The Rest Is History - 82. Sparta

Episode Date: August 2, 2021

What does it mean to be a Spartan? How much of this Spartan image is real and how much is based on projections and prejudices of others? Tom and Dominic delve into the Ancient Greek world and take us inside the minds and reality of this civilisation. They also analyse the film “300” and look at what it got right and wrong.  A Goalhanger Films & Left Peg Media production Produced by Jack Davenport & Harry Lineker Exec Producer Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. There is no room for softness, not in Sparta, no place for weakness. Only the hard and the strong may call themselves Spartans. Only the hard, only the strong. The words of Dilios, narrator of the film 300, adapted from Frank Miller's comic book about the Battle of Thermopylae. And those words, of course, apply to one of the Rest is History's presenters. But which?

Which indeed? Today, we will discover which of us is the hardened Spartan and which the metropolitan Athenian fob. It's so hard to tell so tom i know you know loads about sparta let me be completely frank i know nothing about sparta at all you've just you've just been there right yes uh so you've just come back from the peloponnese i have that's right the fork bit that is attached to the mainland of Greece. Right, the bottom bit of Greece. You can imagine the map. Yeah, the bottom. Sparta is kind of above the bottom. So there are three forks, the one furthest right.

That's right. It sort of commands the plain of Laconia. The Eurotas Valley. We passed through it. So we were in a place called Monemvasia, which is on the coast, which is a Byzantine city for a time and then we were driving to a place that I'm sure you know called Mistras which is another Byzantine city up in the mountains the Tigetos mountains I think they're called and sort of Sparta is just below Mistras the modern Sparta um I have to say it didn't delay

us very long because basically it is very modern now you i'm gonna shame you well not shame you because you will be i know you have no shame uh i do you um you you gave me a recommendation while i was away you said there was some temple where people competed for cheese is that right yes um temple of artemis orthea that's right you said it's a chilling site and we should absolutely go and see it so i raised this with my family and there was a general sort of murmur of discontent as people as people said is it just a load of old stones in a field um we know what tom holland likes and then i googled it and the first thing that came up when I googled it was it said,

a well-known haunt for local homeless and drug addicts. And so my wife said, that's where Tom Holland is sending us. Absolutely no way. No way. So we didn't go. You didn't go? No, we didn't go.

We went for lunch instead, and we had a massive, massive souvlaki on a skewer suspended above our table. Maybe if you remind me i'll tweet a picture of it's a brilliant picture of this enormous quantity of food very well i think the question about i think the question is is answered one of us fearlessly goes out in the heat of day to look at a load of stones yeah there are drug addicts who might attack you yeah and one of us sits in the comfort and sloth of a large i mean you know absolutely clear

no no i was i was engaging with the local spartan citizenry um and uh you were gorging your face i have to say modern sparta modern sparta you know it's not the it wouldn't be the first place in anybody's list would it i'm not knocking it but it's it's it's a little bit humdrum it doesn't it's great if you like tractor factories yeah it doesn't be the first place in anybody's list, would it? I'm not knocking it, but it's a little bit humdrum. It's great if you like tractor factories. Yeah, it doesn't speak of the romance of the ancient world. But then neither did Sparta in antiquity, famously. So famously, Thucydides, the Athenian, who writes up the Peloponnesian War,

says of Sparta that he imagines that it's become deserted and that only the temples and the foundations of the buildings remain he said that he thinks that people would no longer you know people simply wouldn't believe that the place had been as powerful as it really was yeah i can because because because sparta you know basically it was an agglomeration of various villages. It famously didn't have a wall because it had its shield wall. Yeah. You know, it didn't invest in the kind of things that the Athenians invested in. Well, we had been there, you see.

We'd been there in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. My son and I. Okay, so how does it look in that? It looks great. It does look a bit Collection of Villages-ish. So there's no wall. These things are done. They were all done in collaboration with archaeologists and stuff. So I think it's reasonably, well, as accurate as it can be in a video game.

But it bears no relation to the tractor factories. So the reason I suggested the Temple of Artemis Orthia is because that was a very old building um and it was covered in very sinister masks so if you went to the museum you might have seen some of them um so there were kind of marked you know images of of young men but also images of hideous crones howling in pain wow very very sinister that's good and it was out in the marshes so it was surrounded by the croaking of frogs um and there was a very kind of antique statue of artemis who is the the virgin huntress the sister of apollo the the mistress of of wild animals and um that's where they played the cheese game yeah um this is where people compete for cheese right young people and they're the piles of their piles of cheese on a table,

and there are men armed with whips. So this is a bit like something from the Cotswold Olympics that we talked about recently. It is very similar, yes, very similar. And you have to brave the whips to get the cheese. And basically it's a kind of coming-of-age ritual. So you'd success in the cheese game. Then means, as a young Spartan man, success in the cheese game, then means

as a young Spartan man, that you have the chance to join the Cryptea. We're going to come to that, Tom. Don't tell us what the Cryptea is. I'm not allowed to talk about that? No, you have to talk about it later. Have you worked out a structure for this program? I have. Because I have nothing to say, I have

been able to devote my time. The hours that I spend preparing for the rest is history. I have put able to devote my time, the hours that I spend preparing for The Rest is History, I have put them into preparing a structure for you to interrogate you about the history of Sparta. So it's all about... And you've become Melvin Bragg. Yeah.

