Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The Spartan public education system, the agoge, trained the mind as well as the body. Spartans were not only literate but admired for their intellectual culture and poetry. Socrates said the "most ancient and fertile homes of philosophy among the Greeks are Crete and Sparta, where are found more sophists than anywhere on earth."
Sparta entered its long-term decline after a severe military defeat to Epaminondas of Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra. This was the first time that a full strength Spartan army lost a land battle. As Spartan citizenship was inherited by blood, Sparta increasingly faced a helot population that vastly outnumbered its citizens.
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.
In ancient Sparta, cults for women reflected Spartan society's emphasis on the women's roles as child-bearers and raisers. Consequently, cults focused on fertility, women's health, and beauty. [ 57 ] The cult of Eileithyia , the goddess of childbirth, was an important cult for Spartan women. [ 57 ]
Like the Spartans, the perioeci owned helots, which means that the main division in the Spartan society was between Spartan citizens and perioeci on one side, and helots on the other. [12] For instance, in 413, during the Peloponnesian War , Athens made a raid on the territory of the perioecic city of Epidaurus Limera with the goal of ...
"Men of Sparta" (the message ran), "the Athenians ask you to help them, and not to stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and subdued by a foreign invader; for even now Eretria has been enslaved, and Greece is the weaker by the loss of one fine city." The Spartans, though moved by the appeal, and willing to send help to ...
Lycurgus (/ l aɪ ˈ k ɜːr ɡ ə s /; Ancient Greek: Λυκοῦργος Lykourgos) was the legendary lawgiver of Sparta, credited with the formation of its eunomia (' good order '), [1] involving political, economic, and social reforms to produce a military-oriented Spartan society in accordance with the Delphic oracle.
Spartan kings received a recurring posthumous hero cult like that of the similarly Doric kings of Cyrene. [4] The kings' firstborn sons, as heirs-apparent, were the only Spartan boys expressly exempt from the Agoge; however, they were allowed to take part if they so wished, and this endowed them with increased prestige when they ascended the ...