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Historys Greatest Warriors S01E05
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00:08The most feared warriors of their time.
00:12When you got a Spartan warrior in your face, your days are numbered.
00:17Elite soldiers, trained from childhood.
00:20They are brutalized, like boy scouts from hell.
00:26Destined to be the most dominant fighters in ancient Greece.
00:30They have tenacity that other armies lack.
00:34It is bloody and brutal, and the Spartans never surrender.
00:40It's hell. It's hell on earth.
00:52Warriors aren't born. They're built.
00:59Understanding how reveals the true nature of their greatness.
01:05From the cradle to the grave, these are the steps to creating history's greatest warriors.
01:27A life-long journey of intense drilling and brutal discipline creates the most feared warrior of the ancient Greek world.
01:39Master of the spear and shield, the Spartan is bound by law and honor to defend his homeland and bring
01:46glory to Sparta.
01:49On the classical Greek battlefield, the story of the Spartans looms largest for many centuries.
01:57No other army can match the Spartans.
02:02Sparta introduces training from the age of seven to make them the ultimate soldiers in service to the state.
02:14You take the individual boy and you scrape and grind and beat away his personality until he comes out on
02:21the other side, a Spartan warrior.
02:24We're talking about professional soldiers.
02:28The discipline, the obedience, the focus, all will be there in ways that you can't expect from ordinary citizens turned
02:39soldiers.
02:42Their skill in combat enabled the Spartans to multiply the power of their own city-state for over 150 years.
02:53Sparta's growth into a military superpower demands an elite warrior.
03:00He must endure brutal training from childhood.
03:04Master the use of his bladed weapons and iconic shields.
03:09And overwhelm all enemies with the most precise and lethal tactics of his day.
03:26The Spartan city-state begins in early archaic period of Greek history.
03:32If you look at a map of Greece, you'll see to the southwest, there's a very large peninsula.
03:37It looks like a big tooth with three points pointing south.
03:41Towards the bottom of that is the city of Sparta.
03:44Ancient Greece is a world of seafarers.
03:48But Sparta is constrained by land.
03:52During the archaic period, Sparta grows in power and the Spartans are conquering and taking control of the southern Peloponnese.
04:04As its territory expands, Sparta covets the rich farmland of Mycenae, its neighbor to the west.
04:12Mycenae had a lot of flat plains.
04:14Flat plains means good farmland.
04:16And the Spartans decide to conquer Mycenae.
04:23It's a very hard war. It lasts 20 years.
04:27And when they defeat the Mycenaeans, most of the Mycenaeans are turned into national slaves called helots.
04:35The helot slaves worked the land for their Spartan masters.
04:43But often revolt.
04:47The helot slaves may outnumber the Spartan citizens by a count of seven to one.
04:53And if the slave population rebels, the Spartan state goes into crisis.
04:59Constant slave revolts threaten to destroy Sparta.
05:03But King Lycurgus creates a new code of laws and remakes Sparta as a militarized state.
05:13Lycurgus, he is the originator of what the Spartans considered their constitution.
05:21Lycurgus went to the Delphic Oracle, which is the most sacred religious center in the Greek world.
05:30And there is a priestess there who prophesies.
05:35And he gets the approval of the Oracle for his laws.
05:42With that sort of endorsement, it makes it much easier for Lycurgus to get these vast reforms that come from
05:50the world.
05:50To completely remake Spartan society accepted by the Spartans.
05:56According to the plan of Lycurgus, it is illegal for a Spartan to practice any trade.
06:03In Sparta, the only acceptable work for a male citizen is being a soldier.
06:10The first duty of these new citizen warriors is to crush slave revolt.
06:17When you have a much larger population enslaved, your primary goal, keep the slaves enslaved.
06:25And that slave population, the helots, takes on all of the agricultural work, all of the domestic work.
06:31Now, the Spartans, they have this free time to do nothing but train for war.