Well, I mean, I think people have seen that coming for a while, haven't they? That's terrifying. Yeah. We've got shouting at me. We've got similarly luxuriant hair as as as well known yes okay so i'll tell you what we should do because i've given this so much thought i think what we should do is for a couple of minutes you should give just a complete sort of very broad brush overview of sparta of sort of ancient sparta and then we'll get into

these questions that i have so brilliantly put out. Before I do that, I know we don't usually talk about historiography, about how we know about things, but I think it's really, really important with Sparta. Before we get into the history of it and the weirdness of it, basically, I have to flag up

that historians who write about it talk about the Spartan mir mirage right and they refer to it as a mirage in a way that they don't about other you know they don't talk about athens or rome like that and the reason is that um we have very few sources written by spartans yeah kieran right we have asked this question he says are we all are we just dealing with things that other people say about the spartans rather than the things they say about themselves? Basically, so we've got two poets, Teteus and Alckman from the 7th century. And then basically, aside from that, we have no Spartans.

So there are multiple kind of layers of mystery. So there is what the Spartans actually did. There's what the Spartans kind of said they did or kind of claimed that they did there's what other greeks other contemporaries said the spartans did and then there's the kind of what people since have said the spartans did yeah so there's just kind of it's a constant echo chamber of of weird reports and rumors and the the problem is is that the origins of sparta and everything that makes it distinctive is rooted in a period of greek history called the archaic which is notoriously tricky to make sense of right and um iris murdoch the great novelist said of of archaic greece that

it's a game with with very few pieces where the skill of the player lies in complicating the rules. Right. And that is absolutely the case with Sparta. So I just need to flag that up. It's a bit like Duel Flunking, very similar to that. Well, yeah, it's actually not like Duel Flunking, because Duel Flunking, you can see footage of it. Yeah.

Whereas this, it's difficult to get a handle on so it's it's there's a lot of myth here okay but the myth in itself is very powerful and is important so i think that's so let's come back to that in a second but now just give us yeah okay an overview who are the spartans what's the story why do they end okay so uh sparta is it it's it's girt on both side by great mountain ranges it's got the sea to the south it's girt on both sides by great mountain ranges. It's got the sea to the south. It's got kind of dark hills to the north. So it's very naturally well fortified.

So it's ideally suited basically to be a military power. In mythology, it's chiefly famous as the home of Helen, who marries Menelaus, the king of Sparta, at that generation after the Trojan War. It gets burnt. New people come. These are the people who claim to be the Spartans, supposedly. Sparta in the 8th, 7th centuries for Greeks is an absolute model of how not to run a city. It's terrible. The rich persecute the poor. Everyone's kind of given over to all kinds of depravity.

They go to war with their neighbors over on the other side of Mount Tegatus, a place called Messenia, which is even a kind of richer agricultural land than Sparta is. The Spartans conquer it. This money then enhances the class differences. The whole city seems to be falling to pieces. They also need military manpower to keep the Mycenaeans down. And so they institute a radical redrafting of their constitution, which basically transforms it into a kind of slave state where all the Spartan citizens are conditioned and trained to fight as warriors and this makes them the most formidable fighting force in Greece.

Sparta is the largest city, it's the most proficient military power in Greece. As such it is able basically to bring most of the Peloponnese under its rule. It plays a leading role in the Persian Wars, famous defence of Thermopylae. It wins the Battle of Plataea in 479, the year after Thermopylae, which sees the Persian invasion brought to an end. The rising power of Athens brings it to conflict with Sparta. Sparta ends up winning that. For a few years, its kind of mastery of Greece is undisputed, but Greece being Greece, they're endlessly fighting with another. The whole thing implodes. Thebes, a city that previously had been very, very marginal,

very much looked down upon, rises to this incredible military peak and destroys Sparta in two famous battles and from that point and and the the what the Thebans do is to divest the Spartans of Messenia which up till then had basically provided them with their great power stages and once Messenia has gone Sparta is immediately transformed into a kind of second-class power from that point on they they obdurately cling to their independence but they become more and more marginal and they end up absorbed into the roman empire and essentially they become a kind of um cosplay version of their ancestors yeah they you know they lay on kind of um spectacular whipping demonstrations for the entertainment of visiting tourists and that kind of thing. When the Roman Empire falls, Sparta gets caught up in

the process of barbarian invasions, it gets sacked. In the sixth century, Slavs invade, Sparta gets completely denuded, people take to the mountains and the hills and Mistres, the Byzantine city that you referred to, basically it's made of what remains of the urban fabric of Sparta. And no one lives in the Eurotas from that point up until the Greek War of Independence when Sparta is refounded in this kind of classicizing way that the Greeks have after they've won their independence. And the myth is much greater than the reality of downtown Sparta today. Yes.

But in a sense, that's always been the case. So how much... It's always been a vital complement to even at its absolute heyday, when people came up against Sparta, they were fighting the myth as well as the reality. OK, let's get back to Kieran Roach's question then. So everything we're going to be talking about in the rest of this podcast, how much is it, do you think, as far as anyone can say about ancient history, how much is it based on genuine historical evidence

and how much is it a projection, as Kieran says, of other people's prejudices and other people's kind of wish fulfillment in a way about the spartans the since academic studies of sparta are are really tough because it's all about fragments of pottery fragments of source material um the sifting and the balancing of texts that might often be written kind of centuries apart. So it is a challenge. And it's undoubtedly the case that an awful lot of what we know about Sparta, people who were consciously mythologizing it, whether because they admired it, which lots of people did, or whether because they admired it which lots of people did or whether because they hated it which equally lots of people did so it's i think it's very difficult but i think that um i think it's entirely justified to kind of construct a kind of sense of of what the society

had been like because it's been so influential it was massively influential on on the greeks back in antiquity and it's been hugely influential in the modern period as well so i i think i think you can kind of you know you know this isn't a this isn't a kind of a lecture for a degree course yeah it's not the open university we don't want to go down that road no it's not um and we're not even melvin bragg i mean no matter what some people may have said earlier in the podcast where we as you said to me when we first discussed doing the podcast it's all about the b. As you said to me when we first discussed it in the podcast, it's all about the bants. It's all about the bants, yeah.

