INTRODUCTION

Rome was a warrior state. During two centuries of imperial expansion following the second war against Carthage, that is in the last two centuries bc, Rome conquered the whole of the Mediterranean basin, and incorporated the conquered territory and its inhabitants, perhaps one fifth or one sixth of the world's then population, within the Roman state. These victories were bought at a price, paid by hundreds of thousands of men killed in war, and by captive slaves, and by soldiers who owed their victory to training and discipline. Decimation illustrates the point well. If an army unit was judged disobedient or cowardly in battle, one soldier in ten was selected by lot and cudgelled to death by his former comrades (Polybius 6.38). Decimation was not merely a terrifying myth, told to enforce compliance among fresh recruits. Decimation actually occurred, and often enough not to be particularly remarked on (e.g. Dio 41.35 and 48.42). Roman soldiers killed each other for their common good. Small wonder then that they executed military deserters without mercy; or that prisoners of war were sometimes forced to fight in gladiatorial contests, or were thrown to wild beasts for popular entertainment.

Public executions of prisoners helped inculcate valour and fear in the men, women and children left at home. Children learnt the lesson about what happened to soldiers who were defeated. These were the rituals which helped maintain an atmosphere of violence, even in peace.

INTRODUCTION

The imposition of monarchy changed Roman political culture but to a remarkable extent preserved the existing political structure. The first emperor, Augustus (31 bc–ad 14), boasted that he had restored the Republic. This was partly propaganda designed to legitimate his reign, and to obscure his innovations. There was also some truth in it. But why did a monarch restore the Republican constitution? One partial answer is that the oligarchic system of power-sharing had significant advantages for a monarch who wanted the support of aristocrats, but who also wanted to fragment the power of each so that it did not constitute a danger for himself. The maxim, divide and rule, was applied to senators as well as to barbarians. The persistence of the Republican constitutional forms was in the emperors' interest.

But the emperors' self-interest is not a sufficient explanation. Emperors were also constrained by tradition and by the lack of alternatives. Emperors had to delegate power. In choosing generals, judges and provincial governors, they had little choice but to rely in the first instance on aristocrats, and to reward the new men to whom they gave elite positions with the traditional marks of aristocratic status. They also used knights and ex-slaves of the imperial household in a wide range of supervisory positions, but more as checks on senatorial governors than as their replacements. After all, the emperors were conservative not revolutionaries; too much change would have undermined their own legitimacy.

The primary purpose of this volume is to supplement the standard and easily accessible sources of the history of the Greek world from the Archaic period to the end of the Peloponnesian War.

The predominance of fifth-century Athenian inscriptions in the documents translated here is due almost as much to the unflagging willingness of the Athenians to carve their decrees and accounts on marble and to the long and successful excavations in the Athenian Agora as to their intrinsic importance. An attempt, nevertheless, has been made to provide a selection of the more important, or interesting, non-Athenian documents. Here I follow closely and owe a debt to Marcus Niebuhr Tod for volume I of his Greek historical inscriptions and to Russell Meiggs and David Lewis for their expanded and updated successor volume.

Much of the material in this volume derives from secondary authors, particularly scholiasts, ancient scholars who themselves wrote commentaries on the ‘classical’ authors. Mainly, these were men living in Hellenistic times, having access to sources not extant today, and their work, in turn, was quoted (and abbreviated) by scholars who came after them. The scholia (material written by ancient scholars in the margins of texts) to Aristophanes and Pindar provide examples of such mines of information, and the lexicographers of Roman and Byzantine times – e.g. Harpocration in his Lexicon and the compilation called the Suda – provide another.

Greek and Roman history has always been in an ambivalent position in American higher education, having to find a home either in a Department of History or in a Department of Classics, and in both it is usually regarded as marginal. Moreover, in a History Department the subject tends to be taught without regard to the fact that the nature of the evidence is, on the whole, very different from that for American, English, or French history, while in a Classics Department it tends to be viewed as a ‘philological’ subject and taught by methods appropriate to Greek and Latin authors. Even on the undergraduate level the difference may be important, but on the graduate level, where future teachers and scholars, who are to engage in original research, are trained, it becomes quite clear that neither of these solutions is adequate.

One problem is the standard of proficiency that should be required in Greek and Latin – both difficult languages, necessitating years of study; and few students start the study, even of Latin, let alone Greek, before they come to college. The editors recognize that for the student aiming at a Ph.D. in the subject and at advancing present knowledge of it there can be no substitute for a thorough training in the two languages.

