When talking about ancient Greece it's easy to make generalizations. Most of our hard evidence from that era comes from Athens, home to the beginnings of democracy during the classical period, but there was more diversity of political and social structures in antiquity than you might think. Ancient Sparta (or just Sparta), for one, was a very different place.
The entire society of Sparta was built around being an elite military power. Full Spartan citizens ('Spartiates'), the top strata of their strict class system, all went through intense training starting as children ('agoge') and were only soldiers, they weren't allowed to have other jobs. In Athens and other poleis the bulk of the army (the heavy troops, the hoplites) was made up of farmers and craftsmen who took up arms when necessary. Sparta was through this period, and long afterward, a quaint place. They lived simply, did not enact a large building program (like the Acropolis) or place much, if any, emphasis on things like art or philosophy. They didn't even record their own history and most of what we know about them comes from external sources. Another thing, unlike basically all other ancient Greek cities they didn't build defensive walls around their main settlement, at least until much later. Part of this was due to the natural fortification of the surrounding hills, but more-so it was a faith in their militant culture and army. There's good reason the definition of the word 'spartan' means austere, self-disciplined, frugal.
All of this was effective, the Spartan army was legendary in its own time and the best soldiers on land for about 300 years (~650 to 371 BC). Many today might simply describe them as the 'most awesome' ancient Greeks, thanks largely to one battle and its depictions. As seen in 300 (first a 1998 graphic novel by Frank Miller then a 2007 major motion picture by Zack Snyder), King Leonidas and 300 Spartan soldiers defied Achaemenid King Xerxes at Thermopylae in 480 BC as part of the Greco-Persian Wars. Their sacrifice supposedly inspired wider Greece to rally and expel the Persian invaders. This may not be entirely accurate, but it's certainly a major contributor to the mythology of Sparta. At Thermopylae Leonidas is credited for uttering the famous phrase, 'ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ' (or 'Molon Labe'), translated roughly to 'come and take them,' a challenge to Xerxes regarding the Spartan's weapons. If you see this on the back of a car or in a social media bio, you've found a current-day gun rights activist.
Even if you respect the Spartans for their fighting prowess and unwillingness to bow down to an aspiring conquerer, we shouldn't ignore everything else about how their society developed or functioned. As already mentioned Sparta had a strictly divided class structure. The top class was their citizen-soldiers, the Spartiates. Their government was an oligarchy, with leadership by a dual hereditary monarchy, from two families believed to be descendants of Heracles (aka Hercules), and a council of elders elected for life that was filled primarily with other royal family members. On the other end, the lowest class, were the 'helots,' slaves more akin to medieval serfs than what you found in America prior to the Civil War.
The helots were a massive subordinate population, including for a time nearly the whole of the neighboring region of Messenia, conquered by Sparta about 720 BC. They were owned by the state and worked the land or held other economically supportive roles that weren't going to be done by the top of the Spartan hierarchy. What makes the helots exceptional, even in the ancient world where slavery was common, was how many of them there were. Herodotus (the 'father of history') claimed that at the battle of Plataea (479), where the full Spartan army appeared, there were seven helots to every Spartiate. This ratio, which was possibly exaggerated (as could happen in the ancient primary sources), was the basis for historians to estimate the total number of helots, often thought to be in the hundreds of thousands. After some Googling I found an interesting (though long) 2003 study that tried to find a reasonable answer to this question by looking at agricultural production. They drew a line (again ~479BC) at about 100,000 helots as compared to about 25,000 Spartiates. Even if less than what was long considered to be the case, the helots were still considerably more numerous than the rest of the total Spartan population (maybe 50,000) and outnumbered its citizens several times over.
Spartan culture cannot be understood without looking at the relationship with these helots. Following the First Messenian War (743-724 BC) the Spartans subjugated the people of Messenia in order to take and control their fertile land. Following the Second Messenian War (660-650 BC), basically a large-scale helot rebellion, is when Sparta made the militaristic changes to their society, adopting the agoge and more. Sparta adopted this culture largely to crush their own lowest class, which was by-and-large the groups they had conquered through the previous centuries. This setup, this ratio of slaves to citizens, was a constant problem for Sparta even through its ascendency in classical Greece. During this period there weren't many more actual revolts (the most notable coincided with a large earthquake in 464 BC), but the fear of it happening again constrained Spartan foreign policy and resulted in the larger group being ruled through fear, intimidation and outright murder. The helots were routinely, perhaps ritually, treated cruelly, shamed in public, given terrible jobs etc. Much worse, annually the Spartan citizenry declared war on them, where the up-and-coming males could kill helots without repercussions. Pretty awful stuff. What's kind of fascinating is that, because of many wars and the continued difficulty of becoming a citizen, the number of Spartiates dwindled through the classical period while the number of helots likely grew, or stayed the same, as they lived separately and had families without interference. In other words the ratio of helots to citizens increased over time even through this repression, further worsening the stress on Spartan society.
Sparta peaked after it won the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC), a fight with Athens for primacy, or hegemony, in Greece. Because of the Delian League (the Athenian empire talked about briefly here), many other Greek states looked to Sparta as liberators. Once Sparta finally overthrew Athens, with the help of Persia(!), the other poleis didn't appreciate the treatment they received from their new overlords. It shouldn't be surprising that the Spartans, in leadership over most of Greece, were unnecessarily harsh and brutal. Ten years later, in response to now aggressive expansion attempts, they were at war again with many of their former allies. After the battle of Leuktra (371), the Spartans would never again be the dominant military power they once were. It was a pretty rapid descent.
My main point here is the Spartans probably shouldn't be held up as an exemplar of freedom, or as the best of the Greeks. No one questions that they could really fight, at least until their whole system, built wholly on an overwhelming number of terribly-treated slaves, collapsed upon them. For this I'd say they were actually the worst.
This post was inspired and aided by the book I'm working through currently: The Greek World 479-323 BC, Simon Hornblower (3rd Ed. - 2002). It's incredibly dense, is probably used as a college textbook and has too much information for me to process at times, but it's still been an enjoyable read.
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