What Is Sparta?
In fourth century BC Greece was about 1500 scattered small cities around the Mediterranean and Black sea shores. Each city had different forms of government, rulers in its history which ranges from democracy to monarchies and oligarchies.
By around 730 BCE, Sparta had conquered the neighboring city-state of Messenia in the south-west corner of the Peloponnesus. The government was like monarchy/ tyranny, where one sole ruler had taken the power in hand by force. Helots were treated as public slaves, forced to work their own ancestral lands and give as much as half its produce to support Spartan citizens. Sparta’s unique dual kingship came from two separate royal tribes who traced their line back to legendary founders. There were three Ephors …show more content…
Ten tribes were created and each tribe had members scattered across Athens and the Attic peninsula so that each one had men from each of the old factions— men of the plains, the coast and the hill. This clever policy broke up the old factions as well as the powerful influence aristocrats had over the system. These subdivisions (demos) joined together and their populations made up the ten tribes.
In the late 460s Ephialtes and Pericles presided over a radicalization of power that shifted the balance decisively to the poorest sections of society. This was the democratic Athens that won and lost an empire which built the Parthenon, that gave a stage to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and that laid the foundations of western rational and critical thought.
Classical Athens was a direct democracy. Democracy in Athens lasted for less than 200 years. . For the next 2000 years, the birthplace of democracy was ruled by a series of foreign kings and emperors: The Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottoman Turks. Women only gained the universal right to vote after the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the 36 Constitution in 1920. Full legal equality for African Americans was not achieved until the
By around 730 BCE, Sparta had conquered the neighboring city-state of Messenia in the south-west corner of the Peloponnesus. The government was like monarchy/ tyranny, where one sole ruler had taken the power in hand by force. Helots were treated as public slaves, forced to work their own ancestral lands and give as much as half its produce to support Spartan citizens. Sparta’s unique dual kingship came from two separate royal tribes who traced their line back to legendary founders. There were three Ephors …show more content…
Ten tribes were created and each tribe had members scattered across Athens and the Attic peninsula so that each one had men from each of the old factions— men of the plains, the coast and the hill. This clever policy broke up the old factions as well as the powerful influence aristocrats had over the system. These subdivisions (demos) joined together and their populations made up the ten tribes.
In the late 460s Ephialtes and Pericles presided over a radicalization of power that shifted the balance decisively to the poorest sections of society. This was the democratic Athens that won and lost an empire which built the Parthenon, that gave a stage to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes, and that laid the foundations of western rational and critical thought.
Classical Athens was a direct democracy. Democracy in Athens lasted for less than 200 years. . For the next 2000 years, the birthplace of democracy was ruled by a series of foreign kings and emperors: The Macedonians, Romans, Byzantines, and Ottoman Turks. Women only gained the universal right to vote after the adoption of the Nineteenth Amendment to the 36 Constitution in 1920. Full legal equality for African Americans was not achieved until the