A little 400-500BC Greek History Part 2 - Sparta

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Sparta!

The other big player in classical Greece.

Sparta was THE superpower of Greece, mainly due to it's flagrant use of greek slaves (a real no-no to the the rest of Greece). Having alot of slaves meant Sparta could actually support a professional army. Most Greek cities' armies were made of regular citizens who donned armor and spear whenever needed. Having a fulltime professional army paid dividends as they we trained from the age of 7 to adulthood in fighting (see the agoge).

Their moment in the sun was the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC vs the Persians - this is the famous suicidal last stand of King Leonidas and his 300 hand picked spartans as well as a few thousand allies (athens, plataea, megara,?). The spartans were all killed, but they are credited with inspiring the rest of Greece to victory a year later in Plataea. We will definately check out the Thermopylae pass on our trip! Check out the movie "300" for a fictionalized version of events, but still gets the main points right (I've read Herodotus's account). The book "Gates of Fire" is also highly reccommended. It was the 300 movie that really got me started on my love of ancient greece.

After a few decades of minor skirmishes, slave revolts and earthquakes, Sparta's next big moment in history is the Peloponnesian War, which is my favorite historical event - I'm very glad Thucydides decided to write it's history! More details will come up later, but Sparta ended up wining a hollow victory over Athens thanks to it's alliance with its longtime enemy Persia.

Unfortuneately, Sparta was pretty "spartan" (where do you think the words spartan and sparse came from). They didn't believe in fancy buildings and walls, so there are not alot of ruins left for for us. Thucydides wrote:

"Suppose, for example, that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and foundations of buildings remained, I think that future generations would, as time passed, find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be"