It is the nature of tyrannies that, no matter how excellent the first ruler is, his successors shall swiftly fall into corruption and madness, and in Athens it was no different. Hippias and Hipparchus, the successors of Peisistratus, took control in 527 BC and failed to show the political cunning of their father, adopting regal airs and engaging in scandal. After one such scandal turned foul, Hipparchus was murdered, and Hippias began a brutal purge which proved too much for the Athenians to bear. Calling upon Spartan help, they overthrew their tyrant and created a uniquely radical form of democracy.
Democracy, in the Athenian term, has little really to do with majority rule. The vast majority of the Athenian population had no voice in government. Women, slaves and foreigners were amongst the groups totally excluded from the political process. Only the Athenian citizens, who (after a fairly short time) needed to have parents both of the Athenian citizenry, were allowed to remain within the assembly. Most notably for the purposes of this essay, it was also a requirement that a male Athenian citizen had completed military training in the Ephebes if he wished to take his place[1]. Of perhaps a total population of 350,000 in Attica, only at most 60,000 will have been entitled to political voice.[2]
No state can be run with a parliament of 60,000, so most of the day to day administration was handled by the boule. The boule effectively acted as an executive committee for the assembly, but also handled such functions as the treasury, and the welcoming of foreign ambassadors.
Sparta, at first, could not appear more different. The Spartan polis was dedicated, with little exception, to warfare. Art and poetry rapidly vanish from Spartan society very early on, and currency barely leaves the form of simple barter. However, every Spartan male was raised to be a warrior, and every Spartan woman was raised to create more Spartan males. Exercise and Athletics were proscribed for both sexes in the agoge, the most brutal education system in European history, beginning at age seven for men and a little later for women. Reading was not deemed important enough for state schooling.
Young Spartan males were fed too little, and expected to steal to make up for the shortfall. Being caught stealing resulted in beatings so severe that death was not unlikely. Indeed, many things appear to have warranted severe beating in Spartan education; the entire process was designed quite consciously to weed out the weak and the inferior. Any man who failed the agoge would be denied full Spartan citizenship, relegated to the status of perioikoi. Those who passed would join the ranks of the Homoioi, the 'equals'.
The Spartan social system essentially breaks down into a three-tier structure. The Spartan warriors were at the top, and they alone held political rights. Beneath them, the economic class of the perioikoi handled those middle-class pursuits that were needed by the state; armour smithing, limited trade, masons and carpenters. Finally, at the bottom of the heap were the conquered neighbouring people of Messina, now re-branded as helots. The helot was rather closer to a Russian Serf than a traditional Hellenic slave; they were tied to the land and were not transferable in themselves, although murdering one bore no real penalty. They were the agricultural basis of Sparta, the people who generated enough surplus food for Spartans to concentrate entirely on military training, and yet they were not truly considered part of the state. Indeed, the Spartans declared war on the helots each year, in order to legitimize the murderous methods used to suppress them.[3]
Sparta's political system is equally bizarre. Two hereditary kings oversaw the state, acting as the executive arm of government, and they in turn were watched over by the Ephors, a group of five annually elected magistrates. Decisions were further filtered through the Gerousia, a council of thirty Spartans (including both kings), members of which had to be over sixty years of age. Membership of the Gerousia was for life; and while in theory membership was open to all Spartans, generally (at least according to Aristotle) members usually seemed to belong to a small group of dominant aristocratic families[4]. The group was also empowered to override all other aspects of the political process, including the kings. Finally, there was the Apella, a general assembly of all Spartan males. They would be presented with a choice (the options decided by the Gerousia), and would decide based on which choice elicited the loudest shouts of appreciation; it would appear likely that this whole part of the system was really a charade conducted by the Gerousia to ensure the 'correct' choice was made. Even if it wasn't, they could simply overrule anyway.
The two polis could not seem any less similar, at first glance. However, a closer inspection rapidly shows remarkable similarities in structure. Firstly, both systems break down into a three-tiered society; split along economic and social rights, as demonstrated in fig.1.
Fig.1.
The Citizens are the Spartan Homoioi, and the Athenian Citizen Base; the tradesmen are the Spartan Perioikoi and the foreign-bored metics in Athens (plus those Athenian-born citizens who failed to complete military training), and the slave classes are the slaves in Athens (notably foreign by definition, after Solon) and the Spartan Helots (equally, considered foreigners).
So, the political citizen base earns its voice through military service; the citizen who cannot or will not fight becomes the middle-class yeomanry, and the slave can only ever be foreign-born. The social structure is clearly identical in these simple terms, despite the cosmetic differences. The greater dedication of Sparta to it's military training can be seen as a facet of the different requirements of naval and land warfare; a professional army requires more training than a navy, while naval supremacy is generally achieved by money.
Politically, all citizens have a vote, and only a small portion of the total population (in both cases, roughly one tenth) are granted this privileged status. In Sparta, the Gerousia ensures that real power remains in the hands of an exceptionally small aristocratic elite. In Athens, it is the art of Rhetoric which maintains this same effect; only the aristocrats could afford the rhetorical training which permitted them to control the opinion of the mass of Athenian public opinion. While the assembly holds supreme power, the assembly itself is led by the nose through the superior education afforded to the wealthy, leading to the effective dominance of a small number of highly charismatic individuals from a selection of aristocratic families.
In the denial of political rights to free-born foreigners, and the nature of the slave classes as exclusively foreign-born, we see a possible foreshadowing of the later racism that would mark Western history. Sparta and Athens were idealised and consciously aped by the states of later history, and their reliance on slavery and serfdom went some way to making these institutions 'the natural order of things'. The foreigner as inferior, the unequal distribution of political and economic rights, and a three-tiered social system are all hangovers from the ancient world that would last until the beginning of the last century, and the effects still mark the structure of society today.
References
[1] Aristotle, page 407
[2] Kitto, page 66.
[3] Aristotle, page 125 – 134
[4] Aristotle, page 125.
Bibliography
Aristotle, The Politics, Translated T. A. Sinclair (Guild Publishing, 1990).
H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks, (Penguin, 1977)
J.C. Stobart, The Glory that was Greece 4th edition (Sidgwick and Jackson, 1971)
Bethany Hughes, The Spartans (Channel 4, 2003)