The Rise of Athens

—

At last the Athenians could thank their hosts at Troezen and Salamis and, after long months as hard-up refugees, go home. Thucydides wrote:

The Athenian people, after the departure of the barbarian from their country, at once proceeded to bring over their children and wives, and such possessions as they had saved, from the places where they had deposited them. They prepared to rebuild their city and their walls. Only isolated portions of the circumference had been left standing, and most of the houses were in ruins, though a few remained, in which the Persian grandees had lodged.

In fact, the Spartans feared that Athens would get above itself and they had relished any opportunity to interfere militarily in its domestic affairs. Their own city was famous for being without walls and they asked the Athenian ecclesia not to build any themselves, and to join them in knocking down the fortifications of other city-states. Their stated motive was to make sure that if the Persians invaded for a third time there would be no strong places that they could capture and use as bases.

A likely tale, thought Themistocles; they simply wanted to keep the Athenians weak. Before he could be stopped, he put to work the entire male population on urgent wall construction and on improving the defenses of Piraeus. The perimeter of the city was enlarged, to accommodate a growing population. Gravestones, column drums from an unbuilt temple, and other miscellaneous material were cannibalized. Only when the work reached the lowest defensible height, at least so far as Athens itself was concerned, did he inform the Spartans what had been done. Privately, they were annoyed, but said nothing.

Twenty years later, very much in the spirit of Themistocles, who (in Plutarch’s metaphor) “attached the city to the Piraeus and made the land dependant on the sea,” two massive new walls were constructed to lead from Athens to the new port five miles away, and to the bay at Phaleron and so literally link the city to the sea. Later a third wall, parallel to the first, was added, creating a corridor two hundred yards wide. So long as its mercantile profits and the silver of Laurium allowed it to maintain its fleet, the polis would in effect become an unconquerable island. It would no longer have to worry about land powers, such as Sparta or Argos or disgraced Thebes. The Long Walls, as they came to be called, were very probably the wily statesman’s original idea—even if a generation had to pass before it was realized.

There was one exception to the general renewal of the sacked city. When the allies swore their oath before the battle of Plataea every Athenian was reported to have vowed: “I will not rebuild a single one of the temples which the barbarians have burned and razed to the ground, but will let them remain for future generations as a memorial of their impiety.”

So the Acropolis stayed a charred ruin. “Lest we forget” was the visible message that loomed above the city. There was little chance of that, as the Great King was to find out.

The Athenians had not finished with him yet.

13

League of Nations

Nobody underplayed the resonance of victory. It echoed and re-echoed. Monuments, shrines, odes, and elegies proliferated.

Simonides of Ceos specialized in public poetry and was so much in demand that, despite his murky track record as celebrator of the Pisistratid tyranny at Athens, he became the unofficial poet laureate of the Persian Wars. He (probably) wrote that most celebrated of epitaphs in honor of the Spartan king and the famous Three Hundred. Leonidas and his comrades were buried in 480 where they fell on the mound behind the ancient wall at Thermopylae. A stone lion commemorated the king. The poem’s terseness can, paradoxically, move the reader, even today.

Go tell the Spartans, passer by,

That here obedient to their laws we lie.

A Thermopylae memorial was erected in Sparta, which listed the names of all the Spartiate dead (of course, no acknowledgment was made of the bravery of the conscripted helots, an unwise decision as would appear later). Statues of Leonidas and Pausanias stood nearby (modern archaeologists have uncovered the head and torso of a Greek warrior, almost certainly the Spartan king).

The twin demigods, Castor and Pollux, were brothers of Helen of Troy, beautiful wife of Sparta’s king, Menelaus. Statues of them traditionally accompanied armies on campaign, as the poet implied in an elegy on the battle of Plataea. The men of Sparta, he wrote,

Did not forget their courage…

And their glory among men will be immortal.

Leaving the river Eurotas and the town of Sparta,

They hastened, accompanied by the horse-taming sons of Zeus,

The heroes Castor and Pollux and mighty Menelaus…

Led by the noble son of king Cleombrotus…

Pausanias.

For Salamis, Apollo was given a statue of himself holding in his hand the stern ornament of a trireme. Sanctuaries at Salamis, Sunium on the southernmost tip of Attica, and the Isthmus were each allocated a captured warship. Pausanias donated bronzes of Zeus, king of the gods, and his brother, the sea-god Poseidon.

His most munificent, if boastful, gift was the Serpent Column at Delphi. Three intertwined snakes, worked in bronze, stood about twenty feet high, with a golden tripod on top. The names of thirty-one Greek states that had fought the Persians were inscribed on the coils. Originally, an inscription on the tripod read: “Pausanias, commander-in-chief of the Hellenes, dedicated this monument to Apollo, when he destroyed the army of the Medes.” Who did the destroying? The commander or the god? The grammatical ambiguity was intentional. The Spartan authorities had the inscription erased.

Simonides did not leave out the fallen Athenians:

If the greatest part of virtue is to die nobly

Then Fortune granted this to us above all others,

For after striving to crown Greece with liberty

We lie here enjoying praise that will never grow old.

—

Nobody was surprised that Themistocles blew his own trumpet, but what was odd was the resentment and annoyance it caused. As the man of the hour, who had engineered the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis, he was invited by the Spartans to take part in their victory celebrations. While Eurybiades, the local boy, won the prize for valor, they awarded Themistocles one for wisdom; in each case this consisted of nothing more elaborate than a wreath of olive leaves. More substantially, though, he was given the finest chariot in town and, when he left for home, three hundred young men escorted him to the Spartan frontier. These were exceptional honors for a foreigner.

Such accolades irritated the Athenians, who felt that Salamis had benefited people in the Peloponnese far more than it had themselves. Themistocles made matters worse by building a small temple and altar to the west of the Acropolis, not far from his house in a popular residential district. Inside he placed a statue of himself. Unblushingly, he dedicated the shrine to Artemis of the Best Advice. Public opinion took against this swanking.

The popularity of Themistocles among the Spartans soon evaporated too. He opposed their argument that all states which had medized should be excluded from the Greek alliance, for he realized that that would give them and their allies in the Peloponnese an automatic voting majority in their councils. He also appears to have extorted money from a number of islands in the Aegean.

A poet of Rhodes wrote some scathing verses about the Athenian leader’s partiality for money. Called Timocreon, he had been banished for medizing. His chances of returning home were scuppered when, he alleged, Themistocles, then sailing with the fleet, took a hefty bribe to veto his return from exile. What made this betrayal particularly scandalous was the fact the two men were guest-friends. He prayed for redress to Leto, mother of the gods Apollo and Artemis and the protectress of oaths. She

can’t stand Themistocles,

Liar, cheat, and traitor, who, though Timocreon was his host,

With shitty lucre was persuaded not to bring him back

To Ialysus [in Rhodes], his native land,

But grabbed three silver talents and went cruising off.

Themistocles felt for himself the ingratitude of the demos, just as his father had foreseen. He learned what it was like to be a redundant trireme. Except once in 478, he was never again elected strategos; his naval policy was still followed, but new politicians were coming forward and Themistocles was yesterday’s man.

Eventually he fell victim to the political device he had made good use of himself. In 472 or 471 he was ostracized and exiled from Athens for a period of ten years. Potsherds reveal various scratched opinions of the great man; one citizen condemned him, counterintuitively, “because of his esteem” or high reputation. Another simply added “Asshole” (the Greek word implies a shameful liking for being buggered) after his name, and a third that he was a “pollution to the land.”

The other hero of the war, Pausanias, the victor of Plataea, also got into trouble. Like other fellow-countrymen he kicked over the traces when he was abroad and temporarily liberated from the iron constraints of Spartan society.

He was appointed admiral of an allied squadron with Aristides in command of the Athenian contingent. His general brief was to liberate Greek islanders and the Ionians of the Asian coastline from Persian control and, after Mycale, to do everything possible to keep the Great King on the run. He made good progress, expelling a Persian garrison from the city-state of Byzantium, which was strategically placed on the shores of the Bosphorus, the narrow passage of water leading to the Black Sea. Whoever controlled Byzantium, controlled the grain trade. He also campaigned successfully in Cyprus and freed most of this large island from Persian rule, for the time being at least.

Unfortunately, Pausanias, young, energetic, and delighted with himself, started misbehaving. He accidentally killed a Byzantine woman he had taken for sexual purposes. He acted insolently and oppressively. When Aristides questioned his conduct, he scowled, said he was busy, and refused to listen. He took to wearing Persian dress and eating Persian food, sinister signs of ideological unreliability from a Greek point of view. People suspected Pausanias, correctly as it turned out, of making overtures to the enemy. He was alleged to have secretly returned some of Xerxes’ friends and relatives, whom he had taken prisoner at Byzantium. He sent the Great King a private letter promising to “make Sparta and the rest of Hellas subject to you,” if Persia would help him. The king wrote back enthusiastically, promising unlimited financial support.

A widespread feeling grew among the Ionian Greeks that they would be better off if they were led by Athens rather than Sparta. It was after all the former who had made the all-important commitment to sea power. It was its triremes that were the mainstay of the fleet. As we have seen, the city was widely reported to be the originator of the Ionian “race.” The Ionian Greeks looked up to Athens, and Pausanias’s poor performance was their cue to seek a transfer of command.

It was also thought that Pausanias was tampering with the helots, promising them freedom if they helped him become sole monarch of Sparta. The fact that their contribution to the war effort had not been recognized would have loosened any loyalty they may have felt to their masters. If there was one thing that frightened the authorities, it was the prospect of the enslaved peoples of Messenia rising once more in revolt.

Hearing these reports of their admiral’s misconduct the ephors recalled him, but they had insufficient proof to charge him with any offense. Pausanias slipped away on a trireme to the Bosphorus and took command at Byzantium, where he still had some support. The Athenians angrily ejected him, and in 470 the ephors again summoned home their errant regent. But they still had too little hard evidence to convict him—until one of his former lovers came forward. This man showed them an incriminating letter that he had been instructed to deliver to the Great King. He had noticed that all Pausanias’s previous messengers to Xerxes had failed ever to reappear. He undid the latest letter and found the postscript he had expected—an order to put the carrier to death.

Even now the ephors hesitated. No contemporary tells us this, but we may surmise that Pausanias was popular either with the helots or with the Spartiate hoplites with whom he had fought at Plataea—or with both. The Spartan establishment did not want to risk a popular rising.

So a sting was devised. The messenger went as a suppliant to Taenarum (now Cape Matapan), a promontory on Sparta’s southern coast sixty miles or so from the capital. Here a celebrated temple of Poseidon was built inside a cave that was said to lead to the underworld. An oracle enabled petitioners to summon and consult the dead. Taenarum was the chief sacred place for helots and perioeci, where they could seek sanctuary. It was a well-chosen refuge for someone in trouble with the authorities.

Pausanias’s onetime boyfriend took up residence there in a hut. The regent, doubtless a little alarmed when he heard about this, traveled down from Sparta, entered the hut, which had a partition behind which some ephors were hiding, and asked the man what he thought he was doing. In the conversation that followed Pausanias admitted his guilt. He guaranteed the messenger his safety and sent him on his way.

Back in Sparta the ephors now had all the evidence they could require and moved to arrest Pausanias in the street. But when he saw them approaching he guessed from the expression on an ephor’s face what his mission was and another gave him a secret warning sign. He ran to a nearby temple of Athena, goddess of the Brazen House, and sought sanctuary there.

The authorities walled him up and starved him to death. Just before he drew his last breath they pulled him out, hoping to avoid polluting a sacred space with mortality. They were disappointed, for Apollo at Delphi ruled otherwise and laid the Spartans under a curse. Having stolen one body from the goddess’s protection they were told to expiate the sin by giving her a couple in return—in the shape of costly bronze statues.

—

Themistocles became entangled in the downfall of Pausanias. Compromising documents were found among the regent’s possessions, which the ephors handed over to the Athenians. The ecclesia summoned their savior to stand trial for treason and issued a warrant for his arrest. At the time he was based at Argos, where he seems to have been making trouble for the Spartans, traveling around the peninsula and very probably fomenting discontent.

Well-informed as ever, Themistocles learned in advance what was afoot and fled to Corcyra. Still not feeling safe, he traveled north to the backward kingdom of the Molossians, where life had not changed much since the days of Agamemnon and where, as in Homer, guests were sacrosanct. Here he was given asylum, despite the fact that in the past he had angered the ruler, Admetus, by not doing him some favor he had requested. His wife and children joined him from Athens, although the man who arranged their escape was executed for his pains.

Themistocles had to move on, though, for the long arm of Athens would eventually and inevitably reach him wherever he was in the Balkans. The only realistic solution was to head for the Persian Empire, but what kind of reception could the Great King’s nemesis expect to receive? He made his way east cross-country to the Macedonian port of Pydna north of Mount Olympus, where he took ship for Asia. Narrowly escaping an Athenian squadron off Naxos, he arrived at Ephesus. He arranged for cash to be sent to him from friends in Athens and from “secret hoards” at Argos. Money stuck to him like glue and he never appears to have been seriously embarrassed for funds.

Themistocles wrote a letter to the Great King at Susa. This was now Artaxerxes I, third son of Xerxes, for in August 465 his father had been assassinated in exotic and obscure circumstances. Apparently, the commander of the royal bodyguard had hanged the crown prince on Xerxes’ orders. Having killed the son, he then feared that he would get the blame and so killed the father.

According to Thucydides, Themistocles was unabashed. Referring to the supposedly helpful messages he had sent Xerxes just before and after Salamis, he claimed: “For the past you owe me a good turn. For the present, [I am] able to do you great service. It’s because of my friendship for you that I am here, pursued by the Hellenes.”

Artaxerxes bit on the bait and welcomed the Athenian statesman to his court. His defection was a public relations coup and his background briefings on Greek affairs will have been useful, although he had been out of government too long to have any “live” secrets to tell. He was made governor of the wealthy city of Magnesia on the Ionian coast not far from Ephesus, where he died in 459. A surprising fate. Who could have predicted that the architect of Salamis would have ended up as a Persian high official?

—

Taken at face value, the stories of how the two undoubted heroes of the Persian Wars, Pausanias and Themistocles, met their ends are bizarre. These perfectly rational politicians appear to have lost their senses, made grave errors, and followed suicidal or at least eccentric courses of action. But one grand idea, unspoken admittedly, united them and could provide a solution of the mystery.

If there was a lesson to be learned from the Persian Wars it was that Greece had been extremely lucky. The multiplicity of tiny states, prone to ceaseless wrangling, prevented the Hellenes from pursuing a common goal. It was only at the last minute that a precarious unity had been achieved at Salamis. It would hardly be surprising if intelligent men began to wonder how Greece could be integrated into a single powerful state. This might be most readily achieved by encouraging one or other of the leading powers, Athens and Sparta, to establish a hegemony.

Pausanias felt that constitutional reform at home was essential if Sparta was to play an effective international role; and Themistocles foresaw the creation of an Athenian empire among the islands of the Aegean and on the Asian coastline. They both understood the difficulties that lay ahead and realized that Persian military and financial support could offer them a handy shortcut to attain their ends. But to their cost they underestimated the opposition they would arouse from reactionaries at home. They cast the dice and lost.

The Spartan was by far the lesser figure of the two. His contemporaries recognized that Themistocles was the greatest man of the age. He was no traitor, although he would take money from anyone and do business with anyone. The historian Thucydides was a cool judge of men, but he believed that the Athenian statesman transcended his flaws, large and brightly colored as they were. He was

a man who showed the most unmistakable signs of genius; indeed, in this respect he was quite exceptional and has an unparalleled claim on our admiration….Whether we consider the extent of his natural powers, or his speed of action, this extraordinary man outdid everyone else in his ability intuitively to meet an emergency.

But to the Athenians he was a traitor and as such, according to law, could not be buried in the national territory. In Magnesia, though, he remained popular even after his death and a magnificent memorial was built in his honor in the main square. As late as the first century A.D. his direct descendants were still receiving a pension from public funds. It was reported that his family removed his bones to Athens and buried them secretly.

At some stage a monument to him, known as the Tomb of Themistocles, was erected on a headland near the Grand Harbor at Piraeus. It looked rather like an altar and stood on a stone plinth. With touching aptness for the father of the Athenian navy, sailors would set a course by the tomb when it appeared on the horizon. The comic poet Plato wrote towards the end of the fifth century, addressing him directly:

there you look down

Upon the outward and the inward bound,

And galleys crowding sail as they race for home.

—

The war with Persia did not end at Plataea and Mycale. Greeks at the time celebrated their victory, but they did not feel safe. The Hellenic heartland had been saved, but for how long? The invasion had cost the Great King a mass of treasure, but his empire was rich and he could well afford to build another fleet and equip another army, if he so chose.

What was more, the whole story had begun fifteen years previously in Darius’s day with the revolt of the Ionian cities of Asia Minor—but they were still in chains and still waiting for them to be struck off. Would they ever be free? Finally, the Greeks were not rich, and now that they had the upper hand they looked for opportunities to make up the cost of the war by pillaging the Great King’s lands.

So the idea of a maritime league dedicated to continuing the fighting at sea and (now that the infuriating Pausanias was safely out of the way) led by the leading Ionian power, Athens, received universal support. States around the Aegean pressed it to accept the challenge, but in truth it needed little persuasion. What other use did it have for its two hundred triremes?

Even Sparta, dislodged from its leadership role, was content to allow matters to take their course. It recognized that Persia needed to be treated firmly and welcomed the emergence of a standing allied fleet, even if it were to play little part in its operations. The Athenians had acted bravely and, for a Greek polis, more or less disinterestedly. They might as well take charge, even if some nationalists back in the Peloponnese were anxious about the long-term consequences.

Founded in 478, the league’s administrative headquarters and treasury were established on the holy island of Delos in the Cyclades—hence the name by which this association of Greek states is known, the Delian League. It was an appropriate choice for here was the birthplace of Apollo, divine patron of the Ionians, for whom it was a cult center. Delegates met in the god’s temple there, and each of them, whatever the size and wealth of the state he represented, had a single vote. Member states were autonomous and Athens guaranteed their independence. We do not know how many joined the league in the first instance, but in its heyday later in the century they may have numbered as many as two hundred.

The league was a full offensive and defensive alliance. Some members provided ships for the fleet, and others—especially those miniature island states that could not afford to fit out even a single trireme—made a financial contribution to Athens. To begin with it was agreed that members who paid in cash rather than kind should in total cover the costs of one hundred triremes, estimated at 460 talents annually. As the years rolled by more and more league members found that their citizens disliked military service and absence abroad. They preferred, writes Plutarch, “to stay at home and become farmers and peace-loving merchants instead of fighters, and all through their short-sighted love of comfort.” They switched from providing ships to handing over money. This was greatly in the interest of Athens, for the triremes that membership income financed came under its direct control and were, in effect, an addition to its fleet. In time only three members, the rich and large islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos, insisted on contributing their own small but effective navies.

