The Rise & Fall of Sparta

Today, we trace the rise and fall of ancient Greece’s most formidable warrior society - Sparta. This society's militaristic culture and battlefield feats are the stuff of legend - but how much of its story is based on cold, hard fact? Joining us is Dr Andrew Bayliss, a professor of Greek History at the University of Birmingham. He separates the fact from the fiction, explaining how a brutal education system and unyielding discipline forged an elite military state, and eventually led to its downfall. Join Dan and the team for the first-ever LIVE recording of Dan Snow's History Hit on Friday 12th September 2025! To celebrate 10 years of the podcast, Dan is putting on a special show of signature storytelling, never-before-heard anecdotes from his often stranger-than-fiction career as well as answering the burning questions you've always wanted to ask! Get tickets here, before they sell out: https://www.kingsplace.co.uk/whats-on/words/dan-snows-history-hit/ You can now find Dan Snow's History Hit on YouTube! Watch episodes every Friday (including this one) here https://www.youtube.com/@DSHHPodcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:15Speaker 01

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• 1:56Dan Snow?

  Hi folks, welcome to Dan Snow's History. When they were asked to lay down their weapons by the King of Kings, the Lord of Asia, Xerxes of Persia, they simply replied: "Come and take them." And in the battle that followed, in that narrow pass in northern Greece, a legend was born: the legend of Sparta. Now, long-time fans of this show will know that we love to do a little historical myth busting. We like to take the legends, we like to look at the stereotypes that people might have got from novels and movies and popular culture, and we like to give you the real history, the cold hard facts, because we believe that they're actually more engaging, more astonishing and interesting.

• 2:41Dan Snow?

  And there is no civilization, no group, no people more mythologized in history, in fiction, in film, than the Spartans.

• 2:52Dan Snow?

  Today, a generation of us knows them from the movie 300, a muscle-bound Gerard Butler in his red cloak bellowing "This is Sparta", and he goes on to sell his life dearly at the Battle of Thermopylae. Turns out that that movie was the Canary in the Coal Mine, the inciting instant, the start gun, for the manosphere which washes around us at the moment. But actually, it's not just this generation that are obsessed with Sparta. Even in the ancient world, Sparta stood apart. Tourists flocked there in the centuries that followed Sparta's heyday to learn about this city that was shrouded in mystery, it was feared, it was admired, for its militarism, its discipline. So how much of what we believe, what their contemporaries believed and those that followed, how much of all that is true?

• 3:38Dan Snow?

  In this episode, we're going to try and answer that question, and there's no better person to sort out facts from fiction than Dr. Andrew Baylis. He's from the University of Birmingham, and his wonderful book, The Spartans, does just that. This is your ultimate guide to the Spartans. And if you want to watch this interview and check out two chiseled dudes doing some intellectual heavy lifting, oiled up, you can check it out on our YouTube channel. The link is in the show notes. Let's get into it.

• 4:25Dan Snow?

  Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell me about this world in which you have this tapestry of these little teeny little states, all with quite different, well, potentially quite different systems of government.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a brilliant way to start. The thing I always grapple with trying to explain to people is ancient Greece isn't Greece. It's not just the modern nation of Greece. There are 1,200 different city-states scattered around the Mediterranean. And my favourite fun fact is to tell people that Marseille was the Greek city of Messilia. And I think that really illustrates how far-flung all the different Greek city-states were. So I keep on saying city-states, they called themselves a polis. We translate that as a city-state. And so it's people living in an urban centre, surrounding countryside, and it's usually either demarcated by they live on an island, or there's a nice sort of geographical barrier like a mountain range, or they're in a valley, that kind of thing.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  And they're of very, very different sizes. So some of them are tiny. Sparta is one of the mega ones. It's about 8,500 square kilometres. Athens, another major city-state, is only 2,500 square kilometres. And then the rest are smaller and smaller and smaller, scattered around the Mediterranean and beyond.

• 5:39Dan Snow?

  And before I ask you about how Sparta came to be started, because there's plenty of valleys and mountains in the Peloponnese, which it could have easily been penned in by, but people are looking out across all of those little statelets. Did they think at the time, "Sparta's a bit of an outlier, they're a bit weird"? Were they as interested in Sparta as we are?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Yes. Particularly their real rivals, Athens. There was a whole lot of people in Athens who were fascinated by the Spartans and even presented themselves as if they were Spartans. So they grew their hair long like the Spartans, they supposedly shunned baths like the Spartans, and just wanted to be little Spartans.

• 6:13Dan Snow?

  So it was quite a powerful brand even at the time.

• 6:16Speaker 03

  Absolutely, and that's one of the problems we have in trying to work out what they're like. Because none of the primary sources were written by the Spartans themselves. They're all written by outsiders who were often real admirers of them, who were then trying to paint them as these sort of amazing, radically different other that would explain why they were so amazing and why Athens should be more like Sparta, or why Thebes should be more like Sparta and so on.

• 6:43Dan Snow?

