Spartans

I started listening to Cartledge’s The Spartans on my drive to and from mom’s house this weekend. The box says the running time is 8 hours so I thought great, I can just get through it if I take the back roads (which I much prefer to the interstate). I got about half way through it, not because I wasn’t enjoying it or not learning anything. I was in fact learning so much that I had to listen to many tracks twice.

It is a really quick ride from the somewhat nebulous beginning of Sparta (roughly late 8th C. to early 7th C. BCE—I think I have that right…690 to 710 BCE) down through Thermopylae (480 BCE) and the repulsion of the Persians through its victory in the Peloponnesian War with Athens to its fall not long thereafter (early 4th C. BCE). That’s a lot of ground to cover so I am grateful for the three minute tracks so periods with which I was less familiar could be listened to twice.

Nice words from Cartledge for Pressfield’s Gates of Fire (“historical” fiction piece that Michael and I both enjoyed).

From the Amazon Blurb:

According to Cartledge, the Spartans' legacy to Western culture includes devotion to duty, discipline, the willingness to sacrifice individual life for the greater good of the community and the nobility of arms in a cause worth dying for. Cartledge's crystalline prose, his vivacious storytelling and his lucid historical insights combine here to provide a first-rate history of the Spartans, their significance to ancient Greece and their influence on our culture. It ties in to a PBS series to air this summer.

That blurb tied in to the 2003 release of the hardcover so I presume it’s long since aired. I’ll visit PBS’s website to see if it’s available…I’m that enamored. I just hope a tenth of the content is sinking in.