The nuances of Spartan politics can no more be observed during the Peloponnesian War than at any other time; with Athens one can, on the other hand, piece together some evidence for the character and problems of war-time political life. The basic context for it was the fact that the entire population of Attika was evacuated to the astu itself (207). On an abstract view this might have been no bad thing, with decision-making in the ekklēsia thus more fully representative of ‘the Athenians’ as a whole than ever before (and ever again), and general political awareness profitably increased thereby. In fact however the outcome seems to have been at best apathy (211) and at worst the development of symptoms of stress and strain within the very fabric of a radical democratic system, now left (as Thucydides, at any rate, saw it: 208–209) with inferior and unstable leaders to guide it through the war; the competence of the dēmos to sustain a consistent strategy was called into question (210), and a gulf began to open between those advising a course of action and those who had the job of implementing it (212).

The Persian and the Greek worlds met along the coast of Asia Minor. There, the Greek (and particularly the Ionian) poleis found themselves, after the fall of Lydia, as the western seaboard of the Achaimenid empire – the dominant military and territorial power of the Near and Middle East. But the Asiatic Greeks never fully reconciled themselves to Persian suzerainty; and their efforts, under energetic and ambitious leaders, to enlist the support of the Balkan and Aegean Greeks in throwing off Persian rule brought the two worlds into direct conflict with each other. The confrontation – chronicled by the West's first true historian, Herodotus – saw the Persians twice beaten back; while at the other end of the Mediterranean the Greeks of Sicily withstood a scarcely less weighty assault from Carthage. See in general Burn, Persia, and Hignett, Xerxes.

The tyrants sponsored by Persia

The Persians no doubt found it easy to deal with a single person in each of the poleis under their control, as well as in accord with their belief in the propriety of monarchy, and few Greeks were able to resist the temptation offered by the position of tyranny or quasi-tyranny which resulted (see Andrewes, Tyrants, 123–4). In the course of Dareios' Skythian expedition, the Greek leaders guarding the bridge over the Danube were invited by the Skythians to remove it; their response was not automatic and was, in the end, negative.

In the immediate aftermath of the Persian Wars, the Athenians showed themselves more eager than anyone else to carry the war into enemy territory and before long replaced the Spartans as the hēgemones of the allied forces; and a new alliance was created to prosecute the war (129–130). Much modern debate centres round an alleged transformation of this Delian League into an Athenian empire (for instance, Meiggs, Empire, ch.9). It is of course clear that practice hardened into precedent as the years went by, and that the Athenians took various coercive measures as they became necessary to ensure their hegemony; it is also clear that the phrase used by the Athenians ‘the poleis over which the Athenians rule’ (e.g. Thuc. V.47.2) is not conceivable in 477, and that allied perceptions of their position changed between then and 431; but it is not clear that Thucydides is wrong to hang his general account of the Athenian empire on the first revolt and largely ignore the detailed mechanisms by which the Athenians ensured their hegemony (134–135). What is important is that it was an Athenian organisation from start to finish (compare VIII.68.4 = 227b, and see M. I. Finley, ‘The fifth-century Athenian empire: a balance sheet’, in P. D. A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker (eds.), Imperialism in the Ancient World (Cambridge, 1978), ch.5).

The acquisition of an empire of course went hand in hand with the emergence of the dēmos in control at Athens itself, a fact of which the demos took advantage.

Of the allies of Sparta, the Boiotians, Corinthians, Eleians and Megarians had voted against the peace of 421 (see 193); in the uncertain atmosphere of the period, the Spartans seem to have attempted to restore the unity between themselves and the Athenians which had obtained at the time of the Persian Wars. The Argives, fearing the Spartans, sought first to ally themselves with Sparta's disgruntled allies, then to bring in an Athens suspicious of Sparta; and ‘traditional’ alignments at once asserted themselves once more – Sparta and her allies (except for Elis and Mantineia) on the one side, Athens and Argos on the other.

202. The problems of peace

One factor which had no doubt encouraged some Spartans to vote for war in 432 was the fear that their allies would otherwise abandon them (and the defensive ring round the vulnerable Spartan politeia disappear); Spartan hopes in 421, however, that they would not be forced to choose between peace with Athens and the satisfaction of their allies, turned out to be ill-founded.

It fell by lot to the Spartans to be the first to give back what they held, and so they at once released the men whom they held as prisoners and sent Ischagoras and Menas and Philocharidas as ambassadors to the area of Thrake to order Klearidas to hand over Amphipolis to the Athenians and everyone else to implement the terms of the treaty as they applied to them.

The archaic period – conventionally the eighth, seventh and sixth centuries – is a uniquely interesting and important era of Greek history. It is also uniquely difficult to study in detail, especially through the medium of a source-book of this kind, chiefly because (as already explained, p. 5) the developments which characterise it were already under way before the appearance of any record, literary or epigraphical, to document them. Already by the eighth century, for example, the Greeks probably perceived themselves as an entity, racial and cultural, distinct from all others (see 1–2); and although the part played by the formation of a shared system of values can often be adequately illustrated (5, 6, 12, 13), it remains extraordinarily hard to make sense of the period and its trends, and marshal the meagre and diverse data in the service of some sort of explanation of what was happening. One theme predominates: the evolution of what was to become, and remain, the characteristic form and expression of Greek society – the polis. (See above, pp. 1–4. There is an excellent discussion of this (problematical) historical development by Austin and Vidal-Naquet, Economy, 49–53.)

