this is Delfy one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Greece to the Greeks it was the omphalos the navel of the world an umbilical cord connecting them to their archaic past when the distance between heaven and earth didn't seem so great but as well as providing a link to the past Delfy was also a window on the future thanks to its famous Oracle the Oracle offered an appealing combination of contact with the spirit world and concrete day to day advice if you had a question about anything from foreign affairs to love affairs you'd
come here should we invade Attica this summer will I marry Leander or Leonidas your answers came by a strange phenomenon in the Greek world apatheia this prophetess was an old woman who wore young virgins clothes she'd get herself into a state of ecstatic frenzy by using hallucinogenic plants chewing on laurel leaves or inhaling smoking henbane she babble away and her utterances which appeared to be divinely inspired would be written down by a priest he'd been turned these into elegant hexameter verse and there was your Oracle Oracle's were notoriously ambiguous and the true meaning of their
utterances often became clear only after the event perhaps that's why places like Delfy were by the end of the fifth century BC becoming just a little bit old-fashioned a new spirit of skepticism and rationality was abroad in Greece and fundamental beliefs about men the gods and the universe were being called into question nowhere more so than in Athens where philosophers speculated that the Sun was a red hot rock and the playwright Aristophanes joked the thunder was just a bad case of cosmic indigestion [Music] but elsewhere in Greece notions like this were simply unthinkable in Sparta
safe and secure in the ureters Valley it was still possible to believe that the gods were in their heaven and all was right with the world Sparta had once been a revolutionary Society but that was 250 years ago now the revolution that had created its unique social system had become embalmed in tradition Sparta's warrior elite had become suspicious of change and hostile to the new for a decade now Sparta had been at war with Athens its former ally the source of radical democracy and more and more these days skepticism about the powers of the Delphic
Oracle for conservative minded Spartans on the other hand our Accords remained articles of faith and when the Pythia gobbled they listened so if in 415 BC some Spartans had come here demanding to know what the future had in store for their city and assuming the Pythia was on form that day they'd have come home with deeply disturbing news soon they'd see the walls of the city of their greatest enemy reduced to rubble and would gorge themselves on the fruits of victory but that victory would turn rocky and it would be the turn of the Spartans
to taste the bitterness of total defeat [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] the war between Sparta and Athens had been bloody and inconclusive ten years of fighting had produced plenty of killing but no killer blow following devastating plague in Athens and a military humiliation for the Spartans on the island of SPAC tyria the two sides had finally concluded an armistice and withdrew to lick their wounds after six years of uneasy peace the wounds would be spectacularly reopened in sy refused on the island of Sicily it was here hundreds of miles from Greece itself but the most significant
battle in the conflict between Sparta and Athens took place for Athens it would end in a defeat of seismic proportions and what happened after with surpassing brutality everything had gone before in this pitiless war Syracuse had been founded during the period of colonization which had created Greek cities all over the Mediterranean and beyond in the war that turned the whole of the Greek world into two armed camps it was allied to Sparta in the year 415 war fever swept Athens and its focus was Syracuse one of the loudest voices in the campaign for war against
Syracuse belong to Alcibiades he was clever good-looking and ambitious in many ways the quintessential Athenian he was popular with the people and a fan of the new learnings have taken root in Athens Socrates was one of his friends but his enemies circulated rumors about him saying he was an atheist who mocked the gods our bodies was a hard liver given to wine and women despite the scoldings of his wise friends Socrates during the plague that had devastated Athens it was said that dissipation had tipped over into something worse as the death toll mounted and the
city despaired he was rumoured to have shown his scorn for the gods by profaning sacred rites and yet despite this dubious reputation when our see bodies talk war the Athenians listened in a wall between a city of soldiers and a democracy it's only too easy to assume it's of warriors who spoiling for a fight but in fact the Athenians were always keen to flex their Imperial muscle because actually said it was easier to get 30,000 Athenians to agree to fight than a single Spartan so on this occasion antibodies gung-ho appeal pressed all the right buttons
but before the fleet could get underway an outrageous act of sacrilege rocked the city over the course of a single night an attack was made by persons unknown on the hermie good luck statues that could be found all over Athens according to the more polite accounts the statues were left without noses in reality the Vandals targeted the Hermes prominent phalluses a double blow against the city's good fortune and virility [Music] despite the bad omens and the accusations flying around the athenian fleet set sail and Alcibiades went along to his enemies capitalized on his absence they
