Whatever the merits, in the eyes of Thucydides (see 227B, end) and others, of the politeia of the Five Thousand, ‘while Athens still depended on her ships and rowers for the maintenance of her empire, a constitution which excluded the thētes from the full rights of citizenship could only be tolerated as a temporary expedient’ (Hignett, Constitution, 279); and by July 410, full radical democracy had been restored – and lasted for the remaining six years of the war (see Hignett, Constitution, 280–4). Then in the summer of 404, however, came the end of the war, and with it another oligarchical interlude, the régime of the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ (244). To some extent it is self-evident that these two counter-revolutions, of 411 and 404, are to be viewed as a pair, deriving from internal (or internally-generated) factors: if disenchantment with the democracy's record, especially in conducting the war, had set in after the Sicilian disaster and played its part in 411, it will have been all the stronger now that the war had been finally lost, and the reduction of the once supreme Athenian navy to a mere twelve vessels (240) will simply have achieved by force what would in any case have come about – the political impotence, for the time being, of the dēmos. The oligarchs, by contrast, were renewed and strengthened by the return, as the armistice required, of a host of exiles, many of whom were doubtless eager for revolution and revenge, and some of whom were undeniably prominent amongst the Thirty.

As we saw in Ch.16 (172, 174), the Athenians had a long-standing interest in the far west. They had entered into alliances with various cities of Sicily and southern Italy, presumably out of a desire to exert some general influence in this important grain-producing area but probably not in any expectation that it would come under their direct hēgemonia. During the Archidamian War however we see the desire for influence turning into a desire for conquest (217), and a consequent feeling that such conquest was a real possibility; so when an opportunity arose to remedy the ‘failure’ of 427–424 it was eagerly seized. Between 415 and 413, with the Peloponnesian War in a state of uneasy truce, the Athenians mounted a second expedition to Sicily – shorter in length than the first, therefore, but incomparably larger in its scope and its (for Athens) disastrous consequences. It is an episode which finds Thucydides' narrative powers, in Books VI and VII, at their zenith, and this chapter can give no more than the barest bones of his detailed account of the despatch, the fortunes and the ultimate annihilation of the Athenian forces. As an explanation of the fiasco he asserts in II.65.11 (see 209, end), written after the war was finally over in 404, that to some extent it was simple military underestimation of the opposition – which was evidently the conventional verdict – but chiefly the fact that back in Athens decisions were made which put domestic political advantage above the interests and requirements of the campaign itself.

The kingdom of Makedonia lay on the northern fringe of the Aegean, set against a hinterland of non-Greek peoples – Illyrians, Paionians and Thrakians. Were the Makedonians themselves Greeks? By the yardsticks which the Greeks themselves recognised (encapsulated in Hdt. VIII. 144.2) the answer is, and was, ambiguous; and so was the role of Makedonia in the Greek world before the second quarter of the fourth century, with kings such as Alexandros I (c.498–c.454) playing a part in the Persian War (114) and Perdikkas II (c.454–c.413) in the Peloponnesian (177, 192) but with no consistent impact upon Greek affairs. A sketchy picture of developments can be pieced together (321), but they were slow. In 359, however, came the accession to the throne of king Philippos II, father of Alexander (III) the Great, and his reign (359–336) marks a watershed, not simply in Makedonian history but in Greek history as a whole. (For the spectacular archaeological finds at Vergina in 1977, including a royal tomb which may well be that of Philippos II, see N. G. L. Hammond, ‘“Philip's tomb” in historical context’, GRBS 19 (1978), 331–50.) His dealings with the Greeks, whom by 338 he had conquered, form the subject of Ch.34; here, first, the texts and documents have been chosen to illustrate the Makedonian domestic background and the influence of Philippos upon it.

Perikles held that all Athens had to do was to retain the empire and to avoid any defeat. (Note the remarks of the Mytilenians on the dependence of the Athenians on their empire, Thuc. III. 13.5–7.) It was not as easy as he supposed, however, to retain control of the empire and simultaneously to fight even a limited war against Sparta, and it is reasonable to surmise that among the Athenians there were those who held that as long as Sparta remained potentially hostile Athens and her empire were necessarily insecure. Did the Athenians, if they made peace after achieving stalemate, have to fear another war in the future when their reserves of men and money were still depleted? Did they have to defeat Sparta before making peace? Certainly attempts were made to tip the balance decisively against Sparta; the recovery of Megara would have achieved this, as well as rendering Attika immune to invasion; and as early as 426, a raid on Tanagra in Boiotia was mounted (Thuc. III. 91.3–6). This was the prelude to a full-scale attempt in 424 to recover Boiotia, which ended in defeat at Delion (Thuc. IV. 76–101.2).

