Chat Ed : Welcome to this evening's 'SPARTANS' chat with historian BETTANY HUGHES and series consultant PAUL CARTLEDGE. You can purchase the book accompanying the series, written by Paul, from the Channel 4 shop. Call 0870 1234 344 or go to channel4.com/shop.
Bettany Hughes : Hello and thanks for watching the programme, I'm glad you're making contact.
Paul Cartledge : Likewise, greetings from me, looking forward to talking with you.
dienekes : that was brillaint show bettany
Carla : Hiya :-)
AngelEyez : hello bettany and paul
Notata Dignum : So much is known about the various city states in Ancient Greece, how much do you feel your documentary as added to the sphere of knowledge of Spartan society
Bettany Hughes : Hopefully what the programme has done is to put the archaeological and documentary evidence that we have for the city states into the context of a location, so that you're actually, hopefully, understanding a little bit more about the people who lived in Ancient Greece by inhabiting the same landscapes that they inhabited.
markw : The programme last week described the system of having two kings, but apart from that it says very little about how political decisions were made in Sparta. Do we know, for example,how the decision to declare war on Athens came about?
Paul Cartledge : Yes we do because we have the account of Thucydides, who was a contemporary though an Athenian.
Katy : How much do you believe the accuracy of Thucydides work?
Paul Cartledge : The Spartans took such major foreign policy decisions en masse by shouting, except that on this particular occasion the presiding official claimed not to be able to distinguish which of the shouts were the loudest - for war, or against. He therefore called for a division - he invited the Spartans to go to either end of the assembly place and then the majority for war was extremely clear, but to repeat, this was an exceptional procedure.
Peter Olive : to what extent did athens seize the myths of sparta and turn them into propaganda for their own purposes?
jh : The spartans were the butt of many a Greek joke - how do you separate the myth from the reality?
Paul Cartledge chuckles
Bettany Hughes : Good question! The interesting thing is that the Athenians were largely responsible for creating the myth that surrounded the Spartans because many of the sources that we have for Spartan life come from non-Spartan minds, but you certainly feel, when you spent time with the Spartans, that actually they quite enjoyed this state of affairs and that they almost had a cult of secrecy around their state.
Paul Cartledge : This cult of secrecy is to be connected to the fact that the Spartans chose to base their entire way of life on suppressing a much larger group of Greeks whom they enslaved as Helots.
mike : How much do we know of non-Greek views of Sparta?
Paul Cartledge : The problem with studying the history of relations between the Greeks and their contemporary non-Greek neighbours is that the non-Greeks, for the most part, did not preserve the sort of sources historical and literary that the Greeks developed and indeed invented so there are no Persian Herodotuses and therefore we cannot say what for example the Persians thought of the Spartans except in so far as Herodotus preserves what are supposedly Persian views.
Jonathan : Why did the Spartans not use ranged weapons or better tactics in war ?
Colin : Weren't the Spartans a bit stupid not to use archery if they were so obsessed with military prowess?
Bettany Hughes chuckles
Bettany Hughes : What's clear with the Spartans is that ideas of honour and bravery were paramount. We actually talk about them in the programme as pragmatic but they were much more than that. So when they describe arrows as spindles it's a very heartfelt dismissal of what they thought of as a cowardly weapon. There's an interesting parallel in Bronze Age Britain where in the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, although killing machines are being developed for the first time (that is weapons whose pure purpose were to kill other people - daggers etc) bows and arrows are in fact just as efficient a means of killing people but they are lost from the archaeological record. So you have to imagine that the only reason for that is that Bronze Age and Iron Age warriors in Britain had such an ethos of hand to hand combat that they actually lost sight of the most effective way of killing each other.
Steve T : I don't understand how the Spartan's being such a strict people did not punish the 150 off the island ?
Paul Cartledge : Right... there were in fact 120 who were sent back home. They had an already severe shortage of manpower especially among the elite officer class. These 120 were, to begin with, treated with a certain distancing but quite soon were permitted to hold office because they were needed. As we will see in the next and final episode, one of the major reasons for Sparta's eventual decline and fall was the serious shrinkage of its effective military manpower.
andy : if the sparatan women were so tough fit and able to 'run with the best of the boys' were they ever employed in battle?
luttrel psalter : given the shortage of man power isnt it surprising the spartan women didnt fight?
Bettany Hughes : Indeed, excellent question and to be honest a bit of a conundrum. The period we are looking at is Classical Greece and by this time there was clearly a prevailing consensus that women shouldn't be fighters, which is probably why you get the development of the Amazonian myth of these females fiends who are doing something completely unnatural, but also women were truly prized in their ability to produce future Spartans. Testament to this is in the fact that by and large it was said that Spartan men were honoured with a named headstone if they died in battle and women had a named headstone if they died in childbirth.
