Sparta: City of Warriors

Sparta is one of the most celebrated and most misunderstood cities of the ancient world. In Greek mythology, it was the home of Helen, “the face that launch'd a thousand ships,” as Marlowe later wrote, whose abduction by the Trojan prince Paris triggered the decade-long Trojan War. In history, it was the dominant military power of classical Greece, the city that defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War and stood at the forefront of resistance against the Persian invasions.

The word “Spartan” has entered the English language as a synonym for austere, disciplined, and militarily focused, a legacy of the city's extraordinary social system, the agoge, which raised male citizens from boyhood as warriors and instilled a culture of self-denial, physical endurance, and absolute loyalty to the state. Sparta famously built no great temples or monuments, produced no great literature or philosophy, and left almost nothing standing for archaeologists to find. Its power lay in its people, not its stones.

Yet Sparta is also a city of myth, beauty, and divine patronage. Its patron goddess was not only Ares (god of war) but also Athena and Apollo, and the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia was one of the most important cult sites in the Peloponnese. Its mythological queen Helen was celebrated as the most beautiful woman in the world, and the twin heroes Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri), sons of Leda and brothers of Helen, were among the most widely worshipped divine figures in the Greek world.

In Greek mythology, Sparta's most important role is as the home of Helen, the daughter of Zeus and Leda, and wife of the Spartan king Menelaus. Helen was considered the most beautiful woman in the world, and her beauty was the ultimate cause of the Trojan War, the conflict that defined the heroic age and gave Homer the subject matter for both the Iliad and the Odyssey.

The myth of Helen's origin is one of Greek mythology's strangest and most celebrated: Zeus came to Sparta disguised as a swan and seduced (or in some versions, ravished) the Spartan queen Leda. From this union, Leda laid an egg (or eggs) from which hatched not only Helen but also the divine twins Castor and Pollux (the Dioscuri) and the future queen Clytemnestra (who would marry Agamemnon and murder him on his return from Troy). The exact parentage of each child varies between ancient sources, with some children attributed to Zeus and others to Leda's mortal husband Tyndareus.

The Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux, were among the most beloved heroes in the ancient Greek world. They were patron gods of sailors (their appearance as the electrical phenomenon of St. Elmo's Fire was taken as a sign of their protection), of athletic contest, and of Sparta itself. When Castor, the mortal twin, was killed, his immortal brother Pollux was so grieved that Zeus allowed them to share immortality, alternating between Olympus and the Underworld. Their story is a moving exploration of brotherly love, sacrifice, and the longing to overcome death.

Sparta also appears in the myth of Heracles, who was partly educated there according to some traditions, and in the myths of the Dioscuri's various adventures, including the Calydonian Boar Hunt and the voyage of the Argonauts.

Helen's story begins in Sparta and ends, in the most common versions of the myth, back in Sparta, though the journey between those two points comprises much of the heroic tradition. As the most beautiful woman in the world, Helen attracted suitors from across Greece when she came of age. Her mortal father Tyndareus, fearing the violence that choosing among so many powerful men might provoke, accepted the suggestion of the clever Odysseus: all suitors would swear an oath to defend the chosen husband against any wrong done to him, before the winner was named.

The chosen husband was Menelaus, king of Sparta. But the oath of the suitors was tested almost immediately: the Trojan prince Paris visited Sparta, was received as a guest by Menelaus, and then, in a catastrophic violation of the sacred laws of hospitality (xenia), abducted Helen (or, in some versions, eloped with her willingly) and took her to Troy. The oath of the suitors bound the kings of Greece to help Menelaus reclaim his wife, and the great expedition to Troy was assembled.

The moral ambiguity of Helen, victim or willing participant, the most beautiful face in the world attached to a figure who brought catastrophic destruction, made her one of the most contested figures in ancient literature. Homer's Helen in the Iliad is complex and sympathetic, clearly unhappy with Paris and longing for her home in Sparta. The tragedians, especially Euripides, explored her ambiguity further: his Helen proposes the remarkable alternative myth (drawn from Stesichorus) that the real Helen spent the entire war virtuously waiting in Egypt, while a phantom double accompanied Paris to Troy and caused the war for nothing.

At the end of the Trojan War, Menelaus intended to kill Helen in revenge but was overcome by her beauty when he saw her again. He brought her back to Sparta, where she lived out her days as his queen, forgiven or unpunishable, depending on your point of view.

The historical Sparta was organised around its unique military-social system, the agoge, a rigorous education and training regime that took male citizens from their families at age seven and shaped them into the most formidable warriors in the Greek world. Boys in the agoge lived communally, underwent deliberate hardship and deprivation (including being encouraged to steal food, but punished if caught), learned to endure pain in silence, and were prepared for a lifetime of military service.

At twenty, Spartan men joined the army and were assigned to a syssitia (common mess), where they ate and socialised with their fellow soldiers. Full citizenship was achieved at thirty, and Spartan men could retire from active service at sixty. Women in Sparta had considerably more freedom and physical education than in other Greek cities, they trained athletically, managed their households and estates while their husbands were away, and were expected to produce healthy children and maintain the social order.

