The Historical Overview provides a brief summary of the history of ancient Greece from approximately 1200 B.C., the period when Mycenaean civilization perished, to 323 B.C., the death of Alexander the Great. These limits were chosen to complement the emphasis of the Greek texts included in this version of Perseus, most of which fall between Homer and Aristotle. The epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey of Homer were composed in the eighth century B.C., but their stories belong to the much earlier period of the Trojan War, which has often been dated to the years not long after 1200. Whether there ever was an actual Trojan War and, if so, when it took place, are questions still debated, as is the question of how much reliable historical information the Homeric epics may provide on this early period. The historical overview begins where it does in the hope that users of Perseus will find this background helpful in studying later Greek civilization, namely that of the Greek city-state (polis). The polis began to emerge as a new form of social and political organization in the eighth century B.C., and the emphasis of the Overview is on the history of the polis, particularly during the fifth century (the so-called Golden Age of Athens, the largest and best documented of Greek city-states). The overview ends where it does because 323 has traditionally been identified as the end of the Classical period in ancient Greek history. After this date the monarchies founded by Alexander’s successors tended to overshadow or even dominate the city-states in international politics. The significance of 323 as a turning point in Greek history is in fact just as problematic on several grounds as is the history of the Trojan War, but at least ending the Overview at this conventional date allows the survey to conclude roughly in the period of the life of the fourth-century philosopher and polymath Aristotle (died 322), who tutored the young Alexander for a while.
There can be no such thing as an authoritative history of ancient Greece, not least because the surviving evidence is often so thin. Many interpretations expressed in the Overview obviously would not win universal assent, but not all such points of potential controversy can be marked in a survey that is meant to be brief. Users of Perseus should regard the Overview as a source intended to provide a series of jumping-off points for learning through discovery in the many other resources of Perseus.
NB: Users of Perseus are reminded that the Overview is under separate copyright and that use of the Overview is governed by the regulations pertaining to copyrighted material as well as by the terms of the Perseus licensing agreement.
This brief section is intended to serve as a jumping-off point for the Overview by providing a summary description of the physical environment of the Greek world and a very short sketch of the end of Mycenaean civilization, which had flourished in mainland Greece for several hundred years before the period following 1200 B.C., with which the main part of the Overview commences. The atlas in Perseus offers an alternative resource for understanding the landscape of Greece visually.
The Greek homeland lay in and around the Aegean Sea. This section of the Mediterranean Sea is dotted with numerous islands both large and small and flanked on the west by the land mass called the Balkan Peninsula, which today forms the territory of the modern nation of Greece, and flanked on the east by the coast of modern Turkey. Greeks also came to live in the western Mediterranean and on the coast of north Africa, and some of the most famous and prosperous of Greek cities were founded in southern Italy and on the island of Sicily (an area commonly referred to by the Latin name “Magna Graecia”).
The landscape of mainland Greece is dominated by mountains, many of which run in ranges along the Balkan Peninsula in a northwest-southeast orientation. A chain of rugged peaks also fences Greece from the northern Balkan peninsula and the region that was Macedonia in antiquity. Although none of the mountains wrinkling the landscape of the Greek mainland looms higher than 10,000 feet, their steep slopes were difficult to traverse and operated as barriers separating communities. Some regions, such as Thessaly in eastern central Greece, Messenia in southwestern Greece, the island of Crete southeast of the mainland, and the island of Sicily, had large plains, but much of Greek territory lacked such large-scale open areas. Settlements tended to spring up where there were pockets of arable land nestled among the mountains or along the coast where good harbors could be found. Greece’s rivers were practically useless for trade and communication because most of them slowed to a trickle during the many months each year during which little or no rainfall occurred.
The most plentiful natural resource of the mountains of mainland Greece was timber for building houses and ships, but deforestation may have already begun to occur in antiquity. In any case, Greeks eventually began to import timber from the regions north of them. Some deposits of metal ore were also scattered throughout Greek territory, as were clays suitable for making pottery and sculpture. Scattered quarries of fine stone such as marble provided material for special buildings and works of art. The uneven distribution of these resources meant that some areas and islands were considerably richer than others. The silver mines of Athens, for example, contributed greatly to that state’s famous prosperity in the fifth century, its “Golden Age”.
Only about twenty to thirty percent of the total land area of Greece was arable. The scarcity of level terrain ruled out the raising of cattle and horses on any large scale in most areas; pigs, sheep, and goats were the common livestock. The domestic chicken had also been introduced into Greece from the Near East by the seventh century B.C. Farmers mostly grew barley, the cereal staple of the Greek diet, with wine grapes and olives as the other most important crops. Wine diluted with water was the most common beverage of Greeks and drunk by almost everyone. Olive oil furnished a main source of fat in the diet, as well as serving many other uses such as a cleaning agent for bathing and a base for perfumes.
The coastline of mainland Greece was so jagged that almost all its communities were within forty miles of the sea. Most Greeks, regardless of where they lived, never traveled very far from their home; what few long-distance travelers there were customarily went by sea. Overland transport was slow and expensive because rudimentary dirt paths served as the only roads in the predominantly mountainous terrain where most Greeks lived. Their proximity to the Mediterranean Sea allowed Greek entrepreneurs to use it as a highway for contact with one another and for potentially lucrative international trade with, in particular, Egypt and the Near East. But going to sea meant dangers from pirates and storms, and prevailing winds and fierce gales almost ruled out sailing in winter. Even in calm conditions sailors hugged the coast as much as possible and preferred to put in to shore at night for safety. As the eighth-century poet Hesiod commented, merchants needing to make a living took to the sea “because an income means life to poor mortals, but it is a terrible fate to die among the waves.”
The climate of Greece is what meteorologists call “Mediterranean,”meaning intermittent heavy rain during a few winter months and hot, dry summers. Snow falls on the upper ranges of the mountains in Greece, but most Greek communities received little snow. Winters could be cold and blustery, however. Since the amount of annual precipitation was highly variable, farming was a precarious business of boom and bust, with drought and flood both to be feared. Like the modern residents of southern California, however, whose climate is also “Mediterranean,” the Greeks thought their climate the world’s best despite its hazards. “The Greeks occupy a middle position [between hot and cold climates] and correspondingly enjoy both energy and intelligence,”said the fourth-century philosopher Aristotle, who believed climate controlled a people’s political destiny. “For this reason they retain their freedom and have the best of political institutions. In fact, if they could forge political unity among themselves, they could control the rest of the world.”
Speakers of Greek had lived at various locations on the mainland and islands of the Aegean for centuries upon centuries before the period that saw the beginnings of written Greek literature and thus the creation of the texts included in Perseus. The ancient Greeks never in any period of their history constituted a nation in the modern political sense because their independent communities never existed as a unified organization. Greeks identified with each other culturally, however, because they spoke the same language and worshipped the same gods, although with local variations in both cases.
Greek civilization of the second millennium B.C., known as Mycenaean after the famous archaeological site of Mycenae in the northeastern Peloponnese (the peninsula that constitutes southern Greece), lies outside the limits of the Overview, but perhaps some background information on it will be helpful. Mycenaean civilization was organized around large architectural complexes today referred to as “palaces.”These structures held many rooms, often elaborately decorated with wall paintings, and were outfitted with luxuries like bath tubs. The elite of Mycenaean society lived very well, in comfort and style.
Political power was held by monarchical rulers apparently controlling separate territories and never achieving unity among themselves. These potent and wealthy rulers controlled redistributive economies, in which agricultural products and other goods were brought into the palaces and then redistributed throughout the society on a predetermined scheme rather than through free markets. Writing, done in a syllabic script known today as Linear B, was used in Mycenaean society primarily to record the transactions of this process, and presumably only the scribes in charge of this record keeping knew how to write. Mycenaean society seems to have been hierarchical, with social differentiation among people marked by wealth, clothing, and titles. No written literature – prose or poetry – is attested for this period.
The power and prosperity of Mycenaean Greece were lost in a period of violent conflict around 1200 B.C. that encompassed not only Greece but also much of the eastern Mediterranean region of the Near East. The causes of this disaster are still obscure, but strife among the principal centers seems to have played a significant role in the undoing of Mycenaean Greece, as perhaps did also incursions by raiders from the sea. The damage done to Greek society by the dissolution of the redistributive economies of Mycenaean Greece after 1200 B.C. took centuries to repair. Only Athens seems to have escaped wholesale disaster. In fact, the later Athenians, of the fifth century B.C., prided themselves on their unique status among the peoples of classical Greece: “sprung from the soil” of their homeland (autochthonoi), as they called themselves, they had not been forced to emigrate in the turmoil that engulfed the rest of Greece in the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C.
The nature of the Athenians’ boast gives some indication of the sorry fate of many other Greeks at the start of the first millennium B.C. Uprooted from their homes, they wandered abroad in search of new territory to settle. The Ionian Greeks, who in later times inhabited the central coast of western Anatolia, dated their emigration from the mainland to this period. Luxuries of Mycenaean civilization like fine jewelry, knives inlaid with gold, and built-in bathtubs disappeared. To an outside observer, Greek society at the end of the Mycenaean Age might have seemed destined for irreversible economic and social decline, even oblivion. This prediction would have been false.
Many city-states and kingdoms in the Near East and Greece were weakened or obliterated in the disruptions of the period 1200-1000 B.C., and these misfortunes brought grinding poverty to many of the people who did survive the troubles of this age. Enormous difficulties impede our understanding of the history of this troubled period and of the period of recovery that followed because few literary or documentary sources exist to supplement the incomplete information provided by archaeology. Both because conditions were so gloomy for so many people and because we have only a dim view of what happened in these years, it is customary to refer to the era beginning in the twelfth/eleventh centuries as a Dark Age: the fortunes of the people of the time seem generally dark, as does our understanding of the period. The Near East recovered its strength much sooner than did Greece, ending its Dark Age by around 900 B.C. The Greeks did not fully recover until perhaps a hundred and fifty years after that.
The depressed economic conditions in Greece after the fall of Mycenaean civilization present a dramatic example of the desperately reduced circumstances of life which so many people in the Mediterranean and Near Eastern world had to endure during the worst years of the Dark Age. Mycenaean society collapsed because the complex economic system was destroyed on which its prosperity had depended. The most startling indication of the severe conditions of life in the early Dark Age is that the Greeks apparently lost their knowledge of writing when Mycenaean civilization was destroyed, although it has recently been suggested that the loss was not total. In any case, the loss of the common use of a technology as vital as writing is explicable because the linear B script used by the Mycenaeans was difficult to master and probably known only by a restricted group of specialists, the scribes who worked in the palaces keeping records. They employed writing only for recording the flow of goods into the palaces and then out again for redistribution. When the redistributive economy of Mycenaean Greece was destroyed, there was no longer a place for scribes or a need for writing. The oral transmission of the traditions of the past allowed Greek culture to survive this loss by continuing its stories and legends as valuable possessions passed on from generation to generation.
The Greeks later believed that, following the collapse of the Mycenaeans, a Greek-speaking group from the north, called the Dorians, began to invade central and southern Greece. Dorians were especially remembered as the ancestors of the Spartans, the most powerful city-state on the mainland before the spectacular rise to prominence of Athens in the fifth century B.C. Strikingly, however, archaeology has not discovered any distinctive remains attesting a Dorian invasion, and many scholars reject it as a fiction. The lack of written works from the Greek Dark Age means that the mute evidence uncovered by archaeologists must provide the foundation for recovering the history of this transitional period.
Archaeological excavation has shown that the Greeks cultivated much less land and had many fewer settlements in the early Dark Age than at the height of Mycenaean prosperity. No longer did powerful rulers ensconced in fortresses of stone preside over several towns and far-flung but tightly organized territories, with their redistributive economies providing a tolerable standard of living for farmers, herders, and a wide array of craft workers. The Greek ships filled with adventurers, raiders, and traders that had plied the Mediterranean during the second millennium now numbered a paltry few. Developed political states no longer existed in Greece in the early Dark Age, and people eked out their existence as herders, shepherds, and subsistence farmers bunched in tiny settlements as small as twenty people in most cases. Prosperous Mycenaean communities had been many times larger. Indeed, the entire Greek population was far smaller in the early Dark Age than it had been previously. As the population shrank, less land was cultivated, leading to a decline in the production of food. The decreased food supply in turn tended to encourage a further decline in the population. By reinforcing one another, these two processes multiplied their effects. The withering away of agriculture led more Greeks than ever before to herd animals as a larger part of their living in what remained nevertheless a complex agricultural economy. This increasingly pastoral way of life meant that people became more mobile because they had to be prepared to move their herds to new pastures once they had overgrazed their current location. If they were lucky, they might find a new spot that allowed them to grow a crop of grain if they stayed there long enough. As a result of this less-settled lifestyle, people built only simple huts as their houses and got along with few possessions. Unlike their Mycenaean forebears, Greeks in the Dark Age no longer had monumental architecture, and they ceased depicting people and animals in their principal art form, the designs on ceramics.
The general level of poverty perhaps meant that early Dark Age communities were largely egalitarian. Archaeologists have recently analyzed evidence from burials, however, which suggests that Greek society had once again begun to develop a hierarchical system perhaps as early as 1050 B.C. The revival of a social hierarchy in Dark Age Greece clearly shows up in the tenth century B.C. at a site now known as Lefkandi on the island of Euboea, off the eastern coast of the Greek mainland. There archaeologists have discovered the richly furnished burials of a man and woman, who died about 950 B.C. Their riches included goods of Near Eastern manufacture and style, testifying to the ongoing contacts between Greece and the Near East in the Dark Age. These contacts deeply influenced Greek mythology and religion as well as commerce. The dead woman wore elaborate gold ornaments that testify to her exceptional wealth. The couple were buried under a building more than 150 feet long with wooden columns on the exterior. The striking architecture and riches of their graves suggest that they enjoyed high social status during their lives and perhaps received a form of ancestor worship after their death. Such wealthy and powerful people were probably still few in number at this date, but their existence at Lefkandi proves that marked social differentiation had once again emerged in the Greek world. Stresses in this hierarchical organization of Greek society, as we shall see, were to set the stage for the emergence of Greece’s influential new political form, the self-governing city-state of free citizens.
In Greece, the Dark Age of depopulation and poverty persisted longer than in the Near East. Although Greek economic improvement is evident as early as about 900 B.C., it was not until the period around 750 B.C. that political states, now of a new kind, developed again and the Dark Age can be seen as ended. The obscure history of Greece in years between these general dates laid the foundation for the pronounced social, political, and intellectual changes associated with the creation of the Greek city-state. Throughout this period, continued contact with the Near East greatly influenced Greece, not only in commerce and trade but also in the exchange of ideas. Entrepreneurs from the Near East apparently often made their way to Greece, bringing with them both the knowledge of new technologies, such as iron working, and of ideas that Greeks took over and made their own in mythology and religion.
The evidence from burials shows that Greeks in more and more locations had become conspicuously wealthy by about 900 B.C. A hierarchical arrangement of society was evidently spreading throughout Greece, and the few men and women at the pinnacle of society had the riches to have expensive material goods placed in their tombs with them. In the earlier part of the Dark Age, the best grave offerings a dead person could expect were a few clay pots. The exceptional contents of rich graves point to significant economic changes already under way by the ninth century B.C.
Metallurgical technology eventually helped bring about the end of the Greek Dark Age. Archaeology allows us to see this trend, as in the evidence from the burial of a male about 900 B.C., which consisted of a pit into which was placed a clay pot to hold the dead man’s cremated remains. Surrounding the pot were metal weapons including a long sword, spearheads, and knives. The inclusion of weapons of war in a male grave was a continuation of the burial traditions of the Mycenaean Age, but these arms were forged from iron, not bronze, which had been the primary metal of the earlier period (often referred to therefore as the Bronze Age). This difference reflects a significant shift in metallurgy, which took place throughout the Mediterranean region during the early centuries of the first millennium B.C.: iron displacing bronze as the principal metal used to make tools and weapons. Greeks probably learned to work iron from voyaging Near Eastern entrepreneurs who brought their skills with them from their homelands. The island of Cyprus seems to have been particularly important as a place where this new technology developed and then was passed on to other places further west. In keeping with the habit of characterizing periods of history from the name of the metal most used at the time, the Dark Age can also be referred to as the Early Iron Age in Greece.
The Greeks, like others in the Near East, turned to iron because they could no longer obtain the tin needed to mix with copper to make bronze. The international trading routes that had once brought tin to Greece and the Near East from distant sources had been disrupted in the upheaval associated with the wide-spread turmoil that affected the eastern Mediterranean region beginning around 1200 B.C. Iron ore, by contrast, was available locally in Greece and in other areas throughout the Near East. Iron eventually replaced bronze in many uses, above all in the production of agricultural tools, swords, and spear points. Bronze remained in use for shields and armor, however. The lower cost of iron tools and weapons meant more people could afford them, and with iron being harder than bronze, implements kept their sharp edges longer.
Better and more plentiful farming implements of iron eventually helped to increase the production of food, a development reflected by the evidence of a burial from Athens. This grave, from about 850 B.C., held the remains of a woman and her treasures, including gold rings and earrings, a necklace of glass beads, and an unusual chest of baked clay. The necklace was an imported item from Egypt or Syria, and the technique of the gold jewelry was also that of the Near East. These objects reflected Greek trade with the more prosperous civilizations of that region, a relationship whose influence on Greece increased as the Dark Age came to an end in the next century. The most intriguing object from the burial is the woman’s terra-cotta storage chest. It was painted with characteristically intricate and regular designs, whose precision has led modern art historians to give the name Geometric to this style of the late Dark Age. On its top were sculpted five beehive-like urns that are miniature models of granaries (structures for storing grain). If these models were important enough to be buried as objects of special value, we can deduce that actual granaries and the grain they held were valuable commodities in real life. This deduction in turn means that already by 850 B.C. agriculture had begun to recover from its devastation in the early Dark Age, when herding animals had become more prevalent and cultivation had decreased. Whether the woman was the owner of grain fields we cannot know, but from her sculpted chest we can glimpse the significance of farming for her and her contemporaries.
Increased agricultural production in this period accompanied a growth in population. It is impossible to determine whether a rise in population preceded and led to the raising of more grain or, conversely, whether improvements in agricultural technology and the placing of more fields under cultivation spurred a consequent growth in the population by increasing the number of people the land could support. These two developments reinforced one another: as the Greeks produced more food, the better-fed population reproduced faster, and as the population grew, more people could produce more food. The repopulation of Greece in the late Dark Age established the demographic conditions under which the new political forms of Greece were to emerge.
People like the wealthy woman buried with the granary model at Athens and the earlier couple from Lefkandi constituted the aristocracy that emerged during the later part of the Greek Dark Age. The term aristocracy comes from Greek and means “rule of the best.” Although the use of this term is traditional in accounts of ancient Greek history, it is important to remember that “aristocracy”in this context does not mean what it often means in, for example, French or English history. That is, ancient Greece never had an aristocracy that was an officially recognized nobility, whose members inherited their status regardless of their wealth or other socio-economic characteristics. Rather, the term as used in ancient Greek history refers to the social elite, whose status depended on a combination of factors, of which wealth and public conduct were very important. When one speaks of a Greek aristocrat, then, it is crucial to understand this designation as meaning “a member of the social elite.”Aristocrats in ancient Greece seem to have possessed more wealth than others in their communities, but birth was also a criterion in their enjoying general acknowledgment as the “best” in their society – that is, the people with the greatest social status and political influence. We can only speculate about the various ways in which families might have originally gained their designation as aristocratic and thus became entitled to pass on this status to those born into them. Some aristocratic families in the Dark Age might have inherited their status as descendants of the most prominent and wealthy families of the Mycenean Age; some might have made themselves aristocrats during the Dark Age by amassing wealth and befriending less fortunate people who were willing to acknowledge their benefactors’ superior status in return for material help; and some might have acquired aristocratic status by monopolizing control of essential religious rituals.
The aristocrats’ ideas and traditions on organizing their communities and about proper behavior for everyone in them – that is, their code of social values – represented, like the reappearance of agriculture, fundamental components of Greece’s emerging new political forms. The aristocratic social values of the Dark Age underlie the stories told in the Iliad and Odyssey, two book-length poems that first began to be written down about the middle of the eighth century B.C., at the very end of the Dark Age. Despite the ancient origins of Homeric poetry, the behavioral code that it portrayed primarily reflected values established in the aristocratic society of Greece of the Dark Age before the rise of political systems based on citizenship.
The primary characters in the Homeric poems are aristocrats, who are expected to live up to a demanding code of values. The men are mainly warriors, like the incomparable Achilles of the Iliad. This poem tells part of the famous story of the attack by a Greek army on the city of Troy, a stronghold located in northwestern Anatolia. Although it is commonly assumed that the Trojans were a different people from the Greeks, the poems themselves provide no definitive answer to the question of their ethnic identity. In the Iliad’s representation of the Trojan War, which the Greeks believed occurred about four hundred years before Homer’s time, Achilles is, in the language of the poem, “the best of the Greeks”because he is a “doer of deeds and speaker of words”without equal. Achilles’ overriding concern in word and action is with the glory and recognition for all time that he can win with his “excellence”(the best available translation for Greek arete, a word with a range of meanings). Like all aristocrats, Achilles feared the disgrace that he would feel before others if he were seen to fail to live up to the code of excellence. Under the aristocratic code, failure and wrongdoing produced public shame.
A concentration on excellence (arete) distinguishes the code of values of the aristocrats of the Homeric poems. For an aristocratic woman like Penelope, the wife of the hero of the Odyssey, excellence consists of preserving her household and its property by relying on her intelligence, beauty, social status, and intense fidelity to her husband. This curatorship requires her to display great stamina and ingenuity in resisting the attempted predations of her husband’s rivals at home because he, Odysseus, is away for twenty years fighting the Trojan War and then sailing home in a long series of dangerous adventures. Although Penelope clearly counts as an exceptional figure of literature, aristocratic women in real life, like men, could see their proper role in life as requiring them to develop an exceptional excellence to set themselves apart from others of more ordinary character and status. Under this code, any life was contemptible whose goal was not the pursuit of excellence and the fame it brought.
The Greeks had relearned the technology of writing as a result of contact with the literate civilizations of the Near East and the alphabet developed there long before. Sometime between about 950 and 750 the Greeks modified a Phoenician alphabet to represent the sounds of their own language, and the Greek version of the alphabet eventually formed the base of the alphabet used for English today. Greeks of the Archaic Age (roughly, the period from 750 to 500 B.C.) swiftly applied their newly acquired skill to write down oral literature, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Greeks believed that Homer, a blind poet from the Greek region called Ionia (today the western coast of Turkey), had composed the Iliad and Odyssey. Modern scholarship has often disputed this attribution on the grounds that no single author could have been responsible for these lengthy and complex poems if, as is commonly assumed, they were originally composed and transmitted orally, without the aid of writing. If, on the other hand, Homeric poetry as we have it was composed by writing, the authorship question is on a different footing. Whatever the truth of this much disputed question, Homeric poetry, even if it was put into final form by a single author, grew out of centuries of oral performance by countless Greek poets singing of the deeds and values of legendary aristocrats. Stories from Near Eastern poetic tales influenced this oral poetry, which for centuries helped to transmit cultural values from one generations of Greeks to the next.
Excellence (arete) as a competitive value for male Greek aristocrats showed up clearly in the Olympic Games, a religious festival associated with a large sanctuary of Zeus, king of the gods of the Greeks. The sanctuary was located at Olympia, in the northwestern Peloponnese (the large peninsula that forms southern Greece), where the games were held every four years beginning in 776 B.C. During these great celebrations the aristocratic men of the age competed in running events and wrestling as individuals, not as national representatives on teams, as in the modern Olympic Games. The emphasis on physical prowess and fitness, competition, and public recognition by other men corresponded to the ideal of Greek masculine identity as it developed in this period. In a rare departure from the ancient Mediterranean tradition against public nakedness, Greek athletes competed without clothing (hence the word gymnasium, from the Greek word meaning “naked,” gymnos). Other competitions such as horse and chariot racing were added to the Olympic Games later, but the principal event remained a sprint of about two hundred yards called the stadion (hence our word “stadium”). Winners originally received no financial prizes, only a garland made from wild olive leaves, but the prestige of victory could bring other rewards as well. In later Greek athletic competitions prizes of value were often awarded. Admission was free to men; married women were not allowed to attend, on pain of death, but women had their own separate festival at Olympia on a different date in honor of Zeus’ wife, Hera. Although less is known about the games of Hera, literary sources report that unmarried young women competed on the Olympic track in a foot race five-sixths as long as the men’s stadion. In later times, international games including the Olympics were dominated by professional athletes, who made good livings from appearance fees and prizes won at various games held all over Greece. The most famous of them all was Milo, from Croton, in southern Italy. Winner of the Olympic wrestling crown six times beginning in 536 B.C., he was renowned for showy stunts such as holding his breath until his blood expanded his veins so much that they would snap a cord tied around his head.
The competition of the Olympic Games originally centered on contests among aristocrats, who prided themselves on their innate distinctiveness from ordinary people, as the fifth-century B.C. poet Pindar made clear in praising a family of victors: “Hiding the nature you are born with is impossible. The seasons rich in their flowers have many times bestowed on you, sons of Aletes [of Corinth], the brightness that victory brings, when you achieved the heights of excellence in the sacred games.”The organization of the festival as an event for all of Greece nevertheless indicates a trend toward communal activity that was under way in Greek society and politics by the mid-eighth century B.C. First of all, the building of a special sanctuary for the worship of Zeus at Olympia provided an architectural center as a focus for public gatherings with a surrounding space for crowds to assemble. The social complement to the creation of this physical environment was the tradition that the Games of Zeus and Hera were pan-hellenic, that is, open to all Greeks. Moreover, an international truce of several weeks was declared so that competitors and spectators from all Greek communities could travel to and from Olympia in security even if wars were otherwise in progress along their way. In short, the arrangements for the Olympic Games demonstrate that in eighth century B.C. Greece the aristocratic values of individual activity and pursuit of excellence by one’s self were beginning to be channeled into a new context appropriate for a changing society. This sort of assertion of the importance of communal interests was another important precondition for the creation of Greece’s new political forms.
Religion provided the context for almost all communal activity throughout the history of ancient Greece. Sports, as in the Olympic Games held to honor Zeus, took place in the religious context of festivals honoring specific gods. War was conducted according to the signs of divine will that civil and military leaders identified in the sacrifice of animals and in omens derived from occurrences in nature such as unusual weather. Sacrifices themselves, the central event of Greek religious rituals, were performed before crowds in the open air on public occasions that involved communal feasting afterward on the sacrificed meat. The conceptual basis of Greek religion was found in myth (mythos, a Greek word meaning “story”or “tale”) about the gods and their relationship to humans. In the eighth century B.C., the Greeks began to record their myths in writing, and the poetry of Hesiod preserved from this period (there was at this date not yet any Greek literature in prose) reveals how religious myth, as well as the economic changes and social values of the time, contributed to the feeling of community that underlay the creation of new political structures in Greece.
Hesiod, an eighth-century B.C. poet from the region of Boeotia in central Greece, employed myth to reveal the divine origin of justice. His long poem The Theogony (“The Genealogy of the Gods”) details the birth of the race of gods from primordial Chaos (“void”or “vacuum”) and Earth, the mother of Sky and numerous other children. This myth about the succession of the gods owed its inspiration to Near Eastern myths, another example of the importance of contact with that region for the cultural as well as economic development of Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. Hesiod explained that, when Sky began to imprison his siblings, Earth persuaded her fiercest male offspring, Kronos, to overthrow him by violence because “Sky first contrived to do shameful things.”When Kronos later began to swallow up all his own children, Kronos’ wife had their son Zeus overthrow his father by force in retribution for his evil deeds. These vivid stories, which had their origins in Near Eastern myths like those of the Mesopotamian Epic of Creation, carried the message that existence, even for gods, entailed struggle, sorrow, and violence. Even more significantly, however, they showed that a concern for justice had also been a component of the divine order of the universe from the beginning. In his poem Works and Days, Hesiod identified Zeus as the fount of justice in human affairs, a marked contrast to the portrayal of Zeus in Homeric poetry as mainly concerned with the fates of his favorite aristocratic warriors. Hesiod presents justice as a divine quality that will assert itself to punish evil-doers: “For Zeus ordained that fishes and wild beasts and birds should eat each other, for they have no justice; but to human beings he has given justice, which is far the best.”
Aristocratic men dominated the distribution of justice in Dark Age society. They exercised direct control over their family members and household servants. Others outside their immediate households would become their followers by acknowledging the aristocrats’ status as leaders. An aristocrat’s followers would grant him a certain amount of authority because, as the followers were roughly equal in wealth and status among themselves, they needed a figure invested with authority to settle disputes and organize defense against raids or other military threats. In anthropological terms, aristocrats operated as chiefs of bands. An aristocratic chief had authority to settle arguments over property and duties, oversaw the distribution of rewards and punishments, and usually headed the religious rituals deemed essential to the security of the group. At the same time, a chief’s actual power to coerce unwilling members of his band was limited. When decisions affecting the entire group had to be made, his leadership depended on being capable of forging a consensus by persuading members of the band about what to do. The poet Hesiod describes how an effective chief exercised leadership: “When his people in their assembly get on the wrong track, he gently sets matters right, persuading them with soft words.”In short, a chief could only lead his followers where they were willing to go.
Aristocratic chiefs sometimes abused their status and created tensions between leaders and followers. Eventually this tension contributed to the political reorganization of the Greek world in the creation of the city-state. A story from the Iliad provides a fictional illustration of the kind of abusive aristocratic behavior that chiefs could exhibit in the period before the city-state emerged. According to the Iliad, when Agamemnon, the aristocratic leader of the Greek army besieging Troy, summoned the troops to announce a decision to prolong the war, now in its tenth year, an ordinary soldier named Thersites spoke up in opposition. Thersites could express his opinion because Agamemnon led the Greeks as a Dark Age chief led a band, which required that all men’s opinions be heard with respect. Thersites criticized Agamemnon as unjustly greedy. “Let’s leave him here to digest his booty,”Thersites shouted to his fellow soldiers in the ranks. Odysseus, another chief, immediately rose up to support Agamemnon, saying to Thersites, “If I ever find you being so foolish again, may my head not remain on my body if I don’t strip you naked and send you back to your ship crying from the blows I give you.”Odysseus thereupon cowed Thersites with a blow to his back, which drew blood.
In this fictional episode, the assembled soldiers approve of Odysseus’ inequitable treatment of Thersites, who admittedly speaks without moderation or tact. For the city-state to be created as a political institution in which all free men had a stake, the idea that all men had the right to speak their minds, even rudely, had to emerge in the real world. Non-aristocratic men had to insist that they deserved equitable treatment, even if aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and carry out the policies agreed on by the group.
The poet Hesiod reveals that a state of heightened tension had developed between aristocratic chiefs and the peasants (the free proprietors of small farms, who might own a slave or two, oxen to work their fields, and other movable property of value) in the eighth century. Their property made peasants the most influential group among the men ranging from poor to moderately well-off who made up the bands of followers of aristocratic chiefs in late Dark Age Greece. Assuming the perspective of a peasant farming a small holding, the poet insisted that the divine origin of justice should be a warning to “bribe-devouring chiefs,”who settled disputes among their followers and neighbors “with crooked judgments.”This feeling of outrage evidently felt by non-aristocrats at not receiving equal treatment in the settlement of disputes served as a stimulus for the gradual movement toward new forms of political organization in Greece.
The term Archaic Age, meaning the “Old-fashioned Age”and designating Greek history from approximately 750 to 500 B.C., stems from art history. Modern scholars of Greek art judged the style of works from this period as looking more old fashioned than the more naturalistic art of the following period (the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.), which they saw as producing models of beauty and therefore named the Classical Age. Archaic sculptors, for example, made free-standing figures who stood stiffly, staring straight ahead in imitation of Egyptian statuary. By the Classical Age, sculptors depicted their subjects in more varied and lively poses. During the Archaic Age the Greeks developed the most widespread and influential of their new political forms, the city-state, or polis.
Polis, from which we derive our term “politics,”is usually translated as “city-state”to emphasize its difference from what we today normally think of as a city. As in many earlier states in the ancient Near East, the polis included not just an urban center, often protected by stout walls in later centuries, but also countryside for some miles around with its various small settlements. Members of the polis, then, lived both in the town at its center and also in the villages scattered around its territory. Presiding over the polis as protector and patron was a particular god, as, for example, Athena at Athens. Different communities could chose the same deity as their protector; Sparta, Athens’ chief rival in the Classical period, also had Athena as its patron god. The members of a polis constituted a religious association obliged to honor the state’s patron deity as well as the community’s other gods. The community expressed official homage and respect to the gods through its cults, which were regular sets of public religious activities overseen by citizens serving as priests and priestesses and paid for at public expense. The central ritual of a city-state’s cults was the sacrifice of animals to demonstrate to the gods as divine protectors the respect and piety of the members of the polis.
A polis was independent of its neighbors and had political unity among its settlements. Together the members of these settlements made up a community of citizens comprising a political state, and it was this partnership among citizens that represented the distinctive political characteristic of the polis. Only men had the rights of political participation, but women still counted as citizens of the community legally, socially, and religiously. The Greeks may have been influenced in the organization of the polis by their contacts with the Near East, where the city-monarchies of Cyprus and the states of Phoenicia, situated on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean, provided possible precedents. The distinctiveness of citizenship as an organizing concept was that it assumed in theory certain basic levels of legal equality, essentially the expectation of equal treatment under the law, with the exception that different regulations could apply to women in certain areas of life such as acceptable sexual behavior and the control of property. But the general legal equality that the polis provided was not dependent on a citizen’s wealth. Since pronounced social differentiation between rich and poor had characterized the history of the ancient Near East and Greece of the Mycenaean Age and had once again become common in Greece by the late Dark Age, it is remarkable that a notion of some sort of legal equality, no matter how incomplete it may have been in practice, came to serve as the basis for the reorganization of Greek society in the Archaic Age. The polis based on citizenship remained the preeminent form of political and social organization in Greece from the time of its earliest appearance about 750 B.C. until the beginning of the Roman Empire eight centuries later. The other most common new form of political organization in Greece was the ethnos (“league”or “federation”), a flexible form of association over a broad territory which was itself sometimes composed of city-states.
The geography of Greece greatly influenced the process by which this radically new way of organizing human communities came about. The severely mountainous terrain of the mainland meant that city-states were often physically separated by significant barriers to easy communication, thus reinforcing the tendency of city-states to develop separately and not to cooperate with one another. A single Greek island could be home to multiple city-states maintaining their independence from one another; the large island of Lesbos, for example, was the home for five different city-states. Since few city-states controlled enough arable land to grow food sufficient to feed a large body of citizens, polis communities no larger than several hundred to a couple of thousand people were normal even after the population of Greece rose dramatically at the end of the Dark Age. By the fifth century Athens had grown to a size of perhaps forty thousand adult male citizens and a total population, including slaves and other non-citizens, of several hundred thousand people, but this was a rare exception to the generally small size of Greek city-states. A population as large as that of classical Athens could be supported only by the regular importation of food from abroad, which had to be financed by trade and other revenues.
The most famous ancient analyst of Greek politics and society, the philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), later insisted the emergence of the polis had been the inevitable result of the forces of nature at work. “Humans,”he said, “are beings who by nature live in a polis.”Anyone who existed outside the community of a polis, Aristotle only half-jokingly maintained, must be either a beast or a deity. In referring to nature, Aristotle meant the combined effect of social and economic forces.
Some Greeks had emigrated from the mainland eastward across the Aegean Sea to settle in Ionia as early as the ninth century B.C. Starting around 750 B.C., however, Greeks began to settle even farther outside the Greek homeland. Within two hundred years, Greek colonies were established in areas that are today southern France, Spain, Sicily and southern Italy, and along North Africa and the coast of the Black Sea. Eventually the Greek world had perhaps as many as 1,500 different city-states. A scarcity of arable land certainly gave momentum to emigration from Greece, but the revival of international trade in the Mediterranean in this era perhaps provided the original stimulus for Greeks to leave their homeland, whose economy was still struggling. Some Greeks with commercial interests took up residence in foreign settlements, such as those founded in Spain in this period by the Phoenicians from Palestine. The Phoenicians were active in building commercially-motivated settlements throughout the western Mediterranean. Within a century of its foundation sometime before 750 B.C., for example, the Phoenician settlement on the site of modern Cadiz in Spain had become a city thriving on economic and cultural interaction with the indigenous Iberian population.
Like other peoples of the eastern Mediterranean, Greeks also established their own trading posts abroad. Traders from Euboea, for instance, had already established commercial contacts by 800 B.C. with a community located on the Syrian coast at a site now called Al Mina. Men wealthy enough to finance risky expeditions by sea ranged far from home in search of metals. Homeric poetry testifies to the basic strategy of this entrepreneurial commodity trading. In the Odyssey, the goddess Athena once appears disguised as a metal trader to hide her identity from the son of the poem’s hero: “I am here at present,”she says to him, “with my ship and crew on our way across the wine-dark sea to foreign lands in search of copper; I am carrying iron now.”By about 775 B.C., Euboeans, who seem to have been particularly active explorers, had also established a settlement for purposes of trade on the island of Ischia, in the bay of Naples off southern Italy. There they processed iron ore imported from the Etruscans, who lived in central Italy. Archaeologists have documented the expanding overseas communication of the eighth century by finding Greek pottery at more than eighty sites outside the Greek homeland; for the tenth century, by contrast, only two pots have been found that were carried abroad.