  How did Sparta come to be Sparta? So you mentioned it's enormous. Is that through conquest?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  It is through conquest. Now, initially, it's just a normal city. It grows into the surrounding countryside. They ultimately conquer the whole river valley where they are. That's the modern region of Laconia. It was called Laconia then. And if Sparta had stopped there, it would have actually been quite a big city-state. But they then conquered their nearest neighbours, the Messenians, and enslaved them. And that turned them into a megalopolis.

• 7:14Dan Snow?

  And is it because of that enslavement they're able to think of different ways to live? If they've got these slaves working for them, they can build an elite culture that feels a bit different to other people?

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Yes, very much so. So slavery is the default in ancient Greece. But the difference with Sparta is every single Spartan citizen owns a lot of slaves and has a huge amount of land. It's a very high bar for citizenship in Sparta. Every single Spartan citizen would have been very, very wealthy by ancient Greek standards. So they have the time and leisure to do what they want to do.

• 7:49Dan Snow?

  And what do they decide they want to do?

• 7:51Speaker 03

  Well, what they decided they want to do depends on how you view them. So when I was young, everyone cast Sparta as this military state, a society that decided to turn themselves into super soldiers. But really, what they do is spend their time doing aristocratic, ancient Greek activities. So anyone who's read the Iliad knows that Homer's heroes were warriors, but they were also men who engaged in sport. They hunted. And that's essentially what the Spartans did. They spent their time being gentlemen of leisure. So that might mean sport, it might mean going off into the countryside, or it might mean putting on heavy armour and going off and fighting other people.

• 8:32Dan Snow?

  It does imply that they've got a bit more time to put in for that militia practice on the town square.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they must have done. Now, there is not a single primary source that describes the Spartans doing that practice, but they have to have done. They're described by people who knew what they did as doing manoeuvres that military instructors found difficult. Now, to do that kind of thing, they have to have been practising. But a lot of their leisure activities would have been useful in that kind of way. So a lot of the sport, they do team sports, that's all about coordinated movement. They do a lot of song and dance, and a lot of their dancing was done in full armour. So that kind of thing is just going to make them better and stronger. And when it comes to hoplite warfare, if you're fighting for hours and hours and hours

• 9:20Speaker 03

  wearing 35 kilos of bronze armour and carrying a big, big wooden shield that's faced with bronze, that's just going to be heavy, the stronger you are, the more endurance you have, that's just going to make you more likely to win.

• 9:33Dan Snow?

  So they're not a sort of complete world apart, they just happen to be a bit better than everyone, enough better than everyone else?

• 9:39Speaker 03

  Yes, and at the height of their citizen numbers, they can put together an army that's as big as any other Greek city-state, made up entirely of men who don't need to do anything else to earn a living. So they just will be spending their time exercising and just getting to know each other and hanging out with each other. They have what must be what sociologists would call an in-group, like a really strong in-group.

• 10:05Dan Snow?

  So you instinctively know you're hunting together, whereas poor old Thebans might be busy, you know, flogging wine half the time and, you know, off on trading journeys or things like that?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So if you're not actually needing to travel abroad to earn your money, you can spend your time just hanging out with your fellow citizens. And to reflect their comparative equality, they call themselves the homoioi, which sometimes gets translated as equals, but it's probably better described as similars. But they all wear their hair long, they dress the same, they have a really obvious brand.

• 10:38Dan Snow?

  And how are they governed, how they ruled? Is that similar, is those equals, is it reflected in the kind of rugged democracy like Athens? Or is it, does everyone do what the king tells?

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Every Greek city-state has a citizen assembly, and Sparta is no different from that. Sparta has a governing council that's called the garusia, which means the old men, and it's made up of 28 men aged over 60, plus their two kings. And that's the real oddity about Sparta, they don't just have kings, they have two of them. And I always say to people, "Name another diarchy", and people frantically scroll around on Google trying to find it. And it's really hard to find another actual diarchy with two different royal houses. So there are kings who tell them what to do, but the king's powers are moderated by the ruling council, by the citizen assembly, and there are five annually elected officials known as the ephors,

• 11:31Speaker 03

  which literally means overseers. And ancient Greek commentators like Plato and Aristotle saw that as a measure of democracy.

• 11:38Dan Snow?

  Okay, so there is a flavour of democracy there, but not, of course, when it comes to the gigantic number of enslaved people that they rule over.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  Yes, it's very hard to call Sparta a democracy, although oddly, in the Enlightenment period, some people suggested Sparta would be a good role model for a modern democracy. But that made you question their vision of the world. So there are, very hard to pin down exactly how many helots there were, who were the Spartan slaves, but there were probably 150,000 of them being ruled over by no more than 8,000 or 9,000 Spartan citizens. So it's a very unequal society when you bring the whole of the population of their region together.

• 12:17Dan Snow?

  And that domination is underpinned by ferocious violence?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Absolutely. The life of the helots is, by any standards, terrible. They are mistreated by the Spartans, there's talk of floggings, regardless of whether they've done anything wrong or not, having to wear degrading uniforms like dogskin hats and animal skins as their clothing. They would be sometimes brought into the common messes where Spartan citizens dined, so that young Spartans Could see, they'd make them drink unmixed wine so they'd get roaringly drunk and then young Spartans could see the perils of alcohol. They were subject to a brutal example of state terror, an institution known as the Cryptaea, which basically means the secret service.

