These two cities dominate discussion of ancient Greece [1], but why did these two cities come to be so important? Based on the discussion yesterday, it doesn't seem that Athens was blessed with particular fecundity, though nor was it cursed with a poverty of resources, so what distinguished it from other major Greek polises (polei? poles?). Were the silver mines the big factor? Or was it institutional, something internal to Athens's social and political system that gave it the ability to accumulate, organize, and deploy resources?
And similarly with Sparta: was it a particularly resource-blessed area? Or was it the peculiar institutional structure of Helot-exploitation combined with incredible martial prowess that made it a particularly important player in Greek power-politics.
[1] The dominance that I see is, I think, a function of what materials I'm consuming about ancient Greece. I'm sort of near the end of the academic cycle, mostly reliant on world history or western civ textbooks, often that are themselves a decade or more older. Since I'm interested in this material in the service of my western civilization survey course, I don't really have the time to devote to the recent monographs and journals. It does seem, however, that the textbooks I've been drawing from are not giving the Classical world its historiographical due. Instead, they tend to focus on the old-fashioned "Western Civ" narrative: Athens was super terrific because of philosophy, arts, culture, etc; Sparta was super terrific because of Thermopylae, etc; and isn't it all too bad that Athens and Sparta fought each other in the Peloponnesian War after they kicked so much non-Western ass in the Persian Wars. Unfortunately, these kinds of treatments are actually impeding what I'm much more interested in: a more grounded social and cultural history of ancient Greece.
We should really divide this question into two: Why were the Athenians and the Spartans so dominant in contemporary affairs of the 5th Century, and why are ancient and modern historians so mesmerized by them? The first question begs the further question, is that true? I don't think that there are many classicists out there today who would say that it's not, no matter how much we remind a student to remember that there were plenty of other influential states that did all kinds of important stuff or that influenced these two or other great powers. In the end, for the 5th Century there's really no one else as important as Athens and Sparta, although many other states were much more powerful than many people understand (why that is will follow). The second question seems like it could be answered by lack of source material--but then why do even ancient historians pay particular attention to Athens and Sparta? We will see:
For one thing, Athens mesmerized everyone. Athens was, after all, the first truly democratic state in the Greek world. We can point to all sorts of things like the lack of citizenship for slaves and women, all of which can be addressed in much longer posts elsewhere (and are, if you want to search for them) but the fact remains that never before in the ancient world was any state willing to give so much power and political equality to so many people, regardless of their social status. That last bit's important, because a lot of the "proto-democracies" that receive a lot of attention these days are just aristocracies or oligarchies with a very finely-tuned system (Sparta is often a candidate for this, and we'll take a look at the reality there). Athens' uniqueness is in the way that the citizens decided that they had no need of social superiors to be their masters, but took it upon themselves to defend their own interests politically (yes, the real situation is more complicated, but for all intents and purposes this is true, and it's certainly true compared to the contemporary states surrounding Athens). Now in terms of geographical considerations, Athens is actually one of the states that is pointed to to disprove geographical determinists whenever they rear their ugly heads. Athens, while it didn't have a lack of resources (mostly), didn't have anything good or important. Most of her land was mountainous (yes, like most of Greece, but keep reading) and what soil she had was notoriously inferior (one scholar likes to say that they were only good for pottery clay). Her main exports at the end of the Archaic Period were honey and a steadily increasing pottery trade that she had taken over from the Corinthians. There's nothing that makes her particularly impressive, and even the silver mines at Laurium don't count since the revenue there was used pretty much solely to support the fleet. So what gives? The thing about the Athenians is that, due to their political structure, they thrived. Athens was growing in significance at the end of the Archaic Period, but she was a non-Doric backwater until she burst onto the political scene by expelling the Pisistratids and defeating Spartans, Corinthians, Aeginetans, Boeotians, Euboeans, and pretty much every one of her neighbors (often at the same time), who all rose up against her to crush the new regime. Those early years forged an enormous feeling of Athenian unity and uniqueness, which was already growing under the Pisistratids for a number of reasons. Because of what the Athenian people had had to endure to allow their state to survive, and because of the knowledge that they were unique and special, the state of Athens was highly crystallized and strengthened patriotically. Another thing about Athens was how cosmopolitan it became. The treatment of metics is often frowned upon by some scholars (who honestly have no idea what they're talking about) but in reality metics in Athens were treated far better than elsewhere. The flood of foreigners increased dramatically during the Persian Wars, as Ionians flooded into the city (Attica, as the last refuge of pre-Dorians on the mainland, was considered to be the ancestral homeland of the Ionians) after the Ionian Revolt failed (Athens was also the only city to send help to the Ionians, sending 20 ships to them at a time when they were heavily beset by their neighbors. This is the reason why Darius targeted them so specifically). The Ionians, through a number of different influences, had become sort of the rhetorical and philosophical breeding ground of Greece during the Archaic Period, and this flooded into the city, mostly after the Persian Wars when the secure mainland was seen as a refuge for the Ionians living in captive Asia Minor. At the same time Athens was glorying in the pride of having borne the brunt of the wars and survived. Ionian philosophy, Athenian pride and solidarity, and a new-found wealth from suddenly increased trade (as well as a suddenly politically prominent position) catapulted Athens to the fore. She blossomed rapidly into a haven of arts and philosophy, and her military might was, to be honest, unsurpassed (sorry Spartan fans, but we'll go over this one in a moment). The promise of Athenian aid and the knowledge of how Athens, the role model, had fared so wonderfully brought many a Greek state under Athens' wing and influence, artistically and politically (and let's not forget that most of these cities were Ionian and thus were rich in material and artistic riches, nor the unsurpassed and unprecedented navy that made such an empire possible). Eventually Athens became so politically powerful that she became an empire, but one nice thing that this did was it spread her artistic and philosophical accomplishments extremely widely, so that even early in the Classical Period Athens was already associated with intellectual brilliance.
