Casting Through Ancient Greece
Casting Through Ancient Greece
Interview: Prof. Paul Cartledge - Sparta, A Remarkable Polis
Join us as we take you on an exploration of the fascinating world of the ancient Spartans. With Professor Paul Cartledge, a leading historian on the Spartans, as our guide, we will demystify the intriguing tales, values, and societal structure of this resilient warrior society. We'll wade through the Spartan mirage, unveiling the unique education system, political structure, and unrivalled military prowess that have shaped our understanding of this ancient civilization.
We're not stopping at the surface; we whisk you into the depth of the Spartan world and the wider Greek realm. We'll probe into the Spartan lifestyle, the Greek ideal of freedom, participation, agency, and involvement. Can you imagine a society where women commanded respect and power unlike their contemporaries? Well, get ready, we'll be discussing the unique status of Spartan women, their education, physical strength, and property rights.
What if we told you that Sparta's influence extends far beyond the ancient world, even to our modern-day society? Brace yourself for our exploration of the legacy of Sparta, its influence and misappropriation throughout history. We'll dissect the portrayal of the Battle of Thermopylae in the movie 300, contrast views of Sparta in the French Revolution, and examine how the Spartan mirage is perpetuated in North America. Immerse yourself in this captivating journey as we unravel the enigma that is Spartan society, their enduring values, and their lasting legacy.
Hello everyone, I'm Mark Selleh and welcome back to Castings for Ancient Greece for this interview episode with Professor Paul Cartledge, where we will be discussing what made the Spartans remarkable. When discussing Ancient Greece, the city of Sparta inevitably comes to mind. Alongside Athens, it held a position of great power in the Greek world, spanning from the archaic period into the classical age. Across the ages, a reputation of discipline, military virtue, courage and valor have persisted, with many attempting to emulate what they perceive as a Spartan way in their own societies, militaries or organisations. Conversely, some are sought to criticise or diminish the significance of the Ancient Spartans. Both perspectives, however, often fail to grasp the full understanding of who the Spartans were, neglecting the context of the world they inhabited. Many modern interpretations of Spartan ideals are moulded to fit particular agendas, selectively incorporating traits while disregarding essential aspects that define the Spartans. Conversely, critiques are often rooted in a contemporary understanding, overlooking the 2,500 years of development since the Spartans' zenith. Such criticisms tend to target isolated aspects of Spartan culture without considering the historical context, essentially judging them by the values of our present times. This recurring pattern is evident across various facets of society, making it challenging to find accounts of Sparta presented on its own terms. In my series, I have endeavoured to break away from this trend, seeking to neither idealise nor demean the Spartans, but rather comprehend who they were, their actions and the motivations behind them. Adding to the mystery is a fact that the Spartans left no written records of their history. Our knowledge comes primarily from writers of other Greek cities, particularly Athens. When inviting Professor Cartledge to the show, it was this enigmatic nature of the Spartans that I aim to explore. Something must indeed be extraordinary and intriguing about the polis for numerous ancient writers not of Spartan origin to comment on various aspects related to the Spartans. My choice of Professor Cartledge as a guest stems from his position as leading historian on the Spartans. While his work, which I have admired for a long time, is characterised by an unbiased approach, he presents the Spartans without placing them on a pedestal or denigrating them. Instead, he endeavours to understand them on their own terms. Professor Paul Cartledge was educated at Oxford. He is AG Leventus Senior Research Fellow of Clare College, cambridge, an emeritus AG Leventus Professor of Greek Culture in the University of Cambridge, retired 2014. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of some 30 books, the most recent being Democracy or Life, 2018, and Thebes, the Forgotten City of Ancient Greece 2021. He is a commander of the Order of Honor Hellenic Republic and honorary citizen of Spartii, today's modern Sparta.
Mark Selleck:In the upcoming episode, as the title suggests, we delve into what makes the Spartans remarkable. Professor Cartledge provides much needed context around the Spartans and the broader Greek world. We explore various facets of Spartan life, including their values, education system, political structure and military prowess. Additionally, we examine the role of women in Sparta, the Spartan mirage and their lasting legacy. While these are our key points of focus, our conversation does delve into many other areas of interest. Without further ado, I present to you Professor Paul Cartledge. Welcome, professor Cartledge. It's fantastic to have you on the show coming to talk to us about the Spartans.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Thank you, mark, for having me really kind of you to ask me.
Mark Selleck:I've been looking forward to this chat. I have read a number of your books over the years. I think my first introduction to Greek history was Herodotus and I think not long after that you all booked. The Spartans and Tom Holland's Persian Fire were the first two sort of modern histories that I read after trying to digest Herodotus.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, you started in the right place, because Herodotus, we call him the father of history and of course, he is, in a way, the very first Western person who wrote history in this sense, not just what happened, but why did it happen and what does it mean that it happened the way it did. So he was critical, and that's, of course, a word we in English speakers we take from the Greeks. Critis means a judge, and history isn't just the past. We all have different pasts. We're very aware now, of course, identity politics. We choose to remember what we wish to remember. But Herodotus was the first to write about civilizations as well, not just individual people or individual cities, but whole cultures. So Greeks as against non Greeks, especially Persians.
Mark Selleck:Yes, I found his work quite deep after. I usually read it, probably once a year just out of interest, and I always tend to find that there's a new question that pops up every time I read it. It's crammed full of so much.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, one of my favorite historians, modern historians, 18th century Edward Gibbon. He once said that Herodotus writes sometimes for children and sometimes for philosophers. So what he meant by that was that on the one hand, he told really nice stories and of course today we're much more critical, we're much more rational, perhaps even than Herodotus, so we don't believe absolutely every story he told. But on the other hand, he sometimes imagined situations where the whole big questions about are men responsible, humans for their actions, or do some forces such as gods or goddesses determine what humans do? So the big philosophicalist is about who we are, where we came from, why we exist at all. And then he has some lovely stories. For example, he'll make his emperor, xerxes, as a character in his drama. He's invading Greece.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Think forward to oh dear, in 100 years. This is all fiction, in fact, but it's a lovely story. Herodotus makes Xerxes muse In 100 years time, none of the people and he's looking at thousands, hundreds of thousands on a battlefield will be here. And so you think mortality, legacy, you think all those sorts of big things. So great story and absolutely well worth reading once a year. Well done you.