The Helots, the enslaved population of Sparta, descended from the pre-Dorian inhabitants of Laconia and Messenia, did the agricultural and domestic labour that freed Spartan citizens for military training. Helots vastly outnumbered the Spartiate citizen class, and the fear of Helot revolt was a constant undercurrent in Spartan social organisation, justifying the perpetual military readiness of the citizen body.

The Krypteia, a secret police institution where young Spartans were sent into the countryside at night, without weapons, to survive by their wits and kill any Helots they encountered, served both as a rite of passage and as a tool of terror. It is one of the most disturbing aspects of the Spartan system and a reminder that the celebrated Spartan virtues were built on a foundation of systematic oppression.

No event in Sparta's history has captured the Western imagination more powerfully than the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BCE, when the Spartan king Leonidas led a force of approximately 7,000 Greek soldiers (including 300 Spartans) to hold the narrow coastal pass of Thermopylae against the massive Persian army of Xerxes for three days.

When a local shepherd revealed a mountain path that allowed Persian forces to outflank the Greek position, Leonidas sent most of the allied forces away and remained with his 300 Spartans and about 700 Thespians and 400 Thebans to fight a rearguard action. They were slaughtered to the last man, but their stand gave the other Greek forces time to retreat and reorganise, contributing to the eventual Greek victories at Salamis and Plataea that drove the Persians from Greece.

The epitaph composed by Simonides for the Spartan dead at Thermopylae is one of the most famous inscriptions in history: “Go, tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” The Battle of Thermopylae became the defining symbol of self-sacrifice in the service of freedom, a status it has retained in Western culture from antiquity to the present day, most recently in Frank Miller's graphic novel and Zack Snyder's film 300 (2006).

Leonidas was regarded as a hero after his death and was given a heroic cult at Sparta. His bones were eventually recovered from Thermopylae and interred in a prominent tomb in the city.

The historical Sparta (also called Lacedaemon) was founded in the Eurotas valley of the southern Peloponnese, probably in the early Iron Age, by the Dorian Greeks who entered the Peloponnese after the Bronze Age collapse. By the 7th century BCE, Sparta had conquered Messenia and its population, enslaving them as Helots, and had developed its distinctive militarised social system in response to the need to control this large servile population.

Sparta was the dominant land power in Greece for much of the classical period. It led the Greek resistance to the Persian invasions (490–479 BCE) alongside Athens, most famously at Thermopylae and Plataea, and then fought and eventually defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BCE). Spartan hegemony over Greece lasted from 404 until 371 BCE, when the Theban general Epaminondas defeated the Spartans at Leuctra, the first time a Spartan army had been defeated in a pitched battle on land in living memory.

After Leuctra, Sparta never recovered its former power. Epaminondas's subsequent invasions of the Peloponnese liberated Messenia (depriving Sparta of its Helot labour force) and established a new city, Megalopolis, as a counterweight to Spartan influence. Sparta declined gradually thereafter, and the city was captured by the Roman general Mummius in 146 BCE. Under Roman rule it survived as a curiosity, a living museum of Spartan customs that attracted tourists who wanted to witness the traditional practices and the brutal rites at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia.

Unlike Athens, Thebes, or Corinth, Sparta left almost no architectural monuments. The Spartans built in wood and mudbrick rather than stone, and they prided themselves on having no walls, their warriors were their walls, as the saying went. This self-conscious rejection of monumental building means that modern visitors to Sparta find comparatively little to see above ground.

Modern Sparti is a pleasant, somewhat sleepy Greek provincial city in the Eurotas valley, far less visited than Athens, Corinth, or Mycenae. The ancient remains are scattered and modest, a reflection of Sparta's deliberate rejection of monumental stone architecture, but the Archaeological Museum of Sparta is excellent and contains important finds from the region, including votive offerings from the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, Archaic period sculptures, and various objects that bring the Spartan world to life.

The main ancient site visible above ground is the acropolis of Sparta (now called the Acropoli), where the foundations of a theatre, a sanctuary of Athena, and various later structures can be seen. The sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, where Spartan boys underwent the famous ritual flogging as a rite of passage (attested by Roman-era sources), lies near the Eurotas river and has a small Roman-era theatre built around it for spectators.

The highlight of any visit to the Sparta area is the medieval city of Mystras, about 8 kilometres west of Sparti in the foothills of the Taygetos mountains. Mystras was the last major Byzantine city in Greece before the Ottoman conquest (it fell in 1460) and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of extraordinary beauty, with well-preserved palaces, churches, and monasteries cascading down a steep hillside. Some of the finest late Byzantine frescoes anywhere in Greece survive in the churches of Mystras.

The Menelaion, a sanctuary on a hill south of Sparti dedicated to Menelaus and Helen, is worth the short excursion for anyone interested in the mythological dimension of the site. The view from the sanctuary over the Eurotas valley is magnificent, and the sanctuary's continued use from the Mycenaean period into the classical era reflects the deep local attachment to the Trojan War tradition.

Sparta is about 210 kilometres from Athens (roughly 2.5 hours by road) and makes an excellent base for exploring the Mani peninsula, one of the wildest and most dramatic landscapes in Greece.

Common questions about mythological and historical Sparta.