Sparta vs.

Athens
Sparta Builds an Army State
Sparta was located in the southern part of Greece, in the area
known as the Peloponnesus. This stretch of land is nearly cut
off from the rest of Greece by the Gulf of Corinth.
While other city-states founded colonies abroad, Sparta looked
no farther than the fertile fields of neighboring Messenia. About
725 BCE, the Spartans conquered the Messenians and took
over their land.
The Spartans treated the Messenians almost
as slaves. Messenians became helots,
peasants forced to stay on the land they
worked. Each year, the Spartans
demanded of the Messenians yearly
crop. Around 600 BCE, the Messenians,
who outnumbered the Spartans eight to
one, revolted. The Spartans put down
the revolt, but just barely. From then
on, the Spartans lived in fear of a helot
uprising. The Spartans concluded that
A bust of
the only way to survive was to make
Lycurgus
their city-state overwhelmingly strong.
They adopted a harsh set of laws known as the
Code of Lycurgus. According to legend, Lycurgus
gave Sparta its laws, then starved himself to death to
save for for his polis (city-state.) Also, for good measure,
Spartans declared war on their slaves once a year to keep them
in order.
Spartan babies were examined at birth to see if they were
healthy. If not, they were left in the hills to die. All fit children
stayed with their mothers until their seventh birthdays. Then the
boys were sent to army barracks, and their training began. They
wore one light tunic, winter or summer, and usually went
barefoot. Their beds were hard benches. For food, they had
meager servings of course black porridge. They were expected
to get extra food by stealing from nearby farms, though they
would be whipped if caught. Such schooling produced tough
soldiers.
At the age of 20, a Spartan man was allowed to marry. He
continued, though, to live in the barracks for another 10 years.
After completing full-time military service, men remained on
active reserve for another 30 years.
Spartan girls also led hardy lives. They ran, wrestled, and
played sports. As adults, they managed the family estates while
their husbands served the polis. Spartan women had every right
except the right to vote. As a result of their freedom, they
scandalized other Greeks.
From around 600 until 371 BCE, the Spartans had the most
powerful army in Greece, but they paid a high price
for it. They created little literature, art, or architecture. The
Spartans valued duty, strength, and discipline over
individuality, beauty, and freedom of thought.
Athens turned to democracy
In outlook and values, Athens stood in sharp contrast to Sparta.
An ambassador from Corinth, a city halfway between the two
rivals, once compared the Spartans to the Athenians as he spoke

to the Spartan assembly. With typical Greek frankness, he told

the Spartans that even though they had the strongest army in
Greece, they were overly cautious and generally lacking in any
excitement of the mind. Athenians, he said, were always eager
to learn new ideas. They had been educated to think and act as
free people.
Like other city- states, Athens went through a power struggle
between rich and poor. However, Athenians avoided civil war
by making timely reforms. Two of the leading reformers were
Solon and Cleisthenes. These reforms created a democracy, a
government in which all citizens took part.
After all of the reforms, Athenians enjoyed nearly a complete
democracy. However, it is important to remember that only
about one fifth of the people in Athens were citizens. The rest
were slaves, foreigners, and women. Women in Athens had no
part in government and very little part in its intellectual life.
Persian Attacks and Athenian Victory
In 490 and 480 BCE the Persians, led by Darius the Great and
later Xerxes, led attacks on Greece, determined to conquer all
the city-states within. In Thermopylae, 300 Spartans and 7000
other Greeks held off Xerxes and his forces long enough to
allow others to flee to safety. The Persian forces annihilated the
famed 300 and headed towards the other Greek city- states. In
the end it was Athens, with its dominant navy, that defeated the
powerful Persian forces.
Athens basked in the glory of the Persian defeat. Athens alone
had challenged Persian power from the beginning. heroes had
fallen first in Ionia, then at Marathon. The city of Athens,
burned to ashes, had suffered the most damage. The Athenians
claimed to be the wars greatest heroes. Their pride in
themselves and their city soared to new heights.
After the war, Athens became the leader of
an alliance of 140 city-states called the
Delian League. The purpose of the
league was to ward off further
Persian attacks. Soon, though,
Athens began to use its powerful
navy to control the other
members of the league. Citystates were forced to join the
league and pay yearly dues to
Athens. The Delian League thus
became just another name for an
Athenian empire. The prestige of
victory and the wealth of the empire set the
stage for a dazzling outburst of creativity in Athens. The city
was entering its brief, brilliant Golden Age.
Pericles glorifies Athens
After the Persian wars literally burned Athens to the ground a
young man, Pericles, emerged as the leader of the victorious
city- state. Pericles first attended the Athenian assembly
(democracy) meetings at the age of 20. Soon, his talent for
oratory won him fame. He did not try to excite his audiences
but only to reason with them. He made sense to aristocrats,
farmers, and artisans alike.
In 461 BCE, the assemble elected Pericles as one Athenss 10
generals. Eventually, this one man so dominated the life of

