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Compare And Contrast Athens And Sparta

732 Words3 Pages

The main objective of this essay is to describe and investigate the structure of the government in the ancient Greece’s most powerful city states, namely, Athens and Sparta. Both city states have gone through various cycles of wars, reforms, social upheaval and unrests, and each of these elements has had influenced the development of the governmental systems that we have bettered or inherited today. Athenians saw the need for fundamental changes in the government, allowing them to pave the way for direct participation of their citizens and citizen’s initiative in the democracy and elimination of the some oligarchical elements. The Sparta, although not as democratic as Athens, allowed women to be far more than reproductive machines whom were expected to live only to please the men. However, the militarized society of Sparta and the warrior mindset didn’t chose alienation of the masses over the integration of the weakest members of the society. With that in mind, we will now look at the finer details of the governmental systems of these two city states.

Discussion
How did people in Athens and Sparta obtain the right to participate in public life and make decisions affecting the community?
Athenians participated in the public life and the process of decision making for the community, by the means of direct democracy; Thetes - all free male members who were also a citizen of Athens – had the right to partake in debates and passing laws in Ekklesia or “People’s

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