Athens & Sparta

A city-state is an independent country whose territory consists solely of a single major city and the area immediately surrounding it. Examples include the city-states of ancient Greece (the poleis such as Athens, Sparta, Thebes, and Corinth), the Phoenician cities of Canaan (such as Tyre and Sidon), and the Sumerian cities of Mesopotamia (such as Babylon... [continue reading]

Sparta was an ancient Greek city and the most powerful state of the Peloponnese. The city lay on the northern end of the Laconian plain, on the right bank of the river Eurotas. The site is admirably fitted by nature to guard the only routes by which an army can penetrate Laconia from the land side. At the same time its distance from sea made it invulnerable... [continue reading]

Greece is a country in southeastern Europe, known in Greek as Hellas, and consisting of a mainland and an archipelago of islands. Greece is the birthplace of Western Philosophy (Plato), Literature (Homer), Mathematics (Pythagoras), History (Herodotus), Drama (Sophocles and Aristophanes), the Olympic Games, and Democracy and Science (these last two most notably... [continue reading]

The city of Athens, Greece, with its famous Acropolis, has come to symbolize the whole of the country in the popular imagination; and not without cause. Athens, which began as a small, Mycenaen community (though still worthy of the massive Cyclopean stonework which characterized the great palaces of the Poloponnese) grew to become a city which, at its height, epitomized... [continue reading]

A City is defined as a populated urban center of commerce and administration with a system of laws and, usually, regulated means of sanitation (the word derives from the Latin civitas). The first cities sprang up in the region known as Mesopotamia between 4300 and 3100 BCE. The city of Ur was first settled in 4000 BCE and walled cities, for defence, were common... [continue reading]