The ancient Greeks used one of three words to refer to the Spartan city-state and its location. First, "Sparta" refers … See more

Sparta is located in the region of Laconia, in the south-eastern Peloponnese. Ancient Sparta was built on the banks of the Eurotas, the largest river of Laconia, which provided it with a source of fresh water. The Eurotas val… See more

Lacedaemon (Greek: Λακεδαίμων) was a mythical king of Laconia. The son of Zeus by the nymph Taygete, he married Sparta, the daughter of Eurotas, by whom he became the father of Amyclas, Eurydice, and Asine. As king, h… See more

Thucydides wrote:
Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but the temples and the ground-plan, distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaem… See more

The prehistory of Sparta is difficult to reconstruct because the literary evidence was written far later than the events it describes and is distorted by oral tradition. The earliest certain evidence of human settlement i… See more

Sparta was an oligarchy. The state was ruled by two hereditary kings of the Agiad and Eurypontid families, both supposedly descendants of Heracles and equal in authority, so that one could not act against the power … See more

Sparta was above all a militarist state, and emphasis on military fitness began virtually at birth. According to Plutarch after birth, a mother would bathe her child in wine to see whether the child was strong. If the child survived it … See more