The Greek city-state that subordinated all life to military excellence, produced the most feared army in the ancient world, and invented a social system so extreme — the agoge, the helot system, the suppression of individual life — that it has fascinated and disturbed observers from Plato to the present.
Sparta was the city that Athens was not — and that Athens feared, studied, and occasionally admired. It had no walls because its citizens were the walls. It educated children from age seven in a system designed to produce perfect soldiers. It ran on the labor of enslaved helots who outnumbered their masters six to one. And it left almost no literature, art, or philosophy — only the legend, which has been more influential than most things that were written down.