The Rise of Athens

Isocrates became an influential opinion former. It was his firm belief that Hellas would be weakened, even destroyed, by the inability of its constituent poleis to agree on anything among their own citizens or with each other. In 380 he published a celebrated pamphlet, The Panegyric or Festival Speech, in which he drew a bleak picture of a broken Hellenic community.

Who would desire a state of affairs where pirates command the seas and mercenaries occupy our cities? Fellow-citizens, instead of waging war in defense of their territories against foreigners, are fighting each other inside their own city walls?…And so far are

poleis

from “freedom” and “autonomy” that some of them are under tyrants, some are controlled by Spartan governors, some have been sacked and razed to the ground and some are under barbarian masters—the same barbarians whom we once punished for their audacity in crossing over into Greece.

Isocrates was an admirer of the Athenian Empire in its most unblushing form and even defended its brutality at Melos. He agreed with Pericles that his city was an education to Greece. He claimed:

And so far has our city distanced the rest of mankind in thought and in speech that her pupils have become the teachers of the rest of the world. She has brought it about that the name Hellene suggests no longer a race but an intelligence, a way of thinking, and that the word is applied to those who share our culture rather than to those who share a common blood.

The clash of civilizations between Europe and Asia had been a Greek fixation ever since the war at Troy. Isocrates proposed a unification of Greece under two great powers—Athens by sea and Sparta on land—which together would lead a war of liberation against the Persian barbarians.

There was much in this proposition to please the Athenians. For some time they had been wondering if they could reconstitute their maritime league and found that across the Aegean many small states would welcome its return. The seas had become unruly, piracy was widespread, and a return to order was much to be desired. However, Isocrates’ fellow-citizens made one reservation. Although in the long run a crusade against the Great King had great appeal, a more immediate enemy had to be tackled first—Sparta, whose behavior as the dominant Greek state was oppressive.

In 378–77 the ecclesia passed a decree establishing the principle of a new league. The original stone inscription has survived (in many pieces), which states the aim as being to “compel the Spartans to allow the Greeks to enjoy peace in freedom and independence, with their lands unviolated.” The league’s sphere of operations was to be mainland Greece and the islands, and the Persians were discreetly left out of account, although they remained at the back of everyone’s mind. Troops were levied, and ships commissioned and manned.

The Athenians understood that they had to show contrition for the old empire they had deservedly lost. The allies were to have their own assembly, parallel to, but separate from, the Athenian ecclesia. It met in Athens, but Athens was to play no part in its deliberations. A measure passed by one body would only be valid if approved by the other. This double lock meant that, unlike under the first empire, the allies could veto Athenian decisions.

Obviously there had to be a common fund to pay for the fleet, of which Athens would be the treasurer, but payments into it were politely called “contributions” in place of the odious word phoros, or tribute. Cleruchies, or Athenian settlements on league members’ land, were not permitted and no Athenian was allowed to buy or mortgage any real estate there.

The new league was very popular. The first members were already allies and included Chios, Byzantium, Mytilene, Methymna, and the powerful island of Rhodes. Most of the poleis on Euboea joined, as did (extraordinarily) Thebes. Among other members were Corcyra off western Greece, and Jason, the energetic tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly. The total membership rose to about seventy.

The league was crucial for Athens. In part this was a question of pride, for it gave the impression that the empire was back. To some extent, though, this was an illusion, for the days of Pericles had passed. Where Athens used to command it now had to consult. However, it was able to afford a large fleet that could protect the trade route from the Black Sea, its most important strategic priority.

No doubt Isocrates was pleased by the rise of Athens and the unification of the seagoing city-states, but this meant little to him if Sparta was still the enemy, however badly it had behaved, and so long as the Ionian cities remained under the Great King’s thumb.

—

It was the winter of 379 and the weather was cold and windy, presaging snow. Seven exiles including a certain Pelopidas planned to overthrow a pro-Spartan oligarchy in Thebes and to remove the Spartan garrison in its citadel, the Cadmea. Dressed as peasants, they crossed into Theban territory by night and spent the next day quietly in some unpopulated spot. Then, pretending to be coming in from the fields, they joined other farm laborers who were passing through the city gate at the end of the working day.

With their faces muffled ostensibly against the bad weather, the group made its way to a “safe house” where other local conspirators were already gathered. Their plan was to enter the homes of two leading generals or polemarchs, Archias and Philippos, that evening, and assassinate them. That would be enough, they calculated, to overthrow the regime and replace it with a democracy.

A banquet was being held in honor of the polemarchs, who were leaving office that day. The celebration was organized by their administrative secretary, Phyllidas, who happened to be among the plotters. At the polemarchs’ request, he promised to lay on some attractive women (as Xenophon noted sourly, “they were that sort of men”). They feasted and soon, with a little help from their secretary, became very drunk.

A letter came in for Archias, revealing details of the plot. He put it on one side, saying he would look at it the next day. The party shouted for the women and Phyllidas went out for them. He returned with three of the more attractive conspirators in drag and wearing veils and wreaths. They were accompanied by some equally transvestite maids. They insisted demurely that the servants left before they joined the party. Once that had been done the conspirators entered the dining room and lay down next to the polemarchs, threw off their disguises, drew their daggers, and slaughtered them. The victims were too befuddled to defend themselves.

Afterwards another guilty man, the Theban oligarch who had let Phoebidas into the city three years previously, was attacked and killed in his house nearby. It was now full night and the townspeople were asleep. The triumphant conspirators tried to rouse them, shouting that the tyrants were dead. As long as it was dark nobody dared to come out, but with daybreak everyone poured into the streets and cheered the revolution.

In the Cadmea the nervous Spartan garrison did not know what to do, but were eventually persuaded to leave town quietly. So ended a scandal that seriously damaged the reputation of Sparta.

When they learned what had happened, the Spartans collectively lost their temper, the classic sign of a guilty conscience. They executed two of their three garrison commanders and banished the third, for capitulating without a fight. They complained to Athens about volunteers that had gone to Thebes to help.

And then, as if to compound the offense of Phoebidas, a Spartan called Sphodrias thought he would compensate for the loss of Thebes by acquiring Piraeus. He decided to march overnight deep into Attica and capture the port of Athens by attacking it from its landward side (despite its rebuilt walls Piraeus still had no town gates). He seems to have been no brighter than Phoebidas; by sunrise he had only reached Eleusis and still had miles to go. He was forced into a humiliating retreat, but not before showing the world what he had intended.

—

While the star of Athens was in the ascendant, that of Sparta was overclouded. A storm was on its way.

During the 370s, Thebes resisted the might of the Spartan army and grew stronger as a result. It deepened its control over the poleis of Boeotia, whatever the Athenians and their new league said about liberty. At sea the Athenian navy scored major successes against the Spartans and their allies, whose prestige slowly declined.

King Agesilaus seems to have harbored an obsessive hatred for the Thebans and a Spartan army invaded Thebes a number of times during this decade, although it was careful to avoid risking too many casualties and undertook no sieges. Meanwhile the Thebans built a defensive rampart around part of their Boeotian territory.

In response to continual Spartan bullying, a Theban general called Epaminondas with his great friend (and possibly lover) Pelopidas developed innovative tactics for hoplite battles. Three hundred male couples, each an erastes with his (grown-up) eromenos, were brought together in a new elite regiment, the Sacred Band. The theory was that they would not want to act disgracefully in each other’s presence. It seems to have worked, for they soon won a fearsome reputation for courage under fire.

In 375 a small but fierce encounter took place during which the Sacred Band and a few cavalry routed a Spartan force of more than one thousand hoplites and killed two of its commanders. This was the first time in history that a Spartan army had been defeated by an enemy of equal or lesser size. The wind was shifting.

The regular formation for hoplites was the phalanx in which men were deployed eight or more ranks deep in a long line (see this page). Epaminondas tailored his own version, which he marshaled up to fifty ranks deep and placed on one of his wings. The rest of his army was thinned out and stepped back in an oblique formation. The phalanx bristling with long spears drove into its opponents with irresistible force.

In 371 a peace congress was held in Sparta and a general settlement was agreed on the familiar principle of autonomy for individual city-states. The question of the Boeotian League arose. Should Thebes be excluded from the treaty on the grounds that it dominated the other poleis in Boeotia? Epaminondas the Theban took the oath endorsing the peace on behalf of all Boeotians. His view was that because Boeotia was a geographical unity it was also and rightly a political unity—just like Laconia, which was governed by the Spartan polis.

Agesilaus, who was recovering from a long illness, lost his temper. He asked Epaminondas whether, in the light of the principle of autonomy, he thought it just and equitable for the cities of Boeotia to be independent. The Theban replied with another question. “Does Agesilaus think it just and equitable for the cities of Laconia to be independent?” The king furiously erased the name of Thebes from the treaty text and issued a declaration of war.

According to the terms of the accord, all parties were to withdraw or disband their forces, but Sparta thought otherwise and an allied army of ten thousand hoplites and one thousand horse under King Cleombrotus, Agesilaus’s co-monarch, was ordered to march against the Thebans and liberate the Boeotian cities. They encountered Epaminondas and an opposing force of about six thousand men at a village called Leuctra seven miles southwest of Thebes.

Seven Boeotarchs or generals of the Boeotian League were in charge of the Theban campaign (it was typical for Greek armies and navies to have multiple commanders). Epaminondas and two other generals argued for an immediate battle, but three others were in favor of pulling back and looking for a more advantageous position. The seventh Boeotarch was absent guarding a mountain pass. When he returned to the camp he backed Epaminondas, who now had a majority for battle. He prepared a highly original plan that was designed more than to make up for his inferior numbers.

Cleombrotus held a council of war after breakfast on July 6, 371, at which it was decided to accept battle (there was a rumor that wine was drunk). He received a surprise when the armies began to take their positions. As was traditional, the Spartan hoplites, including seven hundred Equals, formed up on the right wing under the king’s command. They stood in a phalanx twelve ranks deep. In front of them was a weak squadron of Spartan cavalry.

Astonishingly, though, the Spartan right was confronted by a massed Theban phalanx fifty ranks deep, also covered by cavalry. The rest of the Theban army was echeloned back from this formidable mass of men and was evidently not expected to play a major part in the forthcoming battle.

The Boeotian horse were well trained and in the opening phase of the battle soon cleared the Spartan cavalry from the field. Cleombrotus extended his phalanx farther to the right to outflank the Boeotians. But while he was undertaking this maneuver, the oversized Theban phalanx, headed by Pelopidas and the Sacred Band, ran at the double towards the Spartan king and his staff.

The impact when it bulldozed into the Spartan hoplites was terrible. Almost immediately Cleombrotus fell mortally wounded and his hoplites were overwhelmed. When half the Spartans, including four hundred of the Equals, had been felled, the remainder broke and fled to their camp. The Equals who were still alive wanted to resume the fight, but the allies had had enough.

In a single day, Spartan power had been destroyed. The slaughter of the Equals reduced their number to a point where Sparta could no longer field a proper army. A rout on this scale amazed the Greek world. As the news spread, remaining harmosts were expelled and democracies reinstalled throughout the mainland and the Aegean, and even in Sparta’s backyard, the Peloponnese.

—

Immediately after the battle, a garlanded Theban herald was sent to Athens to bring the good news to the Athenian boulē, which happened to be in session at the time on the Acropolis. He asked for their support and said: “It is now possible to take vengeance on the Spartans for all the things they have done to us.” But this was the last thing on the councilors’ minds. They were dismayed by the fact that Thebes was now the dominant force in mainland Greece and had upset the centuries-old balance of power. They made no reply to the herald and did not even give him a customary meal of hospitality. He returned home, unthanked.

In Sparta they were celebrating the Festival of the Naked Youths (Gymnopaedia). Unclothed teenagers and men took part in competitive sports, choral events, and displayed their military skill by performing mock-combat dances. A messenger arrived to announce the disaster during a performance in the theater by the men’s chorus. The ephors were greatly distressed when they heard the news, but allowed the concert to run its course before revealing the names of the dead to their families. The Spartans reacted with characteristic serenity. Xenophon writes:

…they ordered the women not to cry out, but to bear the calamity in silence. On the following day one could see those whose relatives had died going about in public with bright and cheerful faces. You would have seen few whose relatives had been reported as still alive, and these few walking about with gloomy and downcast faces.

Agesilaus held his nerve. Knowing that every soldier was needed, he suspended the law that removed citizenship from those who fled in the face of the enemy. In 370 he launched an incursion into Arcadia, for the sake of morale, but took care not to lose any men.

Epaminondas and Pelopidas were determined that Sparta should fall never to rise again. The simplest means of achieving this was to prize the Peloponnese from its grasp. This would mean freeing the helots and establishing Messenia as an independent state, and doing the same for the Arcadians in the north. In the winter of 370, Epaminondas led a large army into the Peloponnese. It was the first of four invasions in the coming years.

The Thebans and their allies set out for Sparta itself, sacking and burning the countryside as they went. For half a millennium no foreign enemy had ever penetrated the Peloponnese and the shock to Lacedaemonian pride was tremendous. Women who had never cast eyes on a foreigner before could not bear to see the smoke rising from fires in the suburbs. Perioeci broke free from their masters. A mere eight hundred or so Equals guarded the unwalled city. As a risky last resort, the aged Agesilaus recruited six thousand helots to join the defense. Some long-standing allies, such as Corinth, sent help. As they watched their countryside being laid waste, the Spartans, like the Athenians in 431, wanted to go on the attack, but the king refused to let them. A Theban crowed: “Where are the Spartans now?”

A fierce defense made the Thebans pull back. They bypassed Sparta and marched south to its port, Gythium, destroying everything they came across. Then they went west and liberated Messenia. At long last the helots were free. To secure their future Epaminondas decided to build them a well-fortified capital city, Messene, and for its location selected the slopes of Mount Ithome, focus of ancient revolts and symbol of resistance. The omens were auspicious, stone was ordered, and town planners and developers skilled in building houses, temples, and fortifications were hired. In solemn ceremonies, the ancient heroes, or demigods, of Messenia were begged to return to their native land. The loudest summons was for a historical personality, Aristomenes, rebel leader and elected king during the Second Messenian War in the seventh century. Exiles, who had retained their customs and still spoke a pure Doric dialect, were recalled after centuries of absence.

In eighty-five days the Thebans and their allies, guided by the experts, constructed a massive stone perimeter wall; five and a half miles long, with guard towers and two main gates, its remains can still be seen. They also built houses and temples. The men worked to the music of flutes. The bones of Aristomenes were retrieved from their resting place abroad and reburied; it was said that his ghost had been present at the battle of Leuctra and guided the Thebans to victory.

In 368 a fortified city, Megalopolis, was also founded to guard a newly independent confederation of Arcadia. So both to the north and in the west Sparta’s onetime subject peoples and compulsory allies were given their freedom as well as the means with which to defend themselves.

The Greeks were used to city-states temporarily losing their authority and influence, but after a while recovering them. But this time it was clear that Sparta could not recover from the decision of Leuctra. It dwindled into a local power in the Peloponnese and would never again bestride the Hellenic stage.

Eventually after three months, the Peloponnesian allies of Thebes began to leave, taking with them as much booty as they could carry. The Theban hoplites, too, began to think of home. Having altered the course of history, Epaminondas called it a day.

22

Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”

Isocrates was a disappointed man.

He had argued for Greek unification and invasion of the Persian Empire. He had proposed in his Panegyric that Athens, his own city, and Sparta should join forces, as they had done during the long-ago invasion by Xerxes, and give the Great King his just deserts.

But the years had passed without anything being done. At last, writing in 346, he conceded that Athens had proved to be a disappointment.

I turned to Athens first of all and tried to win her over to this cause with all the earnestness of which my nature is capable, but when I realized that she cared less for what I said than for the ravings of speakers in the

ecclesia,

I gave her up, although I did not abandon my efforts.

At different points in his long career he identified other candidates for the leadership of Greece. They included the Spartan king, Agesilaus, who campaigned against the Persians in Asia Minor with some success. Then there was Jason, tyrant of Pherae, a town in Thessaly, in the 370s. He commanded an efficient and well-trained mercenary army with which he dominated Thessaly and even planned a war against the Persians. Xenophon has a fellow-Thessalian say that Jason

is so intelligent a general that whatever he sets out to achieve—whether by stealth, anticipation or brute force, he does not fail to get….Of all the men I know, he is the one most able to control the desires of the body, so that he is not hindered by such things from achieving what needs to be done.

However, any hopes for Jason were dashed when he was assassinated in 370.

The gaze of the eighty-year-old sage turned to Dionysius I, tyrant of Syracuse, whom he petitioned as the “foremost of our race and possessor of the greatest power,” but he too disappointingly died; and then to Archidamus, son and successor of Agesilaus. He sounded him out in an open letter:

Men of good counsel should not wage war against the king of Persia until someone shall have first reconciled the Greeks with each other and have made us cease from our madness and contentiousness.

But it was obvious that Sparta was a broken reed and was obliged to spend most of its energies trying, and failing, to recover its position in the Peloponnese.

At last, Isocrates found a leader who might indeed call a halt to Greece’s quarrels and attack the evil empire. He was Philip, ruler of Macedon in the north, to whom he wrote yet another of his open letters:

I have chosen to challenge you to the task of leading the expedition against the barbarians and of taking Hellas under your care, while I have passed over my own city.

This time Isocrates hit the mark, for Philip did indeed dream of dominating Greece and was seriously tempted by the Great King’s fabulous wealth.

—

So who was Philip? Was he truly Greek? And would he last? In 359 at the age of twenty-two he was acclaimed king of Macedon by his army, the traditional method of confirming the succession. His inheritance was, to put it mildly, insecure.

The kingdom lay northeast of the Greek mainland above the three-pronged peninsula of Chalcidice. Populated by hardy peasants and horsey squires, it was divided into two distinct parts—lowlands and highlands. Lower Macedonia consisted of a flat, fertile plain through which two rivers flowed into the Thermaic Gulf. The land was predominantly pastoral. The climate was warm, timber and minerals were plentiful, and Herodotus praises the “gardens of Midas [named after the mythical king of Phrygia whose touch turned everything to gold] where roses grow wild, each with sixty blossoms and more fragrant than any others in the world.”

This was the heartland of the kingdom and was ringed with hills. Beyond them lay the plateaus of Upper Macedonia to the west, which are themselves ringed by mountains. Feudal barons dominated these remote fastnesses. Unlike the lowlanders, they preferred Thracian deities to the Olympian gods and indulged in orgiastic cult practices, not at all dissimilar to those in Euripides’ late masterpiece, The Bacchae, written in Macedon and premiered in Athens in 405.

To the west and north lived the tribes of Epirus, Illyria, and Paeonia and, farther along on the eastern shore, the coastline of Thrace. These unmanageable peoples were constantly on the attack and placed Macedon under severe pressure. From about 700 the Argead dynasty had provided rulers for the region, but they exercised only a loose control outside the lowlands.

Greeks from their city-states regarded themselves as civilized and looked down on the Macedonians as barbarous and uncouth. They spoke a dialect of what they claimed to be Greek, but nobody else understood it. In fact, although they had no indigenous literature, they enjoyed a sophisticated visual culture. Their craftsmen created very fine gold, silver, and bronze artworks. They also painted murals in their tombs and commissioned superb mosaics depicting stories from Greek mythology or everyday scenes, such as deer hunting. Their feudal warriors had something of Homer about them; they thirsted to excel and placed a high value on military glory for its own sake. They lived the life of an Achilles or a Hector.

