The Spartan Army was the military force of Sparta, one of the leading city-states of ancient Greece. The army stood at the centre of the Spartan state, whose citizens’ primary obligation was to be good soldiers.[1] Subject to military drill from infancy, the Spartans were one of the most feared military forces in world history. At Sparta’s heyday in the 6th to 4th centuries BC, it was commonly accepted that "one Spartan was worth several men of any other state".[1]

The Spartan people (the "Lakedaemonians") were divided in three classes: Full citizens, known as the Spartiates proper or Hómoioi ("equals" or peers), who received a grant of land (kláros or kleros, "lot") for their military service. The second class were the Perioeci (the "dwellers nearby"), free non-citizens, generally merchants, craftsmen.[1] The third and most numerous class were the Helots, state-owned serfs used to farm the Spartiate kleros. By the 5th century BC, the helots too were used as light troops in skirmishes.[1] The Spartiates were the core of the Spartan army: they participated in the Assembly (Apella) and provided the hoplites in the army. Indeed, they were supposed to be soldiers and nothing else, being forbidde to learn and exercise any other trade.[1] To a large degree, the necessity for the constant war footing of the Spartan society was the need to keep the vastly more numerous helots subdued.[1] One of the major problems of the later Spartan society was the steady decline in fully enfranchised citizens, which also meant a decline in available military manpower: the number of Spartiates decreased from 6,000 in 640 BC to 1,000 in 330 BC.[2] The Spartans were therefore forced to use helot hoplites, and occasionally they freed some of the Lakonian helots, the neodamodeis (the "newly enfranchised"), and gave them land to settle in exchange for military service.[3]

Little is known of the earlier organization, and much is left open to speculation. The earliest form of social and military organization having three tribes, and subsequently a further subdivision of the fraternity was later replaced by five territorial divisions, the obai ("villages"), which supplied a lochos of ca. 1,000 men each.[3] This system was still used during the Persian Wars, as implied by references to the lochoi made by Herodotus in his history.[1]

The changes that occurred between the Persian and the Peloponnesian Wars are not documented, but according to Thucydides, at Mantinea in 418 BC there were 7 lochoi present, each subdivided into four pentekostyes of 128 and 16 enomotiai of 32 men, giving a total of 3584 men for the main Spartan army.[4] By the end of the Peloponnesian War, the structure had evolved further, both to address the shortages in manpower and to create a more flexible system that allowed the Spartans to send smaller detachments on campaign or to garrisons outside their homeland.[3]

The full army was nominally led in battle by the two kings; initially both went on campaign, but after the 6th century BC only one, with the other remaining home.[3] The kings were accompanied by a select group of 300 men as a royal guard, who were termed hippeis ("cavalrymen"). Despite their title, they were infantry hoplites like all Spartiatai. The hippeis belonged to the first mora and were the elite of the Spartan army, being deployed on the honorary right side of the battle line. It was the hippeis who participated in a celebrated contest in 546 BC against the Argive knights, and it was these who accompanied king Leonidas in his famous last stand at Thermopylae. The following epitaph was put over the tomb of the Spartans who fell at the Battle of Thermopylae:

The Spartans used the same typical hoplite equipment as the other Greek neighbours; the only distinctive Spartan features were the crimson tunic (chiton) and cloak (himation),[3] and the long hair, which the Spartans retained to a far later date than most Greeks. To the Spartans, the long hair retained its older Archaic meaning as the symbol of a free man; to the other Greeks by the 5th century, its peculiar association with the Spartans had come to signify pro-Spartan sympathies.[3] Xenophon tells us that men who entered manhood were permitted to wear their hair long in the belief that it made them look taller, more dignified and more terrifying. According to another version, long hair made handsome men more beautiful and ugly men more terrible. In Archaic times, long hair was the mark of an aristocrat. Its retention was a symptom of the increasing conservatism of Lakedaemonian society from the middle of the sixth century. Outside Lakedaemon, long hair became a sign of Lakonian sympathies. Lakonian hairstyles did change somewhat over time. On warrior statuettes of the 5th century, all the locks are swept to the back under the helmet. In the early 4th century, hair is normally dressed in four locks falling to the front, two on either shoulder, and four to the back. The beard is short and pointed and the upper lip is normally shaven. Plutarch, quoting Aristotle, informs us that every year upon entering office the ephors would order the citizens to cut their moustaches and obey the law. The same can be said in the later 5th century with 2 locks of hair worn on either shoulder to the front, the upper lip continued to be shaved but the beard was worn longer. Plutarch quotes a Lakonian who, upon being asked why he wore his beard so very long, said, so I can see my grey hairs and never do anything unworthy of them.

Another widely known Spartan symbol, adopted in the 420 BC, was the letter lambda, standing for Lacedaemon, which was painted on the Spartans’ shields.[3] Spartan hoplites were often depicted bearing a transverse horsehair crest on their helmet, which was possibly used to identify officers.[5]

In the Archaic period, Spartans were armoured with flanged bronze cuirasses, leg greaves, and a helmet, most usually of the Corinthian type. It is often disputed which torso armour the Spartans wore during the Persian Wars, though it seems likely they either continued to wear bronze cuirasses of a more sculptured type, or instead had adopted the linothorax. During the late 5th century BC, when warfare had become more flexible and full-scale phalanx confrontations became rarer, the Greeks abandoned most forms of body armour. The Lakedaemonians also adopted a new tunic, the exomis, which could be arranged so that it left the right arm and shoulder uncovered and free for action in combat.[3] The Spartan’s main weapon was the Doru. The Spartiates was always armed with a xiphos as a secondary weapon. The Spartans retained the traditional hoplite phalanx until the reforms of Cleomenes III, when they were re-equipped with the Macedonian sarissa and trained in the style of the Macedonian phalanx.

During the Archaic period, the most popular helmet type in use in Sparta as in the rest of Greece, was the Corinthian helmet, as portrayed in our bust. This helmet completely enclosed the head so vision and hearing were restricted. During the 5th century, the Corinthian helmet was replaced by other more open-faced types such as the Pilos helmet as good vision and hearing in the phalanx were becoming more important as increasingly complex manoeuvres were implemented. Consequently the new Pilos helmet was adopted at the same time as body armour was abandoned. Once adopted by the Lakedaemonian army, the Pilos helmet became as much a Lakonian symbol as the crimson exomis and was copied by many armies both inside and outside the Peloponnesian league. For aesthetic reasons, we have decided to depict our Spartan with a Corinthian helmet. Our Hoplite bust possibly depicts the transition from the Archaic to the Classical.

Main Source: www.wikipedia.org.

Text References: [1] Connolly, Peter (2006). Greece and Rome at War. Greenhill Books. ISBN 978-1853673030; [2] Lane Fox, Robin. The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian. Basic Books. ISBN 0465024963; [3] Sekunda, Nicholas (1998). The Spartan Army (Elite Series #60). Osprey Publications. ISBN 1-85532-659-0; [4] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 5.68.2; [5] Sekunda, Nicholas (1986). The Ancient Greeks: Armies of Classical Greece, 5th and 4th Centuries BC (Elite Series #7). Osprey Publications. ISBN 085045686X. Other References: Fitzhardinge L.F. (1980). The Spartans. Thames and Hudson Ltd. ISBN 0-500-27364-2.