The Ancients - The Spartan Warrior

Episode Date: December 9, 2023

One of the most famed classes of soldiers from antiquity, the Spartan warrior has been immortalised in media today. Characterised as super soldiers, formidable fighters who would rather perish than surrender - their reputation truly did proceed them. But how accurate is this image - and does it correlate with what the ancient sources actually tell us?In the second episode of our Sparta mini-series, Tristan welcomes Dr Roel Konijnendijk from the University of Oxford, to take a deep dive into the life of a Spartan warrior. Looking at their education, training, and familial expectations - how do you separate fact from fiction when it comes to the Spartans? And is it possible to know what their society was truly like?Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code ANCIENTS sign up now for your 14-day free trial HERE.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. this to look least like women's clothing and to be most suitable for war. And a bronze shield, because it is very soon polished and tarnishes very slowly. He also permitted men who were past their first youth to grow their hair long, believing that it would make them look taller, more dignified, and more terrifying. They wore their hair long as soon as they ceased to be youths, and particularly in times of danger they took pains to have it glossy and well combed,

remembering a certain saying of Lycurgus that a fine head of hair made the handsome more comely still and the ugly more terrible. It was a sight equally grand and terrifying when they marched in step with the rhythm of the flute, without any gap in the line and with no confusion in their souls, but calmly and cheerfully moving with the strains of their hymn into danger. Those were the words of the ancient historians Plutarch and Xenophon, describing one of the most well-known classes of soldiers in antiquity, the Spartan warrior. Popularised today in films, TV series, books and games, the image of the Spartans as ancient super-soldiers that always fought to the last is one that is never far away. However, the truth is a bit more

complicated. In some ways, the Spartans were formidable fighters, but in many other ways, their martial prowess has been greatly exaggerated and mythologised. So in this episode, we're going to be taking an awesome deep dive into the Spartan warrior, what the sources actually reveal about these iconic soldiers with their tough lifestyle, red cloaks and bronze shields. Joining me to explain all, I was delighted to interview Dr Ruhl Kninerdijk from the University of Oxford. Ruhl, well he's a big name on YouTube, dissecting ancient warfare and Sparta. This is an episode that you do not want to miss. This is Ruhl in his element. A filmed version of the episode will be out on the History Hit

YouTube channel in due course. I really do hope you enjoy, and here's Ruhl. Ruhl, it is wonderful to have you on the podcast today. It's fantastic to be here. Thanks so much for having me. You're more than welcome. And to do it filmed here in this studio in London, and to talk about the Spartan warrior. Now, Rule, this feels like one of the most iconic units of ancient history, but also one, there's a lot of fiction around this unit today. Absolutely, yeah. So we're basically talking about a unit that have become the paragon of the ancient warrior and who are sometimes cited as being the iconic foremost warrior culture in history. But more recent scholarship has been kind of picked at that to the point where there's

not much left of that facade. So there's a big discrepancy between what people in wider audiences think about the Spartans and what scholars are actually saying about them. Well, we're certainly going to explore all of that. First of all, for yourself as a historian, exploring all of the material that we have for the actual Spartan warriors, how difficult is it when you look at the sources to dissect fact from fiction? It's incredibly difficult, and that's particularly true for Sparta. I mean, they're famously difficult in the sense that when you look at ancient Sparta, you're not looking at a society talking about itself. You're almost always looking at others, looking at this place and saying, look at those guys. These guys are weird. They're doing things differently. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what's good, what's bad. And obviously,

that's a distorting view in itself. but it's even more distorting when you realize that many of them are kind of trying to sell you this system and they're trying to say, look, this is great. This creates fantastic outcomes. We should do things their way. That obviously means that they're not going to talk about all the things they take for granted, all the things that they already do anyway,

all the things that they accept. They're going to focus on the things that are a little bit strange to them, a little bit different, but that also means that they're going to be bigging that up and they're going to focus on the things that are a little bit strange to them, a little bit different. But that also means that they're going to be bigging that up and they're going to be trying to portray that in the best possible light. And they're going to try and glorify it and polish it. And that just means that it's very difficult to get at the core of what's actually true about that society. Very hard to get anything that you can say with confidence, like, this is what it was. It's also really interesting because these are outsider sources, and yet they're really

trying to promote a way of life, almost quite a fictional way of life, of a society that they themselves think is quite weird. Yeah, no, it's absolutely about almost utopian thinking. They're talking about a lot of these Greeks, especially in Athens, there's a lot of philosophical and political discussion about what an ideal society should look like. And obviously there are different versions of different voices in that. The voice that's almost kind of lost, interestingly enough, is the one that promotes the way that Athens actually exists. You know, the democratic, fairly liberal, sort of free-minded way of life. That kind of thing is not promoted. It's taken

for granted. So what you do get is a lot of voices that are more conservative, voices that are more aristocratic, voices that essentially are representing the idea of like, it would be better if we the rich were in charge, and we could determine the values of the society in a more sort of traditionally approved way. And when they want an example of what such a society should look like, of course, they're going to turn to the Spartans and they're going to say, look, there's a society that's run entirely by a class of rich citizens. They have created the society that they think is best. And look, these are all the ways in which it is better than the way that we live here under the yoke of democracy. And that is how they approach Spartan.

So interesting indeed. Well, we're going to be focusing largely on the fifth and fourth centuries Sparta, but why of all centuries is it these two centuries in particular that we always have these images of Sparta with these iconic warriors? So Sparta obviously emerges from the Archaic period, so the centuries before that, as the foremost Greek state. And in the Classical period, so from around the Persian Wars to Alexander, they are one of the biggest players. And they have claim, which they keep on trying to assert in more or less successful ways, to being the hegemon of the Greek world.

So being the most powerful, most influential state in that whole constellation of Greek communities. And so it is in that period that they are the most prominent. It's in that period that they have the most power. But it's also that period in which their story, the myth that they propagate about themselves, becomes best established. That follows entirely from their actions during the Persian Wars. And just as Athens is promoting themselves as the great protector of the Greeks because they fought with their ships at Salamis, the Spartans are saying that they are the great protectors of the Greeks because they fought to the death at Thermopylae and because they destroyed the Persian army of Plataea. And if we go pre-Persian wars, so pre-5th century, do we know

much about the Spartan army? Are there any great stories of the Spartans before the 5th century? Surprisingly not. I mean, this is the really interesting aspect. When you're talking about the Persian wars, Herodotus, who describes these for us, obviously he lives a few generations later and he lives in a world where Spartan military prowess is just completely accepted. They believe all the stories that they hear because they remember Thermopylae and because they remember Plataea, and they're just like, this is what the Spartans do. So he's describing it as if back in that day, they already had this reputation of being these glorious warriors who fight together and are just completely invincible, or at least undaunted by defeat, undaunted by any enemy, etc. The thing is, if you want to actually look through, pick through what he tells us of the earlier period, you can't actually find good evidence of any of

