The Riddle of Ancient Sparta: Unwrapping an Enigma - Professor Paul Cartledge

the title my title the riddle of Ancients further unwrapping and ending the some of you will instantly have recognized as being a sort of quotation that's to say it's a version of what Sir Winston Churchill once used as a way of referring to Soviet Russia the Soviet Russia with which he had tangled right at its very origins he'd tried to murder it in the cradle by sending troops in in 1918 and he had to cooperate collaborate with it with Joe Stalin in the second war he did so reluctantly because of course it went against every fiber of his being in all sorts of ways and he referred to the Soviet Union the Soviet Russia in particular as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma well all those what the two key terms in that mystery and enigma of course ancient Greek words originally secret and something riddling so it's some clear nastic in a way he's saying the same thing twice but the point is this if you've thought very very highly of the Soviet Union what it stood for what it had done in the second war maybe just as an ally when you perhaps had an over rosy view of what life really was like in that society generate up to the 1950s and in particularly you probably didn't know about the Moscow trials of 1936 1937 and you probably didn't know about the attempted extermination of the cool acts and so on you thought only here was a society that had an ideal it held up the worker as the hero the ordinary person not the elite it aimed at equality is aimed at abundance and it was better than the Czar ridden aristocrat ridden Imperial Russia which it had replaced if on the other hand let's say you were an extreme capitalist or you were an extreme libertarian and you felt that the way in which the Soviet Union deprived lots of people of freedom caused major economic disasters and was in general something rather to be feared as potentially a world conquering power one that wanted to take over the world and especially your world well then you might be veering the anti the Soviet Union it was very rare I think very difficult to take a middling position as sort of well it's got its good points as well as it's bad points either people really hated it or they they loved it by and large and if they loved it they were sometimes called fellow travelers they might be members of the cpg be the Communist Party of Great Britain or France or where all the Western countries which looked to the Soviet Union as offering an alternative to their as they saw it dreadful Society well suppose you're in ancient Greece go back to the fifth century BC it's very similar situation in terms of attitudes to ancient Sparta on the part of non Spartans like the Soviet Union the Spartans did not welcome in visitors in general foreigners in general because they suspected that they might be enemy agents they were a closed society if you can believe the sources they actually expelled foreigners periodically and as a regular routine thing on the other hand if you were a pro Spartan if you thought that Athens for example was a dreadful tyrant imperialist state if you thought democracy which is what I wrote my most recent book on if you thought that the rule of the masses the ordinary ignorant illiterate possibly stupid fickle people over the elite people like yourself if you thought that that was what democracy was then you might actually think if only we could be more like Sparta where you know top-down it's a military kind of society people know their place plus they've got this brilliant system they don't do any work except fighting which some of them find pleasant and they've got these thousands of Greek underclass quasi slaves to do the work for them look at it another way and I'll come back to this even those who liked the thought of Sparta not being a democracy had a little pause given when they contemplated the role status respect and function of women in Sparta we'll come back to that as I came in as I'm sure you all saw terrific emphasis on the centenary of the vote being given to certain women in 1918 immediately after the second at the First World War and so Spartans seemed to be rather lacks in the way they did not control their women in the way that in Athens they certainly did by various sorts of means we can talk about this afterwards if you're interested so my point is this when you study Sparta you don't get an unmediated view very few Spartans ever wrote about their own Society to such an extent that some nasty Athenians said that all Spartans were illiterate which is completely false but you can see how the idea might develop and so what we are confronted with is this bifurcated tradition wildly perot wildly ante by and large very little in between there are some image but very very few they're the minority of the extant sources to such an extent that in the 1930s a French scholar coined the expression let me toss part yeah now some of you may remember a dreadful American soap series in which there was a hotel which they barbarously dubbed la Mirage they saw that it had an e at the end of the word so they thought oh it must be feminine no look me Taj sparked it now in English a mirage I just read a review of a book by an American using the word I think normally has the primary sense of it seems to be the case but actually it's not so it's a false perception and it's as if