Learning from overseas traders of likely places to relocate, Greek colonists set out from their “mother city”(metropolis in Greek), which selected a leader called the “founder”(ktistes). Even though they were going to establish an independent city-state at their new location, colonists were expected to retain ties with their metropolis. A colony that sided with its metropolis’ enemy in a war, for example, was regarded as disloyal. Sometimes the colonists enjoyed a friendly welcome from the local inhabitants where they settled; sometimes they had to fight to win the land for their new community. The colony’s founder was in charge of laying out the settlement properly and parceling out the land, as Homer describes in speaking of the foundation of a fictional colony: “So [the founder] led them away, settling them in [a place called] Scheria, far from the bustle of men. He had a wall constructed around the town center, built houses, erected temples for the gods, and divided the land.”
Commercial interests perhaps first induced Greeks to emigrate, but greater numbers of them began to move abroad permanently in the mid-eighth century B.C., probably because the population explosion in the late Dark Age had caused a scarcity of land available for farming. Because arable land represented the most desirable form of wealth for Greek men, tensions caused by competition for good land arose in some city-states. Emigration helped solve this problem by sending men without land to foreign regions, where they could acquire their own fields in the territory of colonies founded as new city-states. Since colonizing expeditions were apparently usually all male, wives for the colonists had to be found among the locals, either through peaceful negotiation or by violent kidnappings.
The case of the foundation of a Greek colony in Cyrene (in what is now Libya in North Africa) in about 630 B.C. reveals how full of tensions the process of colonization could be. The people of the polis of Thera, on an island north of Crete, apparently were unable to support their population. Sending some people out as colonists to Cyrene therefore made sense as a solution to population pressures. A later inscription purports to tells us what happened at the time of colonization and reveals the urgency of the situation at the time: “One adult son [from each family] is to be conscripted....If any man is unwilling to leave when the polis sends him, he shall be subject to the death penalty and his property shall be confiscated.”(M. Crawford and D. Whitehead, Archaic and Classical Greece: A Selection of Ancient Sources in Translation, Cambridge, 1983, no. 16B) Evidently the young men of Thera were reluctant to leave their home for the new colony. This evidence shows, then, that colonization in response to population growth was not always a matter of individual choice of the people feeling the pressure. The possibility of acquiring land in a colony on which a man could perhaps grow wealthy obviously had to be weighed against the terrors of being torn from family and friends to voyage over treacherous seas to regions filled with unknown dangers. Greek colonists had reason to be scared about their future. Moreover, in some cases, colonies were founded to rid the metropolis of undesirables whose presence was causing social unrest. The Spartans, for example, colonized Taras (modern Taranto) in southern Italy in 706 B.C. with a group of illegitimate sons whom they could not successfully integrate into their citizen body. These unfortunate outcasts certainly did not go as colonists by their own choice.
The participation of Greeks in international trade and in colonization increased their contact with the peoples of Anatolia, Egypt, and the Near East. They admired and envied these older civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean for their wealth, such as the gold of the Phrygian kingdom of Midas, and their cultural accomplishments, such as the lively pictures of animals on Near Eastern ceramics, the magnificent temples of Egypt, and the alphabets of the Phoenician cities. During the early Dark Age, Greek artists had stopped portraying people or other living creatures in their designs. The pictures they saw on pottery imported from the Near East in the late Dark Age and early Archaic Age influenced them to begin once again to depict figures in their paintings on pots. The style of Near Eastern reliefs and free-standing sculptures also inspired creative imitation in Greek art of the period. When the improving economy of the later Archaic Age allowed Greeks to revive monumental architecture in stone, temples for the worship of the gods emulating Egyptian architectural designs represented the most prominent examples of this new trend in erecting large, expensive buildings. The Greeks began to mint coins in the sixth century B.C., a technology they learned from the Lydians, who invented coinage in the seventh century. Long after this innovation, however, much economic exchange continued to be made through barter, especially in the Near East. Highly monetized economies took centuries to develop.
Knowledge of writing was the most dramatic contribution of the ancient Near East to Greece as it emerged from its Dark Age. The Greeks probably originally learned the alphabet from the Phoenicians to use it for record keeping in business and trade, as the Phoenicians did so well, but they soon started to employ it to record literature such as Homeric poetry. Since the ability to read and write remained unnecessary for most purposes in the predominately agricultural economy of archaic Greece and there were no schools, few people at first learned the new technology of letters.
Success in competing for international markets affected the fortunes of Greek city-states during this period. The city-state of Corinth, for example, grew prosperous from ship building and its geographical location controlling the narrow isthmus of land connecting northern and southern Greece. Since ships plying the east-west sea lanes of the Mediterranean preferred to avoid the stormy passage around the tip of southern Greece, they commonly off-loaded their cargoes for transshipment on a special roadbed built across the isthmus and subsequent reloading on different ships on the other side. Small ships may even have been dragged over the roadbed from one side of the isthmus to the other. Corinth became a bustling center for shipping and earned a large income from sales and harbor taxes. Taking advantage of its deposits of fine clay and the expertise of a growing number of potters, Corinth also developed a thriving export trade in fine decorated pottery, which non-Greek peoples such as Etruscans in central Italy seem to have prized as luxury goods. By the late sixth century B.C., however, Athens began to displace Corinth as the leading Greek exporter of fancy painted pottery, especially after consumers came to prefer designs featuring the red color for which its clay was better suited than Corinth’s.
The Greeks were always careful to solicit approval from their gods before setting out from home, whether for commercial voyages or colonization. The god most frequently consulted about sending out a colony was Apollo in his sanctuary at Delphi, a hauntingly beautiful spot in the mountains of central Greece. The Delphic sanctuary began to be internationally renowned in the eighth century B.C. because it housed an oracular shrine in which a prophetess, the Pythia, spoke the will of Apollo in response to questions from visiting petitioners. The Delphic oracle operated for a limited number of days over nine months of the year, and demand for its services was so high that the operators of the sanctuary rewarded generous contributors with the privilege of jumping to the head of the line. The great majority of visitors to Delphi consulted the oracle about personal matters such as marriage and having children. That Greeks hoping to found a colony felt they had to secure the approval of Apollo of Delphi demonstrates the oracle was held in high esteem already as early as the 700s B.C., a reputation that continued to make the oracle a force in Greek international affairs in the centuries to come.
The reasons for the change in Greek politics represented by the gradual emergence of the city-state in the Archaic Age remain controversial. An insurmountable difficulty to forming a clear interpretation of this complex process is that the surviving evidence for the change mainly concerns Athens, which was not a typical city-state in significant aspects, as in the large size of its population. Much of what we can say about the reasons for the emergence of the city-state therefore applies solely to Athens. Other city-states certainly emerged under varying conditions and with different results. Nevertheless, it seems possible to draw some general conclusions about the slow process through which city-states began to emerge starting around 750 B.C.
The economic revival of the Archaic Age and the growth in the population of Greece evident by the eighth century B.C. certainly gave momentum to the process. Men who managed to acquire substantial property from success in agriculture or commerce could now demand a greater say in political affairs from the hereditary aristocrats, who claimed status based on their family lines. Theognis of Megara, a sixth-century poet whose verses also reflect earlier conditions, gave voice to the distress of aristocrats at the emergence of new avenues to social and political influence: “... men today prize possessions, and noble men marry into “bad”[that is, non-aristocratic] families and “bad”men into noble families. Riches have mixed up lines of breeding... and the good breeding of the citizens is becoming obscured.”The increase in population in this era probably came mostly in the ranks of the non-aristocratic poor. Such families raised more children, who could help to farm more land, which had been empty for the taking after the depopulation of the early Dark Age. Like the Zeus of Hesiod’s Theogony, who acted in response to the injustice of Kronos, the growing number of poorer non-aristocrats apparently reacted against what they saw as unacceptable inequity in the leadership of aristocrats, who sometimes acted as if they were petty kings in their local territory and dispensed what seemed “crooked”justice to those with less wealth and power. This concern for equity and fairness gave a direction to the social and political pressures created by the growth of the population.
For the city-state to be created as a political institution in which all free men had a share, non-aristocratic men had to insist that they deserved equitable treatment, even if aristocrats were to remain in leadership positions and carry out the policies agreed on by the group. The invention of the concept of citizenship as the basis for the city-state and the extension of citizen status to non-aristocrats responded to that demand. Citizenship above all carried certain legal rights, such as access to courts to resolve disputes, protection against enslavement by kidnapping, and participation in the religious and cultural life of the city-state. It also implied participation in politics, although the degree of participation open to poor men varied among the different city states. The ability to hold public office, for example, could be limited in some cases to owners of a certain amount of property or wealth. Most prominently, citizen status distinguished free men and women from slaves and metics (resident aliens), foreigners who were officially granted limited legal rights and permission to reside in a city-state that was not their homeland. Thus, even the poor had a distinction setting themselves apart from others.
Social and economic inequality among citizens persisted as part of life in the polis despite the legal guarantees of citizenship, The incompleteness of the equality that underlay the political structure of the city-state especially revealed itself in the status of citizen women. Women became citizens of the city-states in the crucial sense that they had an identity, social status, and local rights denied metics and slaves. The important difference between citizen and non-citizen women was made clear in the Greek language, which included terms meaning “female citizen”(politis), in certain religious cults reserved for citizen women only, and in legal protection against being kidnapped and sold into slavery. Citizen women also had recourse to the courts in disputes over property and other legal wrangles, but they could not represent themselves and had to have men speak for their interests, a requirement that reveals their inequality under the law. The traditional paternalism of Greek society – men acting as “fathers”to regulate the lives of women and safeguard their interests as defined by men – demanded that every woman have an official male guardian (kurios) to protect them physically and legally. In line with this assumption about the need of women for regulation and protection by men, women were granted no rights to participate in politics. They never attended political assemblies, nor could they vote. They did hold certain civic priesthoods, however, and they had access along with men to the initiation rights of the popular cult of the goddess Demeter at Eleusis near Athens. This internationally renowned cult, about which more is said elsewhere in the Overview, served in some sense as a safety valve for the pressures created by the remaining inequalities of life in Greek city-states because it offered to all regardless of class its promised benefits of protection from evil and a better fate in the after-world.
Despite the only limited equality characteristic of the Greek city-state, the creation of this new form of political organization nevertheless represented a significant break with the past, and the extension of at least some political rights to the poor stands as one of the most striking developments in this process of change. Unfortunately we cannot identify with certainty the forces that led to the emergence of the polis as a political institution in which even poor men had a vote on political matters. The explanation long favored by many makes a so-called hoplite revolution responsible for the general widening of political rights in the city-state, but recent research has undermined the plausibility of this theory as a completely satisfactory explanation. Hoplites were infantrymen clad in metal body armor, and they constituted the main strike force of the citizen militias that defended Greek city-states in the period before navies became important. Men armed as hoplites marched into combat shoulder to shoulder in a rectangular formation called a phalanx. Staying in line and working as part of the group was the secret to successful phalanx tactics. A good hoplite, in the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Archilochus, was “a short man firmly placed upon his legs, with a courageous heart, not to be uprooted from the spot where he plants his feet.”Greeks had fought in phalanxes for a long time, but until the eighth century B.C., only aristocrats and a relatively small number of their non-aristocratic followers could afford the equipment to serve as hoplites. In the eighth century B.C., however, a growing number of men had become sufficiently prosperous to buy metal weapons, especially since the use of iron had made them more readily available. Presumably these new hoplites, since they paid for their own equipment and trained hard to learn phalanx tactics to defend their community, felt they, too, were entitled to political rights. According to the theory of a hoplite revolution, these new hoplite-level men forced the aristocrats to share political power by threatening to refuse to fight and thereby cripple the community’s military defense.
The theory correctly assumes that new hoplites had the power to demand an increased political say for themselves, a development of great significance for the development of the city-state as an institution not solely under the power of a small circle of aristocrats. The theory of a hoplite revolution cannot explain, however, one crucial question: why were poor men as well as hoplites given the political right of voting on policy in the city-state?
Most men in the new city-states were too poor to qualify as hoplites. It is usually assumed that poor men most likely could contribute little to military defense because they lacked hoplite armor and metal weapons and Greek armies at this date made scant use of light-armed troops like skirmishers, slingers, and archers. Nor had the Greeks developed navies yet, the military service for which poor men would provide the manpower in later times when a fleet was a city-state’s most effective weapon. If being able to make a contribution to the city-state’s defense as a hoplite was the only grounds for meriting the political rights of citizenship, the aristocrats along with the old and new hoplites had no obvious reason to grant poor men the right to vote on important matters. Yet poor men did become politically empowered citizens in many city-states, with some variations on whether a man had to own a certain amount of land to have full political rights or whether eligibility for higher public offices required a certain level of income. In general, however, all male citizens, regardless of their level of wealth, eventually were entitled to attend, speak in, and cast a vote in the communal assemblies in which policy decisions for the city-states were made. That poor men gradually came to participate in the assemblies of the city-states means they were citizens possessing the basic component of political equality. The hoplite revolution fails as a complete explanation of the development of the city-state above all because it cannot account for the extension of this right to the poor. Furthermore, the emergence of large numbers of men wealthy enough to afford hoplite armor seems to belong to the middle of the seventh century B.C., well after the period when the city-state as an innovative form of political organization was first coming into existence.
No thoroughly satisfactory alternative or complement to the theory of hoplite revolution has yet emerged to explain the rise of the polis as a political organization that opened citizenship to poor citizens as well as those better off. The laboring free poor – the workers in agriculture, trade, and crafts – contributed much to the economic strength of the city-state, but it is hard to see how their value as laborers could have been translated into political rights. The better-off elements in society certainly did not extend the rights of citizenship to the poor out of any romanticized vision of poverty as spiritually noble. As one contemporary put it, “Money is the man; no poor man ever counts as good or honorable.” One significant boost to extending political rights to the poor perhaps came from the sole rulers, called tyrants, who seized power for a time in some city-states and whose history will be discussed subsequently. Tyrants could have used grants of citizenship to poor or disenfranchised men as a means of marshaling popular support for their regimes. Another, more speculative possibility is that the aristocrats and hoplites had simply become less cohesive as a political group in this period of dramatic change, thereby weakening opposition to the growing idea that it was unjust to exclude the poor from political participation. When the poor agitated for power in the citizen community, on this view, there would have been no united front of aristocrats and hoplites to oppose them, making compromise necessary to prevent destructive civil unrest. Or it may be that we underestimate the significance of lightly-armed combatants in the eighth century, when hoplites were presumably not as numerous as in later times and perhaps the sheer force of the numbers of poor men – wielding staves, throwing rocks, employing farming implements as weapons – could have helped their city-state’s contingent of hoplites to sway the tide of battle against an opposing force.
The hallmark of the politics of the developed Greek city-states was certainly the practice of the citizen men making decisions communally. Aristocrats continued to be powerfully influential in Greek politics even after city-states had come into existence, but the unprecedented political influence non-aristocratic men came to enjoy in city-states constituted the most remarkable feature of the change in the political organization of Greek society in the Archaic Age. This process was gradual, as city-states certainly did not suddenly emerge fully formed around 750 B.C. Three hundred years after that date, for example, the male citizens of Athens were still making major changes in their political institutions to disperse political power more widely among the male citizen body.
The only evidence for slavery in the Dark Age – the language of the poetry of Homer and Hesiod – reveals complex relationships of dependency among free and unfree people. Some people taken prisoner in war seem to be chattel slaves (slaves regarded as property, like cattle – hence the term), wholly under the domination of others, who benefit from the captives’ labor. Other dependent people in the poems seem more like inferior members of the owners’ households. They live under virtually the same conditions as their superiors and enjoy a family life of their own. If the language of this poetry reflects actual conditions in the Dark Age, chattel slavery was not the primary form of dependency in Greece during that period.
The creation of citizenship as a category to define membership in the exclusive group of people constituting a polis inevitably highlighted the contrast between those included in the category of citizens and those outside it. Freedom from control by others was a necessary precondition to become a citizen with full political rights, which in the city-states meant being a free-born adult male. The strongest contrast citizenship produced, therefore, was that between free and unfree. In this way, the development of a clear idea of personal freedom in the formation of the city-state as a new political form may ironically have encouraged the complementary development of chattel slavery in the Archaic Age. The rise in economic activity in this period probably also encouraged the importation of slaves by increasing the demand for labor. In any case, slavery as it developed in the Archaic Age reduced unfree persons to a state of absolute dependence; they were the property of their owners. As Aristotle later categorized them, slaves were “living tools.”
Captives taken in war provided an important source of slaves, and relatively few slaves seem to have been born and raised in the households of those for whom they worked. Slaves were also imported from the regions to the north and east of Greek territory, where non-Greek people would be seized by pirates or foreign raiders. The fierce bands in these areas would also capture each other and sell the captives to slave dealers. The dealers would then sell their purchases in Greece at a profit. Herodotus, a Greek historian of the fifth century B. C., reported that some of the Thracians, a group of peoples living to the north of mainland Greece, “sold their children for export.”But this report probably meant only that one band of Thracians sold children captured from other bands of Thracians, whom the first group considered different from themselves. The Greeks lumped together all foreigners who did not speak Greek as “barbarians” – people whose speech sounded to Greeks like the repetition of the meaningless sounds “bar, bar.”Greeks, like Thracians and other slave-holding peoples, found it easier to enslave people whom they considered different from themselves and whose ethnic and cultural otherness made it easier to disregard their shared humanity. Greeks also enslaved fellow Greeks, however, especially those defeated in war, but these Greek slaves were not members of the same polis as their masters. Rich families prized Greek slaves with some education because they could be made to serve as tutors for children, for whom there were no publicly-financed schools in this period.
Chattel slavery became widespread in Greece only after about 600 B.C. Eventually, slaves became cheap enough that people of moderate means could afford one or two. Nevertheless, even wealthy Greek landowners never acquired gangs of hundreds of slaves like those who maintained Rome’s water system under the Roman Empire or worked large plantations in the southern United States before the American Civil War. Maintaining a large number of slaves year around in ancient Greece would have been uneconomical because the cultivation of the crops grown there called for short periods of intense labor punctuated by long stretches of inactivity, during which slaves would have to be fed even while they had no work to do.
By the fifth century B.C., however, the number of slaves in some city-states had grown to as much as one-third of the total population. This percentage still means that most labor was performed by small land-owners and their families themselves, sometimes hiring free workers. The special system of slavery in Sparta provides a rare exception to this situation.
Rich Greeks everywhere regarded working for someone else for wages as disgraceful, but their attitude did not correspond to the realities of life for many poor people, who had to earn a living at any work they could find. Like free workers, chattel slaves did all kinds of labor. Household slaves, often women, had the physically least dangerous existence. They cleaned, cooked, fetched water from public fountains, helped the wife with the weaving, watched the children, accompanied the husband as he did the marketing, and performed other domestic chores. Yet they could not refuse if their masters demanded sexual favors. Slaves who worked in small manufacturing businesses, like those of potters or metalworkers, and slaves working on farms often labored alongside their masters. Rich landowners, however, might appoint a slave supervisor to oversee the work of their other slaves in their fields while they remained in town. The worst conditions of life for slaves obtained for those men leased out to work in the narrow, landslide-prone tunnels of Greece’s few silver and gold mines. The conditions of their painful and dangerous job were dark, confined, and backbreaking. Owners could punish their slaves with impunity, even kill them without fear of meaningful sanctions. (A master’s murder of a slave was regarded as at least improper and perhaps even illegal in Athens of the classical period, but the penalty may have been no more than ritual purification.) Beatings severe enough to cripple a working slave and executions of able-bodied slaves were probably infrequent because destroying such property made no economic sense for an owner.
Some slaves enjoyed a measure of independence by working as public slaves owned by the city-state instead of an individual. They lived on their own and performed specialized tasks. In Athens, for example, public slaves in the classical period had the responsibility for certifying the genuineness of the city-state’s coinage as well as many other administrative jobs in city service. Athenian public slaves also formed a corps of assistants to the citizen magistrates responsible for the punishment of criminals, and the city-state’s official executioner was a public slave. In this way, citizens were able to maintain an arm’s-length distance between themselves and distasteful jobs like the arrest and execution of fellow citizens.
Slaves attached to temples also lived without individual owners because temple slaves belonged to the god of the sanctuary, for which they worked as servants. Some female temple slaves served as sacred prostitutes at the temple of Aphrodite in Corinth, and their earnings helped support the sanctuary.
Under the best conditions, household slaves with humane masters might live lives free of violent punishment. They might even be allowed to join their owners’ families on excursions and attend religious rituals such as sacrifices. Without the right to a family of their own, however, without property, without legal or political rights, they lived an existence alienated from regular society. In the words of an ancient commentator, chattel slaves lived lives of “work, punishment, and food.”Their labor helped maintain the economy of Greek society, but their work rarely benefited themselves. Yet despite the misery of their condition, Greek chattel slaves – outside Sparta – almost never revolted on a large scale, perhaps because they were of too many different origins and nationalities and too scattered to organize themselves for rebellion. Sometimes owners freed their slaves voluntarily, and some promised freedom at a future date to encourage their slaves to work hard in the meantime. Freed slaves did not become citizens in Greek city-states but instead mixed into the population of resident foreigners (the metics). They were expected to continue to help out their former masters when called upon.
The emergence of slavery in the city-state on a large scale gave women new and bigger responsibilities for the household (oikos, oikia), especially rich women, whose lives were especially circumscribed by the responsibility of managing their large households. As partners in the maintenance of the family with their husbands, who spent their time outside farming, participating in politics, and meeting their male friends, wives were entrusted with the management of the household (oikonomia, whence our word “economics “). They were expected to raise the children,, supervise the preservation and preparation of food, keep the family’s financial accounts, weave cloth to make clothing,, direct the work of the household slaves, and nurse them when they were ill. Households thus depended on women, whose work permitted the family to be economically self-reliant and the male citizens to participate in the public life of the polis.
Poor women worked outside the home, often as small-scale merchants in the public market that occupied the center of every settlement. Only at Sparta did women have the freedom to participate in athletic training along with men. Women played their major role in the public life of the city-state by participating in funerals, state festivals, and religious rituals. Certain festivals were reserved for women only, especially in the cult of the goddess Demeter, whom the Greeks credited with teaching them the indispensable technology of agriculture. As priestesses, women also fulfilled public duties in various official cults; for example, women officiated as priestesses in more than forty such cults in Athens by the fifth century B.C. Women holding these posts often enjoyed considerable prestige, practical benefits such as a salary paid by the state, and greater freedom of movement in public.
Upon marriage women became the legal wards of their husbands, as they previously had been of their fathers while still unmarried. Marriages were arranged by men. A woman’s guardian – her father, or if he were dead, her uncle or her brother – would commonly betroth her to another man’s son while she was still a child, perhaps as young as five. The betrothal was an important public event conducted in the presence of witnesses. The guardian on this occasion repeated the phrase that expressed the primary aim of marriage: “I give you this woman for the plowing [procreation] of legitimate children.”The marriage itself customarily took place when the girl was in her early teens and the groom ten to fifteen years older. Hesiod advised a man to marry a virgin in the fifth year after her puberty, when he himself was “not much younger than thirty and not much older.”A legal marriage consisted of the bride’s going to live in the house of her husband. The procession to his house served as the ceremony. The woman brought with her a dowry of property (perhaps land yielding an income, if she were wealthy) and personal possessions that formed part of the new household’s assets and could be inherited by her children. Her husband was legally obliged to preserve the dowry and to return it in case of a divorce. Procedures for divorce were more concerned with power than law: a husband could expel his wife from his home, while a wife, in theory, could on her own initiative leave her husband to return to the guardianship of her male relatives. Her freedom of action could be constricted, however, if her husband used force to keep her from leaving. Except in certain cases in Sparta, monogamy was the rule in ancient Greece, and a nuclear family structure (that is, husband, wife, and children living together without other relatives in the same house) was common, although at different stages of life a married couple might have other relatives living with them. Citizen men could have sexual relations without penalty with slaves, foreign concubines, female prostitutes, or willing pre-adult citizen males. Citizen women had no such sexual freedom, and adultery carried harsh penalties for wives, as well as the male adulterer, except at Sparta when a woman was childless, the aim of the liaison was to produce children, and the husband gave his consent.
More than anything else, a dual concern to regulate marriage and procreation and to maintain family property underlay the placing of the legal rights of Greek women and the conditions of their citizenship under the guardianship of men. The paternalistic attitude of Greek men toward women was rooted in the desire to control human reproduction and, consequently, the distribution of property, a concern that gained special urgency in the reduced economic circumstances of the Dark Age. Hesiod, for instance, makes this point explicitly in relating the myth of the first woman, named Pandora. According to the legend, Zeus, the king of the gods, created Pandora as a punishment for men when Prometheus, a divine being hostile to Zeus, stole fire from Zeus to give it to Prometheus’s human friends, who had hitherto lacked that technology. Pandora subsequently loosed “evils and diseases”into the previously trouble-free world of men by removing the lid from the jar or box the gods had filled for her. Hesiod then refers to Pandora’s descendants, the female sex, as a “beautiful evil”for men ever after, comparing them to drones who live off the toil of other bees while devising mischief at home. But, he goes on to say, any man who refuses to marry to escape the “troublesome deeds of women”will come to “destructive old age”without any children to care for him. After his death, moreover, his relatives will divide his property among themselves. A man must marry, in other words, so that he can sire children to serve as his support system in his waning years and to preserve his holdings after his death by inheriting them. Women, according to Greek mythology, were for men a necessary evil, but the reality of women’s lives in the city-state incorporated social and religious roles of enormous importance.
Although the Greek city-states differed among themselves in size and natural resources, over the course of the Archaic age they came to share certain fundamental political institutions and social traditions: citizenship, slavery, the legal disadvantages and political exclusion of women, and the continuing influence of aristocrats in society and politics. During this time, however, different city-states developed these shared characteristics in strikingly different ways. Monarchy had died out in Greece with the end of Mycenaean civilization, except for the dual kingship that existed in Sparta as part of its complex oligarchic system rather than as a monarchy in the ordinary sense. In Sparta and some other Greek city-states, only a rather restricted number of men exercised meaningful political power (thus creating a political system called an oligarchy, meaning “rule by the few.”) Other city-states experienced periods of domination by the kind of sole ruler who seized power in unconstitutional fashion and whom the Greeks called a tyrant. Tyranny, passed down from father to son, existed at various times across the breadth of the Greek world from city-states on the island of Sicily in the west to Samos off the coast of Ionia in the east. Still other city-states created early forms of democracy (“rule by the people”) by giving all male citizens the power to participate in governing. Assemblies of men with some influence on the king had existed in certain early states in the ancient Near East, but Greek democracy broke new ground with the amount of political power that it invested in its male citizen body. The Athenians established Greece’s most renowned democracy, in which the individual freedom of citizens flourished to a degree unprecedented in the ancient world. By examining these different paths of political and social development, we can grasp the great challenge faced by the Greeks as they struggled to construct a new way of life during the Archaic Age. In the course of this struggle, they also began to formulate new ways of understanding the physical world, their relations to it, and their relationships with each other.
The Spartans made oligarchy the political base for a society devoted to military readiness, and the resulting Spartan way of life became famous for its discipline, which showed most prominently in the Spartan infantry, the most powerful military force in Greece during the Archaic Age. Sparta’s easily defended location – nestled on a narrow north-south plain between rugged mountain ranges in the southeastern Peloponnese, in a region called Laconia (hence the designation of Spartans as Laconians) – gave it a secure base for developing its might. Sparta had access to the sea through a harbor situated some twenty-five miles south of its urban center, but this harbor opened onto a dangerous stretch of the Mediterranean whipped by treacherous currents and winds. As a consequence, enemies could not threaten the Spartans by sea, but their relative isolation from the sea also kept the Spartans from becoming adept sailors. Their interests and their strength lay on the land.
The Greeks believed the ancestors of the Spartans were Dorians who had invaded the Peloponnese from central Greece and defeated the original inhabitants of Laconia around 950 B.C., but no archaeological evidence supports the notion that a “Dorian invasion”actually took place. From wherever the original Spartans came, they conquered the inhabitants of Laconia and settled in at least four small villages, two of which apparently dominated the others. These early settlements later cooperated to form the core of what would in the Archaic Age become the polis of the Spartans. The Greeks gave the name “synoecism” (“union of households”) to this process of political unification, in which most people continued to live in their original villages even after one village began to serve as the center of the new city-state. One apparent result of the compromises required to forge Spartan unity was that the Spartans retained not one but two hereditary military leaders of high prestige, whom they called kings. These kings, perhaps originally the leaders of the two dominant villages, served as the religious heads of Sparta and commanders of its army. The kings did not enjoy unfettered power to make decisions or set policy, however, because they operated not as pure monarchs but as leaders of the oligarchic institutions that governed the Spartan city-state. Rivalry between the two royal families periodically led to fierce disputes, and the initial custom of having two supreme military commanders also paralyzed the Spartan army when the kings disagreed on strategy in the middle of a military campaign. The Spartans therefore eventually decided that the army on campaign would be commanded by only one king at a time.
The “few”(oligoi) who made policy in the oligarchy ruling Sparta were a group of twenty-eight men over sixty years old, joined by the two kings. This group of thirty, called the “council of elders”(gerousia), formulated proposals that were submitted to an assembly of all free adult males. This assembly had only limited power to amend the proposals put before it; mostly it was expected to approve the council’s plans. Rejections were rare because the council retained the right to withdraw a proposal when the reaction to it by the crowd in the assembly presaged a negative vote. “If the people speak crookedly,”according to Spartan tradition, “the elders and the leaders of the people shall be withdrawers [of the proposal].”The council could then bring the proposal back on another occasion after there had been time to marshal support for its passage.
A board of five annually elected “overseers”(ephors) counterbalanced the influence of the kings and the gerousia. Chosen from the adult male citizens at large, the ephors convened the gerousia and the assembly, and they exercised considerable judicial powers of judgment and punishment. They could even bring charges against a king and imprison him until his trial. The creation of the board of ephors diluted the political power of the oligarchic gerousia and the kings because the job of the ephors was to ensure the supremacy of law. The Athenian Xenophon later reported: “All men rise from their seats in the presence of the king, except for the ephors. The ephors on behalf of the polis and the king on his own behalf swear an oath to each other every month: the king swears that he will exercise his office according to the established laws of the polis, and the polis swears that it will preserve his kingship undisturbed if he abides by his oath.”
The Spartans were sticklers for obedience to the law (nomos) as the guide to proper behavior on matters large and small. When the ephors entered office, for example, they issued an official proclamation to the men of Sparta: “Shave your mustache and obey the laws.”The depth of Spartan respect for their system of government under law was symbolized by their tradition that Apollo of Delphi had sanctioned it with an oracle called the Rhetra. A Spartan leader named Lycurgus, they said, had instituted the reforms that the Rhetra institutionalized. Even in antiquity historians had no firm information about the dates of Lycurgus’ leadership or precisely how he changed Spartan laws. All we can say today is that the Spartans evolved their law-based political system during the period from about 800 to 600 B.C. Unlike other Greeks, the Spartans never had their laws written down. Instead, they preserved their system from generation to generation with a distinctive, highly structured way of life based on a special economic foundation.
The distinctiveness of the Spartan way of life was fundamentally a reaction to their living in the midst of people whom they had conquered in war and enslaved to exploit economically but who outnumbered them greatly. To maintain their position of superiority over their conquered neighbors, from whom they derived their subsistence, Spartan men had to turn themselves into a society of soldiers constantly on guard. They accomplished this transformation by a radical restructuring of traditional family life enforced by strict adherence to the laws and customs governing practically all aspects of behavior. Through constant, daily reinforcement of their strict code of values, the Spartans ensured their survival against the enemies they had created by subjugating their neighbors. The seventh-century poet Tyrtaeus, whose verses exemplify the high quality of the poetry produced in early Sparta before its military culture began to exclude such accomplishments, expressed that code in his ranking of martial courage as the supreme male value: “I would never remember or mention in my work any man for his speed afoot or wrestling skill, not if he was as huge and strong as a Cyclops or could run faster than the North Wind, nor more handsome than Tithonus or richer than Midas or Cinyras, nor more kingly than Pelops, or had speech more honeyed than Adrastus, not even if he possessed every glory – not unless he had the strength of a warrior in full rush.”
Some of the conquered inhabitants of Laconia, the territory of Sparta, continued to live in self-governing communities. Called “those who live round about”(perioikoi), these neighbors were required to serve in the Spartan army and pay taxes but lacked citizen rights. Perhaps because they retained their personal freedom and property, however, the perioikoi never rebelled against Spartan control. Far different was the fate of the conquered people who ended up as helots, a word derived from the Greek term for “capture.” Later ancient commentators described the helots as “between slave and free”because they were not the personal property of individual Spartans but rather slaves belonging to the whole community, which alone could free them. Helots had a semblance of family life because they were expected to produce children to maintain their population, which was compelled to labor as farmers and household slaves as a way of freeing Spartan citizens from any need to do such work. Spartan men in fact wore their hair very long to show they were “gentlemen”rather than laborers, for whom long hair was an inconvenience.
In their private lives, helots could keep some personal possessions and practice their religion, as could slaves generally in Greece. Publicly, however, helots lived under the threat of officially sanctioned violence. Every year the ephors formally declared a state of war to exist between Sparta and the helots, thereby allowing any Spartan to kill a helot without any civil penalty or fear of offending the gods by unsanctioned murder. By beating the helots frequently, forcing them to get drunk in public as an object lesson to young Spartans, marking them out by having them wear dog-skin caps, and generally treating them with scorn, the Spartans consistently emphasized the otherness of the helots compared to themselves. In this way, the Spartans erected a moral barrier between themselves and the helots to justify their harsh treatment of fellow Greeks.
When the arable land of Laconia, which was predominately held by aristocrats, proved too small to support the full citizen population of Sparta, the Spartans attacked their Greek neighbors to the west in the Peloponnese, the Messenians. In the First Messenian War (c. 730-710 B.C.) and then in the Second (c. 640-630 B.C.), the Spartan army captured the territory of Messenia, which amounted to forty percent of the Peloponnese, and reduced the Messenians to the status of helots. With the addition of the tens of thousands of people in Messenia, the total helot population now more than outnumbered that of Sparta, whose male citizens at this time amounted to perhaps between 8,000 and 10,000. The terrible loss felt by the Messenians at their fate is well portrayed by their legend of King Aristodemus, whom the Messenians remembered as having sacrificed his beloved daughter to the gods of the underworld in an attempt to enlist their aid against the invading Spartans. When his campaign of guerrilla warfare at last failed, Aristodemus is said to have slain himself in despair on her grave. Deprived of their freedom and their polis, the Messenian helots were ever after on the lookout for a chance to revolt against their Spartan overlords.
Their labor made helots valuable to the Spartans. Laconian and Messenian helots alike primarily farmed plots of land that the state had originally allotted to individual Spartan households for their sustenance. Some helots also worked as household servants. By the fifth century, helots would also accompany Spartan hoplite warriors on the march to carry their heavy gear and armor. In the words of the seventh-century B.C. poet Tyrtaeus, helots worked “like donkeys exhausted under heavy loads; they lived under the painful necessity of having to give their masters half the food their ploughed land bore.”This compulsory rent of fifty percent of everything produced by the helots working on each free family’s assigned plot was supposed to amount to seventy measures of barley each year to the male master of the household and twelve to his wife, along with an equivalent amount of fruit and other produce. In all, this food was enough to support six or seven people. The labor of the helots allowed Spartan men to devote themselves to full-time training for hoplite warfare in order to protect themselves from external enemies and to suppress helot rebellions, especially in Messenia. Contrasting the freedom of Spartan citizens from ordinary work with the lot of the helots, the later Athenian Critias commented “Laconia is the home of the freest of the Greeks, and of the most enslaved.”
The entire Spartan way of life was directed toward keeping the Spartan army at tip-top strength. Boys lived at home only until their seventh year, when they were taken away to live in communal barracks with other males until they were thirty. They spent most of their time exercising, hunting, training with weapons, and being acculturated to Spartan values by listening to tales of bravery and heroism at the common meals presided over by older men. The standard of discipline was strict, to prepare young males for the hard life of a soldier on campaign. For example, they were not allowed to speak at will. (Our word “laconic”meaning “of few words”comes from the Greek word “Laconian,”one of the terms for a Spartan; another is Lacedaimonian, from the name Lacedaimon applied to Sparta). Boys were also purposely underfed so that they would have to develop the skills of stealth by stealing food. Yet if they were caught, punishment and disgrace followed immediately. One famous Spartan tale taught how seriously boys were supposed to fear such failure: having successfully stolen a fox, which he was hiding under his clothing, a Spartan youth died because he let the panicked animal rip out his insides rather than be detected in the theft. By the Classical period, older boys would be dispatched to live in the wilds for a period as members of the “secret band”whose job it was to murder any helots who seemed likely to foment rebellion.
Spartan boys who could not survive the tough conditions of their childhood training fell into social disgrace and were not certified as Equals (homoioi), the official name for adult males entitled to full citizen rights of participation in politics and the respect of the community. Only the sons of the royal family were exempted from this training, perhaps to avoid a potential social crisis if a king’s son failed to stay the course.
