The Spartan Diaita: Reconstructing The Truth of the Quotidian Experience of the Average Classical Era Spartan Citizen Beyond the Spartan Mirage

The legend of ancient Sparta has built cumulatively since antiquity, creating an image of Spartan society that is more of an abstract than a concretely attestable historical reality. From the 20th century onwards, there has been a concerted drive within scholarship to understand how this mirage has obfuscated understandings of Sparta and to present a more realistic view of Spartan society. While this drive has taken great steps towards demystifying ancient Sparta, there is to date only a limited amount of scholarship focussing on the everyday social and cultural experiences of ordinary Spartans, which restricts the extent to which Spartan institutions and practices can be contextualised within their wider socio-political setting. This thesis addresses this gap in Spartan historiography by reconstructing the lived experience of the ordinary Spartiate from a sociological and psychological perspective, aiming in the process to prove how this methodological approach can benefit Spartan scholarship by expanding upon, and contextualising, the research of other scholars.