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Athenian acropolis ruins
Inside the acropolis, the goddess Athena
The god Apollo, son of Zeus
Herodotus, Europe's first historian
Battle of Marathon, Greek hoplites
on top, Persians below
Thucydides, historian
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The tyrant Pisistratus died in 527 and was succeeded by two sons who ruled jointly. In 514, a young aristocrat opposed to popular rule assassinated one of the sons, and some aristocrats attempted but failed to assassinate the surviving son, Hippias. Hippias retaliated, and some aristocrats went into exile. The priest at the principal shrine of the god Apollo, at Delphi, encouraged the exiled aristocrats by suggesting that Apollo was on their side. A leading aristocratic family from Athens, the Alcmaeonidaens, won the support of Sparta, and to do the will of Apollo, Sparta, in 510, sent an army that defeated Hippias and sent him fleeing to Persia.
Sparta's army put into power an oligarchy of Athenian aristocrats, but most Athenians did not want a return to the subservience and dependence on local powerful families that existed before the rule of Pisistratus. The oligarchy found itself unable to rule and, in 508, progressive members of the upper classes united with commoners and led a popular resurgence that brought them to power.
The most prominent leader of the resurgence was an aristocrat named Cleisthenes, who wished to govern in a way that brought more unity among the Athenians. Across recent generations immigration had made Athens a mix of people unrelated by blood, and Cleisthenes extended to many immigrants, and to some slaves, the same rights that Athenian citizens had. He drew up a constitution for Athens that divided Athenians into ten "tribes" based not on blood relations but on where people lived. Each tribe had its own military unit, shrine, priest and assembly. Any member of a tribe could participate in the election of local and state officials, and each tribe sent fifty representatives for one year of service to a city assembly.
The popularity of Cleisthenes' reforms brought new enthusiasm among Athenians for their government and city. This and Cleisthenes' new military organization made Athens stronger militarily, and its strength was soon tested. In 506, Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies invaded Attica hoping to crush the democracy in Athens, which Spartans saw as a defiance of religious tradition. The new politics and morale won over tradition, with Athens defeating the invaders and the invaders withdrawing. And to stave off any future aggressions from Sparta and its allies, Athens made an alliance with Persia.
In Athens, physical training and education was extended to the male children of common families, and it became commonly accepted that boys of commoners should be able to read and write. Schooling was inexpensive because teachers were paid little. Boys started school at the age of seven, and for many it continued for only three or four years, while some others continued until they were eighteen.
In addition to reading and writing, the boys studied literature and grammar. They learned poetry by heart, especially the works of Homer, which was believed to contain messages of morality. Prose authors were not studied, nor were mathematics and technical subjects. Education in music declined in importance from what it had been centuries before, but school included choral singing, dancing and the playing of musical instruments. Physical education emphasized individual efforts rather than team sports. As before, education in Athens -- and elsewhere in Greece -- fostered loyalty to the group. It fostered pride in Athens and pride in being Greek as opposed to being "barbarian."
In Athens and some other Greek cities, dramas and writings appeared that focused on the human condition. The spirit that contributed to other Greek achievements helped the Greeks create an easy, lucid poetry about shared pleasures, love and other feelings. Some innovative writers went beyond simple divisions of good versus evil people and dramatized human complexity and weakness, including the flaws in exemplary heroes. They wrote dramas that contained insights that modern psychology would build upon and refer to: narcissism, the Oedipus complex, phobias and manias. In 535, an Athenian, Thespis, introduced acting to choral music and recitation. In the 400s, two of the greatest Athenian playwrights were Euripides and Aristophanes. The Athenian, Aeshylus, wrote a number of plays: The Suppliants, The Persians, The Seven against Thebes, Prometheus Bound, Agamemnon, Choephoroe, and Eumenides. An Athenian named Sophocles - who lived from around 497 to 405 BCE -- wrote plays entitled Oedipus Rex, Philoctetes, Women of Trachis, Electra, Oedipus at Colonus, Antigone and Ajax. These were pursuits that prophets of the Old Testament would have seen as frivolous distractions, as in the complaint of Isaiah that "...they do not pay attention to the deeds of the Lord." (Isaiah 5:12) It was a celebration of humanity -- a humanism -- that would appear centuries later in Europe's renaissance and influence Shakespeare and other great dramatists of the future.
Democracy brought Athenians greater contentment and political stability, but slaves and women remained without a voice in political affairs, and of the forty thousand adult males free to participate in deciding issues, less than a sixth did so. Also, Athens lacked a professional, responsible, civil service. The functioning of governmental offices remained the special knowledge of a few ambitious politicians who used this knowledge to gain or maintain power and influence. For decades a man had to pass property qualifications to run for high office. Politics and the judiciary in Athens remained under the influence of people of wealth. Venal judges presided at courts of law marked by corruption and perjury. Common people did not have the leisure to serve their city as officials or as members of juries. Not until after 460, when Athens acquired wealth from empire, would people be paid to participate in jury duty or paid to serve as one of the five hundred city council members -- pay that would enable common people to leave their work for such activities.
Athens was an intellectual center, but only a few there were interested in advancing their worldly knowledge, and these were mostly young men of leisure from wealthy families. Self-interest remained stronger than community interest, and in the city's market place one could see poverty, slave drivers, loud peddlers and those who cheated their customers.
Some wealthy Athenians grumbled about the vulgarity of democratic politics. Among them was the playwright Aristophanes, who disliked seeing men attempt to create a following by promising rewards and playing on superstitions. Some men of wealth felt exploited for the sake of what they saw as the ignorant, disorderly mob. And some found democratic government too slow in making judgments and getting things done.
