After the Peloponnesian War, Spartan hegemony of Greece would seem to have been assured. A single generation, though, would have seen Sparta at the peak of its power, and its defeat by the Thebans at Leuctra, effectively turning it into a second rate power. The victory in the Peloponnesian War was ...

During the Greek civil war, Aristophanes wrote the comedy Lysistrata which, behind its Battle-of-the-Sexes plotline, critiques the war between the Spartans and Athenians. Like Confucius, who used the private family to dictate how a king should govern his country, Aristophanes used the private disput...

HOW ATHENS TOOK OVER LEADERSHIP OF SPARTA AFTER THE PERSIAN WARS During the period of Greek history from the last years of the Persian Wars till the beginning of the First Peloponnesian War, the primacy of Sparta declined whileAthens was gaining increased influence in Greece. The Athenian, Thuc...

During the early centuries prior to the birth of Christ, Athens and Sparta were the two most well-known Greek city-states. Since both Athens and Sparta resided in Greece, one could come to the conclusion that their societies and the culture of their city-states might be largely similar. Surprising...

Pericles of Athens and Archidamus of Sparta devised net assessments that both believed would provide strategies that would bring victory and peace for their respective states. This essay will show that Archidamus did a better job of net assessment prior to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. A...

How does the section of Thucydides narrative about the debate at Sparta and the declaration of war show the Spartans as being unwilling to enter into a war with Athens? Thucydides is thought by some to be the true father of history; most historians before him, such as Herodotus, could be more acc...

Compare the leadership qualities of Pericles and Creon In the ancient Greek period, it's hard to tell that whether a man has a good leadership or not just based on his triumphant on wars since there are many political and social factors which roughly influence their states and personal live...

PERICLES ESSAY CONTEXT The Classical Age of Greece begins with the Persian War (490-479 B.C.) and ends with the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.). Besides war and conquest, in this period, the Greeks produced great literature, poetry, philosophy, drama, and art. In 461 BC, the Spartans beg...

The Lysistrata of Aristophanes Aristophanes was a satirist who produced Lysistrata around 413 BC when the news of Athen's warships had been destroyed near Sicily. For twenty-one years, while Athens was engaged in war, he relentlessly and wittliy attacked the war, the ideals of the war...

Herodotus was a Greek historian, generally called the "Father of History." The work of Herodotus is the oldest surviving major Greek prose and the first history in Western civilization. He was born at Halicarnassus, a Greek state under Persian rule, in southwestern Asia Minor. After ...

The country of Greece, in 400-500 BCE was led to greatness by two city-states. These city-states, diverse in ideas and actions, were Sparta and Athens. Sparta and Athens were as different as night and day. Sparta glorified military tactics while Athens took relish in art and learning. These city...

Athens Athens was one of the first city-states. Each of these independent states consisted of a city and the region that surrounded it. Athens had a king, as did other Greek states. According to tradition, the first king of Athens was named Cecrops. Kings ruled the city-state until 682 B....

The Rosetta stone was an important in our understanding of the ancient Egyptians because the Egyptians used hieroglyphics that we no longer use nor do we understand. Located on this stone were three forms of written language, Greek and two styles of Egyptian. Since we already knew the Greek language...

Sparta and Athens are like apples and oranges: the same but different. Both are fruit grown on trees in the case of the apples and oranges, and both are city-states in Greece in the case of Athens and Sparta. Apples and oranges have distinctly different tastes, textures and flavors. Athens and Sp...

The Ancient Greeks became the first civilized people in a place where frankly early civilization just shouldn't have taken place. The Mycenaeans arrived in modern Greece around 200 B.C. There they found a dry, hot, and harsh mountainous terrain muck like the conditions found today in Arizona. By 70...

Democracy takes on many forms and continues to be a difficult concept to define accurately. In Aristophanes, The Acharnians, he almost gives the readers immediate insight into the opinion of this comic poet regarding the Greek democratic system and its representatives. Six years after the st...

Athens versus Sparta Athens and Sparta were two major civilizations. Each had their own beliefs, morals, traditions, and things that set them apart. They each lived in different areas of the world. Sparta was very isolated, and Athens was a trade capital of the world. They each had their own ...