When my wife heard those words, she said, don't do it, for God's sake, don't do it. Right, anyway, let's move on. So why is Sparta Sparta, Tom? Is it about geography? Why has it become this military machine? Or is it less different from other Greek city-states than we commonly think I think it's really different okay I mean to begin

with it isn't different so back in the Bronze Age so a further confusion is it has two names actually has loads of names so it's also called lack of diamond yeah and like it's that's what it's originally called we know that because um tablets have been found in actually in in boeotia and thebes that names it it's in it's mentioned in homer it's it's hollow lacedaemon um sparta seems to mean um land that's sown so sparrow is is i so so it seems to so basically lacedaemon is the old name. Sparta comes to mean this fertile valley where people are plowing and sowing. And I think that that's the key to Sparta's initial status,

is that it has this fertile valley and it is very well defended. And the thing that makes Sparta aberrant is that they conquer their neighbours. Right. And they reduce them to a level of servitude that other Greeks regarded as shocking. And this servitude is called helotage. They're called helots. We'll come to the helots in a sec. But why does the military culture develop?

That's a question we've had tons of people asking that. Ben Gladwin, for example, says, why does Sparta develop this unique military culture when there are so many different greek city states why are they the outlier well as ever with greek history there's there's a myth and then there's a probable reality so the myth is that um in the wake of the conquest of messenia, as I said, Sparta falls to pieces. It becomes a model of bad order. And an eminent Spartan by the name of Lycurgus, which means wolf worker, goes to Delphi and consults with the Oracle.

And Apollo sees him and says, oh, I don't know who you are. I'm not sure who you are. Lycurgus, are you a god or a man? man i'm not sure but i think you're probably a god so that's kind of you know this strange ambivalent heroic status that lycurgus has and the oracle gives lycurgus a constitution which basically provides um it transforms the citizens of Sparta into a military elite. Yeah. And they can do this because they've conquered Messina. And so they can use the Messinians as basically to grow the food.

Slaves, basically. So Piteas, the poet, says that they're like donkeys laden down with heavy burdens. The Spartans also have people called perioikoi which are people who live around sparta who can do the the things like um make the pots or make the armor or whatever the spartan warriors themselves that's all they do okay so any any other any other greek city the people who fight they do it on a strictly amateur basis they're carpenters they're um whatever but in sparta that's not the case they are purely soldiers so young tom holland is born in the year 450 or whatever how does his life work in sparta so talk me through it well young tom holland is born and he's a bit he looks a bit wussy so he'd probably he'd be taken to uh these magistrates called EFORs who are elected every year.

The EFORs would inspect me. They would say, is he going to go up to be a mighty muscle-bound warrior? I feel so sorry for you. I know. And so I'd be taken to a place called the Apothetai, which is the dumping ground, which is a ravine at the foot of Mount Togatus. And I'd be exposed there along with all the other baby boys. All the other misfits.

Don't pass muster. But let's say it's young Dominic Sandbrook. Wow, very different story. A fine, strapping young lad. Yeah. Clearly made to grow up and defend his city. Then at the age of seven seven you'd go to the equivalent of a boarding school right you'd go to a kind of a barracks um and you'd undergo what's

called the ago gay um which is uh um it's a kind of train training procedure and you'd be under um people i mean basically that that your instructor would would in greek means a kind of a child a herd so you're being raised like animals and it's that thing with like you know the the maker of wolves you're being you're you're simultaneously being trained to be ferocious like a wolf but also to be broken to control and discipline so this is not grey fries in the billy bunter this is not no no it's not and so you are you are schooled in um in in the use of arms you're schooled in drill you're schooled in um wrestling you're schooled to forage so there'll be times where you you were not fed enough so is this the cheese go out is this the no that's it that's it that's different because that's a game this is you know you have to go out into the onto

the mountainside and kind of kill animals or you have to steal things from other people or whatever so there's a famous story of the um a boy who is found um and he's got a fox which he's going to eat and he hides it under his tunic and an elder stops him and asks him what he's doing and he says absolutely nothing meanwhile the fox is gnawing away at his stomach and the boy suddenly drops down dead and he hasn't mentioned it oh my god do that you know i mean this this story is clearly not true because who would eat a fox but it suggests that boys you know young boys are taking on um vulpine characteristics they're trained to become foxes. And also that stoicism is absolutely key to the Spartan sense of themselves.

Yes. It's resilience. So the reed Sparta and the area around it is called Laconia. And we still have the word laconic. You're beaten if you talk too much. You're encouraged to say things as concisely as you possibly can. Just like you on this podcast right i mean exactly like me yes and the thing that's the thing that's also very distinctive about sparta is it's

not just boys who get an education girls do as well yes so we had tons of girls girls and women so so girls also um you know they're they seem to be have been taught to read to write um they're taught to be kind of forthright um to express their opinions they um they they they have this kind of distinctive dance where they slap their buttocks with the bottom of their feet with the bottom of their feet yeah so you kind of you know sort of leap up yeah you leap up you kick your legs up and you hit your buttocks with the bottom of your feet okay OK, so no one was doing that when I was in Sparta, disappointing. Something they could revive. Yeah.

