We think of Sparta as a grim place, more of a military barracks with some civilians attached than an actual city. Its inhumane marriage laws, nauseating eugenics program, brutal educational system, obsession with military training, and paranoid suspicion of non-Spartans all led French historian Henri-Irénée Marrou to label Classical Sparta as an ancient fascist state. But there was a time, as Marrou argues in his history of ancient education, when Sparta was the cultural center of ancient Greek life. Artists and musicians flocked to pre-Classical, archaic Sparta to find a population more appreciative of fine poetry and music than anywhere else in Greece. Jonathan and Ryan turn to the Spartan lyric poets Tyrtaeus and Alcman to investigate what Spartan education and society was like in the archaic period, before the city closed in on itself.
Henri-Irénée Marrou's A History of Education in Antiquity: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780299088149
Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199537341
New Humanists episode on Homer's Contest: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/13949908-nietzsche-homer-and-cruelty-episode-lvi
M.L. West's Greek Lyric Poetry: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780199540396
Richmond Lattimore's Greek Lyrics: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780226469447
New Humanists episode on Benjamin Constant: https://newhumanists.buzzsprout.com/1791279/episodes/16302266-what-the-modern-world-lost-episode-lxxx
The Anti-Federalist Papers: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780451528841
Thomas Babington Macaulay's Horatius: https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius
Plato's Republic: https://bookshop.org/a/25626/9780465094080
New Humanists is brought to you by the Ancient Language Institute: https://ancientlanguage.com/
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Music: Save Us Now by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com
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