Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hello and welcome to Conflicted, the history podcast where we talk about the struggles that shaped us, the hard questions that they pose, and why we should care about any of it. I'm your host, Zach Cornwell, and this is episode one, This is Sparta? In 2006, a movie was released. Almost overnight, it became a cultural phenomenon, raking in half a billion dollars and dominating the summer blockbuster season.
It told the story of a heroic last stand made by proud, noble warriors. It told a tale of honor and love and sacrifice and guitar solos. So many guitar solos. As you may have guessed by now, this movie was called 300. At the time, there was no escaping this movie. It sparked memes and parodies and was endlessly quotable. I remember seeing it in the theater and leaving on an adrenaline high that I can barely even describe.
In my defense, I was a 17-year-old kid at the time, but it was the ultimate underdog story, right? Good versus evil, light versus darkness, and best of all, it was ostensibly history. It actually happened. It was the biggest movie in the world. And the heroes of our story were hundreds of highly trained, perfectly sculpted, slave-holding, wife-swapping pedophiles.
Wait, wait, wait, wait, you might be saying. Hold the phone. Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender did not shed gallons of CGI blood, sweat, and tears just to let you, a rando history podcaster, slander the noble warriors who died at Thermopylae. The fact is, we have a certain image of the ancient Spartans, and it is a very flattering one. You think Spartan, and what comes to mind?
Badass. Soldier. Honor. Brotherhood. Athleticism. Patriotism. Democracy. Bravery. Spartan imagery is everywhere in our culture. The timeless visual of the battle-hardened Spartan warrior, or hoplite, has been utilized in almost every strata of society. From high school football teams, to fitness clubs, to tech and software companies, even cleaning products.
That ubiquitous obsession with the Spartan Hoplite is built on a very rosy characterization of who these guys were, what kind of lives they led, and the society that created them. Because underneath the legend and the myth, there's a darker reality that would contrast pretty sharply with our progressive post-Enlightenment values.
And the irony of that is stark, considering how emblematic the Spartans have become as staunch defenders of what some would call, quote, Western values. Like all societies, they were a bundle of flaws and contradictions. There are things to both admire and detest about that scrappy little city-state on the Aegean. And we can learn a lot more from them than how to get shredded six-pack abs, bruh.
It's thought that the ancestors of the people who would eventually found the city of Sparta came from the island of Crete. But Sparta didn't really become the Sparta that we know and love until the 9th century BC, when a guy named Lycurgus the Lawmaker comes along.
We don't really know if he was a real guy or an amalgam of different Spartan leaders who lived at the same time. But according to Plutarch, a Greek writer who lived much later, Lycurgus set down many of the codes and laws that came to define the city-state of Sparta and made their culture so unique from the rest of the Greek world. But the linchpin of Spartan society, the thing that every single aspect of their culture orbited around, was war.
Every cog and gear in the Spartan machine turned for the purpose of developing the most effective and powerful career soldiers in the Greek world. And we know that they, more or less, accomplished this. But how did they accomplish it? Back to our buddy Lycurgus for just a minute. When he comes to power, he makes three big changes that really set the mold for what Sparta is going to become and the overall trajectory it's going to take.
First of all, he stabilizes the government by installing a series of complex, interlocking power structures. It's a little bit like our own system of checks and balances here in the U.S., but unlike the U.S., we get the impression that factional politics wasn't much of an issue in ancient Sparta, because these multiple power systems were so perfectly calibrated.
They had not one, but two kings who shared power as dual figureheads of the government. But their power wasn't absolute. There was also a small council of elected officials called ephors that could serve as a power check to the two kings. New ephors would be elected and swapped in and out regularly to keep power from staying in anyone's hands for too long.
And on top of all that, there was also a council of elders called the "Gerousia" which were elected for life and could influence the decisions of the other branches of government. And it all worked pretty well. It's not unlike how the United States government is supposed to work in theory, where each branch exercises checks and balances to reach the best decision for the people. There's a temptation to assume that all Greek city-states were hardcore democracies like Athens.
But Sparta created a unique blend of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy that just worked really well for them. And on paper, that all sounds well and good. But how do you keep a government like that going? We know all too well how the influence of bribes and money can breed corruption and push a government toward bad policy. Well, Lycurgus had an answer for that, too. And that answer was, no money.
He forbade gold and silver within the Spartan borders. The only currency worth anything were these heavy iron rods that were really hard to steal and bulky and just not great for accumulation. He also gave all adult male Spartans an equally sized patch of land for them to live on. At the time, it was a pretty clever bit of social engineering.
