Sparta was dominant in the Peloponnesus. A lot of things led up to their dominance some of which include Causes of the War, The advances in warfare, and Sparta’s other invasions and sieges. All of these together show the wits and strength of Sparta.
The first thing that led up to their dominance was the causes of the Peloponnesus War. After both greek city-states had a major role in the defeat of the Persians, for the next half-century Athens and Sparta both assumed they where greater than all other city-states, and their rivalry led to the long expected Peloponnesian War. Thucydides believed that the war broke out because of Spartan fear of the rising power of Athens. Both had the economy with nearly 200,000 helots who worked on the farms.
Athens was a much more superior polis compared to Sparta because the Athenians invented new ideas and creations that supported the people, such as democracy, the Athenians led the Delian League, and Sparta created the Peloponnesian League after the Athenians created their alliance, and the Athenians changed the ways of their government many times to suit the people, and the Spartans did not.
Thucydides set out to narrate the events of what he believed would be a great war—one requiring great power amassed on both sides and great states to carry out. Greatness, for Thucydides, was measured most fundamentally in capital and military strength, but his history delves into almost every aspect of the war, including, quite prominently, its leaders. In Athens especially, leadership was vital to the war effort because the city’s leaders were chosen by its people and thus, both shaped Athens and reflected its character during their lifetimes. The leaders themselves, however, are vastly different in their abilities and their effects on the city. Thucydides featured both Pericles and Alcibiades prominently in his history, and each had a distinct place in the evolution of Athenian empire and the war it sparked between Athens and Sparta. Pericles ascended to power at the empire’s height and was, according to Thucydides, the city’s most capable politician, a man who understood fully the nature of his city and its political institutions and used his understanding to further its interests in tandem with his own. After Pericles, however, Thucydides notes a drastic decline in the quality of Athenian leaders, culminating in Alcibiades, the last major general to be described in The Peloponnesian War. While he is explicit in this conclusion, he is much more reticent regarding its cause. What changed in Athens to produce the decline in the quality of its leadership?
... one another until they were no more. From the Persian War to the Peloponnesian the two states had changed a lot of the years. Starting from their greatest alliance yet first moment of subtle rivalry, the Persian War. Although they were indistinctly competing against one another, without each other they could not have dominated. Then there were the two blows to the peace treaty. The first blow being the Athenian assistance in the battle between Corinth and Corycra. The second blow being the idea to burn Corinth’s town down. Although these were remarkable mistakes the Athenians saw nothing wrong with them. Lastly, was the war. In 431 B.C. the Peloponnesian War broke out between the two allies, after all they had been through, their alliance was over. War was bound to happen, although they lived in tranquility for so long, one or the other was destined to break out.
Sparta, a city-state from Ancient Greece, was very respected in its time. One of few cities to rival its power was Athens. With thousands of poleis in Ancient Greece, it was a great achievement to reach this level of prestige. So how did Sparta become so strong? I believe the strength of the city can be contributed to the roles of both men and women working and devoting their lives to Sparta. Since birth, both sexes were educated, treated, and acted accordingly to reap the most power the state it can from its people.
In conclusion Athens and Sparta were both very different Greek city-states, so different in fact that they could not get along. Trade, democracy, foreigners, individualism, thought, and the arts were all a part of Athens. Contrasting was Sparta whose focus was on the state, achieving power and independence, and their military. They were not able to ever unite, because of their sociological and cultural differences. Geographically they were so close that they could not ignore one another but fought for the top position among the Greek city-states. For in the end, it was their differences drove them apart.
The history of Sparta was the great exception to the political evolution of the city-states. Despite the fact that Spartans in the end were all Greek, Sparta failed to ever move in the direction of democratic rule. Instead, its government evolved into something more closely resembling a modern day dictatorship. If the Spartans had followed the other Greek city-states in their political practices they might have been able to avoid their own downfall and could have even become stronger.
Throughout the Ancient Greek world, there have been many wars and standoffs. However, there has been only one which changed the course of Greek history forever; the Peloponnesian War. Caused by the growing tension between Athens and Sparta, it came and left, leaving only destruction in its wake. The defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War caused the downfall of Greece, and the end of the Classical Age.
In Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles commends the ergon of Athenian heroes, which has placed them in the realm of logos, while directing the Athenians to follow these ideals of logos. The maintenance and continued success of Athens' political establishment relies on the prevalence of polis, rationality and discourse over family, emotion and reckless action. However, the indiscriminate turns of fate and fortune, often place logos in opposition with the base, primal nature of ergon. Both Thucydides and Sophocles recognize that when logos conflicts with the unexpected ergon, the preservation of rationality and unanimity among the citizens of the polis depend on the leadership of a single honest leader. In the History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides presents Pericles as a man of logos, whom Athens needs to achieve its full potential as an empire and later to rescue her from disaster. Likewise, Sophocles presents Theseus, in Oedipus Colonus, as the perfect successor of Pericles, who returns Athens to its former glory before the end of the war. In these two examples, we see that the dominance of logos over ergon within a polis lies in the ability and logos of the city’s current leader.
In ancient Greece during the 7th and 8th centuries, different armies and cities were fighting for control of land and power. During this time period, it was very gruesome and many people died because different states wanted to expand their control over new territories so they could gain more power. With all the different armies and militaries fighting for control, there was one that stood out as the elite of all militaries, Sparta. Quickly Sparta became known throughout Greece as the most highly disciplined and coordinated militaries in the world.
When two great and powerful city-states ban together for a common cause the results will in turn will have great expectations. Those expectations were met when an undermanned Greek army defeated the large Persian Army throughout the course of the Persian War. The problem occurs when each of the city-states’ own ego gets in the way of the cause. They handily defeated the Persians, but the Athenians took the credit for it, and paid homage to themselves, through elaborate celebrations of victory. In their minds, they were at the head of Hellas. The Spartans took exception to this and rightfully so. The credit has to go to them as well, for the large part that they played in the victory over Persia. This dissension in the end had a lot to do with the Peloponnesian War. Never mind the military structures and governments that each set up, which made their differences clear cut. There was no way to avoid the war between these two great powers, it was inevitable, just as Thucydides had predicted.
The Greeks were able to repel the overwhelming and seemly unstoppable Persian Empire. They were able to do so because of the victories won thanks to the Athenian navy in the Aegean Sea, the hard fought and strategically important battles that the Spartans just would not give up during and they were able to put aside their differences in order to face the greater threat for the good or their culture. Each major city/state contributed what it was good at. It was a nice display of teamwork.
One of those traits is that although Athenian citizens and soldiers live a more leisurely life and are not trained as rigorously as the Spartans in land warfare, Athenians’ natural courage makes up for that (Thucydides pg. 42). Athens was definitely the dominant naval power in Greece at the time, but the Athenians’ devaluing of land warfare led to a stalemate in the first phase of the Peloponnesian War before the Peace of Nicias in which Sparta ravaged Athens’ countryside and forced its citizens to be holed up in the city walls and to live in close quarters, making them susceptible to the plague. Another trait of Athens that can be argued as not a positive factor is its institution of democracy. Athenian democracy was quite limited in the modern sense since its citizenry only included ethnic Athenian males over the age of 20, but it was remarkable in the ancient world for the amount of civic participation it allowed of those that it considered citizens. The Athenians prided themselves on including people of lower economic status into the citizenry, but this trait may be not as positive as Pericles proclaimed (Thucydides pg. 40). In an oligarchic system such as Sparta’s, if the city-state was to win a war, it
In conclusion, Athens and Sparta, both powerful Greek City-State. The Archidaminam War, The Peace of Nicias, and The Decelan of Ionian. In total these 3 wars lasted 27 years.Sparta, the capital of Laconia, was at one time the most powerful City-State in Ancient Greece. Thucydide, a greek historian who lived during the peloponnesian war, said the war was because of the Athenian empire and its fast growing power. Sparta won the war and remained the the most powerful until
When examining the causes for the Peloponnesian War, which was between 431-404 B.C., there are a number of causes that factored into the cause of this war. However, one of the most important causes to this war was largely due to the fact that the Spartans feared the growing power and success of Athens. The Spartans were “particularly alarmed at the growing power of Athens” (Cartwright, “Peloponnesian War”). During the Persian war in 479 BC, Athens grew fiercely strong with power with help of its many allies and continued with their no mercy attacks on Persian territories. When the Persians left Greece, Athens further enraged Sparta when they built large and tall walls around its empire in the event of an attack, which was mostly thought to be from Sparta if it happened.
Beginning in 492 B.C., a series of wars erupted, appropriately entitled the Persian Wars, which lasted around thirteen years. Because of the constant battles between the Persians, led by Xerxes, and Greece, both civilization started growing weaker and weaker. When the wars ended, the Greeks were successful at defeating the Persians. However, being in a weakened state caused the Greek city- states (mainly Athens against Sparta) to fight amongst themselves in order to have more influence over the rest of the city-states. This type of war was termed the Peloponnesian War and continued from 431B.C. to 404 B.C. (History of Greece:The Golden Age of Greece) and