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 that outsiders so often admired much about the Spartan system. The word paradox has its root in the Greek, and it was in Athens that more than anywhere else philosophers had leisure to dissect the physical and moral world. Athens, the aggressive, immensely self-confident, radical democracy was often brash and even vulgar as well as cruel, yet it also gave the world so many ideas, comedy and drama that moved audiences in ways unlike anything that had come before and art that has provided inspiration ever since. Spartans did not innovate, while Athenians threw out ideas constantly – some good and some bad. No other major state has allowed thousands to join in debates where anyone could propose a law and see it enacted. This was a society capable of remarkably clear thinking and such pointless savagery as executing Socrates for challenging accepted ideas.

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.