Mark Selleck:Yes, well, thank you. Well, I guess, before we do get stuck into some stuff around the Spartans, I was wondering, obviously, well, I think most people in historical circles to do with ancient Greece are aware of your work and what you've done, but I thought perhaps those that are newish to ancient Greece could you just give us a bit of your background.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Sure, well, I'm from an upper middle class English family. I was born in London city of London. I went privately educated at school high school, you'd call it and then I went to Oxford. I read there what's called great, which is combination of knowing Latin and Greek, reading Latin and Greek texts, and also then, on the one hand, ancient history that is, both Greek and Roman and on the other hand, philosophy. So my undergraduate degree was half philosophy, half history, and by that time, by the age of 22 or so, I thought well, I've done a lot of history, I've done a lot of literature. I want to do something different. So I did an archaeological doctorate at Oxford again, but not as normal, as it were.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Greek historians like myself, historians of ancient Greece, they would normally have done a historical topic, but I chose to do an archaeo historical topic. So my main evidence was archaeological evidence, and so I had to familiarize myself with excavation reports, with field surveys and putting together and this is actually the main problem I'm still currently in the middle of is putting together mute archaeological data. The speed of spade, it said, never lies. And someone said yes, that's because it can't speak. You have to make archaeological evidence speak, and how do you do it? Well, you use an interpretative framework which comes ultimately from literary evidence, from written sources, whether historical accounts or whether they are epigraphical documents, that is, inscriptions. People write tombstones, for example, or sometimes laws. The Greeks inscribed some of their laws and they put them on bronze or stone. So I became what we now call an archaeo historian, and that's back now, in the early to mid 1970s, and by then I'd already had two or three jobs. I actually worked for six years in Ireland. After my graduate work in Oxford, I taught in Northern Ireland, then I taught in Southern Ireland and I got a job back in England in 1979. I've been in Cambridge ever since then, so the last 50, getting on for 50 plus years anyway. So I'm, yes, as you say, I'm a historian, a historian of ancient Greece. I've written or I've edited something like 30 books. I mean it's getting on, and the ones you mentioned are indeed the ones I suppose that mean the most to me.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Sparta, why did I fix on Sparta? Because my supervisor, the man who actually mentored me during my archaeological doctoral work at Oxford, was somebody who had done some work on the excavated material from Sparta, and it was British dig material, in other words the excavations carried out beginning of the 20th century by the British school at Athens. So he said go out to Greece, look again at what the British dug up in the early 20th century and then reinterpreted it in light of subsequent both discoveries and interpretations. So I became an archaeo historian of Sparta. My first book was the book of my doctoral thesis and I took it from there. Now I had another particular interest in doing Sparta, and it was because I was then very left-wing and as many people as born in the late 40s, and so I came of age in the 60s and love about the student revolution and what have you?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, the Spartans though I've studied them now for 60 odd years, I don't particularly love them, if I can put it that way. They say that if you work on a subject and you want to write sympathetically about them, then you've got to in some way really like them. Well, what I don't like, I'll put it in a nutshell. Their lifestyle and it was a massively interesting and successful one was premised on, was based on, I mean, if you imagine, a kind of pyramid there at the top layers of people below them or Greek, but who were more or less disenfranchised or exploited and right at the bottom, the largest single population element in the entirety of the Spartan state, bunch of people the Spartans called helots and I don't know if that word is familiar in Australian discourse, but it does actually appear in dictionaries. I mean it means any people who are collectively exploited. I'll give you a modern example blacks in South Africa before the end of apartheid. So under apartheid blacks have no rights and they were treated pretty much like things jackets rather than human beings.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now, the oddity in ancient Greece of this was that the Greek ideal we're going to talk more about this later was of freedom and participation and involvement and agency. Well, the helots, though they were Greeks, they were natives, they had been conquered by the Spartans and forced to work for the Spartans so that they were the labor force of the Spartans. Some few of them did rise. I mean there was some social mobility, but by and large you're born a slave, you die a slave and sometimes you rise up hoping for your freedom and you get knocked down again. So whenever one thinks the Spartans did this, you have to then think, yes, but they couldn't have done it but for the helots and other people. So that's why I've always felt a bit conflicted at studying the Spartans. On the one hand, admire them intensely and we'll come back to why but on the other hand, really feel uncomfortable about the very nature of Spartan society and politics.
Mark Selleck:Yeah. So I guess I mean you've sort of delved a bit into what I was going to ask you to, what initially drew you to your study of Sparta. But with having uncovered more to do with Sparta, has this also increased your understanding of the wider Greek world as well?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, the thing which, of course, struck me, it grows on you as you become more experienced as an ancient historian there are really four political entities around which one can write wider Greek history, as opposed to just the history of that city. And, by the way, I should preface everything I say by pointing out that there were 1,000 separate Greek political entities. It's quite remarkable, as we say the ancient Greeks. Well, there were a thousand different, lots of ancient Greeks, and they were scattered all around the Mediterranean and around the Black Sea. So, of those 1,000, there were four political entities which were such that you could write a wider Greek history around them Sparta, athens and then thirdly one I wrote my most recent book on, actually Thebes, and it was very much, very brief that the Theban dominance, the Theban prominence, came late in ancient Greek history and didn't last for very long. Athens and Sparta were, as it were, number one, number two if you can imagine in, for example, english premiership soccer, football terms, it's Arsenal or Manchester City for hundreds of years. And then Thebes I mentioned. We can come back or we can leave Thebes, but they are in central Greece, athens and Thebes, whereas Sparta's in southern Greece.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well then, the last of the four great powers was from northern Greece, from Macedonia, and of course that's been very controversial politically recently for all sorts of difficult reasons. But in ancient Greece, macedonia, up in the north, north of the mainland Greek peninsula, had been nothing really, just a collection of people, until about 400 BC one king of the Macedonians united the kingdom and they started to make some sort of a name for themselves further south. But it was with the reigns of Philip II and his son Alexander, who becomes Alexander the Great. Macedon actually becomes the great power of old Greece. So they conquer mainland Greece. They are the place from which, after Alexander, conquers most of the Middle East. The Greek world of the next 300 years, in the last three centuries BC, is a Macedonian dominated Greek world. So Sparta is the first major Greek power. Athens rises up in the fifth century, thebes briefly in the fourth century. Macedon from the fourth century onwards until the Romans conquer Greece in the second and first centuries BC.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So I found myself in. This is partly purely coincidental. I mean, when I'd done my undergraduate studies I'd of course written about Sparta, because Sparta was such a big deal in the early part of Greek history in the 76th century. But I hadn't quite realized that by doing a doctorate on Sparta, I was going to be in the position to well, I won't put it too strongly dominate the field or sort of create an entire field. But if I put it this way, most historians of ancient Greece like me studying 87654 would gravitate towards Athens, and Athens is influenced.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Not surprisingly, most of the evidence for ancient Greek history comes from either Athenians, or we've talked about Herodotus. People who are very influenced by, who went to Athens, were influenced by Athenian outlooks and wrote history around Athens, not around Sparta, because Sparta, either famously or notoriously, was not very cultured. So, in other words, writing literature, producing written accounts of that's not a Spartan thing. They did rather than thought, if I can put it that way.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So you're in this ironic situation where you're writing history of Sparta, but looking at Sparta through Athenian or Athenian influenced eyes, with one exception. This is where I've tried to make a virtue of it. Archaeological evidence is, as I've said, mute in itself. It doesn't speak, but it's authentic, it's genuine, it's not, if you like, got an axe to grind and so you excavate Sparta and you're excavating authentic Spartan life. You're as close to a real ancient Spartan as you'll ever get, because you're looking at stuff which was actually once held by a Spartan or made by somebody in Sparta. You see how exciting it was to me to get into a new way of looking at ancient Sparta.
