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In my opinion, the Spartan model was more or less a manual how to NOT design a society. The Spartan system had many flaws, so I just want to mention some of them:

1) Its population was to small since only sons of citizens could become citizens, Spartans married only after 30 and life and education was made hard on purpose
2) It didn't manage to open up it's civic body for the free but otherwise disenfranchised Perioeci who would certainly have Sparta even more willingly if they had been treated as equal
3) To further increase the number of citizens, Sparta should have given full rights to the Bastards (nothoi - children of a Spartan father and a helot woman)
4) The Spartans could never use their full manpower due to the constant threat of being outnumbered by the Helots (once read that there were ten times more Helots than Spartans) - that is, in my view, a sign that they never realized that you can, through incentives like a possible maumission or a human treatment gain the loyalty of your subjects
5) The decision to discourage economic activity of citizens and to limit the right to travel abroad to Perioeci was another disastrous move, since even in an agricultural society like ancient Greece trade, craftsmanship and fishing were fundamental sources of wealth, and a society were the citizens become poorer than the disenfranchised tradesmen is bound to become unstable.
6) The general conservatism imposed upon Spartan society by these and other provisions made reforms of the broken civil and military system impossible and lead to Sparta's defeats in the 4th century and to the rise of Macedon.

Sparta was neither a center of culture like Athens, nor a military great power like Rome, nor an important empire like Persia.

So what makes Sparta so admirable?
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