Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes 0:00 – Introduction: The Importance of the Spartans The Spartans are, I think, just irresistible. They are one of the most extreme civilizations that ever walked on this earth. And I’ve always thought they deserved the same white heat of attention that’s normally reserved for the Romans and the ancient Egyptians. After all, these are people who bathe their babies in wine in order to toughen them up. They throw weeping newborns off the mountains that range around Sparta like a fortress. These are men who scorn luxury. They ban coined money and prostitutes, and they ate the most disgusting national dish, which is basically a black broth made of pig’s blood. In the military messes, homosexuality was compulsory between grown boys and older men. It’s all pretty hot stuff. But the Spartans aren’t just odd. They’re really important. Relatively early in Greek history, before the Classical World has begun, they drive through a radical political and social revolution. In effect, all Spartan men are meant to be equal. And they developed really key concepts that we still use today, about the importance of self-­‐sacrifice, of the common good, values, duties, and of rights. All Spartans aimed to be as perfectly human as was humanly possible to be. Every single one of our ideas about utopia stems from the Spartan example. The Spartans was the first series I made for Channel 4 in 2002, and it’s great to see how this civilization has seemed to really capture the popular imagination. There are brilliant, best-­‐
selling books about the Battle of Thermopylae, the famous battle where 301 Spartans stood against the Persians. In the end it was a suicidal stand, the last man fighting with his bare hands and his teeth. And Zach Snyder’s film, The 300, has brought the Spartan story to an international audience of millions. But for a historian, the Spartans pose a problem because they just left so few written records. Unlike the Athenians, they were terrible at their own P.R. They didn’t build grand architecture that we can then analyze to try to get to know them better. That makes them all the more intriguing and all the more reason to tell their story afresh. But I need to confess that I’m particularly attracted to the Spartans because of their women. Spartan girls simply were different. They enjoyed a degree of freedom and equality that was unparalleled anywhere else in the ancient world. Young Spartan girls, oiled head to toe in olive oil, would exercise naked in the gymnasia and sing to one another of their beauty. They were allowed to drink wine, they were allowed to ride horses, and they were allowed to own land. But then, when you got older, if you thought that a younger man would sire healthier offspring then you were allowed to take him as your lover. They were fit, and they were feisty. While the men were off in their training camps, women dominated the Spartan streets, and they had a real say in the running of their state. You know how people say to you, “Is there another time you would like to live in history?” I have to say, I think we’re pretty lucky to live when we do now. But I would just love to spend one day as a Spartan girl. So, if you want to witness the heady extremes that human civilization is capable of, then meet the Spartans. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 31 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 3:55 – The Spartan Pursuit of Perfection When we think of Ancient Greece, this is the image that most of us have in mind: The Parthenon in Athens. This is where the blueprint for western civilization received its first draft. Philosophy and science, art and architecture, democracy itself, have their roots here, and their embodied in the serene lines of one of the most famous buildings in monument to a very different kind of Greek city. It’s the burial mound of 300 warriors from Sparta, who in 480 BC, made a heroic last stand in the pass at Thermopylae, resisting a massive invasion force of the Persian Empire. Surrounded, and outnumbered by about forty to one, they put up a spectacular fight before they were hacked to pieces. They’re interred here, and honored by this inscription, which still echoes down the centuries. “Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” Unlike Athens, Sparta can’t boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It’s famous for two things: its frugality, which is where we get our word “Spartan” from, and its fighters. In everyday Spartan life, these two were intimately linked. The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of discipline and extreme self-­‐sacrifice. Their aim: to create the perfect state, protected by perfect warriors. The pursuit of perfection made Sparta a strange place, where money was outlawed, equality was enforced, and weak children were exterminated. Male homosexuality was compulsory, and women enjoyed a degree of social and sexual freedom that quite simply was unheard of in the ancient world. Its history was one of ruthless militarism, slavery on a massive scale, and a system that sometimes can seem like a premonition of modern day totalitarian regimes. But Sparta was the first Greek city to define the rights and duties of its citizens, and it can also claim, alongside Athens, to have saved the western world from enslavement by the Persian Empire. Although Spartan hardline ideals don’t have the charisma of Athenian culture, they’ve meant as much to western civilization as the ideals represented by the Parthenon. So in a sense, the story of the Spartans is the story of ourselves, and how some of the ideas that have molded western civilization were first tried out in a warrior state on the Greek mainland over two-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half thousand years ago. 8:20 – The Setting and Early History of Sparta The story of the Spartans takes me on a journey through some dramatic history, and there’s a setting to match. Over there is the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula, crowned by rugged mountains and scored by deep gorges, that forms the southernmost part of the Greek mainland. The Ancient Greeks thought of it as an island, and you can see why. It does have a brooding, closed-­‐in feel, cold-­‐shouldering the outside world. But long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War, some three thousand years ago, came from here. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, ruled over Mycenae in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the south in Sparta was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen. For Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused the Trojan War, was once Helen of Sparta. But at some point around 1100 BC, it all disappeared. No one knows for sure what happened. Earthquakes, slave revolts, even asteroids have been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the world of Helen went under in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 32 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 remnant clung on for a few hundred years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece, and the thread of history snapped. And during those centuries of darkness, out of the north new people came, seeking more hospitable lands. They brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats, and a few simple possessions. They settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to the lands that once belonged to King Menelaus. It was a journey worth making. The people who came here must have thought they had found a Shangri-­‐La. Down there is the plain of the Eurotas River, fifty miles north to south of precious, fertile farmland. And a river runs through it, all year round. In land-­‐hungry Greece, where 70 per cent of the land can’t be farmed and the rest is squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that’s a lot of elbow room. To the west are the spectacular Taygetus Mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet in places. Patches of snow still linger, while down on the plain, spring is turning into summer. The slopes once teemed with game, deer, hare, and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals. But what statistics can’t convey is the striking quality of this place, a fantastic sense of security. Everywhere you look, on every horizon, you’re bounded by hills and mountains. It’s not claustrophobic, just safe. You feel that everything you could possibly want is here, if you could just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world at bay. And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees and settled down here. A new Sparta came into being, and the new Spartans built this temple, the Menelaean, to honor the legendary king and his wayward wife. In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new cities like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all governed by a mutually agreed set of laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but the aim was broadly the same: to create good order and justice, and to protect against chaos and lawlessness. Today in Sparta, archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some three thousand years ago and built an ideal city, a utopia. It’s not an easy task because they left few clues behind them, and much of what they did leave was buried or destroyed when the modern day city was built. But whenever there’s a building program, precious new pieces of the puzzle are revealed. Every find is precious because the Spartans didn’t leave us much in the way of stuff. Unlike the Athenians, they were famous for not building, for not making things, and for not writing about themselves. So of all the cities and civilizations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and mysterious. Take for example Sparta’s kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had not one but two kings at the same time, two royal houses, twice the potential for the rows that all monarchies are prone to. The Spartans explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great, great grandsons of Heracles, the strongman of Greek myth. According to legend, it was this pair of twins who rested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of Agamemnon. The stories that people tell about themselves are always revealing. And this tale of a land grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to the neighbors. And it wasn’t long before the Spartans started throwing their weight around, seizing control of the whole Eurotas valley, enslaving non-­‐Spartans, or categorizing them as perioikoi, meaning “those who live around.” The perioikoi became a disenfranchised caste of craftsmen and traders, Sparta’s economic muscle. But sorting out their immediate neighbors was just the start of Sparta’s aggressive expansionism. Despite the generous acres of the Eurotas valley, Sparta like the rest of Greece was always hungry for more farmland. Other cities dealt with this by founding colonies, satellite Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 33 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 settlements that would eventually spread as far west as the Straits of Gibraltar, and as far east as the Crimea and the Black Sea. The Spartans came up with their own take on colonization. They turned their eyes west, and began to discover what opportunities there were beyond the mountains. It was there they would go to satisfy their land hunger. It was there that Shangri-­‐La would reveal its darker side, because it was there that a slave nation would be created to serve the Spartan master race. 16:40 – Slaves and Citizen-­‐Soldiers The journey through the gorges of the Taygetus Mountains is as spectacular now as it must have been some 2,800 years ago, when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest. Several days of hard march through the mountains would bring them to the territory of the Messenians. The Spartans weren’t just coming for their land. They wanted their freedom too. They intended to turn the Messenians en masse into helots. The word translates into captives, but it means more bluntly, slaves. Slavery in Ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners, barbarians who spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature for servitude. The enslavement of fellow Greeks, and on a massive scale, was something else again. And the crushing of Messene would set Sparta apart from the rest of Greece. It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became, wary of unrest, paranoid about revolt. Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-­‐scale wars, each lasting twenty years or more. We know something about the second war because we have an eyewitness to the events, one of the first identifiable eyewitnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus, a Spartan soldier and, just as importantly, a poet. “It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his homeland. Let us fight with spirit for this land, and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our lives. Come on you young men, make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love with life when you are a fighting man.” Tyrtaeus was a war poet, but hardly of the Wilfred Owens school. I doubt that he had any concept of the pity of war. His verses were more like battles cries, barked out with the directness of a sergeant-­‐major, putting backbone into the shirkers and faint hearts. “Look, if you want this land, you’re gonna have to fight for it.” This is the kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems. He was called a hoplite, an infantryman armed with an eight foot spear and round shield. By the end of the seventh century, practically all Greek cities had their own contingent of hoplites. These weren’t full time professional soldiers. They were farmers who swapped plows for spears in defense of their communities. By standing side-­‐by-­‐side with their neighbors, these militiamen demonstrated not just their courage, but their status as citizens. 20:15 – Hoplite Warfare This is Olympia, home of the famous games. It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter, for this was where you’d come to dedicate your arms to the gods in thanks for victory. That’s the hoplon, or round shield, the cardinal item for a hoplite, and probably where he got his name. You’d have held it by thrusting your left arm through the central armband, then grasping Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 34 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 onto the leather thing at the rim. It was made of wood and metal and would have weighed about twenty pounds, which is a hell of a weight if you think of carrying that for a day’s fighting. But to let your arm fall and the shield drop was the ultimate disgrace. Hoplite fighting was a team effort. Half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to your left. The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks, called a phalanx, seven or eight deep, and perhaps fifty shields across. Coordination and discipline were important, but most important of all was trust. If your neighbor broke and ran, you’d be exposed to the spear points of the enemy. When two phalanxes met, the tendency was for each line to shift to the right. The natural instinct was always to tuck yourself as tight as possible behind your neighbor’s shield. At that moment, the discipline of the phalanx threatened to collapse. To be effective, you just had to grit your teeth and stand your ground. Tyrtaeus had some typically helpful advice: “Those who dare to stand fast at one another’s side and to advance toward the front ranks in hand to hand combat, they die in smaller numbers, and they keep the troops behind, safe.” There wasn’t much in the way of tactics once the shield walls came together. The battlefields all but disappeared in a dust cloud, as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved against each other. The rear ranks provided the traction, pushing forward, like rugby players in a scrum. It was in the front three ranks, within range of the enemy’s spear points, that things got deadly. It was there that you’d have come face to face with this, a gorgon, emblazoned on your enemy’s shields. This was the goddess whose gaze had the power to turn men into stone, and in the sweaty, stabbing frenzy of the battle, ending up inches from her must have been a literally petrifying experience. Ultimately Sparta would surpass all other Greek cities in the art of this particular kind of fighting. But first they had to beat and enslave their neighbors, the Messenians. This was finally achieved around the year 650 BC. For the next three hundred years, the Messenians would be forced to slave in the fields of their Spartan masters, like asses worn out by heavy burdens, according to Tyrtaeus. But now that Messene had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became then, and for centuries to come: How do we keep it? Elsewhere in Greece cities were being torn apart by civil wars between rich and poor. With the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly increased. To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on, utopia was their aim. They would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be modeled on the hoplite phalanx: disciplined, collective, and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution in Shangri-­‐La. 25:30 – Lycurgus and Sparta’s Radical Institutions, @650 BC Every revolution needs its great leader, and this is Sparta’s: Lycurgus, the wolf-­‐worker. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say that he existed, but the Spartans believed in him. For them he was a miracle worker, someone who created heaven on earth following the advice of the gods themselves. Whether it was him, or a bunch of people, or a whole generation, who knows? But someone here embarked on a social experiment that would create one of the most extreme civilizations in the ancient world. The revolution that transformed Sparta took place around 650 BC, when Sparta’s neighbors, the Messenians, were finally defeated and enslaved. In order to keep the helots quiet, and, as Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 35 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 importantly, to stop themselves falling out over the spoils of war, the Spartans set out to become the most formidable, disciplined and professional hoplite warriors Greece had ever seen. The whole of Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp. Spartan men would neither fish nor farm, neither manufacture nor trade. They would simply fight. And if they weren’t fighting, they were training. And if they weren’t training, they were hanging out with their fellow fighters. The family unit counted for very little. What mattered was bonding with their male peers, fostering the solidarity of the phalanx. It was a program they pursued with typical single-­‐mindedness. Being born Spartan was not enough. All male Spartans had to earn their citizenship through long years of competitive struggle, and the survival of one of the most grueling training systems ever invented. The first test came early. This ravine a few miles outside of Sparta was known as the apothetai, or deposits. It was also called the place of rejection, because it was down there that a newly born child would be thrown if he did not match up to Spartan standards of physical perfection. In fact, infanticide was common throughout Ancient Greece. Unwanted babies, usually girls, were left on a hillside. Sometime they’d be placed in a basket or a protective pot so that there was at least a chance of someone or something coming along and taking the child in. In Sparta, as ever, things were very different. Boys rather than girls were the usual victims, and it wasn’t the parents, but the city elders who decided whether they lived or died. And there was absolutely no possibility of a brooding vixen or kindly shepherd rescuing the newborn child once they had been tossed down there. The city elders’ decision was final and absolute. Surviving the apothetai was just the start for the boys. At the age of seven, they were taken from their families and placed in a training system called the agoge. It means literally “the rearing,” and the children were treated little better than animals. For Spartan boys, this was a classroom: the wild hills of Mount Taygetus, where they would have spent much of their time. They were organized into bouai, which was the Spartan word for “herd of cattle.” An older child was put in charge of them, responsible for their discipline and punishment, and he was known as a “boyherd.” Emphasis was on surviving, coping on the minimum. Each child was given one cloak, to last them all year round, which seems fine on a afternoon like this, but in winter here, it drops to minus six. Food supplies were short, and they were encouraged to steal their rations. If they were caught, they were flogged, not for the act of stealing, but simply for not getting away with it. It was as much a trial by ordeal as it was an education. The mountains also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta’s most controversial and disputed institutions, the krypteia, or secret service brigade, membership in which was reserved for the boys who’d shown particular promise. The really hard cases were singled out, given a knife, and turned loose into the wilds. By day they’d lie low, but at night they’d infiltrate the valley, hunting down and murdering any helots that they’d caught. Exactly how the krypteia operated, and the kind of “hit rate” it had, has always been a mystery. But the mere rumor of bloodthirsty, adolescent death squads roaming the countryside, was enough to institute a reign of terror, the perfect tactic to keep a slave population quiet and obedient. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 36 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 31:30 – Military Training for Spartan Soldiers Though Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed as high a value on individual achievement. The boys were tested constantly, against each other, and against their own limitations. This is the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Authea, and it was here that the competitive nature of Spartan society had its most extreme form of expression. Assuming you’d survived the first five years of the agoge system. At age twelve, you were brought here for a brutal right of passage. The altar up there was piled high with cheeses. Your challenge was simple: steal as many cheeses as possible. In front of the altar was a line of older boys, each armed with a whip. Their instruction: to defend the altar, showing neither mercy nor restraint. Indoctrinated with the tents of endurance and perseverance, desperate to excel in a public display, the 12 year-­‐old boys braved the gauntlet again and again and again. Meeting the whips head on, they sustained the most horrific injuries, and some, we’re told, were beaten to death. It’s easy to find yourself reeling back at the sheer brutality of a system that seems as alien and violent as these clay masks, found at the sanctuary of Artemis Authea. And it’s not just modern audiences that find the Spartans shocking. The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals, while other Greeks pictured them as bees, swarming around a hive, creature stripped of their individuality. It’s been a popular conception of Sparta through centuries, but one that misses an important point. Being a part f any mass activity can be fantastically liberating. If you’ve ever been in a Mexican wave in a football ground, or sung in a choir, or taken part in a protest march, you’ll know that being part of a crowd doesn’t diminish you, it makes you stronger. Your reach is greater, your sense of self is magnified. And that was the fundamental attraction of the Spartan system: the possibility of transcending your limitations as an individual and becoming part of something bigger and better. From the age of twelve onwards, the boys’ training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and writing, we’re told, were taught no more than was necessary, but music and dancing were regarded as essential. The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as “the dancing floors of war.” And a phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable dancing partner. So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as war music, a rhythmic drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned the reputation for being the most musical and the most warlike of people. At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion, Spartan males faced their most crucial test: election to one of the common messes, or dining clubs, where they’d be expected to spend most of their time when they weren’t training or fighting. But entry to these exclusive gentlemen’s clubs was not guaranteed. Election to the common mess was by the vote of the existing members. If you failed to measure up, you’d be blackballed and then that was that: you were a failed Spartan, publicly humiliated, excluded from the society into which you’d been born. It must have been a living hell. If, on the other hand, you were elected, you were given a big, fat portion of land by the State, and a quota of helot slaves to support you and your family. You were now one of the homioi, the equals, the warrior elite at the top of Sparta’s hierarchy. The common messes, which lay a mile or so outside of the center of Sparta, were an essential part of the city’s social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at bay. Old and Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 37 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 young mixed here, easing generational conflicts, a constant source of friction elsewhere in Greece. More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden by a rigorously enforced code of conspicuous non-­‐consumption. In egalitarian Sparta, the rule was: even if you have got it, don’t flaunt it. And it was applied to everything, from houses to clothes, even to food. Elsewhere in Greece, rich men would lay on a couple of prostitutes, crack open some amphoras of wine, and invite their mates round to feast on locked tongues and honey-­‐roasted tuna. In Sparta, there was no time for fine dining. In the common messes, the dish of the day, every day, was a concoction of boiled pig’s blood and vinegar, known as melas zoumas, black soup. An old joke goes: There’s a man from Sybaris in southern Italy, a town infamous for its luxury and gluttony, who was told the recipe for black soup. “Ah,” he said, “now I understand why the Spartans are so willing to die.” Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries, but to a modern audience, their diet, leaving aside the black soup, sounds nutritious and healthy. Judging from the contented expression on the face of this Spartan diner, Lycurgus’s system paid off. Well nourished, and free from the need to make a living, or keep up with the neighbors, this is someone who despite the demands of Spartan society, knew the good life. It’s also the face of an entirely new kind of human being, a citizen. Spartan society was one of the first to introduce a form of social contract, where the duties of an individual were balanced by certain privileges and rights. It’s a profound concept, and one that was current in Sparta a hundred years or so before any other Greek city was even beginning to think along similar lines. But utopias need protecting, and in the year 480BC, disturbing news reached Sparta. The Persian Empire was on the move. A huge invasion force was heading west by land and sea. The time had come to see whether Sparta's celebrated warriors would live up to their fearsome reputation, and save the Greek world from destruction. 39:20 – Leonidas and the Persian Invasion, 480 BC Archeology came relatively late to Sparta. It wasn't until 1906 that a British team began the first systematic digs. In 1925 there was a major find: a striking life size bust of a Spartan warrior dating from the 5th century BC. These lantern slides record the moment of discovery. When the bust was inched out of the earth, and it became clear that he was a magnificent warrior, one of the Greek workmen said without a moment's hesitation, "This is Leonidas." Leonidas was Sparta's super hero, the king who with 300 warriors made a doomed last stand against the mighty Persia in the pass at Thermopylae. There isn't any hard evidence for that identification, although he is from the right period, but I think we can forgive the wishful thinking. After all, everyone wants a legend to have a face. These days the warrior presides over the museum in Sparta. They still call him Leonidas, the name is safely in quote marks. But whoever he was, he remains an impressive piece of work. That enigmatic smile is typical of the sculpture of the period, and it gives him a Mona Lisa-­‐like quality. His eyes are blank now, but in their day, they had been inlaid with rock crystal and seashells, and would have glittered out of the stone. His torso is fantastically fit and toned. His hair is very elaborately dressed, and his upper lip is clean-­‐shaven. It was one of Lycurgus’s most fussy reforms that Spartan men should not have mustaches. So, if you want a picture of the ultimate Spartan, here he is. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 38 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 We know very little of the real Leonidas. He was a member of the Agidae, one of the two aristocratic families that supplied Sparta with her kings. He had been on the throne for 10 years when the Persian juggernaut began to roll west. Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean, a vast empire, stretching from present day Afghanistan to the Aegean Sea. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome presence on the western limits of their empire, inciting rebellion among the king's subjects in the cities of Asia Minor. It was the Persian king Darius who made the first move. He sent punitive forces to land at Marathon, only to see them routed by Athens and its allies. The King died before he could avenge the insult, and it was left to his son Xerxes to sort out the troublesome Greeks once and for all. The Persians set out by land and sea early in the year 480. The army was so vast, that according to the Greek historian, Herodotus, it drank whole rivers dry. Herodotus also reckons the combined Persian forces had more than one and a half million. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000, big enough to crush the minnow-­‐like cities of Greece. When the Spartans learned the Persian invasion was on its way, they sent for advice of the oracle at Delphi. Oracles were thought of as messages from the gods, delivered through the mouth of the possessed priestess. The Spartans were deeply pious and they treated oracles as though they were military orders. On this occasion the orders made for sobering reading. "Hear, hear your fate, o dwellers in Sparta, of the wide spaces. Either your famed great town must be left by Perseus’s sons, or the whole land must mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.” Beneath the flowery language, a simple choice was offered: capitulate or fight to the death. The Spartans being Spartans chose the latter and put themselves at the head of the resistance to the invasion. As the Persian army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under the leadership of King Leonidas headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae, the gates of fire. In 480 Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck. Now the sea has receded miles in that direction, but then the road south was squeezed between the shoreline and these mountains. It was here that between seven and eight thousand hoplites came from all over Greece. The first thing they did was to rebuild a wall that crossed the most narrow point of the pass. Hunkering down behind it, they aimed to stop the Persian advance in its tracks. The Greeks were hopelessly outnumbered, but they did have geography on their side. If they could just slow down the Persians, it would allow others to organize more formidable defenses on land and sea. But for Leonidas and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied him, Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point. It was the place where they intended to show the world what it meant to be a Spartan. As a whole, the Greeks made a great deal of noise about the nobility of dying for your country. But for the Spartans, it was far more than just a platitude. In battle, they were ordered to seek out “a beautiful death.” It encompassed everything that the poet Tyrtaeus spoke of – advancing calmly in meeting your enemy. Never fleeing the battlefield, and embracing death Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 39 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 like a lover. In fact on campaign, the Spartans would make offerings to Eros, the god of love. The beautiful death was a sacrifice in the true sense of the word, turning something mortal into something sacred. The men that Leonidas chose to do the job for him here were all married, older, and with sons. He knew none of them would be coming back. The Spartans who fought at Thermopylae were a 300-­‐strong kamikaze squad. 46:40 – Leonidas and the Final Stand at Thermopylae, 480 BC For three days, the Greeks held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind their wall and then counter attacking in hoplite formation. Three times the Persians attacked; 3 times they were beaten back. Xerxes had almost given up, but then he was told of a secret path that went through the mountains and came out behind the Greek wall. When Leonidas discovered the Persians were on their way, he knew the game was up. Before long the Greeks would be surrounded. While there was still time for them to escape, Leonidas dismissed most of the Greek allies, setting the stage for one of history’s most celebrated last stands. On the final morning the Spartans followed their normal pre-­‐battle rituals. They stripped naked and exercised. They oiled their bodies, and combed each other’s long hair. They wrote their names out on little sticks and fastened them to their arms like dog tags so their bodies could be identified later. Persian spies observing these strange activities, reported them back to Xerxes, who found them laughable. It was said it looked as though they were getting ready for a party. In fact they were making themselves [Greek phrase]: “greater, more noble, more terrible.” Herodotus describes the final act: “In the morning, Xerxes poured a libation to the rising sun and the ordered the advance. The Greeks under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed forward into the widest part of the pass. They fought with reckless desperation, with swords if they had them, and if not, with their hands and teeth. Until the Persians, coming in from the front and closing in from behind, overwhelmed them.” Militarily speaking, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week, was soon rolling south again. Shortly afterwards, another battle took place, here in the Bay of Salamis, where a Greek fleet led by Athens destroyed the Persian ships. It was a scrappy hit-­‐and-­‐miss affair, but Salamis finished what Thermopylae had started. And the following year the Persians were finally driven out of Greece. In the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the imagination of the Greeks. Thermopylae was a stage upon which the Spartans played out the role they’d spent their lives preparing for. They’d shown the world the kind of place that Sparta was, and the kind of men it produced. They’d fulfilled the ideals of their city, and justified the claims of their utopia. And, by doing that, according to Herodotus, they had “laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame, in which no other city could share.” “Go tell the Spartams Stranger passing by That here, obedient to Their laws, we lie” Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 40 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 51:25 – The Rise of the Athenian Empire, 479-­‐431 BC For Sparta and Athens, the experience of the Persian invasion had been very different. Hundreds of miles from the front line, in the idyllic countryside of Laconia, the Spartan homeland had been untouched by the war. Whereas Athens itself had been invaded and its Acropolis destroyed, here in Sparta, in the rugged, enclosed peninsula of the Peloponnese, the war had seemed a distant affair. With peace restored, the Spartans quickly returned to their usual routines, the pursuit of physical and military perfection. This society was disciplined, obedient, and above all, willing to sacrifice the needs of the family and the individual for the good of the state. If necessary, to die for the cause. The cause was simple: protection of the utopia the Spartans thought they’d created. To do that, they needed to produce more of their famed hoplite warriors. But beyond that, the Spartans had few other ambitions. All they wanted was to maintain the status quo. But in postwar Athens, things were changing fast. The trauma of occupation, followed by the euphoria of victory, was transforming the city. Before the war, the foundations of democracy had been laid, but it was democracy in name only. In reality, it was men with money who had the say. Now, a massive power shift was taking place. Welcome to the cradle of democracy, an Athenian trireme. Powered by nearly two hundred oarsmen, it was seaborne battering rams like this that had annihilated the Persian fleet at Salamis. At the hour of crisis for Greece, it was the poor of Athens who’d squeezed down onto these cramped rowing benches and sent the triremes smashing into the hulls of their enemies. These were the have-­‐nots of the city, the bottom of the political pecking order. But after Salamis, all that changed. The oarsmen who’d endured the sweat and the stench and the terror of being down here had won an historic victory, and now they wanted to have their say. Athenian democracy was galvanized. The champion of the Athenian oarsmen was Pericles. He was a wealthy aristocrat, exactly the sort who’d ruled the so-­‐called democracy in Athens for generations. He was also shrewd enough to sense that things had changed, and ambitious enough to place himself at the head of that change. Pericles could see that in order to secure power, he needed to distance himself from the nobles, play to the gallery, and ingratiate himself with the people. He was a formidable orator, and his powers of argument and speech won them over. But it wasn’t just what Pericles said that impressed the citizens of Athens. He designed a mass civic building program that in effect would be a job-­‐creation scheme for the city’s poor. “All kinds of enterprises and demands will be created, which will provide inspiration for every art, find employment for every hand, and transform the whole people into wage-­‐earners, so that the city will decorate and maintain herself at the same time.” True to his word, Pericles opened the coffers of Athens to pay for public festivals and grandiose monuments like the Parthenon. But most significantly of all, he introduced state salaries for juries and war service. Now the oarsmen could trade in their rowing benches for seats of power in the city. For the first time in Athens, democracy was really coming to mean government by the people. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 41 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 And this is where its voice could be heard: the Athenian Agora. If the Acropolis was the soul of Athens, then the Agora was its beating heart. It was here that the day-­‐to-­‐day life of Athens took place. Artisans and lawyers, shopkeepers and philosophers, men from all walks of life rubbed shoulders here, creating the buzz and bustle of the most democratic city in Greece. Official posts were open to everyone, irrespective of their wealth and status. And you were expected to pull your weight and participate. On days when speeches and debates were heard, all the exits to the Agora were closed, apart from the one that led up to the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly sat. Slaves with ropes dipped in red paint would shivvy citizens up the slope, marking out for a fine any who dragged their feet or tried to slip away. In Athens, democracy was enforced as rigorously as military discipline was in Sparta. But it wasn’t just Athenian political life that had been revolutionized after the defeat of Persia. Everything from commerce to culture was infused with energy and new thinking. Although the Greek alliance had emerged victorious from the war, Persia remained a constant threat. The cities of Greece needed a leader to carry on the fight against the enemy from the East. Sparta had no desire to take on the job. So while it turned its attentions inward, Athens, this confident, outgoing democracy, took the helm, and set its course in a different direction. Unlike Sparta, happily landlocked in the Peloponnese, Athens had always been half in love with the sea. With the defeat of the Persians, that love affair was formalized. When the city was physically linked to the Port of Piraeus by defensive walls, the walls meant that Athens now was officially a sea power, will that implied in terms of trade, the movement of people in and out, an the potential for empire building. The Athenians devoured their own city to build their walls, scavenging raw materials from public monuments, even using headstones from graveyards. The result was twelve miles of imposing fortifications, erected in record time. As a statement of intent, it certainly packed a punch. A defensive shield designed to keep the wealth of Athens in, and unwanted busybodies from neighboring states out. Athens became of the policeman of the eastern Mediterranean. Its allies were expected to tow the line and foot the bill, and if anyone objected, they’d soon find an Athenian fleet in their harbor. It was “trireme diplomacy.” This shift in the balance of power could hardly have been missed by Sparta. The burgeoning Athenian fleet was evidence enough. But when Sparta discovered that Athens had been building walls, there was even more cause for concern. The Spartans disliked walls, because walls defined cities. Cities, if you weren’t careful, encouraged other things, like democracy, and if there was one thing Spartans distrusted more than walls, it was democracy. Sparta famously had no walls. It was said, “Its walls were its young men, and its borders, the tips of their spears.” For the Spartans, it wasn’t laws, or walls, or magnificent public buildings that made a city. It was their own ideals. In essence, Sparta was a city of the head and the heart, and it existed in its purest form in the disciplined march of a hoplite phalanx on their way to war. 1:00:25 – Contrasts between Athens and Sparta: The Role of Women Athens and Sparta represented two radically different ways of being. Choosing between them would seem to present no difficulties. Sparta was militaristic and xenophobic. Athens was dynamic and open to the world. But of course things are never that simple. Athens could be Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 42 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 imperialist, arrogant, and aggressive. And its democracy excluded women, foreigners, and slaves. But for the Greeks, their main problem with Athenian politics was its volatility, and the threat that posed to their cherished value of eunomia, or good order. Pindar, the fifth century poet, called êunomia the secure foundation stone of cities, and the Greeks knew from bitter experience what happened when this foundation was threatened. Civil war between the haves and the have-­‐nots, fields left unharvested, blood in the streets. The Spartan system, on the other hand, with its peculiar blend of equality and elitism, held many attractions for the Greeks. Its emphasis on the common good, duty, and cohesion seemed to guarantee good order. But, for the other Greeks, good order in Sparta was compromised by its extraordinary attitude to sexual politics. Because when it came to women, conservative Sparta was positively radical. If you were a woman, life in fifth century Athens can’t have been much fun. The city may have been at the cutting edge of all that was good in art and architecture and democracy, but these were intended for the consumption of men. Female achievement consisted primarily of playing the part of dutiful, shadowy wife. In fact, in most of Ancient Greece, women were expected to be neither seen nor heard. The historian Xenophon recommended that they stay indoors, and for the orator Pericles, it was shameful if they were even mentioned in public. Athenian women led a very sheltered existence. Apart from training for domestic duties, they were given as little education as possible. In a society where women had no say, education must have seemed at best pointless, and at worst dangerous. As one comic poet put it: “Teach women letters? A serious mistake, like giving extra venom to a terrifying snake.” An Athenian girl could be married off as young as twelve, to a man chosen for her. She’d be taken away from her family, and would disappear into her husband’s house. A woman’s role was to manage the family and do the chores, grind corn, wash, or bake bread. Rich women who had slaves to take care of the drudgery would spin and sew. There would be the occasional sortie outside, to attend to domestic matters, or go a religious ceremony. But basically, life was confined within four walls. In Sparta, by contrast, women were everywhere. Imagine airlifting all the men between the age of seven and sixty out of the street, and you get a feeling of what it must have been like. For a start, there were more girls than boys, because they weren’t victims of a state program of infanticide. And if men weren’t away fighting or training, they were relaxing with their male colleagues in the common messes. Women would have dominated the day-­‐to-­‐day life of the city. The simple visibility of Spartan women made them objects of fear and fascination to non-­‐
Spartan men. Homer called Sparta “the land of beautiful women.” The beauty of Helen of Troy, originally Helen of Sparta, was legendary. Of course, not every Spartan woman who looked at herself in a mirror like this could have lived up to her standards, but they were uniquely fit. Spartan girls had an upbringing unparalleled anywhere else in Greece. For starts, they were fed the same rations as boys, and allowed to drink wine. The state taught them how to sing and dance, to wrestle, to throw the javelin and discus, and they were encouraged to be every bit as competitive as the boys. Girls and boys would exercise naked, but there was nothing immodest about it. Nudity was the norm because it was thought to banish prudery and encourage fitness. It paid off. Physically they were outstanding. There’s a great scene in the comedy Lysistrata by the Athenian Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 43 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 playwright Aristophanes. A group of Athenian women crowd around a Spartan woman called Lampeto. “What a gorgeous creature,” they say, “what healthy skin, what firmness of physique.” And one of them adds, “I’ve never seen a pair of breasts like that.” To which Lampeto proudly responds, “I go to the gym. I make my buttocks hard.” When you see these lead votive offerings of dancers here in the Sparta museum, you can understand why Spartan women were the subject of such lurid speculation amongst Athenian men. One of the most important virtues of Athenian women was “wise restraint.” Well, there’s not much of that in evidence here in these uninhibited dancers. Even after thousands of years, you can sense the energy and almost smell the sweat. Spartan dancers were famous for their vitality. In one particularly athletic version, women had to jump up and drum their buttocks with their heels as many times as possible. It’s incredibly difficult, but most importantly for the ancients, it revealed a large amount of naked thigh, which is probably where Spartan girls earned their nickname, “thigh flashers.” As part of their state education, the “thigh flashers” would come down here to the banks of the Eurotas in what one poet described as “the ambrosial night.” The poet comes on to evoke scenes of ritual ecstatic dances and choral contests, the girls singing to each other of a limb-­‐
loosening desire, tossing their long hair, being ridden like horses, and exhausted by love. It’s no surprise that Sparta was one of the few ancient cities that had the reputation for encouraging girl on girl sex. 1:08:40 – Spartan Family Life: Marriage and Child Rearing Women and men in Sparta were used to living separate lives. At the age of seven, boys would be sent away to the agoge, the tough, uncompromising Spartan system where they’d be schooled in the art of war. Male bonding wasn’t just encouraged; it was compulsory. At the age of twelve, a boy was paired with an older man, usually on of the unmarried warriors, aged between twenty and thirty. This man would have looked after the boy’s material needs, and was responsible for his care and conduct. He was a surrogate mother and father, as well as a teacher and mentor. But he was also a lover. For institutionalized pederasty was a part and parcel of life for the Spartan warriors. These intimate relationships seemed to have had lasting psychological and emotional effects on the men. When the time came for them to get married, it must have been a difficult adjustment to make. But the pragmatic Spartans came up with an unusual way to help them through their wedding night. The Spartans practiced a custom called “marriage by capture.” On her wedding night, a bride would have her head shaved like a small boy in the agoge. She’d be dressed in a man’s cloak and sandals and left alone in a dark room. Meanwhile, her husband would quietly live the common mess, come to her, lay her down on a straw pallet, have sex with her, and then slip back to sleep with his comrades as usual. This wasn’t just a quaint wedding night ritual. It could carry on for months, or even years. There’s much debate about the significance of this bizarre ritual. But it seems obvious that it was a piece of sexual theater designed to acclimatize men to the presence of women, when, up until then, their only experience of sex had been with other men. And yet, however hard the Spartans tried to make marriage to their young men, persuading them to do their duty could be problematic. According to one story, which is probably Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 44 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 exaggerated but too good not to repeat, Spartan women would beat men about the head and then drag them around an altar to get them to commit. There’s another, more credible account, that goes something like this. Unmarried men were stripped naked and forced to march round the marketplace in the middle of winter, singing a humiliating song about how their punishment was just and fair because they’d flouted the laws. Sparta was no place for a confirmed bachelor. The treatment meted out to these men may seem extreme, but its severity stemmed from a very real need: to produce the next generation of warriors. The obsession with competition and physical fitness for girls reflected the same anxiety. Women were well fed and well treated because healthy women were more likely to produce healthy babies. This is probably a fragment of a sculpture of Lethea, the goddess of childbirth. What’s certain is that she’s in labor. There are spirits on either side of her touching her belly, helping her get through those terrible pains. Spartan women would have paid this image a lot of respect because of the constant pressure on them to keep producing sturdy, male children. It was a huge priority for the Spartans to keep the numbers of their warrior elite high. There were never that many of them, at most ten thousand, a number which steadily declined throughout the fifth century. One reason was that Spartan girls wouldn’t get married until they were eighteen, and biys until they were 28 or 29, incredibly late by Greek standards. But Spartan women weren’t just baby makers. At a time when Greek women were expected to be invisible, they had power and responsibility in their own right. In fact, they were so cocksure, they dared to take on the men in politics, on the streets, and even in that most sacred bastion, the sporting arena. 