EPISODE 5 “SPARTA”

You are listening to Trojan War, the podcast, history's most awesome epic. This is episode number 5 in the series. Today's episode is titled, Sparta. So welcome to episode number 5. Now most of you listening in at this stage are veterans of Trojan War, the podcast, and you're familiar with what we're doing. On the other hand, if you happen to have stumbled across this particular episode, an episode titled Sparta, completely out of context of the podcast series, then what we're doing here is I'm retelling the entire story of the Trojan War epic in serialized form, and you're welcome to stick around and learn all kinds of interesting and fascinating things about Sparta. But I think you might have a little bit more fun if you actually head over to my website, trojanwarpodcast.com, and pick up the series with episode number 1. It's a serialized telling, and you'll just have an awful lot more fun if you begin at the beginning. So if you recall at the end of the previous episode, the episode that I titled The Judgment of Paris, Paris had been given the option of choosing which of three goddesses to award an apple, a golden apple titled for the most beautiful. And after a lot of toing and froing, a bribery contest between the goddesses had broken out, and the ultimate winner of that contest had been Aphrodite, goddess of lust and sexual passion. Aphrodite had bribed Paris, the 18-year-old shepherd, with a very, very interesting bribe that appealed to Paris's, well, unrelenting and endless fascination with all things female. Aphrodite had promised Paris that she would give him the undying lust of the smoking hottest woman in the entire planet, and that that woman, Aphrodite assured Paris, would be insatiable, putty in Paris's hand, day and night, as long as Paris walked the face of the earth. Well, Paris had immediately handed Aphrodite the apple, and the other goddesses had raged off to Mount Olympus in a huff, plotting misery for Paris. Following awarding the apple, Aphrodite had briefly explained to Paris that he wasn't really a shepherd, that he was actually a prince of the city of Troy, second in line to inherit the throne, and that Aphrodite thought it would be a good idea for Paris to head down and move into Troy, get familiar with being a prince, so that when Aphrodite managed to hook Paris up with this particular gorgeous woman, that, well, Aphrodite would be hooking a prince up with a gorgeous woman, as opposed to hooking a shepherd up with a gorgeous woman. So Paris had agreed. He had summarily abandoned his lifelong wife-partner, a beautiful, beautiful mountain nymph named Danone, and Paris had headed south to the city of Troy. Now, when Paris got to Troy, he was anxious. He knew he didn't know how to be a prince, and nothing had prepared him for this, but Aphrodite had promised him that she would work some minor magic on the people of Troy, and that when Paris got to the city, the people of Troy would forget that, well, they had never seen this boy in their lives. And Aphrodite further counseled Paris that, you know, if you have trouble adjusting to being a prince, just, Paris, roll with it. You'll do just fine. I'll help you out with minor bits of magic along the way as necessary. So when Paris got to the gates of Troy, he kind of thought, well, let's see if Aphrodite is as good as her word, and Aphrodite was as good as her word. The people of Troy welcomed Paris back to the city of Troy with open arms, completely forgetting that they had not seen this boy in 18 years. The royal family of Troy welcomed Paris back into the palace with open arms and completely forgot that, well, 18 years ago, Priam, in particular, had done his very best to extinguish this boy's life. Remember, Paris was going to be the torch which prophecy said would burn the city of Troy to the ground, and now here, 18 years later, for some reason, Priam seemed to have completely, completely forgotten all about that. Now, whether Aphrodite used that mist that I've been talking about and somehow clouded the minds of everybody inside of Troy so that when they tried to piece together the history of Paris, it all kind of went vague and fuzzy, and then they decided to not worry about it, or whether there were inklings inside of the Trojan royal family that Paris was bad news, but it was kind of awkward or difficult to talk about it, well, we don't really know. And the truth is, it doesn't really matter. The important thing is, Paris moved into Troy and very seamlessly, with Aphrodite's help, assumed his position as second in line to the throne. Paris discovered that he absolutely adored being a prince. Compared to being a shepherd, being a prince was a heck of a lot more fun and an awful lot easier. Paris had servants, he had slaves, he had private quarters in the palace, and, well, when Paris would head out and tour the streets of the palace, the common folk, the citizen of Troy, would drop to their knees and yell out things like, Hail Paris, Prince of Troy, and Paris liked that. It turned out that, well, sheep just never had hailed Paris, and it was kind of a nice feeling. So Paris moved in very, very comfortably to the palace, and it got even better about two weeks after he arrived when Paris stumbled across the Royal Harem. And wow, for Paris, the Royal Harem was, well, it was a gift from the gods. So Paris spent most of his free time in the Royal Harem, and within a couple of weeks of having found it, he