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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.
Even before this period the polis of Sparta was the greatest military land power of classical Greek antiquity and governed, dominated or influenced the entire Peloponnese. The defeat of the Athenians and the Delian League in the Peloponnesian War in 431–404 BC resulted in a short-lived Spartan dominance of the southern Greek world from 404 to ...
Like much of Greece, Mycenaean Sparta was engulfed in the Dorian invasions, which ended the Mycenaean civilization and ushered in the so-called "Greek Dark Ages." During this time, Sparta (or Lacedaemon) was merely a Doric village on the banks of the River Eurotas in Laconia. However, in the early 8th century BC, Spartan society transformed.
After the rise of the democracy in Athens, other city-states founded democracies. However, many retained more traditional forms of government. As so often in other matters, Sparta was a notable exception to the rest of Greece, ruled through the whole period by not one, but two hereditary monarchs. This was a form of diarchy.
Sparta played no active part in the Achaean War in 146 BC when the Achaean League was defeated by the Roman general Lucius Mummius. Subsequently, Sparta became a free city under Roman rule, some of the institutions of Lycurgus were restored, [63] and the city became a tourist attraction for the Roman elite who came to observe exotic Spartan ...
Image credits: ES_Legman #3. Queen Gorgo of Sparta when asked why only Spartan women were equal to their men: "Because only Spartan women give birth to men.".
Based on a passage by Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War positing that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable", [11] [12] Allison used the term to describe a tendency towards war when a rising power (exemplified by Athens) challenges the status of a ruling power ...
The defeat of the pro-Athens forces and the triumph of Sparta in the preceding Corinthian War (394–386 BC) was especially disastrous to Thebes, as the general settlement of 387 BC, called the Peace of Antalcidas or "King's Peace", stipulated the complete autonomy of all Greek towns and so withdrew the other Boeotians from the political control of Thebes.