The Helots, whose name means “captives,” were fellow Greeks, originally from Laconia and Messenia, who had been conquered by the Spartans and turned into slaves. The Spartans’ way of life would not have been possible without the Helots, who handled all the day-to-day tasks and unskilled labor required to keep society functioning: They were farmers, domestic servants, nurses and military attendants.

Absolutely, yes. Popular culture constantly leaves out the Helots. They are not actually very often referred to as slaves in the primary sources, but they were servile labourers and that was why Sparta could produce the type of men whom Herodotus describes at the Battle of Thermopylae. Spartan citizens were landowning gentlemen who had the leisure time to devote to the types of practices that would enable them to be elite warriors because they had other people doing the work for them. Sparta is not a great role model in that regard, to say the least.These days, the standard line of thought in Spartan scholarship is that if something is only in one of the later sources, we worry about its reliability” No one soldier was considered superior to another. Going into battle, a Spartan soldier, or hoplite, wore a large bronze helmet, breastplate and ankle guards, and carried a round shield made of bronze and wood, a long spear and sword. Spartan warriors were also known for their long hair and red cloaks.

When you talk about wealth, you’re not just talking about the agricultural produce of an estate that allowed Spartans to fight. You’re talking about luxury. Which brings me to the style of Spartan Victory; I’d wager that Francois is a fan of JK Rowling, because in common with the ruling mistress of crap English prose he leans heavily on adverbs as modifiers. Well, not adverbs – just the one: “ironically”, which appears no fewer than 33 times in Spartan Victory. By comparison, there are only five instances of “sadly” and none at all of “happily”. The Sayings sections are a real treat as well. The Spartans were raised to express themselves in few words, so pithy witticisms abound. Some of them are laugh-out-loud funny. Take the Spartan men's tendency to wear their hair long, bearing in mind Lycurgus' statement that "it renders handsome men better looking, and ugly ones more frightening." And there's not a little manly bravado mixed in, like Leonidas' remark at the battle of Thermopylae, when the sky was invisible due to the number of Persians' arrows: "How pleasant then, if we're going to fight them in the shade."

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But most of the sources are outsiders and often quite late. There are the sayings of the Spartan women recorded by Plutarch, a writer of the Roman period. They are a wonderful source of information about Spartan women, but they’re so late that there is a big question mark hanging over their word-for-word reliability. It’s more a case of being able to take the tone of the sayings, rather than their actual wording. As for the Nazis, Hitler was quite partial to Sparta’s eugenics. There was a sense that the Spartan way of doing things could be applied in the modern world. There’s a document from the 1940s that outlines a plan that said that the Germans would be the Spartans, the Poles could be the perioikoi and the Russians could be the Helots. That was how they were going to run the east of Europe. Fortunately, they didn’t get to continue their plans for a new Sparta in 20th century Europe. Such harsh punishment was a prominent part of the Spartan training system. The Spartans even turned it into an annual ritual, in which boys tried to steal cheeses from a temple altar, which required them to evade guards armed with whips.

The sayings reveal mothers who would not have made their boys soft. Many of the sayings of Spartan women are coercing their sons, telling them off for having behaved badly. Several of them relate to mothers actually killing their sons for having shown cowardice. In one story a Spartan boy comes home from the wars and his mother asks, ‘How did the Spartans fare?’ He says, ‘Everyone was killed.’ She says, ‘Everyone?’, and then kills him by beating him with a roof tile.Spartan women had a reputation for being independent-minded, and enjoyed more freedoms and power than their counterparts throughout ancient Greece. While they played no role in the military, female Spartans often received a formal education, although separate from boys and not at boarding schools. Now, 90 years on, young women of today are encouraged to take up apprenticeships in aviation and aerospace industries, including here on the Isle of Wight. Let’s move on to the books you’ve chosen about Sparta. First up is Herodotus’s Histories. They cover the Greek struggle against the Persians, but they’re much wider than that. Can you give us a sense of the general context of the Histories and how he talks about Sparta within that? Before we get into the books on Sparta you’re recommending, I’d like to ask a couple of preliminary questions. I realised, when I started thinking about this interview, that I know very little about Sparta—beyond the clichés about the austerity of its cultural life and its militarism. When was the period of classical Sparta’s greatness and did it overlap with that of Athens?

If you're looking for a book that has passed the Lindy test, I recommend reading this one. (You should read about Solon too). The teenage boys who demonstrated the most leadership potential were selected for participation in the Crypteia, which acted as a secret police force whose primary goal was to terrorize the general Helot population and murder those who were troublemakers. At age 20, Spartan males became full-time soldiers, and remained on active duty until age 60. Spartan Armor, Shield and Helmet The thing I always explain to my students—when I’m talking to them about what they should be finding in this book—is the sheer deluge of evidence about wealth in Sparta. The supposedly austere Spartans don’t have wealth, but there’s wealth everywhere in Sparta and Steve really emphasizes that in this book. It’s a wonderful reappraisal of how Spartan society really operated. It’s one of those works that has just changed how we view Sparta.Xenophon’s Spartan Society is a fine look at the city-state (if indeed Xenophon wrote it; translator Richard J.A. Talbert of the University of North Carolina has his doubts). But readers of On Sparta may derive more enjoyment from the collection of “Sayings of Spartans” and “Sayings of Spartan Women” that Plutarch collected. The word “laconic,” after all – referring as it does to a pithy saying that conveys a great deal in a few words – comes from “Laconia,” the name of the Peloponnesian region of which Sparta was the capital; and these statements, from both famous and otherwise unknown Laconians, unquestionably have that laconic quality. The book explores how Spartan society was developed. Plutarch, a Greek who lived between AD 50 and 120, describes in this well-written book the fascinating lives of the most prominent characters of the era. I recommend reading about the lawgiver Lycurgus, one of the great leaders of Sparta. On Sparta’s behalf, it must be said that the Spartans really knew how to fight. In condemnation of Sparta, it must be said that the Spartans really knew how to fight. Such are the paradoxes involved in studying the warrior nation that, for a time, dominated the city-states of ancient Greece; and for the student of classical culture who wants to get to know Sparta better, the biographies, sayings, and historical work brought together in this Plutarch volume under the title On Sparta provide a fine place to start. Another Spartan woman, when she heard her son had died in battle right at his place in the line, said: "Bury him and let his brother fill his place."