Each Spartan Equal had to gain entry to a group that dined together at common meals, in a “common mess”(sussition), each of which had about fifteen members. If not blackballed when he applied, the new member was admitted on the condition that he contribute a regular amount of barley, cheese, figs, condiments, and wine to the mess from the produce provided by the helots working on his family plot. Some meat was apparently contributed, too, because Spartan cuisine was infamous for a black, bloody broth of pork condemned as practically inedible by other Greeks. Perhaps it was made from the wild boars Spartan men loved to hunt, an activity for which messmates were formally excused from the compulsory communal meals. If any member failed to keep up his contributions, he was expelled from the mess and lost his full citizen rights. The experience of spending so much time in these common messes schooled Sparta’s young men in the values of their society. There they learned to call all older men “father”to emphasize that their primary loyalty was to the group and not to their genetic families. There they were chosen to be the special favorites of males older than themselves to build bonds of affection, including physical love, for others at whose side they would have to march into deadly battle. There they learned to take the rough joking of army life for which Sparta was well known. In short, the common mess took the place of a boy’s family and school when he was growing up and remained his main social environment once he had reached adulthood. Its function was to mold and maintain his values consistent with the demands of the one honorable occupation for Spartan men: a soldier obedient to orders. Tyrtaeus enshrined the Spartan male ideal in his poetry: “Know that it is good for the polis and the whole people when a man takes his place in the front row of warriors and stands his ground without flinching.”
Spartan women were renowned throughout the Greek world for their relative freedom. Other Greeks regarded it as scandalous that Spartan girls exercised with boys and did so wearing minimal clothing. Women at Sparta were supposed to use the freedom from labor provided by the helot system to keep themselves physically fit to bear healthy children and raise them to be strict upholders of Spartan values. A metaphorical formulation of the male ideal for Spartan women appears, for example, in the poetry of Alcman in the late seventh century, who wrote songs for the performances of female and male choruses that were common on Spartan civic and religious occasions. The dazzling leader of a women’s chorus, he writes, “stands out as if among a herd of cows someone placed a firmly-built horse with ringing hooves, a prize winner from winged dreams.”
Spartan women, like men, could own land privately. Ordinary coined money was deliberately banned to try to discourage the accumulation of material goods, but the ownership of land remained extremely important in Spartan society. More and more land came into the hands of women in later Spartan history because the male population declined through losses in war, especially during the Classical Age. Moreover, Spartan women with property enjoyed special status as a result of the Spartan law forbidding the division of the portion of land originally allotted to a family. This law meant that, in a family with more than one son, all the land went to the eldest son. Fathers with multiple sons therefore needed to seek out brides for their younger sons who had inherited land and property from their fathers because they had no brother surviving. Otherwise, younger sons, inheriting no land from their own family, might fall into dire poverty.
The freedom of Spartan women from some of the restrictions imposed on them in other Greek city-states had the same purpose as the men’s common messes: the production of manpower for the Spartan army. By the Classical Age, the ongoing problem of producing enough children to keep the Spartan citizen population from shrinking had grown acute. Men were legally required to get married, with bachelors subjected to fines and public ridicule. Women who died in childbirth were apparently the only Spartans allowed to have their names placed on their tombstones, a mark of honor for their sacrifice to the state.
With their husbands so rarely at home, women directed the households, which included servants, daughters, and sons until they left for their communal training. As a result, Spartan women exercised more power in the household than did women elsewhere in Greece. Until he was thirty, a Spartan husband was not allowed to live with his family, and even newly-wed men were expected to pay only short visits to their brides by sneaking into their own houses at night. This tradition was only one of the Spartan customs of heterosexual behavior that other Greeks found bizarre. If all parties agreed, a woman could have children by a man other than her husband, so pressing was the need to reproduce in this strictly ordered society.
All Spartan citizens were expected to put service to their city-state before personal concerns because Sparta’s survival was continually threatened by its own economic foundation, the great mass of helots. Since Sparta’s well-being depended on the systematic exploitation of these enslaved Greeks, its entire political and social system by necessity had as its aim a staunch militarism and a conservatism in values. Change meant danger at Sparta. As part of its population policy, however, Spartan conservatism encompassed sexual behavior seen as overly permissive by other Greeks. The Spartans simultaneously institutionalized a form of equality as the basis for their male social unit, the common mess, while denying true social and political equality to ordinary male citizens by making their government an oligarchy. Whatever other Greeks may have thought of the particulars of the Spartan system, they admired the Spartans’ unswerving respect for their laws as a guide to life in hostile surroundings, albeit of their own making.
Opposition to oligarchic domination brought the first Greek tyrants to power in numerous city-states, although Sparta never experienced a tyranny. Greek tyranny represented a distinctive type of rule for several reasons. For one, although tyrants were by definition rulers who usurped power by force rather than inheriting it like legitimate kings, they then established family dynasties to maintain their tyranny, with sons inheriting their fathers’ position as the head of state. Also, the men who became tyrants were usually aristocrats, or at least near-aristocrats, who nevertheless rallied support from non-aristocrats for their coups. In places where propertyless men may have lacked citizenship or at least felt substantially disenfranchised in the political life of the city-state, tyrants perhaps won adherents by extending citizenship and other privileges to these groups. Tyrants moreover sometimes preserved the existing laws and political institutions of their city-states as part of their rule, thus promoting social stability.
The most famous early tyranny arose at Corinth, a large city-state in the northeastern Peloponnese, around 657 B.C. in opposition to the rule of the aristocratic family called the Bacchiads. Under Bacchiad rule in the eighth and early seventh centuries B.C., Corinth had blossomed into the most economically advanced city in Archaic Greece. The Corinthians had forged so far ahead in naval engineering, for instance, that other Greeks contracted with them to have ships built. Corinth’s strong fleet helped the Bacchiads in founding overseas colonies at Corcyra in northwest Greece and Syracuse on Sicily, city-states which would themselves become major naval powers.
The Bacchiads became unpopular despite the city’s prosperity because they ruled violently. Cypselus, himself an aristocrat whose mother was a Bacchiad, readied himself to take over by becoming popular with the masses: “he became one of the most admired of Corinth’s citizens because he was courageous, prudent, and helpful to the people, unlike the oligarchs in power, who were insolent and violent,”according to a later historian. Cypselus engineered the overthrow of Bacchiad rule with popular support and a favorable oracle from Delphi. He then ruthlessly suppressed rival aristocrats, but his popularity with the people remained so high that he could govern without the protection of a bodyguard. Corinth added to its economic strength during Cypselus’ rule by exporting large quantities of fine pottery, especially to markets in Italy and Sicily. Cypselus founded additional colonies along the sailing route to the western Mediterranean to promote Corinthian trade in that direction.
When Cypselus died in 625 B.C., his son Periander succeeded him. Periander aggressively continued Corinth’s economic expansion by founding colonies on the coasts both northwest and northeast of Greek territory to increase trade with the interior regions there, which were rich in timber and precious metals. He also pursued commercial contacts with Egypt, an interest commemorated in the Egyptian name Psammetichus he gave to one of his sons. The city’s prosperity encouraged flourishing development in crafts, art, and architecture. The foundations of the great stone temple to Apollo begun in this period can still be seen today. Unlike his father, however, Periander lost the support of Corinth’s people by ruling harshly. He kept his power until his death in 585 B.C., but the hostile feelings that persisted against his rule led to the overthrow of his successor, Psamettichus, within a short time. The opponents of tyranny thereupon installed a government based on a board of eight magistrates and a council of eighty men.
As in the case of the Cypselid tyranny at Corinth, most tyrannies needed to cultivate support among the masses of their city-states to remain in power because their armies were composed primarily of non-aristocrats. The dynasty of tyrants on the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean Sea, for example, who came to power about 540 B.C., built enormous public works to benefit their city-state and provide employment. They began construction of a temple to Hera meant to be the largest in the Greek world, and they dramatically improved the water supply of their urban center by excavating a great tunnel connected to a distant spring. This marvel of engineering with a channel eight feet high ran for nearly a mile through a 900-foot high mountain. The later tyrannies that emerged in city-states on Sicily similarly graced their cities with beautiful temples and public buildings.
By working in the interests of their peoples, some tyrannies, like that founded by Cypselus at Corinth, maintained their popularity for decades. Other tyrants experienced bitter opposition from aristocrats jealous of the tyrant’s power or provoked civil war by ruling brutally and inequitably. The poet Alcaeus of the city-state of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos in the northeastern Aegean, himself a rebellious aristocrat, described such strife around 600 B.C.: “Let’s forget our anger; let’s quit our heart-devouring strife and civil war, which some god has stirred up among us, ruining the people but bestowing the glory on our tyrant for which he prays.”In short, the title tyrant in Archaic Greece did not automatically label a ruler as brutal or unwelcome, as the use of the same word in English implies. Greeks evaluated tyrants as good or bad depending on their behavior as rulers.
It was a traditional Greek practice to explain significant historical changes such as the founding of communities or the codification of law as the work of an individual “inventor”from the distant past. Just like the Spartans, for whom the legendary Lycurgus was remembered as the founder of their city-state, the Athenians also believed their polis owed its start to a single man in the distant past. Athenian legends made Theseus responsible for founding the polis of Athens at a remote date by the synoecism of villages in Attica, the name given to the peninsula at the southeastern corner of the mainland of Greece that formed the territory of the Athenian polis. Since Attica had several fine ports along its coast, the Athenians were much more oriented to seafaring and communication with other peoples than were the almost-landlocked Spartans. Theseus made an appropriate mythical founder because he was described as a traveling adventurer, sailing, for example, to the island of Crete to defeat the Minotaur, a cannibalistic monster, half-human and half-bull. This exploit, like his other legendary adventures, or “labors”as they are called in imitation of those of Heracles, became favorite subject matter for vase painters. There can be no historical reality to the story of Theseus as the founder of Athenian democracy, but the civilizing nature of his legendary labors – he defeated many monsters who threatened travelers and polis residents alike – made his story appropriate to the aspirations of Athenian civic life.
Unlike most other important sites inhabited in the Mycenaean period, Athens had apparently not suffered any catastrophic destruction at the end of the Mycenaean period. Nevertheless, it is difficult to believe that Athens wholly escaped the troubles of this period, and its population shrank in the early Dark Age. By around 850 B.C., however, archaeological evidence such as the model granary from a woman’s burial mentioned elsewhere in the Overview shows that the Athenian agricultural economy was reviving. When the population of Attica apparently expanded at a phenomenal rate during the century from about 800 to 700 B.C., the free peasants constituted the fastest-growing segment of the population as economic conditions improved in the early Archaic Age. These small agricultural producers apparently began to insist on having a say in making Athenian policies because they felt justice demanded at least a limited form of political equality. Some of these modest land owners became wealthy enough afford to afford hoplite armor, and these men probably made strong demands on the aristocrats who had previously ruled Athens as what amounted to a relatively broad oligarchy. Rivalries among the aristocrats for status and material wealth prevented them from presenting a united front, and they had to respond to these pressures to insure the allegiance of the hoplites, on whom depended Athenian military strength.
By the late seventh century B.C., Athens’ male citizens rich, middle-class, and poor had established the first beginnings of a limited form of democratic government. Determining why they moved toward democracy instead of, for example, toward a narrow oligarchy like that of Sparta remains a difficult problem. Two factors perhaps encouraging the emergence of the Athenian polis as an incipient democracy were rapid population growth and a rough sense of egalitarianism among male citizens that survived from the frontier-like conditions of the early Dark Age, when most people had shared the same meager existence. These same factors, however, do not necessarily differentiate Athens from other city-states that did not evolve into democracies because the same conditions pertained across the Greek world in the Archaic Age. Perhaps population growth was so rapid among Athenian peasants that they had greater power than at other places to demand a share in governing. Their power and political coherence was evident, for example, in about 632 B.C. when they rallied “from the fields in a body”to foil the attempted coup of an Athenian nobleman named Cylon. A former champion in the Olympics and married to a daughter of Theagenes, tyrant of Megara, Cylon and some of his aristocratic friends had planned to install a tyranny. Athens also had some influential aristocrats like Solon and Cleisthenes who worked to strengthen Athenian democracy for differing reasons.
The scanty evidence seems to indicate that by the seventh century all free-born adult male citizens of Athens had the right to attend open meetings, in a body called the assembly (ekklesia), which elected nine magistrates called archons (rulers) each year. The archons, still all aristocrats in this early period, headed the government and rendered verdicts in disputes and criminal accusations. As they had earlier, aristocrats at this time still dominated Athenian political life by using their influence to secure election as archons, perhaps by marshaling their traditional bands of followers as supporters and by making alliances with other aristocrats. The right of middle-class and poor men to serve as members of the assembly as yet had only limited value because little business besides the election of archons was conducted in its gatherings, which probably met rarely in this period and then only when the current archons decided the time was right.
Aristocratic political alliances often proved temporary in Athenian politics, as elsewhere, and rivalries among aristocrats jealous of each other’s status continued under early Athenian democracy. In the aftermath of Cylon’s attempted tyranny, an Athenian named Draco was appointed in 621 B.C., perhaps after pressure by the hoplites, to establish a code of laws promoting stability and equity. Unfortunately, Draco’s laws somehow further destabilized the political situation; the Athenians later remembered them as having been as harsh as the meaning of his name (drakon, “dragon, serpent”), and our word Draconian, meaning excessively severe, reflects this view. A deterioration in the well-being of Athens’s free peasants, which had been slowly building for a long time, also further undermined social peace. Later Athenians did not know what had caused this economic crisis, only that it pitted the rich against the middle-class and the poor.
One cause of the economic crisis that plagued Athens in the later seventh century around the time of Draco may have been that the precariousness of agriculture in this period could sometimes lead to the gradual accumulation of the available farm land in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In subsistence agriculture, the level at which many Athenian farmers operated, a lean year could mean starvation. Moreover, farmers lacked any easy method to convert the surplus of a good year into imperishable capital, such as coined money, which could be then be stored up to offset bad years in the future, because coinage was not even invented until late in the seventh-century B.C. in Lydia in Anatolia and took a long time to become common in Greece. Failed farmers had to borrow food and seed to survive. When they could borrow no more, they had to leave their land to find a job to support their families, most likely by laboring for successful farmers. Under these conditions, farmers who became more effective than others, or simply more fortunate, could acquire the use and even the ownership of the land of failed farmers. In any case, many poor Athenians had apparently lost control of their land to wealthier proprietors by the late seventh century. The crisis became so acute that impoverished peasants were even being sold into slavery to pay off debts. Finally, twenty-five years after Draco’s legislation, conditions had become so acute that a civil war threatened to break out.
In desperation, the Athenians in 594 B.C. gave Solon special authority to revise their laws to deal with the economic crisis and its dire social consequences that had brought their society to the brink of internecine war. As he explains in his autobiographical poetry, Solon tried to steer a middle course between the demands of the rich to preserve their financial advantages and the call of the poor for a redistribution of land to themselves from the holdings of the large landowners. His famous “shaking off of obligations”somehow freed those farms whose ownership had become formally encumbered without, however, actually redistributing any land. He also forbade the selling of Athenians into slavery for debt and secured the liberation of citizens who had become slaves in this way, commemorating his success in the verses he wrote about his reforms: “To Athens, their home established by the gods, I brought back many who had been sold into slavery, some justly, some not...”
Attempting to balance political power between rich and poor,, Solon ranked male citizens into four classes according to their income: “five-hundred-measure men”(pentakosiomedimnoi, those with an annual income equivalent to that much agricultural produce), “horsemen”(hippeis, income of three hundred measures), “yoked men”(zeugitai, two hundred measures), and “laborers”(thetes, less than two hundred measures). The higher a man’s class, the higher the governmental office for which he was eligible, with the laborer class barred from all posts. Solon did reaffirm the right of this class to participate in the assembly (ekklesia), however. Solon probably created a council (boule) of four hundred men to prepare an agenda for the discussions in the assembly, although some scholars place this innovation later than Solon’s time. Aristocrats could not dominate the council’s deliberations because its members were chosen by lot, probably only from the top three income classes. Solon may also have initiated a schedule of regular meetings for the assembly. These reforms gave added impetus to the assembly’s legislative role and thus indirectly laid a foundation for the political influence that the “laborer”(thete) class would gradually acquire over the next century and a half.
Despite the restriction on office holding by the lowest income class, Solon’s classification scheme supported further development of conditions leading to democracy because it allowed for upward social mobility: if a man managed to increase his income, he could move up the scale of eligibility for office. The absence of direct taxes on income made it easier for entrepreneurial citizens to better their lot. From Solon’s reforms, Athenian male citizens gained a political and social system far more open to individual initiative and change than that of Sparta.
Equally important to restoring stability in a time of acute crisis was Solon’s ruling that any male citizen could bring charges on a wide variety of offenses against wrongdoers on behalf of any victim of a crime. Furthermore, he provided for the right of appeal to the assembly by persons who believed a magistrate had rendered unjust judgments against them. With these two measures, Solon made the administration of justice the concern of ordinary citizens and not just of still predominately aristocratic magistrates. He balanced these judicial reforms favoring the people, however, by granting broader powers to the “Council which meets on the Hill of the god of war Ares,”the Areopagus (meaning “Ares’ hill”). Archons became members of the Areopagus after their year in office. This body of ex-archons could, if the members chose, exercise great power because at this period it judged the most serious judicial cases, in particular accusations against archons themselves. Solon probably also expected the Areopagus to use its power to protect his reforms.
For its place and time, Athens’ emerging democracy was remarkable, even at this early stage in its development, because it granted all male citizens the possibility of participating meaningfully in the making of laws and the administration of justice. But not everyone found the system admirable. A visiting foreign king is reputed to have expressed the scornful opinion that he found Athenian democracy ludicrous. Observing the procedure in the Athenian assembly, he expressed his amazement that leading aristocratic politicians could only recommend policy in their speeches, while the male citizens as a whole voted on what to do: “I find it astonishing,”he remarked, “that here wise men speak on public affairs, while fools decide them.”Some Athenians who agreed with the king that aristocrats were wise and the poor foolish did their best to undermine Solon’s reforms after their creation in 594 B.C., and such oligarchic sympathizers continued to challenge Athenian democracy at intervals throughout its history.
Strife among aristocrats, combined with the continuing discontent of the poorest Athenians, lay behind the period of strife in the mid-sixth century following Solon’s reforms that led to Athens’ first tyranny. At this time an Athenian aristocrat named Pisistratus began a violent effort to make himself sole ruler with the help of his upper-class friends and the poor, whose interests he championed. He finally established himself securely as tyrant at Athens in 546 B.C. Pisistratus made funds available to help peasants acquire needed farm equipment and provided employment for poorer men while benefiting Athens by building roads and initiating major public works, such as a great temple to Zeus and fountains to increase the supply of drinking water. The tax that he imposed on agricultural production, one of the rare instances of direct taxation in Athenian history, financed the loans to farmers and the building projects. He also arranged for judicial officials to go on circuits through the outlying villages of Attica to hear cases, thus saving farmers the trouble of having to leave their fields to seek justice in Athens, the urban center of the polis. Like the earlier tyrants of Corinth, he promoted the economic, cultural, and architectural development of Athens. Athenian pottery, for example, now began to crowd out Corinthian in the export trade.
Hippias, the eldest son of Pisistratus, continued the tyranny after his father’s death in 527 B.C. He governed by making certain that his relatives and friends occupied magistracies, but for a time he also allowed his aristocratic rivals to hold office, thereby defusing some of the tension created by their jealousy of his superior status. Eventually, however, the aristocratic family of the Alcmaeonids arranged to have the Spartans send an army to expel Hippias.
In the ensuing vacuum of power at Athens after the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias, the leading member of the aristocratic Alcmaeonid family, a man named Cleisthenes, sought support among the masses by promising dramatic democratic reforms. The promise of such reforms seems to have been a response to the success of Cleisthenes’ bitterest rival, Isagoras, an aristocrat from a different family, in becoming archon in 508 B.C. Cleisthenes had apparently despaired of winning political success other than by appealing to the non-aristocratic masses at Athens. When Isagoras tried to block Cleisthenes’ reforms by calling in the Spartans again, the Athenian people united to force Isagoras and his Laconian allies out. The ensuing conflict between Athens and Sparta ended quickly but sowed the seeds of mutual distrust between the two city-states.
His popular support gave Cleisthenes the authority to begin to install the democratic system for which Athens has become famous, and the importance of his reforms led later Athenians to think of him as a principal founder of their democracy. First, he made the pre-existing villages of the countryside and the neighborhoods of the city of Athens (both called “demes,” demoi) the constituent units of Athenian political organization. Organized in their demes, the male citizens participated directly in the running of their government: they kept track in deme registers of which males were citizens and therefore eligible at eighteen to attend the assembly to vote on laws and public policies. The demes in turn were grouped for other administrative functions into ten so-called tribes (phylai), replacing an earlier division into four tribes. Cleisthenic democracy used its ten tribes for purposes such as choosing fifty representatives by lot from each tribe to serve for one year on the council (boule) of five hundred, which replaced Solon’s council of four hundred. The number of representatives from each deme was proportional to its population. Athenian men were also called up for service in the citizen militia by tribal affiliation. Most importantly, the ten men who served each year as “generals”(strategoi), the officials with the highest civil and military authority, were elected one from each tribe. Cleisthenes’ reorganization was complex, but its general aim seems to have been to undermine existing political alliances among aristocrats in the interests of greater democracy.
By about 500 B.C. Cleisthenes had succeeded in devising an Athenian democracy based on direct participation by as many adult male citizens as possible. That he could put such a system in place successfully in a time of turmoil and have it endure, as it did, means that he must have been building on pre-existing conditions favorable to democracy. Certainly, as an aristocrat looking for popular support, Cleisthenes had reason to invent the kind of system he thought ordinary people wanted. That he based his system on the demes, the great majority of which were country villages, suggests that some conditions favoring democracy may have stemmed from the traditions of village life. Possibly, the notion of wide-spread participation in government gained support from the custom village residents often have of dealing with each other on relatively egalitarian terms. That is, each man in a village is entitled to his say in running local affairs and must persuade, not compel, others of the wisdom of his recommendations. Since many aristocrats increasingly seem to have preferred to reside in the city, their ability to dominate discussion in the demes was reduced. In any case, the idea that persuasion, rather than force or status, should constitute the mechanism for political decision-making in the emerging Athenian democracy fit well with the spirit of the intellectual changes which were taking place during the late Archaic Age. That is, the idea that people had to present plausible reasons for their recommendations corresponded to one of the period’s new ways of thought. This development has proved one of the most influential legacies of Greek civilization.
Poetry represented the only form of Greek literature until the late Archaic Age. The earliest Greek poetry, that of Homer and Hesiod, had been confined to a single rhythm. A much greater rhythmic diversity characterized the new form of poetry, called lyric, that emerged during the Archaic Age. (These texts are not yet available to Perseus.) Lyric poems were far shorter than the narrative poetry of Homer or the didactic poetry of Hesiod, and they encompassed many forms and subjects, but they were always performed with the accompaniment of the lyre (a kind of harp that gives its name to the poetry). Choral poets like Alcman of Sparta wrote songs to be performed by groups on public occasions to honor the gods, to celebrate famous events in a city-state’s history, for wedding processions, and to praise victors in athletic contests. Lyric poets writing songs for solo performance on social occasions stressed a personal level of expression on a variety of topics. Solon and Alcaeus, for example, wrote poems focused on contemporary politics. Others self-consciously adopted a critical attitude toward traditional values such as strength in war. For instance, Sappho, a lyric poet from Lesbos born about 630 B.C. and famous for her poems on love, wrote, “Some would say the most beautiful thing on our dark earth is an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, but I say it’s whatever a person loves.”In this poem Sappho was expressing her longing for a woman she loved, who was now far away. Archilochus of Paros, whose lifetime probably fell in the early seventh century, became famous for his range of poems on themes as diverse as friends lost at sea, mockery of martial valor, and love gone astray. The bitter power of his poetic invective reportedly caused a father and his two daughters to commit suicide when Archilochus ridiculed them in anger after the father had put an end to Archilochus’ affair with his daughter Neobule. Some modern literary critics think the poems about Neobule and her family are fictional, not autobiographical, and were meant to display Archilochus’ dazzling talent for “blame poetry,”the mirror image of lyric as the poetry of praise. Mimnermus of Colophon, another seventh century lyric poet, rhapsodized about the glory of youth and lamented its brevity, “no longer than the time the sun shines on the plain.”Lyric poetry’s focus on the individual’s feelings represented a new stage in Greek literary sensibilities, one that continues to inspire poets.
Thinkers usually referred to today as philosophers, but who could equally well be described as theoretical scientists studying the physical world, gave impetus to new ways of thinking in the late Archaic age. These thinkers, who came from the city-states of Ionia along the eastern Aegean coast, were developing radically new explanations of the world of human beings and its relation to the world of the gods. In this way began the study of philosophy in Greece. Ionia’s geographical location next to the non-Greek civilizations of Anatolia, which were in contact with the older civilizations of Egypt and the Near East, meant Ionian thinkers were in a position to acquire knowledge and intellectual inspiration from their neighbors in the eastern Mediterranean area. Since Greece in this period had no formal schools at any level, thinkers like those from Ionia had to make their ideas known by teaching pupils privately and giving public lectures. They also used writing to record their doctrines, and some of them developed prose in Greek to express their new ways of thought. Some Ionian thinkers composed poetry as well to explain their theories and gave public recitations of their works. People who studied with these thinkers or heard their presentations would then help to spread knowledge of the new ideas.
Knowledge from the ancient Near East influenced the Ionian thinkers, just as it had influenced Greek artists of the Archaic Age. Greek vase painters and specialists in decorating metal vessels imitated Near Eastern designs depicting animals and luxuriant plants; Greek sculptors produced narrative reliefs like those of Assyria and statues with the stiff, frontal poses familiar from Egyptian precedents; Egypt also gave inspiration to Greek architects to employ stone for columns, ornamental details, and, eventually, entire buildings. In a similar process of the transfer of knowledge from east to west, information about the regular movements of the stars and planets developed by astronomers in Babylonia proved especially important in helping Ionian thinkers reach their conclusions about the nature of the physical world. The first of the Ionian theorists, Thales (c. 625 - 545 B.C.) from the city-state of Miletus, was said to have predicted a solar eclipse in 585 B.C., an accomplishment implying he had been influenced by Babylonian learning. Modern astronomers doubt Thales actually could have predicted an eclipse, but the story shows how influential eastern scientific and mathematical knowledge was to the thinkers of Ionia. Working from knowledge such as the observed fact that celestial bodies moved in a regular pattern, scientific thinkers like Thales and Anaximander (c. 610- 540 B.C.), also from Miletus, drew the revolutionary conclusion that the physical world was regulated by a set of laws of nature rather than by the arbitrary intervention of divine beings. Pythagoras, who emigrated from Samos to south Italy about 530 B.C., taught that the entire world was explicable through numbers. His doctrines inspired systematic study of mathematics and the numerical aspects of musical harmony.
The Ionian thinkers insisted that the workings of the universe could be explained because the phenomena of nature were neither random nor arbitrary. The universe, the totality of things, they named cosmos because this word meant an orderly arrangement that is beautiful (hence our word “cosmetic”). The order characteristic of the cosmos, perceived as lovely because it was ordered, encompassed not only the motions of the heavenly bodies but also everything else: the weather, the growth of plants and animals, human health and psychology, and so on. Since the universe was ordered, it was intelligible; since it was intelligible, explanations of events could be discovered by thought and research. The thinkers who conceived this view believed it necessary to give reasons for their conclusions and to persuade others by arguments based on evidence. They believed, in other words, in logic (a word derived from the Greek term logos meaning, among other things, a reasoned explanation). This way of thought based on reason represented a crucial first step toward science and philosophy as these disciplines endure today. The rule-based view of the causes of events and physical phenomena developed by these thinkers contrasted sharply with the traditional mythological view of causation. Naturally, many people had difficulty accepting such a startling change in their understanding of the world, and the older tradition explaining events as the work of gods lived on alongside the new ideas.
The ideas of the Ionian thinkers probably spread slowly because no means of mass communication existed, and few men could afford to spend the time to become followers of these thinkers and then return home to explain these new ways of thought to others. Magic remained an important preoccupation in the lives of the majority of ordinary people, who retained their notions that gods and demons frequently and directly affected their fortunes and health as well as the events of nature. Despite their perhaps limited immediate effect on the ancient world at large, the Ionian thinkers had initiated a tremendously important development in intellectual history: the separation of scientific thinking from myth and religion. Some modern scholars call this development the birth of rationalism, but it would be unfair to label myths and religious ways of thought as irrational if that term is taken to mean “unthinking”or “silly.”Ancient people realized that their lives were constantly subject to forces beyond their control and understanding, and it was not unreasonable to attribute supernatural origins to the powers of nature or the ravages of disease. The new scientific ways of thought insisted, however, that observable evidence had to be sought and theories of explanation had to be logical. Just being old or popular no longer bestowed veracity on a story purporting to explain natural phenomena. In this way, the Ionian thinkers parted company with the traditional ways of thinking of the ancient Near East as found in its rich mythology and repeated in the myths of early Greece.
Developing the view that people must give reasons to explain what they believe to be true, rather than just make assertions that they expect others to believe without evidence, was the most important achievement of the early Ionian thinkers. Along with the invention of democracy based on citizenship, their achievement gave real distinction to the Greek Archaic Age. The insistence of the Ionian thinkers on rationality, coupled with the belief that the world could be understood as something other than the plaything of divine whim, gave human beings hope that they could improve their lives through their own efforts. As Xenophanes from Colophon (c. 580 - 480 B.C.), put it, “The gods have not revealed all things from the beginning to mortals, but, by seeking, human beings find out, in time, what is better.”Xenophanes, like other Ionian thinkers, believed in the existence of gods, but he nevertheless assigned the opportunity and the responsibility for improving human life squarely to human beings themselves. Human beings themselves were to “find what is better.”
Athens achieved its greatest international power, economic prosperity, and cultural flowering during the fifth century B.C. The enduring fame of the drama, art, architecture, historical writing, and philosophy produced at Athens in these years by Athenians and non-Athenians, who had been attracted to the city by its economic and cultural vitality, has impelled historians to refer to the fifth century after the Persian Wars as the “Golden Age of Athens.”This Athenian Golden Age coincides with the first part of the so-called Classical period of ancient Greek history, a modern designation that is conventionally fixed between about 500 B. C., when the Greeks began to come into conflict with the kingdom of Persia to the east, and the death of the Macedonian king and conqueror Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. This section of the Overview will concentrate on the military, political, economic, and cultural history of Athens during this most famous span of Greek history, the Golden Age. The focus on Athens in this period reflects both the traditional fame that the city and its people have acquired in later times and the undeniable fact that far more ancient evidence has survived concerning Athens than any other ancient Greek state.
As the association of the Classical period’s opening chronological boundary with clashes against Persian forces and of its close with the military expeditions of Alexander reveals, the Classical period of Greek history was an age often marked by turbulence and war. The Golden Age of Athens was no exception, and one bloody conflict after another raged in mainland Greece during the fifth century, beginning with war against the great kingdom of Persia, whose heartland lay in what is today southern Iran. The kingdom of Persia had by around 500 expanded far enough westward that the Greeks were becoming aware of its enormous might, but neither the Persians nor the Greeks, especially those on the mainland, yet knew much about each other. Their mutual ignorance opened the door to explosive misunderstandings and a deadly war. When the Greeks allied against the Persians managed by 479 to defeat their more numerous foe and expel its invading army from the Greek mainland, the way was opened to the full blossoming of the Golden Age. After their success in the war with the Persians, however, the two major powers in mainland Greece – Sparta and Athens, who had cooperated in fighting the Persians – gradually became more and more hostile to each other in the course of the fifth century. Eventually, their mutual suspicions and hostilities erupted into open warfare of Greek against Greek, culminating in the drawn-out and destructive Peloponnesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta and their allies. This catastrophic struggle lasted for twenty-seven bitter years. Athens’ defeat in this war brought an end to the Athenian Golden Age.
The sources of the strife between these two major powers of the Greek mainland are significant for an understanding of the history of the Athenian Golden Age because that greatest era of Athens’ prosperity and cultural achievement came to an end as a result of the terrible defeat inflicted on Athens by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. Sparta, dominated politically by a conservative oligarchy that was always suspicious of change, had already become concerned by the end of the sixth century by the development of greater democracy at Athens under the leadership of Cleisthenes after 507. The Spartan leaders feared that the increasing democratization of Athenian government under the reforms of Cleisthenes would lead Athens to contest Spartan predominance in Greece. After seeing the military power, especially the navy, that Athens marshalled against the Persian army, the Spartan leaders increasingly saw Athens as more than just a theoretical threat to their state’s dominance. The majority of men at Athens reciprocated this feeling of suspicion and feared the Spartan army, Greece’s most formidable infantry force, as a threat to their international ambitions and security. The allies of Athens and Sparta also contributed significantly to the friction between the two powers by complaining to their respective leaders about real and imagined grievances against the other leading state.
The story of the genesis of the Athenian Golden Age begins chronologically with the history of the wars between a coalition of Greek states and the Persian Kingdom that erupted just after 500 B.C. and continued intermittently for decades. The Persian Kingdom outstripped mainland Greece in every imaginable category of material resources, from precious metals to beasts of burden. But, above all, it had a preponderance of the ancient world’s most precious resource, human beings. No resource was harder to replace than people because the populations of antiquity were constantly at risk from disease and regional scarcities of food to a degree unknown in the modern Western world. Death was not a phenomenon expected under ordinary conditions to afflict only the old, as today; illness, injury, and malnutrition could and did carry off people at every age all the time. The imbalance in demographic resources made the wars between Persians and Greeks seemingly into a contest between an elephant and a mouse. No one could have reasonably expected the mouse to prevail. The unexpectedness of the result – a Greek victory – contributed mightily to the feeling of self-confidence that characterized the Athenian Golden Age, for good and for ill.
The greatest military danger ever to threaten ancient Athens began with a diplomatic misunderstanding. In 507 B.C the Athenians sent ambassadors to ask for a protective alliance with the king of Persia, Darius I (ruler between 522-486 B.C.), because they feared that the Spartans would try to intervene in support of the Athenian aristocratic faction opposed to democracy, which opposed the political reforms of the time promoting added democracy at Athens that were the brainchild of the Athenian Cleisthenes. This ill-fated diplomatic mission unwittingly set in motion a sequence of events that culminated in invasions of mainland Greece by the huge army and navy of the king of Persia, who could summon vast numbers of fighting men from the many different peoples under his rule.
The motive of the Athenian embassy to Persia was to seek added security for the democratic reforms of Cleisthenes against possible Spartan intervention. Seeking security through an alliance with Persia made sense because the Persian Kingdom (or Persian Empire, as it is more often called, despite its monarch being referred to as a king, not an emperor) had become the richest, largest, and most militarily powerful state in the ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern world. Since Athens had never before had any official contacts with the Persian Kingdom, the diplomatic mission necessarily had to be sent off without precise instructions. The Athenian diplomats would simply have to feel their way as best they could in dealing with the Persians because they had no idea what to expect. The Athenian emissaries met with a representative of the king at Sardis, the Persian headquarters in western Anatolia (today Turkey). When the royal representative, who served as the governor of the surrounding territory for the king, had heard the Athenians’ plea for an alliance to help protect them against the Spartans, he first replied, “But who in the world are you and where do you live?”
The reply of the Persian king’s representative to the Athenian ambassadors revealed that, from the Persian perspective, the Athenians were so insignificant that he had never even heard of them before, despite his having been posted as a provincial governor on the western fringe of the Persian Empire, as close to Greek territory as Persians usually got. Still less would the king in the distant heartland of Persia (modern Iran) far to the east know anything of Athens. The king’s representative immediately demanded of the Athenian ambassadors the symbolic offerings of earth and water, which the king customarily required from all the peoples under his dominion. These tokens symbolized submission to the king, who recognized no one as his equal; he did not make alliances as if between partners, the kind of agreements that the Greek ambassadors, ignorant of Persian diplomatic procedure, had naively assumed they could make because that was how Greeks made alliances. Afraid to return to Athens empty-handed, they complied with the demand for earth and water. When the Athenian assembly (in Greek, the ekklesia, the body of free-born male citizens over eighteen years old, who met regularly to make policy decisions and laws for Athens) heard what its ambassadors had done, it angrily censured them – but it sent no message to Sardis to repudiate their actions. The outrage the Athenian assembly felt when their ambassador reported that they had offered tokens of submission revealed the intensity of the feelings the Athenians had developed for the political independence enjoyed by their city-state (polis in Greek – a political unit defined by an urban center surrounded by countryside, which often also had smaller settlements scattered throughout it). Although the Athenians had heard amazing tales of the resources of the Persian king, they were unwilling to buy his protection at the cost of yielding their freedom. The Athenians, then, continued to think of themselves as independent, but as far as the king of Persia was concerned, they were foreigners who had now voluntarily submitted to his representative and owed him the same loyalty he expected from all his other subjects. The dynamics of this diplomatic incident expose a significant source of the wider conflicts that would dominate the military and political history of mainland Greece during the fifth century B.C.: failed diplomacy emerging from mutual misunderstanding that opened the way to conflict.
