{"product_id":"the-spartans-isbn-9781400078851","title":"The Spartans","description":"The Spartans were a society of warrior-heroes who were the living exemplars of such core values as duty, discipline, self-sacrifice, and extreme toughness. This book, written by one of the world’s leading experts on Sparta, traces the rise and fall of Spartan society and explores the tremendous influence the Spartans had on their world and even on ours. Paul Cartledge brings to life figures like legendary founding father Lycurgus and King Leonidas, who embodied the heroism so closely identified with this unique culture, and he shows how Spartan women enjoyed an unusually dominant and powerful role in this hyper-masculine society. Based firmly on original sources, \u003cb\u003eThe Spartans\u003c\/b\u003e is the definitive book about one of the most fascinating cultures of ancient Greece.“Cartledge displays a marvelous ability to make the readers care about the Laconic warriors . . . and the society that shaped them.” —\u003ci\u003eUSA Today\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Cartledge brings [the Spartans] to life again with verve [and] style.” —\u003ci\u003eMilwaukee Journal-Sentinel\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The history and atmosphere of Sparta are well conveyed by Cartledge.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“A fine overview of the rise and fall of a singular culture, spiced with anecdotes, quotations, brisk summary, and real insight.” —\u003ci\u003eSeattle Times\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The Spartans presented in this book could change the popular image of ancient history, making it more compelling and accessible.” —\u003ci\u003eThe\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eTimes Literary Supplement\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003ePaul Cartledge\u003c\/b\u003e, professor of Greek history at the University of Cambridge, is the author of \u003ci\u003eAlexander the Great, The Spartans, \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eThe Greeks: Crucible of Civilization.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eUNDER THE SIGN OF LYCURGUS\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe image of Sparta as a dour, barracks-like camp hardly prepares the  first-time visitor for the glorious spectacle that unfolds as one  emerges from the uplands abutting Arcadia to the north and enters  down the Eurotas valley into the Spartan plain. Stretching before one  are two parallel mountain chains, that of Taygetus on the west  reaching to 2,404 metres at the peak, and that of Parnon on the east  (1,935 metres at its peak). The alluvial plain itself, and its  continuation south in the Eurotas valley that runs out into the sea  in the Laconian Gulf, constitute one of the most fertile and  desirable pieces of land in all southern Greece. Soil, climate and  man conspire to yield and garner sometimes two harvests of grain in a  single year. Olives and grapevines, the other two staples of the  so-called Mediterranean diet, flourish here too - as of course does  the forest of citrus trees, but they are a post-Classical import,  reminding us that the terrain and vegetation we see today are not  necessarily those enjoyed by the inhabitants of two and a half  millennia ago.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHardly surprisingly, this region, known in historical times as  Lacedaemon, was believed also to have been the seat of a great king  in the ancient Greeks' heroic age - what we scholars more prosaically  call the Mycenaean or Late Bronze Age (\u003ci\u003ec.\u003c\/i\u003e 1500-1100 BC). An attempt  has been made very recently (see biography of Helen p. 48) to  relocate the palace of Homer's Menelaus from Sparta to Pellana  further north in Laconia, but that flies in the face not only of  ancient legend and religious worship but also of topographical  geopolitics. Any real Late Bronze Age Menelaus must have had his  palace in or near the site of historical Sparta - perhaps actually  where a large settlement, including a building qualifying as a  'mansion', has been scrupulously excavated by the British School at  Athens. However, no contemporary palace on the scale of those  excavated at Mycenae (seat of Homer's Agamemnon, brother of Menelaus)  and Pylos (capital of garrulous old Nestor) has yet come to light in  Laconia - and perhaps never will. It is important not to read Homer  as a straight history textbook, however archaeologically productive  that mistake has undoubtedly been.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHELEN\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHelen of Troy - or Helen of Sparta? She was, of course, both. A local  girl, daughter of Tyndareus, according to one version of her myth,  but yet, according to another version, daughter of great father Zeus  and born miraculously from an egg because her mother Leda had been  visited by Zeus in the disguise of a swan. Her unsurpassed beauty  made her a natural prize for the ambitious Menelaus, son of Atreus of  Mycenae, whose older son Agamemnon took Helen's sister Clytemnestra  for his bride. However, that beauty also captivated an unwelcome  visitor to Sparta: Paris, prince of Troy in Asia, overlooking the  straits of the Dardanelles, who - aided crucially by the Cyprus-born  love goddess Aphrodite - violated the sacred obligations of  guest-friendship and robbed Menelaus of his lawfully wedded wife.