Sparta and Athens: A Tale of Two City-States
Sparta and Athens: The Antithetical City-States of Greece
It seems counterintuitive that forces separated by only ninety miles would evolve into oppugnant peoples, with entirely different views on morality, way of life, and government. Athens and Sparta, the greatest city-states of the classical era, were home to unique, disparate cultures and ultimately worst of enemies. Their contrasting ideals — Athenian democracy versus Spartan oligarchy, equality as measured by status versus equality as measured by wealth, and the Athenian life of freedom versus the Spartan life of service to the state — created two wholly unique and opposing centers of influence across Greece in the classical era and led to a cataclysmic Peloponnesian War that enveloped the Greek world.
The most obvious difference and the one that brought about the great war was the system of governance. Cleisthenes in the sixth century B.C. led a popular uprising against the tyrants of Athens and instituted the world’s first known democracy.[1] A council of five hundred called the boule would be elected, followed by a general for each district and a polemarch to be commander of the armed forces.[2] Pericles in his famous funeral oration called it “a democracy because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people.”[3] While a grand statement, the opposite was true, for only men born of parents who were both Athenian could vote. Men who only had one Athenian parent were disenfranchised, and no woman in Athens could vote. Those fortunate enough to be citizens participated in a direct democracy; the Athenian citizens not only elected government officials but voted on the issues themselves. Citizens could also vote to banish another Athenian citizen in order to keep any one person from becoming too powerful.
Spartan government was officially an oligarchy, but it was likewise unique and supremely effective. It was a diarchy, a nation ruled by two kings with a senate of 28 gerousia, or elders, that were elected by the people.[4] A total of five ephors, or high councilmen, were elected as well. These men could pass laws and, most importantly, impeach an unruly king.[5] The highly effective two-king system meant that the death of a king would not render Sparta leaderless. There would never be a transition of leaders, never anarchy, never a period without stable leadership. The Spartan people were represented by the elected council, but they also spoke for themselves as well. The king or ephors would propose laws and courses of action to the people, and the Spartan citizens had the power to veto any measure they disagreed with.[6] The ephors were trusted to maintain the balance of this system, not to allow it to become too democratic, nor to allow it to slip into tyranny.[7] Spartan government was a balanced blend of monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy.
Athens’ democracy and Sparta’s hybrid oligarchy, despite the clash between the city-states that would precipitate the Peloponnesian War, were both effective systems of governance. The Spartan oligarchy ultimately proved the most effective government in time of war and crisis. The two Spartan kings provided steady leadership, while Athens was plagued by warring political factions. Upon the death of Pericles, Athenian statesmen such as Cleon, Nicias, and Alciabades all rallied for opposing war strategies. As a result, with no clear, unified direction, Athens lost the war and saw the destruction of its empire.[8]
With the pronounced differences between Athenian democracy and Spartan oligarchy, it is not surprising that Athens and Sparta had two very different views of what equality for their citizens meant. Athens sought to maintain equality by limiting any individual’s power and prestige, and Sparta sought to promote equality by eliminating wealth and a life of excess.
Sparta in the eighth century B.C., under its legendary reformer Lycurgus, sought to create equality by eliminating the power of the rich. One of his first laws split the land of Sparta and divided it evenly amongst its male citizens, ensuring that each male citizen had the same amount of land.[9] He also took extreme measures to prevent the rich from outwardly displaying their prosperity. Every Spartan house was to be constructed with the axe and saw only and was to look as plain as possible.[10] He banned the majority of the arts, besides song and poetry. Lycurgus also banned the use of gold and silver coinage, limiting Spartans to using iron coins as currency. He proceeded to ban foreigners and foreign trade as well, so no items of excess such as gold or silver could reach Sparta.[11] To Lycurgus, the enemy of equality was wealth, and he enacted every law he could to remove material wealth from Sparta.
Athens gave its male citizens equality through democracy, giving each man an equal vote in government. The most surprising Athenian tactic for maintaining equality, however, was the practice of ostracism. The Athenians, according to Plutarch, ostracized and exiled those who became too popular or powerful in order to maintain equality amongst its citizens.[12] What fool would aspire to serve his nation well, knowing his success would result in his exile? Countless heroes, however, did. Athens, despite promoting ideals of equality, often behaved terribly towards its best citizens. It rewarded its greatest heroes and saviors with ostracism or death. Theseus, who slew the monstrous Minotaur and freed Athens from the blood tribute of Minos and later reigned well over Athens, was forced to flee for his life and was murdered on the island of Skyros.[13] Themistocles, Athens’ last great hero, the victor of Salamis and savior of Athens and indeed all of Greece from Persian rule, would be most unceremoniously ostracized as well.[14] Athenian warrior culture was thus undermined by its own concept of equality. Valor led to heroism, and heroism led to betrayal by the state.
