"TEXT:" "WTC-SWE" "(yelling)" "2,500 years ago, western civilization was threatened with extinction." "An invader from the east, the Persian Empire, came with a huge army to enslave the independent cities of Greece." "In the face of overwhelming odds," "Sparta and Athens led the resistance." "(yelling)" "In the narrow pass of Thermopylae" ""the gates of fire"-- 300 hoplite warriors from Sparta made a heroic last stand, sacrificing themselves to delay the enemy and set an example to the rest of Greece." "Within days the Athenian navy took on the might of the Persians." "They delivered a crushing blow to their fleet just a few miles from the heart of Athens, here in the Bay of Salamis." "In the war against the Persians," "Sparta and Athens had fought as allies, but these were two very different places." "Athens, a fledy, could boast of being the commercial and cultural center of Greece;" "an outward looking, civilized society where power supposedly lay with thedemos,the people." "(yelling)" "Sparta was a militaristic state, ruled by a warrior elite and propped up by a population of slaves." "Its boys, if they survived a state program of infanticide, were taken from the arms of their mothers at the age of seven, to be indoctrinated with the Spartan code of death or glory." "They lived mainly apart from their women, who were a phenomenon in their own right-- smart, independent, and physically outstanding." "These radically opposing systems were so incompatible that with no common enemy to distract them, cooperation between the two most powerful city states in Greece would eventually give way to fear and paranoia." "And the one-time allies would be driven to take up arms again, this time, against each other." "And so the stage was set for an epic struggle:" "Sparta versus Athens." "The warrior elite versus the demos." "The result of that conflict would decide the fate of Greece." "For Sparta and Athens, the experience of the Persian invasion had been very different." "Hundreds of miles from the front line, in the idyllic countryside of Laconia, the Spartan homeland had been untouched by the war." "Whilst the warrior elite were away fighting, for the women, children and slaves of Sparta, life continued as normal, protected by the Taygetus Mountains and sustained by the fields of the Eurotas Valley, one of the most fertile regions ofreece." "Athens didn't fare as well." "The city had been occupied by the Persians, and its citizens forced to flee." "The treasurers and priests who barricaded themselves in on the Acropolis, to guard the belongings of the gods, had been unable to prevent the destruction of this, the city's most sacred place." "Here, in Sparta, in the rugged enclosed peninsula of the Peloponnese, the war had seemed a distant affair." "With peace restored, the Spartans quickly returned usual routines-- the pursuit of physical and military perfection." "This society was disciplined, obedient and, above all, willing to sacrifice the needs of the family and of the individual for the good of the state-- if necessary, to die for the cause." "The cause was simple:" "protection of the Utopia the Spartans thought they'd created." "To do that, they needed to produce more of their famed hoplite warriors, but beyond that, the Spartans had few other ambitions." "All they wanted was to maintain the status quo." "But in postwar Athens, things were changing fast." "The trauma of occupation followed by the euphoria of victory was transforming the city." "Before the war, the foundations of democracy had been laid, but it was democracy in name only." "In reality, it was men with money who had the say." "Now, a massive power shift was taking place." "Welcome to the cradle of democracy-- an Athenian trireme." "Powered by nearly 200 oarsmen, it was seaborne battering rams like this that had annihilated the Persian fleet at Salamis." "At the hour of crisis for Greece, it was the poor of Athens" "and sent the triremes smashing into the hulls of their enemie" "(man shouting)" "(oarsmen chanting)" "These were the have-nots of the city, the bottom of the political pecking order." "But after Salamis, all that changed." "The oarsmen, who'd endured the sweat and the stench and the terror of being down here, had won a historic victory, and now they wanted to have their say." "Athenian democracy was galvanized." "The champion of the Athenian oarsmen was Pericles." "He was a wealthy aristocrat-- exactly the sort who'd run the so-called democracy in Athens for generations." "He was also shrewd enough to sense that things had changed, and ambitious enough himself at the head of that change.ut" "Pericles could see that in order to secure power, e needed to distance himself Pericles could see that infrom the nobles, power,h play to the gallery, ingratiate himself with the people." "He was a formidable orator, d his powers of argument and speech won them over." "But it wasn't just what Pericles said that impressed the citizens