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Sparta's agriculture consisted mainly of barley, wine, cheese, grain, and figs. These items were grown locally on each Spartan citizen's kleros and were tended to by helots. Spartan citizens were required to donate a certain amount of what they yielded from their kleros to their syssitia, or mess.
Eurotas River. According to myth, the first king of the region later to be called Laconia, but then called Lelegia was the eponymous King Lelex.He was followed, according to tradition, by a series of kings allegorizing several traits of later-to-be Sparta and Laconia, such as the Kings Myles, Eurotas, Lacedaemon and Amyclas of Sparta.
Classical Spartan society was rigidly divided into several castes, each with assigned duties and privileges. The smallest of them, with the most power and freedom, was the Spartiate class. Spartiates (Spartiate-class males over 30) held some extremely limited power in the government and would own kleroi (plots of land with associated Helots).
The Spartans used the same typical hoplite equipment as their other Greek neighbors; the only distinctive Spartan features were the crimson tunic (chitōn) and cloak (himation), [38] as well as long hair, which the Spartans retained to a far later date than most Greeks. To the Spartans, long hair kept its older Archaic meaning as the symbol of ...
Thermopylae is the site of the Battle of Thermopylae between the Greek forces (including Spartans, Thebans and Thespians) and the invading Persian forces, commemorated by Simonides of Ceos in the epitaph, "Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by, That here we lie, having answered our common oaths."
During the Carneia, military activity was forbidden by Spartan law; the Spartans had arrived too late at the Battle of Marathon because of this requirement. [50] It was also the time of the Olympic Games , and therefore the Olympic truce, and thus it would have been doubly sacrilegious for the whole Spartan army to march to war.
After the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BC, Sparta, under king Agesilaus, took several opportunities over the ensuing years to discipline a number of restive allies. In 385 BC, the Spartans attacked Mantinea and forced the city to dissolve, splitting it into five separate villages, each of which was governed by a Spartan-backed oligarchy. [1]
In classical Greece, Laconia was Spartan territory but from the 4th century BC onward Sparta lost control of various ports, towns and areas. [ 15 ] [ 16 ] From the mid-2nd century BC until 395 AD, Laconia was a part of the Roman Empire .