Temple of Hephestos, Agora
Athens, Greece
Theater ruins, Sparta, Greece
Temple of Hephestos, Agora
Athens, Greece
Theater ruins, Sparta, Greece
As one of your possible topics for the writing assignment for this unit can be on a comparison between Athens and Sparta, you may want to pay special attention to this segment of the unit!
There will be many ways to compare these two city states - and if you choose this one for your writing assignment for this unit, be sure that you are comparing "apples and apples"! and not "apples and oranges." Click on this link for a chart that you can use to collect your information for such a comparison.
First, you might want to check these two sites on the two most important lawmakers of the two city states - Lycurgus and Solon, as described by a Greek-speaking scholar who lived several hundreds of years later, in late Roman times. A small section of his account of Lycurgus is in our textbook, p. 103. Are Solon and democracy 180 degrees away from Lycurgus' reforms, presumably on behalf of tyranny?
We know much more about Athens today than about Sparta because Athens has become a huge city which treasures its past, particularly this period; while Sparta is a small town in the highlands of the Peloponesus. Look at this "virtual tour" of Athens' Acropolis - it is considered one of the modern wonders of the "virtual age." You might end up spending a lot of time on this, all of it well spent! Of course it's more exciting to travel to Athens and have a real tour!
Those of you who followed the 2006 summer Olympics in Athens will have been shown some of the city's new subway stations. When the new subway was being built and extended for the summer games, the Athenians discovered historical monuments everywhere they dug. So they decided to make each subway station a museum!
A wonderful website for information on The Ancient City of Athens!
And in my opinion, everyone who studies anything about ancient Greece should at least once in their lifetime read Pericles' Funeral Oration in full. Of course, no one was there to take minutes of his speech, nor has a copy of his notes been found. But one of Athens' greatest historians was present, and wrote down his recollection of what Pericles said and put it in his famous History of the Peloponnesian War.
It was in 431 BCE, soon after the long and disastrous war had broken out
between Athens and Sparta, that Pericles spoke to the gathered Athenian citizens
about the responsibilities of citizenship.
One of the topics in this course to which we will return in future units in greater detail is the question - who owns the past? Is it the people who today live in the land whose history is in question? Is it the world in general? One small instance of this issue being important today is the question of who owns the sculptures which once adorned the Parthenon in Athens. About 200 years ago, a British diplomat who also had a good deal of money purchased quite a lot of sculptures which had once been on the Parthenon, but which had either fallen off over the centuries or which had been removed and were just "laying about" on the ground nearby. He was Lord Elgin, and he took these sculptures to England where today they are in the British Museum.
200 years ago, there was no independent country called Greece - it was part of another empire - and it is likely that Lord Elgin actually bought them from the local political officer in Athens. Today, however, the government of Greece wants them returned. You can click on these two links to get opposing viewpoints on this question, which has soured relations between Greece and Britain over the past several decades: