Andrew Bayliss is the author of the new book Sparta: The Rise & Fall of an Ancient Superpower. He also has written the book The Spartans: A Very Short Introduction. He teaches at the University of Birmingham, and he lives in Cheltenham, England.
Q: What inspired you to write Sparta?
A: My previous book on the Spartans had a hard limit of 35,000 words. So every time I wanted to add an interesting fact or story about the Spartans, I had to cut out a different fact or story to squeeze it in.
I really wanted to be able to tell some of the amazing personal stories about the Spartans like the bizarre rivalry between Leonidas’ half-brothers Cleomenes and Dorieus. Although Cleomenes was the elder brother and recognised heir, Dorieus refused to accept being ruled by his brother, and churlishly ran off and got himself killed trying to found a colony in southern Italy.
Had Dorieus coped better with being a “spare” royal, he would have been the one who succeeded Cleomenes rather than Leonidas. So Dorieus could have been the big Spartan hero everyone knows about today rather than Leonidas.
Q: What would you say are some of the most common perceptions and misconceptions about the Spartans?
A: I think everyone has a romanticised image of the Spartans as a super-disciplined caste of warriors not unlike the Japanese samurai.
But in reality, the Spartans were wealthy landowners who spent their time hanging out in the gymnasium, playing ball games, singing, dancing, hunting, and eating and drinking with their fellow citizens.
Spartan citizens were far from austere – they ate a lot, and drank a truly astonishing amount of wine every single night. Even more surprisingly, not one extant contemporary source describes the Spartans practicing fighting.
Q: The author Stephen Pressfield said of the book, “Whereas most standard modern histories depict the Spartans one-dimensionally, the truth, as Andrew Bayliss shows, is far more complex and human.” What do you think of that assessment?
A: I was blown away when I read that. I read Pressfield’s novel Gates of Fire on my morning commute when I was teaching Sparta to Classical Civilisation students at a school near Cambridge more than 20 years ago, so it’s always in the back of my mind when I teach about Sparta.
I really enjoyed his story, especially how he depicted the toughness of upbringing of young Spartans. I also respected the way Pressfield managed to make the Spartans the good guys of his story without covering up how horrifically the Spartans treated their helot slaves.
In my book, I tried to avoid making the Spartans seem one-dimensional by explaining why they were the way they were. I wanted to show that if they had not been so controlling and so greedy for their own freedom, the Spartans might have been the good guys of the story more often than they actually were.
Q: What do you see as Sparta’s legacy today?
A: That is a really tricky question to answer, because I don’t want to resort to trite stereotypes based on the Spartans’ own propaganda about their fight to death at the Battle of Thermopylae.
If we do that, we end up with Sparta’s legacy being an inaccurate and romanticised image as freedom fighters who would happily sacrifice themselves for the freedom of others.
Sadly, in many ways the Spartans’ true legacy is being a caricature of hypermasculinity, which has often been exploited for questionable political purposes.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Right now, I’m working on some academic articles focusing on the psychological impact of the Spartan upbringing on Spartan boys and men. I’m interested in exploring how the collective upbringing fuelled their intense hostility to outsiders.
I’m also thinking more deeply about how the rules of Spartan society impacted on the lives of the underclasses, especially the helots. I want to explore how centuries of terrorisation by the Spartan citizens affected their mindset. The theory of “internalised oppression” is a key concept for me.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I find it fascinating that so many people in the USA today admire the Spartans and see them as role models to emulate and invoke.
But I think they might be less keen to compare themselves to the Spartans if they realised how little regard many of the Founding Fathers of the United States had for Sparta. Some saw positives in the stability of Spartan government, but they tended not to admire the Spartans as people.
John Quincy Adams accused the Spartans of “barbarous cruelty,” while Thomas Jefferson dismissed them as “military monks” ruling over helots “reduced to abject slavery.” Alexander Hamilton wrote that “Sparta was little better than a well-regulated camp,” while John Adams even described aspects of Spartan society as “stark mad.”
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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