The fifteen decades which elapsed between the expedition to Sicily of the Athenians during the Peloponnesian War and the war between Pyrrhus of Epirus and the Romans are something of a heroic age in Italian history. It was a time of trial during which the success or failure of communities was constantly at stake, and in which the patterns of the preceding centuries were often obliterated and those which were to endure until the late imperial period formed. The trial took the form of almost unceasing warfare, confused by continuous changing of sides according to a mutable diplomacy and the exigencies of more or less mercenary manpower. Overall, the losers were the already ancient apoikiai, the city states of the Greek diaspora, whose champions, whether leaders from within the body politic or condottieri summoned from the east, all failed to establish their power sufficiently for either their descendants or their successors to share in it. The victory went to the Italic communities, whose elites in this period provided the forebears of long lines of city aristocrats whose tradition endured until the Roman empire. That such continuity came out of this period reminds us that it was no Dark Age. The victors were not usually in a position to despoil or obliterate completely; the fighting was not genocidal. This was partly because the warfare of the time was promoted and fuelled by background social and economic conditions which were tending, despite the dangers of the time, in positive directions: demographically, Italy was regarded at this time as a place with relatively abundant manpower, and the rewards of the integration of local production systems into Mediterranean-wide networks of distribution and consumption were becoming generally more palpable.

In the three quarters of a century between Lysander of Sparta and Alexander the Great – the period covered by this volume – the classical world had expanded and changed spectacularly, above all by the overthrow of the Achaemenid empire. The aim of this Epilogue is to put that, the biggest single change, into historical context.

Much of the present volume may seem to have been, in one way or another, preparation for Alexander the Great, who has himself filled the two preceding chapters. Philip, the subject of chs. 14 and 15, most obviously invites comparison with Alexander. Alexander's army was Philip's and so were its commanders, that is, Alexander's initial advisers. The deification of Alexander had a precedent in Philip's, and Philip the city-founder was, together with the Elder Cyrus, Alexander's likely model. Most important of all, it is arguable that Alexander conquered the Persian empire only because Philip had planned its conquest. (See further below.)

And behind Philip stand some autocrats of an earlier, but still fourth-century, generation. Dionysius I of Syracuse is the prototype (see ch. 5 above). He was a forceful military despot who concentrated power in his own hands and was effective simply by knowing where he was going – the secret of political power and success in all periods and under all forms of government. Both Philip and Dionysius had features in common with yet other fourth-century rulers such as the Bosporan kings of south Russia (ch. 9f) or Mausolus the semi-autonomous satrap of Caria (ch. 8a).

Xerxes and his successors succeeded in consolidating imperial control over Mesopotamia. There is, at least, no explicit record of Babylonian resistance to Achaemenid rule after the revolts in the early years of Xerxes’ reign (CAH iv 73–5, 133–5). Later political disturbances were not matters of provincial reaction, but struggles among members of the Achaemenid dynasty and the imperial aristocracy. Even these left few plain marks in Babylonian texts.

The available Babylonian texts are similar in kind to those from the early Achaemenid reigns, but there are fewer of them. They include few fragments of historiographic texts and royal inscriptions. Most are legal and administrative documents. Among about 1,100 published texts of these kinds from the last 150 years of the Achaemenids, a few are temple records, but most belonged to the private archives of Babylonians – in fact, nearly two thirds of them come from a single source, the Murashû archive (454–404 B.C.) – and, although they record contacts with agencies of the provincial government, they are not documents from the conduct of government as such. What they divulge is limited by the concerns of city-based businessmen. They are conservative in form, almost oblivious to political events, and often enigmatic in their allusions to contemporary institutions. They are a rich source of detail on local conditions, but an episodic source on the history of their times.

MAINLAND GREECE IN ALEXANDER'S REIGN

THE DOMINANCE OF THE CORINTHIAN LEAGUE, 336–330 B.C.

During Alexander's reign the Greek world was controlled by the political system established after Chaeronea, which modern scholars have conveniently labelled the Corinthian League. This was primarily an alliance under the leadership of the Macedonian king, in which all states which had individual treaties with Macedon were organized in a single structure, directed to the war against Persia. The corollary of alliance was peace. All contracting states committed themselves to a wide-ranging common peace, affirming freedom and autonomy for all and renouncing subversion of any participating government. The implementation of these two general aims was in the hands of a council (synedrion) to which all states in the alliance sent representatives. The council made general enactments about the war, prohibiting service under the Persian King, and it policed the common peace, with the ultimate power to declare war against any transgressor, a war in which all contracting states were obliged by oath to participate. It might even act as a court of arbitration, ruling on disputes between member states before they endangered the peace (Tod no. 179). But the executive power was vested in the hegemon, the Macedonian king whose monarchy all states were bound to uphold. Inevitably the system would be geared to Macedonian interests. Sympathetic regimes could expect the support of the synedrion, whereas, if a state antagonistic to the Macedonian king suffered a change of government, it was unlikely that complaints would be effectively voiced.

STYLE AND ICONOLOGY

Greek art in the fourth century B.C. is made up of two distinct strands – one, an external set of stylistic mannerisms derived from the art of the fifth century B.C. and the other, an inner spirit that anticipates the art of the hellenistic period – and it is these two strands, woven together, that give the monuments of the period their particular character.

