How did Spartans sleep?

The Spartan government wanted to make the boys tough. To do this they were given little clothing and no shoes. They slept on hard beds made of reeds and were not given any covers.
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What did Spartans do with weak babies?

If a baby was weak, the Spartans exposed it on the hillside or took it away to become a slave (helot). Infanticide was common in ancient cultures, but the Spartans were particularly picky about their children. It was not just a matter of the family, the city-state decided the fate of the child.
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Did Spartans throw babies off cliffs?

Researchers say that the Greek myth that ancient Spartans threw their stunted and sickly newborns off a cliff has not been corroborated by archaeological digs in the area.
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How did Spartans treat their wives?

Spartan Women and Marriage

As adults, Spartan women were allowed to own and manage property. Additionally, they were typically unencumbered by domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and making clothing, tasks which were handled by the helots.
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What do girls do in Sparta?

Spartan women were famously proud of their children who were expected to honor the city-state through virtuous behavior. At the same time, women had the responsibility of running the farm or estate, managing finances, and operating businesses as the men were frequently away at war.
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Why Humans Are Supposed to Sleep in Two 4-Hour Phases



Did Spartans share their wives?

An unusual feature of Spartan life was “wife sharing”. Polybius [1], Xenophon[2] and Plutarch[3] all refer to it. Three, four, sometimes more, brothers might share the same wife, as a means of preventing the dividing of their inheritance into several much smaller parts.
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What age did Spartan girls marry?

While Athenian women might have expected to marry for the first time around the age of fourteen to men much older than them, Spartan women normally married between the ages of eighteen and twenty to men close to them in age.
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What did Spartan eat?

The Spartans, noted among ancient writers for their austerity, prepared a black broth of blood and boiled pig's leg, seasoned with vinegar, which they combined with servings of barley, fruit, raw greens, wine and, at larger dinners, sausages or roasted meat. Spartan boys were sparingly issued barley cakes.
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What would Spartans never do during a battle?

It is often said that the Spartan warriors never retreated and never surrendered. They would fight to the death no matter the odds, and were trained to do so from a young age.
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How were Spartans so strong?

The Spartan Army

Spartan hoplites were well-trained and the fiercest of the Greek soldiers. Their constant training made them dexterous in the formation of a phalanx. The highlight of the phalanx formation was that the success in the battle was a team effort and no one man could take credit for the victory.
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What did Sparta girls and boys do?

Spartan girls were allowed to remain with their parents, but they were also subjected to a rigorous education and training program. While boys were readied for a life on campaign, girls practiced dance, gymnastics and javelin and discus throwing, which were thought to make them physically strong for motherhood.
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What did Spartans do daily?

Men devoted their entire lives to serving the army, beginning at age seven, and women were responsible for raising physically fit children to serve as future soldiers. Work was done by the helot population, with the native Spartans rejecting wealth and luxury. Even their food and clothing were simple and basic.
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How long did Spartans stay in fight shape?

Every Spartan underwent was the Agoge – a 13 year-long rite of passage and veritable physiological forge that crafted the bodies and minds of future Spartan warriors.
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Did any of the 300 Spartans survive?

Yet there was another man, one of Leonidas' 300, namely Aristodemus of Sparta, the only survivor of the epic battle. According to the historian Herodotus, there were only three men out of Leonidas' elite army who did not fight in the epic battle.
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Did Sparta ever lose a war?

The decisive defeat of the Spartan hoplite army by the armed forces of Thebes at the battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. ended an epoch in Greek military history and permanently altered the Greek balance of power.
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Why was Sparta abandoned?

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.
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Did the Spartans lift weights?

Spartan Training History

The Spartan life centered around military training and toughness. Spartan males were soldiers from the age of 13 to 60, and even the women were taught physical and gymnastics training. In the "modern" era weightlifting was introduced as an event at the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens.
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How many times a day did Spartans eat?

You are allowed to drink fluids and take small snacks, but a large meal is not eaten before the evening. The period of fasting or minimal eating lasts for about 20 hours every day.
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How did ancient Greeks view virginity?

Virginity in Ancient Greece and Rome

Virgins were “free women,” not subject to the will of a man. Far before the advent of Christianity, mythology contained the values of the day, and virgins played a central role in many of the stories.
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How did Sparta treat their slaves?

Plutarch also states that Spartans treated the Helots "harshly and cruelly": they compelled them to drink pure wine (which was considered dangerous—wine usually being diluted with water) "... and to lead them in that condition into their public halls, that the children might see what a sight a drunken man is; they made ...
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How were females treated in ancient Greece?

Greek women had virtually no political rights of any kind and were controlled by men at nearly every stage of their lives. The most important duties for a city-dwelling woman were to bear children--preferably male--and to run the household.
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Why did Spartan brides shave their heads?

TIL that Spartan women shaved their heads and wore men's clothes on their wedding days to help facilitate the transition of Spartan men from homosexual intercourse to heterosexual.
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Was there slavery in Sparta?

Sparta had the highest number of slaves compared to the number of owners. Some scholars estimate that there were seven times as many slaves as citizens. Q: What did slaves do in Sparta? Slaves in Sparta worked on their lands and produced agricultural products for their masters.
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