Current Events > What do you think of Sparta?

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Basically today there's two schools of thought regarding Sparta. The revisionists and the orthodoxy.

The revisionists claim that Sparta wasn't a warrior society nor did they dedicate much to martial prowess. This is the result of the Spartan mirage which is basically what the Spartan wanted others to think of them or the result of Athenian and later authors propaganda. In this case the Spartans were a professional leisure class as in they were professional rich people who didn't have to toil for a living.

Their status as Spartans rested on their wealth, not any martial skill. The Spartans would live a life of leisure by singing, dancing, hunting, raising horses and sponsoring chariot teams, and other things like managing their estates. They would exercise to train their bodies to reach the ideal figure. Something poorer Greeks couldn't achive for it was the ideal of the rich to strive to get the best bodies. They would wear their hair long as a mark of leisured gentlemen.

As far as any martial prowess they didn't have much. Aside from a simple formation drill it seems they didnt actually have much war training. There's also no proof of classical Sparta engaging in weapon training. Instead the Spartans relied on terror tactics to intimidate their opponents by reputation and apperance. There's atnleast four major battles the Spartans won without having to fight and in one everyone was trampling one another out of sheer terror in trying to flee.

The orthodoxy is pretty much what you read on wikipedia about Sparta being a hardcore military society.
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