How do you keep your society and government safe from greed? You eliminate the accelerants of greed by instituting absolute equality and removing the ability to accumulate wealth. It's a radical idea, not only for our own time, but for the ancient world as well. Other Greek city-states like Athens thought the Spartans were nuts. They were hardcore capitalists by comparison. But Lycurgus wasn't done yet. So you've got a stable government. You've got a content population.
What's left to do? You make sure nothing can threaten that system. And that means a strong military. This last pillar is what gives purpose to the lives of Spartan citizens. It's a bit of a chicken and an egg situation. Did Spartans strive to become such amazing warriors simply to protect this great society? Or was their streamlined society what allowed them to focus on being such amazing fighters?
The answer is neither, but we'll get to that. To achieve this goal of a perfect military machine, Lycurgus creates what's called the Agogae. It's a huge school where all Spartan boys, starting at the age of seven, go to in order to learn the arts of war. They say goodbye to their families, and they don't come out of there until they're 20 years old. They undergo intense physical training every day.
Imagine a CrossFit session from hell that lasts your entire childhood. They were beaten, they received very harsh punishments when they failed, and it was incredibly rigorous. But you could not argue with the results. The system produced the finest soldiers in ancient Greece.
This is where the utopian veneer begins to slip away, and we start to see the darker side of the Spartan lifestyle. I'm going to put a caveat on this next part because there was a lot of heated debate about it. Historians still have intense, even emotional, disagreements on what the exact nature of this next facet of Spartan boyhood was, because it's a bit of a doozy. The Spartans were enthusiastic pederasts.
Within this rigid training structure, sexual relationships developed between the Spartan adult males and the adolescent boys that they were training. Now let's just get it out of the way that this is nasty and horrifying and absolutely unacceptable to our modern moral compass. But according to the sources we have, and that's all we have to go on, it wasn't quite the predatory situation that you might be thinking of. First of all, these relationships were intensely formalized.
The way it would work was once a Spartan boy went through puberty, he would select an older male to serve as a kind of mentor. The selection process involved gift-giving and a kind of pseudo-courtship. Once solidified, this relationship often became sexual. But it was a bit broader than that. The mentor was expected to offer guidance and support as the kid navigated this intense, decade-spanning training within the Agogae.
Both the men and the boys' reputations and prestige in Spartan society would be linked for a time. And if the boy failed in some way, that would reflect badly on his mentor, and they could both be ostracized. So these adults had a vested interest in the boy's success from a personal pride standpoint. But all of this amounts to what a modern observer can clearly identify as institutionalized child abuse.
And this is what makes the admiration of the Spartans all that more problematic. Because the system that created these incredibly talented fighters was built on practices that we would find morally repulsive today. But the poor treatment of kids didn't end there. The Spartans were also very big on infanticide.
millennia before your boy Charles Darwin would popularize the evolutionary theory of survival of the fittest, the Spartans were exercising the idea as social policy.
The practice of discarding deformed or sickly infants is a pretty well-known feature of Spartan culture. But their definition of sickly was a little broader than we might assume. Spartan women would bathe their newborns not in water, but in wine. According to Plutarch, quote,
End quote.
If an infant had a bad reaction to the wine or got sick, that child would be discarded. And in this case, discarded means being thrown into a pit and left to die.
Our friend Plutarch elaborates, quote, "...the father must take the offspring to the place called Leshae, where the elders of the same tribe, sitting as judges, closely examine the child. If he is strong and of sound body, they command that he be raised, and they assign him an allotment of land from the 9,000 plots. If he is ill-born and misshapen, they throw him into the pit at the
at the place called Apothetae below Mount Tagetis, as it is better neither for him nor for the city to remain alive, as from the beginning he does not have a good start towards becoming healthy and strong. End quote.
We don't really know any percentages. We don't know the ratio of discarded infants to kept infants. It was likely relatively low, if only for practical reasons. You can't kill every baby that can't do 10 push-ups straight out of the womb. You need a population, right? And honestly, this was also a social practice that likely brought indescribable anguish to Spartan mothers.
Imagine having to hand your newborn baby over to people you knew would kill it hours later just because it was born a little smaller or couldn't get over a cough or had spasms from being soaked in friggin' wine. And that makes me wonder just how often this was going on and how strictly this was enforced.
