In Our Time - Sparta

Episode Date: November 19, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall and Angie Hobbs discuss Sparta, the militaristic Ancient Greek city-state, and the political ideas it spawned.The isolated Ancient Greek city-state of Sparta was a ferocious opposite to the cosmopolitan port of Athens. Spartans were hostile to outsiders and rhetoric, to philosophy and change. Two and a half thousand years on, Sparta remains famous for its brutally rigorous culture of military discipline, as inculcated in its young men through communal living, and terrifying, licensed violence towards the Helots, the city-state's subjugated majority. Sparta and its cruelty was used as an argument against slavery by British Abolitionists in the early 1800s, before inspiring the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.Yet Sparta also produced poets of great skill: Tyrteaus wrote marching songs for the young men; Alcman wrote choral lyrics for the young women. Moreover, the city-state's rulers pioneered a radically egalitarian political system, and its ideals were invoked by Plato. Its inhabitants also prided themselves on their wit: we don't only derive the word 'spartan' from their culture, but the word 'laconic'. Paul Cartledge is AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; Edith Hall is Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London; Angie Hobbs is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, uniquely in ancient Greece, the city-state of Sparta didn't see any need to build a wall around itself. The Spartans felt confident that they could repel anyone,

unwise enough to attack them. Sparta's brutal military culture was based on male communal living from the age of seven and the permanent subjugation of its neighbours. It established itself as a ferocious antithesis to the cosmopolitan intellectual energy of Athens. Its name has been a byword for ruthless discipline ever since. Yet Sparta also produced artefacts and poetry and especially songs of great beauty and pioneered a radically egalitarian political system. With me to discuss Sparta, its history and its mythic status,

are Paul Cartlidge, the A.G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge. Edith Hall, Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway University of London. And Angie Hobbes, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. Paul Cartlidge, where was Sparta and how did it arrive at its very early fame? I can't give you the coordinates off the top of my head, but it is in the southern Peloponnese. Peloponnese is very nearly a peninsula, a large bit of the main bit of Greece. And if you head from Corinth, from the Isthmus of Corinth, you get finally to the valley, hollow Lacedaimon, as it was called, as early as Homer.

And Lacedaimon, puzzlingly, is both the name for the region and for the city of Sparta. Sparta actually is another name. Sparta's official name was Lacedaemon. and the first impression a traveller gets is of stunning beauty because as you look down from an eminence above the valley you have on your left the Pannon mountain range and you have on your right the Teigatos mountain range and Teigatos rises up 2,404 metres so it goes up to over 8,000 feet

Parnon is slightly lower but nevertheless two very long and large mountain chains which Sparta nestles the market Now, the extraordinary thing about the topography of this part of the world is that the Spartans defied it. In other words, at one point in their history, they decided that what they had in the valley of the Eurotas, the river Eurotas, was not enough. They were greedy.

And even though that was exceptionally fertile by Greek standards, producing sometimes two crops of cereals in one season, very good for olives, very good for vines, they thought they wanted more. and they went west over this mountain chain, not literally over the top, but rounded. And they occupied the region to the west, which we call Messina. And I'm just concluding on the point that this was the largest Greek city state, by far in terms of its territory, and a quite extraordinary achievement.

Can you give us a date there, Paul, please? And the largest Greek set, we're talking about Greeks being all over the Mediterranean. We're talking about, say, a thousand cities, and this was the largest. No, absolutely right. And the date is what? Right, well, the Greek language is first attested around about 1400 BCE. We archaeologists call that the late Bronze Age. Well, then there's a hiatus, a dark age,

and what we call historical Greece gets going in roughly the 9th 8th century. And we're talking about the foundation of Sparta as a major city in the 8th century, very broadly speaking, between 800 and 700 BC or BC. It attacks its neighbours, the Messenians, who are also groups. Greeks. I mean, it's not attracting another sort of people and that sort of thing. And makes them captives, and they become known as the Helots or Helots, or you'll pronounce it in Greek, for our delegation and delight. And there they are for the rest of Sparta's time, for the rest of Sparta's official time, which goes for hundreds of years.