06:36At that point, Sparta becomes a very unusual Greek state.
06:41No other Greek state had a standing army.
06:44And many armies in history, their primary job is to be a farmer or a carpenter.
06:51And they are called to military service as and when needed.
06:54When we look at the Spartan, his entire job is to be a professional soldier.
06:59And his entire culture and the government is set up to support that institution.
07:04And that gives the Spartans a tremendous military advantage.
07:07At its core, the new law has a singular purpose.
07:11To create the greatest warriors in all of Greece.
07:15And the creation process begins before the warrior is even born.
07:22The Spartans feel that the best way to produce the strongest soldiers is for mothers to be well-trained themselves.
07:32Girls are encouraged to engage in athletic contests.
07:35This is almost unheard of in other Greek city-states.
07:38The Spartan government wanted there to be strong, healthy women in order to produce robust babies.
07:45But they must prove themselves worthy from the day they are born.
07:50When a Spartan boy was born, government officials inspect the boy.
07:55If it looks robust, it's allowed to live.
07:57And if not, it's left at the bottom of Mount Tychitis.
08:03Spartans are apprehensive about blood guilt.
08:06They don't smother unwanted babies.
08:08They don't strangle them. They leave it up to the gods.
08:11It's as if the Spartans are engaging in a kind of primitive eugenics program.
08:15Making sure that all children are perfect in form.
08:20The Spartan child who passes this first test is only just beginning.
08:26Standing between him and his destiny are years of blood, sweat and pain.
08:32Training now begins.
08:46The road to building a Spartan warrior is long and brutal.
08:53In all the stories of Spartan battles, we see a level of discipline and organization that is indeed different from
09:00and better than other Greeks.
09:02Well, you don't get there in a vacuum. To make great warriors, you need a training program.
09:12For a Spartan, the path to military glory begins in childhood.
09:18According to Plutarch's life of Lycurgus, he introduces reforms to Spartan society.
09:25And the reforms include the famed agogae, which is the upbringing that begins training the Spartans solely for war.
09:36Agogae comes from the Greek word for competition, and it gives us English agony.
09:40Agony. And that's a good name for it, the agony.
09:42The boys in the agogae, they are brutalized day in and day out.
09:50Chauvin are taken from their parents at age seven, and they're turned into, I think the quote from Aristotle is,
09:57brave little beasts.
09:59I sometimes think of the Spartan agogae as boy scouts from hell.
10:05And what's hellish about it is not just the toughness of the training that the boys have to undergo, but
10:10the length of time that it lasts.
10:12I think the Spartans would have a hearty chuckle about modern day boot camps.
10:17The United States Marine Corps has a 13 week boot camp.
10:20The Spartans boot camp goes on for 13 years, and then kind of persists for the rest of the adult
10:26male life.
10:29Spartan training begins with the strengthening of the body.
10:33The Spartan boys in the agogae, they are woken up early and forced to train, run for miles, dance with
10:40armor on, box, fight, wrestle each other.
10:43Boys are schooled in the form of wrestling known as Pankration.
10:49It's like Greek MMA, ancient Greek MMA, and Pankration has two rules.
10:54Don't gouge the eyes, and don't rip the gonads.
10:58Ripping off ears, breaking fingers, that's all fair game, and they are taught to do that from a very young
11:03age.
11:04The grueling regimen makes boys resilient in the face of humiliation and suffering.
11:09You have to break the ego of the boy down through years of degradation and beatings and starvation.
11:17The conditions in the agogae are intentionally harsh.
11:21Boys are not given proper clothing.
11:25They have to subsist on very limited amounts of food.
11:30They are implicitly encouraged to steal food in order to actually survive.
11:34Life in the agogae combines the trauma of being separated from your family with the extraordinary miseries of deprivation.
11:46They are given one tunic to wear no matter how cold it is.
11:51They are not given shoes, and they are forced to toughen the soles of their feet.