you're looking at a stick in the jug of water actually the stick is completely straight look at it you have an optical illusion that it is bent that is one sense of mirrors a distortion of something that's really there the other sense is you're driving along on a hot dusty road I did this once in California I drove for about a hundred miles on such a road and in front of you it looks like a lake you're going along and he seemed to be driving through a lake of water actually there's no water there whatsoever and mirage has that sense so it's pure fiction fate news as perhaps a certain POTUS might refer to it so the riddle of Sparta the Enigma of Sparta the mystery of Sparta is partly due significantly due to the nature of the evidence which presents us with a combination of that which is there but is distorted that which is not there at all but which is made up so for us historians it's actually very difficult to penetrate the Mirage I would say it's almost impossible and one reason I did my doctorate in Oxford sadly we all make mistakes but you have to start somewhere and I've seen the light since shining in the East any right um I did a doctorate trying exactly to line up match up confront and if you like contradict the mirrors with the archaeological evidence and the point about the archaeological evidence is that it's direct it has a story to tell but you have to make it tell that story famously it said the Spade can never lie to which someone replied that's because it can't speak and that's true we archaeologists make the material a buck so you've got this authentic contemporary real not fake material Evans trouble is we've got really relatively very little and what we have is skewed not from settlement very little from graves mainly from sanctuaries that is religious spaces where Spartans and others made offerings to their gods goddesses heroes and heroines so that gives you one side a very important side Spartans were massively religious or you might say superstitious but it's only a partial picture on the screen I've used as my title slide the tund oh that's the bowl the inner bit of a drinking cup icky licks in in Greek so a kind of chalice a kind of goblet and it shows you a characteristically Spartan scene namely a boar hunt on foot face to face though in this case the boars back is to the human hunters today the boar is hunted it is hunted at a great distance with high-velocity rifles I believed certain French people are particularly keen on this kind of activity well if you did it in ancient Greece you risked life and limb boars are exceptionally fierce creatures and they're heavy and they're fast and you're taking a great risk I'll come back to it in one other connection but here I want to focus on the masculinity of this scene only left I hope you can see clearly enough is a beardless youth on the right is an adult male signified the fact that he's adult by his beard and so you're in a relationship of age difference and possibly hinting I don't know the painter may not have had this in mind at all but a pairing relationship of that nature possibly sexual certainly educational was built into the Spartans unique form of Education unique in two senses only the Spartans had a public education system at all and only the Spartans built what well the ancient Greek word pederasty means literally love of a boy by an adult it doesn't carry the negative connotations that it would in our English language and it may be that this is what's being hinted at any rate this was a manhood test Spartans once they became fully admitted adult Spartans member of the army they dined in messes and they were required to eat communally every evening evening meal together out in the open every evening undercover of course if it was raining and so on but nevertheless not within one building but lots and lots of tables as it were set out over a long span rather like the Royal Jubilee or something like that those sort of street parties you see that's what the Spartans did every evening well there were three reasons why a Spartan might legitimately not attend once in a while at very exceptionally not attend the evening meal which otherwise he would be required to do and one of them was precisely when you're off hunting wild boar and as I say it's a manhood test if you come back alive not bad but if you come back also with the boar meat then you add that to the mass meal of you're in median mass mates the fair of which was so awful this is of course part of the myth but a visiting Sybarite a Greek from Sybaris we get our word Sybarite because they were supposed to have lived high on that oh that's a terrible pun coming high on the hog any rate um they a visiting Sybarite came to Sparta he was dined and afterwards he said now I know why the Spartans are so keen to die and this is the sort of joke that non spy if you're Irish you know what carry man jokes well the equivalent is in non Spartans making up jokes about Spartans that that was one of them so underneath interestingly Tully fish tuna who knows is a Greek word the origin ultimately of tuna honey and the Spartans in fact lived quite a long way from the sea about 25 miles I'll show you a map shortly and so this is quite interesting that the painter thought that he would paint two kinds of special foods that the Spartans might occasionally eat why is the pothole I don't know if any of you thought of this