blackened his reputation and spread rumours about him eventually they got the city authorities to recall him to face charges of conspiracy and sacrilege Alcibiades knew all about the fickleness of the Athenians he was after all a master at manipulating them for his own ends reckoning his chances of a fair hearing as slim he went on the run where he ended up amazed everyone he came to Sparta and set about winning for himself a new and highly unlikely following Alcibiades the crowd-pleaser pulled off the performance of a lifetime his cloak was more ragged his food poorer
than even the most hardline spartan but it wasn't done completely cynically he was a sworn enemy of Sparta but his background was riddled with Spartan connections his family like many other aristocratic Athenians were lucano files men who were in love with the values of laconia the spartan homeland aceveda's himself was given a spartan name he was even went nursed by spartan nanny he could play the spartan with real conviction and the real spartans were simply bowled over and it wasn't just the spartan crowds that fell for Alcibiades formidable charms the rumor was that he also
made a conquest of timaya the wife of the Spartan King Aegeus Sparta's sexual codes when a Tory ously at odds with the rest of Greece elsewhere adultery was punishable by death but in Sparta married women could with the consent of their husbands enjoyed multiple sexual partners and if you're thinking swingers think again free love wasn't the motivation the Spartans were acutely anxious about the decline in their popular monogamy and the nuclear family weren't important what mattered was producing healthy male children and therefore you choose your lover if he was strong courageous and fertile it's not
clear where the King Aegeus was a cuckold or an accomplice when his wife puts Spartan ideals into practice but what's certain is that the love affair would have consequences long after Alcibiades left the scene alcibiades repayed spartan hospitality by revolutionising their military thinking he advised them to come to the aid of their allies in Syracuse something the Spartans had been reluctant to do Alcibiades convinced them to send a Spartan general Jilla purse to help oversee the defenses a low-cost way of honoring their commitments the advice would prove fatal to thousands of his fellow Athenians the
expedition against Syracuse started well but with the arrival of the Spartan general Julius things began to go wrong for Athens Julius wasn't a brilliant tactician he didn't think you jury enforcement's and there was no secret weapon hidden underneath his scarlet cloak but the mere presence of a Spartan warrior raised the morale of the beleaguered Syracusans they began to fight back [Music] [Music] Athens had to send reinforcements they launched a massive night attack on a string of hill forts overlooking the city inch by inch they fought their way to the top and at one point it
looked like they might succeed but by Dawn the Athenian soldiers were exhausted and they were pushed right back to their camp in the harbor now all they wanted was to get out of Syracuse but on the very eve of departure nature or the gods took a hand [Music] though the Athenians had the reputation for being the most godless of the Greeks no one was rash enough to ignore an omen as dramatic as an eclipse of the moon the priests of the army camp advised them to hold tight and promised that by the time of the
next full moon the omens would be better it was a bad call Julius ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of Syracuse Harbor the Athenians were trapped in the fighting that followed thousands of athenian troops died they were perhaps the lucky ones it would be the survivors who would pay the full price for Alcibiades treachery the survivors some 7,000 of them were taken here to the stone quarries outside town now the quarries have been landscaped so you have to imagine how it was then a narrow rocky chasm no shade no
water nothing thousands of prisoners were kept here for months many were wounded and dying and spent their last days baked by the Sun in the dog days of summer and Aemon summer turned to autumn frozen at night they were given hardly any food and water diseases soon broke out and because it was impossible to bury the dead the corpses were stacked and left to rot as well as hardship hunger and disease there were summary executions and torture the Syracusans would bring their children to the quarry's edge to mock the defeated enemy and in this cathedral
sized mine the Syracusans spiced up the routine brutalities with a dash of high culture [Music] for the athenians there was only one path to survival the steric yusin's were passionate about the playwright Euripides prisoners who could recite his verses were brought here to this natural concert hall if they performed in a style that pleased their tormentors they were let out to be sold on into slavery if you didn't come up to scratch you were left to die and there's one line of Euripides that goes and happy Greeks barbarians to each other I wonder if any