They they're known as they wear these kind of very skimpy slits tunics that causes a lot of kind of prurient disapproval from from other Greeks. Sometimes they wrestle naked um and one of the things that girls do is i mean it's so it's kind of every school boy's worst nightmare is it that you at certain points you you you have to strip naked and stand before the girls and the girl you know if you don't measure up the girls are encouraged to laugh and mock you really so yeah so that's fun yeah um and then i mean it's good for the soul so at a certain point you you will play the cheese game that we talked about and then the odd thing is so that that the ideal is simultaneously to um to kind of encourage this egalitarianism but it doesn't mean everyone's

equal yeah so there's this ferocious sense of competition you have to make yourself the best and if you win the cheese game or if you pass kind of various tests then that your huge opportunity is that you you can join the cryptia this kind of elite. Yes. Which is basically Duke of Edinburgh Award, the gold, whatever it is. Gold Award. Yeah, Gold Award. And you go up into the mountains. You go down the other side. You go into Messenia and you have to kill a helot.

So helot is a slave. These are the people who are tilling the land. These are the Messenians. And if you do that, then you. So a helot is a slave. These are the people who are tilling the land. These are the Mycenaeans. And if you do that, then you come back and you get your gold award. And you have the chance to enter what's called the Hippaeus, which is basically the cavalry, the knights. But this being Sparta, they're not. They're all on foot.

But these are the 300 who go with Lenny, Dust of Thermopylae, the famous 300, as in the in the film talk to me about the killing the slave you can kill any slave you can just leap on them and stab them in the neck or whatever so so helots are again very just a very distinctive kind of phenomenon in sparta so you know people kind of discuss what were hell it's basically helots were helots they were that they were distinctive there was a there was a village in in laconia called helos and so there were all kinds of stories that these were the first helots other stories were that um the first helots were spartans who'd been cowards and had been reduced to this servitude to humiliate them but basically um helots are there to work the land and to provide the messes that enable the spartan warriors to function as warriors and so it's it's a kind of chicken and

egg situation what comes first is it the militarism of sparta that enables them to keep the helots down or do they have to keep the helots down because otherwise the helots will rise up and kill them? We had a question about this. We had lots of questions. Benji, why didn't the helots revolt? And were the Spartans afraid of it? And Paul Hogarth says, how paranoid were the Spartans of a helot uprising? And does that explain their militarism? So was there ever a helot uprising? Well, the Spartans are very paranoid about it.

I mean, I think a lot of the, you know, for a free citizen to be whipped or to be beaten as Spartans were, you know And I think kind of hanging over it is a reminder of what will happen to them if the helots gain power and conquer them. The Spartans, every year, the Ephors declare war against the Messenians, which they see as licensing the murder of helots. So Herodotus has this kind of very chilling phrase where he says uh that the the spartans alone do not regard murder as a crime um and they are they practice a kind of very self-conscious eugenic so just as they um you know

they they breed themselves they're famous as breeding horses, for breeding dogs and for breeding themselves. So this is why they chuck out people who, you know, babies that don't measure up. So conversely, the members of the Cryptaea, when they're passing their Duke of Edinburgh, they're given people to kill. They're given helots to kill. And these helots are the ones who've shown initiative, who are smarter or clever or whatever. So they're trying to breed an adultish, servile population. So they've actually singled out the brightest, most talented helots, Messinians,

and they basically say to their own children, teenagers, I guess, go and kill them. Yeah. Yeah. And that's then the their own children, teenagers, I guess, go and kill them. Yeah. Yeah. And that's then the mark of, you know, that you've kind of passed the grade. Yeah. And what they also do is for entertainment, sometimes when they're in their messes, they will bring a helot in.

And the helots are made to wear these kind of revolting dog skins. You know, it's designed to make them look ridiculous and ugly and scabby and they will get the helots drunk on unmixed wine so the greeks mix wine yeah with water they give it they give it neat and the helot gets absolutely off his face uh he kind of collapses in a drunken stupor. The Spartans then kind of ran the evening off by pelting him with animal bones. And the whole thing is designed both to, you know, addict helots to drink. Yeah. So that they're enfeebled, but also to serve as a moral lesson to the Spartans to practice moderation in everything.

And you can see the influence of this on, say, the way that the Nazis envisage their rule in Eastern Europe. I mean, it's absolutely modelled on this. But Nazi generals actually talk of the Spartans and the helots. I mean, there's sort of textual evidence for this. So their plan is basically to kind of reduce Poland to helotage. Yeah, exactly. And you asked about revolts. You asked about revolts.

So in 465, there's a particularly devastating earthquake. And off the back of that, there's a massive helot revolt. And the Spartans repress it very brutally. And actually, I mean, their treatment of the helots after that seems to become even more brutal. So, again, they offer prizes to helots who will help them um and so about 2 000 helots step forward um and they show great initiative in in helping the spartans the spartans then kind of disappear them god because yeah these are people who are obvious leaders that's incredible and nobody even knows what their fate

is i mean they they literally vanish and is it completely demented tom to make a comparison with other slave systems so for example the american south let's say um and the sort of fear of miscegenation and the fear of the slaves and the sort of the racism is is there any element of that no no because because what's shocking for to the greeks is that the helots are greek so and actually more than that they they're dorian so this is also a important part of how the spartans see themselves is that they see themselves as these invaders called dorians who have have swept southwards and conquered the Peloponnese with these kind of great Achaean cities, Mycenae and Argos and of course Sparta. And the Mycenaeans are Dorians, like the Spartans.

So in that sense, they're kin. And so actually the humiliations that are imposed on them, the determination to breed them into a kind of slave people, isn't because they are seen as alien, isn't because of racism. It's absolutely the opposite. It's because there is this incredible sense of kinship. But Tom, in that case, here's an obvious question. What makes a Spartan a Spartan? So how do you become a Spartan if they're kind of vaguely related to the other Dorian peoples, to the Mycenaeans, how are the Spartans Spartans? Is it just particular families? Is it literally the fact of residency in Sparta?