The Macedonians insisted that they were members of the Hellenic community, competed in the various international games, and did their best to adopt the best of Greek culture. Both Agathon and the octogenarian Euripides emigrated from Athens to the court of King Archelaus. The king had the reputation of a dissipated homosexual, but he was a busy administrator and a committed Hellenizer; he founded the Olympian Festival, which was dedicated to the Nine Muses and included athletic and musical contests. He invited Socrates to Macedon, but the philosopher was too much attached to his home city and politely declined the offer. He would rather not accept favors, he explained, that he could never repay.

Archelaus did his best to unify Upper and Lower Macedonia. He undertook major military reforms, improving the supply of weapons, horses, and other military resources and building a network of roads. He relocated the capital to the strategic port of Pella.

If other things had been equal, Macedon should have been a great power. But its monarchs were always having to resist the enemies that crowded around the country’s borders, and when they were not doing so they faced treacherous pretenders at home. It is something of a mystery that anyone should compete for such a contested and blood-drenched throne. So far as the Hellenic powers were concerned Macedon was a fringe player in the great game of international politics.

After the assassination of Archelaus in 399 a period of anarchy ensued. Five monarchs followed one another on the throne in the space of six years. All the good work of Archelaus had seemingly gone for nothing. Calm was restored under Philip’s father, Amyntas III, but upheavals and lawlessness resumed on his death in 369. The kingdom entered another period of dynastic chaos.

—

For ten years after Leuctra, Thebes was the leading power in Greece, but its predominance was only temporary.

Soon after the battle, Pelopidas was invited to arbitrate between two contenders for the Macedonian throne. The one he chose was swiftly murdered by his rival, who decided that a treaty with Thebes would be advisable.

To demonstrate his sincerity, the usurper sent some distinguished hostages to Thebes. These included Philip, then only fifteen years old and a younger son of the dead monarch. He was a bright and attractive teenager, who appears to have caught the roving eye of Pelopidas. He learned from him the art of polite behavior. His Theban hosts were also intellectuals and it was probably from them that, a little surprisingly in the light of his later violent career, he also developed an interest in the philosophy of the mathematician and mystic Pythagoras.

To more practical effect, Philip watched Epaminondas at work on army affairs and listened carefully to his conversation. He received military advice from another general, Pammenes, in whose house he lodged and with whom he was also rumored to have shared his charms. He was a popular boy. Pammenes admired the Sacred Band, whose self-discipline he compared favorably with the unruly peoples and tribes in Homer. Philip stored in his mind everything he heard at Thebes before returning home in 364.

During the ten years after Leuctra, we have seen that Epaminondas invaded the Peloponnese a number of times. He was determined to prevent a Spartan resurgence. Thebes also turned its attention to central and northern Greece. It built a fleet to rival that of the Athenians and fostered discontent among their allies, Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium. Pelopidas intervened in Thessaly, where Jason of Pherae’s son and successor was behaving aggressively towards his neighbors, but, although the campaign was ultimately successful, the Theban commander lost his life.

People began to tire of Thebes—so much so that there was talk in the Peloponnese of that most implausible event, an anti-Theban alliance between Lacedaemon and its long-standing enemy, the Arcadians. In 362, fearful of losing influence, Epaminondas found himself having to launch his fourth expedition to southern Greece. Once again he threatened Sparta itself. Xenophon compared the city to helpless chicks in a nest without their parents, but luckily Agesilaus was warned in time and came to the rescue.

At Mantinea, Epaminondas faced the army of a grand alliance, led by Athens and Sparta. In terms of numbers, this was to be the largest battle yet fought between Hellenes: the Thebans and their allies came with thirty thousand infantry and three thousand cavalry and ranged against them were twenty thousand infantry and two thousand cavalry. It was a long day, but the Theban cavalry and then the deep phalanx eventually put the Spartans to flight.

The enemy targeted Epaminondas, who was pushing a little ahead of his line and a Spartan wounded him with a spear. He was taken to his tent. Victory in the battle was his, but he knew that he had been fatally hurt. He asked for one of his best generals to assume command, and was told he had been killed; then for another, but he too was dead. “In that case,” said Epaminondas before expiring, “make peace.”

The loss of Epaminondas and Pelopidas was a heavy blow to Thebes. Its influence ebbed. In the long run, though, this had less to do with victories or defeats in the field than with the fact that it had never managed to unite Boeotia fully into an integrated and loyal whole. One medium-sized polis on its own did not have the resources to play a leading role on the international stage for any length of time.

—

The waning of Thebes left Athens as the strongest Hellenic power. But the old energy was missing. Somehow lifeblood was seeping from the polis, the city-state that, in the fifth century, had claimed to be an education to Greece and had not only demanded but received its citizens’ active loyalty on the battlefield. The orator Aeschines made a telling point when he said

the people, discouraged by their experiences, as though they were suffering from dementia or been declared of unsound mind, lay claim only to the name of democracy, and have given away the substance of it to others. And so you go home from the meetings of your

ecclesia,

not from a serious debate, but after dividing the profits like shareholders.

The city was becoming an open-air museum. Visitors came to tour the monuments of the Periclean age. Apart from restoring their fortifications, the Athenians only started major new building works and refurbishments again in the third quarter of the century; these included ship sheds, the arsenal, the great stone theater of Dionysus, and a Panathenaic stadium in a valley southeast of the city—important projects, but not quite on the old grand scale. Wonderful sculpture continued to be carved or cast, but with a difference. Where Pheidias conveyed the majesty of anthropomorphic gods, Praxiteles, the leading Athenian sculptor of his age, portrayed in marble beings that were nominally supernatural but in fact looked like individual men and women, if very beautiful ones. His celebrated Aphrodite at Cnidus was sexy and erotic: so much so that it is said that a young admirer had himself locked up overnight in the temple where she stood and left semen stains on the marble.

Tragedies were still composed, although inspiration was failing and none of them has survived. So far as we can tell, they gradually withered into unactable literary exercises. A tradition grew of reviving the masterpieces of the past, especially the plays of Euripides. The concept of the classic was born.

The scabrous political farces of Aristophanes, which oxygenated the democracy of the fifth century (called by scholars Old Comedy), modulated into something softer, comedies in which innuendo supplanted obscenity (Middle Comedy). These in turn were replaced by a brand-new style of humor—gentle, optimistic, and focused on individuals rather than on politics (New Comedy). A leading practitioner was Menander, who flourished in the second half of the fourth century.

His plays are usually set in Athens or the countryside of Attica and concerned the private lives of affluent middle-class families. The plots are artificial and depend on implausible coincidences. They describe obstacles to true love and center on the young man of the house. Children are abandoned or kidnapped and are finally recognized many years later thanks to some curio or trinket. The characters are stereotypes—the boastful soldier, the irate father, the garrulous chef, the clever but cowardly slave, the good-time girl with a heart of gold. Story lines that could never have happened in real life were made convincing by colloquial and witty verse dialogue. In ancient times, Menander was seen as a realist.

His work has only survived in papyrus fragments that archaeologists have found in the rubbish tips of ancient Egypt—convincing evidence that his work was not only acted in theaters, but also read throughout the Greek world.

By a similar process, the subject matter of red-figure pottery paid less attention to the male body, sex scenes and drinking parties, military images, and mythological stories and more to domestic incidents and the private lives of women. The last figurative pottery was produced in the city no later than about 320.

—

A modest prosperity returned to Athens, although there was never quite enough money to pay for its ambitions.

The state’s income was sufficient to pay for the administration of the democracy and the law courts. The new league meant that its subscriptions allowed the city to run a peacetime fleet. However, for all the ingenuity of its politicians, Athens was unable to build sufficient reserves to cover the prohibitive costs of a major military campaign or lengthy hostilities. These pressures had the beneficial effect of making the city improve its financial systems (especially under its leading statesmen, Callicrates and Eubulus, during the middle years of the century), and imaginative means were found of bleeding the rich.

Eubulus also devised a cleverly cheap way of helping the poor. He created (or perhaps reinstated) a Festival Fund. Athens had more festivals than any other Greek polis. Attendance used to be free, but now charges were levied; the new fund paid for the admittance of poorer citizens. This popular measure has been estimated to have cost no more than thirty talents a year. However, the fund’s budget soon rose sharply. As well as its regular income, it received all annual exchequer surpluses and became a powerful agency that eclipsed the official financial institutions, including the boulē, and gave grants for all kinds of public purpose.

In a pamphlet on the Athenian economy, Xenophon acknowledged the state’s financial weakness and very sensibly recommended measures to increase trade and, above all, “a complete end to war, on land and sea.” On the face of it, Athens looked as if it had recovered its fifth-century status, but in fact its supremacy was fragile.

Nevertheless, the shortage of money by no means prevented the city from being busy militarily everywhere, albeit as cheaply as possible and without much effect. During the decade after Leuctra its land forces fought in the Peloponnese most years with varying allies, the general aim being to undermine the dominance of Thebes. It also tried to halt Theban activity in Thessaly and intervened in Macedonia. Athenian generals won campaigns in Samos in 365, the Chersonese from 365 onwards, much of Chalcidice in 364, and Euboea in 357. Among them stood the towering figure of Timotheus, son of the great Athenian admiral Conon. A capable commander and politician during the era of the new Athenian maritime league, he worked hard to revive his city’s imperial power.

The city’s main defense priority remained to keep clear the sea-lane from the Black Sea to Piraeus. There were two dangerous obstacles along the way: the city-states of the peninsula of Chalcidice needed to be under Athenian control or at least friendly; and the narrow waters of the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Bosphorus had to be open to Athenian shipping.

In 364 a storm blew up out of an apparently clear sky. The Athenians seem not to have noticed that their heavy-handed behavior was seriously annoying their Aegean allies; although they had promised not to create cleruchies, they in fact had done so and the undisciplined activities of mercenaries in their employ whom they failed to pay regularly produced many complaints. Discontent was fomented by the energetic ruler of Caria, Mausolus. The successor of Tissaphernes, he was nominally a Persian satrap, but to all intents an independent power. On his encouragement, some allies of Athens broke away from the league. These were the great islands of Rhodes, Cos, and Chios, which Mausolus wanted to bring into his sphere of influence, together with Byzantium on the Bosphorus.

Athens opened a vigorous campaign against the insurgents in what is called the War of the Allies, but lost decisively two major naval engagements. One of its best admirals was killed and two others, who had avoided battle because of stormy weather, were unjustly brought to trial on a charge of treachery (one was Timotheus, who went into exile to avoid a colossal fine of 200 talents and died shortly thereafter). To raise money to pay his troops, an Athenian general went to the aid of a rebellious satrap, to the fury of the Great King, who threatened war. But the treasury was empty (the city had spent 1,000 talents on mercenaries alone) and in 355 Athens was obliged to agree to a peace. The three island rebels were allowed to leave the league and the independence of Byzantium was recognized. The dismembered confederation struggled on, but the renewed dream of empire was over.

—

The lame old man still labored unstintingly as the servant of his country. In 361 Agesilaus, now eighty years old (a very great age by the standards of the day), agreed to lead a Spartan force to Egypt. It had won its independence from Persia some forty years previously and its pharaoh was now going on the offensive against the Great King. He needed some Greek mercenaries to help him.

An unconvincing justification for Agesilaus’s accepting the commission was that it would advance “the noble cause to restore the freedom of the Greeks” in Asia Minor by fighting the Persians wherever they could be found, but the truth was simpler. The Spartan government was desperately short of ready cash and was compelled to hire out a king and some of its meager band of Equals to raise revenue. The embarrassment was palpable.

When Agesilaus arrived in Egypt the pharaoh’s top commanders paid him a courtesy visit. He was an international celebrity and they were amazed by what they found. Plutarch describes the scene:

Everyone crowded round to catch a glimpse of him. The spectacle proved to be nothing brilliant, just a pathetic old man of slight build, wrapped in a coarse, shabby cloak, and lying on some grass by the sea. People began to laugh and jeer at him.

The long career of Agesilaus—more than forty-one years on the throne—has a tragic dimension. Although he was a man of some ability, he saw the world as if he suffered from tunnel vision. He allowed his values to be distorted by a hot-tempered fidelity to his homeland. Whatever was in his country’s interest, narrowly defined, was right, and whatever was not was wrong.

He refused to accept, for example, that the illegal seizure of the Theban citadel had been counterproductive. His long-standing prejudice against the Thebans encouraged them to military reforms and so contributed to the disaster of Leuctra. He never accepted the loss of Messenia and demotion from the status of a great power.

At the height of his success he believed himself destined to lead an invasion of the Persian Empire and so avenge the criminal aggression of Darius and Xerxes. He represented Sparta in its days of unparalleled authority, but he lived long enough to see it reduced to a maddened impotence.

Relations with the Egyptians were complicated and unsatisfactory. But Agesilaus had to swallow his pride and fulfill his contract. In 360, a rival pharaoh, to whom he had switched his loyalties, let him go. He was given a fine formal leave-taking—and the sum of 250 talents.

Agesilaus never made it home. Since it was winter, he had his fleet hug the shore. At a deserted spot on the Libyan coast, called the Harbor of Menelaus, he died. As a rule the bodies of Spartans who lost their lives abroad were buried where they fell, but kings were brought home. The custom was to steep their corpses in honey, but on this occasion none could be found. So his comrades embalmed their leader in wax.

As he approached his end, Agesilaus gave instructions, according to Plutarch, to his staff that they should not commission any image of his person: “If I have accomplished any glorious act, that will be my memorial. If I have not, not all the statues in the world—the products of vulgar, worthless men—will make any difference.”

Into which category, one wonders, did the calamitous king place himself?

—

As its power diminished, Athens became the ancient equivalent of a university town, where wealthy young men just out of their teens could finish their education.

Sophists had usually been itinerant, but from the end of the fifth century some of them settled down and founded higher education establishments, especially in Athens. Groups of teachers, students, and researchers came together in one place for a common purpose. They arrived from all parts of the Greek world and Athens was soon more than one polis among many, but a genuinely Panhellenic center. At last the dream of Pericles was coming true—culturally if not politically.

For most of these establishments the basic offer to the student, as Plato put into the mouth of Protagoras, was to promote “sound judgment in his personal life, showing him how best to manage his household, and in public life to make the most effective contribution in action and speech.”

The first to open his school in Athens shortly after 399 was Antisthenes, a devotee of Socrates (although he placed more emphasis on the written word than Socrates and expected those attending his classes to take notes). Then a few years later came Isocrates’ establishment, many of whose students came from abroad. One of his favorites was the then young and promising Timotheus.

Plato (a nickname perhaps meaning broad-browed, his given name being Aristocles) was by far the most able of the disciples of Socrates. He had a bad time of things during the early postwar years. He was born about 429 to a distinguished and wealthy upper-class family and could have expected a career in public affairs. Critias, leader of the Thirty, was an uncle of his as was one of his colleagues in power, Charmides. The violence of the regime disillusioned him with politics and “it soon showed the preceding government to have been an age of gold.” The revived democracy was scarcely an improvement, for it put Socrates to death.

The grief-stricken Plato and other disciples retreated to Megara. He spent the next twelve years traveling—first, to Cyrene in North Africa, then to southern Italy and Sicily where he met followers of the sixth-century polymath and mystic Pythagoras. He visited the court of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, but disliked its pleasure-seeking atmosphere. (He made two more visits to the city in the vain hope of training his son and successor to be a virtuous ruler.)

In 387, Plato bought a small estate next to the Academy, a public park and gymnasium just outside the city. Here he opened a school of philosophy and mathematics of which he remained the head until his death in 347. Unlike most of his competitors he banned the teaching of rhetoric, the art of making the worse seem the better cause.

Plato wrote about twenty-five philosophical dialogues, all of which survive (the authenticity of a few has been questioned). He does not appear in any of them himself and he never announces his own Platonic doctrines. This detachment sends an important message to the inquirer after truth: he should never accept any philosophical proposition without testing it. Knowledge can only be won through intellectual struggle.

However, some overriding themes do emerge in Plato’s work. Values are absolute and virtue is essential to an individual’s life. True knowledge, what Socrates in the dialogues calls wisdom, enables whoever has it to see that sense impressions are illusory and to understand their ideal or perfect “forms” (see this page). These forms are actual entities, but can only be grasped by abstract reflection and inquiry, not by experience. Wrongdoing stems from ignorance; those who truly know what is good will inevitably do good. In On the State, Plato, no democrat, describes an ideal state governed by wise guardians or philosopher-kings.

The historical Socrates used his technique of question and answer, the elenchus, or dialectic, to test definitions of, say, love or justice. However, the technique has a weakness in that it tends to show what these things are not, not what they are. In Plato’s later dialogues “his” Socrates plays a lesser role or fades away altogether. Positive theories or teachings are put forward (for instance, a belief in reincarnation, so that new knowledge is really an act of remembering what we had known before we were born) and we may guess that what we read derives from the disciple rather than the master.

Plato was an inspiration to his contemporaries (including to that well-known intellectual King Philip of Macedon, who paid him memorial honors when he died) and has remained so to the present day. A leading British thinker of the twentieth century wrote: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

One of Plato’s best students was a seventeen-year-old lad called Aristotle, a native of Chalcidice. He was the son of the court physician to the king of Macedon and may well have been, or become, a citizen of the kingdom. He enrolled at the Academy in 367 and was quickly recognized as an outstanding student. It seems that while respecting Plato he was not slow to criticize him. Plato was reported to have said of him: “Aristotle kicked against me as a colt kicks against his mother.”

Aristotle remained at the Academy until Plato’s death and at about that time left Athens, probably because of his association with the unpopular Macedonians. He settled for a while with fellow-philosophers in a small city-state in the Troad under the protection of Hermeias, an intellectually inclined tyrant who had studied at the Academy under Plato. Aristotle married his niece and adopted daughter.

Hermeias conspired with Philip of Macedon and rose against the Great King, but was tricked into attending a meeting with the Persian general commissioned to quash the revolt. Sent in chains to Susa, he was tortured, mutilated, and impaled. He died saying: “I have done nothing unworthy of philosophy.”

The sad end of this aspirational despot throws light on the seriousness with which educated Greeks pursued intellectual inquiry. Philosophy was a new discipline that transformed the world, ferreted out the secrets of the universe, and solved the mystery of life. How could any rational human being resist its allure?

Aristotle retreated to the greater safety of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos and wrote an ode in Hermeias’s memory. Then after a few years he was summoned to Macedon to tutor Philip’s teenaged son, Alexander. In 335 he returned to Athens and started teaching at the gymnasium in the Lyceum, a grove sacred to Apollo Lyceus (“belonging to a wolf”). Apparently he lectured to his students in the morning and the public at large in the evening. The venue was a covered walk or peripatos and from this came the name given to his style of philosophy—peripatetic.

Aristotle disagreed with Plato in that he favored observation over abstract speculation. In his pioneering History of Animals he sought to catalogue, describe, and explain the biological world. He included in it human beings, both their physical characteristics and, in other books, their social and political arrangements.

He was extraordinarily productive and four hundred works were attributed to him, of which about one fifth have survived. They fall into three categories. These comprise, first, polished popular books of philosophy for a general readership, often in dialogue form, which have all been lost; collections of historical and scientific data, often assembled in partnership with research assistants, such as lists of victors at the Olympic and Pythian games, records of theatrical productions at Athens, and analyses of some 158 Greek states, of which only a study of the Athenian constitution survives; and, finally, philosophical and scientific texts, frequently in the form of lecture notes that were not intended for publication and are mostly extant.

