Sparta

A Greek state organised entirely around holding down the population it had enslaved. Sparta conquered neighbouring Messenia in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE and reduced its people to helots, state-owned agricultural labourers who outnumbered Spartan citizens by a wide margin - and the whole apparatus of Spartan life followed from the problem of keeping them subdued. Boys entered the agoge at seven for a training system of deprivation and violence, men ate in common messes and could not engage in trade or farming, and the ephors formally declared war on the helots each year so that killing one carried no religious pollution. Spartan women owned property, exercised publicly and had a legal position unusual in Greece, largely because the men were absent. The system produced the best heavy infantry in the Greek world and a state that almost never innovated. Thermopylae in 480 BCE and victory over Athens in 404 are its high points; defeat by Thebes at Leuctra in 371 broke it permanently, because Epaminondas then freed Messenia and removed the economic base. Citizen numbers had already collapsed. Sparta left almost no monuments, which Thucydides predicted. Sparta lay in the Eurotas valley in Laconia, and the word laconic comes from its reputation for short speech. The city had no walls, on the argument that its men were the walls. Two hereditary kings ruled jointly alongside the ephors and a council of elders. Helots may have outnumbered Spartiates by seven to one. The full citizen body had fallen to perhaps a thousand men by the fourth century BCE.

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