This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises approximately twenty‐five to forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialization. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

Claude Calame is Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has also been Professor of Greek language and literature at the University of Lausanne, and has taught at the Universities of Urbino and Siena in Italy, and at Yale University in the US. In English he has published The Craft of Poetic Speech in Ancient Greece (Cornell 1995), The Poetics of Eros in Ancient Greece (Princeton 1999), Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece (Lanham 2001, 2nd edn), Masks of Authority: Fiction and Pragmatics in Ancient Greek Poetics (Cornell 2005), Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece (Harvard 2009), and Greek Mythology: Poetics, Pragmatics and Fiction (Cambridge 2009).

William Cavanagh is Professor Emeritus of Aegean Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. His research has focused on three main areas: field archaeology, the archaeology of death and mathematical applications to archaeology. His fieldwork has concentrated on Lakonia, with publications including the Laconia Survey (1996, 2002), the Laconia Rural Sites Project (2005), and, most recently on the excavations at Kouphovouno, ‘Early Bronze Age Chronology of Mainland Greece: New Dates from the Excavations at Kouphovouno’ (co‐authored with C. Mee and J. Renard, Annual of the British School at Athens, 2014: 109). Publications on death include A Private Place: Death in Prehistoric Greece (co‐authored with C. Mee, 1998), and on statistics in archaeology The Bayesian Approach to the Interpretation of Archaeological Data (co‐authored with C. Buck, and C. Litton, 1996).

Stephen Hodkinson is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham and director of its centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. He is an internationally recognized authority on ancient Sparta and its modern reception. The author of numerous influential studies, his book Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (London and Swansea 2000) is the leading work in the field. Co‐organizer of the International Sparta Seminar with Anton Powell, he has co‐edited several collected volumes, including Sparta: New Perspectives (London 1999) and Sparta and War (Swansea 2006). As director of the research project, ‘Sparta in Comparative Perspective, Ancient to Modern’, he is editor of Sparta: Comparative Approaches (Swansea 2009) and Sparta in Modern Thought (Swansea 2012). He was historical consultant to Kieron Gillen’s graphic novel Three (2014), set in fourth‐century Sparta. He has been given Honorary Citizenship of modern Sparta.

Yves Lafond is Professor of Greek History at the University of Poitiers and a member of the research team HeRMA. His research interests are in the fields of cultural and social history, with particular emphasis on landscapes and spaces, religious practices in ancient cities and the relationship between memory and representation. He is the author of Pausanias. Description de la Grèce. Livre VII. L’Achaïe (translation and commentary, Paris 2000) and of La mémoire des cités dans le Péloponnèse d’époque romaine (IIe siècle av. J.‐C.‐IIIe siècle ap. J.‐C.), (Rennes 2006).

Marcello Lupi teaches Greek history at the Second University of Naples. His research interests focus mainly on the social and institutional history of Sparta and, more broadly, on archaic Greece, the Persian Wars and Greek classical historiography. He is the author of L’ordine delle generazioni. Classi di età e costumi matrimoniali nell’antica Sparta (Bari 2000) and co‐editor with L. Breglia of Da Elea a Samo. Filosofi e politici di fronte all’impero ateniese (Naples 2005). An introductory book on Sparta, in Italian, is his Sparta: Storia e rappresentazioni di una città greca (Rome 2017). Professor Lupi is also working on a major monograph on villages, civic subdivisions and citizenship in archaic and classical Sparta.

Massimo Nafissi is Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Perugia. His research focuses on the history of Sparta, Olympia and Elis, colonization and South Italy, Greek religion, and also on the epigraphy of Iasos (Caria). He has published numerous articles on Greek history, and notably is author of the influential monograph on Sparta, La nascita del kosmos. Ricerche sulla storia e la società di Sparta (Naples 1991).