• 13:05Speaker 03

  And young Spartan men were given basic supplies, a knife, and told to go out into the countryside and kill the largest, most threatening looking helot or any helots they found on the roads at night. So the Spartans' treatment of the helots is just plain terrible. And I think the best illustration of that is one of the rare primary sources we have that was written by a Spartan. It's the war poet Titaeus, who describes them as like donkeys exhausted under great loads, being broken down by the amount of labour they have to do for their Spartan masters.

• 13:38Dan Snow?

  Meanwhile, those Spartan masters able to enjoy the benefit of the leisure time, the wealth that they derive from that. There's a sense in some of the literature that those Spartans chose with that leisure time to act in a more Spartan fashion. So they didn't go in for finery and perhaps in a way that you see some ancient cultures. Where do we get that sense of their rugged simplicity or is that just a myth?

• 14:00Speaker 03

  It's not just a myth, it's amplified by our primary sources. We often talk about austerity in Sparta when we're talking amongst ourselves as Sparta researchers. The idea is that the Spartans shunned luxury. They shunned the lifestyle that other ancient Greeks had, so they weren't interested in literature. They were notoriously barely literate and barely numerate. They had functional literacy, but they're not writing great works of poetry or drama or history. They're not interested in those kind of things. They spend their time doing rough masculine activities. And there's a suggestion in the sources that they're not allowed to dress extravagantly.

• 14:45Speaker 03

  They're not allowed to have dyed clothing inside Sparta. Outside of Sparta, they wear dramatically red dyed clothing, but in Sparta it's just undyed plain clothing. Everyone kind of looks the same. So. Sense of it being quite a drab society in that way. And they are required to dine together every night in communal messes. That was supposedly very abstemious, very temperate. But when you actually look at the amount of food they had available to them. It's actually a huge amount of calories and a huge amount of wine. So it's maybe more about not being seen to overindulge rather than not actually indulging.

• 15:24Dan Snow?

  So they come together and would women be allowed in those spaces?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  No, they're very much man only spaces. The Spartan common messes were probably like drinking clubs of men in other Greek city states, but just done in a very Spartan kind of way.

• 15:39Dan Snow?

  Or perhaps a little bit like the British elite going to their gentlemen's clubs in the 19th century in London.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Probably not unlike that.

• 15:45Dan Snow?

  Interesting. So what about the place of women in that society?

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Well, women in Sparta had a very visible place, which marked them out in ancient Greece. And other ancient writers like Aristotle, for example, was very troubled by how much authority Spartan women had. He actually went as far as to describe Sparta as a goonicocracy, a place where women held power. And part of that was because they had a lot of wealth. Spartan women were able to inherit property alongside Spartan men. So there's even a suggestion that they might have inherited equally alongside men. So by the time Aristotle was writing, two fifths of Spartan land was owned by women.

• 16:26Dan Snow?

  And were they able to take part in the, therefore the politics of Sparta?

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Not formally. So we have some wonderful stories of royal women having their say. Most, I think famously Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae. She has five recorded sayings and the most famous one of hers is an Athenian woman asked why Spartan women were able to rule men and her response was because they were the only ones who gave birth to men.

• 16:55Dan Snow?

  You get the impression in Spartan culture that you'd better treat women well because they are bearing the next generation of Spartans.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. They are mothers of the next generation of Spartan citizens and they are taken seriously as a result of that. And they have a really obvious voice, which is usually directed towards their sons, telling them how to behave. So there's a lot of sayings of Spartan women criticizing their sons for not being brave enough or actually killing their sons because they have shown cowardice in battle.

• 17:24Dan Snow?

  Right. So the idea of them as supersized, it's a militaristic culture.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  There is a massive modern debate about this, but you are dealing with a culture where every single citizen is going to fight as a heavily armed infantryman. So that is his one function in life beyond having this lifestyle of gentlemanly leisure. So Xenophon, who knew Sparta quite well, he was in Athenian and he travelled there and he was friends with the Spartan king, Gesselaus. He said that the only thing Spartan men were allowed to do in terms of their sort of career, for want of a better way of putting it, was activities that contributed to the freedom of the polis. And the obvious thing, when you think about that, what's going to contribute to the freedom of the polis, it's actually fighting to defend the polis.

• 18:12Dan Snow?

  That's so fascinating. Do we know how that culture emerges?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  There is a long going debate about how this comes about. So it was often thought that the conquest of the helots was the reason why they developed a seemingly militarized society, that they enslaved thousands and thousands of men who outnumbered them, so they needed to turn themselves into soldiers to defend themselves against the helots. But a lot of the idea we get about Sparta being quite austere and militarized actually comes from much later. So it's not clear exactly when and why they chose to do things this way. It's perhaps more than anything else in the sixth century BCE, there was a lot of social dislocation throughout the Greek peninsula and in other city-states that led

• 18:59Speaker 03

  to quite serious civil disputes, civil wars. Sparta may have developed its quite strong culture of similarity to try and avoid that kind of problem.