What is it that makes you Spartan? You have to be the son of freeborn Spartan parents. Yeah. And you have to have a certain kind of land qualification. Okay. And this is seen as the kind of the radical innovation of the lycurgian revolution right um and it's why sparta has appealed to the left as well as to the right is that um these incredible social differences which had seen the rich oppressing the poor

kind of get dissolved and everybody has to live the same life they all have to belong to a barracks they all have to eat the same food they all have to dress in the life. They all have to belong to a barracks. They all have to eat the same food. They all have to dress in the same way. They all have to fight in the same battle line. And the reality is, of course, that there are still people who are considerably richer than other people. But there has to be a certain property qualification. of this over time is that um you know spartan warriors die um there is a kind of uh you know as is always the way um the rich do tend to kind of increasingly monopolize land and so there's a steady kind of collapse in the number of people who are qualified to serve as spartans and that's one of the reasons that that leads to the collapse of Spartan power. Right. Okay. Fair enough.

So this, again, goes right the way back to the beginnings, is that most of the Spartans are Dorian, as I said, but there are families that aren't. And two of these families provide the two kings that rule at any one time. Oh, yes. So Sparta is a kind of weird mix. So you've got the ethos, the elected magistrates. You've got the assembly, which is kind of public assembly.

You've got the equivalent of a senate. Gerasia is literally the Greek for senate. It's assembly of old men, which, which again has kind of consultative power. And then you have two kings. And both of these kings are descended ultimately, they say, from Heracles, the great kind of paradigmatic Greek hero, who's an Achaean.

So weirdly, the kings in Sparta are not Dorian. They're Achaean. That that is strange it's kind of linked with the vanished past i suppose yes and um it basically it it it means that you know we were talking about the olympics yeah um and how olympian here you know winners in the olympics provide the greeks with a reminder of the heroic age, the age of heroes, and how heroes don't necessarily have the meaning that they have for us. Heroes are often very sinister figures, dangerous figures, who are kind of midway between humans and the gods. And the Spartans kings have that role. And so there's all kinds of myths about why there are two

kings. The most popular myth is um there is uh that there's a spartan king he has um twins the spartans don't he dies the spartans don't know who should succeed so they go to delphi delphi says they should both rule but um the one who's eldest should uh should should be senior which is kind of classically unhelpful yeah kind of delving solution you know gives the solution with one hand and takes it away with the other so the spartans say fine okay so we'll have these two kings um but how are we going to find out um who the elder one is and so a messenian interestingly helot suggests well watch the queen and see which one of them she bathes first on the assumption that the elder son is going to

be the favourite. And so they watch the queen, and she's not actually a queen. Sparta doesn't have queens, but the wife of the king. And they see which one it is, and that then becomes the founder of the senior branch of kings, and the other one is the junior branch. And that goes right the way through to, I think, the third century, this diarchy it's called.'s a very strange system okay one last

quick very quick question before we go to the break Optopian asks a question that I don't really understand he says thoughts and if possible a tasting on the role played by the Spartans black soup I don't know what this is what is the black soup Tom so the black soup is this notoriously revolting dish. So a Spartan would bring the raw ingredients, the helicooks would brew it up. It was basically a kind of blood broth. And Spartans would wolf it down. Any visitors would say it was disgusting. And the joke was, you know, an Athenian tasted it and said, now I understand why the Spartans have no fear of death. Very good. All right, I'm off to have a bowl of soup.

After the break, we shall go through some highlights of Spartan history and some of the characters, and then we'll talk about Sparta's reputation, and no doubt we'll be talking about 300. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde and I'm Richard Osman and together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip and on our Q&A we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com Welcome back to The Rest Is History. We are talking about Sparta. We're going to be coming to 300, of course, later in the show.

But first of all, I want to talk about, we had so many questions, Tom. Let's just go through the questions. And a couple of them are about individuals. And one of the first individuals is Cleomenes so jonathan metzer says can you tell us about king cleomenes expansionist tried to suppress athenian democratic revolution exiled recalled insane imprisoned and then found dead from wounds in custody what's the story with him so i don't know anything about this do you want to tell me about cleomenes he's so cleomenes is really the first great character that we know about because herodotus writes about him and Herodotus the first historian is basically

our main source well often our only source for early Sparta and it's clear that Herodotus has spoken to lots of different people about Cleomenes because he gives quite different perspectives on him Cleomenes is a king who rules for a very long time. And that means that he's able to build up quite a power base. And he's a very, he's an unusually imaginative and expansionist king. Spartans, the tradition is that they are very hidebound. Cleomenes seems not to have been. He plays kind of key roles in various developments in the decades before the persian invasions so he the the delphic oracle starts telling spartans go and um

chuck the tyrants out of athens so cleomenes does that um but he then gets terribly upset when the athenians decide they're going to set up a democracy. Yeah. And he tries to stop them. That all goes wrong. So that's that's a kind of blot on his copy book. The he he's encouraged. He gets asked by the Ionians who are Greeks who live on the other side of the Aegean to join in the revolt against the Persians, which ultimately the Athenians do join, which then results in the Battle of Marathon. So it's a disaster. Cleomenes works out that it's going to be a disaster. And he does that because he has a very sassy,

very intelligent, very smart daughter called Gorgo, who is actually the heroine of the children's book. No, of the children's book. Oh, right, okay. That I have just today finished before starting this. What a nice, it's a nice moment. And also a nice sort of anticipatory plug. That's very, yes, very kind very so gorgo is my narrator well congratulations according to but according to herodotus um this this ionian guy comes to try and persuade cleomenes and