But we can never know. All we know is that Spartans had an institutional practice of killing babies they deemed too weak to contribute to their society. They were essentially practicing a primitive form of eugenics. They believed this brutal style of social engineering would shape their population into a collection of the strongest, most resilient people in the world. Ultimately, they would turn out to be mistaken. So, we've talked a lot about the men of Sparta.
But what was it like to be a Spartan girl? What place does a woman have in this hyper-masculine, macho warrior culture? Well, an interesting one, to say the least. To understand and contextualize the role women had in Spartan culture, I think it might be good to look at how women lived in the rest of the Greek world. Although Athens is touted as the world's greatest early democracy, women had very little rights within it.
They could not vote. They could not own property. They lived harsh, difficult lives. The ones who didn't perform menial labor were rarely allowed to leave the house, except for large festivals or family funerals. Spartan women, on the other hand, enjoyed a much larger degree of freedom and autonomy. They didn't have any substantial voice in the government or voting rights, of course, but they could inherit property. They were given a formal education, taught to read and write properly,
They were strongly encouraged towards athletic pursuits like javelin throwing, chariot racing, and wrestling, to name a few. They were also allowed to train alongside the boys and the men. And we actually hear a lot about Spartans training in the nude, with both sexes intermingling together. I'm sure there were some very distracted wrestlers in the yard, but hey, whatever works. As Thucydides, an Athenian historian, noted, quote,
The Spartans were the first to strip naked and to disrobe openly, and anoint themselves with oil after playing sports in the nude." No, you could never accuse the Spartans of having body image issues. And again, you've got to consider the context. Everything about Spartan society was done with a purpose. That singular, obsessive goal of a strong military guided every single decision.
The men and women were allowed to train together and did so in the nude, not just because they wanted to crush it at the next Olympics, but to create an environment that would facilitate courtship, marriage, and the creation of more healthy Spartan babies. Here's another interesting anecdote from Plutarch regarding a quote attributed to a Spartan queen named Gorgo. Quote, "'Wherefore they led to think and speak as Gorgo, the wife of Leonidas, is said to have done.'"
When some foreign woman, as it would seem, said to her, quote, "You Spartan women are the only ones who rule their men." She answered, "Yes, we are the only ones who give birth to men." As quotes go, that's pretty awesome. But anyway, moving on. Spartan marriages were far from what we would consider traditional. Actually, they were downright libertine. They closely resembled what we would call open marriages today, meaning you can sleep around so long as you have the go-ahead from your spouse.
It wasn't uncommon for men to approach other men and ask them if they could have sex with their wives, so long as the women consented. And women could do the same. If they saw a young Spartan dude that they had the hots for, they could act on it, if their husband agreed. If you were an older man and had a young wife, you might try and facilitate hookups between her and men of a similar age. It's hard for most of us to wrap our heads around, but the jealousy just wasn't there.
It was all rationalized by the overarching goal of wanting to make as many healthy babies as possible. Everything in Sparta, all the way down to sex and marriage, was viewed through the lens of maintaining a strong military. Now, when you read about all the stuff we've been talking about, a big question starts to pop up. How did they have time to do all of this?
I mean, most of us can barely make it to the gym for a 45-minute workout after the daily grind. How were the Spartans able to devote every waking moment towards athletic pursuits, combat training, and physical perfection? How were they able to remain in peak condition and train all day, every day? How was it possible for almost every single Spartan man and woman to do this?
After all, who was working the fields, man? Who was cooking the food, cleaning the streets, sewing the clothes, making the weapons, gathering the water, building the houses? The answer is slaves. The Spartans had a massive slave population. They were called the Helots. And the Helots were made up of the populations of neighboring Greek states that the Spartans had defeated in war and then brought back home for the purpose of forced labor.
Just as the wealth of the antebellum south was built on the backs of kidnapped Africans, the wealth and power of Sparta was made possible by the subjugation and enslavement of their neighbors.
This is something I think a lot of us forget about when talking about ancient cultures. Slavery was very, very common. The societies that we idolize from antiquity, like Imperial Rome or Ancient Egypt, were more often than not built and sustained by a substantial slave population and full of practices that were just as brutal, if not more so, than the transatlantic slavery that we're only a few generations removed from here in the States.
But the Spartans had a bit of a complex about the whole slavery thing. There was an atmosphere of paranoia about the Helots and the threat that they posed because the Helots outnumbered the Spartans seven to one. And on top of those numerical issues, these slaves lived and worked among their masters. They were embedded into society. And if a revolt sprang up, it could happen suddenly and completely without warning.
