Sparta

ancient city, Greece
Also known as: Lacedaemon, Néa Spartí, Spartí
Modern Greek:
Spartí
Historically:
Lacedaemon
Related Topics:
Peloponnesian League
Arcadian League
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Sparta, ancient capital of the Laconia district of the southeastern Peloponnese, southwestern Greece. Along with the surrounding area, it forms the perifereiakí enótita (regional unit) of Laconia (Modern Greek: Lakonía) within the Peloponnese (Pelopónnisos) periféreia (region). The city lies on the right bank of the Evrótas Potamós (river). The sparsity of ruins from antiquity around the modern city reflects the austerity of the military oligarchy that ruled the Spartan city-state from the 6th to the 2nd century bce.

Reputedly founded in the 9th century bce with a rigid oligarchic constitution, the state of Sparta for centuries retained as lifetime corulers two kings who arbitrated in time of war. In time of peace, power was concentrated in a Senate of 30 members. Between the 8th and 5th century bce, Sparta subdued Messenia, reducing the inhabitants to serflike status. From the 5th century the ruling class of Sparta devoted itself to war and diplomacy, deliberately neglecting the arts, philosophy, and literature, and forged the most powerful army standing in Greece.

Sparta’s single-minded dedication to rule by a militarized oligarchy precluded any hope of a political unification of Classical Greece, but it performed a great service in 480 bce by its heroic stand at Thermopylae and its subsequent leadership in the Greco-Persian wars. The Battle of Salamis (480) revealed the magnitude of Athenian naval power and set in motion the deadly struggle between the two powers that ended in Athenian defeat at the close of the Peloponnesian War in 404 and the emergence of Sparta as the most powerful state in Greece. In the Corinthian War (395–387) Sparta had two land victories over Athenian allied states and a severe naval defeat at Cnidus by a combined Athenian and Persian fleet. Sparta’s involvement in Persian civil wars in Asia Minor under Agesilaus II (ruled 399–360) and the subsequent Spartan occupation (382) of the Theban citadel, Cadmea, overextended Spartan power and exposed the state to defeat at Leuctra (371) by the Theban Epaminondas, who went on to liberate Messenia. A century-long decline followed.

Marble bust of Alexander the Great, in the British Museum, London, England. Hellenistic Greek, 2nd-1st century BC. Said to be from Alexandria, Egypt. Height: 37 cm.
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Ancient Greece

Sparta’s continued agitation spurred Rome’s war on the Achaeans (146) and the Roman conquest of the Peloponnese. In 396 ce the modest city was destroyed by the Visigoths. The Byzantines repopulated the site and gave it the ancient Homeric name Lacedaemon. After 1204 the Franks built a new fortress city, Mistra, on a spur of the Taygetus range southwest of Sparta; after 1259 Mistra was capital of the Despotate of Morea (i.e., the Peloponnese) and flourished for about two centuries. From 1460 until the War of Greek Independence (1821–29), except for a Venetian interlude, the region was under Turkish rule.

The present-day city was built in 1834 on the ancient site; it is called Néa (New) Spartí locally to distinguish it from the ruins that were excavated in 1906–10 and 1924–29. A small commercial and industrial centre of the European plain, the city trades in citrus fruits and olive oil. As in antiquity, it is served by the small port of Githion (Yíthion), 28 miles (45 km) southeast, to which it is linked by a paved road. Pop. (2001) city, 17,503; (2011) 16,239.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia BritannicaThis article was most recently revised and updated by Adam Augustyn.
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ancient Greek civilization, the period following Mycenaean civilization, which ended about 1200 bce, to the death of Alexander the Great, in 323 bce. It was a period of political, philosophical, artistic, and scientific achievements that formed a legacy with unparalleled influence. The larger historical period spanning from the output of ancient Greek author Homer in the 8th century bce to the decline of the Roman Empire in the 5th century ce is known as "Classical antiquity," encompassing Greco-Roman culture, playing a major role in the Mediterranean sphere of influence and in the creation of Western civilization, and shaping areas as diverse as law, architecture, art, language, poetry, rhetoric, politics, and philosophy.