Maria Pipili is a Greek archaeologist, educated at the Universities of Athens and Oxford (DPhil, 1982). In 1985 she was appointed researcher at the Research Centre for Antiquity of the Academy of Athens where she also served as director from 1994 until her retirement in 2012. Her main research interests are Greek vase painting and iconography, particularly of Sparta. She is author of Laconian Iconography of the Sixth Century bc (Oxford 1987), a volume of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum for the National Museum of Athens (1993), several contributions to the Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae and many articles on Attic and Laconian pottery. She is currently preparing a Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum volume dedicated to vases from Athenian private collections.

Anton Powell founded the International Sparta Seminar, and was the editor of its first volume, Classical Sparta: Techniques behind her Success (London 1989). Since then, with Stephen Hodkinson, he has edited most of the Seminar’s volumes, including The Shadow of Sparta (London and Swansea 1994) and Sparta: The Body Politic (Swansea 2010). His introduction to source criticism in Greek history, Athens and Sparta, is in its third edition (London 2016), and his monograph Virgil the Partisan (Swansea 2008) was awarded the prize of the American Vergilian Society for ‘the book that makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and appreciation of Vergil’. Powell is also the founder of the Celtic Conference in Classics, and of the Classical Press of Wales. He has twice been Invited Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2006 for Greek history and in 2008 for Latin literature.

Francis Prost is Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University Paris 1‐Panthéon Sorbonne, and formerly member of the French School of Archaeology in Athens (1994–1998). A specialist in material culture and religious practices of archaic Greece, and in particular of Delos and the heroic sanctuary of the Archegetes Anios, Professor Prost is preparing publication of the corpus of archaic sculpture found on the island. His fieldwork involves excavation of the Delian sanctuary of Apollo, as well as of the Hellenistic city of Euromos in Caria.

James Roy held posts at the Universities of Sheffield (1963–1989) and Nottingham (1989–2004). He also enjoyed a year (1969–70) as a Humboldt‐Stipendiat at the University of Heidelberg. Since retiring in 2004 he has been an Honorary Research Associate of the Department of Classics in the University of Nottingham. He has published extensively. Main research interests have included the histories of classical Arkadia, Elis and Olympia, and the interaction between these regions and other parts of the Peloponnese.

Françoise Ruzé is Emeritus Professor at the University of Caen, where for many years she conducted and directed research on Greek societies of the archaic and classical periods. Her books include Délibération et pouvoir dans la cité grecque, de Nestor à Socrate (Paris 1997); Sparte: géographie, mythes et histoire (with Jacqueline Christien; Paris 2007). Professor Ruzé is currently preparing a monograph on Les législateurs du monde grec archaïque.

Daniel Stewart is Lecturer in Ancient History in the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. He has published on the history and archaeology of the Hellenistic and Roman Peloponnese, and has contributed to, and co‐directed, archaeological projects in Arcadia, Sikyonia and Crete. He is currently preparing a book on the relationship between archaeology and ancient history, and co‐directing a landscape archaeology project on Roman Knossos.

Hans van Wees is currently Grote Professor of Ancient History at University College London. He is among the world’s foremost experts on the warfare, ethics and economy of Greece, from the time of the Homeric poems onwards. His noted books include Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History (Amsterdam 1992), Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (London 2004) and Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute: A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens (London 2013).

‘Sparta Lives’

‘We think Sparta will be really popular across a wide range of territories …’. This quotation is not actually taken from the blurb of an optimistic academic publisher, as one might have thought, but from a promotional statement (in 2016) by a Casino slot games developer, Habanero.

Ancient Sparta does still achieve massive resonance in the modern world, in other words, but not always in the places and through the media that a scholar might perhaps ideally wish. The movie 300 is another prize exhibit in that same category. Happily, the two volumes to which I have the privilege to be writing this Foreword will go a long way towards righting the balance.

