People simply said he was a relative of the gods and let it go at that. No one remembered exactly who he was or where he had come from. It was covered by their strict laws, which had been written by an ancient king named Lycurgus. No one was rich, but that was a part of the Spartan plan. SPARTANS LINE THE STREETS TO CHEER THE PROCESSION OF THEIR VICTORIOUS ARMY.Īt home, serfs did the farm work and foreigners were the city’s only craftsmen and merchants. By the sixth century, all but two of the cities of the Peloponnesus had put their troops under Spartan command and Sparta was on call to defend half of Greece. One by one, their neighbours came to terms. The Spartans were willing, so long as the others agreed to let them decide where and how the battles would be fought. Then it occurred to them that the Spartans might be willing to lend a hand when a neighbour was in trouble. Their own troops were not nearly that strong. The big army, always in top fighting condition, began to worry the rulers of nearby poleis. So Sparta remained a city of soldiers standing watch over its serfs. They knew that at the first sign of weakness the helots would be at their throats again. When at last the helots were beaten down, the Spartans did not dare to put away their arms. There was no time for anything that did not help to win the war. The people lived in barracks and ate in public mess halls. During the long fight with the serfs, the city was turned into a military camp. It took every citizen to hold off the furious mobs that attacked the clubs and sticks and broken hoes. In the seventh century, the serfs, who were called helots, rose up against their masters. However, it gave them trouble, too, because there were many more serfs than Spartans. This gave them much land, as well as the serfs they needed to work on the land. By the time they stopped, they had conquered the entire southern half of the Peloponnesus. Using iron swords, they had quickly overrun the neighbouring kingdoms. Their ancestors, a fierce tribe of Dorian invaders, had taken the city from its old Achaean rulers. C., when Athens was changing almost from day to day, the Spartans established their own way of doing things. In the early days, Sparta had been very much like Athens. He obeyed orders and had no time for experimenting with newfangled ideas. His orders came from his officers, the kings and the five ephors who managed the day-to-day affairs of the city. He started his training when he was seven and he remained a soldier until he was sixty. Each citizen of the polis was in the army. His own days and years were run on a military schedule, because he was a soldier in the army. The system that modern Athens called “democracy” looked to him like bad organization and if there was one thing a Spartan wanted it was to keep things in order. Each kept a watchful eye on the other and the one who was the better general took charge of the army.įor a Spartan, that was progress enough. The only change its citizens made in more than 400 years was to have two kings instead of one. The polis had begun as a kingdom and it stayed a kingdom. Sparta was old fashioned and proud of it. Even the temples, although big, were plain and there was little in Sparta to show that this was the strongest polis in Greece. The people in the streets were not well dressed. In Sparta, the shops in the market place had little gold or jewelry to sell and no fine furniture at all.
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