cleomenes is almost swayed because the the ionian is saying oh if you conquer the persians you'll get so much money and gorgo says uh you know don't do it this is a terrible you know you're you're you're being um you're being bribed here um back off so cleomenes does so that's but the um he cleomenes is also the guy who chucks out the persian ambassadors down the well so people who've watched 300 will think you know in that leonidas does that but actually it's cleomenes who does that right um and the other thing that that cleomenes does is the only rival that sparta has in the peloponnese is argos which likewise has this incredible pedigree that's where heracles lived and so on um cleomenes absolutely smashes argos and he does it in in a um

basically he pulverizes them loads of archives hide in a grove um clermont says that he'll he'll spare them if they come out of the grove some come out of the grave clermont kills them he then burns down the grove and this is a sacred grove and in due course Cleomenes goes mad yeah um he he takes to the hills um he starts raiding Sparta he opens up negotiations with the efforts to return comes back and he goes completely off his completely insane gets locked up in the stocks gets guarded by Helot the Helot walks into the shed where he's been locked up in the morning and finds that so insane is Cleomenes that he has taken a sharp knife.

He's hacked the flesh off his toes, off his feet, off his calves, off his thighs, hacked open his groin, started to peel off all the flesh from his stomach and killed himself. And so Herodotus describes

this and he says you know there were many many disagreements about what could have caused this was it because Cleomenes had burnt down the sacred grove was it because he'd offended Demeter outside Athens was it because he'd done this was it because he'd done that what what Herodotus never asks is might he have been murdered yeah which is sort of the obvious yeah and if he was murdered then you know on the principle of qui bono who benefits the person who succeeds him is his half-brother yeah leonidas so that okay so leonidas yeah may well have the guilt of fratricide on his conscience but that's not what he's famous for he's famous for thermopylae he is gerard butler isn't he yes and uh you know i saw in modern sparta they have this fan you know 1960s but you know very admirable statue of him and he's the one spartan that most

people have heard of we are going to do a podcast later i mean i mean i know that we say this about so many subjects but we genuinely are going to do a podcast about Thermopylae. So we won't go massively into... Yeah, because this is the 2500th anniversary of it. Yeah, so we have to. So we absolutely have to. So the anniversary of Thermopylae is coming up at the end of August and then of Salamis, the great naval victory outside

Athens in September. So we're going to do it then. But just as a sort of taster, Michael Bird's question. was thermopylae really 300 spartans fighting a million persians armed with nothing more than capes underpants spears and scottish accents um no well there were more than 300 nor did the nor were the persians no there were more than 300 nor did the army bring tom right there were more than 300 of them yeah so what happens is i mean we actually talked about this with the olympics is that

um the olympic games are going on and so the peloponnesians can't go because it will offend the gods but equally thermopylae is the ideal place to stage a holding operation yeah so the 300 go this is the hippias this is the the bodyguard of the king, the crack squad. They know they're going to die because only people who've had sons go. So they know that they're in kind of high risk of dying. They take about several thousand other Peloponnesians. They meet up with various locals around the pass and that they hold it um the the the outsized role that Leonidas plays in this story is of course that um when the Persians end up going round the pass and come down in the Spartans rear he sends most of the other troops away there are some that that

insist on standing with him they they are the ones who don't tend to be remembered the thespians yes and some thebans as well um it's it's the stand of the 300 yeah it is um that that is commemorated and really is i think what thrills people about sparta yes fetishized isn't it this time well it's you know there's there's so much that's that's terrifying and frightening about Sparta and I think that the terror and the fear of them is also what makes them fascinating I mean I when I was a child I was you know hugely into dinosaurs

and the spectacle of you know theropods allosaurs, velociraptors, whatever tyrannosaurs was you know I found it thrilling and I found contemplating sparta gave me something very you know very similar children like that i mean my son when we went on holiday you know he bought he he demanded spartan t-shirts he he's brought home a little statue of leonidas he he

loves all that i mean the athenians i when i say to him athens philosophy poetry i mean he could give a damn about those things. The thought of sort of training and fighting as a warrior, that's what gets small boys interested. Right, right. So that makes them frightening and terrifying and kind of glamorous. Yeah. But what Leonidas, Leonidas is cast as a man who dies for the freedom of his city and for greece and that therefore has given him an outsized role through greek history so um he you know his festival is celebrated throughout roman times right i mean even even say origin the great church father the alexandrian um christian

uh teacher he compares uh christ delaney does that's fascinating so he's not his life so he's not a hollywood invention he's not a modern invention he was if he is an invention at all he's a much older one you know and then and then when this story gets rediscovered in the renaissance you you have montaigne who says that um the the defeat at thermopylae is much nobler than all you know the victories at marathon or salamis or platea um you famous you have byron um earth render back from out thy breast a remnant of our spartan dead of the 300 grant but three to make a new thermopylae and that clearly inspires him to go and fight for greece and to die for greek freedom and and you've

got this kind of famous essay by william golding who goes to the hot gates and and and says that a little part of little part of the freedom that i enjoy is due to leonidas and that of course is the counterpoint to the sense of the spartans as basically nazis because of course the the irony is is that if the Spartans had had if Sparta had been conquered by the Persians the Persians would have done what the Thebans subsequently did which is to liberate the Messenians and the Messenians would have been would have led a much more free life under Persia than they would have done under Sparta. Okay well let's come on to the racism and fascism questions a bit later. The obvious sort of elephant

in the room we haven't talked about is athens so sparta kind of works in the modern imagination as a counterpoint to athens doesn't it it's a bit like lennon and mccarney or something or you know you can't imagine one without the other well it's it's america and russia it's american soviet union the cold war it's rocky four it's uh drago and uh sylvester stallone. That's exactly right. Except Sylvester Stallone isn't, I mean, he's not a great philosopher, is he? No, he's not. We're great poets. Well, I guess.

