Admired in peace and dreaded in war, for much of the Archaic and Classical periods Sparta was the most powerful city in the Greek world. It was also different from other poleis. To be sure, the Spartans shared many basic institutions with other Greeks: their society was patriarchal and polytheistic, servile labor played a key role, and agriculture formed the basis of the economy. As elsewhere in Greece, law was revered and martial valor prized. Nonetheless, Sparta was unique in many important ways. No other Greek state ever defined its goals as clearly as Sparta or expended so much effort in trying to attain them. While the intrusion of the state into the lives of individuals was substantial in all Greek states, no state surpassed Sparta in the invasive role it played in the daily lives of its citizens. Spartans took enormous pride in their polis, and other Greeks were impressed by the rigorous patriotism and selflessness the Spartan system entailed. The Spartans' extreme denial of individuality fostered a powerful sense of belonging that other Greeks envied, and Sparta continues to cast an eerie spell over historians, philosophers, and political scientists even in an age that tends to recoil from totalitarianism.

Despite the interest the Spartans sparked in their contemporaries, it is surprisingly difficult to write the history of Sparta And of its surrounding territory, Laconia. The problem is not lack of sources. Though unfortunately all the sources concentrate on upper-class and royal Spartiates and provide little information about the majority of the population of the territory of Laconia--the servile masses known as helots and the large disfranchised free class known as perioikoi --still the volume of ancient writing on Sparta is large. In the course of their narratives on Greek history, the two greatest Greek historians, Herodotus and Thucydides, reveal a great deal about Spartan history, but the bulk of our information comes from two authors who wrote works focusing specifically on Archaic and Classical Sparta: Xenophon and Plutarch.

Xenophon was born in Athens around 430 BC, and he knew the Spartans at first hand. With other young men Xenophon left Greece in 401 to serve as a mercenary in the army of Cyrus the Younger, pretender to the Persian throne. In the course of this expedition and subsequent campaigns in Asia he became acquainted with many Spartans including the king Agesilaus II, whom he came greatly to admire. In the late 390s, with Athens and Sparta at war, Xenophon was exiled by the Athenians for having favored the Spartans. Relocating in the Peloponnesus, he wrote a treatise called the Spartan Constitution. Since Xenophon was an eyewitness and knew many leading Spartans personally, his work is our best source for Spartan social, political, and military institutions, although his admiration of Spartan institutions as they were said to have been before his time may have influenced his account.

A similar enthusiasm marks the writings of Plutarch, who lived from 46 to 120 AD, a thousand years after the earliest events at Sparta that he describes. He was a Greek living in a Roman world, since by his day his native Boeotia had been incorporated into the Roman empire. Plutarch's writings on Sparta, more than those of any other ancient author, have shaped later views of Sparta, but Plutarch was a biographer and a philosopher of ethics, not a historian. His works on Sparta include five biographies: the lives of Lycurgus, Lysander, Agesilaus, Agis, and Cleomenes (the latter two combined in a single essay). The Sayings of Spartans and the Sayings of Spartan Women are also included among Plutarch's works. Despite the centuries that separated him from the people he depicted, Plutarch's work is of value since he visited Sparta and also read books that are now lost or survive only in fragments. Although his writings contain large quantities of information, Plutarch was influenced by histories written after the decline of Sparta and marked by nostalgia for a happier past, real or imagined.

The problem, therefore, is not so much the quantity of information about Sparta as the fact that our sources are tainted by their acceptance of an idealized image of Sparta that historians call the "Spartan mirage." This idea of Sparta was a vision of an egalitarian and orderly society characterized by selfless patriotism, superhuman tolerance for deprivation, and boundless courage in battle. (Such propaganda, which had an important core of truth, also won Sparta a position of leadership among the Greeks.) As Spartans did not write historical literature before the Hellenistic period, this view of Spartan invincibility must have been disseminated orally at first and in literature written by non-Spartans. Even Sparta's laws were preserved in memory rather than committed to writing. Except for some fragmentary lyric verse by the seventh-century poets Alcman and Tyrtaeus, our literary evidence for Sparta was created by outsiders who wrote well after many of the events they described and whose work was to some extent shaped by their enormous admiration for Sparta. In many ways the fictions that surrounded the Spartans are as interesting as the reality they sought to represent, but though fiction and reality are difficult to separate, they should not be confused.

