Ancient Sparta: Warriors of Greece
Sparta is the exception to almost every generalization one might make about ancient Greece. While Athens was a busy commercial democracy full of talkers and philosophers, Sparta was a closed, militarized state in which the entire society was organized around the production of soldiers. While the other Greek cities were experimenting with democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, Sparta had a unique mixed constitution that it credited to the legendary lawgiver Lycurgus. While other Greek women were confined to the women’s quarters, Spartan women received physical training, ran businesses, and owned a great deal of the property of the state.
Sparta’s small professional army was, for a long time, the best in the Greek world. Its soldiers won the decisive land battle of the Persian Wars at Plataea (479 BCE) and held the famous pass at Thermopylae against the entire Persian army. Its defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War (404 BCE) made it briefly the dominant power in Greece. But Spartan power collapsed almost as quickly as it had risen, and Sparta eventually became a tourist destination for Roman aristocrats who came to admire its supposedly ancient virtues.
The Geography of Sparta
Sparta lies in the valley of the Eurotas River in the southeastern Peloponnese, the large peninsula that hangs down from central Greece. The valley is fertile — better agricultural land than the rocky soil of Attica — and Sparta was famous for its plain black-figure pottery, its wine, and its olive oil. The surrounding mountains made the city easy to defend, and the Spartan state expanded by conquering the surrounding Laconian and Messenian territories and reducing the original inhabitants to a servile status.
The Spartan Constitution
Sparta’s government was a strange mix of two kings, a council of elders, an assembly, and five elected overseers. The two kings, drawn from two royal families, served as military commanders and as the high priests of the state cult. The Council of Elders (Gerousia), twenty-eight men over sixty plus the two kings, proposed legislation to the assembly. The Assembly (Apella) of all male citizens over thirty voted on the proposals, and elected the five ephors (overseers) who actually ran the day-to-day government and had the power to depose kings and bring them to trial.
Spartan citizens were a small minority of the total population. The original Spartans, the Spartiates, were full citizens. The non-citizens included the perioeci, free men who lived in the surrounding towns and engaged in commerce, and the helots, a servile class bound to the land and owned by the state.
The Spartan Upbringing: The Agoge
Every male Spartan citizen underwent the agoge, the state education system that produced the Spartan warrior. At the age of seven, the boy was taken from his family and placed in a barracks-style school with other boys his age. He was given a single cloak to wear in all seasons, a meager diet, and almost no bedding. He was expected to steal food, but if caught he was punished for being a bad thief. At twelve, he was assigned an older mentor, often a young warrior, with whom he would form a lifelong bond.
The agoge included military drill, athletics, hunting, dancing, and music. Boys competed in endurance tests: they were flogged at the altar of Artemis Orthia, sometimes to the death. Survival brought honor; failure was disgrace. The system produced soldiers of extraordinary discipline and cohesion, but it also produced men who were, by most accounts, narrow, brutal, and isolated from the wider Greek culture.
Spartan Women
Spartan women were unique in the Greek world. Because Spartan men were often away at war, women were expected to run the household, manage the family estate, and run businesses. They received physical training (running, wrestling, throwing the javelin and discus), and they were famous for their beauty and outspokenness. They owned perhaps forty percent of the land of Sparta at the height of the city’s power. Plutarch reports a Spartan mother telling her son, as he left for battle, to come back “with your shield or on it.”
The Persian Wars
Sparta’s finest hour was the Persian Wars. When Xerxes’ massive army invaded Greece in 480 BCE, the Greek cities agreed to put a Spartan general in command of the combined Greek land forces. The Spartan king Leonidas marched north with a small force, including the famous Three Hundred Spartans, and held the pass at Thermopylae for three days against the entire Persian army. Leonidas and his Spartans died to the last man, buying time for the rest of Greece to prepare. The Greeks won the war, and Sparta and Athens fought over the credit for the victory. You can read the full story in The Persian Wars.
The Peloponnesian War
The rivalry between Athens and Sparta had been building for decades when it finally erupted into the Peloponnesian War in 431 BCE. The war lasted twenty-seven years, with one brief truce. It was the largest war the Greek world had ever seen, and it ended in 404 BCE with the total defeat of Athens. Thucydides, the Athenian general turned historian, left an account of the first phase of the war that is still read as a model of historical analysis and a primer on the nature of power politics. The Peloponnesian War bankrupted both combatants, and left Greece open to Macedonian conquest.
The Decline of Sparta
Sparta had won the war but lost the peace. A few decades after 404 BCE, the Spartan general Lysander had been killed, the city’s population had dwindled, the helot population had grown, and the rigid social system was creaking. Thebes under the brilliant general Epaminondas inflicted a devastating defeat on Sparta at Leuctra in 371 BCE, freeing the helots of Messenia and ending Sparta’s territorial power. Sparta limped on, eventually becoming a Roman client state and then a tourist destination famous for its antique ways.
Spartan Legacy
Sparta has always been a touchstone for arguments about the relationship between freedom and discipline, the individual and the state, equality and excellence. The Roman writer Tacitus compared the Germanic tribes of his day to the Spartans. The eighteenth-century admirers of Rousseau and the founders of the United States cited Sparta as an example of austere civic virtue. The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, both Nazi and Soviet, admired the Spartan model of state power. The phrase “Spartan” survives in English as a synonym for austere, disciplined, and willing to do without comfort.