Few ancient cities are as famous as Sparta, and few are as misunderstood. Its name has become an English word: “spartan” means austere and tough. The story of its three hundred warriors at Thermopylae has inspired poems, paintings, films and political movements for two and a half thousand years. Yet the Spartans themselves wrote almost nothing about their society, and most of what we know comes from outsiders, many of whom admired or feared them. This course asks how Sparta worked, what really happened at Thermopylae, and why the Spartan legend has proved so powerful.

The land

Sparta lay in Laconia, in the southern Peloponnese, the large peninsula of southern Greece. The city sat in the fertile valley of the Eurotas River, protected by mountains: the Taygetus range to the west and the Parnon range to the east. Unlike Athens, Sparta had no city walls for most of its history. Spartans boasted that their men were their walls.

Sparta was not a single compact city but a group of villages close together. Visitors were often surprised by how plain it looked. The historian Thucydides, an Athenian writing in the fifth century BCE, remarked that if Sparta were ever deserted, later generations would find it hard to believe it had been so powerful, because it had no grand temples or public buildings to match its fame.

Origins

Greek tradition held that the Spartans were Dorians, a group of Greeks who had moved into the Peloponnese after the collapse of the Mycenaean palace civilization around 1200 BCE. The Spartans also claimed descent from the hero Heracles. In Homer's Iliad, Sparta is the home of King Menelaus and his wife Helen, whose abduction caused the Trojan War, but that legendary Bronze Age Sparta was very different from the later city.

Lycurgus

The Spartans credited their unique system to a lawgiver named Lycurgus. According to tradition, he reformed Sparta's government and way of life after consulting the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, and then made the Spartans swear not to change his laws until he returned, after which he left and never came back. The biographer Plutarch, writing around 100 CE, began his life of Lycurgus by admitting that nothing could be said about him that was not disputed. Most historians today think Lycurgus is semi-legendary: the Spartan system developed gradually, over generations, and was later attributed to a single founder.

A short text preserved by Plutarch, called the Great Rhetra, or “Great Pronouncement,” is said to record an early Spartan constitution handed down from Delphi. It set out a council of elders with two kings and a regular assembly of citizens. Whatever its exact date, it suggests that Sparta had a structured government with popular participation earlier than most Greek cities.

The conquest of Messenia

The single most important event in Sparta's early history was the conquest of Messenia, the rich region to the west of the Taygetus mountains. In the Messenian Wars, probably fought in the late eighth and seventh centuries BCE, Sparta conquered its neighbors and turned much of the population into helots, an enslaved, unfree people bound to the land, who farmed it and handed over a large share of the harvest to their Spartan masters.

The conquest made Sparta rich in land, but it also created a permanent danger. The helots greatly outnumbered the Spartans and never accepted their condition. The second Messenian War was a long, bitter revolt. The Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, writing during that war, urged the Spartans to stand firm in battle and declared it noble for a brave man to fall fighting in the front ranks for his country. His poems were sung by Spartan soldiers on campaign for centuries.

A society shaped by fear

Many historians believe that the need to control a much larger enslaved population shaped almost every feature of Spartan life that later generations found remarkable: the constant military training, the communal discipline, the suspicion of outsiders and the reluctance to send armies far from home. Spartan society, on this view, was organized as a permanent armed camp, not only to fight other Greeks but to keep the helots down.

Worked example: reading a source about Sparta

Because the Spartans wrote little about themselves, historians depend on outsiders. Suppose you read in Plutarch that Lycurgus banned gold and silver coins and replaced them with heavy iron bars, so that wealth would be useless and greed would disappear. How should you treat this claim?

• Who wrote it, and when? Plutarch, a Greek writing under the Roman Empire, around eight centuries after Lycurgus was supposed to have lived.
• Why did he write? His Lives were moral portraits meant to teach virtue. A story about defeating greed fits that purpose.
• Is it supported elsewhere? Earlier writers such as Xenophon, who knew Sparta well in the fourth century BCE, do mention Spartan restrictions on money, and Sparta did not mint its own coins until late in its history.
• What is likely? Spartans probably did restrict the use of precious metals, but the neat story of one lawgiver abolishing greed is a later simplification.

Historians call the idealized image of Sparta created by outsiders the “Spartan mirage.” Learning to see through it, without dismissing everything ancient writers said, is the central skill this course will practice.