- Because it is such a spartan environment and lacks significant variation or detail, it lends itself readily to imaginative transformation.
- The dining room, not exactly spartan but simpler than most of Starck's restaurant interiors, is high enough to afford fine westerly views upriver to the City and beyond.
- Schmidt is potentially a cold character, spartan with words and frugal with money.
mid 17th century: from Spartan1, because the inhabitants of Sparta were traditionally held to be indifferent to comfort or luxury.
A spartan place or lifestyle is one lacking comfort or luxury. The word is a tribute to the Spartans of ancient Greece, traditional foes of Athens, who left weak or sickly babies out on a cold mountain slope at night to die and forced all children to live in military ‘boarding schools’ from the age of about seven. Their terse speech also gave us the word laconic.
Most popular in the US
Most popular in the UK
Most popular in Canada
Most popular in Australia
Most popular in Malaysia
Most popular in Pakistan
- My jaw literally dropped as the girl started picking out books about ancient Spartan history - senior school work.
- With the collapse of Spartan hegemony in 371, the fragmentation of Greece was such that it became harder to find allies than to hire troops.
- Those two aspects of Spartan culture and society by themselves make Sparta worthy of our continued study, but they far from exhaust Sparta's fascination.
nounBack to top
- The Spartans were the Dorian inhabitants of a Greek city-state in the Peloponnese that for many centuries was one of the greatest of Greek powers.
- The Spartans finally won through Lysander's abilities as a general and his friendship with Cyrus, the son of the Persian King, who financed the Spartan navy more regularly and fully than it had been.
- At the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans slew any trader they caught sailing around their coast line, irrespective of their ethnicity.