Aristides, the Athenian statesman and old rival of Themistocles, was detailed to determine the assessments member by member. He fixed them according to their assets and their ability to pay. He seems to have done the job fairly as his nickname, “The Just,” testifies. He was not a rich man when he went into the process nor, tellingly, when he came out of it. Aristides once told an unregenerate Themistocles that “the quality which makes a real general is the power to keep his hands clean.” No doubt irritated that he had not been given the assessment commission himself, he in turn sneered that Aristides’ reputation “suited a money-box rather than a human being.”

Athens led expeditions and appointed its own treasurers to record and manage the league’s income. Probably the council met to agree on a plan of campaign for the year ahead, but after a time these sessions were discontinued and Athens took all the key military decisions itself.

Another method of control, indirect but powerful, lay in the administration of justice. Each polis, however tiny, had its own judicial system, with different kinds of court, definitions of offenses, and punishments. What was to be done when citizens of one jurisdiction were sued or tried in another? Normally states entered into bilateral agreements. As leaders of the alliance the Athenians insisted that commercial lawsuits involving their citizens should be tried in their own courts. It seems that juries acted fairly and there were few complaints, but the arrangement only added to a shift of power from the periphery to the center.

A critic of the democracy, fierce but clear-eyed, wrote that “the Athenian people are thought to act ill-advisedly in this matter, namely, in forcing the allies to sail to Athens for litigation.” But in fact there were advantages to the arrangement. It kept the law courts busy, filled boardinghouses, increased income from harbor dues, and guaranteed juror fees. He continued: “Sitting at home without sailing out on ships, they control the allied cities.”

—

We have already seen that a remarkable feature of the Athenian democracy was the indestructibility of the upper crust. In other Greek states the arrival of popular rule usually meant the extinction or at least the expulsion of the old families. In Athens the inventor of democracy, Cleisthenes, was an Alcmaeonid and that rich and ambitious clan, nicknamed “accursed” because of its role in the Cylon affair 250 years previously, still flourished. Another clan, the Philaids, were wealthy conservative landowners, and the celebrated Miltiades, victor at Marathon, had been of their number. Now his son Cimon, the new chief of the Philaids, took center stage in the politics of Athens. It was telling that he married an Alcmaeonid, granddaughter of the Megacles who was suspected of Medism after the battle of Marathon and was exiled in 486. The “best people” (literally, “the beautiful and the good”) knew that it was in their interest to stick together.

During the 470s the Athenians continued on their upwards imperial path, but the dramatis personae changed. Themistocles was no longer employed and, as we have seen, by the end of the decade he was ostracized. Xanthippus’s final command was in 479 and that of Aristides in the following year. It seems they merely grew old. The dates of their deaths are unknown, although Aristides lived to see the expulsion of his great competitor.

New personalities emerged, and Cimon was the dominant figure. Born in 510 to a Thracian mother, he had a miserable inheritance. Being only half a Hellene, he was looked down on as a second-class citizen. His father had been fined by an Athenian court the enormous sum of fifty talents (for the details see this page) and immediately died. His son, then scarcely more than a boy, paid the fine and must have been nearly bankrupted. For a time, he and his sister, Elpinice, lay low. There was not enough money to marry her off with a good dowry, and the siblings lived together in the family home.

The young Cimon sowed wild oats. According to Plutarch,

He earned himself a bad name for delinquency and heavy drinking. He was said to take after his grandfather Cimon, who, they say, was so stupid that he was nicknamed Moron. Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who was a contemporary of Cimon, says that he did not receive an advanced education, and had none of the other liberal and typically Greek accomplishments. He did not show a trace of Athenian cleverness and fluency of speech.

However, he adds that his public manner was dignified and straightforward. In fact, the essence of the man was more Peloponnesian than Athenian. As Euripides wrote of Heracles, he was

Plain and unadorned,

In a great crisis brave and true.

Cimon was highly sexed. He was rumored to have committed incest with Elpinice, but this may mean no more than that they gave the appearance of being a couple because they lived together in the same house. In any event he married his sister off to one of Athens’s richest men, Callias, who provided slaves to work the state-owned silver mines at Laurium.

Cimon recouped the family fortune, perhaps from his family’s interests in the Chersonese, although it was said that Callias had agreed to restore his wealth in return for Elpinice. Cimon won high praise for bravery at the battle of Salamis. He also spent some of his fortune on public works: he transformed a parched grove of olive trees outside the city walls, called the Academy, into a well-watered gymnasium, equipped with running tracks and shady walks.

On the north side of the agora he erected a handsome colonnade as a civic amenity and named it after his brother-in-law. Its long back wall was decorated with paintings by the finest artists of the day. These depicted Athenian military exploits from the days of the Trojan War to the present. The Painted Stoa, as the colonnade came to be known, was rather like a modern war museum and, as well as history paintings, mementos of victories, such as captured bronze shields, were on display. It became a popular rendezvous and we hear of jugglers, sword-swallowers, beggars, and fishmongers gathering there.

Over time Cimon became very popular, perhaps because of the ordinariness of his tastes. His record as a playboy amusingly contradicted his admiration for the austere Spartan way of life. Even a satirist such as Eupolis was affectionately scurrilous:

He was not such a scoundrel as they go,

Only too lazy and fond of drinking,

And often he would spend the night in Sparta

And leave Elpinice to sleep alone.

—

As time passed, war-weariness set in. Allied states started to grumble at the high standards of efficiency expected of them and some sought to leave the alliance—or, as the Athenians saw it, revolted. Thucydides reports that the chief reasons for these defections were failures to produce the right amount of tribute or the right number of ships, and sometimes a refusal to produce any ships at all. The Athenians insisted on obligations being exactly met and made themselves detested by bringing the severest pressure to bear on men who were not used to continuous labor, and not disposed to undertake it.

Once the rebels had been brought to heel they realized to their dismay that they had lost all freedom of action and in future had to do as they were told. From these small beginnings an alliance of independent states gradually grew into an empire.

The first ally to announce unilaterally its secession was the powerful island of Naxos. The Athenians made it clear that a polis was free to join the league, but not to leave it. They besieged the island and forced it back into allegiance. In effect, Naxos became a subject state. Thucydides noted dourly:

This was the first time that the League was forced to enslave [i.e., remove the independence of] an allied

polis

. The precedent was followed in later cases as circumstances dictated.

Secession was also a reaction against an Athenian policy of sending out small detachments of settlers (the Greek word was cleruchy) to different parts of the Eastern Mediterranean. These were different from ordinary colonies in that the settlers remained Athenian citizens and were not altogether independent of the home country. They acted as military garrisons and often competed economically with local city-states.

(Cleruchies did not invariably thrive. A substantial force of Athenian citizens was sent to Amphipolis in Thrace at about this time; on moving inland they were attacked by local people and wiped out.)

Athenian arrogance caused bad blood. In about 465, when the Athenians sought to place a settlement in Thrace, the prosperous island polis of Thasos, which had commercial and precious metal mining interests in the region, was furious and revolted. It had a sizable fleet and felt it was well able to defend itself. But after a three-year siege the island surrendered to Athens. Its city walls were demolished, its fleet was confiscated and so were its mines. In place of supplying the ships it now no longer had, the Thasians were compelled to pay the annual league membership fee. Their fate was the most egregious example of Athens acting selfishly under the veil of league policy.

Although they had abdicated the command of the seas, the Spartans were finding the growth of Athenian power hard to take. They tried to conceal their bitterness, but in 464 secretly—and slyly—agreed to help Thasos by staging an invasion of Attica to divert the Athenians’ attention. However, earthquakes in the Peloponnese distracted them (for more on this see the following chapter).

Even states that declined to join the league could be dragooned into membership: this was what happened in 472 to Carystus, a small polis in southern Euboea. It was only a few miles across the water from the coast of Attica and its refusal was seen as an all-too-visible insult.

The league did not spend all its time pursuing defaulting members; it also did its proper job and harried the Persians until, if we are to believe Plutarch, the Chersonese fell to the allies and there was “not a single Persian soldier along the southern coast of Asia Minor from Ionia to Pamphylia.” To enable him to operate amphibiously, Cimon, then in command of the navy, redesigned the traditional Athenian trireme, giving it a broader beam and creating more room to carry armed hoplites. At an unknown date sometime during the first half of the decade, the Persians gathered together a large army and a fleet of 340 warships at the mouth of the Eurymedon River (in today’s southern Turkey) and in response Cimon sailed out to meet them.

With only 250 league triremes he routed the Persians, capturing two hundred of their ships and twenty thousand prisoners of war, and destroying others. The remnant fled to Cyprus where they abandoned their vessels and escaped inland. Evening was falling, but Cimon was not finished. He placed some Persian ships in his vanguard, dressed the crew in Persian uniforms, and sailed up the Eurymedon to where the enemy was encamped on the riverbank. The trick worked. The Greeks landed without opposition and their hoplites fell on the unsuspecting Persians. There was no moon and the night was dark. Many did not know who was attacking them and, in fact, were unaware that the league fleet was carrying infantry. The slaughter was immense.

This stunning double victory in or about 466 removed any lingering threat to Hellas and its liberties. As usual, Simonides was invited to praise the fallen with a moving verse:

These men lost the splendour of their youth at the Eurymedon.

Spearmen, they fought the vanguard of Persian archers,

Not only on foot but on their swift ships.

Dying, they left the most beautiful memory of their valour.

Nevertheless, more as symbol than from any real need, the Athenians decided to fortify the Acropolis, and the spoils from the Eurymedon paid for the work. The torched temples, though, were left as they were, still untouched.

—

During these triumphant postwar decades, Theseus, the national hero of Athens, put in a reappearance. He had long been honored as a demigod and hoplites fighting at Marathon believed that they saw him in full armor, leading the charge against the barbarians.

Then came a new development. In 476, the authorities consulted the oracle at Delphi. The Pythia demanded that the bones of Theseus be found and reinterred in Athens. Their approximate location was known—the island of Scyros off Euboea in the Aegean. In the misty days of myth, the aging Theseus decided to settle there and its ruler, seeing him as a rival, had pushed him off a high cliff to his death. But where precisely the body had been buried was a mystery.

Cimon understood the importance of Theseus to the Athenian brand and, after a successful campaign in Thrace in the same year as the Pythia’s ruling, restored his shrine at Athens. At this juncture, the league decided to invade Scyros and expel its inhabitants.

The reason was this. The island was largely barren and its inhabitants were inefficient farmers; so instead they made their living from piracy and disrupted peaceful trade. The high seas were not a safe place and maritime banditry was commonplace and almost respectable. To be a pirate was to be somebody in the world; whenever a ship arrived at port, the first question anyone would ask the captain was: “Are you pirates?” If he was, he would be confidently expected to acknowledge the fact. As Thucydides observed, there was “no sense of shame in the profession, rather a glorying in it.”

The last straw came when pirates confiscated the goods of some merchants from Thessaly, who had dropped anchor at the port of Scyros, and threw them into prison. The merchants managed to escape and, furious at their treatment, complained to the Amphictyony of Delphi, an association of states in middle and northern Greece—in effect, a federation of neighbors.

Judgment was given in their favor and the authorities at Scyros, anxious to avoid retaliation, named the actual culprits and instructed them to return their plunder. Panic-stricken, the robbers wrote to Cimon and promised to betray the island and hand it over to him, presumably in return for a pardon.

This was too good an offer to resist. Cimon arrived with the allied fleet, captured Scyros without trouble, and removed the population (exchanging it with Athenians and so, in effect, annexing the place). Now that he was there, and mindful of Apollo’s commandment, the admiral set about looking for the lost king. It was hard to know where to start until (or so the story goes) he saw an eagle pecking about on the top of a mound. He immediately dug there and unearthed a coffin containing the bones of an unusually tall warrior, a bronze spear and sword at his side.

Evidently Cimon had found his man and, with his sacred cargo on board his personal trireme, he set sail for Athens. His fellow-citizens were thrilled. There were massive celebrations, splendid processions, and sacrifices as if the once and future king were coming back into his own. A monument was built where his remains received the worship due to a hero or a demigod. Plutarch writes:

And now he lies buried in the heart of the city…and his tomb is a sanctuary and place of refuge for runaway slaves and all poor men who stand in fear of men in power, since Theseus was their champion and helper throughout his life, and listened kindly to the pleas of the needy and downtrodden.

—

How much of this tale should we take at face value? We may suspect Cimon to have had Theseus in mind when planning his raid on the pirates. No doubt what he found was an ancient barrow of some kind or the fossilized remains of a prehistoric creature, easily interpreted as the outsize skeleton of a hero. He knew the value of public relations.

Theseus was a talisman for the demos and the new philosophy of government. His legend showed him to have been indomitable, imaginative, popular, ruthless, and quick-witted. These were the values of the contemporary Athenian. He was a metaphor in human form of the democracy. Through him the glorious and mythic past blessed the imperial present.

14

The Falling-Out

One might think that nothing could be done to unwalled Sparta, that haphazard collection of dusty villages, to make it even more unimpressive to look at than it already was. But then, probably in 465, that all changed.

The place was flattened by a series of tremendous earthquakes. The peaks of neighboring Mount Taygetus broke away. The entire city was demolished, except for five houses. Where there had been little to look at there was now nothing to look at. Some young men and boys were exercising together at the time under the colonnade of a gymnasium; just before the earthquake struck, the boys’ attention was distracted by a hare and, still naked and covered in oil, they ran after it into the open. But the men were all killed when the gymnasium collapsed on them.

There was huge loss of life—twenty thousand deaths according to one source and, wrote Plutarch, “all the ephebes or military cadets.” Full adult male Spartan citizens, the invincible Equals, were in short supply.

For the helots—the enslaved population of the southern Peloponnese—the catastrophe was a god-sent opportunity. They immediately rose in revolt. Some in the countryside nearby headed at once for the city, where the survivors were trying to rescue those caught under rubble and masonry or to retrieve their possessions. The twenty-four-year-old king Archidamus astutely anticipated trouble and had the trumpet blown to herald an imminent enemy attack. When the helots arrived they faced an armed force and withdrew.

—

However, rebellion spread and many perioeci, free men but without civic rights and under Spartan rule, joined it. The Spartans were unable to put out the flames themselves and asked their allies to assist. The appeal was extended to the Athenians in spite of the fact that it was only a short while since they had themselves been planning an invasion of Attica. It was lucky that the men of Thasos kept their mouths shut.

The comic playwright Aristophanes has one of his characters amusedly recall the day “when Pericleidas the Spartan came here once and sat at the altars petitioning the Athenians, with a white face and a scarlet cloak, begging for an army.” There was lively debate in the ecclesia, some arguing that it would be good for Sparta to be taken down a peg or two. But Cimon, Plutarch writes, “put Sparta’s interests before his own country’s aggrandizement” and persuaded the assembly to send out an expeditionary force, under his command.

At this point things went mysteriously and very wrong.

The insurgents were gradually pushed back to their heartland and their final defensive position, Mount Ithome deep inside Messenia, where they built stockades and prepared to make a last stand. The Athenians had the reputation of being good at siege operations and this was the main reason for asking for their help. They arrived in force with four thousand hoplites, but before they could achieve anything the Spartans had a startling change of heart.

They abruptly sent the Athenians home, alone of all the foreign troops that had come to help them. They were perfectly polite and merely said that they no longer needed them. According to Thucydides they “grew afraid of the enterprise and the unorthodoxy of the Athenians and…feared that, if they stayed on in the Peloponnese, they might listen to the people in Ithome and become the sponsors of some revolutionary changes.”

There may have been some truth in this. The whole point of Athenian policy, and that of its maritime league, was to free Greeks and not to oppress them. The helots of Messenia were Greek. Why were Cimon’s hoplites helping Sparta to re-enslave them? It is quite possible that they were in touch with the rebels, if only from shame. It is hard to see what else can explain the apparent stupidity of Sparta’s action.

Predictably, the Athenians were deeply offended and, just as predictably, the consequences fell on the head of the statesman most associated with their pro-Spartan policy.

—

This was Cimon. He believed in the dual leadership of Greece, a partnership between equals, in which the Spartans dominated by land and Athens by sea. As we have seen, he greatly admired the plain Lacedaemonian way of life—and even named one of his sons Lacedaemonius. A natural oligarch (remember his family background), he was uneasy with the extreme democracy of his homeland. He was unpopular among populist politicians. On his victorious return from Thasos in 462, he was vindictively hauled before the law courts for bribery. He defended himself with vigor and candor:

I am not, like other Athenians, the spokesman of wealthy Ionians or Thessalians, to be courted or paid for my services. Instead, I represent the Spartans, whose simplicity and moderation I love to imitate—and I do so for free.

Cimon was acquitted.

Now he was in more serious trouble. His dismissal at Mount Ithome discredited his Sparta-friendly policy and helped put an end to his political career. “On a slight pretext,” according to Plutarch, the demos took its public revenge on Cimon. He was ostracized, and so compelled to leave Attica for ten years. An ostracon has come to light that raises an old slander: “Let Cimon take his sister Elpinice and get out.” It was a typical irony of democratic politics that absence made the heart fonder. In exile, the lost leader was soon forgiven.

As for Sparta, it paid a price for its incivility. Athens abrogated its alliance that had been agreed during the Persian Wars and made pacts with its enemies. Although the Spartan army eventually put down the Messenian revolt, the fortress at Ithome never fell. The defenders marched out proudly under an armistice. The Athenians took them under their wing and mischievously resettled them at Naupactus, their naval base on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf; from this point of vantage the former serfs kept the Peloponnese under their watchful gaze.

—

The swell created by the Persian Wars was still rolling. It pushed the excited democrats at Athens to further logical extremes. A new leader was emerging who was determined that every citizen be enabled to be politically active, that the democracy should be made even more democratic. He was to become the greatest of the city’s statesmen.

Typically, he was another aristocrat and, yet again, a member of the accursed clan. He was the son of Xanthippus, the Alcmaeonid by marriage who had been brought back from a period of ostracism to help fight the Persians, had displaced Themistocles as commander of the Athenian contingent of the allied Greek fleet, and fought at the crowning mercy of Mycale. The boy’s mother, Agariste, was of equally high birth. She was the niece of Cleisthenes, who had introduced the city’s (and the world’s) first democratic constitution.

Pericles, for that was his name, was born about 495. He was good-looking, except that his head was rather long and out of proportion. It resembled the bulb of the squill, a perennial herb common in Europe and the Middle East, and satirists nicknamed him Squill-head.

With this malformation, he was lucky to have survived the first few days of life, for Greek parents took disabled (or indeed for any reason unwanted) children outside the city bounds and left them to die in some unfrequented open space. On the fifth day after his birth the newborn Pericles was welcomed to the household and placed under the protection of the household gods. In a special ritual called the Amphidromia, or the Running Around, his father had to run around the domestic hearth holding the child in his arms and consecrating him to the goddess of the hearth, Hestia.

