They were as good as any other....myth!

[PMBardunias]

The meaning of „Spartans are not better than others 1on1“..Is not in sense you understood-that they can be matched by any regular farmer,but in the sense that there are some better individuals out there...But there is no group with better average(of first, second and third places in some imaginary scale of combat skill)...

I disagree completely that this was the intention of the quote. The whole point of the line is to emphasize that, due to their extensive group training, Spartans could move and fight in a level of synchrony and cohesion that was unattainable by more amateur forces, or by implication the cream of the Persian elite. It is not that Spartans were further along on a bell curve than other men in terms of individual fighting skill.

Persian immortals for example may well have been on average better individual combatants than Spartans. Why? Because they were drawn from a much larger sample set than the tiny population of Spartiates could produce. So even if the average Spartiate were better than the average Persian, the Spartans must include all of their variability, the best and the worst, while the Persians are sampling only the very best of the best to make up the immortals.

There is a famous quote comparing French and Mamluk cavalry that captures the essence of this. Paraphrased for Spartans and Persians it would read: The average Immortal could outfight a Spartan, any 10 Spartans would be an even match for 10 immortals, but 300 Spartans were more than a match for 10,000 immortals. It is all about cohesion of the group, not individual fighting skill.

The above was to specifically address the intention of the line in Herodotus, but it is probable that a Spartiate was a better individual combatant than a "farmer." But remember that many of these spent a lot of time at the gymnasium and hired the services of hoplomachoi, so it is not the same as comparing the average raw conscript with the cream of Spetsznas. The ancient sources are quite split on the usefulness of individual weapons skills, like those taught by hoplomachoi, in any case. Plato tells us that the Spartans had no use for them (Laches), and Xenophon (cyropaedia) tells us that it takes no training to use a sword- any kid will know how to strike and you can't miss in a phalanx. As for mental toughness and a willingness to fight, this is of course hard to guage, but the ancient Greeks were a very agonistic society, so there was a lot of this as well.