I begin by declaring an interest – my own, in studying this peculiar (in at least one sense) ancient community. This interest started with an undergraduate essay on the hoplite ‘revolution’ (if such it was) of the seventh century BC. In its original form this was written in 1968 for my New College Oxford tutor, Geoffrey de Ste. Croix, whom the magnificent editor of this Companion boldly but not implausibly styles the modern founder of the scholarly study of ancient Sparta. A much later version was published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies in 1977 and republished in German translation and with addenda in a splendid 1986 Wissenschaftliches Buchgesellschaft volume devoted to Sparta and edited by the eminent Karl Christ. At the back of that volume will be found a comprehensive, calibrated bibliography organized by topic; at its front, a remarkably comprehensive and insightful introduction to modern Spartan scholarship by the editor himself. The modern scholarly literature on Sparta going back to the work of J.C.F. Manso (1800–1805) is simply immense. It is beautifully if only partially placed in context by Elizabeth Rawson’s The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (Oxford 1969, 1991), though ‘European’ for her includes ‘North American’.

Ste. Croix was both a colleague and a sparring partner of George Forrest, one of the two examiners of my Oxford doctoral thesis on early Sparta c.950–650 BC, completed in 1975. (The other examiner, since this was a mainly archaeological thesis, was the distinguished Oxford art historian Professor Martin Robertson; my supervisor was John Boardman, then plain ‘Mr’, now Sir John.) In 1968 Forrest had published with Hutchinson a slim, streamlined volume entitled A History of Sparta 950‐192 BC. It had been read for him in draft by an Oxonian Sparta expert of an earlier generation, H.T. Wade‐Gery (one‐time lover of historical novelist Naomi Mitchison, author of Black Sparta, 1928, and The Corn King and the Spring Queen, 1933). ‘This account’, its left‐wing author confessed – or rather boasted, ‘has not shown much sympathy with Sparta; sympathy is killed by the narrow‐minded jealousy she showed for so long to anyone whose power looked like becoming greater than her own and by the utter inhumanity of her behaviour when her own power was supreme.’ It is indeed hard to preserve a pose of objectivity when faced with the Spartan myth, mirage, legend or tradition.

Forrest’s little book was reprinted in 1980 in what the new publisher (Duckworth) was pleased to call a ‘second edition’. This actually came with only the addition of an intriguing new Preface in which the author was kind enough to refer to my 1979 monograph, the book of my DPhil thesis, as a ‘major’ work. But at the end of that Preface Forrest uttered a far more controversial – to me – opinion, that there existed some ‘overall agreement’ as to the ‘kind of society’ almost all students now believed Sparta to have been. Had he been writing that Preface after 1994 (and the second edition of the book was reprinted in 1995, by the Bristol Classical Press), I don’t believe he could possibly have been so blandly confident. For in that year the redoubtable editorial duo of ‘Powell & Hodkinson’ (or, by alternation, ‘Hodkinson & Powell’) published the first of their long‐running series of superbly edited collections on themes or aspects of ancient Spartan history that have been crucial in helping to radically transform our scholarly perceptions and representations of this extraordinary community. The present Companion is their worthy successor, and indeed rightly contains essays by several of the editor’s previous contributors and collaborators.

By my reckoning eight of the twenty‐five Companion authors are British or British‐based, seven are from the USA, with six French, two Italians and one each German and Greek. Apart from anything else, this reminds us that there are distinct national traditions of Spartan scholarship: especially German (nicely recapitulated in the Christ volume); French (one thinks of the two foundational volumes of François Ollier on what he baptized ‘le mirage spartiate’); Italian (I am proud to own what was once Wade‐Gery’s copy of Luigi Pareti’s 1917 Storia di Sparta arcaica, to which Massimo Nafisso’s La nascita del kosmos, also 1994, is a very worthy successor); and North American (Tom Figueira is a standout); but also Japanese (Mariko Sakurai), among others. It is of course invidious to single out any particular chapters of the present Companion for mention … but I’m going to do so anyhow: those of Hodkinson, Cavanagh, Powell (Chapter 11), van Wees, Flower, Millender (Chapter 19), and Rebenich.