of them were brave or foolhardy enough to quote it [Music] on the night that news of the military disaster at Syracuse reached Athens it was said that a wail of grief could be heard passing along the walls as the story was carried from the port up to the city itself the failure of the adventure plunged Athens into despair the years of war were taking their toll Athens was weakened and its citizens dragged down by the hardships of life on the homefront in the law courts of the Agora the pulsing heart of the city one man
complained that his mother was reduced to earning her living as a nurse and a ribbon seller we do not live as we would like he said with poignant understatement [Music] Sarek you should have paved the way to total victory for the spartans slow footed and cautious as ever they failed to capitalize on athenian disarray after a year of turmoil athens pulled itself back from the brink and turned to face the old enemy once again but defeat for athens had only been deferred the man who delivered the final blow was called Lysander he was a Spartan
but by no means a typical one his origins were humble he was a morphix it translates as bastard but it meant that while his father was a full Spartan citizen his mother was a helot possibly even one of the despised Messenians whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the Spartan utopia despite this mixed parentage Lysander qualified for admission to the Agoge brutal training system that turned Spartan boys into Spartan warriors but what Lysander lacked in social standing he made up for in very unspun ass and soon emerged from the pack as a military leader
and shrewd political operator lisara's politicking included wooing the Persian Empire whose invasion seventy years before had briefly United the fractious Greeks under the leadership of Sparta and Athens now that Greeks were killing Greeks purges autocratic Kings were content to stand on the sidelines handing out gold to whichever side seemed like list to serve their interests [Music] most spartans claim to hate the persians they despise their dissipation and sycophant see all that bowing and scraping to one man who was himself above the rule of law but Lysander was perfectly happy to put traditional Spartan ideals behind
him and suck up to the Persians if that's what it took to get the coffers open he forged a close personal friendship with Cyrus the king's son funds materialized and at a stroke the pay rate of the Spartan fleet was increased by 25% freelance Osman and mercenaries went with the money and it was said that the Athenian ships were emptied overnight fueled by Persian gold Lysander's fleet was able to defeat athens and her allies time and time again eventually he was able to impose a naval blockade the cutting athens off from its grain supplies the
climax came in the year 405 BC when Lysander encountered a large Athenian fleet as ever he outfoxed them refusing to come to battle making them think he was scared and then striking when their guard was down the Athenians were routed and their city was at lights and as mercy [Music] [Music] as soon as Athens capitulated resentment and jealousy simmering for decades within the Greek world boiled over into full-scale vengeance one Theban said that the city should be razed to the ground and the land turned over to sheep but the Spartans didn't get hysterical despite the
years of fighting and huge loss of life they calmly set out their terms the removal of the democratic government the reduction of the athenian fleet to three ships and then and this time you can sense their pleasure the total destruction of the city walls the walls that sparta had scorned for so long and as the city walls burnt down and sparta was recognized as the ruler of the greek world Lysander watched the flute girls Athenian prostitutes who camped around the city quickly changing sides dancing in the embers serenading the death of an empire pro-spartan collaborators
took over the city and blood flowed in the streets as old schools were settled among the victims was Alcibiades in spite of his defection to Sparta he'd somehow managed to sweet-talk his way back into the affections of the Athenians in the wake of defeat he was seen as someone who might eventually lead a fight back which was doubtless why the order came from Sparta to have him quickly bumped off Lysander chose to mark the victory over Athens at Delphi he built for himself a grandiose monument that made a mockery of the Spartan code of understatement
and self-effacement now all that's left is the base but once this monument would have been crowded with 30 more than life-sized bronze statues representing Lysander's friends and supporters the men who'd helped him win his victory and right in the center stood Lysander himself being crowned by none other than the god of the sea Poseidon as a piece of self-advertisement it was positively shameless astute as ever Lysander realized that victory over Athens had changed everything Sparta was now the most powerful city-state in the Greek world an imperial power if it chose to go down that route
and Lassonde had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan World Order [Music] this is sparta in the year 400 BC four years after its defeat of Athens on the surface things are just as spartans like them unchanged their shangri-la is safe and secure the river you rotus flows the mountains are full of game the fields of fertile the helot slaves are quiet and the unique social system designed to produce the best warriors in the world has emerged intact from decades of war but within a generation the Spartans who had boasted that their