Mark Selleck:Yeah, I was going to ask you, given the fact that I guess our sources coming out of Sparta are very almost non-existent, if we're talking about writers and you've alluded to that, obviously archaeology is one avenue that helps shed some light on Spartan history. What other sources or mythologies have you used to help reconstruct your histories around Sparta?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, you'll use the word mythologies, then Of course there are two, in a way, types of ways of thinking about ancient Greece, especially early Greece. So what is the earliest Greek literature? Homer, iliad, odyssey. Now, as a historian, what you ask is how historically based is the siege and the capture of the fall of Troy, for example? Well, if you're a Spartan historian, that has an absolutely central relationship and relevance for you, because Helen of Troy was originally Helen of Sparta. She was nicked by Paris, the Trojan Prince, from Sparta to go to Troy, which is well, we can argue exactly what Troy was at the time. But it's pretty clear that there's one site in Northwest Turkey which is the most likely real basis of Homer's mythical account of the Trojan War story. So Sparta exists as the capital of Menelaus's kingdom and Helen is his wife.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now, was there a real ancient Sparta of the right sort of period to be Menelaus's capital? The answer only very recently has been discovered. This is quite extraordinary. We knew where Mycenae was, the kingdom of Agamemnon, for 140 years, but we didn't know where Sparta you know, the original Homeric Sparta was until very recently, and it's actually quite a long way south of today's Sparta. So there is a disconnect. There is terrific centrality of the importance of Sparta in the earliest Greek literature. But the ancient equivalent, the real Sparta of that period and we call it the late Bronze Age, the late Mycenaean Age or Heladike there are various archaeological terms for that period before historical Sparta there is a big disconnect between the Bronze Age Sparta, the Sparta that's the basis of the myth, and the real Sparta, which is pretty much where modern town of Sparta is. It was plonked modern Sparta 1834, after the independence from the Turks, a new Sparta was built bang on top of where the ancient historical Sparta was. So the Sparta I study comes into being in the ninth, eighth centuries BC, in the eight hundreds, the seven hundreds.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But there is a word which I think is very helpful for getting a handle on how is the source picture for the ancient Spartans? When you want to try to get a hold on what the real ancient Spartans were like, what they did, what's the evidence, will you ask me? There is this word, mirage that was coined in the 1930s by a French scholar. His point was this we don't very often, in fact hardly ever, get direct access from a Spartan source that's contemporary, authentic and not wildly biased for hundreds of years of historical Spartan history. So Sparta comes into being and it's not until 500 years later that an actual Spartan sets about writing about his own community.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So before that you are reliant on non-Spartan sources and they can be divided basically crudely into two categories One, those who thought ancient Sparta was really great, and they were non-Spartans, and they're writing about Sparta. They wish their city was more like Sparta or exactly like what they think Sparta is like. On the other side you've got those who hated the Spartans, and maybe just for political reasons. In other words, the Spartans have done something to them, or they hated the way of life of the Spartans, and it might be a kind of a liberal attitude. They thought that the treatment of the helots by the Spartans was atrocious, or it might be not quite so high-minded. It might simply be that they didn't wish for themselves to have to go through a Spartan educational regime or live in effect in barracks, like the Spartan warriors seem to have had to do.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So the Mirage metaphor works in this way, I think, you and I, if we're driving, let's say, in a very dusty area, straight road, very hot, and you see on the road in front of you what looks like a pool of water. Well, there isn't really a pool of water, that's a Mirage. So the Spartan Mirage is partly like that. It's people saying things about Sparta that really aren't true. They really weren't there.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now there's another version of Mirage, which is I use the analogy of a stick straight stick in the jug of water. If you put a straight stick in a jug and look at it, it looks bent, it looks crooked. Well, so that's like somebody non-Spartan looking at Sparta and seeing things that are there. Really, there is a stick, but they see it crookedly, they reflect it inaccurately. So the Mirage is a combination of pure invention and of distorted reflection. Now, how then do you sort out those two, first of all, and then secondly, thirdly, well, rather, what I want to get to is the actuality. So the straight stick in the jug of water, the non-pool of water on the road. So I've spent my life and historians will always differ, because there is no such objective standard. There is no, as it were. Well, history, anyway, is always partly invention, but in the case of Sparta, it's much more invention, inevitably, than it is in the case of some other cities, because the Spartans themselves don't give us enough authentic evidence of their own for us to work with.
Mark Selleck:So I guess the mirage it could be putting Sparta on a pedestal, or it could be someone who's looking to bash Sparta. It doesn't matter which sort of end of the spectrum they're on.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Completely right. Yeah.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:All right. Well, I'll give you one example just before we move on. An example of somebody who sets Sparta up on a pedestal is the Athenian Xenophon. Now, he's a most interesting character, flourishing around 400 BC, very elite, very wealthy and well-born and what have you? Very conservative, so not keen on the regime in force in his own city, which was democracy.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And democracy implies that the masses, the demots, the people as a whole, ordinary people, have ultimate power and control. And if you're from one of the elite that is, the few, the better educated, the wealthier, your feelings towards democracy are that it's not your system, because it's not a system geared to favor you. You can flourish in it, but you have to accept that the masses are going to have to be humid. You're going to have to somehow win them round. Well, xenophon was one who didn't like the system, like Plato, another contemporaries, another philosopher, and they both looked to Sparta because it seemed to them a nice hierarchical, in a military sort of way, top down, so ordinary Spartans, by and large this is their view obeyed, they respected their betters, who are the officers, as it were, at the top, including, of course, some who were just born superior and will come back to the two kings, for example. And so Sparta seemed to them a hierarchical, orderly society without a masses who are constantly making things difficult for the elite. All right.
Mark Selleck:Well, I thought, obviously I'm calling this episode Sparta a remarkable polis, and we're going to drill down into some aspects of what made Sparta remarkable, but I thought, before we do, it might be helpful just to get some context. I mean, you started just pointing out a historical Sparta developing around the 900s BC, so perhaps could we just explain, or just a bit of the summary of how Sparta would emerge within Greece.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Right. So that date is, of course, archaeological. There is no writing in Greece anywhere at that period, and this is one of the peculiarities of ancient Greek history that they had writing in the Bronze Age, the so-called linear B script. But it wasn't an alphabetic script, it was a syllabary, so each sign stands for a syllable, not for a single letter or single sound. And for some three to 400 years that script disappeared linear B and there was nothing until round about 800. And this is just when we're talking about Sparta coming into existence as a settlement. Someone, somewhere, invented an alphabet which was translated into Greek terms. It was borrowed from a neighbouring people. We call them, or the Greeks called them, the Phoenicians. They lived in what's today Lebanon. Anyway, sparta emerges as a very strung out series of villages rather than a compact settlement with a wall round. Some Greek cities as early as the 9th, 8th centuries had walls around them.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, the Spartans never, did at the time of their great period. Later in their history, roman conquests and so on yes, they got a wall, but that's when Sparta was no longer a major player. So why and how Sparta emerges? The ancient written sources tell us and this is part myth that a bunch of people came down from North Greece, from a region called Doris, which is up in the north and eastern part of the Greek peninsula, towards the Macedonia I was talking about, and so they migrated. This is a period in which, indeed, there was a lot of Greek movement going east to what's today Turkey, going west to France, spain, north Africa and so on. So it wouldn't have been odd if really there had been Greeks wandering around, coming from the north and coming to settle down in Sparta. But some of us think no, no, that's probably largely myth and it doesn't have much of a historical base To generate whatever the actual explanation of how Sparta came to be around about 800 BC, a settlement in the plain of the river Eurotus. Now, this is the absolutely key geographical feature, together with the two mountain chains on either side of the Eurotus Valley, so it's exceptionally fertile and it's exceptionally defensible. The settlement site of Sparta in the southeast Peloponnese of mainland Greece and it rattles along and never develops much in the way of urban infrastructure and doesn't seem evidently particularly densely settled. The total population could have got up into the tens of thousands. But nevertheless, compared with Athens, which is going to be a big city with a city wall and an acropolis in the middle, sparta has a relatively paltry acropolis, no city wall, and settlements are strung out along a quite a long area in this part of the Eurotus Valley, the northern Eurotus Valley. Now, the main differentiating factor, why does Sparta ever become the biggest thing in Greece, as it has done by 500 BC, in one word, the conquest of Messenia.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now, I've mentioned the helots to you before. That's a collective term for all the Greeks that the Spartans treated as if they had all been conquered, and it's true. I think that at least half of them were conquered, but it's not necessarily the case. They all resisted a major military enterprise by the Spartans. It's very complicated to try to understand how the Spartans developed their helot system, but there is one consistent feature of both the evidence and likelihood Sparta is next to massive mountain chain. I've mentioned there were two mountain chains. Well, the one on the west is called the Teigatos mountain chain, it rises to what we would call 8,000 feet, 2,400 meters. You can't just walk through it or across it with an army. And yet, if you look on the map, sparta's territory, its city-state territory, is almost half the Peloponnese. If you drew a line north of Sparta, across the Peloponnese, well, everything south of that the Spartans control, owned, exploitative, so half of it had to be conquered, physically by armies going round Teigatos, not overtaken.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And imagine, once you've defeated the local people there, you've enslaved them, you've said, in place a situation which keeps them down, and that's complicated in itself. You've got them, you go back to Sparta. How do you keep track? How do you manage to maintain the system? Well, the way you do it is you find people who are not the helots, they're free, but they're not Spartans. So they're local village communities who are left free, but their function is partly to watch out for any Messinian helot unrest. And the Spartans call people like that, and they have them in their own territory, by the way, their own original southeast Peloponnesian territory too and they're called perioikoi. They're called dwellers round about. So not Spartans, not helots, but somewhere in between. And that's the point I was making earlier about the pyramid, the layering of Spartans society, from the Spartans at the very top, helots at the bottom. In between are these perioikoi.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So by, let's say, 700 BC, sparta has this enlarged, hugely enlarged territory. They had to fight for it. It seems that the Messinian, some of them, always resented being subjects of Sparta and periodically they'd rise up, sometimes with help from other Greeks outside the Spartans territory, and there was a big, apparently, rebellion in the 7th century, so in the 600s. But by 600 BC you can say the Spartan territory is fixed. They are therefore by far the biggest city, biggest city state in the entire Greek world. Huge territory, about 8,000 square kilometers, 3,000 square miles, two riverine valleys, very fertile, so olives, wheat, barley, all growing very, very well, wine. Therefore they were never short of grain, cereals they were never short of, and therefore it's fundamentally a combination of power, military power and economic resources which puts Sparta in number one spot. But well, we'll come back. Maybe you want me to come back later to political developments, but the military developments are the crucial basis of the emergence of Sparta as well. We call it a conquest state. I think that's a very good description on it.
