Full disclosure: I have always been interested in the Spartans but was confirmed in this view in 2014 when I visited Sparta for the first time, and saw, in the middle of the main street, a board detailing every Spartan victory in the Olympic Games (with the event) going back to the 8th century BC. These people are proud and are not afraid to show it! Andrew Bayliss had a similar ‘moment’ when he learnt about the battle of Thermopylae and the bravery of the Spartan soldiers as told by Herodotus. It is a stirring tale, retold most recently, with some licence, in 300 (2006), but also in 1962 in The 300 Spartans, where Sir Ralph Richardson plays Themistocles. The story is often ‘adapted’ but the general idea is of a suicide mission which delayed the main Persian forces and thereby allowed the remaining Greek city states, Athens in particular, to gather at Salamis. Thermopylae was a defeat for the Spartans but Paul Cartledge (The Spartans: An Epic History, C4 Books 2002) rightly points out that although Leonidas must have been aware of the Delphic oracle saying ‘only the death of a Spartan king would ensure an eventual Greek victory against the Persians’, it was really a battle fought for freedom, and it was this lesson that Xerxes had to be taught. But was that the most important thing we know about the Spartans? Probably not. Bayliss writes in an engaging manner under seven major headings: the story of Thermopylae; the civic structure of Sparta (more democratic perhaps than the Athenian commentators liked us to think, with some interesting anecdotes about ‘tremblers’ who had allegedly shown cowardice in battle and the homoioi or Spartiates, whose fathers were also part of this elite group and who had to serve in the army until the age of 60 to retain citizenship) and the Spartan lifestyle, including the dining clubs and the rather egalitarian requirement to donate equal rations of barley, cheese, figs, olive oil and wine produced on their own estates. This would have provided an enormous amount of food which is now believed to have gone towards feeding the boys who were being trained or even to the helots to ensure they had enough food to do their tasks. The relative abstemiousness of the Spartans in comparison to the Athenian symposia is illuminating. There is also a chapter on raising a Spartiate, the paideia (sometimes called agogē) and one on Spartan women who, in general, seemed to have a better time than Athenian women. Helots have a chapter to themselves and Bayliss debunks some of the accepted stories about the treatment of these people who it has long been believed, from Thucydides, gave the Spartans serious headaches. The final chapter deals with modern reception of the Spartans; particularly sad is the fact that, following the Nazification of the Spartan legacy in 1930s Germany, it was not until the last two decades of the twentieth century that Sparta became a mainstream subject again. This is an excellent and informative book, as are most of the books in this series, and it would be very useful as an introduction to the topic of Sparta which is popular in Classical Civilisation curricula and syllabuses.
Open access
