An update?

I've moved all of the Greece pictures over to Picasa, on account of the general obnoxiousness of Panoramio. The old ones are still up at Panoramio (at least as long as the old posts still link there), but all of them are available for your viewing pleasure at http://picasaweb.google.com/AvesCorax, and these are the ones I'll be linking to whenever I get around to doing write-ups for the remainder of the trip.

The End is Nigh

I just lost the first version of this post. Bah. Anyway, long story short, this will probably be the last set of pictures until I'm back in the States. So here's a bunch from the second half of the trip to tide you guys over until I'm back. With less commentary, because I'm annoyed at the internet. You'll get more when I do proper posts from home.

Peloponnese trip:
The temple of Apollo at Bassae was guarded by ferocious kittens.

A nice odeon (basically a theater that had a roof) in Messene. The city was founded by the Theban general Epamenondas for the Messenian slaves he had freed from the Spartans.

A shot from the medieval fortress of Mystra. Those white buildings are the modern town of Sparti. Even the view from a higher part of the castle looking at a lower part was impressive.

A monument in Sparti listing every Spartan Olympic victor from Akanthos in 720 BC to Thomakos in AD 2004.

Looking to the right from about 2/3rds of the way up into the theater at Epidauros. Most of this is original, actually, and they reconstructed the rest so that they could have plays in the summer.

The bay in Nafplio, as seen from our second medieval castle. That island is the fortress that I posted pictures of after our first trip to Nafplio, when we did Mycenae and Tiryns.

The isthmus of Corinth as seen from the acropolis of ancient Corinth. That's the Gulf of Corinth (between the Peloponnese and the mainland) on the left and the Saronic Gulf (south of Attica) on the right.

The Temple of Olympian Zeus in Athens, with the Acropolis in the background. It's famous mostly for being really big, and is only about ten minutes from CYA.

Northern Greece:
One of the handful of surviving chryselephantine statues. This one's Apollon in the museum at Delphi. These were the nicest of the cult statues (both the Wonder of the World statue of Zeus in Olympia and the one of Athena in the Parthenon were in this style). The god's skin is carved ivory, which has turned black in this one for some reason, and the hair and clothing were all pure gold.

A modern mosaic of St. Demetrius, the patron saint of Thessaloniki, in the Aghios Demetrios.

A 2200 year old or so yahtzee set from a Macedonian tomb. The Macedonians didn't have 20-sided dice, and thus were unable to play Dungeons and Dragons until the Roman period.

Currently the last picture on my camera. It's a mosaic from a Roman bathhouse in Dion, near Mt. Olympos.

Ok, now it's lunchtime before the internet eats my post again. I'll see you all next week.

I figured I'd do a quick update for those loyal readers out there. No pictures tonight, though, since I'm paying for the time and wanted to take care of some other things while I had computer access. And, while I'm thinking of it, no pictures of today, either. The Verginia museum is probably the coolest one in Greece, but they don't allow pictures. For those who didn't obsessively read the wikipedia links from my first post way back when, Vergina is the site of some royal Macedonian tombs, which they've actually built the museum around. There's lots of gold and ivory; very cool stuff. Alexander the Great's tomb was in Egpyt until it was lost in the middle ages, and despite claims that his dad's buried at Vergina, it's most likely just his brother, Philip III, and his son, Alexander IV, who were both killed off by the generals dividing up the Macedonian empire after Alexander died.

Tonight and the next two nights we're in Thessaloniki (named after one of Alexander's half-sisters, if I remember right), Greece's 2nd largest city. It's got a much different feel from Athens and is much more multicultural. Back before the Nazi occupation it was also one of the biggest centers of Jewry in Europe. Anyway, when we get back there's a day off, the final, and then I have another day off before leaving Athens on the 10th. It's not much longer now.

