Spartan women enjoyed considerably more rights and equality to men than elsewhere in the classical antiquity.Sparta was the subject of fascination in its own day, as well as in Western culture following the revival of classical learning.However, it maintained its political independence until the Roman conquest of Greece in 146 BC.It then underwent a long period of decline, especially in the Middle Ages, when many Spartans moved to live in Mystras. Site of the Menelaion, the ancient shrine to Helen and Menelaus constructed in the Bronze Age city that stood on the hill of Therapne on the left bank of the Eurotas River overlooking the future site of Dorian Sparta.Across the valley the successive ridges of Mount Taygetus are in evidence.

Though landlocked, Sparta had a harbor, Gytheio, on the Laconian Gulf.

Its inhabitants were classified as Spartiates (Spartan citizens, who enjoyed full rights), mothakes (non-Spartan free men raised as Spartans), perioikoi (free residents, literally "dwellers around"), and helots (state-owned serfs, enslaved non-Spartan local population).

Spartiates underwent the rigorous agoge training and education regimen, and Spartan phalanges were widely considered to be among the best in battle.

The likely total of 40,000–50,000 made Sparta one of the largest Greek cities; The French classicist François Ollier in his 1933 book Le mirage spartiate ("The Spartan Mirage") warned that a major scholarly problem regarding Sparta is that all the surviving accounts were written by non-Spartans who often presented an excessively idealized image of Sparta.

this was also used sometimes as an adjective and is the name commonly used in the works of Homer and the historians Herodotus and Thucydides.