The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece Paperback – August 10, 2004

What a fun book to read! I am a newbie when it comes to Greek and Spartan history and found this to be a great place to start! Lots of great details. Lots of fun stories. I wish there was more coverage of the exact ways Spartan men were intimate with each other both physically and emotionally, and how they and their women interacted, loved, and processed what to them was a perfectly normal, in fact, great, civilization. As far as I can tell, maybe we don’t actually know because we don’t have source information to describe it beyond what is written in this book. I have no idea. At any rate, a great book.

By avoiding the pitfalls of a tendentious interpretation, I think the professor offers here a very entertaining read about Sparta. It is hard for us in the privileged West to imagine what life was like when leadership and courage actually mattered in everyday life. The tension between ethics and self-preservation colors our interpretations of history and cultural norms of past civilizations. Professor Cartledge's extended discussion of Spartan history and culture is highly readable and balances that tension among right and wrong and the facts of life. One of the best aspects of this volume is that Cartledge discusses in detail the later Spartans, an area most students either avoid or forget once they get past the Theban hegemony in the middle of the 4th century. Sparta continued to awe and inspire Mediteranian civilization long after their heyday, and it is that part of Cartledge's book that I found most valuable.

It’s a good book. I wish it had a little more cultural analysis and a little less meticulous historical detail, but it does have both in a reasonable balance.

Great read and a ton of good background and detail into the Spartan lifestyle and ideology. Spartans have attained almost mythical status in todays time with the help of movies, and time, to hide some of their human flaws and downsides. This book does an excellent job at going into just enough detail to give you the whole story on how they came into existence, power, and then decline without being a 10 part series. Fascinating read that flew by.

As a historian, I must say, Paul Cartledge has compiled a must read on the ancient history of the Spartans!

Have seldom if ever read a more pedantic author. Perhaps typical of British historians, when Cartridge needed yet another word for his lengthy run-on sentences, he seems to be quite willing to make one up.Still, I must admit to learning a few things about ancient Sparta that are logical if not necessarily factual.

Cartledge does a fantastic job at just giving us the facts and really demystifying the legendary spartans. They are often portrayed as these heros and great warriors but most of that is just myth, they lost more than they won and always seemed to have some religious holiday anytime they were needed for war. At any rate its a wonderful read for those who want to learn about Spartan culture, which was interesting, despite its brutality.

Herodotus, the father of all historians, said there is a "Hellenic sameness in blood and speech, shared religious shrines and sacrifices, and a general uniformity in the manner of life." He saw the Greek city-state as an inclusive society of "hoi Hellenes", the inhabitants of the Greek peninsula who shared a similar language and roughly the same religious beliefs, who experienced a typical climate and geography, farmed and fought in near-identical fashion, and were part of a unique and elsewhere unknown political institution, the polis.The exception to that Greek pattern of sameness has always been Sparta. The ancient tradition, fostered by the Spartans themselves and promoted especially by the Athenians, was that Sparta was 'other', crucially different in basic ways from all other Greek cities and societies. Key to the myth of the Spartan warrior and his ideal of self-sacrifice was the compulsive education system called Agoge that turned boys into fighting men whose reputation for discipline, courage and military skill was unsurpassed. The main expression of citizenship for adult men was the participation in communal dining along with mess companions, whereas women benefited from a surprising degree of freedom.Sparta lived under the constant menace of a revolt by the Helots, the class of serf-like peasants submitted around Sparta's home territory of Laconia and Messenia in ancient times, who vastly outnumbered the Spartans and provided them with the economic basis of their unique lifestyle. Spartans lived on a constant war footing against the threat of enemies from within as well as without. Other Greeks, who also depended on servile manpower by foreign slaves, were shocked by this enslavement of fellow Hellenes.Paul Cartledge's book takes its reader through the different stages of Sparta's history, starting with the foundation of the city-state by the mythical Lycurgus and the rapture of Helen by the prince of Troy, and going through the successful resistance against the Persian Empire around 480, the epic confrontation between Sparta and Athens in the Peloponnesian War of 431-404, and Sparta's triumph that ended abruptly along the lines of a doom-laden prediction about a crippled kingship. Lively vignettes about Spartan heroes are inserted in the narrative: King Leonidas who led the resistance against the Persian army at the Thermopylae, his wife Gorgo who, asked about the power enjoyed by Spartan women, responded that it was "because we are the only women who give birth to (real) men," and many others.Finally, beautiful illustrations are included in the book. Bronze figurines of proud hoplites clad in their red cloak or donning their crested helmet were popular ornaments that helped popularize the myth of the Spartan warrior throughout the Greek world and beyond. A very large bronze krater or mixing-bowl used to mix wine with water offers a testimony of the skill of Laconian craftsmens, most of whom belonged to the class of Perioeci or 'out-dwellers', as Spartans themselves were banned from engaging in any trade apart from war-making. A sprightly figurine of a young female in athletic pose illustrates the grace, freedom and social status that distinguished Spartan women from their relegated sisters in other Greek states. A reproduction of Jacques-Louis David's painting Leonidas at Thermopylae, his masterwork, displays strong homoerotic undertones that somehow escaped censorship in Napoleonic France. And the statues of Spartan warriors that modern Greece erected on its street crossings and monuments echo the lyric accents of Lord Byron who fanned philhellenic sentiments throughout Europe by appealing to the noble figure of Leonidas.