Let us remember who the Spartans were; the most boring and violent of all the Greek city-states. They lived together in infamously homosexual "messes", and every so many years would cull their slave population by a certain percentage in a ritual massacre. This kept the slaves in terror....and eager to stay off the list. The Spartans could obviously fight and were brave as hell. But that was the ancient world- it was cruel beyond what we can imagine, was based on a slave economy, and man-boy love was accepted as fairly common (I am not gay by the way). For those of us still fighting the civil war, or politically polarized, we might note Greece as an example; joining forces against the Persians was the exception. Those people were so busy fighting each other they finally self-destructed.