Note that the celebration of Sparta goes all the way back to their contemporaries in the rest of Greece. Generally, like today, their image was used as a rhetor

Note that the celebration of Sparta goes all the way back to their contemporaries in the rest of Greece. Generally, like today, their image was used as a rhetorical cudgel to beat your opponents with; usually for being too democratic, not "manly" enough, too attached to the civilian economy, &c That celebration is an expression of a long-running thread of similarly abhorrent tendencies in Western intellectual tradition.