athens and sparta

bmxsmith

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Athens and Sparta were two rival city-states, but at one time they had been united to protect the Greek states from a series of invasions by Persia. There were three major battles against the Persians: the Athenians stopped the Persian king Darius’s invasion of the Greek mainland at the battle of Marathon in 490 BCE. Under their new king Xerxes, the Persians regrouped and invaded Greece again, occupying more than half the country before being defeated by a coalition of 31 city-states, fighting together as Greeks to defend their homeland. Led by Athens and Sparta, the Greeks defeated the Persians at the battle of Salamis in 480 and at Plataea in 479 BCE.

The Spartans were not dependent upon slaves from other territories for their labor force. Instead, "they created what Sue Blundell calls a “serf class” from the native populations they had conquered." These serf-like peoples, known as helots, resented their suppression and constantly rebeled against sparta, who met the rebelion by training their citizens into a well rounded army. A male citizen’s life was spent in learning and practicing the military arts, most all of their citizens were professional soldiers. “They were trained for this role from childhood and up to the age of thirty they lived continuously in barracks. After that, they could set up their own domestic establishments, but for the rest of their lives they ate every night in a common mess.” As a result of a lifetime of training, the Spartans were famed for their military abilities. The Spartans and their alliance, the Peloponnesian League, were a strong military force and dominated the southern region of Greece

Unlike Sparta who was to a great degree independent and did not have dealings with others, Athens gained its welth and tributes from states that looked to Athens’s navy for protection, and were a slave based economy. (There were about 40,000 citizens in Attica in the early 400s BCE and 100,000 slaves). Athens was wealthy, many of its citizens had a relatively large amount of leisure. The city produced a series of writers, thinkers, philosophers, and politicians; they invented theatre, created democracy, and produced great art, architecture, and literature.