Paul Cartledge : The Greek word that translates as 'courage in battle' means literally virility/manliness because war was the man's sphere, even in Sparta.
mark wilson : Bettany quite simly where would you rather have lived Sparta or Athens and why?
Bettany Hughes : Sparta. No doubt.
Duncan : What is Sparta called now?
jim robinson : since greece still exists today whom are the decendants of the Spartans
Bettany Hughes : Sparta is called Sparti now.
Paul Cartledge : The questions of the genetic composition of the modern Greek people is seriously irrelevant to any historical understanding of either the modern Greeks or the ancient Spartans.
Bettany Hughes : What's interesting though if you spend time in modern day Sparta and hang out in any of the nightclubs or coffee shops, is that actually most men who are drinking there identify themselves very strongly with the ancient Spartans, they are very proud of their association with this race of uber-warriors and the rivalry with Athens is still talked about.
rebecca : I am interested in the mention of state instituted infanticide in Sparta - the programme implied that it was male children that were selectively culled, but did not expand on the topic - can you shed any light?
Bettany Hughes : Again it's a slightly vexed question. There isn't any direct documentary evidence that it was just the boys who were subject to infanticide but it does seem very likely that it was mainly them.
Dr Robert Drake : Helllo Bettany, marfvellous programme, willl there be a dvd or video and will you cover spartan arts and poetry in the third programme?
Bettany Hughes : I don't think there is going to be a DVD or video, there is an excellent book though called The Spartans by Paul Cartledge...
Paul Cartledge : …which contains illustrations of Spartan works of art.
Chat Ed : You can purchase the book accompanying the series, written by Paul, from the Channel 4 shop. Call 0870 1234 344 or go to channel4.com/shop.
Bettany Hughes : There are 2 problems with Spartan art, not that much survived in comparison with Athens and again, in comparison to Athens, not that much was produced. In this month's BBC History magazine though there is an article that Paul and I have written about the Spartans in which Paul writes about Spartan music and dance. If you watch next week we do show some very lovely bronzes and terracotta figures from Sparta.
Mike_S : I understand the Athenians ultimately won over the Spartans. How different do you think European and world history would have been had the Spartans won?
Paul Cartledge : Actually the Spartans won and the Athenians never again beat the Spartans, the Thebans later defeated the Spartans. However the Thebans ascendancy in Greece was very brief and the kingdom of Macedon determined the future course of the Greeks and by extension world history. First Philip II and then his son Alexander the Great between them conquered the entire Greek world east of the Adriatic and Alexander, as is well known, went on to conquer the entire middle east as well. This in turn formed the basis of the eastern half of the Roman Empire within which Christianity developed. So there is a direct link between Macedon and the rise of Christianity.
steve : Do the panel think Alexander the Great or his father King Philip were influenced by the Spartan military technique?
Kronos28 : Would you agree that a fusion of Spartan and Athenian values created the ideal power, Rome?
Paul Cartledge : The short answer to the first question is that Philip and Alexander were deeply influenced by Spartan training and morale but not by Spartan military technique.
Bettany Hughes : The second question.....it's an impossible thing to answer really. One can only fantasise over a question such as that!
SteveL : Do you think Sparta was always going to be too unique a civilisation to survive for long?
Bettany Hughes : I think it was too inflexible a civilisation to endure much beyond its own chronology of power.
Paul Cartledge : The Spartan experiment lasted for as much as 500 years which would take us back to the beginning of the 17th Century so yes it probably was doomed but it had an awful lot of dying in it. Sparta was just one of hundreds of Greek cities that experimented with its way of life.
Chat Ed : That's it! Our time is up. Thank you BETTANY and PAUL for coming, and thank you all for the excellent questions.
ticktock : thanks for your time, bye!
joe : Bettany and Paul - thank you for such beautiful programs
jh : ta muchly
tammy : bye bye
Bettany Hughes : Spread the word, watch the programme.
michael : thank you
Katy : Thankyou!
Milla : I love the show, see ya
Dr Robert Drake : Excellent thanks
craigd : thanks bettany, paul
Simba : thanks Bettany and Paul, most illuminating
Paul Cartledge : You can check out the Spartans website for more information and thank you for watching and logging on. We deeply appreciate it.
Vassilis : Good Job !!! Do more of that ....
Zippy : buy the book! its great :)
Bettany Hughes : This feedback can only make broadcasters, like Channel 4, make similar programmes, so thank you.