this. He says very offhandedly in one sentence that they managed to suppress the entire Peloponnese. How they did that is difficult to find, but we do find that all of these different states in their own backyard, the Peloponnese in their own region, were able to resist them sometimes successfully. We're able to band together. We're not afraid to band together and try to resist them. And there are very few episodes where we actually have some detail. We can see this Burton army at work, where we can see what they're actually doing. And when we do, they don't always actually succeed. They often end up being evenly matched or even defeated by their enemies. And I've got in one case, and it just

sounds such an awesome name, this Battle of the Champions. What exactly is this? Yeah, the Battle of the Champions is one of those episodes. So around the middle of the 540s, we don't know exactly when because chronology in this period is very fuzzy. Herodotus wasn't able to reconstruct this accurately. But around that time, they have a big war with Argos, who is the other biggest player in the Peloponnese. They're fighting over a borderland between them. And basically, they're fighting for control, but they know that this is going to be a big bloody battle. So instead of having that battle, they decide uniquely in Greek history, this never happened before or since, to send 300 of their best warriors out into battle

against 300 of the best Argives and to have this sort of mass duel that way and to try and decide it. Now obviously if you believe what we are now told about the Spartans this should be an absolute cakewalk for them, right? The Spartans are obviously better warriors and therefore they're just going to trounce these Argives and that'll be it. But the way Herodotus describes it, actually, it ends with more or less even outcome. At the very end of that, everyone dies, and two Argives are left alive and one Spartan. So apparently, one-on-one, you know, Spartan against Argive in this period, they would more or less evenly match. The thing is, at that point, the Argives say, well, there's two of us and there's one of you. So they just go home to Argos and say, look, we won. At which point the Spartan looks around him and sees that he's the only one left on the

battlefield and says, well, that means I won. So he goes home to Sparta and says he won. At which point, obviously, the two armies decide, OK, well, neither of us are accepting this outcome. So there was a big battle anyway. The whole experiment to try and limit the fight to this like narrow mass duel completely fails. This doesn't work because ultimately the outcome is still disputed and they decide to have their limit the fight to this narrow mass duel, completely fails. This doesn't work because

ultimately the outcome is still disputed and they decide to have their all-out fight. But it's also one of those moments when you can actually see the Spartans and the Argive army being apparently pretty evenly matched until they can bring their full numbers to bear, at which point the Spartans actually do win and take this land for themselves and cause a great humiliation to the Argive. Look at that, Sparta versus Argos, one of those great rivals of antiquity on the Greek mainland, isn't it? Yeah, it isn't over, you know, this thing goes on for centuries. Oh, absolutely, it does, doesn't it? Well, let's explore the education of one of these

Spartan warriors, particularly when he gets to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Rul, when did training or their education begin for a full Spartiate citizen? There's obviously lots of famous talk about the Spartan education. We would like to say that we know a lot about this, but actually it's really difficult to pin this down. We have a very good source in the 4th century that describes it, and we have a lot of faith in that account because that is a person who sent his own sons through this education system. So he would have seen it firsthand to some extent, or at least heard very close accounts of this. This is Xenophon.

And then we have a much later account by Plutarch who's writing in the second century AD, so we're talking about 400 or 500 years later. So those are the two accounts that we have of it. When we try to talk about the Spartan education further back, like in the fifth century, let alone before the Persian Wars, we're quite in the dark. We have indications that, for instance, there was an education system that Leonidas went through, so you have something that is there, but we don't know if it quite had the same shape as it did later on. But when we're talking about the 4th century, so we have this

good account, we have Xenophon's account, and then when you dig into that you realize that actually this isn't maybe what you have been told about the education. It does start at seven, which is the common account, right? Taken away from their homes at seven and they're brought into this common mess where they have to, or this common barracks where they have to live out their formative years. It does start at seven. But initially it doesn't seem to have much to it. They're just kind of gathered in these bands, these herds as they're called, of boys, under a supervisor. But there's not much specifically about what they do. They just kind of hang around and they're taught, they're trained in the morality that a Spartan is supposed

to have. So they're basically being taught what to do and how to think and how to speak. But there doesn't seem to be any kind of element of training to that. This is indoctrination, this is education more than it is training. And throughout that period, as far as we can tell from these anecdotes, they do still go home as well. They do spend some of their time just spent with their parents at home. They have to learn certain things from their parents, like reading and writing. There are certain things that seem to be entirely sort of antithetical to this idea that they

are taken away from their parents and never see them again. This kind of image is clearly wrong. But also there are stories, for instance, like, oh, you know, when a Spartan boy is punished in public by a supervisor or by a random citizen and he goes home and complains about it, it's the duty of the father to punish him again. And from that anecdote, which is obviously, you know, a beautiful demonstration of the sort of collective mindset that they're supposed to represent, this sort of unity of values. But it also shows that these kids go home, you know, they talk to their parents about what happened to them during the day. So you really have to picture them as going to school and then coming back at the end of the day. So this kind of image that they're off to the barracks and never seen again, or even sent

into the wild, this is completely exaggerated. It's not until later in their education, and Xenophon places this around maybe 12, that they actually start doing exercises and start to sort of merge into the system that looks a little bit more like what we think of when we think of Spartan training. Because one of those images we sometimes get today of the Spartans in that early stage of their education is going somewhere through a very difficult environment and hunting in Poplar in 300 to get the wolf, don't you? Or a boar or something like that. But that feels like later legend. Yeah, well, not entirely in the sense that that is a very difficult thing to pin down. So

when we're talking about general education from age 12, they start doing exercises, they start being trained. A lot of that training is just athletics and it's also song and dance, literally. They do a lot of singing and dancing we'll get back to that i think but when they reach 18 there is another stage to this which is depicted in the movie when he goes out in the snow and kills a wolf this is called the cryptea and this is a separate thing that we find very very difficult to pin down because we have different sources of it that all contradict each other and that don't have a coherent sense of what the cryptia is or who it's for. So you have Plato, who's the earliest one who mentions this, who just says that some of these kids, a couple of select ones, are basically sent out into the wild.