was on a first-name basis with all the people working there. Well, about three weeks after Paris arrived, he did come up for air long enough from the Royal Harem to recognize and have to confront a few hard facts about his new reality as a prince. And the truth of the matter that was confronting Paris is that he knew absolutely nothing about being a prince. Paris barely knew enough to be a shepherd of 15 sheep, but being a prince of a city the size of Troy, a city with a population of 150,000 people, a major player in the Mediterranean world, well, nothing had prepared Paris for this. And as Paris thought about his lack of knowledge in all things princely, it was brought into stark contrast every time he looked to his big brother. Now Paris had discovered he had a big brother. The big brother was a year and a half, two years older than Paris, so about 19, 20 years old. The big brother's name was Hector, and Hector was the heir apparent to the throne of Troy. When King Priam the King died someday, Hector would be assuming the mantle of kingship. And as Paris watched his big brother Hector, he realized that being a prince of a major city was not at all easy. Hector was constantly, constantly, constantly training for the job of becoming the king of that city, and that involved a lot of things. Hector would wake up in the morning and he'd spend his entire morning working on military matters. As a Bronze Age prince and as a Bronze Age king-in-waiting, Hector was expected to be able to not only lead his soldiers into battle, but Hector was expected to be at the vanguard of that army, fighting in the front ranks, and indeed be the greatest soldier that Troy could put into the field. So Hector was spending all of his morning working on all things military, and then Paris would watch. Hector would come in. He'd have a very brief lunch, and in the afternoon it was, well, learning how to run and administer a kingdom. So it was a whole afternoon of lessons on palace politics, palace bureaucracy, economic systems, food supplies, all of the kind of things that, you know, the nickel-and-dime things that if you're actually going to make your kingdom a world superpower, you need to take care of. And come evening, Paris would come up to his big brother Hector and say, hey, Hector, let's go down to the harem. There's somebody I'd like you to meet. And Hector would turn around and say, sorry, Paris, but I just don't have time. My evening is dedicated to studies in diplomacy, foreign languages, comparative religions, international studies, and that type of thing. Well, of course, Troy, which sat on the east end of the Mediterranean and kind of straddled the western world of the Mediterranean and the eastern world of Asia Minor and the Middle East, well, there was an awful lot for a king or a prince preparing to be a king to learn about governance and diplomacy, and Hector was just always busy. So Paris was left to his own devices, and it occurred to Paris that one option was for him to emulate his big brother Hector and take a serious crack at learning how to be a prince. And Paris knew that he'd have to go back a few steps to do this, but he thought, well, you know, I could study, I could learn, and maybe someday I could actually learn how to hold a sword properly, or I could learn how to govern, or I could speak a foreign language, I could be of some use here. But every time Paris started to contemplate doing that, well, the hard truth and the sad reality of Paris's core personality came out, and the fact was that Paris was born with very, very, very little by way of discipline or interest in anything unless it happened to do with women. And Paris would kind of think for a moment and go, yes, I should study, I should work hard, but then, you know, the harem would call and he'd forget his best resolutions. So after a couple of months in Troy, Paris had essentially made a deal with himself. Paris had decided that he would content himself with being the number two prince, the nothing more than the emergency back-up prince. And by Paris's reasoning, his dad, Prime, would die someday, and Hector was young, Hector would assume the throne, and, you know, with any luck, Paris would never, ever, ever have to step into the big shoes. And so Paris decided, I'll just do what I enjoy doing. And what Paris enjoyed doing was being gorgeous, charming, friendly, and hanging out in the harem. Now I've already told you that Paris was actually incredibly gorgeous. In fact, generally it was regarded inside of the Bronze Age that Paris was the best looking man inside of the Mediterranean basin with the possible, possible exception of Achilles himself. And so Paris was incredibly good looking and Paris was actually, honestly, very, very charming and friendly. He had the gift of the gab and Paris was good with crowds. He was good with people. He set people at ease. He had a natural skill set. The only skill set that Paris didn't have, of course, is that if he was having conversations with people and the subject of the conversation actually went from the fluffy and the lightweight into something that required intellect, sober thought, sobriety, introspection, gravitas, any of those things, well, then Paris was completely out of his element because the truth was that Paris, deep down, was very shallow. But that didn't seem to matter to the citizens of Troy. The citizens of Troy, well, they actually fell in love with Paris. They liked Hector