At the beginning of the first millennium, Greek communities formed the population of mainland Greece, the Aegean islands, some areas of western Asia Minor and parts of Cyprus (the last two as a result of recent settlement). In the core of this area – Greece, the Aegean and coastal Asia Minor – they lived in small, poor, static communities, with little contact with the rest of the Mediterranean. Five centuries later, the communities of this core of the Greek world were – by ancient standards – wealthy, organised and creative; and similar communities were spread throughout the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

We have so far observed a number of common features of the archaic period – colonisation, tyrants, lawgivers – within the general theme of the evolution of the institutions of the polis, it is essential to recognise, however, that these and other things occurred at different rates (if indeed at all) in different parts of the Greek world, with the result that by the end of the archaic period that world was highly diverse in character. W. G. Forrest writes, for example, of The Emergence of Greek Democracy. Democracy certainly did ‘emerge’, as we have seen (Chs.6–7), in Athens, and in some other places as well (notably in Ionia and Sicily), but elsewhere oligarchy was and always remained a perfectly natural and viable form of government; in certain poleis there were good reasons, internal or external, for prolonging the rule of tyrants into the classical period; many aristocracies survived unshaken either by tyranny or by demands for a wider diffusion of power; and in some parts of the Greek world the primitive monarchies of the Dark Ages continued to exist. (On the role of tyrannies (and oligarchies) in the patronage of ‘traditional’ arts see 29, 72 with n.4.) Admittedly, where social and political development could proceed unimpeded – a crucial proviso – a polis was always defined as the collectivity of its politai, but that said nothing about how, by what means and to what limits, this collectivity was to take on actual political shape.

Just as the creation of the empire was an enterprise of the polis, so the wealth from the empire, public and private, facilitated the visual transformation of Athens by the construction of magnificent sacred and secular buildings and the lavish celebration of the festivals of the polis with their associated dramatic contests (for an early tragedian, Phrynichus, see 105). The artistic and literary achievements of the fifth century are indeed so stunning that it is hard for us to remember that to an Athenian they were an essential and inseparable aspect of the religion of the polis. It is also important to remember that it was the dēmos which chose and paid its architects (as in the accounts for the building of the Erechtheion, see 242 Intro.), the dēmos which channelled the resources of the wealthy into, for instance, the training of choruses for the dramatic festivals (see 144); it was not only the scale of activity which led to advance, but also the fact that for the first time a dēmos was patron of the arts. The contrast with the tyrants and aristocrats for whom Pindar continued to write traditional odes celebrating victory in the Olympic and other games (see 11–12) could not be more striking. For a large selection of texts in translation see J. P. Sabben-Clare and M. S. Warman (eds.), The Culture of Athens (Lactor 12, 1978).

Although Kleisthenes can be seen to have been the creator of many of the cardinal features of radical, participatory democracy in Athens (Ch.7), his creation was in many ways no more than a blueprint for the future, and the development of the system in practice – whether or not as envisaged by him – was left for the fifth century. On one level this was a matter of changes in political attitudes, and consequently in political behaviour, on the Athenians' part, changes hastened on their way by such practical corollaries of the Kleisthenic machinery as the institution of salaries attached to all the new public offices (see 137 and 141); and evidence selected to illustrate the character of public life and politics in the period is presented in Ch.13. But on the purely constitutional plane there was still to come after Kleisthenes a half-century of development, most of it pithily documented in the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. It is impossible to say whether those responsible for each part of the process, known or anonymous, saw themselves primarily as tinkering with the past or mapping out the future; nonetheless the various individual developments did go to make up a more or less coherent and linear evolution, to a point where Athens in the second half of the fifth century displayed a set of political institutions and practices corresponding almost exactly with those which Aristotle – looking back from the fourth century – declared to be characteristic of a democratic constitution (126).

To Sparta one must devote its own chapter; inevitably so, for Sparta was, or became, unique. As successive waves of Greek-speaking peoples migrated down into the Balkans towards the end of the second millenium, most of them simply displaced the previous inhabitants of whatever area they chose to settle in. Hence, in large measure, the eastwardflowing ‘colonisation’ of the Aegean islands and the coast of Asia Minor between c.1050 and c.950 (not to be confused with the later and more organised colonising movement documented in Ch.2). But the Dorians, who by c. 1000 were pressing on down to the southern Peloponnesos and occupying the Eurotas valley, took a different course – to subjugate the population which they found there and to subordinate it totally to their own requirements. Such a policy was not, in point of fact, unparalleled outside Sparta and Lakonia, as we have already seen (19; Austin and Vidal-Naquet, Economy, 65, 86–9), but there is every reason to believe that the problems which the Spartans (or more properly Lakedaimo-nians) thereby created for themselves became in the end uniquely severe – particularly when they took the step of annexing neighbouring Messenia also, in much the same fashion (45); and certainly without parallel was their own course of action once the full extent of those problems had become apparent. Already odd in various ways (possessing, for instance, a dual monarchy: 50), Sparta changed during the seventh and sixth centuries in aspects and at levels so fundamental as to be revolutionary.

