Spartan men devoted their lives to military service, and lived communally well into adulthood. Spartans, who were outnumbered by the Helots, often treated them brutally and oppressively in an effort to prevent uprisings. Spartans would humiliate the Helots by doing such things as forcing them to get debilitatingly drunk on wine and then make fools of themselves in public.
This practice was also intended to demonstrate to young people how an adult Spartan should never act, as self-control was a prized trait.
Methods of mistreatment could be far more extreme: Spartans were allowed to kill Helots for being too smart or too fit, among other reasons. Unlike such Greek city-states as Athens, a center for the arts, learning and philosophy, Sparta was centered on a warrior culture. Male Spartan citizens were allowed only one occupation: soldier.
Indoctrination into this lifestyle began early. Spartan boys started their military training at age 7, when they left home and entered the Agoge. The boys lived communally under austere conditions. They were subjected to continual physical, competitions which could involve violence , given meager rations and expected to become skilled at stealing food, among other survival skills. The teenage boys who demonstrated the most leadership potential were selected for participation in the Crypteia, which acted as a secret police force whose primary goal was to terrorize the general Helot population and murder those who were troublemakers.
At age 20, Spartan males became full-time soldiers, and remained on active duty until age In the phalanx, the army worked as a unit in a close, deep formation, and made coordinated mass maneuvers. No one soldier was considered superior to another. Going into battle, a Spartan soldier, or hoplite, wore a large bronze helmet, breastplate and ankle guards, and carried a round shield made of bronze and wood, a long spear and sword.
Spartan warriors were also known for their long hair and red cloaks. Spartan women had a reputation for being independent-minded, and enjoyed more freedoms and power than their counterparts throughout ancient Greece.
While they played no role in the military, female Spartans often received a formal education, although separate from boys and not at boarding schools.
In part to attract mates, females engaged in athletic competitions, including javelin-throwing and wrestling, and also sang and danced competitively. As adults, Spartan women were allowed to own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the helots. Marriage was important to Spartans, as the state put pressure on people to have male children who would grow up to become citizen-warriors, and replace those who died in battle.
Men who delayed marriage were publicly shamed, while those who fathered multiple sons could be rewarded. In preparation for marriage, Spartan women had their heads shaved; they kept their hair short after they wed. Share Information. Specialty Products. Catalogs, Flyers and Price Lists. Open Access. Open Access for Authors.
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He withdrew two units of sub-Similars—neither manned by full Spartiates—from the line and deployed them on his left flank, then commanded two regiments of Similars to withdraw from the right flank and fill the gap.
But, putting the safety of their unit-mates before the good of the army as a whole, the two Similar regimental commanders refused to obey the order. This left a dangerous gap in the Spartan left wing. Their opponents poured through the gap, forcing back the Spartan left and inflicting numerous casualties. A lesser army would have collapsed. But King Agis led the Spartan center in a confident advance and quickly put the troops facing them to flight. The victorious Spartan soldiers marched home, just in time to celebrate an important festival on their busy religious calendar.
They also banished the two regimental commanders who had refused the order, charging them with cowardice. The defeat of the Athenians and their allies at Mantinea proved a propitious sign for the rest of the war.
Although it dragged on for another fourteen years, Sparta eventually got the upper hand; Athens surrendered in B. Sparta and Persia, the great territorial empire of the East, which eventually entered the war on the Spartan side, divided the spoils: Persia regained control of the culturally Greek western littoral of Anatolia. Sparta, now unquestionably the dominant mainland Greek state, established friendly governments and garrisons in island and northern Greek states formerly subject to Athens.
It seemed the dawn of a new Spartan century. Yet only thirty-four years later, at Leuctra, Sparta was permanently removed from the ranks of great Aegean powers. Leuctra was not just a setback—it marked the end of Spartan power and influence. Many of the Fringe Dwellers seem not to have been particularly hostile to the Spartan regime, but neither did they have any reason to be particularly loyal to the Similars when it came to a crunch.
Beneath the Fringe-Dwellers was the enormous serf caste of Helots. The Helot was bound to the soil; he could not be bought and sold, as could a chattel slave, but neither could he move from the farm to which he was assigned, and he owed a significant part of the annual harvest to the Spartan Similar who was assigned by the state to be his master.
Helots initially came in two main varieties: those who were natives of Laconia, and the Messenians. The Messenian Helots, residents of the westernmost finger of the Peloponnese, had once been free citizens of their own polis; they were conquered by Sparta in colonial wars of the eighth and seventh centuries b. Despite centuries of subjugation, the Messenian Helots remembered their free origins; they told tales of their brave resistance in ancient conflicts with the Spartans.