Well, they, indeed, the Messenians are not just Greeks, but they actually belong to the same language family of Greeks, sharing the same religious festivals. They're Dorians, and they speak the Doric dialect. of Greek. So they are actually the Spartans conquering people who are very like themselves. And one reason therefore I think that they were as nasty as they were to these people having conquered them was precisely because

they were so like them. They spoke the same language, they worshipped the same gods. So one way to make them other is to treat them as other and so ritual humiliation was part of the package but the extraordinary thing is that they held on to these Messenians

as Helots for some four centuries, and that was the basis of Sparta's power. And the new land they got was the basis of it could feed itself, it was self-sustaining, which gave it possibilities and, in a sense, problems as well. But anyway, come down in a minute. Edithor, why did Sparta's mythic version of its own origins affect the way it treated the helots, affect the way decided to move into this great power position? I think it was fundamental.

The Spartans myth of their origin. was that their forefathers many, many, many centuries ago, who were the children of the great physical hero, Heracles, they all saw themselves as descended from Heracles, the greatest warrior of them all, had been expelled, had been driven out, had been exiled by the Messinians and other groups in the Peloponnese, and they'd had to come back to reclaim their own.

So they, and every year, e-Fors, actually, who we'll go on to, but they actually declared official war on the Mesopotamines, because they'd come back and colonised, recolonise their own land. So the emotional status of being a spot and was one of having taken revenge for having got back what had been taken from you. So that that was actually heightened by the return of the children of Heracles. It's called the return of the Heraclitite to the Peloponnese. Now that's completely different from, say, the Athenian myth, which is that the Athenians are sprung from their own land. They're truly indigenous, a myth called autotony, which.

which means sprung from our own soil, your own soil. The Spartan foundation myth was about violent suppression of an enemy. So can you tell us about the... Before you go into detail, the basic set of... It was ruled by free Spartans. Let's start with that. How equal society was it? Who were these free Spartans?

Oh, just get the proportion right, sorry. There were ten times as many helots as there were Spartans all the way along, at least ten times as many. It was ten to one, and the odds went up. and up and up, didn't they? But they still were under the thumb. People think it is about one in ten. That's based on both ancient estimates and other data, which isn't so different, actually, from the proportion of Athenians to non-Athenians in Athens. It's actually pretty similar. It seems that the economics of it seems to have demanded the sort of labor of nine

to the complete absence of labour for the tenth, so he could train himself in military warfare all day long. You actually buy the leisure of the one off the backs of the labour of the other nine. There's a peculiar contradiction there with Sparta because of the extraordinary formal public equality of the free Spartiates. This is the privileged group who get to fight, the men of Sparta. They have an official public status of total equality, which actually masks the fact there were radical differences in wealth between them. have a sort of public myth of egalitarianism, which is what some left-wing groups in history have found so attractive. To be a free Spartan, you have to have a Spartan father and the

Spartan mother, which given the number of them who were killed in battle after battle after battle, and keeping down the helots, made it quite difficult for the times, just to be enough. Absolutely it did, and they had constant population crises. One of the ways they got round that was by their very peculiar marriage customs, which meant that they heightened and you weren't really allowed to live with your wife when you got married. You only allowed sort of random visits at night, which meant that the amount of sex that had to be crammed in when you did it must actually helped the birth rate.

Until you were 30, allegedly. Exactly, but during that high time, they actually controlled sexual access in order to heighten it. And the other one is, of course, eugenics. I mean, sick babies were regularly, that's to go on to another part of the story. But, I mean, there were very specific social mechanisms put in place to try to maximize the number of very strong healthy children. You might well finish the sick babies while we're here.

Sure, they would be exposed, which to us sounds extraordinarily cruel, but in some cases they might actually be picked up. This is a practice not just of Sparta, by the way, but Athens. And the Athenians knew perfectly well where to go. If you wanted a child who wasn't perhaps absolutely, either wanted by the parents, they couldn't rear it, or there was something wrong with them. But the Spartans made it an official, centrally directed practice.

which is typically Spartan. Angie Hobbes, there's this figure called Lycurgus. Have you got that right? Lecurgis, probably. Lecurgis, probably. Lecurgis will do, okay, Lecurgus. And he's credited with instilling certain virtues into the Spartans. So we're trying to define what the Spartan is.