Before Herodotus, events were described in imaginative poems often by priests who wished to put their god or gods in the best light. Herodotus -- a Greek from Asia Minor -- also believed that gods intervened in human affairs, and he believed in oracles and that dreams were sent by the gods, but he tried to add discipline to his work and to describe what people had done and why they had done it. Before Herodotus, the past was seen in legend and myth, without a sense of measured time. Herodotus wrote about events that he placed in linear time. He wrote that his purpose was to describe the deeds of people so that these deeds would not be forgotten by posterity. Unlike priestly writers, he admitted that his work was subjective, in other words that his work remained within the limits of his own ability to interpret.
Living in an age of travel, diversity and exploration, Herodotus was motivated in part by his curiosity. He attempted to describe and explain what he thought was interesting. Running from Persian authority, he traveled for seventeen years, to Egypt, the Black Sea, through Greece and to Italy and Sicily. He described the places and people he had seen -- descriptions that would be of great value to modern historians. He saw the pyramids and wondered about them. He speculated about the causes of the regular flooding of the Nile. Drawing from folk tales, Herodotus tried to describe Cyrus II historically, a modern source on Cyrus more detailed than that recorded in the Old Testament.
Herodotus' open-mindedness about the cultures of the people he visited may have been helped by the mix of cultures of his home city, Halicarnassus, which was a mix of Greek and Carian peoples. It was an open-mindedness that led Greeks less open-minded than he to accuse him of being a "barbarian-lover."
Herodotus' methodology was less precise than that of some modern journalists and historians, but during his travels he tried to verify a story by listening to a variety of people. His chronology was vague, and sometimes he failed to describe conflicting political forces, but unlike the storytellers who preceded him he sought accuracy and discernment between fact and fiction. And he tried to do more than just tell a story: he tried to analyze.
Herodotus was the first known to have described war analytically. This was the war between the Persians and cities in Greece. People around him quickly turned what they had heard of the war into inaccuracies and exaggerations -- into legends -- and inadvertently Herodotus included such distortions into his work. But he tried to be objective: he wrote of the war without undue adulation of his fellow Greeks, whom he favored, or undue vilification of the Persians.
The empire of the Persian Achaemenid dynasty extended to Thrace and Chalcidice - Darius the Great having led an expedition along the northern coast of the Aegean Sea in 513 BCE. As for Darius' rule among the Greeks in Asia Minor, it was generally tolerant of local customs, it provided its subjects protection from attacks from wandering warrior tribes, and it offered its subjects peace, good communications and a stable coinage. But in 499, a desire for self-rule among the Greeks of Asia Minor helped fuel a rebellion against the Persians.
Athens and the city of a Eretria, about thirty miles north of Athens, supported the uprising. By 494, the Persians crushed the rebellion, destroying Miletus, sacking and burning other towns and taking select Greek boys and girls back to Persia. Then, believing that his god-given right to rule should not have been challenged, Darius set out to punish Athens and others who had supported the uprising. He hoped to extend his rule down the Greek peninsula, and many Greeks opposed to democracy, including some Athenians, favored submission to the Persians. They saw Persia as a champion of authoritarian rule and expected that Persian rule would include freedom of worship and allow local self-government as it had in Asia Minor.
Those who supported democracy favored resisting the Persians. So too did many Greeks who made their living in industry and trade, these Greeks fearing that the Persians would give trading favors to rivals such as the Phoenicians -- who were subjects of Darius. And the Spartans feared the Persians, believing that if the Persians came to the Greek mainland they would try to eliminate them as a military power.
In the year 490, the Persian fleet sailed across the Aegean Sea and landed a force of many thousand soldiers at Marathon Bay, twenty-six miles by road north of Athens. With the Persians was Hippias, who expected the Persians to return him to power in Athens. The Athenians responded to the threat from Persia by sending troops to Marathon, and it sent a fast runner to Sparta with the news of the Persian landing. Sparta announced that it would join Athens against the Persians. But remaining faithful to their gods, the Spartans waited for the passing of a full moon, and the Athenians had to confront the Persians without them.
The Greek city of Plataea, faithful to a new alliance with Athens, fought with the Athenians at Marathon, and there a highly motivated force of about 10,000 Greeks, in phalanx formations, defeated a much greater number of Persian cavalry and archers. More than six thousand Persians died, and around two hundred Greeks.
The Spartans arrived after the battle had ended, and they returned home praising the Athenians. Greeks far and wide, including the Athenians, were inspired by their victory over the great Persian Empire, and they held a religious festival at Delphi as thanksgiving to the gods for the victory at Marathon. And there the oracle of Apollo praised Athens as an eagle "for all time."
Soon it was said that the god Pan had given the Athenians their victory by his causing panic among the Persians. It was said that Pan had done so after having seen a slack in devotion to him among the Athenians, Pan wanting to regain their devotion -- a tactic different from Yahweh's reaction to the lack of devotion he had found among his Hebrews, and one that apparently worked better.
After Darius died in 486, his son and successor, Xerxes, intended to carry out his father's plan to invade the Greek mainland again. Xerxes failed to appreciate adequately the costs that would be incurred by such an expansion, or the burdens of maintaining an empire that would be farther reaching. He had trouble enough with the empire as it was: his plans for invading Greece had to be delayed so he could crush more rebellions, again by the Egyptians, and by the Babylonians - rebellions that had been encouraged by the death of his father, Darius. But Xerxes believed in the power of his god, Mazda.
Athens, Sparta and some other Greek city-states expected the return of the Persians. And they did as so many others had done before them: they set aside their differences and formed a military alliance. Their alliance was called the Hellenic League and was led by Sparta, still seen as the greatest military power among them. Member cities sent representatives to league congresses, the first of which was held in 481. This congress ended the small wars that were taking place among member cities. And at these congresses, oaths were taken that were supposed to bind the city-states to each other permanently.