These texts cover rhetoric (again in opposition to Plato, he included this in the curriculum of his school at the Lyceum); a group of works (what we call the Organon) on logic and the science of reasoning; metaphysics (he disagreed with Plato’s doctrine of the forms, believing them to be immanent in objects and without an external reality); natural science, ethics, and politics; dramatic and literary theory (the Poetics, in two books, the second of which is lost).

Aristotle’s influence in the Middle Ages in almost every field of inquiry was absolute; his work on logic retained its validity until the development of mathematical logic in the nineteenth century.

The schools of Athens were the city’s main cultural achievement in the fourth century.

—

While the Greeks were indulging in their customary internecine feuds, the young Philip returned to his native Macedon from being a hostage in Thebes. His two elder brothers died violently, one by assassination and the other in battle, and in 359 he assumed the regency of his younger brother’s son, Amyntas IV, then a child of less than ten years.

There was no reason to suppose the monarchy’s traditional pattern of murderous incompetence was to be broken or that Philip would fare any better than his predecessors on their slippery throne, but he turned out to be bright, determined, and ruthless.

The kingdom was lucky to have him, for enemies were circling. The Illyrians in the west were planning an invasion; the Paeonians were launching raids across the northern frontier; the Thracians in the east were plotting to replace Philip with a pretender to the throne; and, as always, the Athenians were anxious to strengthen their position in Chalcidice and were promoting a pretender of their own.

Philip was a master of the art of divide-and-rule. By a mixture of crafty statecraft and military force he confronted, outwitted, and finally defeated in the field each of his foes one by one. In 356, once his people had gotten his measure, they elected him king in his own right. He took the cruel precaution of hunting down and (eventually) liquidating three stepbrothers on the grounds that they were potential rivals for the throne, although he kept his prepubertal predecessor at court and treated him kindly. He was pitiless, but, if he felt unthreatened, not bloodthirsty.

Now that he had secured the kingdom and calmed the untamed barons of Upper Macedonia, he gave Lower Macedonia access to the sea by taking control of the poleis of the Thermaic Gulf. This brought him into conflict with Athens, which wanted nothing to impede the free flow of maritime traffic from the Black Sea to Piraeus along the Greek and Thracian coastline, but one by one the great independent city-states of the region—among them, Methone—fell to the king or came over to his side, as Olynthus did. Athens had lost Amphipolis to the Spartan commander Brasidas in 422, and ever afterwards yearned to get it back. But Philip won it by a typical combination of force and deceit.

He picked a quarrel with its government and laid the city under siege. When it applied to the Athenians for help, he promised to hand it over to them in exchange for Pydna on the Thermaic Gulf, a member of the Athenian League. But once he had taken Amphipolis in 357, he kept it for himself. To add insult to injury, he proceeded to capture Pydna too. To reduce the influence of Athens in the region, he made advances to the Chalcidian League, which was a potential threat to Macedonian interests and uncertain which side to favor.

The Athenians declared war on Philip, but were powerless to do much about it, for their hands were full at the time with the War of the Allies. In any case, the treasury was bare and they did not have the money to send a major expeditionary force to prize Philip’s ill-gotten gains from his grasp. Nevertheless, hostilities dribbled on for a number of years.

Philip was now the most successful and popular monarch Macedonia had ever seen. All that he lacked was a reliable income to pay for his soldiers. He looked towards Thrace and, seizing a pretext for intervention, marched east and in 356 founded the city of Philippi inland from the island of Thasos. It was no accident that it lay in the neighborhood of highly profitable gold mines. Philip expropriated them and they contributed to his treasury the huge annual sum of 1,000 talents. He now had his own copious counterpart to the silver mines at Laurium.

Never satisfied, the Macedonian king looked for fresh conquests. By now, if not before, he guessed at the dizzying prospect of uniting Hellas under his leadership. As a first step, he accepted an invitation to intervene in northern Greece on behalf of Thessaly’s feudal barons against the tyrants of Pherae. They were horse lovers like the Macedonians and found him a congenial ally, so perhaps as early as 352 they elected him as their Archon, or commander-in-chief for life.

—

There were two parts to the Macedonian constitution—the warrior king and an assembly of soldier citizens. For most of the time the former ruled absolutely and embodied the state; he owned all the land, commanded the army, was the supreme court of appeal and, as high priest, presided over daily sacrifices that ensured the well-being of the realm. However, the assembly was the king-maker. It elected the monarch by acclamation (it also presided over trials for treason). The men wore full armor and clashed their spears against their shields to show their approval.

Philip knew that this approval could be withdrawn and that continuing popularity depended on success in battle. He was interested in power and not its trappings; he never described himself as king in any official document. People called him Philip and he wore no royal insignia.

He was a man of great personal charm and had a dry sense of humor. He often deployed these qualities to mislead. He lied to and tricked his opponents with a smile on his face.

Philip preferred diplomacy to war, although he adopted an original style. A polygamist, he married seven times and never divorced any of his wives. The motive for these unions was invariably reason of state. Lust seems to have played a part, never love. As one ancient commentator neatly observed, he “made war by marriage.” His third bride was the hawk-eyed and ferocious Olympias, a princess of Epirus (as well as wedding her, Philip is also reported to have seduced her brother, a good-looking boy). In 356, she gave him a son and heir, Alexander, to the promotion of whose interests she devoted the rest of her monomaniacal life.

Philip’s other main negotiating technique was bribery. No city was impregnable, he liked to say, if it had a postern gate big enough to admit a donkey laden with gold.

When diplomacy failed, Philip unhesitatingly resorted to war. He was brave in battle, as his scars attested, and set a powerful example to his men. His idea of war owed something to the individual heroism of Homeric heroes. At the siege of Methone, a polis on the coast of the Thermaic Gulf, he was inspecting his lines when a defender on the ramparts shot an arrow that struck his right eye and blinded him. Despite this dangerous wound, he remained in active command and when the city sued for peace some days later he generously gave them easy terms. Other injuries left a hand and a leg permanently damaged and a shattered collarbone.

Personal courage, though, was not enough to ensure victory. Inspired by Epaminondas and Pelopidas, Philip introduced sweeping military reforms. He professionalized the army by introducing regular pay, providing armor at his expense, and establishing a system of promotion. He made his soldiers carry their own armor, weapons, and food, so reducing the need for a cumbersome baggage train. They were no longer seasonal peasant farmers, but full-time career soldiers.

Philip was inspired by the primal phalanx in Homer’s Iliad. The Greeks confront the Trojans in battle with

an impenetrable hedge of spears and sloping shields, buckler to buckler, helmet to helmet, man to man. So close were the ranks that when they moved their heads the glittering peaks of their plumed helmets met and the spears overlapped as they swung them forward in their sturdy hands.

But Philip was also an innovator. He took the concept of the phalanx to its logical conclusion. He introduced an extraordinarily long pike, the sarissa. This was between fourteen and eighteen feet in length and had to be held in both hands. It was carried upright and, when approaching the enemy, the first five ranks of the phalanx lowered their sarissas, creating the effect of a super-sized porcupine, and charged. The shield-wall of the ordinary Greek phalanx found itself facing a spear-wall. Old-fashioned hoplites were unable to reach enemy combatants and fight them hand-to-hand with their short swords.

Philip deployed his new-look phalanx in close association with his heavy cavalry. Like Epaminondas, he ordered the latter to attack at the beginning of a battle rather than waiting for the infantry to engage. While the phalanx pinned down the enemy’s center, the cavalry, riding in wedgelike squadrons, did their best, slashing and stabbing, to disrupt the opposite line and, above all, to ride against its flanks or rear.

Greek armies did not have the technology to capture walled towns with any ease, and when they fell it was usually because of treachery. In about 350 Philip established an engineering corps. Its commander designed new siege machines, such as a covered battering ram, and seems to have invented the torsion catapult, whose missiles had a greater range and speed of travel than the traditional mechanically drawn catapult.

Macedonian kings gathered around them an elite force, the Companions, who were friends and advisers at home and led the cavalry in the field. They functioned as royal bodyguards. Philip expanded their number to eight hundred and personally chose each one of them.

With his new supplies of gold Philip could afford to add mercenaries to his native Macedonian troops. These men were necessarily loyal to him alone and, as well as strengthening his military capacity, they made it more difficult for his own citizens to apply political pressure on him.

On campaign, discipline was fierce and training relentless. On one occasion the king dismissed an officer for taking a hot bath in camp and another was flogged when he broke ranks for a drink. But if we are to trust the fourth-century historian Theopompus, many were hell-raisers off-duty.

According to him, they were addicted to drink, with a shocking propensity for unmixed wine, the ancient equivalent of spirits, and for gambling. There was worse to come.

Some of them used to shave and depilate their bodies, although they were men, while others made love to their companions, although they were bearded [in other words, they were adult homosexuals in our modern sense, something Greeks found distasteful]. They habitually took two or three rent boys about with them, and themselves provided the same service for others. It would be perfectly fair to call them courtesans rather than courtiers, escorts rather than bodyguards.

Even if some of this is exaggerated, we know that Philip admired the Theban Sacred Band and we may infer that he encouraged sexualized male bonding among his special forces as a method for managing morale.

—

This was not a boy with obvious potential. He was delicate and underdeveloped. He had been skinny and sickly ever since he was a child. He had a weak voice and found it difficult to pronounce the letter “r.” His manner seems to have been effeminate, for other boys nicknamed him Battalus, after a well-known and very effeminate flute player. (As an adult, he was accused of frequenting workingmen’s taverns in drag and was criticized for his alleged homosexuality: but he also married and had three children. We do not know where the truth lies.)

Born in 385, the infant was called Demosthenes after his father, who was a successful businessman and owned a factory that manufactured swords and cutlery; he also produced couches. Unfortunately, he died when his son was only seven years old. Relatives who were appointed as guardians in his will so mismanaged the estate that when Demosthenes reached his majority at eighteen there was hardly any of it left to inherit.

He was in his teens when he heard a leading statesman of the day, Callistratus, speak at a trial and was so impressed that he chose oratory as his future vocation. He gave up his other studies, enrolled with teachers of rhetoric, and read textbooks on public speaking.

The law courts in the fourth century were busier than ever and litigation thrived. There were careers, and money, to be made. The provision of legal advice and the writing and delivery of speeches on behalf of accusers and defendants was professionalized. There were honorable advocates and real criminals to pursue, but enemies with grudges, business rivals, politicians flooded the courts with false or frivolous charges. There was no public prosecution service, although a state official could raise an action if it concerned the community as a whole. Any citizen was allowed to bring a preosecution, and a class of habitual litigants came into being, nicknamed sycophants (literally, one who brings figs to light by shaking the tree; whence our word for a fawner or flatterer). Ostensibly, they worked in the public interest, but in fact for financial gain. They blackmailed innocent citizens by threatening them with court proceedings. In some cases, the state paid for convictions. It was this murky world that Demosthenes aspired to enter.

The young orator underwent a strict training regime. If we are to believe the stories told about him, he spent every waking hour practicing declamation and acquired a full-length mirror to monitor his performance. He liked to go down to the sea at Phaleron where he shouted above the sound of the waves and, as he was short-winded, he hired an actor to teach him how to deliver long sentences in a single breath. He corrected his indistinct articulation by reciting speeches with pebbles in his mouth and developed his vocal strength by speaking at the same time as walking uphill.

Despite all his hard work, Demosthenes’ maiden speech was a disaster. He was heckled and laughed at. However, he spent three years suing his former guardians for negligence and fraud, during which time he learned to perfect his craft. Eventually he won the action, but probably recovered only a little of his lost family fortune. However, his reputation grew and he earned a good living as a popular writer of courtroom speeches. Through sheer willpower, he had realized his dream.

His attention turned to politics and he gave speech after speech to the ecclesia in which, like a dog with a bone, he obsessively worried at the threat from the north. He soon became Philip of Macedon’s most feared and hated critic.

—

Phocis was one of the smallest states in Greece, but it contained within its boundaries the international center and oracle of Delphi. The oracle was guaranteed its independence by a committee of neighboring powers, called the Amphictyonic Council, which had the authority to punish any state’s sacrilegious acts. Phocis had been forced unwillingly to join the Boeotian alliance after the Battle of Leuctra, but now that the power of Thebes was fading and Epaminondas had lost his life at Mantinea, it began to act independently.

The Thebans took offense and accused Phocis of failing to pay the oracle a fine for sacrilege; apparently it had been tilling land in the plain below Delphi that was sacred to the god’s sacrificial animals. They were met with defiance, a refusal to hand over an obol, and a quotation from the Iliad to justify an ancient claim to the land in question.

Here were the origins of what the Greeks came to call a Sacred War. Phocis had many enemies on the Amphictyonic Council—the Thessalians, the Locrians, and, worst of all of course, the Thebans. If it did not act now it would be under their thumb for the foreseeable future. Unlike the Athenians and King Philip, it had no silver or gold mines. However, in Delphi it possessed something almost as good—the treasuries where Greek states stored their silver and gold gifts to Apollo. In 356 the Phocians seized Delphi and “borrowed” these possessions of the god and used them to pay for an army of mercenaries. They even dug beneath the floor of the temple of Apollo itself on a rumor of secret treasure, only to be disappointed.

They raided the treasury of the long-ago king of Lydia, Croesus, rich with gold and silver artifacts and ingots. All this was melted down into coins worth 4,000 gold talents. Croesus’s silver offerings were also recast as ready money—totaling 6,000 silver talents.

Over the coming years vast sums were extracted from the treasuries of Delphi and the Phocians enjoyed a brief heyday of military glory. In their opinion Delphi was not only an international institution, it was a national possession. Rather as the Athenians had made use of the precious metals in their temples when the Peloponnesian War was going badly for them, they believed they were justified in exploiting the riches of Delphi. At least to begin with, they had every intention of repaying what they saw as loans. However, after a while their indebtedness grew so large that repayment in full would take many years. From borrowers they insensibly mutated into thieves.

Sparta, which also owed the god a steep fine for capturing the citadel of Thebes during a time of peace (see this page), and Athens discreetly supported Phocis, largely because any enemy of the Thebans was a friend of theirs.

The Macedonian king was drawn into the affair when the Phocian general Onomarchus marched into Thessaly to help Pherae, which complained of Philip’s rough treatment of them. He was defeated by Onomarchus and withdrew to Macedon. He was used to winning his battles and growled: “I am retreating like the ram, to butt harder.”

He told the truth. In 353 or 352 he returned and expelled the Phocians from Thessaly. In a plain by the sea where a crocus field was planted, he drove their army into the waves. One third of it was destroyed. A friendly Athenian fleet helped pick up survivors. Onomarchus was carried out to sea on his horse and drowned. Philip insulted his corpse by displaying it on a cross.

Philip prepared to march south and rescue Apollo and his shrine at Delphi from the temple-robbing Phocians. Athens, ever anxious about Macedon’s seemingly irresistible rise, moved fast. Eubulus, usually an advocate of parsimony and peace, sent a large force to guard the pass at Thermopylae and so halted the king in his tracks. He withdrew and went campaigning instead in Thrace, where he threatened the interests of Athens in the Chersonese. All the while he awaited a new opportunity to deal with Phocis.

—

The next stage in the growth of Macedonia was the annexation of the peninsula of Chalcidice. Olynthus proved to be an unreliable ally and harbored a claimant to Philip’s throne (one of his stepbrothers, see this page). Fearful of Philip’s intentions they entered into an alliance with Athens. In 348 this was enough to persuade the king to intervene and place the city under siege. He distracted Athens by fomenting trouble in Euboea and, by the time a relief force of two thousand Athenian hoplites and a cavalry squadron arrived, Olynthus had fallen. It is presumed that the unlucky pretender was caught and killed.

Philip always punished disloyalty; he razed the city to the ground and sent its surviving inhabitants to Macedon where they were put to work as slaves in the mines or the fields.

The ecclesia was furious and feelings against Philip ran high, but Athens was broke. It needed peace. So too did the king, for, now that he had gotten his way over Chalcidice, he had another project in mind. The Thebans had invited him to march south on behalf of the Amphictyonic Council and crush the Phocians. This was very tempting, for victory would make Macedon the dominant power in mainland Greece. Before embarking on this new military adventure, though, he needed to clear his desk.

In 346 peace negotiations were opened. Demosthenes joined a delegation to Philip whom they met in Pella, Macedon’s capital. The encounter appears to have been a disaster, if we can trust the lip-smacking account of Aeschines, a fellow-envoy and no friend of his. Apparently when his turn came to address the king, Demosthenes succumbed to stage fright. He forgot his lines and suddenly stopped speaking. Philip behaved very well, encouraging the orator to take heart and try again, but the speech had to be abandoned.

A treaty was agreed on the terms that all parties should retain the territories of which they were in possession at the time. The allies of Macedon and Athens were included in the pact—with the major exception of Phocis, which had now emptied the treasuries of Delphi and was no longer the serious military threat it had been. Philip hoped that the treaty would lead to a friendly and active partnership with Athens, but Demosthenes made sure that anti-Macedonian sentiment was reignited.

Philip had no special grievance against Phocis, but its sacrilege gave him an ideal means of strengthening his political position by intervening in central Greece. His army was allowed through the pass at Thermopylae, thanks to a treacherous Phocian general. To the general surprise the government of Phocis surrendered to Philip without demur or delay, and some suspected the king to have eased his way with gold. Members of the Amphictyonic Council were grateful for the fall of Phocis and argued that the maximum legal penalty for the sacrilege to the god should be imposed; that is, all Phocians should be thrown from the top of some high cliffs.

Philip, who was appointed chairman of Delphi’s Pythian Games, a high honor, persuaded the council to adopt a more lenient approach. Phocis lost its seat on the council and its two votes were given to Macedon. It was no longer allowed to consult the oracle at Delphi. It was required to repay the money value of the stolen treasures in annual installments.

As usual, though, it was ordinary people who suffered the ravages of war. Demosthenes recalled traveling through a devastated landscape:

When we recently made our way to Delphi, we could not help but see everything—houses razed, fortifications demolished, countryside empty of adult men, a handful of women and children, miserable old people. No one could find words to describe the trouble [the Phocians] now have.

The winner of these proceedings was, without a doubt, Philip. He was now a member of an ancient and respected Panhellenic institution and had a foothold in the polity of mainland Greece. Of great practical value, his army’s boots were firmly on the ground. Nobody could say any longer that he was not a Greek, as he had always claimed he was.

—

The people of Athens were a grave disappointment to Demosthenes. In the first of a series of great speeches he delivered against the threat that Philip posed to the Hellenic world, he compared their lack of spirit to a boxer who covers where he has been hit rather than aggressively counterattacks.

You wage war on Philip in exactly the way a barbarian boxes. When struck, he always grabs that spot; hit him on the other side and there go his hands. He neither knows nor cares how to parry a blow or how to watch his adversary. So if you hear of Philip in the Chersonese you send a relief force there; if at Thermopylae, you vote one there. If he is somewhere else, you still run around to keep up with him.

If the Athenians were less than eager to take the war to Philip, he was not looking for a fight with them. He greatly respected the city, which was the cultural and intellectual center of the Greek world. While he knew how to drink deep with his Companions, he liked to associate on equal terms with Athenian philosophers and writers. In 343 he chose Aristotle, Plato’s onetime student, to be tutor to his teenaged son Alexander, whom he wanted to grow up into a fully fledged Hellene. The boy studied literature and philosophy, just as if he were a young Athenian.

