Short History Of... - The Spartans (Repeat)

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

In 480BC, the Spartans secured their place in history when 300 of their soldiers fought to the death against the mighty Persian army at Thermopylae. Their reputation for brutal decisiveness and simple living have been admired for thousands of years. But what about the darker side of Spartan ideology, a society that culled weak babies, forced children to fight, and enslaved its neighbours? Was Sparta really a utopia? Or was Aristotle right when he said that Spartans simply made men into machines? This is a Short History of the Spartans. Written by Jo Furniss. With thanks to Dr Andrew Bayliss, Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Birmingham, UK, and author of The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction. Get every episode of Short History Of a week early with Noiser+. You’ll also get ad-free listening, bonus material, and early access to shows across the Noiser network. Click the Noiser+ banner to get started. Or, if you’re on Spotify or Android, go to noiser.com/subscriptions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. It is the year 480 BC. Late summer on the mainland of Greece. A legion of soldiers stands in formation in the

morning sun. Already brutally hot, the earth under their leather-bound feet is hard and cracked. The only sound is the scream of cicadas. The air smells of wild thyme and spilt blood. King Leonidas walks among the ranks of these men, his fellow Spartans. Their cloaks are scarlet and their breastplates are bronze, bright shocks of color against the arid landscape. Here, on a narrow pass hemmed in by rugged hills, King is resolute and restless as he waits for battle to recommence. His men are part of an alliance of Greek city-states who have spent two days fighting the Persians,

a mighty army that attack from the east. The invaders outnumber the Greeks by at least 20 to 1, and maybe as many as 40 to 1. The Greeks are holding them off. But for how much longer? Leonidas' battalion of Spartans marches into position. This coastal pass is called Thermopylae. It means hot gates, because there are thermal springs nearby. In Greek mythology, Thermopylae was the steamy entrance to Hades, the hall of the dead.

Leonidas is growing uneasy. The Oracle at Delphi, a priestess through whom the god Apollo is believed to speak, once made a shocking prophecy. She predicted that the Spartans will either lose their homeland to the Persians or lose their king. The prophecy gives Leonidas, as a Spartan and a king, two reasons to believe that his soul may soon enter those hot gates of Hades. This battle is a date with destiny. The Spartans establish a line of defense across a narrow point of the pass. They form a phalanx, shoulder to shoulder, each soldier raising his shield so it overlaps the man next to him.

An impenetrable wall. They are poised and ready to fight. But there is a reason the Persians are late to the battlefield today. The king of the Persians, a man named Xerxes, is on the move. Unbeknown to the Greeks, in the hills above Thermopylae, a local Greek shepherd has turned traitor. In return for a fistful of money, he is leading the Persians along a herder's track that snakes behind the Greek line of defense. If they can't get through the narrow pass,

they'll go around it. Down in the valley, there is a warning cry. Leonidas turns to see Persians swarming down from the foothills like columns of ants. turns to see Persians swarming down from the foothills like columns of ants. The Spartans are surrounded. With nothing to stop the Persians from marching on into Greece, Leonidas can only delay the invasion. The prophecy of the Oracle at Delphi is coming true. It is now a choice between king or country. But for Leonidas, surrender is not an option.

Moving quickly among his own soldiers, the king chooses 300 Spartans to remain by his side. He picks those who have sons to continue their bloodline. The rest he sends away on the long march home, a race to pull back and defend Sparta. The majority of the other Greek battalions follow their lead and retreat. As the Persian troops amass, Leonidas tells his Spartans that tonight they dine in Hades. The king is sixty years old and a lifelong warrior. He will die on the attack.

At his signal, they get into formation and charge into battle. The Spartans fight in a frenzy. When their spears break, they use swords. When these are lost, they use their teeth. One by one they fall, refusing to surrender even in the face of certain death. Eventually, Leonidas is hit by a deluge of arrows, and his soul slips away through the hot gates to Hades. The reputation of King Leonidas, however, proves immortal. The last stand at Thermopylae establishes the Spartans as the most heroic, patriotic and formidable of warriors.