Hellenistic and Roman Athens

One of the cool things about archeology is that human settlements are like layer cakes, especially the older ones. In antiquity, back before the days of backhoes and subterranean power lines, it was almost always easier to replace earlier ruins by leaving them intact and covering them with dirt until you had a level enough surface to build new things on. Troy, for example, has nine layers over about 2900 years, stacked one on top of the other. This presents some problems, though, most notably that you have to dig through the old stuff to get to the older stuff beneath it. At Troy, Heinrich Schliemann (Remember him?) dug right through what we now think was Homer's Troy (whatever the implies about the truth of the Iliad) because he was in a hurry and figured he'd find Priam's palace or something if he just dug deeper. This is also why you tend to see so many Classical ruins in Greece, because up until fairly recently excavators would rip up Hellenistic stuff on top of it because the earlier layers were valued more.

But all this is only generalization, and in some places you'll find the same ground level used for various eras, which can be a mixed blessing. For example, the middle of the Athenian agora is mostly an unintelligible mess to the layman because of how overcrowded the space is by Classical, Hellenistic and early Roman ruins. But the bright side is that, in 21st century Athens, you get a chance to experience a more representative sample of history.

Athens is mostly famous for the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, which started off with them besting the Persians at Marathon, Salamis and Plateia, although the city itself was annihilated after a mass evacuation. Afterward, though, the Athenians rebuilt, and the following two centuries produced all of the following: the Parthenon, Socrates and Plato, Xenophon (another of Socrates' students, overshadowed by Plato in philosophy but also a writer of history, historical fiction, hunting manuals aimed at dog owners, and a travelogue involving 10,000 Greek mercenaries in the middle of Mesopotamia, who have to get out of the heart of the Persian empire after a failed bid to overthrow its new king), the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, Sophocles and Aristophanes, the political careers of Thucydides, Pericles and the birth of direct democracy, and all of those other reasons your teachers told you why you should care about the ancient Greeks. This came to a pretty nasty conclusion: 30 years of bloody war between Athens and it's "allies" and Sparta and it's "allies", ending in Athens' defeat and a short-lived end of democracy. The polis bounced back over the following decades, but was prevented from dominating Greece by the rise of the Macedonians to the north. After being effectively conquered by Alexander the Great, the Athenians took another shot at relevancy after he died only to be put in their place by the Macedonian general Antipater. After this, Athens settled into its new role as a college town for the rest of antiquity. Essentially, wealthy young Greeks and Romans would come to town to catch themselves a philosopher or orator to study under before setting off on a political career. The up side for Athens is that wealthy alumni and men who wanted to appear to be great patrons of culture would build them neat stuff. One of these men was King Attalus of Pergamon, who built them a neat stoa that has been restored and turned into the Agora Museum. Another, even better one, was Hadrian, one of Rome's better emperors.

Hadrian is most famous for a grand tour of Rome's provinces and the neat things he had built during and after it. The most impressive of these, at least in Athens, is the Temple of Olympian Zeus. I guess it's slightly uncool that it wasn't Hadrian's idea. It was originally started way back in the Archaic period by Pisistratus and his sons, the tyrants of Athens, but daddy died and his sons were booted out of town before the project was finished. The democracy ignored the project, and eventually King Antiochus IV (ruler of most of modern Turkey, Syria, Iraq, Iran and bits of several other countries) picked it up 375ish years later. He died before it could be completed, and progress went backward, if anywhere, until Hadrian had it completed, 675ish years after construction started. So nevermind, it was entirely cool.
It's really big. Here's a close-up of Dan and I in front of it. If the photo quality looks a little low, it's because the shot's zoomed in on my wimpy camera. Here's the real shot.
There are 15 giant columns still standing, and a 16th on the ground. Most of the original 104 are scattered around Athens, having been broken up for building material for houses, churches, and, in at least one case, a mosque. Although this makes for a good photo op, it mostly brings to mind a certain poem of Shelley's: "Behold my works, ye mighty, and despair."

It was nice to finally get to see the temple up close, since we walked past it every time we went into downtown Athens. It's just off the road, shielded a bit by some trees. Down that street a little we'd come to a major road, and stand next to another of Hadrian's monuments waiting for the stoplight. This is the appropriately named Arch of Hadrian. It came with an inscription that sums up the extent of his building projects around the newer parts of the city. On the side facing the ancient downtown area, it reads: "This is Athens, the ancient city of Theseus." On the side facing the newer, mostly Roman-era development, including the Temple of Olympian Zeus, it reads: "This is the city of Hadrian, not Theseus."

Next up: the Roman agora. By the time their Roman overlords decided that republics are overrated, the original Athenian agora was filling up. Between Pericle's junk, Hellenistic junk (like that Attalid stoa), and Roman junk ("Eheu! Our Revered and Divine Emperor has given us a statue of himself. Where can we put this to best suck up to him?" "Just dump it in the agora with the other 20.") it was getting increasingly difficult to use the marketplace for, your know, marketplace stuff. So the Athenians cleared out a spot which, while not exactly downtown, was within what Hadrian might call "The Thesus Zone" and set up shop. There's not a whole lot left of it, and most of that is of the "generic ruins" variety, and I'm writing this about a year after last seeing it, so I'll just give you the high points (or low points, in a few cases).

Sitting around waiting for the next cargo ship to come in gets boring, so Greek shopkeepers resorted to vandalism. Those are some sort of game boards, carved into what would have been the floor, and businessmen played something on them to pass the time. And if you think that's cool, go look up Senet.

Stuff. That's Doug, delivering his site report, and a gutter which is either remarkably intact or well-restored (or both), and the Tower of the Winds in the background. You can get a good sense for the layout of the place. The bottom-left quarter of this shot shows a level area without anything sticking out of it. This was an open courtyard. Along the right side you can see how, just past the gutter, the land is a few inches higher. This is where the building was, and you would have seen a long, covered are broken up into different stores. The columns supporting that structure are more visible in the background.

A very pretty archway which marked the entrance to the new agora. Walking out that would lead you into the old agora; the Acropolis is due south.

Polluted marble. I'll give you a cookie if you can tell me the order (architectural style) of the columns. DISCLAIMER: You have to come and get it. I'm not mailing you a cookie.

The main flaw of marble is that any bits sticking off from the main column tend to fall off. The Greeks just wrote it off as more suitable for building than sculpting (all of those fancy marbles you see are generally Roman copies of Greek bronzes), but the Romans were determined to make it work. But after a centuries of being kicked around by the elements, barbarians and Christians, bits like heads and hands tend to fall off anyway.

That said, marble is a much more attractive building material than brick.

The door to the Tower of the Winds. It was so named because the top depicts the eight winds. "But wait," you say, "there were only four winds personified in mythology!" Oh ho, what clever and well-read readers I have (or did before I stopped updating regularly and you all got bored and wandered off). There were only four winds, but square buildings are boring, and the lovely 6x13 temple proportions don't lend themselves well to towers, so the ancients just said "Screw it, we'll just make it octagonal and invent four more winds." Only in Greek.

And, to finish up, Doug lecturing about a toilet seat.

Peloponnese Trip VI: Nemea and Corinth

After a night in Nafplio we finished the Peloponnese trip with a short stop at Nemea, a surprise guest appearance by a real life active archeological dig, and the grand finale at Corinth. This was also our last teaching day with Dr. Farney, who returned to his family in the States after a few weeks with us and a pretty long stay during research in Italy before the trip started.