Not to kill wolves or to kill helots or anything else, but they're basically just sent out to survive on their own for a little bit. Anthropologists are keen to grab onto this and say say like, this is just a rite of passage. This is something we see in a lot of societies where children around that age, when they are on the cusp of manhood, they sort of get sent out and then they have to come back in. And that is the moment when they turn into full adults and full citizens. But later sources talk about this as either a sort of informal form of like state terrorism, like they're supposed to go and hunt and kill helots. So they're enslaved underclass to keep them on their toes. And another account that actually says that they are just special forces terrorism like they're supposed to go and hunt and kill helots so they're enslaved underclass to keep them on their toes and another account that actually says that they are just special forces like they're an elite unit that is sort of training to operate separately on the battlefield a lot of those accounts are very difficult to believe but in any case what we can

tell is that this is not a part of the normal education most of these kids would not go through this this is something that is for an exceptional few, and what it even is, we're not entirely sure. So for the normal education, how much of a military bent really was there for this early stage in Spartan education? I'm tempted to say none. Fundamentally, what we don't hear of in any account of Spartan upbringing is weapons training, for instance. That isn't a factor. They do a lot of fighting, but obviously fighting means many things. I mean, it means a scrap with another boy who insulted you, or it means like a full-on mock battle. And we don't know exactly where we are on that spectrum. They get beat up a lot, which is not really military training so much

as it is just the kind of way that the upbringing of children looks like in that period, not just in Sparta, but elsewhere in the Greek world. But in terms of their actual exercises, this is all gymnastic, as far as we can tell. This is them doing running, jumping, wrestling, and boxing, maybe to the extent that they do combat sports. But nothing that we can really identify either as, for instance, formation drill, military exercises that are explicitly military. That just doesn't occur in any of these accounts. So as far as we know, it's a fitness regime, right? They're being trained in PE, they're regularly made to exercise, but they also, we can tell, have a lot of extra time. They have a lot of spare time in which they're kind of just hanging around together, socializing each other and essentially sort of training each other to behave like proper Spartiates, they also have

time to go off on their own quite a bit. And then the question is, like, what do they actually do? There's a lot of talk about how they're expected to behave and how they're better behaved than any other Greeks anywhere, which is, again, that idea of presenting this in the most favorable light. But what that probably means is that there's a lot of anxiety about what these boys get up to, because they're not under so much control. They're not under sort of permanent supervision. And so there's a question of how do we make that into something that actually turns them into the kind of people we want them to be. Is there any focus from what you're saying there, therefore, maybe not weapons training, but is there mental resilience? They want to build that up very much from a young age with

these Spartans. Yeah, so that is something they are focusing on much more so there's a lot of emphasis on the idea that this upbringing this supervision in groups and these common activities and these exercises they're meant to make them obedient and they're meant to make them hardy so like resistant to shortages of food resistant to the hardship of cold and heat and exhaustion. These kind of things are what they're basically being trained to endure. So there's a lot of the kind of things that are being focused on, like they're not being given a lot of clothing, right? They're only wearing the same outfit throughout all seasons. So in summer, it's very hot. They have to wear the cloak. In winter, it's very cold. They have to wear just

one cloak, still the same cloak. So they're always sort of either hot or cold to make them sort of willing to endure those kind of extremes. They're supposed to sleep on simple mats. They're not going to have any padding, any soft pillows or anything like that. They're made to go barefoot and supposedly they don't receive enough food. Now that's kind of a contested one because on the one hand, there's well-attested sort of instances of cadets, for instance, and there's a great scholar, Helen Roche, who has studied the comparison between the Spartan upbringing and, for instance, the upbringing of Prussian cadets in the 18th and 19th centuries. And she explains how this is a feature of their education as well, is that they're not

given enough food because that means that they're encouraged to steal, which is then going to train their cunning and train their subterfuge. But it also means that if they fail at being good at stealing, you know, if they're caught, then they can be brutally punished. So it's a way of trying to condition a certain attitude, a certain kind of behavior. And it also bonds them together, because they're obviously going to try and help each other supplement their diet.

So on the one hand, that seems perfectly plausible. They're not given enough rations, and they're encouraged to steal to make up for it, which then sort of trains them into a certain way of thinking about how to provision for how to provide for themselves. On the other hand, we have really nice stories of all the nice things that they would bring to their meal. You know, it's kind of like a potluck, like all of these sort of elite meals in the Greek

world. You can bring your own food to supplement the kind of stuff that's already there. So while their rations are not very luxurious, they can bring more food, presumably from home. This is just something that they can bring along and then it gets handed out by the leader of their pack. And some of them are excluded from it and others are given it. So there's clearly a way to get around this idea

that they can't get enough food. And the other thing, obviously, is the fact that these are all rich kids. All Spartan citizens are leisure class. So these are all the children of estate owners whose own leisure, as you see later on in Spartan life, and their own form of training is to hunt. And so these kids are learning to hunt in the same period that they're learning to be obedient and to be fit and to behave like Spartans. And so they're supplementing their food that way as well. I mean, if they catch something or if they kill something in the hunts, then there you go, there's your extra ration. So a lot of that idea that they're sort of going around stealing apples from orchards or

like stealing food off the cooling pie from a windowsill. I mean, this is very romantic, but actually there are a lot of ways that you can find extra food if you are growing up in such a society where your parents are rich, your parents are trying to train you to hunt, to provide for yourself that way, and obviously where a lot of people are living entirely to support your life. And it's interesting how you mentioned how they would be in this group of people their same age, and as you say, they are bringing stuff to the table so that they can all eat at times if, as you say, they didn't actually have enough, so they're encouraged to eat these various different ways of acquiring food. Well, following this early stage of a Spartan's education is the agogae, if I'm correct?

Well, yeah. It's known as the agogae from later sources. The interesting thing is that in the classical period, the period we're talking about, that word isn't used. It's a Hellenistic word that gets used for all education systems from the third century onward. In this period, it's just called paideia. And this is kind of another factor that's important to stress when you're talking about the agogae and people are like, oh, the Spartan agogae, the agogae, you know,

they like to know that they know this word. It's just a word for an education system. There's nothing special about it, like as a term. It's not a unique term. It's not just used for Spartans. The Spartan education system for the period that we're talking about is called paideia, just like every other education system in the Greek world. And later on, it's called Agogae, just like every other education system in the Greek world. And in fact, the Agogae, as we know it from later sources, wasn't designed by a Spartan. It was designed when it was reintroduced in the third century by someone who was brought in from the outside, a philosopher, who was engaged by the kings of Sparta to say, look, our education system is deteriorated. Can you help bring us back to

our old standard? And so he reformed the education system, brought it back, and it's from that point that it starts to be called the agogae, because presumably it's modeled on other education systems that exist in the Hellenistic Greek world. So yes, it's called the agogae in sort of the popular imagination and in some sources, but not because the agogae in the popular imagination and in some sources, but not because the agogae is some kind of special label. It's like others have education, but they have the agogae. That's what you call it. It's school. Right, I stand corrected. My knowledge of Sparta is increasing every moment as we talk through this rule. Well, when they've passed this first stage of the paideia, of

Spartan education, where do these Spartan boys or adolescent young men, where do they go next? So when they're 18, they grow up, they become adults, right? And this is true in Sparta, it's true in every Greek state, which means that if you're an Athenian, that's the time when you get enrolled, and that's the time when you become liable for military service. And that's also true in Sparta. So basically they're enrolled as adult citizens. We don't think there's necessarily as much of a written record as there is in other places, but they become sort of known as adults. And it's at that stage that things become a bit blurry. Like we're not exactly sure what happens between the period when they turn 18 and when they're 20, at which point they become eligible for various other things. Like that's when they

become eligible to serve in the field army, for instance. They never really send out men who are only 18, 19. And also when they become eligible to serve in the field army, for instance. They never really send out men who are only 18, 19. And also when they become eligible to serve in the hippies, so the royal guard. So there's a period in between when some are being sent out on the cryptaea, which we mentioned before. So some of these kids are being taken out and sent out into the wild, maybe, to go and either fend for themselves or to enforce state tyranny. And others are essentially just in a final stage of their upbringing. It's possible that we should situate military training in this period, but we're not really sure. There's not much explicit testimony to that effect.

