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

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.

This commentary has two main purposes. First, to give some at least of the help which unpractised readers might want in tackling Iliad 24. Second, to show in detail, over a continuous stretch of his poem, something of Homer's skill and greatness. I have not ignored ‘analytic’ and ‘formulaic’ criticism; and I believe I have learned something from them. But I do not share their assumption that the Iliad is not a designed and significant whole, or not the work of a deeply thoughtful poet who repays close study as much as Sophocles or Dante or Shakespeare. Ruth Finnegan's Oral poetry (Cambridge 1977), and her Penguin Anthology, have made it clear both how diverse and how subtle or reflective oral poetry can be. I have attempted a commentary because that seemed the best way to bring out how variously Homer's art is manifested and how firmly it is sustained; questions of style and expression, as well as of overall structure, have therefore claimed a good deal of attention. I have also introduced more parallels than might be expected from later authors, in order to show how Homer's language, artistry and thought are comparable to theirs. The greatest poet of ancient Greece is too often treated as if he were not a part of Greek civilization.

A word on (1) the arrangement and (2) the limits of this book.