Paul has taken as to where they came from in the deep, deep, deep, 1400 BC, to this magnificent valley that everywhere was go and visit now, then. Over a mountain range they went and conquered the breadbasket of the whole of that area, became the biggest city, biggest Greek city around, and we've begun to talk about the way that they managed their affairs. But this is a defining man, if he was a man, or just a myth or a collection. What did he do and what did he say that made the difference? Well, whether he existed or not, I probably think he didn't.

It's strange. He's not mentioned in the Spartan poet Tertius and so on as well come on to. But certainly around the time of the... late 7th, early 6th centuries BC, we get a lot of very important changes in the way the Spartan constitution is set up and the way the Spartans educated themselves. And this sort of package of reforms has been attributed to this semi-mythical character called Lecurgis. So in terms of the upbringing which is meant to instill certain virtues, at the age of seven, as we've said, the young male, Bartons were taken away from home. They were away from home forever after that.

They never came back. They came back for holidays, though? Well... There was no such thing. No, it was... Spartan wouldn't recognise the term. Really? No, it was... In my notes, it says holidays.

Oh, right. I don't know which one of you said holidays. They changed the rules. No, even worse than boarding school. They went through what was known as the Ogoga, which is this extremely tough, discipline, both mentally and physically, designed to instill the military virtues in them. So above all, they are being trained to be courageous and strong in both body and mind.

And then the other great Spartan virtues of self-discipline and austerity, they come in to feed this military package. So everything is geared to creating this warrior class. Can you give us some detail? You say it's extremely strict and very disciplined. you'd mean very emphatic. What did they make these boys, then adolescents, then young men do? Okay, well, until the age of 18, so they're going through very rigorous military training, gymnastics, food deprivation, for instance. They have to go on, they have periods when they have to go and forage for their own food.

So just the idea is to develop not just the military skills, but the kind of cunning and resourcefulness that is going to be needed to fight on campaign. And then at 18 it gets even more sinister. The select few of these Spartan youths are selected for what they undergo something called the Crypteia. When they're sort of sent off into the countryside with just a knife to forage for themselves for a fairly extended period of time. And one of the things that they're meant to do in this period, this period of kind of, I don't know, secret sort of service operation, It's like an SOE sort of band is to kill helots, to keep the helot numbers down. That is actually part of what they're meant to do

is part of the subjugation of the helots as a sort of revolting ritual culling of them. Now behind this, there was also a political system that was very different from other systems. Can you, the three of you, can we get through that quite briskly? Okay, well we've got four sort of division of power, as it were, we have two hereditary kings from two different royal families.

Exactly, exactly, but as Edith has said, they both saw themselves as descendants of Heracles. And they have increasingly fewer powers, as time goes on, that they always remain generals on campaign, they always retain some religious powers, their priests as well as kings, and they retain some limited judicial powers connected with inheritance and heiresses.

Then there's the Gerusia, the Senate, a body of 28 men over 60, mainly from aristocratic backgrounds, plus the two kings, so making 30 in all. And they act preparing the motions for the assembly, and they also act as a kind of Supreme Court, a Supreme Judicial Court. Thirdly, we've got the Efforts, five annually elected overseers who can come from all class backgrounds. and again they have enormous amount of executive power and judicial power and finally there's the Damos, what the people were called and they can vote on stuff that's been prepared for them by... This is the free Spartans. Exactly, the free Spartan males, yes.

So a pretty small bunch compared to the population as a whole. But even their votes, it looks as if they could be overturned by the Gerusia, the Senate, if the Senate didn't like the result. Quite like the idea of a gerontocracy. I think it is. Can you tell us how this is. What evidence do you have of how this worked in practice? The question of evidence with classical Sparta is incredibly fraught.

But it does seem as though to me that if we went sort of back to ancient Sparta, one of the most startling things would be the extraordinary ability of the elder Spartans to keep the younger generations obedient to them, especially the young men, the vigorous young men of under 30. Now that's the case that old age was respected in most ancient Greek societies but we've actually found an inscription on a stone bench in Sparta that says get up and make way for your elders. It's like we have on the buses.

And they have all sorts of... No, we don't have it on the buses. Sorry, have it on the seats of the buses. There's a poet. We have two actual Spartan voices in poetry. We only have two real Spartans talk to us at all. in the historical record and they're both poets. And one of the poets is Tertius

and he composes the songs with which the young men were trained for military discipline. They had to sing them as they did drill. And these are highly militaristic songs. And in one of them, yeah, there's this image of the most shameful thing is to let an elder die in front of you on the battlefield. With the white beard.

