Sparta

19 Nov, 2009 930 History of the Ancient World

Melvyn Bragg and guests Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall and Angie Hobbs discuss Sparta, the militaristic Ancient Greek city-state, and the political ideas it spawned.The isolated Ancient Greek city-state of Sparta was a ferocious opposite to the cosmopolitan port of Athens. Spartans were hostile to outsiders and rhetoric, to philosophy and change. Two and a half thousand years on, Sparta remains famous for its brutally rigorous culture of military discipline, as inculcated in its young men through communal living, and terrifying, licensed violence towards the Helots, the city-state’s subjugated majority. Sparta and its cruelty was used as an argument against slavery by British Abolitionists in the early 1800s, before inspiring the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.Yet Sparta also produced poets of great skill: Tyrteaus wrote marching songs for the young men; Alcman wrote choral lyrics for the young women. Moreover, the city-state’s rulers pioneered a radically egalitarian political system, and its ideals were invoked by Plato. Its inhabitants also prided themselves on their wit: we don’t only derive the word ‘spartan’ from their culture, but the word ‘laconic’.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Paul Cartledge 21 episodes
    AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge
  • Edith Hall 19 episodes
    Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London
  • Angie Hobbs 24 episodes
    Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick

Related episodes

Programme ID: b00nvz72

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00nvz72

Auto-category: 938.9 (Ancient Greece & Rome)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. Uniquely in ancient Greece, the city-state of Sparta didn't see any need to build a wall around itself.