11:56So you have to imagine these shivering boys schlepping through the mountains of Sparta,
12:02leaving bloody footprints behind them.
12:05The aspects of training that involve harsh conditions and toughness are designed to enable Spartan soldiers to fight in any
12:13conditions.
12:17To further condition the boys to overcome pain, they take part in a violent, competitive ritual.
12:24The feast of Artemis Orthea is a strange, fascinating element of their training.
12:33The story goes that there is a feast at this sanctuary and there are wheels of cheese left on the
12:42altar.
12:43Spartan youths are encouraged to steal as much cheese as they can from the altars, but there are others with
12:49whips waiting for them.
12:51It's a competition to see which boy is able to get away with the most cheese.
13:01But that boy is surely going to bear the signs of the whippings that he took on the way.
13:12This competition is designed so that they throw themselves into the grinder of pain in order to achieve some goal.
13:19The cheese is immaterial, it's the willingness to endure pain and press on despite that.
13:26The boys also study legendary battles that illustrate the willingness to sacrifice one's life for Sparta.
13:36The Battle of the Champions takes place in the middle of the 6th century BCE.
13:41Herodotus tells us it's a conflict between Argos and Sparta.
13:47The story goes that they agree to have a contest of champions, 300 men from each side will meet, both
13:54armies will go away, and whoever survives the Battle of Champions wins this engagement.
14:04300 Spartans, 300 Argives, they fight, and they fight, and it is absolutely bloody and brutal.
14:17Both sides are ground down to nothing, and two Argives survive, and they leave the battle thinking, fantastic, we survived,
14:30we won.
14:33A single Spartan, however, survived.
14:38And what he does is he strips the Argives dead with their arms and armor and builds what in Greek
14:44we call a tropiona, a trophy.
14:49This is a traditional ancient Greek way of claiming the battlefield for the victorious.
14:55When the Spartans come to collect their dead, they find this dying Spartan and this trophy, this expression of Spartan
15:04duty until death.
15:06This shows Spartan tenacity. Even left for dead, this Spartan somehow manages to recover and build a trophy.
15:17The young Spartan is taught to fight to the end, even if horribly wounded.
15:24Sparta is not only a cult of war, it is also a cult of death.
15:29In looking at these stories, we get a glimpse of the basis of what Sparta values, what they think a
15:37warrior should be.
15:38Whether the legends are accurate or not is really immaterial.
15:43This is what the Spartans believe, and this is what drove them to military excellence.
15:49The final step of the Agogé is teaching the warriors to fight together.
15:55The Spartans are best when fighting in a group.
15:59No other army can match the Spartans for unit cohesion.
16:05They have incredible discipline and organization and greater tactical flexibility.
16:11To achieve success on the battlefield, the boys must learn to move in lockstep.
16:16And the specific training is often a dance.
16:20In dancing, what the boy learns is to move in coordinated formation with a lot of other soldiers.
16:29And many scholars believe that the purpose of war dance is to provide movements, the bashing with a shield, the
16:34thrusting with a spear.
16:35It also means that a soldier can respond to musical cues without thinking.
16:43To close up ranks, to shift the lines to the beat of music.
16:51As the boys near the end of their training, a select few are conscripted into a special group.
16:58Those who have excelled are chosen for the secret service known as the Kryptea.
17:05It's a group of boys who go out in secret and murder enslaved people in the middle of the night.
17:11The Spartans fear slave rebellion, so the goal is to make the slaves fear them more.
17:18Service in the Kryptea gives boys the experience of a first kill, which is an initiation into manhood.
17:29After 13 years of training, the young warrior has earned his place in the Spartan army.
17:37The Spartan warrior must now be armed with the weapons he will need to wage war.
17:4813 years of training transform a Spartan boy into a fearsome warrior.
17:55Now, he must learn to master the weapons of a hoplite, the most heavily armed soldier of the ancient world.