And there's this picture of the tragic old man dying when you should be out there dying instead. And this is one of the songs they had to learn was that they saw an old man, went in and sacrificed themselves instead. So that gets a real sense. Can I lighten things up a bit? I'm quite enjoying it.

A category of eminence is Spartan sayings, which people were interested in inventing as well as collecting. Some of them may be genuine. Well, one of them is a Spartan goes to another city, doesn't matter where, and he sees a sit-down toilet. And he says, well, we don't have

any of those in Sparta. You know why? Because you don't want to have a seat where somebody couldn't get up and make way. for an older man. Exactly. So in other words, you see a seat, then the first thought in Sparta is where's the oldest man around

to sit on it? So I'm looking forward to that sort of thing myself. The old age business is very, very startling because in an awful lot of Greek myth, you actually have the older men being replaced or displaced by young men in their prime, whether it's Laertes being displaced by Odysse in the Odyssey or Priam being displaced by that.

you don't get that in Spartan myth. And it's one of the things that Aristotle's going to criticize the Spartan constitution for too much power in the hands of old men when mental powers are failing. We should remember that Aristotle died in his early 60s, so he has a bit of a vested interest here. He was exactly my age when he died. Can we come back to the Anomouton, please? How effective was this and how different was this constitution? Well, it was radically different from anything else.

One reason we can say that for sure is that the Greeks themselves, including Aristotle, couldn't work out what it was. Because by the time people thought politically, theoretically, about what a constitution was, in Greek, apolitire, they had two main kinds, either a democracy, rule of the demos, in some sense, or an oligarchy. There were very few kingships around, and the only alternative to aversion of oligarchy or democracy was some of each. and so a mixed constitution.

And the Spartans themselves, if pressed, I think, would have had trouble saying whether they had a monarchy, a kingship, because the two kings were very important, or was it a gerontocracy, an oligarchy of the Garusia, or was it a democracy because the efforts had great power, and they came from the whole people, and the whole people decided, e.g., do we go to war, do we not go to war? I have my own view, but in pure theoretical terms, it's extremely difficult. But try to get a fix at the time. Did other cities, there are a thousand cities? It's a nice one number.

There are always a thousand of something. The other number of 984, but no mind, there's thousands of. And now they're looking to Spartan and say they're different. They're not only the biggest and the most powerful and military is the most effective for about 400 years. They're different. What did it recognise at a time that this was a different place? These were a different lot of people. Most of our evidence, as Edith says, our evidence is extremely poor in general.

But most of it is filtered through or directly from Athens. And Athens and Spada fight it out from the late 5th century BC onwards, the famous Paloponnesian War. And occasionally they come together against a common enemy, but typically our evidence is Athenocentric and either biased for, because Athenians who write actually like some features of Sparta, e.g. a few people having great influence, and then others are very against because they're Democrats

and they hate the notion that the people actually doesn't have initiative. What was really admired was the good order. I mean, I think there are two virtues we haven't mentioned that we really have to. And one is what was called eunomia, which means good order. And people who like orderly cities where everybody didn't get anarchic and noisy, loved Sparta, and the other is obedience. And all the ancient poetry is all about inculcating obedience. obedience is something to be proud of.

Rebellion is something that will mean that you cannot be a Spartiate anymore. I'm sure we'll get back to that with the way that the Spartans were talked about in the 20th century. Can we stay here for a moment? You mentioned the poet, the poets. Now, the songs of Titeus, what do his poems about young Spartan men reveal? Can you give us some sense, even sound of them? Well, they're marching songs. So if you imagine...

They're not a sound apiece, they're el-a-giots. They're both. Yeah, yeah. If you imagine certain kinds of songs sung by American GIs while they're training, they're sung to pipe and drum, you do your military drill by them. They're called Embateria, which actually means marching songs. That actually means them. And Tertes published at least four and possibly published, composed, four or five of these.

And they really are in the we voice. They're in the we voice. We are going to war. It is the most disgraceful thing. not to die beside your shield. The Messenians, we have conquered the Messenians and they now have to live like poor asses and give us more than half of their money.

