Why was Sparta the only city-state without walls?
Sparta’s reason was firstly that it was a collection of villages, and a wall around the lot would have been impracticable. So they decided theat, rather than have one village walled as a citadel, to rely on being able to defeat an invader (or their serfs, or their non-citizen freemen living in the countryside) by fighting in the open and in the village streets – as they said, their warriors were their walls.
