Una città abitata kata komas. La rappresentazione di Sparta e dei suoi villaggi all’alba della storiografia moderna

It is generally believed that the villages referred to by Thucydides, when he describes Sparta as a city settled in villages (kata komas), were just five and located around the acropolis. This paper aims to show that this orthodoxy has been originally formulated at the end of the eighteenth century, primarily by Jean-Jacques Barthélemy, and that some of the arguments used in those early studies have frozen the debate on Sparta’s urban form, which needs to be reopened.