and more important than liking Hector, they deeply respected Hector. They knew he was a serious, hardworking prince that had their best interests at heart. But when Paris suddenly seemed to arrive out of nowhere on the scene, well, Paris was good looking, devastatingly good looking and glamorous and friendly and charming. And Paris had all the time in the world for wandering around and hugging senior citizens and kissing babies and flirting with young women and flirting with older women and making them feel they were young. Paris was naturally good and gifted at that kind of thing. And within a matter of a few months of Paris's arrival, he had become the celebrity superstar of the city of Troy. Now, we really shouldn't be surprised by this. Celebrity culture isn't something that our particular generation developed. I mean, I know we've turned it into an art form, but the Bronze Age world and the people in the Bronze Age world were just as capable as we were of becoming trapped and victimized by celebrity culture. And you know how it works. We find somebody, some individual who's stunningly good looking and deliciously, wonderfully friendly and charming. And because they're so good looking and charming, we graft onto that individual a whole series of other attributes, including a deep and probing intellect and a strong moral compass. And then, of course, we're always shocked and dismayed when it turns out that the celebrity we grafted these additional qualities onto possesses none of them. But Paris was popular. And so it's surprising, or not really that surprising, that about six months into his stay in Troy, when an invitation arrived from an overseas Greek kingdom, a Greek kingdom named Sparta, inviting some member of the Trojan family to come on a royal tour of Sparta. It shouldn't surprise us, really, that the citizens of Troy, in their wisdom and in their enthusiasm for Paris, the exciting new celebrity, had unanimously announced that they thought Paris should be the Trojan prince who was sent off to Sparta on royal tour, as opposed to sending off Hector, his eminently more qualified and well-trained big brother. Now, you can almost understand how the Trojan public would want to do this. They were likely thinking, well, let's send our pretty prince. He's really attractive. He's really smooth. He's charming. Everybody will have a wonderful time over there. He'll make Troy look good in Sparta. What is really interesting, though, is that King Priam also thought that it was a good idea to send Paris, as opposed to Hector, off on the royal tour of Sparta. Now, Priam was a monarch. He was a hereditary monarch. He wasn't just pandering to the masses to try to win votes or approval. If Priam had have sincerely believed that Paris was not the prince for the job, then Priam would have told Paris, you're staying at home, and Priam would have sent Hector in his stead. But Priam obviously decided that Paris was the right prince for the job, and Priam was no fool. In fact, Priam was a highly competent ruler. So why did Priam decide to send his lightweight son, Paris, off on this royal tour? Well, I think the answer to that question is contained in the phrase, royal tour. And what this royal tour was, really, was just a meet and greet. It was a... social event. This was a 21st century thing. This was basically royalty coming from one nation to another, touring around a few cities, doing lots of photo ops, wearing different clothes every day, hugging babies, shaking hands with old people, and generally spreading goodwill. This was not a diplomatic mission of any gravitas whatsoever. This was just an opportunity to sort of allow the Trojans and the Spartan people to feel a little bit more warm and fuzzy around each other. So Priam likely realized that, well, Paris was the perfect guy for the job. This was a candyfloss tour and Priam had a candyfloss son as a prince and so Priam thought he'll send that prince. But there was another reason why Priam chose to send Paris instead of Hector and it was an awful lot more subtle and diplomatic. Priam, by sending his candyfloss son, his son number two, his second tier son off to Sparta, was essentially delicately letting the Spartan people know that in the eyes of Troy, Sparta was a second tier player of very little significance to Troy. If Priam had have decided to send Hector along, that would have sent a very clear message that Troy considered Sparta a serious player in the international scene and as consequence, Troy was sending a serious prince on the international scene. But the truth of the matter is that Sparta at the time of this particular story was really a second tier Greek kingdom. It was relatively small. It wasn't very physically powerful. It was run by a second tier leader, a Bronze Age warlord whose name was Menelaus. He was a second tier fighter. He was a second tier politician. He was a second tier thinker. He ran a second tier kingdom and consequently, Priam decided that, well, I don't want the Spartans going and getting all uppity or getting airs about their relationship or their place on the planet, so I will send them my second tier son. Now if the other kings in the other Greek cities had have invited the Trojan royal family on tour, well, Priam might have thought differently and sent Hector. There were some major players in the Greek world that Priam took very seriously. Menelaus of Sparta, for example, had a big brother named Agamemnon. Agamemnon