Sparta

Origins

Sparta was founded as the dominant settlement of the Laconian plain in the southern Peloponnese, probably in the 10th or 9th century BC. By the 8th century it had subjugated its neighbour Messenia in two long wars (c. 740–720 BC and c. 660–640 BC) and reduced the entire population of the southwestern Peloponnese — perhaps 200,000 people — to the status of Helots: state-owned serfs bound to the land of individual Spartan citizens. The Helot system was the foundation of Spartan society. It provided the agricultural surplus that supported the citizen class and freed Spartan men to spend their adult lives in military service. It also produced the chronic security problem that shaped Spartan policy for the next four centuries.

The Lycurgan system

The traditional Spartan constitution was attributed to the semi-legendary lawgiver Lycurgus, conventionally dated to the 9th or 8th century BC. The actual development was more gradual but had stabilized by approximately 600 BC into the distinctive form known to the classical Greek world:

Political structure: two hereditary kings (from two royal lines, the Agiads and the Eurypontids) sharing executive authority; a Gerousia (council of elders) of 28 men over 60, elected for life; five Ephors (annual executive magistrates) chosen by lot among the citizens; and an assembly of all adult male citizens that ratified policy by acclamation.

Social structure: three classes — the Spartiates (full citizens), the Perioeci (free non-citizens in surrounding settlements), and the Helots (state-owned serfs).

Military and social training: the agōgē — a state-run system of compulsory military and athletic education from age 7 to 30 for all Spartiate boys, designed to produce the homogeneous professional infantry that gave Sparta its military reputation. Spartans were the only fully professional citizen-soldiers in the Greek world; every other Greek city raised hoplite infantry from its part-time landholding citizens.

Economic restrictions: gold and silver coinage was prohibited; iron spits were used as currency; commerce, manufacturing, and most professional occupations were forbidden to citizens.

The result was a society peculiar by Greek standards: militaristic, austere, conservative, hostile to foreign cultural influences, and demographically fragile. The Spartiate citizen body had stood at approximately 8,000–10,000 at the start of the Persian Wars in 490 BC. By the 4th century BC it had collapsed to under 1,000 — a long-running demographic problem that Sparta never solved and that eventually broke its great-power status.

The Persian Wars

Sparta’s military reputation was established and amplified during the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC). The famous Spartan stand at Thermopylae in August 480 BC — under King Leonidas, with approximately 300 Spartans and several thousand allied Greeks holding the pass for three days against the army of Persian Xerxes I — was a tactical defeat but a strategic and cultural triumph. Leonidas and his Spartans were killed almost to the last man; the cultural memory of the engagement shaped Greek and later European political imagination for two and a half millennia.

The decisive land engagement of the war was the Battle of Plataea (August 479 BC), at which the Spartan regent Pausanias commanded the combined Greek army that defeated the surviving Persian force. The naval victory at Salamis the year before had been Athenian; Plataea was Spartan. Sparta was, by 478 BC, the dominant military power on the Greek mainland.

The Peloponnesian War

The Persian Wars had produced a brief Spartan-Athenian alliance. It did not last. Through the 470s and 460s BC, Athens organized the Aegean cities into the Delian League — a maritime alliance that became, by the 450s, an Athenian empire. Sparta led the rival Peloponnesian League of mainland states. The two leagues fought, with intermissions, for most of the second half of the 5th century BC.

The Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), the great civil war of classical Greek civilization, was won by Sparta. Athens surrendered in 404 BC after the loss of its Aegean fleet at the Battle of Aegospotami. The walls of Athens were dismantled to the accompaniment of Spartan music. Sparta installed pro-Spartan oligarchies in subject cities and briefly became the hegemon of the entire Greek world.

The hegemony lasted approximately 30 years. Spartan military and political behaviour proved deeply unpopular with allies and former enemies alike, and Spartan demographic decline made sustained imperial commitments impossible.

Decline

The decisive defeat was the Battle of Leuctra (6 July 371 BC), at which the Theban general Epaminondas — using a new tactical formation built around an elite professional unit called the Sacred Band — defeated a Spartan army under King Cleombrotus. Cleombrotus was killed; approximately 400 of the 700 Spartiates present died with him. The defeat was demographically catastrophic for a citizen body that had already shrunk to perhaps 1,000–1,500 men.

Epaminondas followed up by invading the Peloponnese in 370 BC, freeing the Messenian Helots, and refounding the city of Messene with explicit anti-Spartan intent. The Spartan economic base — Messenian Helot agriculture — was permanently lost. Sparta survived as a regional power but never again threatened the great-power balance of the Greek world.

The city was sacked by Visigoths in 396 AD, abandoned in the late Roman and Byzantine periods, and replaced by the small medieval town of Mystras above the original site. Modern Sparti, the capital of Laconia, was refounded in 1834 by King Otto of Greece.