Sparta: History, State and Society

Apart from the acropolis and the temple of Artemis Orthia, only one more structure extant in today’s Sparta is thought to date from the Classical period. It is the Leonidaion, an odd rectangular construction made of stone blocks, which was reported to be the tomb of King Leonidas, fallen at the Thermopylae. Other traces of Antiquity in Sparta date from as late as the Imperial period, and they can be investigated by reading scholarly studies rather than by trying to guess what is concealed inside the fenced-off plots of land in which the archaeologists find the remnants of ancient – in fact, mainly Roman – buildings.

There are, however, two more sites in the vicinity of Lycurgus’s city that were of great importance in the Classical period. The first of them lies at least an hour’s walk from Sparta, on a hill called the Menelaion, from which spreads a wonderful panorama of the city and the Taygetus range. This is where ca. 700 BC the cult of Menelaus and Helen had stated, as we are informed by numerous votive objects. It would be interesting to know why it was founded so uncomfortably far from the city and in such an inaccessible place; perhaps this was because the Spartans traditionally believed that this was where Menelaus and his semi-divine wife Helen had once dwelt. The foundations of a small structure was indeed discovered close to the Menelaion, which Hector Catling (1998, 26) considers to be the remnants of a proto-palace from the second half of the fifteenth century BC. It is, however, also possible that the main Mycenaean centre was located in a still different place, close to Vaphio or Pellana.

The second of those sites lies even farther away. Walking southwards towards Gytheion, we shall reach the village of Amyklai, besides which we shall find the temple of Apollo Amyklaios. Today, a small Orthodox church stands on the site. The mighty wall shows how massive the temple must have been, and shards of old pottery scattered all around clearly indicate that in this remote but charming site we come truly close to the period from two and a half thousand years ago.

With the area of nearly 8,500 km², the ancient Sparta (Sparte, Doric: Sparta) was the largest polis of Greece proper. It encompassed Laconia (Lakonike ge) (ca. 5,000 km², Shipley 2004a, 569–598), Messenia (Messene) (ca. 3,240 km², Shipley 2004b, 547–568), and the island of Cythera (Kythera) (260 km²) located at the Peloponnesian shore. The citizens of Sparta were known as the Spartiates or the Laconians. The term Lacedaemonians, in turn, denoted both the citizens enjoying full rights and the perioikoi who did not have full political rights, but enjoyed personal freedom and autonomy in their settlements.

The citizens, who described themselves as homoioi (equal, similar, or even identical), did not engage in profit-making activities; maintaining the Spartiates was the task of the subjugated helots, who farmed the “land portions” (kleroi) belonging to the citizens. All Spartiates went through a formation period lasting from the age of seven to the age of twenty, during which their education was controlled by the state. Adult Spartiates spent most of their time together, participating in daily meals (syssitia), military drills, physical exercises, and the meetings of the People’s Assembly.

Sparta, a country of brave warriors who led an austere life and were boundlessly devoted to their homeland, has always aroused conflicting emotions: fascination and admiration, but also dislike and even hatred. Testimonies to of such attitudes are found both in the Antiquity and in later eras. The less was known about Sparta, the more readily the Spartan model was evoked.

As a model, Sparta was most often treated purely instrumentally. The point was not to look for the real picture of ancient Sparta, but to keep to the stereotypes, often selected with a bias, and in them to discover a confirmation of the already entrenched attitudes. The image of Sparta changed like a chameleon, getting adjusted to the environment that created it for its own needs. So far, the most extreme embodiment of this idealisation was, as Henri Irenne Marrou put it, “a totalitarian state”:

Its appropriation by the Third Reich resulted in the fact that after 1945, together with the whole array of stereotypes, Sparta landed in the scholarly purgatory. It began to gradually emerge from it in the 1970s, after a revival of Spartan studies began with the publication of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix’s research in 1972. The year 1983 is, in a sense, symbolic, having witnessed the publication of the German-language synthesis by Manfred Clauss, which contained the summa of information on Sparta at the time, and article Social Order and the Conflict of Ideas in Classical Sparta by Stephen Hodkinson (Hodkinson 1983, 239–281), published in the “Chiron” magazine, which opened a new era in the scholarly interest in Laconia. Despite the continuously advancing research, many questions still await an answer, among them the question whether Sparta was an ordinary or an exceptional polis. Until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was Athens that were seen as exceptional and Sparta as typical; but in the twentieth century, following the change in preferences regarding political systems, Sparta became exceptional, and Athens, ordinary. Interestingly, an outstanding authority on Sparta, Stephen Hodkinson (Hodkinson 1997; 1998; 2000; 2005; 2009, 417–472; 2018, 1, 29–57), considers it to have been “remarkably normal by Greek standards”, whereas an outstanding authority on the polis, especially the Athenian democracy, Mogens Herman Hansen (2009, 385–416) considers Sparta to have been exceptional.

The extent of information regarding Sparta naturally changed during the two hundred years of scholarly research on its history (cf. Kennel 2010, 2). Although today we know far more about it than we ever did, we are still at the start of the journey, since many doubts, even regarding issues which are central to our understanding of the phenomenon of Sparta, have not yet been cleared. Fortunately, however, we are able to quite clearly present the key moments in the history of Sparta.

Its beginnings go back to the arrival of the Dorians to the Peloponnese towards the end of the second millennium BC. In the tenth century, they lived in four villages on the banks of the Eurotas, which together formed a community centred around the temple of Athena Poliouchos on the acropolis and the nearby temple of Artemis Orthia. The fifth village, Amyclae, located some 6 km south from the others, joined the community in the ninth century, giving it its final shape. From then on those five villages, collectively known as Sparta, constituted the political centre of the Spartan state.

The Spartans themselves ascribed the creation of their state’s socio-political system to the great lawgiver, Lycurgus (cf. e.g. Hooker 1988, 340–345; Hölkeskamp 2010, 316–335). Before, Sparta had the very worst legal system (kakonomia); he introduced the best one, which the Spartans described as kosmos (order, good regulation) or eunomia (the condition of having good laws). Lycurgus is a semi-legendary figure. His Greek biographer, Plutarch of Chaeronea, wrote:

Investigating the historicity of Lycurgus is, however, a task that is productive and sterile at the same time, and certainly located outside the scope of this book; suffice it to say that the proposed dating of his lifetime and his reforms varies greatly, as they are placed in the ninth, eighth, and even seventh century BC. References to the “laws of Lycurgus” will appear repeatedly in the subsequent chapters of this book, but this does not indicate our taking a stance regarding the historicity of the lawgiver, but only serves to indicate that the ancients associated a given regulation or custom with him. This is because, while there is no certainty whether Lycurgus really existed, and if so, then when, we can be sure that the “laws of Lycurgus” did exist; this was the name which the Spartans (and other Greeks as well) gave to the set of regulations and customs in force in Sparta, even though those laws may have been introduced neither in the early period nor concurrently. In any case, until the beginning of the fifth century, as Massimo Nafissi (2018, 111) put it, “the whole edifice of political and social standards at Sparta was attributed to Lykourgos”.

Also, from a certain point in time the Spartans believed that it was Lycurgus who divided the nine thousand, or at least a half of that number (see below, p. 28), of plots of land (kleroi) among the citizens, thereby freeing them from the duty to work and allowing them to devote all their time to serving the state. The so-called Great Rhetra, which was ascribed to Lycurgus (Meier 1998, 186 ff.; Luther 2004, 29–59; Nafissi 2010) introduced the institution of the council of elders (gerousia) to Sparta and defined the relations between the gerousia, the two kings and the People’s Assembly (damos, apella):

The Great Rhetra was later amended by kings Theopompus and Polydorus, which limited the apella’s autonomy by giving the gerousia the right to rescind those of its decisions that would be deemed harmful to the state:

Before the amendment was introduced (although it cannot be ruled out positively that only after that), a five-person college of the ephors was established, which counterbalanced the power of the kings (and possibly the gerontes as well). With this, the political system of Sparta assumed its final form, which persisted, practically unchanged, until the turn of the fourth century BC.