It actually says that. We love looking at blood. The man who doesn't look at blood is a wimp. And then there's a lot of things like with shield, with spear, crest by crest, side by side, with my sword, I march along. I mean, that's what it's about.

And these are the things that the young men had to learn off by heart and they weren't given very much other literature. They didn't have an intellectual culture. And they sung and danced them in armour, didn't they often? Absolutely, whilst they were doing hot plight drill, of the most extraordinarily complicated manoeuvres they had to be able to do well.

So they turn their artistic competitions into a kind of military competition as well. What that is extraordinary artistic, intricate military maneuvers? Can you give us some idea of that? I wish I could. I mean, the best thing for you to do would be go and watch the movie 300,

which has had some rather exciting hotline scenes for Tach Snyder's 300. It had lots of faults, but it's very good on hot plight tactics. They were very, very secret. a lot of them. And in fact, I think one of the reasons why they were so xenophobic and drove strangers out, was to stop, which they did ritually and quite often.

They actually had expulsions of strangers because they didn't want their secret signals. They had these secret signals who went to perform different kinds of things with their shields and their spears and went to suddenly turn. We know they did sudden turns. And they were also extremely cunning. They would pretend to retreat. They would pretend to retreat and then come back at them,

things like that. This is the mopuli and the famous thing. Exactly. So they had all kinds of really, really, really secret things that they had to keep secret, or they wouldn't be so effective in warfare? Paul, can we bring women into the picture now? How did they fare? And this is an extremely militarised society. They don't have to work, they have to go to war, or the men are taken to go to war.

They're supported by ten helots support war on Spartan in very many ways so that they can make war, which they do extraordinarily, effectively, for centuries. What about the women? Well, women, as you say, were essential for producing the next generation of Spartans, in other words, reproduction, they are the necessary other half together with the male. But though they were passive, as all Greek women were, they were nevertheless expected to more actively endorse the male credo, the male ideology, than was the case in other Greek

cities. And so we were talking earlier about how a lot of the evidence for Sparta comes through Athens. Well, the Athenians hated the fact that Spartan women not only spoke in public, but spoke to men in public and addressed them forcefully in public and had something to say. This is utterly un-Athenian. You can read whole tracts of historical works about Athens,

and you won't know the name of an Athenian woman. So I'll give you one. It's the most famous example. It's the typical Spartan, either mother or wife. and she says to either her son or her husband, with it or on it. And this is the most extreme version of laconic speech. In other words, laconic is the adjective from Spartan, Lacedaemonic.

And with it or on it means you come back with your shield or you come back dead carried on it. Now actually it probably is historically false because if a Spartan died abroad, he would be buried abroad. He wouldn't be brought back to Sparta unless he was a king. and so it's not actually factually true, but it's brilliantly Spartan. And so that emblematises what a Spartan woman was supposed to do.

She's non-military, but she backs up her male to the hilt. Andrew? Well, yes, I mean, though the Spartan women are passive, maybe compared to modern standards, they're so much not passive compared to a lot of the rest of Greece, in terms of the fact they could inherit property, they could manage businesses. They had to manage businesses a lot,

because their men folk were away on campaigns so often. They have a reputation amongst the rest of the Greeks for being extremely forceful in business, for having too much power, for being indeed sexually licentious. Paul, am I right in thinking there wasn't even a law against adultery in Sparta? You just had to keep propagating the next generation. And adultery was massively censored and punished in Athens.

Absolutely. And these women were educated, or at least the citizens, As far as anyone was. As far as anybody was, they did have some both intellectual and physical education. They were literate. They did enter into gymnastics and athletic competitions. They were a lot fitter than the rest of the Greeks.

They were different, and all the other Greek writers comment, either favourably or disapprovingly, on how different Spartan women were. They were the most beautiful women in Greece, the Delphic oracle said such. Helen of Sparta. Yeah, well, we do actually have some very strong pictures of individual Spartan women quite apart from the fact that we've got songs that were sung by them. I mean, Gorgho, who is Leonidas's wife, the wife of the famous one who died at Somopoli,

she actively intervened with her father on military matters. She actually gave him military advice. We've got Kyniska, who's the sister of a very important king, Agassilas, who actually is the first ever woman who owns a team of racehorses that win at the Olympics and set a great fashion. Unbelievable. It's like the Queen Mother. She has these race horses. So we actually have,

individual aristocratic women, we had no great, had great influence. But we've also got the other great Spartan poet Altmar, whose songs for training young women in choral dancing, which is the very physical and energetic equivalent of physical training for the men, which we've got these two big songs, which are called Maiden or Virgin songs, which they sang at festivals for Artemis when they were getting ready to get married.

