually be able to be confident to know what the plan was. Our primary sources confuse us. The invasion seems to have coincided with a religious festival called the Karneia, where all of the Dorian Greeks, so that means the Spartans, the Corinthians, the Tegeans,

and various others, will not fight for that entire month. It seems to have coincided somewhat with the Olympic Games when there's a truce, when ancient Greeks don't fight. So Xerxes might have invaded at a time when he knows that many of the Greeks are going to be absent. That might explain why only 300 Spartans go. They may be all there prepared to spare at a time when they shouldn't be fighting. The timing's a bit confusing in that way. They're probably an advance guard intended to hold the Persians up until a larger number of men can actually come and reinforce them. In the end, though, they end up fighting a battle to the last man.

They do, and whether that was intended or not is entirely unclear. Herodotus, who is our best and earliest source for it, suggests that every single one of those 300 men, including Leonidas, had a son to replace him if he died. So that might intend that they knew they were going to die. There was an oracle which he only mentions after he's explained the battle, which prophesied that either Sparta would be destroyed or a Spartan king would die. So Leonidas may have known that if he died, then all was going to be okay for the Spartans. That could have been invented after the fact to explain away what was actually quite a quick defeat. I love the line about the Spartans rather enjoying the day of battle because it was a bit of a rest from their training.

Yes, but they did train throughout military campaigns. It's one of the things that's quite interesting about them. They don't stop exercising because they're fighting. They just exercise a little bit less. They do apparently give a good account of themselves. They stun the Persians with their martial ability. Do you think it's a little bit of PR here? Do you think this is a bit of historical whitewashing? There has to be some exaggeration here. We know there's two days of fighting and then the third day where it all goes wrong. Herodotus kind of gives the impression that there's fighting all day, but actually really only describes three separate assaults by the Persians on each of those two days. So they could have been quite short assaults. They could have been long, all-day fighting. It's

just too difficult for us to tell. Roditus was riding 50 years after the event. He was talking to the descendants of the descendants of the men who fought at Thermopylae. So he was getting some Spartan spin, for sure. But we think that they refortify an old wall across the road, do they? Yeah. So at its narrowest, the pass at Thermopylae is only about 15 and a half meters wide, and there's a wall there which they help rebuild to try and block the Persians' route into southern Greece. And the Persians have an enormous army, but they cannot bring that to bear on this narrow pass. Well, 15 meters or so wide, 30 men, eight ranks of them. It's not far shy of 300. So the Spartans on their own could have blocked it with a standard ancient Greek phalanx formation.

There's sheer cliff on one side and there's marshy bog sea on the other side. So there's no way to get around them on that side and the mountain is hemming them in. Is there a qualitative difference between the training, but also the equipment, perhaps the quality of the armor and edges of the swords between the Spartans and their enemies, the Persians? The way in which all of the ancient Greek hoplites are equipped is way better suited to fighting in a narrow place like Thermopylae. They have the big wooden bronze face shields that I mentioned earlier.

They have the heavy armor. Their spears, according to Herodotus, were longer than those of the Persians. The Persians do not have much in the way of body armor, and they have flimsy wicker shields, which may well have just kind of practically cracked as soon as they hurled themselves against the Spartans. So it really would have been quite simple, I think, for well-trained men who trusted each other and who were physically very strong to resist the Persians for some time. And we hear that Xerxes, the Persian leader, sends his immortals into battle, his best troops,

and they cannot get through. Yeah. So he sends the Medes and the Cassians in first, just gives them orders to arrest the Spartans and bring them back to him as how it's painted by Herodotus. And that goes very, very wrong. And when he gets desperate, he sends in his crack troops and they fare absolutely no better. So you think all of that, we can trust that, can we? I think it's dangerous to say we could trust all of it, but I think the fact that they were able to successfully repel assaults by the Persians without major casualties for some time makes sense. But then the Persians discover a little route around the flank. Yes, exactly. What they were warned would happen at Tempe happens at Thermopylae. And that's

something that modern scholars have always got quite excited about because when they got there, they were told, oh, there's another way around this position here. And they left it to the local Phocians to guard that. And many modern scholars have said, why didn't Leonidas put a Spartan officer in charge? But that's not how ancient Greek allied armies worked. You wouldn't have done something like that. And it turned out to not be a brilliant decision. So there's these allied troops guarding this mountain path that goes around the flank. Yeah.

And the Persians are showed that route through the mountains. Yes, by a local named Ephialtes, whose name spectacularly means nightmare in ancient Greek and modern Greek. And it's either just sheer coincidence or it's the kind of thing that's part of the romance of the battle that someone pinned this name on him because there's suggestion he might have had another name. So maybe this is a more dramatic name that was thrown at him after the event. The Persians push these allied troops aside. Well, the way Herodotus describes it, the Phocaeans thought, they're coming for us. And they went to higher ground to defend themselves.

And the Persians just swept past. And so the Persians arrive behind the Spartans who are blocking this pass. Yeah. There's more Spartans after this. Don't go away. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. At that point, could Leonidas still have withdrawn? Did they choose destruction over retreat at that point, do you think? That's the way it's painted. So the way the sources tell it, Leonidas learned before it was too late that they were going to be

surrounded. So he sent the allies away and the Thespians from the region of Boeotia, just south of Thermopylae, refused to go. And according to what Herodotus says, the Thebans were given orders to stay as well and kept as hostages, which frankly seems a dangerous thing to do when you're in a fight to the death. So they chose to sacrifice themselves. And there's a question, were they planning to really fight to the death? Did they leave too late to escape if they were trying to hold up one end of the Persians? Did they just get the timing wrong is a possibility. We just don't know. But either way, we think that they were eventually caught between the hammer and the anvil

and the Persian attack from both sides. Yep, that's the way Herodotus tells it. So that's the canonical story. They fight aggressively until they've been surrounded and then they withdraw to a low hill and make a final stand. And they are killed to a man? Killed to a man with two exceptions

who had been sent away before the final stand was made. So it's portrayed as a bit of a Pyrrhic victory. The Persians win, but they've got a real bloody nose. And they're also made aware these Greeks are going to be a hard nut to crack. There is then a great sea battle off the coast of Athens, but there's then the other great battle of this war, which Les talked about, which is Plataea, when you also see the Spartans excelling. Yeah. In many ways, Plataea is a better example of the potential that Sparta has as a military power. They send 5,000 Spartan citizens. They send 5,000 of the second-class citizens, the perioikoi. They have 35,000 helots armed for war, and they lead a massive allied army against the Persians. There's 30,000 plus hoplites, and they wipe out the Persian forces.

This is the year after Thermopylae. The Persians still occupy northern Greece, but the Greeks now pushing up to try and liberate that land. Yeah, and it's a different Persian force as well. Xerxes has returned home. He's left the best troops behind with his cousin Mardonius, who's actually picked through various contingents of the Persian allied army and picked guys who looked like they might be useful for fighting against hoplites. So he took the marines off the Egyptian warships because they had heavy armor and big wooden shields. So Mardonius clearly had some ideas and he knew what he'd faced at Thermopylae

and was trying to prepare himself better to face the Spartans a second time around. But in large numbers, they did the job. We can't pass this section without quickly doing some myth busting on the 300 movie that for a certain generation was very, very important indeed, I think, and hugely influential.

What's some of your headlines about the most prominent myths in that movie? Well, the thing I always start with is say the film 300 is a very faithful reproduction of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300. And so Frank Miller is a superhero comic book writer. So the Spartans in many ways are superheroes. So the film amplifies aspects of Spartan society. So they have the red cloaks, they have the Lambda shields. So that looks quite good. There's a moment where they actually fight like hoplites, which is quite good.

But then it just goes crazy with so many imaginary features, like Ephialtes being a disabled Spartan when he was a local Greek who did it for the cash. The fact that they end up fighting in a very free and out of a phalanx kind of way. The fact that there's barely anyone other than 300 Spartans. The fact that they don't wear bronze armor. Spartans did not go around wearing leather trunks. In normal life, they might have actually got around much more naked than that, but they wouldn't have done combat that way. So certainly no war rhinos in Xerxes' army. Xerxes was a Persian king. He's not a giant bejeweled demigod kind of thing. What about same-sex relationships?

In Sparta, yes. So one of the most notorious lines in the graphic novel, which I think made its way into the film, is Leonidas dismissing the Athenians as boy lovers, which is actually a line that the Athenians would have used against the Spartans. actually a line that the Athenians would have used against the Spartans. So part of their upbringing, a key part of that was a pederastic relationship between an older man and a teenage boy. And that would have been an aspect of Spartan culture? Very much so, yes. With the Persians gone, or at least back in Asia Minor for a while, still quite interesting in the Greek world, do the Spartans and Athenians turn on each other quite rapidly? What's the Greece like they leave behind? They do turn on each other quite quickly. So they defeat Xerxes, they have this allied force, and they do initially work together with the other Greeks to try and continue the war against the Persians. But it goes wrong for the Spartans very quickly, partly because Pausanias,

the nephew of Leonidas, who was the general who won the Battle of Plataea, goes rogue quite quickly and ends up reportedly even trying to do dodgy deals with the Persians and goes around to the city of Byzantium with a bodyguard of Persians and Egyptians and is basically trying to turn himself into the king of Greece. So the Athenians seize the opportunity that this presents to effectively nudge the Spartans out of the way and take over the leadership of the war against the Persians. Do you then get this decades-long war between Athens and Sparta, famously written up by Thucydides. The perception I had when I was a kid reading that was that it was not unlike Napoleon and

