Original subtitles

The most feared warriors of their time...

When you've got a Spartan warrior in your face,

your days are numbered.

Elite soldiers, trained from childhood...

They are brutalized.

Like Boy Scouts from hell.

Destined to be the most dominant fighters

in ancient Greece.

They have tenacity that other armies lack.

It is bloody and brutal,

and the Spartans never surrender.

It's hell. It's hell on Earth.

Warriors aren't born...

They're built.

Understanding how

reveals the true nature of their greatness.

From the cradle to the grave...

These are the steps to creating...

History's Greatest Warriors.

A lifelong journey of intense drilling

and brutal discipline...

...creates the most feared warrior of

the ancient Greek world.

Master of the spear and shield,

the Spartan is bound by law and honor to defend

his homeland and bring glory to Sparta.

On the classical Greek battlefield,

the story of the Spartans looms largest

for many centuries.

No other army...

can match the Spartans.

Sparta introduces training from the age of seven...

to make them the ultimate soldiers

in service to the state.

You take the individual boy,

and you scrape and grind and beat away his personality

until he comes out on the other side a Spartan warrior.

You're talking about professional soldiers.

The discipline...

The obedience...

The focus...

All will be there in ways that...

you can't expect from

ordinary citizens turned soldiers.

Their skill in combat enabled the Spartans to

multiply the power of their own city state for...

over 150 years.

Sparta's growth...

into a military superpower

demands an elite warrior.

He must endure brutal training from childhood...

Master the use of his bladed weapons and iconic shield...

And overwhelm all enemies with the most precise

and lethal tactics of his day.

It is a path that begins in the 9th century...

The Spartan city state begins in

early Archaic period of Greek history.

If you look at a map of Greece,

you'll see to the southwest,

there's a very large peninsula.

It looks like a big tooth,

with three points pointing south.

Towards the bottom of that is the city of Sparta.

Ancient Greece is a world of seafarers.

But Sparta is constrained by land.

During the Archaic period...

Sparta grows in power,

and the Spartans are conquering

and taking control of the southern Peloponnese.

As its territory expands,

Sparta covets the rich farmland of Messenia,

its neighbor to the west.

Messenia had a lot of flat plain.

Flat plains means good farmland.

And, the Spartans decide to conquer Messenia.

It's a very hard war.

It lasts 20 years.

And when they defeat the Messenians,

most of the Messenians are turned into

national slaves, called helots.

The helot slaves work the land

for their Spartan masters...

But often revolt.

The helot slaves may outnumber the

Spartan citizens by a count of 7 to 1.

And, if the slave population rebels,

the Spartan state goes into crisis.

Constant slave revolts threaten to destroy

Sparta, but King Lycurgus creates a new code of laws

and remakes Sparta as a militarized state.

Lycurgus, he is the...

originator of what the Spartans

consider their constitution.

Lycurgus went to the Delphic oracle,

which is the most sacred religious center

in the Greek world.

And there is a priestess there...

who prophesies.

And, he gets the approval

of the oracle for his laws.

With that sort of endorsement...

it makes it much easier for Lycurgus to get these vast

reforms that completely remake Spartan society

accepted by the Spartans.

According to the plan of Lycurgus,

it is illegal for a Spartan to practice any trade.

In Sparta, the only acceptable work for

a male citizen is being a soldier.

The first duty of these new citizen-warriors

is to crush slave revolts.

When you have a much larger population enslaved,

your primary goal: keep the slaves enslaved.

And that slave population, the helots,

takes on all of the agricultural work,

all of the domestic work.

Now, the Spartans, they have this free time

to do nothing but train for war.

At that point, Sparta becomes

a very unusual Greek state.

No other Greek state had a standing army.

In many armies in history,

their primary job is to be a farmer,

or a carpenter, and they are called to

military service as and when needed.

When we look at the Spartan, his entire job is to be a

professional soldier, and his entire culture and the

government is set up to support that institution.

That gives the Spartans a tremendous

military advantage.

At its core, the new law has

a singular purpose-

to create the greatest warriors in all of Greece.

And the creation process begins before the warrior

is even born.

The Spartans feel that the best way to produce the

strongest soldiers is for mothers

to be well-trained, themselves.

