Sparta’s legacy too has been far from purely or solely a military one – as a reading of Elizabeth Rawson’s The Spartan Tradition in European Thought (1969) amply demonstrates – though that is the predominant element in its reception today for sure, as it was in 19th-century Prussia and 20th-century Nazi Germany.
Athens does much more than (visual, theatrical, rhetorical) art: for example, democracy, philosophy, and indeed high culture generally made Athens the key city for the Romans wishing to inherit and claim descent from ‘Hellenic’ culture, via Alexandria’s Museum and Library.
Of course, it is a lot more complex than that. Attic red-figure kylix, found at Vulci, Italy. Alamy Stock Photo Oedipus and the Sphinx, attributed to the Oedipus Painter, c.470 BC.