Like other little Athenians, Pericles will have been brought to the Anthesteria, a Flower and Wine Festival, in the early spring of the fourth year of his life. There he was presented with a wreath to wear on his head, a small jug from which he drank his first sip of wine, and a toy cart. This ceremony was a rite of passage, leading him from the privacy of the family to the open community of citizens.

For it to operate efficiently, the democracy depended on a population that could read, and for this reason if no other the Athenians paid great attention to the education of children. From about the age of seven Pericles was probably tutored at home, although small schools catered for ten or fifteen pupils. The curriculum concentrated on reading and writing, athletics together with music and the arts. Students used waxed tablets on which they scratched letters and texts with a stylus. Pottery sherds also served the function of scrap paper. Literature was taught by rote and Pericles will have learned substantial chunks from the classics of Greek poetry, drama, and epic verse, especially by Homer. But at least Xanthippus did not force him to memorize the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some 27,000 lines, as the father of one hapless youth insisted.

From the age of seven Athenian boys went to a sports ground or palaestra (literally, “wrestling school”) where a professional trainer or paidotribes took charge of their physical health and introduced them to competitive athletics. There they ran and threw discuses and javelins, boxed and wrestled. The very best young men would enter for the Olympic Games and the other athletic festivals.

Little Pericles’ upbringing was interrupted at the age of ten, when he and his family accompanied his ostracized father. He was soon back home in 481 after Xanthippus’s truncated exile. At fourteen he was introduced into a phratry, or brotherhood, one of thirty such mutual societies or associations. Members met for religious ceremonies and gave each other assistance when in trouble.

At the age of eighteen Pericles was registered at his deme, or local council, which functioned as if it were a miniature polis, as a full citizen, son of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. He entered the adult world with enthusiasm. As a teenager he was much influenced by his music and arts teacher, Damon, who also discreetly introduced him to the world of politics. He remained a close adviser of the adult Pericles and, Plutarch writes, “played the role of masseur and trainer for this political athlete.”

—

Pericles was an intellectual and took a lively interest in philosophical questions. He studied under the Italian thinker Zeno of Elea, a Greek colony on the southern Italian coast. Zeno is credited with having invented the dialectic—that is, a method of inquiry based on question and answer. A cynical commentator remarked:

His was a tongue that could argue both sides of a question

With an irresistible fury.

He also devised a number of subtle and profound “paradoxes,” in which logic contradicts the evidence of the senses. The most famous of these tells of Achilles, the great warrior, and a tortoise.

Achilles is racing the tortoise. He gives it a head start of one hundred yards. By the time he has run the one hundred yards, the tortoise has advanced (say) by one yard. It takes Achilles some more time to cover the additional yard, during which the tortoise has advanced a bit further still. So at each point that Achilles reaches, the tortoise has moved forward and, as there is an infinite number of points, he will never overtake the tortoise. (But in real life, of course, he does. The paradox, which has tested the finest philosophical minds for two millennia, reveals a mismatch between the way we think about the world and the way the world actually is.)

With teasers like this Pericles titillated his mind. But although he admired Zeno, he also became a close friend of Anaxagoras, a philosopher from Clazomenae, a polis in Asia Minor. He was credited with having introduced philosophy to Athens, where he settled in the mid- to late 460s. He was more interested in scientific inquiry than the pursuit of reason or metaphysical speculation. He believed that everything in nature was infinitely divisible and that mind was a substance that enters into the composition of living things and is the source both of all change and also of motion. He was the first to understand that moonlight is reflected from the sun.

Pericles enjoyed lengthy discussions with another of the age’s great thinkers, Protagoras, born in Abdera, an important Greek polis on the coast of Thrace. His ideas were controversial and deeply offended right-thinking, right-wing Athenians. He was skeptical about the supernatural and was a moral relativist. “About the gods,” he wrote, “I have no way of knowing whether they exist or not, nor what form they may have: the subject is very hard to understand and life is short.” He also made the bold claim that “man is the measure of all things: of those which are, that they are, and of those which are not, that they are not.” This left little room for the Olympians.

Sitting at the feet of men like Anaxagoras and Protagoras, Pericles learned to abandon magical explanations of natural events for rational ones. Once an eclipse of the sun took place when he was sailing in a ship. The helmsman panicked, as did everyone else on board, and did not know what to do. Once the eclipse had passed, Pericles held his cloak in front of the helmsman’s eyes and asked: “Is this a terrible omen?”

“No, it is not,” came the reply.

“Well then, what is the difference between this and the eclipse—except that the eclipse was caused by something larger than my cloak?”

—

Pericles was in his early twenties when he first entered the political stage. In the spring of 472 he was chosen to be choregos, or theatrical investor and producer, for the tragic playwright Aeschylus. By then his father was dead and he was in charge of the family fortune.

Like other wealthy citizens Pericles was expected to undertake a liturgy (the Greek for “work for the people”). This entailed undertaking a costly task for the state at his own expense. There were two kinds of liturgy—responsibility for running a trireme in the navy for one year and funding some aspect or other of a festival (a banquet or an athletic team or, as in this case, a chorus for a musical or dramatic performance). This was a typically ingenious means of encouraging public-spirited expenditure in place of an unpopular tax.

Pericles was choregos at the Great Dionysia drama festival and he was the financier and producer of three plays by Aeschylus, one of which survives, The Persians. Most Greek dramas were set in the legendary past, but in this case Aeschylus chose as his subject the victory at Salamis, only eight years after the battle had been won and lost. The action takes place at the imperial court in Susa, one of the Persian Empire’s capital cities, and its centerpiece is a long description of the battle by an eyewitness (see this page to this page). It gave plenty of opportunity for splendid and barbaric spectacle. We may imagine that the young Alcmaeonid spared no expense.

It was in this year or thereabouts that Themistocles was ostracized, and it may well be that Pericles used the play to remind the demos of the great man’s achievement and restore his popularity. If so, it was a bold political move for a newcomer and, as we know, it failed. Themistocles was soon voted out of Athens and obliged to leave his native land.

—

As a young man Pericles was the coming hope of the nobility, but he took up the people’s cause from motives of self-preservation and ambition. He came to act as aide to the leading democratic personality of the day, a man called Ephialtes. Little is known of him, but (unusually) he was probably not of aristocratic stock. Unlike most public figures of the day he was incorruptible. He was the guiding spirit behind the trial of Cimon. Pericles was appointed one of the ten prosecutors, although his heart seems not to have been in the task. Cimon’s sister begged Pericles to be gentle with her brother. He replied with a smile: “Elpinice, you are too old, much too old, for this kind of business.” In front of the jury he did not press the accusations against Cimon very hard.

For the two democrats there were serious flaws in the way the constitution was working. The first concerned the role of the antique council of the Areopagus. Its members were former Archons, public officials appointed from the two richest social classes in the polis. It was not directly elected and the less well-off were excluded from participation. This was against the spirit of the age and action was called for. The council should be either abolished or reformed.

Ephialtes opened the campaign against the Areopagus by bringing individual members to court for corruption and fraud. Having weakened the council’s self-confidence, he moved in for the kill. He chose his moment with care. In 462, when his leading opponent, Cimon, was away in Messenia on his unsuccessful mission to help the Spartans, Ephialtes persuaded the ecclesia to pass a package of bills that stripped the Areopagus of all its powers that were of political significance. These included its right to punish elected officials if they broke any laws while in office, to supervise the administration of government, and to ensure that the laws were obeyed. Its power to inquire into the private lives of citizens was also abolished.

The functions of the Areopagus were transferred either to the ecclesia, the boulē, or the jury courts. The council itself was left in being, but its only real, remaining function was to try cases of homicide. To add insult to injury, it was charged with looking after the sacred olive trees of Athena and helping to safeguard the property of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis in western Attica, where annual Mysteries in their honor were held.

Victory was gratifying, but short-lived. In 461, not long after the reform of the Areopagus, Ephialtes was kidnapped one night and murdered. According to Diodorus, it was never clear “just how his death came about”—a mysterious phrase, implying either that his body was not found or that the cause of death was unclear. In any case, his killer or killers were never caught. Plutarch reported that a certain Aristodicus of Tanagra was to blame, but nothing is known about him. It is a fair guess that Ephialtes fell victim to embittered oligarchs who wanted to avenge the emasculation of the Areopagus.

But what if we apply the test cui bono? To whose advantage was the murder? The obvious answer was Pericles, who inherited the leadership of the democratic faction. Malicious rumor suggested that he had arranged the assassination. Plutarch dismissed it as a “poisonous accusation” and he was right to do so. Pericles was a law-abiding man, self-righteously so.

—

At the age of thirty-three Pericles picked up the baton that had been seized from Ephialtes. For year after year during most of the next three decades, he was elected one of the city’s ten generals. Although he was by no means a despot, he was by far the most influential political figure in the ecclesia as well as being an able and aggressive military commander. In the last analysis, though, he operated in a direct democracy and advised rather than governed.

Pericles immediately proceeded to further reforms. There were three areas where he was sure improvements could be made.

First, he introduced a citizenship law. The franchise was restricted to those both of whose parents were Athenians. Previously a foreign mother had been no bar to civic status; Cleisthenes, Themistocles, and Cimon had all had foreign mothers. The polis was home to a large number of resident foreigners and Pericles’ aim was to limit access to the benefits of citizenship. Athens was internationally influential and there were practical advantages in turning citizens into a more exclusive closed group. It is also possible that immigration was unpopular (foreigners stealing jobs is a familiar complaint down the ages).

Henceforward, most public officials were appointed annually by lot rather than by election. This had the huge advantage of ensuring equal opportunity for all and of discouraging the creation of political factions or pressure groups. But when Solon introduced sortition for the Archons (see this page and this page), it was only applied to a directly elected long-list. He wanted to ensure the quality of candidates and a willingness to serve, but for Pericles these factors were less important than ensuring that all citizens had the chance of playing a part in public life. Loyalty outdid competence by a long chalk. So preliminary elections were abolished and appointments to the boulē and of Archons were made purely by lot.

This new arrangement would only work smoothly if office holders were paid, for otherwise the working poor would be unable to find the time required to fulfill their public duties. So Pericles brought in pay for those serving as Archons and boulē members.

Any male citizen above thirty years of age could offer to sit as a juror in the courts. Six thousand of these volunteers were appointed by lot at the beginning of a year (six hundred from each tribe), from which jurors were enrolled for individual cases. Juries were large—1,501 for the most important trials and between 201 and 401 for private suits. Pericles introduced jury pay at the living wage of two obols a day (later in the fifth century this was raised to three obols).

Numerous other officials, who received state salaries or sat on committees, were appointed by lot. These included the Treasurers of Athena, who were responsible for the imperial exchequer with its vast income flows; the Vendors, who farmed out public contracts to work the silver mines at Laurium; the Receivers, who collected public revenues and distributed them to the appropriate officials; the Accountants, who checked all the public accounts; the Examiners, who sat in the agora to receive complaints against office holders; and the Commissioners, who maintained the public sanctuaries. The polis also employed market inspectors who monitored the quality of goods on sale, commissioners of weights and measures, and grain inspectors. Only military and some technical financial responsibilities, where competence was absolutely essential, were not subject to appointment by lot.

The Greek alphabet first came into use during the eighth century when reading and writing were relatively novel skills. The Spartans used written records as little as possible to the amused scorn of other Greeks. But without high levels of literacy it would not have been possible for the Athenian democracy to function. A complicated constitution that prioritized openness, participation, accountability, and a busy economy dependent on international trade required reliable systems of reporting and documentation. Citizens had to be able to add and subtract, and understand script. We must assume that even many poor Athenians were, or under force of circumstance became, basically literate.

The democracy was very expensive to run. It has been estimated that by 440 up to twenty thousand citizens, about one third of the total or more, were in receipt of some form or other of state pay. This made a change of constitution unlikely, for there were so many citizens who had a vested interest in the democratic system. The point did not escape a caustic critic of the new order of things. “The poor, the men of the people, and the working class are doing very well and in large numbers, and so will increase support for the democracy.”

This was important, for Athenian democrats felt embattled. They went in constant fear that their constitution would be overthrown. The “best people” thought that the democracy was a completely unnecessary innovation; it was unfair, incompetent, and open to the worst kind of demagogue. It was a rogues’ charter. The same commentator, attributed (probably wrongly) to Xenophon, puts the argument:

…everywhere on earth the best element in society is opposed to democracy. For among the best people there is minimal wantonness and injustice but a maximum of scrupulous attention to what is good. However, among the people there is a maximum of ignorance, disorder, and wickedness. This is because poverty leads them to disgraceful behavior, and thanks to a lack of money some men are uneducated and ignorant.

The once dominant noble clans would have liked to see a return to oligarchy, to government by a well-bred minority, but they mostly kept their opinions to themselves and, like the lordly Cimon, served the state uncomplainingly.

—

A broken inscription survives that catalogues the dead from one of the ten Athenian tribes, the Erechtheis, in the year 460 or 459. Usually the fallen of all the ten tribes were recorded onto one stone slab or stele, but the large number of casualties probably explains the use of separate stelae. The inscription opens with a list of the various campaigns, which Athens was fighting simultaneously; the final phrase was in spaced-out capital letters for astonished emphasis.

Of [the tribe] Erechtheis

Those died in the war: in Cyprus, in Egy-

pt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, on Aegina, at Megara

I N T H E S A M E Y E A R.

There then followed the names of eight generals and 179 soldiers in three columns. Halieis refers to an unsuccessful foray into the territory of Argos in the Peloponnese. In the mid-fifth century the number of adult male citizens may have totaled as many as sixty thousand, but the polis had no hesitation in risking overextension.

Of about the same date is a small, beautifully carved marble relief that shows the goddess Athena, melancholy and in mourning (see the illustration). She may be reading a casualty list on a stele or contemplating a hoplite’s gravestone. Either way the image seems to embody the pity of war.

But, for all their grief for the fallen, as the Delian League gradually morphed into an empire, the Athenians became extraordinarily self-confident and aggressive. There was no question of fighting only on a single front, but on as many fronts as cared to present themselves.

An irresistible opportunity for cutting the Persians down to size arose almost by chance. The Egyptians always resented being a colony of the Achaemenids and, when they heard of the assassination of Xerxes in the summer of 465 and the confusion this was likely to cause at Susa, raised the standard of revolt under the leadership of Inaros, a young Libyan prince. The decision to do so was taken in the autumn of 464 and the winter was given over to careful planning and raising a preliminary military force. The Persian administration in Egypt was removed in the summer or autumn of the following year.

A large allied fleet of two hundred triremes happened to be campaigning off Cyprus and, when they learned of the revolt, abandoned what they were doing and sailed to Egypt to support the rebels. This was not altogether an opportunistic decision. To poke a finger in the Great King’s eye was always a pleasure. But the growing population of Athens depended on imported grain and Egypt was a breadbasket of the ancient world. If it could be pried from Persia’s grasp the land of the pharaohs could become a valuable supplier and supplement the Black Sea trade.

To begin with, fortune favored the Greeks. The fleet sailed up the Nile, gained control of the river and of the onetime capital city of Memphis, just south of the Delta, except for its Persian garrison in a fortification called the White Tower.

The Great King tried to bribe the Peloponnesians to invade Attica, but to their credit they declined, while pocketing an advance payment. The Delian League helped repel a Persian expeditionary force, but Artaxerxes sent another one in due course. The Egyptians and their allies were driven from Memphis and besieged on a river island in the Nile Delta for a year and a half. Eventually the Persians drained the marsh waters and captured the island by infantry assault. Most of the league fleet was lost and after six years the Greek expedition ended in complete failure.

Despite the evidence of Thucydides, it would seem that many Athenians escaped albeit not with their boats, for otherwise fifty thousand lives would have been sacrificed (as we have seen, a trireme needed a two-hundred-strong crew). Although some of the oarsmen must have come from allied states, losses on such a scale would have prevented the polis from pursuing the active military policy it actually did in the coming years. But the disaster was indeed a blow to league morale.

Ever resilient, Athens resolved to become a land power in Greece as well as a sea power in the Aegean. The strategic aim was to control the bottleneck of the Isthmus and so prevent invasions of Attica led by Sparta. For a time it based a hoplite force in Megara and built Long Walls to connect it with its port, Nisaea. With harbors on both Megara’s northern and southern coasts, Athens now controlled the Corinthian gulf. It defeated its longtime rival, the island of Aegina, confiscated its navy, and compelled it to join the league as a paying member. This was the last chorus of an old song.

Finally, Athens conquered all of Boeotia except for its powerful polis, Thebes. Sparta watched these developments with growing fury. Between about 460 and 445 it and its Peloponnesian allies engaged in on-off fighting with the new boastful imperial power (named too generously as the First Peloponnesian War). The Athenians did not hold on to their mainland acquisitions for much longer than a decade. In 447 an important battle was lost at Coronea in Boeotia, with heavy upper-class casualties including Cleinias, an Alcmaeonid. Athenian hegemony in mainland Greece came to an abrupt end. Luckily a revolt in the important and nearby island dependency of Euboea was speedily put down.

With astute anticipation of failure, the Athenians made sure they could protect themselves. The Long Walls connecting Athens to Piraeus and Phaleron were completed in 457. From now onwards, so long as its fleet ruled the waves Athens was invulnerable. Themistocles’ vision of his city transformed into a maritime power was at last fully realized. In the 440s the so-called Middle Wall was built, which created a narrow and probably more defensible corridor to the port.

Meanwhile on the far side of the Aegean, Cimon, back home after his ten years of ostracism, proved once again that, although never the convinced democrat, he was ever the democracy’s proud servant. He was given command of an amphibious expedition against the Persians on Cyprus; but in 450 he fell sick or was wounded and died. At his suggestion on his deathbed, the news was kept secret to give the Greeks time to extricate themselves and abandon the campaign unimpeded.

An epitaph for the fallen, in the manner of the late Simonides, makes much of Cimon’s last hurrah.

From the time when the sea divided Europe from Asia

And wild Ares dominated the cities of mortals,

No such act by men of this earth ever took place

On land and sea at one and the same time.

The lines refer to the Cyprus campaign, but they would be a fitting if overstated envoi to this whole era of Athenian overreach. For all the gallantry and all the glory in these middle years of the fifth century, how much was really achieved? The answer is mixed.

In fact, Athens had reached the limits of its capacity. At one point the polis was so short of manpower that men as young as eighteen and as old as sixty had to be called up as reinforcements. In 456 it contemptuously sent a fleet to sail around the Peloponnese and set fire to Sparta’s naval yards at its port of Gytheion. However, in 451 it agreed to a five-year truce with Sparta. A couple of years later an advantageous accord was struck with the Great King, the Peace of Callias (so named after the politician who negotiated it, Cimon’s multimillionaire brother-in-law). The Greek cities of Asia Minor were to be free and subject to their own laws, except for Cyprus, permanently lost to Persia—a bitter pill. In effect, Athens had abandoned its ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean.

