Spartan History Podcast

The concluding half of the Bronze Age collapse series traces the fate of Homer's Achaeans, the Mycenaeans, through the ills besetting their society toward a case for a mass migration and for Greek participation in the Sea People events.

The conclusion follows Helen of Sparta from the death of Hector to her return home over the ashes of Troy, reuniting with her daughter Hermione after a decade among the Trojan women.

Part two follows Helen's abduction by Paris from Sparta to the walls of Troy, where for the first time her voice is heard, closing like the Iliad itself with her oration at the funeral of mighty Hector.

Part one of a three part biography traces Helen from her conception on the banks of the Eurotas river through her marriage to Menelaus, framing her as the classical Spartans' most famous ancestor.

The episode describes the predominant Bronze Age Greek civilisation behind Agamemnon, a Mycenaean or Homeric Achaean, covering architecture, religious and burial practices before his doomed return from Troy.

A special interest episode on how Homer and his peers remembered and transmitted epic oral works, and the tricks of oral tradition that supported memorising the nearly 16000 lines of poetry in the Iliad.

With Paul Bardunias

Professor Paul Bardunias, co-author of Hoplites at War, traces hoplite warfare from its 8th century advent to the eve of the Persian wars through his three fundamentals: the men, the tools and the group.

With Paul Cartledge

Professor Paul Cartledge closes the Lycurgan Sparta arc with a summary of the archaic period's societal, political and religious reforms, in a conversation that at certain points got extremely academic and specific.

With Paul Rahe

Professor Paul Rahe, whose book The Spartan Regime focuses on the archaic formation of Spartan institutions, goes briefly back to the Bronze Age, then through the Dark Age and into the early Dorian migration into Laconia.

By the middle of the 6th century Sparta, through her alliances the most powerful military force in Hellas, faces Argos, is asked for aid by King Croesus of Lydia, and invades Samos in 525 BCE to oust the tyrant Polycrates.

Cleomenes the First held the Agiad throne of Sparta from around 520 to 490 BCE, ruling with an iron fist against co-king Demaratus while the Achaemenid Persian empire loomed before the Greco-Persian wars began.

With the most powerful military in Greece by around 550 BCE, Sparta forged the Peloponnesian League, a fortress that was also a prison for the Helots, and became Hegemon over the largest army since the mythical Trojan war.

Within a century Sparta's four villages on the Eurotas grow into a Peloponnesian powerhouse through aggressive expansion, unlike the colonisation other Greek cities chose, culminating in the 20 year first Messenian war.

A biography of Lycurgus, a liminal figure between the dark and archaic ages whose status even an early Delphic oracle doubted, with his achievements as lawmaker and an attempt to debunk the more outlandish events of his legend.

Sparta's 6th and 7th century government blended Monarchic, Aristocratic and Democratic rule: kings descended from Heracles, a council of elders, a citizen assembly for ratification, and five annually elected Ephors drawn from the Demos.

Sparta consolidates her 7th century hold on Messenia, building two temples from war wealth before a crushing defeat by the Argives sparks the second Messenian war, a conflict the poet Tyrtaeus is largely believed to have helped turn.

In the early archaic phase, Sparta's pious religious calendar of festivals and dualistic deities is traced, from Herodotus's claim about faith in the gods to the reciprocal bond between the Delphic oracle and Sparta.

With Owen Rees

Dr Owen Rees, a historian specialising in the psychological effects of ancient warfare, discusses the Battle of Marathon of 490 BCE, its build up, the peculiarities of Athenian general Miltiades and its aftermath.

With Trevor Culley

Trevor Culley, host of the History of Persia Podcast, introduces the Persian empire as the greatest threat Greek city-states faced until the Roman conquest of Greece in the 2nd century BCE, reaching the 5th century outbreak of Greco-Persian hostilities.

With Paul Cartledge

Professor Paul Cartledge examines Thermopylae's 3 fateful days at the hot gates, when Leonidas and his 300 wrote their Polis' legend, separating the facts of the battle from the myth making around it.

With Mark Selleck

Part two of a collaboration with Mark from Casting Through Ancient Greece opens on the possible veracity of the Lycurgus myth and closes with Spartan and Athenian contributions to victory in the Persian wars.

With Barry Strauss

Cornell University Professor Barry Strauss on the battle of Salamis, where an allied Hellenic fleet nominally under Spartan command, with Athenian citizens as its backbone and a navy built under Themistocles, faced Persian forces outnumbering it around 4 to 1.

The Greco-Persian wars' genesis is traced to the Ionian revolt, led by Aristagoras of Miletus, whose tyranny was underpinned by his father-in-law Histiaeus, setting the path toward Marathon, Thermopylae, Plataea and Salamis.

The third instalment of the Greco-Persian war series covers the decade between Marathon and Thermopylae: Themistocles' Athenian naval build up, Sparta's two new and unstable kings, and Xerxes' mounting forces in Persia.

With Jeremy Swist

Dr Jeremy Swist, a Brandeis University classicist studying classical reception, traces Laconophilia, or affection for Sparta, through Heavy Metal Music, linking duty, defiance and dedication to a genre born out of governmental tyrannies, real and perceived, of the early 1970s.

With Myke Cole

Author Myke Cole discusses his book The Bronze Lie, which dismantles the Spartan mirage and its appropriation by ultra nationalist movements, aiming to leave a fair and unbiased representation of the real Spartan story.

Sparta's compulsory, state sponsored education raised children of both sexes as future warriors and mothers, set against Athenian rivals, and the episode addresses pederasty, misogyny and child abuse within that system directly.

Three favourite myths in one episode: Perseus and Andromeda, with the hero rising above his apparently low birth, Bellerophon and Pegasus, where the hero conquered all and ended in misery, and the tragedy of Oedipus and fate's inescapable grip.

Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, are traced from their disputed birth in the house of Tyndareus through a youth beside Heracles, Theseus and Jason and travels across the ancient Greek world to their worship as gods by the Graeco-roman world.

The Spartiates, or Homoioi, are examined as a ruling class funded by helot labour, bound to land tenure and communal dining halls, with the very word Homoioi better read as similars, not strict equals.

The conclusion sees Medea forsake her homeland to join the Argonauts fleeing Colchis and King Aeetes's pursuing fleet, while an act of fratricide draws Zeus's curse before the Argo finally reaches Iolcus.

Spartan society's castes are surveyed: the Spartiate ruler class, the Helot slave class forming a massive share of the population, and the Perioikoi, dwellers around who worked as blacksmiths and fought as Hoplites.

Book two of Apollonius's Argonautica carries the Argo from the Bosporus channel to the eastern edges of the Black Sea, after a look at the story's evolution and possible eastern influences, past the Harpies and the Amazons.

Part one of a four part retelling of Apollonius of Rhodes' Argonautica follows the heroes' departure for Colchis to retrieve the golden fleece, ending where his first book does, at the Bosphorus.

Book three of the Argonautica finds Jason and his Argonauts on the river Phasis in Colchis, aided by Hera and Athena, with his love for Medea at the centre before he faces King Aeetes' bulls of bronze and earthborn giants.