Nemea, as a site, is pretty boring, and if I have any pictures of the museum then I can't pick them apart from the ones taken at Corinth, since the upload to Picasa shuffled my pictures around for no apparent reason. So here's some mythology to compensate. Herakles' (that's the name civilized peoples use for the strong guy who does all those labors and was played by Kevin Sorbo on tv) first labor was killing a giant nasty lion around Nemea. The beast, called the Nemean Lion for lack of a more interesting name, had an invincible hide and claws that could cut through anything. The latter trait trumped the former, though, and the big H just wrestled the cat to the ground and skinned it with its own claws. I suggest you not think of the mechanics of that too much. Anyway, that's what he's usually depicted wearing a lion skin - not only was it fashionable, but it was functional armor and reminded everyone why you don't rampage through the countryside while Herakles is around.

A more real story about the region is that the museum was broken into a few years ago and quite a lot of artifacts were stolen. This is extremely lame. Not only do people not get to look at them, but the Greek government doesn't make money off of them (money which could fund continued excavations), and scholars don't get to study them. This prompted a big stern lecture on antiquities thieves, how much the suck, and how happy certain giant fine arts museums are to buy stolen goods. While it's rare for a museum to be robbed, during the off season excavation sites are routinely scavenged by looters looking for a quick buck. Even if what they get finds its way into a museum, it's robbed of all useful context that archaeologists could use to learn about the place where it was found and the people who lived there.

All of this was reinforced unexpectedly, when our professors bumped into a buddy of theirs from grad school who had run into town to get lunch. A short while later we got back on the bus and followed her back to a nearby excavation and got a tour of a few bronze age tombs they were working on. Then we got another talk about antiquities thieves and how frustrating they are an how much money we have to waste of private security for dig sites. This was further reinforced when we were walking back to the bus afterward and I noticed some spent shotgun shells in the dust. Anyway, normally taking pictures of unpublished digs is a no-no, but at the end of the tour we were granted special permission. So here's the one shot I took. That's the entrance to a tomb, a Mycenean one, if I remember right, that I got to go into. It was pretty sweet.

Then we went back to Nemea and here are pictures.
A dead Christian. Although the Greeks and Romans would go back and forth on this, the generalization is that they were into cremation. Early Christians, however, expected to be resurrected any day now and didn't think the Kingdom would be very much fun if all they had to enjoy it with was a pile of ash. So in this period they were buried, facing whatever direction they thought Christ was coming back from (West, I think) so they'd have a good view. This lucky lady even had a pillow carved out of the rock for her head.
Neat pipes. Almost certainly Roman.
See also the associated water facilities.
There was also a track for foot races nearby. Here's the other end. Nemea, being a pretty central location for the Greek mainland, hosted a very popular set of games every two (I think) years. For various reasons people dropped coins here a lot, and so the museum had a pretty impressive collection of coins from all over the Greek world.
Here's the Roman-era entrance tunnel.
I have no idea what either of them are doing in this picture. Suggested captions are welcome.

Then we went to Corinth. Map time. The coloration is from a Hellenistic war, so ignore that. But you can see Corinth, right at the isthmus connecting the Peloponnese (the big hand-shaped almost-an-island) to the peninsula that contains Boeotia (around Thebes) and Attica (around Athens). That isthmus is only about ten miles wide around Corinth, so in most of the big land wars it became a focus of fighting between Peloponnesians and everyone else. Since the southern coast of the Peloponnese was pretty rough sailing, it was usually easier to sail through the isthmus. The one problem with that is that the land is solid rock towering over the water level, and so nobody managed to build a canal through it until the 19th century. What they did have were cranes, wheels, chains and slaves, and so the ancients would haul ships up and drag them over the isthmus to the other side. This made the Corinthians rich, and they ended up being a major naval power in the Greek world until the Athenians crushed their navy at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war. Even still, Corinth fared pretty well until the managed to annoy the Romans, who obliterated the city under the general Mummius. A hundred years later Julius Caesar refounded it as a Roman military colony, and those are the ruins that still stand.

