Everyone is either an Athenian or a Spartan, it has been said. Athens is associated with art, reason, and democracy; the sort of place where liberals, intellectuals, and bohemians might have felt at home.
Not so Sparta, with its obsessive focus on brutal discipline, preparation for war, and the subjugation of others. Sparta looks more like a model for militarists, empire-builders, even fascists.
What is certainly true is that Sparta fielded the only fully professional army in Classical Greece – because it was the only city-state whose citizen elite were not required to labour, because they had a class of subject helots, effectively state serfs, to work their farms for them. This freed up the adult male citizen-body – around 10,000 strong at peak – for full-time military training. While the rest of Greece was working in the fields, the Spartans were drilling.
War Classics – Thucydides: History of the Peloponnesian War