AllMovie

In this three-part documentary, British historian Bettany Hughes traces the rise and fall of ancient Greece's military utopia, "one of the most radical and extreme civilizations that history has ever known." Part 1 traces the Spartans as they settle in Greece's Peloponnese sometime around 1000 B.C., and set up a society that is frugal, disciplined and totalitarian, but also egalitarian (except for its many slaves) and centered on a "warrior elite." Indeed, says, Hughes, "the whole of Spartan society became, in effect, a military training camp." It worked for some 300 years, beginning around 650 B.C., when the Spartans enslaved their neighbors, the Messenians.