Athens & Sparta by Charles River Editors

In virtually all fields of human endeavor Athens was so much at the forefront of dynamism and innovation that the products of its most brilliant minds remain not only influential but entirely relevant to this day. In the field of medicine, the great physician Hippocrates not only advanced the practical knowledge of human anatomy and care-giving but changed the entire face of the medical profession. The great philosophers of Athens, men like Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato, interrogated themselves with startling complexity about the nature of good and evil, questioned the existence of divinity, advocated intelligent design, and went so far as to argue that all life was composed of infinitesimal particles. Great architects and sculptors such as Phidias produced works of art of such breathtaking realism and startling dynamism that they later formed the driving force behind the resurgence of sculpture during the Renaissance and served as masters to artists such as Michelangelo, Bernini, and Donatello. The plays of dramatists such as Aristophanes not only displayed an acerbic wit and a genius for political satire so pronounced that their works continue to be performed – and topical – to this day, but served as the inspiration for virtually all playwrights from Shakespeare to the present day. And this does not take into account the host of equally brilliant mathematicians, natural philosophers, historians, astronomers and politicians that the city’s great schools nurtured and produced.

For much of its history, the Athenian navy was the single mightiest force in the Mediterranean, having defeated the overwhelming might of Persia in pitched battle upon the open sea numerous times. The Athenian army itself, though subordinate to its naval power – a sop to the fact that it was trade and empire-building that had made Athens rich – was nothing to be sneered at, as it succeeded in meting out a humiliating defeat to Darius’s Persians at Marathon.

The most unique city-state in Ancient Greece was Sparta, which continues to fascinate contemporaneous society.  It is not entirely clear why Sparta placed such a great emphasis on having a militaristic society, but the result was that military fitness was a preoccupation from birth.  If a Spartan baby did not appear physically fit at birth, it was left to die.  Spartan children underwent military training around the age of 7 years old, and every male had to join the army around the age of 18. 

The Spartans, whose carefully constructed approach to warfare and – there is no other word for it – Spartan way of life, earned the grudging admiration of all of Greece and succeeded in establishing themselves in the years following the reforms of the semi-legendary ruler Lycurgus as the greatest military force in all of Hellas. Athens might have the mightiest fleet and the greatest cadre of philosophers and dramatists, Thessaly might have had the most vaunted cavalry, and the great city-states of Argos, Thebes and Corinth all had their own claims to fame, but on the battlefield the Spartan phalanx stood without peer. So feared were they in Greece that their very appearance on the battlefield could cause entire enemy armies to flee in terror, and in one of history’s most famous battles, 300 Spartan warriors headed a combined Greek force which held off the hundreds of thousands of Persian warriors of Xerxes’s invading army for three days at Thermopylae, inflicting an estimated 20,000 casualties upon them before dying to the last man rather than retreating.