women had never beheld the campfires of their enemies would witness exactly that and the dismantling of their utopia the collapse of Sparta didn't exactly come out of the blue sometime in the year 400 an Oracle one of those messages from the gods to which the Spartans paid strict attention had started to circulate in the city bursting sparta be careful not to sprout a crippled gene ship and look for deers and numberless dr shall oppress you and the storm even loosen em killing war shall roll down upon most Oracle's were ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness
but this one was very explicit it seemed to refer directly to a power struggle that even then was being played out in Sparta King address was dead and there were two contenders for the vacant throne his son lokahi das and his half-brother Ajit Elias the succession should have been straightforward Latty HEDIS was the heir apparent the throne was his by right and besides ajussi Laius had been born lame [Music] this is the place where Spartan children who were imperfect in any way would usually end up as a small pile of bones in the place of
rejection but if you were of royal blood then normal rules didn't apply so a GC Laius was spared at the age of seven he was enrolled in the Agoge the Spartan education system that took boys and turned them into warriors no other member of the Spartan royal family had ever been subjected to the Agoge but despite his disability a GC Laius thrived in the competitive atmosphere when King Aegeus died Ajit Elias was confident enough to bid for the throne but it was just then that the troubling Oracle began to circulate the reference to a crippled
kingship seemed unambiguously to point to his own disability and the threatened consequences would dire but Oracle's are only as good as the interpretation that's placed on them and on this occasion an alternative was supplied by none other than Lysander for an old Fox like Lysander twisting an Oracle to serve political ends presented no problems all he had to do was remind the Spartans of a little bit of recent history did anyone recall he wondered when that slippery poseur Alcibiades was in town the rumors connecting him with the Kings wife to mayor and wasn't it also
said that when she was nursing her baby son Latika Das who incidentally arrived nine months or so after the Athenian left town she constantly whispered into his ear the name Alcibiades Lysander's innuendos did the trick allowing the Spartans to believe that crippled could mean illegitimate the Sun was out the uncle was in and so Ajit Elias came to the throne the most Spartan King Sparta had ever known a typical product of the Agoge his belief in the rightness of the Spartan system was absolute Ajit Elias was an arch-conservative but Spartan society itself was changing the
victory over Athens had brought with it the spoils of war and temptation for the famously frugal warriors the war had shown them places where there was more to life than black broth the traditional Spartan dish made of pig's blood and vinegar Spartan commanders abroad gained the reputation for corruption and they brought their ill-gotten gains home with them for the first time in centuries the good times were rolling in Sparta Ajit Elias tried to put a stop to all that nonsense he led by example even once he became king he and his family lived as simply
as before his ragged cloak became something of a trademark but decadence was only one of his problems his more immediate concern was what to do about Lysander Lysander astute handling of the Oracle had increased his power in Sparta and it looked like payback time but for once the consummate politician miscalculated the new king had very definite ideas about the dignity to a Spartan ruler during his successful naval campaign against Athens Lysander had accumulated a crowd of hangers-on and political climbers men who treated him with more respect than they did the lame King in the ragged
cloak address Elias decided to put him down very publicly and very definitely whenever Lysander recommended a course of action adieu Solaris did the opposite if one of his cronies sought a favor the King refused it he made it absolutely clear that association with Lysander meant the kiss of death the final breach came when a Julius ordered Lysander to serve at his table you know well how to humiliate your friends Lysander said the king replied yes I do especially those who set themselves up to be more powerful than myself Lysander left Sparta under a cloud he
came to Delfy and began to plot against Ajit Elias he tried to bribe the Oracle into issuing alarming prophecies knowing that these would destabilize the superstitious Spartans he was killed in battle before his plots could be realized only then was it discovered just how high he'd been aiming sorting through his papers after his death a juice Elias found a speech written for Lysander it laid out a revolution for the Spartan Constitution a kind of elective kingship open to all-comers and offered to the best candidate clearly Lysander thought of himself as the most likely contender Ajit