The Spartans knew that they had this dagger hovering over their backs every single hour of every single day, so they do what all slavers do and use fear to maintain that control. They terrorized the Helots constantly to keep them in line, and they do it in a few different ways. Plutarch tells us about a little yearly tradition that they had where war would be declared on the Helots.
Small teams of the youngest, strongest Spartan warriors would roam the countryside, killing slaves at will, usually seeking out the strongest or the fittest. The closest analogy I can think of is The Purge. You know, those horror movies where for one night a year all crime is legal, including murder. It wasn't quite that anarchic, but for the Helots, you can imagine the vibe is pretty similar. You know this is coming every year, like clockwork.
and you just have to hope and pray that you weren't targeted in one of these violent raids by the Spartan warriors. They were called the Cryptaea. This tradition served a dual purpose. It put the fear of God into the Helots, but it was also a rite of passage for the young Spartan warriors. And on top of all that, the Helots were also humiliated on a regular basis. Plutarch tells us, quote,
So just a little light hazing to really let these slaves know what was what.
And like most slavers, the Spartans weren't above using their property as sex objects either. The justification for this was by having sex with their slaves, they were replenishing the helot population. It was a renewable resource. Although, if the helot woman gave birth to a girl, that child was often killed. Only healthy male babies were considered useful.
And who knows what the ratio was between consenting encounters and non-consenting encounters. It's impossible to really pin down, but come on. The Helots had no choice in any of this, so draw your own conclusions on that last point. So we've talked a lot about Spartan society and culture. We've peeled back the veneer of legend and looked into the seedier side of their society. But where did they go?
What happened to these hardcore warriors? How long could a society like this survive?
I'm Ken Harbaugh, host of Burn the Boats from Evergreen Podcasts. I interview political leaders and influencers, folks like award-winning journalist Soledad O'Brien and conservative columnist Bill Kristol about the choices they confront when failure is not an option. I won't agree with everyone I talk to, but I respect anyone who believes in something enough to risk everything for it. Because history belongs to those willing to burn the boats. Episodes are out every other week, wherever you get your podcasts.
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and learn more about it on my website, thoughtsfromapage.com. Thanks so much for checking it out. The conflict that gets the most pop culture ink concerning Sparta is a series of clashes called the Persian Wars. Now, we're not going to get too in-depth into that today. I'm just giving you the Cliff Notes version because it informs the trajectory the overall Greek political situation is going to take. Cue the chorus of disappointed jeers from people who thought they were going to hear about Thermopylae today. Wrong.
Much has been written, said, and filmed about that battle by people who are a lot smarter than me. So while we won't be going too much into that stuff, I do want to step back and take a look at Sparta's overall role in the Persian Wars, or lack thereof. Because it's these wars that tip the first domino on the path to what will eventually happen to the Spartans.
Because only 100 years after the legendary stand at the hot gates of Thermopylae, the seemingly invincible Spartan army would be crushed. Its proud hoplites sent retreating in panic, and its supremacy over the Greek world toppled forever. The Persian Wars take place in the early 400s BC, and the first thing to understand about them is that Athens started it. Sort of.
See, we have this image of an aggressive Persian empire, bent on snuffing out the flame of democracy and dragging the world into an age of slavery and darkness. But get that out of your head. That's 300 the movie talking. In reality, the Persian empire was a huge mosaic of different peoples and cultures all united under a moderately tolerant regime.
Now, if you revolted, they'd pound you into the dust. That was just the way the Persians kept their subjects in check. But it was nothing like the proactive domestic terrorism that the Spartans employed against the Helots. The trouble starts when a subject under the control of Persia does rebel, a people called the Ionians, situated in what is modern-day Turkey. And the democratic city-state of Athens decides they're going to sponsor this little rebellion, engage in a little proxy war.
Well, the Persians don't like that at all. The Persian king, Darius, says "don't touch my stuff" and decides to punish the meddling Athenians. He assembles an army for a punitive expedition with one goal: burn Athens to the ground. This Persian army lands at a place called Marathon, 26 miles from the city of Athens itself.
Now you're probably going, wait a minute. Marathon, 26 miles, there's a connection here. Well, you're absolutely right. After the Athenians smash Darius' army and hurl them back into the sea, they send a runner to deliver the good news back to the city. According to popular legend, that is the origin story of the first marathon run. So the Athenians stopped the mighty Persian Empire in its tracks.
But where were the Spartans? Where were the preeminent badasses of ancient Greece? They were late. A crack force of 2,000 Spartan hoplites had, to their credit, answered the Athenians' call for help and had marched all the way up from their home in the south to lend their support. But they arrived a day or two after the battle.
