The Spartans

Of the over 1,000 independent city-states that made up the Hellenic world -- and competed in the Olympic Games -- Sparta is today the most notorious and influential (after Athens). This book provides a wonderful insight into its extraordinary culture, where Spartan males were brought up in a strict, even ruthless regime of military training, discipline, and self-sacrifice for the communal good -- but where women were given unexpected freedom and power.

There was really no such thing as Classical Greece. Instead, 1,000 city-states founded by Greeks around the Mediterranean and the Black Sea experimented with constitutions ranging from democracy to tyranny. None was as idiosyncratic as Sparta. Even contemporary Athenians, who viewed it as their mirror image, found it hard to penetrate the ‘mirage’ of this secretive, militaristic yet fascinating society. Cartledge, a world expert as well as a persuasive writer, untangles romance from reality to give the general reader a real flavour of life in this eccentric state and unpick the reasons for its power and ultimate demise – and… show more.