ran a kingdom named Mycenae. Mycenae was a serious player in the international scene. It was nowhere nearly as big or powerful or dominant as Troy, but Mycenae mattered. Agamemnon was considered a serious politician. Had it been a royal tour of Mycenae, Hector would have been on the boat. But as it was, Paris was on the boat heading to Sparta. Well, five days after he departed, Paris arrived in the shores of Sparta and down to Greetum came a very, very enthusiastic king, Menelaus, the king of that city. And Menelaus was absolutely delighted. I mean, Menelaus didn't pick up on the diplomatic snub or insult. I don't think Menelaus was likely quite bright enough to pick up on subtleties like that. And the truth of the matter was Menelaus was so in awe of Troy that he was just delighted that any member of the Trojan family had agreed to come and do sort of a photo op royal tour with him. So Menelaus welcomed Paris with open arms and brought him back up to the palace and they did a wonderful whirlwind tour of Menelaus' Sparta. Paris was there for well over two weeks and Menelaus took him everywhere and everywhere he went. Paris was an absolutely natural at this sort of thing. The nice thing about Paris, the amazing thing about Paris is he didn't recognize how shallow he was. And so because of this, Paris was never ill at ease. He never recognized just, you know, how candy floss his personality and his intellect was. So Paris was always happy to hug another senior or kiss another baby. Now a few days into the visit, for all intents and purposes, Paris and Menelaus had become brothers in the sights of man and in the sights of gods. They had entered into a relationship which was very common in Troy and inside of the ancient Bronze Age Greek world. They'd entered into a relationship of xenia. Now we don't have any term for it in our language because we don't have any need for xenia in our language. But what xenia did is that it essentially turned Paris and Menelaus into family. And it meant that if Paris ever found himself on Menelaus's territory at any time in the future, Paris would be guaranteed of safe passage, a safe place for the night, and to be given wonderful, wonderful gifts by Menelaus. And it was a reciprocal arrangement. So if Menelaus ever went to Troy, the same thing would happen. And the thing about these xenia relationships, though, is that it wasn't just Paris and Menelaus. By Paris and Menelaus entering into this relationship, they're families, they're cousins, they're relatives, and their children and grandchildren drowned through the ages. So these xenia relationships essentially bonded people together for a very long amount of time, where these bonds were so great and so ordained by Zeus, king of the gods, that you didn't mess around with them. Which is likely why Menelaus made the biggest mistake of his entire political life a few days after that. Here's what happened. The visit had been going along swimmingly well, and Menelaus was just ridiculously confident. High as a kite. Here he had this Trojan prince who was actually taking him seriously and enjoying his company. And so Menelaus began to hold more and more wonderful, dramatic, theatrical banquets in the evening. Menelaus was now pulling out all the stops. He was emptying out his treasury to impress his newly minted brother Paris. And it was at one of these banquets that Menelaus made his huge mistake. Most of these banquets were attended only by Greek men. Now there was a reason for this, and the reason wasn't what you think. And the reason wasn't that word had got out that Paris was a philanderer, so keep your women locked up. That would have been a good reason. But the real reason was that the Greek world of the Bronze Age, 1250 BCE, was a very, very strict patriarchal world. And the men in this world treated their women like commodities, like property. Women inside of this particular time period in Greece had absolutely no legal, social, political rights. They were the property of their men. And Bronze Age Greek men, like Menelaus in particular, and warlords and members of the upper echelons of Bronze Age society, were constantly obsessed and worried about their women being stolen, or their women entering into adulterous affairs with other men. And of course, these were the days before DNA testing, or paternity testing, and things like that. So there was a reason why the Bronze Age Greek warriors worried about this kind of thing, as they didn't want to end up raising a son who they had suspicions wasn't really their own. So what the Bronze Age warriors did is that they left their women locked up in the ladies' quarters of the palaces all the time. And poor Paris, the only downside of this visit that he could recall, because he'd been having such a wonderful time, is that he hadn't seen any eligible women everywhere. He'd been kind of thinking, well, maybe Aphrodite will give me this woman she's promised me on my road trip to Sparta. But being a patriarchy, all the warlords and all the senior people inside of Menelaus' kingdom, well, they kept their women sensibly locked up and out of the way, so no men would ever see them. So Paris hadn't seen any women until the night when Menelaus, as I told you, made this huge and grave error that changed everything. On that particular night, Menelaus was hosting yet another banquet. On that particular night, Menelaus did something strange. About one o'clock in the morning, and maybe