The Spartans
'The Spartans were a strange people...Their contemporaries in the ancient world were intrigued by the 'mystery' that surrounded them, by their secretiveness, their peculiar manner of life and the impenetrable seclusion into which they had withdrawn. In their own day they were a great people; but their greatness sprang from qualities violently and astonishingly different from those that the world regards as typically Greek.'
(H Michell, 1964, Sparta, Cambridge University Press, London, p.1)