Elias wanted to publicize it immediately to prove what a threat Lysander had been but one of the city elders read it and found the arguments so persuasive he urged Adisa Laius not to bring Lysander back from the grave but to bury the speech with him the speech was hushed up and Sparta continued as before but the world around Sparta was changing fast and a series of disasters would soon prove the truth of the Oracles gloomiest predictions [Music] the Spartan King argelius was a magnet for gloomy omens It was as if the archaic powers of Greece
and retreat elsewhere found a way back through this spirit haunted King a year after his accession during a routine sacrifice the priests announced with great alarm that according to the signs Sparta was even then surrounded by enemies in fact this was hardly news for nearly three centuries now sparta had flourished thanks to its system of social apartheid with helot slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and toil and the perioikoi the free but disenfranchised traders and artisans providing the commercial muscle and at the top with a homey oi Sparta's elite citizen warriors a tiny minority
which kept its thumb firmly on the majority beneath it so the priests warning about Sparta being surrounded by enemies might have seemed to be merely stating the obvious in fact there was far more to it than that a few days later a plot was unmasked to completely overthrow the Spartan system one of its leaders was kinna Dhin he was neither a helot nor a perry oak but what was known as a lower grade spartan there were a variety of ways you could be reduced to this limbo like state cowardice in battle made you a trembler
if you were a bastard or of mixed blood you were categorized ammo facts and you could even be stripped of your citizenship for simply failing to pay your subs to the common mess the alarming thing about Canada's conspiracy was its scope it appeared to involve everyone from helot slave through perioikoi to the lower-grade Spartans all of those who'd been excluded from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia according to Kenna Dhin they all wanted to eat the spartans raw once they've made their confessions Kennedy and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at spearpoint
beneath a gauntlet of whips to face their final punishment they probably ended up here a crevasse a few miles out of Sparta called chaos a place of execution legends about this place have always been sinister but for once it seems that locals aren't exaggerating an archeological survey has revealed that the cavern floor is many feet thick with human remains down there it's a subterranean charnel-house only a tiny sample of the bones have been analysed but the results show that they are from the 5th and 6th centuries and belonged to men women and children some of
the adult skeletons are crouched in crevices suggesting that they were alive when they were thrown down and died trying to climb out I should imagine that after canadians torturous punishment he'd probably a stayed put once he hit the bottom but the Canada conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system it's pathological elitism sparta may have been the first greek city to define citizenship but it had always been the privilege of a small minority this minority was further reduced by the spartan instinct to exclude anyone who failed to measure up to their exacting standards
the consequence simply put was that Sparta was running out of Spartans a hundred years before at the time of Thermopylae had been perhaps 10,000 full Spartan citizens now there were as few as 1000 Spartan numbers were dangerously low it produced a body bag syndrome their reluctance to commit large numbers of full citizens to battle now when the Spartans went to war they formed an officer elite the fighting was done by helots promised their freedom and allies increasingly reluctant and alienated from the spartan cause sparta was living on borrowed time when the walls of Athens had
been pulled down to the sound of flutes in 404 it was thought according to one contemporary historian that this day was the beginning of freedom for Greece overbearing and arrogant the Athenian Empire had few friends by the end but the Spartan Empire had proved just as oppressive where Athens demanded money to finance its fleet the spartans demanded men to fight their Wars Athens had turned its allies into cash cows the Spartans turned theirs into battle fodder it was a bad time to fall out with your friends because Sparta had a new enemy to deal with
Thebes militarily speaking it had never really been in the big league but in recent years it have been getting more and more experienced thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held against the city by King Aegeus things came to a head in sparta in a spring of 371 bc a meeting of city-states have been called to try and sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and turf wars that had flared up diplomacy and tax would obviously pay premiums but these were never Ajit Elias his strong points Sparta was supposed to be top dog here
but Ajit Elias noticed the respect with which the other Greeks treated at the delegate from Thebes the King saw red and picked a fight with him the Theban stood his ground and even had the temerity to answer back this time Ajit Elias completely lost his temper he took the peace treaty and struck out the name of Thebes within 20 days the armies of the two cities clashed at a place called left rrah for sparta it would prove to be a day of reckoning [Music] [Music] [Music] in those days when you won a battle you'd have
