Aristotle has been one of the most influential philosophers of all time. So important that in the middle ages people just called him, “The philosopher.” Aristotle was one of Plato’s students at the academy. He viewed him highly even though they did have some disagreements. One of Aristotle’s most famous books is probably Nicomachean Ethics in which he discusses how people should live their life. He in it he says that people should live lives of virtue. Aristotle made the first study of logic that was the dominant source of formal logic until the 19th century. Even now people argue say that logic reached its completion with Aristotle. Aristotle was also the first person to speculate in his book Meteorology there was a landmass in the southern high altitude that he called Antarctica.
Sparta did not start out as a militaristic state. It originally started out as a state with some philosophy and art. But then then in the 7th century BC they conquered the nations of Messenia and Lakonia and made them all slaves. The slave population out numbered the Spartans 10 to 1 with the slaves ready to rebel at any moment. In response the Spartans became a militaristic society with every man being a soldier. They were able to live this way because the slaves did all of the work. Spartan boys were taken away at the age of 7 to have 13 years of grueling military training. From then on they had to constantly be in the army until the age of 30 when they became a citizen. From then on they could live at home but they still had to eat at public mess halls to remind them that those men were their family. The slaves were beaten yearly to remind them that they were slaves and could also be killed for military training or killed because they were too weak.