Sparta: Beyond the Mirage

Introduction - Stephen Hodkinson
I. Representations of Sparta
1. Herodotus and Spartan Despotism - Ellen Millender
2. Spartan Ate at Thermopylai: Semantics and Ideology at Herodotus, Histories 7.234 - Michael Clarke
3. Was Sophrosyne Ever a Spartan Virtue? - Noreen Humble
4. Three Evocations of the Dead with Pausanias - Daniel Ogden
II. Invention and Tradition
5. Iron Money and the Ideology of Consumption in Laconia - Thomas J. Figueira
6. Iron Money in Sparta: Myth and History - Jacqueline Christien
7. The Invention of Tradition in Classical and Hellenistic Sparta - Michael Flower
8. Notes on the Influence of the Spartan Great Rhetra on Tyrtaeus, Herodotus and Xenophon - Michael Lipka
III. Subject Populations
9. Helotic Slavery Reconsidered - Nino Luraghi
10. Helotage and Spartan Social Organization - Nikos Birgalias
11. Settlements of Spartan Perioikoi: Poleis or Komai? - Andrey Eremin
12. Ouk Homoioi, Agathoi De: The Perioikoi in the Classical Lakedaimonian Polis - Norbert Mertens
IV. Historiographical Reception
13. Sparta Compared: Ethnographic Perspectives in Spartan Sstudies - Marcello Lupi
14. From Thermopylae to Stalingrad: The Myth of Leonidas in German Historiography - Stefan Rebenich
Index

Anton Powell was the Late Director of Classical Press of Wales, UK. He has published extensively on the history of Sparta, Athens – and the literature of the Roman Revolution. He was the author of an introduction to source-criticism in Greek history, Athens and Sparta (3rd edition 2016), the editor of Companion to Sparta (2 volumes, 2018), and co-editor (with Nicolas Richer) of Xenophon and Sparta (2020). His monograph Virgil the Partisan (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’. He has twice been Invited Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2006 for Greek history and in 2008 for Latin literature.

Stephen Hodkinson is an internationally recognised authority on Sparta and the founder of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. Author of numerous influential studies on Greek history, his Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000) is the leading work in its field. He has been made an Honorary Citizen of modern Sparta for his contributions to the global understanding of Spartan history. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham.