"...The two-volume work by Sarantos Kargakos, a renowned historian from Laconia, totaling 1600 pages, comes to cover with remarkable conciseness and scientific depth the history of the city-state of Sparta, which together with the city of Athens formed the dyad around which ancient Greek life was predominantly woven in its rich and diverse manifestations. The book, as the diligent researcher and reader will ascertain, covers the course of Sparta from mythical times and the pre-Dorian era until the 4th century BC. A pivotal element of the writing is the exhaustiveness of the sources up to 2005. Based on this vast "material," where ancient writers take precedence, S. Kargakos analytically examines the events and imparts to his writing a characteristic multi-layered form. Thus, his history is not - as one would expect, solely military and partially political - it is economic, religious, demographic, as required for a society in constant action. This allows him to refer to many unknown or obscure figures and aspects of Spartan history. The work is embellished with rare and at the same time rich photographic material, as well as rare lithographs, exclusively sourced from the author's archive.
All of the above is framed by the well-known writing skill, clarity, and personal style of the renowned historian S. Kargakos, who manages, despite the extensive nature of the work, to make "The History of Ancient Sparta" accessible and enjoyable to the reader, without diminishing the scientific prestige of the work in the slightest..."