After the martyrdom of the 300, the Greeks unite against a common enemy. In the centuries that follow, the brutality of the Spartans will inspire Roman bloodlust and influence European political thought. Even in the 21st century, we admire Spartan ideals of simple living and devotion. But what about the darker side of Spartan ideology? This was a society that culled weak babies, forced children to fight, and enslaved its neighbors. So was Sparta really a utopia? Or was the great philosopher Aristotle right when he said that Spartans simply made men into machines? I'm John Hopkins, and this is a short history of the Spartans.

From ancient times, a community thrives in the area known then as Lacedaemon, and now as Laconia, on the Peloponnese Peninsula. Situated to the southwest of Athens, Lacedaemon is remote from the rest of Greece, almost an island, and further isolated by a fringe of rugged hills. By the 8th century BC, its city-state of Sparta is powerful enough to conquer its neighbors. This brings wealth,

as well as slaves called helots, who do the Spartans' dirty work. With menial tasks such as farming and domestic chores taken care of, the free citizens focus on civic matters. All Spartan men are soldiers, known as hoplites. The military is the only job open to males. All Spartan women are expected to raise healthy boys. Motherhood is the only role of value for them. It is said that the greatest honor for a Spartan is to be laid to rest in a marked grave. But there are only two ways to earn a headstone, to die in battle or to die in childbirth.

a headstone, to die in battle or to die in childbirth. Dr. Andrew Baylis is Associate Professor of Greek History at the University of Birmingham in England. He is the author of The Spartans, A Very Short Introduction. Warfare is part and parcel of life in ancient Greece. So it's not just Sparta, it's all the ancient Greeks. Citizens of every single ancient Greek. So it's not just Sparta, it's all the ancient Greeks. Citizens of every single ancient Greek city-state would have been required to fight in whatever capacity they could. So using Athens as a frame of reference, all citizens there would afford, and if they were wealthy enough, they would afford as hoplites. If they were really wealthy, they would afford in the cavalry. But if they were poorer,

they would afford as light-armed troops or rode in the fleet. So the difference there is that Sparta, the wealth requirements for citizenship was so high that all the citizens were required to fight as heavily armed infantrymen. So rather than seeing the Spartans as militarized, it might be better to think of them as a society of landed gentry. They all have the capacity to spend their time living the lives of gentlemen. That'll involve hunting, sport, hanging around with other gentlemen, but it will also mean fighting when they're required to.

It is the winter of 480 BC, a few months after the heroic last stand at Thermopylae. Back in Sparta, a boy called Tyros hurries through a busy market. The twelve-year-old is barefoot, his feet hardened from physical exercise at the agogae, or military school. The barracks has been his home since the age of seven. While his education is varied, including lessons in combat, martial arts, and sports, the Agogé is far from a comforting environment. The boys get meager rations, often just a black broth, a liquid form of black pudding made of animal blood and grains.

As Tyros passes stalls of fruits and delicious-smelling bread, his stomach growls and drives him to take desperate measures. Moving swiftly between carts, shoppers, and stallholders, he tries to be invisible. He sneaks up to a baker's stall. It's the same one his mother used to buy from in the years before he went away to the Agoge. The bread smells like his old home.

Making a quick dash, he grabs a loaf and sprints away. He's not quick enough. The baker raises the alarm and powerful hands lift him off the ground, his bare feet scrabbling in the dirt. As Tyros is frog-merched back to the barracks, he prepares himself for what is coming. Out in the courtyard, he submits to a whipping. It's not because he stole, his teacher tells him, but because he got caught. Spartans must have their wits about them.