Menelaus was a little bit deep into his cups and that's why he did it, Menelaus had stood up beside Paris and held up his wine goblet and banged his fists onto the table, called the dining hall to attention, and then turned around to Paris and said, Paris, brother, friend, do I have a treat for you? And Menelaus had called to the back of the great hall, the banquet hall, and he had yelled out a very clear order. He had yelled out, summon Helen. Well, the hall, the banquet hall, had immediately gone deadly quiet. Obviously, Helen was not routinely summoned to the banquet hall, and the men in the hall, the Greek men in the hall were looking shocked, but they were also looking in a deep form of anticipation, and Paris stood there. He didn't quite grasp the whole patriarchy thing, so this wasn't as shocking for Paris as it was for everybody else in the hall, but Paris waited, and about two minutes later, the door to the banquet hall opened and in stepped a woman. Well, Menelaus smiled, beaming from ear to ear. He turned around to Paris, he patted him on the back, and he said, something along the lines of, Paris, I'd like to introduce you to my wife. Paris, this is Helen, Helen of Sparta, my most valuable possession. And then Menelaus had invited Helen, Helen of Sparta, to come and sit at the table and dine with himself and his brother, his special guest, Paris. Well, Paris took one look at Helen when she stepped into the room, and in a moment of blinding, certain, absolute clarity, Paris knew beyond a shadow of any doubt that he was currently staring at the most stunningly gorgeous, beautiful, smoking hot woman who had ever graced Zeus's green earth. There was no doubt about it. And in a second moment of blinding certainty, Paris realized that this was the woman that Aphrodite had promised. Aphrodite had said to him, trust me, Paris, when you see her, you will know. And Paris, now looking at Helen of Sparta, he knew. Well, Helen walked forward. She bowed graciously and modestly to her husband, Menelaus. She bowed graciously and modestly to Paris, and then Helen took her seat between the two men, and the dining began. Menelaus stood up, he proposed another long series of toasts, and as Menelaus was busy proposing toasts and chatting about this and that and the other, Paris briefly tuned out. Paris closed his eyes, and under his breath, he called on Aphrodite. He whispered her name three times, just as a goddess of everything south of the waist had instructed him to do. And then a moment later, in a flash of brilliance that only Paris could see, Aphrodite arrived invisibly sitting beside Paris, and Aphrodite had the most mischievous and lascivious look on her face, and Aphrodite was radiating raw sexual energy. Well, she had turned to Paris, and she had smiled, and she had essentially said to Paris, I told you I'd find you the most smoking hot beautiful woman on the planet, and there she is, Helen of Sparta is that woman. And Paris had agreed that he agreed with Aphrodite that this indeed had to be the woman. He had never even dreamed of a woman as beautiful as a woman who was now sitting beside him. And then Aphrodite had explained to Paris that she had now fulfilled her end of the bargain. She had found the woman, and if Paris wanted, then Aphrodite would instruct her son. The son was sitting beside her, you know, the fat little kid with a bow and arrows, Eros. And Eros had a quiver of erotic arrows at his disposal, and his bow was there. And Aphrodite basically said to Paris, the choice is yours now, Paris. All I have to do is give the word, and Eros will shoot one of those erotic arrows directly into Helen, and then, well, look out boy, she will go crazy. And then Aphrodite had turned and said, but the choice is yours, Paris. Do you want me to do this, or do you not want me to do this? Now, to say that the choice was Paris's is likely a little bit precious on Aphrodite's part. Aphrodite, as I told you, when she stepped into a room, she caused everybody's pants to immediately fall to their knees. She was a force of nature, and here she was sitting right beside Paris with her little henchman, Eros, sitting there. And there was Helen, the most stunningly smoking hot, beautiful woman in the room, sort of sitting there. But on the other hand, Paris was also sitting right beside Menelaus, Helen of Sparta's husband, and Paris was a guest in Menelaus's home, and Menelaus had obviously felt so confident in his relationship. It hadn't occurred to him that bringing Helen out and showing Helen to Paris was a big and bad mistake. So, on the one hand, you could say that Paris had no choice, but on the other hand, Paris did have a choice, and I would really like now at this point, ladies and gentlemen, to be able to say that, well, Paris thought it through. He considered what he was doing to Menelaus, he considered the geopolitical implications of how this might impact on Trojan-Spartan relations, and that sort of thing. But as I told you earlier, Paris didn't think about these things, because deep down, Paris was shallow. All Paris saw was a smoking hot, gorgeous woman sitting in front of him, and Aphrodite sitting there saying, do I do her, Paris? Do I make her fall in lust with you? So Paris, he looked at Aphrodite, he smiled, and he nodded, and he said, do it. Shoot that arrow right through her. I can hardly wait. Well, Eros notched the arrow into the bow. Eros took very careful aim at Helen, and Helen, who