The growth of Persian power had begun when Cyrus (ruler between 560-530 B.C.) established himself as the first Persian king. Previously, the Persians had been ruled by the Medes, a related people whose original territory occupied what is now northern Iran. The Greeks indeed often used the term “Mede” to refer to Persians. The ancestral homeland of the Persians themselves was found to the south of what is now the country of Iran. The Iranian language of today remains a descendant of ancient Persian, in contrast to the Arabic now spoken in neighboring Iraq and other countries of the Near East. By the reign of Darius I from 522 to 486, the Persian Kingdom had expanded to encompass a vast territory of heterogeneous populations stretching east-west from what is now Afghanistan to Turkey, and north-south from the southern territory of the former U.S.S.R. to Egypt and the Indian Ocean. The Persian king governed this immense area through a system of provincial organization, whose chief administrators were governors, called satraps, like the one whom the Athenian ambassadors met in Sardis. A satrap was a powerful figure in his own right, ruling over his province like a monarch.
By 500 B.C the Persian Kingdom had millions of subjects. The Persian kings exacted taxes from their many subject peoples in different ways in different regions. Tax revenues could be levied in the form of food stuffs, precious metals as bullion or coinage, and other valuable commodities. The various provinces were also responsible for supplying soldiers to staff the royal army. The material and human revenues of the immense kingdom made the Persian kings wealthy beyond the Greek imagination. Although the Persians did not regard their king as a god, everything about him was meant to emphasize his grandeur and superiority to ordinary mortals. His purple robes were of the most splendid fabric; red carpets were spread for him alone to walk upon; his servants held their hands before their mouths in his presence to muffle their breath so that he would not have to breathe the same air; he was depicted as larger than any other human being in the sculpture adorning his palace. To display his concern for his loyal subjects, as well as the gargantuan scale of his resources, the king provided meals for some 15,000 nobles, courtiers, and other followers every day, although he himself ate hidden from the view of his guests. The Greeks, in awe of the Persian monarch’s power and lavishness, referred to him simply as “The Great King.”
As absolute autocrats, the Persian kings believed they were superior to all human beings. Neither they nor their subjects, however, considered the king to be a god but, rather, the agent of the supreme god of Persian religion, Ahura Mazda. Persian religion, based on the teachings of the prophet Zoroaster, was dualistic, conceptualizing the world as the arena for a constant battle between good and evil. Unlike the Greeks, the Persians avoided animal sacrifice. Fire, kindled on special altars, formed an important part of their religious rituals. Although the language of ancient Persia has survived in its homeland in the form of modern Iranian, the religion of ancient Persia has been replaced in today’s Iran by Islam. The religion called Zoroastrianism, a descendant of the dualistic religion of ancient Persia, survives to this day in the modern world. Contemporary Zoroastrianism has preserved the central role of fire in its practice, and its sanctuaries are called fire temples. The largest surviving population of Zoroastrians today resides in Bombay, India, descended from Persians, who had emigrated from their homeland over a thousand years ago.
Despite their autocratic rule, the ancient Persian kings usually did not interfere with the religious practices or everyday customs of their subjects. When the Persian king Cyrus overthrew the Babylonian kingdom in 539 B.C., for example, he permitted the Hebrews to return from exile in Babylon to Palestine, which was designated as the province Yehud, from the name of the southern Hebrew kingdom Judah. From this geographical term came the name Jews, the customary designation of the Hebrews after the exile. Cyrus allowed the Jews to rebuild their main temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II in 587 B.C., and to practice their religion. Like the rest of the subjects of the Persian kings, the Jews were permitted to live as they pleased, so long as they did nothing to foment revolt, impede the regular flow of taxes to the royal treasury, or hinder the occasional dispatch of soldiers to the royal army.
The most famous series of wars in ancient Greek history – the so-called Persian Wars which took place in the 490s and in 480-479 – broke out when the Persian king decided to punish Greek states he regarded as rebellious subjects. The trouble started with a revolt in Ionia, on the west coast of Anatolia (modern Turkey), where the Greek city-states had earlier come under Persian control.
The Ionian Greeks originally lost their independence not to the Persians but when they were overpowered by Croesus (*c. 560-546), king of Lydia. The Lydians were a non-Greek people whose land bordered on Ionia on the east. Since Croesus gained confidence from this conquest and was emboldened by his vast wealth, he resolved to attack the Persian kingdom, whose territory lay to the east of Lydia. Persia was just now becoming powerful and thus a potential threat to Lydia. Croesus sent an emissary to request advice from the oracle of the god Apollo at Delphi in central Greece on the advisability of the Lydian army attacking Persia. The oracle responded, “If Croesus crosses into Persian territory, he will destroy a great kingdom.”When Croesus attacked the Persians in 546 B.C., his forces were crushed by Cyrus, the Persian king. Lydia, along with Ionia, fell to the Persians. Later, Cyrus allowed Croesus, now his prisoner being treated with respect in honor of his former royal status, to complain to the Delphic oracle that its advice had been wrong and that the god had not repaid the favor that Croesus had earlier shown him by sending splendid gifts to his Delphic sanctuary. The oracle pointedly replied to the complaint by answering that, if Croesus had been wise, he would have asked a second question: whose kingdom was he going to destroy with his expedition, Cyrus’ or his own?
As overlords of Ionia, the Persian kings installed and supported tyrants in its city-states. By 499 B.C. the Ionians were tired of Persian-backed tyranny and suffered from internal unrest. They rebelled, sending representatives to mainland Greece to ask for help in their revolt against Persia. The Spartan king Cleomenes declined to help after he saw the map the Ionian representative had brought and learned that an attack on the Persian capital would entail a three months’ march inland from Ionia. He, like the other Spartans, had no idea of the geography of the Near East. The men of the Athenian assembly responded differently to the Ionian plea. They voted to join the city-state of Eretria on the neighboring island Euboea and send military aid to the Ionians. The combined Athenian-Eretrian force actually got as far as Sardis, Croesus’ old capital, now the headquarters of a Persian provincial governor. After burning Sardis to the ground, however, the Athenians and Eretrians returned home when a Persian counterattack caused the Ionian allies to loose their coordination. Subsequent campaigns by the Persian king’s commanders crushed the Ionian rebels by 494 B.C.
King Darius was doubly furious when he learned that the Athenians had aided the Ionian revolt: not only had they dared attack his kingdom, they had done so after earlier having offered him earth and water, thereby signifying – in the king’s eyes – their submission to him in order to secure an alliance. Insignificant though Athens was in his opinion because its resources were so puny compared to those of his kingdom, Darius vowed to exact vengeance from Athens as punishment for its disloyalty to him. The Greeks later claimed that, to keep himself from forgetting his vow in the press of all his other concerns, Darius ordered one of his slaves to say to him three times at every meal, “Sire, remember the Athenians.”In 490 B.C. Darius dispatched a flotilla of ships carrying troops to attack the disloyal Greeks. After burning Eretria, the city-state on the island of Euboea whose troops had joined those of Athens in the attack on Sardis, the Persian expedition landed on the northeastern coast of Attica near a village called Marathon. The Persians had brought with them the elderly Hippias, the son of the former tyrant of Athens named Pisistratus. Hippias had himself been tyrant of Athens until he was forced into exile in 510 B.C. by an Athenian democratic uprising backed by Spartan military force. The Persians expected to reinstall Hippias as tyrant of Athens under their sway, in similar fashion to the tyrannies they had once installed in Ionian city-states. Since the Persian troops at Marathon outnumbered the citizen militia of Athenian hoplites (heavily armored infantry men armed with spears and swords, the principal component of Greek land armies), the Athenians asked the Spartans and other Greek city-states for military help. The Athenian courier dispatched to Sparta became famous because he ran the hundred and forty miles from Athens to Sparta in less than two days. By the time the battle of Marathon took place, however, the only allied troops to arrive were a contingent from the small, nearby city-state of Plataea.
Everyone expected the Persians to win at Marathon. The Athenian and Plataean soldiers, who had never seen Persians before, grew afraid just gazing at their unfamiliar and (to Greek eyes) frighteningly outlandish outfits. Nevertheless, the Athenian generals – the board of ten men elected each year as the civil and military leaders of Athens – never let their men lose heart. Led by the aristocrat Miltiades (c. 550-489 B.C.) and carefully planning their tactics to minimize the time their soldiers would be exposed to the fire of Persian archers, the generals sent their hoplites across the plain of Marathon at a dead run against the Persian line. The Greeks in their metal armor clanked across the open space between the two armies under a hail of Persian arrows fired like an artillery barrage. Once engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Persians, the Greek hoplites benefited from their superior, more protective armor and longer weapons, which allowed them to strike their enemies while they themselves were still out of reach. After a furious struggle, the Greek infantry men drove the Persians back into a swamp, where the invaders who failed to escape to their ships could be picked off safely at the attackers’ leisure.
At the end of the battle of Marathon an Athenian messenger ran the twenty-six miles from the plain of Marathon to the city of Athens to report the victory and warn the people in the city to guard against a naval attack by the Persian fleet, which was sailing around the peninsula of Attica (the territory of Athens as a city-state) to see if the city could be taken by an approach from the coast to its west. When the Persians ended up sailing home without taking Athens, the Athenians rejoiced in disbelief. The Persians, whom they had feared as invincible, had retreated. For decades afterwards, the greatest honor an Athenian man could claim was to say he had been a “Marathon fighter.”The run of the messenger who reported the victory is commemorated in today’s marathon races, whose name and distance are derived from this run in 490 B.C.
The symbolic importance of the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C. far outweighed its military significance. The defeat of his punitive expedition enraged Darius because it insulted his prestige, not because it represented any threat to the security of his kingdom. The Athenian men who comprised the city-state’s army, on the other hand, had dramatically demonstrated their commitment to preserving their freedom by refusing to capitulate to an enemy whose reputation for power and wealth had made a disastrous Athenian defeat appear certain. The unexpected victory at Marathon gave an unparalleled boost to Athenian self-confidence, and the city-state’s soldiers and leaders thereafter always boasted that they had stood fast before the feared barbarians even though the Spartans had not arrived in time to help them.
Their newly-won confidence heartened the Athenians to join the resistance against the gigantic Persian invasion which arrived in Greece in 480 B.C. Darius had vowed the invasion as revenge for the defeat at Marathon, but it took so long to marshal forces from all over the far-flung Persian kingdom that he died before it could be launched. His son, Xerxes I (*486-465) led the massive invasion force of infantry and ships against the Greek mainland. So huge was Xerxes’ army, the Greeks later claimed, it required seven days and seven nights of continuous marching to cross the Hellespont strait between Anatolia and the Greek mainland on a temporary bridge lashed together from boats and pontoons. Xerxes expected the Greek states simply to surrender without a fight once they realized the size of his forces. Many of them did, especially the ones in northern Greece along the route of the Persian army’s march. A coalition of thirty-one Greek states decided to fight, however, with the Spartans chosen as leaders because they constituted Greece’s most formidable hoplite army.
The Spartans showed their courage when three hundred of their men, along with a few other allied Greek contingents, held off Xerxes’ huge army for several days at the narrow pass called Thermopylae (“Warm Gates”) in central Greece. The characteristic Spartan refusal to be intimidated was summed up in the reputed comment of a Spartan hoplite. A companion remarked that the Persian archers were so numerous that their arrows darkened the sky in battle. “That’s good news,” said the Spartan, “we will get to fight in the shade.”The pass was so narrow that the Persians could not employ their superior numbers to overwhelm the Greek defenders, who were better warriors one-on-one. Only when a local Greek, hoping for a reward from the Persian king, showed the Persian troops a secret route around the pass were they able to massacre its Greek defenders by attacking them from the front and the rear simultaneously.
The Athenians soon after proved their mettle. Rather than surrender when Xerxes arrived in Attica with his army, they abandoned their city for him to sack. The Athenian commander Themistocles (c. 528-462 B.C.) then maneuvered the other Greeks into facing the larger Persian navy in a sea battle in the narrow channel between the island of Salamis and the west coast of Attica. Athens was able to supply the largest contingent to the Greek navy at Salamis because the assembly had been financing the construction of warships ever since a rich strike of silver had been made in Attica in 483 B.C. The proceeds from the silver mines went to the state andat the urging of Themistocles, the assembly had voted to use the financial windfall to build a navy for defense, rather than to distribute the money among individual citizens. As at Thermopylae, the Greeks in the battle of Salamis in 480 B.C. used topography to their advantage. The narrowness of the channel prevented the Persians from using all their ships at once and minimized the advantage of their ships’ greater maneuverability. In the close quarters of the Salamis channel, the heavier Greek ships could employ their underwater rams to sink the less sturdy Persian craft. When Xerxes observed that the most energetic of his naval commanders appeared to be the one woman among them Artemisia of Caria (the southwest corner of Turkey), he reportedly remarked, “My men have become women, and my women, men.”
The Greek victory at Salamis in 480 B.C. sent Xerxes back to Persia, but he left behind an enormous infantry force under his best general and an offer for the Athenians (if only they would capitulate): they would remain unharmed and become the king’s overlords over the other Greeks. The assembly refused, the Athenian population evacuated its homes and city once again, and Xerxes’ general wrecked Athens for the second time in as many years. In 479 B.C., the Greek infantry headed by the Spartans under the command of a royal son named Pausanias (c. 520-470 B.C.) outfought the Persian infantry at the battle of Plataea in Boeotia, just north of Attica, while a Greek fleet caught the Persian navy napping at Mykale on the coast of Ionia. The coalition of Greek city-states had thus done the incredible: they had protected their homeland and their independence from the strongest power in the world.
The Greeks’ superior armor and weapons and their adroit use of topography to counterbalance the enemy’s greater numbers explain their victories from a military perspective. What is truly remarkable about the Persian Wars, however, is that the citizen militias of the thirty-one Greek city-states decided to fight in the first place. They could have surrendered and agreed to become Persian subjects to save themselves. Instead, eager to defend their freedom despite the risks and encouraged to fight by the citizens of their communities, these Greeks chose to strive together against apparently overwhelming odds. Since the Greek forces included not only aristocrats and hoplites (who had to be financially capable of supplying their own armor and weapons), but also thousands of poorer men who rowed the warships, the effort against the Persians cut across social and economic divisions. The decision by Greeks to fight the Persian Wars demonstrated courage inspired by a deep devotion to the ideal of the political freedom of the city-state, which had emerged in the preceding Archaic Age.
The struggle against the Persian invasion had occasioned a rare interval of inter-state cooperation in ancient Greek history. The two most powerful city-states, Athens and Sparta, had put aside their mutual suspicions stemming from their clash at the time of Cleisthenes’ reforms in order to share the leadership of the united Greek military forces. Their attempt to continue this cooperation after the repulse of the Persians, however, ended in failure. Out of this failure arose the so-called Athenian Empire, a modern label invented to point out the political and economic dominance Athens came to exercise over other Greek states in an alliance originally set up as a voluntary association of its members against Persia.
The victorious Greeks decided in 478 B.C. to continue a naval alliance in order to attack the Persian outposts that still existed in far northern Greece and western Anatolia, especially Ionia. The Spartans naturally assumed leadership of this alliance, continuing the position that they had held at the had of the Greek coalition formed to resist the invasion of Xerxes. The conduct of the Spartan commander, Pausanias, soon caused disaffection among the Greek allies, however, and Athens soon took over the position of hegemon (leader by consensus) of the alliance. This change in leadership marked the beginning of the establishment of what would become an Athenian Empire.
The Spartan Pausanias, victor of the battle of Plataea, was chosen to lead the first expedition of the naval alliance against the remaining Persian outposts in Greek territory. His arrogant and violent behavior, especially toward women, quickly led to dissatisfaction with Spartan leadership among the Greek allies. This kind of outrageous conduct was to prove common in the future for Spartan men in positions of power when away from home. Their regimented training in Sparta apparently left them ill prepared to operate humanely and effectively once they had escaped from the constraints imposed by their austere way of life as “Equals”, as Spartan adult male citizens were called, always under scrutiny by one another in their homeland. Spartan kings, too, who grew up under a freer regimen than did ordinary Spartan men, tended to lose sight of the Spartan tradition of austerity and just behavior when they campaigned abroad for long periods. Not even they were immune to the corrupting influence of the desire for luxury, which the austere life of Spartans at home in Sparta excluded as a matter of principle and law.
By 477 B.C., the Athenian aristocrat Aristides (c. 525-465 B.C.) had successfully persuaded the other Greeks to request Athenian leadership of the continuing naval alliance against the Persians. The leaders at Sparta were happy to cede their position at the head of the alliance because, in the words of the Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.), “they were afraid any other commanders they sent abroad would be corrupted, as Pausanias had been, and they were glad to be relieved of the burden of fighting the Persians.... Besides, at the time they still thought of the Athenians as friendly allies.”It could be added that Sparta’s ongoing need to keep its army at home most of the time to guard against helot revolts also made prolonged overseas operations difficult to maintain.
Under Athenian direction, the Greek alliance against Persia took on a permanent organizational structure. Member states swore a solemn oath never to desert the coalition. The members were predominately located in northern Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and along the western coast of Anatolia – that is, in the areas most exposed to Persian attack. Most of the independent city-states of the Peloponnese, on the other hand, remained in their traditional alliance with the Spartans. This alliance of Sparta and its allies, which modern historians refer to as the Peloponnesian League, had an assembly to set policy, but no action could be taken unless the Spartan leaders agreed to it. The alliance headed by Athens also had an assembly of representatives to make policy. Its structure was supposed to allow participation by all its members.
The Athenian representatives came to dominate this erstwhile democracy, however, as a result of the special arrangements made to finance the alliance’s naval operations. Aristides set the different levels of payments the various member states were to pay each year, based on their size and prosperity. The Greek word describing the payments was phoros, literally “that which is brought.”Modern historians refer to the payments as “tribute,” but the translation “dues” might come closer to the official terminology of the alliance, so long as it is remembered that these dues were compulsory and permanent. For their tribute payments, larger member states were assessed the responsibility of supplying entire warships complete with crews and pay; smaller states could share the cost of a ship, or simply contribute cash which would be put together with others’ payments to pay for ships and crews. Over time, more and more of the members of the alliance chose to pay their dues in cash rather than go to the trouble of furnishing warships. The alliance’s funds were kept on the centrally-located island of Delos, in the group of islands in the Aegean Sea called the Cyclades, where they were placed under the guardianship of the god Apollo, to whom the whole island of Delos was sacred. Historians today refer to the alliance as the Delian League because its treasury was originally located on Delos.
The warship of the time was a narrow vessel built for speed called a trireme(“triple-banks-of-oars ship”), a name derived from its having three tiers of oarsmen on each side for propulsion in battle. One hundred and eighty rowers were needed to propel a trireme, which fought mainly by ramming enemy ships with a metal-clad ram attached to the bow and thus sinking them by puncturing their hulls below the water line. Triremes also carried a complement of about twenty officers and marines; the marines, armed as infantry, could board enemy ships. Effective battle tactics in triremes required extensive training and physical conditioning of the crews. Most member states of the Delian League preferred to pay their annual dues in cash instead of furnishing triremes because it was beyond their capacities to build ships as specialized as triremes and to train crews in the intricate teamwork required to work triple banks of oars in battle maneuvers. Athens was far richer and more populous than most of its allies in the Delian League, and it not only had the shipyards and craftsmen to build triremes in numbers but also a large pool of poorer men eager to earn pay as rowers. Therefore, Athens built and manned most of the alliance’s triremes, using the dues of allies to supplement its own contribution.
Since Athens supplied the largest number of warships in the fleet of the Delian League, the balance of power in the League came firmly into the hands of the Athenian assembly, whose members decided how Athenian ships were to be employed. Members of the League had no effective recourse if they disagreed with decisions made for the League as a whole under Athenian leadership. Athens, for instance, could compel the League to send its ships to force reluctant allies to go on paying dues if they stopped making their annual payments. The most egregious instance of such compulsion was the case of the city-state of the island of Thasos which, in 465 B.C, unilaterally withdrew from the Delian League after a dispute with Athens over gold mines on the neighboring mainland. To compel the Thasians to keep their sworn agreement to stay in the League, the Athenians led the fleet of the Delian League, including ships from other member states, against Thasos. The attack turned into a protracted siege, which finally ended after three years’ campaigns in 463 B.C. with the island’s surrender. As punishment, the League forced Thasos to pull down its defensive walls, give up its navy, and pay enormous dues and fines. As Thucydides observed, rebellious allies like the Thasians “lost their independence,” making the Athenians as the League’s leaders “no longer as popular as they used to be.”
The Athenian-dominated Delian League enjoyed success after success against the Persians in the 470s and 460s. Within twenty years after the rout of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis in 479, almost all Persian garrisons had been expelled from the Greek world and the Persian fleet driven from the Aegean. Although the Persian heartland was not threatened by these setbacks, Persia ceased to be a threat to Greeks for the next fifty years. Athens meanwhile grew stronger from its share of the spoils captured from Persian outposts and the dues paid by its members. By the middle of the fifth century B.C., League members’ dues alone totaled an amount equivalent to perhaps $200,000,000 in contemporary terms (based on the assumption of $80 as the average daily pay of a worker today). For a state the size of Athens (around 30,000 to 40,000 adult male citizens at the time), this annual income meant prosperity.
The male citizens meeting in the assembly decided how to spend the city-state’s income. Rich and poor alike had a self-interest in keeping the the fleet active and the allies paying for it. Well-heeled aristocrats like Cimon (c. 510-450 B.C.), the son of Miltiades the victor of the battle of Marathon, could enhance their social status by commanding successful League campaigns and then spending their share of the spoils on benefactions to Athens. The numerous Athenian men of lesser means who rowed the Delian League’s ships came to depend on the income they earned on League expeditions. The allies were given no choice but to acquiesce to Athenian wishes on League policy. The men of Athens insisted on freedom for themselves, but they failed to preserve it for the member states in the alliance that had been born in the fight for just this sort of freedom from domination by others. In this way, alliance was transformed into empire, despite Athenian support of democratic governments in some allied city-states previously ruled by oligarchies. From the Athenian point of view, this transformation was justified because, by keeping the allies in line, the alliance remained strong enough to do its job of protecting Greece from the Persians.
Since poorer men powered Athens’ fleet as rowers and since Athenian empire rested on naval power, the military and political importance of poorer men grew at Athens in the decades following the Persian Wars. As these poorer citizens came to recognize that they provided the foundation of Athenian security and prosperity, they evidently felt the time had come to make the administration of justice at Athens just as democratic as the process of making policy and passing laws in the assembly, which was open to all male citizens over eighteen years old. Equally democratic in its selection was the membership of the council of 500 (boule), which prepared the assembly’s agenda and performed other public business including some judicial functions. The council was filled each year by drawing lots to select the year’s membership in the council from among male citizens over thirty years of age. The use of the lot was felt to be democratic because it gave an equal chance to all eligible men to be selected for government office. Although at this time the assembly could serve as a court of appeals, most judicial verdicts were rendered by the city-state’s nine annual magistrates (archons) and the Areopagus council of ex-magistrates. The nine annual magistrates, officials who saw to much of the administration of the city-state, had been chosen by lot rather than by election since 487 B.C. The use of the lot made access to those offices a matter of random and therefore democratic chance rather than liable to domination by wealthy aristocrats, who could afford major electoral campaigns. But even democratically selected magistrates were susceptible to corruption, as were the members of the Areopagus. A different judicial system was needed if those men who decided cases were to be insulated from pressure by socially prominent people and from bribery by those rich enough to buy a favorable verdict. That laws were enacted by democratically constituted bodies meant little if those same laws were not applied fairly and honestly.
The pressure to reform the judicial system reached the boiling point when a crisis in foreign affairs heated up Athenian politics. The crisis began in 465 B.C. with a tremendous earthquake in Laconia, the territory of the Spartans in the Peloponnese. It killed so many Spartans that the helots in Messenia instigated a massive revolt. Messenia was the large region of the Peloponnesus bordering Spartan territory on the west, which the Spartans had conquered in the eighth and seventh centuries and whose formerly free inhabitants they had enslaved as helots to farm the land for the benefit of the Spartans. By 462 B.C. the revolt had become so serious that the Spartans, swallowing their considerable pride, appealed to Athens for military help, despite the chill that had fallen over relations between Athens and Sparta since the days of their cooperation against the Persians. The tension between the former allies was caused by rebellious members of the Delian League like the Thasians, who had received at least moral support from the leaders at Sparta. Spartan leaders apparently felt that Athens, as the head of the Delian League, was growing powerful enough someday to threaten Spartan interests in the Peloponnese. Cimon, the hero of the Delian League’s campaigns, marshaled all his prestige to persuade a reluctant Athenian assembly to send hoplites to help the Spartans in 462 B.C. Cimon, like many Athenian aristocrats, had always admired the Spartans, and he was renowned for registering his opposition to proposals in the assembly by saying, “But that is not what the Spartans would do.”(This quotation is attributed to the fifth-century author Stesimbrotus) His Spartan friends let him down, however, by soon changing their minds and sending him and his army home. The Spartans feared that the democratically inclined Athenian soldiers might decide to help the helots (who were fellow Greeks) escape from Spartan domination.
The humiliating rejection by Sparta of their help outraged the men of Athens and provoked hostile relations between the two states. The disgrace the rejection brought to Cimon carried over to his fellow aristocrats in general, thereby establishing a political climate ripe for further democratic reforms. An Athenian named Ephialtes promptly seized the moment in 461 B.C. and convinced the assembly to pass measures limiting the power of the Areopagus. More importantly, his reforms set up a judicial system of courts manned by male citizens over thirty years old chosen by lot for each case. The reforms made it virtually impossible to influence or bribe the citizen jurors because 1) all trials were concluded in one day, and 2) juries were large (from several hundred to several thousand). There was no judge to instruct the jurors, nor any lawyers to harangue them – only an official to keep fights from breaking out. Jurors made up their own minds after hearing speeches made by the plaintiffs and defendants, who spoke on their own behalf and sometimes called their friends and supporters to do so. The accuser and the accused, although they were required to speak for themselves, might pay someone else to compose their speech to the court, which they then delivered as if it consisted of their own words. A majority vote of the jurors ruled, and there was no appeal from the decision of the court.
The structure of the new court system reflected the underlying principles of what scholars today call the “radical” democracy of Athens in the Golden Age of the mid-fifth century B.C. In that system, candidates for the office of general (strategos) and a few other offices competed in elections for their annual offices because their posts required special competencies. Most posts in Athenian government, however, were filled by lot from among the adult male citizen body. All adult male citizens could attend the assembly, which met in regular session about forty times a year, to propose, discuss, and vote on legislation. The egalitarian nature of Athenian radical democracy depended on a set of principles, which was not without its own internal tensions: 1) wide-spread participation by a cross-section of male citizens in government and the administration of justice, 2) selection of participants at random for most public offices, 3) elaborate precautions to prevent corruption and strict procedures for reviewing the performance in office of officials, 4) equal protection under the law for citizens regardless of wealth, 5) some legal restrictions on citizen women, 6) privilege being given to the interest of the majority when that interest was in conflict with the interest of any minority or individual, while maintaining at the same time 7) a firm respect for the freedom of the individual.
The potential conflict between Athenian radical democracy’s principle of privileging the interest of the majority while valuing the freedom of the individual can be seen most dramatically in the official procedure for exiling a man from Athens for ten years. Every year the assembly voted whether to go through this procedure, which was called ostracism (from the word ostrakon, meaning a piece of broken pottery, the material used for ballots). If the vote was affirmative, all male citizens on a predetermined day could cast a ballot on which they had scratched the name of the man they thought should be exiled. If 6,000 ballots were cast, whichever man was mentioned on the greatest number of them was compelled to leave Attica for ten years. He suffered no other penalty, and his family and property could remain behind undisturbed. It is important to emphasize that ostracism was not a criminal penalty: men returning from ostracism enjoyed undiminished rights as citizens. Ostracism served different purposes. The first ostracisms, for example, which occurred in the 480s B.C., were intended to protect democracy, after the appearance of the ex-tyrant Hippias with the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C. had spread the fear that someone might try to reestablish tyranny in place of democracy. Ostracism could also serve as a mechanism for placing blame on an individual for a failed policy that the assembly had originally supported. Cimon, for example was made the scapegoat for the disastrous Athenian attempt to cooperate militarily with Sparta during the helot revolt of the late 460s and therefore ostracized. Ostracism was not undertaken casually, it seems, at least not if one judges from the number of men ostracized in the fifth century. The total of men ostracized probably amounted to no more than a total of a dozen or two. Ostracism fell into disuse after about 416 B.C. because the procedure was discredited by the discovery of a conspiracy by two prominent politicians, Alcibiades and Nicias, to manipulate the process to keep themselves from being ostracized.
The threat ostracism was meant to combat could also come from a man’s great personal prominence, if he became so prominent that he could appear to overshadow all others on the political scene and thus threaten the egalitarian principles of Athenian democracy, in which no one man was supposed to dominate the making of policy. This point is illustrated by a famous anecdote concerning Aristides, who set the dues for the Delian League. This Aristides had the nickname “The Just” because he was reputed to be so fair-minded. On the balloting day for an ostracism, an illiterate man from the countryside handed Aristides a potsherd, asking him to scratch on it the name of the man’s choice for ostracism. “Certainly,” said Aristides; “Which name shall I write?” “Aristides,” replied the countryman. “Very well,” remarked Aristides as he proceeded to inscribe his own name. “But tell me, why do you want to ostracize Aristides? What has he done to you?” “Oh, nothing; I don’t even know him,” sputtered the man. “I’m just sick and tired of hearing everybody refer to him as ‘The Just.’”
The anecdote about Aristides and the illiterate voter may well be apocryphal, but Aristides was indeed ostracized in 482 B.C. (and recalled early in 480 B.C. to fight the Persians). Nevertheless, it makes a valid point: the Athenian political system assumed that the right way to protect democracy was, even in cases in which an individual might be unfairly penalized, to rely on the judgment of the mass of ordinary male citizens as expressed in a majority vote. This conviction required making allowances for irresponsible types like the kind of man depicted in the story about Aristides. It rested on the belief that the cumulative political wisdom of the majority of male citizens would outweigh the eccentricity and irresponsibility of the few. And personal prominence certainly did not usually lead to ostracism. Pericles, the most prominent and famous of Athenian political leaders of the fifth century, was never ostracized, even though his political opponents apparently tried to use that procedure against him on at least one occasion. Pericles presumably avoided ostracism because the majority of the voters approved of his policies and because he was able to outmaneuver his opponents by rallying popular support when they tried to get him ostracized.
The idea that democracy was best served by involving a cross-section of the male citizenry received further backing in the 450s B.C. from the measures proposed to the assembly by a wealthy aristocract named Pericles (c. 495-429 B.C.), whose mother had been the niece of the famous democratic reformer Cleisthenes. Pericles successfully proposed that state revenues be used to pay a daily stipend to men who served on juries, in the Council of the Five Hundred, and in other public offices filled by lot. The stipend was modest, in fact less than a skilled worker could have made on a good day. Without the stipend, however, poorer men would have found it virtually impossible to leave their regular work to serve in these positions, which required much of a man’s time. By contrast, the board of ten annually elected generals – the most influential public officials, who had broad responsibilities for the city-state’s military, civil, and financial affairs – were to receive no stipends despite the heavy demands of their post. Mainly rich men like Pericles won election as generals because they were supposed to have been able to afford the education and training required to handle this top job and to have the personal wealth to serve without financial compensation. They were compensated by the prestige conferred by election to their office. Like Cleisthenes before him, Pericles was an aristocrat who became the most influential leader in the Athens of his era by devising innovations to strengthen the egalitarian tendencies of Athenian democracy. Pericles and others of his economic status had inherited enough wealth to spend their time in politics without worrying about money, but remuneration for poorer men serving in public offices was an essential foundation of Athenian democracy, if it was truly going to be open to the majority of men, who, along with their wives and children, had to work to support themselves and their families. Above all, Pericles’ proposal that jurors receive state stipends made him overwhelmingly popular with the mass of ordinary male citizens. Consequently, he was able to introduce dramatic changes in Athenian domestic and foreign policy beginning in the 450s B.C.
In 451 B.C. Pericles introduced one of most striking proposals with his sponsorship of a law stating that henceforth citizenship would be conferred only on children whose mother and father both were Athenians. Previously, the offspring of Athenian men who married non-Athenian women were granted citizenship. Aristocratic men in particular had tended to marry rich foreign women, as Pericles’ own maternal grandfather had done. Pericles’ new law enhanced the status of Athenian mothers and made Athenian citizenship a more exclusive category, definitively setting Athenians off from all others. Not long thereafter, a review of the citizenship rolls was conducted to expel any who had claimed citizenship fraudulently. Together these actions served to limit the number of citizens and thus limit dilution of the advantages which citizenship in Athens’ radical democracy conveyed on those included in the citizenry. Those advantages included, for men, the freedom to participate in politics and juries, to influence decisions that directly affected their lives, to have equal protection under the law, and to own land and houses in Athenian territory. Citizen women had less rights because they were excluded from politics, had to have a male legal guardian (kurios), who, for example, spoke for them in court, and were not legally entitled to make large financial transactions on their own. They could, however, control property and have their financial interests protected in law suits. Like men, they were entitled to the protection of the law regardless of their wealth. Both female and male citizens experienced the advantage of belonging to a city-state that was enjoying unparalleled material prosperity. Citizens clearly saw themselves as the elite residents of Athens.
Once he had gained political prominence in the 450s at Athens, Pericles devoted his attention to foreign policy as well as domestic proposals. His intial foreign policy encompassed dual goals: 1) continuing military action against the Persian presence in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean and 2) greater attention to Athenian relations and disputes with other Greek states. This latter part of his policy reflected above all the growing hostility between Athens and Sparta. Hostilities with Sparta and its allies had become more and more frequent following the rebuff of Cimon’s expedition to Sparta in 462 B.C. The former part of the policy suffered a severe setback when a campaign to liberate Egypt from Persian control ended with the catastrophic loss of over two hundred ships and their crews in 454 B.C. The Delian League treasury was thereupon transferred to Athens from Delos to move it farther away from a potential Persian raid. The decision to move the alliance’s funds, apparently taken unilaterally, confirmed Athens’ absolute superiority over the other allies. Even after the Egyptian disaster the Athenian assembly did not immediately renounce further action against the Persians. Cimon, now returned from the exile imposed by his ostracism, was in fact sent out in charge of a major naval expedition to the eastern Mediterranean to try to pry the large island of Cyprus from Persian control. When he was killed on this campaign in 450 B.C., however, the assembly apparently decided not to send out any further overseas expeditions against Persian territory. Rather, Athens would focus its military efforts on containing Spartan power in Greece and preventing the Delian League from disintegrating through revolts of allies. When neither Sparta nor Athens was able to achieve a clear-cut dominance in Greece in the battles that followed in the early 440s, Pericles in 445 engineered a peace treaty with Sparta designed to freeze the current balance of power in Greece for thirty years and thus preserve Athenian dominance in the Delian League.
After making peace with Sparta in 445, Pericles was free to turn his attention to his political rivals at Athens, who were jealous of his dominant influence over the board of ten annually elected generals, the highest magistrates of Athenian democracy. When the voters in 443 expressed their approval of Pericles’ policies by choosing to ostracize not him but rather his chief political rival, Thucydides (not the same man as the historian of the same name), Pericles’ overwhelming political prominence was confirmed. He was thereafter elected general fifteen years in a row. His ascendancy was again challenged, however, on the grounds that he mishandled the revolt in 441-439 of Samos, a valuable and consistently loyal Athenian ally in the Delian League. Instead of seeking a diplomatic solution to the dispute, Pericles quickly opted for a military response. A brutal struggle ensued that extended over three campaigning seasons and inflicted bloody losses on both sides before the Samians were forced to capitulate. With his judgment under attack for this incident, Pericles soon faced an even greater challenge as relations with Sparta worsened in the mid-430s. When the Spartans finally threatened war unless the Athenians ceased their support of some rebellious Spartan allies, Pericles prevailed upon the assembly to refuse all compromises. His critics claimed he was sticking to his hard line against Sparta and insisting on provoking a war in order to revive his fading popularity by whipping up a jingoistic furor in the assembly. Pericles retorted that no accommodation to Spartan demands was possible because Athens’ freedom of action was at stake. By 431 B.C. the Thirty Years’ Peace made in 445 B.C. had been shattered beyond repair. The protracted Peloponnesian War (as modern historians call it) began in that year, not to end until 404 B.C., and ultimately put an end to the Athenian Golden Age.
The Peloponnesian War put a stop to the most spectacular demonstration of the confidence and pride that Pericles and his fellow citizens felt in their city-state during the height of the Golden Age in the 440s and 430s B.C. In the early 440s B.C. the assembly accepted Pericles’ recommendation to initiate a public building program of temples and other structures in public religious sanctuaries on a scale seldom before seen in a Greek city-state. The new buildings seemed spectacular not only because they were expensive but also because their large scale, decoration, and surrounding open spaces contrasted so vividly with the private architecture of Athens in the fifth century B.C.
