This is an old book (1980) and doubtless out of date, but I found it a very useful and readable introduction to the Spartans, whom I didn't know much about. It doesn't have a lot to say about the Spartan myths of a disciplined and rigorous military lifestyle, which appears to have been limited to the middle section of society who, rather than being the yeoman farmers who comprised the infantry in other Greek armies, had an allotment of land which they did not farm, the proceeds from which were used to pay their mess fees.
The book concentrates more on the archaeological finds, particularly of the earlier eras, and there were interesting snippets of information such as the area being sparsely populated before the Dorian invaders of the ninth century BC. Syrian and Phoenician traders came looking for the purple dye of the murex at Gytheum on the south coast and brought ivory with them. The carving of ivory had disappeared from Greece with the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation, but had been kept alive in two areas in Syria and Phoenicia. The art reappears in the early seventh century in Greece, but the supply of ivory dried up in the first half of the sixth century BC when the trade was disrupted by Assyrian expansion and the siege of Tyre in 573 BC, so bone and bronze was used for inlay, and terracotta statuettes developed. Yet by the fifth and fourth centuries, the individual nature of Spartan art had disappeared under the more popular influence of Athenian and Corinthian art.
The Spartans by L F Fitzhardinge
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