Slavery in Ancient Greece was acceptable and common, as in most organized societies of the time, yet with differences between ...

This story appears in the November/December 2016 issue of National Geographic History magazine. Sparta’s enemies, when facing the intimidating Spartan forces, would see a wall of shields ...

Amid serene olive groves, I meandered through Greece’s ghostly ruins of ancient Sparta, its archeological rubble evidence of a militant society where school-aged boys were whipped bloody to toughen ...

Myke Cole - Co-author, The Killing Ground: A Biography of Thermopylae Ancient Sparta has been held up for the last two and a half millennia as the unmatched warrior city-state, where every male ...

King Agesilaus II—who led the Spartan Army at the peak of its power in the fourth century B.C.—proclaimed that one of Sparta’s greatest strengths was its citizens’ “contempt of pleasure.” ...

Sparta had a highly unusual system of government. Two kings ruled the city, but a 28-member 'council of elders' limited their powers. These men were recruited from the highest social class, the ...

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Inward-looking and self-sufficient, the Spartans were the most feared hoplites (infantrymen) in all Greece. They lived an austere life, despising any sort of luxury, in a city that contained ...

In ancient times, Greece wasn't a single country like it is today. It was made up of lots of smaller states. These states were always squabbling and often went to war. Sparta and Athens fought a ...