‘The Athenians thought and the Spartans fought’ just about sums up today’s popular memory of Classical Greece, such as it is. Whereas we are assured that a surprisingly high proportion of men daydream of ancient Rome on a regular basis, the Greeks get less attention, something reflected in wider culture. On-screen documentaries and dramas about the Romans vastly outnumber the occasional offering about ancient Greece. There is still a general awareness that it was Greeks who gave us the idea and the name of ‘democracy’, and who laid the basis for subsequent philosophical and scientific thought. Sometimes the central role played by Athens in all this is remembered, but, even then, this is often tinged with disapproval; the Athenians made Socrates drink from the hemlock cup, and, for all their talk of government by the people, they denied the vote to women and were slave-owners.

The Spartans come off a little better, albeit because the memory of them is focused on a single episode, when King Leonidas and the 300 died rather than surrender at the Pass of Thermopylae in 480 BC. Heroic last stands are inherently dramatic and moving, and Thermopylae has become the quintessential last stand, with men fighting and dying for a good cause against overwhelming odds and ultimately making it possible for their side to prevail in the war, turning back the Persian invaders. Presented to a new audience in the highly stylised movie 300, Spartans are celebrated as the ultimate tough, capable and unyielding warriors, but with little attempt to place them in the context of the Classical Greek world.

The Spartans and the Athenians were Greeks, but their cities flourished at a time before there was a Greece in any meaningful way. Greeks spoke the same language, and although there were many dialects – including Dorian Greek at Sparta and Ionian Greek at Athens – it seems that all Greeks could understand each other. This was in contrast to everyone else in the world, those barbarians who, to the Greeks’ ears, bleated like sheep. Greeks were distinct and special, obviously superior in their own estimation to the rest, and, as well as language, they shared traditions and beliefs, the same core of stories about the Olympian gods, the same poems, most famously the works of Homer.

Every four years, Greeks came together to compete in the Olympic Games, and there were other similar festivals no longer so famous. When King Alexander I of Macedon – an ancestor of Alexander the Great – wanted to compete at Olympia there was a long debate about whether or not the Macedonians were Greeks. In the end, he was allowed to take part because the royal family of Macedon claimed to be descended from refugees from the city of Argos, neighbour and rival of Sparta and thus unambiguously Greek, unlike the mass of the semi-barbarous Macedonian population.

Greeks set themselves apart the rest of the world but showed no desire to unite in one state. Instead, they lived in many fiercely independent communities who were usually rivals and frequently enemies. For the Olympic festival a month-long truce was declared, temporarily suspending wars between Greeks so that everyone could take part.

The ideal, almost natural community as far as Greeks were concerned, was based around a city, an urban centre controlling the surrounding farmland, and over a thousand of these are attested, in mainland Greece, on the islands of the Aegean, the Asian coast, and as far afield as North Africa, Spain and the Black Sea. Some ‘cities’ were tiny, with a total population of a thousand or less and barely 10 or 12 square miles of territory, and the vast majority were only two or three times bigger. Even so, membership of the community was a source of immense pride, and its reputation was jealously guarded, if necessary, in war against neighbours who usually lived within sight and certainly within walking distance.

There was a close correlation between political rights and the ability and willingness to fight for the city against its rivals. At the heart of these citizen armies were the hoplites, well-armoured spearmen who fought in a dense phalanx against their counterparts from other cities. These were not professional soldiers, but small-scale farmers, men owning enough property to afford the moderately expensive equipment and to want to protect the status it brought them. Going to war for such men was an important duty, a shared obligation with their neighbours and fellow citizens, while at the same time essentially an interruption to all the vital tasks of working their land.

