Were the cultures of 5th century BC Athens and Sparta as different as they are portrayed in the popular mindset?

Yes. They were two completely different societies. Athens was capitalistic, full of factories, banks, trade, and wealthy citizens. Its propertied males were an upper middle class who fought as a militia and had the right to vote - it was country club democracy on a mudsil of slaves and laborers.

Sparta was a feudal society. The "upper class" was a warrior elite who weer expected not to work, only to fight. Their wives were removed from their barracks, and very independent. The lives of Athenian women were severely oppressed in comparison. A middleman merchant class lived like immigrants and migrant workers, and a mass of enslaved Helots farmed the land.

That said, even though the societies were extremely different, popular conception is totally wrong too. Athens was not the soft, intellectual place it's thought of as. They were the ones who murdered Socrates after all. And movies like 300 portray Sparta at the height of its power - for most of Spartan history, the Spartans were not hardass warriors - soon after the end of the Persian invasion, the Spartan army and training system fell into disrepair and decline.

The writings of famous philosophes in Athens really detailed the differences between the two countries. In Athens, Plato wrote men defended laws as if they were fighting to the death, and everything was about competition. The drive to own things and have your name everywhere was the measure of success. It was a nation of Trump. Men made long winded, eloquent speeches, and were measured by their rhetoric.

In Sparta, Plato wrote that people hardly spoke more than a sentence, that words were to be distrusted, and people lived simply.

Sparta was more of a traditional Greek feudal state, while Athens was part of a club of "new cities" build by trade.

/r/AskHistorians Thread