"Why are you Spartan women the only ones who can rule men?" "Because we are also the only ones who give birth to men."
Gorgo, Queen of Sparta and wife of Leonidas, as quoted by Plutarch[1]
Spartan women were famous in ancient Greece for seemingly having more freedom than women elsewhere in the Greek world. To contemporaries outside of Sparta, Spartan women had a reputation for promiscuity and controlling their husbands. Spartan women could legally own and inherit property, and they were usually better educated than their Athenian counterparts. The surviving written sources are limited and largely from a non-Spartan viewpoint. Anton Powell wrote that to say the written sources are "'not without problems'... as an understatement would be hard to beat".[2]
Similar to other places in ancient Greece, in Sparta, far more is known about the elites than the lower classes, and ancient sources do not discuss gender in relation to the non-citizens (e.g. helots) who constituted the majority of the population of the Spartan state.[3]
^Plutarch, Moralia 225A and 240E
^Powell 2004
^Pomeroy 2002, p. 95.
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