Mark Selleck:And I think what I found reading Spartan history is, you start to see that they have a very different value system to other areas of Greece. Could you maybe just sort of point out where they differed to a lot of other Greek city states?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Right. Well, now this where as I don't want to labour this, but I would preface all that your listeners must imagine before I answer any question the mirage. So the answer one gives to any such question has to be conditioned by the fact that there is an element of myth making and the inevitable element on both sides in regard to such a question as you've just asked me the fundamental value. So the pro-Spartan side emphasises the military ness of Spartan society. So an educational system which, for the boys, is designed to produce not thinkers but doers and in particular warriors, and particular warriors of a certain kind.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So the way in which Greeks fought, developing in the 7th and 6th century, is a very particular form of phalanx, that is, heavy and closely packed infantry warfare based on one item of defensive equipment, namely the shield, basically made of wood but with bronze facing. It's about a metre wide, it's heavy and in order to be functional you have to have someone next to you, next to you on your right, who's protecting your right side. You're protecting your left side, but you need your right side protected in close formation. So we call those people this is an ancient Greek word hotlines. So the Spartans became the best at in all Greece. But they of course initially fought only in the Peloponnes. Later they then fought in the central Greece against Athens and later against Thebes and so on. But initially all their fighting is against other Peloponnesian cities. They became the greatest hotline military state.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now some scholars today, taking account of the mirage, they say, yes, okay, they were very good fighting and, yes, they obviously had a really good army. But that wasn't a be all, an end all and they tried desperately to make Spartans less military than the other side wants to make them.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But I'm old-fashioned, I suppose, but I think they were predominantly a military state so far as the men are concerned. So what were their values? I think they can be put down as discipline, obedience and a bubble bravery. Now there is a Greek word, it's the standard word for the virtue of courage, but literally it means manliness or virility, and that tells you quite a lot, because it means that women half the human race in ancient Greek value terms cannot be brave because they're not male. And that tells you, as I say, quite a lot. We'll come back to the women of Sparta later.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So the notion is the educational system teaches endurance, tolerance of great deprivation and pain. So you've got to be able to keep going on the minimum of food, you've got to have a body that can tolerate the maximum of heat, the uncomfortableness of running over rocks Greece is very, very rocky and doing with as little sleep as possible, being able to function in the dark, not only in the light. You can see what I mean. These are all soldierly virtues, but today we associate them only with elite forces such as the Marines or the paratroops, not a regular infantryman. Spartans were trained to be elite force soldiers of the most extreme kind. Now, what about non-martial, ie quiet virtues of just when they're not actually fighting? Of course they didn't fight all that much. They trained a great deal but they didn't fight all that much and ideally they would rather not fight. It's very interesting that number of times we learn that, whether there could have been an actual encounter, the Spartans were happy if they deterred their enemies from taking them on or gave up a position simply from the threat of a Spartan attack upon them. And that's a very sensible thing, as you minimise loss of manpower. But they did all sorts of things like minimise the individual quality. So the chief qualities are cooperative, not individual. For example, the only case in which a Spartan could have a name on his grave and this is absolutely extraordinary every other Greek city, when you die and they're very familiar with the notion of a tombstone and you put the name of the person on the tombstone. Spartans allowed named tombstones only for men who died in battle, not died by any other means. So that's again to highlight the absolute, crucial importance of being wonderfully solitary in warfare.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So what did the Spartans spend the rest of the day, as it were, all the rest of the year when they weren't actually fighting. What were they doing? And that's, in a way, a problem. It's hard to think they just simply existed. They didn't do any work. The helots did all the physical work they grew the vines, they grew the olives, they harvested the vines, the olives, they grew the wheat and barley, they and so on.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So a Spartan man's only work was war, and if he wasn't actually fighting, well, he was just preparing to fight. Well, what they did in the way of maintaining solidarity in the very long periods when they weren't actually fighting was they regularly, they had to die together in the evening meal, which would be, I suppose, six o'clock, seven o'clock in our terms in the evening, and so once a day they would all re solidify themselves as a community. What were their wives doing? Well, their wives were living in their homes and they were eating in their homes. Because there's a total separation in lifestyle between males and females from the age of seven, by the way, boys educated in one way, girls educated in another way, and this corresponds to the division of function between males and females. Males keep the society going by defending it or attacking other people. Women keep the society going by reproducing and and managing the households of the husband and wife pairings.
Mark Selleck:Yeah. So I guess we see these instilling of these martial values starting from seven years of age and they're constantly reinforced all through their childhood and into adulthood. And that's what seems to, I guess, become the central point of the value system is, even though you're not going to war all the time, it's important to keep these ideas instilled so that when war does come, you are ready and your society can deal with it.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now, I've talked about, as it were, everyday life, but there is one dimension Spartans lives not unique, this is by no means in itself unique, but the Spartans were the ancients said this, herodotus said it twice exceptionally pious. In other words, they worried more than other Greeks, and this is saying something collectively about what the gods wanted of them, what they thought they should do to keep the gods happy, and the gods means typically Apollo and Athena and Zeus. They seem to be the three major gods of the Olympian Pantheon, also Artemis, for various cultural reasons. But one thing that archaeologists have found is the extraordinarily large number of shrines, so places where religious worship went on, in the settlement area of Sparta. This is very, very interesting, and that would be one thing that when you're not fighting or feasting or making love, you could privately, that is, individually, pay your respects to one or other god, goddess or heroes.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Spartans very keen on people who were either once upon a time human and then they were made into divine phenomena, or they were half divine, half human in their birth. This is myth, of course, rather than reality. So the principal hero for the whole city was Heracles, and Heracles was, on the one hand, son of Zeus, but, on the other hand, his mother was not a god, she was a human being from Thebes, so they worshiped Heracles. The leading families of the Spartans claimed that they were literally a descendant from Heracles. Ultimately, through a bunch of these Heraclids as they're called Heraclidae, descendants of Heracles, who had been among the founders of the city of Sparta, they were founder leaders and, for example, the two royal families were both kingly families that claimed to be Heracles, so that they traced their ancestry, ultimately fictitiously, back to Heracles.