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRecently, a Greek archaeologist caused a little stir by claiming that  he had located Helen's (and Menelaus') palace, not at Sparta but at  Pellana some fifteen kilometres farther north. That claim would have  astonished the ancient Spartans, who built a new shrine for Helen in  Sparta, or more precisely at Therapne to the south-east of the  ancient town, where she received worship along with her husband  Menelaus and her divine brothers the Dioscuri, Castor and Polydeuces  (Pollux in Latin). This was in the later eighth century, a time when  the Spartans were, so to speak, rediscovering their roots, seeking to  legitimize their recently won domain in south-east Peloponnese by  presenting it as the legitimate successor of the kingdom of Menelaus  as set out in Homer's \u003ci\u003eIliad\u003c\/i\u003e. In actual fact, the cult of Helen at  Therapne probably reflects a conflation of two Helens: one a goddess  of vegetation and fertility associated with trees (also worshipped as  such on Rhodes), the other the heroic Helen of Homeric legend. We  shall stick with the latter.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMore specifically, since Helen served later as an icon of Spartan  womanhood and beauty, we must ask, was Helen raped (according to our  usage of that term) by Paris or did she go with him consensually, of  her own accord? Herodotus, father of history (in the phrase of  Cicero), has three very interesting passages regarding Helen. The  first comes in his opening aetiology of the Graeco-Persian Wars of  the early fifth century, where he traces the history or mythography  of Greek-Oriental enmity back through the mists of time and legend. A  series of claims and counter-claims is wittily rehearsed, with  Herodotus purporting merely to relate the stories he has been told by  learned Phoenicians and Persians. Among them features, inevitably,  the theft, if that is what it was, by Paris of Helen. Herodotus  himself adopts a robust, not to say male chauvinist, view of the  matter:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eit is obvious that no young woman allows\u003cbr\u003eherself to be abducted if she does not wish to be.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHowever, an unambiguous tale, not related by Herodotus, of an earlier  rape of Helen, effected by Theseus of Athens when she was but a girl  rather than an adult wife, tells a different story. Lately, both  Elizabeth Cook in her imaginative retelling of Achilles' story and  John Barton in his no less powerful \u003ci\u003eTantalus\u003c\/i\u003e play-cycle have reminded  us opportunely of this earlier, darker chapter in Helen's eventful  life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe next reference to Helen in Herodotus is, if anything, even more  disturbing, from the historical point of view. For according to him,  as he relates it in his account of matters Egyptian in the second  book of his Histories, she never went to Troy at all, but sat out the  ten years of the Trojan War in Egypt:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThis is the account the Egyptian priests told me \u003cbr\u003eof Helen's story, and I am inclined to accept it, on \u003cbr\u003ethe following ground: had Helen really been in \u003cbr\u003eTroy, she would have been handed back to the \u003cbr\u003eGreeks whether Paris consented or not... This, then, \u003cbr\u003eis my own interpretation.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt was thus, for Herodotus, merely to recover a simulacrum, a phantom  double, of Helen's face that Menelaus and Agamemnon and all the other  Greeks had launched their thousand ships!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis heterodox version, for obvious reasons unused by Homer, was not  original to Herodotus, since we know that it was being peddled as  early as the mid-sixth century by the Greek lyric poet Stesichorus,  from Himera in western Sicily. And after Herodotus it was again found  congenial by the great Athenian dramatist Euripides, who based his  surving melodrama \u003ci\u003eHelen\u003c\/i\u003e upon it; but for most ancients, as for most  of us, Helen can safely remain Helen of Troy.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe third mention in Herodotus brings us back from Egypt to Sparta  and more precisely to Helen's shrine at Therapne, which was the  setting of a classic folktale, beautifully retold by Herodotus for  his fifth-century audience. Once upon a time, somewhere in the second  half of the sixth century in our terms, a wealthy Spartan couple had  a daughter, but, alas, their beloved infant was distressingly plain.  