1:13:20 – Freedoms for Spartan Women It wasn’t just Spartan women’s physicality that shocked the outside world. Their freedom was equally notorious. Aristotle described the place as a “gynocratia,” a state rune by women. And he didn’t mean it as a compliment. In Athens and other Greek cities, women were not allowed to own land or control large amounts of wealth. Heiresses and widows married according to the wishes of fathers or brothers, usually to cousins or uncles, in order to keep the wealth in the family. And with the exception of traveling in ox-­‐drawn carts to weddings and funerals, riding would have been out of the question. But in Sparta, women had the keys to the coffers. They could be landowners and property holders in their own right. They could inherit estates, and even seemed to have the right to choose who or even whether to marry. So you have to imagine these economically independent women riding out to oversee their estates and slaves, cracking the whip and running things. Unless you believe the myth of the Amazons, this was a sight unprecedented anywhere else in the ancient world. Whereas laws in Athens were drawn up that restricted women’s visibility in public, some Spartan women actually achieved the unthinkable: they became celebrities. The most famous example was Kyniska, a Spartan princess and in her day, a sporting legend. Kyniska means “Little Hound,” and she was obviously a tomboy from a sporty family. The names of her female relations translate as things like “Well Horsed,” “Flash of Lightning,” and “She Who Leads from the Front.” But it would be Kyniska who would go down in the history books as the owner of a champion of chariot team. Kyniska was an equestrian expert and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer. She didn’t race herself, but employed men to drive, and Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 45 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 she made no secret of her ambition. She entered her team at the Olympic games, the showcase for outstanding athletes from all over the Greek world. It won. Men were astounded. Four years later, she entered again. She won again. The bitter irony is that Kyniska probably didn’t see her victories. At Olympia, the usual all-­‐male rules applied. But she made certain that the world wouldn’t miss out on her success. She dedicated a monument to herself, right in the heart of the Olympic sanctuary. The inscription read: “I Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift footed horses, have erected this statue, and declare that I am the only woman in all of Greece to have won this crown.” But women weren’t only powerful in the sporting arena. Spartan women also played a role in the political life of the city. They were trained to speak in public, and although they had no official place in the decision-­‐making process, they made sure their opinions were heard. And it was the women who seemed to have been the most vociferous when it came to enforcing the warrior ethic. Sparta’s unwritten laws were policed at street level by a kind of community based rough justice. Women were in the forefront, praising the brace and insulting cowards as they passed. You get an idea of the kind of things they’d have called out from a collection called “The Sayings of the Spartan Women.” In Athens, silence was a mark of breeding. But Spartan girls were positively lippy. They were masters in the art of laconic speaking, named after Laconia, heartland of Sparta. Deployed properly, a laconic phrase could drw blood from the skin of even the most armor-­‐plated warrior. When a warrior was describing the brave death of a comrade, a woman said, “Such a noble journey. Shouldn’t you have gone too?” A man complained that his sword was too short. His mother replied, “Take a step forward and it would be long enough.” Although Spartan women enjoyed freedom of speech and financial liberty, it would be a mistake to paint a picture of Sparta as a kind of feminist wonderland. You should think of Spartan women as regimental wives, the backbone of the system, breeding sons and then surrendering them to the agoge when they turned seven. Because Sparta was constantly anxious about its decline in birthrate, every Spartan boy must have been the apple of his mother’s eye. Helots were there to do the domestic chores, and there was plenty of time to dote on little Leonidas. But when the time came to send him off to the agoge, though it must have been a wrench, it was done without hesitation. This was Sparta, and maternal instincts came a poor second to the interests of the state. Our concept of motherhood is of a tender, supportive relationship between mother and child. But in Sparta, there was little room for sentimentality. In a state where unswerving obedience to the warrior code was rated more highly than life itself, mothers wanted to make absolutely sure their sons did their duty. Their approach was more Nazi than nurture. When a son left for battle, his mother would issue a traditional farewell: “With your shield, or on it.” In other words, either come back victorious, or come back dead. But if a son failed to live up to this injunction, he could expect little sympathy from mom. One story goes that a mother, confronting her runaway son, hitched up her skirts and asked him if he intended to crawl back where he’d come from. Following the defeat of Persia, there’d been few opportunities for Spartan men to make their mothers proud. But that was all about to change. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 46 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 1:20:50 – Underlying Causes of War between Sparta and Athens, beginning 465 BC Since the Persian invasion, Sparta and Athens had coexisted peacefully. Against all the odds, the alliance had held firm. But given the huge ideological differences between these two Greek superpowers, it was almost inevitable that at some point mutual mistrust would boil over into outright conflict. In the end, it took one catastrophic event to shake the foundations of the alliance, and set Sparta and Athens on a collision course. In the year 465 BC, a series of massive earthquakes hit Sparta. The consequences were devastating. The loss of life was immense. But the earthquakes also gave a golden opportunity to Sparta’s enemy within, the huge population of helots, whose slave labor propped up the Spartan system. In the aftermath of the earthquakes, the helots seized their chance and revolted. The rebel slaves came here to Mount Athone, at the heart of Messene, the homeland that had been taken from them by the Spartans. They fortified the position and waited for the Spartans to come. For all its fearsome reputation, Sparta failed to put down the revolt. And with the conflict dragging on, it was forced to appeal to Athens and its other allies for assistance. Spartan allies sent over troops to put down the revolt, and the Athenians brought in siege equipment, technology not developed by the hidebound Spartans. It was then that the Spartans began to fret. Enslavement of the Messenians had always been a slightly sticky issue. As a whole, the Greeks had absolutely no problem with slavery. But when it came to subjugating an entire native Greek population, it was less easy to swallow. The Spartans knew this, and that’s when paranoia set in. What would happen if the Athenians sided with the rebels, or even worse, spread the virus of democracy among Spartan citizens themselves? It was a risk not worth taking, and they sent the Athenians home. Athens took serious offense at its dismissal by the Spartans. Being summarily sent home with no explanation was not the treatment they’d expected from an ally, who they’d only been trying to help. The Athenians tore up the old treaty of alliance, and began to collude with Sparta’s enemies. And to add insult to injury, they even helped the rebels who’d managed to escape by setting them up in a new city. It was the beginning of open hostilities. Sparta and Athens would soon be at war. This time, with each other. 1:24:10 – The Peloponnesian War: The First Phase, 431-­‐421 BC When the war between Athens and Sparta finally came, it had many apparent causes. But the simple truth was that over a period of fifty years, Sparta had allowed Athens to get so powerful that its own sphere of influence on the mainland of the Peloponnese was now under threat. Seizing upon a rather flimsy pretext, Sparta declared war in 431 BC. It sent troops to invade Athenian territory. They forced their way to within seven miles of the hated city walls of Athens itself. The onetime allies were now mortal enemies. The Athenian casualties of the first year of the war were given a ceremonial burial in this graveyard outside the city. Here, in their honor, Pericles delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd. Pericles’ Funeral Oration has gone down in history as one of the all-­‐time great war speeches. It’s based on a simple and satisfying proposition: Everything that we the Athenians do is right, and everything our enemies the Spartans do is wrong. “The Spartans from their earliest boyhood are submitted to the most laborious training in courage. We pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 47 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 same dangers as they are. We meet danger voluntarily, with natural rather state-­‐induced courage.” Pericles’ speech is a rally cry in defense of a way of being, a call to arms against an enemy whose social system, politics, and even character were so alien as to make peaceful coexistence impossible. The speech set the tone for an all-­‐out war that would be unprecedented in its scale and savagery. History would know it as the Peloponnesian War, but in fact it would rage from Sicily in the west to the Hellespont in the east, and would last for more than two decades. The vicious fighting dragged on as neither side was able to land the killer blow. The war quickly became a stalemate, with Sparta dominant on land, and Athens at sea. Every year for five years, Spartan armies laid waste to Athenian territory, burning farms and destroying crops. The Athenians fled from the countryside, and withdrew behind the walls that connected their city to the Port of Piraeus. They became in effect islanders, marooned and reliant on their fleet to keep them supplied. Within a year, plague came to the overcrowded city. Corpses were piled high in the streets, and almost a third of the population of Athens was wiped out. The historian Thucydides described the sufferings of the Athenian plague victims as almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure. Wealth and power were no protection. Pericles himself succumbed to the virulent disease. For Sparta, the decimation of Athens and its leaders was proof that the gods were on their side. But gods can be fickle. According to Thucydides, who was an eyewitness to much of the war, nothing shocked the Greeks so much as something that happened on that island in Sparta’s very own backyard. Pylos was a port on the west coast of the Peloponnese, and of major strategic importance to the Spartans. In the year 425 BC, it was seized by the Athenian army, helped by the former slaves who’d revolted against Sparta after the earthquake. The Spartans couldn’t stomach this provocation, and sent an army to retake Pylos. They laid siege to the Athenians in the town, and set up a smaller unit on the mile-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half of rock that stretches across Pylos Bay, the island of Sphacteria. Their plan was to blockade the Athenians by land and water. But I think they’d forgotten who they were dealing with. The Athenians were totally at home on the sea, and within a few days had sent a large fleet into Pylos Bay. They seized control of all of these waters. The tables had been turned. Sparta was forced to withdraw, leaving behind the 400 or so troops who’d been posted on the island of Sphacteria. They were trapped, and for 72 days there was a standoff. The stalemate was finally broken when the Spartans scored a spectacular “own goal.” A group of soldiers stupidly let a campfire get out of control. It raged across the island, burning off all the protective cover. The Spartans had nowhere to hide. The Athenians could now see exactly how many they were and where they were. The Athenians decided to try and take the island, with 800 archers and 800 lightly-­‐armed troops. The Athenians landed, but they refused to fight the Spartans at close quarters. Instead, they picked them off with javelins and arrows and rocks. Whenever the Spartan phalanx advanced, the Athenians retreated. Soon it was the Spartans who were backing off, leaving some 300 dead, while the survivors headed to a defensive position on the north end of the island. An Athenian commander sent an detachment of archers to cut them off from behind. The Spartans were surrounded. It looked as if this were going to be a mini-­‐
