How Did Ancient Sparta Really Fall? | The Spartans | Odyssey

This is Delphi, 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, Delphi 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 via a strange phenomenon in the Greek world, epithia. 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'd babble away, and her utterances, which appeared to be divinely inspired, would be written down by a priest. He'd then turn these into elegant hexameter verse, and there was your oracle. Oracles were notoriously ambiguous, and the true meaning of their utterances often became clear only after the event. Perhaps that's why places like Delphi were, by the end of the 5th century BC, becoming just a little bit old-fashioned. A new spirit of scepticism 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 thunder was just a bad case of cosmic indigestion. But elsewhere in Greece, notions like this were simply unthinkable. In Sparta, safe and secure in the Eurotasian mountains, 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, scepticism about the powers of the Delphic Oracle. For conservative-minded Spartans, on the other hand, oracles remained articles of faith, and when the Pythia gabbled, 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 rotten, and it would be the turn of the Spartans to taste the bitterness of total defeat. 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 Sphacteria, 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 Syracuse on the island of Sicily. It was here, hundreds of miles from Greece itself, that the most significant battle in conflict between Sparta and Athens took place. For Athens, it would end in a defeat of seismic proportions, and what happened after would surpass in brutality everything to have gone before in this pitiless war. Syracuse had been founded during the period of colonisation which had created Greek cities all over the Mediterranean and beyond. In the war that turned the whole of 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 belonged 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 had taken root in Athens. Socrates was one of his friends, but his enemies circulated rumours about him, saying he was an atheist who mocked the gods. Alcibades was a hard liver, given to wine and women despite the scoldings of his wise friend 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 Alcibades talked war, the Athenians listened. In a war between a city of soldiers and a democracy, it's only too easy to assume it's the warriors who are spoiling for a fight, but in fact the Athenians were always keen to flex their imperial muscle. It was actually said it was easier to get 30,000 Athenians to agree to fight than a single Spartan. So on this occasion, Alcibades' 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 Hermae, 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 Hermae's prominent phalluses, a double blow against the city's good fortune and virility. Despite the bad omens and the accusations flying around, the Athenian fleet set sail and Alcibades went along too. His enemies capitalised 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. Alcibades 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. Alcibades, 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 laconophiles, men who were in love with the values of Laconia, the Spartan homeland. Alcibades himself was given a Spartan name. He was even wet-nursed by a 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 Alcibades' formidable charms. The rumour was that he also made a conquest of Timaea, the wife of the Spartan king, Agis. Sparta's sexual codes were notoriously 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, enjoy multiple sexual partners. Now, if you're thinking swingers, think again. Free love wasn't the The Spartans were acutely anxious about the decline in their population. Monogamy and the nuclear family weren't important. What mattered was producing healthy male children, and therefore you'd choose your lover if he was strong, courageous, and fertile. It's not clear whether King Agis was a cuckold or an accomplice when his wife put Spartan ideals into practice, but what's certain is that the love affair would have consequences long after Alcibades left the scene. Alcibades repaid 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. Alcibades convinced them to send a Spartan general, Jallippus, to help oversee the defences, a low-cost way of honouring 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 Jallippus, things began to go wrong for Athens. Jallippus wasn't a brilliant tactician, he didn't bring huge reinforcements, 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. Athens had to send reinforcements. They launched a massive night attack on a string of hillforts 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 harbour. Now, all they wanted was to get out of Syracuse. But on the very eve of departure, nature, or the gods, took a hand. 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. Jallippus ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of Syracuse harbour. 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 then when 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. For the Athenians, there was only one path to survival. The Syracusans 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. There's one line of Euripides that goes, unhappy Greeks, barbarians to each other. I wonder if any of them were brave or foolhardy enough to quote it. 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 home front. 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. Syracuse 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 mothax, 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 Mycenaeans whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the Spartan utopia. Despite this mixed parentage, Lysander qualified for admission to the agogi, the brutal training system that turns Spartan boys into Spartan warriors. But what Lysander lacked in social standing, he made up for in very unspartan mouse and soon emerged from the pack as a military leader and shrewd political operator. Lysander's politicking included wooing the Persian empire, whose invasion 70 years before had briefly united the fractious Greeks under the leadership of Sparta and Athens. Now that Greeks were killing Greeks, Persia's autocratic kings were content to stand on the sidelines, handing out gold to whichever side seemed likeliest to serve their interests. Most Spartans claimed to hate the Persians. They despised their dissipation and sycophancy, 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 materialised and at a stroke pay rate of the Spartan fleet was increased by 25%. Freelance oarsmen and mercenaries went with the money and it was said that the Athenian ships were emptied overnight. Fuelled 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, 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 Lysander's mercy. 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 recognised 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 scores 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, and imperial power if it chose to go down that route. And Lysander had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan world order. 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 Eurotas flows, the mountains are full of game, the fields are 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. Boasting Sparta, be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship, and look for ordeals, and numberless trials shall oppress you, and the stormy billows of man-killing war shall roll down upon you. Most oracles 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 Agis was dead, and there were two contenders for the vacant throne. His son, Latihidas, and his half-brother, Agitilaus. The succession should have been straightforward. Latihidas was the heir apparent, the throne was his by right, and besides, Agitilaus had been born lame. 