Girls are encouraged to engage in athletic contests.

This is almost unheard of in other Greek city states.

The Spartan government wanted there to be

strong, healthy women in order to

produce robust babies.

But they must prove themselves worthy

from the day they are born.

When a Spartan boy was born,

government officials inspect the boy.

If it looks robust, it's allowed to live.

And if not, it's left at

the bottom of Mount Taygetus.

Spartans are apprehensive about blood guilt.

They don't smother unwanted babies,

they don't strangle them.

They leave it up to the gods.

It's as if the Spartans are engaging in

a kind of primitive eugenics program,

making sure that all children are perfect in form.

The Spartan child who passes

this first test is only just beginning.

Standing between him and his destiny

are years of blood, sweat, and pain.

Training now begins.

The road to building a Spartan warrior...

is long...

and brutal.

In all the stories of Spartan battles we see a level of

discipline and organization that is indeed different from

and better than other Greeks.

Well, you don't get there in a vacuum.

To make great warriors you need a training program.

For a Spartan, the path to military glory...

begins in childhood.

According to Plutarch's "Life of Lycurgus"...

he introduces reforms to Spartan society,

and the reforms include the famed agoge...

which is the upbringing that

begins training the Spartans,

solely for war.

Agoge comes from the Greek word for competition,

and it gives us English "agony".

And that's a good name for it, the agony.

The boys in the agoge, they are brutalized

day in and day out.

Children are taken from their parents at age seven,

and they are turned into, I think the quote from

Aristotle is, "brave little beasts."

I sometimes think of the Spartan agoge as...

Boy Scouts from hell.

And what's hellish about it is not just the toughness of

the training that the boys have to undergo,

but the length of time that it lasts.

I think the Spartans would have a hearty chuckle

about modern-day boot camps.

The United States Marine Corps

has a 13-week boot camp.

The Spartans' boot camp goes on for 13 years,

and then kind of persists for the rest of

the adult male life.

Spartan training begins with the

strengthening of the body.

Spartan boys in the agoge,

they are woken up early and forced to train.

Run for miles, dance with armor on,

box, fight, wrestle each other.

Boys are schooled in the form of wrestling

known as pankration.

It's like Greek MMA, ancient Greek MMA.

And pankration has two rules:

don't gouge the eyes,

and don't rip the gonads.

Ripping off ears, breaking fingers,

that's all fair game, and they are taught to do that

from a very young age.

The grueling regimen makes boys resilient

in the face of humiliation and suffering.

You have to break the ego of the boy down

through years of degradation and

beatings and starvation.

The conditions in the agoge are intentionally harsh.

The boys are not given proper clothing.

They have to subsist on very limited amounts of food.

They are implicitly encouraged to steal food

in order to actually survive.

Life in the agoge combines the trauma

of being separated from your family, with the

extraordinary miseries of deprivation.

They're given one tunic to wear

no matter how cold it is.

They are not given shoes, and they are forced to

toughen the soles of their feet.

So you have to imagine these shivering boys

schlepping through the mountains of Sparta,

leaving bloody footprints behind them.

The aspects of training that involve harsh conditions and

toughness are designed to enable Spartan soldiers

to fight in any conditions.

To further condition the boys to

overcome pain, they take part in a violent,

competitive ritual.

The Feast of Artemis Orthia is a...

strange, fascinating element of their training.

The story goes that

there is a feast at this sanctuary,

and there are wheels of cheese

left on the altar.

Spartan youths are encouraged to steal as much cheese

as they can from the altars, but there are others

with whips waiting for them.

It's a competition to see which boy

is able to get away with the most cheese.

But that boy is surely going to bear the signs of...

the whippings that he took on the way.

This competition is designed so that they

throw themselves into the grinder of pain,

in order to achieve some goal.

The cheese is immaterial.

It's the willingness to endure pain and

press on despite that.

The boys also study legendary battles that

illustrate the willingness to sacrifice one's life

for Sparta.

The Battle of the Champions takes place

in the middle of the sixth century BCE.

Herodotus tells us it's a conflict between

Argos and Sparta.

The story goes that they agree to have

a contest of champions.

300 men from each side will meet.

Both armies will go away, and whoever survives

the Battle of Champions wins this engagement.