• 19:12Dan Snow?

  Was it families that turned young Spartan boys into these warriors? Or was that education, that training take place communally?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  There is obviously some reinforcing of Spartan values coming from the family. But at age seven, Spartan boys were essentially separated from their families and put through a state organised upbringing. And both admirers of Sparta and critics of Sparta from ancient Greece are pretty unanimous in explaining that this is a communal experience that everyone has to go through, regardless of wealth. And the only exception to that is the immediate heir to both thrones.

• 19:50Dan Snow?

  So as long as you're a citizen, if you pass that high bar, there's an equality to their upbringing?

• 19:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So there will be, some Spartans are quite wealthy, some of them will be staggeringly wealthy, they're all going through exactly the same system. At age seven, they're divided into herds, they're overseen by an official whose title translates as the boy herder. He's given a staff of young men armed with whips, who will mete out punishments for infractions by Spartan boys. And if neither the official overseeing it or the whip bearers that are around, any random Spartan father would oversee the activities of the boys, there was always someone to keep an eye on them. They were being watched very closely.

• 20:32Dan Snow?

  I always think the, the proof of the pudding though is, and if you look at the great Spartan generals and leaders that we know about, do they tend to come from the same sort of families or are they drawn really widely from this wide pool of citizens?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  So when there's a big Spartan army, it will be a king in charge of that. So in theory, that should be therefore a man who hasn't gone through this system. But the big names actually did go through the system. So I mentioned Gerselaus earlier, who was friendly with Xenophon. He definitely went through the upbringing because we're told this by Plutarch, who wrote a biography of him. And he went through the upbringing because no one would ever imagined he was going to become the king, because he was a younger brother of the king. So there was no reason for him to ever become the king. And that definitely had an impact on how he was perceived by other Spartans and his entire way of approaching leading an army.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  But the obvious other king who must have gone through the upbringing is Leonidas, the hero of Thermopylae, because he wasn't just not the immediate heir to the throne, he was the third brother. So he was an extremely unlikely king.

• 21:36Dan Snow?

  What about the Spartans on the battlefield? Because you could be forgiven for thinking in books and movies that they were somehow superhumans. They fought differently. Are you saying they fought in the same manner as other Greeks, but they were just the best at it?

• 21:48Speaker 03

  They do fight in exactly the same formation as any other ancient Greek city-state. So when we're looking at classical Greece, Spartans fight in a phalanx, just like any other Greek.

• 22:01Dan Snow?

  Packed together side by side with long spears.

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, long spears, eight feet long, shields, 90 centimetres round, bronze armour on their chests, bronze helmet, probably bronze armour on their legs. They're not going to look dramatically different from others, except for their uniformity. So all wearing the red uniforms, all with their long hair. And there is a suggestion in the sources that they actually had an L for Lacedaemon emblazoned on their shields as well. So they would have had a a uniformity that the others didn't have, which might have seemed quite intimidating. They were trained to march into battle slowly to the tune of pipe players.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  They would go into battle reciting marching songs written by the Spartan war poet Teteus. And that probably would have been quite intimidating as well. But they're just a better version of this at the height of their military prowess and at the height of their citizen numbers as well. When there's enough of them to go around, they just are better.

• 23:03Dan Snow?

  And for example, when when the enemy run away, rather than everyone sort of charging after them to loot the camp, they will retain their discipline and can can pivot round, attack a different part of the enemy army or something like that.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. And when it goes wrong, they are actually better than other Greeks at responding to that. So there's a few examples where the battle in the initial phases went a little bit wrong for them and actually some of their allies ran away. But they were actually able to regroup, wheel around and attack the seeming victors as they were returning and wipe them out. So they were very good at fighting in disorder. That's one of the things that Xenophon picks out about their excellence.

• 23:40Dan Snow?

  Yeah, because other armies, once panic sets in, you can be transformed into a fleeing rabble.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. And one of the things that we know about them as well, they didn't pursue too aggressively when their opponents ran away. And I tend to wonder whether that was actually a deliberate strategy to encourage the others to run away. So they knew that, oh, it's going to be pretty dangerous to fight against these guys. If we do actually run away, they're not going to pursue us too far. So it might have planted that little bit of a seed of, actually, we can get out of this if we just don't fight them.

• 24:13Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's history. Talking about the Spartans, more coming up.

• 24:22Dan Snow?

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• 25:33Dan Snow?

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• 27:46Dan Snow?

