Athens and Sparta

Constructing Greek Political and Social History from 478 BC

Anton Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000445909
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Athens and Sparta has established itself as a handbook to the main topics of Greek history in the classical period. It deals not only with the established areas of political history, but also with some of the most important aspects of Greek social history and historical methods to the main topics of Greek history in the classical period.

1 The Delian League: Its Origins and Early History

DOI: 10.4324/9781003209102-1

Introduction

In 479 BC the city of Athens was in ruins. The invading forces of the Persian king, Xerxes, had forced it to be abandoned in 480. The greater part of its defensive wall and most of its houses were subsequently destroyed.¹ The Athenian sailors who, with other Greeks and under Spartan leadership, defeated Xerxes’ fleet in 480 at nearby Salamis, were men without a city.² In 479 two further Greek victories, at Plataia in Central Greece and at Mykale on the western coast of Asia Minor, spelled the end of the Persian invasion. The Athenians could reoccupy the site of their city, rebuild its perimeter wall and fortify the city’s new port, Peiraieus.³ Allied with eastern Greeks who now rebelled from the king of Persia, Athenian forces went onto the offensive.

Sparta’s attempts to keep command of the naval alliance against Persia were not wholehearted. Following up their success at My kale, the Greeks sailed to assault the Persian force controlling Sestos, on the northern shore of the Dardanelles. However, the Spartan commander, King Leotykhidas, returned home: an Athenian, Xanthippos, led the campaign.⁴ Another Spartan, the regent Pausanias, did lead the Greek fleet with some success against Cyprus (defiantly close to the bases of Xerxes’ best nonGreek sailors, the Phoenicians) and Byzantion (strategically placed to control the importing of corn from the Black Sea territories to mainland Greece) — campaigns probably of 478.⁵ But Sparta acquiesced when, not long afterwards, the eastern Greeks and the Athenians rejected the leadership of Pausanias and his Spartan successors.⁶ With the enthusiastic approval of the eastern Greeks, command of the naval war against Persia was formally given to Athens.⁷

The naval alliance under this changed leadership is called by scholars “the Delian League”; its treasury and meetings (“synods”) were located on the symbolic mid-Aegean island of Delos.⁸ By stages the League was transformed into an Athenian empire. The wealth it generated, and channelled to Athens, helped the spectacular rebuilding of the city: the construction, for example, of the Parthenon and of the gateway building of the Akropolis, the Propylaia, which to contemporary Greeks was perhaps even more remarkable.⁹ In its later stages the Delian League seems to have promoted dēmokratia, the control of cities’ internal affairs by and for their own (male) citizen poor;¹⁰ the subsequent Athenian Empire certainly did.¹¹ But aristocratic and wealthy Athenians profited especially from the League and Empire.¹² The funding by rich Athenians of artistic activities, including the production of tragic and comic drama, was made possible or facilitated by the proceeds of Athenian domination. The Thracian goldmines, possession of which probably did much for the education and leisure of the historian Thucydides, may have been acquired through the activities of the Delian League and later were protected, at least indirectly, by the power of Athens’ imperial navy.¹³ Also, we may suspect that a fertile sense of their own importance arose in Athenian thinkers (even those opposed to dēmokratia and Athenian imperialism) from contemplating the extent of Athenian power and the understandable principles on which open dēmokratia proceeded. It is well known that the influence of these thinkers on later civilisations has been profound: in studying the origins of Athenian rule we are examining the material base of much of European culture.

Reconstructing the history of the Delian League should involve an exercise in self-restraint. We should not claim to have a satisfactory knowledge of the period; for one thing, it contains several years to which we cannot confidently assign a single recorded event. Our most important source of information, Thucydides, set out to describe a later episode, the war which began in 431 between the Athenians and the Peloponnesian alliance.¹⁴ He was taking notes as an adult from that year,¹⁵ had sufficient seniority to be a general of Athens in 424¹⁶ and survived until at least 404.¹⁷ His account of events before 432 is, with important exceptions, brief. At the start of his history he states that events of the pre-war period and earlier were “impossible to discover with certainty because of the passage of so much time”.¹⁸ He adds that certain trustworthy inferences were, on the other hand, possible. The context of these remarks makes clear that Thucydides’ concern here was particularly with the scale of events. But, as it stands, his statement about the obscurity of events embraces more than their scale. Also, it seems to apply to — among other periods — the time of the Delian League: that is, from 477 to c.450.

