It's the ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes your host and in today's podcast

where we are focusing in on one of the most famous Hellenic city states from antiquity.

Classical Sparta. We're going to be looking at, shall we say, truth versus myth. It's

difficult for me to say that because there is so much of ancient Sparta as you're about

to hear which is incredibly debated. But we're going to be looking at various aspects of

classical Sparta and society. We're going to be looking at social hierarchy. We're going

to be looking at women. We're going to be looking at leconic sayings, the sayings of the

Spartans and the influence of later writers, particularly a figure called Plutac.

Now to talk through all of these and more, I was delighted to get on the show, a leading

ancient Sparta expert, a man who has got honorary citizenship at the modern town of Sparta

today. And this is Professor Stephen Hodgkinson. This is going to be the first of two parts.

The second part will be ours in due course. But in the meantime, here's Stephen.

Stephen, it is an absolute pleasure to have another eminent Spartan historian on the show.

It's really great to be here talking to Tristan.

Now war and society in classical Sparta. I mean, this seems like one of the most

shall we say debated topics of antiquity. Well, it really is extremely controversial. And I

seem to have spent most of my 30 or 40 years working on Sparta trying to challenge

Orthodox traditional views. Well, let's start sorting the fact from the fiction truth

versus myth. And first of all, when we talk about classical Sparta, what period in time are we

talking about? Well, when we talk about classical Greece in general, we refer to the periods from

the end of the Persian Wars to the death of Alexander, that is 479 through to 323 BC.

But the Sparta is better to think of a long classical period starting half a century or so

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