Sparta: The Ancient Greek Warrior State

Podcast Transcript

Few societies in history have inspired as much fascination as ancient Sparta.

It was a city-state built on discipline, military power, and a way of life unlike anywhere else in the ancient world.

From its feared hoplite army to its rigid social system, Sparta became one of history’s most famous cities.

Yet the real story is far more complex than myth.

Learn more about Sparta and how it functioned on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

Sparta was one of the most famous and unusual city-states of ancient Greece.

Sparta sat inland along the Eurotas river valley in Laconia, on the southern Peloponnese peninsula. Its development contrasted with that of the sea-faring city-states, particularly Athens. The valley, bordered by Mt. Taygetos in the south and Mt. Parnon in the east, protected the city against invasion.

The location was not perfect, as the inland geography prevented Sparta from becoming a mercantile or maritime power.

However, Sparta’s geography led to the development of its renowned infantry.

Our most common image of the Spartans undoubtedly comes from the movie 300 and the story of the remarkable stand at the Battle of Thermopylae, which I covered in a previous episode.

At Thermopylae, Spartan King Leonidas and 300 warriors held off the Persian King Xerxes and his massive army for three days. This defensive stand allowed other Greek forces to mobilize against the Persians and eventually defeated them at the Battle of Salamis.

Sparta was home to the most powerful infantry in the ancient world. To build such a formidable force, the Spartans built their entire existence around military discipline.

The other Greek city-states all had militaries, but they did not function anything like the Spartans. Across the Aegean world, militaries fought only after the harvest was in, and with limited training throughout the year.

For the Spartans, war and military training were year-round endeavors. The entire Spartan citizenry was a full-time professional army, which made it a military machine unlike any in the ancient world.

To build a strong military, the state exempted Spartans from ordinary tasks, such as farming. To satisfy their military aspirations, Sparta employed the most rigid slave-based system in antiquity.

Sparta utilized a slave class called “helots”. Helots were captives from neighboring regions, particularly the area around Messenia, which they conquered in 700 BC. The total population of helots was larger than the Spartans; some estimates held that the helots outnumbered the Spartans by as much as 10:1.

To maintain order and obedience in this situation, the Spartans adopted a unique system to control the helots. Unlike other slave systems in World History, the helots belonged to the state itself rather than to private masters.

To increase the available workforce, the Spartans encouraged the Helots to form families and reproduce. In order to maintain control over this massive population and ensure their continued labor for the state’s agricultural needs, the Spartans established a regime of officially sanctioned, state-sponsored violence against them.

Once a year, the Spartan government declared war against the helots, in which any Spartan could kill a helot without legal consequence or sanction by the gods of Olympus. Think an ancient version of the Purge, but only on one segment of society.

The Spartans controlled the helots through fear, humiliation, and social separation. Spartan men grew their hair very long to show their citizenship. Helots had to wear dog-skin caps as a symbol of servitude.

The Spartans placed great value on citizenship and freedom. They did not believe in citizenship by birth. They had a system in which citizenship was earned and had to be maintained.

To claim the title of Spartiate (SPAR-shee-aht), which was a full citizen of Sparta, a man had to trace his lineage back to the Dorians, the valley’s original conquerors. As such, the number of Spartan citizens never exceeded 10,000.

The military requirements made citizenship even more difficult to attain. A Spartiate had to participate in and maintain the syssitia (sih-SIT-ee-uh) system. The syssitia was the communal dining and barracks of the Spartan infantry.

Helots farmed the land under the watchful eyes of Spartan wives, while the state required the infantry to commit to communal life and full-time training. Existing members had to vote a man into the syssitia. Those who failed lost their standing in the mess hall and their rights in the barracks.

Spartan training began an early age in the Agoge. The Agoge (uh-GOH-gay) was the state-sponsored military training system that all men had to complete. The system sought to eliminate personal identity, thereby creating an unstoppable warrior who was entirely dependent on his comrades.

Failure to complete the program rendered a man a hypomeiones (hy-po-MY-oh-neeze), an inferior coward who would face life as a social outcast, subject to humiliation until their death.

Sparta created an egalitarian caste of warriors bound by a powerful social contract and without a motivation to pursue wealth or rise above their peers.

Simply put, Spartiates viewed one another as Homoioi (ho-MOY-oy), a group of equals in the eyes of the state and their brothers in arms. As equals, the Spartans ate the same food, wore the same clothes, and had the same goal, unity in their veneration of the state and its laws.

The Spartan diet reveals the remarkable level of their commitment. Spartan warriors ate a monotonous, awful dish known as melas zomos, or black broth. Melas zomos consisted of pig’s blood, vinegar, salt, and lentils. It was believed to foster strength.

A visitor to Sparta once remarked, “Now I know why the Spartans do not fear death.”

The Spartan agoge (uh-GOH-gay) began at birth, when elders examined Spartan children to assess their strength and fitness. Near Mount Taygetus, at a somber location called the Apothetae, infants deemed too weak or sickly by the tribal elders were abandoned to die.