Xerxes assembled the greatest military force ever, and in the year 480 he launched his invasion, marching his armies along the coast of Macedonia and down into Greece, while keeping these armies supplied by his navy. Sparta and Thebes sent armies to meet the invaders at Thermopylae - thirty miles northwest of Thebes and eighty-five miles northwest of Athens. There they held the Persians at a narrow pass while the league's navy, mostly Athenian, engaged Persian naval forces offshore. Herodotus described the storm that wrecked much of the Persian fleet as an intervention by Zeus, but, inexplicably, Zeus appeared uninterested in helping the Greek cause on land. A traitor among the Greeks showed the Persian foot soldiers a way around the pass at Thermopylae, and the Persians attacked the Greeks from behind. The Thebans surrendered while the Spartans fought and died to the last man. The main force of Persians swarmed through the pass toward Athens. Persia's army overran Attica and Athens, while Athenians fled to the islands of Salamis, near their port, and Aegina, tens miles to the southwest.
The Athenian navy placed itself between Xerxes' force and the Athenian refugees on the island of Salamis, and it rallied support from numerous coastal Greek cities. Near Salamis, the Athenian navy and its allies won a great naval battle, destroying the Persian fleet -- the waters said to be covered with Persian wreckage and blood. With much of the Persia army dependent on ships for supplies, it was forced to march out of Greece and back to Asia Minor. But peace was not declared, and Persia and the Greeks remained at war.
During their war against Persia, a spirit of unity and brotherhood had arisen among those Greek cities opposed to the Persians, a unity served by their common language, common customs and common religious beliefs. But federation among their cities was far from their minds, and the spirit of unity among the Greeks proved superficial as those of different cities drifted back to seeing themselves as different from each other.
Unity between Athens and Sparta cracked as Sparta became fearful of Athens. Sparta was alarmed over Athenian insistence on rebuilding fortifications that the Persians had destroyed, including protection of its harbor at Piraeus, which to the Spartans indicated that Athens aimed at an independent military strength. Sparta was annoyed at Athens taking command of naval operations at the straits to the Black Sea, a place of greater interest to Athens because of the grain it imported through those straits. And differences arose between Sparta and Athens over the question of continuing their war against Persia. The Athenians were interested in trade with the Greek cities still ruled by Persia, and they wanted to continue the war in order to liberate their fellow Greeks from Persian rule. Sparta had no interest in trading with those Greek cities, nor interest in democracy. Moreover, the Spartans were concerned about the many men they had already lost in battle, and they feared that their Helot slaves might take advantage of this loss and more military losses by rising against them. So Sparta was ready to let Persia continue its rule over other Greek cities.
Sparta and its allies on the Peloponnese peninsula withdrew from the war, leaving Athens as the most influential among those cities continuing the war. Athens created a new league of states -- a voluntary association called the Delian League. Member states agreed to donate money, ships and crewmen to the war effort and to police the Aegean Sea, and they sent representatives to assemblies where league policies and goals were to be decided.
Recent successes by Athens and its rise to prominence increased the pride of the Athenians, and some Athenians, including its leader, Pericles, saw the greatness of Athens as rooted in its political power. Athens arrogated to itself the role of policeman within its alliance. According to the Athenian journalist Thucydides, the Athenians were heavy handed in pressuring allies who were "neither accustomed nor willing to undertake protracted toil." Athens forced back into its alliance a city that had broken its oath to remain in the league. It suppressed petty wars within the league and intervened in disputes within member cities, favoring those who supported democracy (to the chagrin of Athenian aristocrats) while those in other cities who supported aristocratic rule tended to look to Sparta for leadership.
The Athenians were creating an empire. Seeing themselves as superior to other Greeks, some Athenians argued that empire was the natural order of things, that if they did not have the strength to dominate others they would soon be dominated. Some saw empire as a remedy to over-population. Some landless Athenians favored the confiscation of lands abroad as an opportunity to become landowners. Some wealthy Athenians saw in imperialism an opportunity to gain more land. Those Athenians making money from trade supported empire believing that it would benefit them commercially. Some believed that imperialism would provide them jobs, such as jobs on ships that policed the seas, and jobs on the docks that serviced those ships. Some supported empire also because it appeared to guarantee supplies of grain. Many Athenians saw benefit in their city receiving tribute from those city-states that Athens dominated, taxes they would otherwise have to pay. And Pericles, seeing democracy as popular, believed that with his support for democracy and democracy's spread would come an increase in the popularity of Athens' power.
Athens forced its rule on the island of Scyros (seventy-five miles to its southeast), and Athenians claimed authority there on the grounds of the discovery in Scyros of the bones of a mythical king of Athens who was said to have migrated there during the Dorian invasions. And claiming that during the Dorian invasions Athenians populated the western coast of Asia Minor, Athenian propaganda portrayed Athens as the mother of cities there. These cities, according to the Athenian imperialists, owed Athens religious homage -- as was customary between a mother city and its offspring. These Athenians claimed that their goddess Demeter, a goddess of harvest and fertility, had given grain to humanity and that Athens therefore was a benefactor of humanity and was justified in ruling others.
In 464, an earthquake leveled most of Sparta's dwellings and killed around 20,000. The Spartans believed that the earthquake was the work of the earthshaking god Poseiden and that Poseiden had been offended by a recent violation of his sanctuary, from which some Helots had been dragged away and executed. Following the earthquake, the Helots revolted, encouraged perhaps by their belief that the god Poseiden was sympathetic with their cause. They attacked what was left of Sparta, and they were joined in their rebellion by nearby enemies of Sparta who sought advantage from Sparta's sudden tragedy. The Spartans managed to contain the revolt, which lasted into 462.
In 462, Athens concluded an alliance with Argos, and with Thessaly (north of Thermopylae). Athens was a nominal all of Sparta, and Sparta was offended by these alliances and by the meager support it received from Athens during the Helot revolt. Corinth, was also displeased with Athens. Corinth was a maritime commercial power fifty miles west of Athens. It had colonies, and it feared Athens as a rival. Corinth was in conflict with the city of Megara, which lay between Corinth and Athens. Megara was unhappy over Corinthian encroachments on its territory, and when Athens accepted Megara into its league, the Corinthians responded with enmity for Athens. The alliance between Megara and Athens gave Athens a naval base in the Gulf of Corinth, just west of Megara. The Corinthians disliked this intrusion into the waters near their city. The navy of Sparta's Peloponnesian League was dominated by ships from Corinth, and it came to blows with the Athenian navy in the Gulf of Saronicus.