The decision to publish a second edition of Archaic Times to the End of the Peloponnesian War has enabled me and the Editors of the Series of which this volume is a part to subject the book to intensive scrutiny. Many errors in the text and indices have been removed, and there has been some augmentation of the material contained in the volume, limited though it was by the need to retain the numeration of the first edition. The typography and format have also been modified in order to produce a better-looking page that will make it easier going for the reader.

I have a number of obligations to others which it is a pleasure to record. I am grateful to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press for their willingness to publish this volume in the second edition. As before, I gratefully acknowledge my enormous debt to Professors E. Badian and Robert K. Sherk for their tireless assistance and salutary criticism. I am also indebted to a considerable number of other scholars for their corrections and kindly criticisms. Of these D. M. Lewis was especially generous and helpful, even to the point of providing me with the appropriate references to IG I. Those errors that still remain are entirely my own, though their number was diminished by a useful list of errata and suggestions presented by Professor D. J. Geagan.

Despite the battle of Mantineia in 418 (see 205), the Spartans and the Athenians remained formally at peace with each other and the Spartans made no attempt to come to the help of Melos (see 206). But the Sicilian expedition clearly induced a majority at Sparta to believe that Athens must and could be attacked and defeated; and this time, there was none of the feeling which had dogged Sparta in the Archidamian War, that she had been guilty of starting the war and therefore enjoyed no success. The exile Alkibiades found a ready hearing and the Spartans moved to fortify Dekeleia in the heart of Attika.

But even after the defeat of the Sicilian expedition, Athens was far from being down; and the Spartans were even now only able to make headway by persuading Persia to provide them with the money for a fleet. The long-term effect of the Spartan offensive was to make Persia once more a major factor in Greek affairs.

See in general Lewis, Sparta and Persia.

228. Alkibiades in Sparta

Choosing exile rather than trial (see 214), Alkibiades arrived in Sparta in the winter of 415/14; he there set out to disarm opposition generated by his earlier activities inimical to Spartan interests and his democratic leanings, and then proceeded to make himself indispensable by terrifying the Spartans with an account of Athenian plans to conquer Sicily, Italy and Carthage and deploy the forces so acquired against Sparta.

I Greek society

The study of the history of ancient Greece is both exciting and infuriating – exciting because of the inherent interest of the way in which Greek society organised itself, and because the members of that society still seem able through their writings to communicate as individuals with us who are the inheritors of much which they created; infuriating because in the course of transmission over two and half millennia much information has disappeared, and because the information which remains often shatters on inspection the first impression of similarity between the Greeks and ourselves.

We hope that the texts and other sources presented here will provide a coherent and comprehensible picture of ancient Greece; certain things, however, need some comment.

The characteristic institution of the Greek world was the polis, a small, independent community consisting of an urban nucleus, or astu, and territory, or chōra. Although a few Greeks chose to spend much or all of their lives away from the place of their birth, for most Greeks existence outside their polis was unthinkable. An exile was prepared to go to almost any lengths to secure his return and if a polis was destroyed by one great power and restored by another, as sometimes happened, the survivors of the destruction returned to re-people their home. If a colony (apoikia) was destroyed, its men were likely to return to the polis which had sent them out.

The economic foundations of Athens, as of all poleis, lay in land, the land of Attika. The Athenians claimed to be ‘sprung from the soil’ (autochthonous), and whatever alternative sources of community supply and of personal affluence might arise, cultivating the chōra of Attika preserved the polis as an agricultural state, and owning a part of it was and always remained the traditional, basic and best source and index of wealth. Yet the foundations of Athens' robust economic position in the fifth century had been set down, by Solon and then the Peisistratidai, principally by fostering the non-landed sectors of the Athenian economy. By about the time of the Persian Wars three interconnected areas were clearly emerging as important: a large and energetic immigrant community (160); a thriving commercial traffic through the Peiraieus (159) – these two linked by a policy of welcoming foreigners, whether as residents or visitors (158); and the optimisation of Attika's supreme natural asset, the silver mines (161). These three areas were still seen as crucial in the mid-fourth century, when Xenophon came to write his treatise Ways and Means (Poroi); in addition he proposed acquisition by the state of a slave labour force (see 277, and Ch.29 in general). The bulk of chattel-slaves were in fact in private ownership, however; and their contribution to the economy was vital (162).