Can you imagine how pissed off these career soldiers would have been to find the Athenians celebrating a miraculous victory achieved entirely without their help? That had to be brutally disappointing for the rank-and-file soldiers who trained their entire lives for war, only to be robbed of this opportunity for glory. But ten years later, in 480 BC, they would get their chance.
The Persian king, Darius, vows revenge following the embarrassing defeat at Marathon, but he dies before he can assemble another army for round two. He has a son, though, Xerxes, who can't let the Athenians' humiliation of dear old dad stand.
And Xerxes is not taking any chances this time. Ten years after his father's initial invasion, he assembles a much larger force, well into the hundreds of thousands, and sails back to Greece to kick these audacious Athenians in the teeth.
So when Xerxes and his giant army land in northern Greece, a small, elite force of Spartan hoplites and one of their kings, the famous Leonidas, haul ass up to the narrow pass of Thermopylae and hold the Persians off for three days. They don't do it alone, though. They are joined by a small coalition from other Greek city-states, but eventually they are all overwhelmed by the superior numbers and killed mostly to a man.
In my opinion, and again, I am not a historian, I'm just connecting the dots here, I think that King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans were motivated by a little more than patriotic duty and self-sacrifice. The Spartan absence at Marathon 10 years earlier had to have been a huge sore spot.
Can you imagine training your whole life for something, and then your big opportunity comes, only then to watch your single biggest frenemy knock it out of the park without your help? These guys had something to prove. And it's undeniable, the Battle of Thermopylae is such a potent symbol of resilience and sacrifice, it's no wonder it's etched into our historical memory. It's inspiring. You can't help but admire their bravery.
When the Persians demand the Spartans surrender their weapons, they send back the response, "Molan labe!" or "Come and take it." 1,351 years later, outnumbered revolutionaries would stitch the very same slogan on a battle flag in Gonzales, Texas. It's a good slogan. So the small Spartan force helps delay the Persians, not to mention rattle the hell out of them, while the other Greek city-states organize their defenses.
Shortly after Thermopylae, the Persian navy engages the Greeks near an island called Salamis. The Greeks wreck shop and cripple the Persian armada. It's a huge win for Athens in particular, who is developing into a formidable naval power. That's going to be important later. King Xerxes quietly slinks back to Persia, but he's not whipped yet. He leaves the command of his remaining ground forces to one of his generals.
The big climax of the Persian Wars is a battle called Plataea. I'm going to go ahead and indulge in a little Lord of the Rings reference here and say that this is the equivalent of the climactic battle at the end of Return of the King that decides the entire war. It's huge. You can never fully trust numbers when it comes to history, but historians generally agree that 100,000 Greeks faced off against a Persian army of similar size at Plataea.
Everybody is there, the Spartans, the Athenians, the Corinthians, the Argonians, but one city-state isn't there. A city-state called Thebes. They're a powerful kingdom to the west of Athens, and they have sided with the Persians. Now I want you to remember that name, Thebes. This will not be the last time we hear from them.
Long story short, the Greek coalition wins at Plataea and ends the Persian threat to mainland Greece for good. But you might be asking, why are we talking about wars in which the Spartans functionally did very little? They were late to the first big battle, they lose their second, and they form only about a tenth of the army that defeats the Persians at Plataea. Well, the political situation changes drastically in the aftermath of the Persian Wars.
Sparta marches home to the south and becomes borderline isolationist. They're content to just terrorize their slaves and get swole at the gym all day. They mostly keep to themselves. This allows Athens to step in as the dominant political force in the Greek world. They establish a vibrant sea trade, amassing huge wealth. They develop a powerful navy to protect those trade routes, and they bring many other small kingdoms and city-states into their sphere of influence.
This period following the Persian Wars is what's called the Golden Age of Athens. Literature, art, and philosophy spring up and flourish, setting the foundation for many hallmarks of modern Western culture. Although age is a bit of a strong word because this dominance doesn't last very long, but it produces such an abundance of culturally impactful stuff that two and a half millennia later we are still talking about it.
So how do the very rational and not paranoid at all Spartans react to this blossoming rival power? As you can imagine, not well. Not well at all. In his fantastic book, A War Like No Other, Victor Davis Hanson makes a really interesting comparison between the tensions flaring up between Athens and Sparta in the aftermath of the Persian Wars and the simmering conflict between the United States and Soviet Russia after World War II.
