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Sparta It’s hard for textbooks to say anything nice about the Spartans. Take up any world history textbook and read; you’ll find that the Spartans were “an armed camp,” “economically stagnant,” “Politically stagnant,” and other negative assessments. The reality, of course, lives somewhere beyond these value judgments. Greek history does, after all, come down to us through the eyes of the other major city-state in Greece, Athens, a better enemy and arrival of Sparta. The two represent diametrically (completely) oppose concepts of the Greek polis and its relations with other city-states; they also represent diametrically opposed concepts of the individual’s relationship to the state. Despite all the rhetoric in Athens and in the European historical tradition, we should keep in mind that the Spartans believe they lived in the best of all Greek worlds, and many of their Greek neighbors agreed with them. The rivalry, then, between Sparta and Athens, which would erupt into a disastrous war for Athens, was also an ideological and cultural rivalry. The single, overwhelming fact of Spartan history is the Messenean War. In the eighth century BC, Sparta, like all her neighbors, was a monarchy with a limited oligarchy. In 725, however, meeting land to feed a dramatically growing population, the Spartans marched over the Targets Mountains and annexed all the territory of their neighbor, Messenia. The Messeneans occupied a fertile plane in the Spartans found themselves with more than enough land to support themselves and their newly conquered people. However, like all concord people, the Messenian’s did not appreciate the loss of their independence. With the help of the city-state of Argo’s, the Messenian’s revolted in 640 BC. This was no ordinary revolt, for not only did the Messenian’s almost win, they almost destroyed Sparta itself. Here’s how the situation stood for Sparta at the end of the Messenian revolt. Almost defeated, controlling the territory of a subjected to population that outnumbered their own population 10 to 1, it was only a matter of time before this subjected population would overrun their conquerors. So the Spartans invented a new political system as dramatically revolutionary as Athenian democracy in the north: they turned their state into what amounts to a military state. The Messenians were turned into agricultural slaves called Helots. We described their lives as he life of a “serf,” for they worked small plots of land on the estates owned by Spartans; part of their produce went to the master of the estate, and the remainder went to the helot farmer and his family. There’s no question that the life of the helots was a miserable life. Labor was long and hard and the helots always lived right on the border of subsistence. But Spartan society itself changed. The military and the city-state became the center of Spartan existence. The state determine whether children, both male and female, we’re strong when they were born; we clean infants were left in the hills to die of exposure. Exposing week or sickly children was a common practice in the Greek world, but Sparta institutionalized it as a state necessity rather than a domestic choice. At the age of seven, every male Spartan was sent to military and athletic school. The schools talk toughness, discipline, endurance of pain (often severe pain), and survival skills. At 20, after 13 years of training, the Spartan male became a soldier. The Spartan soldiers spent his life with his fellow soldiers; he lived in barracks and ate all his meals with his fellow soldiers. He also married, but he didn’t live with his wife; one Athenian once joked that Spartans had children before they even saw the face of their wives. Government Spartan government was an odd affair, but its overwhelming characteristic was stability. The Spartans, in fact, had the most stable government in the history of ancient Greece (some historians call this stability, "political stagnation"). At the top of government was the monarchy; the monarchy, however, was a dual monarchy- they had to kings. Below the monarchy was a council that was composed of the two kings plus 28 nobles, all of whom were over 60, that is, retired from the military. The council debated and set legislative and foreign policy, and was the supreme criminal court. Below the council (or above it), was an assembly of all the Spartan males (a democracy, in other words) that selected the council and approved or vetoed council proposals. Above the mall, however, was a small group of five men known as the Ephors. For all practical purposes, Spartan government was run by the Ephors, for these five men lead the counsel, ran the military, ran the educational system, ran the infant selection system, and head veto power over everything coming out of the council for the assembly. They even had power to depose (remove) the king; however, they needed powerful divine proof (in the form of omens or oracles) to exercise this power. So what kind of government was Spartan government? It was a democratic timocratic monarchial oligarchy. Chew on that a few times. The anxiety-ridden situation with the helots led the Spartans to fear even their neighbors, who were often sticking their spoons in that pot to brew up trouble. So in the sixth century BC, the Spartans began to set their military sites on neighboring states. However, when they conquered their neighbor, Tegea, they set up a truce with them rather then annex their land and people. They demanded instead an alliance. Tegea would follow Sparta in all its foreign relationships, including wars, and wood supply Sparta with a fixed amount of soldiers and equipment. In exchange, the Tegeans could remain an independent state. This was a brilliant move on the part of the Spartans. In a short time, Sparta had formed alliances with a large number of states in the southern part of Greece (Called the Peloponnesus), and had become the major power in Greece when the Persians invaded in 490 BC. Their power eclipsed that of even the powerful neighbor in the north, Athens.