Meanwhile, Athens and its league had won additional naval victories against Persia, and Persia had withdrawn from all Greek territories in Asia Minor. It seemed that the war against Persia might be over, but Athens continued hostilities against Persia. It helped Cyprus rid itself of Persian rule. Then the potentate of Libya, who was fomenting rebellion in Egypt against Persian rule, invited the Greek fleet to help the Egyptians. Athens saw this as an opportunity to win more control of foreign trade, to gain much needed grain from the region of the Nile and to establish a naval station on Egypt's coast. The Athenian navy and marines invaded Egypt. Believing that Athens was too involved in Egypt to defend Megara effectively, Corinth invaded Megara's territory, but a small force of Athenian infantry drove the Corinthians back.
Then Sparta, having recovered to a degree from the Helot revolt, felt able to send a force north to Boeotia. It sent a force to revive the Boeotian League in order to check growing Athenian power and to give support to the little state of Doris, which had been attacked by an ally of Athens: Phocis. Athens and its ally Thessaly sent troops against the Spartans, and in the clash that followed, in 457, both Sparta and Athens suffered heavy losses. And the wounded Spartans returned to Sparta, ravaging Megara's territory on their way home.
With Spartan forces gone, Athens was able to assert its power in Boeotia. Athens acquired control over the whole of Boeotia except for the city of Thebes, and even at Thebes it was able to set up a democracy, driving from power oligarchs who had been allied with Sparta. Athens sent a naval expedition around the Peloponnese peninsula, attacking the Peloponnesian alliance in places, and it gained Achaea ( in the northwest of Peloponnesus) to its alliance -- which put Athens at the height of its power.
In 454 -- six years after the Athenians had invaded Egypt -- the Persian emperor, Artaxerxes, with help from his Phoenician navy, drove the Athenians out of Egypt. Athens lost its hoped for grain from Egypt, and in the years of 451 and 450 Athenians suffered from famine. Wearied by its continuing war against Persia and believing that it could not wage war against both Persia and members of the Peloponnesian League, Athens invited members of the Peloponnesian League and other Greek states to send representatives to Athens for a congress to discuss matters of common interest, such as the restoration of temples burned by the Persians, the payment offerings due the gods for their delivering Greece from the Persians, and common measures for clearing the seas of piracy. Sparta was reluctant to acknowledge Athenian supremacy in the Aegean Sea, and Sparta and its allies feared that membership in any congress with Athens would lead to their domination by Athens. Sparta opposed attending the conference, and the conference failed.
With the failure of this conference, Pericles prepared for more war against Sparta and its league. He increased taxation (tribute) from Athens' league of cities -- much more than was necessary to cover the costs of providing these subject-allies with protection. He launched a program to tighten control over them, and he ordered them to send representatives to the annual religious festival of the Greater Dionysia. He began a civic building and restoration program in Athens that gave relief to the unemployed and boosted Athenian morale. Then Pericles made peace with Persia, leaving the Greek cities on Cyprus to deal with an attempt by Persia's Phoenician navy to exterminate Greek civilization there.
On-again, off-again wars among the Greeks continued. Phocis sought control of Delphi. Sparta sent a force north to expel the Phocians. The Phocis was allied with Athens, and Athens restored Phocian rule at Delphi. Athens also intervened in Boeotia, where, after misgovernment by democrats, an oligarchy had come to power again in Thebes. Thebes had become a refuge for oligarchs from elsewhere in Boeotia. A rebellion against Athenian power broke out in northern Boeotia, and a Boeotian force defeated an Athenian force of a thousand Athenian volunteers, led by men who had mistakenly believed that their small force could subdue the rebellion.
In 446, cities in Euboea joined the revolt against Athenian domination. Pericles was worried about the example that rebellion would set for others in the Athenian empire, and with an army and navy he went to Euboea to crush the rebellion. Megara had become unhappy with the Athenian bullying, and it took advantage of Athens' troubles by joining the rebellion. Pericles withdrew from Euboea to fight Megara. An army from the Peloponnesian League, under a Spartan king, Pleistoanax, responded by invading Attica, but after laying waste to some countryside it withdrew. Then Pericles and an army of five thousand infantrymen supported by fifty ships returned to Euboea. They subdued all of that island and established a settlement with all but the city of Histiaea, whose inhabitants they drove away, Athens taking the territory for itself.
During the coming winter, Athens suffered again from famine, and Pericles led Athens in peace overtures to Sparta. Still fearing its Helots, Sparta agreed to a settlement with Athens -- a treaty that was supposed to be good for thirty years. Athens agreed to recognize Sparta's superiority on land, to return to Megara its ports and to withdraw control of all inland territories that it controlled, including Achaea. And Sparta agreed to recognize Athenian power among the islands and along the coasts of the Aegean Sea.
Before the end of 444, Athens was running out of money, and revenues from its subject allies that otherwise would have paid for naval services Athens used in finishing its building projects, including the completion of its temple, the Parthenon, on the acropolis in Athens. In 441, Samos (off the coast of Asia Minor) tried to secede from the Athenian alliance. Samos appealed for help from Sparta and the Persians, but Sparta remained passive and Persia remained fearful of the Athenian navy. By 339 the Athenian navy was able to blockade Samos and starve it into submission. Samos surrendered its navy. Its defensive walls were torn down. It was forced to pay Athens reparations with money and land. Its oligarchs were exiled and replaced by democrats. And none of this was viewed by Sparta as a violation of its treaty with Athens.