Athenians lived in a variety of different kinds of private dwellings in the city proper, in its densely populated suburb around the main harbor of Piraeus, in villages of varying sizes scattered throughout the countryside of Attica, and, occasionally, in isolated farmsteads. The majority of city and suburban dwellers lived in apartment buildings, which could be several stories high. Most apartment dwellers probably crowded themselves and their families into no more space than a room or two, which they rented from the building’s owner, because they could not afford a very high rent. Wealthier people in the city owned individual homes, but they frequently had a house and land in the countryside, too. Dwellers in the countryside owned or rented houses that varied in size from tiny bungalows to larger structures perhaps on the scale of a small modern house that might be accompanied by other farm buildings such as sheds. Indeed, Athenian private houses in both in the city and the country were generally modest in size.
Archaeology has not been able to reveal much detail about the homes of residents of Athens because the modern city covers the remains of almost all the residential districts of the ancient city and thus inhibits excavation. Nevertheless, we know that homes in ancient Athens were wedged haphazardly against one another along narrow, winding streets. Even the residences of rich people followed the same basic design of bedrooms, storerooms, and dining rooms grouped around open-air courtyards. Some houses had more than one story. The women and men of the household usually had rooms set apart for their separate use, especially if there were infants or small children in the family. These youngsters would be looked after in the women’s quarters, but all members of the household would see each other frequently despite the notional division of the interior space of the home by gender and age. The architectural tradition of grouping the house’s rooms around a courtyard facilitated contact among all the members of the household, who included the slaves of the family. Wall paintings or works of art were as yet uncommon as decoration in private homes. infants or small children Sparse furnishings and simple furniture were the rule. Water for household needs had to be fetched from public fountains. This onerous and constant work was performed by women and the household’s slaves. Sanitary facilities usually consisted of a pit dug just outside the front door. The pits were emptied by collectors paid to dump manure outside the city at a distance set by law.
The rich citizens of Athens were expected to benefit the public as a whole by spending their own money to increase the amenities of life for all. In the case of the civic duties called liturgies (“work for the people; public service”), the wealthy were legally obligated to provide financial benefits to the city-state. Especially costly liturgies included duties such as paying the costs of putting on drama in the annual public festivals of Athens or financing and serving as an officer on a warship in the city-state’s fleet. In other cases the wealthy provided benefactions that were not obligatory but nevertheless also displayed their civic mindedness and generosity toward their fellow citizens. Such benefactions included providing animals for public sacrifices and the feasting on their roasted meat that followed and constructing public buildings and other architectural improvements in the city. Although the costs of liturgies and benefactions, which could be heavy, obviously were a drain on the resources of a family as a whole, they were normally performed in the name of the male head of the household. Spending generously to provide benefits for the common good was regarded as a primary component of male aristocratic virtue. Generous benefactors of the public earned increased social eminence as their reward and perhaps greater favor with their fellow male citizens when they ran for elective office, such as that of general. Liturgies and benefactions performed by the rich in the interest of the city compensated to a certain extent for the lack of any regular income or property taxes.
Cimon, an aristocratic and wealthy man, gained great fame for his costly benefactions to his fellow citizens. He was renowned, for example, for opening his orchards to let others pick whatever they wanted, but his most famous benefactions were architectural. He paid to have landscaping with shade trees and running tracks installed in open areas of Athens, and he also footed the enormous bill for the construction of footings for defensive walls to link the urban center of Athens and the harbor at Piraeus some seven kilometers away. Cimon’s brother-in-law also participated in the family tradition of benefiting Athens by paying for highly-visible public building projects. He had built as a gift to the city the renowned Painted Stoa. Stoas were narrow, colonnaded buildings open along one side, whose purpose was to provide shelter from sun or rain for these conversations. The Painted Stoa stood on the edge of the central open area, the agora, at the center of the city. The agora served both as a market area where merchants could set up small stalls and as a gathering place for Athenian men to discuss politics and every other issue affecting their lives in the city-state. It was the commercial and social heart of Athens. The crowds of men who came to the agora daily for conversation would cluster inside the Painted Stoa, whose walls were decorated with paintings of great moments in Greek history commissioned from the most famous painters of the time, Polygnotus and Mikon. That one of the stoa’s paintings portrayed the battle of Marathon in which Cimon’s father, Miltiades, had won glory was only appropriate, since the building had been paid for by the husband of Cimon’s sister, probably with financial assistance from Cimon himself.
Although rich Athenians sometimes personally financed the construction of buildings for the use of the public in classical Athens in keeping with the tradition that the wealthy should benefit their city-state, the most conspicuous and ultimately most famous architectural monuments of the fifth century were paid for by public revenues. Athens received revenues from many indirect taxes such as harbor fees and sales taxes. The extent to which Athens may have benefited from the tribute paid by the allies in the Delian League remains controversial because the ancient sources offer no detailed picture of the ways in which the tribute was expended. Some scholars think that Athens used part of the League funds, which were stored on the acropolis after the League’s treasury was moved to Athens from the island of Delos in 454, to help finance the massive public building program initiated by Pericles in 447. Others argue, however, that the ancient evidence does not support this view.
The scale of Athenian public buildings varied according to the amount and kind of space required to fulfill their function. The complex of buildings on the agora’s southwestern edge, for instance, consisted of modest-sized structures such as that in which the city-state’s council of 500 held its frequent meetings and the public archives were kept. The larger meetings of the assembly, for which 6,000 attendees seems to have represented a quorum, did not take place in a building at all but rather convened in the open air on a hillside above the agora. There the architectural modifications were minimal: a speaker’s platform hewn from the rock of the hillside, a retaining wall built up at the rear of the meeting area, and, eventually, a portico along the sides of the open area.
In 447 Pericles instigated a building project in Athens whose scale, cost, and magnificence provoked comment and controversy in its own time and has contributed enormously in later ages to the reputation of the Golden Age of Greece. The focus of the project’s construction was the Athenian acropolis. The acropolis (“upper city” or “city-height”) was the massive, mesa-like promontory that rose abruptly from the plain on which the city was built and towered over its center, the agora below. Here the original settlers of Athens had made their homes, and only slowly had the city expanded onto the plain at the foot of the looming citadel. A single access road, the “Sacred Way”, wound up the slope from the agora to the acropolis and passed through a gate near the top at its western end. The two most conspicuous monuments constructed on the acropolis under Pericles’ program were a huge marble temple of Athena (called the Parthenon) and a mammoth gate building (called the propylaia) straddling the western entrance to the acropolis. The purpose of the Parthenon was to house a costly new image of the goddess, over thirty feet high and made of gold and ivory. Elaborate carved sculptures decorated the outside of the Parthenon, which was surrounded by a colonnade of fluted columns. The propylaia, too, had columns, and one of its rooms apparently housed paintings, rather like a modern museum.
The Parthenon and the propylaia alone easily cost more than the equivalent of a billion dollars in contemporary terms, a phenomenal sum for an ancient Greek city-state. The finances for the program perhaps came in part from the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League, although scholars debate to what extent allied funds were used. Funds certainly came from the financial reserves of the goddess, whose sanctuaries, like those of the other gods throughout Greece, received both private donations and public support. Pericles’ program was so expensive, however, that his political enemies among the aristocrats railed at him for squandering public funds and ruining the city-state’s budget. In response to the criticism, Pericles brought the issue before the assembly of male citizens: “Do you think I have spent too much?” he reportedly asked. “Entirely too much,” they shouted back. “Fine,” he retorted, “I will pay for the buildings myself and put my name on them instead of the people’s.” Shamed by the implication that they lacked pride in their city-state, the men in the assembly immediately changed their minds. In an uproar they authorized Pericles to spare no expense in spending public funds to finish the project.
The new temple built for Athena on the acropolis became known as the Parthenon, meaning “the house of the virgin goddess,” from the Greek word for a virginal female, parthenos. As the patron goddess of Athens, Athena had long possessed another sanctuary on the acropolis. Its focus was an olive tree regarded as the sacred symbol of the goddess, who was believed to provide for the economic health of the Athenians. Athena’s temple in this earlier sanctuary had largely been destroyed by the Persians in the invasion of 480 B.C. For thirty years, the Athenians purposely left the Acropolis in ruins as a memorial to the sacrifice of their homeland in that war. When Pericles urged the rebuilding of the Acropolis’ temples, the assembly turned not to reconstruction of the olive-tree sanctuary, but rather to construction of the Parthenon. The Parthenon honored Athena not in her capacity as the provider of economic prosperity but as a warrior serving as the divine champion of Athenian military power. Inside the Parthenon, the gold and ivory statue, over thirty feet high, portrayed the goddess in battle armor and holding in her outstretched hand a six-foot statue of the figure of Victory (Nike in Greek).
Like all Greek temples, the Parthenon itself was meant as a house for its deity, not as a gathering place for worshippers. In its general design, the Parthenon was representative of the standard architecture of Greek temples: a rectangular box on a raised platform, a plan that the Greeks probably derived from the stone temples of Egypt. The box, which had only one relatively small door at the front, was fenced in columns all around. Normally only priests and priestesses could enter the box-like interior of the temple; public religious ceremonies took place around the open-air altar, which was located outside the east end of the temple. The soaring columns of the Parthenon were carved in the simple style called Doric, in contrast to the more elaborately decorative Ionic or Corinthian styles that have often been imitated in modern buildings. The facade of the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., for example, is built in the Corinthian-style.
The Parthenon was special in its great size and elaborate decoration. Constructed from 20,000 tons of Attic marble, it stretched nearly 230 feet in length and a hundred feet wide, with eight columns across the ends instead of the six normally employed in Doric style, and seventeen instead of thirteen along the sides. These dimensions gave it a massive look conveying an impression of power. Since perfectly rectilinear architecture appears curved to the human eye, the Parthenon’s architects ingeniously designed subtle curves and inclines in its architecture to produce an optical illusion of completely straight lines: the columns were given a slight bulge in their middles; the corner columns on the corners of the temple’s raised platform were installed at a slight incline and closer together; the platform itself was made slightly convex. These technical refinements made the Parthenon appear ordered and regular in a way a building built entirely on straight lines would not. By overcoming the distortions of nature, the Parthenon’s sophisticated architecture made a confident statement about human ability to construct order out of the entropic disorder of the natural world.
The sculptural decoration of the Parthenon also proclaimed Athenian confidence about their city-state’s relationship with the gods, whom the citizens regarded as their helpers and supporters. The Parthenon had sculptured panels along its exterior above the columns and tableaux of sculptures in the triangular spaces (pediments) underneath the roof line at both ends of the building. These decorations were part of the Doric architectural style, but the Parthenon also presented a unique sculptural feature. Carved in relief around the top of the walls inside the porch formed by the columns along the edges of the building’s platform was a continuous band of figures. This sort of continuous frieze was usually put only on Ionic-style buildings. Adding an Ionic frieze to a Doric temple was a striking change meant to attract notice to its subject. The Parthenon’s frieze depicted the Athenian religious ritual in which a procession of citizens paraded to the Acropolis to present to Athena in her olive-tree sanctuary a new robe woven by specially selected Athenian girls (the Panathenaic festival). Depicting the procession in motion, like a filmstrip in stone, the frieze showed men riding spirited horses, women walking along carrying sacred implements, and the gods gathering together at the head of the parade to observe their human worshippers. As usual in the sculptural decoration on Greek temples, the Parthenon frieze sparkled with brightly colored paint enlivening the figures and the background. Shiny metal attachments also brightened the picture, serving, for example, as the horsemen’s reins.
No other city-state had ever before gone beyond the traditional function of temples in paying honor and glorifying its special deities by adorning, as the Athenians did on the Parthenon, a temple with representations of its citizens. Previously, the closest temples had come to a reference of such local significance had been to place sculptures in their pediments that depicted mythological scenes with particular meaning for the people of the locale in which temple had been built. The Parthenon, indeed, had such scenes in its pediments. The sculptures of the east pediment portrayed the birth of Athena, the patron deity of the Athenians, while the west pediment portrayed Athena and Poseidon, god of the sea, engaged in a contest to see who would become the patron deity of the Athenians by bestowing on them the greater blessing. The Parthenon frieze, however, achieved a new level of local reference. It made a unique statement about the relationship between Athens and the gods by showing its citizens in the company of the gods, even if the assembled deities carved in the frieze at the temple’s eastern end were understood to be separated from and perhaps invisible to the humans in the procession depicted in the frieze. A temple adorned with pictures of citizens, albeit idealized citizens of perfect physique and beauty, amounted to a claim of special intimacy between the city-state and the gods, a statement of confidence that these honored deities favored the Athenians. Presumably this claim reflected the Athenian interpretation of their success in helping to turn back the Persians, in achieving leadership of a powerful naval alliance, and in controlling, from their silver mines and the allies’ dues, an amount of revenue which made Athens richer than all its neighbors in mainland Greece. The Parthenon, like the rest of the Periclean building program, paid honor to the gods with whom the city-state was identified and expressed the Athenian view that the gods looked favorably on their empire. Their success, the Athenians would have said, proved that the gods were on their side.
Unprecedented changes occurred in many areas of the lives of the Athenians in the Golden Age, but at the same time central aspects of Athenian society remained unchanged. The result was a mix of innovation and continuity. The most conspicuous continuity was in traditional Greek religion, which permeated public and private life. For most people, their religious beliefs and practices remained largely the same as they had always been. One of the most striking cultural changes of the period, on the other hand, come with the development of tragic drama as a publicly supported art form performed before mass audiences. Artists as well as dramatists were experimenting with new techniques and approaches in this period, too, and artistic developments in free-standing sculpture provide the clearest demonstration of the innovation and variety in the depiction of the human form that characterized Greek art in the fifth century.
The Athenians’ attitude in the mid-fifth century B.C. about their fortunate relationship to the gods corresponded to the basic tenet of traditional Greek religion: humans both as individuals and as groups paid honors to the gods to thank them for blessings received and to receive blessings in return. Those honors consisted of sacrifices, gifts to the gods’ sanctuaries, and festivals of songs, dances, prayers, and processions. A seventh-century B.C. bronze statuette, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, which a man named Mantiklos gave to a (now unknown) sanctuary of Apollo to honor the god, makes clear why individuals gave such gifts. On the statuette’s legs Mantiklos inscribed his understanding of the transaction: “Mantiklos gave this from his share to the Far Darter of the Silver Bow [i.e., Apollo]; now you, Apollo, do something for me in return.” This idea of reciprocity between gods and humans underlay the Greek understanding of the divine. Gods did not love human beings, except sometimes literally in mythological stories of gods taking earthly lovers and producing half-divine children. Rather, gods supported humans who paid them honor and avoided offending them. Gods whom humans offended sent calamities in response, such as famines, earthquakes, epidemic diseases, or defeat in war.
The Greeks believed that their gods lived easy lives, sometimes exposed to pain in their dealings with one another but essentially care-free in their immortality. The twelve most important of the gods, headed by Zeus, were conceived as assembling for banquets atop Mount Olympus, the highest peak in mainland Greece. They are known as the Olympic pantheon (“collectivity of gods”). They as well as some other, lesser deities were conceived in anthropomorphic form, both female and male. Like the human aristocrats of the stories of Homer, the gods were much concerned with slights to their honor. “I am well aware that the gods are full of envy and disruptive towards humans,” is the Athenian Solon’s summary of their nature in one of the many (and probably fictitious) anecdotes in which he is portrayed as giving advice to another famous person, in this case the Lydian king Croesus before he lost his kingdom to the Persians. Seers, prophets, diviners, oracles, dreams – all these agents were regarded as clues to what humans might have done to anger the gods. Offenses could be those of omission, such as forgetting a sacrifice, or of commission, such as violating the sanctity of a temple area or breaking an oath or sworn agreement made to another person. The gods were regarded as especially concerned with certain transgressions (such as oaths), but as generally not bothering with common crimes, which humans had to police for themselves. Homicide, however, the gods were thought to punish by casting a state of pollution (miasma, as it was called) upon murderers and upon all those around them as well. Unless the members of the affected group took steps to purify themselves by punishing the murderer, they could all expect to suffer divine punishment such as bad harvests or disease.
The greatest difficulty for humans lay in anticipating what might offend a god. Fortunately, some of the gods’ expectations were codified in a moral order with rules of behavior for human beings. For example, the Greeks believed that the gods demanded hospitality for strangers and proper burial for family members and that the gods punished human arrogance and murderous violence. Oracles, dreams, divination, and the prophecies of seers were all regarded as clues as to what humans might have done to anger the gods. Offenses could be forgetting a sacrifice, violating the sanctity of a temple area, or breaking an oath or sworn agreement made to another person.
Humans made sacrifices and offerings to sanctuaries to honor and to thank the gods for blessings and to propitiate them when misfortune struck and was interpreted as a sign of divine anger at human behavior. Offerings could consist of works of art, money, and other valuables. Private individuals could offer sacrifices to the gods at home with the members of the household gathered around, sometimes including the family’s slaves. The sacrifices of public cults were conducted at the open-air altars of the city-state’s temples by priests and priestesses, who were in most cases chosen from the citizen body as a whole. The priests and priestesses of Greek cult were usually attached to a particular sanctuary or shrine and did not unite to influence political or social matters. Their special and essential knowledge consisted of knowing how to perform the gods’ rites according to tradition. They were not guardians of theological orthodoxy, as we might describe a function of some clergy today, because Greek religion had no systematic theology or canonical dogma, nor any institutions comparable to today’s religious institutions to oversee doctrine.
Different cults had differing rituals, but sacrifice served as their centering experience. Sacrifices ranged from the bloodless offering of fruits, vegetables, and small cakes to the slaughter of large animals. The tradition of animal sacrifice may have descended from the practice of prehistoric hunters, who perhaps felt that they might somehow suffer retribution from supernatural powers for taking the lives of animals, living creatures like themselves, to feed themselves and their human community. The rite of sacrifice perhaps expressed their uneasiness about the paradox of having to kill animals in order to secure the means to keep themselves alive and their consequent attempt to show respect and honor to the divine forces concerned with animals. The Greeks of the classical period often sacrificed valuable domestic animals such as cattle, which their land supported in only small numbers. Looking back on fifth-century Athens, the orator Lysias explained the necessity for public sacrifice: “Our ancestors handed down to us the most powerful and prosperous community in Greece by performing the prescribed sacrifices. It is therefore proper for us to offer the same sacrifices as they, if only for the sake of the success which has resulted from those rites.”
The ritual of sacrifice provided the primary occasion of contact between the gods and their worshippers. The great majority of sacrifices took place as regularly scheduled events on the community’s civic calendar. At Athens, for example, the first eight days of every month were marked by demonstrations of the citizens’ piety toward the deities of the city-state’s official cults. The third day of each month was celebrated as Athena’s birthday; the sixth as that of Artemis, the goddess of wild animals, who was also the special patroness of the Athenian council of 500; her brother, Apollo, was honored on the following day. Athens boasted of having the largest number of religious festivals in all of Greece, with nearly half the days of the year featuring one, some large and some small. Not everyone attended all the festivals, and hired laborers’ contracts would specify which holidays they received to attend religious ceremonies. Major occasions such as the Panathenaic festival, whose procession was portrayed on the Parthenon frieze, attracted large crowds of men, women, and children. The Panathenaic festival honored Athena not only with sacrifices and parades, but also with contests in music, dancing, poetry, and athletics. Valuable prizes were awarded to the winners. Some festivals were for women only, such as the three-day festival for married women in honor of the goddess Demeter, the protectress of agriculture and life-giving fertility in general.
The sacrifice of a large animal both provided an occasion for the community to reassemble to reaffirm its ties to the divine world and, by the sharing of the roasted meat of the sacrificed animal, for the worshippers to benefit personally from a good relationship with the gods. The feasting that followed a blood sacrifice was especially meaningful in this latter sense because meat was comparatively rare in the Greek diet. The actual sacrificing of the animal proceeded along strict rules meant to ensure the purity of the occasion. The elaborate procedures required for a blood sacrifice show how seriously and solemnly the Greeks regarded the killing of animals for sacrifice. The victim had to be an unblemished domestic animal, specially decorated with garlands, and induced to approach the altar as if of its own volition. The assembled crowd had to maintain a strict silence to avoid possibly impure remarks. The sacrificer sprinkled water on the victim’s head so it would, in shaking its head in response to the sprinkle, appear to consent to its death. After washing his hands, the sacrificer scattered barley grains on the altar fire and the victim’s head and then cut a lock of the animal’s hair to throw on the fire. Following a prayer, he swiftly cut the animal’s throat while musicians played flute-like pipes and female worshippers screamed, presumably to express the group’s ritual sorrow at the victim’s death. The carcass was then butchered, with some portions thrown on the altar fire so their aromatic smoke could waft its way upwards to the god of the cult. The majority of the meat was then distributed among the worshippers.
Greek religion encompassed many activities besides those of the cults of the twelve Olympian deities. In private life, prayers, sacrifices, and rituals marked important occasions like birth, marriage, and death. Ancestors were honored by offerings made at their tombs. Seers were consulted for the meanings of dreams and omens. Magicians offered spells to improve one’s love life or curses to harm one’s enemies. Particularly important both to the community and to individuals were what we call hero-cults, rituals performed at the tomb of a man or woman, usually from the distant past, whose remains were thought to retain special power. This power was local, whether for revealing the future through oracles, for healing injuries and disease, or for providing assistance in war. For example, Athenian soldiers in the battle of Marathon in 490 B.C reported having seen the ghost of the hero Theseus leading the way against the Persians. When Cimon in 475 B.C. brought back to Athens bones alleged to be those of Theseus (who was said to have died on a distant island), the people of Athens celebrated the occasion as a major triumph for their community and had the remains installed in a special shrine at the center of the city. The only hero to whom cults were established internationally all over the Greek world was the strongman Heracles (or Hercules, as his name was later spelled by the Romans), whose superhuman feats in overcoming monsters and generally doing the impossible gave him tremendous appeal as a protector in many city-states.
The mystery cult of Demeter and her daughter Kore (or Persephone) was international in a different sense from that the hero cult of Heracles, which had shrines throughout the Greek world. The cult of Demeter and Kore had a fixed center in its major sanctuary at Eleusis, a settlement on the western coast of Attica, to which worshippers flocked from all over the Greek world. The central rite of this cult was called the Mysteries, a series of ceremonies of initiation into the secret knowledge of the cult. If they were free of pollution, all speakers of Greek from anywhere in the world – women and men, adults and children – were eligible for initiation, as were some slaves who worked in the sanctuary. Initiation proceeded in several stages. The main stage took place during an annual festival lasting almost two weeks. So important were the Eleusinian Mysteries that an international truce of fifty-five days was proclaimed to allow travel to and from the festival even from the distant corners of the Greek world. Initiates expected that they would enjoy added protection from troubles in their lives on earth and also a better fate after death. “Richly blessed is the mortal who has seen these rites; but whoever is not an initiate and has no share in them, never has an equal portion after death, down in the gloomy darkness,” are the words that the sixth-century poem called The Hymn to Demeter uses to describe the benefits of initiation in the Eleusinian Mysteries.
Prospective initiates in the Eleusinian Mysteries participated in a complicated set of ceremonies that culminated in the revelation of Demeter’s central secret after a day of fasting. The revelation was performed in an initiation hall (telesterion) constructed solely for this purpose. Under a roof fifty-five yards square supported on a forest of interior columns, the hall held three thousand people standing around its sides on tiered steps. The most eloquent proof of the sanctity attached to the Mysteries of Demeter and Kore is that, throughout the thousand years during which they were celebrated, we know of no one who ever revealed the secret. To this day, all we know is that it involved something done, something said, and something shown.
The Eleusinian Mysteries were not the only mystery cult of the Greek world, nor were they unique in their concern with what lay beyond death for human beings. Most mystery cults emphasized protection for initiates in their daily lives, whether against ghosts, illness, poverty, shipwrecks, or the countless other everyday dangers of ancient Greek life. Such protection came, however, from appropriate human behavior, not from any abstract belief in the gods. For the ancient Greeks, gods expected honors and rites, and Greek religion required action from its worshippers. Prayers had to be said, sacrifices had to be performed, and purifications had to be undergone. These rituals represented an active response to the precarious conditions of human life in a world in which early death from disease, accident, or war was commonplace. Furthermore, the Greeks believed the same gods were responsible for sending both good and bad. As Solon warned Croesus in an anecdote related by the fifth-century author Herodotus, “In all matters look to the end, and to how it turns out. For god has given prosperous happiness to many people, but afterwards uprooted them utterly.” As a result of their belief in the capability of the gods for bestowing both good and evil on human beings, the Greeks had no expectation that paradise would be achieved at some future time when evil forces would at last be vanquished forever. Their assessment of human existence made no allowance for change in the nature of the relationship between the human and the divine. That relationship encompassed sorrow as well as joy, punishment in the here and now, with the uncertain hope for favored treatment both in this life and in an afterlife for initiates of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
The problematic relationship that Greeks believed existed between gods and humans formed the basis of classical Athens’ most enduring cultural innovation: the tragic dramas performed over the course of three days at the major annual festival held in honor of the god Dionysus. These plays, still read, translated, and produced on stage today around the world, were presented in ancient Athens as part of a drama contest, in keeping with the competitive spirit characteristic of many events held in the gods’ honor. The earliest tragedies were composed in the late sixth century, but Athenian tragedy reached its peak as a dramatic form in the fifth century.
The term tragedy – derived, for reasons now lost, from the Greek words for goat and song – referred to plays with plots that involved fierce conflict and characters that represented powerful forces, both divine and human. Tragedies were written in verse in elevated, solemn language and often based on stories about the violent consequences of the interaction between gods and humans and of conflict among human beings. Tragic plots frequently were mainly constructed from myths, although a few tragedies dealt with contemporary historical events. The plot of a tragedy often ended with a resolution to the trouble, but only after considerable suffering.
The most important presentations of tragedy at Athens took place once a year as part of a competition at the city’s main festival in honor of the god Dionysus. For this festival, one of Athens’ magistrates chose three playwrights to present four plays each. Three were tragedies and one a satyr play, the latter so named because it featured actors portraying the half-human, half-animal (horse or goat) creatures called satyrs. Satyr plays presented versions of the solemn stories of tragedy that were infused with humor and even farce. A board of citizen judges awarded first, second, and third prizes to the competing playwrights at the end of the festival. The performance of Athenian tragedies bore little resemblance to conventional modern theater productions. They took place during the daytime in an outdoor theater sacred to Dionysus, built into the slope of the southern hillside of Athens’ acropolis. This theater of Dionysus held around 14,000 spectators overlooking an open, circular area in front of a slightly raised stage platform. To ensure fairness in the competition, all tragedies were required to have the same size cast, all of whom were men: three actors to play the speaking roles of all male and female characters and fifteen chorus members. Although the chorus’ leader sometimes engaged in dialogue with the actors, the chorus primarily performed songs and dances in the circular area in front of the stage, called the orchestra (“dancing area”). Since all the actors’ lines were in verse with special rhythms, the musical aspect of the chorus’ role enhanced the overall poetic nature of Athenian tragedy.
Even though scenery on the stage was sparse, a good tragedy presented a vivid spectacle. The chorus wore elaborate, decorative costumes and trained hard to perform intricate dance routines. The actors, who wore masks, used broad gestures and booming voices to reach the upper tier of seats. A powerful voice was crucial to a tragic actor because words represented the heart of a tragedy, in which dialogue and long speeches were far more common than physical action. Special effects were, however, part of the spectacle. For example, a crane allowed actors playing the roles of gods to fly suddenly onto stage, like super-heroes in a modern movie. The actors playing the lead roles, called the protagonists (“first competitors”), were also competing against each other for the designation of best actor. So important was it to have a first-rate lead actor to provide a successful tragedy that protagonists were assigned by lot to the competing playwrights of the year to give all three of them an equal chance to have the finest cast. Great protagonists, who had to have prodigious vocal skills, became enormously popular figures, although, unlike many playwrights, they were not usually aristocrats and generally did not move in upper-class social circles, or, if they did have aristocratic friends, they were not on an equal footing with them in terms of social status.
The author of a slate of tragedies in the festival of Dionysus also served as director, producer, musical composer, choreographer, and sometimes even one of the actors. Only men of some wealth could afford the prodigious amounts of time such work demanded because the prizes in the tragedy competition were probably modest. As citizens, playwrights also fulfilled the normal military and political obligations of an Athenian man. The best known Athenian tragedians – Aeschylus (525-456 B.C.), Sophocles (c. 496-406 B.C.), and Euripides (c. 485-406 B.C.) – all either served in the army, held public office at some point in their careers, or they did both. Aeschylus fought at Marathon and Salamis; the epitaph on his tombstone, which says nothing of his great success as a playwright, reveals how highly he valued his contribution to his city-state as a citizen-soldier: “Under this stone lies Aeschylus the Athenian, son of Euphorion... the grove at Marathon and the Persians who landed there were witnesses to his courage.”
Aeschylus’ pride in his military service to his homeland points to a fundamental characteristic of Athenian tragedy: it was at its base a public art form, an expression of the city-state (polis), that explored the ethical quandaries of human beings in conflict with gods and with one another in the context of a polis-like community. Even though variations on stories from the pre-polis past, such as tales of the Trojan War, supplied the plots of most tragedies, the moral issues they illuminated were always presented in the context of the society and obligations of citizens in a polis.
Sophocles’ tragedies were overwhelmingly popular. In a sixty-year career as a playwright, he competed with a series of tragedies about thirty times, winning at least twenty times and never finishing worse than second. Since winning plays were selected by a panel of ordinary male citizens who were influenced by the audience’s reaction, Sophocles’ record clearly means his works appealed to the large number of men who attended the drama competition of the festival of Dionysus. The evidence on whether women attended is contradictory, but they probably were allowed to see dramas. That Sophocles’ plays concerned difficult ethical problems in the context of the polis is significant for understanding the function of Athenian tragedy. We cannot know precisely how the ancient audience interpreted tragedies in general or those of Sophocles in particular, but the spectators can hardly have been unaware that the central characters of the plays were figures who fell into disaster from positions of power and prestige. Their reversals of fortune come about not because they are villains, but because, as human beings, they are susceptible to a lethal mixture of error, ignorance, and hubris (aggressive arrogance).
The Athenian empire was at its height when audiences at Athens were seeing the plays of Sophocles. Indeed, the presentation of the plays at the festival of Dionysus was preceded by a procession in the theater to display the revenues of Athens received from the dues of the allies. Thoughtful spectators would have perhaps reflected on the possibility that Athens’ current power and prestige, managed as it was by human beings, remained hostage to the same forces which, the playwrights taught, controlled the fates of the heroes and heroines of tragedy. Tragedies certainly had appeal because they were engrossing purely as entertainment; but they also had an educative function: to remind its male citizens, those who in the assembly made policy for the polis, that success by its nature engendered problems of a moral complexity too formidable to be fathomed casually or arrogantly.
The relevance that the themes of tragedy could have to issues affecting the city-state even in plays whose plots had ostensibly nothing to do with life in a polis shows up clearly in Sophocles’ play entitled Ajax, presented in the early 440s B.C. The play bore the name of the second-best warrior (Achilles had been preeminent) in the Greek army that besieged Troy in the Trojan War. When his fellow Greek soldiers voted to award the armor of the dead Achilles to the wily Odysseus instead of himself, Ajax went on a berserk rampage against his former friends which the goddess Athena thwarted because Ajax had once rejected her help in battle. Disgraced by his failure to secure revenge Ajax committed suicide. Odysseus then stepped in to convince the Greek chiefs to bury Ajax despite his attempted treachery because the future security of the army and the obligations of friendship demanded that they obey the divine injunction always to bury the dead. Odysseus’ arguments in favor of burying Ajax anachronistically treat the army as if it were a polis, and his use of persuasive speech to achieve accommodation of conflicting individual interests to the benefit of the community corresponds to the way in which disputes in the polis were supposed to be resolved.
In his powerful play of 441 B.C. entitled Antigone, Sophocles presented a drama of harsh conflict between the family’s moral obligation to bury its dead in obedience to divine command and the male-dominated city-state’s need to preserve its order and defend its values. Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, the now-deceased former king of Thebes, comes into conflict with her uncle, the new ruler, when he forbids the burial of one of Antigone’s two brothers on the grounds he had been a traitor. This brother had attacked Thebes after the other brother had broken an agreement to share the kingship. Both brothers died in the ensuing battle, but Antigone’s uncle had allowed the burial only of the brother who had remained in power. When Antigone brazenly defies her uncle by symbolically burying the allegedly traitorous brother, her uncle condemns her to die. He only realizes his error when sacrifices to the gods go wrong. His decision to punish Antigone ends in personal disaster when his son and then his wife kill themselves in despair. In this horrifying story of anger and death, Sophocles deliberately exposes the right and wrong on each side of the conflict. Although Antigone’s uncle eventually acknowledges a leader’s responsibility to listen to his people, the play offers no easy resolution of the competing interests of divinely-sanctioned moral tradition expressed by a woman and the political rules of the state enforced by a man.
Sculptors were certainly not the only artists of the Golden Age who experimented with new techniques and approaches, but the work of sculptors who specialized in making free-standing statues dramatically illustrates the new ways in which Greek artists began to portray the human form during the fifth century B.C. Such sculptures could either be public or private in the sense that they could be paid for by state funds or the funds of private individuals, but even privately-commissioned works did not serve as pieces of private decorative art in the modern sense. Greeks who ordered statues from sculptors had not yet developed the habit of using them to decorate the interior of their homes. Instead, they set them up on public display for a variety of purposes. In this sense, all free-standing sculpture in the Golden Age was public art.
The sculptors who achieved the greatest successes in this genre of art became international celebrities, like the Athenian Pheidias (c. 490-425 B.C.). His dazzling creation of an enormous image in gold and ivory of the goddess Athena, standing in full armor nearly forty feet high and serving as the cult statue for the interior of the Parthenon, won him fame and the friendship of leaders such as Pericles as well as invitations from other Greek states to make great statues for their temples. For instance, he also created the famous statue of Zeus seated on a throne for the main temple in the sanctuary at Olympia. Like the design of the sculpture attached to the outside of the Parthenon, the enormous size and expense of the free-standing figure of Athena placed inside the Parthenon expressed the innovative and confident spirit of Athens in the Golden Age.
Privately commissioned statues as well as those paid for by public funds could be placed in a temple as a representation of a god. In the tradition of offering lovely crafted objects to divinities as commemorations of important personal experiences such as economic success or victories in athletic contests, people also placed sculptures of physically beautiful human beings in the sanctuaries of the gods as gifts of honor. Wealthy families would commission statues of their deceased members, especially if they had died young, to be placed above their graves as memorials of their virtue. In every case, private statues were meant to be seen by other people. In this sense, then, private sculpture in the Golden Age served a public function: it broadcast a message to an audience.
Statues in the Greek Archaic Age had been characterized by a stiff posture imitating the style of standing figures from Egypt. Egyptian sculptors had gone on producing this style unchanged for centuries. Greek artists who made free-standing sculptures, on the other hand, had begun to change their style by the time of the Persian Wars, and the fifth century B.C. saw new poses become more prevalent in this genre, continuing an earlier evolution toward movement visible in the sculpture attached to temples. Human males were still being generally portrayed nude as athletes or warriors, and women were still clothed in fine robes. But their postures and their physiques were evolving toward ever more naturalistic renderings. While archaic male statues had been made striding forward with their left legs, arms held rigidly at their sides, male statues might now have bent arms or the body’s weight on either leg. Their musculature was anatomically correct rather than sketchy and almost impressionistic, as had been the style in the sixth century B.C. Female statues, too, now had more relaxed poses and clothing, which hung in such a way as to hint at the shape of the body underneath instead of disguise it. The faces of classical sculptures, however, reflected an impassive calm rather than the smiles that had characterized archaic figures.
Bronze was the preferred material of the sculptors who devised the daring new styles in free-standing sculpture in the fifth century, although marble was also popular. Creating bronze statues, which were cast in molds made from clay models, required a particularly well-equipped workshop with furnaces, tools, and foundry workers skilled in metallurgy. Because sculptors and artists labored with their hands, aristocrats regarded them as workmen of low social status, and only the most famous ones, like Pheidias, could move in high society. Properly prepared bronze had the tensile strength to allow outstretched poses of arms and legs, which could not be done in marble without supports. (Hence the intrusive tree trunks and other such supporting members introduced in the marble copies made in Roman times of Greek statues in bronze. These Roman copies of the sort commonly seen in modern museums are often the only surviving examples of the originals.)
The strength and malleability of bronze allowed innovative sculptors like the Athenian Myron and Polyclitus of Argos to push the development of the free-standing statue to its physical limits. Myron, for example, sculpted a discus thrower crouched at the top of his backswing, a pose far from the relaxed and serene symmetry of early archaic statuary. The figure not only assumes an asymmetrical pose but also seems to burst with the tension of the athlete’s effort. Polyclitus’ renowned statue of a walking man carrying a spear is posed to give a different impression from every angle of viewing. The feeling of motion it conveys is palpable. The same is true of the famous statue by an unknown sculptor of a female (perhaps the goddess of love Aphrodite) adjusting her diaphanous robe with one upraised arm. The message these statues conveyed to their ancient audience was one of energy, motion, and asymmetry in delicate balance. Archaic statues impressed a viewer with their appearance of stability; not even a hard shove looked likely to budge them. Free-standing statues of the classical period, by contrast, showed greater range in a variety of poses and impressions. The spirited movement of some of these statues suggests the energy of the times but also the possibility of change and instability.
