SPARTA, after Athens, was the most powerful and important of the Greek states. Her fame rested mainly on her soldiers, her military discipline, her somewhat narrow patriotism, and her intense political conservatism; in general intellectual culture, in art and in everything connected with it, she was immeasurably inferior to Athens, and even to some of the other Greek states, though there is evidence to show that a genius and a taste for sculpture and music were by no means wanting to her citizens. Her eminent men were almost all eminent as soldiers, and few of them had any pretensions to rank as able and en-lightened statesmen. No such man as Themistocles or Pericles ever appeared in Sparta; she produced no great thinkers or philosophers ; the typical Spartan, in short, was a brave and well-trained soldier, with a decided simplicity of character and strong religious scruples, amounting to what we must call superstition, which from time to time were a hindrance to prompt action and discredited the state in the public opinion of Greece.
Sparta was not so much a city as a cluster of open villages in a plain in the heart of Laconia (see vol. xi. plate I.), in the middle valley of the Eurotas, on the west bank of the river, between the ranges of Taygetus and Parnon, and built in part on the spurs of these mountains. Its situation was very picturesque: "hollow, lovely Lacedaemon" is Homer's description. Taygetus on the west rises to its greatest height of nearly 8000 feet just above the city, with primeval forests on its lower slopes, in which Spartans hunted the stag and the wild boar. Sparta seems to have been about six miles in circuit; it was not, like most Greek cities, near the coast,—Gythium,
and consisting chiefly of three essays by Mr J. H. Gurney, jun., Lieut.-Col. C. Russell, and Prof. Cones, but the last has only reference to the behaviour of the bird in the United States of America, where, from the reason above assigned, its presence was expected by almost all well-informed persons to be detrimental.
2 A more important difference is that the two sexes have almost the same plumage, while in the House-Sparrow they are unlike in this respect.
3 Lacedaemon was simply another name for Sparta, though sometimes it seems to stand for the surrounding district.