It's a strong analogy. You have two huge powers who, after teaming up to combat a larger threat, end up in this uneasy balance of power with competing spheres of influence. The war that's about to erupt between Athens and Sparta is called the Peloponnesian War, a conflict as difficult to explain as it is to spell. It lasts 30 years, and it is a rollercoaster.
Most of what we know about this war comes from an ancient historian named Thucydides, who actually fought for Athens during this war. His sprawling account of the conflict is held up by historians as a defining text from antiquity, one that sets the template for what a historical text should be. And even though he fought on the Athenian side, his account is considered to be fairly objective. Sparta starts to see the rising influence of Athens and gets very nervous about
Not only do they fear Athens' geopolitical clout, they also really, really don't like the Athenian ideology. Athens and Sparta are downright antithetical in terms of what they value as societies. The Athenians saw the Spartans as simple-minded country brutes, and the Spartans saw the Athenians as soft, greedy intellectuals. So Sparta launches what amounts to a preemptive strike.
They march a huge army into the Athenians' backyard and start burning crops, olive groves and wheat fields, in an attempt to lure the Athenians into a decisive land battle. But the Athenians, led by a man named Pericles, are not stupid. They're a naval power. They know their soldiers can't stand against Spartan hoplites in the open field. I mean, the Persians were one thing.
At Marathon, bronze-encased Athenians had made short work of Persian soldiers armored only in padded wool and carrying wicker shields. But facing off against Sparta would be much different. This would be hoplite versus hoplite, phalanx versus phalanx. And the Spartans were just better drilled and better trained. So Pericles, the Athenian leader, decides to go with a different strategy.
Rather than take the bait and rush out to fight a battle he was certain they'd lose, he brings the entire Athenian population into the city to wait out the raiding Spartans behind the thick protective walls of Athens. Armies are expensive to maintain in the field. You have to feed them, you have to pay them, and on a long enough timeline it becomes impossible to do that.
Pericles, like a small boxer fighting a heavyweight opponent, hopes he can bide his time and let the Spartans wear themselves out. And it actually works. The Spartans realize they can't defeat an army that won't come out and fight. And they don't do much damage to the Athenian crops either. Olive trees are very resilient and quickly grow back even when you hack them down. On top of all that, Spartan siege tactics are not advanced enough to get them over the huge walls of Athens.
So they just kind of throw their hands up and march back south to rethink this whole "war with Athens" thing. At first glance, Pericles' strategy seemed to be brilliant. But it had one fatal flaw. Because what happens when you pack an entire countryside's population into the walls of a single city in a hot, humid, Mediterranean climate with no sewage system and poor sanitation?
Yeah, it would not be Spartan spears that unraveled Pericles' plan, but good old-fashioned germs. In the summer of 430 BC, a plague rips through Athens. Modern historians are still scratching their heads over what exactly it was. Some have said Ebola. There are theories about where it originated. Some people say it started in Ethiopia and traveled across the Mediterranean by way of trade ships.
There's even a conspiracy theory or two involving deliberate poisoning of the water supply by the Spartans. But precise biological warfare seems a little too creative for them, at least to me. Whatever it was, and wherever it came from, it was nasty. And very, very contagious. And it absolutely devastates the Athenians.
Our historian friend Thucydides actually caught it too, and luckily for us, lived to tell of his experience with it. Nothing did more damage to Athens than the plague, he said.
The symptoms of this disease read like the list of side effects at the end of any prescription ad. It's just a never-ending parade of pain and discomfort. Victor Davis Hansen describes it in his book as flu, dysentery, measles, and pneumonia all wrapped up into one nightmare disease. If you caught this, first you'd get really hot and flushed, just dripping sweat constantly.
Then your eyes would start to itch and burn. Your tongue would bleed. It would also start to smell bad too, so you'd have this odor cloud hanging over your head 24-7. You'd develop a hacking cough. You'd start to vomit up bile every hour on the hour. Then spasms and convulsions would set in. Throw in a little diarrhea for good measure. And all this discomfort means you can't sleep. So you develop insomnia due to the constant pain.
And all of this lasts about a week until your body finally just gives up from exhaustion and you die.
The corpses start piling up more than anyone can bury or burn, especially since the healthy are so terrified of catching it and the sick are too weak to lift anything. These bodies just start rotting in the street, which causes sanitation to take a nosedive and just accelerates the whole situation. And worst of all, the Athenian leader, Pericles, well, he catches it too. And he dies.
