Sparta Before the Reactionary Turn | Episode XCII

We think of Sparta as a grim place, more of a military barracks with some civilians attached than an actual city. Its inhumane marriage laws, nauseating eugenics program, brutal educational system, obsession with military training, and paranoid suspicion of non-Spartans all led French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou to label Classical Sparta as an ancient fascist state. But there was a time, as Marrou argues in his history of ancient education, when Sparta was the cultural center of ancient Greek life. Artists and musicians flocked to pre-Classical, archaic Sparta to find a population more appreciative of fine poetry and music than anywhere else in Greece. Jonathan and Ryan turn to the Spartan lyric poets Tyrtaeus and Alcman to investigate what Spartan education and society was like in the archaic period, before the city closed in on itself.

Henri-Irénée Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149

Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199537341

New Humanists episode on Homer's Contest: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/13949908-nietzsche-homer-and-cruelty-episode-lvi

M.L. West's Greek Lyric Poetry: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199540396

Richmond Lattimore's Greek Lyrics: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226469447

New Humanists episode on Benjamin Constant: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/16302266-what-the-modern-world-lost-episode-lxxx

The Anti-Federalist Papers: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780451528841

Thomas Babington Macaulay's Horatius: https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius

Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080

New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/

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Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com