A complex interweaving of continuity and change characterized the social and intellectual history of Athens in the Golden Age. The lives of Athenian women during most of the fifth century largely continued the patterns established in Athenian society in earlier times. The loss of many husbands, fathers, and brothers in the prolonged struggle of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431-404 B.C.), however, forced many citizen women to look for work outside the home for the first time. The traditional character of education for wealthy young men also experienced a major change when professional teachers called sophists began to offer new views on subjects as diverse as oratory and physics in the second half of the century. The friendships that developed between prominent, controversial sophists and political leaders such as Pericles only heightened the concern that many people felt about the possibly deleterious effects on society of these new intellectual trends.
Athenian women exercised power and earned status both in private life and public, through their roles in the family and religion respectively. Their absence from politics, however, meant that their contributions to the city-state might well be overlooked by men. One heroine in a fragmentary tragedy by Euripides, Melanippe, vigorously expresses this judgment in a famous speech denouncing men who denigrate women: “Empty is the slanderous blame men place on women; it is no more than the twanging of a bowstring without an arrow; women are better than men, and I will prove it: women make agreements without having to have witnesses to guarantee their honesty... Women manage the household and preserve its valuable property. Without a wife, no household is clean or happily prosperous. And in matters pertaining to the gods – this is our most important contribution – we have the greatest share. In the oracle at Delphi we propound the will of Apollo, and at the oracle of Zeus at Dodona we reveal the will of Zeus to any Greek who wishes to know it.” Euripides portrays his heroine Medea as insisting that women who bear children are due respect at least commensurate with that granted men who fight as hoplites: “People say that we women lead a safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather fight in the phalanx three times than give birth to a child only once.”
Athenian women contributed to the public life of the polis by acting as priestesses and participating as priestesses and participating as worshippers in religious rites and festivals. Their private responsibilities included, above all, bearing and raising legitimate children, the future citizens of the city-state, and serving as managers of the family’s property in the home, including household slaves, and its supplies. These aspects of their private lives obviously had bearing on the public life of the community as well, for it could not continue without a constant supply of new citizens and management of the goods and labor that helped sustain them. Women’s property rights in classical Athens reflected both the importance of the control of property by women as well as the predisposition of Athenian society to promote the formation and preservation of households headed by property-owning men. Under Athenian democracy, women could control property, even land – the most valued possession in their society – through inheritance and dowry, although more legal restrictions were imposed on their ability to dispose of property freely than on that of men.
Athenian men and women were supposed to preserve their property as best they could so that it could be handed down to their children. Parents who spent all of their cash and disposed of their other property for their own personal pleasure without due regard for the ultimate consequences for their offspring incurred social disgrace. Daughters did not inherit a portion of their father’s property if there were any living sons, but demographic patterns meant that perhaps one household in five had only daughters, to whom the father’s property then fell. Women could also inherit from other male relatives who had no male offspring. A woman’s regular share in her father’s estate came to her in her dowry at marriage. A son whose father was still alive at the time of the son’s marriage similarly often received a share of his inheritance at that time to allow him to set up a household. A bride’s husband had legal control over the property in his wife’s dowry, and their respective holdings frequently became commingled. In this sense husband and wife were co-owners of the household’s common property, which only had to be allotted between its separate owners if the marriage was dissolved. The husband was legally responsible for preserving the dowry and using it for the support and comfort of his wife and her children. A man often had to put up valuable land of his own as collateral to guarantee the safety of his wife’s dowry. Upon her death, the dowry became the inheritance of her children. The expectation that a woman would have a dowry tended to encourage marriage within groups of similar wealth and status. As with the rules governing women’s rights to inheritances, customary dowry arrangements supported the society’s goal of enabling males to establish and maintain households because daughters’ dowries were usually smaller in value than their brothers’ inheritances and therefore kept the bulk of a father’s property attached to his sons.
Like the rules concerning inheritance and dowry, Athenian law concerning heiresses also supported the goal of providing resources to enable as many male citizens as possible to form households. Under Athenian law, if a father died leaving only a daughter to survive him, his property devolved upon her as his heiress, but she did not own it in the modern sense of being able to dispose of it as she pleased. Instead, the law (in the simplest case) required her father’s closest male relative – her official guardian after her father’s death – to marry her himself, with the aim of producing a son. The inherited property then belonged to that son when he reached adulthood. This rule theoretically applied regardless of whether the heiress was already married (without any sons) or whether the male relative already had a wife. The heiress and the male relative were both supposed to divorce their present spouses and marry each other, although in practice the rule could be circumvented by legal subterfuge. This rule about heiresses preserved the father’s line and kept the property in his family, prevented rich men from getting richer by engineering deals with wealthy heiresses’ guardians to marry them and therefore merge their estates, and, above all, prevented property from piling up in the hands of unmarried women. At Sparta, Aristotle reported, precisely this kind of agglomeration of wealth took place as women inherited land or received it in their dowries without – to Aristotle’s way of thinking – adequate regulations promoting remarriage. He claimed that women in this way had come to own forty percent of Spartan territory. The law at Athens was more successful at regulating women’s control over property in the interests of forming households headed by property-owning men.
The character Medea’s comment in Euripides’ play named after her that women were said to lead a safe life at home reflected the expectation in Athenian society that women from the propertied class would avoid frequent or close contact with men who were not members of their own family or its circle of friends. Women of this socio-economic level were therefore supposed to spend much of their time in their own home or the home of women friends. There, women dressed and slept in rooms set aside for them, but these rooms usually opened onto a walled courtyard where the women could walk in the open air, talk, supervise the domestic chores of the family’s slaves, and interact with other members of the household male and female. Here, in their territory as it were, women would spin wool for clothing while chatting with women friends who had come to visit, play with their children, and give their opinions on various matters to the men of the house as they came and went. Poor women had little time for such activities because they, like their husbands, sons, and brothers, had to leave their homes, often only a crowded rental apartment, to find work. They often set up small stalls to sell bread, vegetables, simple clothing, or trinkets. Their husbands and sons sought jobs as laborers in workshops or foundries or on construction projects..
Upper-class women were supposed to observe standards of decorum that restricted her freedom of movement in public life and her contact with men outside her family. A woman rich enough to have servants in her home who answered the door herself would be reproached as careless of her reputation. So, too, a proper woman would go out of her home only for an appropriate reason. Fortunately, there were many such occasions: religious festivals, funerals, childbirths at the houses of relatives and friends, and trips to workshops to buy shoes or other articles. Sometimes her husband would escort her, but more often she was accompanied only by a servant, which left more opportunity for independent action. Social protocol also dictated the way in which men dealt with women. For example, custom demanded that men not speak the names of women in public conversations and speeches in court unless practical necessity demanded it or the women were not socially respectable, as in the case of prostitutes. Presumably, many upper-class women valued their limited contact with men outside the household as a badge of their superior social status. In a gender-segregated society such as that of the wealthy at Athens, the primary opportunities for personal relationships in a wealthy woman’s life probably came in her contact with her children and the other women with whom she spent most of her time.
Since they stayed inside or in the shade so much, women rich enough not to have to work maintained very pale complexions. This pallor was much admired as a sign of a enviable life of leisure and wealth, much as an even, all-over tan is valued today for the same reason. Women regularly used powdered white lead as make-up to give themselves a suitably pale look. As depictions of women on vase paintings, richly decorated and colorful clothing, headbands, coiffures, and jewelry constituted important aspects of a woman’s beauty as well.
The social restrictions on women’s freedom of movement served men’s goal of avoiding uncertainty about the paternity of children by limiting opportunities for adultery among wives and protecting the virginity of daughters. Given the importance attached to citizenship as the defining political structure of the city-state and of a man’s personal freedom, it was crucially important to be certain a boy truly was his father’s son and not the offspring of some other man, who could conceivably even be a foreigner or a slave. Furthermore, the preference for keeping property in the father’s line could be maintained only if the boys who inherited a father’s property were his legitimate sons. In this patriarchal system, the value attached to citizenship for men and its accompanying rights to property therefore led to restrictions on women’s freedom of movement in society. Women who did bear legitimate children, however, immediately earned a higher social standing and greater freedom in the family, as explained, for example, by an Athenian man in this excerpt from his remarks before a court in a case in which he had killed an adulterer whom he had caught with his wife: “After my marriage, I initially refrained from bothering my wife very much, but neither did I allow her too much independence. I kept an eye on her.... But after she had a baby, I started to trust her more and put her in charge of all my things, believing we now had the closest of relationships.”
Bearing male children brought special honor to a woman because sons meant security for parents. They could appear in court in support of their parents in lawsuits and protect them in the streets of the city, which had no regular police patrols. By law, sons were required to support their parents in their old age, a necessity in a society with no state-sponsored system for the support of the elderly like Social Security in the United States. So intense was the pressure to produce sons that stories were common of barren women who smuggled in a baby born to a slave in order to pass it off as their own. Such tales, whose truth is hard to gauge, were only credible because husbands customarily were not present at childbirth.
Athenian men, unlike women, had opportunities for heterosexual sex outside marriage that carried no penalties. “Certainly you don’t think men beget children out of sexual desire?”, wrote an Athenian man. “The streets and the brothels are swarming with ways to take care of that.” Besides sex with female slaves, who could not refuse their masters, men could choose among various classes of prostitutes, depending on how much money they had to spend. A man could not keep a prostitute in the same house as his wife without causing trouble, but otherwise he incurred no disgrace by paying for sex with a woman. The most expensive female prostitutes the Greeks called “companions”. Usually from another city-state than the one in which they worked, “companions” supplemented their physical attractiveness with the ability to sing and play musical instruments at men’s dinner parties (which wives never attended). Many “companions” lived precarious lives subject to exploitation or even violence at the hands of their male customers. The most accomplished “companions,” however, could attract lovers from the highest levels of society and become sufficiently rich to live in luxury on their own. This independent existence strongly distinguished them from citizen women, as did the freedom to control their own sexuality.
The cultivated ability of “companions” to converse with men in public was as distinctive as their erotic skills. Like the geisha of Japan, “companions” entertained men especially with their witty, bantering conversation. Indeed, “companions,” with their characteristic skill at clever taunts and verbal snubs, enjoyed a freedom of speech in conversing with men that was denied proper women. Only very rich citizen women of advanced years, such as Elpinike the sister of Cimon, could occasionally enjoy a similar freedom of expression. She, for example, once publicly rebuked Pericles for having boasted about the Athenian conquest of Samos after its rebellion. When other Athenian women were praising Pericles for his success, Elpinike sarcastically remarked, “This really is wonderful, Pericles, ... that you have caused the loss of many good citizens, not in battle against Phoenicians or Persians, like my brother Cimon, but in suppressing an allied city of fellow Greeks.”
The norms of respectable behavior in ancient Athens for both women and men were primarily taught not in school, but by the family and in the countless episodes of everyday life. Formal education in the modern sense indeed hardly existed because schools subsidized by the state did not exist. Privately-paid instructors or educated family slaves taught children the rudiments of learning, if their parents could afford the expense. Around the middle of the fifth century, however, a new kind of professional teachers emerged. The sophists, as they are called, taught controversial theories on many subjects ranging from public speaking to ethics to cosmology. They charged high fees, enjoyed great celebrity, and upset people who worried about the effects on society of the sophists’ views.
Classical Athens had no public schools or teachers paid by the state. Only well-to-do families could afford to pay the fees charged by private teachers, to whom they sent their sons to learn to read, to write, perhaps to learn to sing or play a musical instrument, and to train for athletics and military service. Physical fitness was considered so important for men, however, who could be called on for military service from the age of eighteen until sixty, that the city-state did provide open-air exercise facilities for daily workouts. These gymnasia were also favorite places for political conversations and the exchange of news. Tutors would be hired to teach basic skills to girls of well-to-do families because a woman with the ability to read, write, and do simple arithmetic would be better prepared to manage the household finances and supplies for the husband of property she was expected to marry and aid with daily estate management.
Poorer girls and boys learned a trade and perhaps some rudiments of literacy by helping their parents in their daily work, or, if they were fortunate, by being apprenticed to skilled crafts producers. The level of literacy in Athenian society outside the ranks of the prosperous was quite low by modern standards, with only a small minority of the poor able to do much more than perhaps sign their names. The inability to read presented few insurmountable difficulties for most people, who could find someone to read aloud to them any written texts they needed to understand. The predominance of oral rather than written communication meant that people were accustomed to absorbing information by ear (those who could read usually read out loud) and very fond of songs, speeches, narrated stories, and lively conversation.
Young men from prosperous families traditionally acquired the advanced skills required for successful participation in the public life of Athenian democracy by observing their fathers, uncles, and other older men as they participated in the assembly, served as councilors or magistrates, and made speeches in court cases. The most important skill to acquire was an effective style in public speaking and persuasive argument. In many cases, an older man would choose an adolescent boy as his special favorite to educate. The boy would learn about public life by spending his time in the company of the older man and his adult friends. During the day, the boy would observe his mentor talking politics in the agora,, help him perform his duties in public office, and work out with him in a gymnasium. Their evenings would be spent at a symposium, a drinking party for men and “companions,” which could encompass a range of behavior from serious political and philosophical discussion to riotous partying.
The mentor-protégé relationship between an older and a younger man could include homosexual love as an expression of the bond between the boy and the man, who would normally also be married. Although homosexuality between women, as between men outside a mentor-protégé relationship, was not socially acceptable, the homosexuality between older mentors and younger protégés was generally accepted as appropriate behavior so long as the older man did not exploit his younger companion physically while neglecting his education in public affairs. Athenian society therefore encompassed a wide range of bonds among men, ranging from political and military activity, to training of mind and body, to sexual practices.
In the second half of the fifth century B.C., a new kind of teacher became available to young men who sought to polish their skills for politics. They were called sophists (“wise men”), a label that acquired a pejorative sense preserved in the English word “sophistry,” because they were so clever at public speaking and philosophic debates and were feared by traditionally-minded men whose political opinions they threatened. The earliest sophists arose in parts of the Greek world other than Athens, but from about 450 B.C. on they began to travel to Athens, which was then at the height of its material prosperity, in search of pupils who could pay the hefty prices the sophists charged for their instruction. Wealthy young men flocked to the dazzling demonstrations of these itinerant teachers’ ability to speak persuasively, an ability that they claimed to be able to impart to students. The sophists were offering just what every ambitious young man wanted to learn because the greatest single skill that a man in democratic Athens could possess was to be able to persuade his fellow male citizens in the debates of the assembly and the council or in lawsuits before large juries. For those unwilling or unable to master the new rhetorical skills of sophistry, the sophists for hefty fees would compose speeches to be delivered by the purchaser as his own composition. The overwhelming importance of persuasive speech in an oral culture like that of ancient Greece made the sophists frightening figures to many, for the new teachers offered an escalation of the power of speech that seemed potentially destabilizing to political and social traditions.
The most famous sophist was Protagoras, a contemporary of Pericles from Abdera in northern Greece. Protagoras emigrated to Athens about 450 B.C. when he was about forty and spent most of his career there. His oratorical ability and his upright character so impressed the men of Athens that they soon chose him to devise a code of laws for a new colony to be founded in Thurii in southern Italy in 444 B.C. Some of Protagoras’ ideas eventually aroused considerable controversy, such as his agnostic position concerning the gods: “Whether the gods exist I cannot discover, nor what their form is like, for there are many impediments to knowledge, [such as] the obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”
Equally controversial was Protagoras’ view that there was no absolute standard of truth, that there were two sides to every question. For example, if one person feeling a breeze thinks it warm, while a different person judges the same wind to be cool, there is no decision to be made concerning which judgment is correct; the wind simply is warm to one and cool to the other. Protagoras summed up his subjectivism (the belief that there is no absolute reality behind and independent of appearances) in the much-quoted opening of his work entitled Truth (most of which is now lost): “Man is the measure of all things, of the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are not.” “Man” in this passage (anthropos in Greek, hence our word anthropology) seems to refer to the individual human being (whether male or female), whom Protagoras makes the sole judge of his or her own impressions.
Two related views taught by sophists aroused special controversy: the idea that human institutions and values were only matters of convention, custom, or law (nomos) and not products of nature (physis), and the idea that, since truth was relative, speakers should be able to argue either side of a question with equal persuasiveness. Since the first idea implied that traditional human institutions were arbitrary rather than grounded in immutable nature and the second made rhetoric into an amoral skill, the combination of the two seemed very dangerous to a society so devoted to the spoken word because it threatened the shared public values of the polis with unpredictable changes. Protagoras himself insisted that his doctrines were not hostile to democracy, especially because he argued that every person had an innate capability for “excellence” and that human survival depended on the rule of law based on a sense of justice. Members of the community, he argued, should be persuaded to obey the laws not because they were based on absolute truth, which did not exist, but because it was expedient for people to live by them. A thief who claimed, for instance, that in his opinion a law against stealing was not appropriate, would have to be persuaded that the law forbidding theft was to his advantage, both to protect his own property and to allow the community to function in which he, like all human beings, had to live in order to survive.
Protagoras’ relativistic approach to such fundamental issues as the moral basis of the rule of law in society was not the only source of disquietude for many Athenian men concerning the new intellectual developments. Philosophers such as Anaxagoras of Clazomenae in Ionia and Leucippus of Miletus propounded unsettling new theories about the nature of the cosmos in response to the provocative physics of the Ionian thinkers of the sixth century B.C. Anaxagoras’ general theory postulating an abstract force he called “mind”as the organizing principle of the universe probably impressed most people as too obscure to worry about, but the details of his thought seemed to offend those who held the assumptions of traditional religion. For example, he argued that the sun was in truth nothing more than a lump of flaming rock, not a divine entity. Leucippus, whose doctrines were made famous by his pupil Democritus of Abdera, invented an atomic theory of matter to explain how change was possible and indeed constant. Everything, he argued, consisted of tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms. This physical explanation of the source of change, like Anaxagoras’ analysis of the nature of the sun, seemed to deny the validity of the entire superstructure of traditional religion, which explained events as the outcome of divine forces.
Sophists were not the only thinkers to emerge with new ideas in the mid-fifth century. In historical writing, for example, Hecataeus of Miletus, born in the later sixth century B.C., had earlier opened the way to a broader and more critical vision of the past. He wrote both an extensive guide book to illustrate his map of the world as he knew it and a treatise criticizing mythological traditions of the past. Most Greek historians who came after him concentrated on the histories of their local areas and wrote in a spare, chronicle-like style that made history into little more than a list of events and geographical facts. Herodotus of Halicarnassus (c. 485-425 B.C.), however, building on the foundations laid by Hecataeus, made his Histories a ground-breaking work in its wide geographical scope, its critical approach to historical evidence, and its lively narrative. To describe and explain the clash between East and West represented by the wars between Persians and Greeks in the early fifth century, Herodotus searched for the origins of the conflict both by delving deep into the past and by examining the cultural traditions of all the peoples involved. His interest in ethnography recognized the importance and the delight of studying the cultures of others as a component of historical investigation.
The emergence of new ideas in Greek medicine in this period is associated with the name of Hippocrates of Cos, a younger contemporary of Herodotus. Details are sketchy about the life of this most famous of all Greek doctors, but he certainly made great strides in putting medical diagnosis and treatment on a scientific basis. Earlier medical practices had depended on magic and ritual. Hippocrates taught that physicians should base their knowledge on careful observation of patients and their response to remedies. Empirically grounded clinical experience, he insisted, was the best guide to treatments that would not do the sick more harm than good. His contribution to medicine is remembered today in the oath bearing his name that all doctors swear at the beginning of their professional careers.
The teachings of sophists like Protagoras and Anaxagoras made many Athenians nervous, especially because leading figures like Pericles flocked to hear them. Many people feared that the teachings of the sophists in particular and indeed of intellectuals in general could offend the gods and therefore erode the divine favor that they believed Athens to enjoy. Just like a murderer, a teacher spouting doctrines offensive to the gods could bring pollution and therefore divine punishment on the whole community. So deeply felt was this anxiety that Pericles’ friendship with Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other controversial intellectuals gave his rivals a weapon to use against him when political tensions came to a head in the 430s B.C. as a result of the threat of war with Sparta. Pericles’ opponents criticized him as sympathetic to dangerous new ideas as well as autocratic in his leadership. The impact on ordinary people of the new developments in history and medicine is hard to assess, but their misgivings about the new trends in education and philosophy with which Pericles was associated definitely heightened the political tension in Athens in the 430s B.C. These intellectual developments had a wide-ranging effect because political, intellectual, and religious life in ancient Athens was so intricately connected. The same person could feel like talking about the city-state’s foreign and domestic policies on one occasion, about novel theories of the nature of the universe on another, and on every day about whether the gods were angry or pleased with the community. By the late 430s B.C., the Athenians had new reasons to worry about each of these topics.
Athens and Sparta had cooperated during the Persian War, but relations between these two most powerful states in mainland Greece deteriorated in the decades following the Greek victories of 479 B.C. The deterioration had progressed to open hostilities by the middle of the century. The peace struck in 446/445 formally ended the fighting, supposedly for thirty years. New disagreements that arose in the 430s over how each of the two states should treat the allies of the other led to the collapse of the peace, however. When negotiations to settle the disagreements collapsed, the result was the devastating war of twenty-seven years that modern historians call the Peloponnesian War after the location of Sparta and most of its allies in the Peloponnese, the large peninsula that forms the southernmost part of mainland Greece. The war dragged on from 431 to 404 B.C. and engulfed almost the entire Greek world. This bitter conflict, extraordinary in Greek classical history for its protracted length, wreaked havoc on the social and political harmony of Athens, its economic strength, and the day-to-day existence of many of its citizens. The severe pressures that the war brought to bear on Athens were expressed most prominently in the comedies produced by Aristophanes on the Athenian dramatic stage during the war years.
The history of the Peloponnesian War reveals both the unpredictability of war in general and the particular consequences of the repeated unwillingness of the Athenian assembly to negotiate peace terms with the other side. The other side of that same coin, of course, is the remarkable resilience shown by Athens in recovering from disastrous defeats and losses of population. Athens kept fighting no matter how dismal the situation until the very moment that an unbreakable Spartan blockade locked the city in a strangle hold in 404. The losses in population and property that Athens suffered in the war had a disastrous, albeit temporary, effect on its international power, revenues, and social cohesiveness.
Most of our knowledge of the causes and the events of this decisive war depends on the history written by the Athenian Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.). Thucydides served as an Athenian commander in northern Greece in the early years of the war until the assembly exiled him for losing an outpost to the enemy. During his exile, Thucydides was able to interview witnesses from both sides of the conflict. Unlike Herodotus, Thucydides concentrated on contemporary history and presented his account of the events of the war in an annalistic framework, that is, by organizing his history according to the years of the war with only occasional divergences from chronological order. Like Herodotus, he included versions of direct speeches in addition to the description of events. The speeches in Thucydides, usually longer and more complex than those in Herodotus, deal with major events and issues of the war in difficult and dramatic language. Their contents often address the motives of the participants in the war and offer broad interpretations of human nature and behavior. Historians disagree about the extent to which Thucydides has put words and ideas into the mouths of his speakers, but it seems indisputable that the speeches deal with the moral and political issues that Thucydides saw as central for understanding the Peloponnesian War as well as human conflict in general. His perceptive narrative and interpretation of the causes and events of the war made his book a pioneering work of history as the narrative of great contemporary events and power politics.
The Peloponnesian War, like most wars, had a complex origin. Thucydides reveals that the immediate causes centered on disputes between Athens and Sparta on whether they had a free hand in dealing with each other’s allies. Violent disputes broke out both concerning Athenian economic sanctions against the city-state of Megara, an ally of Sparta, and the Athenian blockade of Potidaea, a city-state formerly allied to Athens but now in revolt and seeking help from Corinth, a principal ally of Sparta. The deeper causes involved the antagonists’ ambitions for hegemony, fears of each other’s power, and concern for freedom from interference by a strong rival.
The outbreak of the war came when the Spartans issued ultimatums to Athens that the men of the Athenian assembly rejected at the urging of Pericles. The Spartan ultimatums promised attack unless Athens lifted its economic sanctions against the city-state of Megara, a Spartan ally that lay just west of Athenian territory, and stopped its military blockage of Potidaea, a strategically located city-state in northern Greece. The Athenians had forbidden the Megarians from trading in all the harbors of the Athenian empire, a severe blow for Megara, which derived much income from trade. The Athenians had imposed the sanctions in retaliation for alleged Megarian encroachment on sacred land along the border between the territory of Megara and Athens. As for Potidaea, it been an ally of Athens but was now in rebellion. Potidaea retained ties to Corinth, the city that had originally founded it, and Corinth, an ally of Sparta, had protested the Athenian blockade of its erstwhile colony. The Corinthians were already angry at the Athenians for having supported the city-state of Corcyra in its earlier quarrel with Corinth and securing an alliance with Corcyra and its formidable navy. The Spartans issued the ultimatums in order to placate the Megarians and, more importantly, the Corinthians with their powerful naval force. Corinth had threatened to withdraw from the Peloponnesian League and join a different international alliance if the Spartans delayed any longer in backing them in their dispute with the Athenians over Potidaea. In this way, the actions of lesser powers nudged the two great powers, Athens and Sparta, over the brink to war in 431 B.C.
The disputes over Athenian action against Megara and Potidaea reflected the larger issues of power motivating the hostility between Athens and Sparta. The Spartan leaders feared that the Athenians would use their superiority in long-distance offensive weaponry – the naval forces of the Delian League – to destroy Spartan control over the members of the Peloponnesian League. The majority in the Athenian assembly, for their part, resented Spartan interference in their freedom of action. For example, Thucydides portrays Pericles as making the following arguments in a speech to convince his fellow male citizens to reject the Spartan demands even if that means war: “If we do go to war, harbor no thought that you went to war over a trivial affair. For you this trifling matter is the assurance and the proof of your determination. If you yield to their demands, they will immediately confront you with some larger demand, since they will think that you only gave way on the first point out of fear. But if you stand firm, you will show them that they have to deal with you as equals ... When our equals, without agreeing to arbitration of the matter under dispute, make claims on us as neighbors and state those claims as commands, it would be no better than slavery to give in to them, no matter how large or how small the claim may be.”
Athens’ fleet and fortifications made its urban center impregnable to direct attack. Already by the 450s the Athenians had encircled the city center with a massive stone wall and fortified a broad corridor with a wall on both sides leading all the way to the main harbor at Piraeus seven kilometers to the west. The technology of military siege machines in this period was unequal to the task of broaching such walls. Consequently, no matter what damage was done to the agricultural production of Attica in the course of the war, the Athenians could feed themselves by importing food by ship through their fortified port. They could pay for the food with the huge financial reserves they had accumulated from the dues of the Delian League and the income from their silver mines. The Athenians could also retreat safely behind their walls in the case of attacks by the superior Spartan infantry. From this impregnable position, they could launch surprise attacks against Spartan territory by sending their ships to land troops behind enemy lines. Like aircraft in modern warfare before the invention of radar warning systems, Athenian warships could swoop down unexpectedly on their enemies before they could prepare to defend themselves. This two-pronged strategy, which Pericles devised for Athens, was therefore simple: avoid set battles with the Spartan infantry even if it ravaged Athenian territory but attack Spartan territory from the sea. In the end, he predicted, the superior resources of Athens in money and men would enable it to win a war of attrition.
The difficulty in carrying out Pericles’ strategy for winning the war was that it required the many Athenians who resided outside the urban center to abandon their homes and fields to the depredations of the Spartan army during its regular invasions of Attica. As Thucydides reports, people hated coming in from the countryside where “most Athenians were born and bred; they grumbled at having to move their entire households [into Athens] ..., abandoning their normal way of life and leaving behind what they regarded as their true city.”When in 431 B.C. the Spartans invaded Attica for the first time and began to destroy property in the countryside, the country dwellers of Attica became enraged as, standing in safety on Athens’ walls, they watched the smoke rise from their property as the Spartans put it to the torch. Pericles only barely managed to stop the citizen militia from rushing out despite the odds to take on the Spartan hoplites. The Spartan army returned home after about a month in Attica because it lacked the structure for resupply over a longer period and could not risk being away from Sparta too long for fear of helot revolt. For these reasons, the annual invasions of Attica that the Spartans sent in the early years of the war never lasted longer than forty days. Even in this short time, however, the Spartan army could inflict losses on the Athenian countryside that were felt very keenly by the Athenians holed up in their walled city.
The innate unpredictability of war undermined Pericles’ strategy, especially as an epidemic disease ravaged Athens’ population for several years beginning in 430 B.C. The disease struck while the Athenians were jammed together in unsanitary conditions to escape Spartan attack behind their walls. The symptoms were gruesome: vomiting, convulsions, painful sores, uncontrollable diarrhea, and fever and thirst so extreme that sufferers threw themselves into cisterns vainly hoping to find relief in the cold water. The rate of mortality was so high it crippled Athenian ability to man the naval expeditions Pericles’ wartime strategy demanded. Pericles himself died of the disease in 429 B.C. He apparently had not anticipated the damage to Athens which the loss of his firm leadership could mean. The epidemic also seriously hampered the war effort by destroying Athenian confidence in their relationship with the gods.” As far as the gods were concerned, it seemed not to matter whether one worshipped them or not because the good and the bad were dying indiscriminately,” was Thucydides’ description of the population’s attitude at the height of the epidemic.
The epidemic thus hurt the Athenians materially by devastating their population, politically by removing their foremost leader, Pericles, and psychologically by damaging their self-confidence. Nevertheless, they fought on resiliently. Despite the loss of manpower inflicted by the epidemic, the Athenian military forces proved effective. Potidaea, the ally whose rebellion had exacerbated the hostile relations between Athens and Corinth, was compelled to surrender in 430. The Athenian navy won two major victories in 429 off Naupactus in the western Gulf of Corinth under the general Phormio. A serious revolt in 428-427 on the island of Lesbos, led by the city-state of Mytilene, was forcefully put down. One of the most famous passages in Thucydides is the set of vivid speeches on the fate of the Mytilenians presented by Cleon and Diodotus. The opposing speeches respectively argue for capital punishment based on justice and clemency based on expediency. Their arguments represent stirring and provocative positions that bear on larger political and ethical questions than the immediate issue of what to do about the rebels of Mytilene.
In 425 B.C. the Athenian general Cleon won an unprecedented victory by capturing some 120 Spartan Equals and about 170 allied troops in a battle at Pylos in the western Peloponnese. No Spartan soldiers had ever before surrendered under any circumstances. They had always taken as their martial creed the sentiment expressed by the legendary advice of a Spartan mother as she handed her son his shield as he went off to war: “Come home either with this or on it,” meaning he should return either as a victor carrying his shield or as a corpse carried upon it. By this date, however, the population of Spartan Equals had been so reduced that the loss of even such a small group was perceived as intolerable. The Spartan leaders therefore offered the Athenians favorable peace terms in return for the captives. Cleon’s success at Pylos had vaulted him into a position of political leadership, and he advocated a hard line toward Sparta. Thucydides, who apparently had no love for Cleon, called him “the most violent of the citizens.”At Cleon’s urging the Athenian assembly refused to make peace with Sparta.
The lack of wisdom in the Athenian decision to refuse the Spartan offer of peace after the battle of Pylos in 425 B.C became clear with the next unexpected development of the war: a sudden reversal in the Spartan policy against waging military expeditions far from home. In 424 the Spartan general Brasidas led an army on a daring campaign against Athenian strongholds in far northern Greece hundreds of miles from Sparta. His most important victory came with the conquest of Amphipolis, an important Athenian colony near the coast that the Athenians regarded as essential to their strategic position. Brasidas’ success there robbed Athens of access to gold and silver mines and a major source of timber for building warships. Even though he was not directly involved in the battle at Amphipolis, Thucydides lost his command and was forced into exile because he was the commander in charge of the region when the city was lost and was held responsible for the catastrophe.
Cleon, the most prominent and influential leader at Athens after the Athenian victory at Pylos in 425, was dispatched to northern Greece in 422 to try to stop Brasidas. As it happened, both he and Brasidas were killed before Amphipolis in 422 B.C. in a battle won by the Spartan army. Their deaths deprived each side of its most energetic military commander and opened the way to negotiations. Peace came in 421 B.C. when both sides agreed to resurrect the balance of forces just as it had been in 431 B.C. The agreement made in that year is known as the Peace of Nicias after the name of the Athenian general Nicias, who was instrumental in convincing the Athenian assembly to agree to a peace treaty. The Spartan agreement to the peace revealed a fracture in the coalition of Greek states allied with Sparta against Athens and its allies because the Corinthians and the Boetians refused to join the Spartans in signing the treaty.
The Peace of Nicias failed to quiet those on both sides of the conflict who were pushing for a decisive victory over the enemy. A brash Athenian aristocrat named Alcibiades (c. 450-404 B.C.) was especially active against the uneasy peace. He was a member of one of Athens’ richest and most distinguished families, and he had been raised in the household of Pericles after his father had died in battle against allies of Sparta in 447 when his son was only about three years old. By now in his early thirties – a very young age at which to have achieved political influence, by Athenian standards – Alcibiades rallied some support at Athens for action against Spartan interests in the Peloponnese. Despite the ostensible conditions of peace between Sparta and Athens, he managed to cobble together a new alliance between Athens, Argos, and some other Peloponnesian city-states that were hostile to Sparta. He evidently believed that Athenian power and security, as well as his own career, would be best served by a continuing effort to weaken Sparta. Since the geographical location of Argos in the northeastern Peloponnese placed it astride the principal north-south route in and out of Spartan territory, the Spartans had reason to fear this alliance created by Alcibiades. If the alliance held, Argos and its allies could virtually pen the Spartan army inside its own borders. Nevertheless, support for this new coalition seems to have been shaky in Athens, perhaps because the memory of the ten years of war just concluded was still vivid. The Spartans, recognizing the threat to themselves, met and defeated the forces of the coalition in battle at Mantinea in the northeastern Peloponnese in 418. The Peace of Nicias was now certainly a dead letter in practice, whatever its notional continuance in theory.
In 416 an Athenian force besieged the tiny city-state on the island of Melos situated in the Mediterranean south of the Peloponnese, a community sympathetic to Sparta that had taken no active part in the war, although it may have made a monetary contribution to the Spartan war effort. In any case, that Athens considered Melos an enemy had been made clear earlier when Nicias had led an unsuccessful attack on the island in 426. Now once again Athens in 416 demanded that Melos support its alliance voluntarily or face destruction, but the Melians refused to submit despite the overwhelming superiority of Athenian force. When Melos eventually had to surrender to the besieging army, its men were killed and its women and children sold into slavery. An Athenian community was then established on the island. Thucydides portrays Athenian motives in the affair of Melos as concerned exclusively with the amoral politics of the use of force, while the Melians he shows as relying on a concept of justice to govern relations between states. He represents the leaders of the opposing sides as participating in a private meeting to discuss their views of what issues are at stake. This passage in his history, called the Melian Dialogue, offers a chillingly realistic insight into the clash between ethics and power in international politics.
In 415 B.C. Alcibiades convinced the Athenian assembly to vote to launch a massive naval campaign against the large island of Sicily to seek the great riches awaiting a conqueror there and prevent any Sicilian cities from aiding the Spartans. Formally speaking, Athens was responding to a request for support from the Sicilian city of Egesta (also known as Segesta), with whom an alliance had been struck more than thirty years earlier. The Egestans encouraged Athens to prepare a naval expedition by misrepresenting the extent of the resources that they had to devote to the military campaign against non-allies in Sicily. The prosperous city of Syracuse near the southeastern corner of the island represented both the richest prize and the largest threat. In the debate preceding the vote on the expedition, Alcibiades and his supporters argued that the numerous war ships in the fleet of Syracuse represented an especially serious potential threat to the security of the Athenian alliance because they could sail from Sicily to join the Spartan alliance in attacks on Athens and its allies. Nicias led the opposition to the proposed expedition, but his arguments for caution failed to counteract the enthusiasm for action that Alcibiades generated with his speeches. His aggressive dreams of martial glory especially appealed to young men, who had not yet experienced the realities of war for themselves. The assembly resoundingly backed his vision by voting to send to Sicily the greatest force ever to sail from Greece. The arrogant flamboyance of Alcibiades’ private life and his blatant political ambitions had made him many enemies in Athens, and they managed to get him recalled from the expedition’s command by accusing him of having participated in a sacrilegious mockery of the Eleusinian Mysteries and being mixed up in the sacrilegious vandalizing of statues called Herms just before the sailing of the expedition. Alcibiades’ reaction to the charges certainly was unforeseen: he deserted to Sparta.
Herms, stone posts with sculpted sets of erect male organs and a bust of the god Hermes, were placed throughout the city as protectors against infertility and bad luck. A Herm stood at nearly every street intersection, for example, because crossings were, symbolically at least, zones of special danger. The vandals outraged the public by knocking off the statues’ phalluses.
The desertion of Alcibiades left the Athenian expedition against Sicily without a strong and decisive leader. The Athenian fleet was so strong that it won initial victories against Syracuse and its allies even without brilliant leadership, but eventually the indecisiveness of Nicias undermined the attackers’ successes. The Athenian assembly responded to the setbacks by authorizing large reinforcements led by the general Demosthenes, but these new forces proved incapable of defeating Syracuse, which enjoyed effective military leadership to complement its material strength. Alcibiades had a decisive influence on the quality of Syracusan military leadership because Sparta adopted his suggestion to send an experienced Spartan commander to Syracuse to combat the invading expedition. The Athenian forces were eventually trapped in the harbor of Syracuse and completely crushed in a climactic naval battle in 413 B.C. When the survivors of the attacking force tried to flee overland to safety, they were either slaughtered or captured almost to a man. The Sicilian expedition ended in ignominious defeat for Athens and the crippling of its navy, its main source of military power.
