The Spartan Way / Literature

• The war camp run by the Bloodletter in Black Dagger Brotherhood qualifies for this trope. And unlike the real Spartans, who started training at age seven, his trainees started at age three. Made worse by the fact that winners of sparring bouts were encouraged to rape the losers. Alumni of this camp include Darius and Vishous.
• In Brotherhood of the Rose the CIA assassin protagonists are recruited as boys from a government orphanage (whose boys were already being groomed as patriotic cannon fodder for the US military) and then raised to be killing machines, to the point where disguised CIA agents were sent to mug the boys and beat them humiliatingly so as to make them really want to learn martial arts. As one of them puts it: "The way we were raised, I don't think we were ever kids."
• Tom Kratman's Carrera's Legions features the titular mercenary outfit, which makes the training for its infantry super-harsh (as in, training casualties amounting to about one per cent of full strength). It's even worse for officers: they have to go through infantry training, and then their equivalent of Ranger School.
• In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, the Betas' training. They start off with a run and if they don't run fast enough to please him, Barrage sends explosions to their feet; he had, in the past, sent all but one of them to the infirmary with injuries. In Villains Rising, the milder methods that Gage devises for training surprise the Junior Rangers; the Rangers had used much less serious, and then the Betas tell them how their training was conducted.
• The Blood Lords, from John Ringo's Council Wars series. Somewhat of a necessity given that, just a few months prior to the titular conflict kicking off, the people in it had been members of a post-scarcity survivor. They wouldn't have stood a chance against the numerically superior opposition otherwise.
• In The Defense of Hill 781 soldiers who get sent to Purgatory find it just like the US Army National Training Center. In other words either the army needed something really nasty and modeled the NTC on Purgatory. Or the afterlife needed something really purgatorial and used the NTC as the closest example on Earth.
• The Greek text Deipnosophistae ("the dinner philosophers") features an example of The Spartan Way as applied to table manners: A Spartan was invited to a seafood banquet featuring urchins. Not being familiar with how they're eaten (and not about to ask one of those pansy-ass Athenians), he puts one in his mouth and starts chewing.
  "What detestable food! I will not now be so effeminate as to eject it, but I will never take it again."
• The Draka self-consciously mirror the training regimen of ancient Sparta, even calling their militaristic boarding school program the Agoge. Unlike in Sparta, both boys and girls are trained this way. While the Spartans had the Helots to keep in line, the Draka have everyone on Earth who is not them.
• In Dune, the incredibly harsh prison planet Salusa Secundus serves as the secret training grounds for the Emperor's elite Sardukar shock troops. And the incredibly lethal deserts of the titular planet Dune serve to make its indigenous people, The Fremen, hardy enough to overcome even the Sardukar.
  "The Sardukar was forced to use the jet engines of their troop transporters as flamethrowers. That, my dear Baron, is an act of desperation!"
  • The Ginaz Academy, which trains the best warriors in the Empire. It's a grueling eight-year program, and roughly one-third of all students do not survive training. Another third simply wash out, and the final third join the ranks of the Ginaz Swordmasters.
• The Forever War. While the initial training is brutal enough, it is later mentioned to the lead that growing and programming ideal soldiers from birth was tried and didn't work (the aliens do suicidal valor better). The training was justified by the fact that the environments they were fighting in were just as lethal, and that they had to be trained to fight in them. Considering that they were training on an airless rock where one wrong step could kill them, the casualties taken were probably low. The impracticality of this is lampshaded many times by the main characters, and given how the military is drafting geniuses and using them as Cannon Fodder, on airless rocks that could be bombarded from orbit and retain the same value, and how it turns out that the aliens had nothing to do with the destroyed ship that started the war, it seems to suggest that the government is just trying to kill off all the smart people.
• The Wilds in A Harvest of War are literate and have access to some of the best technology available (things like crucible steel) yet still choose to live as hunter-gatherers in the wilderness, particularly forests, while maintaining combat readiness on par with knights (who have a lot more free time to practice).
• In the Sven Hassel WW2 novel Monte Cassino the 27th Penal Panzer Regiment is commanded by Major Mike Braun, a German-American and former US Marine.