The early Archaic period

The post-Mycenaean period and Lefkandi

The period between the catastrophic end of the Mycenaean civilization and about 900 bce is often called a Dark Age. It was a time about which Greeks of the Classical age had confused and actually false notions. Thucydides, the great ancient historian of the 5th century bce, wrote a sketch of Greek history from the Trojan War to his own day, in which he notoriously fails, in the appropriate chapter, to signal any kind of dramatic rupture. (He does, however, speak of Greece “settling down gradually” and colonizing Italy, Sicily, and what is now western Turkey. This surely implies that Greece was settling down after something.) Thucydides does indeed display sound knowledge of the series of migrations by which Greece was resettled in the post-Mycenaean period. The most famous of these was the “Dorian invasion,” which the Greeks called, or connected with, the legendary “return of the descendants of Heracles.” Although much about that invasion is problematic—it left little or no archaeological trace at the point in time where tradition puts it—the problems are of no concern here. Important for the understanding of the Archaic and Classical periods, however, is the powerful belief in Dorianism as a linguistic and religious concept. Thucydides casually but significantly mentions soldiers speaking the “Doric dialect” in a narrative about ordinary military matters in the year 426. That is a surprisingly abstract way of looking at the subdivisions of the Greeks, because it would have been more natural for a 5th-century Greek to identify soldiers by home cities. Equally important to the understanding of this period is the hostility to Dorians, usually on the part of Ionians, another linguistic and religious subgroup, whose most-famous city was Athens. So extreme was this hostility that Dorians were prohibited from entering Ionian sanctuaries; extant today is a 5th-century example of such a prohibition, an inscription from the island of Paros.

Phenomena such as the tension between Dorians and Ionians that have their origins in the Dark Age are a reminder that Greek civilization did not emerge either unannounced or uncontaminated by what had gone before. The Dark Age itself is beyond the scope of this article. One is bound to notice, however, that archaeological finds tend to call into question the whole concept of a Dark Age by showing that certain features of Greek civilization once thought not to antedate about 800 bce can actually be pushed back by as much as two centuries. One example, chosen for its relevance to the emergence of the Greek city-state, or polis, will suffice. In 1981 archaeology pulled back the curtain on the “darkest” phase of all, the Protogeometric Period (c. 1075–900 bce), which takes its name from the geometric shapes painted on pottery. A grave, rich by the standards of any period, was uncovered at a site called Lefkandi on Euboea, the island along the eastern flank of Attica (the territory controlled by Athens). The grave, which dates to about 1000 bce, contains the (probably cremated) remains of a man and a woman. The large bronze vessel in which the man’s ashes were deposited came from Cyprus, and the gold items buried with the woman are splendid and sophisticated in their workmanship. Remains of horses were found as well; the animals had been buried with their snaffle bits. The grave was within a large collapsed house, whose form anticipates that of the Greek temples two centuries later. Previously it had been thought that those temples were one of the first manifestations of the “monumentalizing” associated with the beginnings of the city-state. Thus, that find and those made in a set of nearby cemeteries in the years before 1980 attesting further contacts between Egypt and Cyprus between 1000 and 800 bce are important evidence. They show that one corner of one island of Greece, at least, was neither impoverished nor isolated in a period usually thought to have been both. The difficulty is to know just how exceptional Lefkandi was, but in any view it has revised former ideas about what was and what was not possible at the beginning of the 1st millennium bce.

Colonization and city-state formation

The term colonization, although it may be convenient and widely used, is misleading. When applied to Archaic Greece, it should not necessarily be taken to imply the state-sponsored sending out of definite numbers of settlers, as the later Roman origin of the word implies. For one thing, it will be seen that state formation may itself be a product of the colonizing movement.

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