Sparta :: essays research papers

Its hard for textbooks to say anything nice about the Spartans. one whitethorn find that the Spartans described as "an armed camp," "brutal," "cultur bothy 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 domain of a function 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 submit into a military state. The Messenians were turned into agricultural slaves called helots, "serfs", where they worked small plots of land on estates ow ned by Spartans. Theres no question that the living of the helots was a miserable life. crowd 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 impregnable 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 nonplus 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 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 under stand the Spartans. The ideology of Sparta was oriented rough 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 Messenean revolt. Paradoxically, this soldier-centered state was the most liberal state in regards to the status of women.