General Resources
Component-wide resources
In Our Time
Sparta
The BBC website says:
Melvyn Bragg and guests Paul Cartledge, Edith Hall and Angie Hobbs discuss Sparta, the militaristic Ancient Greek city-state, and the political ideas it spawned. The isolated Ancient Greek city-state of Sparta was a ferocious opposite to the cosmopolitan port of Athens. Spartans were hostile to outsiders and rhetoric, to philosophy and change. Two and a half thousand years on, Sparta remains famous for its brutally rigorous culture of military discipline, as inculcated in its young men through communal living, and terrifying, licensed violence towards the Helots, the city-state's subjugated majority. Sparta and its cruelty was used as an argument against slavery by British Abolitionists in the early 1800s, before inspiring the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.Yet Sparta also produced poets of great skill: Tyrteaus wrote marching songs for the young men; Alcman wrote choral lyrics for the young women. Moreover, the city-state's rulers pioneered a radically egalitarian political system, and its ideals were invoked by Plato. Its inhabitants also prided themselves on their wit: we don't only derive the word 'spartan' from their culture, but the word 'laconic'. Paul Cartledge is AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture and a Fellow of Clare College, University of Cambridge; Edith Hall is Professor of Classics and Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London; Angie Hobbs is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Senior Fellow in the Public Understanding of Philosophy at the University of Warwick.
Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia
An article on the website of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge.
To view some of the finds from the sanctuary in the Fitzwilliam collection click here.
To view illustrations of the site click here.
OMNIBUS
P.J. Rhodes, 'The Spartan Alternative'
S. Hodkinson, 'Spartan Militarism a modern mirage?'
P. Low, 'War, death & Burial in Classical Sparta'
D. Gribble, 'Alcibiades'
YouTube
Bettany Hughes' Channel 4 documentary 'The Spartans'.
Classics Confidential: Meet the Spartans
An interview with Stephen Hodkinson at the 2011 Classics Association Conference at the University of Durham.
2.1 Education & Values
'Athetics and Social Order in Sparta in the Classical Period', P. Christesen, Classical Antiquity, Vol. 31 No. 2 (2012), pp 193-225.
A discussion of the athletics activities of the Spartans and unmarried girls and its position in the state.
2.2 Social Structure
'Plural Marriage and the Spartan State', A. G. Scott, Historia (2011), pp413-424.
A review of modern studies and the sources and a suggestion about this institution’s origins.
2.3 Political Structure
'The succession of the Spartan kingship 520-400 BC', B. Griffith-Williams, Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, Vol. 54 No. 2 (2011), pp 43-58.