Considerable in extent, but still inadequate, the sources which form the basis of our knowledge of ancient Greek history have in many cases survived either by pure chance or for literary reasons unconnected with their historical significance. Within the necessarily restricted confines of a single volume, we have tried both to represent the diversity of the Greek historical tradition and to present what we hope is a balanced picture of ancient Greek society. What we offer is a selection from the selection already created by time and chance, but it is at least a deliberate one. There is of course much that cannot be documented from written sources, and we have tried to draw attention to archaeological and other evidence, just as we have tried to explain difficulties and uncertainties in the written sources. The book has been born from and improved by our own teaching experiences. It is also in its final form the result of prolonged discussion of the parts for which each of us provided a first draft. Traces of our different interests and approaches no doubt remain. We shall be grateful for the comments of our colleagues and above all for those of the students for whom the book is intended to provide, through the medium of their own language, an approach to one of the most absorbing human societies of all time. That the book exists at all is due to a very large extent to the interest and encouragement of the Cambridge University Press. We warmly thank those concerned.

Having taken the decision after the defeat in Sicily to fight on (see 226), the Athenians were remarkably successful; the last years of the war, however, saw the balance of power shifting steadily against them. Internal dissension affected their ability to control the empire (see 235) and the cohesion of the fleet (see 236), culminating in the trial of the stratēgoi who fought at Arginousai (237). Finally, failure to perceive that Persia had definitely decided to back Sparta led to inevitable defeat. But not the least interest of these years lies in the deliberate attempt to preserve homonoia, concord, in the polis (241–243); the fatal mistake of the democracy was perhaps not to realise that the loyalty of the rich was as crucial as that of the poor.

235. Phrynichos and the empire

Given the absolute dependence of Athens on her empire in the last stages of the war (see 215 for the service rendered by Alkibiades in this sphere), it is not surprising that problems arising out of the relationship between Athens and the dēmos in each polis should be prominent in this period, with a dēmos favourable to Athens at Chios and Samos, an oligarchy hostile to Athens at Rhodes, Thasos and Methymna (in this last case with the help of mercenaries, Thuc. VIII. 100); nor is it surprising that the period should evoke reflection on the problems, here attributed by Thuc. to Phrynichos (for whom see 227).

The Greek poleis in Asia Minor soon found that they had to live with powerful empires based in the interior, first Lydia, then Persia; after the defeat of Lydia, Persia indeed controlled the entire seaboard of the eastern Mediterranean, from the Bosporos to Pelousion; the conquest of Egypt and Kyrene in the south and of Thrake in the north soon followed. But the empire which in 490 and 480 set out to conquer Greece was not only vast, it was also from the reign of Dareios onwards relatively highly organised, compared with other ancient empires of the Mediterranean area.

The Greeks were fascinated by Persia (see in general Momigliano, Alien Wisdom, ch.6), and Herodotus (partly no doubt because he was born in Halikarnassos) was able to describe Persian religion and social structure with a fair degree of accuracy; but despite his often accurate perception of the alien nature of Persia (see 99), Herodotus chose to place a quintessentially Greek constitutional debate in a Persian setting (see 89). Greek fascination with Persia did not prevent the perpetuation of substantial ignorance and, during the century and a half in which the two worlds co-existed, endless difficulties over their mutual relationships (see, for instance, 231, as well as 99); and the Greeks never really understood the functions of proskynēsis (obeisance, see 98) or of ‘gifts’ in an absolute monarchy.

As the climax of the interchange of demands and counter-demands which Thucydides represents as filling the period between the Spartan and the Athenian votes for war (181), the Spartans insisted that the Athenians ‘let the Greeks be autonomous’ (see 194a) – in other words, relinquish their Aegean hēgemonia. The Athenians, despite what Perikles is made to say in Thuc. 1.144.2 (194a), had no aggressive objective corresponding to this. It is therefore obvious that whereas the Athenians could have settled for simple survival in the war (see Thuc. I.144.1, II.13.9 and II.65.7), the Spartans needed to win it outright. Unfortunately – for them – they turned out to be ill-equipped to do so, at least during the Archidamian War. The theoretical basis of Peloponnesian strategy was necessarily well known to all concerned (see 183), but since the same must have been true of the Athenian counter-strategy there was every possibility of stalemate unless one side or the other could make a really telling move, or else capitalise on their opponents' mistakes or bad luck. It was undeniably bad luck for the Athenians that in 430 they fell victim to the Plague (196), but the Spartans found no way to take advantage of this, and for the first seven years of the war their basic strategy – annual invasions of Attika (186) – proved increasingly and embarrassingly ineffective.