Right, so Matthew Hisbunt says, Sparta, Athens, Scotland, England. Always happy when squabbling with each other. Always ready to knock spots off each other until a common enemy, Persia, seems to unite them temporarily to defend hearth and home. But that seems to me i'm not knocking matthew hispant but it's the other way around isn't it that the the common defense comes

before the peloponnesian war which is when they when they so the peloponnesian war um sparta wins that i mean basically that ends athens's period of glory um why why did the other greek cities not side with athens when sparta is so is it because they're frightened of sparta or is it because they are much more resentful and suspicious of athens than sort of modern you know athena files would would imagine well basically athens overreaches itself so it launches this completely abortive invasion of Sicily. Yeah. That's Alcibiades who does that, is it? Is that right?

Well, Alcibiades is, again, we talked about in the Olympics, he wins the top three places in the chariot race. He gets accused of impiety in Athens. And basically, he's the guy behind the Sicilian invasion. But he ends up fleeing. And he ends up in Sparta. And he advises the Spartans on what to do, the things that the Athenians would least like. And basically, the Athenian war effort kind of crumbles away after that. And amazingly, Sparta is able to cast itself as the defender of freedom, even though it obviously isn't.

And when the walls of Athens are pulled down to pipes, people say this is the day for the beginning of freedom of Greece. because Sparta is a kind of brutal militarist power that insists on having its own way, that kind of, you know, it instinctively wants to subordinate almost everybody that it comes up against. It can't reduce them to heritage, but it certainly wants to subordinate them. And so in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War, its power just melts away. And amazingly, within just a few decades, the Athenians are back. They've got their fleet back up in working order. And you've got Thebes, the third of these great cities, which up till then had always been. So the majority of Thebans sided with the Persians.

And that's something that the Spartans and athenians never let them forget but you you have this um this general of absolute genius called epaminondas who radically recalibrates um military strategy and is able to defeat the spartan war machine which up until that point had been invincible and there is this great battle um at Leuctra in 371 where the myth of Spartan invincibility is completely shattered. And the Spartans try and kind of reconstitute their army. But again, they're kind of shattered at a place called Mantinea, actually in the Peloponnese in 362 and and that essentially is it because you know as I said the the Thebans liberate the Messenians and from that point on Sparta is is a busted flush but Tom to backtrack a little bit when they were top top nation top or top Greek city-state at the end of the Peloponnesian War, why didn't they become Rome?

Why didn't they do what the Romans did, which is basically crush all their neighbours, absorb them or whatever, and the momentum of military conquest just carry them from victory to victory? Why didn't Sparta manage to do that? Because the whole basis of the Lycurgian constitution is that you have a Spartan elite sitting atop a volcano I mean that's basically it right and the Spartans are incredibly conservative and they're incredibly proud of this constitution and so they refuse to change it and the strange thing is is that you know all the way all the way through the centuries that lead up to the the absorption of Sparta into the Roman Empire, they assume that the answer to their problems is to go back to this Lycurgian constitution.

So you have repeated attempts to try and reanimate it. And people want to believe in it. So Cicero says of the Spartans that they're the only people in the world who have lived, you know, with customs and laws that have been unchanged for 700 years. I mean, this isn't true, but the Spartans are able to kind of convince the Romans that this is the case and people want to believe it. And actually, the idea that that Sparta is unchanging is a crucial part of this you know, of this idea of it as a mirage. It's a crucial part of both what the Spartans want to believe and therefore what outsiders want to believe. Okay. Okay. I buy that. So talking of a nice segue here about what outsiders think of the Spartans, there are a ton of questions about racism and fascism. So here's a good example. Josh Glancy, who writes for the Sunday Times times has asked us a is it in any way

accurate or historically relevant to describe the spartans as fascist or as proto-fascist we've had lots of questions paradoxy moron says should they be cancelled because of their cruelty to the helots sirs further was sparta the most racist state in history so you know first of all fascism are they it doesn't make any sense to well them as fascists so on the racism you know as i i don't i think that's an anachronistic yeah way of seeing it and you know as i said the whole thing is is that actually the helots you know are it's the same people yes that's the that's the point um are they fascist well again that's kind of putting it the wrong way wrong way around

is is there something of sparta and fascism would be the better way of yes putting it and i would say indisputably yeah um the nazis definitely were fascinated absolutely um you know hitler hitler says that the black broth, the famous Spartan dish, originally came from Schleswig-Holstein, your favourite German state. Where did it come from, Dominic? Schleswig-Holstein, Tom. See, I can say it perfectly now when I'm not thinking about it. But there's also an element, isn't there,

that it's not just the Nazis who are fascinated by Sparta. So we had a couple of questions about Victorian Britain, example Spartan virtues Dr Arnold and rugby school and the the public school tradition I mean a lot of that owes something to a romance of Sparta doesn't it so I think it's fair to say that by contemporary standards the the Spartans were quite right wing right but as I said they they you know they have a a big constituency on the left as well and the idea that of universal education yeah is one that thomas moore in utopia picks up on yeah russo was a big russo love the sparsity yeah um so the specific model of the boarding school of taking boys away when they're seven and toughening them up um you know putting them into the equivalent of houses uh making them play ferocious degrees of sport yeah um this is

you know an overt influence on the way that public schools in 19th century britain develop um so the the you know the influences are manifold yeah and when people use the word spartan it's not always a pejorative is it you know no it's kind of austere it's austere but that's self-disciplined yeah it's pure um it's clean it's all those and of course that's not luxurious that that's not decadent no and that's the opposite of decadent and that plays into both victorianism and and fascism, I would say. Now, 300. We said we'd come to 300, and here we are.

