INTRODUCTION: TOPOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

Exposed on the extreme north-eastern rim of the classical Greek, and later of the hellenistic, world, was the Bosporan state, ruled from about 438 B.C. for 330 years by dynasts bearing Greek and Thracian names – Spartocus, Leucon, Satyrus, Paerisades. The ruler styled himself ‘archon of Bosporus and Theodosia’, and ‘king of the Sindi, Toreti, Dandarii and Psessi’, or sometimes ‘king of all the Maeotians’. From the early fourth century B.C. the state comprised the eastern portion of the Crimea (Kerch Peninsula) and the opposing part of the northern Caucasus (Taman Peninsula), separated by the sea current flowing through the then Cimmerian Bosporus (present-day Straits of Kerch). On the Asiatic side in Taman were once five islands in the delta of the Antikeites/Hypanis (now River Kuban); here the Sindi, agriculturally very productive, lay immediately inland of the Greek cities in the lower valley of the Hypanis. In the Kerch Peninsula a native population of sedentary Scythians, and perhaps some remaining Cimmerians left behind from their wanderings of the late eighth century B.C., exploited the area's noted fertility.

The main cities in the area were three in the Kerch Peninsula, Panticapaeum, Nymphaeum, Theodosia, which last was annexed to Bosporus some years after 390 B.C., and three on the islands and in the Kuban delta to the east of the straits, Phanagoria, Hermonassa, and Gorgippia, in the hinterland of which lay the Sindi who were incorporated in Bosporus between 400 and 375 B.C. A number of other small townships flourished by the Bosporus, situated near salt-water lakes or inlets (limans) or under rocky headlands – Porthmieus, Myrmecium, Tyritace, Cimmericum, Acra, Cytaea, and a lost Hermisium on the Crimean side.

Our concern is mainly with the area which today comprises Epirus and north-western Macedonia in Greece, Albania and the Yugoslav cantons of Metohija and Kosovo. Its geographical features have been described in Vol. III.I, 619–24. In ancient times it was inhabited by southern Illyrian tribes and north-western Greek tribes. Our knowledge of them for the period c. 540 to c. 360 B.C. is derived from some fragments of Hecataeus and some passages in Strabo and from the findings of archaeology, especially in Albania. For the subsequent period, 360–323 B.C., there is more literary evidence, and something like a consecutive story can be told. This chapter is therefore divided chronologically into two parts.

THE ILLYRIANS c. 540–360 B.C.

The lakeland area holds a most important place in the south-west Balkans economically and strategically. Three parallel ranges, running north and south, enclose Lakes Ochrid, Prespa, Little Prespa and until recently Malik (now artificially drained); and these lakes, being more than 800 m above sea level, are exceptionally rich in fish and eels. The lowlands afford excellent arable land and pasture, and the mountains are forested and abound in game. Silver was mined in antiquity by the Damastini to the east and the north east of Lake Ochrid. The economic wealth of the area is somewhat obscured today by the fact that it is divided between three countries – the former Yugoslavia, Albania and Greece. Strategically it stands at the main crossroads of the southern Balkans. Communications from north to south, running through this high corridor, are very easy because there are no considerable rivers or mountains to cross.

The fifth century opened with the Persian Wars, which epitomized the superiority over the barbarian of the citizen-soldier, that ideal type which was to flourish in Periclean Athens, the newly dominant city state of Greece. As an institution and in terms of official ideology (as expressed in funeral orations, for example), this ideal was to remain unchallenged until the end of the classical period. In some respects it was even reinforced after the Peloponnesian War by the admission of thetes to the ranks of the hoplites and again, in the time of Lycurgus, by improvement in the military training of epheboi.

In fact, however, the situation was already changing, for although it is true that citizens continued to the last to mobilize without too much reluctance for decisive battles, at other times in the fourth century they were only too ready to entrust their overseas campaigns to mercenaries, to the despair of those who looked back with nostalgia to the days of Athenian greatness and ancestral tradition. The same process was at work, although in varying degrees, in the majority of cities, particularly those, like the Syracuse of Dionysius I and Pherae under Jason, where the power of the tyrant could in this way be increased. It applied even to Sparta, which witnessed a dangerous diminution in the number of its Equals – not to mention the Great King and his western satraps, who were always seeking ‘men of bronze’ to settle their differences for them and to intervene in Mediterranean affairs.

