Athens, by contrast, was a port city on a dry and bare promontory of Attica that took pride in its culture. Isolated from the rest of mainland Greece by high and sparsely populated mountains, Athens had always been a trading nation, supplied by the merchants who crisscrossed the Aegean Sea selling olive oil and timber, textiles and precious stones. Unlike Sparta’s garrison state, Athens was an open society, its academies enrolling students from across Greece. And after centuries of rule by strongmen, Athens had also begun a bold, new political experiment in what it called democracy. Its
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