you go to the British Museum and you see whole parts not shattered Franklin's because it comes from a tomb and not from any tomb in Sparta as I say the very few tombs in spud have been found and not many of them contain really interesting grave goods but this is found in in Italy the the Etruscans are very keen on importing Greek pots like these this is of the later 6th century BC we're in the 540 s roughly that sometimes a 2500 odd years ago right hoping that this works yeah so I begin with firm the eastern end of the Mediterranean and with what sometimes called the Greek heartland or old Greece and that's so cool cause from about 750 onwards Greeks expanded they created what eventually was called a diaspora which means a scattering of Greeks all around the Aegean and all around then the Mediterranean pretty much and then all around the Black Sea up to the Northeast here and Plato in one of his dialogues says that we Greeks we live like frogs or ants around the pond he meant two ponds the Mediterranean the Black Sea and this shows you if this also works yeah well here is the Peloponnese I'm going to show you a more detailed version of this shortly there's sparta on the river Everett as euro Taz there's the port of Gyan that's where the fishermen could have caught those tiny fish and brought them up by mule by ox cart up to spuds very laborious about 25 miles this is the southwest of the Peloponnese this is sometimes called Laconia that's Messina and the Spartans conquered and controlled roughly half just a bit under half two-fifths of the Peloponnese that was their basic city and Athens is up here just to tell you the two poles of opposition very often Sparta was seen as the antithesis of Athens and vice-versa so as I say this is a little more close-up of a map and there's Laconia mentioned and the key feature of the two key features really of this terrain Sparta's own territory down in the southern Peloponnese sauce Peloponnese or mountains running here and here but pan on Range the te Gatos range there's the of robust this is the River Rhine Valley of the euro toss and there's a river rhine valley called the panty sauce river there so Sparta has exceptionally large amounts of good fertile agricultural land but traveling around within its territory is made extremely difficult by these mountain barriers so it's in order to get to there you have to go up and round you can't just go across there that arrow is a terrifically optimistic sort of thing and the best way to getting up here is go up the aratus Valley and then across there and over here some of you may have been Daman in vacío it's roundabout there well that's quite easy to get to but then it's difficult to get down there it's very difficult to get down here big mountain chain going all the way almost to the bottom so I'm incent Tiger toss if you've been to Sparta and height of summer and it's about 4 o'clock and you think well it won't get dark yet and suddenly you're in gloom well the reason is the Sun sinks behind that mountain range which goes up to over 8,000 feet 2404 metres and it's exceptionally beautiful as always snow there's always some snow right on the Peak District this of course is a winter shot hence the large amount of snow and I chose this image because coincidentally as it happens it's taken from an area where very recently a palace has been discovered and excavated prehistoric Late Bronze Age what we historians and archaeologists called the Mycenaean period and was often wondered you know where is the real equivalent of the fictional Palace of Menelaus in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey people look for it ever couldn't find and finally it's been found in this area here but I chose it not just because of that but you've got two eras represented here at least because in the front is of course a Byzantine Church and Sparta Laconia is famous for especially the money for its extent and still used originally Basanta what do we mean by presenter between the foundation of Constantinople which was on May the 11th 3:30 so had this lecture been 18 days earlier I could have said today is a really happy day it's when vis Antion became Constantinople but it ended in 1453 May 29th that is the anniversary we we mentioned today so I'm going to now illustrate Spartan life with a number of snapshots but before I go any further I must mention that one of the legacies we we historians are very interested in the extent to which the ancient world in our case it might be the Byzantine world in another case still influence it lives on has an impact on our way of seeing the world and talking about the world well as it happens the Spartans have the legate it had given to us bequeathed to us not one not two but three English words if I can call them English one is Spartan and an adjective meaning austere self-denying military tough enduring resistant secondly laconic and it's one of the peculiarities of this part of the world that the Spartans didn't only call themselves Spartans they also called themselves by a name meaning people from this part of the world lack a dime onions lack a diamond was also the name for the city of Sparta Sparta was only a geographical term not a political term so as we say Westminster well that's just a part of London but we also say Westminster does meaning Parliament does something well in the same way the spartans use this word Lacan