Behind the decision of Philippos II to attack Persia (see 350), implemented by his son Alexander the Great, there lie both a growing awareness in Greece that it could and should be done and the type of hegemony briefly exercised by Iason of Pherai.

Persian money often seemed in the fourth century to control the Greek poleis like so many puppets (Diod. xv.70.2; Xen. Hell. VII.1.27); there were nonetheless real weaknesses in the Persian position. The post of satrap itself was often in effect hereditary (see Xen. Hell. IV.1.32) and large areas of the Persian empire were actually ruled by local dynasts owing nominal allegiance to Persia. The Hekatomnids, for example, were able to create a virtually independent kingdom in Karia (see 339), and Euagoras ruled Cypriot Salamis from 411 to 374/3, years which included a period of open rebellion from Persia.

The Persian royal house was also sometimes a prey to internecine strife, as in the sequence of events which led up to the attempt of Kyros on the throne (see 252). The subsequent escape of his mercenaries, the Ten Thousand, the invasion of Asia by Agesilaos and the successes of Athens all helped to create an impression of Persian weakness. It may be that this picture is overdrawn (so C. G. Starr, ‘Greeks and Persians in the fourth century B.C.’, Iranica Antiqua II (1975), 39–99; (1977), 49–115), but the important thing is that it existed, and existed alongside Greek resentment of Persian influence.

The wholesale devastation of Attika after the fortification of Dekeleia by the Spartans (see 229) had been something new in Greek warfare; but the years from 394 to 386 saw the devastation of much of the north-east Peloponnesos (even the sanctuary of Perachora in the territory of Corinth was fortified, at some point before 371, see R. A. Tomlinson, Annual of the British School at Athens 64 (1969), 155) and Boiotia was ravaged by the Spartans in the 370s. It is not surprising that such sufferings were accompanied by an exacerbation of existing conflicts between democrats and oligarchs or that the fourth century saw a resurgence of tyranny as a general phenomenon (see 317 Intro.), quite apart from the spectacular tyranny of Dionysios of Syracuse and its aftermath (294–297). Even Athens was now haunted by a fear of tyranny (see 25B).

At the same time, the use of mercenaries (see 257 and 287, also 298) came to be taken for granted, not least in internal strife. A casual notice in Polyaenus (a writer of the second century a.d. on stratagems), relating to the Corinthian War, is revealing: ‘Iphikrates was in Corinth; learning that the opposite side intended to bring in some mercenaries by night from Sparta …’ (III.9.45). These are probably the remains of Xenophon's Ten Thousand (see 252); but with Persian money available, the practice was often repeated.

‘Tyranny’ in the Greek context simply means unconstitutional rule by an individual. Few Greek poleis, apart from Sparta, avoided a period of such rule during the archaic age (even if the date was different in different poleis), and so the temptation to see archaic Greek tyranny as a general phenomenon and to seek general explanations is a strong one. But few of those which have been advanced, from the alleged rise of a mercantile class to the appearance of the hoplite phalanx (for which see 22), stand up to examination.

The source problems are grave: Herodotus preserves much information (even if it contains already a large ‘fairy-tale’ element), but within a chronological framework rejected by most Greek scholars of the fourth century and later (see p.618). Their information, however, must also be treated with caution; Aristotle distinguishes not, as we do today, between tyranny down to the Persian Wars and tyranny of the late fifth century or later, but between the tyrants of his own day and all earlier tyrants; Dionysios of Syracuse (tyrant from 406 to 367) was for Aristotle one of the archaioi tyrannoi (tyrants of old), and it is clear on some points and likely on others that what is reported of archaic tyrants in our sense of the term is heavily influenced by the career of Dionysios.

A few general points may, however, be made.

With the end of the Peloponnesian War and the consequent dissolution of the Athenian empire, the Spartans had a second chance, 75 years after 479, of an unchallenged Aegean hēgemonia. Its implementation, however, and above all that ‘freedom for the Greeks’ which Sparta had claimed to be going to war to restore (Thuc. I.139.3), lay at first chiefly in the hands of Lysandros, around whom some of the trappings of a personality cult had by now arisen (see 249) – though there were others in the Spartan leadership, notably king Pausanias, who found themselves at odds with him in the style and substance of policy-making (see Xen. Hell. II.4.29). At all events, although the 390s saw an intensification of those internal problems – political, social and (in Greek eyes) moral – which while always endemic in Sparta were now to lead directly to her catastrophic defeat at Leuktra (see Ch.28), the period between 401 and 395 found Spartan aims and preoccupations at their most outward-looking for eighty years. Ultimately, though, the desultory Asian campaigning, even in the hands of the strong new king Agesilaos, brought few concrete results – except for the outbreak of the Corinthian War (254).

For a modern study of the period 405 to 386 see C. D. Hamilton, Sparta's Bitter Victories: politics and diplomacy in the Corinthian War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979); his model of Spartan political life is, however, too schematic.

