During the recovery of Greek civilization, Greek began developing city states. Basically, small places that consisted no more than a town and had a few miles of country side. Athens and Sparta were the biggest of city states, resembling the size of a couple U.S. countries. Athens and Sparta constantly fought one another; however they both had a similar important activity of worshipping a god or goddess. The Greek language is the first known language to have a word specifying a member of a community as citizen. Nonetheless, Sparta and Athens could not be any more different from one another including their government systems.
The Athens found the way Spartans lived not worth living. Spartan was more agricultural than Athens. Athens however had direct access to the sea, so overseas trade was convenient and helped with trade. Spartans had a more powerful army than Athens; all they had was the strength of their navy. Sparta didn’t
…show more content…
Not only did Athenians have freedom, but at a certain time, they had exceptional power for the city. Over a few centuries, Athens became one of the wealthiest and most powerful city-states in Greek due to its growth of overseas trade. Also, because of the large fertile land making Athens become the producer and exporter of wine and oil. However, with all this wealth came social and political issues, usually between the wealthy aristocrats, who are descendants of the Athenian families that had ruled the city-state. Due to one of these issues, democracy was instituted. In the Athenian democracy, the power rested on the assembly of adult citizens. Meetings were held weekly, voting was usually by a show of hand and simply the majority determined the outcome. Most leading politicians were wealthy and well-educated aristocrats. However, Athens did not start out as a democracy; it had several stages of political growth, starting with monarchy which included oligarchy and