300 Spartans.

300 Argives.

They fight, and they fight,

and it is absolutely bloody and brutal.

Both sides are ground down...

to nothing.

And two Argives survive,

and they leave the battle thinking, "Fantastic.

We survived, we won."

A single Spartan, however, survives.

And what he does is he strips the Argive dead of

their arms and armor and builds what in Greek

we call a tropaion, a trophy.

This is a traditional, ancient Greek way of

claiming the battlefield for the victorious.

When the Spartans come to collect their dead,

they find this dying Spartan and this trophy.

This expression of Spartan duty until death.

This shows Spartan tenacity.

Even left for dead,

this Spartan somehow manages to recover...

and build a trophy.

The young Spartan is taught to fight

to the end, even if horribly wounded.

Sparta is not only a cult of war,

it is also a cult of death.

Looking at these stories,

we get a glimpse of the basis of what Sparta values,

what they think a warrior should be.

Whether the legends are accurate or not

is really immaterial.

This is what the Spartans believe,

and this is what drove them to military excellence.

The final step of the agoge is

teaching the warriors to fight together.

The Spartans are best when fighting in a group.

No other army...

can match the Spartans...

for unit cohesion.

They have incredible discipline and organization,

and greater tactical flexibility.

To achieve success on the battlefield,

the boys must learn to move in lock step.

And the specific training is often a dance.

In dancing, what the boy learns is to move in

coordinated formation with a lot of other soldiers.

And many scholars believe that the purpose

of war dance is to provide movements,

the bashing with the shield, the thrusting with the spear.

It also means that a soldier can respond to

musical cues without thinking...

to close up ranks, to shift the lines,

to the beat of music.

As the boys near the end of their training,

a select few are conscripted into a special group.

Those who have excelled are chosen for the

Secret Service, known as the Crypteia.

It's a group of boys who go out in secret and

murder enslaved people in the middle of the night.

The Spartans fear slave rebellion.

So, the goal is to make the slaves fear them more.

Service in the Crypteia gives boys

the experience of a first kill,

which is an initiation into manhood.

After 13 years of training,

the young warrior has earned his place in the Spartan army.

The Spartan warrior must now be armed with

the weapons he will need...

to wage war.

13 years of training transform

a Spartan boy into a fearsome warrior.

Now, he must learn to master the weapons of a hoplite,

the most heavily armed soldier of the ancient world.

A hoplite is the standard Greek heavy infantry.

The best translation for hoplite is 'man at arms'.

All hoplites are armed with a spear,

Called a "dory" in Greek.

These vary in length somewhat,

but they might be around 8 or 10 feet long.

They have a leaf-shaped iron bladed point on the end

that you're thrusting with, but they have a

bronze spike at the bottom end.

The tip and the butt spike are unequally weighted

such that the butt spike is heavier than the front.

It means that you have greater reach,

because you've got that counterbalance

at the back end.

The spear may be wielded overhand...

Or underhand.

Obviously, those target different parts of the body.

An over shot, the throat.

Under shot coming up, the groin.

One of the absolute most important weapons of the

Spartan hoplite is the shield,

known as the Aspis.

It is a convex or domed shield.

Quite large, about 3 feet in diameter.

It weighs about 22 to 26 pounds,

comprised of overlapping glued pieces of wood,

and a very thin coating of bronze.

You've got an almost impenetrable shield.

Normal arrows and spearheads

are never gonna go through the shield,

but coming at the cost of weight.

The most important thing about the shield is

that half of it hangs beyond the body.

In a phalanx, the left part of your shield covers the

exposed right part of the man to your left,

so the shield is what connects, literally,

the Spartan army to each other.

A phalanx is a horizontal arrangement of

Greek heavy infantry, about 8 ranks deep,

and shield, over shield, over shield

across the entire front line.

If the Spartans can just get you into one engagement-

phalanx against phalanx-

that is where the Spartans really shine.

The Spartan phalanx is

a devastating superweapon,

as seen in the Peloponnesian War

in the 5th century BC.

The scene is this: We're in the middle of the

Peloponnesian War between primarily the Athenians and

the Delian League on one side,

and the Spartans and their allies on the other.

