Sparta

Fall of a Warrior Nation

By: Philip Matyszak

Narrated by: Mike Cooper

Length: 6 hrs and 28 mins

Publisher's summary

This cultural history of Ancient Sparta chronicles the rise of its legendary military power and offers revealing insight into the people behind the myths.

The Spartans of ancient Greece are typically portrayed as macho heroes: noble, laconic, totally fearless. But life was not as simple as this image suggests. In truth, ancient Sparta was a city of contrasts.

We might admire their physical toughness, but Spartans also systematically abused their children. They gave rights to female citizens that were unmatched in Europe until the modern era, meanwhile subjecting their conquered subject peoples to a murderous reign of terror. Though idealized by the Athenian contemporaries of Socrates, Sparta was almost devoid of intellectual achievement.

In this revealing history of Spartan society, Philip Matyszak chronicles the rise of the city from a Peloponnesian village to the military superpower of Greece. Above all, Matyszak investigates the role of the Spartan hoplite, the archetypal Greek warrior who was feared throughout Greece in his own day and has since become a legend. The listener is shown the man behind the myth; who he was, who he thought he was, and the environment which produced him.

©2018 Philip Matyszak (P)2022 Tantor

Bringing the end of Sparta into focus

Amazing narration and narrative of the warrior nation of Sparta, starting at the events after Persian wars Matyszak brings these people to the modern readers in a way classical texts fail to do.

Learn the rest of the story B4 idolizing Sparta

Too many people idealize Sparta and their warrior spirit. This book paints a more rounded history of the region and how its society sowed its own seeds of destruction through the oppression of its colonies, its political backstabbing of allies, and a system that concentrated more and more wealth and power into fewer and fewer hands. Some people are fond of noting that democracies tend to fail within two to three hundred years; Sparta reminds us that dictatorships and authoritarian governments often fare far worse and have neighbors who delight in bringing the bully down.