Sparta being very popular as a role model for certain users, why not have a civilized thread about, furthermore an informative one ? It will be a change from threads about the main plot device of Othello
Sparta was without any doubt the champion of hoplitic warfare in Classical Greece : it does not mean that it was accurately depicted. Spartans wrote very little about themselves (the only major Greek author from Sparta was Tyrtaeus, whose elegies were supposedly very moving, but there is 11 incomplete poems left from him) and the bulk of what is known about them come from a variety of authors that were not Spartans. Short of minor historians who copied other historians, the major works are ...
Plato, who wrote dialogues describing the Spartan system.
Pausannias, who wrote a criminally underestimated touring guide of Greece, depicting monuments and customs related to them
Aristotle, who wrote on the Spartan constituion
In chronologic order, Herotodus, Thucycdides, Xenophon and Plutarch who wrote in detail about Sparta
Plato and Xenophon and to a lesser degree Plutarch all suffered from varying degrees of laconophilia, which is not, to take an aphorism, having an hard-on for Gerald Butler oily abs, but admiring Sparta and wanting their institutions home (with if possible someone else taking the Helots jobs) (Platon and Xenophon certainly liked a lot Spartans, this said, but let's avoid lenghty discussions about backdoor shenanigans)
Those authors also wrote in the best of cases centuries after largely mythical institutions had been laid out, institutions that presumably changed over centuries. That's why, short of what we call in French the image d'Épinal (example : the spartan boy and the fox) it's pretty hard to have a definitive portrayal of Sparta, short that did not shouted all the time THIS IS SPARTA and were usually more clothed than the Chippendales.
I will make several posts on the matter, if people are interested, but let's start with demography and it's meaning for Sparta.
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Spartan demography
Sparta, of all Greek cities, had the most draconian (ZING) conditions for citizenship. (In addition to the usual be of ''Spartan birth'', they had to participate to traditional education, the agoge and both participate to communal dinners, syssities and especially pay their part to the syssities. Before ill fated reform attempt by Agis, Cléomène and Nabis, they bragged about giving citizenship to maybe three people since the time of Lycurgus (Tyrtaeus, a seer and his borther). While Lycurgus laid out a system that was about maintaining a body of citizen to fairly stable numbers,such stability was a far fetched dream. Sparta, more than any other Greek polis, suffered from acute ''oliganthropy'', decline of citizens
The matter seems very simple at first. Laconia (the core region of Sparta, hence words like ''laconism'' and the name actually used by Spartans to describe themselves, Lacedomonians) and Messania, the very unfortunate neighbours of Laconia, was divided in 9000 parcels of lands, one for each hoplite-each lot, a kleros, was to maintain, him, his family, and provide him foodstuffs for the sissyties as well as the means to buy and maintain his weapons. The kleros concept was quite common in Greece.
9000 lots = 9000 Spartans. It's very doubtful however that they ever reached 9000 citizens. This is common with all civilizations, but rather improbable high numbers are given for almost mythical encounters (such as Platées against the Persians) and much lower ones for more historical encounters. By the time of the Peleponesian War, less than a century after Platées, the Spartans mustered maybe 3500 men. A terrible earthquake is supposed to have killed 20 000 people in Sparta in -464, but it's very doubtful that such a deathtoll occured (IE, there were likely far less than 9000 to start with)
What appears the most obvious way of losing population with a city like Sparta is not always the answer-heroic last stands and ''come back with it or on it'' certainly resulted in lots of deaths, but hoplite warfare was not an especially deadly from a war-Spartans kept losing citizens because of social degradation, sometimes because of cowardice on the battlefield (usually meaning ''surrendering'', like at Pylos) but much more often because they lost their kleros to debts and become sub-citizens.
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Bump ? (Single one)