In the end, Athens lost about one-third of its entire population, about 80,000 people. And the Spartans, they can't believe their luck. They're sitting back watching all of this like, oh my god, this is great, we didn't even have to do anything. Their elation would prove premature. Athens may have been ravaged by a mysterious plague, but it was far from beaten.
The war ends up dragging on for decades. In many ways, it's the end of an era. Long gone are the glorious days of Greek cooperation against the invading Persians. Most of the fighting in the Peloponnesian War is very unglamorous. It's dirty, it's backstabby, it involves raids and butchery and mass killing of civilians. Big clashes between armies are actually very rare, and you can sense the disappointment when you read Thucydides' opinion on it all.
He's bummed that it all became so ugly, and he misses the formal, honorable way of fighting from the past. And it's in this new environment that the cracks start to show in the myth of the unstoppable Spartan foot soldier. In one battle, 120 elite Spartan soldiers, the best of the best, their version of the Navy SEALs basically, get surrounded and actually surrender to the Athenians.
This horrifies the people back home. They'd grown up on the story of Leonidas and his 300 at Thermopylae. Spartans do not surrender. It was unthinkable. This is not coming back with your shield or on it. The Athenians would end up holding these elite soldiers hostage for the next 17 years. So this clumsy dance of a war goes back and forth for decades.
Finally, a fragile peace is established, and this is where the Athenians make a critical, fatal mistake. Rather than using this peace as an opportunity to take a breather and rebuild their forces, infrastructure, and society, they decide to indulge in a little Persian-style expansionism. 500 miles southwest of Greece lies the island of Sicily.
And on Sicily, there's a kingdom called Syracuse. Well, Athens decides, you know what? That super-rich kingdom 500 miles away seems pretty sweet. Let's go conquer that. It seems totally out of the blue, but it fits with Athens' behavior over the last half century. They may have been a radical democracy, but they had imperial aspirations.
The Athenians were very aggressive. They were all about expanding and gobbling up more and more bits of territory in the Mediterranean. And they start to covet this rich little Italian kingdom. So Athens sends a huge military expedition to conquer it, and they just get totally crushed. Their navy is destroyed, their army is enslaved, and their military power is greatly reduced. It is an unmitigated disaster.
Sparta sees its opportunity. This is their opening. The peace is broken and they march into Athenian territory. But they've still got a problem. They don't have a great navy. Not one strong enough to sack Athens anyway. They need money to build those ships and hire those rowers. So who comes to their aid? None other than their old enemy, the Persians.
Remember, Persia's original beef was with Athens, and they figured the best way to destroy the Greeks was not to take them all on at once, but to turn them against each other. So the Persians bankroll Sparta, and they're soon able to build lots of ships and hire lots of guys. It's ironic, only a single generation after Thermopylae, the Spartans have been transformed into Persian stooges, pawns in a larger geopolitical game.
The Spartans use their shiny new fleet to finally, after 30 years of bloody fighting, surround the city of Athens, force it to surrender, and end the Peloponnesian War. But the Spartans are what we like to call sore winners. Remember, they hate the radical democratic system of government that Athens has, and what they decide to do is install an oligarchy of Sparta-friendly politicians.
And they don't stop at Athens. They do this to all the Greek city-states within their sphere of influence. The Spartans crack down and implement austere policies that really hamper the freedom and individual liberties of Greek citizens across the region. Ironically, it wasn't Persia that would threaten the freedom of Greeks, but the Spartans themselves. Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to live under a government run by humorless, slave-holding bodybuilders.
And neither do the people of Thebes. Remember them? The guys who'd sat out the fight against the Persians a couple generations back? Well, some Theban revolutionaries say, enough of these Spartan punks, we are taking back our city. And these guys successfully initiate a coup against the Spartan ruling class and get control back over Thebes. Now, they just have one problem. If they want to stay in control of their city, they need to win a decisive victory over Sparta.
But everyone knows you can't beat Sparta on land. Sure, they have the occasional hiccup, but by and large, there's just no way. They're too strong and their soldiers are too good. But the Thebans have a secret advantage. They know Spartan battle tactics backwards and forwards.
They had been an ally of Sparta in the war against Athens. Three decades of seeing how the Spartan army operated up close and personal. They knew all their strengths and weaknesses. They had the playbook. The Spartan and Theban armies meet at a place called Leuctra.
Now, before we get into this, I know there have been a lot of battles in this episode. Which stands to reason we are talking about a fitness cult of super soldiers. But this is the big one, okay? The Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC takes place more than 100 years after the famous last stand at Thermopylae. But it would turn out to be the true last stand of Sparta. And there was nothing glorious about it.