Next came a conflict between Corinth and its colony at Corcyra, an island and city off the northwestern coast of Greece. Corcyra was challenging Corinth's trade monopoly in northwestern Greece and was hampering Corinth's trade with Sicily and southern Italy. Corcyra rebelled against Corinth, and in 435 the navies of Corinth and Corcyra battled each other near Corcyra, and Corinth lost fifteen ships and some prisoners to Corcyra. Corcyra sold some of the Corinthians into slavery, and Corinth began organizing a bigger attack against Corcyra. To protect itself, Corcyra appealed to Athens, and Athens allowed itself to become involved in the conflict by accepting Corcyra as an ally.
The Corinthians again sailed for Corcyra, with a larger force than before, but victory was snatched from them as the great Athenian fleet appeared. Hatred for Athens among the Corinthians rose to a new high. The Corinthians had advocated peace during the conflict between Athens and Samos, but now it wished Sparta at the Peloponnesian League to go to war against Athens. Sparta saw the alliance between Athens and Corcyra as no violation of its thirty-year peace agreement with Athens, but another conflict between Athens and one of its subject-allies helped Corinth in its advocacy of war against Athens. Cities in Chalcidice disliked the extension of Athenian power into their area, and they were ready to support Corinth against Athens. Athens saw revolt coming in one of its subject-ally cities in Chalcidice -- Potidaea -- and, to prevent the spread of revolt, Athens demanded that Potidaea dismantle its defensive walls and give to Athens some Potidaeans as hostages. Instead of giving in to the demands of Athens, Potidaea sought support from Corinth and the Peloponnesian League. Corinth joined Potidaea and some cities in Chalcidice and Boeotia joined the revolt against Athens. All of Sparta's allies that had grievances against Athens were aroused. Corinth again appealed to Sparta, suggesting that if Sparta would not fight for its allies then its allies would seek leadership elsewhere. A meeting of the Peloponnesian League was called, and Sparta sent someone to consult with Apollo at Delphi.
In Boeotia, Thebes desired a solid front against Athens, and it sent a delegation and a small force to its neighboring city, Plataea, which was allied with Athens. The Thebans strode through Plataea and shouted their summons that the people of Plataea declare their support for Boeotia. The Plataeans reacted with hostility, including throwing tiles onto the Thebans from their roof tops. The Thebans took refuge in a building and then surrendered. The Plataeans held the Thebans as hostages against a perceived threat from Thebes. A greater force from Thebes arrived at Plataea's walls and withdrew after the Plataeans assured them that the hostages they held would be spared. Soon the Plataeans let their hatred and fear of Thebes overrule good judgment and they killed their hostages, defeating the purpose of hostage-taking and assuring the arrival of another, greater force from Thebes. Many Plataeans fled to Athens for safety, and Athens sent troops to Plataea. To the enemies of Athens, events at Plataea were a signal for war. They saw the thirty-year peace agreement between Sparta and Athens as violated and as having ended. Sparta, meanwhile, was encouraged by the Oracle at Delphi, who stated that Apollo was on its side, that if Sparta made war with all its might it would win.
The year was 431 BCE, described by some as the end of Greece's Golden Age. Sparta and its allies invaded Attica, announcing that they were fighting against Athenian imperialism for their independence and for the liberty of Greeks. The great Peloponnesian War had begun. The common people of Athens joyously welcomed the news. They blamed the war entirely on Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies. They called for revenge and looked forward to the elimination of the Peloponnesian League as an obstacle to the destiny of Athens. They were either unaware or unconcerned with how long a major war against Sparta and its league would take, or that the goodwill of people throughout Greece was in balance on the side of Sparta and its allies.
Some aristocrats in Athens saw the enthusiasm for war among the crowds as misplaced. They had been offended by the zeal with which common Athenians had supported extensions of their city's power, by the harshness with which Athens applied its power abroad, by their city's use of alliance funds for its own benefit, and they had been unenthusiastic about attempts by their city to extend democracy to other cities. Among the aristocrats who were critical of their city was the journalist Thucydides. Thucydides was also a democrat. He was willing to fight for Athens, but he thought his city had been too inflexible in foreign affairs and too reluctant to admit mistakes.
War had come because people believed in empire, because people feared being dominated by others and because the Athenians did not fear war enough that they would try harder to avoid it. The war was to be a lesson in the benefits of caution over optimism and self-confidence, in the benefits of restraint and modesty in pursuing one's interests and the benefits of cooperation and compromise - lessons that would often be ignored.
Pericles chose to fight where his city had the advantage: on and from the sea. So he let Sparta and its allies advance into Attica. People in Attica abandoned their vineyards and farms and fled to the safety behind the great stone walls of Athens. Those with property exposed to the ravages of the enemy were offended by Pericles' strategy. And the strategy of Pericles offended most Athenians, who, responding to gut instinct, favored direct and immediate attacks.
Sparta's army was reluctant to try to breach the walls that protected Athens, and when that first year of fighting ended, Sparta withdrew from around Athens, having accomplished nothing more than some harassment, destruction of property and having killed many people. Athens now had many dead to bury, and Pericles, in his funeral oration, addressed the benefits versus costs of the war by flattering those who had gathered to pay their respects to the dead. He praised their ancestors and fathers for their efforts at having made Athens great and claimed that those who had died had done so for a glorious cause.
The following year, 430, plague made an appearance in Athens -- probably arriving from a ship carrying grain -- a plague made worse by the overcrowding that had come with people entering the city from the countryside. Again the public found fault with Pericles, and they removed him from office. In 427-26 the plague appeared again, and one-quarter to one-third of the city's population died, including Pericles.
The war intensified the passions of the Athenians, and their passions influenced their choice of a new leader, a man named Cleon, a merchant tanner by trade who was more excitable than had been Pericles and whose desire for vengeance matched theirs. Thucydides described Cleon as a demagogue. In two of his plays (The Acharnians and The Knights), Aristophanes depicted Cleon as a demagogue and a rogue. Aristophanes ridiculed the Athenian public's enthusiasm for empire. He called for an end to the war, and giving voice to his dislike for democracy he expressed his wish that leaders of Athens be chosen by less excitable, more moderate-minded men.