And I shall proceed homerically, husteron proteron, starting with Stefan Rebenich’s elegant and acute summation of ‘The Reception of Sparta in Germany and German‐speaking Europe’ (Chapter 27). Reception studies are hot these days, but we Spartanists or Spartalogues were in on the act right from the very start. Hence all those books and articles on Sparta with ‘myth’ (Moses Finley), ‘mirage’ (Ollier), ‘legend’ (the Swede Eugene Napoleon Tigerstedt) or ‘tradition’ (Rawson) in their titles. The underlying reasons and motivations for Spartan reception‐fixation are fairly obvious: the available written evidence not only is overwhelmingly non‐Spartan but also deeply bifurcated either pro or con, with few or no shades of grey in between. Epigraphy can do something to help us correct for this imbalance, archaeology of various kinds an awful lot more. But there remains the fundamental problem of (to borrow the editor’s eloquent formulation) ‘Reconstructing (Spartan) History from Secrecy, Lies and Myth’. One way of avoiding the dilemma is by embracing it head on, as does Rebenich: all history, it’s been claimed, is contemporary history – but there can be few more startling and unsettling illustrations of that useful nostrum than the reinvention of Sparta as the prototype of the new German National Socialist community of the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, that reinvention has probably done more than anything else to ensure that at least for the foreseeable future Sparta is more likely to figure as a model or ideal of dystopia than of the (e)utopias of yesteryear.

One scholar who has never underestimated the potentially distorting power of the – predominantly, in this case, Athenocentric – Spartan tradition is the American Ellen Millender (Chapter 19). Building on research going back ultimately to her 1996 University of Pennsylvania doctoral dissertation, she brilliantly displays and explicates not only the fascination – and horror – the women of Sparta aroused in, say, Euripides and Aristotle but also the exceptional degree of economic independence and even political power that they were allowed or chose to enjoy and exploit. But before one rushes to feminist‐inspired judgement, one must also factor in the overall conclusion she draws from her balanced and profound examination of the – often unsatisfactory – evidence: that ‘Spartan women’s lives did not significantly differ from those of their Athenian counterparts in terms of their fundamental roles and obligations as daughters, wives, and mothers’. Princesses, queens and priestesses were not, after all, ‘typical’ Spartan women.

Michael Flower (Chapter 16) too includes ‘Women’ as a special category in his chapter on Spartan religion. The ancient Greeks, notoriously, did not ‘have a word for’ religion: they spoke rather of ‘the things of the god(s)’ or of ‘the divine’. Herodotus, a particularly well informed and committed observer of all things religious, from a specifically cross‐cultural comparativist perspective, twice remarked in his Histories that the Spartans treated the things of the gods as more significant and serious than the things of men. Well, almost all Greeks collectively and individually did that, so he must have been trying to make a special point about just how exceptional was the Spartans’ attitude to the religious factor in political, military, diplomatic and other public affairs. Flower takes that point to the full and produces a splendid synopsis of Spartan religiosity in all its peculiarity, showing beyond a peradventure that it ‘comprised a coherent, interconnected, and mutually reinforcing set of beliefs and practices that formed a system’.

Besides editing the Companion and contributing its opening and concluding chapters, Anton Powell also writes an incisive Chapter 11 on roughly the period of Thucydides’s history of the Atheno‐Peloponnesian War, from 478 (the foundation of Athens’s Delian League, from which Sparta abstained or was excluded) to 403 (the year in which Sparta, then still hegemon of much of the Aegean Greek world, permitted the Athenians to restore their democracy). Powell takes as his leitmotif what the Greeks called kairos, or, to borrow the title of an article he published in 1980 that has more than just stood the test of time, ‘Athens’ difficulty, Sparta’s opportunity’. Again, as in his introductory chapter, he recurs tellingly to Sparta’s unusual ‘capacity … for organized deception on a grand scale’ on the international stage, noting its coexistence with a paradoxical combination of austerity with great wealth at home. He concludes with a novel, internalist explanation for Sparta’s ‘extraordinary forbearance towards Athenian democrats’: something which I myself have associated with the rather particular and unusual attitude towards democracy of King Pausanias, who died, from choice in one sense, in the democratic Arcadian city of Mantineia.

