Tag Archives: Spartan

If you had been a citizen of the ancient Greek city of Athens on a fine spring morning in 409 B.C., you would have gathered with thousands of your fellow citizens on a hillside inside the city. You would then have listened carefully to the discussion of various matters of business, conducted by the chairman and secretary of the meeting from a platform below and facing you. You would have seen an Athenian citizen thread his way from the hillside to this platform. This was a sure sign that he had a proposal to make to the voters. The citizen turned toward the assembled throng and spoke in a strong, clear voice. A man named Thrasybulus, he said, should be rewarded with a golden crown for his services to Athens. When the speaker paused, another citizen came to the platform. Yes, by all means thank Thrasybulus and give him a golden crown, urged the second speaker. He went on, these acts were not enough, because Thrasybulus was a foreigner, the best reward for serving Athens so faithfully and so well would be to make him an Athenian citizen. Would the voters of Athens do this? he asked. The chairman called for a vote by a show of hands and tellers counted the votes. A majority was in favour of the proposal and it was declared officially to have been approved by the voters of Athens. The secretary had a copy of the proposal carved on a marble slab to make the record permanent and there the record is to this day, over 2800 years later, but still readable! This old record tells us that Athenian citizens held meetings, discussed their own problems, and decided for themselves What they would do. The voters, instead of a pharaoh or a king, made …

In Sparta, the shops in the market place had little gold or jewelry to sell and no fine furniture at all. The people in the streets were not well dressed. Even the temples, although big, were plain and there was little in Sparta to show that this was the strongest polis in Greece. Sparta was old fashioned and proud of it. The polis had begun as a kingdom and it stayed a kingdom. The only change its citizens made in more than 400 years was to have two kings instead of one. Each kept a watchful eye on the other and the one who was the better general took charge of the army. For a Spartan, that was progress enough. He did not like experiments. The system that modern Athens called “democracy” looked to him like bad organization and if there was one thing a Spartan wanted it was to keep things in order. His own days and years were run on a military schedule, because he was a soldier in the army. Each citizen of the polis was in the army. He started his training when he was seven and he remained a soldier until he was sixty. His orders came from his officers, the kings and the five ephors who managed the day-to-day affairs of the city. He obeyed orders and had no time for experimenting with newfangled ideas. In the early days, Sparta had been very much like Athens. By the seventh century B. C., when Athens was changing almost from day to day, the Spartans established their own way of doing things. As a matter of fact, they had no choice. Their ancestors, a fierce tribe of Dorian invaders, had taken the city from its old Achaean rulers. Using iron swords, they had quickly overrun the …