These folk memories stimulated the will to resist whenever the chance arose, the Messenian Helots rose up against their masters and fled to the steep slopes of Mount Ithome, which looms over the fertile Messenian plain. The best documented of the Messenian uprisings occurred in B. A generation later, during the Peloponnesian War, Helots flocked to the fortified Athenian camp at Pylos—it was Spartan panic at the specter of Athenian support for armed Helot insurgency that precipitated the rash action that led to the Sphakteria debacle.
Spartan society was completely dependent on the systematic exploitation of the Helots, both as agricultural laborers and as porters during military expeditions: at Plataea, during the Persian Wars, each Spartan hoplite was attended by seven Helots.
But since the Helots, especially those of Messenia, were far from willing accomplices, the Spartans were forced to expend enormous energies in attempting to keep their serf caste in its place. Sparta, as a society, was necessarily turned inward on and against itself.
The Similars spent their lives nervously policing the Helots for signs of revolt and obsessively watching each other for signs of non-conformity—because only an unbroken front would keep the much more numerous Helots at bay.
To remind everyone of the real state of affairs in Spartan territory, the Spartan Assembly formally declared war on the Helot population each year.
Individual Helots were ritually humiliated—for example, by forcing them to drink massive quantities of alcohol as object lessons for young Spartans in the virtues of moderation. The youthful members of the Krypteia snuck about Spartan territory, especially at night, and assassinated those Helots thought to be outstanding in any way—it could be fatally dangerous for a Helot to be regarded as handsome, intelligent, or ambitious.
On some occasions, the individualized, random violence of the Krypteia was not regarded as enough. And yet the Spartans soon found that they could not, in fact, do without Helot soldiers; a few years before Mantinea, the Spartan general Brasidas won notable victories against Athenian dependencies in northern Greece at the head of an army that included Helots serving as hoplites—presumably they had been recruited by the same sort of promises once offered to their less lucky compatriots.
But this time the Spartans evidently felt they could not afford to waste manpower resources: if the Helots died in battle, so much the better and good riddance to them while on campaign, but they were now regarded as too valuable to be wantonly slaughtered.
As in the case of sub-Similars, the unitary Helot caste was starting to be subdivided. The apparent switch in policy, from butchering ambitious Helots to employing them as mercenaries, points to a problem that had become serious by the last decades of the fifth century B. The general cause of the seemingly precipitous drop in Similar population is clear enough.
Battlefield casualties were relatively high, but even more importantly the harsh Spartan rules of duty and conformity made downward mobility from the ranks of Similars a relatively easy matter, and upward mobility into the Similars was well-nigh impossible. With the onset of the Peloponnesian War, Spartan society was no longer able to insulate itself effectively from the influences of the wider Greek and Mediterranean cultures: Spartans were necessarily sent far from home, away from the careful scrutiny of their fellows, and for long periods of time.
And as the Spartan economy became increasingly monetarized, landed wealth was concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Many a Similar consequently found himself incapable of keeping up his mess-unit contributions and was rendered an Inferior. The humiliation of being forced into the ranks of sub-Similars was too bitter for some Spartans to swallow.
In the last years of the fifth century, Spartan exultation over their victory in the Peloponnesian War was tempered by the exposure of a bold revolutionary plot by a group of Inferiors, led by one Cinadon. The demographic processes that had led to the social demotion of Cinadon and his fellows became even more pronounced in the decades after the Peloponnesian War. Having won the war, Sparta immediately began to reap the spoils of a dismantled Athenian empire.
Spartans were sent out as governors to the former Athenian dependencies. Not surprisingly, in light of their youthful education in theft, their ingrained habit of despising all non-Similars, and their sudden exposure to the luxuries of the non-Spartan world, these governors were typically rapacious and heartily resented by those they ruled. In the decades after the victory of , Sparta made and broke alliances with casual disdain for the international consequences; well-connected Spartans who engaged in foolish, greedy, or opportunistic military operations, often in blatant contravention of treaty obligations and traditional Greek mores, found that their home government was more than willing to turn a blind eye on their peccadillos.
With an ever-declining store of diplomatic credibility, the Spartans were increasingly put in the position of trying to maintain their authority by raw demonstrations of military might. The bloody battle of Coronea in B. And the Thebans, too, when they saw that their allies had fled toward Helicon, wishing to break through toward their men, closed their ranks and came stoutly on. For what happened next, Agesilaus can unquestionably be called brave, but he did not choose the safest course.
And striking shield against shield they pushed, fought, killed, and died.
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