An Athenian would have loved to know this question was still being asked in 2,500 years — because it shows the remarkable success of Athenian propaganda! The main reason we think of Athens as full of philosophers is because Athenian writing says it was. And the main reason we think Sparta was all brawn and no brain is because Athenian writing says it was.

The biggest difficulty with a question like this is chronology: antiquity was not temporally 'flat' (although one scholar, Francis Cairns, infamously and disastrously tried to argue it was); things changed over the years, perhaps less quickly than under capitalism, but with the same certainty. Athens in 450 BCE was not the same as Athens in 300 CE.

But when we contrast Athens and Sparta as polarities on the Greek cultural spectrum, we usually have one period in mind: the 5th century BCE and the Peloponnesian War. This is the high summer of the city state, before all of Greece was subsumed into multinational empires in the 4th and 3rd centuries. This is also the setting for Assassin's Creed Odyssey, if you've played it.

All our literary sources for what Athens and Sparta were 'like' in the 5th century BCE are Athenian. Thucydides, the great historian of the war, was an Athenian. Aristophanes, a comedic playwright and frequent war-commentator, was Athenian. Xenophon and Plato, who reflect on the war in the following generations, were both Athenians. So too were the myriad of orators whose 'cultural commentary' on Athens and Sparta survives. In fact, almost all surviving literary Greek from the 5th and 4th centuries BCE is Athenian. (By literary, I mean continuous texts, meant for private reading and usually of some length; non-literary texts, like inscriptions, survive from across the Greek world).

Athens lost the war and her empire. But before the end of the war, she had been the most powerful naval force in the western Mediterranean. This should tell us that the brains–brawn dichotomy between Athens and Sparta was illusional: Athens had a navy, and a big one, and they were very good at naval warfare, until a cataclysmic and unpredicted loss at the Battle of Aigospotami in 405 BCE, which ended the war.

Weakened, the Athenians turned to culture and learning as a source of civic pride. There is no doubt they were good at it: Plato, Aristotle, Antisthenes (the first cynic), Zeno (the first Stoic) all lived and taught in Athens after the war. The second most influential writer of antiquity, Menander the comic playwright, also wrote in this period and was an Athenian.

But the Athenians definitely overstated the case: their writings take the realities of Athenian intellectualism to unreal extremes. Take this famous example from the orator Isocrates:

'So far has Athens left the rest of mankind behind in thought and expression that her pupils have become the teachers of the world, and she has made the name of Hellas distinctive no longer of race but of intellect' (Panegyricus 50.)

Meanwhile, Xenophon (an Athenian) describes Sparta in the Constitution of the Spartans as an effective, militarised state — but illiterate, hostile to music, lacking in culture and unversed in philosophy. This was a convenient way to explain Athens' loss to a militarily superior foe, while maintaining Athenian superiority in the arts and sciences.

The Spartan reality is more complex. There were Spartan poets, like Tyrtaios and Alkman. We now know that Spartan elite was literate, thanks to work by scholars like Paul Cartledge. And recent work by Stephen Hodkinson has overturned our old ideas about Spartan militarism: Hodkinson's archaeological evidence shows that Spartans were foremost farmers, that their famous 'military training machine' was far less pervasive than we once believed, and that the Spartan city state had more similarities with other Greek cities than differences.

So much for the 5th century. As the city-state faded in significance, much changed. If Sparta was ever a military machine, then its defeat by Philip II of Macedon in the 330s put an end to that. Athens, meanwhile, did become a centre of learning, something like the ancient world's equivalent of Oxbridge, with the sons of Hellenistic and later Roman elites spending several years there studying with famous philosophers.

What about the other city states? Again, we have two problems. First, time is big, and things changed across antiquity. Second, broad qualitative distinctions loom largest in later reception and are often a-historical. We can only speak of the defining characteristics of city-states in relatively narrow terms. Very often, those characteristics are refracted through the eyes of Athenian writers, or later Greeks writing under the Roman empire. The average citizen living in a given city-state probably considered their life completely ordinary, and not marked out by any locally defining characteristics.

- Corinth: trade. The Corinthians controlled the isthmus, the narrow strip of land between Attica and the Peloponnese. They had access to the Ionian and Adriatic seas and a flourishing pottery industry.

- Megara: the Athenians had a low opinion of the Megarians, who they accused of inventing a particularly lowbrow genre of comedic theatre.

- Thebes: Athens' great neighbour. A good chunk of Attic tragedy is set in this city, which the Athenians considered a rival, not least because the Thebans sided with the Persians in the invasion of 480 BCE.

- Miletus: on the coast of Asia Minor. The home of the ur-scientist Thales and another scientist Anaximander, some authors describe it as a centre of learning.

- Elis: the Olympic games. Elis hosted the Olympics every four years.

- Delphi: the oracle. Not strictly a city-state, but a holy sanctuary and attached town. It did not ally itself with different city-states or join any leagues. It was meant to be a place of peace, although the remaining city-states fought 'holy wars' to gain control of the oracle's sanctuary and the routes to it.

- Paros: marble. Highly prized, white marble was quarried here.

- Magna Graecia: there were countless Greek colonies in southern Italy and Sicily. Many of them became associated with philosophers and poets, especially in the Hellenistic period. The bucolic poet Theokritos was from somewhere in Sicily, though we don't know where. Earlier, Pythagoras, the spiritualist-philosopher and mathematician, lived and taught in a series of Greek colonies in Italy, which became associated with his teachings.