the British in the 19th century. The Athenians couldn't seem to be able to defeat the Spartans on land, and then the Spartans were also at a very great disadvantage at sea. So you have this elephant and the whale kind of wrestling each other for decades. Yeah, absolutely. The Athenians grow their naval power more and more and more, and they do develop quite a serious maritime empire. Spartans don't have a hope of dislodging them at sea. But even though Sparta has its problems on land, Athens just isn't able to do the job. So, they seem to have their own spheres of influence in some way. And so they spend the 50 years after defeating the Persians kind of moving half against each other, not proxy wars where it's Sparta's allies fighting against Athens, but Sparta not actually involved,

squabbling amongst themselves. It's all a bit confusing and messy until it really does finally explode into an actual full-on war, which is the Peloponnesian War. Eventually, that deadlock is broken because Sparta does work out how to fight at sea. Is that fair? Work out how to fight at sea is part of it, but also are prepared to do a dodgy deal with the Persians for cash is the other reason. So Sparta needs to know how to wean at sea, which means they need a commander who can actually do it. But basically, they need ships. That's the only way they can really defeat the Athenians at sea. They need to be able to at least equal them. And the only way they can do that is with money. And they do a dodgy deal with the Persians to get money,

which allows them to build ships, but also quite crucially offer better pay to rowers so they can get the more skilled rowers, which means the Athenians suddenly don't have that extra advantage that they had at sea. With Athens defeated, it looks like Sparta's dominant in the space we today call Greece, but nothing lasts forever. No, the Spartans have genuine empire for a very brief period of time. It all goes wrong quite, quite quickly. And why is that? What changes? It's a combination of things. One, they are awful leaders. They are not nice people, and they have no idea how to actually avoid creating a scenario where all of the other Greeks will

unite against them. And the other problem is there just aren't enough of them. There's just never enough Spartan citizens. The largest number of Spartan citizens we know about for sure is 8,000. By the time they actually have rulership of the Greek world, hegemony is the word the Greeks use, there's probably only 2,500, 3,000 Spartan citizens. Wow, that's not enough. No, that's not nearly enough. Okay, interesting. So in the end, demographics plays a big part. Yeah, and some of it goes right back to that high bar they set for citizenship in Sparta.

bar they set for citizenship in Sparta. They made it so difficult to be a Spartan citizen that it's just too easy to fall into poverty and lose your citizen status. And so in the fourth century, we suddenly hear about a new class of Spartans known as the inferiors. And they seem to have been men who were deprived of their full citizen rights because they were just too poor to be a Spartan citizen. And they've got to go back to farming and they can't just spend all their days hunting and doing military training. Well, they've got to find another way of living. Yeah, so their land resources will just not be enough to meet their contributions for a common mess.

So their sons will not be able to be trained up to be a Spartan and just become a Spartan citizen. They do try and fix it in some ways. There's another underclass we hear about known as the Mothakes, and they seem to have been the sons of the citizens who were sponsored through the upbringing by wealthier citizens in the hope that they might be trained up and be ready to become a Spartan citizen. And maybe the wealthy benefactor might actually gift them enough land that they could then become a citizen as a sort of a safety net for the sons of the poor. But it's not enough, and they're defeated by the Thebans of all people. No one saw that coming.

No, the Thebans might have seen it coming, but I don't think any of- In their wildest dreams. Yeah, I don't think the Thebans 50 years ago would have seen it coming. But by the time that they do defeat the Spartans in 371, the small number of Spartan citizens has become so obvious. And also the Thebans have become much more professionalized themselves. So they have an elite military unit known as the Sacred Band, which is 300 men, reportedly pairs of lovers, 150 pairs of lovers, adding up to 300 who are trained and funded by the state to spend their time being gentlemen

of leisure, ready to fight against men like the Spartans. So that Spartan period of forgetfulness, as you say, doesn't last very long. So why on earth have the whole of subsequent history for two and a half thousand years been obsessed with the Spartans? Thermopylae. It's the romance of Thermopylae. 300 men who are prepared to fight against millions of Persians and die for freedom. It has such a brilliant vibe about it. I can see the 12-year-old Andrew just still bursting to get out.

Absolutely. That's what drew me in and it's what's drawn so many people in. And when you look at so many modern novels set in ancient Sparta, they're set around Thermopylae. Films, they're about Thermopylae. It's always about Thermopylae. And as well as being this wonderful story, it's also one of the first stories of European literature. It's Herodotus, the grandfather of history. I mean, it's the ur-stories from our past, isn't it? Absolutely. I mean, Herodotus is the first surviving recorder of a narrative history and his entire story that starts really, well,

chronologically, it starts in the middle of the sixth century, but he takes things back to mythical events. The whole of that work is drawing you to the big showdowns between the Greeks and the Persians. And one of those moments is Thermopylae. And he has to tell the story in the way that he tells it. Well, thank you for telling us the story of Thermopylae and indeed the whole of the Spartan rise and fall. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube.

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