These villages were open and consisted of small and simple houses built with stone foundations and clay walls.

Despite this, a gravestone of a fallen legionary named Marcus Aurelius Alexys shows him lightly armed, with a pilos-like cap and a wooden club. By the mid-5th century, land had become concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, and the notion that all Spartan citizens were equals had become an empty pretence. It wasn't until after the Peloponnesian War that battles countenanced indiscriminate slaughter, enslavement and depredations among the Greeks. There an amphitheatre was built in the 3rd century AD to observe the ritual whipping of Spartan youths. During the Peloponnesian War, battle engagements became more fluid, light troops became increasingly used, and tactics evolved to meet them.What made Sparta's relations with her slave population unique was that the helots, precisely because they enjoyed privileges such as family and property, retained their identity as a conquered people (the Messenians) and also had effective kinship groups that could be used to organize rebellion.

Six morai composed the Spartan army on campaign, to which were added the Skiritai and the contingents of allied states. Spartan citizens were required to donate a certain amount of what they yielded from their kleros to their syssitia, or mess. The city nevertheless recovered much autonomy after the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC and prospered during the Roman Empire, as its antiquarian customs attracted many Roman tourists. Eventually, this system was replaced by five territorial divisions, the obai ("villages"), which supplied a lochos of about 1,000 men each.To come home without the shield was the mark of a deserter; rhipsaspia, or "dropping the shield," was a synonym for desertion in the field.

At the peak of its power in the early 4th century BC, Sparta had subdued many of the main Greek states and even invaded the Persian provinces in Anatolia (modern day Turkey), a period known as the Spartan hegemony. The Spartans’ real secret wasn’t physical fitness or indifference to pain and suffering, but rather superior organization. However, over the course of the 6th century, Sparta secured her control of the Peloponnese peninsula.Although they did not enjoy full citizen-rights, they were free and not subjected to the same restrictions as the helots. By the end of the Peloponnesian War, the structure of the army had evolved further, to address the shortages in manpower and create a more flexible system which allowed the Spartans to send smaller detachments on campaigns or garrisons outside their homeland.

They were selected every year by specially commissioned officials, the hippagretai, drafted from experienced men who already had sons as heirs. According to Plutarch after birth, a mother would bathe her child in wine to see whether the child was strong. Eventually it produced a sort of conceptual lock when Spartans could not imagine any other kind of life,” Reiter explains. A "small circus" (as described by Leake) proved to be a theatre-like building constructed soon after 200AD around the altar and in front of the Temple of Artemis Orthia.A wall was finally erected after 184 BCE, after the peak of the city-state's power had come and gone. citation needed] The Spartan helots were not only agricultural workers, but were also household servants, both male and female would be assigned domestic duties, such as wool-working. The reasons for delaying marriage were to ensure the birth of healthy children, but the effect was to spare Spartan women the hazards and lasting health damage associated with pregnancy among adolescents. The battle killed a large number of Spartiates, and resulted in the loss of the fertile Messenia region.