Mark Selleck:Well, I guess we've touched on how important the military was to Sparta and you've gone a little bit into, I guess, explaining what a hot light is in general terms. Did Sparta have any specialised training or strategies that set them apart from other Greek city-states?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:We have to infer that they must have done, partly because they had so much time, partly because they had real incentives to train and be as a match fit at any moment. And there is, in fact, a Greek word. The Spartans seemed to have had a special word for when they're at war, and we were talking earlier about the sad situation of Israel today. Well, when the Prime Minister of Israel declares we are at war with Hamas, the Spartans had a word which said we are under military discipline, we are at war with whoever it might be. But in a sense, they were always at war because the helots were the very name that means captives, the sort of people that you've beaten in war and taken prisoner. So they were prisoners of war for life. That's what the word helot means, and the Spartans therefore had very, very strong mechanisms. So they had a military structure top down, there were file leaders, there were regiment leaders, there were all sorts of things.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:We're not sure exactly how someone became a regimental commander as opposed to a ranker, an ordinary member of the rank. How was it decided that someone's fought in the front rank as opposed to one of the seven ranks behind? Typically they would line up in eight ranks deep, depending on how many were sent out for any particular time. They organised their army in terms of age groups, so there's the 20 year olds, the 30 year olds, the 40 year olds, 50 year olds and everybody. All Spartans were under discipline. They were, in other words, liable for call up up to the age of 60, you didn't become time expired and cashiered until you were 60, which is a figure which applies, of course, to another very key feature of Spartan politics and economy and society, namely the Garusia, the old men's council, which we'll come back to later. But we don't actually know because we don't have any Spartan sources, nor do we have any ancient non-Spartan sources that in any detail talk about Spartan manoeuvres or training manoeuvres to enable them to reach this level of fitness and preparedness.
Mark Selleck:I guess, if we're going to talk about Sparta and the military and how they fought, of course we've got to bring up Thermopylae, don't we?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:We do. Of course, one must immediately say two things. First, myth we actually have a near contemporary, because Herodotus was not a contemporary but he was able to talk to anybody who had been involved in any way in that period for 80 BC, and of course he'd visited Sparta and talked to Spartans whose fathers supported Thermopylae or whatever. And so there's a great deal of myth made of that, because it's actually a defeat. It sometimes has to be spelled out that it wasn't a lot of victory, it wasn't one of those. It wasn't, as it were, trafalgar for the British or whatever the Australian equipment would be of a great victory in battle. It was a defeat, but it was a heroic defeat and it set the tone for what was to follow after that. Because had the Spartans not resisted at all, had they not led the resistance to the huge Persian invasion of 480, perhaps 200,000 minimum, maybe even up to a million on the Persian side, as against the Greeks, the maximum they could muster would be getting on for 100,000 at any one time, which they do seem to have once managed to do. There's huge disparity between the two sides. There was a risk and of course it happened in the way it did that the Persian could simply steamroll the down. Their main target was Athens, and that was what in fact they got through to. So the function of Thermopylae was to hold up the Persian advance, as long as it could be held up, to inflict significant damage on the Persian side so that they would realise what they were up against, and, not least, to coordinate between the land forces and the naval forces which were stationed at the top of the island of Euboea, within quite easy reach of Thermopylae. They were resisting the Persians by land and sea. So in all those ways, thermopylae worked very well.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And on the other hand, unfortunately, a it was a defeat, b it was a defeat, enabled by a rossack to treachery.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Now, that's not great if you're trying to resist.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And though relatively few Greeks actually did resist, it's often forgotten that most Greeks were either on the Persian side, in mainland Greece Not necessarily because they wanted to be, but they were or they were trying to be neutral rather than joining the relatively few Greeks who were brave enough, determined enough to physically resist, led by the Spartans. So had the Spartans not taken that leading role no resistance before the Persians took Athens, and that really would have been almost game over, I think, but anyway they did put a terrific resistance and that gave them the authority for any future attempt to recoup because, as I say, the Persians occupied all of Greece down to the Isthmus the division between the Peloponnes and the rest of Greece to the north in 480 BC, so it was 479 BC. The battle of Plotier, that was actually the determining victory of the United Greeks, which were again led by the Spartans, and it was a heavy infantry battle on land led by the Spartans, who were in their element. This is in central Greece, actually in an area not far from the Thieves that I mentioned earlier.
Mark Selleck:And touching just back on, I guess, military, spartan military tactics. I remember this is just going off the top of my head, but one of the days at Thermopylae, I think, herodotus describes the Spartans withdrawing like feigning a retreat, turning around and then capturing the enemy off guard, and I think perhaps you can see some elements of that as well taken place at Plotier, where the Spartans were the ones who seemed to have this more controlled withdrawal back to a defensive line as opposed to the other Greeks, and maybe that sort of points to maybe some evidence that they did have some sort of superior training behind them.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Yeah, you asked me before what evidence do we have for the types of training that they went through? We have absolutely none as such, but you can infer from what Herodotus says about that encounter in the past. It's a very narrow pass. It's about kilometer wide east to west, but in places it's only just wide enough for two chariots to pass each other, and it's right by the sea. You have to think of all that. Anyway, it does suggest I mean I'm it's inevitable.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:I think we have to infer that that was one manoeuvre that the Spartans regularly trained. Okay, one lot of Spartans would face off against another in training and one side would pretend to flee, and then they would train. How do you turn around? You've got to spear about nine foot long, remember, made of cornel wood. Probably you mustn't spear your next door neighbour with that as you turn around. There are all sorts of things. Then you've got to learn to run with a shield, because actually it's so heavy you don't want to run very far. Well, in the past they'd only have to run maybe a hundred meters or so maximum. Even that's a hell of a long way with a really heavy shield. So, yes, so that would be a manoeuvre which they would practice.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:The other thing is the battle of the Mopla took place at the hottest point in the year, so we're in August, so we're in 40 degrees. It might not have been quite 40 then, but it would have been in the in the 30s itinerary, so the Spartans would train in full armour in. Actually, sparta is the hottest place in all of Maine and Greece for its height above sea level, 200 meters or so above sea level. Credibly hot. So they trained to learn not to be knocked out by the heat, wearing this heavy army and running with a heavy shield, so that they could whip round and inflict great damage.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:This that the Persian forces, famously, were more light armed than were the Greeks, and Herodotus makes that point. One reason why battle of Plataea, the Spartans and the other Greeks one was that the equipment was unequal between the two sides as far as lightish sorry, the Persian side, which was a, by the way, a multi ethnic group. There were lots of different peoples from what's today Asia, asia, minor Middle East. They had lighter shields, lighter spears and they relied much more on archery. So fighting at a distance and hand to hand, they weren't used to the sort of hand to hand mode that the Spartans and other Greeks had practiced most particularly out of a point of interest.
Mark Selleck:I'm assuming you've seen the movie 300. What was your opinion on?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, what I had against it wasn't so much because it's done in a particular mode it's a blue screen, it's not really on the battlefield, contrast the what was called the 300 Spartans of 1962, which is actually filmed precisely where the battle had happened in 480 BC, including the Greek army and so on. So thousands of people, the 300 movies, all can CGI, computer generated imagery, apart from one scene, which is where the horse was involved. You can't actually film a horse galloping through a studio, so that's shot outside, but otherwise everything is faked, and so even the blood. You know it's all laid on. It's very interesting.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:If you've ever watched the director's cut. You can listen to Zack Snyder and he's mainly interested in the technicalities, not in the historicity or the dramatic thing, and I hated it. If you like ideology and that's what the Iranians got particularly upset about, presenting the Persian side as if they were some kind of animals, and historically it's quite false and so far as it suggests that a queen of Sparta could address the Spartan assembly, absolutely impossible. Nevertheless, we can come back to Queen Gorgon, which means Gorgon by the way, it's an extraordinary name to give a woman.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:It tells you something about the Spartans that they would call a woman a Gorgon, which is a monster, terrifying, you know, superhuman, but not a real woman. Greek women were supposed not to be quite so manish and violent, and what have you? Typically, at any rate. So I didn't like. The movie glorified warfare, dist foreigners, especially Persianians, as if they were sort of animals, and it was brilliantly shot in the sense of technically at the expert, and it appealed particularly to Marines in the American army. I got quite a bit of correspondence because I'd been one of the consultants, in a very, very minor way, about how to pronounce various names and I'd got various correspondence. Could you send me a copy of your book, and so on and so on? But no, I don't think it did the course of Greek Persian relations or ancient history particularly well.
