Essay On Athens Daily Life

Daily life between Athens and Sparta were completely different depending on social class. If you were a serf, slave, unfree male or Helot, daily life was the same day in and day out with laborious work, long hours, too few breaks, and too little food or sleep. Athens women would be kept busy attending to matters of the household, such as child rearing, schooling, cooking, cleaning and farming. Unless the woman was the child of a free male and by wealthy means, Spartan women would do essentially the same as Athens women with the exception of farming, which would have been done by helots. We start to see the stark social divide of activities with young men born of free males. If raised in Athens, I would venture to say the young man went to school, whether this was done at home or a formal institution, then would seek out his place is the community by either acting, writing plays, pondering philosophy, or if they were skilled at the art of negotiating, he became active in politics, campaigning and voting. According to ‘Athens & Sparta: Democracy vs. Dictatorship’ by Dr. Peter J. Brand, if raised in Sparta, a young man between the ages of 7 - 19 would be subjected to military training - running barefoot and

During wartime with another city-state, I believe day to day life would have been uprooted with residents finding their homes destroyed, animals killed and people slaughtered or taken captive and tortured. Battling in war, a man would see their fellow dining brothers killed before them with the roars of battle cries mixed with the moans of pain heard for miles, aghast devastation everywhere the eye could see, and never would a resident of Athens and Sparta be more similar than during these