In his often-authoritative commentary on Thucydides, A. W. Gomme states that the historian’s words on unknowable events “must mean, both in language and logic, ‘Greek history before the Peloponnesian War’, the whole of it”: they must, that is, include the events of the Delian League.¹⁹ Now this is a somewhat depressing conclusion for the professional historian, and Gomme is unwilling to accept that Thucydides himself did mean this. Gomme argues that the unknowable events for Thucydides belonged to an earlier period, before c.510. He implies that if Thucydides had meant that the period of the Delian League was obscure, he would have indicated as much when dealing in detail with the period between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars.²⁰ Gomme, with other scholars, suggests that some of Thucydides’ original words, which would have drastically changed the meaning of the text here, have been lost in the manuscript tradition.²¹ But our manuscripts have no obvious sign of corruption at this point. Sound method requires that we work from the text which survives, failing strong evidence of corruption (such as the existence of conflicting versions of a text in different manuscripts, or of a text which yields absurdity or nonsense). Doing so in this case, we should conclude that Thucydides placed conspicuously at the start of his work a warning about the obscurity of events before the Peloponnesian War.

This conclusion is strengthened by a remark of Thucydides shortly afterwards (I 20 1): “Such I found the events of long ago to be, though it is difficult to depend on all the inferences made here about them.” These “events of long ago”, in the description of which imperfect inference rather than knowledge is involved, include some which belong to 480 and later, as the preceding chapters (18 and 19) show.²² It seems, then, that Gomme is wrong to exclude events after c.510 from consideration here. That Thucydides did not repeat his caveat about the obscurity of events, when he dealt in detail with the decades from 479, should not trouble us. Having made the point conspicuously and repeatedly at the start of his work, he may have expected his readers to remember it.

Thucydides gives a detailed sketch of the precariously describable period 479-436, which includes the entire life of the Delian League, in Chapters 89 to 117 of Book I. What was his purpose in doing so? At I 89 1 he indicates an intention of showing how the Athenians “arrived at the situation in which they grew great”.²³ He then describes the fortification of Athens and Peiraieus, the campaigns shortly preceding the founding of the Delian League, and the setting up of the League itself. Next, he makes it clear (I 97 1) that he is about to describe “what they [the Athenians] undertook in war and in the management of affairs between the Persian War and this one [the Peloponnesian], against the Persians, against their own allies who revolted, and against the Peloponnesians who came into contact with them on the various occasions”. In justifying this digression from his main theme of the Peloponnesian War, he mentions that the inter-war period had been neglected by other writers, with the exception of Hellanikos, who dealt with it “briefly and with inaccurate chronology”. He also states that the digression makes it clear how the Athenians’ domination was established.

When using the writing of Thucydides, or of anyone else, as a historical source, it is important to investigate the author’s purpose. For one thing, the writer’s purpose controls our ability to make arguments from silence. Thus we could not argue, for example, that “there were no striking developments in the internal, constitutional, history of Athens or Sparta between 479 and 436, or Thucydide...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents Page
• Abbreviations Page
• Introduction Page
• 1. The Delian League: Its Origins and Early History
• 2. From Delian League to Athenian Empire
• 3. The Athenian Empire
• 4. Sparta: Her Problems and Her Ingenuity, 478-431
• 5. The Peloponnesian War, 431-404
• 6. Life within Sparta
• 7. Athenian Dēmokratia
• 8. Citizen Women of Athens
• 9. Religious Prophecy at Athens
• Index