ANTECEDENTS

Higher education had come to Athens with the arrival of the sophists in the third and fourth quarters of the fifth century (CAH V 341–69), in order to meet the demands of a flourishing democracy for excellence in public speaking in Council, Assembly and the jury courts. Protagoras of Abdera, the earliest of these teachers to arrive in Athens, was the first to call himself a ‘sophist’, a term which came to be applied in a more or less loose way also to other teachers of rhetoric who appeared in Athens from abroad during the next two or three decades: Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Ceos, Hippias of Elis, Thrasymachus of Chalcedon, Euthydemus and Dionysodorus of Chios, and a number of others. None of these men spent an extended period of time in Athens, and none had a fixed home there. In the course of their visits, they were entertained at the homes of prominent Athenians, would give public displays of their rhetorical skills, and accepted on an ad hoc basis any Athenian willing to pay a stated fee as their student. Any private home or public place (palaestra, gymnasium, or stoa) might serve as the locale of their instruction.

Unlike the ‘natural philosophers’ of Ionia and of southern Italy, they were not interested in the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake but in preparing their students for a happy and successful life. Young upper-class Athenians believed success to be attained through the art of persuasion, and rhetoric was what the sophists delivered.

FOURTH-CENTURY ATHENS: THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT

Formally, Athens had the same constitution from the tribal reorganization of Cleisthenes in 508/7, or at any rate from the reform of the Areopagus by Ephialtes in 462/1, until the suppression of the democracy by Antipater at the end of 322/1: the oligarchies of 411–410 and 404/3 were brief interruptions, each ending with the restoration of the democracy. The working of this democracy in the time of Pericles has been described in the previous volume. Decisions, on both domestic and external matters, were taken by an assembly of adult male citizens, which by the end of the fifth century had forty regular meetings a year: all topics on which the Assembly pronounced had first to be discussed by the Council of 500, and there were other safeguards by which the Assembly was limited, but any member could propose motions or amendments, or speak in the debate, and decisions were taken by a simple majority. It was not possible for all the citizens to be involved simultaneously in carrying out decisions, as they were all involved simultaneously in making them, but it was possible for them all to be involved in turn. The administration of the democracy was based on a large number of separate boards, usually comprising one man from each of the ten tribes, appointed by lot for one year and not eligible for reappointment to the same board; the scope for competence or incompetence was slight, and the conscientious citizen would serve on several of these boards in the course of his life.

THE MACEDONIAN BACKGROUND

Macedonia had been by the middle of the fifth century a large and populous country:

Thucydides’ summary (II. 99) well describes the kingdom at the death of Alexander I and during Perdiccas II's reign (c. 454–413).

Topographically Lower Macedonia might be described as a three-quarter circle centred approximately on the head of the Thermaic Gulf, which bites a substantial segment from its south-eastern quarter. Framing the alluvial coastal plain is an intermittent circuit of higher land and mountains, behind which a second and concentric ring of smaller plains is broken and confined by taller, more impenetrable ranges.

THE LEADER OF GREECE

The Greek world had long been accustomed to a situation in which there had been two sources of power, Athens and Sparta. The disappearance of Athenian power left the determination of the future to Sparta. Theoretically, the future was clear. The Spartans and their allies had fought the Peloponnesian War for the freedom of Greece and the day on which Lysander sailed into the Piraeus and the demolition of Athens’ Long Walls began was seen as the beginning of that freedom (Xen.Hell. II.2.24). However, the course of the war had inevitably shaped attitudes and aspirations. The simple hope of 431 that all would be well if Athens allowed her allies autonomy had become infinitely complex. It was not only that Sparta had made commitments to Persia which substantially modified the freedom of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The course of the war had produced political changes in many cities which were not easily reversible, and at Sparta itself the effect of success and growing power was to produce a taste for their continuance.

Sparta had serious disqualifications for the role of a leading power, even more for that of an imperial power. Her full citizen population was not more than a few thousand and seems to have been in continuing decline. By the time of the Peloponnesian War, she was already using perioecic hoplites alongside full citizens, and from 424 onwards we find increasing use of freed helots, a group rapidly institutionalized under the name of neodamodeis (new members of the demos).

The sources available for the reconstruction of the exciting developments that took place in Greek medical thought and practice in the late fifth and fourth centuries B.C. are extensive, although in places defective and in places biased. They fall into three main categories, first the extant treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus, second other literary sources, and third the inscriptional evidence, and a summary analysis of each in turn will serve to illustrate both the range and the limitations of the information they provide.

The great majority of the sixty or so treatises in the so-called Hippocratic Corpus date from the later part of the fifth or from the fourth century. The main exceptions are a handful of works, such as On Nutriment, On Sevens and some of the treatises on medical ethics, that show Stoic or Epicurean influence, and one, On the Heart, that is generally thought to be approximately contemporary with the work of the Alexandrian biologists Herophilus and Erasistratus. Even when we discount these few later works, the variety within the Hippocratic Corpus is very great, and the treatises – all of them anonymous – are evidently the work of many different authors representing, in some cases, radically divergent shades of opinion. Whether Hippocrates himself was responsible for any of them is controversial. Although Hippocrates is occasionally referred to in contemporary or near contemporary writers, notably Plato, Aristotle and Aristotle's pupil Meno, the medical historian whose work is excerpted in the papyrus Anonymus Londinensis, they provide only very limited, and in places conflicting, evidence concerning the medical theories and practices he upheld, though they confirm the admiration and respect in which he was held already in the fourth century.

SICILY, 367–354 B.C.

SOURCES

The content of the two books which Philistus devoted to Sicilian history during the five years after the accession of the younger Dionysius is not determinable, though his presentation of the tyrant whom he served can hardly have been unfavourable. Evidence is also meagre on the whole decade to 357 B.C., apart from information about the relations of Dionysius with Dion and Plato. On the other hand, the crusade led by Dion, which liberated Syracuse from tyranny but terminated after three stormy years in failure and death, proved attractive to contemporaries and posterity alike, largely because of his friendship with Plato and the part played by members of the Academy. Contemporary writers tended to be prejudiced in favour of Dion, and most secondary authorities echo this prejudice, but there are also traces of a tradition hostile towards him.

The earliest extant record of his career is provided by the Platonic Epistles, especially the Seventh and Eighth. Although the vexed question of their authenticity has not been satisfactorily resolved, their value as historical evidence is indisputable. If they were not written by Plato himself, the author must have been a contemporary with an exhaustive knowledge not only of Plato and his experience in Sicily but also of his later dialogues and intellectual outlook. Features of these two Epistles indicating the genuineness of their substance are their uneasily defensive tone and the not wholly unfavourable presentation of the younger Dionysius. They are, however, by no means objective.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout Greek antiquity the ownership and cultivation of the land remained fundamental preoccupations at all levels of society, no less during the fifth and fourth centuries than at any other period. The Homeric scene of ‘two men with measures in their hands, quarrelling over boundaries in the shared ploughland’ finds its counterpart in the fourth-century lawsuit between neighbours in Attica concerning flood damage caused by one to the other's property. Instructions in the Athenian decree c. 422 for Demeter's cult at Eleusis, that ‘first-fruits of the harvest are to be offered to the Goddesses according to ancestral custom and the oracle at Delphi’ stem from the same concerns which prompted Hesiod's precept to his brother, ‘Work, so that hunger may hate you and revered Demeter may love you and fill your barn with food.’ If basic preoccupations remained unchanged, the question then arises whether or not agricultural methods and results underwent any transformation in the classical period. If they did, was this in part a response to developments in scientific thought? to increasing demand for food and growing pressure on the land? to progress made elsewhere in the ancient world? or simply to changes in climate and physical environment? If, on the other hand, they did not, was this mainly because there was no need for change, in that increased demand (generally assumed to have occurred) was satisfied by cultivating marginal land, by emigration, or by importing grain? Or, if change was needed but did not occur, was this due to the Greeks’ failure to advance technologically, or to an ingrained conservatism that preserved traditional farming practices even in the face of repeated shortfalls? Or did the proverbial poverty of Greek farmland and the harshness of the climate make further modification of technique impractical before the development of modern farm machinery and fertilizers? Had Greek agriculture already progressed as far as it could?

The central theme of this chapter is the impact of war on the Greek world in the first half of the fourth century B.C. Thucydides described the Peloponnesian War as the greatest disturbance in Greek history, a war that came to affect almost the whole of the Greek world and part of the non-Greek world as well. His verdict was amply verified by subsequent events.

Not every Greek state was affected at once or to the same degree. The central Peloponnese, for example, was largely unscathed, and Elis was in a flourishing condition at the time of the Spartan invasion of c. 402 (Xen. Hell. III.2.21–31). Boeotia as a whole suffered only one abortive Athenian invasion in 424. In the Decelean War the Thebans enriched themselves on the plunder of Attica and acquired many of the runaway Athenian slaves (Hell. Oxy. XVII (XII). 3–5). The impact of the war on the society and economy of the two protagonists differed strikingly. Sparta's victory, and the role she chose to play in Greek affairs after 404, placed strains on her society which she could not withstand. Whereas the fifth-century Athenian empire had spread prosperity through all classes of Athenian society, and thus helped to cement political and social stability, the Spartan empire aggravated internal tensions and inequalities in Sparta. The gap between Sparta's ambitions, and the resources available to her, seemed dangerously wide. Sparta's decline in the fourth century, within little over a generation after her victory, followed as a long-term consequence of that victory.

