How Accurate is Our Knowledge of Ancient Sparta?

did 300 spartans fight at thermopylae yes but there was also one more the king let's say 301 but it doesn't sound as good 301 and there are others groups there are other two there were other greeks there too who unfairly get left out of the count a lot as well yeah [Music] michael always great to have you on the show thank you justin i'm i'm slightly nervous about the the quick fire round absolutely so i've got some quick fire spartan mythbusters questions okay that we're dying to know the answers for um first one the spartan political system was a monarchic one it was but not a straightforward single king kind of thing there were two kings there were also councils of old experienced men and there was even a kind of sort of political democratic political assembly as well it was a bit of a mix of all of them that's mixed 43 fair enough now the spartans were incredibly religious you know they really paid respects to omens and all of that they did but i think no more so than any of the other greeks kind of the athenians the oceans etc um the the famous moments when they've sort of refused to go to war a a bit blown out of proportion uh no more religious than anyone else okay if we go to the persian world because that's the incident you're talking about as it goes the bastard marathon and all that and they say they don't go because of their festival better said run out of proportion but with the persian wars did the spartans really throw persian ambassadors into a well no did 300 spartans fight at thermopylae yes but there was also one more the king let's say 301 but it doesn't sound as good 301 and there were others and there were other two there were other greeks there are two who unfairly get left out of the count a lot as well yeah yeah did 300 spartans die at the moment again not quite cut over again but the number doesn't sound good does it if it's 299. do you know what happened to the other two oh well kind of the ozzy weight when it got limped off and and they weren't allowed to fight one sort of chosen to run away and he didn't really get a good reception when he kind of got back at all he sort of got completely excommunicated for having deserted in the field but the other greeks who were there alongside this one's all elected to leave as well i kind of it was just the the sponsor who decided to kind of do a vanguard action and hold the pass for a little bit longer to let the others get away there you go very noble very noble sacrifice very noble indeed did the spartans always fight against the persians uh well uh kind of when the potions were invading yes pretty much although there were a number who didn't want them to kind of in the famous invasion of 418 479 um and equally of course famously when they first invaded 10 years before the spartans were a bit late to the scene at the battle of marathon and left the athenians to it so not always always fighting against the persians and in fact if you dial forward to the 4th century bce a number of times they'll actually be very happy to take persian money to help them in their war against athens and then to fight both for and against the persians in the fourth century when it all gets extremely confusing i think we've got one of the really big ones next one of the big myths the spartans never retreated or surrendered no not true either sorry uh there are famous guys i mean i think the ideal was and certainly the myth that they liked to put forward was that they never retreated or surrendered but there were occasions when they got forced into it like during the peloponnesian war while fighting against athens at the battle of sfactria for instance now this is also another 300 reference but of course you see the spartans basically fighting almost naked with the big shield and the spear and the red cloak i mean don't forget the little leather nappy as well that they kind of wear how could we forget that well leather nappy um this feels a bit bit far-fetched as well i mean again they the spartans were not necessarily fighting in clothes very in armor very very different from any of the other kind of hoplite warriors of other greek states um mid-fifth century they've got they've definitely got a helmet they've got greaves and they've got a shield i think the thing that and obviously they've got their red cloaks you know things that make spartans but i think the thing that makes the spartans potentially stand out is that from quite an early point in time they get their military kit standardized so that when they are all there in a line actually the impression of all the identicon with the landers on their shield for lackadaimone for sparta kind of really made an impression that would have been very different to the slightly more kind of mix-and-match approach of of some of the other greek city-states and were the spartans better warriors than other greeks they certainly liked to think so and they certainly tried to tell everyone that they were so and in many ways the kind of the elite spartan male who went through the kind of system of training that produced the elite spartan warrior yeah probably was at the end of the day pretty damn good and superior to many but the spartans as a whole were not necessarily superior to all the other greek warriors because they lost just as number of battles against other greeks as they won them well that kind of leads on to the next question if we now focus on spartan life and society i mean was the spartan institution heavily geared towards war yes for those elite spartan kind of males so at the age of seven if you were a spartan spartan spartan kind of elite spartan male at the age of seven you got put into a system called the a goger which is just it means training and that would last through until you were 30 so 23 years of training um uh to become a warrior effectively um and when you came out the other side of it you were a trained warrior so in terms of spartan society dedicating a huge amount of time and space and effort to constructing a kind of long-term training school for this small band of elite warriors then yes you know spartan society was very very militaristic and were these figures were they also encouraged to steal from others at certain points so so different ages in that that seven to thirty would have different kind of focuses on the different ages of their training but in that first phase so the seven through to twelve one of the key things they were supposed to learn was to be able to survive on their wits you know and to survive and at the cost of others and thus stealing was actually encouraged and they had to be able to do it to survive they were sort of turfed out and made to fend for themselves and stealing was never as a result punished but being caught for stealing was punished because he had failed at the test of being able to actually get away with it now if we talk about food spartan food notoriously bad again i think the parts smart and suffer here a little