I mean, they're basically songs about biological passage and to womanhood. And they're absolutely extraordinary. They're like nothing else in world literature. They sing to each other about their beauty. They sing to each other about looking like horses, like looking like beautiful race horses in dreams. They compare each other with the Pleiades,

with the sirens, with the nymphs, including Taggata, the mountain nymph of Tegatus. They go on at each other in a highly homoerotic way in order to get sexually charged. That's quite clear. And I think it's about they get homoerotically excited to prepare themselves for reproduction. We have the names in these songs.

They call beautiful names like Agido and Hargesi Chora. And they sing to each other of how much they fancy each other really. And they sing competitively. As Zengi was saying about the male rituals in armour, that you have choas, choruses, who compete against each other. But this again, as I understand, is unique in Greek culture of the town, that women should dance publicly, sing publicly, be seen doing this. Not quite unique.

At Athens, women would dance, for example, at the birth of a child. There were certain particular domestic festivals when it was. was okay. But this absolutely open and sort of compulsory membership of a peer group of fellow singers and dancers. This is like public choral festivals that were compulsory. Angie, do you want to come in or not? Right.

I want to go to Thamoplae now. Let's try not to refer to the film because I haven't seen it. Thousands and millions of other people haven't seen it. So let's stick with what you three can tell us, right? That's that. Thermopylae, it goes on and on in imagination. One of the LESA by William Golding. films are made about it poems are written about it

480 the idea the idea is that 300 Spartans although there are some helots there as well we now know faced the mass of Persian Epah

for three days and killed thousands and then they were all slain can we start with you Angie about Thermopy why did they go there was it an insane mission from the start

was their sacred mountain they were going up anyway wasn't it a sacred mountain it depends it depends how you define insanity. The Spartans, at any rate, knew that they were not going to come back. And we know that because the 300 who was selected were not just selected from the military most skilled elite

and most courageous elite, but they all had to have one male son. So they had to leave their bloodline behind. They only picked men to fight who already had a son who could carry on after them. The Spartans knew they were going to die. I don't think all the others did. I think that There were about 7,000 in all. And, of course, it's part of the Spartan... Seven thousand of the army. There were 7,000 of the army, yes. From the Peloponnese, from north of the Peloponnesus and so on.

It's a 300... 301. Yes, indeed. That's what you're here for. Right, okay. It's the 300... And of course it's part of the Spartans' cleverness in that they play a part in sort of propagating this myth about the 300.

In fact, there was 7,000. They knew they were. weren't coming back. I think some of the other Greeks probably thought they were. Otherwise, we're all going to get very confused. I mean, you're rushing on too much for me. You keep saying 7,000. There were 300 Spartans in the past of Thermopyla. Yes. That's who we're talking about. And, well, they headed. They headed it. They were the leaders. So how far away were the other 7,000?

They were all there. They were all crammed as... No, no, they were all packed in. It's a kilometre long or so. They're past. But these 300 were at the front. Yeah, absolutely. But right behind them were 4,000 others from the Pelop. Vanessa, sort of, nearly 3,000 from them. Does that make it a different story then? Yes, I think. Well, let's have the no as well as the yes, Paul. Well, let's say it's like Marathon, where the Athenians managed to obliterate the fact that Plotian's also fought with them at Marathon. And there is actually a mound, there was a mound of the dead Plotians as well as the dead Athenians.

So the myth wins out. Another point of myth, and this is where, thank goodness, we have Herodotus, who is our main source. actually not all of them fought at the final battle. Two of them were away. One had such a severe eye disease that he felt he couldn't see, he couldn't usefully fight at all, and another one had been sent away to liaise with the local Greek resistance, and he didn't get back in time. Two survived.

One went back to Sparta and hanged himself in shame because he was meant to die. The other one, the one with the eye disease, somehow coped. No one would speak to him, no one would give him fire. They sent him to Coventry. And when the next big battle came, and that's actually was the decisive one against the Persians, at Plataea, as it happens, he hurled himself into the enemy and, in effect, committed suicide. He thought he was doing the right thing.

