Hello and welcome to another episode of the ancient warfare magazine podcast. I'm Angus Wallace.

We're once more between issues of the magazine, so running with a random ancient warfare topic.

The one that has been pulled out of the hat for this episode is Spartan Invincibility,

which I think Mike suggested quite a while back.

Joining me to discuss the topic is Mark DeSantis, Mary Dan, Lindsay Powell, Mike Cole, Mark McCaffrey and Yasporeauage.

So let's start off with some background for people, not familiar with the topic.

Chris, one of our patrons,

wonders why anyone thought the Spartans were invincible to begin with. Just a fearsome reputation,

high defeat ratio, cool uniforms. How did Spartan gain its reputation as such a fearsome hop-light steat?

Well, Sparta is one of the, you know, the oldest city civilizations in Greece.

They're Dorian as opposed to Ionian, Ionic.

So they are separate in the Peloponnese from the rest of Greece.

And then the kind of isolation of where they are in the Peloponnese leads to a different

pathway from what the other Greek city-states went through after the Dark Ages.

When you get the rise of tyrants and tyranny in the rest of Greece

and you therefore have single individual oligarchs taking control.

Sparta seems, some point in the 7th century,

to go through its own revolution,

which is the development of the dual kingship, which is a very unusual sort of system in, well, anywhere.

So they have the two families, the Europontans and the Aggiads, who give them a king each,

and then they have a council which advises, which is very unusual it's a balance it's a check-in-balance

it's almost the original check-and-balance system and the other thing which of course is most

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