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In the early part of the 6th century Sparta was defeated by neighbouring cities and the people decided that this was because, as people, they were too weak and not fit enough to defend themselves. So, from that time, the idea of extreme fitness and a city of soldiers developed.
Sparta chose not to have walls to defend itself. Without walls people knew they had to be tough and well trained all of the time – including women and children.
You can see how this made Sparta a very different place from Athens. No grand buildings, art and writing here. Instead it looked like a group of villages with a lean and mean military rule that everyone else feared.
Growing up in Sparta
The ordinary Spartan was essentially a soldier, trained to obey and endure. Shortly after birth, children were brought before the elders of the state, who decided whether it was to be reared or not. If found sick or weak, the baby was dropped off a cliff called the Place of Rejection, or left to die in the mountains. In this way the Spartans followed the rule of the Survival of the Fittest.
Boys were taken from their families at the age of six and trained in the art of warfare in the mountains. They were only allowed a cloak, no other clothes and no shoes. They were also given too little food, so they had to try to steal food from the farms – and if they were caught they were beaten. The point of this was that, in battle conditions, food is often not easy to come by, and so you have to know how to get by on little or to find it from somewhere. Spartan boys were not allowed back to their families until they were 20 – so they spent thirteen years being hardened up.
Girls in Sparta did not escape training. They too were taken from their families and trained. The idea was to produce strong women who could have healthy babies and who also knew how to fight if needed.
Girls were found a husband when they were 18 and then they could return home. But there was another side to this. Whereas in other cities women were kept in their homes all of the time, Spartan women could move around freely – in part because their husbands would not live at home until they were in their thirties, but lived in army barracks instead.
This was also important because Sparta controlled a bigger state than any other city – and much of
it had been captured from its neighbours, so there was always the risk of rebellion.
The city of Sparta was like one vast army. It put fitness and strength ahead of reading and the arts, so the people left no written records of themselves.
In the writings that have come down to us, there is hardly a good word to be said for the Spartans, but this is less surprising when we realise that all of this writing was done by their arch-rivals, the Athenians. The Spartans believed their way was the best, and many of their Greek neighbours agreed with them.
CITY, STATE AND WAR Fighting Spartans
E 2 Spartan soldiers preparing to advance on the Acropolis in Athens. They carried shields bearing the Greek letter L ( ), for Laconia, the area the Spartans controlled.
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