Athens’ and Sparta’s respective worlds changed radically in the winter of 413. The Athenians’ attempt to conquer Syracuse, and with that, as noted in the previous chapter, the expedition was shortly to end in catastrophe, especially when a Spartan detachment to Sicily to help the Syracusans proved pivotal in the war. Also in 413 the Spartans installed a permanent fort at Dekeleia in northern Attica. This directly threatened the mining industry at Laureion, but instead of withdrawing from the Sicilian campaign in order to face the new threats at home, the Athenians pressed on when reinforcements arrived from Athens. (We noted in Thucydides’ mention of the eikoste [p. 107], his gripping account of the Athenians’ determination to proceed now with two wars.) In Sicily, however, the Athenians met with utter defeat.

In Aeschylus’ play, performed at Athens in the spring festival of Dionysos in 472 BC, eight years after the battle of Salamis, the Chorus of Persians thus responded to the Queen Mother’s request for information about the Athenians. The language is poetic, but not exaggerated. The play was a tragedy, yes, but it celebrated Athens’ victory over Xerxes, and that victory at sea was won with a fleet made possible because of the rich deposits of silver ore situated in southeast Attica in the mining district of Laureion (Map 2.1).

This passage neatly captures the fundamental link between the abundant wealth in silver that the Athenians had recently recovered from their earth and their rise as a power. That power was explicitly naval, which meant that, unlike land-based powers like Sparta’s, it depended on a huge outlay of money for the building and upkeep of ships and pay for the rowers. The combination of money and ships enabled Athens’ fleet to be the backbone of the successful resistance to the Persians at sea, most significantly in the battle of Salamis, off the coast of Attica, in 480. This turn of events sets the stage for the history of our subject, which begins immediately after the stunning victories of the Greeks in that year and the next.

Now we move to the Peloponnesian War, the first ten years of which is known as the Archidamian War, after the Spartan king and general, Archidamos, who led the first invasion of Athens in 431. In the previous chapter we emphasized the role of the Corinthians, a critical Spartan ally, in the events immediately preceding the war’s outbreak. Corinth used its clout with the Spartans – considerable, not least, because of Corinth’s geographical position at the entry to the Peloponnese, but also because of its wealth and naval power – to garner support for war with Athens, thereby to ensure that the “grievances and disputes” (Thuc. 1.23.5–6) of Peloponnesian League allies translated into a vote for war. We also mentioned Athens’ culpability in infringing the terms of the Thirty Years Peace signed in 446 between Sparta and Athens by sending some ships to fight Corinth at Sybota.

The peace treaty and alliance concluded by Athens and Sparta in 421 were intended to last fifty years. They lasted eight. Even so, Thucydides famously rejected the notion that the Peace of Nikias was a real peace (5.26), punctuated as it was by one of the largest land battles of the entire war (at Mantinea in 418), ineffectual alliances, and renewals of hostilities. He therefore reconstructed the war as one long, twenty-seven-year conflict, an historiographical decision that turned out to have an immense influence. But if we set that aside for a moment and appreciate the perspective most Athenians and other Greeks would have had, a different picture emerges. As with the earlier “Thirty Years Peace” of 446 (which lasted fifteen years), Athens was left with its empire essentially intact, and, freed from the constraints of war with Sparta, could turn to unfinished business and the making of large-scale plans.

When we leave Athens and turn to the coinages minted by the member cities of the arche, we enter the vast, diverse, and highly particularized world of the Greek city-states, each with its separate traditions, its own economic and political interests, and, for those that had the means and incentives to mint a coinage, their own money. Of the approximately two hundred communities known to have been subject to or allied with Athens (in contrast to the many more that were sometimes claimed by Athens), only sixty-eight are known to have minted coins between 478 and 404 BC, that is, roughly one-third. The majority of these were wealthier cities, that is, those that were assessed more than one talent in annual tribute payments to Athens (see Table 3.1). But even among the minting cities, relatively few coined continuously, or even with occasional intervals, from the 470s into the last decade of the century. Many minted only in minor, fractional denominations for one or more brief periods. All of these coinages nevertheless were minted for the practical purpose of serving as currency in the public and private sectors of a city’s economy (plus in a few exceptional cases for export), while enabling the minting city normally to profit from its legal control of this currency, as we shall see. Since initiating a coinage was costly – a city had to procure the necessary stocks of metal and the services of skilled die-cutters and workmen, including slaves – it is understandable that some smaller centers might prefer to use the coins of neighboring cities, especially if the cities were part of a regional commercial network, or in the case of highly traditional agricultural communities to rely on older exchange practices employing agricultural goods. Minting, once undertaken, might be discontinued if it proved economically disadvantageous. And it is important to remember that the closing of a mint did not mean an end to the circulation of the coinage that it had struck; unless called in, the coins, though in an increasingly worn state, might remain in use for decades.