18:07A hoplite is the standard Greek heavy infantry.
18:11The best translation for hoplite is man-at-arms.
18:14All hoplites are armed with a spear, called a dory in Greek.
18:22These vary in length somewhat, but they might be around eight or ten feet long.
18:26They have a leaf-shaped iron-bladed point on the end that you're thrusting with, but they have a bronze
18:32spike at the bottom of it.
18:35The tip and the butt spike are unequally weighted, such that the butt spike is heavier than the front.
18:44It means that you have greater reach, because you've got that counterbalance at the back end.
18:50The spear may be wielded overhand or underhand.
18:56Well, obviously those targets different parts of the body.
18:59It overshot the throat, undershot coming up the groin.
19:05One of the absolute most important weapons of the Spartan hoplite is the shield, known as the aspis.
19:14It is a convex or domed shield, quite large, about three feet in diameter.
19:20It weighs about 22 to 26 pounds, comprised of overlapping glued pieces of wood, and a very thin coating of
19:29bronze.
19:31You've got an almost impenetrable shield.
19:34Normal arrows and spearheads are never going to go through this shield, but coming at the cost of weight.
19:40The most important thing about the shield is that half of it hangs beyond the body.
19:45In a phalanx, the left part of your shield covers the exposed right part of the man to your left.
19:52So the shield is what connects literally the Spartan army to each other.
19:57A phalanx is a horizontal arrangement of Greek heavy infantry.
20:04About eight ranks deep and shield over shield over shield across the entire front line.
20:10If the Spartans can just get you into one engagement, phalanx against phalanx, that is where the Spartans really shine.
20:18The Spartan phalanx is a devastating superweapon, as seen in the Peloponnesian War in the 5th century BC.
20:30The scene is this. We're in the middle of the Peloponnesian War between primarily the Athenians and the Delian League
20:37on one side,
20:38and the Spartans and their allies on the other.
20:41So on the plain below the polis of Mantinea, that's where the battle commences.
20:49The Spartans march forward in silence, hearing only the sound of their flute, giving them instructions on tempo as they
20:58move forward.
20:59The moment of contact between two phalanxes is horrible.
21:07It becomes a fearsome bloody scrum, far more grisly and literally in your face than battles today.
21:16People are stabbing each other in the groin, in the neck.
21:20The smell of death all around you. It's hell on earth.
21:27Both sides crushing the front ranks together.
21:31As the Spartan phalanx presses forward, long spears become ineffective in up-close engagement.
21:38And so the frontline soldiers will use the sword that hoplites carry with them to stab their foes.
21:45The Spartans do have backup weapons.
21:47And the two most common swords that you see in the Spartan phalanx are the kopis and the xyphos.
21:53The xyphos.
21:54It's a straight, leaf-bladed sword that's sharp on both sides.
21:58Much better suited for thrusting, but also perfectly useful for cutting.
22:03The kopis is a nastier weapon.
22:06Kopis is the Greek word for cleaver.
22:09The curved knife, sharp on one side.
22:12And obviously this is used for chopping.
22:15So it's a butcher's weapon repurposed for the battlefield.
22:19The claustrophobic sense of horror.
22:22To see your friends trampled underfoot.
22:25You see their blood spraying.
22:27You might be wearing their blood.
22:29Because the Spartans spend years of their lives training to endure pain, they have tenacity that other armies lack.
22:41Despite the chaos of battle, the Spartan phalanx remains intact as warriors respond in lockstep to musical cues.
22:50On the field at Mantinea, the Spartan right and the Mantinean right each overcome the left part of their opposing
22:59army.
23:00And then the Spartans do something typically Spartan.
23:04It shows great discipline, they remain in formation, and they wheel to the left.
23:14And they come upon the disorganized Mantineans, who are ransacking their baggage train, and they rout them.
23:22And they break.