First off, the museum pictures.
C. Julius Combover. Some fun facts about JC, since everyone knows his name but nobody knows much besides that he was stabbed by a bunch of guys, who, according to Dante, are given personal torture by Satan right alongside Judas. He was notoriously amorous, and slept with half of Rome. Once, during a Senate meeting concerning a conspiracy, Caesar's rival Cato spotted him reading a private letter and insisted it be read to the entire Senate. Much to his chagrin, it was a love letter from Cato's sister. He formed a semi-formalized alliance with Pompey, a famous and popular general, and Crassus, who was rich. Caesar ran off an conquered most of modern France, landing in Britain to beat some obnoxious druids around. Then he wrote a book about it, which was, for some time, the customary first ancient text read by Latin students. Crassus, envious of the two war heroes that he never liked, went off to war in the east and was annihilated with his whole army. Pompey and Caesar fought a big civil war, Caesar won, and then wrote a book about that, too. He was the chief religious official in Rome, and oversaw some calendar reforms. The calendar in use in the west up until the end of the 18th century is called Julian after him, as is the month of July. Had a son by Cleopatra, or at least everyone assumed it was his. Was sort-of the first emperor of Rome, though really that honor goes to his adopted son, who also went through the whole three-way alliance, civil war, sole rule thing but skipped the assassination bit.
A blurry inscription. But you can make out where a word has been chiseled out. It was "M. Antonius", or as we'd say, Marc Antony (the famous one's dad). After Octavian (Caesar's adopted son) fought and won his civil war against Antony (Caesar's right-hand man), he had this reference to Antony's father removed out of spite.
Rooster vase.
Lion thing. It reminds me of a Chinese restaurant in Pembroke mall.
A mosaic. it makes me kind of dizzy.
Hair pins, I think.
Another mosaic. This one reminds me of that "We have Technicolor!" thing from 60s movies.
A guy serenading some cows.
Nero.

Then we wandered around the site for a little while, since all of the real lecture had been in the museum.
An ex-temple.
Picturesque ruins.
Plentiful ruins.
Continued ruins.
A thing. Wait, if I say it in Latin maybe it'll sound like I remember what it was. Res est. Nunc dicimus.
Acrocorinth looming. That's Corinth's acropolis, which positively dwarf's Athens' in size. We took a bus halfway up and climbed the rest.
View from the bus.
View from the parking lot.
More looking up.
Fortification overlooking the path going up. Like every other high point, Acrocorinth has Greco-Roman, Byzantine, Frankish and Turkish stuff on it.
A Turkish mosque. The minarets (those towers they usually have) were knocked down after the Greeks booted the Turks out.
But I think this structure was a free-standing minaret. They're basically enclosed spiral staircases with windows at the top. The idea is that a guy climbs to the top a few times a day and does the Islamic equivalent of yodeling to call the faithful to prayer.
It's as wide as it is tall.
But you can't beat the view.
Quite a look-out.
Although you can't quite see all the way to Athens.
We did see a forest fire.
Perachora. You remember Perachora, don't you?
Land.
Sea.
Clouds and mountains. I almost thought it was going to rain, but it didn't. I was in Greece for a month and did not see a drop of rain, then got back to the US and spent two hours in Philadelphia International's customs area and another I-don't-want-to-remember-how-long in the main airport because of rain.
Peninsulae.
A castle, on the other end of Acrocorinth.
Look left.
Look right.
Look waaaay over there.
The isthmus. Gulf of Corinth on the left, Saronic Gulf on the right. See also dieser Map.
Finally, Dianna and I doing the obligatory pose.
And the modern canal, where we stopped on the way out.

Peloponnese Trip V (Part 2): Epidaurus and Nafplio (again)

After we left the lecture-heavy, ruins-lite site at Sparta, we hit the lecture-heavy, ruins-heavy site of Epidaurus. I found that lecture to be a lot less interesting though, so this is basically a picture post. Epidaurus was a polis on the eastern coast of the Peloponnese, making it a convenient stop between Sparta and the isthmus out of the peninsula. In antiquity the place was mostly known as a sanctuary of Asklepios. Among Apollo's numerous responsibilities, he was also the god of healing, but he was a pretty busy guy and eventually passed that off to his son and/or mortal physician-turned-god Asklepios. These sanctuaries were pretty popular among the ancient Greeks. For one thing, they equated medicine and religion together very strongly during the classical period and only somewhat less strongly afterward. For another, the Asklepia, as the sanctuaries are called, evolved into ancient health spas. Anyway, picture time.

