The Greek City-States: Sparta and Athens

Of the hundreds of city-states that evolved during the Archaic Age, (800- 479 B.C.), Sparta and Athens stand out for their vividly contrasting styles of life and their roles in subsequent Greek history. Sparta, the principal symbol of Dorian civilization, chose to guarantee its integrity and future through stringent and uncompromising policies. The earliest Spartans forcibly enslaved the Helots, the original inhabitants of the lower part of Peloponnese, a peninsula forming the southern part of Greece. To prevent rebellions and to control the Helots, who outnumbered the Spartans ten to one, a vigilant Sparta was forced to keep its military always on the alert. Thus, Sparta created a rigid hierarchical society of well-trained, tough, and athletic men, women, and children. The Spartans also established a genuine oligarchy: a constitutional government operated by five officials elected annually by a small body of citizens. The ruling class, obsessed with keeping social order, passed laws forbidding immigration, limiting material possessions, and restricting creativity. Sparta was admired for its loyal, brave soldiers and its stable social order. But Sparta contributed little to the artistic enrichment of Greece.

By contrast, Athens, the symbol of Ionian civilization, reached greater artistic, intellectual, and literary heights than did any other Greek city-state. Athens, both the city and its surrounding countryside of Attica, was a more open society than Sparta. The Attic clans shared a sense of community with the Athenians and supported them in wartime.

The history of Athens echoes the general pattern of change in the Greek city-states during the Archaic Age. Aristocrats initially ruled Athens through councils and assemblies. As long as farming and trading sustained an expanding population, the nobles ruled without challenge. But at the beginning of the sixth century B.C., many peasant farmers were burdened with debts and were threatened with prison or slavery.Having no voice in the government, the farmers began to protest what they perceived as unfair laws.

In about 590 B.C., the Athenians granted an aristocrat named Solon special powers to reform the economy. He abolished debts and guaranteed a free peasantry, overhauled the judicial system, and recorded the laws. Solon also restructured the Athenian constitution by giving the lower ranks of freemen, those without great name or noble family but with some property or wealth, the right to participate in government.

Solon's principal successor was Cleisthenes, who established democracy in Athens beginning in 508 B.C. He broadened the governmental base by opening it to all free male citizens (called the demos) regardless of their property or bloodlines. Cleisthenes' democratic reforms, which lasted for almost two centuries, created an atmosphere in which civic pride and artistic energy were unleashed, inaugurating the Hellenistic age that made Athens both the pride and the envy of the other Greek city-states.

For moderns, one of the most surprising contrasts between Sparta and Athens is the difference in the roles and status of women. In general, Spartan women spent their time outside and spoke freely to men; Athenian women were kept in seclusion and rarely talked with their husbands. Spartan women were made so independent because, above all else, they were expected to be strong mothers of the vigorous males needed to maintain this warrior society. To that end, Spartan women alone among Greek women were given public education, including choral singing and dancing, archery, and athletics. Spartan women were also unique in being able to own land and to manage their own property.

In contrast, the women of Athens pursued respectability as an ideal, which meant that they were supposed to marry and stay indoors, overseeing their households and performing domestic chores. It is not clear how strictly this ideal was imposed on them in daily life. Athenian drama contains many instances of female characters complaining about their powerlessness, as when a wife is abandoned (Euripides' Medea) or a woman is left during wartime (Aeschylus' Agamemnon). These examples probably reflected reality. Athenian women, lacking public education and excluded by law from government and the military, played a subordinate role to Athenian men.