Mark Selleck:Yeah, I actually did a, probably about two years ago now. I did an episode in the podcast where I looked at 300, but it wasn't to look at it from, I guess, a historical perspective as such. It was more I titled it 300 versus the sources. I wanted to look at 300, the movie, and look at if there's points in the sources that they're drawing upon which, surprisingly, I found there was quite a lot, whether it be some literally, but some figuratively as well, and one I understand. Obviously there was the big part of this glorifying war and portraying Greek history in not a helpful way when, if you're trying to tell it for history's sake, but I did find I guess the whole premise of the movie was coming from this is a Spartan telling other Spartans what took place at Thermopylae, which I mean, which I think that gets overlooked a lot too when people do view the movie from if they do have a background in Greek history as well.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But well, I'll pull out two things. You're absolutely I agree with what you've just said there. That's a very productive way of looking at the battle. And I'll just pull out a couple of things. Why 300? Why did Leonidas take 300? Well, his bodyguard, his royal bodyguard, which he regularly had and it was recruited on an annual basis because people would get too old for it, because they had to be in their 20s was competitive. So you would look to see how different Spartans performed at different points in their education, coming up to the age of 20, when they became fully adult Spartans, and then you'd see, well, which one runs fastest, which one is strongest in wrestling, in all those things. So you have 300 elite royal bodyguard. Did he take the elite royal bodyguard to Thermopylae? He did not. Why did he not?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:This is where Herodotus, being a historian, is able to pitch in. He chose Herodotus's men who, of course, were brave. They had to be good fighters in no good taking weaklings up there, if there were any in Sparta. But they all had to be married and to have already produced their wife, having already produced a son. So you ask yourself what's the point of that? Well, it seems to me, if you like, blindingly obvious that the dad is very likely to get killed, if not almost certainly going to get killed, but his family line will continue. So he will be replaced. It'll take time, 20 years, but he will have a son back in Sparta. Secondly, that son will be the son of a hero who died. This is the way you should die as a Spartan, in battle, and you get a named tombstone. I talked about that earlier. And so you develop within the Spartan society an esprit de corps based on this iconic, this monumental battle.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Of course, leonidas couldn't know that when he had been killed as he was, and the 300, most of them, I'll come back to that have been killed that they would then the Greeks, go on to win. He couldn't be sure that they would win the war, but and he was, I think, pretty clear they'd probably lose the battle. Now the other point here on just makes, which is often overlooked, it's often assumed here Leonidas takes 300 and they all die, so all 301 of them know Herodotus is absolutely clear because he makes a big thing about one of them. Two of the 300 survived the different reasons. One was at the moment of the final battle, not actually on the battlefield, he'd been sent off on a mission and unable to get back in time. The other one, who didn't die at Thermopylae, was there at Thermopylae, but he well, it's very puzzling actually. He said I can't see, so there's absolutely no point in my actually going and fighting. Now I have sort of odd thoughts about this. How was he allowed not to go into the final fighting simply because he couldn't see? He had a terribly bad eye infection. Whatever, he went back to Sparta.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:The guy who had been sent on a mission and survived hanged himself on going back to Sparta. He was made to feel such a heel for not having died. He felt such shame he committed suicide. Why did the other guy, the one with the eye disease who somehow managed to bunk off, go back to Sparta, not commit suicide? Well, herodotus tells us he suffered the ultimate humiliation. No one would talk to him. The way he puts it is share of fire with him. So you know, over a household inside, when they're having an evening meal and they've got a fire going, no one would invite him into their house and no one would affiorse their son or daughter to any children of that guy. He obviously had one or more, either a son or whatever we don't know. In other words, they cut him off from normal Spartan social relations.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Then, in 480, and going forward for the foreseeable future, what does he do? How does he respond? Somehow or other, he trains hard he's amazing Making up for his dereliction of thermopoly. They go off to the battlefield at Plotier. One year later 479, he's somehow in the front rank. Well, that tells you something. How he got back up to there to be allowed to be in the front, that's very interesting. He then, when the battle is joined, as you know, normally Spartans march into the actual encounter with the enemy quite slowly and they don't rush because they have to keep cohesion over potentially uneven ground. This guy rushes out ahead, he takes out as many of the immediately facing him enemy as he can, and then, of course, he's killed because he's isolated on his own.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But for him, clearly, he's, as it were, atoned for his sin at the Mopole the year before, herodotus thought that this guy his name is Aristodarmus was very brave and he deserved the prize for bravery, because to rush out and take on the enemy on, you know, no, the Spartans thought he was mad, because that's a sign of madness if you do that, you don't wait in your rank, and they didn't award him a prize at all. And Herodotus names the Spartans who died at Potea and were awarded the prizes of victory, and none of them is this guy. So but for Herodotus. Most people would have thought all 300 had died at Thermopylae. No, but for Herodotus, most people thought only on it has took the royal bodyguard to Thermopylae. No, he didn't. He had a pickup force of specially chosen men who were married with sons. That's history for you, not myth.
Mark Selleck:Yes, well, I'm pretty sure we could talk about military matters to do with Sparta for our whole time together, but I think we've always got some time together. I want to touch on some other areas too, and you've obviously you've touched on Spartan women a couple of times just briefly, and this is a very unique status within within Sparta compared to other city states. How did this look?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:This is an absolute, classic case of the mirage that, since it's largely Athens oriented, in Athens, girls could never become full, equal citizens with the boys, with their men, when they were married, the relationship between wife and husband was that of guardian and ward, so there was no equality of legal status between men and women, adult men and women in in Athens, excuse me. So if you take that the Athenian situation is being far closer to the Greek norm, the Hellenic norm, all the 1000 Greeks, most women, were in the status of a female women. And then you consider Sparta, where women, first of all, they're educated, not just, in other words, taught skills that typically women have to perform, namely weaving, cooking, household management. The women of Sparta didn't have to learn those because hellot women performed those functions for them. So what did they do? Well, while their brothers were being educated in sometimes it's called boarding schools or sometimes barracks, very separate buildings from their home, from the age of seven, girls lived at home till they were married, and then they went to live in the home of their husband. But while they were living at home, their mothers seem to have encouraged them, and the city seems to have encouraged them, to develop their physical strength, so their athletic capacities, their ability to run, their ability to throw. They even allegedly wrestled and well, this is where Mirage, I think, comes in. Women wrestling, oh, they must have wrestled, and naked, with the boys, mustn't they? Well, I think probably not, if you see what I mean. But the fact is that Spartan girls, and therefore coming up to being brides, were physically much tougher. They'd been given more food, relatively, than the rations given to girls in other Greek cities. All these reasons meant that, physically, women and men were closer together. In part of them they were in other Greek cities.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Another major, and this is a legal point in most Greek cities women could not own land that is the basis of economic existence and power in their own right. So, in other words, they needed a male sponsor or guardian, typically their husband, to negotiate on their behalf, to interact with. For example, if they wanted to sell land, it wouldn't be the woman who sold it, it would be the husband, and so on. In Sparta, women could own property, land included in their own right. Now, why, that's another question, but nevertheless it's the fact. So, in various ways, ancient Spartan women were much more like and equivalently empowered to their male counterparts, their husbands, their brothers and so on. Dan was the case in a bubble, as far as evidence goes. Athens we know most about the legal status of women in Athens because we know most about social life in Athens period. So that's part of it.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But since they now, this is where Spartans, like every other Greek city, spartan women no more fought in battle than did any other Greek women. So what was their function in a fundamental military society and state? It was to instill, to reinforce the martial values we talked about earlier. Now there's a whole bunch of evidence, a rather peculiar sort of evidence, and it's called apotheons, or pithy sayings attributed to Spartans kings, generals, men, women. And the very fact that women are accredited with, attributed with saying, tells you something about the prominence, the political significance of women in Spartan. There's a famous one which goes in Greek. It's just a few words, but I'll spell it out in English Come back from battle, the mother says to her son, either with it or on it, and what it is is the shield. So either you come back dead and your comrades bear you, they carry you from the battlefield on a shield, or you survive, you win and you come back with your shield and ready to fight again another day. That's just one example of how I think they're made up, you say. But other Greeks thought Spartan women were exceptionally prominent and relatively equal to their menfolk in ways that I agree that they really probably were.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And then right at the very top, there are of course quite exceptional women. One of them features in the 300 movie, thermopylae, and this is Queen Gorgor, who was married to Leonidas but was the daughter of Leonidas's half brother, so in other words her uncle or her half uncle. So that's an example of dynastic marriage right at the top. But Gorgor appears in Herodotus very interestingly, is a very smart lady. She, for example, works out there's a message which is conveyed on a wooden tablet with wax covering over it typical wax tablet folding and they open up the tablet. The messenger says and there's nothing on the wax, what's this? And it's Gorgor who says scrape the wax off and you'll find the message written on the wood. And so the point is that she's presented as a very smart lady and then one of her descendants. Actually on the other side there are two Spartan royal families and until very much later they never into marriage, so they're quite separate family lives.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:But a later Spartan princess, a woman called Kyniska. She raised race forces, she had staples and paid for them to be groomed the horses and ridden. And she entered the four horse chariot at the Olympic Games of 396 and won. So she became the first woman Olympic victor in all of Greek history, the first one in nearly 400 years.