of Athens." "He designed a mass civic building program that, in effect, would be a job creation scheme for the city's poor." "PERICLES (dramatized):" "All kinds of enterprises and demands will be created which will provide inspiration for every art, find employment for every hand, and transform the whole people into wage earners, so that the city will decorate and maintain itself" "at the same time." "True to his word, Pericles opened the coffers of Athens to pay for public festivals and grandiose monuments like the Parthenon." "But most significantly of all, he introduced state salaries for juries and war service." "Now the oarsmen could trade in their rowing benches for seats of power in the city." "For the first time in Athens, democracy was really coming to mean "government by the people."" "And this is where its voice could be heard-- the Athenianagora." "If the Acropolis was the soul of Athens, then theagora was its beating heart." "It was here that the day-to-day life of Athens took place." "Artisans and lawyers, shopkeepers and philosophers, men from all walks of life rubbed shoulders here, creating the buzz and bustle of the most democratic city in Greece." "Official posts were open to everyone irrespective of their wealth and status." "And you were expected to pull your weight and participate." "On days when speeches and debates were heard, all the exits to theagora were closed, apart from the one that led up to thepnyx where the Athenian assembly sat." "Slaves with ropes dipped in red paint would chivvy citizens uplope, marking out for a fine any who dragged their feet or tried to slip away." "In Athens, democracy was enforced as rigorously as military discipline was in Sparta." "And it was a highly charged affair." "cracy mad, and this was a dangerous time to stand out from the crowd." "These pottery shards represent Athenian democracy at its most extreme." "They're calledostraka, and they worked as a kind of public referendum." "If you thought anyone deserved to be exiled from the city for ten years, you'd scratch, or paint, his name on the surface." "In theory, they were used to stop ambitious individuals, manipulating their popularity to gain too much personal power, but in practice, they were the perfect way to settle old scores." "Just imagine the situation:" "You've got a grievance against a rival, you persuade a number of your friends to write his name down, and, hey, presto, for the next decade, he's history." "What the practice created was a tall poppy syndrome with a vengeance." "It meant that many of the men responsible for Athens' wealth and security ended up as exiles, a long way from home." "(woman ululating)" "But it wasn't just the political life of Athens that got a shot in the arm." "Everything, from commerce to culture, was infused with energy and new thinking." "Unlike Sparta, happily landlocked in the Peloponnese," "Athens had always been half in love with the sea." "With the defeat of the Persians, that love affair was formalized when the city was physically linked to the port of Piraeus by defensive walls." "that Athens was now officially a sea power with all that implied in terms of trade, the movement of people in and out and the potential for empire building." "The Athenians devoured their own city to build their walls, scavenging raw material from public monuments, even using headstones from graveyards." "The result was 12 miles of imposing fortifications erected in record time." "As a statement of intent, it certainly packed a punch-- a defensive shield designed to keep the wealth of Athens in and unwanted busybodies from neighboring states out." "When the Spartans discovered its allies had been building walls, they weren't pleased." "The Spartans disliked walls because walls defined cities, and cities, if you weren't careful, encouraged other things like democracy." "And if there was one thing Sparta distrusted more than walls, it was democracy." "Sparta famously had no walls." "It was said its walls were its young men, and its borders, the tips of their spears." "It didn't make a big thing out of public buildings." "It had them, but it didn't fetishize them as the Athenians did." "One commentator noted that even at the height of its power, it resembled little more than a collection of small villages with surprisingly little monumental architecture." "Nor did it have much time for laws-- at least not the kind that could be written down and argued over by lawyers." "For the Spartans, it wasn't laws or walls or magnificent public buildings that made a city." "It was their own ideals." "In essence, Sparta was a city of the head and the heart, and it existed in its purest form in the disciplined march of a hoplite phalanx on their way to war." "(men chanting)" "Sparta had no real concept of the dynamic forces that had been unleashed in Athens, and so, while it carried on as it always had done, looking inward, striving for military perfection, the field