Bayliss’s volume is charmingly fitted to its subjects’ reputation for brevity, from its laconic title to its size: a tight 166 pages in a frame measuring about thirteen by eighteen centimetres. Similarly apt is the choice to colour the dust jacket red, like the distinctive cloaks of the Spartans, and decorate it with a spear appearing to cut a slash forming a lambda, the Greek letter popularly imagined as appearing on Spartan shields. These affectations are likely to amuse if noticed and they show the attention to detail paid by the author and press, but never rise to an intrusive level.

The volume is divided into seven chapters. For the most part, the chapters thematically divide aspects of Spartan society, covering ‘Sparta’s Civic Structure’, ‘The Spartan Lifestyle’, ‘Raising a Spartan’, ‘Spartan Women’, ‘Helots’ and ‘The Later Reception of Sparta’. The first chapter, ‘Go Tell the Spartans’, is something of an exception, providing a historical focus on the battle of Thermopylae. The choice is clever, as many, perhaps most, readers will be coming to an interest in Sparta from an introduction through that battle. Much of the volume is pitched as drawing back the curtain on Sparta for novices, moving beyond the heroism of Leonidas to consider the polis’ good, bad and ugly aspects.

Indeed, the book is clearly aimed at a popular audience: it eschews foot- and endnotes, transliterates Greek text, translates all foreign-language material into English and speaks in a slightly elevated but non-specialist register. In this way, it may be compared to Myke Cole’s recent Osprey Press monograph The Bronze Lie (Oxford 2021), which, much like The Spartans, aims to introduce a general audience to something more closely approaching the state of scholarship on various Spartan questions. The most notable differences between the works are size and author: The Bronze Lie is over 450 pages, and unlike Bayliss, who is a trained academic, Cole is an enthusiast, albeit one who extensively reads scholarship and consults with experts. It is clear that Bayliss, too, is in frequent communication with today’s experts on Sparta, and his book, in a way that will be familiar to readers of Plutarch and Herodotus, often lays out multiple scholarly positions on a subject, only sometimes venturing to give the author’s own opinion.

There are several useful addenda after the final chapter, including a fairly detailed timeline of Sparta’s history from 1000 to 370 BC (up to their defeat at the battle of Leuctra and the end of their status as a major Greek power), a set of references sorted by chapter and a short index. In no small part thanks to its low price the volume should be an excellent option for use as a college text in courses on ancient Mediterranean history and society. Such a use would obviate, through the intervention of the instructor, one item that Ifound lacking within the aforementioned addenda: a conspectus of ancient source passages on Sparta. While Isupport the decision to avoid notes to the text with citations ancient or modern, the lack of ancient sources in the ‘References’ section is disappointing.

Although the volume is very recent, there are already two aspects worthy of update. First, under his section on ‘The Darker Side of Spartan Reception’, Bayliss devotes a paragraph to the Greek ‘far-right political party Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi)’ (137). In October 2020, Greek courts ruled Golden Dawn a criminal organization and sentenced its leadership and dozens of its members to prison, including sixteen who were ruled guilty in the 2013 murder of a Greek rapper, Pavlos Fyassas. Bayliss is in no way positive in his appraisal of Golden Dawn, and Ido not doubt that he would have noted the result of the trial had it occurred in time for the book’s publication.

Second, Bayliss on several occasions, as prominently as on the inside cover of the dust jacket and in the book’s second paragraph, brings up the infanticide of disabled babies by the Spartans. The fullest discussion occurs in the chapter on ‘Raising a Spartan’ in the section ‘Spartan Eugenics?’ Bayliss weighs the case for and against before concluding that ‘we should not be lulled into thinking that the Spartans would have normally allowed disabled babies to be reared. The harsh reality is that parents exposed unwanted children throughout the ancient Greek world’ (75). Debby Sneed, in her article on ‘Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece’ (Hesperia 90 (2021), 747–72) has compellingly rejected the notion that killing or exposing disabled babies in ancient Greece was typical, and she has pointed out the harm in uncritically adopting such a position. Again, Sneed’s work postdates the publication of The Spartans, and so Bayliss could not have consulted it.