Within the ancient world it took brains, brawn, and ingenuity; Sparta showed traits of all three. In the ancient world where wars raged, Sparta was an empire of world class fighters. Every Spartan was individually trained, this includes women. There are historians, like Plato, that argue that women caused the fall of Sparta. Although the fall of Sparta was not caused by women because: women were trained in the art of war beside men, women were educated like men, and women were in control of Sparta whenever the men were away.
Many experts believe when Sparta was first founded by the Dorians in 650 B.C.E., there were four quarters called; Limnai, Pitane, Cynosura, and Mesoa (Adkins 144) .Within the four quarters of Dorian came Sparta the citizens of Sparta called themselves Spartiatai (Spartiates); the Spartiates controlled the helots (slaves) and the neodamdeis (free slaves) (Adkins 27). The Spartan Civilization lasted about a thousand years, and although short lived; history will always remember the last stand of the three hundred.
In the Spartan army, the Spartans invented the phalanx, a formation where solders are in ‘close, deep, formations’; in the phalanx no man is stronger or weaker than each other (History Channel). Every Spartan warrior wore roughly thirty to fifty pounds into every battle. On average, a Spartan army was the maximum unit of ten thousand solders. Within every battle a Spartan warrior carried a spear, sword, helmet, armor, shield, and greaves (shin guards).
The Battle of Leuctra happened the year of 371 B.C.E., between the Spartans and the Thebes. The Spartan king in charge was Cleombrotos (who in the end was defeated) and the Theban king named Epimodondas (Martijn). At the beginning of the warm, when the...
... middle of paper ...
...s to battle. Spartans had ingenuity they were they first to think of women rights in the ancient world. Women were not the cause of Sparta because the women of Sparta were too strong, independent, educated, attributes of the Spartan Empire.
Works Cited
C.M. Bowra. Classical Greece, Time Incorporated, New York, Classical Greece, 1965,
Print.
"Deconstructing History: Spartans." HistoryChannel.com.Video, 2014, Web.
History Channel. "Battle of Thermopylae- Last Stand of the 300 Sparta."
HistoryChannel.com. N.p., n.d. Web.
G.L. Cawkwell, The Decline of Sparta, The Classical Quarterly (New Series) Volume 33, December 1983, The Classical Association, Article.
Lesley Adkins, Handbook to Life in Ancient in Ancient Greece, 1997, Print
“Sparta,” HistoryChannel.com. Topic, 2014. Web.
"Spartans," HistoryChannel.com. Video. n.d. Web.
Sparta was known for being strong, but was it really? In case you don’t know, Sparta was a Greek city-state. Sparta only focused on war. Spartans were only taught the basics of other topics. Spartans were trained for 13 years just to fight. Reading and writing were only taught in Sparta for practical reasons. The strengths didn’t outweigh the weaknesses. There were more weaknesses to Sparta than there were strengths. The strengths of Sparta didn’t outweigh the weaknesses for three reasons. The first reason is that the babies were killed just if they looked weak. The second reason is that the Spartans barely new anything about other topics (math, reading, writing, etc). The third and final reason is that the helots outnumbered the Spartans 50 to 1.
To look at this epistemologically, there is an understanding that almost every aspect involved in this culture was derived for the good of the polis. This seemed to be a very proud and arrogant people. A city with no walls, and in almost certainty, only natural born were allowed to earn citizenship. To even be called a Spartan meant years of fighting, service and status. Tyrtaeus states this argument best in the last line of his work. “Thus a man should endeavor to reach this high place of courage with all his heart, and, so trying, never be backward in war.” These writings are great resources for Spartan’s war enhanced values and societal customs, but lack in evidence of governmental affairs and religion.
... disciplines of knowledge and obedience and are some of the best equipped and most feared warriors of their time, their primary focus is the defense of Sparta. Persian forces are ill equipped with primitive weapons and a lack of armor, relying on sheer numbers instead of skill and built for mobility in order to move more quickly around the vast Persian Empire.
Like most Greek states of the Archaic and Classical Era, the Spartan city-state was a militaristic one. Sparta, however, took the idea to its extreme. In order to become the best soldiers, Spartan citizens had to dedicate their entire lives to the occupation. In fact to be a soldier – a hoplite – was the full infrastructure of Spartan society. While most Greek city-states looked down on labor, physical work, and even working for profit, they still had to work for a living, produce something. “The Spartans a...
When discussing the Spartan economy it is essential that the structure of Spartan society is explained. This structure directly effects Spartan economic production and its primary agrarian focus. The social structure of ancient Sparta was made up of three classes of individuals, the Spartiates, the Perioikoi, and the Helots. The Spartiates were native Spartans, those who had ancestry back to the first inhabitants of the settlement. The Homoioi—peers and equals—were at the top of the social pyramid, they were citizens with full rights, Spartiates. It was strictly forbidden for the Spartiates to engage in any economic activity at any time, rather they were devoted to military service and training. Family life for a Spartiate was limited, a
Spartan women were considered fundamentally more advanced than other women of Athens, due to the way that Spartan women were reared. Spartan women were treated equally to men, and given freedom like the men were. They were given the opportunity to train with men, and were even slightly more educated than their male cohorts. Spartan women were exceptionally more advanced than other women during this age due to these factors, and are a great example of strong women within past civilizations.