Alcibiades’ desertion turned out to cause Athens more trouble after the catastrophic end of the Sicilian expedition in 413. While at Sparta he advised the Spartan commanders to establish a permanent base of operations in the Attic countryside. In 413 they acted on his advice. Taking advantage of Athenian weakness in the aftermath of the enormous losses in men and equipment sustained in Sicily, they installed a garrison at Decelea in northeastern Attica, in sight of the walls of Athens itself only a few miles distant. Spartan forces could now raid the Athenian countryside year around instead of only for a limited time, as in the earlier years of the war when the annual invasions dispatched from Sparta could never linger longer than forty days in Athenian territory. The presence of the garrison made agricultural work in the fields of Attica too dangerous and forced Athens to rely on food imported by sea even more heavily than in the past. The damage to Athenian fortunes increased when twenty thousand slaves owned by the state and who worked in Athens’ silver mines ran away to seek refuge in the Spartan camp. The loss of these slave miners put a stop to the flow of revenue from the veins of silver ore. So immense was the distress caused by the crisis that an extraordinary change was made in Athenian government: a board of ten officials was appointed to manage the affairs of the city, virtually supplanting the council of five hundred.
The disastrous consequences of the Athenian defeat in Sicily in 413 were further compounded when Persia now once again took a direct hand in Greek affairs. The present Athenian weakness seemed to make this an opportune time to reassert Persian dominance in western Anatolia by stripping away the allies of Athens there. The satraps governing the Persian provinces in the region therefore began to supply money to help outfit a fleet for the Spartans and their allies. Led by the powerful city-state of the island of Chios, some restless allies of Athens in Ionia and elsewhere took advantage of the depleted state of their erstwhile hegemon to revolt from the Delian League alliance. Their defections were urged on by Alcibiades, whom the Spartans had sent to Ionia in 412 to foment rebellion among the members of the Athenian alliance there. A particularly dangerous result of these latter developments was the threat to the shipping lanes by which Athens imported grain from Egypt to the southeast and the fertile shores of the Black Sea to the northeast.
Athens demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of the great hardships that had begun in 413, however, by beginning to rebuild its fleet and train new crews to man it. The emergency reserve funds that had been stored on the acropolis since the beginning of the war were tapped to finance the rebuilding. By 412-411 Athenian naval forces had revived sufficiently that they managed to prevent a Corinthian fleet from sailing to aid Chios, lay siege to that rebellious island ally, and win some other battles along the Anatolian coast.
The turmoil in Athenian politics and revenues resulting from the Sicilian defeat opened the way for some influential Athenian men, who had long harbored contempt for the broad-based democracy of their city-state, to stage what amounted to an oligarchic coup d’État. They insisted that a small group of elite leaders could manage Athenian policy better than the democratic assembly. Alcibiades furthered their cause by promising to make an alliance with the Persia satraps in western Anatolia and secure funds from them for Athens if only the democracy would be overturned and an oligarchy installed. He apparently hoped that the abolition of the democracy would led to the possibility of his being permitted to return to Athens. He had reason to want to go home again because his negotiations with the satraps had by now aroused the suspicions of the Spartan leaders, who rightly suspected that he was intriguing in his own interests rather than theirs. He had also made Agis, one of Sparta’s two kings, into a powerful enemy by seducing his wife. Alcibiades’ promises helped the oligarchical sympathizers in Athens to play on the assembly’s hopes by holding out the lure of Persian gold. In 411 they succeeded in having the assembly members turn over all power to a group of four hundred men, hoping that this smaller body would provide better guidance for foreign policy in the war and improve Athens’ finances. These four hundred were supposed to choose five thousand to act as the city’s ultimate governing body, but they in fact kept all power in their own hands. The oligarchic regime did not last long, however. In Athens, the oligarchs soon lost their unity in struggling with each other for dominance. In the Athenian fleet, which was currently stationed in the harbor of the island city-state of Samos, a staunch ally of democratic Athens, the crews threatened to sail home to restore democracy by force unless the oligarchs stepped aside. In response, a mixed democracy and oligarchy called the constitution of the Five Thousand was created, which Thucydides praised as “the best form of government that the Athenians had known, at least in my time.” This new government voted to recall Alcibiades and others in exile in the hope that they could improve Athenian military leadership.
With Alcibiades as one of the commanders, the revived Athenian fleet won a great victory over the Spartans in 410 at Cyzicus on the southern shore of the Black Sea. The Athenians intercepted the plaintive and typically brief dispatch sent by the defeated Spartans to their leaders at home: “Ships lost. Commander dead. Men starving. Do not know what to do.”The pro-democratic fleet now demanded the restoration of full democracy at Athens, and in this year Athenian government returned to the form and membership that it had possessed before the oligarchic coup of 411. It also, according to a later source, returned to the same uncompromising bellicosity that had characterized the decisions of the Athenian assembly in the mid-420s. Just as after the defeat at Pylos in 425, the Spartans offered peace after their defeat at Cyzicus in 410. Athens refused. In any case, the Athenian fleet went on to reestablish the safety of the grain routes to Athens and to compel some of the allies who had revolted to return to the alliance.
The aggressive Spartan commander Lysander ultimately doomed Athenian hopes in the war by using Persian money to rebuild the Spartan fleet and by ensuring that it was well led. When in 406 he inflicted a defeat on an Athenian fleet at Notion, near Ephesus on the Anatolian coast, Alcibiades, who had not been present but was held to have been responsible for the safety of the Athenian forces, was forced into exile for the last time. The Athenian fleet nevertheless won a victory off the islands of Arginusai, south of the island of Lesbos, later in 406, but a storm prevented the rescue of the crews of wrecked ships. The Athenian commanders were condemned to death for alleged negligence in a mass trial at Athens that contradicted the normal guarantee of individual trials. Once again the assembly rejected a Spartan offer of peace on the basis of the status quo. Lysander thereupon secured more Persian funds, strengthened the Spartan naval forces still further, and decisively eliminated the Athenian fleet in 405 in a battle at Aegospotami, near Lampsacus on the coast of Anatolia. He subsequently blockaded Athens and finally compelled Athens to surrender in 404 B.C. After twenty-seven years of near-continuous war, the Athenians were at the mercy of their enemies.
The Spartan leaders resisted the demand of their allies the Corinthians, the bitterest enemy of the Athenians, for the utter destruction of Athens. They feared Corinth, with its large fleet and strategic location on the isthmus potentially blocking access to and from the Peloponnese, might grow too strong if Athens were no longer in existence to serve as a counterweight. Instead of ruining Athens, Sparta installed as the conquered city’s rulers a collaborationist regime of anti-democratic Athenian aristocrats, who became known as the Thirty Tyrants. These men came from the class of aristocrats that had traditionally despised democracy and admired oligarchy. Brutally suppressing their opposition and stealing shamelessly from people whose only crime was to possess desirable property, these oligarchs embarked on an eight-month-long period of terror in 404-403 B.C. The metic and famous speechwriter-to-be, Lysias, for example, whose father had earlier moved his family from their native Syracuse at the invitation of Pericles, reported that the henchmen of the Thirty seized his brother for execution as a way of stealing the family’s valuables. The plunderers even ripped the gold earrings from the ears of his brother’s wife in their pursuit of loot. As a result of political divisions among their leadership, the Spartans did not interfere when a pro-democracy resistance movement came to power in Athens after a series of street battles in 403 B.C. To put an end to the internal strife that threatened to tear Athens apart, the newly restored democracy proclaimed an amnesty, the first known in Western history, under which all further charges and official recriminations concerning the period of terror in 404-403 B.C. were forbidden. Athens’ government was once again a functioning democracy; its financial and military strength, however, was shattered, and its society harbored the memory of a bitter divisiveness that no amnesty could completely dispel.
The Peloponnesian War exacted a toll on the domestic life of Athenians as well as on their city-state’s political harmony and international power. The Spartan invasions of the Athenian countryside forced crowds of country dwellers into the cramped confines of the city behind its defensive walls. Many people both urban and rural found their livelihoods threatened by the economic dislocations of the war. Women without wealth whose spouses or male relatives were killed in the war experienced particularly difficult times because dire necessity forced them to seek work outside the home to support themselves and their children. The expenses of the war drained the state treasury. Often reflecting in its plots the social, economic, and political tensions created by the war, Athenian comedy as a public art form revealed the depth of anxiety that the war’s difficulties created and an indomitable confidence in the ingenuity and initiative of the people of Athens in finding solutions to their problems.
Perhaps the most ruinous personal losses and disruptions caused by wartime conditions at Athens were imposed on the many people who usually lived in the countryside outside the walls of the urban center. These country dwellers periodically had to take refuge inside the city walls while the Spartan invaders wrecked their homes and damaged their fields. If they did not also own a house in the city or have friends who could take them in, people whose normal residences were outside the walls of Athens simply had to camp in public areas in the city in uncomfortable and unsanitary conditions. The crowded conditions in the city created by the influx of unhappy and anxious country dwellers led to friction between city dwellers and the refugees from the rural areas.
The Peloponnesian War meant drastic changes in their way of making a living for many men and women of Athens whose incomes depended on agriculture or their own small businesses. Wealthy families that had money and valuable goods stored up could weather the crisis by using their savings, but most people had no financial cushion to fall back on. When their harvests were destroyed by the enemy, farmers used to toiling in their own fields had to scrounge for work as day laborers in the city, but these kinds of jobs became increasingly hard to obtain in proportion to the increase in the pool of men looking for them. Men who rowed the ships of the Athenian fleet could earn regular wages, but they had to spend long periods away from their families and faced death in every battle and storm at sea. Men and women who worked as crafts producers and small merchants or business owners in the city still had their livelihoods, but their income levels suffered because consumers had less money to spend.
The pressure of war on Athenian society became especially evident in the severe damage done to the prosperity and indeed the very nature of the lives of many previously moderately well-off women whose husbands and brothers died during the conflict. Such women had traditionally done weaving at home for their own families and supervised the work of household slaves, but the men had earned the family’s income by farming or practicing a trade. With no one to provide for them and their children now, these women were forced to work outside the home to support their families. The only jobs open to them were low-paying occupations traditional for women such as baby nurse or weaver, or in some cases laboring jobs, such as being a vineyard worker, for which there were not enough men to meet the need. These circumstances brought more women into public view, but they did not lead to a woman’s movement in the modern sense, or to any inclusion of women in Athenian political life.
The financial health of the city-state of Athens suffered during the Peloponnesian War from the many interruptions to agriculture and from the catastrophic loss of income from the state’s silver mines that occurred after the Spartan army took up a permanent presence in 413 B.C. Work could thereafter no longer continue at the mines, especially after the desertion of thousands of slave mine workers to the Spartan fort at Decelea. Some public building projects in the city itself were kept going, like the Erectheum temple to Athena on the acropolis, to demonstrate the Athenian will to carry on and also as a device for infusing some money into the crippled economy. But the demands of the war depleted the funds available for many non-military activities. The scale of the great annual dramatic festivals, for example, had to be cut back. The financial situation had become so desperate by the end of the war that Athenians were required to turn in their silver coins and exchange them for an emergency currency of bronze thinly plated with silver. The regular silver coins, along with gold coins that were minted from golden objects borrowed from Athens’ temples, were then used to pay war expenses.
The stresses of everyday life during the exceedingly trying times of the Peloponnesian War were reflected in Athenian comedies produced during this period. Comic plays were the other main form of dramatic art in ancient Athens besides tragedies. Like tragedies, comedies were composed in verse and had been presented annually since early in the fifth century B.C. They formed a separate competition in the Athenian civic festivals in honor of Dionysus in the same outdoor theater used for tragedies. It is uncertain whether women could attend. The all-male casts of comic productions consisted of a chorus of twenty-four members in addition to regular actors. Unlike tragedy, comedy was not restricted to having no more than three actors with speaking parts on stage at the same time. The beauty of the soaring poetry of the choral songs of comedy was matched by the ingeniously imaginative fantasy of its plots, which almost always ended with a festive resolution of the problems with which they had begun. The story of the Birds by Aristophanes, for example, produced in 414 B.C., has two men trying to escape the hassles of everyday life at Athens by running away to seek a new life in a world called Cloudcuckooland that is inhabited by talking birds, portrayed by the chorus in colorful bird costumes.
The immediate purpose of a comic playwright naturally was to create beautiful poetry and raise laughs at the same time in the hope of winning the award for the festival’s best comedy. Much of the humor of Athenian comedy had to do with sex and bodily functions, and much of its ribaldry was delivered in a stream of imaginative profanity. The plots of fifth-century Athenian comedies primarily dealt with current issues and personalities. Insulting attacks on prominent men such as Pericles or Cleon, the victor of Pylos, were a staple. Pericles apparently instituted a ban on such attacks in response to fierce treatment in comedies after the revolt of Samos in 441-439 B.C., but the measure was soon rescinded. Cleon was so outraged by the way he was portrayed on the comic stage by Aristophanes, (c. 455-385 B.C.), the only comic playwright of the fifth century from whose works entire plays have survived, that he sued the playwright. When Cleon lost the case, Aristophanes responded by pitilessly parodying him in The Knights of 424 B.C. as a reprobate foreign slave. Other well-known men who were not portrayed as characters could come in for insults as sexually effeminate and cowards. On the other hand, women characters who are made figures of fun and ridicule in comedy seem to have been fictional.
Slashing satire directed against the mass of ordinary citizens seems to have been unacceptable in Athenian comedy, but fifth-century comic productions often criticized governmental policies that had been approved by the assembly by blaming political leaders for them. The strongly critical nature of comedy was never more evident than during the war years. Several of the popular comedies of Aristophanes had plots in which characters arranged peace with Sparta, even though the comedies were produced while the war was still being fiercely contested. In The Acharnians of 425 B.C., for example, the protagonist arranges a separate peace treaty with the Spartans for himself and his family while humiliating a character who portrays one of Athens’ prominent military commanders of the time. The play won first prize in competition for comedies that year.
The most remarkable of Aristophanes’ comedies are those in which the main characters, the heroes of the story as it were, are women, who use their wits and their solidarity with one another to compel the men of Athens to overthrow basic policies of the city-state. Most famous of Aristophanes’ comedies depicting powerfully effectual women is the Lysistrata of 411 B.C., named after the female lead character of the play. It portrays the women of Athens as teaming up with the women of Sparta to force their husbands to end the Peloponnesian War. To make the men agree to a peace treaty, the women first seize the Acropolis, where Athens’ financial reserves are kept, and prevent the men from squandering them further on the war. They then beat back an attack on their position by the old men who have remained in Athens while the younger men are out on campaign. When their husbands return from battle, the women refuse to have sex with them. This sex strike, which is portrayed in a series of risqué episodes, finally coerces the men of Athens and Sparta to agree to a peace treaty.
The Lysistrata presents women acting bravely and aggressively against men who seem bent both on destroying their family life by staying away from home for long stretches while on military campaign and on ruining the city-state by prolonging a pointless war. In other words, the play’s powerful women take on masculine roles to preserve the traditional way of life of the community. Lysistrata herself emphasizes this point in the very speech in which she insists that women have the intelligence and judgment to make political decisions. She came by her knowledge, she says, in the traditional way: “I am a woman, and, yes, I have brains. And I’m not badly off for judgment. Nor has my education been bad, coming as it has from my listening often to the conversations of my father and the elders among the men.”Lysistrata was schooled in the traditional fashion, by learning from older men. Her old-fashioned training and good sense allowed her to see what needed to be done to protect the community. Like the heroines of tragedy, Lysistrata is literally a reactionary; she wants to put things back the way they were. To do that, however, she has to act like a revolutionary. Ending the war would be so easy that women could do it, Aristophanes is telling Athenian men, and Athenians should concern themselves with preserving the old ways, lest they be lost.
This section of the Historical Overview continues the history of Greece in the Classical period during the fourth century. Its chronological end falls in 323 B.C., the death of the Macedonian king Alexander the Great. This date is conventionally fixed as the end of the Classical period and the beginning of the Hellenistic period (which is not covered in the Historical Overview). On this traditional scheme of reckoning the Hellenistic period is made to reach until 30 B.C., the death of Cleopatra VII, queen of Egypt and the last descendant of the Macedonian royal house. In the Hellenistic period Rome became the foremost power in the Mediterranean region and eventually made Greece a Roman province.
The city-states of Greece had already been overshadowed as international powers by the rise of the kingdom of Macedonia under Philip II and his son Alexander in the latter half of the fourth century, and after Alexander’s death in 323 the Hellenistic kingdoms that sprang up to control what had been his short-lived empire continued to dominate the Greek world in terms of military and economic power. The basic institutions of the Greek city-state remained in place, however, in the Hellenistic period, and in many respects little changed in the lives of the majority of Greeks – those who worked on the land. The story of Greece in the fourth century – a continuing tale of disunity and strife – provides the background for the loss of political and military dominance by the Greek city-states to the warrior society of Macedonia and its successor kingdoms.
Strife among prominent city-states contending with one another for power continued to plague Greece in the years following the Peloponnesian War. The losses of population, the ravages of the plague, and the financial difficulties brought on by the war caused severe hardships for Athens. Not even the amnesty that accompanied the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 B.C. could quell all the social and political animosities that the war and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants had exacerbated, and the most prominent casualty of this divisive bitterness was the famous philosopher Socrates, whose trial for impiety in 399 B.C. resulted in a sentence of death. The Athenian household – the family members and their personal slaves – nevertheless survived the war as the fundamental unit of the city-state’s society and economy.
Many Athenian households lost fathers, sons, or brothers to the violence of battle in the Peloponnesian War, but resourceful families found ways to compensate for the economic strain that such personal tragedies could create. An Athenian named Aristarchus, for example, is reported by the writer Xenophon (c. 428-354 B.C.) to have experienced financial difficulty because the turmoil of the war had severely diminished his income and also caused his sisters, nieces, and female cousins to come live with him. He found himself unable to support this swollen household of fourteen, not counting the slaves. Aristarchus’s friend Socrates (469-399 B.C.) thereupon reminded him that his female relatives knew quite well how to make men’s and women’s cloaks, shirts, capes, and smocks, “the work considered the best and most fitting for women,”although they had always just made clothing for the family and never had to try to sell it for profit. But others did make a living by selling such clothing or by baking and selling bread, Socrates pointed out, and Aristarchus could have the women in his house do the same. The plan was a success, but the women complained that Aristarchus was now the only member of the household who ate without working. Socrates advised his friend to reply that the women should think of him as sheep did a guard dog – he earned his share of the food by keeping away the wolves from the sheep.
Many Athenian manufactured goods were produced in households like that of Aristarchus, which turned to the production of cloth after the Peloponnesian War, or in small shops, although a few larger enterprises did exist. Among these were metal foundries, pottery workshops, and the shield-making business employing one-hundred twenty slaves owned by the family of Lysias (c. 459-380 B.C.); businesses larger than this were unknown at this period. Lysias, a metic (metoikos, resident alien) from Syracuse whose father had been recruited by Pericles to come live in Athens, had to use his education and turn to writing speeches for others to make a living after the Thirty Tyrants seized his property in 404 B.C. Metics could not own land in Athenian territory without special permission, but they enjoyed legal rights in Athenian courts that foreigners without metic status lacked. In return metics paid taxes and served in the army when called upon. Lysias lived near the harbor of Athens, Piraeus, where many metics were to be found because they played a central role in the international trade in such goods as grain, wine, pottery, and silver from Athens’ mines that passed through Piraeus. The safety of Athenian trade was restored to prewar conditions when the long walls that connected the city with the port, destroyed at the end of the war, were rebuilt by 393 B.C. Another sign of the recovering economic health of Athens was that the city by this time had resumed the minting of its famous silver coins to replace the emergency bronze coinage minted during the financial pressures of the last years of the war.
The importation of grain through Piraeus was crucial for fourth-century Athens. Even before the war Athenian farms had been unable to produce enough of this dietary staple to feed the population. The damage done to farm buildings and equipment during the Spartan invasions of the Peloponnesian War made the situation worse until the Athenians could make repairs. The Spartan establishment of a year-round base at Decelea near Athens from 413 to 404 B.C. had given these enemy forces an opportunity to do much more severe damage in Athenian territory than the usually short campaigns of Greek warfare ordinarily allowed. The invaders had probably even had time to cut down Athenian olive trees, the source of valuable olive oil. These trees took a generation to replace because they grew so slowly. Athenian property owners after the war worked hard to restore their land and businesses to production not only to restore their present incomes but also to provide for future generations. Athenian men and women felt strongly that their property, whether in land, money, or belongings, represented resources to be preserved for the benefit of their descendants. For this reason, Athenian law allowed prosecution of men who squandered their inheritance. The same spirit lay behind the requirement that parents must provide a livelihood for their children, by leaving them income-bearing property or training them in a skill. Most working people probably earned little more than enough to clothe and feed their families.
All indications are that the Greek diet remained much the same over time; after the Peloponnesian War people perhaps had less than before, at least until a modicum of prosperity was restored. Athenians usually had only two meals a day, a light lunch in mid-morning and a heavier meal in the evening. Bread baked from barley or, for richer people, wheat, constituted the main part of the diet. A family could buy its bread from small bakery stands, often run by women, or make it at home, with the wife directing and helping the household slaves to grind the grain, shape the dough, and bake in it in a pottery oven heated by charcoal. Those few households wealthy enough to afford meat from time to time often grilled it over coals on a pottery brazier shaped much like modern picnic grills. For most people, vegetables, olives, fruit, and cheese represented the main variety in their diet, and meat was available only as part of animal sacrifices paid for by the state. The wine that everyone drank, usually much diluted with water, came mainly from local vineyards. Water from public fountains had to be carried into the house with jugs, a task that the women of the household had to perform themselves or see that the household slaves did.
The war had hurt the Athenian state economically by giving a chance for escape to many of the slaves that worked in the silver mines in the Attic countryside, which had provided a substantial revenue to the public coffers. The output of the mines apparently never regained its previous heights, but it is not clear whether this decline in production of silver was the result of an enduring shortage of slaves to work in the mines or a petering out of the veins of precious metal, or perhaps a combination of these factors. The Peloponnesian War had given few opportunities for domestic slaves to escape their servitude, and practically no privately owned slaves had tried to run away during the war. (Since runaway slaves were usually resold by those with whom they sought refuge in any case, escape was by no means a reliable route to freedom.) All but the poorest families, therefore, continued to have at least a slave or two to do chores around the house and look after the children. If a mother did not have a slave to serve as a wet nurse to suckle her infants, she would hire a poor free woman for the job, if her family could afford the expense.
The conviction and execution of Socrates (469-399 B.C.), the most famous philosopher of the late fifth century B.C., became perhaps the most infamous event in the history of Athens after the Peloponnesian War because his life had been devoted to combating the idea that justice should be equated with power to work one’s will. Coming, as it did, during a time of social and political turmoil, his death indicated the fragility of Athenian justice in practice. His passionate concern to discover valid guidelines for leading a just life and to prove that justice is better than injustice under all circumstances gave a new direction to Greek philosophy: an emphasis on ethics. Although other thinkers before him had dealt with moral issues, especially the poets and dramatists, Socrates was the first of those thinkers called philosophers to make ethics and morality his central concern.
Compared to the sophists, Socrates lived in poverty and publicly disdained material possessions, but he nevertheless managed to serve as a hoplite in the army and support a wife and several children. He may have inherited some money, and he also received gifts from wealthy admirers. He paid so little attention to his physical appearance and clothes that many Athenians regarded him as eccentric. Sporting, in his words, a stomach “somewhat too large to be convenient,”he wore the same nondescript cloak summer and winter and scorned shoes no matter how cold the weather. His physical stamina was legendary, both from his tirelessness when he served as a soldier in Athens’s citizen militia and from his ability to outdrink anyone at a symposium.
Whether participating at a symposium, strolling in the agora, or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium, Socrates spent his time in conversation and contemplation. In the first of these characteristics he resembled his fellow Athenians, who placed great value on the importance and pleasure of speaking with each other at length. He wrote nothing; our knowledge of his ideas comes from others’ writings, especially those of his pupil Plato. Plato’s dialogues, so called because they present Socrates and others in extended conversation about philosophy, portray Socrates as a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and various sophists. Socrates’s questions had the unsettling aim of making his interlocutors – his partners in the conversation – examine the basic assumptions of their way of life. Employing what has come to be called the Socratic method, Socrates never directly instructs his conversational partners; instead, he leads them to draw conclusions in response to his probing questions and refutations of their assumptions.
Socrates typically began one of his conversations by asking the interlocutor for a definition of an abstract quality such as happiness or a virtue such as courage. For instance, in the dialogue entitled Laches after the Athenian general of that name who appears as one of the dialogue’s interlocutors, Socrates asks Laches and another distinguished military commander what makes a citizen a brave soldier. Socrates then proceeds by further questioning to show that the definitions of courage and instances of courageous behavior stated by the interlocutors actually conflict with their other beliefs about the behavior that constituted courage.
This indirect method of searching for the truth often left Socrates’s interlocutors in a state of puzzlement because they were forced to conclude that they were ignorant of what they began by assuming they knew very well. Socrates insisted that he, too, was ignorant of the best definition of virtue but that his wisdom consisted of knowing that he did not know. He was trying to improve rather than undermine his interlocutors’ beliefs in morality, even though, as one of his conversationalists put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb just as if he had been stung by a stingray. Socrates wanted to discover through reasoning the universal standards that justified morality. He especially attacked the view of the sophists that proclaimed conventional morality the “fetters that bind nature.”This view, he asserted, equated human happiness with power and “getting more.”
Socrates passionately believed that just behavior was better for human beings than injustice and that morality was justified because it created happiness. Essentially, he seems to have argued that just behavior, or virtue, was identical to knowledge and that true knowledge of justice would inevitably lead people to choose good over evil and therefore to have truly happy lives, regardless of their material success. Since Socrates believed that knowledge itself was sufficient for happiness, he therefore asserted that no one knowingly behaved unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual’s interest. It might appear, he maintained, that individuals could promote their interests by cheating or using force on those weaker than themselves, but this appearance was deceptive. It was in fact ignorance to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to pursue whatever one desired. Instead, the most desirable human life was concerned with virtue and guided by rational reflection. Moral knowledge was all one needed for the good life, as Socrates defined it.
Although Socrates, unlike the sophists, offered no courses and took no fees, his effect on many people was as upsetting as the relativistic doctrines of the sophists had been. Indeed, Socrates’s refutation of his fellow conversationalists’ most cherished certainties, indirectly expressed through his method of questioning, made some of his interlocutors decidedly uncomfortable. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose sons, after listening to Socrates reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came home to try the same technique on their parents. Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional hierarchy of education between parent and child – the son was supposed to be educated by the father – had cause to feel that Socrates’ effect, even if it was not his intention, was to undermine the stability of society by questioning Athenian traditions and inspiring young men to do the same with the passionate enthusiasm of their youth. We cannot say with certainty what Athenian women thought of Socrates or he of them. His thoughts about human capabilities and behavior could be applied to women as well as to men, and he perhaps believed that women and men both had the same basic capacity for justice. Nevertheless, the realities of Athenian society meant that Socrates circulated primarily among men and addressed his ideas to them and their situations. He is, however, reported to have had numerous conversations with Aspasia, the courtesan who lived with Pericles for many years, and Plato has Socrates attribute his ideas on love to a woman, the otherwise-unknown priestess Diotima of Mantinea. Whether these contacts were real or fictional devices remains uncertain.
The feeling that Socrates could be a danger to conventional society gave the comic playwright Aristophanes the inspiration for his comedy Clouds of 423 B.C., so named from the role played by the chorus. In the play Socrates is presented as a cynical sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in the Protagorean technique of making the weaker argument the stronger. When the protagonist’s son is transformed by Socrates’s instruction into a rhetorician able to argue that a son has the right to beat his parents, the protagonist ends the comedy by burning down Socrates’s Thinking Shop, as it is called in the play.
Athenians with qualms about Socrates found confirmation of their fears in the careers of Alcibiades and, especially, Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants. Socrates’s critics blamed him for Alcibiades’ contempt for social conventions because Alcibiades had been one of Socrates’s most devoted followers. Critias, another prominent follower, played a leading role in the murder and plunder perpetrated by the Thirty Tyrants in 404-403 B.C. In blaming Socrates for the crimes of Critias, Socrates’s detractors chose to overlook his defiance of the Thirty Tyrants when they had tried to involve him in their violent schemes and his utter rejection of the immorality Critias had displayed.
The hostility some Athenians felt toward Socrates after the violence of the Thirty Tyrants encouraged the distinguished Athenian Anytus, who had suffered personally under this regime, to join with two other men of lesser prominence in prosecuting Socrates in 399 B.C. Since the amnesty prevented their bringing any charges directly related to the period of tyranny, they accused Socrates of impiety. Since Athenian law did not specify precisely what offenses constituted impiety, the accusers had to convince the jurors in the case that what Socrates had done was a crime. No judge presided to rule on what evidence was admissible or how the law should be applied, as usual in Athenian trials. Speaking for themselves as the prosecutors, as also required by Athenian law, the accusers argued their case against Socrates before a jury of 501 men that had been assembled by lot from that year’s pool of eligible jurors, drawn from the male citizens over thirty years old. The prosecution had both a religious and a moral component. Religiously, they accused Socrates of not believing in the gods of the city-state and of introducing new divinities. Morally, they charged, he had led the young men of Athens away from Athenian conventions and ideals. After the conclusion of the prosecutors’ remarks, Socrates spoke in his own defense, as required by Athenian legal procedure. Plato presents Socrates as taking this occasion not to rebut all the charges or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected in serious cases, but to reiterate his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions. This irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help them learn to live virtuous lives. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves – their souls – as good as possible. He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.
After the jury narrowly voted to convict, standard Athenian legal procedure required the jurors to decide between alternative penalties proposed by the prosecutors and the defendant. Anytus and his associates proposed death. In such instances the defendant was then expected to offer exile as the alternative, which the jury would then usually accept. Socrates, however, replied that he deserved a reward rather than a punishment, until his friends at the trial prevailed upon him to propose a fine as his penalty. The jury chose death. Socrates accepted his sentence with equanimity because, as he put it in a famous paradox, “no evil can befall a good man either in life or in death.”In other words, nothing can take away the knowledge that is virtue, and only the loss of that wisdom could ever count as a true evil. He was executed in the normal Athenian way, by being given a poisonous drink concocted from powdered hemlock. The silencing of Socrates did nothing, however, to restore Athenian confidence to the level of the fifth century B.C., and a later source reports that the Athenians soon came to regret the condemnation of Socrates as a tragic mistake that left a blot on their reputation.
In the fifty years after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta, Thebes, and Athens fought to win a dominant position of international power in the Greek world. Athens probably never regained the same economic and military strength that it had formerly wielded in the fifth century B.C., perhaps because its silver mines were no longer producing at the same level. Nevertheless, it did recover after the re-establishment of democracy in 403 B.C. and soon became a major force in international politics once again. Sparta’s widespread attempts to extend its power in the years after the Peloponnesian War gave Athens and the other Greeks states ample opportunity for diplomatic and military action. In 401 B.C., the Persian satrap Cyrus, son of a previous king, hired a mercenary army to try to unseat Artaxerxes II, who had ascended to the Persian throne in 404. Xenophon, who enlisted under Cyrus, wrote a stirring account in his Anabasis of the expedition’s disastrous defeat at Cunaxa near Babylon and the arduous and long journey home through hostile territory of the terrified Greek mercenaries from Cyrus’ routed army. Sparta had supported Cyrus’ rebellion, thereby arousing the hostility of Artaxerxes. The Spartan general Lysander, the victor over Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian War, pursued an aggressive policy in Anatolia and northern Greece, and other Spartan commanders meddled in Sicily. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos thereupon formed an anti-Spartan coalition because they saw this Spartan activity as threatening their own interests at home and abroad.
In a reversal of the alliances of the end of the Peloponnesian War, the Persian king initially allied with Athens and the other Greek city-states against Sparta in the so-called Corinthian War, which lasted from 395 to 386 B.C. But this alliance failed, too, because the king and the Greek allies were seeking their own advantage rather than peaceful accommodation. The war ended with Sparta once again cutting a deal with Persia. In a blatant renunciation of its claim to be the defender of Greek freedom, Sparta acknowledged the Persian king’s right to control the Greek city-states of Anatolia in return for permission to secure Spartan interests in Greece without Persian interference. The King’s Peace of 386 B.C., as the agreement is called, effectively returned the Greeks of Anatolia to the dependent status of a century ago before the Greek victory in the Persian Wars of 490-479 B.C.
Spartan forces attacked city-states all over Greece in the years after the peace. Athens, meanwhile, had restored its invulnerability to invasion by rebuilding the long walls connecting the city and the harbor. The Athenian general Iphicrates also devised effective new tactics for light-armed troops called peltasts by improving their weapons. The reconstruction of Athens’s navy built up its offensive strength, and by 377 B.C. the city had again become the leader of a naval alliance of Greek states, but this time the members of the league had their rights specified in writing to prevent high-handed Athenian behavior. Spartan hopes for lasting power were dashed in 371 B.C., when a resurgent Thebes defeated the Spartan army at Leuctra in Boeotia and then invaded the Spartan homeland in the Peloponnese. At this point the Thebans seemed likely to challenge Jason, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, for the position of the dominant military power in Greece.
The alliances of the various city-states shifted often in the repeated conflicts that took place in Greece during these early decades of the fourth century B.C. The threat from Thessaly faded with Jason’s murder in 370 B.C., and the former enemies Sparta and Athens momentarily allied against the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C. Thebes won the battle but lost the war when its great leader Epaminondas fell at Mantinea and no credible replacement for him could be found. The Theban quest for dominance in Greece was over. Xenophon adroitly summed up the situation after 362 B.C. with these closing remarks from the history that he wrote of the Greeks in his time (Hellenica): “Everyone had supposed that the winners of this battle would be Greece’s rulers and its losers their subjects; but there was only more confusion and disturbance in Greece after it than before.”The truth of his analysis was confirmed when the naval alliance led by Athens dissolved in the mid-350s B.C. in a war among the leader and the allies.
All the efforts of the various major Greek states to extend their hegemony over mainland Greece in this period therefore ended in failure. By the mid 350s B.C., no Greek city-state had the power to rule more than itself on a consistent basis. The struggle for supremacy in Greece that had begun eighty years earlier with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War had finally ended in a stalemate of exhaustion that opened the way for a new power – the kingdom of Macedonia.
One of the reasons that the sophists, who had flocked to Athens in the fifth century B.C., had stirred up controversy was that their teachings seemed to many to undermine time-honored moral traditions. Their relativistic doctrines implied that justice actually meant, to paraphrase the fifth-century historian Thucydides describing Athenian war-time behavior, the strong seizing all they have the power to obtain and the weak enduring what they had to accept. Attacking this doctrine was one of the many different subjects undertaken by the philosopher Plato in the fourth century B.C. Plato’s famous pupil, Aristotle, combined his teacher’s passion for theoretical philosophy with a scientific curiosity about all the phenomena of the natural world. Their thought helped create a new foundation for ethical and scientific inquiry. Their philosophical interests seemed too distant from the concrete concerns of a public career to men like the orator Isocrates, however, who insisted that a proper education centered on rhetoric and practical wisdom.
Socrates’ fate had a profound effect on his most brilliant follower, Plato (ca. 428 -348 B.C.), who even though an aristocrat nevertheless withdrew from political life after 399 B.C. The condemnation of Socrates had apparently convinced Plato that citizens in a democracy were incapable of rising above narrow self-interest to knowledge of any universal truth. In his works dealing with the organization of society, Plato bitterly rejected democracy as a justifiable system of government. Instead, he sketched what he saw as the philosophical basis for ideal political and social structures among human beings. His utopian vision had virtually no effect on the actual politics of his time, and his attempts to advise Dionysius II (ruled 367-344 B.C.), tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, on how to rule as a true philosopher ended in utter failure. Otherwise we have almost no evidence for the events of Plato’s life.
Political philosophy formed only one portion of Plato’s interests, which ranged widely in astronomy, mathematics, and metaphysics (theoretical explanations for phenomena that cannot be understood through direct experience or scientific experiment). After Plato’s death, his ideas attracted relatively little attention among philosophers for the next two centuries, until they were revived as important points for debate in the Roman era. Nevertheless, the sheer intellectual power of Plato’s thought and the controversy it has engendered ever since his lifetime have won him fame as one of the world’s greatest philosophers.
Plato seem to have disagreed with Socrates’s insistence that fundamental knowledge meant moral knowledge based on inner reflection. Plato concluded that knowledge meant searching for truths that are independent of the observer and could be taught to others. He acted on this latter belief by founding the Academy, a shady gathering spot just outside the walls of Athens, which was named after the local hero whose shrine was nearby. The Academy was not a school or college in the modern sense but rather an informal association of people, who were interested in studying philosophy, mathematics, and theoretical astronomy with Plato as their guide. The Academy became so famous as a gathering place for intellectuals that it continued to operate for nine hundred years after Plato’ death, with periods in which it was directed by distinguished philosophers and others during which it lapsed into mediocrity.