was left open for Athens" "this confident, outgoing democracy-- to show what it could do." "Ever since the defeat of Persia, the other Greeks had been looking for a leader to carry on the fight against the common enemy." "Sparta allowed Athens to take on the role, which it did with relish." "It invested heavily in sea power and became the policeman of the eastern Mediterranean." "Its allies were expected to toe the line and foot the bill, and if anyone objected, they'd soon find an Athenian fleet in their harbor." "It was trireme diplomacy." "Athens and Sparta represented two radically different ways of being." "Choosing between them would seem to present no difficulties." "Sparta was militaristic and xenophobic." "Athens was dynamic and open to the world." "Athens was dynamic things are never that simple." "Athens could be imperialist, arrogant and aggressive, and its democracy excluded women, foreigners and slaves." "But for the Greeks, theirth Ath enian politics was its void the threat t hat posed to their cherished value of "eunomia," or good order." "Pindar, the fifth century poet, called eunomia "the secure foundation stone of cities."" "And the Greeks knew from bitter experience what happened when this foundation was threatened." "Fields left unharvested." "?" "ood in the streets." "Civil war." "em, on the other hand,an syst with its peculiar blend of equality and elitism, held many attractions for the Greeks." "Its emphasis on the common good, duty and cohesion seemed to guarantee good order." "But there were some aspects of Spartan society that the Greeks found less than admirable." "Hundreds of years before, the Spartans had enslaved their immediate neighbors in Laconia, and then did the same to the Mycenaeans, setting their citizens to work in the fields." "These slhelots, were fellow Greeks." "It was perfectly acceptable for Greeks to have barbarians as slaves, but to subjugate fellow countrymen was an affront to the cherished ideal that to be Greek was to be free." "But what the Greeks found most incomprehensible about Sparta was its attitude to sexual politics." "Because when it came to women, conservative Sparta." "was positively radical." "If you were a woman, life in fifth century Athens" "The city may have been at the cutting edge of all that was good in art, architecture and democracy, but these were strictly for the consumption of men." "In public and in private, the sexes were segregated." "z?" "In fact, in most of ancient Greece, women were expected to be neither seen nor heard." "The historian, Xenophon, recommended that they stay indoors, and for the orator Pericles, it was shameful if they were even mentioned in public." "PERICLES (dramatized):" "Women, great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men." "HUGHAthenian women led a very sheltered existence." "Apart from training for domestic duties, they were given as little education as possible." "In a society where women had no say, education must have seemed at best pointless, and at worst, dangerous." "As one comic poet put it:" "MAN:" "Teach women letters?" "A serious mistake." "Like giving extra venom to a terrifying snake." "Some Athenians could recognize that there would be benefits in allowing a certain degree of literacy for women." "Household management would be made easier, for a start." "If the lady of the house could keep accurate records, then men would be able to check up on how the housekeeping money was being spent." "But that was about as far as support for education went." "One Athenian summed up the general feeling when he wrote that further refinement makes women too lazy in other spheres, g them into chatterboxes makes women too lazy land busybodies., turning" "Perhaps to prevent this, an Athenian girl could be married off as young as 12 to a man chosen for her." "She'd be taken away from her family, and would disappear into her husband's house." "A woman's role was to manage the family and do the chores-- grind corn, wash or bake bread." "Rich women who had slaves to take care of the drudgery would spin and sew." "There would be the occasional sortie outside to attend to domestic matters or go to a religious ceremony, but basically, life was confined within four walls." "In Sparta, by contrast, women were everywhere." "Imagine airlifting all the men between the ages of seven and 60 out of this street, and you get a feeling of what it must have been like." "For a start, there were more girls than boys, because they weren't victims of a state program of infanticide." "And if men weren't away fighting or training, in t" "Women would have dominated the day-to-day life of the city." "The simple visibility of Spartan women made them objects of fear and fascination to non-Spartan men." "Homer called Sparta "Kalligynaika--"" "the land of beautiful women." "The beauty of Helen of Troy-- originally Helen of Sparta-- was legendary." "Of course, not every Spartan woman who looked at herself in a