Tyros knows better than to cry. He might have the slight figure of a boy, but he behaves like the Spartan soldier he will become. He does not react to pain, he does not complain, he does not back down. exercise. The sun on the rugged hills is relentless. There are wolves, maybe even mountain lions, but Tyros is more concerned about finding water. He wraps his red cloak around his legs to protect them from thorns and slides down into a gully. He has spotted bees flying around a pile of stones and a shiny spot on a rock that must be a natural spring. shiny spot on a rock that must be a natural spring. Like all Spartan boys, Tyros is never given supplies, only survival skills. He reaches the spring and licks the rock for refreshment. Tyros understands why he must learn to survive among the wolves, so that his spirit grows

as hardened as his feet, so that he can be as brave as the 300 heroes at Thermopylae. Spartan boys learn reading and writing, numeracy and even music and dance at the Agogae. They box and wrestle and practice ball games that test their strength and stamina. But historians such as the Greek writer Plutarch, note that the school is training the mind as much as the body. There's also what you could call mental training in that there's a clear emphasis on controlling their emotions. The Spartans actually worship fear as a god. There's a shrine to fear in Sparta itself. The Spartans clearly recognize that fear is dangerous and that it needed to be controlled, Spartans clearly recognize that fear is dangerous and it needed

to be controlled, but they also recognize that they need to control their anger, desires, and greed as well. Plutarch actually uses an analogy of breaking and horses to describe the Spartan upbringing. There's an official overseeing the whole process whose title is the Paidonomos, and it literally means boy herder. Sources refer to the boys being divided into groups which are called herds. So there's this animal metaphor going on here. The boy herder is assisted by officials who are known as the Masticoforoi, which literally means whip bearers. And there's a strong theme running through our primary sources of Spartan boys being whipped.

And we're talking about serious whips here. They've often been compared to bull whips, the type of whips that would tear flesh off the bodies. So this is quite a brutal environment for them to be growing up in and it's an upbringing that goes on for years and years and years. The Agoge is an entirely male-dominated environment. Boys bid farewell to their mothers aged seven and do not live in another family home until they are 30, if they survive that long. In between, they stay in barracks, camp out in the wild, or go on military campaigns. They stay in barracks, camp out in the wild, or go on military campaigns.

When a boy reaches puberty, he finds a mentor, an older boy or man. In some cases, these associations are paternal, but for others there is an erotic aspect to the relationship. What we're dealing with here is the standard ancient Greek practice of pederasty, which in my teaching I tend to refer to as a homoerotic relationship. It's not really appropriate to use the word homosexual to describe this relationship because that's a very modern label for an ancient practice that's quite different. But our sources, in particular Xenophon, are actually quite vague about what that mentoring involves because they're clearly aware that some people will criticize them for what's going on there. So Xenophon says that it's

permissible for men to admire boys, but he said that there's not meant to be anything sexual in their relationship. And he actually says anything physical would be deemed the same as incest. And Plato talks about pederasty and explicitly forbids it in his ideal society, which clearly shows you that people outside of Sparta thought that there was more than just admiration of the boys going on. In many ways, the messages we get from our primary sources are about the Spartan men resisting the temptation that the boys provide for them. So it's about resisting manfully, not giving in to their desires. This self-denial is a crucial Spartan principle.

One ordeal undertaken by the boys is a long-distance running race that tests their stamina and above all, their self-restraint. At the height of summer, when the barren hills bake under the sun, runners set out with a mouthful of refreshing liquid. The aim is to reach the finishing line and spit out the water. By resisting the temptation to drink, the thinking goes, they learn to control their natural urges, something they're expected to do when they reach adulthood and marry.

Men aged up to 30 would have slept in barracks. So if they were married, newlyweds wouldn't actually be living with their wives. So there's a theme running through our sources of young men sneaking out of the barracks, going home, sleeping with their wives, and then skulking back in again. And it said that it would be shameful for them to be seen coming in and out. So they have to do this sort of very secretively. And it seems to be wrapped up in that idea of controlling their desires again. Xenophon says that men were not supposed to have too much sex with their wives because it would lead to their children being weak and puny. They needed to sort of hold off and then they'd have stronger babies as a result. With their husbands busy in barracks, Spartan women live independent lives.