The Spartans have marched into Theban territory with the intent of making an example. They're led by one of their kings, a guy named Cleombrotus. He's got 700 hoplites under his command. Not a big number. But he does have about 10,000 allied infantry backing him up. And when the Thebans roll up to the party, Cleombrotus feels a very unspartan chill run down his spine. The Thebans have 7,000 hoplites ready to roll.
and among them are a core of elite shock troops called the Sacred Band. They are hand-picked for their strength and physical ability, the cream of the crop. And this group, the Sacred Band, that puts the fear of God into the Spartans, numbers, ironically, 300. But the Sacred Band was unique in that it was composed of 150 couples, male lovers who swore to defend their partners to the death in battle.
It's actually a pretty great idea. Imagine how much more you'd want to kill an enemy if they were trying to kill your significant other right next to you. You'd fight harder, you'd fight longer, you'd do anything to protect the person that you loved. The Sacred Band's one goal is to break that group of 700 Spartan elite hoplites, and they are more than up to the task. Back on the Spartan side, Cleom Brodus isn't liking his odds here at all.
But the historian Xenophon tells us that the king's advisors and buddies start pressuring him into attacking, saying he'll bring shame on Sparta if he backs down from the fight and goes back home with his tail tucked between his legs.
Xenophon says, "...at this juncture the friends of Cleombrotus came to him and urged upon him strong reasons for delivering battle. If you let the Thebans escape without fighting, they said, you will run great risks of suffering the extreme penalty at the hands of the state. In times past you have missed doing anything notable, and let good chances slip. If you have any care for yourself or any attachment to your fatherland, march you must against the enemy."
And so he reluctantly gives the order to make battle preparations. And as the War Council is planning their strategy, the wine comes out. You can imagine the Spartans had a fair amount of nerves going into this, and Cleombrotus especially, so they get drunk. Xenophon says, quote,
Cleom Brodus held his last council, whether to fight or not, after the morning meal. In the heat of the noon, a little wine goes a long way, and the people said it took a somewhat provocative effect upon their spirits. End quote. Once battle commences, it does not last long. The Sacred Band crushes the Spartan hoplite formation, and the Theban superior cavalry outflank their battle line.
Cleombrotus, likely still buzzed from his wine at brunch, is killed. Once his army realizes he's dead, that famous Spartan courage melts away and everyone just starts running. It's a massacre. The city-state of Sparta would never recover from this defeat. After the Battle of Leuctra, Sparta goes into decline. It's a slow death stretching across centuries. And once the Roman Empire eventually marches in and takes over, their fate was sealed.
At the height of Imperial Rome, Sparta actually became a fairly popular tourist destination. Romans on vacation would go out of their way to see the Spartan training grounds and watch the hoplites perform their drills. What was once the most powerful city-state in Greece ultimately became an ancient version of Disneyland. So why talk about any of this at all? Why talk about Sparta and the wars it fought?
Other nations and city-states were much more influential from a geopolitical standpoint, but most people don't know the name Macedonia, or Boeotia, or Thebes, or Argos, or Corinth. But everyone knows Sparta. There's just something about them that seems to capture our imaginations. They're part of who we are, and that's why it's important to understand who they really were. And I'm not saying it's wrong to admire aspects of Sparta. There's plenty to admire about them.
I still enjoy the story of the 300 Spartans as much as anybody. But as the centuries grind on, subtlety tends to fall away. Time starts to sand down the rough edges of the figures from our past. The characterization of historical figures often becomes very binary. Good or bad, weak or strong, right or wrong. The truth is there's a danger to idealizing our ancestors.
whether it's the warriors of Sparta or the founding fathers of the United States. The truth is, none of them had it figured out. And the more we understand about them, the more we can learn about ourselves. What we value, what we fear, and what we're capable of. This has been Conflicted. Thanks for listening.
The Korean War has sadly been known as the Forgotten War, but half a century earlier, the United States was locked in a bloody conflict in Asia that's been all but erased from the history books. Hi, I'm Alex Hastie, the host of Ohio vs. the World, an American history podcast on the Evergreen Podcast Network. In our newest episode, we speak to experts about the Philippine-American War, America's first Asian counterinsurgency conflict. The heroes, the villains. We'll discuss President McKinley, Admiral Dewey, the vicious brutality of the fighting and the scandals and war crimes
that nearly sunk Theodore Roosevelt's presidency. Check out our show, Ohio vs. the World, on the Evergreen Podcast Network for our new episode about America's most forgotten war. Now back to the show.