had been sitting, minding her business, showing no more than a demure and respectable interest in her guest Paris, was suddenly hit, bam, with an erotic arrow. Well, Helen looked up, saw Paris, and Helen... And you know, ladies and gentlemen, what Helen did next is, well, the basis for an entire other podcast episode. So I'm sorry, that's mean of me, but I'm going to leave things hanging on a cliffhanger. And the reason I'm doing this is because what Helen does when she looks up and sees Paris is going to take us a good, fun, and crazy 40 minutes to talk about. So it's an episode for another day. So those of you who are just in it for the story, and those of you who want to know... happens next. I'd encourage you to keep a very close eye on the website trojanwarpodcast.com where the next episode in the podcast series will be posted shortly and you'll be able to get right on into the story. For the rest of you if you want to stick around for 10 or 12 minutes of post-story commentary I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about Sparta in more detail because most of us when we hear the word Sparta and a lot of you when you heard the word Sparta had an image of this powerful warrior state with these incredible soldiers and a battle in a cool movie called the 300 and then you're going well Jeff you just told me that this Sparta state was run by a second-rate king with a second-rate army and how could that be so I'm going to spend a bit of time clarifying a few little historical gaps or it'll be an awful lot of fun I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story about this Sparta that you know about so you can either stick around listen to the post-story commentary or you can gracefully bow out now I'll stop talking for a few seconds so that you don't feel rude for the rest of us and we'll pick up with the story so if you're still with me let's get into the post-story commentary back when I was in high school I took this course this history course which was called ancient medieval studies and what the high school teacher asked us to do was to write a series of essays and we were supposed to choose different cultures in world history and spend a bit of time researching and learning about that culture and how they operated and their values and their you know their political systems and economic systems and their social systems and spend the first half of the essay sort of doing a report on the culture and then in the second half of the essay we were supposed to discuss whether we thought it was a good system and whether it would be a good system for Canada to have or something like that so I got the essay assignment and and I headed down to the library I went up to the librarian and I said I got to do this essay I've got to compare two cultures I need to have an ancient culture and the librarian said why don't you research Sparta and he had handed me a book so I grabbed the book I headed over to a cubicle and started to read and what the librarian had handed me was a book written in the year 100 A.C.E. by a Greek writer writing in Rome a guy named Plutarch and in 100 A.C.E. Plutarch this writer had written a detailed detailed account of life in ancient Sparta well I read Plutarch for about 15 minutes and realized that in translation it was it was still miles and miles over my head so I went onto the shelves and I found sort of a young person's guide to ancient Sparta which was essentially Plutarch's story turned into more contemporary language that a high school student can understand and I read all about this Sparta that Plutarch described and what I read blew my mind it was really awesome and I'll tell you about some of those things in a minute now some of you if you're contemporaries in my age then that's likely where you first learned about Sparta was in a high school classroom but if you didn't do Sparta in a high school classroom well maybe back a few years ago you watched a huge epic movie called the 300 and if you watched that movie and if you watched the sequel to that movie then you learned about Sparta from watching that movie and you learned about this crazy Spartan society inside of that movie well that Sparta the Sparta that Plutarch describes and the Sparta that shows up in the movie the 300 is a Sparta which existed in 480 BCE and just to give you a bit of context here the Sparta of King Menelaus the second tier Sparta run by Menelaus a second tier warrior with a second tier kingdom that Sparta existed in 1250 BCE 700 years earlier than the Sparta of our popular consciousness today and there was no similarities between the two Spartas except they both occupied the same piece of land inside of what we now call Greece but we have somehow our view of Sparta is the Sparta of Plutarch and the Sparta of the movie the 300 so basically what Plutarch told us about Sparta writing 500 years after the Sparta he was talking about is Plutarch described this society which had been founded by a wise lawgiver who had decided that the primary goal of of this kingdom he was designing was to produce an army and a citizen population which was so badass and war and so lethally dangerous that no other Greek kingdom would ever dare attack Sparta in fact no other kingdom anywhere on the planet would ever bother Sparta the idea was to turn this civilization of Sparta this small little civilization of Sparta located in southern Greece into this warrior kingdom which could not be destroyed