The Spartans were not like this. Their tradition maintained that they were conquerors, invaders from northern Greece who had taken by force rich arable territory in the Peloponnese, the big island-like peninsula joined to the rest of Greece by the narrow Isthmus of Corinth. In the 7th century BC, they added substantially to the territory they controlled by conquering Messenia to the west. The Spartans were the victors and remained forever the masters, while the descendants of the defeated inhabitants were forever the vanquished, a serf population known as ‘helots’.  The poet Tyrtaeus – and Spartan poets were a rare thing – told of how such helots toiled only to give half of all they produced to their masters and then had to feign sorrow and mourn publicly whenever one of the masters who exploited them died.

Spartans did not work because all inherited or were allocated land with a helot labour force to manage it. Instead, the Spartan ‘peers’ or ‘equals’ as they called themselves devoted their lives to being full-time citizens, and as part of this they trained themselves for war. The community was ever present – it is wrong to speak of the state because there were no real institutions as we would recognise them. From the age of seven, boys began to undergo a regime intended to toughen them, with the training intensifying around the age of 12 and culminating in effectively continuous military service in their twenties. Physical fitness was fundamental, as was physical and mental toughness, the ability to accept and inflict pain. Diet was basic and barely sufficient, so that boys were expected to steal to supplement it, which taught them stealth and how to cooperate. The only crime was getting caught.

Sparta as a state was often at war and lived always with the threat of war. Partly, this was because the Spartans sought to dominate the Peloponnese, but mainly it was because of the threat from within, of rebellion by the far more numerous helot population. Later tradition claimed that each year the Spartan magistrates declared war on the helots, so that if ever one of the peers killed a helot, the act would be legal. Fear of rebellion encouraged the Spartans to stick together, so that, politically, Sparta was exceptionally stable, something rare in the Greek world. The Spartan peers knew that they could not afford factionalism. While all citizens met and voted yes or no in periodic assemblies, decision making rested with the magistrates, and a permanent high council of elders numbering just 30, including Sparta’s two kings.

Spartans were secretive about their politics and almost every other aspect of their lives, which means that the surviving sources were invariably written by outsiders, often set down much later, and leave much about how the state functioned unclear. What is certain is that by the end of the 6th century BC, Sparta was acknowledged as the foremost military power among the Greeks and had conquered or turned into subordinate allies almost – but not quite – all of the Peloponnese.

Spartan territory was very large by Greek standards, with only three or four other city-states at all comparable in size. Athens was one of these, but, unlike the Spartans, the Athenians did not claim to be conquerors and instead asserted that they were indigenous inhabitants – sprung from the soil of Attica. Whatever their actual origins, Athens swiftly emerged as the main centre over the whole region, and there is no real trace of any rival proto-cities as independent states, unlike the pattern in so much of the Greek world of lots of small cities growing up and living cheek by jowl.

The people of Attica seem to have felt that they belonged to one community, with the city of Athens at its heart. But for all their size and numbers their reputation was unspectacular. Athenians got the briefest of mentions in the Iliad – and plenty of cynics thought that even this was a later interpolation – and did not feature in any other important legends. They had their own hero, Theseus, who roved around killing villains and monsters in a manner suspiciously similar to the, definitely older and more common, tales of Hercules.

Although they fought with their neighbours, most of the traditions about Athens deal with internal disputes and power struggles. Several men staged coups to seize power and rule as a tyrant, one of them succeeding on his third attempt. At other times, lawgivers were proclaimed to restore order during a crisis, including Draco, supposedly so keen on the death penalty that his name survives in the term draconian. When the most successful tyrant, Pisistratus, died, his sons succeeded until one of them was murdered by a pair of aristocratic lovers inspired by a personal slight. Yet the tyranny did not end with this, and, ironically enough, was only overthrown when a Spartan king led an army into Attica. The result, which was not what the king intended, for he supported a different faction, was the proclamation of a new constitution, a democracy where power rested with the people, the demos, who elected leaders each year.

