How Did Ancient Sparta Really Fall? | The Spartans | Odyssey

[Music] 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 apithia this prophetess was an old woman who wore young virgins 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 appear 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 5th 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 that thunder was just a bad case of cosmic indigestion [Music] but elsewhere in greece notions like this were simply unthinkable in sparta safe and secure in the eurotask 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 source of radical democracy and more and more these days skepticism about the powers of the delphic oracle for 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 pithia 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 [Applause] [Music] [Music] hello [Music] 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 bacteria the two sides had finally 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 to gone before in this pitiless war syracuse had been founded during 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 ambitious in many ways the quintessential athenian he was popular with the people and a fan of the new learnings had taken root in athens socrates was one of his friends but his enemies circulated rumors about him saying he was an atheist who mocked the gods alcibiades was a hard liver given to wine and women despite the scoldings of his wise friends socrates during the plague 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 rights and yet despite this dubious reputation when asibiadis 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 al-sabadi's gung-ho appeal pressed 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 hermi 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 hermes prominent fallacies 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 our civilians went along too 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 of 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 hard-line 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 laconophiles men who were in love with the values of laconia the spartan homeland aussie byrd himself was given a 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 [Music] and it wasn't just the spartan crowds that fell for alcibardi's formidable charms the rumor was that he also made a conquest of timaya the wife of the spartan king ajis 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'd choose your lover if he was strong courageous and fertile it's not clear whether king adgis was a cuckold or an accomplice when his wife puts spartan ideals into practice but what's certain is that the love affair would have consequences long after alcibiades left the scene alcibardis 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 gillipas 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 julipus things began to go wrong for athens gillipus 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 [Music] athens had to send reinforcements they launched a massive night attack on a string of hill faults 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 soldiers were exhausted and they were pushed right back to their camp in the harbour now all they wanted was to get out of syracuse [Music] 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 gilipis ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of syracuse harbour 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 seven thousand 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 and 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 the corpses were stacked and left to rot as well as hardship hunger and disease there were summary 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 brave or foolhardy enough to quote it [Music] on the night that news of the military disaster at syracuse reached athens it was said that a whale 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 cellar we do not live as we would like he said with poignant understatement syracuse should have paved the way to 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 moth axe it translates as bastard but it meant that while his father was a full spartan citizen his mother was a hellet possibly even one of the despised missenians whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the spartan utopia despite this mixed parentage lysander qualified for admission to the agogi the brutal training system that turns spartan boys into spartan warriors but what lysander lacked in social standing he made up for in very unspartan mouse and soon emerged from the pack as a military leader and shrewd political operator lysandre'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 likely to serve their interests most spartans claim to hate the persians they despise 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 stroke the pay rate of the spartan fleet was increased by 25 freelance oarsmen and mercenaries went with the money and it was said that the athenian ships were emptied overnight fueled by persian gold lysandre'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 [Music] [Music] 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 raised 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 athenian prostitutes who camped around the city quickly 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 schools 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 [Music] 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 30 more than life-sized bronze statues representing lysander's friends and supporters the men who'd helped him win 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 [Music] this is sparta in the year 400 bc four years after its defeat of athens on the surface things are just as spartans like them unchanged their shangri-la is safe and secure the river eurotas flows the mountains are full of game the fields are fertile the hellet 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 beheld the campfires of their enemies would witness exactly that and the dismantling of their utopia 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 boosting sparta be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship unlooked for ordeals and numberless trials shall oppress you and the stormy billows and 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 [Music] king adjust was dead and there were two contenders for the vacant throne his son latihidas and his half-brother are jitilius [Music] the succession should have been straightforward latijs was the heir apparent the throne was his by right and besides ajith elias had been born lame [Music] 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 agisolais was spared at the age of seven he was enrolled in the agogi the spartan education system that took boys and turned them into warriors [Music] no other member of the spartan royal family had ever been subjected to the agogi but despite his disability aji soleus thrived in the competitive atmosphere when king adjusts died ageless 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 are only as good as the interpretation that's placed on them and on this occasion an alternative was supplied by none other than lysander an old fox like lysander twisting an oracle to serve political ends 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 poser alcibiades was in town the rumors connecting him with the king's wife timaya and wasn't it also said that when she was nursing her baby son latihidas who incidentally arrived nine months or so after the athenian left town she constantly whispered into his ear the name alcibiades lysander's innuendos did the trick allowing