Dan Snow's History Hit - The Spartans

Episode Date: August 20, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by Andrew Bayliss, a Senior Lecturer in Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He's an expert on Sparta and Ancient Greece, and he joined me on the pod to mark the 2,500th anniversary of the battle of Themopylae, when 300 Spartans battled the Persian army. We discussed whether the Spartans deserved the reputations they've developed, and dissected the plethora of myths with have emererged, of musclebound soldiers with long hair and red cloaks. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Everyone's heard of the Spartans through film, through TV, through the exciting podcast that you've heard on this feed. We need to separate myth from reality here. These are not superhuman, militarily indestructible. These are not the human equivalents of the T-2000 Terminator. No, they bled just like you and me. They had politics, they had culture. They were a bit niche. Agreed. And they were pretty fierce on the battlefield. But we shouldn't fall for all of the myths of their subsequent fanboys. Andrew Bayliss, the senior lecturer in Greek history at the University of Birmingham. He's such an engaging speaker, you're going to love this episode. And we talked about

the Spartans, we particularly talked about the Battle of Thermopylae. Now, yeah, I'm terrible at maths, but I think it's the big anniversary because we think the battle of thermopylae was in 480 bc it is now 2020 and therefore i think that's 2500 so that is pretty that's a big anniversary 2500 years ago a spartan-led coalition took on the persians at the hot gates in northern Greece. The battle that resulted in one of the first attested battles in European history was bloody and lasted for days and has become one of the most celebrated battles, one of the most written about in European military history. It was of course a crushing defeat but from that defeat came the legend of the Spartans. Let's hear Andrew Bayliss. Enjoy. the Spartans. Let's hear Andrew Bayliss. Enjoy. Andrew, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Well, thank you for inviting me. It's hailed as one of the great battles in the Western

military historiography. First of all, did it happen as we kind of understand it, like a small group of Spartans and their allies holding back a giant tide of Persians until they were betrayed? Let's just get the the facts straight but then i'll ask about how important it was okay brilliant so when you said it didn't happen as we understand it i was instantly going to ask you what do you mean as we understand it as in popular film and television or as we understand it from reading our sources someone who's watched that film a few times yeah you know with all the supernatural beasts. Yeah, so no giant war rhinos

or anything like that on the Persian side, that's for sure. So it's definitely amplified. Even the sources that we consider to be reliable. Herodotus was writing 50 years after the events. Clearly by then, stories had been elaborated, blown out of proportion. Clearly the number of Persians is a massive exaggeration. Herodotus gives two and a half

million men and no modern scholar would ever suggest it was anything even approaching that. Modern estimates, total guesses, but they're sort of 100,000 to 300,000. So the basic story of 300 Spartans plus several thousand other allies who are often overlooked holding off massive numbers of Persians, yes. The more elaborate side of things, no. Then let's talk about its importance, because as a fan of the history of the Persian invasions, I can never understand why you don't get more Plataea. Why do we all talk about Thermopylae the whole time?

I mean, Salamis, I get it, I love naval history, but Plataea is this, like, crushingly decisive battle, surely, isn't it? And it's the one we never hear about. We should talk about Plataea more. We should talk about Plataea much more because the Persian invasion is ended by Plataea. Salamis gets the ball rolling, but without Plataea, the Persian invasion is ended by Plataea. Salamis gets the ball rolling, but without Plataea,

the Persian invasion would potentially have been a success. So you're 100% right to focus on Plataea. And somebody who works on Sparta, I'd want us to focus on Plataea more because that's where you really get the Spartan army in action. There's 5,000 Spartan citizens. There's 5,000 perioikoi. There's 35,000 helots citizens, there's 5,000 perioikoi, there's 35,000 helots, according

to Herodotus. This is the biggest army that Sparta ever puts in the field. And the way Herodotus describes it, the Spartans and their allies from Tegia are almost on their own against the Persians. So that's the great success. But we focus on the heroic failure, because it's so much more dramatic in that way. 300 men holding off millions in a narrow pass. It just sounds so much better. And I think people can get into a hero-worshipping kind of thing of the Spartans sacrificing themselves when the odds are so much against them. Whereas Portilla, well, it's a win.