  Clearly the Spartans were busy for generations, they've carved out this big empire, they maintain this sort of slave state. But, for many people, their prominence begins with the battle against the Persians, the Greeko-Persian Wars of the 5th century B.C.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, everyone encounters the Spartans for the first time, I think, in the story of the Battle of Thermopylae. That was literally the first thing I knew about the Spartans. I was 12 years old, we had a 40-minute history class, and it was, oh, 300 guys fought against three million Persians and fought to the death, and it's just such a glorious story. There is a kernel of truth within that glorious story. The reality is, at that stage, Sparta has developed a very strong alliance system with the neighbouring people in the Peloponnesian, modern scholars tend to call it the Peloponnesian League, which is an inaccurate title for two reasons: it's not based entirely in the Peloponnesian, and it's not really a league. It's a series of different alliance systems, where the Spartans are allies with Corinth,

• 28:42Speaker 03

  and they're allies with Tegea, and they're allied with Ares. And because they're all allied to Sparta, those other city-states then tend to follow the Spartans wherever they go. And at some point in history, the Spartans actually bound those allies to an oath, where they actually swore that they would follow the Spartans whithersoever they might lead. So they do have to follow the Spartans into battle. So when the Persians invade Greece in 480 B.C., the Spartans are the natural leaders against the Persians, because they already have this very strong alliance network.

• 29:16Dan Snow?

  And we should talk about Greece there, you've mentioned it's not a modern nation-state, of course, but there's a sense in which the Spartans realise this is a threat to the entire Greek cultural sort of solar system, is there?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely, and it's not just the Spartans who've spotted this, other Greeks have spotted this. The Persians have been on the rise since the middle of the 6th century. They have conquered the Kingdom of Lydia, which is most of modern-day Turkey. Various Greek city-states of southern coast of Turkey had been allied or subject To Greece as the king of Lydia, depending on what their relationship was, they were absorbed into the Persian kingdom. The Persians have crossed into Europe, they have conquered the kingdom of Macedon. So mainland Greece is next. And when this is coming, the Spartans seek allies

• 30:08Speaker 03

  from other parts of the Greek-speaking world as well. They travelled to Sicily and they warned Gilon, the tyrant of the city of Syracuse, that if the Greeks in mainland Greece go down, he's going to be next. So they are aware of the big picture.

• 30:22Dan Snow?

  Because there's obviously sort of antagonism between these groups within the Greek world. Is there a sense that the Persians are such a threat that they kind of come together, resolve some of their differences to fight alongside fellow Greeks? Is that, or am I being a bit modern there?

• 30:35Speaker 03

  You're not being too modern. The reality is, is that this Persian invasion is a moment when the Greeks start to realise that they really do have a common identity that they haven't necessarily been following so much as well. We call them Greeks because they were descended from the mythical figure Helen. They called themselves Helenes, hence ancient Greece was actually called Helas. They all have this common ancestry, but they actually have different tribal ancestry. So the Spartans were Dorian's, the Athenians were really technically Ionians, the Thebans were Iolians. But the Persian invasion starts to create a sense where they realise that there's more than being just Spartans and Athenians and Thebans and Corinthians, that they actually have a common identity.

• 31:20Dan Snow?

  And so the Spartans send a small force up to block this very narrow pass into the north of Greece, Thermopylae, the hot gates. They're not by themselves though, are they?

• 31:30Speaker 03

  No, they're not. And that's not actually their first attempt to try and bottle the Persians up. They try a narrow pass further north in Thessaly called the Valley of Tempe, which is similarly narrow. They have 10,000 hoplites and marines, but when they're there, they're warned that they can be surrounded too easily, so they withdraw. So this is a second attempt and they have a small number of their own soldiers, but there's around six or seven thousand other Greek hoplites with them.

• 32:01Dan Snow?

  And so they withdraw to Thermopylae. What's the plan? Do they think they can defeat the mighty Persian horde there?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  It would be brilliant to actually be able to be confident to know what the plan was. Our primary sources confuse us. The invasion seems to have coincided with a religious festival called the Karnaya, where all of the Dorian Greeks, so that means the Spartans, the Corinthians, the Tegeons and various others, will not fight for that entire mouth. It seems to have coincided somewhat with the Olympic Games, when there's a truce, when ancient Greeks don't fight. So Xerxes might have invaded at a time when he knows that many of the Greeks are going to be absent. That might explain why only 300 Spartans go. They may be all there prepared to spare at a time when they shouldn't be fighting.

• 32:53Speaker 03

  The timing's a bit confusing in that way. They're probably an advance guard intended to hold the Persians up until a larger number of men can actually come and reinforce them.

• 33:04Dan Snow?

  In the end, though, they end up fighting a battle of to the last man.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  They do, and whether that was intended or not is entirely unclear. Herodotus, who is our best and earliest source for it, suggests that every single one of those 300 men, including Leonidas, had a son to replace him if he died. So that might intend that they knew they were going to die. There was an oracle, which he only mentions after he's explained the battle, which prophesied that either Sparta would be destroyed or a Spartan king would die. So Leonidas may have known that if he died, then all was going to be okay for the Spartans. That could have been invented after the fact to explain away what was actually quite a quick defeat.

• 33:53Dan Snow?

  I love the line about the Spartans rather enjoying the day of battle because it was a bit of a rest from their training.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Yes, but they did train throughout military campaigns. It's one of the things that's quite interesting about them. They don't stop exercising because they're fighting, they just exercise a little bit less.

• 34:09Dan Snow?

  They do apparently give a good account of themselves. They stun the Persians with their martial ability. Do you think it's a little bit of PR here? Do you think this is a bit of historical whitewashing?