So, on the plain below the polis of Mantinea,

that's where the battle commences.

The Spartans march forward in silence,

hearing only the sound of their flute,

giving them instructions on tempo

as they move forward.

The moment of contact between two phalanxes is horrible.

It becomes a fearsome, bloody scrum.

Far more grisly and literally in your face

than battles today.

People are stabbing each other in the groin,

in the neck.

The smell of death all around you.

It's hell on Earth.

Both sides crushing the front ranks together.

As the spartan phalanx presses forward,

long spears become ineffective in

up-close engagement

And so, the frontline soldiers will use the sword

that hoplites carried with them to stab their foes.

The Spartans do have back-up weapons.

And the two most common swords that you see in the

Spartan phalanx are the kopis and the xiphos.

The xiphos is a straight leaf-bladed sword

that's sharp on both sides, much better suited for

thrusting, but also perfectly useful for cutting.

The kopis is a nastier weapon.

Kopis is the Greek word for cleaver.

The curved knife, sharp on one side.

And obviously, this is used for chopping.

So it's a butcher's weapon

repurposed for the battlefield.

The claustrophobic sense of horror to see

your friends trampled underfoot.

You see their blood spraying.

You might be wearing their blood.

Because the Spartans spend years of their lives

training to endure pain, they have tenacity

that other armies lack.

Despite the chaos of battle,

the Spartan phalanx remains intact...

as warriors respond in lockstep to musical cues.

On the field at Mantineia,

the Spartan right and the Mantinean right each

overcome the left part of their opposing army.

And then the Spartans do something

typically Spartan.

It shows great discipline, they remain in formation,

and they wheel to the left.

When they come upon the disorganized Mantineans,

who are ransacking their baggage train,

and they rout them...

and they break.

Because, they have greater unit cohesion,

the Spartan army really shines in comparison to

a lot of other classical armies.

When we think about phalanx warfare in particular,

and the Spartans marching together,

it's the reason why the shield is so synonymous

with Spartan culture.

The shield is for Spartans

what the katana is for the Samurai.

Spartan mothers, on sending their sons

into battle, say to them,

"Come back with your shield, or on it."

And of course, "on it" means come back dead.

In other words, be a hero

and bring glory to Sparta.

Trained and armed, the young Spartan is

one step closer to becoming a fully forged warrior.

But first, he must face his enemy...

in combat.

The Spartan warrior is built for combat.

What distinguishes the Spartans in comparison to

other Greeks is they spend their

whole lives preparing for this.

One of the most popular poets among the Spartans

is a man named Tyrtaeus.

Tyrtaeus' poems are very bloody,

describing people being stabbed and their blood

pouring out all over the field.

He exhorts Spartans to face their enemies.

Never running, never turning your back.

But the true test...

comes from one-on-one combat.

For his opponent, the Spartan warrior

is an intimidating sight.

The Spartan is kind stony-faced and silent,

which is probably to psych out the enemy.

When you've got a Spartan warrior in your face,

with a 7 to 9-foot spear, your days are numbered.

Both sides try to poke, prod,

stab at the weak points of each other.

Try to get under the shield, over the shield,

in between the eye slits of each man's helmet.

So, if you can picture a Y or almost T-shaped slot,

that's the part of your face that's exposed.

Can you get a spear in there?

Oh, yes, absolutely.

When a warrior loses his spear,

you draw your sword.

Plutarch tells us a story that a Spartan

complains to his mother, "Mom, the sword you gave me,

it's so short." And his mother leans forward,

and says, "Then add a step."

In other words,

get closer to the enemy so you can use it.

The kopis, it's almost like a giant cleaver.

Think about big, sweeping movements

that can take limbs off at a chop,

or hopefully, knock shields down.

The Spartan warrior scans the

enemy's posture and foot position...

...waiting to identify any opening.

You have to keep your shield up, and you can stab,

try to exploit a gap, maybe in the neck.

What you want to do is

the so-called "Hormodious Blow".

From the left shoulder,

you have your sword,

and you bring it down in a chop or a cleave.

That shield is rubbing your arm raw.

All of that bronze...

and leather.

That shield alone is 20 to 22 pounds.

You hang 22 pounds of your shoulders!

That wears someone out.