I always make a joke and say you can't make a good film about Alexander the Great because he wins. You need the heroic failure to get that dramatic effect. Okay, let's just wind back a bit. We've got Persians decide to... Persians is Eurasia's great superpower first, I suppose. And they decide to invade these troublesome Greeks in 80 BC. They cross Thelispon. Their first contact is a battle at Thermopylae.

Tell us what happens. Well, their first contact is technically at Thermopylae. Tell us what happens. Well, their first contact is technically at Thermopylae. The Greeks try to hold them off Tempe in Thessaly before that, but they realise that, well, they're warned that they're going to be too easily surrounded. So that blocking them at the narrow pass isn't going to work. So then they, plan B is block them at Thermopylae where it's 15 and a half metres wide at its most narrow.

So it makes sense as a bottleneck opportunity to hold the Persians up. And the Greeks are allied under Spartan leadership, which is why you have Leonidas, the king of Sparta, commanding the allied Greek force. But it coincides with the Olympic Games and the Festival of the Carneia, where all the Greeks have a truce for the Olympic Games and the festival of the Karnea where the Greeks, well all the Greeks have a truce for the Olympic Games but most of the Peloponnesian Greeks have a strict truce for the month of the Karnea so they can't go out en masse so that's what's described that the 300 Spartans is a

force designed to delay the Persians until the rest of the Spartans can come in full numbers. So we have this narrow road between the cliffs and the sea. There's an important naval aspect, but we can come on to that a bit. This gets the heart of your work. Are the Spartans at Thermopylae, are they these super warriors that Herodotus makes out? Are they kind of stretching and relaxing? Because for them, a day of battle is frankly preferable to a day of training because their training is so hard, they like to relax into the battles.

Well, if we trust the later sources yes the spartan regime upbringing is the most brutal training regime imaginable and the spartans spend every all of every day brutally exercising and strictly monitored and controlled but when you look at the earlier sources the more contemporary sources it's not a lot less clear than that. So in modern scholarship, there's definitely a de-othering of the Spartans happening right now, where people are starting to argue, well, come on, look at how much time the Spartans actually spend fighting, given that there's almost no description of them doing any form of actual military training. Their lifestyle was probably significantly less restrictive than the later

sources certainly paint them as, and certainly much less restrictive than popular culture visions of Sparta. But Spartan citizens are not allowed or not expected to do other forms of work, so they have the time and leisure to spend time exercising, hunting, engaging in communal activities, which will be useful when it comes to military performance later on. So whereas all the other Greek hoplites are amateurs who have day jobs, even if their day job is just being a man of leisure, if they're particularly rich, the Spartans are all citizens and soldiers at the same time. There is a quasi-professionalism

to them that does make them different. And is that multinational, if that's not quite the right word, but that composite force is under Spartan leadership at Thermopylae, regardless of the Spartans as sort of the leaders when it comes to war? They definitely have the reputation of being the best, and they have, over the preceding generations, pretty much seized control of the Peloponnese. They run a league, for want of a better term, that modern scholars refer to as the Peloponnesian League, where basically most of the Peloponnesian Greeks are accepting of Spartan leadership. So when the Greeks decided on a joint strategy of fighting against Xerxes, they were the natural choice. And Herodotus says that the Peloponnesians

refused to serve under Athenian leadership. They would only choose the Spartans. So they're recognised as the dominant force in the Peloponnese, and the Peloponnese is the dominant land-based forces at the time. Under Leonidas, they fight this tough battle. I mean, is it regarded, you say later scholars come to sort of celebrate it. Was it a particularly savage holding action? Was it impressive? Was it dramatic? If it's anything like how Herodotus and other later sources describe it, it will have been a brutal battle. There are so many numbers of Persians. There's so few defenders. There are so many numbers of Persians. There's so few defenders.