Many Greeks approved of King Philip. A reader of the speeches of Demosthenes might gain the impression that all Hellas hated and feared him. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was not only intellectuals like Isocrates who, in the grand manner, saw in Philip a long overdue pacifier of Greece’s poisonous poleis. Small states in the Peloponnese felt threatened by an angry Sparta desperate to restore her power over the peninsula. The weakness of Thebes and its inability to protect them as it had in the days of Epaminondas meant that Philip’s arrival was a godsend. In many quarters the Macedonian king was genuinely welcome.

This was a curious phenomenon—a popular enemy whom most people did not wish to fight, an aggressor who admired the civilization he wished to vanquish. And yet the logic of events brought about a renewal of hostilities.

—

Demosthenes organized a deep Athenian sulk. At his prompting, the city made an implied protest against Macedonia’s membership of the Amphictyonic League by deciding not to attend the Pythian Games, but backed down after Philip sent a polite but firm ultimatum. Having marched the demos up the hill, the orator was forced embarrassingly to march it down again by conceding that it would be folly “to go to war for the shadow at Delphi.”

As time passed, though, anti-Macedonian propaganda had its effect. The public mood swung decisively against the peace. Its leading Athenian negotiator was charged with treason and fled the city. He was condemned to death in absentia for contempt of court. In 343 Demosthenes then impeached Aeschines, his great oratorical rival and supporter of the treaty with Philip. The defendant needed all his skills as a public speaker to obtain an acquittal.

The king lost patience with a state that was ostensibly his friend and ally, and seems to have financed a failed attempt to fire the dockyards of Piraeus. He probably wanted to neutralize the still powerful Athenian fleet before proceeding with his next great enterprise—the permanent and final conquest of Thrace. After a ten months’ campaign in 342 and 341 he was victorious. He doubled the size of his kingdom and extended the Macedonian frontier to the edge of the Chersonese.

Athens rightly regarded this as a threat to the uninterrupted passage of the grain imports on which its population depended. It deployed to the region a few ships and some mercenaries, who unwisely broke the terms of the peace by raiding a recognized ally of Philip. This prompted an angry note from the king.

The Athenians were obviously in the wrong, but Demosthenes was having none of it. He delivered a speech in which he claimed that it was the Macedonian king who had broken the peace.

Now there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that Philip was looking for any opportunity to increase the power of Macedon. His presence at the Chersonese was indeed dangerous and he was being provocative when he encouraged poleis on the island of Euboea to set up oligarchies with Macedonian support.

However, although the Athenian fleet ruled the Aegean waves, Philip’s military superiority by land was there for all to see. Macedonia was wealthy and populous. In the long run, relatively impoverished and un-military as it had become, Athens could not hope to compete with the new great power. Its interest lay in the friendly and active alliance that Philip sought. Indeed he proposed that the treaty between Macedon and Athens should be enlarged to become a common peace for all who wished to join in it.

Demosthenes believed, though, that the king’s chief aim was not to enter into a partnership with Athens, but to bring about its ruin. Hatred outweighed reason in the orator’s mind. There was no doubting his sincerity. He resisted bribery from Macedon, although, writes Plutarch, he was “overwhelmed by Persian gold, which poured from Susa and Ecbatana in a torrent.” Demosthenes gave the demos sincere but very bad advice.

Athenian efforts to mount a common Hellenic front against the king were beginning to show signs of success. At home the ecclesia levied taxes, and monies from the Festivals Fund were diverted to preparations for war. The Great King, fearful of Philip’s invasion plans, agreed to offer his support. In 340 two allies of Macedon in the northeast, Perinthus and the well-fortified polis of Byzantium, changed sides. Philip laid both of them under siege, but even his new torsion catapult failed to dent their defenses.

In compensation, Philip scored a victory at sea. His small fleet attacked and captured an Athenian grain convoy of 230 vessels near the mouth of the Propontis, the contents of which were sold for the enormous sum of 700 talents. All those belonging to Athenians, some 180 ships, were destroyed.

The king marched home through Thrace where he conducted a brief campaign and picked up a serious thigh wound. He limped for the rest of his life, but he had secured Thrace and could safely (and with a certain regret) turn his attention to dealing with Greece.

Philip’s aggressions in the Chersonese were a serious threat to Athens. The loss of the convoy was the last straw. The ecclesia declared war on Macedon and the marble column on which the terms of the peace were inscribed was formally shattered. The policy of Demosthenes had triumphed and he was voted a gold crown in gratitude for his services to the state.

—

Once again a dispute in the Amphictyony gave Philip the opportunity he needed.

After the battle of Plataea in the previous century, the Athenians dedicated at Delphi a set of gold shields with an inscription reading “From the spoils of Persians and Thebans who fought together against the Greeks.” Recently they refurbished and re-presented the trophy. The Thebans had always found this reference to their long-ago alliance with Xerxes to be offensive and this new display opened an old wound.

In the spring of 339, whether prompted by Thebes or of their own volition, the people of Amphissa, a town in nearby Locris, reported Athens to the Amphictyonic Council on grounds of sacrilege. This was because the work on the trophy had been done while Phocis had been illegally and impiously in control of Delphi and Apollo’s oracle. The point was correct but technical. Athens was threatened with a fine of fifty talents.

The orator Aeschines was a member of the Athenian delegation to the council and he brilliantly turned the tables on the Amphissans. It turned out that they had committed a far worse sacrilege, for they were cultivating sacred land in the plain below and had even put up buildings on it. If true, this was a serious offense. The claim was investigated and confirmed.

How are we to explain Aeschines’ inspired guess? The ancient sources do not say, but we may surmise that, over the years, adherence to rules had been lax; everyone knew this, but turned a blind eye.

In any case, nothing more was said about the complaint against Athens, and Amphissa was instructed to remove the buildings and quit the land. Doubtless hoping for support from Thebes (which never came), the delegates refused.

At an emergency meeting Philip was appointed commander of the Amphictyonic army with a view to dealing with the Amphissans. Although Aeschines had cleverly evaded the charge of sacrilege, it was at the very high price of allowing Philip to intervene once again in mainland Greek affairs.

What nobody knew at the time was that the king had finally given up on Athens and its Greek allies. He had offered the hand of friendship, he felt, and been spurned. The only alternative was war. The king understood that the sharpest weapons in a general’s armory were deception and surprise. He awaited his moment.

—

Few people were much troubled by the prospect of a new Sacred War and nothing much was done about it, largely because Philip was still recovering from his Thracian wound. But in the autumn of 339 he marched down into Greece, ostensibly to fulfill his commission from the Amphictyonic Council. But then, ignoring Amphissa, he suddenly turned east and captured the town of Elateia by surprise, a key point on the road to Thebes and Attica. The news, which came at night, stunned the Athenians. An emergency meeting of the ecclesia took place soon after dawn. Plutarch catches the atmosphere:

Nobody dared to mount the speakers’ platform, nobody knew what ought to be said, the assembly was dumbfounded and appeared completely at a loss.

The herald asked: “Who wishes to speak?” No one came forward. He repeated the question again and again to a silent assembly. Then Demosthenes stepped up to the platform and took charge of the situation. He announced a “struggle for freedom.” The ecclesia approved a proposal for an alliance with the Thebans.

Demosthenes headed a delegation to win over the old enemy. When they arrived in Thebes they found envoys from Philip already there. After an impassioned debate, the Thebans agreed to join forces with Athens against the Macedonians. This was despite the fact that they were in Philip’s debt for quashing Phocis. However, they knew they had little choice, for if he conquered Athens they would stand alone and be too weak to resist whatever he demanded. They could only safely be his friend if Athens was his enemy.

The Thebans drove a hard bargain. Athens was to pay two thirds of the costs of the war and to accept a Theban commander-in-chief of land forces. Athens was also to recognize Theban supremacy in Boeotia.

The new allies defended the passes that led into Boeotia and Attica, and winter passed without incident. The ancient historians are silent about this interval, but it appears that at the eleventh hour Philip was still anxious to avert war if he could and may have offered negotiations. If so, he was rebuffed. Demosthenes was awarded a second gold crown. When the summer of 338 came, Philip moved. He forced one of the defended passes, and the coalition retreated to a fallback position on the plain of Chaeronea, a town in Boeotia.

The Macedonians followed and at dawn on August 4, 338, battle commenced. The two armies were more or less equal in numbers, with 30,000 infantry on each side. Philip’s 2,000 cavalry were outnumbered by the coalition’s 3,800. But there was a real difference. The Macedonians were well trained and experienced; the citizen soldiers of Athens and Thebes had scarcely wielded a spear in anger in the previous two decades.

The opposing lines of battle stretched for about two miles between rising ground below the citadel of Chaeronea and a river skirted by marshland. Philip led his elite infantry, the hypaspists, on his right wing with a gentle incline behind him. His son Alexander, now eighteen years old but already a seasoned soldier, commanded the cavalry on the left.

The Athenian hoplites formed up against Philip; various Greek allies stood in the center and the Boeotians on the right. The Sacred Band were placed on the far edge next to the boggy ground.

Philip’s line was echeloned back at an angle from his position. His plan was for the troops under his direct command to make contact with the inexperienced Athenian phalanx. They would then slowly retire in good order up the slope behind them to their right, tempting the Athenians to follow.

This was a trap. The Greeks would almost insensibly shift across to fill the opening the Athenians left as they advanced. The Greek line would be stretched thin and eventually a gap would emerge through which the Macedonian cavalry would be able to gallop.

The trick worked. As Philip’s right wing pulled back at an angle towards Chaeronea, his left moved forward as if the line were rotating on a pivot. As the Athenians moved after Philip, the Greek line thinned out as predicted, except for the Sacred Band at the other end of the battlefield, by the river, which obeyed orders and did not move. As a result a space soon appeared to their left. Alexander saw his chance and thundered through it with the Macedonian horse. The Sacred Band were surrounded. They fought on and most of them died where they stood.

Meanwhile, the Athenians ran overenthusiastically after Philip’s hypaspists. Their commander shouted: “Let’s drive them back to Macedon!” As they scrambled up the slope they lost formation. Philip gave his men the order to countercharge. The stunned Athenians scattered. They were pursued into the foothills. One thousand men died and two thousand were captured.

The rest of them escaped, including Demosthenes. He was no general and had taken his place in the ranks of hoplites, but as the tide of battle swung towards the Macedonians, he took to his heels “in the most shameful fashion” (writes Plutarch). His cloak caught on a bramble bush behind him and he shouted in a panic: “Take me alive.” It was a cruel irony that the inscription on his shield read “Good luck.”

—

Two stories are told of Philip’s reaction to his victory. As they reflect aspects of his contradictory personality they could both be true. After the battle the king presided over a celebratory banquet at which he drank deep of unmixed wine. After the meal he roamed around the battlefield with some companions. They looked at the bodies of the dead and jeered at them. The king took a childish pleasure in repeating the preambles to the bills laid before the ecclesia on the Pnyx, beating time to the rhythm—“Demosthenes, son of Demosthenes, of Paeonia, proposes.”

An Athenian prisoner of war, a leading politician called Demades, reproved Philip, in a reference to two characters in the Iliad—the Mycenaean king who led the Greeks at Troy, and an ugly and abusive soldier with a foul tongue. He said: “Fortune has cast you as Agamemnon. Aren’t you ashamed to act the part of Thersites?” To his credit Philip sobered up instantly.

It must have been on the same occasion that the king came across the corpses of members of the Sacred Band and, perhaps recalling those whom he had known as a hostage in Thebes, he burst into tears. He said: “Perish any man who suspects that these men either did or suffered anything shameful.” They were then buried in a mass grave where they had fallen. Philip ordered the statue of a lion to be erected to mark the spot.

The lion still stands guard and, nearby, modern archaeologists found and excavated the Thebans’ grave. Lying in seven orderly rows were 254 skeletons, sad relics of the brigade of lovers.

—

As usual, Philip was kind to Athens. This was not only a matter of sentiment, but also because the city could still cause him a good deal of trouble. It disposed of a large and powerful fleet and even his new torsion catapults would hardly leave a dent on its high stone walls. It was essential that Greece’s leading polis was settled and peaceful before the king launched his invasion of Persia, plans for which were in active preparation.

Alexander escorted the Athenian dead back to the city and passed on an offer to return prisoners of war without charge. The maritime league was finally dissolved, although a number of islands, including Samos and Delos, were allowed to remain under Athenian control. In theory, Athens was still free and unregulated, if only at home and not abroad (by contrast Thebes was obliged to accept a Macedonian garrison and to replace its democracy with an oligarchy).

The city showed its gratitude, but grudgingly. The ecclesia erected a statue of Philip on a horse and granted him and Alexander the citizenship of Athens, but it also conferred the franchise on Theban refugees. It chose Demosthenes, of all people, to deliver the funeral oration over the war dead. Philip overlooked the snubs.

Great changes are not always felt or observed at the time. Chaeronea was decisive in that it brought to an end the independence of the poleis. Macedon had shown itself to be the region’s superpower and they were too weak, even when united, to oppose it. Small self-governing cities continued to exist, of course, but they were now tamed members of a larger union.

The dream of Isocrates had finally come to pass, but not according to his plan. He had imagined a free coming together of the Greeks and a genuinely collective decision to send another army to sack another Troy. He was accustomed to democratic politics and in his eyes a combination imposed by force was not at all the same thing.

In the autumn of 338, at the time of the annual burying of the war dead, the old man, now in his late nineties, starved himself to death.

—

In winter or spring 337 delegates from all Greek states were summoned to a conference in Corinth, at which Philip announced a Common Peace. He would guarantee it with military force if necessary and a grand committee of the signatories would supervise it. Everywhere pro-Macedonian politicians were swept to power. For those tired of endless bickering and small pointless wars this was a welcome new world. Only the Spartans, impotent and embittered, refused to join in. It was a self-defeating gesture, for Philip accepted an invitation to march down into the Peloponnese where he readjusted borders to their disadvantage.

The move was very well received. The Greek historian Polybius wrote that the leaders who induced

Philip to enter the Peloponnese and humble the Spartans, allowed all its inhabitants to draw breath and think of freedom, and to recover the territory and cities of which the Spartans in their prosperity had deprived the Messenians, Megalopolitans, Tegeans, and Argives. In this way they unquestionably increased the power of their own states.

Later in the year at the committee’s second meeting, Philip announced his intention to punish the Medes and Persians for their desecration of Greek sanctuaries one and a half centuries previously and to free the Greeks of Asia Minor. For all his triumphant campaigns and the gold mines in Thrace, Philip was overdrawn by 500 talents. It was not just for glory that he intended to invade Persia, but also to refill his treasury.

The expedition would be an appropriate project with which to activate Philip’s new league of nations. How much real appetite there was for such a distant and dangerous enterprise is uncertain, but many young hoplites throughout Hellas were unemployed. They had all heard of Xenophon’s adventures in barbarian lands and were thrilled by the prospect of following in his footsteps.

The king sent to the oracle at Delphi, asking for Apollo’s approval of his plan to “liberate the Greek cities” in Ionia. The Pythia gave him a characteristically ambiguous or at least gnomic response. “The bull has been garlanded. Everything has been done. The priest is here to conduct the sacrifice.”

Philip was a little puzzled, but he accepted the oracle as a promise of victory.

—

At this point the spinners intervened and cut the thread of a human life.

A family quarrel broke out at the court in Pella, the causes of which are poorly understood. Apparently Philip repudiated Olympias on grounds of adultery and fostered rumors that his glamorous young heir was illegitimate. Late in 338, he announced his marriage to an attractive young woman from an aristocratic clan in Lower Macedonia.

Hard words were exchanged at the wedding feast. Everyone drank too much. The new bride’s uncle, an important general called Attalus who was high in favor, gave a speech in which he called on Macedonians to beg the gods that the union between Philip and his latest wife would produce a legitimate heir to the throne.

This was too much for the twenty-year-old prince, who was among the guests. He shouted at Attalus: “You scum, are you saying I’m a bastard, then?” and hurled a cup at him. The infuriated king staggered to his feet and drew his sword, intent on cutting down his son. Drink and his lame leg made him trip and he fell headlong to the ground.

Alexander said contemptuously: “Here’s the man who is planning to cross from Europe to Asia. He can’t even make it across from one couch to another!” He stormed out. He took his mother away to her native Epirus and withdrew to the comparative safety of untamed Illyria.

What was going on? We do not know, but we can safely reject the ancients’ notion that Philip’s behavior was down to sexual infatuation. The king was too much of a realist to upset all his political calculations for a pretty face. The most likely explanation is that, rightly or wrongly, he suspected his son and Olympias to be plotting his overthrow. There could be no other justification for the complete disruption of his dynastic plans on the eve of his expedition to Persia.

If the king was hoping for a new heir he was disappointed, for his bride gave birth to a daughter. He would be foolish if he left his kingdom without a successor, even if only a symbolic one, an infant. An advance guard had already crossed into Asia and there was no time to dally. He was obliged to recall and reinstate Alexander, albeit not to his old position of trust, and to reassert his legitimacy. Relations between the two men were icy.

However, in June 336 Philip had every reason to be pleased with life. The preparations for Persia were going well. The Great King and all his sons were poisoned by his grand vizier, a eunuch called Bagoas, who chose a cousin to succeed him as Darius III. The new ruler was his own man and immediately forced the kingmaker to down a dose of his own medicine. But although he was determined and capable, he was inexperienced.

Philip’s new queen at last produced a son. The balance of power at court changed again now that there was an alternative to Alexander, albeit a baby. The happy event coincided with lavish celebrations to mark the dynastic marriage of his daughter by Olympias to Alexander, king of Epirus—Olympias’s brother (and so her uncle) and Philip’s onetime flame.

Everyone who was anyone in all Hellas was present. Athens showed that it had already mastered the arts of deference and flattery. It was one of many cities that gave the king a gold crown, and it announced that it would hand over any plotter against the king who sought asylum in the city. Religious ceremonies in honor of the gods were conducted, music competitions held, and sumptuous meals provided for the guests. Large crowds flocked to the festivities.

A star actor sang arias at a state banquet and on the following morning at the theater at Aegae, the old capital, splendid games were scheduled. Spectators took their seats while it was still dark and at sunrise a magnificent procession entered, headed by statues of the twelve Olympians and accompanied by one of Philip, “suitable for a god.”

Finally, the king came in wearing a white cloak. He had dispensed with the royal bodyguard, for he wanted to show that he was no despot who needed protection from his people. The Greeks had chosen him as their leader and he was guarded by their goodwill.

A young man jumped forward with a sword, which he drove into the king’s side. Philip died at once and Pausanias, for that was the assassin’s name, ran off. Unfortunately for him, he tripped on the root of a vine and three young Macedonians, all of them close to Alexander, caught up with Pausanias and killed him. This meant that he could not be interrogated and tell his tale.

Later, the story went the rounds that Pausanias was one of Philip’s discarded lovers; when he complained about his treatment, he was gang-raped on Attalus’s orders. On this account the motive for the deed was revenge.

There may have been another explanation for what happened. The crown prince’s political position and that of his mother were precarious. Motive and opportunity point to their involvement. If we can believe the reports that have come down to us, Pausanias was a friend of Alexander and had previously asked for his advice about the rape. Also, Olympias’s behavior after the event was suggestive. Pausanias’s body was hung on a cross and she placed a gold crown on its head. When it was taken down she arranged for its cremation.

