Sparta

• 1. Introduction

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  Sparta sat in a valley ringed by mountains, a cluster of villages so unremarkable in appearance that the historian Thucydides warned future generations they would never believe its power matched its fame. He was right to worry. The city had no splendid temples, no grand continuous streets, no defensive wall for most of its history. Its citizens called themselves "homoioi" - equals - and banned themselves by law from trade, from manufacture, from the conspicuous display of gold and silver. And yet for roughly three centuries, from around 650 BC to 371 BC, Sparta stood as one of the most feared military forces in the ancient world.

  What kind of place produces soldiers who hold a mountain pass against the Persian empire with three hundred men? What kind of society legally bars its citizens from earning a living, yet sustains itself for generations? And why do the words "Spartan" and "laconic" still carry meaning in English today, more than two thousand years after the city's decline? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Land and Names

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  The Eurotas River, the largest river in Laconia, gave Sparta its drinking water and shaped the valley that became its natural fortress. To the west, Mount Taygetus rose to 2,407 metres. To the east, Mount Parnon reached 1,935 metres. To the north, hilly uplands climbed to around 1,000 metres, separating Laconia from Arcadia. These natural barriers meant the city was never fortified in its classical prime - the mountains did the work instead.

  The names attached to this place tell their own story of layered identity. In the earliest period, before 800 BC, the state was called Lacedaemon, a word that appears in the works of Homer and in the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Its earliest recorded form is Mycenaean Greek, ra-ke-da-mi-ni-jo, written in Linear B syllabic script. "Sparta" referred specifically to the main cluster of settlements in the Eurotas valley. A third term, Laconice, described the surrounding plateau and sometimes the broader territory under Spartan control.

  In mythology, Lacedaemon was a king, son of Zeus by the nymph Taygete, who named his country after himself and the city after his wife Sparta. He was credited with building the sanctuary of the Charites between Sparta and Amyclae, and a shrine to him stood near Therapne. The province in modern Greece bore the name Lakedaimona until 2006.

• 3. The Stratified Society

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  Thucydides once wrote that Spartan policy was "always mainly governed by the necessity of taking precautions against the helots." That single observation explains much of how Sparta was organised.

  At the top of the social structure sat the Spartiates, full citizens descended from the original inhabitants of the city. Below them were the perioikoi, free non-citizens who lived in the surrounding territory and handled the trade and manufacture that Spartiates were legally forbidden to perform. Their economic role, in a fertile territory with good harbours, gave them a stake in the system that ensured their loyalty. Below the perioikoi were the helots, state-owned people descended from Greeks the Spartans had conquered in Messenia and Laconia. The helots vastly outnumbered both groups above them.

  Helots were not chattel slaves in the manner of other Greek cities. They could marry, retain half the yield from the land they worked, practice religious rites, and own a limited amount of personal property. The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus records that arrangement. They also worked as household servants and travelled with the Spartan army as non-combatant support; at Thermopylae, the Greek dead included not only the three hundred Spartiates but also Thespian and Theban troops and a number of helots.

  But their relative privileges made them more dangerous, not less. Precisely because helots retained family ties, community identity, and the memory of being a conquered people - the Messenians - they had the means to organise. There was at least one major helot revolt, around 465-460 BC, that lasted a decade before ending in a negotiated withdrawal from the Peloponnese. Each year when the Ephors took office, they ritually declared war on the helots, allowing Spartans to kill them without incurring ritual pollution. The Krypteia, a secretive institution involving graduates of the agoge, was tasked with keeping the helot population in fear. Thucydides records that on one occasion, two thousand helots were selected as supposedly freed men, crowned themselves, and went around the temples rejoicing - and were then quietly killed, with no one ever learning how each one died.

  By the mid-4th century BC, Aristotle was already commenting on the alarming decline in Spartiate numbers. From a peak of around 9,000 at an earlier period, citizenship had fallen below 1,000 by his day, and stood at roughly 700 at the accession of Agis IV in 244 BC.

• 4. The Agoge and Military Life

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  Male Spartan citizens began military training at age seven, when they entered the agoge system. Boys lived in communal messes and, as Xenophon recorded - he sent his own two sons through the agoge as foreign students - they were fed just enough that they were never sluggish from fullness but always had a taste of going without. They were trained to steal food when necessary. Beyond physical training and weapons, they studied reading, writing, music, and dancing. Special punishments were imposed if a boy failed to answer questions sufficiently laconically - that is, briefly and wittily.

  Each boy was expected to take an older male mentor, typically an unmarried young man. The older figure was meant to serve as a substitute father and role model. Xenophon, an admirer of the system, explicitly denied that the relationship was sexual; other ancient sources are less certain.

  Some boys became members of the Krypteia, the unit responsible for terrorising the helot population. This was part of the same educational structure that produced soldiers celebrated throughout the Greek world.

  At age twenty, a Spartan citizen joined one of the syssitia, obligatory dining clubs of roughly fifteen members each. He would remain in the active reserve until age sixty. Men were encouraged to marry at twenty but could not live with their families until they left active service at thirty. The aspis, the round shield, carried symbolic weight that no other piece of equipment matched. It was less of a disgrace to lose a helmet or breastplate than to lose the shield, because the shield also protected the man standing to the left. Its loss meant abandoning a comrade; its retention was a statement of belonging to something larger than oneself.

  Aristotle was skeptical of what all this produced. He argued that by concentrating on martial training alone, the Spartans turned men into machines and made them inferior even at war.

• 5. Spartan Women

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  Queen Gorgo, wife of Leonidas I and daughter of king Cleomenes, appears in Herodotus as a child advising her father to refuse a bribe. She later identified a warning about the Persian invasion hidden beneath a wax-covered wooden tablet after Spartan generals had failed to find it. Plutarch records a quip attributed to her: when a woman from Attica asked why Spartan women were the only ones who could rule men, she replied that they were the only ones who were mothers of men.

  Gorgo's prominence was not exceptional by Spartan standards. Spartan girls received formal education, including mousike - music, dancing, singing, and poetry - and choral training that prepared them to participate in the cults of Helen and Artemis. In no other city-state of classical antiquity did women receive any kind of formal education. Plato praised Spartan women's capacity for philosophical discussion.

  Spartan law forbade the marriage of a girl until she was in her late teens or early twenties, a deliberate contrast to cities like Athens where girls were commonly married at twelve or thirteen. The stated reason was to ensure healthy offspring, but the practical effect was to spare women the health damage associated with adolescent pregnancy. In other Greek cities, the median age of death for women was 34.6 years, roughly ten years below that of men. Spartan women, better fed from childhood and physically active, fared considerably better.

  Property law reinforced female standing in a concrete way. In later classical Sparta, when the male population had fallen sharply due to military losses, women were the sole owners of at least 35 per cent of all land and property in the city. Divorce laws applied equally to men and women. An heiress in Athens was required to divorce her husband and marry her nearest male relative to keep property within the paternal line; in Sparta, no such obligation existed.

  In 396, Cynisca, sister of king Agesilaus II, became the first woman in Greece to win an Olympic chariot race. She won again in 392 and marked both victories with permanent monuments: an inscription in Sparta and a set of bronze equestrian statues at the Olympic temple of Zeus.

• 6. Military Power and Its Limits

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  In 480 BC, king Leonidas led a force of roughly 300 Spartiates, 700 Thespians, and 400 Thebans to hold the pass at Thermopylae against the Persian army of Xerxes. The Spartans had received advance warning from their deposed king Demaratus and consulted the Delphic oracle, which proclaimed that either a Spartan king must die or Sparta would be destroyed. Leonidas died in the battle. The following year, at Plataea in 479 BC, Sparta assembled its full strength under Pausanias and led a Greek alliance to a victory that ended Persian ambitions in Europe.

  After those wars, Sparta entered its period of widest reach. It defeated Athens and dismantled the Athenian empire through the Peloponnesian War, which ended in 404 BC with Lysander's naval victory at Aegospotami. During the subsequent Spartan hegemony, armies under Agesilaus II pushed into the western Anatolian satrapies of the Achaemenid empire. At peak strength around 500 BC, the city had between 20,000 and 35,000 citizens, with a likely total population including helots and perioikoi of 40,000-50,000.

  The limits were structural. Spartan citizenship passed by blood and could not easily be replenished. Each military loss reduced the Spartiate pool, and no mechanism existed to replace those citizens quickly. When Sparta suffered a severe defeat at the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC at the hands of Epaminondas of Thebes, the losses proved unrecoverable. The defeat also freed Messenia from Spartan control, depriving the city of the helot labour that its agricultural economy depended on. Terminal decline followed.

  Philip II of Macedon invaded and devastated much of Laconia in 338 BC, expelling Spartans from their territory without seizing the city itself. When Philip sent a message warning that if he invaded Laconia he would "turn you out", Sparta's reply was a single word: "if". When Alexander the Great sent 300 suits of Persian armour to Athens after the Battle of Granicus, the dedicatory inscription read: "Alexander, son of Philip, and all the Greeks except the Spartans, give these offerings taken from the foreigners who live in Asia." Sparta's exclusion was the point.

  In 192 BC, Sparta was forced into the Achaean League, ending its political independence after the defeat of its final king Nabis.

• 7. The Spartan Afterlife

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  After the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC, Sparta recovered a measure of autonomy as a free city and became a tourist destination for the Roman elite who came to watch what remained of Spartan customs. The emperor Caracalla, preparing for his campaign against Parthia in 214 AD, recruited a 500-man Spartan cohort and styled it as a phalanx. A gravestone found for a soldier of that unit, Marcus Aurelius Alexys, shows him lightly armed, with a pilos-like cap and a wooden club - not the bronze-armoured hoplite of legend. The unit was presumably disbanded in 217 after Caracalla's assassination.

  In 396 AD, Visigoths under Alaric I sacked the city. Population gradually shifted to the nearby settlement of Mystras during the medieval period. Modern Sparta was re-founded in 1834 by a decree of king Otto of Greece and is today the capital of the Laconia administrative region.

  The admiration of Sparta, known as Laconophilia, survived the city itself by centuries. The French classicist Francois Ollier warned in his 1933 book Le mirage spartiate that a major scholarly problem is that all surviving ancient accounts of Sparta were written by non-Spartans who often idealised their subject excessively. No accounts written by Spartans themselves have survived, if any were ever committed to writing. Jean-Jacques Rousseau praised Sparta's austere constitution over Athenian sophistication. Revolutionary and Napoleonic France used Sparta as a model of purity. A German strain of Laconophilia, initiated by Karl Otfried Muller, linked Spartan ideals to claims of Dorian racial superiority, and in the 20th century Adolf Hitler praised the Spartan practice of limiting population and described the relationship of Spartiates to helots as a racial hierarchy to be emulated.

  The Tsakonian language, still spoken in the Tsakonia region of Greece, remains the only surviving descendant of the ancient Doric dialect that Sparta spoke - a thread connecting the present to a city that preferred deeds to documents and left almost nothing in its own voice.