the spartans to believe that crippled could mean illegitimate the sun was out the uncle was in and so ajitolais came to the throne the most spartan king sparta had ever known a typical product of the ogogi his belief in the rightness of the spartan system was absolute ajithelius was an arch conservative 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 ajitolius 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 oracle had increased his power in sparta and it looked like payback time but for once the consummate politician miscalculated the new king had very definite ideas about the dignity owed to a spartan ruler during his successful naval campaign against athens lysander had accumulated a crowd of hangars on and political climbers men who treated him with more respect than they did the lame king in the ragged cloak ajiseleus decided to put him down very publicly and very definitely whenever lysander recommended a course of action adjusiles 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 ajithelius 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 aj silayas 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 aji soleus 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 ajutilayus wanted to publicize it immediately to prove what a threat lysandre had been but one of the city elders read it and found the argument so persuasive he urged aji soleus 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 [Music] the spartan king ajit elias was a magnet for gloomy omens it was as if the archaic powers of greece 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 apartheid with hellet slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and toil and the perrioikoi 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 seemed 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 kinidon he was neither a hellet nor a periodic 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 moth facts and you could even be stripped of your citizenship for simply failing to pay your subs to the common mess the alarming thing about kindergarten's conspiracy was its scope it appeared to involve everyone from hell at slave through pericoi to the lower grade spartans all of those who'd been excluded from the full benefits of the spartan utopia according to kindergarten they all wanted to eat the spartans raw once they'd made their confessions kindergarten 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 out of sparta called chaodas a place of execution legends about this place have always been sinister but for once it seems that locals aren't exaggerating an archaeological survey has revealed that the cabin floor is many feet thick with human remains down there it's a subterranean charnel house only a tiny sample of the bones have been analyzed but the results show that they are from the 5th and 6th centuries and belong to men women and children some of the adult skeletons are crouched in crevasses suggesting that they were alive when they were thrown down and died trying to climb out i should imagine that after kindergarten's tortuous punishment he'd probably have stayed put once he hit the bottom but the kind of 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 ten thousand full spartan citizens now there were as few as one thousand spartan numbers were dangerously low it produced a bodybag 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 helits promised their freedom and allies increasingly reluctant and alienated from the spartan cause sparta was living on borrowed time [Music] 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 thieves 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 ajiselayas things came to a head in sparta in the spring of 371 bc a meeting of city-states had been called to try and sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and turf wars that had flared up diplomacy and tax would obviously pay premiums but these were never agita's strong points sparta was supposed to be top dog here but ajit elias noticed the respect with which the other greeks treated the delegate from thebes the king saw red and picked a fight with him the fiebin stood his ground and even had the temerity to answer back this time ajithelius completely lost his temper he took the peace treaty and struck out the name of thebes within 20 days the armies of the two cities clashed at a place called laftra for sparta it would prove to be a day of reckoning good [Music] [Music] in those days when you won a battle you'd have erected one of these in the battlefield so that the world knew of your victory this was put up by the thebans in 371 after they'd crushed the spartans here at laketra 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 ajita layers 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 he 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 thousand three hundred or so hellet slaves and reluctant allies against them were six thousand 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 phalanx's 50 rather than eight men deep a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on you [Applause] [Music] [Music] 400 spartans were killed that day it doesn't sound that many but bear in mind by this stage that's close on half the male warrior population as a military force sparta was effectively finished [Music] the consequences of defeat were profound this was a sight that no spartan ever wanted to see the walls of the city of masini erected after lafra by the helets who for 300 years had slaved for their spartan masters [Applause] [Applause] after later the thebans stormed into laconia the heartlands of sparta and liberated the hellers the messinians 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 ajitolais 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 beach and according to one historian they simply laughed sparta never recovered from the defeat at lafter and the loss of its messinian hellets relegation to the second division of city-states was permanent [Music] in the centuries that followed as 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 messinian slaves sparta just wasn't sparta utopia had been dismantled and no one could put it back together again four hundred 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 honour 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 kind of theme park version of spartan culture in the theatre the spartans put on displays of the competitive dances and religious ceremonies that they'd once been famous for strong affair was on offer at the nearby sanctuary of artemis orthea 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 sado 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 [Music] 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's a telling testimony to the spell cast by sparta looking around this neoclassical wonderland built for the 18th century wig grande lord cobham you might assume that 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 honour with a place here at the temple of ancient virtues 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 like hergus 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 and 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 the pursuit of absolute perfection sparta made an enemy of change itself [Music] then you

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 136,049

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, ancient greece, 300 spartans, ancient sparta, ancient rome, why did sparta, battle of leuctra, fall of sparta, athens and sparta, spartan society, peloponnesian war, history of sparta

Id: l_RHzg7c6Sc

Length: 48min 45sec (2925 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 09 2021