The tale had a moral that every intelligent seeker after truth was wise to heed. When asking for the god’s advice at Delphi, he should never interpret an ambiguous answer to his advantage. Philip should have remembered the story of Croesus of Lydia.

It was not the Great King who was the garlanded bull. The king of Macedon himself was the sacrificial victim to be offered up to the gods.

—

The king’s great opponent, Demosthenes, also died a violent death, but by his own hand.

The orator received the news of Philip’s assassination with delight: he appeared in public dressed in a magnificent costume and with a wreath on his head. He persuaded the boulē to vote a crown for Pausanias. He was certain that the Macedonian hegemony was finished.

Nothing was further from the truth. Alexander succeeded his father and made it clear that he meant to keep Greece under his thumb. He turned out to be a field commander of genius. In 335 Thebes revolted, but in a lightning expedition he captured the city and razed it to the ground as “a terrible warning.” The atrocity shocked all good Hellenes. They never forgave him, but they gave up any thought of resistance.

Demosthenes kept a low profile, although he was implicated in a massive financial scandal that led to his exile. When Alexander invaded the Persian Empire, the orator wrote letters to Persian generals in which he encouraged them to defeat Alexander. In public, though, he was silent on political matters. More than ten years passed, during which the invincible young king scored victory after victory over the Persians and became Great King himself.

Then in 323 Alexander, worn out from wounds and drink, unexpectedly succumbed after a few days of fever. When the news arrived in Athens, Demades advised the ecclesia not to believe a word of it. “If Alexander has really died, the stench of his corpse would have filled the world long before now.”

A new anti-Macedonian Hellenic League instantly formed itself. It was headed by Athens. Demosthenes was recalled and arrived at Piraeus to cheering crowds. It was like the return of Alcibiades, he remarked complacently, “but with greater honor.” The attempt to regain liberty was a last, failed roll of the dice. The Macedonian fleet was victorious at sea and Antipater, who had been Alexander’s deputy in Macedon, quashed the revolt by land. He led his army towards Athens and the city swiftly surrendered.

Alexander had shared his father’s soft spot for Athens, but Antipater was no sentimentalist. He was determined that Athens would never give him trouble again. So he insisted that the Athenian fleet should not be rebuilt. He installed a garrison in Piraeus and replaced the full democracy with a restricted franchise. He demanded the surrender of Demosthenes and other anti-Macedonian politicians. They fled from Attica.

Wherever he went Demosthenes knew he was too famous to escape notice, and he did not travel far. He made for the tiny, hilly, and densely wooded island of Calauria (today’s Poros) in the Saronic Gulf. It is about thirty-six miles from Piraeus. On a hill overlooking the main town stood a temple of Poseidon, famous for offering sanctuary to men on the run, and here the orator found refuge. Its ruins can still be seen.

It took only a few days for his whereabouts to be discovered. A Macedonian officer called Archias, accompanied by some soldiers, arrived at the temple at the head of a military detachment. His orders from Antipater were to hunt down all the Athenian opposition politicians and send them to him for execution. A former actor, he was good at his work and was nicknamed the exile-catcher.

Demosthenes emerged from the shrine to talk with Archias, who assured him that he would not be harshly treated. He was not taken in. “I was never convinced by your acting when you were on stage,” the orator said, “and I am not convinced by your advice now.” When Archias threatened to remove him by force, local people prevented him.

The orator went back inside the temple. He picked up his writing tablets, put to his mouth a pen made from a reed, and bit it, his custom when thinking what he was going to write. After a time, he covered his head with a cloak and lay down.

Some Macedonian soldiers gathered at the temple door and jeered at him for being afraid to take his own life. In fact, the pen contained a poison that he sucked up. Once it began to take effect Demosthenes uncovered himself. To avoid polluting the shrine by his death, he asked to be helped outside. As he passed the altar, he collapsed and died. He was sixty-two.

—

Demosthenes was a man out of his time. He would have flourished in the fifth century when Athenian citizens were energetic, ambitious, and ready to fight for the leadership of Greece. The Peloponnesian War had cut back the city’s population and the loss of empire had reduced its wealth. It could still muster a powerful fleet, but could not afford a lengthy war.

A brilliant orator whose speeches uphold the cause of freedom, Demosthenes dominated the ecclesia, but his foreign policy was based on a false premise—that he was a latter-day Pericles. Against the evidence, he believed that Athens was still a first-rate power.

Among his fellow-Greeks he was a contentious and divisive figure. A narrow nationalist, he did not have an answer to the real question of the day—how the Greeks could unite to counter the rise of an aggressive power, whose resources far outstripped those of the multitude of mini-states that made up Hellas. It had done so triumphantly but briefly during the Persian Wars, but the trick could not be repeated in an unheroic age and another solution had to be found.

Opponents of Demosthenes, such as his great rival Aeschines, were also patriots—despite his best efforts to subvert their reputations for honesty and loyalty. They advocated genuine cooperation with Macedon under the umbrella of a Common Peace. This was a superior alternative to the abrasive and inflexible approach of Demosthenes and his war party. It was much more likely than confrontation to maintain Athenian independence and influence in the world.

It was a bitter truth, but Demosthenes was politically responsible for Chaeronea and the loss, permanent as it turned out, of freedom. One cannot imagine a greater failure of policy. But the orator was unrepentant. Even if Athenian efforts were doomed, it had still been right to resist Philip. In a speech in 330, he claimed:

No, you were not wrong, men of Athens, you were not wrong, when you accepted the risks of war for the redemption and the liberties of mankind. I swear it by our forefathers who bore the brunt of battle at Marathon, who stood in the phalanx line at Plataea, who strove in the sea-fights of Salamis and Artemisium, and by all the brave men who lie in our public cemeteries.

This was little more than nostalgia. There was to be no return to the great days of old.

23

Afterword—“A God-forsaken Hole”

Alexander of Macedon took being Greek very seriously. After all, he was the new Achilles whose Companions were latter-day successors of the mythic warrior’s trusty Myrmidons. He merged metaphor and fact.

Xerxes had seen his invasion of Greece as payback for the Trojan War, and the young Macedonian returned the compliment. Almost the first thing Alexander did, after crossing the Hellespont from Europe into Asia in 334, was to leave his army for a few days and ride to the ruins of Troy.

All that remained of the ancient city was a large tumulus and a tumbledown village with a gimcrack little temple. Tourists were shown a collection of bogus relics. Like the Persian king before him, Alexander sacrificed to Athena, Troy’s tutelary goddess. He received some gold wreaths from a committee of local Greeks and sacrificed at the (so-called) tombs of the Greek heroes Ajax and Achilles.

The king and Hephaestion, his best friend since his school days and probably lover, laid wreaths on the tomb of Achilles and his best friend or lover Patroclus, whose celebrated relationship lay at the heart of Homer’s epic the Iliad. Then, bizarrely, they stripped off, oiled themselves (as Greek athletes routinely did), and ran a race around the tombs.

Alexander made an offering of his own armor and took in exchange a shield and panoply, purportedly preserved from the Trojan War and hanging on the temple walls (at his first victory against the Persians at the river Granicus in May 334 he dressed up in them and had them carried before him in later battles).

Alexander continued to play the role of Achilles during the campaign in Asia. When driving south towards Egypt, the Persian official in charge of the great city and port of Gaza refused to bow to the king even in defeat. Alexander tied him to his chariot and dragged him, still alive, around the city, just as Achilles had done with the corpse of Hector in the Iliad.

The years he spent as a pupil of Aristotle under whom he studied ethics and politics made a powerful impression on the young prince. He was devoted to philosophy and, when king, funded leading thinkers of the day. He was also excited by his tutor’s researches in the sciences and brought with him to Persia a team of architects, geographers, botanists, astronomers, mathematicians, and zoologists.

Alexander was an enthusiastic reader. His personal copy of the Iliad that he kept in Darius’s confiscated casket was annotated by Aristotle in his own hand. When campaigning deep in the interiors of Asia, he asked for books to be sent to him from Greece—histories and poetry anthologies and many of the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Alexander fell out with Aristotle when the philosopher published his teaching notes. These should have remained confidential, the king wrote, as distinct from the books he wrote for the general reader. He complained: “What advantage shall I have over other men if these theories in which you have trained me are to be made common property?” This was a misunderstanding, the philosopher replied. His technical work was not a secret, but was simply inaccessible to the public at large. The royal student’s advantage remained.

Alexander was one of the world’s greatest commanders. In a string of astonishing victories he defeated the Great King Darius III and took over the empire, becoming Great King himself. But his most lasting achievement, cultural rather than military, was to diffuse the Greek language and civilization throughout the lands of the Persian Empire. He founded numerous cities, many of which, and most especially Alexandria in the Nile Delta, promoted the arts and sciences. In effect, he Hellenized most of the known world. Here lay the future.

—

Alexander’s brief but incident-packed career is another story, but together with that of his father, Philip, it added a full stop to the achievements of three very different types of warring state, whose interweavings have been one of this book’s themes—Athens, Sparta, and the Persian Empire. They competed with one another, and each rose and fell in turn within the space of three centuries, leaving the stage empty for the Macedonians.

Sparta was the most brittle and least appealing of them. Militaristic and introverted, its viability depended on the enslavement of its neighbors. What impressed contemporaries in the ancient world was its self-discipline. Its constitution promoted eunomia, or good order, obedience to good laws, stability. The average Spartiate, or Equal, saw himself not so much as an individual but as an undifferentiated member of a unified citizen body. The demands of the collective always trumped personal concerns.

The life of imagination and the arts was firmly discouraged and so was agricultural labor and economic activity, which was the responsibility of a servile class, the helots. As in totalitarian societies of the modern era, every aspect of an Equal’s private and public life was carefully monitored and controlled.

Spartan society was designed to produce military efficiency. This it did with considerable success. Its citizen hoplites were famous for courage, discipline, and technical competence. They did not expect to lose battles and very seldom did. Unfortunately, inequalities in landholding led to a slow decline in their number. The outside world scarcely noticed this development, which was masked by a cloak of invincibility. As already noted, 8,000 Equals in 480 dwindled to only about 1,500 at the time of the Battle of Leuctra in 371.

This defeat exposed Sparta’s reputation as a confidence trick. It never recovered from the blow.

—

The failure of Persian aggression in the fifth century had a benign consequence, in that it instilled into Greeks throughout the Eastern Mediterranean a strong sense of their identity and, so they believed, their superiority. They were proud members simultaneously of Hellas as a whole and of their small but vociferous city-states.

By contrast Persians and their subjects were barbarous and could not even speak intelligibly. Generations of European scholars and students have tended to underrate the achievements of the Achaemenid Empire and seen its history through a Hellenic lens. This is understandable, for the Persians left behind virtually no narrative account of events.

But their empire was a considerable achievement. For the first time it brought together lands from the Indus to the Balkans, from Central Asia to Upper Egypt under a political and military administration. Improved communications (in particular the Royal Road), strong regional governors, and an efficient bureaucracy held the sprawling, feudal empire together. Although the Great King held absolute powers, he did not impose himself on his subjects. “Through a wise and salutary neglect,” as Edmund Burke said in another context, he left old ways, local religious and cultural customs untouched. In return for the payment of taxes and levies of men for the army, he provided peace and stability. Provinces prospered. Astutely, the Macedonian invaders took over most of the institutions of the empire they vanquished and governed it in the same tolerant manner.

Greeks like Xenophon admired the empire, despite the fact that his Persian adventures exposed its military weakness and helped give it a misleading reputation for effeminacy and decadence. If we set on one side an elite force like the Immortals, much of the Persian army was a multitudinous if not very militant militia, which was no match for highly professional Greek mercenaries. Great Kings were happy to recruit hoplites to stiffen their hordes.

—

Athens grew to greatness against a background of favorable economic conditions and unfavorable foreign threats. From the eighth century onwards, Greeks sent merchants sailing around the Mediterranean, opening them up to diverse cultural influences. Population growth led to the establishment of overseas colonies. International trade became essential for Athens when the number of its citizens required more food than its farmers were able to supply, and the city was forced to rely on grain imports from the Black Sea.

The historical record shows that after the establishment of democracy a booming Athens was suffused with energy and creativity. It seems likely that there was a causal connection. The system of direct democracy not only demanded, enforced even, popular participation and communal religious observance, but offered individual citizens an opportunity, perhaps unique in history, to mold their political destiny at first hand.

The fact that the polis was small (although not as small as Plato and Aristotle would have liked) enhanced the felt excitement of the process. The individual and the collective were interlinked and mutually magnified. The Athenian was free, but the state could also be pitiless towards him in return, as (in their different ways) the careers of Socrates, Alcibiades, and others go to show.

Love of liberty was a value of cardinal importance, which the democracy fed and watered. It was the foundation for rational inquiry and free artistic expression. It also inspired (positively) the Greeks’ ferocious resistance to the Persians and (negatively) their own internecine quarrels.

Small wonder that this fertile soil produced a flowering of extraordinary personalities, and great art and thought. The Hellenic city-states took advantage of a briefly opened window of opportunity. They were too small and weak to survive for very long when surrounded by stronger and larger neighbors.

However, for the time that the fates allowed, Athens made the most of her chances.

—

After Alexander’s death in 323, his empire quickly broke apart into the great kingdoms of the Hellenistic age—Macedon, Egypt, the imperial heartland in Asia, and in fourth place, Pergamum.

Athens was reduced to being a walk-on political actor inside the Macedonian sphere of influence. The place became rather dilapidated; the Long Walls between Athens and Piraeus collapsed and were not rebuilt. The city would never again be a full and free democracy with universal adult male suffrage. It would never again dominate the seas with its fleets, although from time to time trade picked up and Piraeus remained a major international port. The city’s unique selling point was as a center for higher education, specializing in rhetoric and philosophy. For centuries young Greeks and, later, Romans spent a year or so in Athens completing their education.

Athens had no alternative but to rest on its laurels. In fact, “laurels” were all that it had: with its temples, its colonnades, its colossal statues of Athena, and its open-air murals, it was a memorial of its own glorious past, a historical theme park packed with tourists.

The city faced competition. Under the Ptolemies, the Macedonian pharaohs, Alexandria became a sophisticated and deluxe metropolis. The state-sponsored museum was an academic center for poetry, scholarship, and the sciences. Its vast library sought to collect every Greek book ever written.

So the idea of Greece shifted from the antiquated mainland poleis to the modern Hellenistic kingdoms of the Middle East. Then in the second century these were absentmindedly conquered by the Roman Republic. In 87 Athens, implicated in an uprising against Rome, was besieged and sacked by the Roman general Sulla. A generation later, the city chose the wrong side in Rome’s civil war. Julius Caesar, the victor, pardoned it, remarking drily: “How often will the glory of your ancestors save you from self-destruction?”

Good question. Under various Roman emperors, among them Augustus and Hadrian, grand new public buildings were commissioned. In the latter’s reign, the temple of Olympian Zeus, enormous but incomplete since the time of Pisistratus, was finished at last in A.D. 132.

A century later Athens was sacked again. It never recovered. Many of its major buildings lay in ruins. The population dwindled. The city became little more than the Acropolis. Successive Gothic invasions washed over it. Weeds grew in the pavements of the Parthenon. A resident Christian archbishop in the late twelfth century described Athens as “a God-forsaken hole.” He wrote a friend:

You cannot look upon Athens without weeping. It is not just that she has lost her ancient glory: that was taken from her long ago. But now she has lost the very form, appearance and character of a city. Everywhere you see walls stripped and demolished, houses razed to the ground, their sites ploughed under.

As Byzantium gave way to the Ottoman Empire, Athens was a small impoverished community. The Parthenon became a mosque and sheep, donkeys, and camels grazed in the agora. In the seventeenth century, in a war between Venetians and the Turks, the temple was used as an arsenal and was blown up by enemy fire.

In the nineteenth century Lord Elgin removed marble masterpieces from what was left of the Parthenon. The Greeks fought for and, with European help, won their independence. Romantic poets made Hellenic liberty their cause. Shelley said: “We are all Greeks.” Lord Byron joined the insurgents and died on campaign of a violent fever and incompetent doctors in 1824.

In 1834 the victorious revolutionaries chose Athens as their capital. For the first time in two millennia, the violet-crowned city was free.

HEROES OF HOMER

The

Iliad,

an epic poem composed toward the end of the eighth century

B.C.

, was a bible that set out ideals of courage, honor, loyalty, and the competitive pursuit of excellence that generation after generation of Greeks sought to realize in their lives. The hero of the

Iliad,

Achilles, chose to be a warrior, win glory, and die young rather than lead a long, peaceful but ignoble life. Here he bandages the arm of his friend and lover, Patroclus, who has been wounded by an arrow.

Attic red-figure vase by the Sosias Painter, about 500

B.C.

, Altes Museum, Berlin

.

ATHENS IN ITS GLORY

A reconstruction of the Acropolis, the citadel of Athens, as it was at the beginning of the fourth century, after the completion of the Parthenon and the other great buildings of the age of Pericles. A. Parthenon; B. Erechtheum; C. Propylaea or monumental gateway; D. Art Gallery; E. Temple of Athena Nike (Victory); F. Ramp; G. House of the Arrephoroi; H. Clepsydra fountain; I. Eleusinium, a shrine for the Eleusinian Mysteries; J.

Agora,

or marketplace; K. Areopagus, or the “Rock of Ares,” a hill where the council of the Areopagus met; L. Theater of Dionysus; M. Unfinished Temple of Olympian Zeus.

Akg-images, Peter Connolly

.

HOUSE OF THE VIRGIN

Athena was the goddess of wisdom and war. She was the patron of the city of Athens, and the Parthenon temple was dedicated to her. It is the masterwork of Athenian architecture. Battered and mutilated after many centuries of neglect and ill-treatment, it retains its power to awe the spectator.

Sculpture in ancient Greece was painted in bright colors, as the Victorian artist, Lawrence Alma-Tadema demonstrates in his

Pheidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends

. The spectators stand on scaffolding to view the reliefs and include the young Alcibiades and Socrates (

left

) and Pericles with his mistress Aspasia (

center right

).

Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

.

Inside the main hall, or

cella,

of the Parthenon, stood a colossal gold and ivory statue of Athena Parthenos (the Maiden) by Pheidias. It disappeared in the fifth century

A.D.

and was presumably destroyed at some point thereafter. However, a re-creation in 1990 by Alan LeQuire, inside a full-scale replica of the Parthenon in Nashville’s Centennial Park, gives a sense of the overwhelming impact of the original.

GREAT MEN

With its sensuous lips, quizzically intelligent look, and rough-and-ready appearance, this portrait of Themistocles evokes the qualities of the most successful statesman Athens ever produced. Always ready to accept a bribe, but not necessarily to fulfill his side of the bargain, he had the guile, the boldness, and the strategic forethought to win the struggle against Persian invaders in 480 and 479

B.C

.

A

Roman copy of a fifth-century Greek original, Museo Ostiense, Ostia, Italy.

Nicknamed the “Olympian” for his mastery as an orator in the citizens’ assembly, Pericles ruled Athens during its golden years between the Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War—despite the fact that, at any moment, the people could dismiss him from office. His defensive military policy toward Sparta and its allies was a failure, and he died in 429

B.C.

a disappointed man.

A Roman copy of a Greek original, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican.