On the credit side, Persian military forces were not allowed to come nearer the Mediterranean coast than one day’s journey by horse, were not to sail past the Blue Rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea (so protecting the grain trade) nor past the islands that lay between Lycia and Pamphilia (thus excluding the Persian navy from the Aegean). In a word, Artaxerxes agreed to keep out of the Hellenic world.

Neither belligerent could claim a total victory, but fortune overall favored the Greeks. Fifty years had passed since Athenians raided Sardis and aroused the ire of King Darius, but at long last the Persian Wars were over. Joy was not altogether unconfined, though, for peace brought Athens a new threat. In island after island across the Aegean Sea people were asking themselves what was the point of their expensive maritime alliance now that the Great King was no longer a serious threat. Why should they go on paying Athens large sums of money for a fleet that was not needed?

—

In 446 the truce between Athens and Sparta was converted into a Thirty Years’ Peace, based on recognition of the status quo. The two great powers in Greece were following very different paths. Once upon a time partners, even friends, Athens and Sparta had not trusted one another for years. Now they were on tolerable terms again, but it did not take a clairvoyant to see trouble ahead.

Sparta was greatly admired throughout the Hellenic world for its self-discipline and austerity. But it was introverted and obsessively resistant to change. Its system was the expression of barely concealed fear. The subject peoples of the Peloponnese were always seething; at any moment they might boil over and Lacedaemon would be overwhelmed. It was this ever-wakeful nightmare that underwrote its virtues.

The Peloponnesian earthquake exposed the flaws of their system, but the Spartans survived. With a convulsive effort, they vanquished the helots and re-enslaved them. But then they found themselves facing another sudden violent shaking, as the revolutionary energy of the Athenian democracy upset the balance of the Hellenic world. It not only controlled the seas, but for a time had established a land empire in central Greece that locked Sparta into its southern peninsula. And the hungry giant of the Persian Empire had been tamed. Athens was well on its way to unifying Greece.

No wonder that at some point during the 440s Pericles proposed a Panhellenic congress. All Greeks, whether from Europe or Asia, were invited. The agenda was to include the future of the Greek sanctuaries burned down by the Persians, the fulfillment of vows made to the gods during the Persian Wars, and, most important of all, the security of the seas. The underlying purpose of the congress was obvious—to win consent to the Athenian hegemony. Unsurprisingly, Sparta sabotaged the plan and the congress never took place.

—

The constitutions of most states cost time and effort only from a minority of citizens, a political class. The complete democracy that Pericles and his predecessors had installed demanded the full-scale participation of every member of society. Even the meanest and stupidest citizen might find himself, by the haphazard workings of the lot, at the head of government. He had no choice but to pay attention.

The energy that this mass involvement in the public sphere released showed itself not just through an aggressive imperialism, but also in the life of the city. The arts and culture thrived as never before.

15

The Kindly Ones

It is night, a little before sunrise. A watchman stands on the roof of the palace at Argos in the Peloponnese, bored and tired. He prays: “Gods! Release me from this long and weary guard duty. Gods! do it.”

He has spent a year, night after night, scrutinizing the heavens—what he calls (for he has a way with words) the “nocturnal conference of stars.” He is waiting for a sign, for something that could be mistaken for a new star, but would in fact be a beacon flaring from a distant hilltop.

The war at Troy is in its tenth year and it has been agreed that if and when the city falls to the Greeks a chain of beacons will be lit. They will island-hop across the Aegean Sea and almost instantly bring the good news to Queen Clytemnestra, wife of the expedition’s leader, Agamemnon.

Then, suddenly, he sees a flame shooting up on the horizon. Victory has come. The queen is woken to see the beacon. She rejoices, or does she?

—

So opens The Oresteia, one of the greatest and earliest dramas in the history of Western civilization. Written by Aeschylus, it was a trilogy that told the bloodstained saga of the ruling family of Argos. Its first performance took place in 458 at the annual festival devoted to the god Dionysus, the Great Dionysia. It is the only complete trilogy to survive.

The origins of the festival are obscure, but the story appears to open at Eleutherae, a small, well-fortified town on the debatable border between Attica and Boeotia. Its people were always being bullied by the Thebans, who throughout their history worked tirelessly to unify Boeotia under their rule.

Eventually in the middle of the sixth century they applied, in the end successfully, to join Attica and become Athenian citizens. Their tutelary deity was Dionysus, the patron of wine and intoxication. As part of the assimilation of Eleutherae into the Athenian state, the god, in the shape of an ancient wooden statue, was transported to Athens. He was carried in procession for the twenty-eight-mile journey and was installed in a tiny, specially built temple on the southern slope of the Acropolis.

In expiation for an initial reluctance to absorb Eleutherae, an annual festival was founded called the Great Dionysia (as already reported, it may have been initiated or enlarged by the tyrant Pisistratus). The original procession was partially restaged every year in March. The statue was escorted from the Academy, the sacred grove of olive trees dedicated to Athena and athletics ground, not far from the city walls. Young men dressed up as satyrs. These were the mythical male followers of Dionysus; partly animal with horse’s tails or goat’s feet, they were exclusively interested in drinking and having unrestrained sex. Wearing goatskins, they danced alongside the cart carrying the statue. Wooden or metal phalluses were carried on sticks. Sacrificial animals were killed, roasted, and eaten. Wine flowed. The night passed in revelry and dancing to the accompaniment of harps and flutes.

The next day, Dionysus, in his incarnation as a statue, was carried into the theater so that he could watch the proceedings. These included choral performances. The pretend-satyrs danced around the altar singing what was called their “goat song” (from tragos, or goat, and oide, or song, tragoidia, whence in due course tragedy). Over time, the leader of the dancers, who also composed the song, spoke or sang to his choir, which in turn sang back to him. He took on the identity of some personage associated with the events being celebrated and wore an appropriate costume.

As explained earlier, the introduction of dialogue was attributed to Thespis. These proto-dramas were meant to feature Dionysus, but over time the myths of other gods and heroes were performed. On rare occasions contemporary events were chosen as a theme. The general impression in these early years was of a staged oratorio.

This was how tragedy was invented. As the form developed and became more subtle and sophisticated, Greek thinkers tried to define its essence. According to Aristotle,

tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action of high importance, complete and of some amplitude…acted not narrated; by means of pity and fear effecting the purgation of these emotions. [It shows] the kind of man who neither is distinguished for excellence and virtue, come to grief not on account of baseness and vice, but on account of some error; a man of great reputation and prosperity….There must be no change from misfortune to good fortune, but only the opposite.

By about 500 two actors worked together with the chorus, each playing a number of different roles; later in the ensuing century a third actor was added to the company. A chorus of twelve or fifteen men would sing and dance and stayed onstage throughout the action. Three authors each presented three tragedies and a satyr play. The tragedies were usually trilogies connected in subject matter and were performed one after another. They were followed by the satyr play, in which Silenus, chief of satyrs, superintended an uproarious burlesque or farce. Five comedies were also presented during the festival. These were topical and heavily satirical. Leading politicians and public figures like the philosopher Socrates had to put up with crude but very funny caricatures of themselves and their opinions. In the hands of a literary genius such as Aristophanes comedies were also imaginative, almost surreal fantasies. Dialogue made the most of bodily functions and was unhesitatingly obscene.

Actors lasted most of the day. There were no intermissions and the patience of audiences must have been tested.

Performers and chorus members, who were all male, wore masks, which had slightly opened mouths and suggested the personality of the character in the play. Masks were made from strips of glued linen and molded on the actor’s face, and were then painted. Women’s masks were usually white. For tragedy, costumes resembled those of everyday life, a tunic and a cloak; but for comedy the tunic covered, or revealed, potbellies, huge buttocks, and enormous phalluses.

—

The Great Dionysia was a five-day festival and tragedies were presented on three of them. Men and boys also sang choral works. The productions were competitive and ten judges (or crites, hence our critics) awarded prizes: to reduce the risk of corruption and to let the god have a say the votes of only five judges, chosen at random, were counted. Performances were enormously popular and tourists flocked into the city (shipping started up again in March after the inactive winter months when sailing was too dangerous).

During the fifth century, the heyday of Athenian power and prestige, plays were performed only once. Every Great Dionysia was a sequence of premieres. If you didn’t catch it you missed it, although texts were available for the literary-minded.

A winter festival in honor of Dionysus was staged every January with prizes for comedy and after 432 for tragedy. This was the Lenaea or Country Dionysia; it catered only to the local Athenian public.

Wealthy and public-spirited men, like Pericles with The Persians, were appointed as choregoi (literally chorus leaders) by the Chief Archon. Each would finance and produce a tragic trilogy and satyr play, or a comedy or a choral concert and dance. They vied with one another for the most lavish productions and some said that Athens spent more on theater than on its fleet (an exaggeration, but an understandable one).

A choregos was allocated a playwright and up to three actors. He hired a professional trainer for the chorus, paid for the actors’ costumes and those of the chorus, and commissioned the decor and props. The state picked up the bill for the actors’ wages. Star performers became increasingly professionalized and acted in arts festivals throughout the Greek world. They commanded high fees and were men of status; being well traveled, they were sometimes employed as state ambassadors. The crafts of theater—writing, production, and acting—often ran in families.

Theater had an important community dimension as well. It has been estimated that as many as 1,500 persons were involved one way or another in the production and presentation of plays in a single year’s Great Dionysia.

To be a choregos was no passing honor. If he won a prize, he was crowned with a garland and given a bronze tripod. He would set this up on a column or in a miniature circular temple in the long Street of the Tripods, which led from the theater eastwards around the Acropolis. A surviving inscription has recorded the name of one proud prizewinner and those of his creative team.

Lysicrates, son of Lysitheides of the Kikynna deme, was the sponsor. The tribe of Akameantis won the boys’ chorus. Theon played the flute. Lysiades the Athenian directed. Euaenetus was Chief Archon.

In this way, the generosity and artistic taste of a choregos were placed on permanent display. His memory would live forever.

Large numbers of citizens—perhaps as many as twenty thousand—attended performances at the Great Dionysia. Originally plays were presented in the agora, but at some stage during the fifth century they were transferred to a space just north of the temple of Dionysus. Here the slope leading down from the Acropolis formed a natural, semicircular, open-air auditorium (a theatron, or seeing space). It was centered on a circular area, called the orchestra, which resembled a traditional threshing floor. This was where the chorus chanted and danced.

In the early years there may have been wooden benches at the front for dignitaries, but most spectators sat on the ground. Later, it appears, fixed wooden seating was installed. The first fully stone theater was not built until the fourth century. The entrance fee was good value at two obols, the equivalent of a worker’s daily wage. As a rule, audiences were male, although women seem to have been allowed to attend in the fourth century. Wine and confectionery were on sale and audiences ate and drank during performances. They consumed most when bored.

Beyond the orchestra was a raised stage and at its back a skene (whence our scene: literally, a booth), a timber framework on which painted scenery could be hung. Usually, a building or buildings were depicted, with two or three doors through which actors could enter or exit. They could also appear on the roof. A crane was installed that brought gods down from on high and carried them off again (we still use the phrase deus ex machina, Latin for “the god from the machine,” for an abrupt and surprising conclusion to a narrative). This was quite an elaborate piece of equipment: in Euripides’ Medea, the eponymous heroine brought the play to a spectacular close by flying away in a chariot, probably drawn by winged serpents and accompanied by the corpses of her dead children.

Violent death was never shown onstage. So, for example, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra meet their respective fates inside their palace; then the skene was opened wide and a platform, the eccyclema, on which their corpses were displayed was wheeled out.

—

We are told that Aeschylus called his plays “slices from the great banquet of Homer.” His masterpiece, The Oresteia, was based on the legendary story of the House of Atreus, but retold in a way to catch the attention of the contemporary theatergoer.

The family lives under a curse and terrible crimes have been committed in each generation. King Agamemnon is the latest to live out a doomed, repetitive pattern of sin and retribution. The Greek fleet gathers under his command at Aulis, a port in Boeotia, but storms prevent it from setting sail to Troy.

…ships and ropes rotted, cables parted,

Men wandered off.

The Greek seer Calchas tells the king that he has offended the goddess Artemis and must sacrifice his daughter, Iphigenia, if he wants a favorable wind. Frightened for the fate of the expedition, he puts on the “harness of necessity.” At the altar Agamemnon calls for someone to bring a gag to stop his daughter from shouting anything that might cast blame on the House of Atreus. The girl has her throat slit, the goddess forgives, the storm subsides, and the ships sail.

Despite the passage of ten years Clytemnestra has neither forgotten nor forgiven her darling daughter’s terrible fate at her father’s hands. Several days pass after the news was brought by the beacon and Agamemnon returns to the palace in his pomp. Clytemnestra has made all the necessary arrangements: he that’s coming must be provided for, in the words of a later chilling lady.

Her husband takes a bath and his queen volunteers to help him. Like a fisherman with a net, she envelops him in a splendid and voluminous robe and then, having caught him up in it, stabs him again, again, and again. Iphigenia has been avenged.

—

Clytemnestra has a lover, Aegisthus, a cousin of Agamemnon with a grudge against him. After Agamemnon’s murder, the couple live together and reign in Argos. So ends the first part of the trilogy; the second is entitled The Libation Bearers.

Seven years have passed. Agamemnon’s two children are grown up. Electra, who adored her father, lives on miserably at Argos. Her brother Orestes, the legitimate heir, is a threat to the usurpers but after Agamemnon’s death was smuggled out of the country to safety.

He faces the most painful of moral dilemmas. As a son he is obliged to avenge his father by killing his murderer. But that is his mother, Clytemnestra, and matricide breaks the gravest of taboos. Whatever he does, then, he sins. This impossible choice is an example of how fate trips up and entraps human beings, even those who have the best of intentions.

Orestes is ordered by the god Apollo at Delphi to put his mother and her paramour to death in retribution for Agamemnon’s assassination. He is horrified by what confronts him, but dutifully returns to Argos accompanied by his friend Pylades. He meets his sister and they plan what is to be done.

The two young men present themselves at the palace, disguised as foreign traders and speaking with a Delphian accent. Obeying the usual etiquette of offering hospitality to strangers, the queen comes out and welcomes them. “As our guest, call this your home,” says Clytemnestra, with unknowing irony. Orestes informs her of his own (supposed) death in Phocis. “Oh misery!” keens the queen in conventional mourning, unconsciously prophetic. “Your story spells our total destruction.”

Her defenses down, she ushers her guests into the house. Orestes first puts Aegisthus to death. Clytemnestra, hearing noise, comes out of the women’s quarters to find out what is happening. She begs her son for her life. Hard-pressed, Orestes asks desperately: “How shall I escape my father’s curse, if I relent?” She yields to her fate. “You are right. I waste my breath.”

As soon as he has struck her down, Orestes decides to go back to Delphi to beg the god to purify him, for even if innocent he is polluted by what he has done. As the play ends, Orestes runs off, pursued by the ancient, pre-Olympian Furies. These hags, dressed in black and wreathed with serpents, pitilessly avenge wrongs done within the family. Despite their age they seem never to have grown up, for they have no sense of the compromises and uncertainties of adult life. Whatever Apollo may say, they mean to hunt Orestes down and never let him go.

—

In the last play of the trilogy, the scene shifts to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. For now, Orestes has outrun the exhausted Furies, who lie on the temple steps growling in their sleep like dogs. Apollo arrives and, when they wake up, he argues with them, fruitlessly, about the fugitive’s fate. The god claims to have purified him of pollution, but agrees that the court of the Areopagus in Athens shall decide whether to clear Orestes of guilt or to convict him of murder. (The audience will have been aware that one of the reformed Areopagus’s few remaining powers was to try cases of homicide.)

We now move to Athens, where a jury of ten Athenian citizens hears the case. Athena presides. A chorus of the Furies prosecutes and Apollo defends. The jurors vote by dropping a white or a black pebble into one of two different urns. The votes are counted and found to be equal. Athena’s casting vote goes for acquittal.

The Furies are furious. “The old is trampled by the new!” they wail. “A curse on you younger gods who override the ancient laws.”

Athena talks them down from their rage and persuades them to settle as honored guests in Athens. “Share my home with me,” she says, and gives them a cave on the Acropolis to live in.

But she warns them solemnly not to

provoke bloodshed in my land. It damages young hearts, maddening them with a rage beyond drunkenness. Do not transplant the hearts of fighting cocks in my people, the spirit of tribal war and boldness against each other. Let them fight foreign enemies instead.

After so much letting of blood we have, finally, a happy ending. The curse of the House of Atreus has run its course thanks to the new democracy of Athens. In a full and confident hope, the Furies are rechristened the Kindly Ones (in Greek, the Eumenides, also the play’s title).

—

During the opening ceremony of the Great Dionysia, the ten generals or strategoi poured libations and, according to a fourth-century inscription, offerings were made to such political abstractions as Democracy, Peace, and Good Fortune. Key priorities of the Athenian state were given memorable visual expression. It was on this date that the annual payments for the upkeep of the allied fleet fell due. The money was carried into the theater and shown to the audience. We have seen that it did not take long for the Delian League to transform itself into the Athenian Empire. This display, in front of representatives of league members and other international visitors as well as metics and citizens, showed very clearly who was now in charge.

Orphan sons of Athenians who had fallen in battle were brought up at the state’s expense and on reaching adulthood were given a set of costly hoplite armor. They were now formally presented to the audience and were a striking reminder of the military power of the polis. This was Athens being regenerated.

Before the tragedies began, the names of men who had in some way benefited the Athenian state were read out, and they were awarded crowns or garlands. This public honoring emphasized the value the polis placed on loyalty and patriotism.

Taken as a whole, the Great Dionysia was a political event of high importance. Of course, in the first place it was a religious service in honor of the gods. But it is no accident that the invention of drama occurred at about the same time as the invention of democracy. Tragedy and comedy were an additional means by which the demos could think about the great social and ethical issues of the day, without having to take political decisions at the same time. In a word, it was the ecclesia at leisure.

Aeschylus is a case in point. We should remember that he knew Pericles well. He was a democrat, as he made clear in The Oresteia. He diverted the course of the old myth so that it ended up in Athens. What the playwright was doing was to endorse the controversial reform of the council of the Areopagus, pretending that its main role had always been to hear murder cases.

He has Athena say:

Since this is how matters have turned out,

I will select sworn judges of homicide, and

I will establish this court for all time.

So summon your witnesses and proofs

Which support your case; I will…choose the best

Of my citizens, for them to decide this matter truly.

Over and above the particular case of the Areopagus, Aeschylus repeatedly emphasizes the importance of reconciliation. An old order is passing, to be replaced by the new. Violence and despotism have given way to justice delivered by the people. The outmoded principle of vengeance, of an eye for an eye, has been overtaken by the light of reason. The ancient Furies have been persuaded to become good-natured, loyal powers, their night outshone by the brightness of Apollo’s sun.