mirror like this could have lived up to her standards." "But they were uniquely fit." "Spartan girls had an upbringing unparalleled anywhere else in Greece." "For starters, they were fed the same rations as boys, and allowed to drink wine." "The state taught them how to sing and dance, to wrestle, to throw the javelin and discus." "And they were encouraged to be every bit as competitive as the boys." "Girls and boys would exercise naked." "But there was nothing immodest about it." "Nudity was the norm because it was thought to banish prudery and encourage fitness." "It paid off." "Physically, they were outstanding." "There's a great scene in the comedyLysistrata by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes." "crowd round a Spartan woman called Lampito." "e," they say. creatur" ""What healthy skin." "What firmness of physique."" "And one of them adds," ""I've never seen a pair of breasts like that."" "To which Lampito proudly responds," ""I go to the gym;" "I make my buttocks hard."" "When you see these lead votive offerings of dancers here in the Sparta museum, you can understand why Spartan women were sometimes the subject of such lurid speculation amongst Athenian men." "One of the most important virtues for Athenian women wassophrosyne--wise restraint." "Well, there's not much of that in evidence here in these uninhibited dancers." "Even after thousands of years, you can sense the energy, and almost smell the sweat." "Spartan dances were famous for their vitality." "In one particularly athletic version, women had to jump up and drum their buttocks with their heels as many tines as possible." "It's incredibly difficult, but most importantly for the ancients, it revealed a large amount of naked thigh, which is probably where Spartan girls earned their nickname-- thigh-flashers." "As part of their state education, the thigh-flashers would come down here to the banks of the Eurotas, in what one poet described as thenichta di ambrosias-- the ambrosial night." "There were ritual ecstatic dances and choral contests." "The girls wo?" "d sing to each other of limb loosening desire, tossing their thick, blond hair, being ridden like horses, and exhausted by love." "It's no surprise that Sparta was one of the few ancient cities that had the reputation for encouraging girl-on-girl sex." "Women and men in Sparta were used to living separate lives." "At the age of seven, boys would be sent away to the agoge-- the tough, uncompromising Spartan system where they'd be schooled in the art of war." "Male bonding wasn't just encouraged-- it was compulsory." "At the age of 12, a boy was paired with an older man-- usually one of the unmarried warriors aged between 20 and 30." "This man would have been responsible not only for the conduct of the boy, but also for providing for him materially." "He was a surrogate mother and father, as well as a teacher and mentor... but he was also a lover, for institutionalized pederasty was a part and parcel of life for the Spartan warriors." "These intimate relationships seemed to have had lasting psychological and emotional effects on the men." "When the time came for them to get married, it must have been a difficult adjustment to make." "But the pragmatic Spartans came up with an unusual way to help them through their wedding night." "The Spartans practiced a custom called marriage by capture." "On her wedding night, a bride would have her head shaved like a small boy in the agoge." "She'd be dressed in a man's cloak and sandals and left alone in a dark room." "Meanwhile, her husband would quietly leave the common mess, come to her, lay her down on the straw palette, have sex with her, and then slip back to sleep with his comrades as usual." "This wasn't just a quaint wedding night ritual." "It could carry on for months or even years." "There's much debate about the significance of this bizarre ritual, but it seems obvious that it was a piece of sexual theater designed to acclimatize men to the presence of women when, up until then, their only experience of sex" "had been with other men." "And yet, however hard the Spartans tried to make marriage more palatable for their young men, persuading them to do their duty could be problematic." "According to one story, which is pbably exaggerated but too good not to repeat," "Spartan women would beat men about the head and then drag them around an altar to get them to commit." "There's another more credible account that goes a bit like this." "Unmarried men were stripped naked and forced to march round the marketplace in the middle of winter singing a humiliating song about how their punishment was just and fair because they'd flouted the laws." "Sparta was no place for a confirmed bachelor." "The treatment meted out to these men may seem extreme, but its severity stemmed from a very real need:" "to produce the next generation of warriors." "The obsession with competition and physical fitness for girls" "Women were