Regardless of Zach Snyder’s deeply fascist, deeply homoerotic, deeply ahistorical film 300, classical Spartan society was very shitty.
Sparta was a highly militarized, nearly-totalitarian slave state. A tiny hereditary elite devoted itself almost entirely to the production and export of violence, living off the labor of a large servile population, the helots.
Helots lived a bit like medieval serfs: they lived in their own villages, farmed their own fields, raised their own families. But each was owned by some member of the Spartan elite and owed a regular tribute of agricultural production to that owner, freeing the Spartan elites from manual labor and permitting them to focus on learning how to hurt people.