They can own property, run farms and households, and they are free to speak their minds. run farms and households, and they are free to speak their minds. Their wit and wisdom is valued so much that the historian Plutarch compiles a book called The Sayings of Spartan Women. One Spartan mother tells her son that he should either come back from war carrying his shield or carried upon it. In other words, victorious or dead. Another mother hears that her sons have come home defeated. Rather than celebrate their safe return, she hitches up her skirts and tells her humiliated boys to crawl back where they came from. Yeah, so there are really good examples of Spartan women telling their men what to do. And there are examples of Spartan women killing their sons for coming back from battle alive when they should have fought to the death. There's one example where a woman hit her son over the head with a roof tile,

which is a standard weapon for women in ancient Greek warfare. Women manned the walls and showered the enemy with roof tiles. So it's a typical woman's weapon that she uses to kill her son for failing to live up to Spartan values. And there's another one where a Spartan boy complained to his mother that his sword wasn't very long because spartan swords were notoriously short and her blunt response was well just step closer to the enemy spartan mothers may seem uncaring but they have been brought up in a culture that prioritizes the need of the military state at all times although women don't go into battle they're expected to prepare their young sons for a life of service. Spartan girls even train for motherhood.

Spartan women have more freedom than Athenian women in particular. They have property-owning rights, which makes them very different from Athenian women and probably different from the vast majority of ancient Greek women. Their primary role is producing children, which is exactly the same role as the primary role of ancient Greek women. Their primary role is producing children, which is exactly the same role as the primary role of women in Athens. That's what their education is about. And it's actually written in some of the sources that while the lives of Spartan girls were free, the lives of Spartan women were much more restrained. There's physical training for girls, and it's very clearly linked to eugenics, as in the thought being that

if girls were strong, they would produce strong children. And Spartan girls were married comparatively later in Sparta than other parts of the ancient Greek world, particularly later than in Athens, where they were married off almost as soon as they hit puberty. Xenophon says that in Sparta, they were married in their prime of life. So we guesstimate that that must be more like 18 when they're getting married. One of the most famous Spartan women is Kyniska, an athlete who wins the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games in 396 BC and again in 392. Her feat is all the more remarkable as the ancient Greek Olympics is only open to men. Her triumph, though, proves hollow. Equestrian sports, then as now, are associated with the elite.

But a good Spartan is not supposed to value personal wealth or glory over the state. So although Kyniska is rewarded for her Olympic victory, the king discourages fellow Spartans from breeding horses when they should be training to fight. In fact, the reaction to Kyniska's victory implies that if the Olympic Games can be won by a mere woman, then they are not worthy of a Spartan man. It's 399 BC, a market day in ancient Sparta. A man named Kynodon makes his way through the busy Agora, past stalls selling pork, fish, and barley cakes. A market seller offers him a pot of honey or a plate of figs, but Kynodon pushes past. Her insults follow him across the square. The scent of her delicious food makes his belly squirm with hunger, but he has no coins

to buy her wares. Kynodon is a member of the so-called Inferiors, Spartans who have lost their civil rights. Some Inferiors lose their rank after showing cowardice on the battlefield. Cynodon is an educated man who served with military distinction, but he is too poor to make the compulsory mess contributions, a tax paid in the form of produce that is used to feed Spartan soldiers. His poverty means he has lost his status as a full citizen. In the market, Cynodon's hunger boils over into anger. The Agora is packed with residents of Sparta, some 4,000 people,

and yet he counts only 40 among them who are peers, that is, males with full rights. Most are inferiors or helots, the cogs that keep the wheels of the city-state running smoothly. Kynodon shouts that there are enough peasants to take down the peers if they choose to revolt. They have sickles and hatchets. They could raise these weapons against their oppressors. and hatchets, they could raise these weapons against their oppressors. Some stop to listen, but others hurry away. This kind of talk is very dangerous in Sparta. Though his rage comes to a head today, in truth, Kynodon has been gathering support for a coup for some time. He's been conspiring to bring down the Spartan elite, redistribute their land and wealth,

and give rights to helots and the impoverished. But now, Kynodon's outburst in the Agora is overheard by an informer, who reports him to the E-Force, the Council of Elders. And they don't like what they hear. Soon after market day, Kynodon is lured out of the city and interrogated by the Spartan secret police, until he gives up his co-conspirators. These men are rounded up too. Alongside Kynodon, they are flogged and to be challenged under any circumstances, however unfair they might seem. To many, the hierarchies do appear staggeringly unjust.

