The Spartan Contribution to Greek Citizenship Theory
One of the major current scholarly debates surrounding ancient Sparta concerns its status as a unicum—or not: how was Sparta ‘different', if indeed it was, from all or most other Greek poleis? One of those possible ways concerns its politeia, that is both its ‘constitution’ and—the original sense of the word—its mode of citizenship. In this chapter it is argued that Sparta may have made a pioneering contribution to Greek citizenship theory. If the so-called ‘Great Rhetra’ is a genuine seventh-century BC document, if Tyrtaeus is the first extant ancient Greek source to use a form of ‘politai’ (polis-persons, citizens) in his verses, if…As with most aspects of early Spartan history, alas, the sources are inadequate, and the ‘mirage’ gets in the way. But there are glimpses of an unexpectedly (given the mirage) progressive Sparta that contradict its later image of fossilized conservatism.