It’s hard for textbooks to say anything nice about the Spartans. one may find that the Spartans described as ‘an armed camp,’ ‘brutal,’ ‘culturally stagnant,’ ‘economically stagnant,’ ‘politically stagnant,’ and other fun things. The reality, of course, lies somewhere behind the value judgements. In 725, the oligarchy of Sparta needed land to feed a dramatically growing population, so the Spartans went over the Taygetus mountains and took over Messenia, where a fertile plain was enough to support themselves and their newly conquered people.
However, like all conquered people, the Messenians fought back in 640 BCE and almost destroyed Sparta itself. Almost defeated, the Spartans invented a new political system as dramatically revolutionary by turning their state into a military state. The Messenians were turned into agricultural slaves called helots, ‘serfs’, where they worked small plots of land on estates owned by Spartans. There’s no question that the life of the helots was a miserable life. Labor was long and hard and the helots always lived right on the border of subsistence.
But Spartan society itself changed, evolving into a city-state. The state determined whether children, both male and female, were strong when they were born, leaving the weak in the hills to perish. At the age of seven, every male Spartan was sent to military and athletic school teaching discipline, endurance of pain, and survival skills. At twenty, the Spartan became a soldier spending his life with his fellow soldiers to live in barracks with his fellow soldiers. Only at the age of thirty, did the Spartan become an ‘equal,’ and was allowed to live in his own house with his own family, although he continued to serve in the military. Military service ended at the age of sixty.
The Term Paper on Military Sociology
As a Master Chief Petty Officer in the United States Coast Guard with over 25 years of continuous active duty military experience, I have worked through the changing conditions, purposes, and sociological culture in the military. The ever-changing, socio-economic times have spawned aggressive recruiting initiatives at times and workforce shaping tools at others, while political correctness has ...
The life of a Spartan male was a life of discipline, self-denial, and simplicity as the Spartans viewed themselves as the true inheritors of the Greek tradition. This key to understanding the Spartans. The ideology of Sparta was oriented around the state as the individual lived (and died) for the state. Their lives were designed to serve the state from their beginning to the age of sixty. The combination of this ideology, the education of Spartan males, and the disciplined maintenance of a standing army gave the Spartans the stability that had been threatened so dramatically in the Messene an revolt. Paradoxically, this soldier-centered state was the most liberal state in regards to the status of women.
While women did not go through military training, they were required to be educated along similar lines. The Spartans were the only Greeks not only to take seriously the education of women, they instituted it as state policy. Education involved teaching women that their lives should be dedicated to the state. In most Greek states, women were required to stay indoors at all times.
Spartan women, on the other hand, were free to move about, and had an unusual amount of domestic freedom for their husbands, after all, didn’t live at home. Spartan government was an odd affair, but its overwhelming characteristic was stability. The Spartans, in fact, had the most stable government in the history of ancient Greece. At the top of government was the dual monarchy with a council below, composed of two kings plus twenty-eight nobles, all of whom were over sixty, that is, retired from the military. Below the council was a democracy of all the Spartiate males that selected the council and approved or vetoed council proposals.
