Units of History - The Spartan Royal Guard DOCUMENTARY

the spartans are remembered today as some of the most famous warriors not just of antiquity but of all history known for their strength discipline and courage they were truly fine examples of what the ancient greek world could bring to bear on the battlefield but among these none more represented the ideal hoplite than the 300 hand-picked soldiers who defended the king today let us take a closer look at the spartan royal guard a big thanks to the great courses plus for sponsoring this video they offer subscription-based on-demand lecture videos put together by top professors from renowned universities and specialists from places like national geographic and the smithsonian you get unlimited access to a huge library of over 11 000 videos which cover topics from history to science math and literature with new content being added every month their history playlist is quite expensive with a huge 48 part series called the other side of history on daily life in the past to enrich our own content definitely check out lecture 13 on being a greek soldier and sailor for me i found it best to download the app on my phone this allows me to swap from video to audio mode so i can listen to the series as a podcast while going about my daily activities right now the great courses plus is offering a free trial which you can start by clicking the link in the description below or visiting the great courses plus dot com forward slash invicta i highly recommend that you take a look at what they have to offer and dive into the material you are most interested in sparta's origins stretch back to the early bronze age when many communities were sprouting up across the fertile eurotes valley of laconia this was a region of some note with a mycenean palace occupying its heights whose mythological king menelaus features prominently in homer's trojan war yet despite this bit of notoriety the communities of laconia fell into decline by the end of the bronze age and subsequently experienced a rather glacial period of development it was only at the start of the archaic period that sparta appears to have begun its rise to power this occurred locally at first as several villages coalesced through a gradual process of cynicism adopting a dual monarchy in the process these unified communities which would become known as sparta then used their collective might to dominate the area around them initial clashes first targeted their immediate neighbours in the valley of laconia but soon after extended to their neighbors across the great taigatos range in messenia during this period of the 8th and 7th century sparta would have closely resembled the other greek communities of its time militarily speaking its early armies were nothing special they consisted of two basic groups the social elite who took the field as heavily armoured spearmen and their followers who deployed as lightly armed footmen yet each group would be far from uniform as everyone had to buy their own equipment this meant that only the wealthiest spartans could afford to act as mounted hoplites riding horses to battle then dismounting to fight on foot in the finest armor we have vaz paintings of these sorts of warriors from corinth and elsewhere which seems to indicate that it was probably a common practice at the time in places like athens and eritrea such rich men formed a separate social class known as the hippies or horsemen it is this prestigious title that would later be given to the spartan royal guard long after they had ceased to actually ride horses in battle the archaic spartan army formed up in loosely organized masses but don't seem to have been able to maneuver or act with much unison according to the spartan poets turtius warriors advanced or hung back as they wished charging forward individually to gain glory for themselves only rarely would a larger number of these spearmen the pro-mccoy or front fighters bunch together to attack or defend [Music] by the early 7th century this motley crew of warriors was able to finally dominate its neighbors in the southern peloponnese folding them into a new social order as subjects who were obliged to give half of their harvest in tribute to the spartans victory now placed sparta in control of some 8 500 square kilometers of territory making it the largest policy in greece however such vast lands were unwieldy to manage and would frequently bark against the reins of their new master this regional instability seems to have undermined sparta as it set out to battle other cities to the north and led to several military defeats something had to be done thus around this time the spartan socio-political system was drastically revised ancient historians attributed this change to the legendary law giver lycurgus however most scholars now assume this happened in a more organic manner around the middle of the 6th century change seems to have brought about a restructuring of the government with a new ruling council known as the garusia and a reformed spartan assembly at the same time a wall was drawn up between citizens and non-citizens the non-citizens were grouped together into the class of the helots and pericoi the former were enslaved communities centered around sparta and messenia who worked the lands and held virtually no rights the latter were free communities from the further flung areas of spartan territory who held limited rights in opposition to these were the full spartan citizens who had started to present themselves as a closed body of absolute equals the home oyo or same ones laws now regulated their food dress language education and behaviour it denied anyone a chance to stand out from the rest even though they were still rich and poor citizens on the outside it seemed they were all the same militarily this meant that the army which had previously been composed of elites and their retinues was now turned into a mass hoplite militia for the wealthy hippias this meant relinquishing their horses and joining their comrades on foot their job now evolved to protecting the king in battle this was the birth of the spartan royal guard no longer were they a unit of the rich now they were a unit of the best the spartan royal guard would have been armed in a similar manner to the other spartan hoplites after all since the guard was now selected for age fitness and zeal rather than wealth individuals would not have been better or more heavily equipped than others defensively this meant donning bronze greaves a bronze kuras or linothorax a teragees skirt a corinthian style helmet with a transverse crest for officers and the most important piece of equipment for a hot light the round double grip shield known as the aspis it was made of laminated strips of wood attached with nails onto an outer rim of bronze the inside face was covered in leather while the outside face might remain wood or be coated in