The Spartans show enormous stamina in battle.

Some of it, of course,

comes from the rigorous training.

But some comes, also, from the Spartan ethic

of fight to the death, never surrender.

Finally, the Spartan finds an opening...

and seizes the opportunity .

The Spartan hoplite shield can be used in

close combat for striking.

And, in the moment of stunning,

in the moment of dazed confusion,

you were able to capitalize on that.

What we see represented in art is

the moment of the kill.

Right before the victory is had,

right before the enemy is killed.

Argh!

There has to be a moment where

first blood is drawn.

And once that coppery smell hits the air,

if you're used to it,

you can hold on longer.

You can endure this...

horrible moment longer than others.

That's, that's the Spartan strength.

But the Spartan warrior is built to fight

as part of a group...

To the death.

The Spartan warrior has trained from

a young age to defend his land and people.

Now, he must confront the greatest threat

Greece has ever faced...

the Persian Empire.

The great King of Persia, Xerxes,

has decided that the Persians are going to add Greece to

the long list of conquests of the Persian Empire.

And Xerxes comes to Greece with an enormous army.

The Spartan warrior is enlisted to join 300 of

his fellow Spartans, to lead a coalition

against the Persian army.

The Greeks have decided that the best place

to stop them is at this narrow pass in

central Greece called Thermopylae.

The Spartan legend is formed at Thermopylae.

Because it's at Thermopylae that the Spartans

demonstrate the greatest courage.

In charge of this is one of the two kings of Sparta,

Leonidas.

He is in charge of

about 7,000 Greek hoplites.

The Persians arrive with a larger army than the

Greeks have ever seen, hundreds of thousands.

Xerxes' goal is simple: punch through and

get his men moving as quickly as possible.

Leonidas and the Greeks' goal is also simple:

hold the Persians in place.

Why?

That big of an army is extremely vulnerable because

armies don't carry that much food with them.

Leonidas' plan is to hold and starve them.

At Thermopylae, the mountains

come down almost to the sea.

And so, there's this very narrow stretch...

where a small force can plug up the gap.

Despite being outnumbered more than

20 to 1, the Spartans prepare for battle.

The traditional Persian way of

softening up infantry is a rain of arrows.

One Spartan warrior at Thermopylae,

when being told that Persians will shoot arrows

in great numbers...

so many arrows that the sun will be blocked,

one Spartan warrior supposedly laughs, and says,

"Well, then we'll fight in the shade."

The Persians are just...

carpeting the ground with arrowheads.

Now, if you're lightly armored,

that's a death sentence.

But the Spartans aren't.

They have heavy wooden shields, bronze helmets,

bronze body armor, bronze greaves.

You turtle up under all of that...

You can sit there for hours all day.

The Spartans fend off the enemy arrows,

and brace for the inevitable attack on foot.

The historian Herodotus describes the Persians

sending wave after wave of soldiers

against the Spartan troops.

Persian infantry are traditionally lighter armored.

So, when they when the lighter armored infantry

crashes into a Spartan phalanx,

it can't dislodge them.

The Spartans, fighting in their hoplite phalanx,

are able to hold the line and execute maneuvers that

trick the Persians, and magnify the slaughter.

And the natural human response to such fear

is to evacuate the bowels.

The smell of it, the...

the grit of blood, and urine, and feces,

and dust just mixing as each man

advances toward each other.

And it only gets worse as the day goes on.

And the Persians are looking out at the

battlefield and seeing hordes of their dead comrades.

The highly trained Spartans

hold off the attack for days...

but the Persian invaders are relentless.

The Persians are able to discover that there is a

pass through the mountains around back

where the Greek position is.

Leonidas sends most of the army away.

So, we have about maybe 300 Spartans

and about 700 other Greeks.

So, Leonidas has decided that he and his men

are gonna remain in the pass and fight to the death

against the Persians.

The remaining forces are outnumbered

by more than 100 to 1.

This is what they have been training for

all their lives.

This is the fulfillment of their destiny.

For the final phase of the battle,

Leonidas and the Spartans cause great slaughter

among the Persians.

They fight until their spears break.

Shields are broken.

Swords break, and at the end,

the Greeks are reduced to fighting with

nothing but nail and tooth and kick.