so the wise ruler of this place who had developed this had gone to work in setting up a system of government and some of the things they did were really interesting the first thing they did of course is that the minute that babies were born inside of this Sparta they were brought before a council of elders and the council of elders would carefully inspect all the babies and if they found any defects in the babies if they found anything physically wrong with the babies if they suspected that there might be anything intellectually wrong with the babies and the babies were summarily thrown over a cliff or in some versions of the story thrown into the sea to die so this Sparta practiced a very strict eugenics policy only the healthy and the fit were going to survive and and then we're told by Plutarch in his account that when little boys reach seven years old they were summarily removed from their family homes and taken away from their mothers and raised inside of military barracks and and the thinking here was that if you let a little boy stay with his mom then the mom will coddle him and he'll turn into some sort of a weak effeminate mama's boy and he'll turn into a useless warrior so the idea was get the kids away from the the tenderness of mother and put him into a barracks and when the Spartan boys at seven were brought into these barracks they must have felt like they'd stepped into some sort of nightmare version of summer camp because the barracks were run by teenage boys who were also in their training and the the teenage boys unlike modern teenage boys who would be camp counselors and carefully instructed in things like sensitivity and multicultural understanding and and watch out for things like bullying and things like that the teenage boys of Sparta were encouraged to bully and beat the snot out of the little kids living in their barracks the idea was that it would weed out the weak and and the ones that survived would be stronger through the experience if you happen to be a kid that showed up in a Spartan barracks at seven or eight or nine years old and suddenly announced that you had no interest in warfare and sports but instead you wanted to dedicate your life to to poetry and maybe interpretive dance or something well you wouldn't have made it to your teenage years before you would have been good and dead well later on we're told that there was a rite of passage of initiation for these these teenage boys before they were fully considered men and in the children's version of the story that i was reading in the library as a student they said the boys as a rite of passage were expected to successfully steal a fox and then kill the fox but later on in life i went back and i actually read my plutarch and it turns out what the boys were expected to do as a rite of passage into adulthood was to murder a slave and get away with it sparta was a society that was propped up by a mass number of slaves and so teenage boys were expected to sneak into slaves quarters and find some men slaves and of course slaves are valuable property and successfully murder that slave and of course if the spartan boy attempting to do this was caught he was he was punished mercilessly but but not for the attempted murder he was punished mercilessly for having inadequate stealth and military tactics and he was told to try again when he thought he was ready to be truly a man well later on of course plutarch tells us he goes on to say that the young men would marry but when the men married they weren't allowed to actually live with their wives because well you know the deal if you're living with your wife she's going to take you away from your primary job of training to be a soldier she'll want you to do things like take out the garbage or do some of the groceries or you know sit and listen to her talk about her feelings or something like that so spartan men were not allowed after they married to stay with their wives they were allowed to go home and have a quickie and procreate that was important but they weren't allowed to stick around they had to stay in the barracks until they're 25 years old with the rest of the men and then they were allowed to go home and spend some time with their wife afterwards other things inside of plutarch's account which didn't make it into my child's book of sparta was their eugenics policy when it came to breeding if it turned out that there was a woman inside of the spartan community who seemed to be producing particularly tough and resilient children and offspring well well then the spartan men would communally take turns impregnating that woman so that stronger children would be available and the reverse was actually true if there was a man that seemed to produce a really really really powerful offspring then he would make his services available to multiple different women inside of the community and nobody lashed an eye at this this was just once again really really good eugenics master race policy formation and plutarch writing about this army says that the real test then came in the year 480 bce when when there was a famous battle and this battle really did happen in 480 bce we do know that the battle happened it was called the battle of thermopylae and apparently what happened to plutarch tells us in this battle and there are some questions about plutarch's account but plutarch says that 300 and there's the origin of the movie title 300 spartans managed to find a narrow pass in