well-fed and well-treated because healthy women were more likely to produce healthy babies." "This is probably a fragment of a sculpture of Eilythea, the goddess of childbirth." "What's certain is that she's in labor." "There are spirits either side of her clutching her belly, helping her get through those terrible pains." "Spartan women would have paid this image a lot of respect because of the constant pressure on them to keep producing sturdy, male children." "It was a huge priority for the Spartans to keep the numbers of their warrior elite high." "There were never that many of them, at most 10,000, a number which steadily declined throughout the 5th century." "One reason was that Spartan girls didn't get married until they were 18, and boys until they were 28 or 29-- incredibly late by Greek standards." "But Spartan women weren't just baby makers." "At a time when Greek women were expected to be invisible, power At a time when Greek women were eand responsibilitysible,ad in their own right." "In fact they were so cocksure, politics, on the streets, they dared to take on the men and even in that most sacred bastion:" "the sporting arena." "?" "It wasn't just Spartan women's physicality the outside world." "It wasn't just Spartan women's physicalityat shocked" "Their freedom was equally notorious." "Aristotle described the place as agyneocratia:" "a state run by women... and he didn't mean it as a compliment." "(clicks tongue)" "In Athens and other Greek cities, women were not allowed to own land or to control large amounts of wealth." "Heiresses and widows married according to the wishes of fathers or brothers, usually to cousins or uncles in order to keep the wealth in the family." "And with the exception of traveling in ox-drawn carts to weddings and funerals, riding would have been out of the question." "But in Sparta, women had the keys to the coffers." "They could be landowners and property holders in their own right." "They could inherit estates, and even seemed to have had the right to choose who, or even whether, to marry." "So you have to imagine these economically independent women riding out to oversee their estates and slaves, cracking the whip, running things." "Unless you believe the myth of the Amazons, this was a sight unprecedented anywhere else in the ancient world." "N?" "n?" "Whereas laws in Athens were drawn up that restricted women's visibility in public, some Spartan women actually achieved the unthinkable." "They became celebrities." "The most famous example was Kyniska, a Spartan princess and, in her day, a sporting legend." "and, in her day, a sporting legend." "Kyniska means "little hound,"" "and she was obviously a tomboy from a sporty family." "The names of her female relations translate as things like "well-horsed," "flash of lightning,"" ""she who leads from the front,"" "but it would be Kyniska who'd go down in the history books as the owner of a champion chariot team." "Kyniska was an equestrian expert and very wealthy:" "the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer." "She didn't race herself, but employed men to drive, and she made no secret of her ambition." "She ente Olympic Games, the showcase for outstanding athletes from all over the Greek world." "It won." "The men were astounded." "Four years later, she entered again." "She won again." "is that Kyniska probably didn't see her victories." "At Olympia, the usual all-male rules applied, but she made certain that the world wouldn't miss out on her success." "She dedicated a monument to herself right in the heart of the Olympic sanctuary." "The inscription read..." "But women weren't only powerful in the sporting arena." "Spartan women also played a role in the political life of the city." "They were trained to speak in public, and although they had no official place in the decision-making process, they made sure their opinions were heard." "And it was the women who seemed to have been the most vociferous when it came to enforcing the warrior ethic." "Sparta's unwritten laws were policed at street level by a kind of community-based were porough justice.t level" "Women were in the forefront, praising the brave, and insulting cowards as they passed." "You get an idea of the kind of things they'd have called out from a collection calledThe Sayings of the Spartan Women." "In Athens, silence was a mark of breeding, but Spartan girls were positively lippy." "They were masters in the art of laconic speaking, named after Laconia, the heartland of Sparta." "Deployed properly, a laconic phrase could draw blood from the skin of even the most armor-plated warrior." "When a warrior was describing the brave death of his comrade, a woman said, "Such a noble journey." "(dramatized):" "Shouldn't you have gone, too?"" "A man complained that his sword was too short." "His mother replied," "(dramatized):" ""Take a step forward, and it would be long enough."" "(birds chirping)" "Though Spartan women enjoyed freedom