The ancient Greeks used one of three words to refer to the Spartan city-state and its location. First, "Sparta" refers primarily to the main cluster of settlements in the valley of the Eurotas River. The second word, "Lacedaemon" … 展开

Lacedaemon (Greek: Λακεδαίμων) was a mythical king of Laconia. The son of Zeus by the nymph Taygete, he married Sparta, the daughter of 展开

Prehistory, "dark age" and archaic period
The prehistory of Sparta is difficult to reconstruct because the literary evidence was written far later than the events it describes and is distorted … 展开

Birth and death
Sparta was above all a militarist state, and emphasis on military fitness began virtually at birth. According … 展开

Sparta is located in the region of Laconia, in the south-eastern Peloponnese. Ancient Sparta was built on the banks of the Eurotas, the … 展开

Thucydides wrote:
Suppose the city of Sparta to be deserted, and nothing left but the temples and the ground-plan, distant ages would be very unwilling to believe that the power of the Lacedaemonians was at all equal to their fame. Their city is not … 展开

Constitution
Sparta was an oligarchy. The state was ruled by two hereditary kings of the Agiad and Eurypontid families, both supposedly descendants of Heracles and equal in authority, so that one could not act against the power and political … 展开