The main temple, I think.
Asklepios. That's a big snake he's hanging out with. The Greeks, who hadn't read Genesis, thought snakes were good things. You see, snakes slither up from the ground, which makes it look kind of like they're just popping into existence; they also shed their skins. Both of these led to associations with healing, renewal and resurrection, and when Asklepios needed a cute sidekick the snake seemed like a perfect match. That staff with snakes wrapped around it that you see on ambulances is the end result of that association.
A well.
That looks like a bathtub to me. The Greeks weren't generally big on bathing, since they didn't have soap. What they did have, though, was olive oil. So they way they'd clean themselves was just to lather themselves up with oil and then use a squeegie-like thing called a strigil to scrape the oil, and all the sweat and dirt and such, off.
Deanna, sitting on a rock that may or may not have been a chair.
Epidaurus also had a pretty sweet stadium. You can see a bit of the Roman-era stone seating.
But the thing that modern people associate with Epidaurus is the theater. The site had a pretty well-preserved Roman stone theater, and the modern Greeks, sensing tourism gold, filled in the missing bits and bam! Giant, beautiful theater. They show plays in it every summer, though we didn't get the chance to catch one. Those train tracks were part of a modern staging of a Euripides play. Phonecian Women, I think.
Looking left.
Looking right. That's Dr. Farney talking, but here's the same shot sans Farney.
Looking up at the seating.
The view from the site.
My favorite part of the site.
Notice that the bottom row is not reserved for the handicapped, just the first row one has to climb a step to get to.
There was also a great production of Aristophanes' Clouds. Bah-bum-tish! (My apologies to Aristophanes for muddying his name with that joke.)

You know what everyone needs more of? Castles. When we got back to Nafplio (where we'd stopped for lunch our first day out of Athens) we decided to hit one before going to the hotel. Palamidi, the castle in question, was built by Venetians in 1714 and eventually saw some action during the Greek revolt against the Turks in 1822. Nafplio was actually independent Greece's first capital, which lasted during its very short time as a Republic before descending into chaos and having a western parliamentary monarchy imposed on them by the Europeans to settle things down.
But back to the castle.
Our approach. We're already up on a big rock that I, in my flatlander ignorance, am going to call a mountain. We took our bus up, then took something approximating 1000 stairs down the steep side to street level.
Nafplio.
The harbor. To the left you can see the town's other castle our in the bay, which I took a picture of on our previous trip.
More bay.
One of those small windows out of which defenders could shoot arrows. I always thought they were a great design, since you can stick a bow or crossbow up to one of these and fire without exposing yourself. But when I actually looked through one I realized that you don't have a good view for shooting.
The other castle, which Wikipedia tells me is called Bourtzi.
Looking off in the direction of Argos.
A bell!
Tourists.
A small peninsula branching off from where Palamidi is. Also, the bill of Pete's hat.
Zoomed in.
Looking down on the peons. Clockwise from bottom: Doug, AJ, Dan, Alex.
I like this shot.
The crew.
Blue.
A long staircase that doubles as a diving board.
More fortifications on the next hill over.
The bell again.
Me. I hadn't shaved in several days, so if you squint you might make out my face's pathetic attempt at growing a beard. I'm trying to stick to the Alexander the Great look these days: clean shaven with long hair.

Peloponnese Trip V (Part 1): Sparta

This post will be particularly text-heavy. Partly that's because Sparta's so incredibly weird that there's a lot to write about it, and partly that's because I have a total of three pictures, one of which might actually be from Epidaurus. The museum in town was closed for renovations, and the archaeological site, well, this is it. There's more to it than that, but very little is visible. That photo is of a Roman theater.