Athens was not the only polis where democrats were competing with aristocrats and tyrants. Emotions were running high throughout the Greek world. Revolutions were overturned and reaction set in. The outcome was often civil strife and bloodletting.

In the Eumenides, the culmination of his trilogy, Aeschylus has the Furies eat their words and preach peace.

Never let civil war, which eats men,

Rage in Athens; never let its soil

Soak up its people’s blood

And murderous passion for revenge

Destroy the state. May its people find joy

In each other, a common will for love.

And when they hate, they must do so with one mind.

The show ends with a procession. Music plays and torches blaze. The Furies don the scarlet ceremonial robes of the metics, the city’s foreign residents. Everyone sings a final song of welcome as the two divinities, Apollo and Athena, take these “ancient children” into their care and lead them joyfully to their new home.

16

“Crowned with Violets”

Pericles was a contradiction in terms—an aristocrat by temperament but a democrat by conviction or, perhaps it might be better to say, from enlightened self-interest. From the death of Ephialtes in 461 until his own thirty years later he dominated Athenian politics.

How did he accomplish this feat? Part of the answer lies in his personality—or at least how he presented it to his fellow-citizens. After entering politics he adopted a new austere lifestyle, writes his biographer Plutarch.

On one street and on one street only was he to be seen walking, the one that led [from his house] to the

agora

and the Council chamber. He declined invitations to dinner and any other kind of social get-together. During the long period that he was at the head of affairs he never ate a meal at a friend’s house—except when his relative Euryptolemus held a wedding banquet. And then he only stayed to the end of the meal and as soon as the serious drinking started he stood up and left.

He cultivated the image of a hardworking public servant. He was known for his politeness, which he maintained even when abused and insulted. Corruption and bribery were rife in the Athenian political system and Pericles made a point of his incorruptibility. He was careful not to make himself too familiar a figure in public life. He did not speak at the assembly on every possible occasion, as some politicians do, but addressed it only at long intervals. This meant that people did not tire of him and, second, he was not held responsible when things went wrong.

Power was in his hands, but there was nothing unconstitutional in the behavior of Pericles. He showed no signs whatever of aspiring to be a new Pisistratus. Every year he had to be reelected as one of the ten generals, or strategoi. These were the only major posts to escape the lot and were decided on merit. The senior executive officers of the democracy, they were coequal in their authority and there was no chief strategos. The competition for position was fierce. The ecclesia was in charge and could dispense with a man’s services whenever it wished. Power was on loan.

Pericles was an able orator and, according to Plutarch, he equipped himself with a formal style of speaking that “harmonised with his way of life and the grandeur of his ideals.” He made use of the philosophical and scientific ideas that he drew from the thinkers and scientists he knew personally. His addresses to the people were marked by a high seriousness and had something of the quality of lectures delivered by a well-informed expert. He refused to dumb down to his audience. This earned him credit, and even when he had something unpopular or disagreeable to say Athenians listened to him with attention.

He was very careful over his use of words and left none of his speeches or papers behind him in writing. He seldom used memorable phrases, although he once appealed to the demos to remove “that eyesore of the Piraeus,” the island of Aegina, and on another occasion said that he could already see “war rushing down at us from the Peloponnese.”

Pericles did not have a quicksilver temperament like Themistocles, open to human foibles, and the Athenians respected him rather than warmed to him. He was nicknamed the Olympian and, when he spoke at the ecclesia, the comic poets of the day made jokes about him thundering and lightning like Zeus, king of the gods.

—

After the catastrophe in Egypt and the end of their brief domination of central Greece, the Athenians took stock. Casualties had been very high and they did not have the manpower to back overambitious military and naval schemes. Now they explicitly recognized the fact and concentrated on keeping what they still had—namely the Delian League, which had in effect become their empire. The league treasury was removed to Athens from the island of Delos in 454, the same year that Persia had regained its Egyptian province. The pretext was that the Great King had been greatly strengthened and his fleets might well decide to try their luck again in the Aegean. It was only a pretext, for Pericles had his eyes on the money.

In theory, the Peace of Callias meant that there was no longer any need for the league. Inscriptions survive which show the annual financial contributions that members made to the upkeep of the powerful allied fleet; but the quota list for 448 is missing and perhaps there was a temporary remission of fees. It is tempting to see this as a consequence of the end of the war with Persia.

From 447 onwards Athens worked hard to recapture its league income. This it succeeded in doing, but at the cost of causing considerable resentment. In fact, it would have been foolish to wind up the league, for the allied fleet ensured the freedom of the seas, something of value and profit to all trading states. Also in the long run Persia remained a potential threat and it was as well to remain prepared for trouble. Pericles was unrepentant. The answer he gave his critics, Plutarch wrote, was that “the Athenians were under no obligation to account for how the allies’ money was spent, provided they carried on the war for them and kept the Persians away. ‘They don’t give us a single horse, nor a soldier, nor a ship,’ he said. ‘All they give us is money.’ ”

A decree was passed in 448 regulating payments to the Athenian treasury. The proposer was Cleinias, a member of the Alcmaeonid clan and so a relative of Pericles. He had fought bravely at Artemisium in 480, captaining a ship he had commissioned and paid for, and was soon to lose his life at the battle of Coronea in 447 (see this page). Cleinias wanted to tighten up the financial administration of the league. This was not simply a question of making sure the assessed quotas were correct, but also that opportunities for fraud were reduced. Efficient management benefited the debtors as well as the great creditor.

To a certain extent the empire rested on consent, however painfully wrung from the island states of the Aegean. The fact was that the allied, or more accurately, the Athenian fleet, did keep the waterways open for trade and ensured peace and stability in the Aegean and the Black Sea. The city-states of Asia Minor knew well that the Persians, even if inactive now, lay in wait and their liberties depended on the Athenian hegemony. Few seriously doubted that in its absence the Great King would be back.

But in the last resort the empire was held in place by the implicit application of force. This was exerted not simply by the fleet, but also by the establishment of small colonies of Athenian settlers, the cleruchies. We have already encountered them in connection with the revolt of Thasos, but Pericles used them extensively as a control mechanism, paying special attention to guarding the grain route. There is evidence for at least twenty-four settlements and perhaps as many as ten thousand citizens emigrated as cleruchies (or as colonists of new or existing cities). Plutarch comments:

In this way he relieved the city of lazy busybodies or agitators, helped alleviate poverty and by imposing garrisons deterred rebellion.

In 436 Pericles staged an ambitious show of force in the Black Sea. He sailed there with a large and splendidly equipped fleet. His object was to display “the size of the Athenian forces, their confidence to go exactly where they pleased and the fact that they ruled the waves.” He negotiated useful arrangements with local states and barbarian kingdoms on behalf of the Greek poleis along the coastline.

Pericles left a permanent reminder of his visit. A force of infantry and thirteen warships helped a group of democratic exiles to expel a tyrant from the important Black Sea port of Sinope; when that was done, six hundred Athenian volunteers joined the inhabitants and divided among themselves the houses and lands that had belonged to the former regime.

—

In 440 the threat of imperial violence was renewed. On this occasion the guilty polis was the island of Samos one mile off the coast of Anatolia and the rugged ridge of Mount Mycale. It was one of the very few league members that still supplied ships to the allied fleet rather than a cash subscription.

Samos was a rich and powerful Ionian state and was well known for its culture and luxury. Its wine was highly prized as was its red Samian pottery. In the sixth century the island had been governed by an ambitious tyrant, Polycrates, who was responsible for the building of an aqueduct, more than half a mile long and tunneled through a mountain, which supplied the capital city with fresh water. Being underground, it could not be detected by an enemy and the supply cut off. Famous Samians included the philosopher Pythagoras and the teller of fables Aesop.

The island was in hot dispute with the wealthy port of Miletus, which lay not many miles away near where the Maeander River debouched into the sea. The bone of contention was the small polis of Priene on the slopes of Mount Mycale.

The Milesians had the worst of the fighting and went to Athens to lay a complaint against the Samians. All the parties were members of the league and, as is usual in family quarrels, feelings ran high. The Milesian cause was supported by some private individuals from Samos who wanted to overthrow the oligarchic form of government. The affair called for a quick response to head off a possible insurrection, which could well spread, if unchecked, throughout the empire: Byzantium, a polis on the European side of the Bosphorus, seized the hour and rebelled from the league.

The Athenians immediately dispatched Pericles with forty ships to Samos, threw out the ruling aristocrats, and established a democracy, which they ordered to abandon hostilities with Miletus. To ensure good behavior they took fifty boys and fifty men as hostages and sent them to the island of Lemnos. Before sailing home, Pericles left behind a garrison of Athenians to deter troublemakers.

Some Samians managed to escape to the mainland and made their way to the Persian governor of Sardis, who promised his assistance. Presumably this came in the form of ready money, for they immediately raised a force of seven hundred mercenaries and crossed the narrow strait to Samos under cover of night. They rescued their hostages and handed over the Athenian garrison to the Persians. They then resumed their war with Miletus.

On hearing the news Pericles wearily returned to Samos. He found that the islanders had raised their sights and were now determined to wrest command of the seas from Athens. But they were beaten in a naval engagement and Pericles laid siege to their capital, the port of Samos. The islanders were undaunted. They sallied out and fought under the city walls. But when reinforcements from Athens arrived the city was completely encircled.

The Persians seem to have been still supporting the rebels. Hearing that a Phoenician fleet was on its way to relieve the island, Pericles took sixty ships and sailed away to meet it. This was an incautious move, for the Samians, commanded (in the true Greek manner) by a philosopher, took advantage of his absence and the fewer Athenian ships, and put out to sea in a highly successful surprise attack. They captured the Athenian camp, which was unfortified, and took numerous prisoners, whose foreheads they branded with the symbol of Athena, the owl, and destroyed many enemy ships.

Pericles hurried back to the rescue and once more defeated the Samian fleet. To avoid continuing casualties, he built a wall around the city and settled down with his men to a long siege. Eventually after nine months the Samians surrendered. They were given a heavy fine, their fleet was confiscated, and the city walls were demolished; Byzantium then capitulated too. Plutarch mentions a report, only to dismiss it, that the Athenians acted with great brutality and crucified Samos’s captains and marines in the main square of Miletus. But they had been given a bad fright, which tends to make men behave badly.

Thucydides believed that Samos came within an inch of depriving Athens of its command of the sea, but apparently his victory gave Pericles a prodigiously high opinion of himself. It had taken Agamemnon ten years to capture Troy, but (he reflected) he had reduced the greatest city of Ionia in less than one. It is hard to agree with him, for the campaign had been marked by one miscalculation after another.

Back home, Pericles presided over funeral honors for all those who had lost their lives in the war. He won high praise for the speech he delivered. For once he found a memorable phrase, which even today touches the heart. With the deaths of these young men, he said, it was “as if the spring had been taken out of the year.”

As he stepped down from the speaker’s rostrum, women mobbed him. They clasped his hand and crowned him with garlands and hair ribbons as if he were an athlete and had won a prize at the Games.

—

A sentry runs to the ruler of Thebes with bad news. Someone unknown has covered the corpse with dry dust where it lies in front of the city walls. It was the duty of a good Greek to bury the dead and a sprinkling of earth was the least he was obliged to do. Without this rite the unhappy spirit would be forever caught between the upper air and the underworld.

But, in the legendary story, King Creon had forbidden any such ceremony, he was so furious with the dead man. This was his nephew Polynices, who had led an invasion against his native city. His brother Eteocles had patriotically commanded the defense. The invasion was repelled, but the two princes met in single combat and, as luck would have it, killed one another. Eteocles was awarded a full burial, but his sibling was left to the birds and the dogs.

It turned out that the illegal burier was the men’s sister Antigone. She was hauled before the king and asked to explain herself. Their exchange sets the theme of a memorable tragedy by Sophocles, successor of Aeschylus and the leading Athenian playwright of the mid-fifth century.

Only seven of his plays have survived and this one, the Antigone, first performed about the time of the revolt of Samos, is a masterpiece. Sophocles was a public figure as well as an artist. He served as a national treasurer and fought as a general during the Samian campaign. His work displays an optimism, an intellectual curiosity, and honesty typical of the age of Pericles. It could only have been written under a democracy.

The chorus sings a justly famous hymn to the vitality of humankind.

Wonders are many on the earth, and the greatest of these

Is man, who rides the ocean and takes his way

Through the deeps…

The use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain

He learned; found out the laws of living together

In cities…

There is nothing beyond his power.

Sophocles makes it clear that humanity is capable of evil as well as good. Overall, the portrait he paints bears a striking resemblance to his fellow-Athenians in their pomp.

The debate between Creon and his niece explores the proper limits of political power and the rights of the individual. It raised imagined issues for the demos that it had to answer for real.

The king asks if Antigone knew of his order not to bury Polynices. She replies that she did.

Creon.

And yet you dared to contravene it?

Antigone.

Yes.

That order did not come from God. Justice,

That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.

I did not think your edicts strong enough

To overrule the unwritten, unalterable laws

Of god and heaven.

Creon insists that the needs of the state take priority over the laws of conscience and condemns his niece to be buried alive in a cave. Eventually he is persuaded to relent, but too late. Antigone hangs herself. Creon’s son, who is her fiancé, and his wife both commit suicide. The broken monarch staggers back into his empty palace.

Creon has been guilty of hubris, an offense that was regarded as a serious crime in Athens. It signified gratuitous harm inflicted by someone who is, or thinks he is, superior to and more powerful than his victim.

Sophocles draws no direct comparison with the life around him, but Creon’s behavior echoes the pride and violence of some Athenian imperialists. His fate, the playwright means us to understand, was a lesson the victors of Samos would be wise to learn.

—

One woman in particular was pleased that the Samian crisis was over. This was the beautiful Aspasia. She was, allege the ancient sources, a high-class prostitute or hetaira (literally, a “female companion”). Hetairai were usually educated women who were expected to offer intellectual and emotional support to their patrons as well as sexual services. The appellation was unfair or at least overstated, for Aspasia appears to have been born to a “good” family in the powerful polis of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor. However, there is no doubt that she lived with Pericles as his mistress.

Public opinion blamed Aspasia for egging on Pericles to take the Milesian side against the Samians. We have no conclusive evidence, but it would be surprising if Aspasia did not raise the topic with her lover. On the other hand, Pericles was not the kind of man to mix politics with pillow talk. Whether Aspasia used her influence or not, the defeat of Samos meant some release from the imputations of scandal.

Mystery and slander surround Aspasia and the more we look the less we see. Nothing is quite as it appears. She was probably not born before 470, and so was twenty-five or so years the junior of Pericles. She may have moved in with him as early as 452 or 451. This was all highly irregular, and out of character for a well-conducted aristocrat.

To the conventional Greek, the female of the species was lethal to the male. She was sexually rapacious and needed to be kept under strict control. According to the eighth-century poet Hesiod, the first woman was invented by the gods as a living punishment.

From her comes all the race of womankind

the deadly female race and tribe of wives

who live with mortal men and bring them harm,

no help to them in dreadful poverty

but ready enough to share with them in wealth.

…Women are bad for men, and they conspire

In wrong.

It is true that women had authority to manage their own households and that there were happy heterosexual relationships, Aspasia and Pericles being a case in point. For every murderous witch, such as Medea, who killed her children to punish her husband, there was a Penelope, the faithful, brave, and intelligent wife of Odysseus, who waited twenty years for her husband to return from Troy; or an Alcestis, who volunteered to die in place of her spouse. But the misogyny was pervasive. Greek society was indelibly sexist.

Marriages were usually arranged and were designed to advance a family’s standing or to acquire property. To preserve an estate an heiress and only child would wed a close relative (she was known as an epikleros, or “a woman attached to the kleros, or estate”). The bride came with a dowry that was repayable in the event of divorce. Men often waited until they were more than thirty years old before marrying. Their wives could be as young as twelve.

An upper-class woman’s chastity was very carefully guarded. She spent most of her time at home, supervising the household. She spun wool and made her husband’s and her own clothes. When she went out shopping she would take care to be accompanied by servants and slaves. She attended religious festivals and funerals, which were among the few occasions when she might meet men outside the close family circle (her unavailability may help to explain the prevalence of pederasty among young men).

In his dialogue The Estate Manager, Xenophon has a husband give instructions to his new wife:

…your duty is to stay indoors. You must send out those servants who have outdoor jobs and supervise those who are working in the house. You must take in the produce that comes in from outside, and distribute or store it as necessary. When wool is delivered make sure that those who need clothes get them and that grain is made into edible provisions.

In spite of the fact that Pericles led an unconventional private life, he summed up the subordinate status of Athenian women in a funeral speech for war dead that he delivered in 431. Advising the men’s widows, he said:

Perhaps I should say a few words about the duties of women…the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or criticising you.

Men did not insist on sexual satisfaction from their wives. As the great Athenian orator Demosthenes put it bluntly in the fourth century:

We have

hetairai

or mistresses for pleasure, an ordinary prostitute to service our bodies’ daily needs, and wives so that we can breed legitimate children and have trustworthy guardians of our domestic possessions.

A marriage was a purely private affair and neither priests nor state officials played any part in it. Weddings were often solemnized in the depth of winter during the Greek month of Gamelion (January to February). The bride dedicated a lock of her hair to the protectors of marriage, Zeus and Hera, and pledged her childhood toys to the virgin goddess Artemis (who heartily disapproved of sex and marriage and needed to be placated).

On her wedding day the bride took a ritual bath in holy water and then attended a banquet that her father gave for the two families and their friends. She sat apart from the men alongside a duenna who guided her through the ceremony. Little cakes covered in sesame seeds, believed to make women fertile, were handed round. Towards sunset the groom led his bride to her new home in a wagon drawn by mules or oxen. They were preceded by a torchlight procession. Noisy wedding hymns were accompanied by flute and lyre. On arrival at the bridegroom’s house the happy couple were showered with nuts and dried figs. They entered the bridal chamber and only then did the new wife remove her veil. Outside the door, teenagers of both sexes sang a nuptial praise song, or epithalamium (literally “at the bedroom”) loudly enough to mask the woman’s—or more often girl’s—cries as her husband penetrated her.

—

The young Pericles obeyed convention, marrying an Alcmaeonid relative (possibly a woman called Deinomache, who later married the Cleinias who fell at Coronea). However, they were not a loving couple and, although they produced two sons, Xanthippus and Paralus, the marriage came to an end in the second half of the 450s.

The boys do not seem to have turned out well. Plato has Socrates hint that they were simpletons and Xanthippus, the firstborn, was on poor terms with his father. He felt that the allowance he received was insufficient (his wife was high-maintenance). Pericles was uninterested in money and, to avoid having to think about it when busy on public business, had an agent manage his estate. He preferred to watch it tick over rather than strain for large profits.

