Sparta Is Better Than Athens Essay

773 Words2 Pages

Was Sparta a Better Place to Live than Athens?

Jayden Thai 7M

Ancient Greece was home to many wondrous city-states. The most powerful of these were Athens and Sparta. In ancient times, the features that made a city good to live in included infrastructure, health and wellbeing, well-built laws and good education. Living in Athens or Sparta were provided two very different experiences for their citizens and it has been a highly contested topic as to which place was the best to live in. However, it is undeniable that Athens was most certainly the better place to reside in. This is because Athens had a superior form of government, a strong focus on education and, finally, a wide range of careers that one could pursue.

Athens was a better place to live in than Sparta because it had a superior form of government. Athens’ system of …show more content…

Athenians could become teachers, doctors, mathematicians, philosophers, etc. and could also choose what they decided to pursue. This is largely enabled by their education system providing Athenians with a wide range of skills and knowledge. In Sparta “All citizens (only men could be citizens) had to be soldiers. Social roles such as farmers, merchants, potters and sculptors were not options for Spartan men.” (Saldais, Taylor and Young, 2011) They were forced to do this until they were sixty, when they retired. Spartans were deprived of their freedom to choose what they could do for a living and were instead forced to violently fight in Spartan campaigns. Athenians, on the other hand, had the freedom to choose what they did and only had to serve in the military for two years in order to acquire the necessary skills to fight. It is obvious that Athens was a better place to live than Sparta because Athenians could choose what jobs and roles they wished to pursue and had the freedom of

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