The powerful Greek city-state overreached itself and saw its influence decline as it failed to integrate conquered territories

Religion, immigration, gender politics and severed heads

What the West owes to the ancient world

Classical Greek and modern ideas of beauty

All serious scholarship on ancient Sparta has to be conducted within the penumbra of the ‘mirage Spartiate’, a French term coined in 1933 to describe the problem posed by idealised accounts of Sparta.

Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political de