23:24Because they have greater unit cohesion, the Spartan army really shines in comparison to a lot of other classical armies.
23:34When we think about phalanx warfare in particular, and the Spartans marching together, it's the reason why the shield is
23:42so synonymous with Spartan culture.
23:45The shield is for Spartans what the katana is for the samurai.
23:53Spartan mothers, on sending their sons into battle, say to them, come back with your shield or on it.
24:00And of course, on it means come back dead.
24:03In other words, be a hero and bring glory to Sparta.
24:09Trained and armed, the young Spartan is one step closer to becoming a fully forged warrior.
24:16But first, he must face his enemy in combat.
24:27The Spartan warrior is built for combat.
24:36What distinguishes the Spartans in comparison to other Greeks is they spend their whole lives preparing for this.
24:45One of the most popular poets among the Spartans is a man named Tertaeus.
24:51Tertaeus' poems are very bloody, describing people being stabbed and their blood pouring out all over the field.
24:58He exports Spartans to face their enemies, never running, never turning your back.
25:05But the true test comes from one-on-one combat.
25:16For his opponent, the Spartan warrior is an intimidating sight.
25:22The Spartan is kind of stony-faced and silent, which is probably to psych out the enemy.
25:28When you got a Spartan warrior in your face with a seven- to nine-foot spear, your days are
25:34numbered.
25:53Both sides try to poke, prod, stab at the weak points of each other.
25:58Try to get under the shield, over the shield, in between the eye slits of each man's helmet.
26:04So if you can picture a wire on this T-shaped slot, that's the part of your face that's exposed.
26:09Can you get a spear in there? Oh, yes, absolutely.
26:24When a warrior loses his spear, you draw your sword.
26:29Plutarch tells us a story that a Spartan complains to his mother.
26:33Mom, the sword you gave me, it's so short.
26:36And his mother leans forward and says, then add a step.
26:40In other words, get closer to the enemy so you can use it.
26:47The culpus, it's almost like a giant cleaver.
26:54Think about big, sweeping movements that can take limbs off at a chop, or hopefully knock shields down.
27:04The Spartan warrior scans the enemy's posture and foot position.
27:11Waiting to identify any opening.
27:14You have to keep your shield up, and you can stab, try to exploit a gap, maybe in the neck.
27:20What you want to do is the so-called harmodious blow.
27:26From the left shoulder, you have your sword, and you bring it down in a chop or a cleave.
27:37That shield is rubbing your arm raw.
27:40All of that bronze and leather.
27:43That shield alone is 20 to 22 pounds.
27:46You hang 22 pounds off your shoulders.
27:47That wears someone out.
27:52The Spartans show enormous stamina in battle.
27:57Some of it, of course, comes from the rigorous training.
28:01But some comes also from the Spartan ethic of fight to the death, never surrender.
28:10Finally, the Spartan finds an opening and seizes the opportunity.
28:15So the Spartan hoplite shield can be used in close combat for striking.
28:25And in the moment of stunning, in the moment of dazed confusion, you are able to capitalize on that.
28:32What we see represented in art is the moment of the kill.
28:39Right before the victory is had, right before the enemy is killed.
28:55There has to be a moment where first blood is drawn.
28:57And once that coppery smell hits the air, if you're used to it, you can hold on longer.
29:05You can endure this horrible moment longer than others.
29:09That's, that's the Spartan strength.
29:12But the Spartan warrior is built to fight as part of a group.
29:19To the death.
29:25The Spartan warrior has trained from a young age to defend his land and people.
29:38Now, he must confront the greatest threat Greece has ever faced.
29:44The Persian Empire.
29:54The great king of Persia, Xerxes, has decided that the Persians are going to add Greece to the long list
30:01of conquests of the Persian Empire.
30:05And Xerxes comes to Greece with an enormous army.
30:13The Spartan warrior is enlisted to join 300 of his fellow Spartans to lead a coalition against the Persian army.
