Who Were The Spartans?
The fascinating history of ancient Greece's warrior-state.
Sparta is everywhere in popular culture. Most notably, the Spartans’ standoff at Thermopylae was the subject of the movie 300. But who were these ancient people?
It is hard to accurately reconstruct Sparta from the scant material evidence. Even Thucydides himself predicted that later generations might underestimate the power of Sparta as a result of this. Southern Greece is known as the Peloponnese. This region is divided up along mountain ranges. The southeastern region was called Laconia. Its main settlement was the city-state of Sparta, located along the central West Bank of the Eurotas River.
Homer’s Iliad
According to Homer’s Iliad, King Menelaus was the ruler of Sparta and brother of Agamemnon, the influential King of Mycenae. When Menelaus’ wife Helen left him for the handsome Prince Paris of Troy, the sons of Atreus vowed to inflict revenge. They mobilized the Greeks to fight the Trojan War. Despite the prominence of Sparta in the Homeric myths, Bronze Age ruins were only discovered very recently. Excavations in 2008 found a palace complex at Ayios Vasileios, west of Sparta.
Early poetry
In the second half of the 7th century BC, there was a poet named Alkman. He wrote choral lyric poetry about various subjects, such as the gods, nature, and women. His verses are anything but terse and laconic. They are extremely detailed, discussing the sound of waves on the beach and what a woman’s hair looked and smelled like. His poems were widely beloved in the ancient Greek world.
Alkman’s poems are so un-Spartan, that the earliest modern scholars mistook them as a misattribution. Alkman probably wrote at a time before Sparta became a militarized state, or perhaps at a time of transition into one.
Around the same time, another poet named Tyrtaios wrote his works. Most of his works are military hymns. They were probably imported from Athens or somewhere else. Tyrtaios’ martial verses became massively popular in Sparta, and articulated classical Spartan values.
Constitution
Possibly due to the struggles of the Second Messenian War, Sparta reformed itself as a military oligarchy. The legendary lawgiver Lycurgus created the Great Rhetra, an oral constitution that were memorized by the citizens. No written copy exists. Its existence is only known from ancient writers living outside of Sparta.
Sparta had a unique political system. It had 10,000 male citizens, who devoted themselves to full-time training and military preparation. Their system was sustained by helots, the former Messenians who had been reduced to slavery. Each year, the Spartans ceremonially declared war on the helots. Young men, called krypteia, wandered around murdering the helots. They acted as a kind of secret police, who deterred helot uprisings. The residents of the nearby Laconian towns were called perioikoi, and they were responsible for all trade, manufacturing, and food production. In Sparta, women practiced sports for eugenic purposes. They believed that active women would produce stronger children.
The values of Sparta were incredibly shocking and fascinating to the other Greek city-states. This phenomenon became known as the Spartan Mirage. Sparta cared little for architecture, literature, or high culture of any kind. There are no Spartan historians or philosophers. There were only two poets in their entire history.
The Peloponnesian League
Sparta had a number of regional allies, which were other Greek city-states. These included Corinth, Megara, and Arcadia. Argos was the only major threat, but this allowed the other cities to remain loyal to Sparta. Sparta did not impose any taxes, and only expected military service out of its vanquished peoples. They had no revenue to celebrate their successes or build meeting places. Sparta and its allies were able to amass armies as large as 60,000, which was incredibly large for the time.
Sparta’s major weakness was the helots. The helots were always threatening to revolt and overthrow Sparta’s system. So Sparta had to ally with its neighbors, who were expected to help crush any helot revolts. For the most part, Sparta was not an imperial power. But the Spartans did intervene in Athens in the late 500s BC, trying to suppress democracy in its early days.
Sparta peaked in the 5th century BC. During the Persian Wars, the Spartans led a Greek coalition which successfully ousted the imperial Persian forces from mainland Greece. The Spartans saw themselves as defending Greek liberty, and criticized Athens as a tyrannical imperialist power. Most other Greek states saw Sparta as a liberator against the hegemony of Athens.
The tensions between Athens and Sparta culminated with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC. In this conflict, Sparta won a protracted power struggle against Athens for dominance over the entire Greek world.
Empire and collapse
Although Sparta won the Peloponnesian War, their society was simply not equipped for empire. Internally, the citizen body shrank as a result of growing inequality. Sparta lacked the cultural dynamism of democratic Athens, and it showed. Tensions broke out, as citizens demanded greater equality and participation. This led to civil strife and degeneration. The troubles began to foment well beyond the enslaved helot class.
Sparta attempted to create an empire by installing oligarchies and tyrannies across the Greek world. This was in imitation of Athens. As a result, many of Sparta’s former allies turned against it, including Corinth.
Within just a decade, Sparta had lost its hold over Asia and northern Greece. In that same time, Athens made a fast recovery. For the next 20 years, Sparta’s hegemony gradually shrank and became more localized. Finally, in 371 BC, Sparta’s stronghold over Greece was decisively smashed by Thebes. The Thebans liberated Messenia from their slavery. The Spartans attempted to regain their empire, but were permanently defeated by Macedon in 330 BC.
Sparta never again enjoyed geopolitical dominance. Their political institutions became antiquated, and their society was too internally divided to compete with the kingdoms and leagues of the Hellenistic era. By 192 BC, the once invincible Spartans were easily conquered by the Romans. Under Roman control, Sparta became little more than a clownish tourist site.
Legacy
Even in ancient times, Sparta was widely admired. Many Athenian philosophers, especially Plato, saw Sparta as the ideal Greek city-state, composed of strong, brave citizens who were free from the corrupting influence of vulgar commercialism. French classicist coined the term Le mirage spartiate (“The Spartan Mirage”) in his 1933 book of the same name.
Love of Sparta is called Laconophilia. With the revival of Classical culture in Renaissance Europe, the Spartans became a subject of interest, such as in the writings of the Italian Machiavelli. Everyone, from Tudor England to Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, loved the Spartans. Rousseau praised Sparta’s simple austerity in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences.
At the same time, Sparta has also inspired the brutality, violence, and deranged collectivism of 20th-century totalitarian states. German racists, such as Karl Otfried Müller, cited Sparta as an example of the racial superiority of the Dorians. The Fascists of the 20th century were deeply enchanted by Sparta. In 1928, Hitler praised Sparta as the first racist state, and sought to subjugate the Soviets into a underclass of Spartan-like helots.
Colloquially speaking, the word “Spartan” is used to describe something that is simple, frugal, and eschews luxury. The term “laconic phrase” is an allusion to the direct, straightforward speaking style of the ancient Spartans.
To historian Victor Davis Hanson, the downfall of Sparta demonstrates how non-democratic societies lack the resilience, open-mindedness, dynamism, and cultural creativity of an Athenian-style democracy. In his book A War Like No Other, Hanson portrayed the Peloponnesian War as an existential struggle between Sparta’s militarized oligarchy against Athenian democracy. The latter, although it lost the war, was able to recover, but Sparta’s authoritarian slave state was destined for the ash heap of history. Thus, for Hanson, Sparta’s collapse demonstrates the moral and practical superiority of Western democracy.
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