Herodotus says 20,000 Persians died, and the best part of 4,000 Greeks died. In terms of casualties, it's massive. They're holding out for several days. It will not have been a gentle affair. There will have been a lot of brutal acts. There will have been a lot of injuries. I mean, just sort of imagining what it would have been like. There must have been a lot of the Greek defenders must have been injured quite early on from Persian arrows and just from hand to hand fighting. So on the second day,

when the Persians expected the Greeks would have been sort of unable to resist them, they turned up again. And this was something that shocked the Persians, according to Herodotus. But one of the reasons they would have been shocked is they just must have assumed that they would have had too many casualties to try and fight again. I think the reason why we pay so much attention to Thermopylae in some ways is something that Diodorus, who was writing in the first century BCE or first century CE, depending on where you place Diodorus, he said that after the battle it was more significant even than Salamis or Plataea because the Greeks who fought at Salamis and Plataea were inspired by the achievements of the Greeks who'd fought at Thermopylae and that the Persians remembered

Thermopylae with a sense of terror because these small number of men had fought against them and held them up for so long and the Greeks themselves, we'd held up the Persians with such a small force. So now there's 40,000 of us. What can we not achieve now? I guess, of course, tragically, we just don't know enough about what the Persians made of these opposition, do we? No. Well, there's a wonderful poem called The Persian Version. And i can't remember when it was written but it's sort of it really puts it tries to take the persian perspective and the persian perspective of the battle of thermopylae the battle of the tea and the battle of salamis and the battle of marathon is to vents in the fringes of the world of no great significance so we in the west sort of

imagine ourselves as the greeks We take the role of the Greeks. But really, as far as the Persians were concerned, this was very much on the fringes of their world. This could have been written off as a minor inconvenience rather than a disastrous defeat. See the British Empire in Afghanistan, further imperfect historical parallels. The Battle of Plataea, where the Spartans do appear, and that was an extraordinary battle going on for days, wasn't it? Proved irresistible.

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Yeah, the Plataea is not a short campaign. There's a lot of skirmishing around the sides. It's a big flat plain where the Persian cavalry, that's the key part of the Persian army, is able to inflict very heavy casualties on the Greeks. The Greek approach ends up being so disordered that the army effectively ends up splitting. And there's a wonderful moment when Pausanias, who is Leonidas' nephew, who's in charge of the Greek army, orders the Spartans and the rest of the allies to withdraw. And the Athenians don't withdraw because they don't trust the Spartans and don't believe them. And one of the Spartan commanders actually refuses to go.

He won't go. He throws down a rock and says, this is my vote and I'm voting to stay here. And eventually he is encouraged to move off because the rest of the Spartans just go and leave him and his forces because he's in command of a regiment. And eventually he realizes he's going to be on his own and he follows eventually. So it's a very disordered campaign before it actually gets to the full-on pitched battle, which will have been brutal and an extraordinary long event by the way Herodotus describes it, because you've got 40,000 plus Greek hoplites plus a large number of likely armed troops, including the 35,000 helots, and modern estimates for Mardonius's

army at Plataea is about 100,000, and almost all of them are killed if we trust Herodotus, thousand and almost all of them are killed if we trust Herodotus so this is not going to be a short battle by any means. Spartans emerge from the Persian wars with this military reputation you're now saying we need to be cautious about. A generation later they fight the Peloponnesian war Athens and Sparta. It does feel like Athens can win every battle except the ones where they meet the Spartans in the open field of battle, right? So there is something, there must be something going on with these Spartan armies. Until the other Greeks really develop any sense of professionalism themselves, the Spartans in full call-up are going to be able to defeat most of their opponents there is something about that degree of i'll call it quasi-professionalism there is something about when they actually have

the numbers one of the things that happens in the latter part of the fifth century in the first part of the fourth century is spartan citizen numbers plummet so not only are their opponents starting to become more professional the number of professionals professionals in the Spartan army is reduced quite significantly, to begin with a levelling off, but then ultimately the Spartans are defeated on numerous occasions. But yeah, the big land battles where there's not an asterisk alongside it. I think when the Spartans surrendered at the battle of Pylos on the island of Sphacteria in 425, you have a big asterisk there.

