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 there was a lean and mean military rule that everyone else feared. 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 they lived in the best of all Greek worlds, and many of their Greek neighbours agreed with them.

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 seven 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 at age 7 and trained. The idea was to produce strong women who could have healthy babies and also who 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 30, but lived in barracks instead.

Living in Sparta

Spartan citizens were forbidden by law from trade or manufacture, so anything that was made was made by people who were not true citizens or slaves. The Spartans did not use coins, but bars of iron. This made trade quite difficult. To keep control over their people, the Spartans had a secret police. Women were encouraged to have as many children as possible for the good of the state.

Sparta had no splendid temples or public buildings. Instead it looked like a group of villages.

Spartan versus Athens

Sparta and Athens were the biggest and most powerful of the Greek cities, and they had completely different ideas of how to live.

Nevertheless, they both had bigger and more powerful rivals, so, from time to time when they were attacked by the Persians, they fought together.

Once they had defeated the Persians, however, they turned against one another. But it was not easy for one state to win out over the other. This is because Athens was strongest with its navy and Sparta with its army. When Sparta attacked, Athens retreated behind its walls and supplied itself with food using its ships.

Eventually, the Athenians and the Spartans got involved in a thirty year long war (called the Peloponessian wars). They slogged it out between themselves for so long that, in the end they were like two punch drunk fighters. Both were fatally weakened, although in the end the Spartans won and forced the Athenians to pull down their city walls.

But the result was that these self-inflicted wounds meant that neither Athens nor Sparta could be powerful again, and it was left to a king from the north to rule the whole country and far more. This would be Alexander the Great.