Sparta Strengths And Weaknesses

Sparta...was it really worth all the attention we give it here in America. We write movies about its strong military and tough culture and glorify its way of life ignoring the actual atrocity that was the Spartan society. Sparta was a Greek city-state located on the Peloponnesus peninsula The city-state’s society was based on its brutal educational system. This system was known as the agoge system and it was basically a military training that the young Spartan boys were forced to go through from the young age of seven to the age of twenty-one. (thirteen years of training). Sparta’s agoge system had many weaknesses but it also had many strengths. Which one outweighed the other? To me the answer is obvious. The weaknesses of the Spartan society outweighed the strengths because the Spartans destroyed families, they abused their youth and they murdered their own people.

At that age he was removed from his family and, from his eighth to twenty first year, he was educated by the state according to the rigorous [military-like] discipline.”(Doc, A)This way of life was unhealthy for the children because the only adults they ever met were the abusive army generals. The children were almost always fighting or training and would never have had time to relax. Also, in addition to the young boys away, the daughters were separate from their families as well. This was because the Spartans believed in training the girls for childbirth from a young age. Due to this separation, the Spartans most likely did not know what the word “family” even meant. This weakened Sparta mainly because it obliterated any possible family connections, which is something most successful modern societies value today. Depriving its people of non-military human interactions was a major flaw in the Spartan