Many self-professed champions of freedom throughout the centuries have looked to ancient Sparta as an inspiration. The doomed stand of 300 Spartan warriors against the Persian Empire at Thermopylae in ...

At the beginning of his new book, The Grand Strategy of Classical Sparta, Paul Rahe quotes a passage from John Stuart Mill—an 1846 passage in which Mill writes that Ancient Greek history is ...

All products featured here are independently selected by our editors and writers. If you buy something through links on our site, Gizmodo may earn an affiliate commission. Reading time 8 minutes It ...

The alt-right and other fanatics of the ancient civilization are distorting history. Sparta can teach us how to rethink liberal democracy. The city of Sparta isn’t much to look at these days. A couple ...

Sparta spent nearly three centuries as the preeminent military power in Ancient Greece. It rose to dominate the Peloponnese, Greece’s large southern peninsula, and led an alliance of city-states to ...

Sparta had a highly unusual system of government. Two kings ruled the city, but a 28-member 'council of elders' limited their powers. These men were recruited from the highest social class, the ...