While Spartan men with full citizenship are expected to dedicate their lives to the military, someone has to do the manual work. That falls to the underclass of helots, inferiors, and migrants known as perioikoi. The helots have been enslaved for generations, and they vastly outnumber the Spartans. It means the state is vulnerable to uprisings and has to devise ways to keep them in their place. The entire Spartan lifestyle is dependent on what we should just call slave labor. According to tradition, they are the original inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia who were enslaved by the Spartans. They work the land for the Spartans. They are required to hand over the fruits of their labors to their Spartan masters, which they require for their mess contributions

to maintain their citizen status. So the whole system is predicated on slave labor. The Spartans do not treat the helots well. They're forced to wear degrading uniforms, dogskin caps, leather jerkins, which are associated with manual labor elsewhere in the Greek world. Whereas the Spartans have their glorious red cloaks, which are a sign of their gentlemanly status and their lovely long hair. According to Myron, one of our latest sources, they are given a stipulated number of beatings every year, whether they've done the wrong thing or not. They go as far as what you could call organized state terror. There's an institution known as the Cryptaea, which you could translate as the secret service. They'd go through the fields and kill the largest helot they could find. They'd go out at night and kill any helots they found on

the roads. And that's an annual event. So it's a terrifying part of Spartan life. Perhaps the Spartan sense of superiority is based on their nation's origin myth. They believe they're descended from the Greek hero Heracles, a demigod who is the son of Zeus. One of Heracles' descendants is a king called Aristodemus, whose wife gives birth to twin boys. When she refuses to confirm which child is the firstborn, both are crowned king of Lacedaemon. This establishes two royal houses, one descending from each brother. By the heyday of Sparta and the rule of King Leonidas, this unusual system of two kings, known as a diarchy, is part of the constitution. The structure has the benefit of one ruler balancing the power of the other, but it's not without its disadvantages. I can think of one very good example of a drawback, and it's one that Herodotus reports.

He's talking about Cleomenes, who was Leonidas' half-brother, and he led an attack on Athens with all of Sparta's allies from the Peloponnese, and he took his co-king Demaratus with him. When they got to the edge of athenian territory demaratus just decided to go home and the spartans allies muttered amongst themselves when they saw demaratus go and then they went home as well and according to herodotus the spartans actually instituted a law after this that said the two kings couldn't go out together with an army because they didn't want to have a repeat of that kind of fiasco nonetheless Sparta rises to be the dominant city-state in all of Greece. The Spartans and Persians meet in July 479 BC at the Battle of Plataea.

The Spartan warrior-king Pausanias leads a combined Greek force of well-armed hoplite foot soldiers. They are highly coordinated troops who fight in formation and at close quarters, a result of that intense training in the Agoge. But the Persians have the upper hand once again. Their general has far more troops and cavalry, just like Thermopylae. But this time the Spartan Pausanias refuses to fight in the open, and the two sides endure a standoff that lasts eleven days. With his water supply dwindling, Pausanias decides to move to a new position overnight.

At dawn, the Persians think the Spartans are retreating and decide to catch them on the hop. But Spartans never retreat. The hoplites regroup and fight. Now, in their favorite position, at close range, they rout the enemy. When the Persian general is killed, his army flees. Some 30,000 Persians die at the Battle of Plataea. The Persian Empire will never invade Greece again. Sparta has proved itself to be the military heart, mind, and muscle of ancient Greece.

