Answer:
In ancient Sparta strength was admired and weakness was despised. The greatest virtue was bravery and the greatest honor was to die fighting in battle.
Step-by-step explanation:
Sparta was one of the greatest city-states of ancient Greece and for a long time the main rival of Athens. Unlike Athens which became a large power by way of trade and naval supremacy, Sparta rose through its military might and bravery. It was said that while Athens was centered around great buildings, Sparta was built by courageous men who “served their city in the place of walls of bricks.”
The Spartan army was small. It was the only professional force in Greece. In Sparta every grown male was a soldier granted a farm run by slaves. The Spartans army was trained to fight in a phalanx, using a tight gird of overlapping shields to form an impenetrable mobile unit. Herodotus wrote the Spartans fought "with swords, eyes, and with their hands and their teeth." Plato, Napoleon and Kurt Hahn, the founder of the Gordonstoun school, where Prince Charles studied, were inspired by the brutal discipline of the ancient Spartans.
According to Encyclopædia Britannica: “Spartans were absolutely debarred by law from trade or manufacture, which consequently rested in the hands of the perioeci (q.v.), and were forbidden to possess either gold or silver, the currency consisting of bars of iron: but there can be no doubt that this prohibitian was evaded in various ways. Wealth was, in theory at least, derived entirely from landed property, and consisted in the annual return made by the helots (q.v.) who cultivated the plots of ground allotted to the Spartans. But this attempt to equalize property proved a failure: from early times there were marked differences of wealth within the state, and these became even more serious after the law of epitadeus, passed at some time after the Peloponnesian War, removed the legal prohibition of the gift or bequest of land. [Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition, 1911 Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Greece, Fordham University]
“Later we find the soil coming more and more into the possession of large landholders, and by the middle of the 3rd century B.C. nearly two fifths of Laconia belonged to women. Hand in hand with this process went a serious diminution in the number of full citizens, who had numbered 8000 at the beginning of the 5th century, but had sunk by Aristotle's day to less than 1000, and had further decreased to 700 at the accession of Agis IV. in 244 B.C. The Spartans did. what they could to remedy this by law: certain penalties were imposed upon those who remained unmarried or who married too late in life. But the~decay was too deep-rooted to be eradicated by such means, and we shall see that at a late period in Sparta's history an attempt was made without success to deal with the evil by much rnore drastic measures.”