Greek sculptors of the fourth century, for example, frequently adopted the elegant, calligraphic style of Attic art of the later fifth century as their point of departure. At other times they reached back beyond this style to the serene and balanced style of the Parthenon frieze or to the formal harmony of Polyclitus. These prototypical styles were further developed, naturally, in ways that make works of the fourth century recognizable and distinctive, but a sense of formal continuity with the past nevertheless always remains strong in them. On the basis of certain votive reliefs and grave stelae, in fact, it can even be argued that neoclassicism, that reverence at a distance for the art of the high Classical period as a moment of perfection which can only be emulated because it cannot be surpassed, had its origin in the fourth century. On the other hand, if one looks at the content of fourth-century sculpture, at the attitudes and feelings that it is used to express, one finds a new interest in the personal experience of the individual as an appropriate subject for the visual arts and, with it, a rejection of the more impersonal, group-oriented themes connected with the life of the polis that had been the concern of much of the art of the fifth century.

Thebes’ victory at Leuctra allowed it to attract allies and wield influence in many parts of the Greek world. It moved quickly from a position of relative weakness to become a leading power in Greek inter-state politics, acting in central Greece, Thessaly and Macedon, the Peloponnese, and – briefly – the Aegean. The available evidence of Theban activity in these various regions is very uneven. Information is richest on events in the Peloponnese, because Xenophon, who gives the fullest ancient account of the 360s, concentrates on Peloponnesian affairs to the neglect of other parts of Greece. Even on Peloponnesian affairs Xenophon is partisan in his judgments, both political and social, and also omits major events of the first importance, such as the liberation of Messenia. None the less his account, taken in conjunction with other available evidence, offers a quantity of information on Peloponnesian affairs that we do not possess for other areas. Much remains uncertain even in Peloponnesian history, but even more in the history of other Greek areas in these years.

The opportunities which opened up for Thebes in the aftermath of Leuctra were great and tempting, but not all predictable. In the Peloponnese Sparta had for long done what it could to prevent unwelcome change. Resentment had none the less developed among Peloponnesian states on a great number of issues; some of these were particular matters, such as Elis’ claim to Triphylia and Mantinea's desire to refound her urban centre, while others were wider, such as a wish to create an Arcadian federal state.

When Cyprus and Phoenicia were incorporated into the Achaemenid empire during the later sixth century B.C. they already looked back upon long centuries of trading connexions and cultural exchanges. During the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. both areas, forming part of the Fifth Satrapy (Hdt. III.91.1), had a number of basic problems in common. Both were divided into a number of relatively small, half-independent political units. These polities were long-established monarchies: Salamis, Ceryneia, Lapethus, Soli, Marium, Tamassus, Citium, Idalium, Amathus, Curium and Paphos in Cyprus; Sidon, Tyre, Byblus and Aradus in Phoenicia.

One trend to be observed in the history of both Cyprus and Phoenicia during this period is a continuous conflict of interests between these kingdoms. Again and again local feuds arise from their attempts to extend their own territory at the cost of neighbouring states or to gain domination over the whole area. These conflicts are superseded for short periods by a common policy when the kingdoms unite in their aim to gain greater, if not absolute, independence from their Persian overlord. Such a tendency – which can be observed in all regions of the Achaemenid empire which had strong political and cultural traditions of their own – is more marked in Cyprus than in Phoenicia. The front-line position of the island during the wars between the Greek poleis and Persia more easily prompted attempts to shake off Achaemenid rule.

Cypriot kingdoms and Phoenician city states also confronted a number of similar social problems, not least the process of growing Hellenization with its consequences. Yet despite such common problems and tendencies the traditions and the development of Phoenicia and Cyprus are different to such a degree that it seems necessary to treat both areas separately during most of the period under review.

THE SUPREMACY OF SPARTA

The Peace of Antalcidas had humbled Sparta's enemies and left them impotent, at least for the time being. The breaking of the Theban hold over Boeotia was followed by the refoundation of Plataea (Paus. IX. I. 4), which probably took place at this time rather than after the seizure of the Cadmea, the citadel of Thebes, and it is likely that Thebes was forced into alliance with Sparta (Isoc. XIV.27, Plut. Pel. 4.5). This has been doubted, but the absence of any allusion to the alliance at the time of the Theban negotiations with Olynthus and the trial of Ismenias is not sufficient to prove that it did not exist.

The Corinthian War was over. Now, as she had in 421 and 404, Sparta turned her attention to the conduct of her friends in the war. Her aim (Xen. Hell. v.2.1) was to punish those of her allies who had favoured the enemy and make such disloyalty impossible for the future. The first victims of her displeasure were the perennially restive Mantineans, who had shown their unreliability in various ways. They had evaded military service under pretext of a sacred truce, shown little enthusiasm when they had served, rejoiced at Sparta's military failures and even supplied the Argives with corn. Therefore, in 385, Sparta issued an ultimatum. Mantinea must dismantle her fortifications: compliance would be accepted as retrospective proof of loyalty. The Mantineans refused, and so an expedition was mounted. Agesilaus was reluctant to command, allegedly because of Mantinea's services to his father, so Agesipolis led the Spartan army, even though his father Pausanias had been on good terms with the leaders of the Mantinean people (Xen. Hell. V.2.3).

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.