mind and muscle of ancient Greece. But the timeline of Sparta is a relentless list of conflict spanning 500 years, and it is not long before the hoplites are back in action. Now, in 413 BC, they take on the might of Athens. While Sparta has a mighty land army athens dominates the sea athens versus sparta means navy versus army democracy versus oligarchy mind versus muscle but the two sides are evenly matched both at the height of their power a stalemate emerges and the Peloponnesian War grinds on for a quarter of a century. Finally, Sparta builds its own naval fleet. It is funded, ironically, by its former foe, the Persians,

who donate ships so that the Spartans can fight their common enemy of Athens. In 405 BC, a Spartan called Lysander finally captures the Athenian fleet in the Hellespont, a narrow strait between Greece and modern-day Turkey. He then sails to Athens and closes their port at Piraeus, cutting off the lifeblood of a city-state made rich from trade. state made rich from trade. Despite being the most famous and influential of all ancient Greek city-states, Athens falls. It will never recover from losing the Peloponnesian War. I think it's a disaster for both city-states, really. They both lost a lot of men. The population drop in Sparta was spectacular, but it was also spectacular in Athens too.

The financial resources that both were required to spend was enormous, and ultimately the Spartans were only able to defeat the Athenians by going to bed with the Persians and asking the Persians for huge wadges of cash to finance a fleet. So it's not exactly Sparta's finest hour. The Spartans' glorious defense of Greek freedom against the Persians is the way we mostly meet the Spartans, and then they happily sacrifice that Greek freedom to defeat the Athenians. This Spartan victory marks a power shift in the entire region. But it also brings on a period of decline

in the homeland of Lacedaemon. As the city-state grows rich on the spoils of war, new generations of Spartans reject the old ways of abstinence, self-sacrifice, and unquestioning loyalty to the state. There had always been quite obvious wealth inequality in Sparta, but this sudden influx of wealth did not help that. Our sources paint the Spartans as being more and more eager to go overseas, to experience

the wider world. And there's a key sort of theme running through our sources that when they get abroad, they learn bad ways of doing things, non-Spartan ways of doing things. They get exposed to money, they get exposed to non-Spartan ways and stop following the rigorous Spartan lifestyle. Unbeknownst to the mighty Spartans, their triumph of 404 BC marks the beginning of the end for the golden age of ancient Greece.

beginning of the end for the golden age of ancient Greece. At its peak, the entire Spartan regime is focused on warfare. Sparta is bound to a wheel of fire, a vicious circle of its own making. They need soldiers to protect the state, they need helots to serve the soldiers, and they need even more soldiers to protect themselves against the helots. There is no room for anyone who is considered, by the prejudices of the time, to be a burden on the system. Later historians describe how newborn Spartans are inspected at birth. Historians describe how newborn Spartans are inspected at birth. If a baby is found to be weak, small or disabled, it may be eliminated in an act of infanticide. This idea that Spartan elders examined a baby when it was born, dipped it in wine to see if it was healthy,

and then would eliminate it off an edge in the mountains, it's called the place of exposure or the apatheti, the place of depositing. It sounds horrible, but maybe it actually didn't happen because Plutarch is our only testimony for this. Both Plato and Aristotle advocate infanticide as a policy for their ideal societies. And there are too many examples of the exposure or attempted exposure of unwanted babies in Greek myth to suggest that this wasn't comparatively normal practice in the ancient Greek world. Plutarch details how unwanted babies are taken to a chasm on Mount Teitos, the highest peak of the Peloponnese.

Here, the infant is either dropped to its death or, more likely, abandoned to the elements. or more likely, abandoned to the elements. Over two millennia later, archaeologists find the location the great historian described. An excavation unearths 46 bodies that date to the 5th and 6th centuries BC, the peak of the Spartan era. The chasm is indeed a killing field. The chasm is indeed a killing field. However, none of the remains belong to babies. The bones are from adults, suggesting that the site was used for the disposal of criminals or traitors.

