Was Sparta really a nation of super-soldiers, or a story told by outsiders?

Sparta really was an unusually militarised society, but much of what we think we know about it comes from outsiders who admired it, feared it or wanted to mock it. No accounts survive by the Spartans themselves, if such were ever written. So the famous Sparta is partly a story told by other Greeks.

What is solid is the system. Spartan society was exceptionally militarised, focusing the entire attention of the Spartiate class on military training and physical development, to the point of legally barring them from productive economic activity. Boys entered the agoge, a training regime that began at age seven and was designed to encourage discipline and physical toughness. Someone had to grow the food, and that was the helots, state-owned enslaved locals who made up the vast majority of the population. Thucydides observed that Spartan policy was mainly governed by the need to take precautions against them.

Then come the legends. The tale that Spartans threw weak babies into a chasm rests on a single ancient source, Plutarch, and excavations in that chasm found only adult remains. The picture of Spartan mothers who disowned cowardly sons also goes back to Plutarch, and historians have argued that those sayings were far more likely to be of Athenian origin, meant to make Spartan women look unnatural.

Historians have a name for the glossy image: the Spartan Mirage. In 1933 the classicist François Ollier warned that all surviving accounts of Sparta were by non-Spartans who often excessively idealised their subject. The honest answer is yes to the system and a careful maybe to the legends.