a thin layer of bronze offensively the royal guard primarily used the roughly two meter double-ended dory spear with a flat leaf-shaped iron head and a bronze butt spike as a backup they might carry the coppice sword a curved single-edged blade weighted towards the tip generally speaking though they carried only a short dagger with a leaf-shaped bronze blade later spartans would brag that their swords were shorter than those of the other greeks because they dared to get closer than their enemies throughout their early history and the persian wars spartan hoplites would be equipped however they liked just like greek militia elsewhere their colours crests and shield blazons would have been their own choice but by the time of the peloponnesian war the spartans had begun to realize the intimidating effect of uniform equipment which showed their sameness and made them look almost superhuman as a result they forced their militia to dress in the same red tunic and carry the same shields now the law required that the aspis front be covered by a bronze outer face with an emblazoned lambda the shining metal meticulously polished would flash in the sun and terrify the enemy that being said standard equipment for hot lights did change over time one of the major trends was towards the use of lighter gear as evidenced by artistic depictions and archaeology the exact reason is never stated by our ancient sources but may have resulted from a recognition that the shield was sufficient for most infantry clashes from a desire to be more mobile and from the fact that as time went on a greater number of regular citizens diluted the previously rich ranks of the phallics thus bronze and linen carrasses became less common leg guards were abandoned and heavy corinthian helmets were replaced with simpler open-faced types the conical pylos helmet for example was standard for spartan hoplites of the peleptonesian war showing off their trademark long hair let's now turn to a discussion of their training and tactics this all began with recruitment selection for the royal guard happened when a spartiad year group turned 20 and became eligible for military service at that point the e4s chose the three most promising young men and named them hippogreti or hepaius pickers each of the three hippogritai chose 100 men from his year group to make up the 300 soldiers of the guard every choice had to be individually justified to the e4s only the finest paragons of spartan virtue could serve at least that was the theory but as spartan citizen numbers dwindled in the course of the classical period the pool of candidates in each year group would have grown smaller and smaller by the time of sparta's defeat at luctra in 371 bc every spartan citizen would have spent his early twenties rotating through the royal guard necessarily serving several consecutive years there simply weren't enough full citizen spartans left to raise anywhere near the required 300 boys to adulthood every year in terms of training the royal guard always consisted of the youngest fittest most competitive but least experienced warriors in the spartan militia they were not professional soldiers but merely the cream of the levy reconstituted every year when a new batch of spartans came of age unfortunately we know nothing about the specific training of the guard most likely this would have been similar to that of the other spartan citizens with emphasized general fitness endurance agility and mental fortitude such training primarily took the form of athletic exercises running jumping wrestling boxing and throwing the discus overall this was quite similar to what the other greeks were doing if only practiced by a greater percentage of the citizen population and more regularly it should be noted that we have no records that the spartans conducted any weapons training with the sword or spear after all they believed a citizen warrior's job was to be brave and to love hard work not to be a martial arts master the closest thing to combat training would be unit formation and drill practice such training was indeed distinct from the other greeks who spent little if any time on these affairs prior to battle it is this fact that would in many ways grant the spartans their edge in battle but beyond this we know very little of actual spartan training in the archaic or classical period beyond what gets reported long after the city's decline many of the most intense aspects of the argoge for instance date to the roman era when sparta had been reduced to a pale shadow of its former self and took deliberate steps to rehabilitate its image there is one interesting note worth mentioning from our sources though that sheds light on the daily activities of the guard apparently young men who had not been chosen for the hippies would constantly try to start fights with them if these challengers could prove that they were better than a guardsman and a brawl they might get picked next time as a result the men in the hippies had to be ready to scrap at all times as one might imagine this would have placed even more pressure on them to maintain peak fitness according to our records it seems these challenges were so common and so vicious that the spartans had to make a rule that anyone had the right to step in and stop the fight disobedience to this command was punished with heavy fines in terms of actual use the royal guard may have functioned similarly to the elite state-sponsored units of other cities like the sacred band of thebes their pious seemed to have been an informal standing force of sorts at the disposal of the e4s whenever they needed muscle they may have been used to respond to crises to suppress helot unrest or to repel invasion from the sea at one point the royal guard even helped the e4s arrest conspirators aiming to overthrow the spartan state but while the royal guard was a flexible jack of all trades unit from a strategic perspective in battle they were simply a part of the spartan phalanx in this regard though we're not sure if the hipaas were a part of the regular militia units of the spartan army or existed alongside it if the former were true they would have been part of the first of the six so-called mirai or battalion sized army units if the latter were true then they operated on their own in some undescribed group in either case the royal guard took their place towards the head of the army's marching column with the king once on the battlefield the spartan army would then have displayed its mastery of formation drills by deploying smoothly from column into line in doing so the first mora at the head of the army would end up on the extreme right of the battlefield in many cases the king joined them on the flank with the royal guard however this was not a universal fact sometimes the king might be stationed elsewhere in the spartan line or allies might be the ones to take up the extreme right yet despite