• 34:17Speaker 03

  There has to be some exaggeration here. We know there's two days of fighting and then the third day where it all goes wrong. Herodotus kind of gives the impression that there's fighting all day, but actually really only describes three separate assaults by the Persians on each of those two days. So they could have been quite short assaults. They could have been long, all-day fighting. It's just too difficult for us to tell. Herodotus was writing 50 years after the event. He was talking to the descendants of the descendants of the men who fought at Thermopylae. So he was getting some Spartan spin for sure.

• 34:55Dan Snow?

  But we think that what they've refortified an old wall across the road, do they?

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. So at its narrowest, the pass at Thermopylae is only about 15 and a half metres wide. And there's a wall there which they help rebuild to try and block the Persians' route into southern Greece.

• 35:11Dan Snow?

  And the Persians have an enormous army, but they cannot bring that to bear on this little narrow pass?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Well, 15 metres or so wide, 30 men, eight ranks of them, it's not far shy of 300. So the Spartans on their own could have blocked it with a standard ancient Greek phalanx formation. There's sheer cliff on one side and there's marshy bog sea on the other side. So there's no way to get around them on that side. And the mountain is hemming them in.

• 35:38Dan Snow?

  Is there a qualitative difference between the training, but also the equipment, perhaps the quality of the armour and edges of the swords between the Spartans and their enemies, the Persians?

• 35:48Speaker 03

  The way in which all of the ancient Greek hoplites are equipped is way better suited to fighting in a narrow place like Thermopylae. They have the big wooden bronze-faced shields that I mentioned earlier. They have the heavy armour. Their spears, according to Herodotus, were longer than those of the Persians. The Persians do not have much in the way of body armour. And they have flimsy wicker shields, which may well have just kind of practically cracked as soon as they hurled themselves against the Spartans. So it really would have been quite simple, I think, for well-trained men who trusted each other and who were physically very strong to resist the Persians for some time.

• 36:29Dan Snow?

  And we hear that Xerxes, the Persian leader, sends his immortals into battle, his best troops, and they cannot get through.

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he sends the Medes and the Chisians in first, just gives them orders to arrest the Spartans and bring them back to him, is how it's painted by Herodotus, and that goes very, very wrong. And when he gets desperate, he sends in his crack troops, and they fare absolutely no better.

• 36:52Dan Snow?

  So you think all of that, we can trust that, can we?

• 36:57Speaker 03

  I think it's dangerous to say we could trust all of it, but I think the fact that they were able to successfully repel assaults by the Persians without major casualties for some time makes sense.

• 37:12Dan Snow?

  But then the Persians discover a little route round the flank.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yes, exactly. What they were warned would happen at Tempe happens at Thermopylae, and that's something that modern scholars have always got quite excited about, because when they got there, they were told, oh, there's another way around this position here, and they left it to the local Phocians to guard that. And many modern scholars have said, why didn't the Herodotus put a Spartan officer in charge? But that's not how ancient Greek allied armies worked. He wouldn't have done something like that, and it turned out to not be a brilliant decision.

• 37:48Dan Snow?

  So there's these allied troops guarding this mountain path that goes around the flank?

• 37:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:53Dan Snow?

  And the Persians are showed that route through the mountains?

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yes, by a local named Ephialtes, whose name spectacularly means nightmare in ancient Greek and modern Greek, and it's either just sheer coincidence, or it's the kind of thing that's part of the romance of the battle, that someone pinned this name on him, because there's suggestion he might have had another name. So maybe this is a more dramatic name that was thrown at him after the event.

• 38:19Dan Snow?

  The Persians push these allied troops aside?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Well, the way Herodotus describes it, the Phocians thought, they're coming for us, and they went to higher ground to defend themselves, and the Persians just went past.

• 38:29Dan Snow?

  And so the Persians arrive behind the Spartans, who are blocking this pass?

• 38:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  There's more Spartans after this, don't go away.

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• 40:17Dan Snow?

  At that point, could Leonidas still have withdrawn? Did they choose destruction over retreat at that point, do you think?

• 40:23Speaker 03

  That's the way it's painted. So the way the sources tell it, Leonidas learned before it was too late that they were going to be surrounded. So he sent the allies away and the Thespians from the region of Biocia, just south of Thermopylae, refused to go. And according to what Herodotus says, the Thebans were given orders to stay as well and kept as hostages, which frankly seems a dangerous thing to do. To do when you're in a fight to the death. So they chose to sacrifice themselves. And there's a question. Were they planning to really fight to the death? Did they leave too late to escape if they were trying to hold up one end of the Persians? Did they just get the timing wrong? It's a possibility.

• 41:08Dan Snow?

  We just don't know. But either way, we think that they were eventually caught between the hammer and the anvil and the Persian attack from both sides.

• 41:14Speaker 03

  Yep, that's the way Herodotus tells it. So that's the canonical story. They fight aggressively. Until they've been surrounded and then they withdraw to a low hill and make a final stand.

• 41:25Dan Snow?