Demosthenes was the most celebrated public speaker in the Greek world. He saw himself as following in the footsteps of Pericles. But a century had passed since the great days of Athens, and his ambitions exceeded his city’s capacity. The rising power of the age was Macedon, but instead of allying Athens with the newcomer he did everything possible to thwart its king, Philip, and his son and successor, Alexander. In 338

B.C.

Philip crushed the Greek city-states at the battle of Chaeronea, and Athens lost its independence. Demosthenes deserves a large share of the blame.

A Roman copy in marble of a bronze original, about 200

B.C.

, by Polyeuctus

.

Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

Ostracism was a remarkable political device invented by the Athenian democracy in the sixth century

B.C.

The people voted on whether or not to banish a leading citizen for ten years. If convicted, he could come home after serving his sentence and resume his career. Ostracism removed unpopular politicians or those believed to threaten the constitution. Votes were cast by scratching a citizen’s name on a broken piece of pottery and depositing it in a voting urn. More than 11,000 of these potsherds, or

ostraca,

have been found. Some of them bear the name of Megacles, son of Hippocrates, a controversial aristocrat, as in these examples. In 486

B.C.

he was ostracized. However, he was not shaken by this setback, for in the same year he won the prestigious chariot race at the Pythian Games at Delphi. The

ostracon

on the left names Themistocles, son of Neocles. In 472 or 471

B.C.

the savior of his country was voted out and ended his days as a pensioner of his old enemy, the Persian Great King.

Stoa of Attalus Museum, Athens.

ARMS AND THE MAN

Only wealthy aristocrats could afford to run a horse, and it was the heavily armed infantryman, the hoplite, who fought for and represented the people. He was, in fact, the democratic citizen in arms. He bought his own equipment: helmet with a horsehair crest; bronze body armor; a spear and a sword; and a round shield made from bronze, wood, and leather. Here we see a fully equipped warrior pouring a libation to the gods before his departure for the wars (or perhaps commemorating his death).

An Attic red-figure oil jar from between 480 and 460

B.C.

, Museo Archeologico Regionale, Palermo.

The Greeks were inordinately proud of their victories over the armies of the Persian Great King and liked to represent their defeated enemy as weak, decadent, and overdressed instead of proudly nude, as in this pottery drinking cup of about 480

B.C.

Triptolemus painter, National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

Two great battles frame the rise and fall of Athens. After the famous victory at Marathon in 490

B.C.

the Athenian dead were buried on the field and covered by a tumulus, which survives to this day. The triumphant Athenian general Miltiades dedicated the helmet, which he (almost certainly) wore on the day, to Zeus at Olympia. It is inscribed with his name.

Olympia Museum, Greece.

The second battle, this time at Chaeronea in central Greece, brought the fiercely independent city-states of Hellas to a bloody close. In 338

B.C.

Philip, king of Macedon, routed an allied Greek army. The statue of a lion was erected on the battlefield in honor of the Sacred Band, a body of male lovers from the Greek city of Thebes, which was almost wiped out during the fighting.

The endless wars between the Greek city-states severely depleted the adult male population. Here a tombstone, erected about 460

B.C.

in the heyday of Athenian power, shows the city’s tutelary goddess deep in thought in front of a stone slab. She is probably paying her respects at the grave marker of a fallen soldier.

Three ancient Athenians still have a living influence on today’s world. Socrates, one of the towering originators of Western thought, said, when on trial for his life: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” For him ethics lay at the heart of philosophical inquiry. He wrote nothing down, asking and answering questions of anyone who was willing to talk with him in the city’s streets and the

agora

. He was a critic of the democracy.

A Roman copy of a lost Greek original, British Museum.

Plato was the most famous of Socrates’ many disciples. In a series of brilliantly written dialogues, he devoted his life to recording and promoting his master’s philosophical method. Over time he developed his own ideas and it can be difficult to decide where the historical Socrates ends and Plato’s independent thinking begins. It is hard to exaggerate Plato’s influence. A leading twentieth-century thinker remarked: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”

A Roman copy after a Greek original, Glyptotek, Munich.

In the fourth century

B.C.

Athens became a base for various philosophical think tanks. The young Aristotle studied at Plato’s Academy before setting up his own school at the Lyceum. He and his team conducted scholarly research of all kinds, including ethics, metaphysics, and the natural sciences. His works on logic remained current and valid until the nineteenth century. Like many philosophers of his day, Aristotle intervened in political affairs and for some years was tutor to the teenaged Alexander the Great.

Roman copy of a lost bronze by Lysippus, Museo Nazionale Romano.

THE DAILY ROUND

Pottery is our best source of what it was like to be an ordinary ancient Athenian. Skilled craftsmen painted vases, bottles, bowls, and plates with the scenes of everyday life. Thousands have survived and even a random selection gives the flavor of a vanished world.

Every self-respecting youth would spend much of his time at the open-air gymnasium developing his physical skills. In a typical scene, a boy gets ready to throw a discus. Nearby a pick will be used to prepare the landing ground for the long jump. A pair of dumbbells, hanging from a hook, will help the athlete keep his balance during the jump. The legend reads: “Kleomelos is beautiful.”

Attic red-figure drinking cup by the Kleomelos Painter, between 510 and 500

B.C.

, Louvre Museum.

A life-size bronze statue is being assembled at a busy foundry. While most Athenians worked on farms, small industrial firms manufactured goods of various kinds, including metal tools; weapons and armor; leather items, among them shoes and boots; painted pottery; and masonry. Workers were highly skilled, and many of their products were exported to foreign markets.

Attic red-figure ware, about 490 to 480

B.C.

, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

Most women spent their lives at home running their households and looking after the children. They could not vote or play an active part in public life. Here a slave hands a baby over to its mother.

Red-figure olive-oil bottle from Eretria, about 470 to 460

B.C.

, National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

There was one class of women that broke the convention of seclusion. The

hetaira

was a high-class courtesan who was expected to offer companionship and intelligent conversation as well as sex. As this depiction of haggling customers shows, the relationships were essentially financial.

Vase by the Kleophrades Painter, about 490 to 480

B.C.

, Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich.

A priest, wearing a wreath, and a boy prepare to slaughter a young boar at an altar. The Greeks were very religious. Their gods were human in appearance and in behavior. Like forces of nature, they were dangerous. They needed to be placated at every opportunity with offerings and burnt sacrifices.

Drinking cup by the Epidromos Painter, about 510 to 500

B.C.

, Louvre Museum.

A guest at a dinner party, or symposium, listens to a musician playing. His bag hangs beside his stick and a cup of wine stands on a table next to his couch. Gatherings of this kind were popular among upper-class Athenian men. Serious conversation and drinking often followed a meal, but if handsome waiters and dancing girls were present, the proceedings could degenerate into something approaching an orgy.

Attic red-figure drinking cup by the Colmar Painter, about 490

B.C.

, Louvre Museum.

THE VILLAGE

For many centuries after the classical era, Athens was no more than a dozy village encumbered by ruins. It occupied a neglected corner of the Ottoman Empire, until Greece won its independence in 1832. One year later, the German artist Johann Michael Wittmer painted the Acropolis as seen from the Temple of Olympian Zeus. The dusty backwater he evoked had just started out on its new career as the Hellenic capital. Today, it has grown into a metropolis of more than four million inhabitants.

Benaki Museum, Athens.

GLOSSARY

Achaemenid Empire: the Persian Empire.

Acropolis: citadel, the highest part of a polis.

agogē: the Spartan education and training system.

agora: marketplace, the center of the public affairs of a polis, and of commercial and retail activities.

Amphictyonic League: association of twelve states in central Greece charged with the upkeep and management of the oracle at Delphi.

Archon: one of nine high government officials, who served for one year. The Eponymous Archon was so-called because he gave his name to the year, which unlike our calendar was not numbered.

Areopagus: hill in Athens; council of former Archons.

aretē: excellence of every kind, moral virtue.

barbarian: non-Greek speaker

Boeotarch: chief official of the Boeotian League.

boulē: state council; in Athens it managed the day-to-day operations of the democracy and prepared the agenda for the ecclesia.

bouleuterion: meeting place for the boulē, city hall.

cella: chamber in a Greek temple.

Cerameicus: a district of Athens inside and outside the city walls, also a public cemetery.

chiliarch: commander of a thousand men.

choregos: a wealthy citizen who paid for and produced dramatic or musical events.

cleruchy: a small colony of Athenian citizens. Unlike ordinary colonies cleruchies retained their Athenian citizenship. Their numbers ranged from 250 to 4,000 settlers.

Companions: members of the elite cavalry of Macedon, royal bodyguards.

Crypteia: a secret police in Sparta.

demos: the people; in Athens the totality of male citizens. A local ward or deme.

Dionysia: annual festival in honor of Dionysus at which plays were performed. Great Dionysia, March/April, and Lenaea or Rural Dionysia, December/January.

drachma: silver coin, equivalent to a day’s pay in the late fifth century.

ecclesia: the general assembly; in Athens it met frequently and made all the important political decisions.

emporion: a trading post.

ephebos, or ephebe: an adolescent male seventeen or eighteen years old.

ephors: five ephors were elected annually, the executive arm of the Spartan state.

Equal: an adult Spartan citizen. Also Spartiate.

erastes: a male lover.

eromenos: a male beloved.

eunomia: good order.

eupatridae: noblemen.

Euxine Sea: literally the Hospitable Sea (meaning the opposite); today’s Black Sea.

gerousia: council of elders at Sparta.

gymnasium: exercise ground.

harmost: a Spartan military governor.

heliaea: supreme court of Athens.

Hellenotamiae: finance officers at the Delian League.

helot: a serf from Laconia and Messenia, subjugated by Sparta.

Herm: bust of Hermes on a stone column with genitalia.

hetaira: a high-class prostitute (literally, a companion).

hippeis: cavalry.

hoplite: heavy-armed infantry soldier.

Lacedaemon: Sparta, the capital city.

Laconia: the territory of Sparta.

liturgy: subsidy by wealthy citizens of public activity, including arts events or the cost of warships.

medize: to collaborate with the Persians.

metic: a resident alien at Athens, without civic rights. Usually a manufacturer or merchant.

metropolis: mother city of a colony.

mothax: son of a Spartiate and a helot woman, or a Spartiate who could not afford the syssitia fee.

oba (plural obai): a Spartan village or small settlement.

obol: coin worth one sixth of a drachma.

oligarchy: rule of the few in a polis.

ostracism: a referendum on exiling a leading Athenian for ten years.

ostracon: broken piece of pottery.

paedogogus: a slave responsible for a child’s upbringing and for taking him to school.

palaestra: a wrestling ground and school.

Panathenaea: major Athenian festival in honor of Athena.

pankration: all-out sport combining boxing and wrestling.

parthenos: a virgin, umarried girl, and young woman.

peltast: lightly armed soldier.

pentacosiomedimni: wealthiest class of Athenian citizen.

peplos: ankle-length woolen robe or shawl worn by women.

perioeci: free residents of Laconia without voting rights.

phalanx: a formation of hoplites, many ranks deep.

phratry: club of Athenian citizens with religious/state functions—e.g., naming and registering a newborn boy (literally brotherhood).

Pnyx: meeting place of the Athenian ecclesia.

polemarch: a war leader, one of the Athenian Archons.

polis (plural poleis): Greek city-state.

polites: citizen of a polis.

Prytaneum: the state headquarters, with a community hearth and an eternal flame. Office of the senior members of the boulē of Athens.

Pythia: the priestess at Delphi.

satrap: provincial governor in the Persian Empire.

seisachtheia: a shaking off of burdens (Solon’s reforms).

sophist: an intellectual and teacher of young men in rhetoric.

Spartiate: the name for an adult Spartan citizen. Also an Equal.

stele: inscribed stone slab, often a gravestone or decree.

stoa: a covered colonnade.

strategos: a general (one of ten elected annually by the ecclesia in Athens).

symposium: a drinking party, usually in aristocratic circles.

synoecism: the union of several towns as a unitary state.

syssitia: a Spartiate’s military mess.

thetes: members of the lowest economic class in Athens.

The Thirty: oligarchs who governed Athens from 404 to 403.

Tholos: the headquarters of the Prytaneum in the agora.

timē: honor, personal status.

trireme: warship with three banks of oars on either side.

trittys: a regional division of Attica.

tyrant: sole ruler who took power unconstitutionally, turannos.

zeugitai: third tier of Solon’s social classes, rich enough to own a hoplite’s armor and weapons.

TIME LINE

B.C.

c.3000 Minoan civilization in Crete begins.

c.2000–1300 Hittites flourish in Asia Minor.

c.1400 Palaces at Cnossos and Phaestus destroyed. Decline of Cretan power.

c.1600–1200 Mycenae flourishes.

1287 Battle of Kadesh. Decline of Egyptian and Hittite power.

1230–1150 Breakdown of settled conditions.

c.1200 Overthrow of Hittite Empire.

c.1180 Myceneans sack Troy, according to tradition.

c.1150 Mycenaean settlements destroyed.

c.1100 “Dorians” settle in the Peloponnese.

c.1050–950 “Ionians” and others colonize Asia Minor. Athens plays leading role. Beginning of Iron Age in Greece.

c.850–730 Athens becomes a leading cultural center in Greece.

776 First Olympiad.

c.750–700 Invention of Greek alphabet. Homer composes the Iliad and Odyssey.

c.735–650 Foundation of Greek colonies across the Mediterranean.

730–10 Sparta conquers Messenia.

c.700 Hesiod flourishes. Midas king of Phrygia.

c.700–650 Invention of hoplite warfare.

683/2 First annual Archon at Athens reported.

650–600 Age of lawgivers in Greece. Rise of tyrannies in Corinth, Megara, and Sicyon; and in Ionia.

c.632 Cylon attempts tyranny at Athens. Alcmaeonids exiled from Athens.

c.620/1 Dracon legislates at Athens.

c.624–546 Thales flourishes.

c.620 Sparta suppresses Messenian revolt.

c.600 Sappho and Alcaeus flourish on Lesbos. Periander tyrant of Corinth.

595 Earliest Greek coins minted at Aegina.

595–86 First Sacred War for control of Delphi.

594/93 Solon Archon. Seisachtheia.

566 Inauguration of the Great Panathenaea.

561/60 Pisistratus, tyrant of Athens, first time.

560–50 War of Sparta with Tegea.

560–46 Croesus king of Lydia.

559 Cyrus king of Persia.

c.559–56 Miltiades senior, tyrant in Thracian Chersonese.

557/6 or 556/5 Pisistratus expelled.

550 Cyrus conquers Media.

550/49 Second tyranny of Pisistratus. Expelled again.

548 Temple of Apollo in Delphi burns down. The Alcmaeonids partly fund its rebuilding.

547 (?) Cyrus conquers Lydia. Fall of Croesus.

546/5 Persia conquers the Greeks of Asia Minor.

545–40 Cyrus pushes into Central Asia.

540/39 Third tyranny of Pisistratus.

538 Cyrus captures Babylon.

530 Cyrus dies.

528/7 Pisistratus dies, succeeded by sons Hippias and Hipparchus.

525 Cambyses, Cyrus’s successor, invades Egypt.

522 Fall of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos. Cambyses dies. Darius assassinates his successor and becomes king of Persia.

521 Darius seizes power in Persia.

520 Cleomenes king of Sparta.

519 Athens at war with Thebes over Plataea.

514 Harmodius and Aristogeiton assassinate Hipparchus.

c.512 Darius conquers Thrace.

510 Expulsion of Hipparchus from Athens.

508/7 Cleomenes of Sparta invades Attica, besieged in Acropolis.

506 Peloponnesian army invades Attica. Athenians defeat Boeotians, Chalcidians, and acquire the Chalcidian plain. They also acquire Oropus.

503/2 Reforms of Cleisthenes begin at Athens.

501 System of ten strategoi established.

499–93 Ionian cities revolt from Persia.

493 Themistocles Archon.

c.492 Persia subdues Thrace and Macedonia. Trial of Miltiades.

491 Envoys of Darius tour Greek states demanding fire and water; those who visit Athens are executed.

490 Persia launches a punitive expedition against Greece. Battle of Marathon.

487 First known ostracism. War of Athens against Aegina.

487/6 Archons appointed by lot. Strategoi supersede the polemarch.

486/5 Egypt revolts from Persia.

485 Darius dies, succeeded by Xerxes.

484/3 Egyptian revolt suppressed. Xerxes prepares for invasion of Greece.

483 Persians cut canal through Mount Athos.

483/2 New vein of silver found at the Laurium mine.

482 Ostracism of Aristides. Athenian fleet enlarged.

481 Conference at Sparta; Greek states plan resistance to Persian invasion. Athens concludes peace with Aegina.

480 Xerxes enters Greece. August: Battles of Artemisium and Thermopylae. September: Battle of Salamis. Xerxes flees to Persia.

479 Second evacuation of Athens. Battle of Plataea. Battle of Mycale. Persia loses Sestos and the Hellespont.

478/6 Walls rebuilt at Athens.

478 Pausanias liberates Cyprus, captures Byzantium. Delian League against Persia founded.

477 Themistocles fortifies Piraeus.

476–73 Victories of Cimon.

472 The Persians of Aeschylus.

472 or 470 Ostracism of Themistocles; goes to Argos.

471 Pausanias expelled from Byzantium.

c.471 Death of Pausanias, flight of Themistocles.

470 Cimon brings back the “bones of Theseus.”

469 Naxos revolts from Delian League. Themistocles flees to Corcyra, then to King Admetus.

468 Themistocles arrives in Persia. Cimon’s first expedition against the helots.

466 Battle of the Eurymedon.

465 Revolt of Thasos from Delian League. Assassination of Xerxes. Artaxerxes I succeeds.

c.464 Earthquake at Sparta. Helots revolt.

463 Siege of Ithome. Sparta rejects Athenian allies. Surrender of Thasos.

463–61 Reforms of Ephialtes at Athens; Areopagus loses its powers.

462–60 Pericles influential at Athens.

462 Athenians and Egyptians defeat Persians.

461 Ostracism of Cimon. Athenian alliance with Argos and Thessaly.

460 Assassination of Ephialtes. Intermittent hostilities between Athens and the Peloponnesians start (the First Peloponnesian War).

459 Athens wins Megara. Final defeat of the helots. Athens at war with Aegina.

458 Oresteia of Aeschylus. Athens builds Long Walls. Athenian expedition to Egypt. Themistocles dies. Athens conquers Aegina.

457 Athens conquers Boeotia. Archonship opened to zeugitai.

454 Egyptian expedition ends in disaster. Delian League treasury moved to Athens. Long Walls completed.

451 Five years’ truce between Athens and the Peloponnesians. Return of Cimon. Citizenship law of Pericles.

449 Cimon dies in Cyprus.

449 Peace of Callias with Persia.

447 Building of Parthenon begins. Athens loses Boeotia. Battle of Coronea.

447/6 Euboean revolt suppressed. Athens loses Megara.

445 Thirty Years Peace between Athens and the Peloponnesians.

443 Ostracism of Thucydides, son of Melesias.

441 Euripides’ first victory at the City Dionysia. Antigone by Sophocles.

440/39 Revolts of Samos and Byzantium. Sophocles a strategos.

436 Foundation of Amphipolis.

436/5 Disorder at Epidamnus.

c.435 Pericles’ expedition to Black Sea.

435 Spring: Corcyra wins sea battle against Corinth.

433 Athenian alliance with Corcyra.

432 Revolt of Potidaea. “Megarian Decree” at Athens.

431 Peloponnesian War begins. First Peloponnesian invasion of Attica.

430–26 Plague at Athens.

