The two city-states fought from 431 BC to 404 BC with Sparta eventually triumphing over Athens. Life in Sparta was vastly different from life in Athens. Write. Test. Then, in the second half of the 8th century, it undertook the wholesale conquest of Messenia (c. 735–715). Here is a compilation of 15 interesting facts you should know about Athens. Yet this called for nerve that even the Spartans did not have: on one occasion 2,000 helots, who were promised freedom and were led garlanded round the temples, disappeared, and nobody ever found out what had happened to them. The lands it controlled were called Laconia and Messenia. 431-404 BC: three decades of war between athens and sparta, sparta saw athens as power hungry, plague broke out in the middle of it so most of athens died off, pericles dies bc of plague, sparta wins but greece weakens sparta falls In the first phase of the war, Archimadus attacked Attica and provoke Athens to counter fight. But Athens then was ruled by their own people. They were also seen as a liability because their fathers needed to raise an endowment for them to marry well. Click the Edit button above to get started. As early as the 5th century one finds “laconizers” in other states (the word derives from “Laconia,” the name for the Spartan state, or Lacedaemon, and signifies cultural admiration for Sparta and its institutions). 4. The arrogant use of a nonmilitary weapon such as a stick actually added to the degradation. Sparta: It is believed that in Sparta, the elders tested a newborn baby for deformities and if the baby was deemed unlikely to become a strong soldier, he was tossed into a gorge. Here are five facts about Spartan women that give you a glimpse on how a Spartan woman lived during those ancient times. The Spartan men were well known for being brave and fierce, and they spent their whole lives training and fighting. Athens is spread across the central plain of Attica, often referred to as the Attica or Athens … This led to water being in short … The former because of their wealth and culture and the latter because of their military expertise. It was located in the Laconia region, in the Peloponnese, on the bank of the Eurotas River. However, Sparta had only about 8,000 citizens, while Athens had between 40,000 and 100,000. Terms in this set (53) Athens Government. Sparta was ruled by two kings, who ruled until they died or were forced out of office. Besides, the city of Sparta was formed by them. Spartan warrior peers (homoioi) were henceforth subjected to a rigorous military training, the agoge, to enable them to deal with the Messenian helots, whose agricultural labours provided the Spartans with the leisure for their military training and life-style—a notoriously vicious circle. Sparta finally succumb to Corinth pressure because they are worried about Athens’ increasing power. Sparta, on the other hand, was located in the Laconia region and exhibited a more temperate and dry climate. These city-states were very different. Gravity. Again and again modifications were forced on Sparta in the sphere of foreign policy. It begins, however, by saying that the tribes must be “tribed” (or “retained”; the Greek is a kind of pun) and the obes (a word for a locality) must be “obed.” The meaning there is desperately obscure, but in an 8th-century context it ought to refer to some kind of political synoecism (Sparta, as stated, was never physically synoecized). Fun Facts About Ancient Greece. That view—which involves down-dating Theopompus and Polydorus to the 7th century from the 8th and still more arbitrarily attributing to them the activity presupposed by the Rhetra rather than the rider—does too much violence to the best chronological evidence (that of Thucydides and Herodotus), and a view in terms of 8th-century political synoecism should be preferred. When Spartan was trying to attack again, Athens was hit by a plague that came from Egypt. Sign Me Up, Editing resources is available exclusively for KidsKonnect Premium members.To edit this worksheet, click the button below to signup (it only takes a minute) and you'll be brought right back to this page to start editing! Spartan soldiers were trained to control their fear and maintain discipline. Athens, on the other hand, was the capital as well as the largest city in Greece. Athens and Sparta are both famous and prosperous cities in Ancient Greece, which have also rivaled each other for years. If suspicion of Persia was behind the deposition of the tyrants, Sparta was inconsistent in carrying out its anti-Persian policy; it did not help Croesus in his final showdown with Persia, nor did it help anti-Persian elements on Samos, nor did it do much in the years immediately before the great Greek-Persian collision of 480–479 called the Persian War (it sent no help to the general rising of Ionia against Persia in 499 nor to Athens at the preliminary campaign of Marathon in 490). After the suppression of the Messenian revolt (perhaps not before 600), Sparta controlled much of the Peloponnese. The perioikoi was also known as free people, because they could do everything such as trade and travel to the other cities. Athens is statistically one of the lowest ranking capital cities when it comes to violent crime. Boys were encouraged to steal food. When Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, it secured an unrivaled hegemony over southern Greece. Athens is spread across the central plain of Attica, often referred to as the Attica or Athens Basin. The Peloponnesian war started when Corinth, an ally of Sparta, engaged in a Civil War with Corcyra, an ally of Athens. The Helots are captured people in the land they conquered. Ancient Greece Sparta. Sparta (also known as Lacedaemon) was one of the key city-states in Ancient Greece. In 481 BC, Xerxes sent ambassadors around Greece requesting "earth and water" but very deliberately omitting Athens and Sparta. Interesting Facts about Athens. Because the Athenians were so close to the sea, they became traders trading with other civilizations around the Mediterranean region. The Spartan poet Tyrtaios refers to Helots being allowed to marry. It was exceptional in that and in many other respects, some of which have already been noted: it sent out few colonies, only to