The Spartans always are admired by historians looking back but the true stars and heroes of Greece were and have always been Athens. They Athenians were just as heroic as the Spartans and did not have to create an oppressive system like the Spartans to be as heroic in combat.
Geez,
I suggest you all read Victor Davis Hanson before you start writing this stuff. The Persian empire was an empire with two classes slave and elite. No one was free but the king, who could kill you at any time. Their armies were made up at mercenaries and slaves. Their economic system was designed to keep money in the elite cliques. Persia was not an oasis of sophistication and tolerance in a barbaric world unless you were one of the elite. That they allowed a certain amount of freedom in certain ways was to their credit, but they were not as free as the Greek City States, who invented the concept of free citizens voting for their rights and the rule of law that protected those rights. And it started the fight in Greece when it decided to invade and invest the land.
The Greeks were indeed free city states, even the Spartans. The Spartans were a cruel people, but women had more rights in Sparta than at any time until present day America. Women could vote, own property, had the same divorce rights as man and were trained as soldiers. This freedom meant that people who owned land could vote and that free citizens manned the armies of the Greeks. That's why they won.
The fight at the Hot Gates allow the Greeks to reassemble and fight at Salamis (Athens had been sacked by this time and the Athenian populations was on various islands near Salamis)and again at Plataea. It is also true that Persian kings rarely put themselves in harms way in battle,(Xerxes watched both the Hot Gates Battle and the disaster at Salamis from a throne perched on a hill) but leaders and kings and consuls and elites did fight for the Greek City States.
On the other hand, it's certainly true that the Athenians supported the Ionian Greek cities during the Ionian Revolt, and that is seen by many historians as the proximate cause of the first Persian invasion.
Given that almost all of our evidence about the Persian empire comes from Greek or other Western sources (e.g. the Bible), it's really hard to know very much about their internal arrangements with respect to tolerance and the latitude subjects had to do as they pleased. Certainly, they treated the Jews better than had their predecessor empires.
As much as I admire aspects of Athens in the Age of Pericles, and as despicable as aspects of Spartan culture appear to have been (again, our sources are mostly Athenian or writers who settled in Athens), I don't think either polis was particularly good example. A point which our Roman forebearers understood well as they crafted a Republic with elements of both, while rejecting some of the worst aspects of both Sparta and Athens.
Though the vogue in the past century or so has been to praise the Greeks to the detriment of the Romans, I have long been and remain of the view that the Roman Republic was in many respects a far greater achievement in the ordering of human affairs than any Greek polis.