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of Sparta derived from those of the Dorian city-states to be found in Crete. Plutarch and others were also of this opinion. It seems perhaps more likely that a similarity of structure was due to common racial origins and a shared outlook.
    At the head of the rigidly stratified society which evolved in Sparta there were at the top the Dorian conquerors, the ‘Spartiates’. They formed, as it were, ‘The Master-Race’. They were the only people to have the vote, and they lived in military messes in the capital. Below them came the Perioikoi or Neighbours - free men who marched and fought along with the Spartiates, but did not have voting rights. The third stratum of the society was formed by the Helots. These, who may well have been descendants of the indigenous inhabitants, worked on the farms that belonged to the Spartiates. They were not slaves in the classical sense of the word but cultivated the land and gave half their produce to the Spartiate citizens. That they were a proud, even if subject, people is shown by the fact that the Spartiates had to keep a close eye on them and be on their guard against a Helot uprising. Nevertheless many of them fought at Thermopylae and again at Plataea. Long after the campaign of Xerxes there was, indeed, a big Helot revolt (which the Spartans put down ferociously), but at the time that Greece was in such danger relations between the rulers and the ruled seem to have been basically amicable. But the threat, however veiled, was always there, and for this reason and because of the other conquered people around them the Spartans had always to keep a proportion of their army at home. They could never field all their fighting manpower.
    Something else which made the Spartans an inward-looking warrior-race was that, being a land-power, they did not, like the other Greek city-states, solve population problems by sending out emigrant ships to the new-found lands of Sicily and Italy. It was true that Sparta had done so in a few cases, most noticeably Tarenturn (Taranto). But their real solution was war, as when they turned on their next-door, western neighbour of Messenia and, after two long and bitter wars, finally annexed the land and enslaved the population. This gave them a further problem: quite apart from the Helots,and the other conquered lands, they now had the hatred of the Messenians to deal with. The conclusion must be that, apart from any inborn qualities, they became a warrior-race largely because it was essential for them. (Grundy calculated that the proportion of Free to Non-Free in the Spartan state was i :i5.) To maintain a ruling class out of such a disproportionate relationship meant that the citizen of Sparta, the Spartiate, must of necessity have made himself so hard and fine a soldier that his efficiency outweighed the balance.
    As the poems of Aleman {circa the mid-seventh century B.C.) reveal, there had been an earlier Sparta. It had been aristocratic, certainly, but far from the Sparta that we hear of later, and which figured so prominently in the fight against the Persians some two centuries later. Even then, it must be noted that Aleman was a foreigner, and there was only one Spartan poet of whose work a little is known and that consists of injunctions to the warrior -martial poems set to music in fact. It seems that the wars against their neighbours eliminated a Sparta which, although not much of a producer of fine pottery and artefacts, certainly imported them from other Greek states.
    The famous discipline of the Spartan warrior caste was attributed to Lycurgus and the laws he impressed upon these people. Nothing is known about him as a man, and even in classical times speculation existed as to whether he was a man, a myth, ox a god. The fact remains that some two centuries or more before the Persian invasions the Spartans had adopted their iron code of rules which set them apart from all other men. For one thing, no Spartiate was permitted to own gold or silver.