Sparta won Greece’s land wars, then lost its slave engine
Classical Sparta—Lacedaemon to the Greeks—rose in the seventh century BC as the Greek world’s top land power. Victory over Athens in 404 BC brought brief hegemony; Theban triumph at Leuctra in 371 BC and the freeing of Messenia gutted the slave labor that fed its army.
The Greeks called the state Lacedaemon; Sparta was its capital, a loose cluster of villages beside the Eurotas River in the south-eastern Peloponnese. Mount Taygetus (2,407 m) and Mount Parnon (1,935 m) walled the valley, and the harbour of Gytheio gave the landlocked city a way to the sea. The name reaches back to Mycenaean Linear B, and myth credited a king called Lacedaemon with naming the land after himself and the city after his wife, Sparta. One ancient observer predicted that later ages, seeing only its modest temples and village layout, would doubt its fame.
Society rested on rigid ranks. Full citizens, the Spartiates, were legally barred from productive work and devoted themselves to war after the harsh agoge training, while helots, state-owned enslaved locals who formed the vast majority, did the labour and suffered brutal treatment that sparked repeated revolts. Free Spartiate women had somewhat more legal rights than elsewhere in Greece. The system was credited to the semi-mythical Lycurgus, and the army’s fearsome reputation owed something to propaganda.
From the seventh century BC Sparta was the leading land power in Greece. It founded the Peloponnesian League in the sixth century, and under Leonidas and Pausanias its army was vital at Thermopylae and Plataea against Persia. Lysander’s naval win at Aegospotami ended the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC) in its favour, and Agesilaus II then campaigned in Anatolia. But Epaminondas of Thebes won at Leuctra in 371 BC and freed Messenia, stripping away the slave labour the city relied on.
The Achaean League annexed Sparta in the early second century BC. Under Rome it became a tourist destination, and a theatre-like structure built around 200 AD at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia hosted the ritual flogging of boys. Alaric the Visigoth sacked the city in 396 AD, and much of its population later drifted to nearby Mystras.
Source: Sparta