erected one of these and the battlefield so that the world knew of your victory this was put up by the Thebans in 371 after they'd crushed the Spartans here at Lake TRO all that's left now is the base but in its day it would have towered up into the sky dominating the landscape around but this doesn't just mark the defeat of a Spartan army it signals the death of Sparta itself a G Solaris wasn't there on the day having caused the fight he refused to lead the Spartan forces into battle apparently he didn't want it
to be said that he was too fond of fighting it was left to Sparta's other King to take charge of a mixed bag of 700 Spartan warriors and 1300 or so helot slaves and reluctant allies against them was 6,000 Feebles highly motivated and thirsty for revenge the disparity in numbers alone would be enough to explain the defeat but the cbins also employed a surprise tactic phalanxes 50 rather than 8 many deep a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on you [Applause] [Applause] [Music] 400 Spartans were killed that day it doesn't sound that many
but bear in mind by this stage that's close on half the male warrior population as a military force Sparta was effectively finished [Music] the consequences of defeat were profound this was a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see the walls of the city of messini erected after life drew by the helots who for 300 years had slaved for their Spartan masters [Applause] after Latro the Thebans stormed into Laconia the heartland of Sparta and liberated the helots the Messenians free for the first time in centuries built six miles of walls around their new city these
are walls built by people who have no intention of ever being enslaved again as for Ajit Elias the last picture we have of him is in Egypt hard out at the age of 80 as a mercenary general in an attempt to fill Sparta's empty coffers when the Egyptians came to greet this legendary warrior King they saw an old man in a ragged cloak sitting on a beach and according to one historian they simply laughed Spartan never recovered from the defeat at laughter and the loss of its masini inherits relegation to the second division of city-states
was permanent [Music] in the centuries that followed as the greeks ran up against the new regional powers of carthage sicily and ultimately Rome the city periodically tried to revive its fortunes by reinstating elements of the old Spartan system but without their Messina enslaves Sparta just wasn't sparta utopia had been dismantled and no one could put it back together again 400 years after sparta collapsed the city received an important visitor the most powerful man in the Western world in fact Augustus Caesar the first emperor of Rome he came here not on Imperial business but on a
personal mission to honor the society that Rome had cherry-picked for so many of its ideas and he wasn't the only Roman tourist this huge theater was built to accommodate all the others who turned up to experience a kind of theme park version of Spartan culture in the theater the Spartans put on displays of the competitive dances and religious ceremonies that they'd once been famous for stronger fare was an offer at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis orthere where young boys were flogged sometimes to death in a crude parody of the rites of passage that once took
place there to end up as a purveyor of Sado tourism to a bunch of Romans is a fate that not even the gloomiest Oracle would have predicted but it's a backhanded compliment to the enduring charisma of Spartan ideals [Music] it's a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the manicured perfection of an English country estate but here at Stowe in Buckinghamshire there's a telling testimony to the spell cast by Sparta looking round this neoclassical Wonderland built for the 18th century Whig grandi Lord Cobham you might assume that it was the culture of Athens
that was being celebrated but in the temple of ancient virtues you can see that it's not all Athens is shown Lord Cobham obviously put a great deal of thought into the Greek figures he chose to honor with a place here at the temple of ancient virtues this exclusive group are the men he wanted the movers and shakers of his age to emulate and so of course you have Socrates described up there as the wisest of men and encourage or of good qualities his much magged friend Alcibiades would have attested to over there is Homer the
first of poets and Herald of virtue but then you get a slightly less predictable choice it's like her Gus the semi-mythical founder of the Spartan social system the inscription reads a father of his country who having invented laws with the greatest wisdom and fenced them against all corruption instituted for his countrymen the firmest Liberty and the soundest morality banishing riches avarice luxury and lust [Music] it's a pretty fair summary of the Spartan ideal with its puritanical appeal to self discipline and self denial although of course there's no mention of the less genteel aspects of Spartan
society the intimate relationships between women the brutal education system the mass slavery and the endless fighting but the greatest omission of all is that it fails to recognize Sparta's fatal flaw that by committing to a radical idea the pursuit of absolute perfection Sparta made an enemy of change itself [Music] [Music] you