Herodotus thought he was doing the right thing. The Spartans thought he'd broken the code, which is, as Edith said, good order. You have to stay in line. Angie? Again, taking the sort of the non-synical line, though there are all these caveats about the Spartans at Thermopylae, it wasn't just them. What we can hang on to, though, is that those nearly 300 did fight to the bitter end, and though they technically lost in the short term, many Greek historians at the time,

and later ones like Deodora Siculus, who was the first century BC, said that their inspirational courage and resistance and just refusal to give in to the overwhelming forces was just an enormous motivating force, which helped the whole Greek loyalist, troops the following year at Plataea and Miquela to push the Persians back. So though it was a short-term loss and the long-term, probably it was more like a victory. Elithaul, can we talk now about the conflict with Athens and the big conflict that Sparta had, it lost a long time. And it's still in our imagination, Sparta and Athens, almost the two opposite poles of ancient Greece. Can you give us some flavour of the intensity of that

and how long it lasted and what was at stake? Well, after the Persian wars, once the Persian threat had, immediate Persian threat of invasion had died down, Athens and Sparta entered a decades-long struggle, basically, for greatest influence in the Greek world. That's the rest of the story of the 5th century from about 570, all the way down to 470 down to 404. That is the story of the conflict.

The actual war didn't break out until 431, the Peloponnesian War. what's at stake is the sort of constitution you're going to have in all of the different Greek cities. It's not just Sparta wanting to have allegiance from some and Athens from others. Sparta encouraged oligarchies everywhere, Athens encouraged democracies everywhere. And what we get from the historians

is a centre of a propaganda battle in which they both colluded, actually, about what is the better way of life. And it's through that that we get this very, very strong, polarised picture. The classic text is actually a speech by another bunch from Corinth about the two of them

in Thucydides. So it's put in the mouth of yet another city state and he actually goes through, the speaker actually goes through all the difference. He says, the Spartans are conservative, the Athenians are innovative, the Spartans are slow to action, the Athenians are always rushing into everything.

The Spartans are incredibly pious, the Athenians are trying to think from themselves. And he actually sets up a whole polarised thing, which I don't think any Athenian or Spartan would have actually disagreed with. I think they'd have both enjoyed that propagandist picture that was given them. And that's why Athens

is now the trendy one, because it's lively, open, multicultural, democratic and noisy. Whereas, for example, in the early modern period, people still admired Sparta as being quiet, orderly and aristocratic military state. Virtuous. Virtually. And just to come to rapidly, before we talk about its influence in South Pole College,

about around 351 BC, Sparta is defeated by thieves, etc. How did this, what impact did this have on the general state of warfare and cities at the time and on Sparta itself? It's the beginning of the end of the old order and actually it's preparatory to the new order, which is a Macedonian order. In other words, Greece is going to be conquered within 40 years or so by a new power from the north Macedon, which then through Alexander the Great is going to spread Greek influence and power. through the Middle East as far as Pakistan and Afghanistan. So this is a sort of turning point. Sparta loses the first time it's ever been defeated in a major pitch battle for 300 years.

And what immediately happens is the invasion of the Peloponnese because one of the functions of the alliance, and Corinth was absolutely key of Spartans, was to prevent anybody getting into the Peloponnese, into their backyard. Briefly, my hero Epaminondas of Thebes is the man of the day, and he was a Democrat and he was a federalist and he was a philosopher. And in all sorts of ways he's lovely. But anyway, he briefly, he briefly and the mates of his held the ring.

But then very quickly, the Macedonians come down. They defeat an alliance of the Athenians and the Thebans. And Thebes is actually under Alexander the Great wiped out. So there's a very nasty period of intra-Greek bloodletting in the 330s, 320s. and some people say that is the end of the great Greek period and others of us think that there's something quite interesting after 3-22 as well I just want to pick three three things now and jump way forward into the modern period

to talk about the influence at Spartan and Spartan ideas so let's start I'm afraid it's briefly we've you all indulge yourselves really I'm trying to keep you absolutely right so let's go to the 18th century, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Enlightenment philosopher, admired Sparta. Why, Paul Carly.