So maybe this is the time when they're finally training to do their instance formation drill. There's no indication that they would have done weapons training because Spartans just don't do that. That's just not a factor in Spartan life. But maybe this is when they get together and start to learn how to operate in a body. But the thing is, the kind of formation drill that we know the Spartans had is described in some detail by Xenophon, which is really, really helpful. Modern people who have experimented with this, they said, you can learn this in half an hour. So if he says, you know, this is something the Spartans are really good at and other Greeks aren't doing it.

Now, I'm sure this is something the Spartans did that made them stand out because it's at least more than other Greeks were doing. But that doesn't mean it takes two years to learn it. And so the question is, were they actually spending a lot of time doing this or were they just continuing the old exercise regime where they have daily gymnastics,

daily athletic exercises? But this kind of formation drill, they're only really taught it when they are drafted where they're sent on campaign because i guess one of the big questions is was all of this preparation so that these spartans then become part of a professional army that they become professional soldiers you're laughing when i say yeah people use that word a lot in fact scholars use that word they call them soldiers or professional soldiers And you see these kind of pop culture descriptions of the Spartans like the only professional forces. This is not a professional army and you really have to be as explicit as possible. This is a militia. These are citizens who are called up only at need. There is no Spartan army that exists in Spartan society unless it is called to war. So just like all the other

Greek states, they all have this militia system. They all have a system in which adult male citizens form the army when there is a military crisis, when there is a military situation that requires troops. No Greek state has a standing military except in very small ways, so very small standing forces that they might may or may not operate. The Spartans don't even have those. They just have their militia. The whole system of their society is built around the idea that it is every citizen's duty to fight for their city, fight for their community, and therefore you don't need a professional army. You don't need to pay someone to fight for you on your behalf. You don't need to have a small selection of people whose job it is

to serve as your soldiers in war because you all do it. That is your duty as citizens. And so they don't have an army. You know, when you grow up and you go around the Spartan city or the Spartan countryside, there is no army. There is nothing you can point to and say, that's the military, that's the barracks, or that's the military school or the academy, whatever. That doesn't exist. There are these tent groups where people eat, but they are citizens.

They're citizens together, just like they are in other Greek states, having their drinking parties, having their dinner parties. And then nothing else that you can point to and say, that's the army. So these are just civic militias that have been indoctrinated to believe that it is their duty, their obligation to fight for their state and no one else will do it. And that's how you form an effective army in the Greek world. Yeah, but surely that alone doesn't make them better soldiers than other Greek city-states, right? I mean, the Athenians would have a similar thought cycle. Some would take up the oar with the navy or they'd pick up the spear and the shield to fight. They similarly, all these Greek city-states were raised with this idea that you would

defend your own city-state, right? Yeah. So who said they were better soldiers? I mean, the thing that is distinct about them is because they're an oligarchy who consists entirely of a leisure class, right? So in Athens, you have everybody's a citizen. Everybody has equal citizen rights if you're an adult male who was born an Athenian citizen. That means that some people fight in the cavalry because they are very rich and they can afford a

horse. Other people fight as hoplites, and a lot of people can't afford even that, so they fight as light-armed troops or they fight in the navy. In Sparta, everybody's a leisure class citizen, which means everybody has the money to afford to fight however they want, but also everybody has the time to prepare for that fight. In Athens, obviously everybody who gets called up, many of them will have busy day jobs and otherwise they can't eat. In Sparta, they have people to do that for them. So their entire citizen class is free to prepare for war. Obviously, we exaggerate that. We are inclined to exaggerate that and say that means they spend all of their time drilling and fighting and being like, this is like what

the movies portray, you know, this idea that the Spartans are doing nothing but preparing for war. And some ancient sources actually say this. But in practice, when you try to pin that down, what they're actually doing is they're exercising. They're doing athletic exercises. And so in that sense, they are fitter, right? They're going to be more uniformly fit to go on campaign. And this constant focus on deprivation, this idea that they can't get enough food or that they can't get enough sleep or that they have to deal with cold and heat. These are the kind of things that in the Greek mind prepare you for war. Being able and willing to go through things like night marches or going

without sleep or fighting without food. So that's what makes them perhaps more willing, more prepared, better prepared to endure what it is to go on campaign. But otherwise, I mean, they don't have any special preparation for this except that formation drill, which they've accustomed themselves to by the late fifth century. And And if these Spartan citizens ruled, they have enough money to fight either as cavalry or as infantry. But was there a particular type of unit that the Spartans preferred that their Spartan citizens fought as? Yeah, so all Spartan citizens fight as hoplites, which is actually kind of a question why. Because in a lot of other states where the ruling class is rich landowners,

that's what is true in Sparta. It's also true in places like Thessaly or, for instance, in some Sicilian cities. Those people tend to fight as cavalry because that is A, the best way to display your wealth is to ride a horse because horses are incredibly expensive to keep and maintain. The Macedonians, there you go. So you have lots of different peoples in and around the Greek world whose way of establishing their status and political and cultural dominance is by fighting as cavalry. And that is also tactically extremely effective. I've written about this before, so I'm a very strong proponent of this idea. Cavalry is disproportionately effective in Greek warfare. It tends to win battles.

And so we would have expected to see these Spartans say, we're a cavalry elite, we fight as cavalry, and that is how we dominate our neighbor. They don't do this. They fight as hoplites. They fight as heavily armed infantry. And it's not entirely certain why, because they have an equestrian culture. They love horses. You know, one of the things that the Spartans do in order to affirm their status in the

Greek world as wealthy, leisure-class citizens is send chariot teams to Olympia where they win the Olympic Games for the chariot race, which is the most expensive contest in the games. They win that all the time. That is their thing. The Spartans are consistent winners in the most luxurious form of competition in the Greek world. So they love their horses, but they don't fight on horseback. And so the question is why? And one way certainly is the idea that their neighbors don't necessarily fight as cavalry. And so to some extent, they have to kind of adapt to their own tactical environment. But another aspect of it is perhaps that even though they're all leisure class citizens, they actually have to deal with

quite a lot of inequality within their society. Their outward facing is that they're all equals. They call themselves the similars, the homoioi. But actually, there's a lot of inequality within them. Some of them are very rich and getting richer all the time. Others are on the brink of losing their citizenship because they can't make the property threshold. They can't make their contributions to the mess halls, which you need in order to be a Spartan citizen.

