Bret Devereaux

As for Schumptre's dictum on democracy, Sparta fails at that. There were exactly 35 people whose opinion mattered in Sparta: 28 gerontes, 2 kings, 5 ephors. Often the gerontes may have also been ephors, which lowers the number further.

Spartan elections - done by acclamation - were about as democratic as modern elections in the various crypto-dictatorships like Russia. Systems to give the ruling minority's decisions the legitimacy of democracy without the reality, a fact that even out ancient sources admit.

The idea of equality even among the peers (the homoioi) is also probably a myth. We see evidence for rich Spartiates and poor spartiates at the moment the sources are good enough to know.

It isn't equal or cohesive. There's a plot by Spartiates who had fallen out of the census in the fourth century to try to overthrow the state - because there were a *lot* of them (the hypomeiones or inferiors).

And to say that Sparta lacked the class distinctions of Rome's patrician/plebian divide is a severe error. Both because it overstates the importance of those divisions (which by the Middle Republic had ceased to matter very much - there were rich, powerful plebians)...

But also because it somehow credits Sparta for an 'equality' Rome could have achieved simply by enslaving all of the plebians. The difference between Rome and Sparta is that in Sparta the patricians managed to completely wall everyone else out from politics.