The process of creating the Athenian system is hard to trace, and some aspects may have been introduced later, but the essence was there from the start. Citizens were divided into four classes based on wealth, and a few roles were initially reserved for the better off. Citizens were also split into new tribes, which mixed together different regions to weaken the power of local aristocrats. All could attend the frequent sessions of the Popular Assembly, all could vote and every vote was equal. More than that, if a man could attract the attention of the presiding officials, anyone could speak and a motion could be taken on his opinion. Decisions of the Assembly were sovereign and instant, for there were no bureaucratic or judicial institutions able to modify, delay or negate them. Many posts came to be allocated by lot, although, significantly, military commanders were always elected, since this was a field where individual talent – or its absence – was more immediately obvious.

Athens flourished under the new system, and the most obvious sign of this to contemporaries was that the Athenians suddenly became far more successful in war-making, fending off all the Spartan-backed attempts to regain control. Well-provided with natural harbours, in a direct contrast with Sparta, Attica had always been outward looking and open to trade. It also had a large, industrious population, and now that it had stability and internal peace, Athens became even more important as a manufacturer and market, generating wealth to add to its plentiful natural resources. Athenians meeting in the Assembly voted to use the windfall profits of communally owned silver mines to build and crew oared warships known as triremes, creating a fleet several times bigger than anything else in the Greek world. When Leonidas and the 300 made their stand at Thermopylae, their flank out to sea was protected by an allied Greek fleet, the bulk of which was Athenian. Later in the year, Athenian ships and crews formed almost two thirds of the combined fleet that routed the Persians at Salamis.

The Spartans knew little of the sea and had scarcely any ships of their own. Spartan hoplites led the way in 479 BC in the defeat of the Persian army, although even there the Athenians played the next most prominent role. When the struggle with Persia became a matter of naval operations around the Aegean, the Athenians assumed command, winning glory, plunder and coming to lead an alliance of well over 100 lesser allies. Most contributed money rather than men or ships, and the tribute helped fund Athenian seapower. Triremes were expensive to build and maintain, and only effective if the crews trained frequently. There was also money to pay citizens to perform public roles, allowing even the poorest to take their turn so that more and more Athenians played an active role in the functioning of the city.

At the same time, they enjoyed celebrating its glory. Monuments, above all the Parthenon, were designed to show that Athens was greater than other cities. Art flourished in many forms, not least the comedies that lampooned leading figures without ever questioning that Athens’ success and fame were richly deserved.

Sparta was inward looking, secretive in its ways. It trained its ‘peers’ to speak in a clipped, often sarcastic fashion – giving us the word laconic – and presented to the world an image of stern austerity. Athens was a bustling trading city, whose inhabitants liked to talk, particularly about themselves. Both were very big states by Greek standards, but at Sparta rights were restricted to just a few. There may have been 9,000 ‘peers’ in the 6th century, but the numbers dwindled to perhaps 1,500 by the start of the 4th century BC. Those left were richer, but their numbers made it harder for the Spartans to dominate militarily. In contrast, in spite of losses from war and plague, there were rarely fewer than 40,000 Athenian citizens.

Athenians and Spartans fought side by side against the Persian invasion. In the aftermath, Athens sought recognition as Sparta’s equal and did not receive it. Rivalry for prestige – something natural for Greek cities and individuals – led to tension and ultimately a series of wars, the most famous known today as the Peloponnesian War 431-404 BC. Neither the Athenians nor the Spartans wanted to remake the other in their own image; instead, the desire was to make the other treat them with the respect and fear each community felt that it deserved. Yet as a contest between a landpower and seapower, each side struggled to do sufficient harm to the other to convince them to capitulate and grant this, and much of the fighting was waged through proxies.

In a grim irony, the Spartans won by securing subsidies from the Persians. Persian gold paid for the construction of a succession of Spartan fleets crewed by allies and mercenaries, for very few peers took part in any of these battles. Athens’ democracy was ambitious, imaginative and reckless in the conduct of war, which led both to spectacular successes and appalling disasters. In the end, the steadiness of the narrow Spartan leadership and the wealth of Persia prevailed. Yet the Spartans struggled to cope with success, and soon alienated both the Persians and most of their Greek allies, while Athenian democracy recovered and the city again flourished, if not quite to the prosperity and power of before.