  He turned to Hauptfeldwebel Hoffman. "Two hours special drill in the river. Anyone who kills a comrade gets three weeks leave. Every tenth cartridge and every twentieth grenade will be live. I want to see at least one broken arm. Otherwise, four hours extra drill."
  Then began one of Mike's usual exercises. We hated him because of them, but they made us hard and inhuman. If you are to be a good soldier, you have to be able to hate. You have to kill a man as if he were a louse.
• In Raven's Shadow, this is how the Sixth Order operates. Ten year old boys come in, seventeen year old Warrior Monk commandos come out. To graduate you have to fight three men to the death at the same time. The attrition rate is about 50%, but those aren't all fatalities, some just wash out. They do differ from the standard in one respect: instead of starving the kids they feed them the equivalent of three banquets a day to ensue they grow up strong and healthy. Although even that has an ulterior motive, once you're used to the massive regular calorie intake they dump you alone in the woods and leave you to fend for yourself over the winter.
• In Red Rising, society is rigidly stratified into various genetically engineered castes, and the ruling Gold caste maintains its power by training future leaders according to this method. Youths are sent to the Institute and the first night in are snatched out of bed and beaten up and then placed in a room with another student, only one of which can leave alive. After that, the students participate in a deadly version of Capture the Flag in which capturing other players and enslaving them is par for the course and there's no rule against maiming, raping, and/or killing opponents. One Gold authority actually makes specific reference to the Spartans as a model, commenting to the effect that both Ancient Athens (a democracy) and Ancient Rome (an aristocratic empire) fell to decadence, and that the Spartan system provides a positive counterexample in combining aristocracy with training that prevented the society from becoming "weak".^note Which is completely ahistorical, but whatever
• The Republic Commando Series books of the Star Wars Expanded Universe describe the training of the original Clone trooper army as including live fire exercises at around age 4-5 and a course called the sickener designed to make the troops wash out. There's also the matter of groups of soldiers going missing if their accuracy is as low as 95%. While there was also the whole cloned issue that led to them being effective, there was definitely more than a little of The Spartan Way involved.
• TIE fighter pilot training in the Star Wars Legends X-Wing Series was noted to be particularly brutal, producing fanatical Blood Knights to a man. Deconstructed in that they're compared negatively against the New Republic pilots, who received tough but fair training, and as a result are a much more well-adjusted Band of Brothers who can still outfly their Imperial counterparts with ease.
• The Reynard Cycle: The blood-guard, the State Sec of Calvaria, are trained in this fashion. Only ten percent of the children selected to serve in the order survive the process.
• Deconstructed in Septimus Heap. The Young Army is trained this way, with little food, a highly militaristic and uncomfortable lifestyle, and periodic 'night exercises', where a troop of boys is left in the dangerous Forest at night and has to find their way back. Boy 412, a ten-year-old who was in the Young Army since he was born, nearly freezes to death (he's saved by magic) because his uniform is too thin for the midwinter cold he's standing guard in, and later loses a fight to Jenna, who is his age and has had an ordinary life, albeit one with six older brothers, because his harsh lifestyle has made him very unhealthy. A later book also flat out states that while the Night Exercises were meant to weed out "the weak, the scared, and the stupid", they mostly just weeded out the unlucky. Not that the Custodian Guard cares; after all, the Young Army is Expendable.
• The Unsullied in George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire are trained from birth, not only to be superior warriors, but also to be unswervingly loyal. This training involves raising a puppy from birth as their only friend, and then personally strangling it to prove they can follow orders. They're also said to be able to stand until they collapse of starvation and are fed a mixture that dulls and eventually eliminates their sense of pain. To demonstrate this, a slaver hacks the nipple off one of the Unsullied, who doesn't even flinch.
  • That first one is drawn from propaganda about SS officer candidate school in Nazi Germany requiring cadets to do the same thing. Probably propaganda.
  • Unsullied training actually has worse aspects, including having no permanent name and having to kill an infant.
  • Notably, they don't appear to appreciate the training, with orders for the more inhumane methods to cease quickly earning their loyalty.
