ARTiculate Ancient History Greek Writers on Sparta

The ARTiculate Talk Series aims to provide senior high school students with additional support complementing the curriculum to enrich their understanding in HSC subjects related to arts, humanities, languages and social sciences.

The body of literary evidence for ancient Sparta raises more questions than they answer. Collectively, this evidence (along with Sparta’s own obscure self-mystification) produces the so-called ‘Spartan Mirage’. Using them to solve the very mythology they have created is not easy. In this talk, Dr Ben Brown will suggest entry points to some of the literary testimonia and offer a straightforward way to identify the usefulness of each source and how that usefulness can be represented to students. While all the literary sources will be considered, we will focus especially on the importance of Herodotus, Xenophon, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Pausanias.

Presented by: Dr Ben Brown, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of Classics and Ancient History, School of Humanities.

00:00:00 Opening
00:01:25 Lecture
00:50:00 Q&A
00:56:57 Upcoming topics and pARTicipate newsletters
00:58:15 Q&A (Continued)
01:25:03 Closing

For our upcoming ARTiculate talk series, please visit: https://sydney.edu.au/arts/articulate