30:22The Greeks have decided that the best place to stop them is at this narrow pass in central Greece called
30:29Thermopylae.
30:31The Spartan legend is formed at Thermopylae because it's at Thermopylae that the Spartans demonstrate the greatest courage.
30:41In charge of this is one of the two kings of Sparta, Leonidas.
30:46He is in charge of about 7,000 Greek hoplites.
30:52The Persians arrive with a larger army than the Greeks have ever seen, hundreds of thousands.
30:59Xerxes' goal is simple. Punch through and get his men moving as quickly as possible.
31:04Leonidas and the Greeks' goal is also simple. Hold the Persians in place.
31:11Why? That big of an army is extremely vulnerable because armies don't carry that much food with them.
31:19The Leonidas' plan is to hold and starve them.
31:26At Thermopylae, the mountains come down almost to the sea.
31:31And so there's this very narrow stretch where a small force can plug up the gap.
31:37Despite being outnumbered more than 20 to 1, the Spartans prepare for battle.
31:47The traditional Persian way of softening up infantry is a rain of arrows.
31:53One Spartan warrior at Thermopylae, when being told that Persians will shoot arrows in great numbers,
32:00so many arrows that the sun will be blocked.
32:03One Spartan warrior supposedly laughs and says, well, then we'll fight in the shade.
32:11The Persians are just carpeting the ground with arrowheads.
32:16Now, if you're lightly armored, that's a death sentence.
32:20But the Spartans aren't.
32:23They have heavy wooden shields, bronze helmets, bronze body armor, bronze greaves.
32:28You turtle up under all of that, and you sit there through hours all day.
32:36The Spartans fend off the enemy arrows and brace for the inevitable attack on foot.
32:44Historian Herodotus describes the Persians sending wave after wave of soldiers against the Spartan troops.
32:55Persian infantry are traditionally lighter armored.
32:59So when the lighter armored infantry crashes into a Spartan phalanx, it can't dislodge them.
33:06The Spartans fighting in their hoplite phalanx are able to hold the line and execute maneuvers that trick the Persians
33:14and magnify the slaughter.
33:19And the natural human response to such fear is to evacuate the bowels.
33:27The smell of it, the grit of blood and urine and feces and dust just mixing as each man advances
33:37toward each other.
33:38And it only gets worse as the day goes on.
33:42And the Persians are looking out at the battlefield and seeing hordes of their dead comrades.
33:49The highly trained Spartans hold off the attack for days.
33:53But the Persian invaders are relentless.
33:57The Persians are able to discover that there is a pass through the mountains, around back where the Greek position
34:03is.
34:06Leonidas sends most of the army away.
34:09So we have about maybe 300 Spartans and about 700 other Greeks.
34:16So Leonidas has decided that he and his men are going to remain in the pass and fight to the
34:21death against the Persians.
34:23The remaining forces are outnumbered by more than 100 to 1.
34:29This is what they have been training for all their lives.
34:32This is the fulfillment of their destiny.
34:36For the final phase of the battle, Leonidas and the Spartans cause great slaughter among the Persians.
34:42They fight until their spears break.
34:47Shields are broken, swords break, and at the end the Greeks are reduced to fighting with nothing but nail and
34:56tooth and kick.
34:58Leonidas does not give up.
35:00He doesn't surrender.
35:04He's cut down.
35:06And the Persians, seeing that the Greeks are outnumbered, their leader dead, they stand back and they shoot them down
35:14from a distance.
35:18For the Spartans, the real truth of the matter is that Thermopylae was a catastrophic loss.
35:24And what Sparta and what the other Greeks have to do is turn a military defeat into a PR victory.
35:36The heroic story of Thermopylae becomes a rallying cry across Greece.
35:42And a new group of Spartan warriors once again leads an alliance against the Persian occupiers.
35:49Next year at the Battle of Plataea, the Persians still have a superior force and terrifically hard infantry battle ensues.
35:58And once again, the Spartans prove to be the heroes at this battle, not because of a heroic death like
36:05at Thermopylae, but because of their skill at arms.
36:08And once they kill the Persian commander, the rest of the Persian forces fall apart and the Greeks were able
36:14to win the battle.
36:15And that is the last time the Persians came to Greece.
36:21After the Persian wars, the Spartan warrior has earned his reputation as the greatest warrior in the ancient Greek world.
36:29But like all great warriors, the Spartans cannot endure forever.
36:45For centuries, Spartan military training produces the most feared warrior in ancient Greece.
36:53But, by the end of the 5th century BC, generations of war against rival city-states deplete the ranks of
37:01elite Spartan warriors.
37:11After 27 years of the Peloponnesian war and years of the Corinthian war, Sparta is now down on its most
37:20important commodity, its warriors.
37:26In the early 4th century, it gets to the point where they have something like 1,500 full Spartan citizen
37:33soldiers,
37:34whereas they had something like 8,000 available for battles in the previous century.
37:39The lure of mercenary pay is too great for many warriors, further weakening the Spartan military.
37:48The training of young Spartans is excellent in terms of teaching them to endure hardship.
37:58It does nothing to teach them to resist temptation.
38:03And when the Spartans are offered bribes when on campaign, they very frequently take them.
38:09Sparta's conservatism also undermines success on the battlefield.
38:15Sparta is dominant on land for centuries.
38:20A couple things bring them to the end of their dominance.
38:23The primary thing is a fault in Spartan military culture.
38:28And that's an unwillingness to adapt.
38:31An unwillingness to innovate.
38:33Sparta really relies on that heavy infantry class.
38:37But ancient warfare isn't just about heavy infantry.
38:40Ancient warfare is about something that we call in the modern military, combined arms.
38:45That means light troops, that means cavalry, that means navy.
38:49And that means flexibility and the ability to adapt.
38:52Other states have come up with new military strategies and the Spartans are doing the same thing.
39:00And it doesn't work anymore.
39:05Ultimately, the Spartans fight a battle at Leuctra in 371 BC, where Thebans adopt some particular tactics designed to defeat
39:14the Spartans in battle.
39:18So, a traditional phalanx battle has the strongest part of the phalanx on the right of each army.
39:26But a commander named Epaminondas of the Thebans decided to flip that.
39:31This heavy, reinforced left is able to push and press harder against the Spartan right, where the traditional elite of
39:39the Spartan society is.
39:41And they're able to press it back and break it.
39:44This is crushing for the Spartans, not just because of the men they lost at Leuctra, but because of the
39:49loss of their reputation.
39:53The Thebans are able to march south and free the enslaved Mycenaean population.
39:58They are finally freed from Spartan enslavement.
40:04From this point forward, Sparta is no longer the great power in Greece that it had been.
40:13Sparta's fall from the world stage is swift, but its reputation for producing great warriors lives on.
40:22Sparta has a greater hold on the modern imagination than a lot of their peers.
40:29There's video games made about the Spartans, there's movies made about the Spartans.
40:33So when we see sports teams throughout the world named the Spartans, it speaks to the enduring legacy of Sparta
40:40as the gold standard for warriors.
40:42People think of the Spartans as some of the greatest warriors who ever fought.
40:46This is not an undeserved reputation.
40:50Not all the stories that are told about the Spartans are true, but they were the best hoplite soldiers fighting
40:56on the battlefields of Greece.
40:58On the classical Greek battlefield, where two armies are pressing and pushing against each other at the limit of desperation,
41:07beyond fear, beyond pain, that is where the Spartans really shine.
41:132,500 years on, the Spartan legacy is known around the world.
41:19A fierce dedication to the ultimate warrior mindset, legendary victories, and great courage in the face of certain defeat, clinch
41:30the Spartans' rightful place among history's greatest warriors.
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