Xanthippus borrowed a substantial sum from one of Pericles’ friends, pretending it was for his father. Pericles knew nothing about the matter until the friend asked for the sum to be repaid. The great man not only refused, but took his son to court. A furious Xanthippus told amusing and discreditable stories about life at home, making his father into a figure of fun.

—

The real reason for his divorce was that Pericles had fallen in love with Aspasia. This tale of a middle-aged man in his fifties shacking up with an attractive bimbo had satirical potential. The gossips of Athens and the city’s comic poets made the most of it.

The allegation they put about was that the general’s live-in lover had been a hooker. The well-known comedy writer Cratinus wrote:

To find our Zeus a Hera, the goddess of Vice

Produced that dog-eyed whore Aspasia for wife

“Dog-eyed” was a cruel parody of Hera’s usual Homeric epithet, “ox-eyed.” Aspasia was reported to be the madam of a brothel on the side, and procured freeborn Athenian women for Pericles (sex outside marriage with a freeborn Athenian woman was illegal and taboo).

However, there is another possibility. We know that Aspasia’s father in Miletus was called Axiochus, a rare Greek personal name. There happens to have been another Axiochus in a branch of the Alcmaeonid family. He was the son of a man called Alcibiades. It seems likely that this Alcibiades, who was ostracized in 460, spent some or all of his exile in Miletus where (we may suppose) he married into Aspasia’s family. In fact, he must have wed a daughter of Axiochus and a sister of our Aspasia. A son, we can reconstruct, was born of the union, who was named Axiochus in honor of the infant’s Milesian grandfather, as was the Greek custom.

Now a gene-proud Alcmaeonid was highly unlikely to wed a prostitute, even a high-class one. So we must assume that Aspasia was a Milesian aristocrat, or at worst belonged to a respectable family. From Pericles’ point of view she was a family friend and all the stories about her disreputable sexuality were libels put about by his enemies or were inventions of the Athenian stage.

Whatever her origin, there was something bold and out of the ordinary about Aspasia. Being a foreigner, she was free from the social restrictions placed on Athenian women and was able to lead something like a public life. She was intelligent and Plutarch pointed to the “great art and power this woman had, that allowed her to manage as she pleased the foremost statesmen of the age and even gave philosophers a theme for lengthy and high-minded debates.”

This is nothing less than the truth. Socrates knew her well and apparently recommended a wealthy friend of his to send his son to study politics under Aspasia’s guidance (perhaps here we have the twisted origin of the brothel-keeping libel). Plato has the philosopher credit her with writing Pericles’ speeches for him:

Yesterday I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration for the fallen. For she had been told, as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker, and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver, partly improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed.

Ancient sources present her as a female Socrates who applied his celebrated technique of conversational cross-examination to her friends.

These stories may well be exaggerations and jokes, we cannot tell. But Aspasia was evidently a remarkable personality. Displays of emotion between the sexes were felt to be embarrassing and unmanly, but we know that Pericles loved her and was willing to show it to the world. It was reported that when he left for work every day in the agora and when he returned home he gave her a kiss. To an Athenian, this verged on the improper and the ridiculous. However fine Aspasia’s mind, we may guess that their relationship was fundamentally erotic and emotional.

—

Another unexpected person, a three-year-old baby this time, joined the household of Pericles. This was a grandson of the Alcibiades who had married (I conjecture) into the Milesian family of Aspasia. His elder son, Cleinias, as we have seen, lost his life at Coronea in 447, leaving behind an infant orphan, called Alcibiades after his paternal grandfather. Members of the Alcmaeonid clan looked after one another when trouble struck; Pericles and his brother were appointed the boy’s guardians, and Pericles took him in and brought him up.

Little Alcibiades proved to be a handful. He was strikingly good-looking. According to Plutarch,

regarding his beauty, we need only say that it flowered at every season of his bodily growth in turn, and gave him grace and charm, alike as a boy, a youth and a man.

He was badly spoiled and became used to getting his own way. Once as a small boy he was playing knucklebones in the narrow street with some friends. Just when his turn came to make a throw, a loaded wagon approached. Alcibiades ordered the driver to stop as his dice had fallen in its path. The driver took no notice, but urged his team on. The other boys scattered out of the way, but Alcibiades threw himself down on his face in front of the horses, stretched out his body, and told the man to drive over him if he cared to. The driver lost his nerve and pulled up. Shocked bystanders ran across and grabbed the child.

As he entered his teens Alcibiades became a scandalous role model for his contemporaries. Although a reasonably conscientious student he refused point-blank to learn to play the flute. His explanation was that, unlike the lyre, it distorts the face and makes it ugly. “Leave the flute to the Thebans,” he said in a reference to a stock polis of stupid foreigners. “They don’t have the slightest idea of how to hold a conversation.”

Alcibiades was athletic, but too competitive not to cheat. When hard-pressed in wrestling he set his teeth into his opponent’s arm so hard that he nearly bit through it. The boy let go his hold and complained that he cheated because he was weak: “Alcibiades, you bite like a woman.” “No, like a lion,” came the reply.

A malicious, but not necessarily untrue, report suggests that the arrival of puberty and numerous male lovers made matters worse. He ran away from home to stay with one of his admirers. It was suggested that the town crier should announce his disappearance. Pericles stayed cool and said no. “If he’s dead, we’ll merely get the news a day sooner. If he’s alive, he’ll have lost his reputation for good.” The boy was no respecter of persons. Once he came across his guardian looking worried and asked him what the matter was. Pericles said: “I’m trying to work out how to produce a statement of public accounts.” Alcibiades replied: “You should not be bothering about how to produce such a statement—but how not to.”

Socrates took Alcibiades under his wing and introduced him to philosophy. Plain-living and ugly, he was a merciless friend. He told the young man awkward truths, unlike the flatterers who surrounded him, and constantly pointed out his moral weaknesses. Nobody had treated Alcibiades like that before and he was entranced. Socrates made no concessions and his reproaches often reduced the boy to tears.

—

Handsome teenagers attracted much attention and a youth such as Alcibiades was expected to play a highly visible role in the city’s lavish festivals.

Every fourth December in the depth of winter, the priestesses of Athena and four little girls of high birth set up a loom on which a new tunic, or peplos, was to be woven—a gift for Athena, the all-wise protector of the city. They worked on it with help from some women weavers, or ergastinae. The material, a simple rectangle six and a half by five feet, was embroidered with the splendid and brave deeds of the goddess and, in particular, featured the great war of the Giants who fought Zeus and the new Olympian deities for control of the universe.

Nine months later in the heat of August the garment was ready for delivery. This was the time of the Great Panathenaea, the quadrennial festival in honor of the goddess. First, there were poetry and music contests, introduced by Pericles. Men and boys sang to the lyre and the flute. Athletic competitions, on the model of the Olympic Games, followed in the agora, where Cimon had planted plane trees to give welcome shade for spectators.

The first four days of the festival were open to foreigners, but the fifth was restricted to the ten Athenian tribes. A popular event was a male beauty contest, the euandria, in which the tribes competed for a generous prize of 100 drachmas and an ox (most victorious athletes at the games were only awarded an amphora, or large two-handled jar, filled with olive oil). Male beauty was highly prized in ancient Greece and not merely among boys and youths, but also men in the prime of life. Old men too were chosen for their handsome looks and were selected to carry an olive branch, sacred to Athena, in the ceremony that brought the Panathenaea to an end. Another team event was the Pyrrhic Dance, in which youths, naked except for helmets, shields, and unbated swords, mimicked the offensive and defensive moves of battle—and sometimes accidentally cut one another.

Nighttime festivities were held during which choirs of boys and girls sang and teams of runners competed in a torch relay race. On the following and final day, a long procession formed to carry the new tunic up to the Acropolis and clothe an ancient wooden statue of the goddess. Crowds gathered before dawn at the Double-Arched or Dipylon Gate. The peplos was conveyed in a life-sized ship, which was wheeled along at the head of the cavalcade. A long train of women carried gifts. Victors at Greece’s various games were present, and so were the winners of the male beauty contests. Leading citizens, priests and priestesses, musicians, bearded elders and army commanders holding olive branches, young cavalrymen with their horses, charioteers, metics in their scarlet cloaks who carried trays of cakes and honey as offerings, all proceeded singing hymns to Athena along the Panathenaic Way, a broad street leading from one of the city gates via the agora to the Acropolis. Ordinary citizens assembled in their demes and brought up the rear.

Sacrifices were offered en route. The peplos was taken from the ship up the steep slope to the Acropolis. There the little girls handed the tunic to the women weavers, who carried the wooden divinity down to the seashore where they washed both it and the tunic. After further sacrifices, the ergastinae dressed the statue in the new peplos. The proceedings ended with a feast attended by invitees chosen by lot from each deme in Attica. They ate the cooked meat of the sacrificed animals together with bread and cakes.

In each of the three years between festivals a smaller celebration was staged for citizens only, but the Great Panathenaea with its athletic and arts contests open to all spread the name of Athens throughout the Greek world.

—

It was a pity that the city looked such a mess. The state buildings in the marketplace were adequate to purpose, but no one would call them grand or well suited to the capital of an empire. The Athenians were as good as their word when they and the other allies had sworn their famous oath before the culminating victory over the Persians at Plataea thirty years previously.

According to one of its clauses, they had vowed not to rebuild any of the burned and demolished temples but to leave them as a memorial. The only new monument to the war was a colossal bronze statue of Athena Promachus (“she who fights in the front line”), which stood on the Acropolis about thirty feet high and could be seen by sailors at sea. It was created by the internationally known sculptor, painter, and architect Pheidias. Otherwise, the Athenian citadel remained a plateau of broken and blackened marble debris.

The peace treaty with the Persians of 449 changed the mood. Pericles moved that the oath of Plataea be rescinded. Once the Delian League members had been bullied and cajoled into obedience again and resumed their annual payments for maritime protection, Athens found that it was becoming richer and richer. The reserve fund had grown from nothing in 478 to 9,700 talents, when it was transferred from the island of Delos to Athens in 454. The end of the war boosted trade, the silver from Laurium continued to flow into the treasury, and in the absence of an enemy it was no longer necessary to dispatch large fleets to sea. In quiet years the Athenians only sent out a flotilla of sixty ships.

The demos, guided by the Olympian, decided to go on a spending spree. They would rebuild all the temples, not only those in the city, but across Attica. The end of the war had driven up unemployment and this massive construction program would not only beautify the city, but also create many jobs. However, there was opposition. Thucydides, son of Melesias (not the historian), who was an aristocrat and a relative of Cimon, led the conservative faction in the ecclesia. He developed the clever tactic of getting his supporters to sit together at assembly meetings in one bloc and to react and applaud in unison—a first step towards a political party. According to Plutarch, they argued:

…the Greeks must be outraged. They must consider this an act of bare-faced tyranny. They can see that, with their own money, extorted from them for the war against the Persians, we are gilding and adorning our city, as if it were some vain woman doing herself up with precious stones and statues and temples worth millions of money.

Thucydides felt that Pericles shaped his policy to bribe citizens with benefits, constantly giving them pageants, banquets, and processions and “entertaining the people with cultural delights.”

Pericles acted decisively. Using his in-built majority in the ecclesia, in 443 he arranged for Thucydides to be ostracized. For the time being that put an end to carping about the grands projets that were to occupy the Olympian’s attention for the next twenty years. History hears no more of Thucydides, who is reported to have settled in a Greek city in southern Italy.

—

Pheidias was placed in overall charge of the Athenian building program and Pericles seems to have collaborated closely with him. Distinguished architects were hired for specific developments as well as a large team of first-rate sculptors. The work proceeded at great speed and many different kinds of business and craft skills were in high demand, as Plutarch reports:

The materials to be used were stone, bronze, ivory, gold, ebony and cypress-wood, while the skilled labor needed to work these materials up were those of carpenter, moulder, coppersmith, stone mason, dyer, worker in gold and ivory, painter, embroiderer, and engraver, and in addition the carriers and suppliers of the materials, such as merchants, sailors, and pilots for maritime traffic, and cartwrights, trainers of draft animals, and drivers of everything that came by land. There were also rope-makers, weavers, leather-workers, road-builders and miners.

In one way or another much of the city’s workforce was involved.

An inscription survives that lists sculptors of the Erechtheum and their earnings. Built between 421 and 406, this complicated little structure, also on the Acropolis, replaced a destroyed archaic temple of Athena, with shrines to various divinities and divine heroes, and was the home of the wooden statue of Athena. They include:

To Praxias, resident at Melite [a city

deme

], for the horse and the man seen behind it who is turning it—120 drachmas.

To Mynnion, resident of Agryle [a

deme

on Mount Hymettus], for the horse and the man striking it. He afterwards added the pillar (for which he was paid a little more)—127 drachmas.

The Acropolis was transformed. Intended to rival the temples of Artemis of the Ephesians and of Hera on Samos, the Parthenon, a huge brand-new edifice, was one of the first construction projects and was completed in 443/2. It was made entirely from local Pentelic marble, which takes on a golden tint in sunlight, and was in the Doric style. Wide fluted columns stood without a base directly on the flat platform (the stylobate) on which the temple was built and were topped by plain stone slabs. The temple was decorated with sculptures painted in bright colors. Their purpose was educational as well as aesthetic, for they celebrated contests of Lapiths and Centaurs, Greeks and Amazons, Gods and Giants, all of them symbols of the triumph of civilization over barbarism. On the triangular pediments at either end of the temple the birth of Athena was displayed and the rivalry between the goddess and her uncle Poseidon for the right to be the patron deity of the city.

Inside the colonnade were two large windowless inner chambers. High up on the outside of their walls a long frieze, depicting the Panathenaeic procession, ran around the temple; sacred shrines were usually reserved for gods and heroes, but here ordinary Athenians were depicted. The larger of the rooms, the cella, was the home of a forty-foot-tall statue of Athena Parthenos, the virgin goddess, created by Pheidias. Her flesh was represented by ivory (because of the dry atmosphere this had to be regularly dampened with water) and her full-length tunic by molded gold plates (in total the gold weighed a little more than one ton and belonged to the Athenian treasury; it could be removed for use in a financial crisis). Gleaming in the gloom, Athena was an awe-inspiring sight.

The temple was beautifully constructed, with refinements often invisible to the human eye. Its horizontal lines curve slightly upwards to avoid an optical impression of sagging, the columns bend and tilt inwards, which creates a sense of height and grandeur, the corner columns thicken so that they stand out when seen against the sky. These modifications are barely perceptible, but they give the building greater presence.

It must be remembered that Greek sculpture did not look as it does today, plain unvarnished marble or bronze. It was painted in brilliant colors. Traces of red, blue, and yellow paint have been found on the Parthenon. So, for example, the background of the metopes (square spaces let into the marble lintels that lie on top of the temple pillars, on which carved reliefs were displayed) appears to have been blue or red. The skin color of males was usually a ruddy brown and of females, white. The overall effect was bright, if not gaudy.

The Parthenon was not simply a monument to victory, it was also a storehouse for state valuables. In the smaller back chamber the income from the league was stored and all kinds of trophy and valuable oddments were kept in the cella. These included a gold crown, five gold libation bowls, two nails of gilded silver, six Persian daggers, a Gorgon mask, twelve stalks of golden wheat, thirty-one bronze shields, seven Chian couches, ten Milesian couches, miscellaneous swords, breastplates, six thrones, and various musical instruments. The treasurers who provided this inventory in 434/3 also noted without comment “eight and a half boxes of rotten and useless arrows.”

The next building to be constructed on the Acropolis was a new monumental entrance, the Propylaea (literally “that which is before the gate” or more generally “the gate building”). The visitor climbed broad steps up to a stone façade that looked like an echo of the Parthenon, with six columns and a pediment. He entered a large covered porch through which he stepped out onto the Acropolis. A little way off to the right the Parthenon towered.

Other new shrines worth noting include the tiny temple of Nike, or Victory, perched on the edge of the Acropolis next to the Propylaea (it was tended by a priestess for an adequate part-time salary of fifty drachmas a year). It is in the Ionic style with elegantly slender fluted pillars surmounted by a carved capital resembling ram’s horns. Also built in the fifth century are a very well-preserved temple on the edge of the agora, in honor of Hephaestus, the god of blacksmiths, artisans, and sculptors, where he and his half sister Athena were worshipped, and a temple of Poseidon on the headland of Sunium. Like the Parthenon, these were both in the heavier Doric style.

Not all public spending was dedicated to temples and statues of the gods. The polis also supported secular and social projects. It had once been natural in the days of Cimon to look to the great aristocratic families for patronage, but the city’s democratic rulers believed it was now their role to make life easier for citizens at state expense. New amenities such as gymnasia and baths were opened to all. Perhaps the most striking of these developments was a concert hall for music events. This was the Odeum, next to the theater of Dionysus, and it was designed to accommodate the music competitions during the Panathenaea. A large square building with a pitched roof rising to a single point and supported by ninety columns, it echoed the design of Xerxes’ great war tent, which had been brought to Athens after the battle of Plataea.

The exact total expenditure on these public works throughout Attica is unknown, but was very considerable. Most of it was drawn from the league reserve. Some badly fragmented inscriptions of accounts survive, from which we learn that the gold and ivory statue of Athena cost between 700 and 1,000 talents. The Parthenon that housed it may have cost about 500 talents. To offer a military comparison, the war against Samos and Byzantium cost 1,400 talents.

—

The demos was proud of what it had achieved, and so was its leader. By the end of the 430s, Athens enjoyed a visual splendor that set it apart from the rest of mainland Greece, and especially from its great competitor Sparta and the collection of dim little villages that made up its capital. Its impotent “allies” could only look on as their Athenian hegemon spent their money on its magnificence.

Pericles well understood the importance of “soft power” and of Athens as a visitor destination. He advocated an open society. Unlike the introverted rigidities of the Spartan system and the impenetrable labyrinth of the Persian court, his city made a point of being readily accessible to all. Secrecy was discouraged so far as possible, even in matters of war and peace where an enemy might be able to gain an advantage by foreknowledge. Spies were welcome.

Thucydides puts into the mouth of Pericles opinions the great man held even if the historian gave him the words. “Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire which we have left. Future ages will marvel at us, as our present age marvels at us now.” A politician’s rhetoric usually has a short shelf life, but the judgment of posterity shows that on this occasion the speaker turned out to be telling the plain truth. The city became a masterpiece.

The great fifth-century poet Pindar evoked the glamour of Athens to his fellow-Greeks in less abstract terms. He will have done so with some reluctance, for he was a man of Thebes in Boeotia and so ought to have been an inveterate enemy of the ambitious new imperial power. But he found an unforgettable if mysterious phrase, when he wrote in praise of Pericles’ extraordinary polis:

Brightly shining and crowned with violets and beloved of poets

The bastion of Greece, famous Athens, god-favoured city.

What did he mean by “crowned with violets”? Pindar died before the city’s architectural rebirth and was perhaps inspired by the spectacular dawns and sunsets of Attica’s dry and dusty air. The glowing paintwork of the temple sculptures only enhanced the atmospheric glories of the Acropolis. Athens was the ville lumière of the ancient world.

