Dr. Owen Rees

They often talk about sending shockwaves through the Greek world, this defeat, because it's very much the entire status quo of 40 years ago, of what we've just accepted for the past century, really.

Athens, Sparta, top.

That is now gone entirely.

Psychologically, it's not just the Greek world that is shaped by it, it is Sparta itself.

is shaken by this realization of what's just occurred.

They have lost, what is it, the 300 bodyguards, the king.

They lost almost 400 of the 700 Spartans they sent in this army.

That is a sizable proportion of their Spartia, so that's their citizen population, has now died.

We hear that when the news enters Lutra, basically people were told to sort of be quiet about it.

And people who had lost people would walk around with smiles.

When the news enters Sparta.

Yeah, when the news itself.

So the families of the dead were supposed to walk around with smiles on their face.

And the families of basically the survivors were in shame.

But I guess Eleos again steps in rather helpfully.

domestically and what is it they say he basically rests the laws of sparta for a day so that the survivors who come home are not declared cowards which has legal and social ramifications on them because basically sparta can't afford for that to happen they literally have to suspend a century of culture and of social norms to allow the society to try and recover from this

Yeah, it is.

And when we talk about them losing Mycenae, that's not just a large proportion of land and farmland.

That's also a large proportion of their helot community that they've been heavily relying on for workforce.

Not all the helots.