Pulling Threads Together

This chapter explores the information ecosystems of Athens and Sparta before the Peloponnesian War in 431BCE, where a form of writing was the major innovation for recording and communicating information. While writing had been around for a few centuries, Socrates still worried about how it would kill the spoken word, and his student Plato thought the outputs from it, like plays, would misinform the people. But messaging from a different type of output, in building projects, was causing a stir. A new radical idea of democracy had taken hold, and Athens was enabling more and more men to participate in public decision-making, such as when to go to war. At the same time, advances in the boat construction and roads to support this democratic court system helped move information faster across the city-state and beyond, opening Athens up to the world. With a growing wealth, Athens promoted its democracy in a massive building program aimed at demonstrating its standing in the Hellenic world after fending off the Persians—all to the dismay of Sparta, whose own information ecosystem was tightly closed and determined not to change. This sparked a rather one-sided information competition between the two Greek states.

Competition (biology) · Democracy · Democratic system · Information transmission · SOCRATES · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · Historical and Literary Studies