  And they are killed to a man?

• 41:27Speaker 03

  Killed to a man with two exceptions who had been sent away before the final stand was made.

• 41:34Dan Snow?

  So it's portrayed as a bit of a pyrrhic victory. The Persians win, but they've got a real bloody nose and they're also made aware these Greeks are going to be a hardened nut to crack. There is then a great sea battle off the coast of Athens, but there's then the great other great battle of this war, which less talked about is Plataea, when you also see the Spartans. Excelling.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, in many ways, Plataea is a better example of the potential that Sparta has as a military power. They send 5,000 Spartan citizens, they send 5,000 of the second-class citizens, the perioikoi. They have 35,000 helots armed for war and they lead a massive allied army against the Persians. There's 30,000 plus. Hoplites and they wipe out the Persian forces.

• 42:19Dan Snow?

  This is the year after Thermopylae, the Persians still occupying northern Greece, but the Greeks now pushing up, trying to liberate that land.

• 42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's a different Persian force as well. Xerxes has returned home. He's left the best troops behind with his cousin Mardonius, who's actually picked through various contingents of the. Persian allied army and picked guys who looked like they might be useful for fighting against hoplites. So he he took the marines off the Egyptian warships because they had. Heavy armour and big wooden shields. So Mardonius clearly had some ideas and he knew what he'd faced at Thermopylae and was trying to prepare himself. Better to face the Spartans a second time around, but in large numbers, they did the job.

• 43:00Dan Snow?

  We can't pass this section without quickly doing some myth busting on the 300 movie that for a certain generation was very, very important indeed, I think, and. Hugely influential. What's some of your headlines about the most prominent myths in that movie?

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Well, the thing I

• 43:15Dan Snow?

  Where to start?

• 43:16Speaker 03

  The thing I, yeah, exactly. Where to start? The thing I always start with is say, the film 300 is a very faithful reproduction of Frank Miller's graphic novel 300. And so Frank Miller is a superhero comic book writer. So the Spartans in many ways are superheroes. So the film amplifies aspects of Spartan society. So they have the red cloaks, they have the lam the shields. So that looks quite good. There's a moment where they actually fight like hoplites, which is quite good. But then it just goes crazy with so many imaginary features like Ephialtes being a disabled Spartan. I mean, he was a local Greek who did it for the cash. The fact that they end up fighting in a very free and out

• 44:00Speaker 03

  of a phalanx kind of way. The fact that there's barely anyone other than 300 Spartans. The fact that they don't wear bronze armour. Spartans did not go around wearing leather trunks. In normal life, they might have actually got around much more naked than that, but they wouldn't have done combat that way. So certainly no war rhinos in Xerxes army. Xerxes was a Persian king. He's not a, he's not, he's not a giant bejeweled demigod kind of thing.

• 44:31Dan Snow?

  What about same-sex relationships?

• 44:33Speaker 03

  In Sparta, yes. So one of the most notorious lines in the graphic novel, which I think made its way into the film, is Leonidas dismissing the Athenians as boy lovers, which is actually a line that the Athenians would have used against the Spartans. So part of their upbringing, a key part of that was a pederastic relationship between an older man and a teenage boy.

• 44:57Dan Snow?

  And that would have been an aspect of Spartan culture?

• 44:59Speaker 03

  Very much so, yes.

• 45:01Dan Snow?

  With the Persians gone, or at least back in Asia Minor for a while, still quite interested in the Greek world. Do the Spartans and Athenians sort of turn on each other quite rapidly? What's Greece like they leave behind?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  They do turn on each other quite quickly. So they defeat Xerxes, they have this allied force, and they do initially work together with the other Greeks to try and continue the war against the Persians. But it goes wrong for the Spartans very quickly, partly because Porzanius, the nephew of Leonidas, who was the general who won the Battle of Plataea, goes rogue quite quickly and ends up reportedly even trying to do dodgy deals with the Persians and goes around to the city of Byzantium with a bodyguard of Persians and Egyptians and is basically trying to turn himself into the king of Greece.

• 45:55Speaker 03

  So the Athenians seize the opportunity that this presents to effectively nudge the Spartans out of the way and take over the leadership of the war against the Persians.

• 46:05Dan Snow?

  You then get this decades-long war between Athens and Sparta, famously written up by Thucydides. The perception I had when I was a kid reading that was that it was not unlike Napoleon and the British in the 19th century. The Athenians couldn't seem to be able to defeat the Spartans on land and then the Spartans were also at a very great disadvantage at sea. So you have this elephant and the whale kind of wrestling each other for decades.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. The Athenians grow their naval power more and more and more and they do develop quite a serious maritime empire. Spartans don't have a hope of dislodging them at sea. But even though Sparta has its problems on land, Athens just isn't able to do the job. So they seem to have their own spheres of influence in some way. And so they spend the 50 years after defeating the Persians kind of moving half against each other, not proxy wars where it's Sparta's allies fighting against Athens, but Sparta not actually involved, squabbling amongst themselves. It's all a bit confusing and messy

• 47:08Speaker 03

  until it really does finally explode into an actual full-on war, which is the Peloponnesian War.