Athens (461 BCE-429BCE)

that the period is often
called the Age of Pericles.
Pericles strengthened the
Athenian democracy by
increasing the number of
Ancient Athenian Coins
public officials who were paid
salaries. Now even the poorest could
afford to serve if elected or chosen by lot. Pericles used the
Delian League to enlarge the wealth and power of Athens. He
used money from the leagues treasury to make Athenss navy
the strongest in the Mediterranean. The navy safeguarded
Athenian commerce and settled disputes between league
members. Pericles also used money from the empire to beautify
Athens. He persuaded the Athenian assembly to vote huge sums
of Delian League money to buy gold, ivory, and marble. Still
more money went to a small army of artisans who worked for
15 years on building one of the architectures nobles works, the
Parthenon.

market, her face was supposed to be veiled. She could not own
or inherit land. She had very few legal rights and could not
appeal to a jury in her own defense. Unlike her brothers who
started going to school at the age of six, she was educated at
home. When she married, she lived in the part of her husbands
house reserved for women. She was supposed to retreat there
whenever her husband entertained male guests at home.

Like the Parthenon, Athenss theatrical productions were both

an expression of civic pride and a tribute to the gods. Writing
plays to be performed on stage was a new form of art. Drama as
we know it was a Greek invention. One playwright became
especially renowned for his works: Sophocles. All together,
Sophocle wrote about 100 plays, including the most famous
Greek drama of all, Oedipus. Sophocles wrote the type of
drama known as the tragedy. To qualify as tragedy, a play had
to portray men and women of strong character whose very
strength led to their downfall. There was no such thing as a
meek hero.Public drama was more than entertainment for the
masses. It was a form of public education. The plays dealt with
great issues that were important to the polis- the power of
leaders, the power of the people, questions of justice and
morality, questions of war and peace, and the duties owed to the
gods, the family and the city. Drama was so important to public
life in Athens that citizens were sometimes paid to attend the
plays, just as they were paid for holding public office. As part
of their civic duty, wealthy citizens bore the cost for producing
the plays.

The Peloponnesian War

Tension between Athens and Sparta had been building for
years. Many people in both cities though war was inevitable.
Instead of trying to avoid war, leaders began to press for a war
to begin while they thought their own city had the advantage.
Finally, in 431 BCE, the Spartans marched into Athenian
territory. They swept the countryside, burning the Athenians
local food supply.

Athens Prospers in the Golden Age

Athens reeked with the odor of the pigpens most families kept
in their backyards. Foul smells mingled with the raucous noise
of the agora. Here merchants in outdoor stalls advertised their
goods by shouting. The sound of clanging metal from nearby
workshops added to the din. Athens was a city of small shopowners and artisans who specialized in every kind of craft: shoe
making, sword making, pottery making, wine making, and so
on. The shops were owned by foreigners as well as by Athenian
citizens.
Free men and slaves worked side by side in a typical shop and
might be given the same meager wages. There were perhaps
100,000 slaves in the city-state of Athens in the 400s, roughly
one-third of the population. Most of them were non Greeks
captured in war. A rich family might own as many as 50 slaves.
Even poor citizens were likely to own one or two. Because poor
citizens and slaves dressed so much alike, however, it was
almost impossible to distinguish them from one another.
The voices in the marketplace were mostly male. A womans
voice rarely was heard outside the home. Cooking meals,
nursing babies, and weaving cloth were expected to consume
all of a womans time. If she stepped outside to buy fish at the

Most Athenian families lived in tiny, plain dwellings with thin,

mud-brick walls. Typical furniture was a few tables and chairs.
Often, a familys most valued possessions were the plain pieces
of pottery in which they stored their wine and olive oil. The red
and black vases made in Athenian workshops were famous
throughout the Mediterranean world. In the Age of Pericles,
they were Athenss chief export.
Despite its physical discomfort, Athens was in many ways a
splendid city. Like the heroes in Sophocles plays, however, the
proud citizens of Athens were soon to suffer a tragic fate.

