Quick questions on Spartan art, architecture, technology, and economy: HSC Ancient History

The picture of Sparta as austere from its foundation is a classical-era ideology, not an archaic reality. Archaic Sparta (7th to early 6th century BC) was artistically rich.

Ancient authors, almost all writing from outside Sparta, or, like Xenophon, admiringly from within its orbit, and mostly from the 4th century BC onward, presented Sparta as a changeless, self-sufficient (autarkeia) society needing nothing from the wider Greek world. The French historian Francois Ollier gave this idealised, often distorted picture its classic name: le mirage spartiate ("the Spartan mirage", 1933).

Laconian bronzeworkers produced sophisticated vessels and statuettes. The Vix Krater (around 530 BC), a 1.64 metre tall bronze mixing vessel found in a Celtic burial in central France, is widely attributed to Laconian workshops. The "Charioteer of Delphi" (around 470 BC), one of the great surviving Greek bronzes, was found at the temple of Apollo at Delphi and is plausibly Laconian.

Laconian black-figure pottery reached its export peak around 575 to 550 BC, the chronology established by Conrad Stibbe's study of the Laconian vase painters, with distinctive bowls, cups, and kraters carrying naturalistic mythological and hunting scenes. The "Cup of Arcesilas" (around 560 BC), which depicts King Arcesilas II of Cyrene supervising the weighing and export of silphium, was itself recovered far from Sparta, in an Etruscan tomb at Vulci, direct evidence for the reach of the export trade. Laconian pottery has been recovered from Etruria, Cyrenaica, Samos, Naukratis in Egypt, and Taras in Magna Graecia; both production and export fall away sharply after the mid-6th century BC.

The Sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, excavated by the British School at Athens from 1906 (chiefly under R. M. Dawkins), preserved over 100,000 votive lead figurines and elaborate ivory plaques from the 7th and 6th centuries BC.

The 7th-century BC poets Tyrtaeus (whose surviving war elegies urged Spartan hoplites to hold the front rank rather than flee) and Alcman (choral lyric, the Partheneia, composed for performance by choirs of Spartan girls) flourished at Sparta. Choral festivals brought poetry, music, and dance together, and both poets are cited by later writers as evidence that archaic Sparta was a full participant in mainstream Greek literary culture, not yet the closed, unliterary society of its later reputation.

Older scholarship, notably W. G. Forrest (A History of Sparta 950-192 BC, 1968), building on Chester Starr's account of a "sixth-century revolution", reads this change as a sudden, deliberate cultural shutdown: around 550 BC Sparta consciously closed itself to outside trade, imported luxury, and artistic exchange, in favour of an austere, militarised way of life bound up with the consolidating agoge and hoplite discipline.

Stephen Hodkinson (Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta, 2000) rejects the "sudden shutdown" model. He argues the visible decline in monumental architecture and imported luxury was not a decline in wealth at all, but a deliberate ideological choice: Spartiate elites stopped DISPLAYING wealth in public monuments and dedications and instead held it privately, in land. Paul Cartledge (Sparta and Lakonia, 1979; The Spartans, 2002) integrates the archaeological and literary evidence and largely endorses this re-reading, while stressing that a real internal reorganisation around the agoge and hoplite training did occur alongside it.

The cult centre of Apollo Hyakinthios at Amyklai, around 5 km south of Sparta. The "Throne of Apollo" (designed by the sculptor Bathycles of Magnesia, 6th century BC) was an elaborate cult installation around a colossal bronze statue of Apollo. Pausanias (3.18) describes it in detail.

Near the Eurotas, just outside Sparta. Excavated since the early 20th century; the site of the diamastigosis (boys' whipping contest). Yielded the lead figurines and ivory plaques.

On the Spartan acropolis. Named for the bronze plaques that lined its walls. King Pausanias died of starvation in this sanctuary around 470 BC (Thucydides 1.134).

A heroon to Menelaus and Helen on a hill east of Sparta. Excavated from the late 19th century onwards; yields dedications across the archaic and classical periods.

A circular structure in central Sparta, possibly the agora's social centre.

A colonnaded hall built at Sparta in the decades after the Persian Wars (the early to mid-5th century BC), funded from the spoils of the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataea (479 BC). Vitruvius (De Architectura 1.1.6) records that its roof was supported not by ordinary columns but by statues of captive Persians in barbarian dress, a permanent, celebratory monument to the victory; it is the closest classical Sparta comes to a triumphal public building.

Wheat, barley, olives, vines, and figs. Production was extensive enough to supply the Spartiate population and to maintain the syssitia contributions. The Helots paid a fixed share of the produce to the Spartiate master.