This is the point that deal is making. He liked the fact. He was a communalist and he was a proto-democrat. Now, you might think the two of them are antithetical, and we think they are now because of the Soviet Union, because of experience of mass societies, because of Hitler's Germany, the notion that if you have a communitarian society,

that somehow crushes individuality. Well, Rousseau distinguished between the Moise own moa, myself, and the moire common, a common me, which is very interesting, the notion that you might have actually something in common with your fellow citizens. Well, he thought Sparta embodied, to the greatest extent, this combination of the altruism that's involved in a communalist society and yet not suppressing totally individual activity and thought, because actually there's quite a lot of evidence for wacky Spartans, and we've already mentioned Gorgo, and there are actually quite a few.

Spansu don't quite follow tow the line, they buck the trend. So they were virtuous, they were selfless, and they were ordered, and he liked that. He did so, they fell from favour, and then the Prussians revived,

and we've come in together. Well, they did, they fell out of fashion with the abolition of slavery, you know, around the 1807 to 1830 acts, because Helotage was seen by most political theorists as the worst and most extreme form of slavery. The Helots, the way that the transatlreated the helots.

So you actually find in all the French and British and indeed later American abolitionist treatises, Sparta is held up as the worst of the worst, probably rightly, in terms of having oppressed their slaves to pieces. Let's just emphasise they declared war on them every year, they butcher them, they, yes. Yeah, and they all had to be flogged every year regardless of whether they've done or anything wrong to keep them in subjection. I mean, it was absolutely appalling. So that is used, and they go thoroughly out of fashion everywhere up until the European revolutions of 1848 and Athens becomes a great model in Britain for democracy

under historians like George Grotten at the time of the great reform acts of the 1830s. What happens after 1848 is that Sparta never really comes back into fashion anywhere except Germany. And the Prussia state identifies itself with Sparta all the way through until 1945. That's the story.

Well, no, let's split it over a bit. We've got pressure and the Bismarck and thing and Germans using Sparta for all sort of Angie now. We come to the way that goes through in Germany from then on. Yeah, I'd first like to say that there is actually alternative tradition in Britain in the 19th century in the British public school system with people like Thomas Arnold at rugby later on in the 20th century, Kurt Hahn at Gordonsten,

infiltrating some of those Spartan ideals into their educational theories. So it's not entirely that it was. wasn't taken up in Britain. Yeah, well, from about 1870, there's the German biologist Hekel, very enthusiastic, racist, very admiring of Sparta for its eugenic policy. Killing puny children? Killing, yeah, exactly, and who's allowed to breed with whom and the fitness of the race.

And then, of course, we get, in Hitler's Svaita's book, his second book, sometimes known as his secret, which he wrote after at Mine Kampf, though didn't publish during the Nazi era. There's absolutely chilling passage in that where he's totally admiring of Sparta for its eugenic policy. He says it wouldn't have been able to control all those helots if it hadn't been racially superior, all the sort of culling of the helots is good, and he calls it the first fulkish state. Sparta is the first fulch state, this word fulk, a kind of state community, but based, partly on racist lines.

So Hitler's getting this via various biologists, who's his tame doctor? Well, there's a tame historian called Alfred Rosenberg, but there also, just to your point, Adolf Hitler Schulen, Adolf Hitler Schools, on which the study of Sparta was the curriculum, was a central part of the curriculum. There's a famous epitaph on the tomb of the 300

was, go tell the Spartan, the stranger passing by, that here obedient to their laws we lie. Now, Schiller, the German romantic poet Schiller, one of his most famous poems of all, was Vandre Comstunach Sparta, and this was on the syllabus of every little Nazi child, and in fact was cited in the war trials,

because it's the obedience. People said we just simply were obedient to our state. Finally, Andrew. Yes, but, I mean, to complicate the story, after 1940, various people in Britain and amongst the Allies were lightning, the few who fought the Battle of Britain to the 300 who fought at Thermopylae.

So the Spartan myth for better or ill has been appropriated all around the world. Specifically in Greece, because the Nazis actually came down through Thermopylae when they occupied Greece. Thank you very much, Edith Hall, Angie Hobbes, Paul Coutledge. Thank you for listening next week. It's a portrait of the artist as a young man by James Joyce. Thanks very much. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research.

To find out more, visit BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four.