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Your list of important-making features is dominated by a modern mindset. In the ancient world, ability to wage war was an important -- if not the important -- feature of many civilizations. Rome, Greece, Persia, Carthage, everybody was obsessed with it.

Looking at purely economics or modern cultural relevance is anachronistic.

In those times, the ability to project power (in a modern military sense) was virtually non-existent.

Aircraft hadn't been invented yet.

Naval transport was subject to the vagaries of the wind and slow.

Land transport was a matter of multi-year campaigns, supplied at great cost.

So effectively, most conflicts were the business of the belligerent and defender, and no one else.

In that world, absent coordinated international response, it's unsurprising military might took on a much more existential value!

"In those times, the ability to project power (in a modern military sense) was virtually non-existent."

This isn't really true. The contemporary Carthaginian and Roman empires spanned hundreds of miles of Mediterranean coastline.

The Carthaginian Empire expanded over ~400 years, and never penetrated far from coasts (per design, but also illustrating the limitations of transportation at that time).

The Roman Republic / Empire expanded over ~600 years.

We may have different definitions of "power projection."

Mine does not include "we'll eventually be there, after everyone who is alive today has lived a full life and died of natural causes."

You are confusing projecting power over a sphere of influence with expanding the sphere of influence within which one can project power. These empires ruled over vast areas of land by threat of force. That is projection of power. The fact that they later projected power over a larger area has no bearing on this.

You're missing my point.

How much would the Japanese have cared about what Rome thought?

Vs now.

Rome stretched from Scotland to Iraq and ruled the entire Mediterranean. So power projection still existed

Uh, international coordination was definitely a thing! There was a whole Delian League formed specifically to coordinate the city-states' response to the Persian invasion – Sparta's exit from the League precipitated the war with Athens.

Syria to Tunisia is ~2,300 km.

For reference, that's about the same distance from NY, NY to Houston, TX.

And that's the long axis of the Mediterranean Sea.

IMHO, that's very different than how we talk about international cooperation (and specifically: intervention) in modern times.

> For reference, that's about the same distance from NY, NY to Houston, TX.

That's roughly the distance between Paris and Moscow, crossing through Belgium, Germany and Poland.

"Economic output?
Influence abroad?
Cultural contributions?

Trade hub?"

Yes, Yes, Obviously, and not as much.

At its height, Sparta was one of the more important military powers among the Greek city states. After the Peloponnesian war, which it won, it was for a time the dominant and most influential of all Greek city states. This dominance and influence is the reason that ancient Greek writers found them important to talk about and consequently is the reason we still talk about about them. The fact that we still debate the legacy of the Spartans speaks to the wide range of their influence.

""You know what? We'll give it a try but even if we do conquer Sparta all we'll get is a bunch of olives, goats, and a whole bunch of whacked-out weirdos with no gold, no navy, and a lot of baggage. So commit but don't 'Commit' and if we lose we'll just wait them out and color in the entire map later when they inevitably collapse." "

Actually, Sparta was quite wealthy if you measure it's wealth in productive farmland land rather than precious metals. We privileged modern westerners don't really recognize the importance of that, but it was quite important for the time.

Also, while the Spartans did not initially have a navy, they had no trouble buying one from the Persians and beat the previously unbeatable Athenian navy with it.

Olives were actually incredible valuable to the ancient Greeks (still are valuable, actually) one of the most important crops and essential to all of their industry. According to myth Athens was given the choice of naming their city after Athena or Poseidon. Athena offered olive trees while Poseidon offered naval power. The Athenians judged that olive trees would be more valuable.

Mainly they were economically and politically important. They were incredibly rich and had alliances with all neighboring city-states, using each alliance as leverage for more alliances. They didn't even need to send many of their own soldiers or slaves for any given war, their allies would send the bulk of the forces.