• 47:14Dan Snow?

  Eventually that deadlock is broken because Sparta does work out how to fight at sea. Is that fair?

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Work out how to fight at sea is part of it, but also are prepared to do a dodgy deal with the Persians for cash is the other reason. So Sparta needs to know how to wean at sea, which means they need a commander who can actually do it. But basically, they need ships. That's the only way they can really defeat the Athenians at sea. They need to be able to at least equal them. And the only way they can do that is with money. And they do a dodgy deal with the Persians to get money, which allows them to build ships, but also quite crucially, offer better pay to rowers. So they can get the more skilled rowers, which means the Athenians suddenly don't have that extra advantage that they had at sea.

• 48:00Dan Snow?

  With Athens defeated, it looks like Sparta's dominant in the space we today call Greece, but nothing lasts forever.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  No, the Spartans have genuine empire for a very brief period of time. It all goes wrong quite, quite quickly.

• 48:16Dan Snow?

  And why is that? What changes?

• 48:18Speaker 03

  It's a combination of things. One, they are awful leaders. They are not nice people, and they have no idea how to actually avoid creating a scenario where all of the other Greeks will unite against them. And the other problem is there just aren't enough of them. There's just never enough Spartan citizens. The largest number of Spartan citizens we know about for sure is 8,000. By the time they actually have rulership of the Greek world, hegemony is the word the Greeks use, there's probably only two and a half, 3,000 Spartan citizens.

• 48:55Dan Snow?

  That's not enough.

• 48:56Speaker 03

  No, that's not nearly enough.

• 48:59Dan Snow?

  Okay, interesting. So in the end, demographics plays a big part.

• 49:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and some of it goes right back to that high bar they set for citizenship in Sparta. They made it so difficult to be a Spartan citizen that it's just too easy to fall into poverty and lose your citizen status. And so in the fourth century, we suddenly hear about a new class of Spartans known as the inferiors. And they seem to have been men who were deprived of their full citizen rights because they were just too poor to be a Spartan citizen.

• 49:30Dan Snow?

  And they've got to go back to farming and they can't just spend all their days hunting and doing military training.

• 49:34Speaker 03

  Well, they've got to find another way of living. Yeah. So their land resources will just not be enough to meet their contributions for a common mess. So their sons will not be able to be trained up to be a Spartan and just become a Spartan citizen. They do try and fix it in some ways. There's another underclass we hear about known as the Motharkes. And they seem to have been the sons of the citizens who were sponsored through the upbringing by wealthier citizens in the hope that they might be trained up and be ready to become a Spartan citizen. And maybe the wealthy benefactor might actually gift them enough land that they could then become a citizen as a sort of a safety net for the sons of the poor.

• 50:17Dan Snow?

  But it's not enough. And they're defeated by the Thebans of all people. No one saw that coming.

• 50:21Speaker 03

  No, the Thebans might have seen it coming, but I don't think.

• 50:24Dan Snow?

  In their wildest dreams.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't think the Thebans fifty years ago would have seen it coming. But by the time that they do defeat the Spartans in three seventy one, the small number of Spartan citizens has become so obvious. And also, the Thebans have become much more professionalized themselves. So they have an elite military unit known as the Sacred Band, which is three hundred men, reportedly pairs of lovers, one hundred and fifty pairs of lovers, adding up to three hundred, who are trained and funded by the state to spend their time being gentlemen of leisure, ready to fight against men like the Spartans.

• 51:01Dan Snow?

  So that Spartan period, if I get it, as you say, doesn't last very long. So why on earth have the whole of subsequent history for two and a half thousand years been obsessed with the Spartans?

• 51:11Speaker 03

  Thermopylae. It's the romance of Thermopylae. Three hundred men who are prepared to fight against millions of Persians and die for freedom. It has such a brilliant vibe about it.

• 51:24Dan Snow?

  I can see the twelve year old Andrew just still bursting to get up.

• 51:27Speaker 03

  Absolutely. That's what drew me in. And it's what's drawn so many people in. And when you look at so many. Modern novels set in ancient Sparta, they're set around Thermopylae. Films, they're about Thermopylae. It's always about Thermopylae.

• 51:40Dan Snow?

  And as well as being this wonderful story, it's also one of the first stories of European literature. It's Herodotus, the grandfather of history. I mean, it's the uh stories from our past, isn't it?

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, Herodotus is the first surviving recorder of a narrative history. And his entire story that starts really, well, chronologically, it starts in the middle of the sixth century. But he takes things back to mythical events. The whole of that work is drawing you to the big showdowns between the Greeks and the Persians. And one of those moments is Thermopylae. And he has to tell the story in the way that he tells it.

• 52:16Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you for telling us the story of Thermopylae and indeed the whole of the Spartan rise and fall. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's History Hit. You know, you could have watched this episode and others on YouTube. That's right. You can peek behind the curtain of how we record this podcast on our YouTube channel. Very exciting new development here. Just click the link in the show notes and head over to subscribe. New YouTube releases every Friday, friends. Don't miss out.

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