To: Sam who wrote (247334 ) 3/13/2014 7:44:05 AM From: koan Respond to Come on Sam, you know everything is relative. The first lights of civilization were only turned on about 700 BC. We know next to nothing before then. It was dark. We were still functioning pretty much as animals and engaged in killing and even cannibalism matter of factly. The concept of Democracy was not even in our heads yet. Good grief, Koan--the Athenians exiled Thucydides, Xenophon and Euripides, they killed Socrates for allegedly teaching the young subversive ideas, and Plato was always on the outs with mainstream Athens society, writing his Socratic dialogues as his only means of protesting against their continued injustices. Aristotle fled from Athens, leaving the school he had founded years earlier, saying that he wouldn't let them sin against philosophy yet another time (killing yet another philosopher). Sophocles was put on trial for mental incompetence as a 90 year old man because his son got tired of waiting for him to die, although fortunately he was not committed--supposedly he read parts of Oedipus at Colonus at the trial, the last play of his Oedipus trilogy. They fought a devastating war for nearly 40 years with Sparta, where a quarter or more of their population died either in battle or due to sickness. They were a slave society, where a quarter to a third of their citizens were enslaved (OK, not their citizens, because slaves couldn't citizens, but they weren't even 3/5 of a person in Athens, lol), and they had an empire where they effectively enslaved other societies as well, forcing them to pay tribute that they couldn't really afford, and using parts of their population as slaves in Athens. Athens and Sparta were both pretty much hated and feared around the Mediterranean world that came into contact with them.
