Sparta is a weird state. I'm not just talking about the warrior culture that pervaded it; although you can't avoid that when talking about Lacedaemon.
It wasn't the first or the last political entity to be dominated by a warrior aristocracy, but as far as I know, it lasted in its form of governance by far the longest, and what's more, without handy external enemies to plunder to justify the existence of said warrior aristocracy.
How did this happen? And why didn't it implode? And how come we have virtually no mention of any strata of Spartan society other than the warrior aristocracy itself?
It's hard to imagine such a place actually existing. It seems fictional.
Their form of currency was IRON INGOTS
let that sink in for a moment, you want to make commercial transactions? Here let me pull out this IRON INGOT to purchase some bread
The public was cool with being a warrior state I guess.
>And why didn't it implode?
It did, constantly, Spartans get a lot of circlejerking for a few spectacular military engagements but they were perpetually plagued with slave revolts and were routinely conquered by every imperial general that rode through the place.
>>490430
The public was tens of thousands of helots who couldn't rebel against the Spartan citizens because they were superb warriors, and the Spartan citizens had to be superb warriors so that the helots couldn't rebel. It was an insanely delicate system.
>>490405
>warrior aristocracy
No. It wasn't just the aristocracy. It was the entire body politic. Every male Spartan was a soldier by law, taken from their mothers at a young age to undergo military training until they could be sworn in as true Spartan citizenship. It was a very rigid society where the men did their duty as soldiers and their women did their duty as mothers first, and keepers of the business and home second. This was why Spartans practiced infanticide on infants that were seen as flawed. If you couldn't be an able soldier or mother, then you were worthless in Spartan society.
>without handy external enemies to plunder to justify the existence of said warrior aristocracy.
That's because they always had enemies, either foreign or domestic, at all times. Since every Spartan male was a soldier, the actual work in society was done by slaves with the Spartan women as managers above them. The large slave/serf majority in Sparta, itching to free themselves when any opportunity arose, reinforced the need for every Spartan male to be a soldier. Sparta was essentially a Greek version of colonial Haiti and unlike the French plantation owners of Haiti, the Spartans knew that a Helot uprising could easily destroy their way of life.
>>490435
How many helot revolts did they have? The only one I'm aware of is when the Thebans defeated them, and that was externally driven, not internal.
I thought the conventional understanding was that helot revolts were rare and put down quickly, what with the Spartan military being strong enough to stamp them into a mud puddle any time they tried.
>>490441
The thing is, you had a significant population chunk between the helots at the bottom and the Spartans at the top. You don't hear much about the Perioikoi, but they outnumbered the Spartans proper by a fair amount. That pretty much makes it a warrior aristocracy.
>That's because they always had enemies, either foreign or domestic, at all times.
Like who? Sparta's foriegn policy was pretty damn peaceful up until the Peloponesean war. They weren't conquerors and plunderers like you see out of steppe nomads, or what happened in Rome after the Marian reforms but before the Empire.
Helots outnumbered the Spartans, and Spartans themselves were encouraged to not have a lot of children as they were pretty destitute outside of the military. How it survived was to keep the Spartans as a land-owning, manager functioning minority while helots as the working class. That's why almost every Spartan citizen was assigned a plot of land and helots.
It was basically a glamorized feudal society. They earned most of their income from agriculture; and didn't declare war that often to keep the helots in check. They also heavily restricted travel throughout Lacedaemon to prevent the spread of differing ideas, treated helots savagely so they wouldn't rebel, and placed so much emphasis on their military and training as more of something to unite them as a class.
>>490411
I get it!
>>490736
>glamorized feudal society
You don't know what feudal means. At most, is distantly similar to the hacienda system if any.
>>490415
No, it was SPOILED iron ingots. They deliberately ruined the ingots so they were stripped of even their use value.
Spartans were hardcore.
>>490405
Because Sparta was full of slaves. The entire thing ran on slave labor and the slaves outnumbered Spartan citizens at like 3 to 1.
Because of that every single Spartan had to be trained to fight. If the slaves decided to revolt, they needed to be put down fast and hard before they simply crushed their masters with numbers alone.
>>490793
>The Perioikoi, didn't exist!
Seriously, this thing of either everyone was a spartan soldier or was a helot slave is a terrible meme and needs to die.
>>490799
I didn't claim that you fucking autist.
>slaves were the majority of the population
Fact.
>spartans had to be trained to keep the risk of revolt low
Fact.
>>490823
>The entire thing ran on slave labor
>Because of that every single Spartan had to be trained to fight.
You were saying?
>>490830
It did run on slave labor and without it Spartan society wouldn't have been sustainable.
They didn't do it for shits and giggles.
>>490452
Semantics. By your definition every spartan is an aristocrat.
>>490830
The perioikoi weren't Spartans.
>>490844
And yet you had a significant population of people who were neither slaves nor warriors by trade, who always seem to get ignored.
So yeah, not every Lacedemonian had to fight, you clearly had a population pool who wasn't in this dichotomy of oppressed slave or oppressing warrior.
>>490848
You do realize that this is quite literally the classification that was used in the city itself, yes? That Σπαρτιάται referred specifically to the warrior elite who could afford to constantly pay to the συσσίτια, the communal mess.
Not everyone who lived in "Sparta" was either a Spartan or a helot. So yes, every "Spartan" was an aristocrat; that is literally what they were. It's no more semantics than saying every knight in a feudal society is an aristocrat.
>>490405
During ancient Greece the cities grew to the point where food was growing too scarce to feed the populace and the Greeks had several ways of solving the problem
several states began establishing colonies on fertile land
Athens created a commercial based economy centered around a greatly expanded artisan population and facilitated through a vast navy, thus aquiring surplus food through trade
Spartan military culture was developed specifically for war against its neighboring cities so that it could support itself with captured farm land and helot labour
>>490884
>Other places needed farm land
>Spartans had land
I guess the cultural differences were to much but couldn't a group supply Sparta with non-revolt prone farm workers in exchange for protection?
>>490405
I asked my history teacher about it once and he said it was because an absurdly large amount of Spartans were actually slaves. The few actual citizens knew that if they didn't stay hardcore, the slaves would rise up and kill them in an instant.