So 300, Frank Miller, the comic book writer, has seen a film from the 1950s, I think, or early 60s, I can't remember which, about... 300 Spartans. Yeah, about Thermopylae, and it sticks in his mind, and he goes on to do this comic book, which some people have seen as fascist actually and they see the film as quite fascistic so talk to me about the film because i know you've

written about it do you think the film is a great you i mean i know you're a big fan of the film as a vision of ancient greece yeah so so i the huge problem with most films about antiquity is is that they have to import anachronism because otherwise the audience will be alienated. So traditionally the way that you do that is you bring in a Christian slave, gladiator films. You always have a Christian slave. Well,

you think of gladiator. It's a kind of liberal Senator who wants to restore the Republic, which is kind of equated with liberal democracy. So the Derek Jacoby character in gladiator, which is entirely bogus. You know, this bogus you know this is you know there were no equivalents of liberals in the classical world um what what 300 does is unapologetically to present the world in the way that um the Spartans did um and so 300 I think is absolutely the kind of film that the you know know, the F4s, if they had been presented, it would have allowed to screen in Spartan. but what it does is to say that um if you are you know if you're if you're handsome if you're ripped

if you have a kind of amazing physique then you're a good person if you're physically ugly if you're deformed then you're not you're you're morally deformed as well so um in in 300 effialti is the guy who who betrays the past of thermopylae and leads the Persians around the rear. He is portrayed as this hunchback, this cripple who wants to become a Spartan warrior. And if this was a Tom Hanks film, that's what would happen. He would join the band of brothers and he would do something heroic

and he'd probably die saving the platoon or something like that. Be tear-jerking. But in this, he's as morally contemptible as he's physically ugly and it's kind of shocking and the other way in which um you know the film opens with the with the apothecary with the um the the the ravine where the babies are chucked down a cliff and it this is the voiceover saying that you know to be span, you have to be strong. And it's unapologetically saying infanticide is a great thing because it'll make for better soldiers.

Yeah. So I think, you know, on one level, you could say that's very fascist. But on the other, you could say that's completely true to the myth that the Spartans propagated about themselves. So I think it's I mean, I do think it is an incredible by our standards an incredibly fascist film but i think that is what makes it kind of true true yeah to how the greek how the spartans saw the world or at least how the greeks saw the spartans and and here's an interesting thing tom because i mean you're a great man you know you've gone through the whole podcast you've gone through the whole podcast without mentioning really Christianity.

And Christianity is kind of cult of the victim and, you know, the sort of Harry and Meghan side of Christianity, the kind of compassion and stuff. And it's weird, isn't it, how the Sparta has endured, the glamour of Sparta has endured, despite the fact that it runs completely counter to the tradition that you think has defined Western culture for the last 2000 years. I mean, I mentioned origin in the in the third century when the second century that the Jews were in revolt and trying to establish a kind of independent state. The high priest wrote to the king of Sparta and said, you know, we are kin. You too are descended from Moses. date the high priest wrote to the king of sparta and said you know we we are kin uh you you too are descended from moses that's right which are weird i don't think i don't think the nazis kind of majored on that no um so there was a even i mean jews and christians were obsessed by sparta as well and i think the the appeal of sparta is, you know, we were talking before, that it's fierce and it's glamorous and they're brave. There's a bit of a Spartan inside all of us, isn't there?

Maybe not all of us, but I think there's more of a Spartan inside us than lots of people would like to think. There's not a Spartan inside Jeremy Corbyn. But I think there's a Spartan inside most of us have got an inner Spartan somewhere even if we try to keep them at bay yeah I mean I think that the the kind of model of extreme heroism yeah and I use you know heroism in the Greek sense that that the Greeks saw in the Spartans is something that is able to kind of inspire maybe grudging admiration. But it's about manliness. Certainly a fascination.

It's manliness as well, isn't it? Do you not think? It is. Well, of course, yes. I mean, it is. It's a very. But, you know, the other paradox about Sparta is that it's probably the best place to be a woman. OK. So, you know, the other paradox about Sparta is that it's probably the best place to be a woman. OK.

So, you know, I mean, that's that is it's a city that that's absolutely full of paradoxes. It's it's a highly masculine city in which the women are freer than anywhere else, certainly more than in Athens it's it's a city where um masters sit on top of a kind of pile of of of inferiors and yet themselves live like slaves um it's it's a a city where um people live you know that they have to live like everybody else and yet at the same time it's absolutely based on ruthless competition so it's this kind of bundle of paradoxes that makes it kind of infinitely fascinating and I think it's really interesting that when we asked for questions for this i mean we got hundreds and hundreds this and that's always a measure of how you know how much potency a field in history has i think um it's a great note on which to end tom um the top ancient

world classical history pundit tom holland has proclaimed sparta land of contrasts so and if you'd like to read more about it uh persian fire by me oh that was shocking shops and my translation of herodotus for penguin classics is also available he i mean i said earlier on you had no shame and i was absolutely right but the spartan we did a whole episode for you that's ancient history right um so well done tom jolly good um i like the spartans personally i think the athenians are a bit of feet and weedy and you astonish me yeah um the spartans would have been um that they'd have been daily mail readers wouldn't they they absolutely would have been they're not guardian people right on that note uh we shall see you next time with

we've got a lot of nuclear war yeah nuclear a lot of cold war stuff coming time with we've got a lot of nuclear Berlin Wall yeah nuclear a lot of Cold War stuff coming up and we've got stuff about exams bizarrely you might think but a really fascinating subject

so we've got lots of good stuff and we will see you next time and I'll do more of the talking next time goodbye bye bye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening