Class Reflection

I thought today's video was quite interesting. What I found most shocking was the gender roles of Sparta. I had always thought of Sparta as the crude, barbaric, back-ward looking city-state, and Athens as the cultured, educated, and progressive city-state. Given these assumptions, I though for sure that Women would be treated much better in Athenian society than in Spartan. Alas, the opposite was surprisingly true as we saw in the video. I was also surprised similarly of the encouragement of Homosexual behavior by Sparta. In this case again, based on what I already knew about the two city-states, I expected that Athens would be much more accepting.