Colonisation and tyranny are not the only phenomena common to many archaic poleis; between the eighth and the sixth centuries these acquired communal institutions which were defined and recorded, a process where the evidence of inscriptions supplements the literary evidence. Whatever form of constitution a polis developed, whether aristocracy, oligarchy or democracy, the rules for its government and for the administration of justice were laid down and known; they could be discussed, justified, attacked or changed and the rule of custom which persisted, whether it functioned well or ill and whether it commanded admiration or its opposite (see 9 and 10), had gone for ever.

Co-operative values

Although Homer always remained the great educational poet for the Greeks, the competitive values which he idealised (though not to the exclusion of justice, see 5 and 9) were clearly not always at a premium in the classical polis. There must have been some development of co-operative values, even though on the one hand a belief in justice, community and rationality (G. E. R. Lloyd, Magic, Reason and Experience (Cambridge, 1979), esp. 264–7) were probably always elements in the mental make-up of the Greeks, and on the other hand the polis continued to provide an arena for competition. Striking early expression of a belief in justice is to be found in a poem of Theognis (see Adkins, Moral Values, 42–3, who, however, exaggerates the contrast with Homer).

The difficulties in the way of characterising changes in the economy of Greece between the fifth century and the fourth are almost insuperable. We possess a great deal of evidence for economic activity in the fourth century; but almost all of it is from Athens and there is no way of telling whether Athens was qualitatively different from other fourth-century poleis or merely larger and better documented. Similarly, we do not know the extent to which practices amply attested in the fourth century were already characteristic of the fifth. In some cases we can see continuity: the position of Peiraieus in the fifth century is already clear (see 159) and is perpetuated in the fourth (276); the mines are already a major factor in individual and collective wealth in the fifth century (see 161) and it is largely accidental that it is the fourth century which provides evidence for their organisation (277). We happen to know of the composition of the substantial estate of the father of the orator Demosthenes, but such estates probably already existed in the fifth century (278). With our knowledge of the chariots maintained by Alkibiades (see 219), it is no surprise to find in the fourth century wealth used for ostentatious display and land mortgaged to raise money not for productive investment but for further display (279–280).

Athens no less than Sparta lays claim to separate treatment and documentation, at any rate from about the last third of the seventh century. But here the reason is different, and altogether simpler: the richness (comparatively speaking) of the surviving source-material from, or relating to, Athens shows us in greater detail than for any other single polis the operation of the factors and developments already outlined (in Chs.2–4) in general terms. And it must be clearly understood that this is a reflection not so much of any real and actual importance of Athens in the archaic period as of the consuming interest of a later age, of men such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Aristotle, in the origins and early history of a city which by then, in its achievements both external and internal, had become something very much out of the ordinary. Little enough of this could have been predicted in the eighth and the seventh centuries, and perhaps not even in the first half of the sixth, when in most respects Athens was seemingly following the trends rather than setting them. We need the benefit of hindsight to appreciate (and dimly enough, even so) just how crucial the sixth century was in bringing Athens and Attika to a point of development – political, social and economic – which, with the stimulus of the Kleisthenic revolution (Ch.7), led on directly to their fifth-century greatness.

The death of Iason of Pherai (318) naturally led to anarchy in Thessaly; this anarchy then encouraged Theban intervention (the Thebans even went on to intervene in Makedonia, see 324); the final result was a Thessaly divided between Alexandros of Pherai (and his supporters) and the rest, a division which provided an easy opening for Makedonia when she began to expand under Philippos II. Theban expansionism in the north had meanwhile also provoked the Phokians in self-defence to seize the treasure of Delphi in order to pay for mercenaries with whom to defend themselves; for a time they dominated central Greece, even becoming involved in Thessaly in competition with Makedonia; but it was the Sacred War between the Phokians and their opponents which Philippos eventually ended in 346, making his entry into Greece thereby.

See in general J. R. Ellis, Philip II (London, 1976), chs.4–8; Hammond and Griffith, Macedonia, chs. 5–21.

333. Anarchy in Thessaly

During this year (369/8) Polydoros of Pherai, the ruler of Thessaly, was poisoned by his nephew Alexandros after being invited to a party; and this nephew Alexandros succeeded him and ruled for eleven years. But having acquired his power illegally and by force he managed the affairs of his empire by adopting the same approach.

In the Pentekontaëtia – the period of almost fifty years between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars – the single most important theme, as regards the interrelationships between Greek poleis large and small, is clearly the one dealt with in Ch. 12: the establishment and history of the anti-Persian alliance, which was in effect the Athenian empire. This organisation can be seen as, and (more important) was at the time seen as, a power bloc in ideological opposition at virtually every turn to the Peloponnesian League headed by Sparta. It was Sparta and Athens, in the van of their respective alliances, who polarised the Greek world between them and who were to fight out the great Peloponnesian War of 431–404 (see Part III); and it was the most intelligent of contemporary observers of that war, the Athenian aristocrat and stratēgos Thucydides, who perceived that its origins stretched back right through the Pentekontaëtia, in the form of the reaction of the Greeks at large to the presence and the potentiality of the Athenian empire – specifically (as he saw it), the growth of Athenian power and the fears to which this gave rise in Sparta (165). So these two elements, separately and in combination, form the subject of this chapter.