of speech and financial liberty, it would be a mistake to paint a picture of Sparta as a kind of feminist wonderland." "You should think of Spartan women as regimental wives-- the backbone of the system, breeding sons and then surrendering them to the agoge when they turned seven." "Because Sparta was constantly anxious about its decline in birth rate, every Spartan boy must have been the apple of his mother's eye." "Helots were there to do the domestic chores, and there's plenty of time to dote on little Leonidas... but when the time came to send them off to the agoge, though it must have been a wrench," "it was done without hesitation." "This was Sparta, and maternal instincts came a poor second to the interests of the state." "Our concept of motherhood is of a tender, supportive relationship between mother and child, here was little room for sentimentality.t" "In a state where unswerving obedience to the warrior code was rated more highly than life itself, mothers wanted to msolutely sure that sons did their duty." "Their approach was more Nazi than nurture." "When a son left for battle, his mother would issue a traditional farewell:" ""With your shield or on it."" "In other words, either come back victorious, or come back dead." "But if a son failed to live up to this injunction, he could expect little sympathy from mum." "One story goes that a mother confronting her runaway son, hitched up her skirts and asked him if he intended to crawl back where he'd come from." "Fighting wars must've seemed the soft option compared to incurring the wrath of Mother." "These women were anything but forgiving." "(dramatized):" ""Why are you Spartans the only women who can rule men?"" "someone once asked." ""Because we are the only ones who give birth to men."" "The preservation of the Spartan utopia and its reputation as a warrior society depended on Spartan women producing male children and then willingly sacrificing them for the common good." "It's an idea that's been picked up by more recent societies." "In the early years of the republic," "American women were urged to model themselves on Spartan mothers." "The future of the fledgling nation, they were told, would be shaped by a new generation of public-spirited citizen women ready to make the ultimate sacrifice for America." "It was an idea with lasting resonance." "During the American Civil War, one mother addressed her son in an open letter to a newspaper." "WOMAN:" "I am ready to offer you up in defense of your country's rights and honor, and I now offer you, a beardless boy, of 17 summers, not with grief, but thanking God that I have a son to offer." "HUGHES:" "Just as in Sparta, it was America's women who enforced the warrior ethic at street level." "The women would leave bonnets and hoop skirts on the doorsteps of the un-enlisted men with letters telling them to join up." "The letters told the men either to come home wearing laurel crowns of victory, or carried on shields of honor." "The authors might not have realized it, but they were echoing the sentiments of Spartan mothers thousands of years before." "Spartan mothers' confidence in their sons' manliness was born of an ethos of heroism that stretched back over centuries." "But since the Persian invasion, there'd been few opportunities for Spartan men to make their mothers proud." "That would soon change." "that would give the new generation of Spartan fighters a chance to test their courage." "Since the Persian invasion," "Against all the odds, the alliance had held firm." "But given the huge ideological differences between these two Greek superpoers, it was almost inevitable that at some point mutual mistrust utright conflic t." "In the end, it took one catastrophic event to shake the foundations of the alliance and set Sparta and Athens on a collision course." "In the year 465 BC, a series of massive earthquakes hit Sparta." "The consequences were devastating." "The loss of life was immense." "But the earthquakes also gave a golden opportunity to Sparta's enemy within-- the huge population of helots, whose slave labor propped up the Spartan system." "The rebel slaves came here to Mount Ithome, at the heart of Messenia-- ?" "the homeland that had been taken from them by the Spartans." "They fortified the position and waited for the Spartans to come." "For all its fearsome reputation," "Sparta failed to put down the revolt, and with the conflict dragging on, it was forced to appeal to Athens and its other allies for assistance." "Spartan allies sent over troops to help put down the revolt, and the Athenians brought in siege equipment-- technology not developed by the hidebound Spartans." "It was then that the Spartans began to fret." "Enslavement of Messenians had always been a slightly sticky issue." "As a whole, the Greeks had absolutely no problem with slavery, but when it came to subjugatin an entire native Greek population, it was less easy to swallow." "The Spartans knew this, and