Spartans

The Spartans

The Spartans will be available to play in the Chronicles: Battle for Greece DLC on November 14, 2024.

The defining event of Spartan history took place in the seventh century BCE, when the Spartans marched into the neighboring territory of Messenia and enslaved its people en masse. These people subsequently became known as helots and were forced into perpetual service to the Spartans.

On the one hand, this enormous population of serfs freed the Spartans from the need to work for themselves, enabling them to devote themselves entirely to military exercises – a tremendous military advantage when most of their foes were armed farmers rather than professional soldiers.

On the other hand, the presence of this hostile helot population, always looking for opportunities to rebel against their enslavers, made the Spartans paranoid, cautious, and cruel. They were reluctant ever to travel too far from the Peloponnese for fear of the enemy back home, and they constantly culled and humiliated the helots to keep them suppressed.

For such a famous society, historians know very little about the Spartans and use the term ‘the Spartan mirage’ to refer to the fact that historical record is drawn from non-Spartan sources looking in on a society deeply hostile to outsiders, whose strange institutions spawned more imaginative speculation than studied observations. Yet one fact seems hard to dispute: on the battlefield, the Spartans were unmatched.