And then, of course, below that, because there are so few Spartiates, they rely on other people to flesh out their military formations. A lot of those people obviously can't afford to fight in the way that they might. And so in order to form a unified block, in order to present themselves as people who are all the same and who fight the same and who fight under the same structure and display the same level of obedience and courage, they have to set that bar a bit lower. They can't set the bar at cavalry service, they have to set it a bit lower. So they fight as hoplites. The other aspect to that of course is when you double down on reputation for military bravery, which they do

after the Persian wars when they say, oh, the Bhopalai, which is actually a disaster, they tend to spin this into, oh, this is a great achievement, actually. We were very brave here. We are exemplifying our morality. That morality is better portrayed by fighting as a hoplite because cavalry fights tentatively. It can charge in for close combat, but most of the time it sort of uses javelins, fights from a distance, wheels away from a fight it can't win. Whereas if you want to prove that your whole morality is built around standing and fighting, standing in a phalanx and fighting in a battle line as hoplites is the way to do that. And that's true in Sparta, it's true in Athens, it's true elsewhere. The narrative, the rhetoric of courage is associated with hoplites because a cavalryman can always get out of a sticky situation, but a hoplite has to stand and fight. We'll definitely explore the phalanx a bit more,

but before we get there, Raoul, you did mention how the Spartans were wanting almost to look the same as hoplites. If we talk briefly about their equipment as these heavily armed infantrymen, did they have standardized equipment? Can you imagine a row of Spartans famously with that iconic lambda on their shield? Is that myth or is that truth? Can we imagine them all being quite standardized in how they looked? Yeah, it's a difficult question, actually, because the evidence is so bad. I mean, this is something that obviously gets picked up a lot in pop culture, that they all look the same. They all have these lambda shields, so the shields with the big L on it for Lacedaemon, which is the region or the polis. There is evidence for that, but it's literally a fragment of a lost

comedy. So it's a single sentence that's making fun of the Athenian general Cleon, which says that Cleon ran away when he saw the lambdas gleaming. Probably bronze shields with a lambda on them, but that's the sum total of it. So there's no other reference to these lambda shields anywhere in Greek literature or in Greek archaeology. There's no sign of this. What we do have is a couple of descriptions of what the Spartans looked like in battle, which do emphasize their uniformity and do emphasize their ferocious look. They seem to have had bronze polished shields.

So you have these big round shields, right, which Hoplite's carried into battle, which could be faced with anything. You could put your own blazon on it. The Spartans seem to have been required to keep that as a bronze facing, first of all, so it was covered in bronze rather than doing it on the cheap. And then to have that polished so that it would shine, so that it would look as intimidating as possible, flashing in the sun. And then they would wear these red tunics, which I've already mentioned, or these red cloaks. I mean, we don't exactly sure what the foinique is. It's the red one. Literally, that is what the name means, or the purple one. It could be a

tunic, it could be a cloak, but either way, they're all wearing that, which means that they look, It could be a tunic, it could be a cloak, but either way, they're all wearing that, which means that they look, as Xenophon describes it on one occasion, as a single mass of bronze and scarlet. Basically, the idea that they look uniform, whereas other Greeks obviously can put whatever they want on their shields and they can wear whatever they want into battle. So the Spartans do have this sense of uniformity, which is kind of unique to them. Although others also adopt uniform shield blazons, for instance, eventually. And others also adopt maybe red cloaks or red tunics because it's just one of the colors that the

Greeks thought was particularly manly. So it's not necessarily something that others can't do too. It's just that something the Spartans are famous for by the fourth century. But I have to stress that because the earliest evidence for these things, for either the red cloak or the lambda shield, is the late fifth century during the time of the Peloponnesian War. During earlier times, we have no evidence of this. We have no references to it. We have no indication that the Persians or the Spartans in the time of the Persian Wars, for instance, were in any sense uniformly equipped, nothing like that. It seems to me quite plausible that they were, especially by the Peloponnesian War, because they doubled down on theirian War, because they doubled down on

their military reputation and because they doubled down on this sense that we are sort of one in our obedience, one in our discipline, and one in our willingness to face any enemy. And in order to sort of broadcast that and be terrifying to their enemies, they decided, you know, one of the ways we can do that is to look the same. But another aspect of that, which I think is really important to bear in mind is again, the Spartans as their population declined really relied on others to kind of fill out their phalanx. So they were relying also on these perioikoi, these non-citizen freeborn Lacedaemonians, and also on freed helots to fill out their battle line. And so if you dress them all up uniformly,

you can't tell which is which. And that's a really important part for, you know, intimidating your enemies is making them believe that all the thousands they're facing are all these Spartan citizens, Spartiads, when in fact a lot of them are not. This idea of a mixed phalanx is really interesting because at the end of Alexander the Great's reign, when he's running low on his Macedonian troops, he employs some Persian troops and other troops, and he puts them further back in his phalanx. So you always have the front row of Macedonians looking the same with their long pikes. And then you have Persians with spears and javelins behind them in this mixed phalanx. It doesn't seem to have lasted very long. But I didn't realise that it was a similar case with the Spartans, that you could see a Spartan battle line, look Spartan from the front, but maybe behind them you've got slingers or javelins or something like

that perhaps. Well, no, there wouldn't have been mixed formations, or at least that's not what we think. So hoplite formations are always homogenous, which just sets them apart. So there would have been perioico who could afford to equip themselves as hoplites, and helots who presumably were equipped on some kind of state funding to be hoplites, to fight as hoplites. Although we don't actually know how that worked, and we don't actually ever see that happening, we have to assume that those helots would have been equipped by the state. But the majority of the men in the phalanx would have been the perioikoi and also increasingly over this period what's called hippomayonase which sounds like what mayonnaise? Hippomayonase,

yes they put mayonnaise on their phalanx. These are called inferiors and the most likely explanation for that name, it's not glossed in the sources, is that these are the Spartiates who have lost their citizenship status because they couldn't afford to be Spartiates anymore. They couldn't afford their mess dues. So they lose their citizen rights. But of course, they still have to fight. And some of the motivation to fight is to hopefully maybe regain some of their reputation. But increasingly, these phalanxes, they have a very small sliver of Spartiates largely in front because they would be the officers behind which would be a mass of perioico and hippomayonese so these inferiors who are ex-Spartiates essentially