With none of these moves is Kleon associated; his strategy is that of Perikles; his interest in the occupation of Pylos and the capture of Sphakteria (190) and in the recovery of the poleis in Thrake detached by Brasidas (193) is wholly Periklean.

Perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly – because of the different sorts of evidence available – the best-documented, aspect of the archaic period is the process whereby Greeks settled throughout the length and breadth of the Mediterranean Sea, from Spain to Syria and from the Crimea to North Africa. The very earliest settlements were unlike the vast majority of later ones and were trading-posts, emporia, at Al Mina in Syria, at Pithekoussai (on Ischia in the Bay of Naples), perhaps at Sinope and Trapezous on the Black Sea, at Naukratis in Egypt. Al Mina was settled by Greeks before 800, Pithekoussai about 775, some Black Sea sites (and some in the Troad and on the Sea of Marmara) perhaps soon afterwards, Naukratis in the late seventh century. This last emporion was itself unlike the other emporia, as far as we know, since it was a venture in which a number of Greek poleis shared and was established under the control of the kingdom of Egypt. (It is also worth noting in passing that large numbers of Greeks settled in Egypt as soldiers of Pharaoh (see 94).)

Greek apoikiai proper, on the other hand, were self-supporting, self-governing agricultural communities. The literary sources always assume that they were organised ventures of established communities (see 16), but it is an open (and important) question how far the need to send out an apoikia was not itself sometimes a factor in the process of self-definition of a polis.

The last decade of the sixth century was a momentous one in Athenian history. In 510 two generations of Peisistratid rule came to an end, hastened by the intervention of the Spartans (74). In its place, interfactional politics returned, of a type familiar enough in the first half of the century (68–69) but almost forgotten, inevitably, during the period of the tyranny. One of the protagonists, Isagoras, secured a temporary advantage over his rival, the Alkmaionid Kleisthenes, by invoking once again Spartan force majeure (75). But Kleisthenes' riposte – to widen, unprecedentedly, the entire basis of the political argument – was on a different level altogether; and whether or not he himself realised in full the implications and potential of what he then went on to do (76–80), its effect was to mark out these years, for Athens and Attika, as the real pivot between the archaic and the classical periods. The reforms of Kleisthenes, like those of Solon, had their application on several levels, of which the narrowly political, the preoccupation of the ancients themselves (80), is perhaps not the most important. True, the partnership in government between his new boulē (77) and the ekklēsia was to be at the very centre of the evolution of radical Athenian democracy in the fifth and fourth centuries, but it is that extraordinary process itself (charted in Chs.11, 21 and 31) which calls for a more fundamental explanation than the development of constitutional machinery – which is not so much cause as effect.

Thucydides has left us a long account of the immediate antecedents of the Peloponnesian War from 435 onwards, which presumably represents material collected soon after the events; in its finished form, however, his text presents a further complex of factors for consideration, and distinguishes between ‘each side's openly expressed complaints’ and the ‘truest cause, albeit the one least publicised’ (see 165). A further problem is posed by the fact that the speeches which Thucydides attributes to the various actors in the drama are redolent of this allegedly least publicised truest cause (see, e.g., 176); these speeches raise, in fact, in its acutest form the problem of the speeches in Thucydides (see p. 11). It is also necessary to observe that the jokes made about the outbreak of war by Aristophanes and others have hopelessly contaminated the later historical tradition (see, for instance, 180).

In looking at the contrast between the ‘truest cause, albeit the one least publicised’ and ‘each side's openly expressed complaints’, there are likely to be as many different views as there are scholars; one may remark, however, that it is not possible to fuse the two Thucydidean accounts by arguing that the Spartans and their allies were always disposed to go to war with the Athenians and saw an occasion in the complaints made at the meeting of 432. For in 440, the Corinthians had blocked a Spartan proposal to help Samos (see 176) and (apparently subsequently) the Spartans had refused to help Lesbos when it wished to revolt (Thuc. III.2.1); they had also attempted to prevent the split between Corinth and Kerkyra.