that's when paranoia set in." "What would happen if the Athenians sided with the rebels, or, even worse, spread the virus of democracy among Spartan citizens themselves?" "It was a risk not worth taking, and they sent the Athenians home." "Athens took serious offense at its dismissal by the Spartans." "Being summarily sent home with no explanation was not the treatment they'd expected from an ally who they'd only been trying to help." "The Athenians tore up the old treaty of allegiance, and began to collude with Sparta's enemies." "And to add insult to injury, they even helped the rebels who'd managed to escape by setting them up in a new city." "It was the beginning of open hostilities." "before Sparta and Athens would be at war again-- this time with each other." "MAN:" "Hellas!" "When the war between Sparta and Athens finally came, it had many apparent causes." "But the simple truth was that over a period of 50 years," "Sparta had allowed Athens to get so powerful that its own sphere of influence on the mainland of the Peloponnese was now under threat." "Seizing upon a rather flimsy pretext," "Sparta declared war in 431 BC." "It sent troops to invade Athenian territory." "They forced their way to within seven miles of the hated city walls of Athens itself." "The one-time allies were now mortal enemies." "The Athenian casualties of the first year of the war were given a ceremonial burial" "Here, in their honor, Pericles delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd." "Pericles' funeral oration has gone down in history as one of the all-time great war speeches." "It's based on a simple and satisfying proposition." "Everything that we the Athenians do is right, and everything our enemies the Spartans do is wrong." "partans and everything our enemies from their earliest boyhoode S" "We pass our lives without all these and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they are." "We meet danger voluntarily, with natural, rather than with state-induced, courage." "S0S0C0?" "0 HUGHES:" "Pericles' speech is a rallying cry in defense of a way of being, a call to arms against an enemy whose social systems, politics and even character were so alien as to make peaceful coexistence impossible." "The speech set the tone for an all-out war that would be unprecedented in its scale and savagery." "History would know it as the Peloponnesian War, but in fact, it would rage from Sicily in the west to the Hellespont in the east, and would last more than two decades." "MAN:" "Hellas!" "The vicious fighting dragged on as neither side was able to land the killer blow." "The war quickly became a stalemate, with Sparta dominant on land, and Athens at sea." "Every year for five years, Spartan armies laid waste to Athenian territory, burning farms and destroying crops." "The Athenians fled from the countryside and withdrew behind the walls that connected their city to the port of Piraeus." "They became, in effect, islanders-- marooned and reliant on their fleet to keep them supplied." "Within a year, plague came to the overcrowded city." "Corpses were piled high in the streets and almost a third of the population of Athens was wiped out." "The historian, Thucydides, described the sufferings of the Athenian plague victims as almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure." "Wealth and power were no protection." "Pericles himself succumbed to the virulent disease." "In their despair, the Athenians recalled the prediction of a grim oracle, that even then was being played out in the streets of their disease-ridden city." "ORACLE:" "O, with certain sums... and death will come at the same time." "HUGHES:" "For Sparta, the decimation of Athens and its leaders was proof that the gods were on their side." "When they asked the gods with Athens," "They received the reply:" "ORACLE:" "Fight with all your might." "Victory will be yours, and the god himself will be on your side." "HUGHES:" "But gods can be fickle." "According to Thucydides, who was an eyewitness to much of the war, nothing shocked the Greeks so much as something that happened on that island in Sparta's very own backyard." "Pylos was a port on the west coast of the Peloponnese and of major strategic importance to the Spartans." "In the year 425 BC it was seized by the Athenian army, helped by the former slaves who'd revolted against Sparta" "The Spartans couldn't stomach this provocation and sent an army to retake Pylos." "They laid siege to the Athenians in the town and set up a smaller unit on the mile and a half of rock that stretches across Pylos Bay, the island of Sphacteria." "Their plan was to blockade the Athenians by land and water, but I think they'd forgotten who they were dealing with." "The Athenians were totally at home on the sea and within a few days they'd sent a large fleet into Pylos Bay." "Now the Athenians on the mainland could ship in the supplies they needed, and cut off the 420 Spartans here on Sphacteria." "The