who would have been trained in this system maybe their ancestors were trained in the system but who themselves no longer take part in it and obviously you kind of want to obscure the difference you kind of want to make them look like they're all the same so that you're going to be terrified thinking you have to plow through all these Spartiates, and it's going to be really hard because they famously don't give up. When in fact, most of those guys are basically just other inhabitants of the Spartan territory. Hippomanes, I love that name. Well, keeping on a bit longer on the armour of one of these Spartan warriors, if we talk a bit more about the shield, how important really was the shield to a Spartan? Because you we talk a bit more about the shield, how important really was

the shield to a Spartan? Because you have those famous sayings, you know, come back with your shield or upon it. Yeah, the shield was very important, but it's important to sort of recognise that this is not just for Spartans, but for all pre-Coplites. I mean, the idea, and this gets stressed sometimes in the sources, is that when you're forming a battle line, your shield is one of the sort of bricks in the wall, so to speak. And there's sometimes literally covers the man on your side. Some people interpret this as like, you know, it overlaps with the man on your left. So he's also hiding behind your shield. So if you drop it, you create a gap. I think more plausible is simply the fact that this is supposed to be an unbroken line, any sign of disorder can cause panic because they're very afraid that they fall into disorder and become easy pickings.

So if they see any kind of sense of disorder, they will panic. And so they want to make sure that that shield line remains unbroken. So the shield is very important. But it's also this factor of if you're a hoplite and in battle and things are going against you, first thing you're going to do is you're going to throw away that heavy shield, which might weigh six kilos or something like that. It's going to burden you so that you can run away. So if you're running away, you're throwing away your shield first, which then is a sign that you didn't fight to the end. You didn't stay with the rest. And you may have been the reason why, because the others saw you running away, the

whole line started to crumble. So in order to prevent those things from happening, A, gaps in the line appearing, and B, possibly panic spreading through the ranks because people are starting to abandon their posts and run off. Both Athens and Sparta basically criminalize throwing away your shield. This is something that is a crime. It's not meant to happen because you're letting down your entire formation and possibly being one of the causes of defeat in Basel. So the Spartans have these famous sayings associated with them, like don't throw away your shield, you must come back with it.

And in fact, they had a rule that said you weren't supposed to be very far away from your shield. So even during their exercises when they were on campaign, their shields had to be piled up nearby. They had to be sort of within a stadium's distance from their shield or something like that. So basically they weren't allowed to get very far removed from their weapons. But the purpose of that is essentially to make sure that you're ready to fight.

And secondly, that when you're in a fight, you're not going to abandon it for any reason. You're going to stay there and you're going to keep doing your part to make sure that the formation can function. So the Spartans have these wonderful anecdotes connected to that. But we mustn't forget that in Athens this was also a crime. They had the same sort of rhetoric of shield flinging, which is what they call it, ripsaspia, which is like throwing away your shield. It's a slander. If you call someone a shield flinger, you're calling them a coward. This is a huge deal. Some people are mocked in Athenian comedy for being shield flingers, for having thrown away their shield in battle. This is a huge disgrace. These people are known as cowards for the rest of their lives. So there's a lot of that rhetoric because that's the way that

Hoplites win battles is by staying in the line, holding onto their shield and hoping that the rest is doing so too. So you have to police that. And did the Spartan warriors, did they wear body armor? Most likely, yes. Although we don't really know. I mean, there's no concrete evidence for any Spartan body armor anywhere, which is one of those things where it's just like, oh, we wish we knew. It's just that, you know, hoplites equip themselves as they wish, right? So some of this is clearly in Sparta becomes regulated. So they have the red cloak, which they're supposed to wear, the red garment, whatever it is.

And they have these bronze shields. But other parts, they can do more or less whatever they want, or at least as far as we know, there's no regulation. So they would have worn helmets, which increasingly we think are very simple pilos, so these conical bronze helmets. And they may have worn body armor if they wanted it, which could have been sort of the full metal cuirass that you get in the archaic period, but increasingly would have been these tube and yoke cuirass, things you see in art a lot of the

time, which are basically made out of something more pliable, which is likely to be layered quilted linen. But this is the kind of armor that, you know, if you wanted to, if you could afford it, obviously no one's going to stop you wearing it. So if we go back to formations and the phalanx, so we've talked about their armour looking quite uniform, their education, their training, having more time to train, in theory at least. Does this transfer into the battlefield as them having more discipline than other Greek city-states and their soldiers? This is the point that I try to emphasize a couple of times when people tell me like, oh, you're constantly doing down the Spartans and you're trying to sort of

busting their myth at the expense of going too far the other way. This is the point that I emphasize is the Spartans are very effective in battle. They have one thing that they do that other Greeks don't do, which is maintain order in their formations. They march into battle in step, which means that they can maintain their formation even when they're moving. They're responding to orders, which means they can maneuver in certain ways. They can make a basic maneuver like a wheel or a countermarch. And that allows them to perform more cohesively in battle. And firstly, it's vastly intimidating. Other Greeks are terrified of seeing the Spartans come down at them, basically. And secondly, it means that a lot of time they have that

edge of control in battle. So they can win a pitched battle because they can maneuver their troops when others, due to their lack of training and lack of an articulated officer hierarchy, lose control once the signal is given, basically. Once they march into battle, those troops become sort of fairly mindless, singular advancing troops, advancing forces. The Spartans maintain some level of control, and this gives them an edge. I mean, for a long period, they're unbeaten in pitch battle, and you can point fairly precisely to the fact that this level of control is letting them win, where other Greeks might have already sort of... Either it would have been a coin toss, basically, like you encounter another force and you have to see who wins.

It comes down to chance, more or less. Or it would have just broken in panic and run away, which happens very often in hot blood battles. So the Spartans do have a greater level of discipline, which comes into play in these big orchestrated pitched battles where they have a definite edge over other Greeks. Is this thanks partly, because you mentioned it in passing there, due to the command structure of Spartan armies, was that also a bit better than other Greek city states? Yeah, so this is the one thing that lets them do this. On the one hand, you could talk about formation drill, but as I said, we don't really have any evidence of it. And we must suppose

that it's actually quite simple and easy to learn, which actually Xenophon keeps stressing. Like, this is easy to learn. You can pick this up. Anyone can do this. He clearly wants other people to do the same because he thinks there should be no obstruction to this. So it's not like you need to have gone through the Agoge or through the Paideia to learn this. It's something that anyone can do, according to him. But what you need in order to do that is to make sure that you have a front rank of soldiers who know what they're doing. And that front rank in the Spartan army is these officers. So they have a greater, more articulated officer hierarchy where instead of having a single commander with a couple of underlings who each command like a large chunk of men, like in Athens, the lowest ranking officer is the lochagos who commands several

