Ancient Greece · Part 3 · The rise of the city-states · B1
Sparta: Soldiers, Helots and Women
Part 3 of Ancient Greece: Sparta was the most famous army in Greece and the strangest city. Its boys were trained as soldiers from the age of seven, its women were freer than other Greek women, and its whole way of life depended on a population of serfs, the helots, who did the work. Must, have to, mustn’t, don’t have to and be allowed to, with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
The bravest soldiers in Greece! Three hundred against a million Persians!
Seven thousand Greeks against a very large army, in fact. And the Spartans had help we rarely hear about.
The people who did all the work, so that the Spartans never had to.
Sparta lay in Laconia, in the south of Greece. In the 8th and 7th centuries BCE it conquered its neighbours in Messenia and turned them into helots: serfs who belonged to the state and had to farm the land and hand over much of the harvest. The helots greatly outnumbered the Spartan citizens.
Freed from work, Spartan men trained for war all their lives. Boys left home at seven for the agoge, a hard public training. Men ate together in military mess halls. The city had two kings at the same time, a council of elders and five officials called ephors. Spartans said their laws came from a lawgiver called Lycurgus, who may never have existed.
Spartan women could own land, exercised outdoors and were famous across Greece for speaking their minds. Sparta’s power ended in 371 BCE, when Thebes defeated its army at Leuctra and freed Messenia. Much of what we know about Sparta was written by admirers from other cities, long after Sparta’s great age.
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