Quote Originally Posted by Teleklos Archelaou
We *all* do agree that there is no way we can know for sure what third century spartans looked like. That is good. Our version of the unit will not be liked by some folks, for sure. Like we were mentioning, there is a range of possibilities. Ours is on the higher end of the range for a few different reasons. CB's recent spartans are on the other end. I can't say that all of our details are right, since most of our information does come from earlier periods (for the sparties). But some things we do know about them that greatly affected our view of the unit was that they fought with the king of sparta, and the served as mercenaries from Sicily and Italy and Greece to Crete and probably in much more distant places on occasion too. They used their money to support their families back home, as the helot business had closed up shop by this point in time. Plus this is the third century, not the fifth, so some changes in armor and helmets and such would be obvious. Sparta at this time had just begun to permit the minting of coins and had a reputation acquired with our starting king of allowing more luxuries than at any previous period. Plus, we felt like maybe taking things a little further (not much more for this point though) to get the point across that these are *not* Thermopylai Spartans, and that they have changed quite a bit in many respects. It's a fairly elite unit too, and although that didn't affect the way the unit was directly created, I'm personally glad I have a unit I can look forward to recruiting instead of feeling like it's a step down from my other units. Well, that's just a few general words to further prepare folks for the spartans when they are released.
I was hoping that this was some good information that might lead to interesting discussion actually.