Leonidas does not give up.

He doesn't surrender.

He's cut down.

And the Persians, seeing that the Greeks are outnumbered,

their leader dead, they stand back...

and they shoot them down from a distance.

For the Spartans, the real truth of the matter

is that Thermopylae was a catastrophic loss.

And, what Sparta and what the other Greeks have to do

is turn a military defeat

into a PR victory.

The heroic story of Thermopylae becomes

a rallying cry across Greece.

And a new group of Spartan warriors once again

leads an alliance against the Persian occupiers.

The next year at the Battle of Plataea,

the Persians still have a superior force and,

terrifically hard infantry battle ensues,

and once again the Spartans proved to be the heroes

at this battle, not because of a heroic death like at

Thermopylae, but because of their skill at arms.

And once they kill the Persian commander,

the rest of the Persian forces fall apart,

and the Greeks are able to win the battle.

And that is the last time

the Persians came to Greece.

After the Persian Wars,

the Spartan warrior has earned his reputation as

the greatest warrior in the ancient Greek world.

But like all great warriors,

the Spartans cannot endure forever.

For centuries, Spartan military training

produces the most feared warrior in ancient Greece.

But, by the end of the 5th century BC,

generations of war against rival city states

deplete the ranks of elite Spartan warriors.

After 27 years of the Peloponnesian War...

And years of the Corinthian War...

Sparta is now down on its most important commodity,

its warriors.

In the early 4th century, it gets to the point where

they have something like 1,500 full Spartan,

citizen soldiers, whereas they had something like

8,000 available for battles in the previous century.

The lure of mercenary pay is

too great for many warriors...

further weakening the Spartan military.

The training of young Spartans...

is excellent...

in terms of teaching them to endure hardship.

It does nothing to teach them to resist temptation.

And when the Spartans are offered bribes when

on campaign, they very frequently take them.

Sparta's conservatism also

undermines success on the battlefield.

Sparta is dominant on land for centuries.

A couple things bring them to the end of their dominance.

The primary thing is a

fault in Spartan military culture,

and that's a unwillingness to adapt...

an unwillingness to innovate.

Sparta really relies on that heavy infantry class.

But ancient warfare isn't just about heavy infantry.

Ancient warfare is about something that we call

in the modern military "combined arms".

That means light troops, that means cavalry.

That means navy.

And that means flexibility and the ability to adapt.

Other states have come up with new military

strategies, and the Spartans are doing the same thing,

and it doesn't work anymore.

Ultimately, the Spartans fight a battle at

Leuctra in 371 BC,

where the Thebans adopt some particular

tactics designed to defeat the Spartans in battle.

So a traditional phalanx battle has the

strongest part of the phalanx on the right of each army.

But a commander named Epaminondas

of the Thebans decided to flip that.

This heavy, reinforced left is able to push and

press harder against the Spartan right,

where the traditional elite of the Spartiate society is,

and they're able to press it back and break it.

This is crushing for the Spartans,

not just because of the men they lost at Leuctra,

but because of the loss of their reputation.

The Thebans are able to march south and

free the enslaved Messenian population.

They are finally freed from Spartan enslavement.

From this point forward,

Sparta is no longer the great power in Greece

that it had been.

Sparta's fall from the world stage is swift,

but its reputation for producing

great warriors lives on.

Sparta has a greater hold on the modern

imagination than a lot of their peers.

There's video games made about the Spartans,

there's movies made about the Spartans.

When we see sports teams throughout the world

named the Spartans, it speaks to the enduring legacy of

Sparta as the gold standard for warriors.

People think of the Spartans as some of the

greatest warriors who ever fought.

This is not an undeserved reputation.

Not all the stories that are told about

the Spartans are true.

But they were the best hoplite soldier fighting

on the battlefields of Greece.

On the classical Greek battlefield...

...where two armies are pressing and pushing against

each other, at the limit of desperation-

beyond fear, beyond pain-

that is where the Spartans really shine.

2,500 years on,

the Spartan legacy is known around the world.

A fierce dedication to the ultimate warrior mindset...

Legendary victories...

And great courage in the face of certain defeat...

Clinch the Spartan's rightful place among

History's Greatest Warriors.