17

The Prisoners on the Island

In the 430s, the politics of Athens began to change. For the time being we hear no more of disgruntled noblemen who were always carping at the democracy. A new breed of politician emerged and Pericles found that, to use the jargon of modern politics, he had enemies on the left rather than, as usual, on the right.

These were men of the middling sort, who had made their fortunes as traders or manufacturers. They rose to prominence on merit and by giving well-received speeches in the ecclesia or the law courts. They were fully committed to the democracy; they just wanted more of it. They were hawkish in foreign affairs and criticized Pericles for being overcautious in his policy towards Sparta and the Peloponnesians. One of their number was Cleon, probably the son of a wealthy leather merchant and tanner. He was a pushy, able, and lucky political improviser, whom Thucydides described as being remarkable “for the violence of his character.” Respectable opinion at the time disapproved of him and history too has been unkind. Aristotle (or one of his students) commented:

more than anyone else he corrupted the people by his wild impulses. He was the first man who, when on the speaker’s platform [at

ecclesia

meetings on the Pnyx], shouted, uttered abuse and made speeches with his clothes hitched up [so that he could move about more easily], while everybody else spoke in an orderly manner.

During this decade, a series of prosecutions against the associates of Pericles was brought. Their purpose was to destabilize his position and we may suppose that they originated in this new opposition. According to Plutarch, one of the sculptors working for Pheidias accused him of embezzlement in regard to the statue of Athena in the Parthenon. Pericles ordered that the gold plates attached to the sculpture be removed and weighed. It was found that the weight was correct and no gold was missing. Pheidias was also accused of having sacrilegiously or at least improperly carved a self-portrait among the figures on the goddess’s shield and, half hidden, a likeness of Pericles.

It would appear that Pheidias was acquitted or else fled the country. He is next heard of at Olympia where he created for the temple of Zeus a colossal chryselephantine statue of the god enthroned. It was listed among the Seven Wonders of the World in tourist guidebooks of the second and first centuries B.C. By a remarkable chance the remains of Pheidias’s workshop at Olympia have been found. Pieces of ivory, tools, and terra-cotta molds have been recovered, and a mug inscribed “I belong to Pheidias.” The floor plan is the same size as that of the temple’s cella and is where the statue was assembled.

Opponents of Pericles ventured even closer to home. They attacked Aspasia. Although we do not know the details, she faced two charges: impiety and pimping freeborn women for Pericles (unless the latter offense qualified as impiety). Prejudice against her, especially in the light of rumors about her role during the Samian revolt, meant that a fair trial might be difficult. Pericles was so alarmed that he came to court in person and, breaking down in tears, pleaded, successfully, for his lover’s acquittal.

As we have seen, the Olympian and his circle had a reputation for advanced thinking, which offended religious conservatives. In 438 a certain Diopeithes, whose head was well stocked with ancient prophecies, introduced a law to the effect that “anyone who did not believe in the gods or taught theories about celestial phenomena” should be prosecuted. He presumably had Pericles in mind.

Probably in 437/6 Pericles’ friend the scientist Anaxagoras was charged with impiety by Cleon and it appears that Pericles defended him in person. He narrowly avoided the death penalty, was fined five talents and expelled from Athens. He ended his days teaching at the city of Lampsacus on the Hellespont.

The real target now came under direct fire. The ecclesia approved a bill instructing Pericles to make his public financial accounts available to the boulē (lucky that he had paid no attention to the advice of young Alcibiades on the subject of accounts) and, under an unusual religious procedure likely to ensure a conviction, to answer a charge of stealing sacred property. However, an amendment was passed to have the case heard before a jury of ordinary citizens, who had long admired and trusted Pericles. An acquittal could now be confidently expected and no more was heard of the accusation.

—

So the Olympian rode out the attacks on his leadership. Having followed his guidance for more than two decades, the demos was not about to abandon him now. But these domestic dissensions coincided with, and may have been caused by, a deteriorating international situation. Sparta and its Peloponnesian allies had been watching with alarm the rising power of Athens. For a long time they were unsure how to counter it, but a drift towards war was increasingly evident—although, as one was a land power and the other a sea power, it was hard to see how it could be waged.

Thucydides had little doubt that a breakdown in relations was inevitable. In the fifty years since the Persian Wars, he writes, the Athenians

succeeded in placing the empire on a firmer footing and greatly added to their own power. The Spartans were fully aware of what was happening, but only opposed it for a little while and remained inactive for most of the period. They were always slow to take up arms and in any case were hampered by wars at home. In the end, the growth of Athenian power could not be ignored when it began to encroach on their allies. At this point they could no longer tolerate the situation.

Pericles did not want war, but he too believed it was coming and had a plan for fighting it. Since the debacle in Egypt and the collapse of the land empire, he had discouraged any further foreign adventures. In the coming conflict with Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies he wanted to avoid needless risks and did his best to delay hostilities. He ran a secret fund of ten talents a year; officially it was “for sundry purposes,” but in fact he spent it in Lacedaemon on calming key personalities.

Looking ahead, he developed a strategy that he said would guarantee victory. Sparta could field a large confederate army of thirty thousand first-rate hoplites without counting reserves, to which Athens could only respond with thirteen thousand (an additional sixteen thousand were needed for various garrisons and the defense of the city itself). So there was no point offering battle on land. The Spartans were likely to invade Attica and they should not be resisted. Farmers and their households were to abandon their fields and retire behind the city’s defenses, which included the Long Walls to the Piraeus and could easily resist any siege. Command of the seas would ensure food imports. The city would not starve. In a sense, Pericles was offering a rerun of the policy of Themistocles during the Persian Wars—abandon the land and rely on the navy.

Athens’s strength did indeed lie in its ships and their well-trained oarsmen. In addition to flotillas contributed by league members Lesbos and Chios, it had three hundred triremes of its own. Most crew members were probably Athenian citizens, but there were not enough of them to man the fleet and many were recruited from the Greek islands. Of the Peloponnesian alliance only Corinth had a fleet, but it was small, inexperienced, and outclassed.

Pericles said of his fellow-citizens: “If they bide their time, look after their navy, refrain from trying to add to the empire during wartime and do nothing to put their city at risk, they will prevail.” In 434/3 strict limits were set on public expenditure and the city’s finances were placed on a war footing. In the Parthenon treasury there were substantial reserves of coined silver. “If the worst came to the worst,” he added, “they will even be able to use the gold on the statue of Athena herself.”

According to Pericles, Sparta would give up on any war long before Athens ran out of money. Provided that the demos was patient, victory or at least a safe draw with few casualties was more or less guaranteed.

—

Epidamnus was a place of no importance, but it lit the greatest military conflagration of the age.

Built on the slope of a hill that descends into a picturesque valley, the polis enjoyed a superb setting and commanded one of the largest harbors on the eastern coastline of the Ionian Sea (today it is Durres in Albania). High stone walls protected the city. However, it was off the beaten track and on the way to nowhere. Its inhabitants traded with native Illyrian tribes in the hinterland. They bartered Greek goods such as pottery, weapons, fabrics, and furniture in return for foodstuffs, wood, pitch, copper, and slaves. Epidamnus remotely thrived.

Or it would have done so were it not politically unstable. The city lost a war with the Illyrians and entered a time of political and economic decline. Then, shortly before 335 there was a democratic revolution and the aristocratic ruling families were expelled. They made common cause with neighboring tribes and launched a series of piratical attacks on their own homeland. It looked as if civil war would destroy the city.

Epidamnus had been founded, or as the Greeks put it, “colonized” by the island of Corcyra, a maritime polis lower down the coast. It boasted a fleet of 120 triremes, which, most unusually, it maintained in peacetime. It was the region’s most formidable sea power after Athens. As we have seen, from the eighth century new Hellenic communities had been established around the Mediterranean in large numbers. Unlike modern colonies, they were independent of their mother polis, but were expected to be respectful, friendly, and cooperative. They might ask it for help in time of trouble.

This is what the citizens of Epidamnus did. They sent an embassy to Corcyra that begged for support in negotiating a peace with the old regime outside their gates. But the Corcyraeans refused even to listen to the envoys. Not knowing what to do, the Epidamnians asked the oracle at Delphi for advice. The god advised them to apply to the rich mercantile state of Corinth, the founder of Corcyra and so the “grandmother” of Epidamnus.

This guidance was thoroughly irresponsible, for the international experts at Delphi must have known that Corinth and Corcyra were not on speaking terms. The islanders looked down on their founder, claiming that they were much stronger militarily and that their wealth put them on a level with the greatest Hellenic states.

The Corinthians were delighted to disoblige their colony and sent a force of soldiers and volunteer settlers from various different poleis, who rescued the democratic regime at Epidamnus from its attackers. They had no strategic interests at stake and their motive was simply to annoy Corcyra. In this they succeeded, only too well.

In a furious reaction the island polis sent forty warships to besiege Epidamnus and proposed that the quarrel be put out to arbitration. The Corinthians refused and with help from their allies assembled seventy-five warships and two thousand hoplites. With their remaining eighty triremes the Corcyraeans met the Corinthian fleet and routed it off the headland of Actium. Epidamnus surrendered and the aristocracy was restored.

No mercy was shown the defeated: all the soldiers and settlers sent by Corinth were executed except for Corinthian citizens, who were kept on as prisoners and bargaining counters. Corcyra now commanded the Ionian Sea and sailed around damaging the allies of Corinth.

Feelings ran high in Corinth and the authorities there could not just let matters rest. They spent the next two years building warships and recruiting crews in the Peloponnese. The Corcyraeans heard of this and panicked. They had no allies of their own and unlike Corinth were not members of the formidable Peloponnesian confederation. Where could they find a powerful friend? There was only one feasible answer—Athens.

So in 433 a Corcyraean embassy made its way to Athens to seek support. The Corinthians got wind of this and were alarmed. They instantly sent an embassy of their own. Both of them put their respective cases to the ecclesia. A decision would not be easy. According to the terms of the Thirty Years Peace, a signatory was entitled to ally itself with any state that was not already affiliated either to the Spartans or to the Athenians. But common sense argued that it would be against the spirit of the treaty, if not the letter, for one side to ally itself with a state such as Corcyra that was already at war with a member of the other.

At first sight the affair was a local one and should have been of little interest to Athens. The demos was not spoiling for a fight and the Corinthians hoped for an abstention. As it turned out, the ecclesia voted to help Corcyra. On mature consideration, there was a good reason for this unexpected outcome. If there was one thing Athens could not permit it was a shift in the maritime balance of power, and that was what a large new Corinthian fleet signified.

However, the ecclesia did not go the whole way. After two debates it decided on a policy of minimum deterrence and offered no more than a defensive alliance. Athens would fight Corinth only if it attacked Corcyra and ordered a token squadron of ten triremes to sail to the island. To reassure the Peloponnesians, Lacedaemonius, son of the pro-Spartan Cimon, was appointed its commander. This was certainly an attempt to avoid breaching the treaty and we may detect the hand of Pericles behind these dispositions. He would do what he could to avoid war, or at least the blame for war.

Events now followed their course. A large Corinthian fleet of 150 triremes, the result of all that preparation, sailed against 110 Corcyraeans. The Corcyraeans were worsted, so the Athenian flotilla intervened. Mystifyingly the Corinthians then withdrew. An explanation soon presented itself; the ecclesia had had second thoughts and twenty additional Athenian triremes had appeared on the horizon as reinforcements. Discretion being the better part of valor, the Corinthians returned home the next day. On their way they captured a Corcyraean colony, Anactorium, a place in the Ambracian Gulf, and installed settlers.

—

The international crisis deepened. Corinth turned its anger from Corcyra to Athens and Pericles decided he needed to take precautionary measures on the peninsula of Chalcidice in the northwestern Aegean. This was an important staging post on the way to the Black Sea and all its cities were members of the Delian League.

Unfortunately, one of these was a Corinthian colony called Potidaea. Athens ordered it to pull down some of its fortifications and to abolish its practice of appointing Corinthian officials. It refused and revolted. Prompted by the neighboring king of Macedon, all Chalcidice followed suit. Corinth, anxious not to be seen to break the peace, recruited an international “volunteer” corps to help the rebels. Athens sent out an expeditionary force, won a battle against the Potidaeans and the volunteers, and placed the city under siege.

The situation was delicate. Pericles took what he saw as a diplomatic step that, without the threat of violence, would warn off allies of Corinth and Sparta from interfering in Athens’s business. The little state of Megara, friendly to Corinth on its western frontier, had been for many years on extremely bad terms with its much bigger eastern neighbor, Athens. The ecclesia passed a decree excluding Megarian ships and goods from all ports in the Athenian empire. For an exporter of cheap woolen goods around the Mediterranean the embargo would bring economic collapse.

Pericles probably intended his démarche to calm the situation, but in fact the effect was incendiary. Ten years later the comic writer Aristophanes set out the common opinion of how the war between Athens and Sparta began. In his play Peace the god Hermes is asked who caused the war. He replies that Pericles was frightened that he would follow his friends and associates and face prosecution in the courts.

Before anything could happen to him, he threw a little spark into the City marked “Megarian Decree” and in a moment it was all ablaze, with him fanning the flames, and the smoke drew tears from the eyes of every Greek, at home or abroad…nobody could halt the disaster and Peace just vanished.

The notion that Pericles started the war only for personal reasons is highly implausible. However, it is true that politicians have been known to elide personal and public motives for action. The waning of his popularity may have formed the background to a hardening of Pericles’ foreign policy. Adventures abroad are often popular with voters.

—

The cautious Spartans were not bellicose and, for the avoidance of doubt, they sent to Delphi to ask the god whether it would be wise for them to go to war. Apollo replied that if they fought with all their might they would win, and that he would be on their side—a surprisingly firm prediction (did money change hands?). Then in autumn 432 they convened a conference to discuss the deteriorating international situation and to decide if Athens had broken the Thirty Years Peace. Although Corinth and Megara complained bitterly about their treatment, it was not altogether clear that it had done so. If anyone was guilty of a breach it was Corinth, which had meddled more or less openly in Chalcidice.

But the fact was that both sides were insensibly edging towards war, whatever the wishes of the politicians. Some Athenians happened to be in Sparta ostensibly on other business and won leave to speak. They made no concessions to their audience. Thucydides has them say: “We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing against the way of the world, in accepting an empire when it was offered to us—and then in refusing to give it up.”

The Spartans asked everyone else to withdraw and considered the matter among themselves. King Archidamus, who was a personal friend of Pericles and a moderate, advised caution, but a hardline ephor, Sthenilaidas, disagreed: “Others may have a lot of money and ships and horses, but we have good allies, and we ought not to betray them to the Athenians.” As with elections, serious decisions at Sparta were decided in assembly by acclamation. Those who shouted loudest won the decision. In this case the roar was for war.

The Spartans then issued an ultimatum that they knew could not be accepted. Remembering that Pericles was an Alcmaeonid, they told Athens to drive out the “Cylonian pollution.” In other words, they were to exile the family of Megacles, who had massacred the supporters of Cylon in the seventh century (see this page). The Athenians repaid the compliment by calling on the Spartans to expel the “curse of Taenarum”; some suppliant helots had been sacrilegiously forced from sanctuary in the temple of Poseidon at Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese and executed.

Neither side budged. The Hellenic world gathered its forces for a letting of blood. Fourteen years had passed since the Thirty Years Peace had been agreed.

Preparations against the invasion of Attica by a Peloponnesian army went ahead. Valuable artifacts from countryside shrines were moved to the Acropolis, and sheep and cattle were transferred to Euboea and other islands off the coast. People brought their movable property into the city. The disruption was unpopular, according to Thucydides:

Most Athenians still lived in the country with their families and households and as a result were not at all inclined to move, especially as they had only just re-established themselves after the Persian invasion. It was anxiously and resentfully that they now abandoned their homes and the time-honoured temples of their historic past, that they prepared to change their whole way of life.

Some of the rural incomers had houses of their own in the city and others were able to stay with friends. But most had to settle down on land that had not been built over or in temples and shrines (although not on the Acropolis, which was out of bounds). There was terrible overcrowding.

The first hostilities—and another glaring violation of the peace—were the siege of the valiant little town of Plataea by Thebes; as we have seen, this longtime ally of Athens distinguished itself in the battle of the same name, which saw off the Persians in 479. The Plataeans resisted the Thebans, but in 427 following an attack by the Peloponnesians they surrendered, not before reminding their conquerors that, in the aftermath of the battle, the Spartan general Pausanias had decreed that Plataea was holy ground and should never be attacked.

“You will get no glory, Spartans, from such behavior—not for breaking the common law of the Hellenes, nor for sinning against your ancestors, nor for killing us, who have done you good service,” Thucydides has a Plataean spokesman tell the Spartans. Nevertheless, their commander had all his prisoners put to death. Some two hundred Plataeans had escaped earlier and were given Athenian citizenship in compensation for the loss of their polis.

For most Athenians the reality of war only struck home in the last days of May 431 when the corn was ripe. King Archidamus led a huge army of about sixty thousand heavy infantry into Attica, albeit without much enthusiasm. In case Archidamus spared his estate, whether out of genuine friendship or to make mischief, Pericles made it over to the polis. Meanwhile, tit for tat, an Athenian fleet sailed round the Peloponnese ravaging coastal settlements. The old rival, Aegina, was ethnically cleansed. The inhabitants were driven out and replaced by Athenian settlers. The island was annexed.

These were minor victories when compared to the psychological impact of the invasion of Attica. This was far greater than the actual damage done. Citizens were outraged at having to watch their farms being torched while being forbidden to offer any resistance (although some Thessalian cavalry were sent out to do what they could to harry the enemy).

Pericles remained certain of the rightness of his war strategy, but could see that the demos was furious with him for not leading them out to fight the Peloponnesians. So he took care not to summon the ecclesia in case “a general discussion resulted in incorrect decisions being taken.”

—

On a winter’s day every year a ceremony was held in honor of the glorious dead. It must have held a special meaning in 431, the first year of the war. The bones of those who had fallen were brought into a tent where relatives could make offerings in their honor. They were then placed in cypress coffins, one for each of the ten tribes. For those whose remains had not been recovered an empty bier was provided.

Two days later a procession of wagons, carrying one coffin apiece, made its way to the Cerameicus suburb that lay just outside the city’s Dipylon or Double Gate. Here was the public burial place where all the city’s military dead were interred, with the exception of the men killed at Marathon: their achievement was so signal that they were buried with full honors on the battlefield itself.

Once the bones had been laid to rest, a distinguished citizen was invited to deliver an oration in praise of the fallen. This year Pericles was chosen and, at a crisis in the city’s affairs, he delivered a ringing encomium of Athens itself and its values. It must have lifted morale and, in the hands of Thucydides, the speech as it has come down to us was a literary masterpiece.