bit i mean so as part of the go gear the men would kind of live within these sort of dining messes and those messes would continue after they'd finished their ago training so for the rest of their lives and these dining messes are called cecilion and people would be supposed to bring ingredients to the sicilian to make kind of a communal food table um and so i don't think we should think about the food that was available there as any better or any worse than kind of anywhere else in the greek world but the the spartans do get a rep for a particular thing that they made which is called um zomas black broth which is basically i've made well i had this stuff made to me and tasted it once upon a time and it's pig's blood um pig meat and sort of barley basically all kind of boiled together and it does taste pretty pretty rank um and there's a famous quote by a king a kind of ruler from well coming from southern italy where you know everyone was a lot more luxurious and a lot more refined in their taste but what he famously says is that once he tried the black broth he realized why spartans were so willing to die on the battlefield so it's probably to avoid having to eat this stuff ever again fair enough now the next one the spartans didn't have slaves no they absolutely did but they had a special name for their slaves which is called helots and the spartans were unusual in that normally greek city states grab their slaves from really far afield so you kind of bring them from from another part of the of the wider mediterranean world spartans actually enslaved the direct area around where they lived in sparta and the peloponnese and turned the entire resident population into their their helot slave community their slave um slave group and there was probably like one spartan warrior for seven helots so it's quite a a good ratio but what that meant was the spartans were actually peculiarly worried throughout their history about slave rebellions because obviously all of their slaves had a single identity they were all one group and that made it much more likely that they were going to come together and go we are going to throw off the shackles of enslavement and there were a number of slave rebellions in kind of hello spartan history and the spartans often were a bit less keen to engage in foreign wars where they had to travel off elsewhere just in case the spartan helot community back home chose the moment to rebel against them well there you go now this definitely seems of all these infamous myths perhaps the most infamous but it is one that we sometimes do associate with sparta now what's the truth behind did spartans throw babies off mount tahitos somebody definitely said they did so an ancient radical pluto kind of mentions this but we think it was a bit of a myth pluto is writing quite late on and talking back about again about this spartan mirage it gets talked about the kind of the image that sparta very very much wanted actively to portray to the outside world because it's a brilliant defense if you've got a myth about yourself that you are you know elite warriors undefeatable in battle you never surrender only the strongest survive in your community very few people are going to be bothered to attack attack you so actually it's a brilliant defense mechanism um but uh kind of we we know and we definitely think that that children babies were examined in some form at birth and if they were decided to be too weak they would probably just be left in the woods or the mountains to die by exposure i don't think necessarily there was a ceremonial walking to the top of a particular mountain and a chucking off it's horrible nonetheless now spartan women had more freedom than other greek women yes i would say this is absolutely true so spartan women were supposed to do their bit which inevitably meant being fit and healthy in order to produce good spartan warriors of the next generation and actually the spawns for the spawns what that meant was that they needed both physical training a lot more than kind of women from other greek communities got but also a certain amount of intellectual training as well because when the spartan men were off fighting actually the women stepped up to run a lot of the kind of civil service governmental kind of positions within spartan society and kept everything going in the meantime so spartan women had their own kind of a go-get process and that they went through where they got a certain amount of learning certainly more than greek women did in other greek city-states and then also physical training and crucially interestingly enough they were also able to inherit property which was totally alien to every other greek city-state the spartans were renowned for their pithy responses yes brilliant so that's when we get the phrase laconic um so the laconic comes from lacquered ammonia and spartan kind of means short pithy response to stuff and again it's all part of this image that the spartans like to create of themselves um men a few words but a bit of big action i think that kind of also we've been hinting it perhaps the answer to this last myth that the spartan myth is largely thanks to non-spartan writers yeah it's interesting isn't it so spartans didn't go in for writing a lot about themselves you know they're not but uh there is a bit of spot in poetry surviving i mean if you know kind of she's a bit urgent to be honest bit kind of like heavy on the wall on the war theme but most of what we hear about sparta comes as you say from writers from outside sparta looking in occasionally it's a sort of midway point so xenophon the writer xenophon who starts life as an athenian but actually he sort of ends up migrating to kind of become a spartan in the respond he writes quite a lot about them as well um but most of what we hear is is from the outside and so it's this extraordinarily clever trick that the spartans in some ways pulled off that they got everyone else to tell a story about them that actually benefited them more than anyone else that's interesting isn't it michael this has been great thanks so much for doing this short thing for history hit thanks very much check out the history hit youtube where you can get great exclusive videos and a sneak peek at what's available on the world's best history channel history hit tv it's growing really fast we're thrilled to have you all aboard

Channel: History Hit

Views: 296,289

Keywords: Sparta, ancient sparta, 300, 300 film, 300 battle of thermopylae, battle of thermopylae, spartan diet, spartan training, spartan agoge, sparta war persia, spartan shields, sparta weapons, michael scott, ancient history, history hit, tristan hughes, the ancients, ancient sparta weapons, ancient sparta helmets, spartan warrior, spartan warrior training, spartan myths, myths about ancient sparta, spartan women, sparta war, 300 film review, this is sparta, spartan cloak

Id: dhriG5PKeAs

Length: 13min 7sec (787 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 23 2022