It's a small number of Spartans, effectively a desert island, besieged by Athenians, and eventually they give up. But big pitch battles, the Spartans have an advantage over the Athenians, definitely. Man, the Athenians made a lot out of that surrender of the Pylos as well. My goodness. They did indeed, yes. One of my favourite, because you don't get that many Spartan artefacts, one of my favourite Spartan artefacts is the shield that you can see in the Museum of the Athenian Agora,

which was taken from one of the Spartans at Pylos. And it has, we can barely see it, but it has inscribed on it, taken from the Spartans at Pylos. And the Athenians were obviously extremely proud of the fact that the Spartans had surrendered to them. were obviously extremely proud of the fact that the Spartans had surrendered to them. So if the Spartans weren't quite the sort of insane martial race of legend, how did they organise themselves? I mean, I always find their constitution a bit confusing. Yeah, it is an unusual constitution to say the least. So two royal houses, so two kings at the same time. Early phases, they appear to have sent both kings together in charge of campaigns.

But there's one that Herodotus describes where it went very, very wrong because the two kings disagreed with each other. So after that, they imposed a new rule that said only one king could command an army at the same time. They have a council of elders, 28 elders plus the two kings. And then they have a citizen assembly, which effectively is a yes-no kind of assembly. So you could describe it as sort of democratic but only just in that way. And what about women? Because there's an interesting debate about women compared to other Greek states, isn't there? Yeah, so the reputation of Spartan women in our primary sources, which are mostly, well the majority of them are Athenian, is that Spartan women are extremely different. So the stereotype of Athenian women is that they're very much cloistered.

They're very seldom educated. The more wealthy they are, the less likely they are to be outside and seen. Whereas Spartan women are very much seen, well, Spartan girls. So Spartan girls have mandatory exercise the primary sources say that so that they would be strong enough to bear strong children they're scantily clad for their exercises so theenian playwright euripides even suggests they exercise naked which is probably an exaggeration but it emphasizes how different spartan women were seen to be and spartan women

have a reputation for telling their men what to do there are sort of 40 recorded sayings by spartan women and the vast majority of them are rebuking their sons or their brothers for not living up to spartan ideals so spartan women stood out because you could see them and you could hear them. Come back with your shield or on it? Yes, that's the one in the film 300. They give that line to Gorgo. Plutarch just gives it to a random Spartan woman. It's a saying that many modern experts on Sparta reject as historically accurate because Spartans didn't come back home. When they died in battle, they were buried near enough to the battle site, the battle site, they're buried in a communal burial. So it's one that you have to work hard to try and rescue. Okay, well, that's good to know.

What about the fall of Sparta, if you like? I mean, I always think, like we don't pay attention to Plataea, I always think we don't pay enough attention to the dominance of Thebes and the way they take on and overturn Spartan hegemony. Was Sparta a victim of its own success? Did it just breed as is the way with military warfare? Did their enemies eventually learn the Spartan ways and simply overcome them, turning their own methods against them? Other Greek states start to introduce what you could call more professional elements. So Thebes, which you mentioned, produces an elite corps of 300 soldiers, the so-called sacred band. Allegedly 150 pairs of lovers who were fiercely loyal to each other, but also had the time to devote themselves to warfare properly.

The Athenians use picked volunteers rather than just ordinary soldiers in some battles. There's just more money spent on things by some of the bigger city-states. But where it really goes wrong for Sparta is the system of Sparta itself, where you have to have a certain amount of wealth to be a Spartan citizen. And inequality grows in Sparta. And one of the problems is there is almost certainly universal female inheritance in Sparta. of the problems is there is almost certainly universal female inheritance in Sparta. So wealth that would have naturally passed on to male heirs elsewhere in the Greek world ends up concentrated in female hands. So by the time of Sparta's collapse, two-fifths of Spartan territory

is owned by women rather than men who would have needed that wealth to be Spartan citizens, because there was effectively a wealth criterion for citizenship. So Spartan numbers go from 5,000 hoplites at the Battle of Plataea. By the time of the Battle of Leuctra in 370, when the Spartans are defeated by the Thebans, there's only 1,500 Spartan citizens. So there's just not enough of them to go around. On the subject of citizens, tell me, exposing the children that appear to be, all children and then the sickly ones get weeded out, is that true? Our only source for the inspection and then rejection of disabled or weak babies is Plutarch and he is writing significantly later than the majority of our sources. And with only him mentioning it,

it's a source that is increasingly being rejected. There is a site in Laconia where it was identified as a potential spot for the place of rejection. There's a nice sort of brown sign from the Greek archaeological service telling you that it's the place of rejection. There were human remains found there. They then looked at the human remains and found there wasn't that many of them, and very few of them were actually children. Most of them were adults. So there's no place that's been found that goes with it. The source is late, so probably not would be the answer. But infanticide was quite normal in the ancient world. You only need to look at the myth of Oedipus. They tried to expose him to see that it's quite normal. So it probably happened. But the idea that the state organised it is probably something that is not true. Okay, so babies weren't all automatically

left out for a night. What about the all young boys had to kill a helot on their kind of crazy military training week or whatever it was their sort of camp yeah so there's the idea that the term that spartans had for this was the crypteia which means the secret thing and in popular culture you have the idea that all spartan citizens going through the upbringing have this time in the wilds where they kill helots but that's not actually what the primary sources tell us the primary sources only say some of the youths did this and some of the primary sources tell us. The primary sources only say some of the youths did this, and some of the primary sources leave out the helot killing part. So either it's something that changed over time, or it's something that the sources that don't mention it don't want to

talk about. But it's the idea that every Spartan had to go out and kill a helot. That's definitely not the case. Some probably. Terrorization of the helots is going to have been the reality of the spartan world wonderful well puncturing myths all over the place thank you very much indeed the book is called the spartans the book is called the spartans yes it's appropriately laconic oh tell us where i love that story about where laconic comes from but they're particularly famous for the dislike of too many words and they happily rebuke other Greeks for using too many words and probably my favourite story of Spartan laconic speech is the one where envoys come from Samos off the coast of Turkey

and ask for Spartans for help and they make a long impassioned speech and the Spartan response is you spoke for so long that we forgot the beginning so we didn't understand the end and when the envoys have another go they hold up a bag and they say this bag needs filling with grain and the Spartan response was you didn't need to say the words the bag so they were particularly blunt with outsiders for being too wordy they would have hated me I always tell my students because I use far too many words and the Spartans would have hated me, I always tell my students, because I use far too many words, and the Spartans would have criticised me immensely for that. Obviously, I love the one, is it later, is it Philip of Macedon? Oh, yes, when Philip of Macedon supposedly said,

if I come, there'll be trouble for you, and the Spartan response was just a one-word if. That's almost certainly apocryphal, but it gives you a good flavour of what the Spartan attitude to limiting your speech was like. My kids, probably another apocryphal, but my kids, every time I told them the battle of the story of the Thermopylae when Leonidas is told the person's so numerous that their arrows will block out the sun. And then he said, oh, we'll fight in the shade.

Herodotus gives that line to Aphia Dionyches and he says he had a reputation amongst the other Greeks for a particular wit. It is a wonderful line. I'd love it to be true. The fact that Herodotus mentions it is good in that he's the earliest source, so it's one of those earlier Spartan sayings, but you could argue that even then the passage of time has maybe elaborated that one, but it is a wonderful one-liner. Well, it is Herodotus after all.

Thank you so much. Good luck with the book. Thank thank you very much it's been a pleasure talking to you i feel we have the mystery on our shoulders one child one teacher one book and one pen can change the world you