Cyprus possesses in the Classical Syllabary a unique system of writing. Except for the Phoenician alphabet used by the Semitic element in the island's population, and for the Greek alphabet on certain coins and in the rare epitaphs of foreigners, the syllabary was in almost exclusive use throughout the Archaic and Classical periods. With two early exceptions (Marium, Golgi), only in the Hellenistic period do ‘digraphic’ inscriptions (with the same or a similar text in both alphabet and syllabary) occur, notably at Paphus and Soli, whose kings were among the earliest Cypriot allies of Ptolemy Soter. The syllabary, in the main or ‘Common’ variant and in the South-Western or ‘Paphian’ repertory, was the vehicle of the Cypriot dialect, the eastern branch of the Arcado-Cypriot group; in some parts of the island, especially at Amathus, the syllabary was also used for the still undeciphered ‘Eteo-Cypriot’ language. The Cypriot dialect and the syllabary are complementary, and (save for Eteo-Cypriot) they are not to be found the one without the other.

Decipherment, based on the Phoenician bilingual of Idalium (ICS no. 220) was ingeniously initiated in 1871 by George Smith, later assisted by S. Birch, and rapidly advanced by Brandis, M. Schmidt, Deecke and Siegismund. By 1876, the Bronze Tablet of Idalium (ICS no. 217; see Plates Volume), complete and very legible, with more than 1,000 signs, had received an established alphabetic text and full commentary, and it remains to this day without a rival as a source of knowledge alike of the dialect and of syllabic usage.

Greek-Egyptian relations before Psammetichus I

Greeks arrived to settle in Egypt in the reign of Psammetichus I (664–610 B.C.). For the period that follows, Herodotus found that Egyptian and non-Egyptian information could be combined (II. 147). Thanks to Greek settlers mingling with the Egyptians, knowledge was now accurate (II. 154). Significantly, no Greek pottery datable to the period between Mycenaean times and 664 B.C. has so far been found in Egypt. Egyptian trinkets, on the other hand, were reaching the Greek world in the eighth century, and a bronze Egyptian jug at Lefkandi in Euboea would seem to date back as far as the ninth. These could have arrived by way of Phoenicia or Cyprus.

Some contact then, even if indirect, there must have been in the disturbed century before Psammetichus I. The Greeks retained some recollection of the Egyptian history of this time. We have seen how the king of Ethiopia and Egypt, who must have been Shabako (c. 716–c. 702 B.C.) in 711 surrendered Yamani of Ashdod, possibly a Greek (above, p. 16). This ‘Sabakōs’ is an historical figure for Herodotus (II. 137, 139) who in the fifth century could get a fair amount of information about the 25th (Nubian or Kushite) dynasty. Shabako's enemy was the delta king Bakenrenef son of Tefnakhte (c. 720–715 ?), whom he eventually captured and burnt alive. Bakenrenef, as Bocchoris, was to figure in Greek imagination, though Herodotus does not mention him. He is celebrated as a sagacious lawgiver in the Egyptian account of Diodorus (I. 45, 65, 79, 94) which derives from earlier Greek writing – probably in large measure from Hecataeus of Abdera, c. 300 B.C.

For the period before about 700 B.C. the chief tools of the historian of Central Greece must be the spade or the map, though a few strokes of ancient pens add a welcome touch of political definition to some events of the second half of the eighth century in stories of colonization and especially of the Lelantine War (CAH III.1, pp., 760–3, and here ch. 39d) which involved not only the cities of Euboea, but southern Thessaly, Megara, Delphi and other states besides.

More importantly, it was about the same time that Boeotia produced in the poet Hesiod our only contemporary literary evidence for the social and political atmosphere of Late Geometric Greece.

Hesiod

Hesiod's life spanned, roughly, the second half of the eighth century, spilling over, perhaps, into the seventh. His father, a trader of Aeolic Cyme, had turned his back on the dangers of the sea to settle on a farm at Ascra on the north-west slopes of Mt Helicon, a miserable village according to the poet, awful in winter and worse in summer, but not perhaps quite so bad as Hesiod's gloom would have us think – at least it was famed in antiquity for its beetroot (Ath. 4D). There Hesiod and his brother Perses were born and there, after their father's death, they fell to quarelling over the estate, a quarrel which prompted that hard picture of the farmer's year and stern sermon on justice, the Works and Days, this around 700 B.C. Somewhat earlier he composed his other surviving work, the Theogony, an account of the genealogies of the gods of Greece attached to the myth of the succession of Cronus to Uranus and of Zeus to Cronus as Lord of the Gods, the backbone of the poem. Of other works we have only fragments.