Spartan Army

The Spartan army was the professional heavy infantry force of the ancient Greek city-state of Sparta, built around citizen hoplites called Spartiates who underwent the agoge, a rigorous state education and military training regimen beginning in childhood, producing arguably the most disciplined and feared infantry in the classical Greek world. The force is exemplified in later legend by the 300 Spartans who died holding Thermopylae against the Persian army in 480 BC, a stand that became emblematic of Spartan discipline and sacrifice. The army's reputation rested on relentless drilling and a social structure subordinating individual Spartiate life to military service, sustained economically by helot agricultural labor that freed citizens for full-time soldiering. Spartan hoplites anchored the Peloponnesian League and were decisive at battles such as Plataea in 479 BC and throughout the Peloponnesian War against Athens from 431 to 404 BC, and Sparta's military system was studied and admired by other Greek states even as its rigid social structure, which excluded most of the population from citizenship, proved unable to sustain its dominance after defeat at Leuctra in 371 BC.