Women in Ancient Sparta: The Lives of the City-State’s Female Inhabitants During the Classical Era

The most unique city-state in ancient Greece was Sparta, which continues to fascinate people today. It is not entirely clear why Sparta placed such a great emphasis on having a militaristic society, but the result was that military fitness was a preoccupation from birth. If a Spartan baby did not appear physically fit at birth, it was left to die. Spartan children underwent military training around the age of seven, and every male had to join the army around the age of 18. 

Sparta will forever be known for its military prowess, but they had lives off the battlefield as well, and their way of life was also unique. For example, Spartan females were formally educated, which was a rarity among the city-states, and according to Plutarch, when Leonidas’s wife Gorgo was asked why Spartan women held such places of prominence in society, she replied, “It is because we Spartan women are the only ones who give birth to men.' 

Athenian girls were married at 14 to husbands they had never met, whereas Spartan girls married in their late teens or twenties. Athenian women were expected to stay indoors, be segregated from men, remain uneducated, and be silent, while Spartan women trained in athletics, exercised in public in scant clothing or none at all, owned property in their own names, and spoke their minds. By the 4th century B.C., according to Aristotle, they owned 40% of the land across the entire polis, and they were credited by foreign observers with influence over their husbands that no other Greek women possessed.

While all of this was acknowledged, the sources are uneven regarding the actual lives of Spartan women, from how they were raised to how they spoke and worshiped. All that can be said for sure is that Sparta had a society in which the female half of the citizen population occupied a position more nearly equal to that of men than anywhere else in the ancient Mediterranean world.