It is possible, of course, that the remains of babies were destroyed by the harsh climate or scavenged by wild animals. But notably, the contemporary historian Xenophon does not record infanticide being carried out by the Spartans. The disposal of unwanted babies is only mentioned centuries later. Perhaps Plutarch's account was influenced by the ruthless reputation of the Spartans. It simply sounds like the sort of thing they would do. We do have the obvious example of Agesilaus, Spartan king who was famously lame throughout his life, and there is no hint in our sources that he was injured during the upbringing or injured in warfare. He does seem to have been born disabled. So maybe he's either the exception that proves the

rule, or maybe the Spartans were a bit more permissive than we might think. By the 4th century BC, Sparta begins to stagnate. Constant warfare means the population is falling, and the strict preservation of the bloodline means there are no new Spartans coming into the society. The Spartan ideology becomes a conceptual block. The leadership is so indoctrinated that it can't imagine any other lifestyle or regime. Nothing is done to counter social problems like the decline in populace or the increasingly unruly underclasses of helots and inferiors. But for a society to survive, it must adapt. By failing to do so, Sparta loses its dominance over Greece after only a generation.

In 371 BC, the city-state is delivered a crushing blow. It is July 6th. On a battlefield in Loutra, central Greece, the stage is set for a clash of the Titans. Sparta is once again vying for supremacy over its rival Thebes. As usual, Sparta goes into battle in a phalanx, a solid block of soldiers marching in rows some twelve men deep. Traditionally, the Spartans place their elite fighters on the right-hand wing. At Lutra, they do the same.

This tactic has served them well for several hundred years. But the Thebans are better able to innovate. In a break with tradition, their general shakes up his battle line and sends a fifty-deep column of men to face the formidable right wing. Even elite Spartan hoplites cannot win a battle when they are vastly outnumbered. The Thebans overrun the strongest part of the Spartan phalanx, and soon the rest crumbles. The Battle of Lutra reveals that the Spartans have only one way to fight, and no plan B when it doesn't work.

A perfect storm of a falling population and a lack of creativity results in a defeat that effectively marks the end of Sparta as a superpower. According to Aristotle, Sparta was unable to survive one great blow and by that he probably means the Battle of Lutra in 371, where the Thebans smashed the Spartan army and basically destroyed Sparta's power in one hit. But the reality is, and Aristotle is clear on this, the reasons why the Spartans lose the Battle of Lutra is a significant decline in citizen numbers. To put that in perspective, at the Battle of Plataea in 479 against the Persians, the Spartans were able to put together an army of 5,000 citizens in their

prime. And by the Battle of Leuctra in 371, there is less than 1,000 Spartans in that army. And that's quite a significant decline. And it must be related very closely to the way the Spartan system works with citizenship limited to wealth. And I think the training system they have produces people who are rule followers rather than order givers. And it's obvious that Sparta is unable to think of a way of getting around the problems that they have. the problems that they have. Their system was clearly flawed, but it obviously never entered anyone's head to think about how to fix that. Slavery, eugenics, pederasty,

plus a culture of brutality and a lack of creative thinking, even the ugly aspects of Spartan life do not discourage later scholars from praising the ideals of the ultimate military regime. Admiration of Sparta is known as Laconophilia, after their homeland of Laconia. Also named after Laconia is our modern word laconic, meaning to speak concisely. The Spartans famously valued the ability to communicate with as few words as possible, ideally in the form of a pithy riposte. In the centuries that follow the decline of the

Spartans, waves of writers, thinkers, and politicians mythologize many of their values. Praise is heaped on their bravery, their laconic wit, their simple living. Even the purity of their bloodline is considered laudable. When the Athenian philosopher Plato imagines his perfect republic around the year 375 BC, he describes a Spartan-style regime that is free from the corruption of money. His student Aristotle also praises Spartan law and order, although he is less favorable about the culture of near-permanent war. By the time of the Roman invasion, some two centuries later, Sparta is a shadow of its

former self, but nonetheless an inspiration. Bloodthirsty Romans come to see the reenactment of Spartan traditions that are laid on for the tourists. So in the Roman period, Sparta was almost a parody of itself. They rebooted their system, they tried to revive the old ways, and some modern scholars have actually used the term theme park to describe Sparta. You could go to Sparta and see weird things like the ritual floggings. You could see the girls not wearing very much. We know famous Romans who visited Sparta and the most obvious example of Cicero. And he says that that he traveled to sparta and he saw the ritual flogging