hundred men. So how are you going to operate that block? How are you going to make those troops follow orders? They can't even hear you when you're shouting. Some of them will be too far away. The Spartans break that down further. So below that level, they have another level, the Pentecostals, and below that, they have the Ennemotarch. These are levels of unit subdivision, each with their own officer, which allows them to pass down orders quickly. And so when you're in one of these units, there's a guy that you can talk to. There's a guy that you need to listen to. You know where he is. He's right there in front of you. All you have to do is either listen to his commands as they come down, which can be passed on very quickly down that chain, or you just have to see what he does and follow him. And that subdivision,

which means a devolution of the responsibility of leadership, means that this phalanx becomes much more responsive and that this formation is able to maneuver much more effectively. Well, there you go. Yeah, the Spartan officers renowned. Of course, they sometimes send officers rather than whole armies, don't they, to inspire and sometimes really influence the cause of certain wars in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Before we completely wrap up, we need to talk a bit about 300. But actually, the 300 themselves, was there really an elite unit of 300 within the Spartan army? There was, but we have to separate those things. We don't know if the 300 at Thermopylae

were the 300 that we knew exist even at the time as an elite unit within the Spartan army. So the Spartan army, as I said, is a militia. And there is no standing force. There is no sort of constantly available army of the Spartans. But there is a unit that is more or less constantly ready and at the disposal of the Spartan kings. And I've referred to it earlier as the royal guard. They're called the hippies, confusingly, which means horsemen. They're not horsemen, and they don't seem to ever fight on horseback.

Possibly they're called hippies in the same way that a lot of other elite units which means horsemen. They're not horsemen, and they don't seem to ever fight on horseback. Possibly they're called hippies in the same way that a lot of other elite units or elite segments of society in various other Greek states are called hippies because they're horse owners. So they may have been originally a unit of particularly rich citizens who therefore fought as a military elite. We don't know. That's possibly the origin of the name. But certainly in our time, they're basically a picked force that serves as an honor guard. So they're not necessarily elite in any sense that they are operating independently. They're not a special forces kind of unit. They're not armed differently as far as we can tell. There's nothing unique about them that means that they are distinct on the battlefield, but they are picked from each year group. So as Spartans mature and become citizens, the best ones of them are picked for

this elite group, and they are supposed to serve as guards of the king. And they're also at the disposal of their officers in the sense that if you need some muscle, if you need something done within the Spartan society, you can go to the E-Force, and the E-Force will say, go to the commander of the guard, and whoever he has at his disposal, they can just sort of group them and send them along with you. So these are basically people who are hanging around as sort of police force as well. But these men are supposed to be picked from men who've turned 20, basically. And there's a lot of competition for this honor, of course, because it is an honor guard. It serves in the battle line as identical to the rest of the army, but around the king. So they get to prove themselves personally.

They get to be close to these kings. And that makes it very competitive. People want to be part of it. And so according to Xenophon, there's a lot of fights in the streets where people are trying to obtain the right to be picked for this, and they dispute it among each other. They say, you can't be picked if I'm here. You're not as brave as I am. You're not as good as I am, whatever. So there's a lot of competition for this. But the fact is that as Spartan population declines, as their number of citizens declines, you end up with the problem that there aren't more than 300 people graduating each year.

And in fact, there should be much fewer towards the end of Spartan history that we can see. So by the third century, when they start to think seriously about reforming the state, everyone would have gone through this. Every Spartan growing up would have been picked for the hippies, because otherwise you can't fill the state. Everyone would have gone through this. Every Spartan growing up would have been picked for the hippies because otherwise you can't fill the numbers. So it stops being a picked unit that is honoured for its prowess, but rather becomes a rite of passage, essentially, a unit of the 20 to 30 year olds within the Spartan militia. So it sounds like Spartan training does, rather confusingly, at a later date, become become more severe like the fictional idea we have of Spartan training at, let's say, at the beginning of the 5th century BC?

Well, we don't actually know anything about whether this unit trained. I mean, this is, something that is totally obscure. I mean, there's no indication that this unit was separately grouped for training or anything like that. So they would have served with the other Spartiids. And in fact, if they were members of their own tent groups, as all Spartan citizens had to be, then they would have actually eaten and celebrated and feasted and trained separately. So they wouldn't necessarily have been set aside for that purpose and kept in a barracks like picked troops in Thebes or in Athens, potentially. They would have just been available when needed, but otherwise would have been a scattered part of the Spartan militia. So again, we mustn't interpret this as a standing force.

We mustn't interpret this as a military elite that is serving as a special force or anything like that. You have to interpret this as just a section of the militia that behaves as an honor guard in battle so that it's grouped around the king. And on one memorable occasion, chaperones Themistocles, the Athenian general, when he's on his way home. This is considered one of the greatest honors that that the Spartans can bestow, is that he is accompanied by the royal guard in honour of his leadership at Salamis.

And is it also true that with the Spartans that say they are out in campaign, whether they're at Thermopylae or Plataea or elsewhere, if the Spartans don't surrender and they die there on the spot, would their bodies be taken back to Sparta and be buried somewhere in a cemetery there? Or what would happen to their burials? So first of all, they don't always extend their ground and fight. I mean, this is something obviously that they like to propagate because it makes them even more intimidating. As I said, a lot of their success in battle hinges on their discipline, but a lot also depends on the fact that their enemies are scared of them. So a lot of the time they don't actually have to fight. When they do have to fight, because their enemies will just run away, right? This

happens at least four occasions when they go into battle and the enemy just goes like, I'm not fighting those guys. Bye. Like, that's it. That's how they win. And so a lot of it is based on fear. When they do have to fight, obviously that reduces the odds to roughly even, because as we've seen, an individual Spartan is no better than an individual hoplite from elsewhere. They may be fit, they may be tough but in a fight that spear is going to hit you and that's a dice roll like you're still going to go down. What you do see is that when it gets tough for them when the Spartans do get stuck in a fight you know they might lose and when they lose when they start to see their numbers going down they might break. This does happen especially from the fourth century onwards that does start to be their numbers going down, they might break. This does happen, especially from the 4th century onwards.

That does start to be a big problem for them, is that they can't reliably win battles anymore. And even before that, in situations that are not quite a full-pitch battle, when they're beset by light troops or beset by cavalry, for instance, they might just break and run. I mean, that just happens because they can't do anything to reach that enemy. They can't fight in the way they want to. And eventually their morale just gives in because they're not superhuman. But those who do fall, fall abroad either in battle or because they're driven out, the Spartans don't bring them home, which is kind of a separation between Sparta and Athens. In this period, the Athenians become very obsessed with bringing all the dead home. They are the origin of the modern attitude that the dead should be buried at home.

Even the unknown soldier should be buried at home. And That is an Athenian tradition. The Spartans rather have a tradition to bury the dead on the battlefield or somewhere near the battlefield where they can leave a testimony to their willingness to go and stick their neck out for other people. So to fight on behalf of their allies, for instance, or to fight on behalf of those who ask for their help. So the Spartans do actually bury their dead as far away from home as possible. And there's this really great anecdote, which I mean, we don't know if it's historical, but for this one, I love for it to be true, where an Argive and a Spartan, obviously, these are the Argives again, you know, they're ancient rivals. And the Argive boasts, there are lots of Spartans buried in my territory.

