Ancient Athens and Spartans

Ancient Athens and Spartans

Introduction

The rivalry between Athens and Sparta was a driving force in the history of Classical Greece, shaping its politics and its military and naval developments. From late in the sixth century (all dates are B.C.) until the end of the fifth, the states came into increasing contact and conflict, until Sparta's triumph in the great Peloponnesian War (431-404) put an end to the Athenian Empire and reduced it to subservience. Even then the rivalry did not stop, for within a decade Athens had recovered enough to join a coalition of states aiming at terminating the new Spartan hegemony in Greece. The Spartans' dominance ended only in 371, when the Thebans crushed their army at Leuctra. By that time Athens had recovered its position as a leading state and the head of a naval alliance that some regarded as a second empire. When Philip of Macedon put an end to Greek autonomy at Chaeronea in 338, the Athenian army fought stoutly in a battle that could have gone either way, but what remained of the Spartan army took no part at all. In a sense, however, the rivalry has never ceased but goes on in the arguments about the competitors' constitutions and cultures that have continued through the millennia to our own time. At first Sparta seems not to have been strikingly different from other poleis. About 725, however, the pressure of population and land hunger led the Spartans to launch a war of conquest against their western neighbor, Messenia. The First Messenian War gave the Spartans as much land as they would ever need. The reduction of the work the land that supported them.

Discussion

Messenians to the status of serfs, or helots, meant that the Spartans did not even need to The turning point in Spartan history came about 650 B.C., when, in the Second Messenian War, the helots rebelled with the help of Argos and other Peloponnesian cities. The war was long and bitter and at one point threatened the existence of Sparta. After the revolt had been put down, the Spartans were forced to reconsider their way of life. They could not expect to repress the helots, who outnumbered them perhaps ten to one, and still maintain the old free and easy habits typical of most Greeks. Faced with the choice of making drastic changes and sacrifices or abandoning their control of Messenia, the ...