• Starship Troopers: In boot camp, less than 10% of Rico's class graduate, and the Mobile Infantry's officers are always soldiers with previous combat experience (you go through boot camp, serve in combat, and if you excel you may apply for Officer Candidate School). Somewhat a deconstruction because of the 90% that didn't pass boot, less than 1% actually died, the training in the first weeks is designed mostly to weed out those who lack the physical or mental capability to serve in the Mobile Infantry, and unless they've been kicked out for bad conduct disqualified trainees are allowed to transfer to a less demanding service branch and complete their Federal Service there.
• The Star Trek book series Star Trek: Klingon Empire establishes this as the way the Klingon Empire trains their soldiers. One task has the soldier dropped off on an ice sheet on Rura Penthe with no supplies or weapons and told to walk to the base at the north pole. One that doesn't actually exist. This is in addition to any training Klingons receive from the own families, which likely include some very harsh parenting techniques.
• In The Tamuli, the Cyrgai are a slightly exaggerated version of the Spartans. Convinced they were the world's greatest warriors, their reliance on massive slave labor kept them from expanding very effectively, and elevation of training exercises to more of a performance art than a martial art landed them in trouble when their enemies started to develop new tactics. Having inferior magic was the nail in their society's coffin. Only the fact that their mindless devotion to their god made him stupendously powerful saved them, but they stagnated and remained in the bronze age indefinitely until they were useful only as tools in a more cunning villain's plans.
• Trapped on Draconica: The lifestyle of all Leonidans is intense physical training from the age of five. There is enough evidence to call it the original spartan way.
• In Victoria, the Confederation's military ethos has strong elements of this. Their doctrine emphasizes individual bravery, physical fitness and personal tactical leadership, and in training much weight is put on demanding field and live-fire exercises. Additionally, their society is quite militarized overall, with the General Staff holding a major influence in politics. Given all this, it is little surprise that they quite consciously and deliberately derive a lot of inspiration from historical Prussia.
• Kiril Island in Vorkosigan Saga efficiently serves the purpose of being a place to train infantry and a place to dump people The Emperor is unhappy with. In other words Barrayaran infantry get sent to their counterpart of Siberia just to get trained.
• Falcone's method of raising his Tyke Bomb soldiers in the Warchild Series. Any child unlucky enough to be designated one of his protégés faced tough physical exercises and early instruction in gambling, sex, and weaponry. It's also implied at least a few of those children are raped as preparation for using sex as a weapon against people (the goal here to produce Super Assassin/Pirates rather than Super Soldiers).
• In the Warrior Cats series, ShadowClan's training while Brokenstar is the leader — even kits are forced to train in the brutal battle training, and many end up dying. Dark Forest training also counts.
• Micheal Z. Williamson's "The Weapon" has the Freehold's special forces Operatives undergo similar training, to the point that one hundred or so of them with minimal support pretty much destroy the UN ruled Earth, killing billions in the process. Before anyone's suspension of disbelief entirely implodes, some points: the Operatives required years of preparation, their acts of sabotage included the use of tacnukes, bioweapons, thermobaric attack on city infrastructure, sabotaging arcologies, and nerve gas, and there were very few Operatives who survived the massive Earth-wide manhunt for them after their attack and that being aided by good fortune bordering on divine providence. It also helps the commando tactics were backed up by a conventional attack afterwards.
• The Witcher: Aspiring witchers were put through a series of trials that only one in ten, sometimes one in twenty, survived. The Trial of the Grasses alone, where they are injected with the herbs and mutagens that grant them their superhuman abilities, had a 60-70% mortality rate.
• In the Wolfbreed series, which is an Elfen Lied homage, The Teutonic Knights do this to a bunch of werewolf children in an attempt to create Super Soldiers. Results were... mixed.
• Wulfrik: Joining Wulfrik's crew involves fighting a fellow candidate to the death on the Wolf Forest, a series of poles of different heights several dozen feet off the ground. The ground is lined with spikes for good measure. The event itself has a festival atmosphere, with members of many different Chaos-worshipping tribes coming to watch or join.