429 Pericles dies. Siege of Plataea.

428 Revolt of Mytilene.

427 Mytilene surrenders. Debate at Athens on Mytilene. Athenian fleet visits Sicily.

426 Plataea surrenders. Civil war in Corcyra. Demosthenes in northwest (Aetolia).

425 Occupation of Pylos in the Peloponnese. Spartans captured. Truce between Athens and Sparta. Invasions of Attica cease. The Acharnians by Aristophanes.

424 Brasidas in Thrace.

423 Peace negotiations; one-year armistice.

422 Armistice expires. Deaths of Brasidas and Cleon outside Amphipolis.

421 Peace by Aristophanes. Peace of Nicias. Fifty-year alliance between Athens and Sparta; breaks down after a year.

417 Ostracism of Hyperbolus. Conquest of Melos. Athenian “war crime.”

415 The Trojan Women by Euripides. Sicilian Expedition. Alcibiades recalled, defects to Sparta.

413 Sicilian Expedition ends in complete disaster.

412 Athenian allies revolt. Alcibiades leaves Sparta.

411 June to September: Council of Four Hundred. Army and fleet at Samos remain loyal to the democracy. Alcibiades rehabilitated, commands fleet. Athenian victories. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Thesmophoriazusae by Aristophanes.

410 Battle of Cyzicus. Full democracy restored at Athens.

407 Alcibiades at Athens.

406 Athenian defeat at Notium; Alcibiades withdraws. Athenian victory at Arginusae; trial of the generals. Euripides dies in Macedon.

405 The Frogs by Aristophanes; in 404 The Frogs is restaged in revised version. Battle of Aegospotami.

405/4 Blockade of Athens. Death of Darius II, accession of Artaxerxes II.

404 Spring: Athens surrenders. Long Walls pulled down.

Summer: Rule of the Thirty. Death of Alcibiades. Death of Theramenes.

403 Spartan garrison at Athens.

September: The Thirty overthrown, democracy restored.

401 Cyrus’s attempt on the Persian throne; killed at Cunaxa.

399 Trial and execution of Socrates.

398 Agesilaus becomes Spartan king.

397 Conon commands Persian fleet.

396–94 Agesilaus campaigns against Persia.

c.396 Antisthenes opens school.

395/4 Anti-Spartan alliance of Athens, Thebes, and others.

395–87 Corinthian War.

395 Work starts on rebuilding Long Walls.

394 Conon defeats Spartan fleet at Cnidus. Battle of Coronea.

393 Conon in Athens.

c.390 Isocrates opens school.

389 Death of Thrasybulus.

387/6 Peace of Antalcidas, the “King’s Peace,” between Persia and Greek states.

387 Plato opens Academy.

386 Old tragedies revived at Dionysia.

c.385 Aristophanes dies. Artaxerxes at war in Egypt.

384–79 Plato’s Symposium.

382 Spartans seize citadel of Thebes.

379/8 Spartans expelled from Theban citadel.

378 Raid of Sphodrias.

378/7 Spring: Second Athenian League founded. Renewal of Athenian power. Athens declares war on Sparta after acquittal of Sphodrias. Agesilaus invades Boeotia. Mausolus satrap of Caria.

After 377 Plato’s Republic.

375 Jason of Pherae becomes ruler of Thessaly.

374 Peace between Athens and Sparta.

374/3 Peace broken.

371 Thebes, led by Epaminondas, defeats Sparta at Leuctra. End of Sparta as a great power.

370 Jason of Pherae assassinated.

370–61 Theban invasions of the Peloponnese. Foundation of Messene.

368 Foundation of Megalopolis.

367 Aristotle joins the Academy.

362 Epaminondas killed in victory at Mantinea.

361 Agesilaus in Egypt.

360 Death of Agesilaus.

359 Philip II rules in Macedon.

357/6 Philip and Athens at war. Athens at war with league allies (Social War).

356 Sacred War begins.

355/4 Athens concedes defeat in Social War.

351 First of series of speeches by Demosthenes against Philip (Philippics).

348 Philip captures Olynthus.

346 Peace between Philip and Athens. Philip defeats Phocis and ends Sacred War. Open letter by Isocrates to Philip.

345–43 Persia regains Egypt.

343 Aristotle tutor to Alexander.

342/1 Philip conquers Thrace.

338 Philip marches down into Greece. Philip defeats Thebes and Athens at Chaeronea. End of Greek independence.

336 Philip assassinated, Alexander succeeds him. Alexander’s first descent on Greece, elected general of the Greeks.

335 Alexander’s second descent into Greece. Destruction of Thebes.

334 Alexander leaves for the Persian Empire.

c.331 Foundation of Alexandria.

331 Alexander wins decisive battle at Gaugamela, assumes the Persian throne.

323 Alexander dies.

322 Greeks revolt (Lamian War), are defeated. Demosthenes kills himself.

286 Athens rebels against Macedon.

146 Roman conquest of Greece.

86 Sulla sacks Athens.

A.D.

c.120–35 Hadrian restores and rebuilds Athens.

1687 Venetians blow up Parthenon.

1801 Lord Elgin removes carvings from Parthenon.

1821–33 Greek War of Independence.

1834 Athens becomes capital of Greece.

For John Brunel Cohen,

my ever-loyal stepfather

—from Salamis to D-Day—

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My warmest thanks go to Roddy Ashworth for his advice throughout and assistance with research. I am greatly indebted to my editor at Penguin Random House, Will Murphy, and to my literary agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, for their guidance and enthusiasm. Grateful thanks are also due to Mika Kasuga, assistant editor at Penguin Random House, for her support. As in the past, Professor Robert Cape of Austin College, Texas, has very kindly read a draft and given me useful comments and suggestions. Professor Sulochana Asirvatham, associate professor of classics and humanities, Montclair State University, has also offered helpful advice. Any errors, of course, must be laid at my door.

SOURCES

The sources for the story of Athens vary in quality and many of them survive only as fragments or as quotations in other books. What we have is mainly related to Athenian affairs, and relatively little is known about the rest of Greece.

Two very great writers dominate the field. The first of these is Herodotus (c. 484–25) from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, in the eyes of the ancient world the “father of history.” The word “history” derives from the Greek term for investigation and his book is the product of his inquiries as he traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean. He describes the various peoples in the region and sets the scene for a comprehensive narrative of the two Persian invasions of Greece in the early fifth century.

Herodotus is essentially a storyteller and he will cheerfully give space to a good yarn whether or not it is plausible. He wrote an epic in prose and the towering figure of Homer lies behind his literary enterprise; he too was concerned with a titanic struggle between Hellenes and an oriental power.

Herodotus describes what he has seen for himself and what he has been told in conversations with apparently well-informed individuals. He is open-minded about different cultures, although he does not always understand the real meaning of what he is describing. However, he recognized the importance of disinterested research and tried to give an accurate record of events. He wrote a generation after the Persian Wars, and so will have been able to gather information from those who took part or at least their close descendants.

If Herodotus is not an altogether reliable guide to what happened, he gives a completely truthful picture of how an intelligent Greek might see the world around him.

By contrast, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 500–c. 399), an Athenian aristocrat, chose another conflict as his subject, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. He believed that this war, closely studied, would be an example to future generations. His history was to be “a possession for all time” and not something “written for display, to make an immediate impression” (in other words, like Herodotus).

He was determined to report events as accurately as possible and took trouble to interview those who took part in them. He is quite exceptionally impartial, exact, responsible, and trustworthy—so much so that he leaves little room for scholarly interpretation. We are obliged to accept what he says (where available, other sources almost invariably confirm his narrative). An innovative feature was his reporting of public speeches given by military and political leaders. While keeping as close as possible to what was said, he wrote what he believed the situation required. Readers must bear this in mind when they encounter quotations from speeches in this book—for instance, the great funeral address of Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.

After a brief summary of early Greek history, Thucydides reports on the rise of the Athenian Empire between 479 and 435. He then covers in detail the first ten years of the war, the Peace of Nicias, the renewal of hostilities, and the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. He takes the story to 411 and breaks off in mid-sentence (presumably overtaken by illness or death).

A number of historians wrote continuations of Thucydides, none of which has survived except for the Hellenica of Xenophon. The book has a certain freshness and directness, but what does not interest the author is ignored. He is heavily biased in favor of Sparta and cannot even bring himself to mention the name of Epaminondas, architect of the Theban victory of Leuctra. He omits some incidents altogether, but was an eyewitness of some scenes in his book which he describes well.

Xenophon’s Anabasis is an exciting narrative of the author’s days as a mercenary in the service of Cyrus the Younger. He was a friend of the Spartan king Agesilaus, and wrote a eulogy of him. He produced numerous other works, including dialogues featuring Socrates and essays on horsemanship, hunting, and home economics. His Education of Cyrus is a curious mixture of romance and documentary.

The main continuous narrative source for the period is the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who flourished in the middle of the first century B.C. This “universal history” is an assembly of summaries of other historians. His coverage of the years 480 to 302 has survived in toto. He is invaluable, but only as trustworthy as the source he happens to be using at the time.

Behind Diodorus and the rest stand the shadowy figures of historians and chroniclers, all of whose books have vanished but who appear indirectly in the writings of their successors or in late epitomes (Theopompus, for instance, or Pompeius Trogus).

The trouble with all these ancient authors is that they concentrate more or less exclusively on military and political affairs. The dismal science of economics had not been invented, nor the more cheerful one of sociology. Little is said of the lives of women or slaves. To gain an idea of everyday life we have to scavenge passing references in all kinds of surviving text.

The biographies and essays of the Greek author Plutarch (c. A.D. 46–120) are not history, strictly speaking, but are gold mines of historical data and offer fascinating insights into the personalities of Athenian and a few other leaders.

Literary masterpieces illumine moral attitudes—Homer, above all, and the epic farmer Hesiod, the Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comic author Aristophanes, and a range of other poets, often represented only by fragments. Speeches by orators and pamphlets, especially dated to the fourth century, are useful political and social documents, but have to be interpreted with caution. The many works of Plato and Aristotle allow us to track the intellectual development not only of Athens, but of Greece as a whole. Two studies of the Athenian constitution were misattributed to Aristotle (probably written by a pupil) and Xenophon, but offer a mass of detail about the democratic process.

Archaeologists have added greatly to our knowledge. Nearly two hundred Athenian state decrees between 478 and 336 and several hundred other administrative documents (for example, building accounts for the Parthenon and records of religious cult activities) have been unearthed, usually inscribed on stone. Ostracism potsherds have been found on which the names of candidates for exile are scratched. Ceramic vessels of great artistry display every kind of interpersonal activity.

For readers who want direct access to the main original materials, the Loeb Classical Library offers the original Greek (or Latin) with translations on the facing page. Modern translations of most of the main texts can be found in Penguin Classics.

Most of the translations are mine. A few are by other hands, usually poetry, of which the most important is E. V. Rieu’s translation of Homer’s Iliad in Penguin Classics. It is my favorite version and for all its flaws it captures the spirit of its great original.

The endnotes that follow identify quotations and particularly important, telling, or controversial scholarly developments. The main sources for each chapter are mentioned, but no further details are given of the authority for specific incidents.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

SELECTED MODERN STUDIES

Barnes, Jonathan. Early Greek Philosophy. London: Penguin Classics, 2002.

Behistun (Bisitun) Inscription, trans. Herbert Cushing Tolman, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1908.

Bicknell, Peter J. “Axiochus Alkibiadou, Aspasia and Aspasios.” L’Antiquité Classique, T 52 (1982), pp. 240–50.

Bloch, Enid. “Hemlock Poisoning and the Death of Socrates: Did Plato Tell the Truth?” Issue 1, Journal of the International Plato Society, University of Notre Dame, 2001.

Burkert, Walter. Greek Religion. Oxford: Blackwell, 1985.

Burn, A. R. Persia and the Greeks, 2nd ed., D. M. Lewis, Postscript. London: Duckworth, 1984.

Bury, J. B. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, 3rd. ed., rev. by R. Meiggs. London: Macmillan, 1951. Still the best narrative history of the period.

Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. 2, part 1, to Vol. 6. Various editors. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971–1994.

Camp, John M. The Archaeology of Athens. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

Cohn-Haft, L. “Divorce in Ancient Athens.” Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 115, pp. 1–14, 1995, London.

Connolly, Peter, and Hazel Dodge. The Ancient City: Life in Classical Athens and Rome. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Crowther, N. B. “Male ‘Beauty’ Contests in Greece: The Euandria and Euexia.” L’Antiquité Classique, Vol. 54, 1985, Brussels, Ghent, Liège, and Louvain.

Curtis, John, and Nigel Tallis. Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia. London: British Museum Press, 2005.

Daiva Inscription XPh, Archaeological Museum, Tehran.

Davies, J. K., Democracy and Classical Greece, Fontana History of the Ancient World. Fontana: 1993.

Diels, Hermann. Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin, 1903, 6th ed., rev. by Walther Kranz. Berlin: Weidmann, 1952 (the editions after the 6th are mainly reprints with little or no change).

Dillon, Matthew, and Linda Garland. Ancient Greece: Social and Historical Documents from Archaic Times to the Death of Alexander the Great, 2nd ed. Abingdon: Routledge, 2000.

Fornara, Charles W. Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War (Translated Documents of Greece and Rome), 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983.

Forrest, W. G. A History of Sparta, 950–192 B.C. London: Hutchinson, 1968.

Forsdyke, Sara. Exile, Ostracism, and Democracy: The Politics of Expulsion in Ancient Greece. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

French, A. The Growth of the Athenian Economy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1964.

Garland, Robert. Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Goldhill, Simon. “The Great Dionysia and Civic Ideology,” eds. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin. Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in Its Social Context. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

Green, Peter. Alexander of Macedon. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.

———. The Greco-Persian Wars. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Hall, Edith. Greek Tragedy: Suffering Under the Sun. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Hallock, R. T. Persepolis Fortifications Tablets. Oriental Institute Publications 92, Chicago, 1969.

Hammond, N. G. L. History of Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959.

Honor, Hugh, and John Fleming. A World History of Art, 7th ed. London: Lawrence King, 2009.

Hornblower, Simon, and Antony Spawforth. Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd ed. rev. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Jacoby, F. Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker. Leiden 1923–64 (for Jacoby online, see Brill.com).

Kagan, Donald. The Peloponnesian War. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003.

———. Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy. Guild Publishing by arrangement with Secker and Warburg, Suffolk, UK, 1990.

Littman, Robert J. “The Loves of Alcibiades.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 101, 1970, Johns Hopkins University.

Meiggs, R., and D. M. Lewis. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions: To the End of the Fifth Century B.C., 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Migeotte, L., trans. Janet Lloyd. The Economy of the Greek Cities, from the Archaic Period to the Early Roman Empire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Morrison, J. S., J. F. Coates, and N. B. Rankov. The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

Murray, Oswyn. Early Greece, Fontana History of the Ancient World, 2nd ed. London: Fontana, 1993.

Overbeck, J., ed. Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Griechen. Leipzig, 1868.

Princeton Encyclopedia of Classical Sites. R. Stillwell and others. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.

Pritchard, James B., ed. Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 3rd ed. rev. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.

Raubitschek, A. E. “The Case Against Alcibiades (Andocides IV).” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, Vol. 79, 1948, pp. 191–210, Johns Hopkins University.

Rhodes, P. J., and Robin Osborne. Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404–323 B.C. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Rubel, Alexander. Fear and Loathing in Ancient Athens: Religion and Politics During the Peloponnesian War. London: Routledge, 2000.

Scott, Michael. Delphi: A History of the Center of the Ancient World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sellars, John. “Simon the Shoemaker and the Problem of Socrates.” Classical Philology, Vol. 98, pp. 207–16 (July 2003), University of Chicago Press.

Sommerstein, Alan H., and David Barrett, trans. Aristophanes, The Birds and Other Plays. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Strauss, Barry S. Athens After the Peloponnesian War: Class, Faction and Policy, 403–386 B.C. London: Croom Helm, 1986.

———. “Thrasybulus and Conon: A Rivalry in Athens in the 390s B.C.” The American Journal of Philology, Vol. 105, No. 1 (Spring 1984), pp. 37–48, Johns Hopkins University.

Swaddling, Judith. The Ancient Olympic Games. London: British Museum, 1980, 2011.

Tod, Marcus Niebuhr, ed. A Selection of Greek Historical Inscriptions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1948.

Waterfield, Robin. Athens: A History from Ancient Ideal to Modern City. London: Macmillan, 2004.