A member of the Athenian's league and the richest Greek island in the Aegean Sea, Lesbos, rebelled against Athenian domination. The city of Mytilene, on Lesbos, led the revolt, and Athens sent its navy against Mytilene. While the Athenian navy held Mytilene under siege, in the Athenian assembly Cleon argued that Mytilene should be destroyed and its inhabitants put to death. Pity, sentiment and indulgence, he said, were fatal to an empire, and brutal measures were necessary because of the tenacity and malice of their enemies. Punish Mytilene, he advised, or give up your empire and live in the danger of weakness that would accompany this. A member of the assembly, Diodotus, argued against him, claiming that haste and passion were the two things most opposed to good counsel. Haste, he said, usually goes hand in hand with folly and passion usually with a coarseness and narrowness of mind. He described the brutal measures advocated by Cleon as terrorism that would not prevent other subject states from rebelling but would encourage them if they did rebel to fight to the bitter end. In a close vote the assembly chose to spare Mytilene's population. Athenian marines conquered Mytilene, and instead of slaughtering the city's inhabitants they tore down the city's walls and confiscated its navy. Athens also confiscated Mytilene lands on the shores of mainland Asia Minor, and Athens opened Mytilene to settlement by Athenians. And, as Cleon proposed, Athens had the leaders of Mytilene's revolt executed.
The city of Plataea fared worse than Mytilene. The Thebans returned, joined by an army from Sparta. They besieged Plataea for almost two years before they were finally able to overrun the city, and they took vengeance for Plataea having killed its Theban hostages. The Theban army slaughtered all citizens of Plataea who could not prove that they had supported Sparta and its allies.
As the war continued, Athens encouraged Sparta's Helots to revolt, while Sparta encouraged slaves in Athens to run away. Many slaves in Athens did. And to increase opposition against Athens, Sparta encouraged aristocrats wherever it could, and in Corcyra aristocrats attempted to seize power. They burst into a meeting of the city council and assassinated sixty democrats. Democrats fought back and won the upper hand. A fleet of Athenians ships arrived, scaring away ships from the Peloponnesian League, and as the Athenian ships lay offshore the democrats slaughtered the coup leaders and their supporters.
Meanwhile, the Athenian navy had been blocking the Peloponnese peninsula, while Sparta continued to exercise its superiority on land. In 425, six years into the war, Sparta again invaded Attica. The Athenian navy made a more effective move: it subdued a fleet of enemy ships at Navarino Bay on the southwest coast of Peloponnesus, and the Athenians cut off a battalion of Spartans there. Feeling pressured by this setback, Sparta promised Athens peace and requested an armistice -- without having consulted its allies. Cleon rejected Sparta's offer. He wanted to wait for Sparta's unconditional surrender and to press what he saw as his city's advantage. The Athenians took 292 Spartan captives back to Athens as hostages and warned Sparta that they would kill these hostages if Sparta again invaded Attica.
Believing that it had neutralized Sparta, Athens attempted a large-scale assault by land against Sparta's Boeotian allies, led by Thebes. It was the only major use of land forces by Athens in the war, and the Boeotians defeated them. Seeing this as a sign of Athenian weakness, cities in Chalcidice turned against Athens. They resented an increase in tribute demanded by Athens, and they were inspired by agents from Sparta. Feeling desperate, Cleon convinced an assembly to allow him to lead a force against the rebellion. In Chalcidice, Cleon defeated some of the rebellions, but on the way to the city of Amphipolis his bravado failed him. He was killed and his army defeated.
Athens was now financially exhausted. Replacing Cleon as the Athenian leader was a more moderate man, a military commander, Nicias, who was willing to end the war. Sparta wanted its hostages back, and it was concerned about its deteriorating position vis-a-vis other cities in Peloponnesus, including the nearby city, Argos -- a neutral power and a democracy. A treaty between Sparta and Argos was soon to end, and Sparta feared that Argos might then join sides with Athens.
In 421, Sparta agreed with Athens to end the fighting, an agreement that included a return of prisoners and captured lands. The war between Athens and Sparta seemed to have ended. In Athens rejoicing erupted, inspired by weariness of war. The Athenian playwright Euripides, who had also wearied of the war, wrote with enthusiasm in one of his plays: "Down with my spear! Let it be covered with spider webs!"
Allies of Sparta, namely Megara, Corinth and Elis, refused to sign the peace treaty. This alarmed Sparta. Desperately wanting peace, Sparta offered Athens an alliance in addition to peace, Sparta pledging that it would be an ally of Athens for fifty years. Athens accepted, and the two city-states pledged to defend each other, including Athens helping Sparta should the Helots revolt.
Technically, Megara, Elis and Corinth remained at war with Athens. And Corinth, which had a small empire of its own, was still competing with Athens for advantages in empire. While Sparta and Athens tried to remain at peace with each other, tensions and sporadic fighting among others continued. Athens employed force against cities that rebelled against its rule, and it retaliated against rebellion in Scione by killing all of that city's adult males and making slaves of its women and children. As Diodotus had argued in his debate against Cleon, such action brought no advantage to Athens. Other cities that wished to be free of Athenian rule responded to Athenian cruelty at Scione with a greater determination to win their independence.
Within two years of having made peace, Sparta felt it had recovered from war. With Athenian imperialism creating tensions and Athens interfering in Peloponnesian affairs, Sparta feared that its alliance with Athens might break down, and it renewed its ties with Corinth, Megara and Elis. Athens asked Sparta to sever its ties with these cities and Sparta refused.