Mark Selleck:Yeah, so obviously this is another point, that where Sparta is remarkable when it comes to greater Greek society as well. And well, I guess one big point on the remarkable nature of Sparta definitely comes down to their political institutions. Obviously, they're quite famous for their dual monarchy and then the Grusia that goes along with that. How are these institutions, I guess, fundamental to Spartan stability?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Again, herodotus is our principal written narrative source, so he gives it a context. He names names. We do have some evidence that is non-Herodotian. We have some inscriptions and we have some other sources, plutarch in particular. And the name that Herodotus gives us and presumably it's the one he was told by the Spartans themselves is that of Lycurgus. His name means wolf worker and the look bit the first syllable, lines him up with Apollo, because Apollo, in one of his dimensions, was thought to be wolf-like and also to be a protection against wolves. So if you're in a society with lots of sheep, goats and you want to protect them from wolves, you appeal to Apollo.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So Lycurgus the wolf worker was thought to be the guy who devised the entirety of the historical Spartan. We call it constitution. They would have called it set of laws, and those laws affected military matters, economic matters, religious matters, social matters. So he was a sort of total legislator and the assumption is that he was so brilliant and he lived quite a long time ago. They couldn't agree exactly how long ago he lived before the 5th century BC, and they couldn't quite agree to whom he was related. So all this suggests to us historians that may have been such a person, but he didn't do everything he was said to have done, so what we're talking about is an evolved system rather than one created just flash bang wallet, like the American constitution in 1776. And so the key thing for Lycurgus or the Lycurgun constitution was to enshrine a balance and all.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Greeks ideally, as a political ideal, put forward the notion of being one mind, hominoya, having a single resolution about what they should do in any particular situation. So on the one hand you have elites, of elites of birth, and in particular the royal families at the top, and you mentioned the Garusia, literally old men's council, so the Latin would be Senate, same word. You had to be over 60. And almost certainly you had to be long to one of those elite families allegedly descended from hieroglyphs or elected by the masses. So this is the compromise the elite council is elected, but they're elected for life. They're non responsible. You can't sort of accuse them that they are the Supreme Court. They have terrific power.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:What then represented the ordinary Spartan soldier on a daily basis, as it was, was the office of the efferent, that means over seers supervisors, and there were five of them and they were elected every year you could only hold the office once and so elected again, probably by the same sort of means as the Garusia, by shouting. So candidates are presented before the assembly and then shouts are given for them and somebody and this is where a little bit of chicane really came in a small group decides which was the loudest shout. Anyway, the Air Force were the day to day executive of the Sparman State. So you've got this balance, this compromise Elites, a permanent to kinship system, a Supreme Council which is above and beyond the everyday reach because they're in office for life. They're likely American Supreme Court in that respect, and so they represent what later Greeks called oligarchy, rule of the few.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:On the other hand, it's the masses, the majority, who decide by shouting any particular decision. So are we going to go to war, yes or no? Are we going to pass this measure, this law, yes or no, and so on. So looking from the outside you could say yes, on the one hand it's a kinship, on the other hand it's an oligarchy. And yet there's elements of democracy as well. And in the classical period, aristotle, the greatest political theorist of the ancient Greek world. He couldn't decide exactly what Sparta was, and there's a good reason for that, because Sparta evolved, it didn't come into being and it didn't fit into any particular classical pattern. So there was no revolution of a political kind in the historical fifth or fourth centuries, because the other Greeks it is many of them had many revolutions and different constitutions which you could identify as democratic or oligarchic. So Sparta's. In that sense also, we mentioned a number of features, if not unique, certainly very distinctive and different.
Mark Selleck:Yes, it's. I think that's what surprises a lot of people when you talk about the Spartan kinship the kings that had final say and made all the decisions. There was a complex system behind the whole thing.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And the fact there were two of them. This is something similar to the Roman two. Why were the two consuls? Well, the consuls were thought to have inherited the power of, once upon a time, one king, and so the division is part of the point. They are supreme executives, but they can counter each other or they can even cancel each other out, and of course that can lead to divisions within the Gerusia. You've got the this king's men and that king's men, and then you've got people who are neither king's men, so there's all sorts of scope for division, and yet there's the overall constraint Helots. We can't afford to be too divided or divisive. We certainly can't afford an internal revolution as long as we're surrounded by, and the power of life that's based upon, a bunch of people, many of whom actually would like to see us off. They like to get rid of the Spartans control.
Mark Selleck:Okay, well, I mean, we're probably getting close to the end of our time here, so I just had a couple more questions, if that's fine with you. Oh, far away. Okay, so I guess we want to put in, I guess, a bit of a bookmark to the Spartans, because no civilisation or society lasts forever and the power and influence of Sparta would decline over time. What were some of the key factors that led to its decline, and?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:yes, if you're a military state, ultimately, so that your power is partly symbolic, in other words, you deter others or you get the respect because of your reputation. If that reputation is dented in any way, if your enemies start to think you're not what you were, that's the beginning of trouble. So there was a major bust up between Athens and Sparta and its allies. After the Persian wars we've been talking about Thermopylae, herodotus we get to the so-called Peloponnesian, the Athenopeloponnesian war of the last third of this century, for which the Usyrdides since the principle source, usyrdides being an Athenian intellectual historian spanned one after 27 years over Athens, but only because they were able to get there's an irony here money from Persia, because Persia was much more frightened of Athens than it was of Sparta. So they supported Athens's main enemy, sparta, and Sparta indeed won the Peloponnesian war, but that, in retrospect, was the high point of Sparta's power ever, because thereafter it's a downward slope and one of the major points in the decline or the degeneration of Spartan power comes in 371 BC. Historian is Xenophon, I mentioned him pro-Spartan, but writing an account of a major conflict between Sparta and Thebes Thebes, the rising power, sparta, the declining power. And near Thebes, in central Greece. They called Lutra and the Thebans won hands down. They smashed the Spartan hoplite army and it turns out by then the majority of so-called Spartans. They're actually not Spartan citizens, they're Perioikoi, these people who live round about Sparta. Secondly, there are only about 1500 Spartan citizens, whereas go back to Potea there had been 8,000. So there's a decline from 8,000 to 1,000, something's going on. It's rather complicated and of those that battle, 400 out of the 700 who fought at Lutra died. More than half of the ones fighting died. About a quarter of the entire adult male population of Sparta was killed in one battle. Anyway, after that it's all over there.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Alliance, it's called Peloponnesian League. Alliance breaks up in the 360s. Thebes is number one and then it's not Sparta that recovers, but Athens recovers better than they had done in the 5th century and Macedon comes down and beats. All of them beats. Athens, beats Thebes. Sparta becomes a bit player by the 320s. Sparta does not become formally a subject of Macedon. That never joins the Alliance. Alexander the Great goes off, conquers the Middle East. Macedon is the big player and it rules the main Hungary, it rules Asia, minot, it rules Egypt, it rules Syria, but these all Macedonian dynasty.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Sparta recovers only after the Roman conquest of all Main Hungary and the Middle East, when, through personal connections between the ruling imperial family in Rome this is Augustus and his wife Livia they have a personal relationship with Sparta. It's quite complicated, anyway. It means that the Romans give lots of money to the Spartans and Sparta becomes really quite wealthy and prosperous within the Roman Empire and part of its revival is a sort of fake theme park revival of ancient Sparta. So it's not really functional because there's no military power allowed by the Romans to the Greeks in Mainland Greece, but they, as it were, go through the education, they go through various religious rituals as if they were still living in the 7th or 6th or 5th century BC. But that really is it.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And there is, of course, continuous inhabitation in Sparta until the medieval period, when people decide for safety because there are lots of people wandering around we're in the 7th, 8th, 9th centuries they take off to live in the mountains around about Sparta. And then in the 13th century in come the Franks Crusaders and they build a new town, a place called Mistra, which is about 5 miles from Sparta, and that becomes, as it were, sparta. In the Middle Ages there are hardly anybody actually living in Sparta. Sparta is pretty much a thing of the past until the early 19th century. As I say, the Greeks rise up against the Ottoman Empire, and successfully. They become semi-independent in the 1830s. Sparta is rebuilt in 1834.