secondly laconic and we mean by that the sort of clipped military-style speech minimalist that term the Spartans were famous for one example power from the north of Greece is threatening to invade sparta and the dick tart they're being asked you know giving without fighting and the message goes something like if we invade your territory we will destroy Sparta Spartans returned one word if no my prop has been removed come along with Rome two props now you might think this is quite innocent the Greek down here says and it's what allegedly Leonidas Leah Nevis Leonidas replied to exact sees Emperor exact sees who demanded that he lay down his arms and surrender at some of light I'll come back to that later he replied with characteristic spartan terseness two words Mullen lebay come and get them we have to say at least four in English come and get them yourself and Leonidas used the familiar plural as you probably know Greek is one of those languages has a formal and an informal plural second singular second plural in Greek terms so he insultingly spoke to the Emperor's if he was another Greek you know a mate or somebody he despised so come and get me and if you go to America you've discovered that the Second Amendment is something that some Americans get extremely excited about and it's to do with actually if you read the Second Amendment it talks about raising a militia but don't think that happens very often in America today and then it says right to bear arms that's what people cling on to at whatever cost and if you remember of a gun club if you go online you can find this out it might be that you've chosen as your slogan precisely that those two words Malo and Lambie I was giving a talk in Chicago about the Spartan legacy tradition and someone told me about I hadn't learned about it before I found it deeply shocking but then I'm a you know a sensitive wimpish Western liberal intellectual so what do I know I'm I am also an honorary citizen of Sparta that's true and I was made one just before my 60th birthday and in ancient Sparta you were required to do military service up to the age of 60 terrifying for an Iraq people said so I'm right you're finally going to be caught I'm because I was too young to do military service in this country and I said well fortunately it is honorary citizenship as opposed to real anyway on the left is a real a version of a real what an ancient laconian Lassard Ionian hoplite might have looked like and I put it that way because this actually comes from Miss senior do you remember that bit on the West not from the east where Sparta is from a sanctuary so it's a dedication and the sanctuary of Apollo and Apollo was one of the major gods that the Spartans worship but not only the Spartans now I've mentioned or I haven't mentioned I'm about to mention what was the third words that we in English have adopted from the ancient its helot and probably not many of you use it in everyday speech but nevertheless you'll find it in the OED and it means an underclass person a subordinated surf like worker well in territory of the sponsor three types of population the spawns themselves they live in Sparta they don't live dispersed except when temporarily avere out hunting and they might spend a night in a village outside you know just before they get back to Sparta secondly and now this is the interesting group that's produced that figurine the Perry boy coy Greek for dwellers roundabout they're free but they have no political rights in Sparta so they're subjects of the spawns within the Spartan state they have their own communities you might say local government but they don't have any say in Spartan foreign or domestic policy of the state as a whole and they're blind to pay taxes and they're obliged to perform military service as and when required whether as here hoplite heavy infantry or cavalry and the main thing really is that they're free they're personally free they're not enslaved which was the condition of the majority of the population of the state of Sparta who were helots and health's means captives so it refers first of all to how the spartans made them helots by conquering them and then slaving them and keeping them on the lands where they themselves had lived freely before the conquest and working the lands now for the Spartans and it also symbolizes the nature of the relationship between the Spartans and the hell's who though Greeks then they worship the same God says this one spoke the same language and dialect as the sponge nevertheless they're permanently on free so the Spartans reminded them of that every year they declared war on them Spartans are very religious so if you commit homicide you incur pollution that's bad you might if you don't free yourself or bid eventually go to a bad end sooner than you would have done otherwise but if you declare war as the sponge did as you know if for example I were to be called up and go and fight in Afghanistan and I kill an Afghan that's normally not considered murder its homicide but it's not murder in the same way if a Spartan killed a helot male or female for whatever reason he would not be normally it would be he considered polluted and that was terribly important the Spartans were very frightened of as most Greeks were the pollution that came from doing something sinful something that would anger a God or the gods generally so Spartans it's been said lived on