Archaeological evidence collected in ancient Laconia reveals great insight into the role and status of Spartan women until 371 BC. A compilation of written sources shows the unique treatment of women in Sparta compared with that of other ancient Greek societies. This treatment differs the economic, religious, marital, reproductive and social responsibilities from those of gender archetypes.
Sparta was a city-state based on strict military ruling, at the age of seven a young Spartan would start out training and be trained into killing machines. When a Spartan baby is born, high elite Spartan soldiers would observe the baby to see if it was healthy and strong, if not the baby was ill and weak so it would be taken up a mountain and left there to die. This is just one example that shows how Sparta only wants a strong army and doesn't care about anything else. Strict rules of the government made it so that every Sp...
Sparta was a strict military city-state. The people were Dorians who conquered Laconia. This region lies in the Peloponnesus, which lied in southern Greece. The invaders turned the conquered people into state owned slaves, called helots. Since the helots greatly outnumbered their rulers, Spartans established a strict and brutal system of control. The Spartan government had two kings and a council of elders who advised the monarchs. An assembly made up of all citizens approved all major decisions. From child-hood, a Spartan prepared to be part of the military. All newborn were examined and the healthy lived and the sickly were left to die. Spartans wanted future soldiers or mothers of soldiers to be healthy. At the age of seven, boys trained for a lifetime in the Spartan military. They moved to the barracks and endured brutal and extensive training.
In approximately 650 B.C., Sparta was formed in the Peloponnese peninsula in Laconia by several smaller city-states that merged together. Located near the fertile farmlands of the Eurotas River, the Peloponnese peninsula was an ideal area to establish a new civilization (Sekunda 3). Sparta, meaning “to sow,” was appropriately named because of its positioning in one of the few fertile valleys in Greece. After conquering its western neighbor Messenia, Sparta gained even more fertile land as well as the Taygetus mountain ranges. These mountains provided essential raw materials including timber and an abundance of wildlife. As a result of the Taygetus range, Sparta was rather isolated from the rest of Greece (Michell 4). This provides insight into the reason Spartan livelihood differed so greatly among other Greek city-states.
The women in Sparta were strong. They birthed warriors. They were warriors themselves. “They also underwent an intensive physical training program, which included discus and javelin throwing, and wrestling. The purpose of this training program was to ensure that they became fit breeders of Spartan babies.” (Garland, Robert. "The People." Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.
Helots were the original residents of the Laconian plain, the term Helots often means ‘prisoner of war’ and that is a good representation of what the Helots were, prisoners or slaves. Owned as property of the state they were assigned land that was owned by individual Spartans, they worked, lived on and made profit from the agricultural products derived from the land though a half of any harvest was directly given to the landowner. The helots produced all the food for the population of Sparta and worked incessantly to maintain the spartiate’s lifestyles, Tyrtaeus compared the helots to ‘Asses exhausted under great loads: Under painful necessity to bring their masters full half the fruit their ploughed land produced’. The tasks of the helots were generally agricultural though, when the Spartans w...
The lifestyle and in some occasions their occupations were chosen from the time they were born. For example, when a Spartan women gave birth to a boy, soldiers went to the place where the baby was born and examined it to determine the strength of the child. Uniquely then the baby is placed into a bath, but not a bathed in water, but wine to see its reaction (“Spartans”). If the baby squirmed and cried a lot then it would be taken away from the parents to become a helot, or a slave. If the child took the bath well, then it would one day become a soldier in the Spartan army (“Spartans”). The Spartans were particularly picky about their children, so much that infanticide was a major problem (“Spartans”). Children had a hard role to fill in Spartans society, because not only was the fate of the child determined by the family but also by the city-state in which the child lived. So if you were not as strong or as intelligent as others you were looked down upon (“Spartans”). The boys that were strong and intelligent though, were taking from their family at age 7 and h...
Unlike other Greek city states, women played an integral role in Spartan society as they were the backbone of the Spartan economic system of inheritance and marriage dowry and they were relied upon to fulfill their main responsibility of producing Spartan warrior sons. These principle economic systems affected wealth distribution among Spartan citizens especially among the Spartan elite class. Spartan women led a completely different life than women in most other ancient Greek city states, as they were depended upon to maintain Spartan social systems. In a society where the state is more involved in home life women had freedom of movement and they were permitted to communicate with men who were not their husbands. Women had domestic responsibilities including the maintenance of homes and farms when the men were on campaign, while the typical Greek female responsibilities such as weaving were delegated to slaves. Girls were raised much like Spartan boys as they were made to go through physical training insuring their success in fulfilling their most important role in society, child-bearing. The few primary sources on Sparta and Spartiate women, namely Aristotle, Plutarch, Herodotus and Xenophon were historians who lived after the prominence of ancient Sparta; therefore, the facts regarding the women’s influence in social, economic and political issues must be carefully interpreted and analysed with help from secondary sources.
In their youth, Spartan women were allowed to train with Spartan warriors. This was done in the belief that their training would give them the power to bear warrior sons (Robert R. Edgar). In fact, women in Sparta formed a military background in their youth. They were also as strong