Thermopylae in the making. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 48 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 Over 50 years before, King Leonidas and his 300 hand-­‐picked troops had sacrificed their lives for the glory of Sparta at the Battle of Thermopylae. For the Spartans on Sphacteria, there was no higher ideal to aspire to. Hopelessly outnumbered by the Athenians, this was their chance to emulate the heroics of their grandfathers and bring honor to the state. They knew exactly what was expected of them: a heroic struggle, a beautiful death, and the final test passed. But that wasn’t what happened at all. The Athenians were far too smart. They held back for a while, and then politely sent over a herald to ask if the Spartans would like to surrender. And unbelievably, that’s exactly what they did. If we were talking about anyone other than Spartans, surrender wouldn’t have been a surprise. After all, these half-­‐starved men had been trapped on the island for more than two months and used by the Athenian archers daily for target practice. But these were Spartans. They’d spent their lives preparing to die fighting. Surrender shouldn’t have been an option. So maybe Pericles had been right in his famous speech, with its mockery of the Spartans’ state-­‐induced courage. On this occasion, that manufactured bravery had been undermined by the tactical cat-­‐
and-­‐mouse mind games of the Athenians. First, they’d refused to give the Spartans what they wanted, a stand-­‐up fight. And then they’d given them something they’d never expected, an opt-­‐
out clause from their death-­‐or-­‐glory contract. The myth of Spartan invincibility had been comprehensibly shattered. For Athens, it was a victory to savor. There’s a remarkable relic from that shocking defeat here in Athens. It’s a shield, probably taken from one of the hoplites who’d thrown in the towel. Judging from its condition, whoever it belonged to would have been put through the mill. You can just about make out an inscription on its battered surface that would have been punched in at a later date. It simply reads: “Taken by the Athenians from the Laconians at Pylos. It’s a terse, triumphant message. Along with this trophy, 120 Spartans were brought to the city as hostages. If Sparta made so much as a move on Athenian territory, they were to be executed. The Spartan hostages were objects of fascination in Athens, where they were displayed in public like exotic animals. You can imagine the Athenians jostling to gawk a their strange captives, sizing them up, jeering. Thucydides tells us that one of the crowd asked mockingly, if the real Spartans had died on the island. “Spindles would be worth a great deal,” came the Spartan reply, “if they could mark out brave men from cowards.” Spindles was the Spartan word for arrows, a weapon they considered wimpy and womanish because they killed from a long distance. It was meant to be a crushing response delivered in true laconic style, but it comes across as plain sulky. Sparta was so rattled by the events on Sphacteria that it immediately sued for peace. But Athens was in no mood to be generous. It capitalized on its advantage and held out for better terms. It would be five years before the Spartan hostages saw their home again. But when they returned, they suffered none of the punishments usually meted out to so-­‐called tremblers. They were not stripped of their citizenship, they were not forbidden to walk around with cheerful faces, and they were not beaten up in the streets. For once, the women kept their cutting comments to themselves. Spartan society was pole-­‐axed. But before long the laughter and mockery of the Athenians would be silenced, as the final act of this bloody war was played out. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 49 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 1:35:45 – The Oracle at Delphi and the Interlude of Peace, 421-­‐415 BC This is Delphi, one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Greece. To the Greeks, it was the omphalos, the navel of the world, an umbilical cord connecting them to their archaic past, when the distance between heaven and earth didn’t seem so great. But as well as providing a link to the past, Delphi was also a window on the future, thanks to its famous oracle. The oracle offered an appealing combination of contact with the spirit world, and concrete day-­‐to-­‐day advice. If you had a question about anything, from foreign affairs to love affairs, you’d come here. Should we invade Attica this summer? Will I marry Leander or Leonidas? Your answers came via a strange phenomenon in the Greek world, a Pythia. This prophetess was an old woman who wore young virgin’s clothes. She’d get herself into a state of ecstatic frenzy by using hallucinogenic plants, chewing on laurel leaves or inhaling smoking henbane. She’d babble away, and her utterances, which appeared to be divinely inspired, would be written down by a priest. He’d then turn these into elegant hexameter verse, and, there was your oracle. Oracles were notoriously ambiguous, and the true meaning of their utterances often became clear only after the event. Perhaps that’s why places like Delphi were, by the end of the fifth century BC, becoming just a little bit old-­‐fashioned. A new spirit of skepticism and rationality was abroad in Greece. And fundamental beliefs about men, the gods, and the universe were being called into question. Nowhere more so than in Athens, where philosophers speculated that the sun was a red hot rock, and the playwright Aristophanes joked, thunder was just a bad case of cosmic indigestion. But elsewhere in Greece, notions like this were simply unthinkable. In Sparta, safe and secure in the Eurotas valley, it was still possible to believe that the gods were in their heaven and all was right with the world. Sparta had once been a revolutionary society, but that was 250 years ago. Now, the revolution that had created its unique social system had become embalmed in tradition. Sparta’s warrior elite had become suspicious of change, and hostile to the new. For a decade now, Sparta had been at war with Athens, its former ally, the force of radical democracy and, more and more these days, skepticism about the powers of the Delphic oracle. For the conservative-­‐minded Spartans, on the other hand, oracles remained articles of faith. And when the Pythia gabbled, they listened. So, if in 415 BC, some Spartans had come here demanding to know what the future had in store for their city, and assuming the Pythia was on form that day, they’d have come home with deeply disturbing news. Soon they’d see the walls of the city of their greatest enemy reduced to rubble, and would gorge themselves on the fruits of victory. But that victory would turn rotten. And it would be the turn of the Spartans to taste the bitterness of total defeat. 1:40:00 – Renewal of the Peloponnesian War: The Athenian Invasion of Sicily, 415 BC The war between Sparta and Athens had been bloody and inconclusive. Ten years of fighting had produced plenty of killing, but no killer blow. Following devastating plague in Athens, and a military humiliation for the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, the two sides had finally Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 50 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 concluded an armistice and withdrew to lick their wounds. After six years of uneasy peace, the wounds would be spectacularly reopened in Syracuse, on the island of Sicily. It was here hundreds of miles from Greece itself, that the most significant battle in the conflict between Sparta and Athens took place. For Athens, it would end in a defeat of seismic proportions. And what happened after, would surpass in brutality everything that had gone before in this pitiless war. Syracuse had been founded in the period of colonization which had created Greek cities all over the Mediterranean and beyond. In the war that turned the whole of the Greek world into two armed camps, it was allied to Sparta. In the year 415, war fever swept Athens, and its focus was Syracuse. One of the loudest voices in the campaign for war against Syracuse belonged to Alcibiades. He was clever, good-­‐looking, and in many ways the quintessential Athenian. He was popular with the people, and a fan of the new learning that had taken root in Athens. Socrates was one of his friends. But his enemies circulated rumors about him, saying he was an atheist and mocked the gods. Alcibiades was a hard liver, given to wine and women, despite the scoldings of his wise friend, Socrates. During the plagues that had devastated Athens, it was said that dissipation had tipped over into something worse. As the death toll mounted, and the city despaired, he was rumored to have shown his scorn for the gods by profaning sacred rites. And yet despite his dubious reputayion, when Alcibiades talked war, the Athenians listened. In a war between a city of soldiers and a democracy, it’s only too easy to assume it’s the warriors who are spoiling for a fight. But in fact the Athenians were always keen to flex their imperial muscle. It was actually said it was easier to get 30,000 Athenians to agree to fight than a single Spartan. So on this occasion, Alcibiades’ gung-­‐ho appeal pushed all the right buttons. But before the fleet could get underway, an outrageous act of sacrilege rocked the city. Over the course of a single night, an attack was made by persons unknown on the Herme, good luck statues that could be found all over Athens. According to the more polite accounts, the statues were left without noses. In reality, the vandals targeted the Herme’s prominent phalluses, a double blow against the city’s good fortune and virility. Despite the bad omens and the accusations flying around, the Athenian fleet set sail, and Alcibiades went along too. But his enemies capitalized on his absence. They blackened his reputation and spread rumors about him. Eventually, they got the city authorities to recall him, to face charges of conspiracy and sacrilege. Alcibiades knew all about the fickleness of the Athenians. He was, after all, a master at manipulating them for his own ends. Reckoning his chances for a fair hearing as slim, he went on the run. Where he ended up, amazed everyone. He came to Sparta, and set about winning for himself a new, and highly unlikely following. Alcibiades, the crowd-­‐pleaser, pulled off the performance of a lifetime. His cloak was more ragged, his food poorer than even the most hardline Spartan. But it wasn’t done completely cynically. He was a sworn enemy of Sparta, but his background was riddled with Spartan connections. His family, like many other aristocratic Athenians, were Lacono-­‐philes, men who were in love with the values of Laconia, the Spartan homeland. Alcibiades himself was given a Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 51 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 Spartan name. He was even wet-­‐nursed by a Spartan nanny. He could play “the Spartan” with real conviction. And the real Spartans were simply bowled over. And it wasn’t just the Spartan crowds that fell for Alcibiades’ formidable charms. The rumor was that he also made a conquest of Timaea, the wife of the Spartan king, Agis. Sparta’s sexual codes were notoriously at odds with the rest of Greece. Elsewhere, adultery was punishable by death. But in Sparta, married women could, with the consent of their husbands, enjoy multiple sexual partners. Now, if you’re thinking swingers, think again. Free love wasn’t the motivation. The Spartans were acutely anxious about the decline in their population. Monogamy and the nuclear family weren’t important. What mattered was producing healthy male children, and therefore you could choose your lover if he was strong, courageous, and fertile. It’s not clear whether King Agis was a cuckold or an accomplice when his wife put Spartan ideals into practice. But what’s certain is that the love affair would have consequences long after Alcibiades left the scene. Alcibiades repaid Spartan hospitality by revolutionizing their military thinking. He advised them to come to the aid of their allies in Syracuse, something the Spartans had been reluctant to do. Alcibiades convinced them to send a Spartan general, Gylippus, to help oversee the defenses, a low cost way of honoring their commitments. The advice would prove fatal to thousands of his fellow Athenians. The expedition against Syracuse started well, but with the arrival of the Spartan general Gylippus, things began to go wrong for Athens. Gylippus wasn’t a brilliant tactician, he didn’t bring huge reinforcements, and there was no secret weapon hidden underneath his scarlet cloak. But the mere presence of a Spartan warrior raised the morale of the beleaguered Syracusans. They began to fight back. Athens had to send reinforcements. They launched a massive night attack on a string of hill forts overlooking the city. Inch by inch, they fought their way to the top, and at one point, it looked like they might succeed. But by dawn, the Athenian soldirs were exhausted, and were pushed right back to their camp in the harbor. Now, all they wanted was to get out of Syracuse. But on the very eve of departure, nature, or the gods, took a hand. Though the Athenians had the reputation for being the most godless of the Greeks, no one was rash enough to ignore an omen as dramatic as an eclipse of the moon. The priests of the army camp advised them to hold tight, and promised that by the time of the next full moon, the omens would be better. It was a bad call. Gylippus ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of Syracuse harbor. The Athenians were trapped. In the fighting that followed, thousands of Athenian troops died. They were perhaps the lucky ones. It would be the survivors who would pay the full price for Alcibiades’ treachery. The survivors, some 7,000 of them, were taken here to the stone quarries outside town. Now the quarries have been landscaped, so you have to imagine how it was then. A narrow, rocky chasm, no shade, no water, nothing. Thousands of prisoners were kept here for months. Many were wounded and dying, and spent their last days baked by the sun in the dog days of summer, and then when summer turned to autumn, frozen at night. They were given hardly any food and water. Diseases soon broke out. And because it was impossible to bury the dead, corpses were stacked and left to rot. As well as hardship, hunger, and disease, there were summary Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 52 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 executions and torture. The Syracusans would bring their children to the quarry’s edge to mock the defeated enemy. And, in this cathedral-­‐sized mine, the Syracusans spiced up the routine brutalities with a dash of high culture. For the Athenians, there was only one path to survival. The Syracusans were passionate about the playwright Euripides. Prisoners who could recite his verses were brought here to this natural concert hall. If they performed in a style that pleased their tormentors, they were let out, to be sold on into slavery. If you didn’t come up to scratch, you were left to die. There’s one line of Euripides that goes, “Unhappy Greeks, barbarians to each other.” I wonder if any of them were brace or foolhardy enough to quote it. 1:51:20 – The Peloponnesian War: The Second Phase, 415-­‐404 BC On the night that news of the military disaster reached Athens, it was said that a wail of grief could be heard passing along the walls, as the story was carried from the port up to the city itself. The failure of the adventure plunged Athens into despair. The years of war were taking their toll. Athens was weakened, and its citizens dragged down by the hardships of life on the home front. In the law courts of the Agora, the pulsing heart of the city, one man complained that his mother was reduced to earning her living as a nurse and a ribbon-­‐seller. “We do not live as we would like,” he said, with poignant understatement. Syracuse should have paved the way for total victory for the Spartans. Slow-­‐footed and cautious as ever, they failed to capitalize on Athenian disarray. After a year of turmoil, Athens pulled itself back from the brink, and turned to face the old enemy once again. But defeat for Athens had only been deferred. The man who delivered the final blow was called Lysander. He was a Spartan, but by no means a typical one. His origins were humble. He was a mothax. It translates as bastard. But it meant that, while his father was a full Spartan citizen, his mother was a helot, possibly even one of the despised Messenians whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the Spartan utopia. Despite this mixed parentage, Lysander qualified for admission to the agoge, the brutal training system that turned Spartan boys into Spartan warriors. But what Lysander lacked in social standing, he made up for in very un-­‐Spartan [?naous], and soon emerged from the pack as a military leader and shrewd political operator. Lysander’s politicking included wooing the Persian Empire, whose invasion 70 years before had briefly united the fractious Greeks under the leadership of Sparta and Athens. Now that Greeks were killing Greeks, Persia’s autocratic kings were content to stand on the sidelines, handing out gold to whichever side seemed likeliest to serve their interests. Most Spartans claimed to hate the Persians. They despised their dissipation and sycophancy. All that bowing and scraping to one man who was himself above the rule of law. But Lysander was perfectly happy to put traditional Spartan ideals behind him and suck up to the Persians, if that’s what it took to get the coffers open. He forged a close, personal friendship with Cyrus, the king’s son. Funds materialized, and at a strike, the pay rate of the Spartan fleet increased by 25%. Freelance oarsmen and mercenaries went with the money, and it was said that the Athenian ships were emptied overnight. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 53 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 Fueled by Persian gold, Lysander’s fleet was able to defeat Athens and her allies time and time again. Eventually, he was able to impose a naval blockade, cutting Athens off from its grain supplies. The climax came in the year 405 BC, when Lysander encountered a large Athenian fleet. As ever, he outfoxed them refusing to come to battle, making them think he was scared, and then striking when their guard was down. The Athenians were routed, and their city was at Lysander’s mercy. As soon as Athens capitulated, resentment and jealousy, simmering for decades within the Greek world, boiled over into full-­‐scale vengeance. One Theban said that the city should be razed to the ground, and the land turned over to sheep. But the Spartans didn’t get hysterical. Despite the years of fighting and huge loss of life, they calmly set out their terms: the removal of the democratic government, the reduction of the Athenian fleet to three ships, and then, and this time you can sense their pleasure, the total destruction of the city walls, the walls that Sparta had scorned for so long. And as the city walls burnt down, and Sparta was recognized as the ruler of the Greek world, Lysander watched the flute girls, Athenians prostitutes who camped round the city, changing sides, dancing in the embers, serenading the death of an empire. Pro-­‐Spartan collaborators took over the city, and blood flowed in the streets as old scores were settled. Among the victims was Alcibiades. In spite of his defection to Sparta, he’d somehow managed to sweet talk his way back into the affections of the Athenians. In the wake of defeat, he was seen as someone who might eventually lead a fight back, which was doubtless why the order came from Sparta to have him quickly bumped off. Lysander chose to mark the victory over Athens at Delphi. He built for himself a grandiose monument that made a mockery of the Spartan code of understatement and self-­‐effacement. Now all that’s left is the base, but once this monument would have been crowded with thirty more-­‐than-­‐life-­‐size bronze statues, representing Lysander’s friends and supporters, the men who’d helped him his victory. And right in the center stood Lysander himself, being crowned by none other than the god of the sea, Poseidon. As a piece of self-­‐advertisement, it was positively shameless. Astute as ever, Lysander realized that victory over Athens had changed everything. Sparta was now the most powerful city-­‐state in the Greek world, an imperial power if it chose to go down that route. And Lysander had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan world order. 1:59:00 – Rivalries in Sparta, @400 BC This is Sparta, in the year 400 BC, four years after its defeat of Athens. On the surface, things were just as Spartans liked them, unchanged. Their Shangri-­‐La is safe and secure, the river Eurotas flows, the mountains are full of game, the fields are fertile, the helot slaves are quiet, and the unique social system, designed to produce the best warriors in the world, has emerged intact from decades of war. But within a generation, the Spartans, who had boasted that their women had never withheld the campfires of their enemies, would witness exactly that, and the dismantling of their utopia. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 54 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 The collapse of Sparta didn’t exactly come out of the blue. Sometime in the year 400, an oracle, one of those messages from the gods to which the Spartans paid strict attention, had started to circulate in the city. “Roasting Sparta, be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship. Unlooked for ordeals and numberless trials shall oppress you. And the stormy blows of man-­‐killing war shall roll down upon you.” Most oracles were ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness, but this one was very explicit. It seemed to refer directly to a power struggle that even then was being played out in Sparta. King Agis was dead, and there were two contenders for the vacant throne. His son, Latyhedas, and his half-­‐brother, Agiselaus. The succession should have been straightforward. Latyhedas was the heir apparent. The throne was him by right. And besides, Agiselaus had been born lame. This is the place where Spartan children who were imperfect in any way would usually end up, as a small pile of bones in the place of rejection. But if you were of royal blood, then normal rules didn’t apply. So, Agiselaus was spared. At the age of seven, he was enrolled in the agoge, the Spartan education system that took boys and turned them into warriors. No other member of the Spartan royal family had ever been subjected to the agoge, but despite his disability, Agiselaus thrived in the competitive atmosphere. When King Agis died, Agiselaus was confident enough to bid for the throne. But it was just then that the troubling oracle began to circulate. The reference to a crippled kingship seemed unambiguously to point to his own disability, and the threatened consequences were dire. But oracles were only as good as the interpretations that were placed on them. And on this occasion, an alternative was supplied by none other than Lysander. For an old fox like Lysander, twisting an oracle to serve political sends presented no problems. All he had to do was remind the Spartans of a little bit of recent history. Did anyone recall, he wondered, when that slippery poseur Alcibiades was in town the rumors connecting him with the king’s wife, Timaea? And wasn’t it also said that, when she was nursing her baby son, Lythedas, who incidentally arrived nine months or so after the Athenian left town, she constantly whispered into his ear the name Alcibiades? Lysander’s innuendoes did the trick, allowing the Spartans to believe that “crippled” could mean illegitimate. The son was out; the uncle was in. And so Agiselaus came to the throne, the most Spartan king Sparta had ever known. A typical product of the agoge, his belief in the rightness of the Spartan system was absolute. Agiselaus was an archconservative, but Spartan society itself was changing. The victory over Athens had brought with it the spoils of war, and temptation for the famously frugal warriors. The war had shown them places where there was more to life than black broth, the traditional Spartan dish made of pig’s blood and vinegar. Spartan commanders abroad gained the reputation for corruption, and they brought their ill-­‐