top of a perpetual volcano and that was liable to erupt and it actually did erupted several times so helots did periodically revolt and eventually one group of them revolted successfully but that's really another story we can talk about another time here is a dedication the helmet with a horsehair crest covering most of the face you can only just see you can't hear much you can speak but turn really it's just sight and it depends on your being in a phalanx formation depending on the men on either side of you or in front and back of you he's got a breastplate bronze two parts strapped at the shoulder terrific protection down to the abdomen but below vulnerability he wears the kind of kilt and you can perhaps see the Greek key meander and rather beautifully embroidered on this is dress uniform this is probably not what they would wear on an everyday basis to fight he wears Greaves shin guards in other words this footballers wear and then behind him you may be able to see a an even essent leg of a creature other than himself it's in fact a dog's leg and in fact originally he had hunting hound represented with him when he dedicated this to Apollo and one of the points of this little disposition is that he's not a Spartan the guy who dedicated this the guy represented is one of the perioikoi privileged members of whom like to think of themselves as buns as like members of the master race because at least they weren't helots and Sparta was one of the most powerful if not the most powerful state in all Greece so it's sort of like say you're docker in Glasgow in the 19th century living in the second biggest city in the British Empire you may be poor and suffering or living the Gorbals but you're part of the British Empire so in the same way I think perioikoi identified with their Spartan masters in this way I've brought along my other prop and I bought this in the shop just upstairs so I'm not sure whether to give it to my six-year-old grandson I think probably not I don't want to encourage him to be too spun around on the right another offering and see it's in pretty good condition and look at his helmet just like the other guy - its crest it's got a full beard masculine it's wearing a breastplate but two things are different in the accouterments from the guy on your left one he has a strap you may see going across his chest well if I were to turn that round and show you the back it is a strap holding up a quiver full of arrows come down below his waist and you may notice that the artist has deliberately accentuated his masculinity I mean his genitals just to make the person very masculine guy and you possibly can't see but it's a lion skin so hoplites heavy-armed infamy didn't go into battle wearing lion skins but here achlys in latin hercules who killed the Nemean lion amia is up in the northeast Peloponnese one of his 12 labors he wore ever after a lion skin and he was regarded by the spartans as part of their myth making their genealogy as the ultimate ancestor of the two royal families who at one generation produced twins such that the royal line bifurcated so that sparta uniquely in in all greece had two kings still even after all the other elements of republican political decision making a Senate and Assembly had come into being they still had two kings they also had an aristocracy despite the ideology of egalitarianism you know you wear the same clothes you eat the same food you fight looking pretty much exactly like everybody else in the Phalanx despite that they still had aristocratic families who were conscious of being aristocratic and one way in which they marked themselves out was to call themselves descendants of Hira Cleese in other words buying into the same ideology as the two spartan royal families now a much much later source whether only we knew so that one distinctive feature of the way the spartans represented their gods was that they represented all of them in armor and that of course is utterly appropriate if you think Sparta was a very military society where the gods must reflect what humans think to be the most important values namely bravery in warfare well think about it Aphrodite if any of you remember your Homer's Iliad the most sort of vigorously masculine type of God in the entire Olympian Pantheon when she gets a tiny scratch she's done just off the main part of the battle she streaks and towels of course she can't be killed because she's immortal so she's escorted off the battlefield well even Aphrodite in Sparta was represented as if she were a warrior goddess the real warrior goddess was of course not Aphrodite but Athena and the FINA was indeed Sparta's patron God as she was Athens his patron goddess and Athena famously was born from her father's head Zeus not born as we say through the usual channels and she was always represented in full male armor with a particular kind of breastplate and she never was conquered subdued by a man in other words she remained a perpetual virgin all her life as indeed did artemis another goddess that the spartans were particularly keen on so the two main female goddesses that the spartan males particularly were the two types who resisted males the two most liked men in other words and in the pantheon so I've introduced the female half of from the spartan race and I used the word race partly as a pun because when this was found actually in what's now southern albania she was