This is one of only four oil studies for the heroic history painting Young Spartans (Lemoisne no. 70, National Gallery, London) which Degas began in 1860 and reworked for twenty years. He planned to exhibit it at the Fifth Impressionist Exhibition in 1880 and although listed, the painting was not shown.

The two girls in this work appear in the left foreground of the National Gallery version. Their posture and expression are the same, although perhaps in deference to the anticipated sensibilities of his fin-de-siècle audience in the final version, Degas covered their loins with brief, open-sided skirts.

Degas had a classical education and read Latin and Greek
all his life. He would have known the original description
of Spartan youth in Plutarch as well as the eighteenth-century
French Voyage du Jeune Anacharsis en Grèce, from which
the following is extracted:

The girls of Sparta were not educated like those of
Athens: they were not obliged to remain at home, to
spin, to abstain from wine and from rich food: rather,
they were taught to dance, to sing, to wrestle with one
another, to race along the beach, to hurl the javelin
or throw quoits, to perform all their exercises unveiled
and half-naked, in the presence of kings, the magistrates,
and all the citizens, including the boys whom they stimulated
to glory, either by their example, or by flattering praise,
or by stinging sarcasm. (A. Forge and R. Gordon, Degas,
New York, 1988, p. 55)

Having worked on the large version for at least twenty years, Degas kept it on an easel in his studio and professed keen admiration for it even in his dotage.