London‐based Dutch scholar Hans van Wees has made immeasurable contributions to our better understanding of pre‐classical, Archaic Greek history both in its totality and at the regional or local scale, for example the financing of the late Archaic Athenian navy. Here he is appropriately afforded the luxury of two consecutive chapters (Chapters 8 and 9); the first precisely on luxury, austerity and equality in archaic and early classical Sparta, the second specifically on the distinctively organized system of common messes. The Spartans themselves tended to want to believe, and want others to believe, that their basic political, military, social, economic and cultural institutions had all been invented, possibly simultaneously, at any rate in some dim and very distant past, after which they had changed if at all only minimally. Moses Finley in a game‐changing article of 1968 had argued rather for the occurrence of a much later, that is much more recent ‘sixth‐century revolution’. Van Wees goes further, or rather later, by downdating the introduction of the classical messes to the very end of the sixth century. Plausibly, he sees this measure as aimed primarily to minimize internal class tension arising from extremes of economic inequality within the Spartiate group. Even more plausibly, to me, he argues that ‘Sparta’s specific solution was extreme’.

Among the archaeologists of several countries (Greece, France, the Netherlands, Britain) working within Lakonia during the past generation, few, if any, have equalled let alone exceeded the range of Nottingham University’s William (Bill) Cavanagh (Chapter 3). From the continued re‐excavation of Neolithic Kouphovouno (co‐directed by him with the late Christopher Mee) to an intensive field survey of the extant ancient remains detectable today on the ground within an area just to the east and north‐east of modern Sparti, by way of a scientific analysis of Laconian lead artefacts, he has blazed a trail in producing fresh material data and applying the latest techniques of analysis to elucidate them. He properly contextualizes, of course, the very recent discovery and ongoing excavation (led by Adamantia Vasilogamvrou) of what must unarguably be Mycenaean (‘Homeric’) Sparta, at Ay. Vasileios, and brings readers up to date with the latest archaeohistorical findings regarding the sociopolitically crucial Ortheia and Menelaion cult sites. But, in their way, at least as important for our understanding of archaic and classical Sparta and Lakonia is his summarizing of the results of intensive field survey and his identification of, and emphasis upon, the ‘unique character of Spartan popular cult’ as attested primarily by votives in terracotta and lead.

Finally, I cite honoris causa Stephen Hodkinson’s typically thoughtful and carefully argued exploration (Chapter 2) of the supposed or alleged domination of Spartan state over Spartan society. The key word of his title is ‘exceptional’, since this recalls an absolutely key and fundamental disagreement, even dispute, between himself and Mogens Herman Hansen. Hansen and he agree that ‘state’ is a viable term of analysis, indeed probably more viable for Sparta than for the other thousand or so Greek poleis and ethne in which capital‐S State institutions were typically relatively underdeveloped and underpowered. (Others believe that even in Sparta the capital‐S State was relatively evanescent, at least by comparison with anything that Thomas Hobbes would have recognized.) But they differ, strongly, over Sparta’s exceptionality.

This is not the place for me to rehearse the arguments, so suffice it to say here that my interpretative sympathies lie wholly and emphatically on Hansen’s side of the argument. (And not just as regards the relation between ‘state’ and ‘society’, but across the board – in respect of, among other things, communal educational practice, the status and treatment of women, the place and mode of religion, for example in the disposal of the dead, and so on and so forth.) But if Sparta does indeed still ‘live’, as my title (pro)claims, that is precisely because of the ongoing fertility of such contentious and yet cogently argued differences of opinion on some of the most important issues to be subjected to what we today – following our original master, Herodotus – call historia, critical enquiry.