Well, in questions like this, I usually like to start with a topographic explanation. As I posted in the other thread, Attica is really quite well situated, topographically. It is open to the sea and easily connected to two excellent harbors--Piraeus and Phaleron--yet it is still well bounded by mountains. Granted, these aren't the Swiss Alps, but they still work as an "enclosure" and may explain the durability and strength of Attica as a psychological space. Now, this is of course not a sufficient answer, as there are plenty of other regions that have potentially favorable geography, and maps aren't destiny, but it is a nice start.
Now, interestingly, we have two explanations from the Classical period of Athens' strength. Herodotus (who was from Halicarnassus) argued that such strength derived from its democracy (V.78--the surrounding chapters give context). Thucydides, on the other hand, credits the soils, saying that Attica's poor soil gave it stability, and caused it to send out colonies (I.2). Sparta's success, on the other hand, is almost universally attributed to its institutions.
You can take these, of course, however you will. I'm not certain what more modern explanations are.
The period of time you are interested in is known as Archaic Greece. There is a great iTunes University / Yale University series by Kagan that coverers the whole history of Archaic and Classical Greece that is quite good.
To answer your question, in Classical Greece Athens and Sparta were the largest micro states on the peninsula, both exerting a large degree of centralized control over their territory. Sparta unified Laconia and Messenia in the 8th Century BC before expanding their influence over the rest of the Peloponnese in the from of military alliances imposed on defeated cities. Attica suffered from regionalism between the City of Athens, the Coast and the inland region, with other "rival" townships of Eleusis and Acharnae. The reforms of Solon and Cleisthenes, better unified the state, and the reorganization of the tribes, and therefore army, so that each included members from all parts of Attica better unified the population. In contrast Thebes was not able to centralize power in Boeotia in a similar manner until after the Peloponnesian War towards the end of the Spartan Hegemony.
Because of their larger size, both Athens and Sparta had a larger population, and therefore a larger Army. These disproportionally larger Armies enabled the coercion of a larger group of Allies into dominate military blocks. Both states use of a non-artitoractic, non-tribal governments enabled them to field, larger and better trained armies than any of their neighbors. The transformation of the Delian League into the Athenian Empire documents this process.
While you can talk to "how" to answer the question, "why" was it Sparta and Athens, rather than say Corinth and Argos or Thebes and Mytilini is a lot harder if not impossible. The individual lucky circumstances matter less than the more foundational state-building that happened during the Arachic period. The Silver Mines at Laurium, and the large strike may have helped springboard Athens to the hight of navel power, but they beat off the first Persian Invasion with their hoplites alone. The city had to have already reached a critical mass in order to have a population to be able to fully exploit their good luck.
First, there's the way it's not - there's the whole shadow history of the Peloponnesian War with Corinth playing Let's You and Him Fight, and if you look past the "Western Civ"-style ellipsis you see parties like Thebes. Second, the notion of the greater Hellenic world is important. Nations have been built on fewer differences than between certain city-states, but the idea of some ethnic unity between them meant a certain predilection to confederation and multi-city power structures
That Helot system was directly related to the military prowess - the Helots gave Spartans time to train in ways that the rest of the militia-oriented cities didn't, as well as meant that there would be much more immediate practice in the form of putting down Helot revolts. They got knocked around a bit at first, but developed their actual military prowess alongside their highly effective psychological warfare tactics. That they then went on to make relatively equal alliances once they conquered their immediate neighbors gave them a considerable sphere of influence.
What distinguished Athens was Marathon, or more specifically that they figured out how to make extremely efficient use of the political capital the Ionian Revolt and Persian Wars brought them. Sparta was comfortable in its sphere of influence, or at least cognizant of its limits of its reach in light of it's constant fear of rebellion at home. Athens filled the gap. It did so because of the geographic differences between it and Sparta, but also the different ethnic relations with the Ionians and the Themistocleian naval reforms, but also sort of because it's victories created a sort of moral tide it could surf against Persia, which it did, right to the point of the Athenian Empire.
For both, the story is something like military might that's used in a canny political fashion that becomes almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. What feels the most distinctive about it is not necessarily the unique resources of Athens or Sparta but that sense of Hellenic identity that led to the city-states forming up underneath them.