the mountain and from that narrow pass they managed to hold off an invading army from persia and the invading army from persia plutarch tells us numbered in the numbers of 1 million and plutarch of course said that because of their iron discipline and the way of life the spartans managed to turn back the persian army well i loved the stories as a kid i thought the stories of sparta were really amazing and i was just wide-eyed looking back on it now i have more than a few reservations about the eugenics and the master race policy but plutarch's account of sparta turned out to be so popular after he wrote it in 100 a.c.e in rome that it sort of trickled down through the generations and was accepted by everybody sort of as well this must be the fact plutarch told us what it was like and and there wasn't an awful lot of historiography until you got into the late 20th century of historians actually saying okay do we have any other evidence aside from plutarch that this sparta actually existed and the truth of the matter is that we don't have very much plutarch was writing 500 years after the sparta that he was describing and plutarch was essentially relying largely on fragments from a couple of other historians herodotus and thucydides but not an awful lot of detail from them and not definitive historical detail and so plutarch was basically cobbling together a story of sparta from the oral tradition and folks we've already talked about the dangers with oral storytelling and tradition and by talking about how homer writing in 700 is describing a war that happened 500 years earlier than that in 1250 bce and how maybe homer's account gets a little bit exaggerated from what really went down there in 1250 bce well you run into the very same sort of problem with plutarch and there's another thing going on with plutarch too and that's it plutarch's history like i suppose everybody's history right up to modern historians is culturally implicated by the historian telling the story and contains a certain amount of well overt or covert polemic and the part of the writer and plutarch was writing inside of a rome that well some romans were beginning to worry that rome was getting maybe a little bit soft and a little bit flabby by the year 100 and there was a conservative element inside of rome that really liked the idea of let's get back to a disciplined roman army that's all for one and one for all and a roman army that will hold the line and won't run away in battle and so when plutarch wrote his stories of sparta he was essentially pointing to his contemporary roman audience and saying hey look you know if we actually get spartan tough here in rome look what we can do we can we can hold off a million strong persian army if there's only 300 of us and so there was a polemic inside of plutarch's writing and the other thing that's interesting of course is that there have been some recent archaeological digs in sparta in the remains of sparta and we haven't found any of those pits with the baby's bones so there's a real doubt about whether the babies really were thrown into pits on the mass numbers that plutarch would led us to believe and and then there's a story of this 300 soldiers against the million strong persian army and i've got to digress here if you want to hear the best most entertaining and fun account of that particular battle that's grounded in history as opposed to grounded in the movie the 300 and awesome big ass special effects and well you really want to go to another podcast if you haven't found a podcast in your life yet by a guy called dan carlin the podcast is called hardcore history if you've not stumbled across dan carlin's hardcore history then your lives are incomplete and someday when you leave this podcast you might want to rush over and listen to the master talk about history and and one of the neat things inside of the carlin podcast is he has an entire episode dedicated to this particular battle of the 300 it's called the shield of the west it's worth looking up and one of the neat things that carlin mentions he talks about historians looking at this particular battle of the 300 and these million persians that apparently the 300 held off and carlin points out that it's impossible that this army ever actually existed in that kind of a number but those kind of things don't really matter when you're telling stories and when you're telling epic they only matter if you actually decide that the stories in the epic and the accounts you're giving are serious real history and then you have a problem because then you have to start questioning in an awful lot more detail your sources so the sparta of your popular imagination the sparta of the movie the 300 did it exist did it not exist yeah an awful lot of doubts i was everything that we've heard about it true yeah not so likely the sparta of menelaus of 1250 bce did it exist yes was menelaus and his sparta a second rate warrior kingdom inside of the bronze age world of that time period yes is anything else about the story true well i'm just going to leave that as i told you back in episode one up for you to decide and that's a great place to say goodbye i hope you've had a little bit of fun i hope you've learned things and I hope you tune in to episode number six of the podcast series on my website trojanwarpodcast.com where what we'll do of course is figure out what happens to Helen now that she's been hit by Aphrodite's arrow. Have a great day.