Any statement about "Greece" or "the Greeks" from the bronze age to Alexander is a pretty sweeping generalization, as each city did their own thing and getting the entire culture to agree on anything was like herding cats - cats with spears that they like to stick into you and each other every summer. Religion, calendars, units of measurement, dialect, alphabet, government, the text of the Iliad and Odyssey, and just about everything that wasn't warfare varied from city to city. But the Spartans are the exception to pretty much any rule we can come up with.

For starters, their entire society revolved around soldiers, who were the only citizens. They were supported by perioikoi, who were free non-citizens under Spartan rule who usually provided most of the man-power for the army anyway, and helots, who were enslaved Greeks from neighboring regions who had been conquered. Most of the helots were from the next valley over, Messenia. At the top of the food chain were landed nobility whose property was worked by helots under the supervision of the head of the household. Like the other Greeks, the Spartans considered the household to be women's sphere of influence; unlike the other Greeks, they actually meant it. Spartan women were notoriously liberated. Some of this was intentional. The Spartans believed that strong, physically fit women would give birth to healthier, stronger children, and so Spartan women married later in life and exercised nude just like men all over Greece did. Not surprisingly, Spartan girls almost always won the girls' footrace at the Olympics. But there was also the matter of necessity: Spartan men spent almost all of their time from age 7 until death in the barracks or on campaign, so their wives and sisters were forced to handle all economic matters.

The Spartans were famous for their one-liners, and the women got a few good ones in, too. When asked why they had so much more freedom than other Greek women, one replied "Because Spartan women are the only ones in Greece to give birth to real men.
" Greek soldiers would often drop their shields when fleeing battle, and the shields of fallen soldiers were used to carry their corpses home, hence the tradition farewell of a Spartan mother to her son going to war: "Come back with your shield or on it."

For men, life was even weirder. At birth they were inspected by government officials for any apparent defects and left on a mountain to die if any was found. From then they were given a reprieve until their seventh year, when they entered the military training system, the agoge. For the next ten years their lives were nothing but harsh training. They were issued one cloak every year, no shoes, and only enough food to keep them alive. If they wanted more, they were encouraged to steal from each other, or to sneak out of the barracks and steal from helots. They were trained constantly in athletics, hoplite warfare, and dance, which was intended to help their march in step during battle. One of the weirder examples of this training regimen is the festival of Artemis Ortheia. The boys would play a little game as part of the ritual, in which the goal was to steal a piece of cheese protected by an older boy with a whip. Participants were almost always injured and died with some frequency. Everything was more brutal in Sparta.

Pederasty was one thing that wasn't that different in Sparta, at least compared to other Greeks. The standard practice was that older men, established in their careers, would hit on boys on the cusp of puberty, give them presents, mentor them, have a sexual relationship for a few years and then continue on a "just-friends" basis afterward. In Sparta, younger boys would pick up an older boyfriend, who would mentor them, sleep with them, and help them with their career. Weird by everybody else's standards, at least until the Romans adopted all things Greek, but pretty standard in their world.

