Equality and Distinction within the Spartiate Community

Davies, Philip

Abstract

© 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. All rights reserved. Spartan society possessed a number of idiosyncratic institutions and practices, elements of which were described using specifically Spartan vocabulary. This chapter considers the extent to which these institutions and practices ‘exceptionalized’ the basis of an individual’s standing within Sparta’s citizen community - the Spartiates - in the classical period. Among the various respects in which our sources regard Sparta as being exceptional, they present the Spartiate community as being exceptionally egalitarian. Sparta’s communal upbringing might reasonably be described as an on-going series of tests and contests. The mess was a central location in any Spartiate’s life. The diverse factors which impacted upon an individual’s standing within the Spartiate community are nicely illustrated by the case of the hippeis. Sparta’s political institutions also privileged the wider Spartan elite - a number of families who across multiple generations managed to maintain positions in the upper echelons of the Spartan citizen stratum.

Citation

Davies, P. (2017). Equality and Distinction within the Spartiate Community. In A. Powell (Ed.), A Companion to Sparta (480-499). Malden, MA: Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119072379.ch18

• Online Publication Date: Oct 20, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017-12
• Deposit Date: Oct 29, 2019
• Publisher: Wiley
• Pages: 480-499
• Book Title: A Companion to Sparta
• Chapter Number: 18
• ISBN: 9781405188692
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119072379.ch18
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/2982057
• Publisher URL: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781119072379.ch18