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 he were of royal blood, then normal rules didn't apply, so Agitilaus was spared. At the age of seven, he was enrolled in the agogi, 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 agogi, but despite his disability, Agitilaus thrived in the competitive atmosphere. When King Agis died, Agitilaus 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 were dire. But oracles 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 rumours connecting him with the king's wife Timaea? And wasn't it also said that when she was nursing her baby son Laticidas, 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 Agitilaus came to the throne, the most Spartan king Sparta had ever known. A typical product of the Agogi, his belief in the rightness of the Spartan system was absolute. Agitilaus 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. Agitilaus 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's 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 owed 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. Agitilaus decided to put him down, very publicly and very definitely. Whenever Lysander recommended a course of action, Agitilaus 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 Agitilaus 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 Delphi and began to plot against Agitilaus. 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, Agitilaus 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. Agitilaus wanted to publicize it immediately to prove what a threat Lysander had been. But one of the city elders read it and found the argument so persuasive he urged Agitilaus 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 oracle's gloomiest predictions. The Spartan king Agitilaus was a magnet for gloomy omens. It was as if the archaic powers of Greece, in retreat elsewhere, found a way back through this spirit-haunted king. A year after his accession, during a routine sacrifice, the priest 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 were the homioi, Sparta's elite citizen warriors, a tiny minority which kept its thumb firmly on the majority beneath it. So the priest's 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 Cynoden. He was neither a helot nor a perioik, 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 categorised a mofax, and you could even be stripped of your citizenship for simply failing to pay your subs to the common mess. The alarming thing about Cynoden'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 Cynoden, they all wanted to eat the Spartans raw. Once they'd made their confessions, Cynoden and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at spear point, beneath a gauntlet of whips to face their final punishment. They probably ended up here, a crevasse a few miles out of Sparta called Keadas, a place of execution. Legends about this place have always been sinister, but for once it seems that locals aren't exaggerating. An archaeological survey has revealed that the cabin 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 belong to men, women and children. Some of the adult skeletons are crouched in crevasses, suggesting that they were alive when they were thrown down and died trying to climb out. I should imagine that after Cynoden's tortuous punishment, he'd probably have stayed put once he hit the bottom. But the Cynoden conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system, its 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, there'd been perhaps 10,000 full Spartan citizens. Now, there were as few as 1,000. Spartan numbers were dangerously low. It produced a body bag syndrome, a 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, thieves. Militarily speaking, it had never really been in the big league. But in recent years, it had been getting more and more experience, thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held against the city by King Agesilaus. Things came to a head in Sparta in the spring of 371 BC. A meeting of city-states had 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 Agesilaus's strong points. Sparta was supposed to be top dog here, but Agesilaus noticed the respect with which the other Greeks treated the delegate from Thebes. The king saw red and picked a fight with him. The Thebans stood his ground and even had the temerity to answer back. This time, Agesilaus 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 Laetra. For Sparta, it would prove to be a day of reckoning. In those days when you won a battle, you'd have erected one of these on 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 Laetra. 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. Agesilaus 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 1,300 or so helot slaves and reluctant allies. Against them were 6,000 Thebans, highly motivated and thirsty for revenge. The disparity in numbers alone would be enough to explain the defeat, but the Thebans also employed a surprise tactic. Phalanxes 50 rather than eight men deep, a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on you. 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. The consequences of defeat were profound. This was a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see. The walls of the city of Mycenae, erected after Laetra by the helots, who for 300 years had slaved for their Spartan masters. After Laetra, the Thebans stormed into Laconia, the heartlands of Sparta, and liberated the helots. The Mycenaeans, 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 Agesilaus, the last picture we have of him is in Egypt, hired 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. Sparta never recovered from the defeat at Laetra and the loss of its Mycenaean helots. Relegation to the second division of city-states was permanent. 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 Mycenaean slaves, 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 honour the society that Rome had cherry-picked for so many of its ideas. And he wasn't the only Roman tourist. This huge theatre was built to accommodate all the others who turned up to experience a kind of theme park version of Spartan culture. In the theatre, the Spartans put on displays of the competitive dances and religious ceremonies that they'd once been famous for. Strong affair was on offer at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis Orthea, 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 sadotourism 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. It's a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the manicured perfection of an English country estate. But here, at Stow in Buckinghamshire, there's a telling testimony to the spell cast by Sparta. Looking round this neoclassical wonderland built for the 18th century Whig grandee 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's show. Lord Cobham obviously put a great deal of thought into the Greek figures he chose to honour with the 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 encourager of good, qualities his much nagged 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 Lycurgus, 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. 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 recognise Sparta's fatal flaw, that by committing to a radical idea, the pursuit of absolute perfection, Sparta made an enemy of change itself.