At the heart of the Athenian achievement, Pericles claimed, lay its democratic constitution.

When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; as for social standing, what counts is not membership of a particular class but a person’s ability. Class is not allowed to interfere with merit, nor is poverty an obstacle. If a man is qualified for public service, his humble origins will not count against him.

Pericles extended the principle of meritocracy to an Athenian’s private life. Provided he obeyed the law, he could do as he liked. The city was culturally rich and commercially, too, for it imported the world’s produce.

We are lovers of beauty with economy; and of things of the mind without growing soft….For us wealth is for use rather than ostentation and poverty is no disgrace, unless we are not doing anything about it.

His message was that out of democracy grew the vitality that led to empire, to wealth, and to the benefits of civilization.

I declare that our city is a liberal education to Greece and each one of our citizens excels all men in versatility, resourcefulness, brilliance and self-reliance. That this is no hollow boast for the occasion, but the actual truth, our city’s power bears witness.

Pericles’ rhetoric rose to an extraordinary metaphor of sexual desire; he saw the city as an eromenos and the citizens as a collective erastes.

Think of the greatness of Athens, as you actually see it day by day, till you fall in love with your

polis

.

The speech glossed over certain unpleasant characteristics and some inconvenient qualities, but its theme, that Athens had been going through a golden age thanks largely to its democratic constitution, seems to have been true enough.

But there was another, much less palatable truth that was about to strike the Athenians. In the summer of 430 during the Peloponnesians’ second invasion when farmers crowded the city and lived huddled in shacks and stifling tents, people began to fall ill and die. The symptoms of the epidemic were horrific, as Thucydides, who had been infected himself and survived, described in detail. Perfectly healthy men and women suddenly began to have burning feelings in the head; their eyes became red and inflamed; inside their mouths their throats and tongues bled, and they had unpleasant breath.

Next came sneezing and hoarseness of voice, and before long victims developed a chest pain and a cough, and then a stomachache. They vomited up every kind of bile.

The skin reddened and broke out into pustules. It felt cool to the touch, but inside sufferers felt burning hot. After seven or eight days a severe diarrhea set in and was often fatal. Thucydides writes: “Nothing did the Athenians so much harm as this or so reduced their strength for war.”

We are not sure what the infection was. It seems to have originated in Egypt and spread through the Persian Empire. Its symptoms resembled those of pneumonic plague, measles, typhoid, and other diseases, but fit none of them exactly. One thing is sure; the “plague,” which is what people called it, was often lethal. The death toll is uncertain. Thucydides gives totals for the cavalry and infantry classes—4,400 infantry out of the 13,000 for the field army. In addition, at Potidaea 1,050 men died in forty days. Three hundred cavalrymen died out of an active total of 1,200. The poor probably suffered most and for them there are no figures. It has been estimated that between one quarter and one third of the population died. It was a terrible blow.

“It was the one thing I didn’t predict,” remarked a despondent Pericles. The plague raged for two summers, took a break, and then resumed in 427 before finally running its course.

Few doubted that the war and the plague were connected and that the gods were punishing Athens for some offense. Everyone could recall the anger of Apollo in Homer’s Iliad, and the punitive plague he inflicted with his twanging arrows on the Greek army before Troy.

Sophocles’ new tragedy, Oedipus the King, was performed at the Great Dionysia of 429 when the plague was at its height. It was no accident that it opens with Apollo at his murderous work again. The play didn’t win first prize, but many see it as his masterpiece. Aristotle wrote in his study of the art of fiction, Poetics, that it best matched his prescription for how drama should be made.

Its hero, Oedipus, becomes king of Thebes by unknowingly killing his father and marrying his mother. Because of the pollution he brings to his kingdom, a terrible pestilence descends on the city. The audience understood all too well the horrors of which the Chorus sings:

Beyond all telling, the city

Reeks with the death in her streets, death-bringing.

None weeps, and her children die,

None by to pity.

Mothers at every altar kneel,

Golden Athena, come near to our crying!

Apollo, hear us and heal!

It was only when the pollution was traced back to Oedipus and he had blinded himself and been expelled from the city that the infection subsided.

People remembered an old prophecy that said:

War with the Dorians [the Spartans were Dorians] and death will come at the same time.

They also recalled that before deciding on war, Sparta had received a favorable response from the oracle at Delphi. Its words appeared to be coming true and it was noticed that the plague scarcely touched the Peloponnese. In the winter of 426 Athens carried out ceremonies of purification at the island of Delos, birthplace of Apollo. All the tombs of those who had died on Delos were dug up and it was proclaimed that in future no deaths or births, both of which were pollutant events, were to be permitted on the island. A five-yearly festival was revived, the Delian Games, and horse racing was added as a new competition.

It comes as little surprise that at this juncture the will of the demos wobbled. Peace feelers were extended to Sparta, although they came to nothing. Probably in September 430, Pericles was suspended from his post as strategos to which he had been elected in the spring, and charged with misappropriation of public funds. He was found guilty and fined fifty talents. He became depressed and spent his time lying about at home. Young Alcibiades and others had to persuade him to resume political work. In the spring, he was reelected, “as is the way with crowds,” Thucydides observed sourly. Pericles was back in office at the start of the new official year in midsummer 429.

The Olympian was felt to be indispensable and he was against wobbling. As always he spoke truth to power—that is, to the demos. “Your empire is, not to mince words, a tyranny,” he advised. “It may be that it was wrong to take it, but to let it go now would be unsafe.”

Pericles was not only unfairly blamed for the plague, he also caught it. He passed the crisis but the disease lingered, and in the autumn of 429 he died. His two unsatisfactory sons had also been infected and preceded him to the grave a year before. So that his direct line should survive, he persuaded the authorities to make Pericles, his unsuffraged child by Aspasia, an Athenian citizen (the young man had fallen foul of the nationality law his own father had introduced all those years ago, which allowed the franchise only to children both of whose parents were Athenian).

—

Pericles was a great man. Thucydides, who was hard to please, admired him. He gave him a fine eulogy.

Being powerful because of his rank, ability, and known integrity, he exercised an independent control over the masses, and was not so much led by it as himself led it. As he did not win power by improper methods he did not have to flatter them….In short, what was nominally a democracy became rule by the first citizen. His successors were more on the same level as one another, and each of them strove to become the leader.

However, as Pericles himself must have recognized, his career ended in failure. This had less to do with the plague than with his war strategy. It was defensive and wars are seldom won without attack, without looking for the enemy and fighting him. He underestimated the devastating impact on public morale of the annual invasions of the homeland. When he reassured the demos before the war that Athens had huge financial reserves, he was factually correct. But here is a puzzle. The city was indeed much richer than its opponents, but Pericles knew as well as anybody else that maritime warfare was prohibitively expensive. By the time of his death the reserves were already running low, and hostilities had hardly opened.

Pericles was cautious by nature and there is only one plausible explanation for his faulty prognosis. His war strategy was that there would be no war—or, rather, a war with very little fighting and one that was likely to end quickly, as soon as Sparta had realized that there were no practical measures they could take to damage the Athenian Empire. In sum, Pericles had been betting on a draw.

It looked as if he was going to lose his stake.

The seemingly endless and ruinous siege of Potidaea did not end until its capture in 430. Costly naval expeditions were needed to counteract the effect on morale of the annual invasion of Attica. Allowance had to be made for future unknowns both known and unknown—in this case it was the plague, but further surprises could be anticipated. These would almost certainly include more bank-breaking rebellions in the empire. Worst of all, the enemy showed no sign of submission. So how was the war actually to be won?

In foreign policy Pericles was a hawk, but he was a cautious hawk. He liked to avoid risk. He would do nothing unless he was reasonably sure in advance of the outcome. Now that he was dead, a new hawk would fly the skies who had no such inhibitions. This raptor saw that Athens had to show real aggression, even to the point of rashness, if it were to defeat the enemy. And it had to grab chances as they came; rather than eliminate luck, it would provoke it. Its name was Cleon, who succeeded Pericles as the chief man in the state.

—

So far the war had been small beer, a succession of minor encounters and skirmishes by land and sea. Realizing that a strategy consisting largely of invasions of an already thoroughly ravaged Attica brought fewer returns with each passing year, the Peloponnesians decided to build a navy to win allies in western Greece and to challenge Athens’s maritime dominance in the Corinthian Gulf. One of Sparta’s chief allies, the mercantile city of Corinth, was suffering badly from what amounted to a blockade.

However, a brilliant Athenian admiral called Phormio outwitted and defeated a much larger fleet (his twenty met forty-seven Peloponnesian warships). Athenian triremes were not simply well built, they also had well-trained and experienced crews and tactically clever officers. Sparta was forced to recognize that to compete at sea required a lot more than investment in timber and canvas.

Both sides needed to recover their finances. Sparta, always short of cash, wondered whether the Great King might fund those who were fighting his bitterest enemy, Athens, and dispatched an embassy to sound him out. The very fact of doing so reveals the lengths to which Sparta was now prepared to go. Only half a century had passed since the invasion of Xerxes, and betrayal of the Greek cause to the Persians had become an acceptable policy.

The huge financial reserves of Athens were dwindling at an alarming rate. In 428 the imperial polis seems to have been maintaining at sea at one and the same time the largest number of warships that it had ever done, 250 in total. As we have seen, thousands of crew members, marines, and hoplites had to be paid at a rate of one drachma a day (or two if they had a servant). There was no sign of the war ending soon and with the disappearance of Pericles the opportunity arose for a new, leaner method of carrying on the struggle. This entailed an absolute severity in collecting league dues, additional taxes at home, and more carefully and economically designed military expeditions.

Such measures might stave off bankruptcy, but they would not win the war. So Athenian generals became more aggressive and more opportunistic. Unlike Pericles, they were not aiming for a draw, but for victory. They were nimble and sought to apply minimum (and so affordable) force to achieve a decisive objective. They were on the lookout for tightly defined risks that would bring real gains if successful and cause little real damage or expense if they failed.

—

“War is a stern master,” observed Thucydides. Standards of decency were breaking down throughout the Greek world and men turned increasingly to violence and terror as routine political methods. The Spartan envoys to the Great King fell into Athenian hands and were sent back to Athens. As soon as they arrived they were executed without trial or even an opportunity to defend themselves. Their bodies were not given a proper burial, but thrown into a pit. The official justification for this criminal act was that it was retaliation for the Spartan practice of putting to death crews of Athenian merchant ships captured off the Peloponnesian coast. Indeed, at the beginning of the war the Spartans killed as enemies all whom they captured at sea, whether they were Athenians or neutrals.

The polities of Greek poleis were breaking down. The first and best example of this trend was the island of Corcyra. The class struggle there that had inadvertently set off the general war continued with vertiginous and bloodstained reversals of fortune, watched over by Peloponnesian and Athenian fleets whose maneuvers at sea pushed the pendulum on land to and fro. In the end the Corcyran democrats prevailed. Four hundred aristocrats and their supporters sought sanctuary in the temple of Hera in Corcyra town and Thucydides reported that the democrats

persuaded about fifty of them to submit to a trial. They then condemned every one of them to death. Seeing what was happening, most of the other suppliants, who had refused to be tried, killed each other there in the sanctuary of Hera; some hanged themselves on trees, and others committed suicide as they were severally able.

Some five hundred aristocrats managed to escape the carnage and established a fort in the north of the island, from which they launched raids against the democrats. A couple of years later they were defeated with help from an Athenian force. The survivors surrendered after receiving guarantees of their safety. They were then shut up in a large building, taken out in groups of twenty, and led past two lines of armed soldiers who beat them and stabbed them. Eventually, and understandably, those who were still inside refused to come out. So the democrats climbed up onto the roof, threw down tiles on the prisoners below, and shot them with arrows.

History then repeated itself. Most of the victims began to

kill themselves by thrusting into their throats the arrows shot by the enemy, and hanging themselves by cords taken from some beds that happened to be there and with strips torn from their clothing….Night fell while these horrors were taking place and most of it had passed before they were brought to a conclusion.

The civil strife in Corcyra ended for the good reason that one side in the conflict had been wiped out.

In theory the crime was the attempted overthrow of the democracy, but in practice people took the opportunity to settle private scores or grab other people’s estates or property. Death took every shape and form. There were no lengths to which the brutality did not go. Fathers killed their sons, suppliants claiming sanctuary at an altar were dragged away or even butchered on it as if they were sacrificial animals. Some were even walled up in a temple of Dionysus and died there.

What happened in Corcyra was repeated elsewhere. As time passed practically the whole of the Greek world was infected, with rival factions in every polis. As a rule, democratic leaders appealed to the Athenians for support and oligarchs or aristocrats to the Spartans. It became a natural thing for those intent on a change of government to seek external alliances. Revolutions broke out in city after city.

Thucydides notes the effect these upheavals had on language and shows how the ordinary meaning of words was transformed and debased.

Reckless aggression was now regarded as the courage of a loyal party supporter; to think of the future and wait and see was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any suggestion of moderation was a disguise for unmanliness; an ability to see all sides of a question meant that one was unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man.

The Greeks did not understand the concept of a loyal opposition. Politics was a zero-sum game in which the winner took all. Losers were either butchered or went into exile. Large numbers of banished patriots were scattered throughout the Greek world and plotted vengeance against their political opponents. Hellenic unity, always fragile, became a lost cause.

—

Athens was by no means immune from this widespread coarsening of moral standards. In 428, the fourth year of the war, the polis of Mytilene and most of the rest of Lesbos, the third largest Greek island, revolted from the league. It was not a subject state but a “free ally” that contributed its own ships.

People on Lesbos had long been planning an insurrection and watched the fall of Samos with dismay. The governing aristocracy of Mytilene had no special grievance, but were striking out for the principle of freedom. They were waiting until they had narrowed the mouths of their harbors, completed some fortifications, and built more warships, but were betrayed before they were ready to rebel.

From the Athenian point of view this revolt was a challenge to the whole rationale of the empire. It came at the worst possible moment, when the city had been devastated by the plague and the treasury was beginning to run low. Worse, Lesbos entered into an alliance with Sparta.

Nevertheless, the Athenians made a great effort. An emergency property tax was introduced. A sizable expeditionary force sailed to Lesbos and placed Mytilene under siege. The Spartans (very boldly for them) sent out a fleet to help the Lesbians, but its commander was nervous and dilatory and arrived too late to save the city.

What happened was that the aristocrats armed ordinary citizens to help with the Mytilenes’ defense. However, these were mostly democrats and, once they had weapons in their hands, mutinied and insisted on surrender to the Athenians. The terms agreed were tough. Athens was accorded the “right to act as it saw fit with regard to the people of Mytilene,” but they in turn were allowed to send representatives to Athens to put their case.

The demos at Athens had received a shock and was in a filthy mood. On a motion from Cleon, “the most violent of its citizens,” it decided to have the entire male population of Mytilene executed immediately and to make slaves of the women and children. A trireme was immediately dispatched to convey the terrible command to the Athenian general on Lesbos.

Overnight there were second thoughts. People worried that the decision was unprecedented and punished the innocent as well as the guilty. It was particularly unjust to kill the democrats, who had in fact opposed the revolt and whose resistance to the government had caused its collapse. The representatives of Mytilene were still in the city and noticed the change of mood. Together with some friendly Athenians, they approached the authorities and asked if the matter could be debated again. They won their point and an immediate meeting of the ecclesia was called.

Cleon spoke again to his original proposal. He was unrepentant. According to Thucydides, he told the demos:

By giving way to your feelings of compassion you are putting yourself in danger and your weakness will not win you any thanks. What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and are always plotting against you.

It is interesting to note that whatever their other quarrels, Cleon and Pericles took the same view about the empire—that it was inherently unjust and that their fellow-citizens should acknowledge the fact and live with it. Might was right. Would Pericles have supported Cleon’s official massacre, though?

He would probably have shared the opinion of a certain Diodotus, whose only appearance in history is as a contributor to this debate. He did not appeal to the compassion of his audience, but to its self-interest. This was not a question of justice, he argued, but of policy. Cleon was too hasty and too angry. The death penalty was not a reliable deterrent, for it simply made future rebels desperate and less likely to surrender.

“The right way to deal with free people is this—not to inflict some tremendous punishment on them after they have revolted, but to take tremendous care of them before this point is reached—to prevent them even contemplating the idea of revolt.”

By a narrow majority the previous day’s decision was reversed. A second warship was sent off with all urgency. The envoys from Lesbos plied the crew with wine and food and promised a large reward if they arrived in time to stop the death sentence being carried out. The men were fed as they rowed with barley mixed with oil and wine, and slept in relays while the remainder rowed on. Luckily there were no contrary winds.

The first trireme dawdled on its disagreeable errand and arrived at Mytilene just a little ahead of the second one. The commander there had only had time to read the original decree and to start making the necessary arrangements for a mass execution before he learned that the order had been countermanded. Thucydides remarked drily: “Mytilene had had a narrow escape.”

The same cannot be said of what happened to an ancient Greek polis in Chalcidice called Scione. Its citizens used to say that their ancestors settled there after being blown off course by a storm on their way home to Greece from Troy. Six years after the Mytilene affair they revolted from Athens and were eventually starved out.

This time nobody in the ecclesia is recorded as having objected when all the adult males of Scione were put to the sword, and the women and children sold into slavery. Perhaps to remind the world that Sparta had been the first to practice this kind of atrocity, the empty city was handed over to the homeless survivors of Plataea.

Values had yet further decayed and we hear no more from Diodotus.

—

A starving wolf met a guard dog of his acquaintance. “I knew what would happen,” said the dog. “Your irregular lifestyle will soon be the death of you. Why don’t you get a steady job like me, and have regular meals?”

“I would have no objection,” said the wolf, “if only I could find one.”

“I’ll fix that,” said the dog. “Come with me to my master and you shall share my work.”

On the way to the dog’s home the wolf noticed that the hair on the dog’s neck was worn away, so he asked him how that had happened.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said the dog. “That is where the collar is put on at night to keep me chained up. It chafes a bit, but one soon gets used to it.”

“Oh, really?” replied the wolf. “Then goodbye to you, master dog.”

This fable is by Aesop, who flourished in the sixth century (if he is not a figure of legend). He was a slave from Thrace and lived on the island of Samos. His exemplary tales mainly featured speaking animals and were immensely popular. Most Greeks would warmly endorse the moral of the encounter between dog and wolf: to starve and be free was far better than to be fat and enslaved.

They knew what they were talking about, for slavery was widespread throughout the Hellenic world. From Homer onwards it was an accepted part of daily life. Aristotle called a slave “a living piece of property.” There was some dispute whether a slave should be treated as a domestic animal or as a child.

An old-fashioned conservative like the anonymous author of The Athenian Constitution had decided views on the subject. Owners were far too soft with their slaves. They were “allowed to take the greatest liberties in Athens. You are not allowed to strike any of them there, nor will a slave stand aside for you….We have put slaves on terms of equality with free men.”