all of the possible ways the army could be deployed our records agree that the royal guard always deployed with the king they were never separately stationed or used as a mobile tactical force as might be the case with the sacred band representing the best of the home oi they fought alongside the rest of the hoplites doing their duty as spartan equals no matter what let's now turn to the service history of the royal guard we can pick things up again in the 6th century bc when sparta had just completed its conquest of the southern peloponnese and undergone significant internal change this helped them regain some domestic stability and allowed them to now focus their effort outwards against their northern rivals unfortunately we have no records of combat from this period and no explicit mention of the royal guard in action however it is possible that they were involved in the famous battle of the champions between sparta and argos where each side chose to commit just 300 of their best fighters to decide the outcome of the conflict in the end only one spartan and two archives were left standing with both cities claiming victory this sort of stalemate was quite representative of sparta's attempt to physically defeat its most immediate neighbors at this time therefore sparta appears to have changed its approach to foreign policy they no longer took enemy territory outright instead they expanded by forcing other states into a system of unequal alliances we call the polypunision league its members had to swear to follow wherever the spartans led by the 5th century bc the power of the polypenisian league was so significant that it elevated sparta as the primary leader of the greek world this presented them with a unique opportunity to achieve greatness with the outbreak of the greco-persian wars one would imagine that the royal guard of sparta would play a key role in the battles of this conflict unfortunately however we have no explicit mention of their use at the battle of thermopylae for instance we know that the spartans sent their king and 300 men with him this seems to fit the bill of the hippias however we are also told that these 300 were picked because they already had sons this poses a problem since the men would have had to have been at least 30 years old when male citizens were allowed to get married yet as we've previously stated the royal guard were chosen from amongst the most promising 20 year olds of that year these two ages contradict one another it is possible that perhaps the 300 of thermopylae were all former guardsmen but we simply don't know eventually the greek forces were able to turn back the persian invasion following the critical battles of salamis and plateau it is at this point that the royal guard officially make their entry into the historical record when we hear of the hippies serving as an honor guard to escort the athenian commander to mysticales back home from a diplomatic mission yet they would spend little time in this role as sparta soon found itself at war with athens in the peloponnesian war it's about halfway through this nearly three decade conflict that we spot them at the important battle of mantanaya in 418 bc here about 20 000 troops faced off and attempted to outflank one another when combat began the spartan left wing was pushed back by the elite archive thousand while the spartan main body with the hippies similarly crushed their opponents at this critical moment king aegis was able to perform an unprecedented wheeling maneuver to save their fleeing comrades on the left and ultimately win the battle this and other successes ultimately led to sparta's victory in the peloponnesian war yet in the aftermath of this conflict spartan supremacy proved short-lived as the greeks were quick to form new alliances in opposition to whoever might currently be the reigning champion the ascendancy of thebes in particular threatened the spartans and precipitated a war between them it's during this conflict that we get our second confirmed sighting of the royal guard at the famous battle of luctra in 371 bc the spartans had mustered a mighty army but were counted by the brilliant tactics of epaminondas rather than replay the tactics of mantaniya the theban commander had chosen to mass his men and the sacred band on the left to launch a massed assault directly on the spartan king while delaying battle elsewhere the attack was devastating sparta's royal guard fought valiantly to hold the line but could not stop the massive thebans bearing down on them many officers died and even the king was felled in the ensuing devastation the entire royal guard was wiped out and the spartan army collapsed into a route after this crippling defeat we never hear of the hippias in action again most likely they were revived in some capacity and continued to serve as the spartan's fittest and most dependable troops however by this point spartan power had faded and fell into terminal decline with each passing year its citizen numbers shrank further and further to the point where it was no longer possible to pick out an elite unit of hoplites without stripping the main phalanx of skilled officers required for it to function properly even when argus and cleominis reformed spartan society and the army once more in the 3rd century bc in an attempt to fight the decline there is no sign of a new royal guard being formed like sparta itself the exclusivity of its military elite proved to be its downfall the best of the best were no more we hope you've appreciated this deep dive into the history of the spartan royal guard a huge thanks is owed to our supporters on patreon and the many talented researchers writers and artists who made this video possible please consider contributing to fund future content and let us know what units of history you want to see covered next thanks for watching you

Channel: Invicta

Views: 183,080

Rating: 4.9587469 out of 5

Keywords: sparta, spartan history, spartan army, spartan royal guard, sparta documentary, rise of sparta, hoplite, hoplite documentary, battle of thermopylae, battle of thermopylae 300, 300 spartans, 300, spartan training, spartan workout, spartan king, leonidas, spartan history documentary, greco persian war, battle of leuctra, units of history immortals, units of history, invicta, royal gyard, history of sparta, history of greece, persian invasion, military history

Id: pSIh_mTEy_o

Length: 22min 30sec (1350 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Dekrow]

Interesting watch. I wonder what really happened at the battle of champions that was mentioned. Seems kind of like an obvious falsehood by the Spartans when they claim "oh yea we had 1 injured guy who actually survived. So you guys actually lost... Oh where he is now? Well he actually killed himself in shame. We all do that, all the time. It's tradition around here. Anyways so we uh won - nothing to dispute here." lol