So plain that the family's nurse - perhaps a Helot woman - had the  following bright idea:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSince she was plain to look at, and her parents, \u003cbr\u003ewho were well off, were distressed at her \u003cbr\u003eunsightliness, her nurse had the idea of carrying \u003cbr\u003eher every day to the shrine of Helen at what is \u003cbr\u003ecalled Therapne, above the shrine of Apollo. She \u003cbr\u003ewould take the baby in, lay her in front of Helen's \u003cbr\u003ecult-statue, and pray to the goddess to rid her of \u003cbr\u003eher ugliness.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne day, an apparition - clearly meant to be Helen herself -  addressed the nurse and stroked the child's head, whereafter she grew  up to be the most beautiful of all the nubile Spartan girls, a  suitable match and catch for a leading Spartan. Unfortunately for  that Spartan, however, he had a best friend who was childless and who  passionately fancied the friend's wife as the bearer of his own  future, ideally male, offspring. Even more unfortunately, the best  friend just happened to be a king of Sparta, for whom the production  of legitimate male offspring was an affair of state and not just of  the heart. In his intense desire to procreate this king had already  married not just once but twice; now, besotted with his friend's  wife, he added insult to injury, obtaining her from him by a low  trick.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe product of the union of Ariston - for that was the king's name -  with the unnamed female beauty was King Demaratus, whom we shall meet  again later in circumstances of alleged illegitimacy and treachery -  everyday charges in the fraught world of Spartan royalty. (See  further his biography, in Chapter 2.) However, before we leave Helen,  it is worth mentioning three very different expressions and  consequences of her legend. First, as early as the seventh century,  the priestess of Apollo at Delphi, the navel of the earth, issued a  prophetic utterance on behalf of her lord and master Apollo that was  translated by the male priests to include a reference to the women of  Sparta, hailing them as the most beautiful in all Greece. That can  only have been a bow to Helen of Sparta, whose fame, thanks to Homer,  was spreading throughout the expanding Greek world, though it will  have surely also put undue pressure, as we have seen, on Spartan  girls and their parents to try to live up to Helen's awesome  reputation.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLater, in the seventh century, the greatest of the ancient Greek  women poets, Sappho from the island of Lesbos, engaged with Helen's  reputation more than once. Sappho's verses can be quite conventional,  as for example in the small fragment addressed to some beautiful and  desired adolescent girl or young woman:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ewhenever I look at you \u003cbr\u003eit seems to me that not even Hermione \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e[daughter of Helen]\u003ci\u003e is your equal \u003cbr\u003eno, far better to compare you \u003cbr\u003eto Helen, whose hair was golden.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOn the other hand, Sappho could also be deeply and disturbingly  unconventional. Flying in the face of normative, male value  judgments, she writes, in a poem that happily survived on papyrus for  centuries in the dry sands of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, and was excavated  only a century or so ago:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSome say a troop of horsemen, some an army on foot \u003cbr\u003eand some a fleet of ships is the most lovely sight \u003cbr\u003eon this dark earth; but I say it is that which \u003cbr\u003eyou desire:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e... for the woman who far excelled all others \u003cbr\u003ein her beauty, Helen, left her husband - \u003cbr\u003ethe best of all men - \u003cbr\u003ebehind and sailed far away to Troy; she did not spare\u003cbr\u003ea single thought for her child \u003c\/i\u003e[Hermione]\u003ci\u003e nor for \u003cbr\u003eher dear parents \u003cbr\u003ebut \u003c\/i\u003e[Aphrodite]\u003ci\u003e led her astray...\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo Sappho both rejects masculine military values and at the same time  excuses Helen's pursuit of the path of Love and Desire as being due  to divine force majeure. That is not a message that the average Greek  husband would have been delighted to hear.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe final expression and consequence I want to mention here is  altogether more lighthearted, indeed literally comic. In 411  Aristophanes staged two comedies at the two major annual Athenian  play-festivals in honour of Dionysus. One of these was the  Lysistrata, the first known comedy to have been named after its  heroine. Lysistrata, a respectable Athenian married woman, is  portrayed respectfully. Seeking to put an end to the war between  Athens and Sparta and their allies, which had been raging on and off  for some twenty years (twice as long as the Trojan War), she  organizes an international conspiracy of Greek women - or rather  wives: the big idea is that their withdrawal of conjugal rights, a  sex-strike, will force their bellicose but sex-starved husbands to  the negotiating table and compel them to make peace (and so be able  to make love once again) at last. The Spartan sororal delegate to the  convention is one Lampito - she bears a good Spartan name, in fact  the real name of the wife of a very recent Spartan king.