In 418, Athens and Sparta went to the assistance of Peloponnesian cities at war with each other, Sparta on one side and Athens on the other, and the armies of Sparta and Athens came to blows. It was the largest land battle since the beginning of the Peloponnesian War -- while officially Sparta and Athens were still at peace with each other. The Spartans won easily. Some Athenians belatedly realized the wisdom of Pericles' strategy of not fighting on land, and the Spartans felt a renewed sense of military superiority and enjoyed a new prestige across Greece. In Argos, supporters of Sparta overthrew democrats who had allied Argos with Athens, and they allied Argos with Sparta. And Sparta concluded agreements with other cities in Peloponnesian, which called for the exclusion of Athens from Peloponnesian affairs.
In an effort to advance its empire, Athens, in 416, confronted the neutral island of Melos, and to officials of Melos it argued that Melos should join its empire. Athens claimed that it wished to do what was best both for itself and for Melos. It argued that Melos would benefit from Athenian strength, that Athens was strong and Melos weak and that it was a law of the gods that the stronger rule over those who were weaker. The people of Melos responded by asking Sparta for support. Athens attacked Melos in the spirit expressed in the Book of Samuel (15:18), where its states: "Go and utterly destroy the sinners ... and fight against them until they are exterminated." The Athenians slaughtered all the adult males of Melos and they enslaved its women and children.
Again, as Diodotus had claimed in his argument against Cleon, such an act brought no benefit to Athens. Other neutral states saw that to be neutral was to invite annihilation, and this encouraged them to join Sparta and its allies. Athens was losing the most crucial battle: for hearts and minds.
The same year that Athens attacked Melos, the Athenian playwright Euripides presented his play, The Trojan Women, in which he warned against the war lust that he believed had taken hold of this fellow Athenians. "How blind you are," he wrote, "who lay waste to cities, cast down temples and defile graves, yourselves soon to die."
In western Sicily, the city-states of Selinus and Segesta went to war against each other. Selinus had the support of Syracuse. Segesta looked around for help and sent a request to Athens for an alliance. Athenian trade was booming again and Athenians believed their city had recovered financially. The population of Athens had started growing again, and it had many slaves, but it still had no sure source of the grain, and some among the Athenians saw remedy in the acquisition of grain from across the Mediterranean Sea to the west, in the region of Sicily and southern Italy. The Athenian assembly saw the request from Segesta as an opportunity to extend their city's power and influence to that part of the world, so the Athenian assembly voted to send a force to Sicily.
Aristophanes was to satirize the expedition in his play The Birds, portraying it as a project by crooks, profiteers and fiddling bureaucrats. Another who opposed the expedition was one of the three men designated as its commander, who consulted with various seers and diviners who prophesied its doom. And supporters of the expedition hired rival oracles who predicted a glorious triumph.
At night an anonymous group opposed to the expedition went around Athens defacing the busts of Hermes -- the god of travelers. The next day, Athenians were alarmed that the defacements might have been the beginnings of a conspiracy to overthrow their democratic constitution and that it might be a bad omen for the expedition. Government agents searched for and executed men they thought to be subversives, and some men fled the persecutions and went abroad.
In June, 415, the expedition sailed from Athens: more than one hundred ships carrying 27,800 combatants, including around five thousand infantry and some cavalry from allied cities, and an additional ten thousand service personnel. The expedition approached Sicily in late summer. Its main objective was Syracuse - the wealthiest and most powerful Greek city in the western Mediterranean. Believing that Syracuse was on the verge of being taken over by democrats, the Athenians were optimistic that they could win Syracuse to its side with just a little pressure.
The expedition established itself on land and in the protected waters around Syracuse, and slowly it began to encircle and blockade the city. It won allies among some cities in Sicily, who supplied the expedition with stores of food. Sparta feared that if Athens succeeded in Sicily, Athens would overshadow Carthage in the western Mediterranean and would become more of a threat. Responding to a request from Syracuse, Sparta and Corinth sent aid, including an able military commander from Sparta, Gylippus, who took charge of Syracuse's defense. Gylippus led a force that broke through the Athenian's blockade and rallied the city's defenders -- while the Athenian expedition bungled opportunities.
In the spring of 413, Sparta and its allies overran Attica, destroying crops, animals and mines. Twenty thousand slaves in Attica, mostly men who had worked Attica's mines, deserted to the side of the Spartans. In the fall, news reached Athens that, two months before, the expedition's great fleet had suffered a disastrous defeat in the bay just off Syracuse. Many Athenians had lost sons in the expedition, and the citizens of Athens grieved and feared for their city and themselves. Hoped for supplies of timber and grain were lost, with timber and grain still scarce and money being in short supply.
News of the defeat of Athenians in Sicily encouraged Persia to regain control of Asia Minor, and Persia began sending envoys to Sparta in hope of gaining Sparta's assent and cooperation. Athenian losses also encouraged members of its empire to revolt against its rule. From Euboea, Lesbos and Chios went messages to Sparta's King, Agis, stating that they would revolt against Athens as soon as a Peloponnesian fleet appeared off their coasts. Sparta promised the Persians recognition of their control over Greek cities in Asia Minor in exchange for funds for building ships and for hiring men to row these ships, and Sparta sought naval reinforcements from Syracuse. While Athens was building ships to replace what they had lost at Syracuse, Sparta was hoping to build a navy that could neutralize the power of Athens at sea.
Sparta sent ships and troops to the eastern side of the Aegean Sea, and there in the winter of 413/412 the revolts against Athenian rule began. Lesbos and the city of Miletus signed a treaty with both Sparta and Persia -- while Persia was reasserting itself as an arbiter in the region and demanding tributes from local rulers.
For Athens, defeat abroad led to turmoil at home. In 411, while the Athenian navy was in the eastern Aegean, a group in Athens opposed to democracy launched a coup and set up an oligarchy called the Four Hundred. They created a constitution based on nostalgia for ancestral custom, and they began a rule of terror and totalitarianism. The Athenian fleet would have liked to return to Athens to drive the Four Hundred from power, but they believed they were needed where they were to defend the empire. The Four Hundred sought help from those with whom they shared a disdain for democracy: the Spartans. But before help could arrive from Sparta, the Four Hundred were driven from power by those who called themselves the Five Thousand, and the following year democracy returned to Athens.