Plato did not write philosophical treatises in the abstract fashion familiar from more recent times but rather composed works called dialogues from their form as conversations or reported conversations. Almost as if they were short plays, the dialogues have settings and casts of conversationalists (often including Socrates), who talk about philosophical issues. Divorcing the philosophical content of a Platonic dialogue from its literary form is no doubt a mistaken approach; a dialogue of Plato demands to be taken as a whole. The dialogues were meant to provoke readers into thoughtful reflection rather than to spoon-feed them a circumscribed set of doctrines.
Plato’s views seem to have changed over time, and he nowhere presents one, coherent set of doctrines. Although it is unwise to try to summarize Plato rather than to read his dialogues as complete pieces, it is perhaps not too misleading to say that he taught that human beings cannot define and understand absolute virtues such as goodness, justice, beauty, or equality by the concrete evidence of these qualities in their lives. Any earthly examples will in another context display the opposite quality. For instance, always returning what one has borrowed might seem to be just. But what if a person who has borrowed a weapon from a friend is confronted by that friend who wants the weapon back to commit a murder? In this case, returning the borrowed item would be unjust. Examples of equality are also only relative. The equality of a stick two feet long, for example, is evident when it is compared with another two-foot stick. Paired with a three-foot stick, however, it displays inequality. In sum, in the world that human beings experience with their senses, every example of the virtues and every quality is relative in some aspect of its context.
Plato refused to accept the relativity of the virtues as reality. He developed the theory that the virtues cannot be discovered through experience; rather, the virtues are absolutes that can be apprehended only by thought and that somehow exist independently of human existence. The separate realities of the pure virtues Plato referred to in some of his works as Forms (singular eidos, plural eide, or singular idea, plural ideai); among the Forms were Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality. He argued that the Forms were invisible, invariable, and eternal entities located in a higher realm beyond the empirical world of human beings. The Forms such as Goodness, Justice, Beauty, and Equality are, according to Plato, true reality; what humans experience with their senses are the impure shadows of this reality.
Each Form, Plato seems to say, is an essential quality, one that people experience only through contrast between opposites. For example, that a stick embodies equality to another of the same length but inequality to a stick of a different length demonstrates equality only through contrast with the unequal stick. The Form Equality, however, is the pure essence of equality, which under no circumstances can be unequal or possess the quality of inequality. Such a pure Form is beyond human experience. The same reasoning applies to the other virtues such as goodness or beauty or justice.
Plato’s concept of Forms required the further belief that knowledge of them came through the human soul, which must be immortal. When a soul is incarnated in its current body, it brings with it knowledge of the Forms. The soul then uses reason in argument and proof, not empirical observation through the senses, to recollect its pre-existent knowledge.
Plato was not consistent throughout his career in his views on the nature or the significance of Forms, and his later works seem quite divorced from the theory. Nevertheless, Forms provide a good example of both the complexity and the wide range of Platonic thought. With his theory of Forms, Plato made metaphysics a central issue for philosophers ever since.
Plato’s idea that humans possessed immortal souls distinct from their bodies established the concept of dualism, positing a separation between spiritual and physical being. This notion of the separateness of soul and body would play an influential role in later philosophical and religious thought. In a dialogue written late in his life, Plato said the pre-existing knowledge possessed by the immortal human soul is in truth the knowledge known to the supreme deity. Plato called this god the Demiurge (“craftsman”) because the deity used knowledge of the Forms to craft the world of living beings from raw matter. According to this doctrine of Plato, a knowing, rational God created the world, and the world therefore has order. Furthermore, its beings have goals, as evidenced by animals adapting to their environments in order to flourish. The Demiurge wanted to reproduce in the material world the perfect order of the Forms, but the world as crafted turned out not to be perfect because matter is necessarily imperfect. Plato suggested that the proper goal for human beings is to seek perfect order and purity in their own souls by making rational desires control their irrational desires. The latter cause harm in various ways. The desire to drink wine to excess, for example, is irrational because the drinker fails to consider the hangover to come the next day. Those who are governed by irrational desires thus fail to consider the future of both body and soul. Finally, since the soul is immortal and the body is not, our present, impure existence is only one passing phase in our cosmic existence.
Plato employed his theory of Forms not only in metaphysical speculation about the original creation of the everyday world in which people live but also in showing the way human society should be constructed in an ideal world. One version of Plato’s utopian vision is found in his most famous dialogue, the Republic. This work, whose Greek title (Politeia) would be more accurately rendered as System of Government, primarily concerns the nature of justice and the reasons that people should be just instead of unjust. Justice, Plato argues, is advantageous; it consists of subordinating the irrational to the rational in the soul. By using the truly just polis as a model for understanding this notion of proper subordination in the soul, Plato presents a vision of the ideal structure for human society. Like a just soul, the just society would have its parts in proper hierarchy, parts that Plato in the Republic presents as three classes of people, as distinguished by their ability to grasp the truth of Forms. The highest class constitutes the rulers, or “guardians”as Plato calls them, who are educated in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics. Next come the “auxiliaries,”whose function it is to defend the polis. The lowest class is that of the producers, who grow the food and make the objects required by the whole population. Each part contributes to society by fulfilling its proper function.
Women as well as men qualify to be guardians because they possess the same virtues and abilities as men, except for a disparity in physical strength between the average woman and the average man. The axiom justifying the inclusion of women, namely that virtue is the same in women as in men, is perhaps a notion that Plato derived from Socrates. The inclusion of women in the ruling class of Plato’s utopian city-state represented a startling departure from the actual practice of his times. Indeed, never before in Western history had anyone proposed – even in fantasy – that work be allocated in human society without regard to gender. Moreover, to minimize distraction, guardians are to have neither private property nor nuclear families. Male and female guardians are to live in houses shared in common, to eat in the same mess halls, and to exercise in the same gymnasiums. The children are to be raised as a group in a common environment by special caretakers. Although this scheme is meant to free women guardians from child-care responsibilities and enable them to rule equally with men, Plato fails to consider that women guardians would in reality have a much tougher life than the men because they would have to be pregnant frequently and undergo the strain and danger of giving birth. At the same time, he evidently does not believe they are disqualified for ruling on this account. The guardians who achieved the highest level of knowledge in Plato’s ideal society would qualify to rule over the ideally just state as philosopher-kings.
To become a guardian, a person from childhood must be educated for many years in mathematics, astronomy, and metaphysics to gain the knowledge that Plato in the Republic presented as necessary if one was to rule for the common good. Plato’s specifications for the education of guardians in fact make him the first thinker to argue systematically that education should be the training of the mind and the character rather than simply the acquisition of information and practical skills. Such a state would necessarily be authoritarian because only the ruling class would possess the knowledge to determine its policies and make decisions determining who is allowed to mate with whom to produce the best children.
The severe regulation of life that Plato proposed for his ideally just state in the Republic was an outgrowth of his tight focus on the question of a rational person’s true interest. Furthermore, he insisted that politics and ethics are fields in which objective truths can be found by the use of reason. Despite his harsh criticism of existing governments such as Athenian democracy and his scorn for the importance of rhetoric in its functioning, Plato also recognized the practical difficulties in implementing radical changes in the way people actually lived. Indeed, his late dialogue The Laws shows him wrestling with the question of improving the real world in a less radical, though still authoritarian, way than in the Republic. Plato hoped that, instead of ordinary politicians, whether democrats or oligarchs, the people who know truth and can promote the common good would rule because their rule would be in everyone’s real interest. For this reason above all, he passionately believed that the study of philosophy mattered to human life.
Plato’s most brilliant follower was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). Aristotle’s great reputation as a thinker in science and philosophy rests on his influence in promoting scientific investigation of the natural world and in developing rigorous systems of logical argument. The enormous influence of Aristotle’s works on scholars in later periods, especially the Middle Ages, has made him a monumental figure in the history of western science and philosophy.
The son of a wealthy doctor from Stagira in northern Greece, Aristotle came to Athens at the age of seventeen to study in Plato’s Academy, where he stayed until the death of Plato in 348/7. He next went to stay with Hermias, a ruler of towns in Mysia in western Anatolia. When Hermias fell from power and died in 345, Aristotle moved to the town of Mytilene on Lesbos, and then in 343 he took up a post at the royal court of Macedonia to tutor Alexander, the son of king Philip II. By 340 he had probably returned to Stagira, and in 335 Aristotle founded his own informal philosophical school in Athens named the Lyceum, later called the Peripatetic School after the covered walkway (peripatos) in which its students carried on conversations while strolling out of the glare of the Mediterranean sun. When Alexander, who had succeeded his father as Macedonian king, died in 323, anti-Macedonian feelings among the Athenians forced Aristotle to depart for Chalcis, where he died in 322.
Aristotle lectured on nearly every branch of learning: biology, medicine, anatomy, psychology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, mathematics, music, metaphysics, rhetoric, political science, ethics, literary criticism. Apparently an inspiring teacher, Aristotle encouraged his followers to conduct research in numerous fields of specialized knowledge. For example, he had student researchers compile reports on the systems of government of 158 Greek states. He also worked out a sophisticated system of logic for precise argumentation. Creating a careful system to identify the forms of valid arguments, Aristotle established grounds for distinguishing a logically sound case from a merely persuasive one. He first gave names to contrasts such as premise versus conclusion and the universal versus the particular that have been commonplaces of thought and speech ever since. He also studied the process of explanation itself, formulating the influential doctrine of four causes. According to Aristotle, four different categories of explanation exist that are not reducible to a single, unified whole: form (defining characteristics), matter (constituent elements), origin of movement (similar to what we commonly mean by “cause”), and telos (aim or goal). This analysis exemplifies Aristotle’s care never to oversimplify the complexity of reality. Some of Aristotle’s most influential discussions concentrated on understanding qualitative concepts that human beings tend to take for granted, such as time, space, motion, and change. Through careful argumentation he probed the philosophical difficulties that lie beneath the surface of these familiar notions, and his views on the nature of things exercised an overwhelming influence on later thinkers.
Much of Aristotle’s philosophical thought reflected the influence of Plato, but he also refined and even rejected ideas that his teacher had advocated. He denied the validity of Plato’s theory of Forms, for example, on the grounds that the separate existence that Plato postulated for them failed to make sense. This position typified Aristotle’s general preference for explanations based on common sense rather than metaphysics. By modern standards his scientific thought paid relatively limited attention to mathematical models of explanation and quantitative reasoning, but mathematics in his time had not yet reached the level of sophistication appropriate for such work. His method also differed from that of modern scientists because it did not include controlled experimentation. Aristotle believed that investigators had a better chance of understanding objects and beings by observing them in their natural setting than under the artificial conditions of a laboratory. His coupling of detailed investigation with perceptive reasoning served especially well in such physical sciences as biology, botany, and zoology. For example, as the first scientist to try to collect all the available information on the animal species and to classify them, Aristotle recorded the facts about more than five hundred different kinds of animals, including insects. Many of his descriptions represented significant advances in learning. His recognition that whales and dolphins were mammals, for instance, which later writers on animals overlooked, was not rediscovered for another two thousand years. His gynecology, however, in contrast to much of his other learning, was seriously flawed.
In his zoological research Aristotle set forth his teleological view of nature – that is, he believed organisms developed as they did because they had a natural goal (telos in Greek), or what we might call an end or a function. To explain a phenomenon, Aristotle said that one must discover its goal – to understand “that for the sake of which”the phenomenon in question existed. A simple example of this kind of explanation is the duck’s webbed feet. According to Aristotle’s reasoning, ducks have webbed feet for the sake of swimming, an activity that supports the goal of a duck’s existence, which is to find food in the water so as to stay alive. Aristotle argued that the natural goal of human beings was to live in the society of a polis and that the city-state came into existence to meet the human need to live together, since individuals living in isolation cannot be self-sufficient. Furthermore, existence in a city-state made possible an orderly life of virtue for its citizens. The means to achieve this ordered life were the rule of law and the process of citizens’ ruling and being ruled in turn.
Aristotle was conventional for his times in regarding slavery as natural on the grounds that some people were by nature bound to be slaves because their souls lacked the rational part that should rule in a human being. Individuals propounding the contrary view were rare, although one fourth-century B.C. orator, Alcidamas, asserted that “God has set all men free; nature has made no one a slave.”Also in tune with his times was Aristotle’s conclusion that women were by nature inferior to men. His view of the inferiority of women was based on faulty notions of biology. He wrongly believed, for example, that in procreation the male with his semen actively gave the fetus its form, while the female had only the passive role of providing its matter. His assertion that females were less courageous than males was justified by dubious evidence about animals, such as the report that a male squid would stand by as if to help when its mate was speared but that a female squid would swim away when the male was impaled. Although his erroneous biology led Aristotle to evaluate females as incomplete males, he believed that human communities could be successful and happy only if they included the contributions of both women and men. Aristotle argued that marriage was meant to provide mutual help and comfort but that the husband should rule.
Aristotle sharply departed from the Socratic idea that knowledge of justice and goodness was all that was necessary for a person to behave justly. He argued that people in their souls often possess knowledge of what is right but that their irrational desires overrule this knowledge and lead them to do wrong. People who know the evils of hangovers still get drunk, for instance. Recognizing a conflict of desires in the human soul, Aristotle devoted special attention to the issue of achieving self-control by training the mind to win out over the instincts and passions. Self-control did not mean denying human desires and appetites; rather, it meant striking a balance between suppressing and heedlessly indulging physical yearnings, of finding “the mean.”Aristotle claimed that the mind should rule in striking this balance because the intellectual is the finest human quality and the mind is the true self, indeed the godlike part of a person.
Aristotle believed that human happiness, which was not to be equated with the simple-minded pursuit of pleasure, stems from fulfilling human potentialities. These potentialities can be identified by rational choice, practical judgment, and recognition of the value of choosing the mean instead of extremes. The central moral problem is the nearly universal human tendency to want to “get more,”to act unjustly whenever one has the power to do so. The aim of education is to dissuade people from this inclination, which has its worst effects when it is directed at acquiring money or honor. In this context Aristotle was thinking of men in public life outside the home, and he says that the dangerous disorder caused by men’s desire for “getting more”occurs both in democracies and oligarchies. The greatest threat to democracy was the teaching of the sophists that freedom is living exactly as a man likes. True freedom, he stressed, consisted in ruling and being ruled in turn according to the agreed-on laws of the community.
Aristotle regarded science and philosophy not as abstract subjects isolated from the concerns of ordinary existence but rather as the disciplined search for knowledge in every aspect of life. That search epitomized the kind of rational human activity that alone could bring the good life and genuine happiness. Some modern critics have replied that Aristotle’s work lacks a clear moral code, but he did the study of ethics a great service by insisting that standards of right and wrong have merit only if they are grounded in character and aligned with the good in human nature and do not simply consist of lists of abstract reasons for behaving in one way rather than another. An ethical system, that is, must be relevant to the actual moral situations that human beings continually experience in their lives. In ethics, as in all his scholarship, Aristotle distinguished himself by the insistence that the life of the mind and experience of the real world were inseparable components in the quest to define a worthwhile existence for human beings.
Despite his interest in subjects such as the history of the constitutions of states and the theory and practice of rhetoric, Aristotle remained a theoretician in the mold of Plato. This characteristic set him apart from the major educational trend of the fourth century B.C., which emphasized practical wisdom and training that had direct application to the public lives of upper-class male citizens in a swiftly changing world. The most important subject in this education was rhetoric, the skill of persuasive public speaking, which itself depended not only on oratorical techniques but also on the knowledge of the world and of human psychology that speakers required to be effective. The ideas about education and rhetoric that emerged in this period exercised tremendous influence throughout the Greek and Roman eras and long thereafter.
Influential believers in the general value of practical knowledge and rhetoric were to be found even among those who had admired Socrates, who had placed no value on such matters. Xenophon, for example, knew Socrates well enough to write extensive memoirs recreating many conversations with the great philosopher. But he also wrote a wide range of works in history, biography, estate management, horsemanship, and the public revenues of Athens. The subjects of these treatises reveal the manifold topics that Xenophon considered essential to the proper education of young men.
The ideas of the famous Athenian orator Isocrates (436-338 B.C.) exemplified the dedication to rhetoric as a practical skill that Plato rejected as utterly wrong. Isocrates was born to a rich family and studied with sophists and thinkers including Socrates. Since he lacked the voice to address large gatherings, Isocrates composed speeches for other men to deliver and sought to influence public opinion and political leaders at Athens and abroad by publishing speeches of his own in writing. He regarded education as the preparation for a useful life doing good in matters of public importance. He sought to develop an educational middle ground between the theoretical study of abstract ideas and purely crass training in rhetorical techniques for influencing others to one’s own personal advantage. In this way he stood between the ideals of Plato and the promises of unscrupulous sophists.
Rhetoric was the skill that Isocrates sought to develop, but that development, he insisted, could come only with natural talent and the practical experience of worldly affairs that trained orators to understand public issues and the psychology of the people whom they had to persuade for the common good. Isocrates saw rhetoric therefore not as a device for cynical self-aggrandizement but as a powerful tool of persuasion for human betterment, if it was wielded by properly gifted and trained men with developed consciences. Women were of course excluded from participation because they could not take part in politics. The Isocratean emphasis on rhetoric and its application in the real world of politics won many more adherents among men in Greek and, later, Roman culture than did the Platonic vision of the philosophical life, and it would have great influence when revived in Renaissance Europe, two thousand years later.
Throughout his life Isocrates tried to put his doctrines to use by addressing works to powerful leaders whose policies he wanted to influence. In his later years he believed the state of Greece had become so unstable that he promoted the cause of Pan-hellenism – political harmony among the Greek states – by urging Philip II, king of Macedonia, to unite the Greeks under his leadership in a crusade against Persia. This radical recommendation was Isocrates’ practical solution to the persistent conflicts among Greek city-states and to the social unrest created by friction between the richer communities and the many poor areas in Greece. Isocrates believed that if the fractious city-states accepted Philip as their leader in a common alliance, they could avoid wars among themselves and relieve the impoverished population among them by establishing Greek colonies on land to be conquered and carved out of Persian-held territory in Anatolia. That a prominent Athenian would openly appeal for a Macedonian king to save the Greeks from themselves reflected the startling new political and military reality that had emerged in the Greek world by the mid-fourth century B.C.
The rise to international power of the kingdom of Macedonia soon filled the power vacuum that had been created by the fruitless wars of the Greek city-states with each other in the early fourth century B.C. and that Xenophon had so acutely summed up at the end his Hellenica. Macedonia was a rough land of mountains and lowland valleys just to the north of Greece, which had greater natural resources. Life there was harder than in Greece because the climate was colder and harsher and because the Macedonians’ western and northern neighbors periodically launched devastating raids into Macedonian territory. The Macedonian population was especially vulnerable to such raids because they generally lived in small villages and towns without protective walls. That this formerly minor kingdom become the greatest power in Greece in the latter part of the fourth century and conquered the Persian Empire must rank as one of the major surprises in ancient military and political history.
Unlike the city-states of Greece, Macedonia was ruled by a monarchy. The power of the king of the Macedonian state was constrained by the tradition that he was supposed to listen to his people, who were accustomed to addressing their monarch with considerable freedom of speech. Above all, the king could govern effectively only as long as he maintained the support of the most powerful aristocrats, who counted as the king’s social equals and controlled large bands of followers. Fighting, hunting, and heavy drinking were the favorite pastimes of these men. The king was expected to demonstrate his prowess in these activities to show he was a Macedonian man’s man capable of heading the state. Macedonian queens and royal mothers received respect in this male-dominated society because they came from powerful families in the Macedonian nobility or the ruling houses of lands bordering Macedonia and bore their husbands the heirs that they needed to carry on their royal dynasties. In the king’s absence these royal women could vie with the king’s designated representative for power at court.
Macedonians had their own language related to Greek, but the aristocrats who dominated Macedonian society routinely learned to speak Greek because they admired the idea of being Greek and thought of themselves and indeed all Macedonians as Greek by blood. At the same time, Macedonians looked down on the Greeks to the south in Greece as a soft lot unequal to the adversities of life in Macedonia. The Greeks reciprocated this scorn. The famed Athenian orator Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.) lambasted the Macedonian king Philip II (*359-336) as “not only not a Greek nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from a land worth mentioning; no, he’s a pestilence from Macedonia, a region where you can’t even buy a slave worth his salt.”Barbed verbal attacks like this one characterized Demosthenes’ speeches on foreign and domestic policy to the Athenian assembly, where he consistently tried to convince his fellow Athenians to oppose Macedonian expansionism in Greece. His exceptional rhetorical skill also made him the foremost of his time in the writing of speeches for other men to deliver in court cases.
The Athenian orator and politician Demosthenes spoke so forcefully against Philip II because he recognized how dangerous and ambitious was this king, who was the person most responsible for making Macedonia into an international power and doing so against heavy odds. For one thing, strife in the royal family and disputes among the leading aristocrats had always been so common that Macedonia before Philip’s reign had never been sufficiently united to mobilize its full military strength. So real was the fear of violence from their own countrymen that Macedonian kings stationed bodyguards not only outside the door to the royal bedroom but inside the door as well. Moreover, Macedonian princes married earlier than did most men, soon after the age of twenty, because the instability of the kingship demanded the production of male heirs as soon as possible.
The situation in Macedonia was grave in 359 B.C. when the current Macedonian king, Perdiccas, and 4,000 Macedonian troops were slaughtered in battle with the Illyrians, hostile neighbors from the north of Macedonia. In this moment of crisis, Philip persuaded the aristocrats to recognize him as king in place of his infant nephew, for whom he was now serving as regent after the loss of the previous king in the field. Philip then rallied the army by teaching the infantrymen an unstoppable new tactic. Macedonian troops carried thrusting spears fourteen feet long, which they had to hold with two hands. Philip drilled his men to handle these heavy weapons in a phalanx formation, whose front line bristled like a lethal porcupine with outstretched spears. With the cavalry of aristocrats deployed as a strike force to soften up the enemy and protect the infantry’s flanks, Philip’s reorganized army promptly routed Macedonia’s attackers and suppressed local rivals to the new king.
After his reorganization of the Macedonian army, Philip embarked on a whirlwind of diplomacy, bribery, and military action to make the states of Greece acknowledge his superiority. He financed this activity by prodigious spending of the gold and silver coinage he had minted from the mines of Macedonia and those that he captured in Thrace. A Greek contemporary, the historian Theopompus of Chios, labeled Philip “insatiable and extravagant; he did everything in a hurry ... he never spared the time to reckon up his income and expenditure.”By the late 340s B.C. Philip had cajoled or forced most of northern Greece to follow his lead in foreign policy. His goal then became to lead a united Macedonian and Greek army against the Persian Empire. His announced reason sprung from a central theme in Greek understanding of the past: the need to avenge the Persian invasion of Macedonia and Greece of 480 B.C. Philip also feared the potentially destabilizing effect on his kingdom if his reinvigorated army were left with nothing to do. To launch his grandiose invasion, however, he needed to strengthen his alliance by adding the forces of southern Greece to it.
At Athens, Demosthenes used his stirring rhetoric to castigate the Greeks for their failure to resist Philip: they stood by, he thundered, “as if Philip were a hailstorm, praying that he would not come their way, but not trying to do anything to head him off.”Finally, Athens and Thebes headed a coalition of southern Greek states to try to block Philip’s plans. In 338 B.C., Philip and his Greek allies trounced the coalition’s forces at the battle of Chaeronea in Boeotia. The defeated Greek states retained their internal freedom, but they were compelled to join an alliance under Philip’s undisputed leadership, called the League of Corinth by modern scholars after the location of its headquarters.
The course of later history proved the battle of Chaeronea in 338, in which Philip of Macedon and his Greek allies defeated a coalition of other Greek states, to have been a decisive turning point in Greek history: never again would the states of Greece make foreign policy for themselves without considering, and usually following, the wishes of outside powers. This change marked the end of the Greek city-states as independent actors in international politics, but they were to retain their significance as the basic economic and social units of the Greek world. But that role would be fulfilled from now on as subjects or allies of the new kingdoms that later emerged from the Macedonian kingdom of Philip and his son Alexander after the latter’s death in 323 B.C. The Hellenistic kingdoms, as these new monarchies are called, like the Roman provinces that in turn eventually replaced them as political masters of the Greeks, depended on the local leaders of the Greek city-states to collect taxes for the imperial treasuries and to insure the loyalty and order of the rest of the citizens.
A disgruntled Macedonian assassinated Philip in 336 B.C. Unconfirmed rumors circulated that the murder had been instigated by one of his several wives, Olympias, a princess from Epirus to the west of Macedonia. In any case, Philip’s son by her, Alexander (356-323 B.C.), promptly liquidated potential rivals for the throne and won recognition as king. In several lightning-fast campaigns, he subdued Macedonia’s traditional enemies to the west and north. Next he compelled the southern Greeks, who had rebelled from the League of Corinth at the news of Philip’s death, to rejoin the alliance. To demonstrate the price of disloyalty, Alexander destroyed Thebes in 335 B.C. as punishment for its rebellion from the League.
With Greece pacified, Alexander in 334 B.C. led a Macedonian and Greek army into Anatolia to fulfill his father’s plan to avenge Greece by attacking Persia. Alexander’s astounding success in conquering the entire Persian Empire while in his twenties earned him the title “the Great”in later ages. In his own time, his greatness consisted of his ability to inspire his men to follow him into hostile, unknown regions where they were reluctant to go, beyond the borders of civilization as they knew it. Alexander inspired his troops with his reckless disregard for his own safety. He often plunged into the enemy at the head of his men, sharing the danger of the common soldier. No one could miss him in his plumed helmet, vividly colored cloak, and armor polished to reflect the sun. So intent on conquering distant lands was Alexander that he had rejected advice to delay his departure from Macedonia until he had married and fathered an heir, to forestall instability in case of his death. He had further alarmed his principal adviser, an experienced older man, by giving away virtually all his land and property in order to strengthen the army, thereby creating new landowners who would furnish troops. “What,”he was asked,”do you have left for yourself?”“My hopes,”Alexander replied. Those hopes centered on constructing a heroic image of himself as a warrior as glorious as the incomparable Achilles of Homer’s Iliad. Alexander always kept a copy of the Iliad under his pillow, along with a dagger. Alexander’s aspirations and his behavior represented the ultimate expression of the Homeric vision of the glorious conquering warrior.
Alexander cast a spear into the earth of Anatolia when in 334 B.C. he crossed the Hellespont strait from Europe to Asia (in what is today part of northwestern Turkey), thereby claiming the Asian continent for himself in Homeric fashion as “territory won by the spear.”The first battle of the campaign, at the River Granicus in western Anatolia, proved the worth of Alexander’s Macedonian and Greek cavalry, which charged across the river and up the bank to rout the opposing Persians. Alexander visited the legendary king Midas’s old capital of Gordion in Phrygia, where an oracle had promised the lordship of Asia to whoever could loose a seemingly impenetrable knot of rope tying the yoke of an ancient chariot preserved in the city. The young Macedonian, so the story goes, cut the Gordion knot with his sword. In 333 B.C. the Persian king, Darius, finally faced Alexander in battle at Issus, near the southeastern corner of Anatolia. Alexander’s army defeated its more numerous opponents with a characteristically bold strike of cavalry through the left side of the Persian lines followed by a flanking maneuver against the king’s position in the center. Darius had to flee from the field to avoid capture, leaving behind his wives and daughters, who had accompanied his campaign in keeping with royal Persian tradition. Alexander’s scrupulously chivalrous treatment of the Persian royal women after their capture at Issus reportedly boosted his reputation among the peoples of the king’s empire.
When Tyre, a heavily fortified city on the coast of what is now Lebanon, refused to surrender to him in 332 B.C., Alexander employed the siege machines and catapults developed by his father to breach its walls. The capture of Tyre rang the death knoll of the impregnable city-state. Although successful sieges remained rare after Alexander because well-constructed city walls still presented formidable barriers to attackers, Alexander’s success against Tyre increased the terror of a siege for a city’s general population. No longer could the citizens of a city-state confidently assume that their defensive system could withstand the technology of their enemy’s offensive weapons indefinitely. The now-present fear that a siege might actually breach a city’s walls made it much harder psychologically for city-states to remain united in the face of threats from enemies like aggressive kings.
Alexander next took over Egypt, where hieroglyphic inscriptions seem to show that he probably presented himself as the successor to the Persian king as the land’s ruler rather than as an Egyptian pharaoh. On the coast, to the west of the Nile River, Alexander founded a new city in 331 B.C. named Alexandria after himself, the first of the many cities he would later go on to establish as far east as Afghanistan. During his time in Egypt, Alexander also paid a mysterious visit to the oracle of the god Ammon, whom the Greeks regarded as identical to Zeus, at the oasis of Siwah far out in the western Egyptian desert. Alexander told no one the details of his consultation of the oracle, but the news got out that he had been informed he was the son of the god and that he joyfully accepted the designation as true.
In 331 B.C., Alexander crushed the Persian king’s main army at the battle of Gaugamela in northern Mesopotamia near the border of modern Iraq and Iran. He subsequently proclaimed himself king of Asia in place of the Persian king. For the heterogeneous populations of the Persian Empire, the succession of a Macedonian to the Persian throne meant essentially no change in their lives. They continued to send the same taxes to a remote master, whom they rarely if ever saw. As in Egypt, Alexander left the local administrative system of the Persian empire in place, even retaining some Persian governors. His long-term aim seems to have been to forge an administrative corps composed of Macedonians, Greeks, and Persians working together to rule the territory he conquered with his army.
Alexander next led his army farther east into territory hardly known to the Greeks. He pared his force to reduce the need for supplies, which were hard to acquire in the arid country through which they were marching. Each hoplite in Greek armies customarily had a personal servant to carry his armor and pack. Alexander, imitating Philip, trained his men to carry their own equipment, thereby creating a leaner force by cutting the number of army servants dramatically. As with all ancient armies, however, a large number of noncombatants trailed after the fighting force: merchants who set up little markets at every stop, women whom soldiers had taken as mates along the way and their children, entertainers, and prostitutes. Although supplying these hangers-on was not Alexander’s responsibility, their foraging for themselves made it harder for Alexander’s quartermasters to find what they needed to supply the army proper.
An ancient army’s demand for supplies usually left a trail of destruction and famine for local inhabitants in the wake of its march. Hostile armies simply took whatever they wanted. Friendly armies expected local people to sell or donate food to its supply officers and also to the merchants trailing along. These entrepreneurs would set up markets to resell locally obtained provisions to the soldiers. Since most farmers in antiquity had practically no surplus to sell, they found this expectation – which was in reality a requirement – a terrific hardship. The money the farmers received was of little use to them because there was nothing to buy with it in the countryside, where their neighbors had also had to participate in the forced marketing of their subsistence.
From the heartland of Persia, Alexander in 329 B.C. marched northeastward into the trackless steppes of Bactria (modern Afghanistan). When he proved unable to subdue completely the highly mobile locals, who avoided pitched battles in favor of the guerrilla tactics of attack and retreat, Alexander settled for an alliance that he sealed by marrying the Bactrian princess Roxane in 327 B.C. In this same period, Alexander completed the cold-blooded suppression of both real and imagined resistance to his plans among the aristocrats in his officer corps. As in past years, he used accusations of treachery or disloyalty as justification for the execution of those Macedonians he had come to distrust. These executions, like the destruction of Thebes in 335 B.C., demonstrate Alexander’s appreciation of terror as a disincentive to rebellion.
From Bactria Alexander headed east to India. He probably intended to push on all the way through to China in search of the edge of the farthest land on the earth, which Aristotle, whom Philip had once employed as the young Alexander’s tutor, had taught was a sphere. Seventy days of marching through monsoon rains, however, finally shattered the nerves of Alexander’s soldiers. In the spring of 326 B.C. they mutinied on the banks of the Hyphasis River (the modern Beas) in western India. Alexander was forced to agree to lead them in the direction of home. When his men had balked before, Alexander had always been able to shame them back into action by sulking in his tent like Achilles in the Iliad. This time the soldiers were beyond shame.
After the mutiny of his troops in northwestern India and his bitter acquiescence to their demand to return homeward, Alexander led his army south down the course of the Indus River. Along the way he took out his frustration at being stopped in his eastward march by slaughtering the Indian tribes who resisted him and by risking his life more flamboyantly then ever before. As a climax to his frustrated rage, he flung himself over the wall of an Indian town to face the enemy alone like a Homeric hero. His horrified officers were barely able to rescue him in time; even so, he received grievous wounds. At the mouth of the Indus on the Indian Ocean, Alexander turned a portion of his army west through the fierce desert of Gedrosia. Another portion took an easier route inland, while a third group sailed westward along the coast to explore for possible sites for new settlements and harbors. Alexander himself led the contingent that braved the desert, planning to surpass earlier Persian kings by marching through territory that they had found impossible. There a flash flood wiped out most of the noncombatants following the army. Many of the soldiers also died on the march through the desert, expiring from lack of water and the heat, which has been recorded at 127 degrees in the shade in that area. Alexander, as always, shared his men’s hardships. In one legendary episode from this horrible ordeal, a few men were said to have brought him a helmet containing some water they had found. Alexander spilled the water out onto the sand rather than drink when his men could not. The remains of the army finally reached safety in the heartland of Persia in 324 B.C.
When he had returned to Persia, Alexander promptly began to formulate plans for an invasion of the Arabian peninsula and, to follow that, all of North Africa west of Egypt. By the time of his return to Persia, Alexander had dropped all pretense of ruling over the Greeks as anything other than an absolute monarch. Despite his earlier promise to respect the internal freedom of the Greek city-states, he impinged on their autonomy by sending a peremptory decree ordering them to restore to citizenship the large number of exiles from the Greek city-states, who had been created over the previous decades of war in Greece and whose status as wandering, stateless persons was creating unrest. Even more striking was his communication that he wished to receive the honors due a god. Initially dumbfounded by this request, the leaders of most Greek states soon complied by sending honorary delegations to him as if he were a god. The Spartan Damis pithily expressed the only prudent position on Alexander’s deification open to the cowed Greeks: “If Alexander wishes to be a god, we agree that he be called a god.”Scholars continue to debate Alexander’s motive for desiring the Greeks to acknowledge him as a god, but few now accept a formerly popular theory that he sought divinity because he believed the city-states would then have to obey his orders as originating from a divinity, whose authority would supersede that of all earthly regimes. Personal rather than political motives best explain his request. He almost certainly had come to believe that he was the son of Zeus; after all, Greek mythology told many stories of Zeus producing children by mating with a human female. Most of those legendary offspring were mortal, but Alexander’s conquest showed that he had surpassed them. His feats must be superhuman, he could well have believed, because they exceeded the bounds of human possibility. Alexander’s accomplishments demonstrated that he had achieved godlike power and therefore must be a god himself. Alexander’s divinity was, in ancient terms, a natural consequence of his power.
Alexander’s overall aims can best be explained as interlinked goals: the conquest and administration of the known world and the exploration and possible colonization of new territory beyond. Conquest through military action was a time-honored pursuit for Macedonian aristocrats like Alexander. He included non-Macedonians in his administration and army because he needed their expertise, not because he wished to promote an abstract notion of what has sometimes been called “the brotherhood of man.”Alexander’s explorations benefited numerous scientific fields from geography to botany because he took along scientifically minded writers to collect and catalogue the new knowledge that they encountered. The far-flung new cities that he founded served as loyal outposts to keep the peace in conquered territory and provide warnings to headquarters in case of local uprisings. They also created new opportunities for trade in valuable goods such as spices that were not produced in the Mediterranean region.
Alexander’s plans to conquer Arabia and North Africa were extinguished by his premature death from a fever and heavy drinking on June 10, 323 B.C. He had already been suffering for months from depression brought on by the death of his best friend, Hephaistion. Close since their boyhoods, Alexander and Hephaistion were probably lovers. When Hephaistion died in a bout of excessive drinking, Alexander went wild with grief. The depth of his emotion was evident when he planned to build an elaborate temple to honor Hephaistion as a god. Meanwhile, Alexander threw himself into preparing for his Arabian campaign by exploring the marshy lowlands of southern Mesopotamia. Perhaps it was on one of these trips that he contracted the malaria-like fever that, exacerbated by a two-day drinking binge, killed him.
Like Pericles, Alexander had made no plans about what should happen if he should die unexpectedly. His wife Roxane was to give birth to their first child only some months after Alexander’s death. When at Alexander’s deathbed his commanders asked him to whom he bequeathed his kingdom, he replied, “To the most powerful.”
The Athenian orator Aeschines (c. 397-322 B.C.) well expressed the bewildered reaction of many people to the events of Alexander’s lifetime: “What strange and unexpected event has not occurred in our time? The life we have lived is no ordinary human one, but we were born to be an object of wonder to posterity.”Alexander himself certainly attained legendary status in later times. Stories of fabulous exploits attributed to him became popular folk tales throughout the ancient world, even reaching distant regions where Alexander had never trod, such as deep into Africa. The popularity of the legend of Alexander as a symbol of the height of achievement for a masculine warrior-hero served as one of his most persistent legacies to later ages. That the worlds of Greece and the Near East had been brought into closer contact than ever before represented the other long-lasting effect of his astonishing career.
Overview of Archaic & Classical Greek History
by Thomas Martin, College of the Holy Cross
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
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