Athens itself, however, seemed safe. Years before, Pericles had

taken the precaution of building the Long Walls, two great
ramparts that protected the roadway from Athens to the sea.
Thus, Athens was safe from starvation as long as ships could
sail into port with food from Athenian colonies as far away as
the Black Sea.
Athens was the strongest
sea power, but Sparta
was the strongest land
power. As the leading
Athenian general,
Pericles did not try to
defeat the Spartans on
land. Instead, his
strategy was to avoid
battles with the superior
Spartan army and to use
Athenss great heavy to
strike Spartas territory from the sea.

The
Long Wall

From the earliest battles, an Athenian writer wrote about the

war in a journal. We still rely on his History of the
Peloponnesian War to understand how this war ruined Athens
and weakened all of Greece.
Disaster for Athens
Two events were particularly deadly to Athens, a plague and a
disastrous military defeat in far-off Sicily (the island off of
southern Italy.) The plague struck in 430 BCE, in the second
year of the war. While Spartan soldiers were again laying waste
to Athenss farmland, Athenians sought safety behind the city
walls. Overcrowding made Athens vulnerable to a frightful
plague that killed roughly one third of the population, including
Pericles.

The second disaster took place in 415 BCE, after the war had
gone on for 16 years. The Athenian assembly sent a huge fleet
carrying 27,000 soldiers to the island of Sicily, near Italy. Their
goal was to destroy the polis of Syracuse, one of Spartas
wealthiest allies. The expedition met overwhelming defeat in
413 BCE. As one writer described, They were destroyed with
a total destruction- their fleet, their army- there was nothing
that was not destroyed, and few out of many returned home.
Somehow, a terribly weakened Athens managed to fend off
Spartan attacks for another nine years. But in 404 BCE, Athens
and its allies surrendered. The Spartans then forced the
Athenians to join in tearing down the Long Walls, symbol of
Athenss strength.
Athens: Post Peloponnesian War
After 27 years of war, Athens had lost its fleet, its empire, its
power, and its wealth. It had also lost its self- confidence. This
loss of spirit was perhaps the most serious of all for the people
of Athens.
Confidence in the democratic government began to falter. One
leader after another proved weak, corrupt, or traitorous. The
assembly began to change its decisions with every shift of the
political winds. Leaders and generals were in constant danger
of exile if a new speaker persuaded the assembly to turn on
them.
Oddly enough, the crisis in public confidence was accompanied
by an artistic outburst. As people turned to their private lives,
art began to reflect their joys and sorrows. For the first time, the
faces of bronze and marble statues began to show emotion.
Drama also underwent a change. It was during the
Peloponnesian War that a playwright named Aristophanes wrote
the first great comedies of the stage. In these plays, he made
fun of politics, people and ideas of his time. The fact that
Athenians could listen to such criticism of themselves, even in
the midst of a great war, showed that the spirit of freedom and
public discussion still lived.

Aristotle was a student of Plato and future teacher to Alexander

the Great. He is remembered, by many as the first scientist and
his theories, about the world and nature lasted over a thousand
years.

SUMMARY
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The Philosophers
In the years after the Peloponnesian War, yet another aspect of
Greek culture emerged; philosophy. The study grew out of a
frustration in recent Greek defeats. Philosophers began to
question the government and its decisions. Three philosophers,
Athenians, became infamous during this time: Socrates, Plato,
and Aristotle.

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Socrates encourage Athenians to

question the government, their and
other long held and common
beliefs. Eventually, the Athenian
was convicted of corrupting the
youth and was put to death.

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Socrates
aka: The
Gadfly

Plato was a student of Socrates. He

distrusted the Athenian democracy
since the system of government was
responsible for his mentors death.
Instead, he believed a system, more
like Sparta was a better form of
government. He believed the
wisest should govern alone, like a
monarch.

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