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To What Extent Is Athens Better Than Sparta

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Your son has just been thrown off a cliff due to his weakness, your wife is distraught due to this event. This is just one of the many downfalls of living in ancient Sparta. I believe that Athens was a better polis in ancient Greece for the following reasons: their way of government was fairer than Sparta, it was well protected, and education was highly valued.
First off, Athenians highly valued education whereas Sparta did not.In Athens you were taught to read, write, play music, dance, math, etc. In Sparta the first thing on the list for you to learn is how to become a good soldier until you were 30. So you were kind of the underdog when it came to academics in Sparta so to speak. In a quote from Socrates, “Education is the kindling of a fire, not the filling of a vessel”. Out of this he is basically saying that athenian education leads to better things in life whereas spartan education is just worthwhile for one occasion and is used for military purposes. This shows that it is not only scientifically evisent but people who lived around that time thought this as well. …show more content…

Athens had a form of government called a democracy which is what we practice here in the United States. They would put all their citizens name in a pot and randomly choose people as representatives. In ancient Sparta on the other hand, they practiced a form of government called an oligarchy. This means that they had a few people ruling, as in fact they had two kings. The issue there is that the power remains in that family line and cannot change, whereas in Athens it can fluctuate. This allows many people to have the opportunity to become president. This shows that Athens’s democracy was fairer than Spartan

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