It should be noted that the chronology of the Pentekontaëtia presents severe problems. The fullest account surviving, that of Diodorus, is unreliable in this as in other respects (see Meiggs, Empire, 452–7), and Thucydides deals with these years only incidentally, in the form of an extended explanation of how in his judgment the Peloponnesian War arose (Thuc. 1.89–118.2) – an excursus without a single absolute date in it.

As agents for the enforcement of the King's Peace (263), Agesilaos and the Spartans dominated the 380s; and Xenophon describes (Hell. V.2–3) how eagerly they grasped this opportunity for action against Mantineia (see 295), Phleious (291), Olynthos and Thebes (see 268 Intro.), as well as issuing threats against Corinth, Argos and others. Yet already there were signs that the Spartans were as likely to fall victim to their own weaknesses as to anyone else's strengths, with revolution and conspiracy in the 390s (264, 266), and with unprecedented opportunities for wealth and power undermining the chaste austerity of the ‘Lykourgan’ ethos (265). More fundamental still was (267) Spartan oliganthrōpia, literally ‘fewness of men’, an increasingly acute crisis in the always precarious Lakonian-Messenian demographic structure which to some Greek observers had clear moral roots and which was certainly now to have clear military consequences. The 370s saw the rise of two formidable rivals to Sparta in the pursuit of hēgemonia: Athens, with a new (anti-Spartan) Aegean hēgemonia (269), and Thebes, at the centre of a reconstituted Boiotian League (270–272); and for the Spartans and their admirers two centuries of invincibility, in fable and reality, came to an abrupt and shattering end on the battlefield at Leuktra (273–274).

See further: R. J. Seager, ‘The King's Peace and the balance of power in Greece, 386–362 b.c.’, Athenaeum 52 (1974), 36–63.

As we saw in Ch.11, during the first half of the fifth century Athenian political institutions developed from the basic form given them by Kleisthenes to a stage where, from the 450s onwards, they provided the means for the politai of Athens to govern themselves in a fully participatory democracy: ekklēsia, boulē and dikastēria; a multiplicity of boards of officials, great and (especially) small; and close control of all holders of office. This was the institutional structure, documented for us by such sources as the Aristotelian Ath. Pol. But when it comes to understanding how the dynamics of political life and practice animated this structure, the Ath. Pol. has little to offer, and one turns instead to a variety of sources which, when used with care, add to our constitutional facts the further and vital dimension of political insights: Thucydides (149), the Old Oligarch (143), Lysias (144), Plato (141b), and above all – given his access to so much material which no longer survives – Plutarch. Here we can learn of such matters as the mobilisation of political support, and the relationship (at all levels of society) between income, expenditure and political activity. Yet the conceptual frameworks employed by the ancients themselves must always be understood for what they are, too often naive and preoccupied with personalities, and our own notions from the world of organised party-politics must not intrude.

The early years of the fourth century saw a quite remarkable revival of Athenian fortunes. The revival was to a certain extent artificial, occurring with the help of Persian money, and it apparently came to nothing; for despite the fact that from 395 Sparta faced the hostility of Persia and of much of Greece, in 387/6 Sparta became once more, with Persian backing, the hēgemōn of Greece. But Persian money not only, following the provocation of the outbreak of the Corinthian War (see 254), helped the revival of Athens, it made possible the use in Greece of mercenaries on a greater scale than ever before (see Ch.32 Intro, for the link between Persian money and the use of mercenaries in the 360s); it was a group of these mercenaries which first dented the legend of Spartan invincibility (257), a legend finally shattered at Leuktra in 371 (see 273).

256. The intervention of Persia in Greece

By early 393, the initial impetus of the war against Sparta had died away and Persian support for the war-effort was vital. Fresh from the naval victory at Knidos, Pharnabazos and the Athenian Konon, serving with Persia, arrived just in time.

And when those who held the polis of the Kytherians, in fear lest they be captured by assault, abandoned the walls, (Pharnabazos) let them depart for Lakedaimon under truce and himself repaired the wall of the Kytherians and left a garrison and Nikophemos as harmost on Kythera.

Athenian politics and society in the fourth century, when set beside those of the fifth, show many obvious similarities and continuities but also some interesting and important differences. The restored democracy of 403 survived unchallenged until its enforced removal in 322 by Makedonian diktat, but by then it had long been viewed without enthusiasm by the conservative theorists (303) and increasingly changed in ethos and practice from the Periklean ideal: the gulf between advice and accountability (212) widened (314); the methods of practical politics grew less edifying (305, 310); and ordinary men needed financial inducement to join in actively shaping their own lives (304). Yet the inducement appears to have done its work, for in a diminishing citizen-body proportionately more Athenians came to attend the ekklēsia in the fourth century than they had done in the fifth (see M. H. Hansen, ‘How many Athenians attended the ekklesia?’, GRBS 17 (1976), 115–34); a nd in a less generally aggressive radical democracy we find more willingness now to give scope to professionalism and expertise, especially in the crucial sphere of finance (307, 309, 311, 313, 315).

See further: P. J. Rhodes, ‘Athenian democracy after 403 B.C.’, Classical Journal 75 (1980), 305–23.

303. Attitudes to democracy in fourth-century political thought