When they turned 17, Spartan trainees got a bump in status. The first order of business was to join a mess club. This was a lot like pledging a fraternity, only there were more expensive dues and if you didn't get in you were stripped of your citizenship and kicked out of school. And, of course, it was Sparta, so the hazing probably involved torture. The upside is that these guys could see the light at the end of the tunnel. From 18-19 they served as a sort of national guard if the army was away. From 20-30 they served as hebontes and made up the backbone of the army. Although they still weren't really citizens, they could at least grow their hair and beards out. The best ones served in the krypteia, the Spartan secret police, whose primary job was to ride around Messenia and Laconia at night terrorizing and murdering helots. At 30 the Spartans who hadn't died, failed out of the agoge or ran out of money became full citizens and could participate in the government. This participate amounted to voting, by screaming, to ratify the decisions of the Gerousia. The Gerousia was a 30-member body: 28 Spartans over the age of 60 (which was about all of the Spartans over the age of 60) and the two kings. What? Two kings? Being the only real Greeks with a home-grown monarchy wasn't weird enough for the Spartans. Instead they had two royal families and two kings at any given time. One king would serve as the general for the garrison in Sparta and one would lead the army out on campaign. The kings and the old men ('Gerousia', like the Roman 'Senatus', and the American 'Senate', basically means "bunch of old guys") proposed all legislature. Most of the legislature was put into practice by five men called Ephors who were elected annually, and who also served as judges and back-up generals in case of dead, young or incompetent kings. 300 presents them as inbred mutant priests who spend all day alone on a mountain counting their gold and molesting oracles, but in reality they were probably the handsomest and bravest men Sparta had to offer.

As far as totalitarian military states go, Sparta's was extremely successful. They conquered about a third of the Peloponnese in the early Archaic period and quickly established a very one-sided set of alliances with everyone else on the peninsula. By the time the Persians started conquering their way to Athens, the Spartans were the natural choice to lead the resistance. Unfortunately for King Leonidas, they needed the Athenian navy to win the war, and so the Greek army had to hastily mount a defense at Thermopylae, north of Athens. Once they were surrounded, Leonidas sent everyone home except for his 300 guards, their helot slaves, 300 Thespians and some Thebans. The Thebans prompted surrendered, and the Persians slaughtered everyone else before marching south and burning Athens to the ground. Free of any obligation to protect what was left of Athens, the Spartans holed up at Corinth, where there weren't any pesky mountain passes for the Persians to use against them. The Athenians managed to break the Persian navy just offshore near the island of Salamis, and the next year the Greek alliance finished off all of the Persian troops that Xerxes hadn't taken home with him after Salamis.

During the following decades, Athens rebuilt and founded a naval empire able to threaten Sparta and its allies. The inevitable war lasted thirty years and decimated all of Greece, and though Sparta won their victory was short-lived. The 30 tyrants they imposed on Athens were so unpopular that within a year even the Spartans were sick of them and helped the Athenians overthrow them. So the Athenians prompted went back to rebuilding their empire. Meanwhile, the arrogant Spartans had managed to alienate almost all of their allies during and immediately after the war. After about a decade of peace, the other Greeks got fed up and Athens, Corinth, Argos and Persia all went to war against Sparta again, though this war didn't last and didn't accomplish much of anything. The next war, however, broke Sparta for good. The Theban general Epamenondas and his fancy new army crushed the Spartans and killed about half of the full citizens at the Battle of Leuktra, then prompted beat feet to Messenia where they freed the helots and built them a heavily fortified city. After this the Spartans kept their attitude but lost their relevance. When the Macedonians conquered the rest of Greece, Sparta was the only city to never submit; and neither Philip nor Alexander considered it worth their trouble to march down there and conquer it.

A statue of Leonidas. The inscription, ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ, is another of those Spartan quips. We have two good ones from Thermopylae. One of them is a reply to the Persian boast that they would fire so many arrows that they would blot out the sun: "Good, then we can fight our battle in the shade." The other, the one written on this statue, is Leonidas' supposed reply to Xerxes' demand that the Greek surrender their weapons: "Come and take them."
A list of every Spartan Olympic victor, from Akanthos in 720BC to Thomakos in 2004. Also of note is Kyniska, who was the only adult female Olympic victor. During the games women were not even allowed on site, but the victors of the chariot races weren't the horses or the charioteers, but the person who funded them. One of the Spartan kings entered a team in his daughter's name out of spite for the Olympic organizers.
This is Sparta (I think).

Because of the length of all the Spartan stuff, I'm breaking this day in half. See the next post for Epidaurus and Nafplio.