Waters, Matt. Ancient Persia: A Concise History of the Achaemenid Empire, 550–330 B.C. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Worthington, Ian. By the Spear: Philip II, Alexander the Great and the Rise and Fall of the Macedonian Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

———. Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

NOTES

ANCIENT SOURCES, ABBREVIATIONS

Aelian, Varia Historia

Ael

Aelius Aristides, Sacred Tales (Hieroi Logoi)

Ael Ar

Aeschines, Orations

Aes

Aeschylus Agamemnon

Aesch Ag

Aeschylus, Choephori (Libation Bearers)

Aesch Cho

Aeschylus, Eumenides (Kindly Ones)

Aesch Eu

Aeschylus, Oresteia

Aesch Orest

Aeschylus, Persae

Aesch Pers

Aesop, Fables

Perry Index

American School of Classical Studies Digital Collections

ASCSA

Andocides, Against Alcibiades I

Ando Alc

Andocides, On the Mysteries

Ando Myst

Apollodorus, Epitome

Apo

Appian, Civil War

App

Aristophanes, The Acharnians

Ar Ach

Aristophanes, The Clouds

Ar Clo

Aristophanes, The Frogs

Ar Frogs

Aristophanes, The Knights (or The Cavalrymen)

Ar Kni

Aristophanes, Lysistrata

Ar Lys

Aristophanes, Peace

Ar Pe

Aristotle, The Athenian Constitution

Arist Con

Aristotle, Metaphysics

Arist Met

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

Arist Ethics

Aristotle, Poetics

Arist Po

Aristotle, Politics

Arist Pol

Aristotle, Rhetoric

Arist Rhet

Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander

Arr

Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae

Ath

Clemens Alexandrius, Paedogogus

Clem Alex Paed

Cornelius Nepos, Miltiades

Nep Milt

Curtius Rufus, Quintus, Histories of Alexander the Great

Curt

Cyrus Cylinder, trans. Irving Finkel, British Museum

Cyr Cyl

Demosthenes, Against Neaira

Dem Neaira

Demosthenes, On the Crown

Dem Steph

Demosthenes, On the Peace

Dem Peace

Die Fragmenter der Vorsokratiker

( Fragments of the Presocratics), ed. H. A. Diels, Berlin, 1903, 6th ed., rev. by Walther Kranz,

Weidmann, Berlin 1952

DK

Dio Chrysostom, Discourses

Dio Chrys

Diodorus Siculus, Historical Library (NB trans. Peter Green, with Introduction and Commentary, Diodorus Siculus, Books 11–12:37:1, Greek History 480–431 b.c.: The Alternative Version, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2006)

Diod

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers

Diog Laer

Dionysius of Halicarnassus, On the Composition of Words

Dion Comp

Empiricus, Sextus, Contra Mathematicos

Sex Emp

Euripides, Ion

Eur Ion

Euripides, Trojan Women

Eur Troj

Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica

Eus

Fouilles de Delphes, École française d’Athènes, 1902–

Delphes

Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker,

Weidmann, Berlin, 1923ff

FGrH

Greek Anthology

Gr Anth

Greek Historical Inscriptions, 404–323 b.c.,

ed. P. J. Rhodes and Robin Osborne, Oxford 2007

GHI

Herodotus, The Histories

Herod

Hesiod, Theogony

Hes Theo

Hesiod, Works and Days

Hes Works

Homer, Iliad

Hom Il

Homer, Odyssey

Hom Ody

Inscriptiones Graecae,

Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1825–

IG

Isocrates

Isoc

Isocrates, Letters

Isoc Letters

Justin, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus

Just

Lucian

Luc

Lycurgus, Against Leocrates

Lyc

Lysias

Lys

Nepos, Cornelius, De Excellentibus Ducibus Vitae Exterarum Gentium (On Eminent Foreign Leaders), Miltiades

Nep Milt

Nepos, Cornelius, De Excellentibus Ducibus Vitae Exterarum Gentium (On Eminent Foreign Leaders), Alcibiades, Conon, Iphicrates

Nep Alc, Con, Iph

Parian Marble

Par

Pausanias, Periegesis Hellados (Description of Greece)

Paus

Philochorus, Atthis

Phil Atthis

Pindar, Odes

Pind

Plato, Alcibiades 1

Plato Alc 1

Plato, Apology

Plato Apol

Plato, Charmides

Plato Charm

Plato, Critias

Plato Crit

Plato, Epistles

Plato Ep

Plato, Euthyphro

Plato Euth

Plato, Gorgias

Plato Gorg

[Plato], spurious Hipparchus

[Plato] Hipp

Plato, Laws

Plato Laws

Plato, Menexenus

Plato Men

Plato, Phaedo

Plato Phaedo

Plato, Phaedrus

Plato Phaed

Plato, Protagoras

Plato Prot

Plato, Symposium

Plato Symp

Plutarch, Amatorius

Plut Amat

Plutarch, Life of Agesilaus

Plut Age

Plutarch, Life of Agis

Plut Agi

Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades

Plut Alc

Plutarch, Life of Aristides

Plut Arist

Plutarch, Life of Artaxerxes

Plut Art

Plutarch, Life of Camillus

Plut Cam

Plutarch, Life of Cimon

Plut Cim

Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes

Plut Dem

Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus

Plut Lyc

Plutarch, Life of Nicias

Plut Nic

Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas

Plut Pel

Plutarch, Life of Pericles

Plut Per

Plutarch, Life of Phocion

Plut Phoc

Plutarch, Life of Themistocles

Plut Them

Plutarch, Life of Theseus

Plut Thes

Plutarch, Lives of the Ten Orators

Plut Ten Or

Plutarch, Moralia

Plut Mor

Plutarch, Precepts

Plut Pre

Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans

Plut Sayings Spartans

Poetae Comici Graeci,

ed. Rudolf Kassel and Stephan Schröder, Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York, 1839–

PCG

Polyaenus, Strategemata

Pol

Polybius, Histories

Polyb

Pseudo-Lucian, Erotes

Luc

Simonides, Epigrams

Sim Ep

Sophocles, Antigone

Soph Ant

Themistius, Orations

Themist

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Thuc

Tyrtaeus, Fragments

Tyrt Frag

Tztetzes, John, Chiliades

Tzet

Xenophon, Anabasis

Xen Ana

Xenophon, Constitution of Sparta

Xen Lac

[Xenophon], Constitution of the Athenians

Xen Con

Xenophon, Hellenica

Xen Hell

Xenophon, Memorabilia

Xen Mem

Xenophon, Oeconomicus

Xen Oec

Xenophon, On Taxation (de Vectigalibus)

Xen Vect

Xenophon, Revenues (Poroi)

Xen Por

Zenobius, Proverbs

Zen

INTRODUCTION

He took a copy with him Plut Alex 26 1–2 5.

even a woman See Samuel Butler, Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897.

“His descent was like nightfall” Hom Il 1 47–53.

“unquenchable laughter” Hom Ody Il 1 599.

“an obstinate old sinner” Ibid., 8 360f.

“Put me on earth again” For this famous episode, see Hom Il 11 465–540.

“Let your motto be, I lead” Il., 6 207–8.

“donkey who gets the better” Ibid., 11 558ff.

“the daring of a fly” Ibid., 17 570–72.

“Weighed down by his helmet” Ibid., 8 306–8.

“bright eyes” Ibid., 16 645.

“How happy I should be” Ibid., 16 97–100.

“vanished like a wisp of smoke” Ibid., 23 100ff.

“What are you saying?” Ibid., 22 177–81.

“We men are wretched things” Ibid., 24 525–26.

“Men in their generations are like the leaves” Ibid., 6 146ff.

“all the best of the Trojans were dead” Ibid., 12 13ff

1. NATIONAL HERO

The main source throughout is Plutarch’s “biography” of Theseus.

“the eldest land of Ionia” Arist Con 5 2.

“the Athenians from their splendid” Hom Il 2 546–51. If these lines were not interpolated later by some Athenian patriot.

“looked for her high and low” Plut Thes 8 2–3.

“nicknamed the Sow” Ibid., 9 1.

“nice-looking” Paus 1 19 1.

collectors of human tribute arrived I follow the most common version of the famous story of Theseus and the Minotaur. There are variants (see Plut Thes 16–17).

Their queen, Hippolyta These are the Theseus and Hippolyta in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

down into the underworld Apol E 1 24.

“conceived a wonderful and far-reaching plan” Plut Thes, 24 1.

“founded a commonwealth” Ibid., 25 1.

“They are innovators” Thuc 1 70 2.

2. A STATE OF WAR

Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus is the main source, supported by his Moralia and Xenophon’s Constitution of Sparta. Swaddling was used for the ancient Olympic Games.

The Spartan boy was terrified This story is told in Plutarch’s Moralia 234a.

“not so high as to be a landmark” Paus 3 17 1.

There would be an impression Thuc 1 10 2.

“These are our walls!” Plut Mor 210c 29.

a young Spartan was brought up For the section on the upbringing of boys, see Plut Lyc 16 1–18 and Xen Lac 2 1–4.

“of no advantage” Plut Lyc 16 2.

“obey orders” Ibid., 16 6.

“any boy who is caught” Ibid., 17 4

fearsome rite of passage Xen Lac 2 9. Pausanias, writing much later, in the first century A.D., describes a practice of scourging boys so that their blood stains the altar of Artemis Orthia (Pau 3 16 7–11). We are not sure whether this is the same ritual to which Xenophon refers—or perhaps some corrupted version of it laid on for Roman tourists.

“All this education” Xen Lac 2 7.

“The Spartan youths drink” Ath 432f. The poet was Critias of Athens (c. 460–403 B.C.).

Three choirs would perform Plut Lyc 21 2.

“For a good man to die” Tyrt Poem 10.

“Knowing how to take orders” Plut Mor 212c.

about fifteen The exact number is uncertain.

“Come back with your shield” Plut Mor 241f. Literally and laconically or “Either with this or on this,” “this” being a shield and the command “come back” being understood.

Women in ancient Greece For the section on Spartan women, see mainly Plut Lyc 14–15 and Xen Lac 1 3–10.

forbidden makeup Clem Alex Paed 2 11.

“and they did not carry on” Plut Lyc 15 5.

“would fill her with noble sperm” Ibid., 15 7.

“I, Cynisca, victorious” Gr Anth 13 16.

“man-taming,” Plut Ages 1 2.

“like frogs around a pond” Plato Phaed 109b.

“we captured Messene” Tyrt Frag 5 = 4D.

“The Lord of the Silver Bow” Diod 7 12 6.

“Just like donkeys” Tyrt Frag 6.

“ballast for the ship of state” Plut Lyc 5 7.

“In the daytime they scattered” Ibid., 28 2–3.

helots were invited to volunteer names Thuc 4 80, Plut Lyc 28 3.

3. THE PERSIAN MULE

For the description of Delphi, see Pausanias and Scott. The story of Croesus is told by Herodotus. He is one of the main sources for this chapter together with various Persian inscriptions (itemized below) and Curtis and Tallis.

“The highroad to Delphi” Paus 1 55 5.

“know yourself” Ibid., 10 24 1; Plato Prot 343b and Charm 164d–165a.

“The parapets of the first circle” Her 1 98 5–6.

“King Ishtumegu” Nabonidus Chronicle, in Pritchard, p. 305.

Croesus wanted to be sure that Delphi The stories about Croesus, oracles, and the end of his reign are best taken with a pinch of salt. But they do illustrate the importance of Delphi and how the oracle pervaded Hellenic life.

“hard-shelled tortoise” Her 1 47 2 3.

“Croesus king of the Lydians” Ibid., 1 53 2.

“Wait till a mule” Ibid., 1 55 2.

never heard of a mule ruling a kingdom In much the same way, Macbeth had never heard of a wood marching about.

“Cyrus, king of Persia” Nabonidus Chronicle, in Pritchard, p. 305.

Thales of Miletus Bertrand Russell claimed that “Western philosophy begins with Thales.” See Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1945).

argued that the Ionians should unite Her 1 170 3.

“for the Spartans will not tolerate it.” Her 1 152 2.

“without fighting or battle” and “Their faces shone” Cyrus Cylinder 17 and 18, https://www.britishmuseum.org/​research/​collection_online/​collection_object_details.aspx?objectId-327188&partId-1.aspx.

“perpetual seed of kingship” For this phrase and the following quotation, Cyrus Cylinder 20–22.

His enraged mother The story is told in Her 1 214 4. There is another version of Cyrus’s death that has him survive for three days after having been wounded.

“O man, I am Cyrus” Strabo 15 3 7.

“Nothing prevents these couriers” Her 8 98.

“the distance from Sardis” Her 5 54 2.

“1:5 [?] quarts of flour supplied” Persepolis Fortifications Tablets 1285, in Hallock, p. 365.

network of provincial governors This paragraph supposes that Xenophon’s account is correct in the Cyropaedia, a romanticized biography of the young Cyrus—see Cyr 2 1.

“not to meddle with anything else” Xen Oec 4 9.

a government inspector This paragraph is based on Xen Cyr 8 6 4.

“I have enabled all the lands” Cyrus Cylinder 36.

“It is no more than fair” Xen Cyr 8 6.

Babylonian deity, Marduk Cyrus Cylinder 23.

According to Isaiah Isaiah 45 1, 41 4.

As in Zoroastrianism Scholars still sharply disagree about whether the Achaemenids were followers of Zoroaster.

“the man who has respect for that law” Daiva 46–56.

scabbard of Cambyses’ sword Her 3 64 3.

“died his own death” Behistun 1 11.

“When Cambyses slew Bardiya” Ibid., 1 10.

impersonated Bardiya It is possible, some scholars argue, that a substitution ritual was held. According to this, in times of bad omens, a substitute king was temporarily installed, to protect the real king, who went into hiding and reemerged when the omens improved. However, if that is what happened, the fate of the real Bardiya is unexplained. See Waters, p. 75.

“The people feared him” Behistun, 1 13.

“Phraortes, seized, was led to me” Ibid., 2.13.

“man is by nature” Arist Pol 1253a2.

“outlaw, without a tribe or a hearth” Ibid. Iliad 9 63.

A city should not be not too small For this paragraph, see ibid., 1326b2 and 1326b11, and Plato Laws 5 737e, 738a.

“…a little polis living in good order” Dio Chrys Disc 36 13.

“It is a disgrace” Her 5 49 2.

“These ships turned out” Ibid., 5 97 3.

“I understand” and “You have levied” GHI no. 12 = 35F.

4. THE SHAKING-OFF

For the Cylon episode, see Thucydides 1 126 3–12. The main sources are Plutarch’s life of Solon and Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, 5–12.

“Man’s life is a day!” Pind Pythian 8 95–98. I use Maurice Bowra’s version of Pindar’s Odes, Penguin Classics, 1982.

“confidence of the people” Arist Pol 1305a 22–24.

“greatest festival of Zeus” Thuc 1 126 5.

the old temple of Athena This shrine was destroyed by the Persians in 480. Its successor is the Parthenon, but it was not completed until 438.

“In no way can [he] pray to Zeus” Hom Il 6 267f.

the Hellenic population The study of population in the ancient world is a form of higher guesswork. One guiding factor is the number of graves discovered from different periods, but population size is only one explanation of rises and falls. However, there is a scholarly consensus that the population grew at this time even if we cannot say by how much.

“Wealth has mixed up the race” Theog 1 183–90.

“This city is still a city” Ibid., 1 53–58.

“The poor were enslaved to the rich” Arist Con 2 2.

“The tyrant is set up” Arist Pol 5 1310b.

Apparently, the death penalty Plut Sol 17 1.

“wrote his laws in blood” Ibid., 17 3. Scholarly opinion is divided on Dracon. Some have asked whether he existed at all. According to Ath Pol 4, he produced a constitution based on the franchise of hoplites, but this is doubted. Most agree that he produced a legal code.

“someone unjustly plundering him” Ins Graec 13104.

claimed descent from Codrus For the story of Codrus, Tzet 4–5, 170–99.

financial difficulties This paragraph follows Plut Sol 2 1.

“I am not prepared” Sol Frag 13.

“owns much silver” Ibid., 24.

“I know, and the pain” Arist Con 5 2.

elected Eponymous Archon, in 594/93 B.C. Dates are uncertain at this time in Athenian history. Some argue for 592/1, and others for twenty years further on. 594/3 seems the likeliest. The sheer quantity of Solon’s reforms makes one wonder whether he was allowed to serve for more than one year.

a wolf at bay encircled Arist Con 12 4.

“Many evil men are rich” Plut Sol 3 2.

“I have given the masses” Arist Con 12 1.

four economic groups Ibid., 7 3.

the principle of randomness There are divided opinions about Solon’s introduction of sortition for the Archons. Arist Con 8 1 is likely to be right, even if contradicted by Arist Pol 2 1273b–1274a, 3 1281b. Presumably the innovation was repealed by the tyranny; if so, it was reintroduced in 487/6.

a citizen who held back Plut Sol 20 1.

the lawgiver lost an eye Ibid., 16 1.

“And if I spared my homeland” Ibid., 14 5.

“I grow old, forever learning” Ibid., 31 3.

lost island of Atlantis Plato Tim 24e–25a, Crit 113a–121c.

“It so accurately fits” Plut Sol 27 1.

“A man to whom I would pay a fortune” Her 86 4.

“Cyrus learned through interpreters” Ibid., 1 86 6.

“on the knees of the gods” Hom Il 17 514 and elsewhere.

“Have you enacted” Plut 15 2.

5. FRIEND OF THE POOR

The main sources are Plutarch’s life of Solon, Herodotus, and Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens, 13–17.

“I have come as a herald” Plut Sol 8 1–3.

“Let us go to Salamis” Diog Laert 1 47.

“Ajax brought twelve warships” Hom Il 2 557. If the interpolation took place, it has survived in the canonical text, although eyebrows have been raised.

this is not implausible Modern scholars have doubted the story.

“with a boy in the lovely flower of youth” Solon F25, Plut Amat 751b.

“Aren’t you pregnant yet?” Plut Amat 768f.

Achilles is presented as the erastes In other accounts, Patroclus is the erastes, and Achilles the eromenos.

“And you rejected my holy reverence” Ath 13 601A–B.

in neighboring Boeotia, man and boy Xen Con Spart 2:12.

“Here a man solemnly” IG I3 1399.

“There is a certain pleasure” Theog 1345–48.

“I swear by Apollo of Delphi” Insc Graec XII.3 543.

“Barbax dances well” Ibid., 537.

“great friend of the poor” Plut Sol 29 2.

the aged Solon arrived The historicity of Solon’s late appearances has been challenged. There seems to be no solid reason for doubting them.

“You listen to the words of a crafty man” Diod 9 20 3.

“Men of Athens” Her 1 60 5.

“the silliest idea I have ever heard of” Ibid., 60 3–5.

“These were people” Ibid., 1 62 1.

bee-loud Mount Hymettus Hymettus honey is still available in shops today.

“The net has been cast” Her., 1 62 4.

6. CHARIOTEERS OF THE SOUL

The sources for this chapter include Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution and Herodotus. For the agora, see Camp, pp. 32–37. For Harmodius and Aristogeiton, see principally Thucydides 6 56–59 and Athenian Constitution 18.

the famous agora of Athens There may have been an earlier marketplace somewhere else in the city, but if so it has not been found.

“humane, mild and forgiving” and “more like a citizen than like a tyrant” Arist Con 16 2. The policy of Pisistratus recalls that of Augustus, Rome’s first emperor, who preserved the forms and offices of the Roman Republic while in fact exercizing autocratic power as an open secret. One wonders whether he learned from Pisistratus’s example.

He left the constitution and institutions Her 1 59 5.

“Onetorides” IS I31031a.

step-uncle of the Miltiades For the account of Miltiades and the Chersonese, see Her 6 35–36.

centuries before the building was completed The Roman emperor Hadrian brought the project to fruition in the second century A.D.

A hymn to Apollo The quotations come from Hom Hymn Ap 146f and 51–61.

he alone of all the poets Lyc Leo 102.

“A reminder from Hipparchus” For both reminders, [Plato] Hipp 229a–b.

men of very different character Arist Con 18 1.

Hipparchus was younger and flightier Some ancient opinion made Hipparchus the elder of the brothers, but it is more likely that Hippias was.

He sent a state warship For this sentence, see [Plato] Hipp 228c.

“Young man with the girlish looks” Anac 360–63.

“Any man is good” Plato Prot 344e–345a.

“hissless hymn” Bury, p. 204.

Aristogeiton was losing his patience The story of Harmodius and Aristogeiton is told in Arist Con 18, Thuc 6 53–59, and Her 5:55–57.

one of their fellow-conspirators Much the same thing happened before the assassination of Julius Caesar, when Brutus and Cassius saw a friendly senator chat with the dictator immediately after wishing them and their “project” well.

“died no easy death” Thuc 6 57 4.

“Fine warriors and from good families’ ” Arist Con 19 2–3.

The initial contractors failed See Scott, p. 100.

“like eyebrows on a smiling face” Eur Ion 185ff.

“more beautiful than the plan” Her 5 62 3.

“First of all free Athens” Ibid., 63 1.

Cleomenes was a man For the career of King Cleomenes, see Herodotus books 5 and 6 passim.

A pillar was set up Thuc 6 55 1–2.

“high principles and intelligence” Ibid., 6 54 5.

“was still governed by the laws” Ibid., 6 54 5–6.

“Athens, which had been great” Her 5 66 1.

7. INVENTING DEMOCRACY

Aristotle’s Athenian Constitution, 20–22, is a major source for this chapter. Also Herodotus for the main narrative of events.

“A bright light shone” IG I³ 502.

So reads the inscription The inscription survives, but the statues are gone.

“Darling Harmodius” Ath 695b, Skolion 894 PMG.

“Spartan stranger, go back” Her 5 72 3.

revolutionary nature of his analysis The career of Cleisthenes bears a curious similarity to that of Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, who initiated what he intended to be reforms but were in fact a revolution; and who disappeared from the political scene as soon as his work was done.

Cleisthenes invented democracy One of the great challenges facing the scholar is the paucity of information in the literary sources about most Greek city-states: we are well informed about the constitutional arrangements of Athens and Sparta and to a lesser extent Thebes, but of few others. It may well be that some other unknown reformer brought democracy to his polis before its introduction in Athens.