Unfortunately, archaeological evidence has only limited ability to remedy the deficiencies of our written sources. In commenting on the need for historians not to be deceived by superficial impressions, the Athenian historian Thucydides observed that:

If, for example, Sparta were to be deserted and only the temples and the foundations of the buildings remained, I imagine that people in the distant future would seriously doubt that Sparta's power ever approached its fame. . . . The Spartans never developed one metropolitan area or built lavish temples and buildings but rather live in scattered settlements in the old-fashioned Greek way.

( Thuc. 1.10; Blanco 1998)

The calculated austerity of Spartan life meant that domestic dwellings were extremely simple, even by Greek standards. This is bad news for archaeologists. Furthermore, modern Sparta has not been the subject of extensive excavation as has Athens, where the efforts of scholars as well as haphazard finds due to the construction of subways and the expansion of the capital city of Greece have led to major discoveries. In Sparta, public construction was limited to a few government buildings, gymnasiums, and temples, and for our knowledge of most of these we are currently dependent less on excavations than on the descriptions of Pausanias, who wrote a guide to Greece in the second century AD. Inscriptions concerning public or private matters are likewise scarce. Even tombstones, which are ubiquitous in the rest of the Greek world, are rare; at Sparta only men who had died in battle or women who had died in childbirth were permitted to have inscribed epitaphs. Because lavish grave offerings were also forbidden, archaeologists have not unearthed the quantities of pottery, mirrors, weapons, and personal items that have been discovered in other parts of the Greek world and exploited in historical research. The only exception is a large number of votive offerings made of clay, amber, lead, bronze, gold, silver, and ivory dating from as early as the early seventh century and continuing through Roman times. These have been found at the site of the temple of Artemis Orthia ("Upright" or "Protector of the ordering of the life cycle"). Understandably, these rich finds from the earliest period of the sanctuary are important for the evaluation of Spartan culture, for they prove conclusively that in the early Archaic period the Spartans were on a par artistically and commercially with their neighbor states in the Peloponnesus. It was only later, in the course of the sixth century, that the famed Spartan austerity made art and other cultural refinements a very low priority.

The number of offerings to Artemis was enormous: over 100,000 separate items have been recovered. This material record is witness to the central role of her cult in religious and civic life. Ritual ceremonies enacted in the precinct of Artemis Orthia appear to have revolved around the passage of Spartan men and women through the key stages of their lives. Choruses of girls sang and danced at the presentation of a new robe for the statue of Artemis, an occasion that probably also celebrated the passage of their age group from girlhood to womanhood. Plaques depicting textiles may likewise have been dedicated at the time when women passed from one life stage to another. There were also dedications to Eileithyia, the spirit of childbirth and protector of young boys and girls. The many lead figurines of hoplite soldiers probably marked the graduation of young men to the status of warriors.

Despite all these obstacles, painstaking research throughout the past two centuries has made it possible to trace the broad outlines of Spartan history. Laconia was an important center in the Bronze Age. Archaeological evidence indicates that there was a large settlement at Therapne east of the Eurotas, with shrines to King Menelaus and his wife Helen. Like much of the rest of Greece, Laconia experienced a sharp drop in population at the end of the Mycenaean period. Most of the settlements that had been inhabited during the second millennium BC were abandoned, and the popularity of cattle and sheep figurines as dedications in sanctuaries in the region suggest that stock raising became a mainstay of the local economy. Sometime in the tenth century BC Dorian newcomers entered the territory. By the eighth century BC trends similar to those documented elsewhere in Greece had begun to appear in Laconia as well. New villages were founded as population gradually increased, and four of those villages near the Eurotas River in the center of the Laconian plain united to form the city of Sparta. Early in the eighth century the town of Amyclae, 3 miles from the original four villages, was added to the city. Thus the Spartan polis was the city center plus the territory of the plain. Increased contacts with the rest of Greece were reflected in the emergence of a distinctive Spartan version of geometric art.

Like other early Greek poleis, Sparta (or Lacedaemon, as it was often called in antiquity) began to experience difficulties in satisfying its needs from its own territory. Sparta was located inland, with the nearest port, Gythium, 27 miles to the south. This atypical location encouraged the city to seek a novel solution to the need for land to feed a growing population, a solution that would determine the course of future Spartan development. Unlike other Archaic Greek cities, which repeatedly founded colonies overseas in an effort to alleviate the pressure on resources caused by population expansion, the Spartans founded only one colony, Taras in southern Italy. Instead of looking abroad for a solution to their difficulties, the Spartans sought a military answer to their problem through conquest of their neighbors, and by the end of the eighth century, they had gained control of the whole of the Laconian plain. The details of how this was accomplished are lost, but the results can be detected in the social structure of historical Sparta.