Discussion: Popular imagination of Athens and Sparta if Sparta was remembered as the "good guys"?

I understand, weird question, hear me out.

There's a definite picture of the two primary Greek city states that exists in the modern imagination. Athens being the birthplace of western civilization, and Sparta as an imperialist slave state with varying levels of oiled-up ab exposure. Of course, in reality it's much more accurate to say they were both imperialist slave states (with varying ab exposure but not in any battle situations), with Sparta being just a bit more focused on the fighting thing and also being a bit more (well, a lot more) harsh to their slaves but at the same time also thinking that (at least some) women can have things like property and rights. Of course, while these cities were peers in their classical heyday, in the ages since Athens has effectively taken the place of being the Greek city-state, the one that all others are compared to, with Sparta being relegated to at best being a kind of Lancer figure - you can count on the Spartans to deliver some badass moments and some funny quips, but Athens is where all the important stuff comes from.

Of course, after the fire of Classical Greece went out the simplifying and stereotyping to mold the period into a convienient shape for the West to slot into its imagining of its own history was inevitable, but I don't think the specific one we got was destined to happen - what if Sparta somehow rose to be the main city that people thought when they are reminded of ancient Greece? What would our conception of ancient Greece be? What aspects of Sparta and Athens would be overlooked or exaggerated?
 

Md139115

Banned
This literally was OTL until post WWII. Everyone from the Renaissance artists to the American Founding Fathers to the Romantics to the Victorians thought the Spartans were the noble fraternal citizen-soldiers and the Athenians were a mob-ruled mess. Then after Hitler and Mussolini, everyone went “maybe we shouldn’t celebrate a culture based solely on naked militarism” since they had been such fertile inspiration to those two.
 
This literally was OTL until post WWII. Everyone from the Renaissance artists to the American Founding Fathers to the Romantics to the Victorians thought the Spartans were the noble fraternal citizen-soldiers and the Athenians were a mob-ruled mess. Then after Hitler and Mussolini, everyone went “maybe we shouldn’t celebrate a culture based solely on naked militarism” since they had been such fertile inspiration to those two.

And it seems that Hollywood found a compromise option by making the Spartans “fighters for freedom” :)
 
What is most ironic in this is the Spartans were effectively the good boys in the Peloponnesian war and even before that.
 
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