Athenians tried to starve out the men trapped on this island, but the Spartans on the mainland promised a number of their slaves freedom if they could break the blockade." "With this incentive, some managed to reach Sphacteria with food for the Spartan soldiers." "For 72 days the standoff continued." "The stalemate was finally broken when the Spartans scored a spectacular own goal." "A group of soldiers stupidly let a campfire get out of control." "It raged across the island, he protective cover." "I t" "The Spartans had nowhere to hide." "The Athenians could now see exactly how many they were, and where they were." "The Athenians decided to try and take the island with 800 archers and 800 lightly armed troops." "The Athenians landed but they refused to fight the Spartans at close quarters." "Instead, they picked them off with javelins and arrows and rocks." "Whenever the Spartan phalanx advanced, the Athenians retreated." "Soon it was Spartans who were backing off, leaving behind them 300 dead as the survivors headed for a defensive position at the north end of the island." "But an Athenian commander sent a detachment of archers to cut them off from behind." "The Spartans were surrounded." "It looked as if this were going to be a mini-Thermopylae in the making." "Over 50 years before," "King Leonidas and his 300 hand-picked troops had sacrificed their lives for the glory of Sparta at the Battle of Thermopylae." "For the Spartans on Sphacteria, there was no higher ideal to aspire to." "Hopelessly outnumbered by the Athenians, this was their chance to emulate the heroics of their grandfathers and bring honor to the state." "They knew exactly what was expected of them:" "a heroic struggle, a beautiful death, the final test passed... but that wasn't what happened at all." "The Athenians were far too smart." "They held back for a while, and then politely sent over a herald to ask if the Spartans would like to surrender, and unbelievably, that's exactly what they did." "If we were talking about anyone other than Spartans, surrender wouldn't have been a surprise-- after all, these half-starved men had been trapped on the island for more than two months, and used by the Athenian archers daily" "for target practice." "But these were Spartans." "They'd spent their lives preparing to die fighting." "Surrender shouldn't have been an option." "So maybe Pericles had been right in his famous speech, with its mockery of the Spartans' state-induced courage." "On this occasion, it had been undermined by the tactical knowledge and mind games of the Athenians." "First, they'd refused to give the Spartans what they'd wanted:" "a stand-up fight." "Then, they'd given them something they'd never expected:" "an opt-out clause from their death-or-glory contract." "The myth of Spartan invincibility had been comprehensively shattered." "For Athens, it was a victory to savor." "There's a remarkable relic from that shocking defeat here in Athens." "It's a shield-- probably taken from one of the hoplites who'd thrown in the towel." "Judging from its condition, whoever it belonged to would have been put through the mill." "You can just about make out an inscription on its battered surface that would have been punched in at a later date." "It simply reads, "Taken by the Athenians from the Laconians at Pylos."" "It's a terse, triumphant message." "Along with this trophy, 120 Spartans were brought to the city as hostages." "If Sparta made so much as a move on Athenian territory, they were to be executed." "The Spartan hostages were objects of fascination in Athens, where they were displayed in public like exotic animals." "You can imagine the Athenians jostling to gawp at their strange captives... sizing them up, jeering." "Thucydides tells us that one of the crowd asked mockingly if the real Spartans had died on the island." ""Spindles would be worth a great deal,"" "came the Spartan reply," ""if they could mark out brave men from cowards."" "Spindles was the Spartan word for arrows-- a weapon they considered wimpy and womanish because they killed from a long distance." "It was meant to be a crushing response delivered in true laconic style, but it comes across as plain sulky." "Sparta was so rattled by the events on Sphacteria that it immediately sued for peace... but Athens was in no mood to be generous." "It capitalized on its advantage and held out for better terms." "It would be five years before the Spartan hostages saw their home again... but when they returned, they suffered none of the punishments usually metered out to so-called tremblers." "They were not stripped of their citizenship." "They were not forbidden to walk around with cheerful faces, and they were not beaten up in the streets." "For once, the women kept their cutting comments to themselves." "Spartan society was poleaxed." "But before long, the laughter and mockery of the Athenians would be silenced as the final act of this bloody war was played out."