Athens and Sparta compared

Ancient Greece was not one country. It was made of hundreds of small states. Each one was a πόλις (polis): a city with its own fields and villages around it, its own laws and its own army. Two of them became the strongest of all: Athens, in Greek Ἀθῆναι, and Sparta, Σπάρτη.

Athens was in Attica, a dry and rocky land in central Greece. It was close to the sea, and its harbour, Piraeus, was full of ships and traders. Sparta was in Laconia, in the south of the Peloponnese. It lay inland, in the green valley of the river Eurotas, between high mountains.

The two cities even looked different. Athens built great marble temples on its Acropolis. Sparta was not one big town but a group of villages with simple buildings. The historian Thucydides wrote that if both cities were one day left empty, people would think Athens had been twice as strong as it really was, and Sparta much weaker than it really was.

The Greek word πολίτευμα means the way a state is governed. Greeks still use it: the first article of Greece’s constitution says that its πολίτευμα is a parliamentary democracy.

Athens became a δημοκρατία, “rule of the people”, after the reforms of Cleisthenes in 508 BC. Adult male citizens could speak and vote in the assembly, the ἐκκλησία, which met about forty times a year. A Council of 500 citizens, chosen by lot, prepared its work. But women, slaves and foreigners could not vote.

Sparta had two kings at the same time, each called a βασιλεύς, from two royal families. They led the army. A council of 28 elders, all over sixty, worked with them. Five ἔφοροι (ephors), elected every year, had great power: every month they and the kings swore to respect the laws. The assembly of Spartan men voted by shouting, not by counting votes. Because a few men held most of the power, Sparta is often called an ὀλιγαρχία, “rule of the few”. But already in ancient times people disagreed: Aristotle reports that some saw in Sparta a mix of kings, a few rulers and the people.

In Sparta, the city decided how children grew up. According to the writer Plutarch, a boy left his family at the age of seven. He lived in a group with other boys and began the ἀγωγή, a hard training to become a soldier. Boys learned to obey, to bear cold and hunger, and to fight. Spartan girls also trained: they ran, wrestled and threw the javelin, so that they would grow up strong.

In Athens, each family chose. The philosopher Plato describes how Athenian boys went to different teachers. One taught them to read and write, and to learn the poems of good poets by heart. Another taught music and the lyre. A trainer taught sports. Most Athenian girls stayed at home, where they learned to spin wool and to run a house.

In a famous speech that Thucydides gives to the Athenian leader Pericles, Athens is proud that its city is open to everyone, while the Spartans, he says, train for courage with hard exercise from childhood.

Athens and Sparta were strong in different places. Thucydides wrote that Sparta was the strongest power on land, and Athens on the sea. Athens had a large στόλος, a fleet of warships.

When the Persians attacked Greece, the two cities fought together, and Sparta led the Greek alliance. In 480 BC, King Leonidas and his Spartans fell at Thermopylae, and in the same year Athenian ships helped to win the sea battle of Salamis. After the victory, the Greek cities split into two groups: one led by Athens, the other by Sparta.

In 431 BC a long war, a πόλεμος, began between them: the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides thought its real cause was that Athens was growing stronger, and Sparta was afraid. In 404 BC Athens surrendered. Some of Sparta’s allies wanted to destroy Athens, but Sparta refused. Athens had to pull down its long walls and give up all but twelve of its ships. Later, in 371 BC, the Thebans beat the Spartans at Leuctra, and Sparta lost its leading place in Greece.