and he saw the boys prepared to meet death during this flogging ritual and enduring it silently and plutarch also says the same thing and he says that he believes all the stories about the brutality of the spartan upbringing because he saw boys dying during this ritual flogging. And he said it makes sense to him that this was actually the way the Spartans did things. There's no sense that things like the ritual flogging in the Roman period actually resemble what the ritual flogging was like in the classical period. Something that was once a religious practice that had an obvious origin story just gets turned into an endurance fest, for want of a better way of putting it. So that's why I use the term a parody of itself.

It's not the real Sparta anymore. In the modern era, Spartan ideals influenced the Renaissance thinker Niccolo Machiavelli, who admires the stability of the ancient city-state. The Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau is attracted to its austerity. During the French Revolution, the statesman Robespierre often alludes to Sparta. And one of the founding fathers of the United States, Samuel Adams,

writes that his new republic falls disappointingly short of a Christian version of Sparta. new republic falls disappointingly short of a Christian version of Sparta. The principles of its education system, the practice of sending boys as young as seven into the strict regime of the agogi, can be followed into the 19th century. The establishment of British boarding schools, American Ivy League colleges, and the Israeli kibbutz movement all have echoes of Spartan ideology. and the Israeli kibbutz movement all have echoes of Spartan ideology. And if other aspects of Spartan culture sound uncomfortably familiar, a look at the darkest political theories of the 20th century will explain why.

You can see that in Nazi Germany, where elements of Spartan policy were clearly admired. Hitler actively praised the eugenics of the Spartans. And there's even an official Nazi document which talks about what will happen under Nazi-controlled Eastern Europe, where it describes the Germans as having the status of the Spartan citizens, the Estonians and the Poles will have the status of the perioikoi, and the Russians will be the helots. So throughout the ages, people have tried to reimagine Sparta in their own terms. When Philip II of Macedonia is about to attack Sparta around the year 340 BC, he sends a threatening message.

If I invade Laconia, he blusters, you will all be destroyed. Unruffled, the Spartans respond with a one-word reply. If. The impudence doesn't stop Philip from invading and ravaging Laconia, but his raid is a mere footnote in history, while the laconic wit of the Spartans is famed for millennia. They get the last laugh, never back down, never surrender, never use more words than is strictly necessary, and, perhaps, never let facts get in the way of a good story. The Spartan reputation is built on one defining moment

in their long and bloody timeline, the last stand of the 300 at Thermopylae. But even this may be based on the so-called Spartan mirage, in which their achievements have been amplified beyond recognition in the echo chamber of history. How do we know the fighting actually took place the way Herodotus describes it? Because Herodotus clearly got the version of Thermopylae

from the Spartans themselves when he visited Sparta, when he learned the names of the 300 and heard all about them. So it's possible that we're getting the wrong end of the stick here, really, altogether. And modern scholars have really started to question how much of a role the spartans themselves had in repainting events like thermopylae because the reality of thermopylae it is a failure they don't keep xerxes away they only hold him off for two days so if as herodotus presents it they were just holding him off until

reinforcements arrived it is a complete and utter failure the defiance and self-sacrifice of that standoff created a legend that has fascinated audiences for thousands of years, from the earliest Roman tourists to the record-breaking crowd at the release of the 2006 movie entitled 300. But for many, the dark side of the Spartans, the slavery, the eugenics and the brutality, overshadows their appeal. Everyone meets the Spartans in many ways through the story of Thermopylae, and I met the Spartans through Thermopylae, and I was blown away by this tale of courage and self-sacrifice. So that's the kind of thing that makes you admire the Spartans.

But if you only hear about the Spartans through Thermopylae, you miss the dark side of Sparta. I often think about William Golding's line that the Spartans were standing on the right side of history at Thermopylae. They were. And while you can admire the Spartans for the courageous stand at Thermopylae, when you start to look at other aspects of Spartan society, you can really see that they are far less admirable than that one glorious story suggests.