ABSTRACT
During the Persian Wars, the small, quarrelsome Greek city-states had finally united
to defeat an outside threat in the name of freedom. However, in the years following
the Persian Wars, the Greeks showed that they were incapable of acting as a unified
whole. In particular, Greece was torn apart by rivalry between Athens and Sparta, the
two most important states in Greece. This rivalry was closely linked to one great
political question: should the Greek states be ruled by democracies, where everyone
shared power, or by oligarchies, where only a few men had power? Athens was a
democracy, and Sparta was an oligarchy. As both states became increasingly
powerful, it was inevitable that they would come into conflict.
