Spártē in Later Traditions
Sparta's afterlife is a reception history rather than a theology. Republican Rome studied the Lycurgan constitution through Xenophon, Aristotle's lost treatise on the Lacedaemonians, and Polybius' account of the mixed constitution — and read Sparta as proof that a state could trade comfort for discipline and longevity. Plutarch's Life of Lycurgus then carried the idealized Sparta into every later century, from Rousseau, who praised the lawgiver's shaping of citizens, to the 19th-century gymnastics and boarding-school movements that borrowed the agoge's name. Modern scholarship, led by Cartledge and Hodkinson, has dismantled the mirage of a changeless Sparta — yet the mirage itself is one of antiquity's most influential exports, a whole political imagination built on a Greek city that may never have existed as its admirers believed.