the chief port of Laconia, being 30 miles distant; nor was it built with anything like the compactness of an Athens or a Corinth. The houses for the most part stood in spacious gardens, an open-air life being altogether to the Spartan taste, and well suited to the pleasant genial climate of the valley. The olive still grows to great per-fection in the neighbourhood, and the silk is said to be of particularly fine quality. The mountain ranges round the city gave it a very strong defensive position, and for a long period Sparta was without walls or fortifications, trusting exclusively to the prowess of her citizens till she was seriously menaced by the victorious Macedonians in the 4th century B.C. The city was never a very splendid one; the houses were plain and simple and there seem to have been no public buildings of striking magnificence. There was the so-called Brazen House of Athene on a hill within a large enclosure, with plates of bronze which gave it its name, on which, among other mythological scenes, were represented the labours of Hercules and the exploits of the great twin brethren, Castor and Pollux, who were specially honoured at Sparta. There was the theatre, still to be traced in huge quadrangular blocks of stone, and there were porticos and colonnades, and the chapels and tombs of Spartan heroes, such as Lycurgus,, Leonidas, Brasidas. Sparta delighted to honour her worthy citizens, and paid them divine honours after death. The site of the city has not been thoroughly investigated, but it is a question whether much remains worth bringing to light. What has hitherto been discovered is poor and disappointing. Sparta's greatness as a city; as Thucydides (i. 10) clearly implies, fell very far short of her political importance as a state.
Sparta's history, passing over her share in the prehistoric Trojan War under her king Menelaus, the brother of Agamemnon, begins with the legislation of Lycurgus in the 9th century B.C. It was this, as has been explained in the article LYCURGUS, which made Sparta what she was, a state whose aim it was rather to hold her own within the Peloponnesus than to launch out into doubt-ful enterprises far away from home. Sparta was not naturally aggressive or ambitious; she was not easily roused to action even in great emergencies. She was safe amid her mountains from the perils to which other Greek cities were exposed. It would seem that in early days Argos had been decidedly the first power in the Pelopon-nesus, Sparta being second to her by a long interval. The relative position of the two states was reversed soon after the time of Lycurgus. The spirit and vigour which bis discipline infused no doubt enabled Sparta, after two severe wars in the 8th and 7th centuries, to accomplish at last the complete conquest of Messene, the south-western portion of the Peloponnesus, and so to become the undis-puted mistress of at least two-fifths of the whole penin-sula. By the year 600 B.C. Sparta was quite in the first rank of Greek states, and it was generally felt that she had a right to take the lead in Greek politics. In the 6th century she put down the tyrants, the heads of the democratic and popular party, in several Greek cities, and drove, for a time at least, the reforming and innovating Clisthenes from Athens. Sparta was the steady foe of democracy and popular government. The Spartans were themselves a small landowning aristocracy, in the midst of a comparatively numerous population, consisting of so-called Periceci (dwellers round about), the aboriginal inhabitants, in fact, of Laconia, and of Helots or serfs, taken to a great extent from the conquered Messenians.
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The government was highly centralized; it was wholly in the hands of the Spartans, the Periceci having no share in it, though many of them may have themselves been landowners, or at any rate have held land under Spartan landlords, and been well-to-do and prosperous. The Helots were farm labourers bound to the soil, slaves in every sense of the word, anything like self-respect being studiously made impossible for them. Spartans could put down a popular rising or a slave insurrection with cold-blooded cruelty, and in a panic following on an earthquake of unusual violence in 464 there was a deliberately-planned massacre of a multitude of Helots for the safety of Sparta, carried out and executed by Spartans in person. A calculating selfishness was a marked trait in Spartan character. Sparta seems always to have put her own interests before those of Greece, though she claimed to be the leading and representative Greek state. She was cautious and even timid, though the courage of her individual citizens in war was unsurpassed. Every Spartan was a hero on the battlefield, and a Spartan army was long assumed to be invincible. Sparta was not much of a colonizing state, but she could point to the famous city of Tarentum in southern Italy as her offspring, and to Lyctus {II., ii. 647; xvii. 611) in Crete, whence came warriors to the Trojan War. In 491, when Greece was threatened with invasion by Persia, we find Athens appealing to Sparta and urging a complaint against the ^Eginetans as traitors to Greece for having given earth and water, the symbols of submission, to the emissaries of the great king. In 480 a Spartan admiral commanded the Greek fleet off Artemisium against Xerxes, and in the following year a Spartan general, Pausanias, commanded the united forces of Greece in the famous battle of Platsea. All this implies a distinct recognition of Sparta as the head of Greece. The Persian War over, Athens under Cimon and Pericles developed extraordinary energy and took Sparta's place. Sparta indeed seems to have retired upon her laurels, and it was not without reluctance and much urgent pressure that she embarked in the Pelopon-nesian War, which, after twenty-eight years of hard fighting, ended in the overthrow of the Athenian empire and the capture of Athens by Lysander in 405. Sparta contributed greatly to the final result by despatching an able officer, Gylippus, to the relief of Syracuse in 414, when the city was on the point of surrendering to the Athenian armament. It was the decisive success of Gylippus in Sicily which turned the scale against Athens. The crushing blow of iEgospotami in 405, which annihilated her fleet and left her defenceless, and the subsequent surrender of the city transferred the supremacy of Greece once more to Sparta, but not for much more than thirty years. Sparta's policy was ungenerous and short-sighted ; it consisted in establishing little oligarchical factions under Spartan control in the Greek cities, and soon degenerated into a tyranny which became utterly odious. All Sparta's worst qualities came out during this period: "autonomy," which had been her watchword throughout the war against Athens, became a dead letter under her rule; and the freedom of city life, so dear to a Greek, was crushed out under her officials and commis-sioners, whom she thrust on a number of Greek cities. Still more did she disgust all the better men of Greece by concluding, after a series of intrigues for her own selfish ends, a peace with Persia in 387, known as the peace of Antalcidas, the Spartan through whom it was negotiated. It was a dishonourable peace for Greece, as its effect was to facilitate Persian intervention in Greek affairs and make the king of Persia the arbiter of Greek disrmtes and differences. Meanwhile Athens was recovering herself; the tables were soon turned on Sparta, and her maritime power collapsed before the united action of Athens and Persia. In the Peloponnesus Sparta was still supreme, but Thebes, she felt, might become a dangerous rival and must be humbled. She insisted that the townships of Boeotia must be " autonomous " and independent of Thebes, and so contrived to pick a quarrel with that state, which to Sparta's cost had at that time the famous Epaminondas, the greatest, perhaps, of Greek generals, among her lead-ing citizens. In 371 came Sparta's crushing defeat at Leuctra, a blow from which she never really recovered, though her courage and military discipline long survived it. But her prestige was gone. Epaminondas carried the war into the heart of Laconia and penetrated to Sparta itself. His victory at Mantinea in 362 gave independence to Mes-sene, and Sparta was now politically ignored by her old allies.
From this time Sparta almost drops out of Greek his-tory. She took no part in the struggle against Macedon; no Spartan soldier stood by the side of the Athenians and Thebans at Chaeronea. She seems to have sunk into polit-ical apathy; very possibly she may have had to concentrate all her remaining strength and energy in keeping down her Helots and the native population of Laconia. When Alexander was winning his victories in Asia, she intrigued feebly against Macedon, and she would take no part in the congress of the Greek states at Corinth which declared Alexander "Leader of the Greeks."
She appears once again, but as not much more than the
ghost of her former self, in the 3d century B.C., attempting
vainly in 281 to unite Greece against the Macedonian
Antigonus, and repulsing Pyrrhus from her walls in 272,
Spartan women working at the city's defence, and a few
Spartan warriors driving back the formidable soldier-
king. There was still the old spirit about her, but the
number of her citizens is said to have dwindled down to
700, and in her last days, with a wealthy few in the
midst of a poor and needy people, Sparta had shrunk into
the narrowest and feeblest of oligarchies. In the latter
half of the 3d century B.C., in the days of the Achaean
league, a vigorous but unsuccessful attempt at internal
reforms and a restoration of the old discipline of Lycurgus
was made by two of her kings, Cleomenes and Agis. She
sank finally, we know not how, under the degrading
dominion of a sort of robber chief, Nabis, who fastened
his tyranny upon her by the support of emancipated
slaves and mercenaries of the lowest class. Her best citizens
were put to death or banished, and she was debased into
a refuge of pirates and robbers. Nabis and his vile gang
were put down by Philopcemen in the name of the Achaean
league, and Philopcemen completed his work by razing
the walls of Sparta and abolishing her old institutions.
Rome simply looked on, knowing well that she was
mistress of the situation, and let matters drag on till 146,
when she captured Corinth, and closed the page of Greek
history. (w. j. B.)

Footnotes

For topographical details we must refer the reader to the elabo-rate works of the German scholar Curtius on the Peloponnesus and works based on them. Mure's Greece and Leake's Morea should be consulted.