Dbq Spartiates

Many may think that child abuse is unacceptable and inappropriate, but the Spartiate would disagree. Sparta was an ancient Greek civilization in the Peloponnese, in a peninsula southern Greece. The weaknesses of Sparta outweighed the strengths because they had no means of education, they were abusive and murderous toward children, and they enslaved natives of the land. Sparta was an abusive society and deserved to fall. To commence, the Spartiate began and fell within only three hundred years. One reason for this is because they had no real means of education. In document D it stated that “[The Spartans] learned to read and write for purely for practical reasons: all other forms of education they banned from the country,” The Spartans thought that in depth education was unimportant and made the country weak. …show more content…
As stated in Document C, “at night they descended upon the highways and slaughtered any helots they caught.” Not only would they have the helots work for no pay but if they seemed too intelligent they would be murdered. The helots were not considered citizens, and didn’t live with the city limits. They had no rights and were treated very poorly. The Spartans didn’t need a currency because they had the helots; they would do all of the farming and would get nothing in return. They were forced to give their masters, the Spartiates, half of what they harvested.

In cessation, many could argue that Sparta gave women equal rights and let them run the country, which is more than most early civilizations did, but this strength doesn’t outweigh the many, many weaknesses of Sparta. Some of these weaknesses include having no means of education, being abusive and murderous towards children, and enslaving natives of the land. All of these weaknesses provide a profuse amount of evidence supporting that the weaknesses outweighed the