Taras (Tarentum, in southern Italy) in the 8th century and—in the prehistoric period—to the Aegean islands of Thera and Melos. The difficulties of reconstructing the details of the agoge are acute: “invented tradition” has been unusually busy in that area. Athens is the capital and the largest city of Greece. It was never able to regain its military supremacy and was finally absorbed by the Achaean League in the 2nd century BC. A solution, occasionally tried by adventurous Spartan commanders, was selective enfranchisement of helots. For a long time, Sparta fought the Greek city-states of Athens and Thebes as well as the Persian Empire for supremacy over the ancient world. Athens and Sparta were two of the most progressive cities in Greece. Magistrates called ephors were unique to Sparta and its offshoots, but there is nothing intrinsically odd about formal magistracies. This city-state was one of the world’s oldest cities and as per records has had a history spanning around for 3,400 years. Prominent among the states that never experienced tyranny was Sparta, a fact remarked on even in antiquity. 2. One effect of the helot phenomenon was the brutalization of the Spartan elite itself. It was helpful during the war because it forces Sparta to engaged them in waters, which was Athens’ strength. The speakers from Corinth begin by explaining how the Spartan have never listened to others’ complaints about Athens because they believe in the power of their army. They are just 95 miles away from each other, but their differences were vastly noticeable. It had an artistic tradition of its own and produced or gave hospitality to such poets as Alcman, Terpander, and Tyrtaeus. Yet a rider to the Rhetra, associated with the late 8th-century kings Theopompus and Polydorus, says that, if the people choose crookedly, the elders and kings shall be dissolvers. facts about ancient egypt for kids Facts about Egypt today ... information on ancient egypt for children . As the name suggests, it was meant to last thirty years, and it set up a framework for a divided Greece that was led by both Athens and Sparta. On this view, which is not here followed, the Rhetra itself, with its stipulation of powers for the (hoplite) damos, is a 7th-century manifestation of hoplite assertiveness: in fact, it represents a kind of Spartan alternative to tyranny. They even had the chance to rise from this social class if they did a good deed, and their masters allowed them to. Words that perfectly describe the Spartans during the Ancient times. Thucydides Reading One: The Character of Athens and Sparta The Peloponnesian league has called its members together to speak about the threat of Athens in light of their actions at Corcyra and Potidaea. The Spartans were ... Facts about Ancient Sparta 3: the Greco-Persian Wars. Another, more obviously pragmatic, reason why Sparta attracted to itself allies in areas like Arcadia was surely fear of Argos. Certainly there is some circularity in the usual reconstructions of one crucial corrupt line of the relevant poem. Or it may have longsightedly detected sympathy on the part of certain tyrants toward the growing power of Persia: it is true that Sparta made some kind of diplomatic arrangement with the threatened Lydian power of the Anatolian ruler Croesus not long before his defeat by Persia in 546. By signing up for this email, you are agreeing to news, offers, and information from Encyclopaedia Britannica. A still more important consequence of the conquest of Messenia, “good to plow and good to hoe” as Tyrtaeus put it, was the acquisition of a large tract of fertile land and the creation of a permanently servile labour force, the “helots,” as the conquered Messenians were now called. Spartan girls were given formal education in order to train them to be productive members of society. Athens, located in the Attica region, had a Mediterranean climate with adequate amounts of precipitation. All men over eighteen years old can exercise their right to vote and hold government positions as they will be full fledged citizens of Athens. It was the Messenian factor above all that determined the peculiar development of Sparta, because it forced Spartans to adjust their institutions to deal with a permanently hostile subject population. #4 Sparta declined to help Athens as the festival of Carneia was taking place. Created: Oct 26, 2009 | Updated: Dec 12, 2014. Sign Me Up. 10 Facts about Ancient Sparta. It is a center for economic, political, financial and culture life in Greece. Lykavittos Hill is the highest point in Athens, rising 277 meters (910 feet) above the city. It was definitely in the 8th century that Sparta took the step which was to make it unique among Greek states. Preview. Athens used a democratic type of government. Athens may have lost the battle, but their contributions became the most relevant in the modern world. The marathon was named after a long run to Athens in 490 B.C. A poem of Tyrtaeus’s has traditionally been thought to echo both parts of that document, rider as well as Rhetra, but that relationship has recently been challenged. 1. Sparta, now a city in Laconia, was also a distinguished city in Ancient Greece known for its disciplined and military-trained people. This worksheet can be edited by Premium members using the free Google Slides online software. The neighbour was Messenia, which lost its independence to Sparta in the 8th century and did not regain it until the 360s. KidsKonnect is a growing library of high-quality, printable worksheets for teachers and homeschoolers. Each state had its own laws, government and money but they shared the same language and religion. This was also the period when Sparta the living legend consciously traded on and exported fantasies about its great past (in the Hellenistic First Book of Maccabees one even finds the idea seriously put forward that the Jews and Spartans were somehow kin). This attack turned into a disaster for Athens as their naval ships and army collapsed. Sparta . Both city states had extremely large slave populations, with each home to about 100,000 slaves. The place was devastated and humiliated. You may know that the city of Athens is named after the Greek Goddess Athena. 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