Classical Greece has had profound influence on the history and culture of the western world and two cities and one era stand at the heart of this. Athens and Sparta became the two greatest powers in the Greek world. United, they helped lead the Greeks in defeating the great Persian invasion. Divided, they spread conflict and destruction throughout the eastern Mediterranean, culminating in the horrors of the Peloponnesian War.
 
They were not simply rivals for power, but polar opposites in culture and ideology, with Athens the outward looking, radical democracy and maritime empire and Sparta the militaristic, rigidly disciplined and brutal society. Both were experiments in how to run a state, extremes of the Greek longing to excel.

This is a story of politics and war, but also of culture. Greek city states were prone to revolution, yet Athens and Sparta were the only two major cities to avoid this for just over a century. It is one of the great paradoxes of the time. Athens and Sparta will tell this remarkable story, one of great drama and extremes of human behaviour, drawing on plentiful sources from the ancient world, not least Herodotus, the father of history, and Thucydides, one of its greatest exponents, as well as the rich archaeology.
 
Populating the story are statesmen, lawgivers, rabble-rousers, philosophers, artists, writers, courtesans and wives, heroes, and cowards. The history of this era is a microcosm of the human experience in all its wonder and horror.