Laconia: Land of the Conquerors

Everyone knows the myth of Sparta. This is the history underneath it.

Laconia: Land of the Conquerors traces the real story of Sparta — from Homer’s legendary Lacedaemon through the brutal conquest of neighboring Messenia, the agoge and its warrior society, Thermopylae and the Persian Wars, a century of Spartan dominance, and the single battle that ended it all. Along the way: Byzantine Mystras, one of the last great intellectual capitals before Constantinople fell, and the Mani peninsula’s fierce, unbroken tradition of resistance that helped ignite the Greek Revolution itself.

COMPANION VOLUME

This is the conqueror’s side of a story told in two books. Messenia: Land of the Liberated tells the same history from the other side of the mountains — the people Sparta ruled for three and a half centuries, and how they finally became free. Read one, or read both.

15 chapters. Myth, and the history underneath it