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere is how Aristophanes introduces Lampito (played of course by a  male actor, in drag):\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWelcome, Lampito, my very dear Spartan friend! \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e[says Lysistrata] \u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSweetest, what beauty you display! What a fine colour of skin,\u003cbr\u003eand what a robust frame you've got! You could throttle a bull!\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTo which Lampito replies, in broad local Spartan dialect:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eYes, indeed, I reckon I could, by the Two Gods\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e[Castor and Pollux]; \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eat any rate, I do gymnastics and heel-to-buttock jumps.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother Athenian co-conspiratrix joins in the fun: \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eWhat a splendid pair of tits you've got!\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLampito affects to be offended by this:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eReally, you're feeling me over like a sacrificial victim.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe mainly Athenian audience, in between its guffaws, could hardly  miss the allusion to the fact that Spartan women, unlike their own  wives and sisters, were given a formal public training in gymnastics  and athletics, performed either completely naked or at least  partially nude. Perhaps too through these exercises Spartan women,  unlike Athenian women, managed to keep their breasts in shape even  after suckling babies - unless, of course they regularly resorted to  Helot wet-nurses.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe \u003ci\u003eLysistrata\u003c\/i\u003e ends also on a completely Spartan note, with first a  Spartan man individually, and then Spartan couples jointly singing  and dancing specifically Spartan songs and figures (the Greek word  'chorus' meant originally dance, before it came to mean collective  singing). Notice particularly the final invocation of Helen, 'Leda's  daughter':\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003ci\u003eLeave lovely Taygetus again   \u003cbr\u003eand come, Laconian Muse, and fittingly   \u003cbr\u003epraise the god of Amyclae\u003c\/i\u003e [Apollo]\u003ci\u003e   \u003cbr\u003eand Athena of the Brazen House   \u003cbr\u003eand the noble sons of Tyndareus \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e[Castor and Pollux]  \u003ci\u003e \u003cbr\u003ewho play beside the Eurotas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  Ola! Opa!   \u003cbr\u003ePrance lightly, that   \u003cbr\u003ewe may hymn Sparta,   \u003cbr\u003ewhich delights in god-honouring dances   \u003cbr\u003eand in the beat of feet,   \u003cbr\u003eand where, like fillies, the maidens   \u003cbr\u003eprance beside the Eurotas,   \u003cbr\u003eraising dustclouds with their feet,   \u003cbr\u003eshaking their hair   \u003cbr\u003elike the hair of bacchantes who wield the thyrsus and dance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  And they are led by Leda's daughter,   \u003cbr\u003etheir pure and beautiful chorus-leader.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn or around 1200 bc, the Mycenaean mansion at Therapne was burnt and  destroyed, and the number and quality of the settlements in the  region as a whole fell away drastically, so that by 1000 it is  possible to speak of Laconia as undergoing a Dark Age. Some shafts of  light are dimly visible in Sparta of the tenth and ninth centuries,  for example at the shrine of Orthia by the Eurotas that would grow to  play a key role in the later Spartan Agoge or Upbringing. However, it  is not until the late eighth century, archaeologically, that the  light becomes brighter and more evenly diffused. By then, there had  been constructed a sanctuary to the city's patron goddess Athena, on  what passed for an acropolis in Sparta; this is the Athena who later,  in the sixth century, acquires the tag 'of the Brazen House' used by  Aristophanes at the end of his \u003ci\u003eLysistrata\u003c\/i\u003e (above). There was also an  important sanctuary of Apollo in Amyclae just a few kilometres to the  south of Sparta, also noted in the \u003ci\u003eLysistrata\u003c\/i\u003e, and it is here rather  than in Sparta proper that myth, religion and politics coalesced to  produce the first glimmerings of a political history of the origins  of the Spartan polis or state.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303828345061,"sku":"NP9781400078851","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400078851.jpg?v=1767741611","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-spartans-isbn-9781400078851","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}