And the Spartan retorts, but there are no Argives buried in ours. The idea being that we go out to fight you where you are, you have never managed to come and fight us where we are. The Spartans are proud of the fact that Spartans are buried abroad rather than at home, which creates an obvious problem when you're looking at that famous quote of come home with your shield or on it, because the Spartans don't come home. If they die, if they fall in battle, they're buried where they fell. And so the question is, does this mother mean that he's only wounded? Like he's being carried back on his shield because he can't walk?

More likely, and this is a really interesting argument that a friend of mine has made. It's something that we're trying to pick apart because we don't understand whether this quote is historical or not. He's argued that maybe this is something that relates to an older tradition before the Spartans start burying their dead abroad. Because we do hear in the Archaic period, so much further back than the Persian Wars, that there are tombs of fallen warriors in Sparta. Eventually they stopped doing this, but if you have tombs of fallen warriors in

Sparta, that means they're bringing their dead back to the city, which then means that that could be a context in which that phrase about coming home with your shield might make sense. So maybe that phrase is not only authentic, but very ancient. Whereas in the classical period, they've changed to a different tradition where they actually don't bring back their dead. So it would be come back with your shield or don't. This has been absolutely brilliant. Last question, it might have to be quite a short answer, but with everything we've discussed, and I think I already know the answer to this already, quite a short answer, but with everything we've discussed, and I think I already know the answer to this already, but we get regularly this depiction of Sparta as a warrior culture. How much of a warrior culture really was classical Sparta?

Deep breath. I would say not at all, but that's a risky claim because there are ancient sources, people who've seen Sparta, who know about Sparta in their own world, who still say that this is not a city, it's a barracks. They emphasize this military aspect. We have to be aware of the fact that for them, this is quite a low bar. They're looking at this society and saying it's very different from ours, and so we emphasize the difference. So to some extent, we can put it away that way and say, oh, well, they're just talking about a society that looks a little bit more militarized, a little bit more regimented than their own. But the other side of that is there are some features of this society that you can see as militarizing, that you can see as sort

of turning the society into a military society, like this common messes, the fact that all these adult men have to eat together, have to dine and sleep together. And you can say, well, this is like an army camp, you know, it's not really like a city. But you can look at that in a different way. When you bring a bunch of elite men in ancient Greece together and have a drinking party, that's called a symposium, right? All Greeks do this. This is how they want to live. This is how they want to advocate, how they want to display their wealth. The Spartans have this same system, but they've regimented it in a way that enforces moderation and sameness. They make them do it every night, but in certain conditions that restrict the lavishness and restrict the extravagance of these parties. So in a way, they're not really doing

things differently. They're just doing the same things in a way that reinforces these things that they want to believe about their own society, that they're all the same. They're all dedicated to the same values, dedicated to the same lifestyle. So you can look at the kind of Spartan practices that other Greeks think is like, well, that's a bit grim, it's a bit harsh, and turn it into something that's just like, well, no, it's just Spartans trying to reinforce the way that they want their citizens to behave without necessarily having a military purpose in mind. These mess halls, there's so much emphasis in the sources on their moral conditioning. These mess halls are about people getting together and singing the songs that advocate their values and telling the stories

that evaluate what they think is good and bad. It's so much about indoctrinating children who are introduced to these mess halls. They have to come and attend these dinners and they supposedly are just asked direct questions like, what do you think of that? Who do you think is a good man? Who do you think is the best man in the polis? These kinds of questions are about this, can you behave, can you pick up and become an expression of ideal Spartan value? It's not about military training. It's not about militarism even. It's about being the Spartan citizen that they want a Spartan citizen to be. And that's very much about being good in council and war and being good as a citizen and upholding the state and upholding its institutions and its values and its morality and behaving in a way that doesn't cause a stir. It's this sort of

imposed conservatism. It's this imposed sense of like, this is how we want to live. And you have to accept that. You have to live that. And you have to breathe it. You have to exude it. And if foreigners ask you, you know, you go abroad and you encounter people, you have to represent us. You know, you have to be a proper Spartan.

And that is what they do in their upbringing. That is how they condition people. Some other aspects of it, the sports, the athletic preparation. Obviously, again, you could say that has a military purpose. It surely does. I mean, these guys are becoming fit men who are prepared, as I said, for the hardships of campaigning. You could say that this is all about warfare, but the women have to exercise too, or rather, I should say, the girls until they marry have to exercise too. And so the purpose of that is explicitly, according to the

sources, eugenic. They want to create fit men and women so that their babies will also be fit, so that their children will be healthy. That's what they believe. That's how they think that genetics works. They don't know about genetics. They think that if you have a fit and healthy and energetic man and a fit and healthy and energetic woman and they have sex, then their child will also be healthy and energetic. And in fact, they believe that if you separate them so that they become sort of hornier and more, they desire each other more, then their sex will be more intense,

and then their children will be more energetic. That's what they believe. So this is purely eugenic, right? This isn't necessarily about creating the best warriors or conditioning people to be these super fighters, you know, these extremely tough men. This is about the idea of, obviously, you want your soldiers to be healthy and fit. Obviously you want your militia, which is drafted from the ordinary citizens, to not be diluted by citizens who are not well prepared for this, which happens in all the other states. You know, when you draw up the whole population for your militia, as Xenophon widely complains and Plato complains, some of them are going to be too old or too young or too fat or too thin and they can't stand it. You know, they're not built for it. So they want to make sure that everybody is more or less of an even standard so

that they are useful to the state there are military sides to that there is a military dimension to that usefulness but that's not the sole purpose they are meant to be citizens they're meant to be the best citizens of sparta well role what an answer to finish this episode on it just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come on the podcast today thank you so much it's really pleasure to be here well there you go there was dr rule canina dyke explaining all the things the spartan warrior what a chat that was it was such a privilege to interview Ruel in person. Such an amazing interview, such an amazing chat, sorting fact from fiction. What we know, what we don't know, what we believe, what are the theories around the Spartan warrior.

I really do hope you enjoy today's episode. And stay tuned, because we've still got a couple more episodes in our special Sparta miniseries this December to go. And they are also real crackers now last things from me if you're listening on spotify then please make sure to click the follow button so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week if you're listening on apple podcasts also make sure you're subscribed to also keep notified and if you'd be kind enough to leave us a comment to let us know your thoughts that helps us get better helps us get bigger so we always really do appreciate your feedback where we're doing well and where you think we can improve

in the weeks months and ultimately in the years ahead too but that's enough from me and i will see you in the next episode.