ultimately thought to be running picking up her little tunic and the Greek word ketone ESCOs means a small ketone which was peculiarly Spartan she has one breast bear and an ancient source tells us that the was indeed a race in which Spartan actually virgins so young girl's name up to the age of about sixteen seventeen eighteen would compete so people ultimately thought oh here's Spartan girl because it was made in a Spartan workshop and it must be a representation of that race or something like it however as roger bannister would not be the last to confess if you look behind you when you're running you run the risk of somebody coming up behind you and overtaking you and it's very difficult to recover if on the other hand you are dancing and you're looking back to one of your fellow dancers in a round dance then this is a perfectly natural manoeuvre alternatively you could say the artist for purely aesthetic reasons wanted a three-quarter profile and that's how he did it but in rain look down probably you can't see but the back foot has a rivet in it a kind of nail so in other words originally she's not a free-standing figure she was nailed to the rim of a large bronze cauldron I'm going to show you an example of the bronze cauldrons the Spartans the perioikoi probably made in Sparta and it's simply huge well this would have been quite big and they're used as we'll see shortly for a particular social function so there is dancing is it or running is it Maidan now in the British Museum as is here at least the Hercules I showed you on the previous slide both of them are casual fine sporadic they called not excavated in regular excavations from a known site they come on the market they bought they're given to a museum in this case the British Museum so here we have from the hugest Krotz here which means a mixing bowl those of you into Greece will know that the modern Greek for wine the informal word is crass II well that is a direct lineal descendant from the Greek word which is related to Crassus which means mixture the formal ancient Greek word and the formal modern Greek word is eNOS and that's the same as we known the Greek work died Gama drops out so it's really one loss and that we know they're directly related the indo-european words for wine Greeks typically did not drink their wine neat they thought it was barbaric literally in other words none Greeks might drink their wine unmixed typical isn't it of barbarians who are inferior they don't speak our language they don't share our customs they're unsophisticated crude and in this case alcoholic and so a Greek would typically mix his mainly drinking parties for respectable persons adult male citizens were for males and they would mix in roughly two to one there's a famous wine in the Odyssey Homer's Odyssey which was so strong that it had to be mixed 20 parts water to one part wine and that was of course the wine but Odysseus gave to the coop clubs the cook law circle ops I the Cyclops on his Island this is from a grave that's why it's so well preserved that was originally found in considerably worse condition than you see it here in burgundy weeks is on the Seine in Burgundy how did it get from the Greek workshop in which it was made eventually across the Mediterranean to the mouth of the Rhone Marseilles is very near the mouth of the road up the road until it reaches the sonne and then the sone is the link between the Rhone and the sin and it eventually ends up at weeks and it's now in the local museum of Schatz your seal sin well it's over five feet high it holds 318 I believe gallons and it's found in a non Greek a princess's grave and she belongs to the cultural horizon that the specialist called the Hallstatt era of Celtic France and around the neck is a classically Greek hoplite HEVC the one in the middle I've put that there deliberately of course to show you what a hoplite holding his one meter wide shield two handles on the inside his sex is again shown not sensible if you think about it in actual battle but it's making a point and this is a chariot scene so it could be in so far as it's realistic it could be a burial of some great heroic warrior and in the grave was indeed found a Celtic chariot so I mean they possibly even thought from the chariots in those days Greeks had long since ceased despite Homer they didn't actually fight with chariots they might have used them as taxis but they didn't actually fight from them and on the very top there you can't see that was a lid and the lid is crowned the handle of a clothed woman demure so a woman run like Athena if you like presiding over a male scene of warriors and some well there's a bit of an argument amongst art historians and archaeologists where exactly was this made some think a workshop in southern Italy well okay there were Greeks there they did make nice bronze things and so on but there's one clue which is the figures in the fries were detachable so that they had when the VARs basis had been created had to be nailed on in the right order in the right position in order to enable the eventual assembler of this FAR's assemblers PABs to get it right to put the right bit of the detachable fries in the right place the craftsman who made the thing scratched on the neck letters of the Greek alphabet and scratched on the corresponding bits that were going to be attached the corresponding letter so the alphabet this is one way