For the Spartans, the physical training began at an early age. The historian Plutarch noted: “As for their education, it was a training in obedience…all the rest of their training was intended to make them obey commands, endure hardships, and conquer in battle.”

The state took Spartan boys from their families at around age 7 to live in groups called agelai (ah-gel-EYE). In the agelai, the boys would learn to walk the path of the warrior. Physically and mentally broken down by deprivation and being separated from their families, the boys learned to rely on their peers.

During this phase, instructors gave boys near-starvation rations to force them to steal food. Boys caught stealing were whipped for their lack of stealth.

One famous story tells of the lengths the boys would go in pursuit of these goals. According to legend, a young Spartan who stole a fox hid it beneath his tunic. He let the terrified animal tear out his innards and kill him, rather than cry out and face shame for being caught.

Subsequent training focused on physical strength, military skill, and advanced military strategy. The program ended at age 18 with two final initiations.

The first was the ritual of the cheeses, which involved placing a stack of cheese upon the altar at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. As the boys tried to steal the cheese, Spartan elders whipped them, spilling their blood on the altar as a sacrifice.

The second ceremony, known as the krypteia, formally signaled a trainee’s entry into the Spartan military. During the Krypteia, the state sent young men into the countryside with only a knife. They had to survive by hunting and killing any Helots they found after dark.

This gruesome event had two somber purposes. It kept the helots in a state of terror and submission. It also gave Spartans their first chance to kill, a skill they needed to get used to.

Spartan society was governed by an oligarchy. A small group of men, known as the Ephors, commanded the Spartan government. The Ephors served as the government’s bureaucratic arm and collaborated with the dyarchy, the state’s two hereditary kings.

The two kings came from Sparta’s two separate, competing royal bloodlines: the Agiads and the Eurypontids. The two kings claimed direct descent from the Greek demigod, Hercules.

Claiming such a lineage gave the two dyarchs incredible authority, grounded in divine right. The kings participated in and led every battle, just as Leonidas did at the Battle of Thermopylae.

The dyarchy ensured that Sparta would still have a king if the first died in battle. Losing a king was very possible. Unlike the Persian King Xerxes, the kings led from the front. They were the tip of the Spartan spear, leading as Hercules would have.

To ensure succession, the Spartans passed a law that allowed only one king to fight at a time.

The laws and rules of the state largely fell to the jurisdiction of the “elders,” a group of 28 men over age 60, the age of military retirement in Sparta. The elders, elected to serve for life, were selected under the supervision of a group of five sequestered judges.

As each candidate passed before the assembled Spartans, the judges assessed the crowd’s reaction to determine the outcome.

Aristotle, who was a critic of Sparta, downplayed the process when he noted: The manner in which they elect their elders is also childish… for it is not right that a man who is to be considered worthy of the office should seek it himself; he should be appointed to it whether he wants it or not… and the judges of the election are too easily influenced by the shouting.”

In a rare gesture of democracy, the Elders submitted their approved laws to all free Spartan males for their consent.

Spartans demanded absolute obedience to their legal code, viewing the laws as the divine words of Apollo.

In an interesting twist, unlike their constitutional neighbors, the Spartans did not write down their laws, in part because they held a general distrust of literacy. Unlike the Athenians, who valued learning and literacy, the Spartans viewed literary pursuits as a weakness.

Spartan children were literate only to the degree necessary to serve the Spartan state. As noted by the historian Plutarch: Of reading and writing, they learned only enough to serve their turn.

What we know about the Spartans comes exclusively from their Greek neighbors, such as Plutarch, since the Spartans did not write their own histories and relied on oral tradition.

The Spartan literary tradition is often described as “laconic,” a term that means brief and blunt.

A famous instance of the Spartans’ concise way with words is the well-known threat they received from Phillip II, the father of Alexander the Great.

Philip sent a message to the Spartan leadership council that read: You are advised to submit without further delay, for if I bring my army into your land, I will destroy your farms, slay your people, and raze your city.

The Spartan reply, an epic one-word response: “If.”

The role that Spartan women played was also unique among the ancient Greek world, particularly compared to their Athenian counterparts.

In one of the great paradoxes of the ancient world, Athens, the birthplace of democracy, kept its women in near-total domestic seclusion, while Spartan women were known for their liberty.

Sparta produced the most liberated, physically fit, and economically powerful women in the Greek world. Spartan women could freely interact within the state; they could be out in public, speak their minds to men, and own land and property.

Because Spartan men spent so much time away from home, Spartan women exercised more power in the community and in their homes than in any other Greek society. Their only limitations were not serving in the military and not voting in the equal assembly.

Spartan women were valued for their roles in bearing the next generation of Spartan warriors and in increasing the Spartan population, a persistent concern.

Spartan women carried the same ethos of the military state as their husbands did. One famous quote attributed to a Spartan mother sending her son off to battle was:

“Come back with your shield or on it”.

Sparta was a society that pursued strength, discipline, and unity with unmatched intensity, forging a reputation as warriors that echoed across time to today. Yet the same system that made Sparta powerful also made it brittle, unable to adapt as the world around it changed.