Any synthesis of Europe north of the Alps in the first half of the first millennium B.C. is conditioned by imbalances in the archaeological record. Much of the evidence is derived from cemeteries with specialized inventories of grave-goods, or from high-status fortified sites of exceptional character and function, rather than from a full spectrum of settlement or material remains. Even these data are unequally distributed regionally, or at any rate unequally studied, and not equally represented in successive chronological phases. The effect of this imbalance and discontinuity of evidence can be the creation of artificial horizons, which may be used to justify historical episodes or socio-economic climaxes, and which compound a tendency towards a ‘selected highlights’ view of European prehistory.

The classification and chronology of later prehistoric Europe is still largely based upon the system devised by Reinecke at the beginning of the century, named after the Alpine type-sites of Hallstatt and La Tène. In Reinecke's scheme, Hallstatt A and B equate with the Older and Younger phases respectively of the Urnfield Culture, in absolute terms spanning the twelfth to eighth centuries B.C., whilst Hallstatt C and D, dating from later eighth to early sixth, are generally recognized as the first Iron Age in central and western Europe. The system is essentially a Central European one, with important transalpine correlations, and it has been developed in large measure from the concentration of systematic research on the rich cemetery assemblages in these regions. West of the Rhine, in both Urnfield and Iron Hallstatt phases, the cemetery inventories show a more limited range of types, with fewer examples that could be regarded as diagnostic of the Central European culture, and local regional variants that progressively lend assemblages a distinctively Atlantic aspect.

PARLIAMENTARY DEMOCRACY IN INDIA

There has been a basic tension in the post-Independence political order, arising in part out of features of the Indian Constitution itself, between authoritarian and democratic tendencies. These in turn overlap with the tension between forces favoring centralization and those favoring decentralization. During the Nehru era, a balance was struck between these opposing tendencies and forces. British parliamentary conventions were adapted to Indian extra-parliamentary practices.

Although the Center's supremacy was rarely challenged, politics in the states were largely autonomous. The exercise of direct political control of state government and politics from the Center was quite infrequent. Indian parliamentarism functioned freely, openly, and competitively. A balance was also struck between the use of extra-constitutional methods by opposition groups and the state's use of extraordinary powers such as laws permitting preventive detention.

Since Nehru's death, the succession crisis that followed, the imposition of the Emergency regime of 1975-77, increasing difficulties faced by national political leaders in aggregating power throughout this vast country and maintaining it for long, and the recent rise of violent and terrorist movements have unsettled the balance. The use of violence by protest groups has become more common as has the state's use of extreme force. Although Emergency rule was followed by the defeat of Mrs. Gandhi and the restoration of normalcy, the armory of coercive powers available to the state for use against its citizens remained very great and has been reinforced in recent years with the passage of new legislation providing extraordinary powers to the state and limiting those of its citizens in areas where violent secessionist movements are in progress. The use of coercive state powers has increased during the past decade and there has been as well a great growth in the number, size, and deployment of various police and semi-military forces to quell domestic disorder and suppress political dissent. In the process, the autonomy of state politics has been further eroded and the balance of powers in India's federal system has shifted to the Center.

Hindu nationalism, Muslim separatism, and secularism, the official ideology of the Indian National Congress during the nationalist movement and of the Indian state since Independence, have existed side by side in Indian politics since the late nineteenth century. Although the three ideologies and the political organizations and movements they have spawned from time to time have always been perceived as mutually antagonistic, they have shared common goals. Before Independence, they all sought to unite either the entire population of the country or one of the two largest segments of it into united wholes to contest for power at the center of the Indian political system. Moreover, these are the only possible bases for uniting the vast heterogeneous populations of the Indian subcontinent, divided amongst language, caste, tribal, religious sectarian, and many other groupings.

Hindu nationalism has offered the prospect of uniting the country around the idea that all those who consider themselves “Hindus,” whatever their sect, language, or caste are joined in fact by systems of beliefs, philosophical principles, and rituals going back to the Vedas, that they share a common history preceding both the British and the Muslim invasions, and that, as the “majority” population of the country, their beliefs and history ought to provide the ideological basis for an Indian state properly conceived as a Hindu state. Muslim separatists took the position that all the Muslims of South Asia constituted one nation different from the Hindus and that the two nations could only live together as equals, sharing power in a single state, or they would have to part and live in separate states. Secular nationalists argued that these very differences emphasized the need to remove religion and sense of community from the center of Indian politics and to establish the independent Indian state as a neutral force standing above these two antagonistic forces, preventing them from tearing each other and the Indian state apart, and recognizing all citizens of India, Hindus, Muslims, and others, as entitled to equal rights as individuals without reference to their religion or communal affiliation.