Mark Selleck:And I guess after that fall and these sort of revivals, that's where you can. Maybe people are latching on to the Spartan mirage even in those times as well. And I guess helping reinforce those ideas that come all the way to us, and I guess that leads on to the legacy and influence that Sparta would leave behind. So, in our times, how's? How's Sparta come to influence our military and political thoughts?
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Well, I trace the modern world typically in all sorts of respects political, economic to the late 18th century. So the French Revolution, american Revolution, and in that period the divide was are you for FM? So are you for Sparta? In other words, would you like more to be like your image of Sparta or would you like to live in this society more like Athens was? And so in the French Revolution context, voltaire goes for Athens because it's trade, it's culture, high culture, theater, philosophy, literature, rousseau, equally brilliant literator but he liked the Spartan values of solidarity and suppression of individualism in favour of collective virtue, so he went for Sparta.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:In the 19th century it takes us like that Athens-Sparta divide is reproduced, but in different terms, in terms of imperialism. So you get the rise of Germany under Prussia, and the Prussians are military guards, the Junkers, the sort of tough in East. What we now say was Eastern Germany, it was Berlin, and they went for Sparta and against them the Brits, british Empire. We tended to think we were the descendants of the Athenians. So that continues into the 20th century and takes an exceptionally unpleasant, vicious term, which is that Hitler, the Nazi ideology in various ways, from education, child rearing, marital relations and the notion of a master race and inferiority who should be, if not extominated, suppressed. All that mapped onto or was mapped onto a vision of ancient Sparta and the reputation of Sparta really, in Western, liberal, democratic terms, has never recovered from that appropriation or misappropriation by Hitler's Nazis.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:On the other hand, the film 300 plays to a certain sort of masculinist narrative of derring do heroic deeds in extreme circumstances.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:So the sort of mythology or ideology that might inform, for example, the Americans fighting in Vietnam, and that type of pro-Spartan mirage image is now perpetuated, not so much in Australia, not so much in England, where I'm from, but in North America by people who are very, very keen on gun rights, typically people from the South, typically very conservative, sometimes white supremacists, and they see the Spartans as their sort of heroic ideological ancestors against blacks or Hispanics or anything they really don't like.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:And they big up the notion that when Leonidas allegedly said to Xerxes, come and get them moll and laby, that is now a slogan of many gun clubs in America to support the notion of we are arms bearing, we are by law entitled to bear arms and the state is, as it were, xerxes coming to try to take our arms away from us. We're going to resist. So Spartan memories are constantly being revived in, I think, rather unpleasant or very unpleasant ways. Rather than focusing on elements of communal solidarity and relatively high status of women, there are various aspects of ancient Spartan that I think could be promoted in a better way than the ones that typically are fastened upon by less desirable elements in our own or in a tenor-rate Western societies today.
Mark Selleck:Yeah, and what you speak about there is, I find, highly frustrating too, because again people are playing to that Spartan mirage and picking and choosing certain elements and glorifying it, perhaps in a way that is somewhat distorted from what it was like in ancient Sparta itself, but then people that don't have much of an understanding of Sparta now start to hate ancient Sparta, and it's, I guess, people like yourself. Especially your book, the Spartans, I think, does an excellent job at giving you a good overview of how Spartan society came about, how it operated and its core values. I guess sort of much of a bit more detailed than like what we've done today, where we've tried to highlight some of the aspects that have made these people remarkable, and on their own terms, though without trying to insert our own ideas of modern times into it.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Thank you very much. I agree with what you just said. It's terribly difficult not to assert our values. So that happens in two ways. One is you judge past societies unacronistically, and the other thing is you are so influenced by your contemporary situation that you interpret things in the past that were actually different as if they were. Or you could simply lift them and put them in 2023, take them out of the fifth. You can't, so thank you very much for inviting me. I really enjoyed our talk.
Mark Selleck:So I greatly appreciate you agreeing to come on and have a talk to us. So, like I said, I've been a big fan of your work for many years. So once again, thank you, professor Carledge, for coming on to talk to us today.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Thank you, Mark. So I hope you've been touched and all best wishes to your listeners. Thank you.
Mark Selleck:No worries, thank you. I would love to pick your brain about many other things as well. Cheers.
Prof. Paul Cartledge:Maybe we'll have another personal chat sometime. Yeah, All right. Thank you All best of luck.
Mark Selleck:I hope everyone enjoyed the interview with Professor Carledge as much as I enjoyed talking with him. As I have said, I have been a long admirer of his work and there is always something special about being able to talk with people who have had an impact on your understanding of the world. I trust that the past hour and a half has helped put into perspective the Spartans as a city, people and society, or, in other words, as a polis, even though our talk did go longer than was originally planned, I felt there was so much more we could have discussed, though I think we were able to effectively cover the main points to help understand what made Sparta remarkable. For those of you who are interested in reading some of Professor Carledge's works, I will place up his author page, found on Amazon on the episode page and in the show notes. He has been involved in authoring a great many works, though I will place some direct links to what I think are some excellent choices when starting on your journey into understanding the Spartans.
Mark Selleck:Next fortnight, we will head back to our regular series where we will be following the remainder of the events taking place during the third year of the Peloponnesian War.
Mark Selleck:This will see us turn to Athens, launching a fresh campaign in the Chalcidides, while the Peloponnesian activities in the west will see the Athenians respond with the campaign launched by the general formio and bring the Athenians some much needed success. Thank you, everyone, for your continued support, and a big shout out to all those who have found some value in the series and have been supporting you on Patreon and other various ways. Your contribution is truly helping me grow the series. If you have also found some value in the show and wish to support the series, you can head to wwwcasingthoranciagreececom and click on the support the series button, where you can discover many ways to extend your support to helping the series grow. Be sure to stay connected and update on what's happening in the series and join me over on Facebook or Instagram at Castings through Ancient Greece or on Twitter at CastingGreece. Be sure to subscribe to the series over at the Castings through Ancient Greece website. I hope you can join me next time when we continue the narrative in the series with episode 79, the victories of formio.