In Athens, as in most of Greece, women were treated as no more independent than children, encouraged to leave the house as little as possible, and required to live greatly restricted lives while the men of society were free to pursue a myriad of choices in life. Spartan men, by contrast, were not free. They had no choice in their lives. Their only option was the life of a Spartan soldier. In this way the women of Sparta actually enjoyed greater liberty and freedom than the men did. They were encouraged to speak their minds and be capable, competing in athletics, participating in religious ceremonies, and above all else producing as many children as possible for the state. Their options amounted to an arguably freer existence than Spartan men experienced, causing one foreign woman to note “this may be the one place in all of Greece where the women rule the men.”[15] While the women didn’t actually rule the men, the observation does highlight the surprising contrasts between the lives of Spartan females and those of Spartan men.
Via the practice of ostracism, Athens enforced equality by punishing those who became too powerful or too popular. To the Athenian, status was the enemy of equality; and those who grew too popular had to be removed. Sparta, with its military society and brotherhood, promoted equality and comradery amongst the men rather than competition amongst nobles. Sparta saw wealth as the impediment to equality and so brought equality to its nation by stripping the wealthy of excess land and riches and eliminating material wealth from its society altogether.
Athens, despite its imperfect democracy and its definition of equality, was, for the ancient world, a beacon of freedom. The Athenian male citizen could be whatever he desired to be, could build a house as extravagant as he wished, and could generally do whatsoever he pleased within a lenient law code. Athens had towering temples and grand buildings, plays, music, statues, and gilded decorations. Sparta, in contrast, was a city of plain buildings and village huts, a place of forced humbleness and servitude to the state. This Spartan culture of service to the state was as unique to Greece as Athenian freedom was.
In Sparta, Lycurgus instituted a wide range of revolutionary laws that would forever change the nation. In addition to imposing equality via the termination of wealth, he sought to turn the male populace into the greatest soldiers on earth. In doing so, he sought to turn Sparta into a ‘master race.’ Newborn Spartan infants would be taken to Mount Taÿgetus to be examined by the ephors; if any physical defect was discovered or the newborn was deemed of poor quality, the infant would be thrown from the cliffs into a chasm called the Apothetae.[16] The Spartan experiment in eugenics, however, stretched far beyond infancy. Boys were raised by the state for one singular purpose, service to the state via the life of a soldier. Males could expect little to no freedom and a torturous existence filled with violence. At age seven every Spartan male would enter military service, to be trained for twelve years to become a battle-hardened warrior.[17] This grueling process involved physical and mental torture. The boys would be ritually starved and then encouraged to kill slaves and steal their food in order to survive.[18] The annual flagellation contest involved the boys being whipped to near death, the winner being the child who could take the longest beating.[19] Upon adulthood, men would be prevented from living with their wives and were instead forced to live in a community barracks.[20] The other unfortunate task of male adulthood was serving in the krupteia, a secret police whose sole service was hunting and killing helots to thin their population.[21]
In sum, all of Sparta ultimately existed as a slave to the city-state. The men were slaves to war and the state; the women were enslaved to produce the population; and the helots were enslaved to produce harvests. A fine, machine-like nation this mighty Sparta was. Athens had founded its democracy by promoting political equality by giving each male citizen a vote. Sparta promoted social equality by dividing the land equally amongst its male citizens; from one perspective, perhaps, it is better to have land without a vote than a vote without land. Athens owned slaves and by law severely restricted the freedom of women, but at least its male citizens had freedom. Although Sparta ultimately triumphed and conquered Athens, it is the ideal of Athenian freedom and democracy, and not the Spartan dream of power and service to the state that would ultimately prevail in the West both as a model for government and as an ideal for individual freedom.
The great differences between Athens and Sparta would explode into a tremendous war that would envelope the Greek world. A contest between democracy and oligarchy erupted across Greece: “The whole of the Hellenic world convulsed, with rival parties in every state — democratic leaders trying to bring in the Athenians, and oligarchs trying to bring in the Spartans… It became a natural thing for anyone who wanted a change of government to call in help from the outside.”[22] Revolutions broke out in seemingly every city, for this was not only a war of nations, but one of political ideology, nation against nation, and neighbor against neighbor. This Greek civil war obliterated alliances and greatly reduced the military power of the peninsula as a whole, allowing King Phillip II of Macedon to successfully invade and usher in an age of imperial Macedonian dominance, ending the era of the Greek city-state and the independence of both Athens and Sparta.
Notes
[1] Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution. ‘Cleisthenes’, 1.20.
[2] Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution ‘Cleisthenes’, 1.22.
[3] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2.37.
[4] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 26.1.
[5] Sara B. Pomeroy, Stanley M. Burstein, Walter Donlan, Jennifer Roberts, David W. Tandy and Georgia Tsouvala, Ancient Greece: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 178.
[6] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 6.1.
[7] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 5.6.
[8] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.65.
[9] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 8.1.
[10] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 13.3.
[11] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 9.3.
[12] Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, 3.22.
[13] Plutarch, Life of Theseus, 1.35
[14] Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, 1.22.
[15] Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 14.4.
[16] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 16.1.
[17] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 16.4.
[18] Plutarch, Moralia, 1.12.
[19] Plutarch, Moralia, 1.40.
[20] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 12.1.
[21] Plutarch, Lycurgus, 28.2.
[22] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, 3.82.