in which Greeks differentiated itself themselves from each other they didn't have the same way of writing the same letters in fact they didn't have the same letters entirely some Greek cities alphabet was only 24 letters other Greeks had alphabet of 28 when I write the letter forms are thought to be distinctively Spartan I'm cutting a long story short e but it is probably the case this was made in sparta transported down to the mouth of the rotus at near Gyan taken from giffy on round very nasty Peninsula the mani Peninsula round and then up eventually to southern France and then up to Burgundy which is where very appropriately this ended that because Trottier wine Burgundy it's thought I've argued that it was the Greek some people have said no no it was the Etruscans but anyway I'm going with the Greeks who introduced the grapevine to southern France and so we ultimately oh the Greeks who did that if you're a fan of Burgundy a wine that's where it all comes from probably back in the seventh or sixth century BC BC no I'm running up to the last series of slides I move back to where I mentioned before Leonidas Leone needless as the modern Greeks they or own Leonidas as the Americans say why one credit in a movie was for the movie 300 I take no for the credit but I was asked how do you pronounce Elio and I da yes and I said go with the modern Greek it's neither British English nor American English it's Greek Greek they leave us of course they went for Leonidas anyway this was excavated in the debris from the a Spartan the crop is what passes for an Acropolis in Sparta it's not very high and stuff had come down from the top so there was a sanctuary on the top and it was dedicated of course to athena city holding athena and in the debris was found this in more than one bit it's been restored and of course you can see the helmet crest has actually been filled in with modern material it's from Perry and Perry and parras the island of Paris in the Cyclades marble so it's not local marble it's particularly fine marble and it's particularly finely worked so this is not just any ordinary piece of work but for some special occasion or some special place well the Greek workmen as soon as this was unearthed Leonie lessee said and that name was stuck however the real Leonidas Indian money does whatever died in 480 would there have been a commemorative statue for him in his lifetime no and yet this is probably before 480 would it mean with the Spartans have set up a statue of this kind for him after his death well no no Greeks did that the Spartans some years later sit up to much smaller bronze statues to commemorate the man who was in charge of the Greek forces at the Battle of Plataea this is pal Sonia spats Aeneas both seniors but so for all these reasons it can't be Leonidas it can't be a representation of him moreover he's not freestanding originally he was part of a group and that group would have been attached to a temple and so he's probably either a god or equally likely a hero but there is one thing about him that is uniquely spa if anybody spotted this what does he not have there doesn't have a moustache has a full beard and he's got wonderful decoration of wild boar on his cheek pieces and RAM on the other side so very fierce animals this is all masculine pugnacity but he doesn't have a mustache and it is a fact that the Spartan chief officials when they came into office every year they change the top five issued a pronouncement to all Spartans which was shave your moustaches and obey the laws the two going together being a Spartan being obedient being different you shave your moustache well that Leonidas has had its own life history subsequently in the mid 1950s a bunch of American Greeks from this region clubbed together to build this memorial opposite the hill where in fact Leonidas died in August 480 BC extremely hot in the summer over 40 degrees and the only this went to resist the Persian invasion with a pict 300 Spartans of whom all but two died it's often said all 300 died so they didn't 298 of the 300 died Leonidas died so 299 Spartans died out of 301 and that I'm it's a trivial example but that's fact as opposed to myth we Mirage is what I started with and then another image more ancient but also more artistic featuring the aforementioned Leone adverse naked completely starkers and in ancient Greek gunas meant both unarmed which he's not and stark naked which is our gym gymnasium from the ancient Greek exercise ground start naked men only well the artist of this was Napoleon's Court painter jacques-louis David and David is what we would today call gay and he was particularly interested in certain portions of young male person's Anatomy but he was also unlike Napoleon who fought the Spartans who'd lost the Battle of Thermopylae were a bunch of losers he admired the sponge I suspect partly because of what I mentioned to you earlier pederasty as integral to the Spartan education and lifestyle he probably thought that was better than the kind of discrimination negativity the homophobia that has been the homosexuals faint for most of their Western post Christian history but for us interested in the myth of legend i direct your attention away from this suggestively place scabbard - what's going on up here a rock well this guy is nailing up anachronistically because of course the epigram is after Leonidas is death and the famous go tell