In the second lecture of Hillsdale College’s course on the histories of Athens and Sparta, which you can follow along with here, Paul A. Rahe, a professor of Western heritage at Hillsdale, explains what life was like in ancient Sparta.
Unlike the Athenians, Spartans left little behind for modern men to marvel at. There are no temples or other massive structures that survived centuries, like in Athens today. Nor did they leave much in terms of literature for modern historians to study and learn about their society, but that shouldn’t lead one to believe their legacy was of lesser importance.
Sparta’s Constitution Is Much Like Ours Today
Sparta was the first society in ancient Greece to create a government with restrictions on power and checks and balances baked into its political system. The Lacedaemonian Constitution separated governing powers within varying branches of government, much like ours today. The kings were still subject to the laws of the land, which the Spartan assembly decided.
There was an elected panel of five men, called ephors, who shared executive powers with the kings. These magistrates were kept accountable by the assembly, which would vote them in and out of office. The kings tended to be rivals of one another and had conflicting interests, so their self-interest kept one another in check.
When Sparta conquered and re-conquered regions, like they did in Messina, they would enslave the local population, making them helots, who were fated to work the land. The helots frequently outnumbered the number of citizens — at one point, there were seven helots for every one Spartan — which made it difficult for the Spartans to stay in control. Sparta was constantly worried about how much they could expand or venture out militarily before spurring an uprising among the helots, who might cooperate with other leaders.
The Argives and Arcadians…
