Sparta

Sparta originated in the 10th century BC as a group of villages in the center of Laconia near the river Eurotas. Presumably from the very start, the Spartans had subjugated the population of the surrounding countryside and reduced them to a state akin to serfdom. These heilotes, helots, as they were called, were forced to work the fields of the Spartans, who alone were citizens of the polis Sparta. At the latest since the middle of the 6th century BC, the Spartans practiced a form of communal life that to some extent was characteristic of several Dorian communities, especially on the island of Crete. But in Sparta we encounter an extreme version of this communal life, which featured collective upbringing of the boys and young men of the community, organized in year classes and age groups, with an emphasis on toughening them and building up their endurance of pain, hunger, and so on. Adult men congregated in clubs or messes organized for warfare, hunting, and eating together. In Sparta too, from the late 8th century BC, there had been tensions between the richer and poorer members of society. Possibly in connection with this, Sparta started wars of conquest and annexed neighboring Messenia in the course of the 7th century. The Messenians became helots in their turn, and their land was distributed among the Spartans. From then on, the Spartans, a group of a few thousand adult men, formed an elite among a far larger population of helots, against which the Spartans always remained on their guard. They called themselves Peers or Equals (homoioi), and paid much attention to their collectivist ways of life that turned the citizen into a sort of professional soldier, since the practice of any manual labor was formally forbidden. Relative to other Greek states, Sparta thereby acquired a military advantage, certainly after all Spartan citizens had become hoplites in the early 6th century BC, if not before. Small autonomous communities in the mountains around Sparta and on the coasts of Laconia and Messenia were demoted to the status of perioikoi, that is, “dwellers-around,” who in time of war had to provide troops for the Spartan army and in general lived under a form of Spartan sovereignty. The larger poleis in the Peloponnese were, with the exception of Argos, in the course of the 6th century BC subjugated by Sparta in the so-called Peloponnesian League. As the leader of that alliance, Sparta could count on contingents of Corinth and other Peloponnesian cities for any military campaigns outside the Peloponnese, which made her, shortly before 500 BC, the most powerful state in the Greek world.