the Spartans stranger passing by but here obedient to their laws we lie and that's some credited to semana DeSimone eNOS who came from the owned of castle care not far from Athens today and of course is post 480 BC penultimate slide an actual either Spartan or periodic shield facing from a well in the Agora civic center of Athens excavated by the American School of Classical Studies in the 1930s how come a Spartan or periodic shield ended up in the Agora of Athens because once it had been carried by either a Spartan or pareo cos who had been in a small detachment on a little island off the west coast of the Peloponnese during the great Peloponnesian War the Persian War heroic Greeks resist the Persians Peloponnesian War very bad a kind of protracted civil war among Greeks really awful generation long affair this was taken back with the person who had held it because the survivors were taken back to Athens as hostages and they they worked the Spartan stopped invading the land of Athens as soon as these 292 hostages were imprisoned in public view in the center of the Athens well the shields were nailed up on the temple and the Athenians just to make absolutely clear how insulting they were being to the Spartans had punched on probably every one of the shields this is only the one that survives a message and it goes Athenians that's the top line from and then lack hair dye money and literally from Spartans and perioikoi out of and then P loss is the nearest town to where this island was where the garrison had been defeated and then made hostages and so to read it out in for its the Athenians have dedicated this to Athena having taken it from the Spartans whom they defeated on the end of in facts bacteria near pylos so it's one of the ironies that we don't have a Spartan shield from Sparta Sparta the most successful hoplite military state of all time we have it only from their worst enemies from a war which actually they eventually won but at this point they were doing rather badly and so I in now with the other half of the human race and Sparta a Spartan woman but not just any woman this is a princess she is as she tells us herself in her victory dedication for winning for the first time as a woman an Olympic crown she owned she trained racehorses who won the four-horse chariot race at Olympia in 396 be seen i she says kynesha which means little puppy or little victorious with the chariot of swift-footed horses have erected this statue I declare myself the only woman in all hello Alice is how the Greeks referred to the pail of Greek settlement wherever Greeks wise hel us to have won this and it was an olive wreath crown and only one there are no silver medals or bronze medals you got just the olive wreath symbolic not itself valuable there is no back story and it's this she was as she says the daughter and sister of in fact a king and then one of these kings is our half-brother one is a full brother well her full brother Aggie Celeste a second ruled by the 40 years most powerful Spartan one of the most powerful Greeks at the time when she is winning this Olympic victory a biographer of a Jesus called Xenophon Athenian exile pro-spartan he's one of those pro-spartan wildly pro-spartan Athenians wrote a biography it's really an in comeon posthumous of ejuice alas and in it he says that it was a decent Lassus idea that Kanishka should rear horses with the view ultimately of winning an Olympic victory why was it his idea to demonstrate but mere racehorses even a woman can win a an Olympic victory with them there are real horses you're getting it you remember the Vics crater then war horses and war is a man's business and the Greek for bravery or courage was an dryer which means literally virility or manliness women by definition could not be brave courageous in the accepted ideal manner of a warrior fighting for his country in battle so this is a mixed message that I leave you with and I think that's quite appropriate and if you have been listening thank you very much

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 198,213

Rating: 4.6166492 out of 5

Keywords: gresham, gresham talk, gresham lecture, lecture, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham college talk, free video, free education, education, public lecture, Event, free event, free public lecture, free lecture, Podcast: Audio, Ancient Sparta, enigma, ancient greece, spartans, The Spartans, Greek Culture, Paul Cartledge, Greece, The Peloponnese, Taygetus, Hoplite, Heracles, VI, krater, Leonidas, Spartan acropolis, Thermopylae, David's Leonidas, Spartan shield, 425 BCE, Kyniska

Id: Wq6VjBx9ysg

Length: 57min 18sec (3438 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 01 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

Ancient Sparta has been handed down in a tradition radically conflicted and confused by rival political and social ideologies. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, one might say. This Spartan tradition is still alive and lively today.

This lecture seeks to shed light rather than heat, by assessing just how odd (different, exceptional, peculiar) Sparta really might have been.

[u/kaz1030]

Excellent video/lecture. As a pre-eminent scholar on the Spartans, I've read some of Cartledge's work, but I'd also recommend, The Spartan Army, by J.F. Lazenby. The book is insightful, well-written, immensely annotated, and fun to read.