Sin: Destroyer of States and of Men
Neither Sparta nor Athens were destroyed by external enemies. Through seemingly divergent means, both poleis protected and advanced the same end: the liberty of the individual citizen. Eventually, however, private individuals, greedy for their own license and with contempt for the rights of the citizenry, since citizens were simultaneously means to their accumulation of wealth and power and obstructions to their drive, turned the governments of Athens and Sparta away from working for the good of their respective citizenry towards the oppressing of the majority for their individual gain. Once firmly under the sway of these greedy few neither state could muster enough resources to arrest, then reverse, the festering corruption within their politics, schools, militaries, cultures, and religions. The greedy few were always present to block reforms. In Sparta, for example, "by the mid-5th century, land had become concentrated in the hands of a tiny elite, and the notion that all S