The playwright Aristophanes, as frustrated as ever by his fellow Athenians, had by now written his play Lysistrata about women withholding sex from their husbands until they stopped making war. But the war was winding down. With Persian financial resources behind them and a new fleet, Sparta and its allies won a series of military successes, including a great victory over the Athenian main fleet. This left Athens surrounded by enemy forces on land and sea and cut off from sources of food. Through the winter of 405-04 Athens starved. In the spring season -- twenty-seven years after the war had first begun -- Athens surrendered. The Great Peloponnesian War had finally ended.
Sparta had been promising to protect the liberty of those threatened by Athens and to restore liberty to those states that had been "enslaved" by Athens. It celebrated its victory over Athens as the dawn of liberty for Greece. But the Spartans were not suited for the task of leadership and liberty for all of Greece. Like the Athenians before the war, the Spartans believed in rule by force rather than cooperation. Like many Athenians, they believed that the strong should dominate those who are weaker and that victors should dominate the vanquished. The Spartans had not considered the role of hearts and minds in the defeat of Athens.
At the war's end, from among Sparta's allies came calls for killing Athenian adult males and enslaving its women and children, as Athens had done to others. But Sparta spared the Athenians, claiming that it was doing so because of the good service Athens had provided the cities of Greece generations before in combating Persia's invasions. But Sparta had another motive for sparing Athens: they feared that a destroyed Athens would add to the growth in influence of Thebes, just north of Athens. Sparta put hope in a new, anti-democratic oligarchy in Athens, and the new oligarchy in Athens executed some fifteen hundred fellow Athenians whom they considered dangerous. They also executed resident aliens whose wealth they wished to confiscate. And about five hundred democrats fled Athens and became the nucleus of a resistance group based in Thebes.
In various cities, Sparta left a military force backing local aristocratic oligarchies. Violence erupted against these oligarchies. And in 403 BCE, while Sparta busied itself in putting down these rebellions, in Athens a coalition of moderate conservatives and democrats overthrew the oligarchy there.
Sparta found itself fighting numerous little wars, and from 395 to 386 it fought against a coalition that included Boeotia, Corinth, Argos and Athens. Then Greeks under Persian rule in Asia Minor rebelled again, and they asked Sparta to act on its claim as the defender of liberty for Greeks. The Spartans had honored their promise to Persia and had recognized Persia's power over the Greeks in Asia Minor. But now, Sparta tried to redeem itself as the defender of all Greeks, and it went to war against Persia.
Sparta was discovering the disadvantages of being policeman and the supreme defender of Greek liberty. Military actions were weakening it. Persia defeated Sparta's fleet, which ended Sparta's naval superiority among the Greeks. And to the alarm of Sparta and the Persians, Athens -- a quarter-century after the end of the Peloponnesian War -- was rebuilding its navy. In 379, Athens was able to help Theban exiles liberate their city from an oppressive, pro-Spartan oligarchy.
Ultimately, security for Sparta lay not in its physical might but in support it had, however passive, among other cities. But, like Athens around the time of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta had been generating a lot of animosity toward itself, not only by interfering in local politics by supporting aristocratic oligarchies but also by collecting tribute with methods more brutal than had Athens.
In response to the threat of the coalition that was forming against it, Sparta made peace again with Persia, which offended many Greeks. With the Greeks responding to new realities and forgetting the Peloponnesian War, Athens was able to create a maritime confederacy that included most of its former allies. Thebes built its own federation among neighboring cities in Boeotia. And Thebes and Athens fought skirmishes against Sparta.
Sparta, Athens and Thebes attempted negotiations to settle their differences, but the negotiations collapsed over Thebes' insistence on recognition of her federation. In 371, believing that it was defending its dominant position in Greece, Sparta moved against Thebes by invading Boeotia in force. Sparta had already lost its dominance in Greece, and now the Thebans defeated Sparta's army, destroying the myth that Sparta's army was invincible. Greeks far and wide now recognized that Sparta's domination of Greece had ended. New coalitions were formed. Thebes was the strongest military power, and, to put a check of Theban power, Athens joined a coalition with the humbled Sparta and Elis, Achaea and Mantinea.
The way of life that Sparta had hoped to maintain by devoting itself to militarism now came to an end. Sparta had exhausted itself. It had lost much in manpower, and many Spartans had lost their enthusiasm for war. Outside their own city, the Spartans had been less inhibited and often corrupt and avaricious. The travel that accompanied military and diplomatic operations had made many Spartans more interested in leisure and other pleasures. With a change in values, land in Sparta had begun being bought and sold, two-fifths of the landowners being women - the survivors of war. Trade between Sparta and the outside world had increased, with some Spartans accumulating luxuries. The acquisition of money promoted inequalities among the Spartans. Some were declining into poverty and becoming malcontents. And those who were still wealthy with land feared that these malcontents might make common cause with the Helots.
Meanwhile, despite all of the war, the birth rate in Greece began to rise again, adding to the chaos. There was a loss in Greece's ability to export manufactured goods to pay for the greater need to import food to feed the rising population. A ruinous shift in the balance of trade developed against Greece's cities. These conditions gave rise again to numerous Greeks looking for places to emigrate. Desperate young men sold themselves as mercenary soldiers to almost any power. With all of the heroism, sacrifice, speech about glory and communications with the gods, the Greeks had failed to elevate themselves in their well-being.
Recommended Books
The Peloponnesian War : A New Translation, Backgrounds, Interpretations, by Thucydides, Walter Blanco translator, 1998
The Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides, Rex Warner translator, (Penguin Classics), 1986
The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition, by Donald Kagan, 1981
Armada from Athens, by Peter Green, 1970
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