There was a latent rivalry between the Ionian people of an Athens influenced by Asia Minor, and the Dorian people of Sparta directly influenced by their Nordic heritage, who never stopped being governed by anything but their ancestral tradition and their popular consciousness.
Except for Athens, which saw herself as the best, all other Hellenic states reserved their admiration for Sparta, seeing it as a shrine of wisdom and justice: the true repository of primitive Hellenic tradition. Sparta was always the most famous and respected city among the Greeks. They always resorted to her to arbitrate interstate disputes, and most of the times they not even had to resort to force: Sparta sent an ambassador to which everyone would voluntarily submit, like a divine envoy.
(Passages from one of Evropa Soberana’s essays in The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour.)