Spartan Influences on the Design of the American Republic

This paper examines the structural and theoretical influence of the Spartan constitution of Lycurgus, who lived around the ninth to eighth century BC, on the design of the American Republic. Rome and Athens seem to get nearly all the credit for the republic the Founders built, yet a much larger share belongs to Sparta, and the paper makes that case. Sparta was a martial society organized as a strict hierarchy: a small, leisured, land-owning warrior aristocracy of Spartiates; the Perioikoi, free non-citizens who worked the trades and fought beside them; and the Helots, the state-owned serfs who worked the land and made up the great majority of the people. The Spartans recognized that hierarchy openly, as if Pareto had handed his principle to Lycurgus in advance, and their constitution was monarchical, aristocratic, or democratic depending on one’s place in it. It was also anchored in religion, in the worship of Apollo and Artemis. The founding carried a significant, mediated inheritance from that constitution, passed down through Polybius, the Roman Republic, and the living example of Britain.