Spartan Women

Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics

BBC

Stand-up, History, Comedy

4.8 • 598 Ratings

🗓️ 21 August 2022

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Uniquely in the ancient world, women from Sparta had extraordinary rights and freedom. Relatively speaking. They were educated: they learnt to dance, sing, recite poetry and to keep fit, in a regime where physical beauty and feminine strength were prized. They were not expected to marry until they reached maturity, which meant fewer of them died in childbirth. Their gods were female and so was the company they kept, since boys were separated from their families at age seven, and raised to be soldiers in this highly militarised society.

‘Rock star mythologist’ and reformed stand-up Natalie Haynes is obsessed with the ancient world. She explores key stories from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. They might be biographical, topographical, mythological or epic, but they are always hilarious, magical and tragic, mystifying and revelatory. And they tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

With guests Professors Edith Hall and Paul Cartledge Producer: Mary Ward-Lowery

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, podcasts.
0:05.9	Today I am standing up for Spartan women.
0:17.2	I mean, most of all, I want to stand up for one particular Spartan woman called Gorgo, who is Queen of Sparta. She's born around 506 BC. She is the daughter of King Cleomenes. She's the wife of King Leonidas. But we need a bit of background, because inexplicably, we've made it to series eight, and I've never talked about Sparta, which I feel really bad about. So let's get some context. Sparta is a city-state,
0:38.9	Polis in Greek, in the Peloponnese, in the southern part of the mainland of Greece. And it is
0:44.9	famous for its highly militarized society. When I say highly militarized, I mean, if you are a man and you
0:50.7	are born Spartan, you have to be a soldier. There is no other career available to you
0:54.7	at all. Automatically, you are a soldier. They have this sort of hypermasculine ideal that the only
1:00.3	appropriate life for a man is to fight. And it's a hypermasculine ideal which is epitomized in various
1:05.8	stories, but particularly in the sort of quasi-mythical story of the Battle of Thermopylae, which happens in
1:13.0	480. It's a historic battle on which copious myth has been overlaid, I guess it would be fair to
1:19.6	say. It's the battle in which 300 Spartans and a lot of their allies who don't very often get
1:24.8	mentioned, fight off a Persian invasion. And there are, I mean, I'm rounding up slightly, but like 80 billion
1:32.5	guerrillion Persians.
1:35.0	And they fight at this place the Mopoli, this narrow past the Mopoli, and it's a fight
1:38.9	to the death.
1:39.4	It's a suicide mission for the Spartans.
1:41.3	And it's a story which has been celebrated in films, in graphic novels,
1:46.6	not least the film The 300, which those of you who are regular visitors to the radio theatre
1:51.4	slash listeners to the show will know is very problematic for me because of my Gerard Butler blindness,
1:56.2	in which I inexplicably can't recognise him twice. How is he doing that? One minute he's basically in some ropy rom-com, which I'm never going to
2:04.7	watch or remember, and the next minute, he's practically naked and fighting Persians and a rhino.
2:09.7	How is it the same man? It's like I don't understand how acting works.
	...

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