Spartans

Origins

Sparta, in the region of Laconia in the southern Peloponnese, organized an entire society around producing one product: the hoplite. By the seventh century BC the Spartans had conquered neighboring Messenia and reduced its people, with the original Laconian underclass, to helots, state-owned serfs who farmed the land. The helots outnumbered the citizens many times over, and the fear of revolt shaped Spartan life. Freed from work by helot labor, full citizens, the Spartiates, could spend their lives training for war. For about three centuries Sparta had the most feared infantry of the Greek City-States.

Organization & Training

Male citizens entered the agoge at seven, a state upbringing of hardship, discipline and drill in which boys were kept hungry, lightly clothed and organized into packs under older youths. Adult men ate in common messes, the syssitia, and a man who could not pay his share of food lost his citizen rights. Citizens called themselves homoioi, "equals", and remained liable for service until sixty. The army was led by one of Sparta's two kings and was divided into units that other Greeks lacked, from the enomotia of a few dozen men up to the large mora; Xenophon describes six morai in his day. This chain of officers let Spartan formations wheel and countermarch under pressure, something ordinary citizen militias could not do. Pipers kept the phalanx in step: Thucydides describes the Spartans advancing slowly to the music of many pipers at Mantinea in 418 BC. Free non-citizens of Laconia, the perioikoi, also fought as hoplites.

Weapons & Equipment

Spartan equipment was the standard hoplite panoply, wielded with unusual cohesion. Each man carried the Hoplite Dory, a thrusting spear with a butt-spike, and the great round Greek Aspis, which covered his own left side and part of his neighbor's. Earlier Spartans wore the bronze Corinthian Helmet and a bronze cuirass, but by the late fifth century many had given up body armor for speed and wore the simple conical pilos helmet. For a sidearm they carried the famously short Greek Xiphos, and some Greek hoplites also used the curved Greek Kopis. The crimson cloak was uniform before uniforms existed, and by the late fifth century Spartan shields could carry the letter lambda, for Lacedaemon.

Notable Actions

The record made the myth. At the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC, King Leonidas and three hundred Spartans, with several thousand other Greeks, held the pass against Xerxes for three days before being surrounded. A year later a Spartan-led army crushed the Persians at Plataea, ending the invasion (see Greco-Persian Wars, and the Persian Immortals they faced). In the Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC Sparta and its allies defeated Athens. The surrender of about 120 Spartiates on the island of Sphacteria in 425 BC shocked Greece because Spartans were not supposed to surrender. Decline came from within, as the citizen body shrank relentlessly. At Leuctra in 371 BC the Thebans under Epaminondas broke the Spartan line, and Xenophon says about 400 of the 700 Spartiates present were killed. Sparta never recovered its power.

Legacy

The words "spartan" and "laconic", from Laconia and the Spartans' blunt short speech, entered many European languages. The Thermopylae stand remains the West's shorthand for defiance against the odds, retold from Herodotus to modern films. Historians warn that much of what we know comes from admiring outsiders, and that the Sparta of legend is tidier than the real one.

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