gotten gains home with them. For the first time in centuries, the good times were rolling in Sparta. Agiselaus tried to put a stop to all that nonsense. He led by example. Even once he became king, he and his family lived as simply as before. His ragged cloak became something of a trademark. But decadence was only one of his problems. His more immediate concern was what to do about Lysander. Lysander’s astute handling of the oracles had increased his power in Sparta, and it looked like payback time. Bit for once, the consummate politician miscalculated. The new king had very Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 55 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 definite ideas about the dignity owed to a Spartan ruler. During his successful naval campaign against Athens, Lysander had accumulated a crowd of hangers on and political climbers, men who treated him with more respect than they did the lame king in the ragged cloak. Agiselaus decided to put him down, very publicly and very definitely. Whenever Lysander recommended a course of action, Agiselaus did the opposite. If one of his cronies sought a favor, the king refused it. He made it absolutely clear that association with Lysander meant the kiss of death. The final breach came when Agiselaus ordered Lysander to serve at his table. “You know well how to humiliate your friends,” Lysander said. The king replied, “Yes, I do, especially those who set themselves up to be more powerful than myself.” Lysander left Sparta under a cloud. He came to Delphi and began to plot against Agiselaus. He tried to bribe the oracle into issuing alarming prophecies, knowing that these would destabilize the superstitious Spartans. He was killed in battle before his plots could be realized. Only then was it discovered just how high he’d been aiming. Sorting through his papers after his death, Agiselaus found a speech written for Lysander. It laid out a revolution for the Spartan constitution, a kind of elective kingship, open to all comers, and offered to the best candidate. Clearly Lysander thought of himself as the most likely contender. Agiselaus wanted to publicize it immediately, to prove what a threat Lysander had been. But one of the city elders read it, and found the argument so persuasive, he urged Agiselaus not to bring Lysander back from the grave, but to bury the speech with him. The speech was hushed up, and Sparta continued as before. But the world around Sparta was changing fast, and a series of disasters would soon prove the truth of the oracle’s gloomiest predictions. 2:07:15 – The Helot Uprising and the Defeat at Leuctra, 371 BC The Spartan king Agiselaus was a magnet for gloomy omens. It was as if the archaic powers of Greece, in retreat elsewhere, found a way back through this spirit-­‐haunted king. A year after his accession, during a routine sacrifice, the priest announced great alarm that, according to the signs, Sparta was even then surrounded by enemies. In fact, this was hardly news, for nearly three centuries now, Sparta had flourished thanks to its system of social hierarchy, with helot slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and toil, and the perioikoi, the free but disenfranchised traders and artisans, providing the commercial muscle. And at the top were the homioi, Sparta’s elite citizen-­‐warriors, a tiny minority which kept its thumb firmly on the majority beneath it. So the priest’s warning about Sparta being surrounded by enemies might have been seen to be merely stating the obvious. In fact, there was far more to it than that. A few days later, a plot was unmasked, to completely overthrow the Spartan system. One of its leaders was king Cynedon. He was neither e helot nor a perioikos, but what was known as a lower grade Spartan. There were a variety of ways you could be reduced to this limbo-­‐like state. Cowardice in battle made you a trembler. If you were a bastard or of mixed blood, you were categorized a mothax, and you could eve be stripped of your citizenship for failing to pay your subs to the common mess. The alrming thing about Cynedon’s conspiracy was its scope. It appeared to involve everyone, from helot slaves through perioikoi to the lower grade Spartans, all of those who’d been excluded from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia. According to Cynedon, they all wanted to eat the Spartans raw. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 56 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 Once they’d made their confessions, Cynedon and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at spear point, beneath a gauntlet of whips, to face their final punishment. They probably ended up here, a crevasse a few miles outside of Sparta, called Chaodos, a place of execution. Legends about this place have always been sinister, but for once it seems the locals aren’t exaggerating. An archaeological survey has revealed that the cavern floor is many feet thick with human remains. Down there is a subterranean charnel house. Only a tiny sample of the bones have been analyzed, but the results show that they are from the fifth and sixth centuries, and belong to men, women, and children. Some of the adult skeletons are crouched in crevasses, suggesting they were alive when they were thrown down, and died trying to climb out. I should imagine that after Cynedon’s torturous punishment, he;d probably have stayed put once he hit the bottom. But the Cynedon conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system: its pathological elitism. Sparta may have been the first Greek city to define citizenship, but it had always been the privilege of a small minority. This minority was further reduced by the Spartan instinct to exclude anyone who failed to measure up to their exacting standards. The consequence, simply put, was that Sparta was running out of Spartans. A hundred years before, at the time of Thermopylae, there’d been perhaps 10,000 full Spartan citizens. Now, there was as few as one thousand. Spartan numbers were dangerously low. It produced a “body bag syndrome,” a reluctance to commit large numbers of full citizens to battle. Now when the Spartans went to war, they formed an officer elite. The fighting was done by helots promised their freedom, and allies increasingly reluctant and alienated from the Spartan cause. Sparta was living on borrowed time. When the walls of Athens had been pulled down to the sound of flutes in 404, it was thought, according to one contemporary historian, that this day was the beginning of freedom for Greece. Overbearing and arrogant, the Athenian empire had few friends by the end. But the Spartan empire had proved just as oppressive. Where Athens demanded money to finance its fleet, the Spartans demanded men to fight their wars. Athens had turned its allies into cash cows. The Spartans turned theirs into battle fodder. It was a bad time to fall out with your friends, because Sparta had a new enemy to deal with: Thebes. Militarily speaking, it had never really been in the big league, but in recent years it had been getting more and more experience, thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held against the city by King Agiselaus. Things came to a head in Sparta in the spring of 371 BC. A meeting of city-­‐states had been called to try to sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and turf wars that had flared up. Diplomacy and tact would obviously pay premiums, but these were never Agiselaus’s strong points. Sparta was supposed to be top dog here, but Agiselaus noticed the respect with which the other Greeks treated the delegate from Thebes. The king saw red and picked a fight with him. The Theban stood his ground, and even had the temerity to answer back. This time Agiselaus completely lost his temper. He took the peace treaty and struck out the name of Thebes. Within twenty days, the armies of the two cities clashed at a place called Leuctra. For Sparta, it would prove to be a day of reckoning. Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 57 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 In those days, when you won a battle, you’d have erected one of these on the battlefield so the world knew of your victory. This was put up by the Thebans in 371, after they’d crushed the Spartans here at Leuctra. All that’s left now is the base, but in its day it would have towered up into the sky, dominating the landscape around. But this doesn’t just mark the defeat of a Spartan army. It signals the death of Sparta itself. Agiselaus wasn’t there on the day. Having caused the fight, he refused to lead the Spartan forces into battle. Apparently, he didn’t want it to be said that was too fond of fighting. It was left to Sparta’s other king to take charge of a mixed bag of 700 Spartan warriors and 1,300 or so helot slaves an reluctant allies. Against them were 6,000 Thebans, highly motivated and thirsty for revenge. The disparity in numbers alone would be enough to explain the defeat, but the Thebans also employed a surprise tactic: phalanxes fifty, rather than eight men deep, a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on you. 400 Spartans were killed that day. It doesn’t sound that many, but bear in mind that by this stage, that’s close on half the male warrior population. As a military force, Sparta was effectively finished. 2:17:30 – The Consequences of Defeat: The Downfall of Sparta The consequences of defeat were profound. This was a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see: the walls of the city of Messene, erected after Leuctra by helots who, for 300 years, had slaved for their Spartan masters. After Leuctra, the Thebans stormed into Laconia, the heartland of Sparta, and liberated the helots. The Messenians, free for the first time in centuries, built six miles of walls around their new city. These are walls built by people who have no intention of ever being enslaved again. As for Agiselaus, the last picture we have of him is in Egypt, hired out at the age of 80, as a mercenary general in an attempt to fill Sparta’s empty coffers. When the Egyptians came to greet this legendary warrior-­‐king, they saw an old man in a ragged cloak, sitting on a a beach. And according to one historian, they laughed. Sparta never recovered from the defeat at Leuctra, and the loss of its Messenian helots. Relegation to the second division of city-­‐states was permanent. In the centuries that followed, the Greeks ran up against the new regional powers of Carthage, Sicily, and ultimately Rome. The city periodically tried to revive its fortunes by reinstating elements of the old Spartan system. But without their Messenian slaves, Sparta just wasn’t Sparta. Utopia had been dismantled, and no one could put it back together again. 400 years after Sparta collapsed, the city received an important visitor, the most powerful man in the western world, in fact. Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome. He came here not on imperial business, but on a personal mission to honor the society that Rome had cherry-­‐picked for so many of its ideas. And he wasn’t the only Roman tourist. This huge theater was built to accommodate all the others who turned up to experience a kind of theme-­‐park version of Spartan culture. In the theater, the Spartans put on displays of the competitive dances and Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 58 Transcript of “The Spartans” – Bettany Hughes – Channel Four Productions, 2002 religious ceremonies that they’d once been famous for. Stronger fare was on offer at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis Authea, where young boys were flogged, sometimes to death, in a crude parody of the rites of passage that once took place there. To end up as a purveyor of s ado-­‐tourism to a bunch of Romans is a fate that not even the gloomiest oracle would have predicted. But it’s a backhanded compliment to the enduring charisma of Spartan ideals. It’s a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the manicured perfection of an English country estate. But here, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, there is telling testimony to the spell cast by Sparta. Looking round this Neo-­‐Classical wonderland built for the 18th century Whig grandee, Lord Cobham, you might assume it was the culture of Athens that was being celebrated. But in the Temple of Ancient Virtues, you can see that it’s not all Athens’s show. Lord Cobham obviously put a great deal of thought into the Greek figures he chose to honor with a place here at the Temple of Ancient Virtues. In this exclusive group are the men he wanted the movers and shakers of his age to emulate. And so of course you have Socrates, described up there as “the wisest of men and encourager of good,” qualities his much-­‐nagged friend Alcibiades would have attested to. Over there is Homer, “the first of poets and herald of virtue.” But then you get a slightly less predictable choice. It’s Lycurgus, the semi-­‐mythical founder of the Spartan social system. The inscription reads: “A father of his country, who having invented laws with the greatest wisdom and fenced them against all corruption, instituted for his countrymen the firmest liberty and the soundest morality, banishing riches, avarice, luxury, and lust.” It’s a pretty fair summary of the Spartan ideal, with its puritanical appeal to self-­‐discipline and self-­‐denial. Although of course there’s no mention of the less genteel aspects of Spartan society: the intimate relationships between women, the brutal education system, the mass slavery, the endless fighting. But the greatest omission of all is that it fails to recognize Sparta’s fatal flaw: that by committing to a radical idea, pursuit of absolute perfection, Sparta made an enemy of change itself. 2:23:45 -­‐ Credits Transcribed by Burke Rogers – July 201431 59