Athenians and Spartans sound bad. Is there some hipster City that had less pederasty, more rights for women, and fewer slaves in intensive occupations?
Athenians and Spartans sound bad. Is there some hipster City that had less pederasty, more rights for women, and fewer slaves in intensive occupations?
They literally did: membership in the ruling warrior class was predicated on owning enough land to be able to live off the passive income alone. Their ruling class was basically a fraternal order of landlords, and even if they were semi-equal amongst themselves within that organization there was still such a drift towards the accumulation of land by major landlords that they literally had to do land redistribution multiple times just to be able to keep up the ranks of the landed military class (basically inheritance reduced the land held by any given member below the threshold for membership, and they'd sell that land to some wealthier landowner and as a result the military class lost its ranks piecemeal over the years).
I think I confused sparta with the hypothetical society from plato's republic where the warriors own no property. should keep my mouth shut on things i know nothing about.
Sparta also gets mythologized that way because there was some communality of property (but not land/capital) within the ruling class and a lot of what is said about them tends to skip over the whole "they were landlords living on the backs of slaves they repeatedly did pogroms against as a form of terrorism and control" stuff.