The study of the Spartans is now pursued more widely and intensively than ever. Indeed, no longer is Sparta the 'second city' of ancient Greece. This volume, the fourth in the established series on which Powell and Hodkinson have collaborated, breaks fresh ground, not least in the range of its contributors. The authors of the fourteen new papers represent nine different countries and demonstrate many of the fertile modern approaches to the history, the archaeology - and the still-influential image - of the city on the Eurotas.

The editors: Anton Powell† published extensively on the history of Sparta, Athens – and the literature of the Roman Revolution. He founded the International Sparta Seminar and co-edited most of its published volumes. He was the author of an introduction to source-criticism in Greek history, Athens and Sparta (Routledge, 3rd edition 2016) and the editor of Wiley Blackwell’s Companion to Sparta (2 volumes, 2018). His monograph Virgil the Partisan (2008) was awarded the prize of the American Vergilian Society for ‘the book that makes the greatest contribution toward our understanding and appreciation of Vergil’. He was twice Invited Professor at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, in 2006 for Greek history and in 2008 for Latin literature.
Stephen Hodkinson is an internationally recognised authority on Sparta and the founder of the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies. With Anton Powell, he has been co-organiser of the International Sparta Seminar. Author of numerous influential studies on Greek history, his Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (CPW, 2000) is the leading work in its field. He has been made an Honorary Citizen of modern Sparta for his contributions to the global understanding of Spartan history. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham.