Ancient Sparta: How odd?
Professor Paul Cartledge, Department of Classics, University of Cambridge

• Wednesday 10 June 2015, 6.00PM to 7.00pm
• Free admission
  Booking required
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• K/133, King's Manor, Exhibition Square (map)

No wheelchair access

Event details

Due to popular demand, this event is now sold out. You may get in on the door on the night; any free seats will be made available on a first-come-first-served basis.

Ancient Sparta has given us three English words: spartan, laconic, and helot. No other ancient Greek city apart from Athens plays so prominent a role in the long development of the Classical tradition. But how different, or odd, was Sparta, really? Paul Cartledge has worked on Sparta for over 40 years and is one of the world’s leading experts on ancient Greek history and culture as a whole. In this lecture he will examine in turn the Spartan educational system, the military regime, the status of women and relations between the sexes, treatment of the servile underclass of Helots, attitudes to the gods, and funerary rituals.

Speaker biography

Paul Cartledge is the author/coauthor/editor/co-editor of over 25 books, the most recent being Ancient Greek Political Thought in Practice (Cambridge University Press 2009), Ancient Greece: A Very Short History (Oxford University Press 2011), and After Thermopylae: the Oath of plataea and the End of the Graeco-Persian Wars (Oxford University Press 2013). He is an Honorary Citizen of modern Sparta.

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