Of the more than nine hundred tragedies that could have been performed in the fifth century at the City Dionysia alone, only thirty-two have survived. Moreover, these do not span the entire fifth century, but were composed roughly between the end of the Persian Wars and Athens’ defeat by Sparta and her allies (on the fourth-century Rhesus see Cropp, chapter 17 in this volume). When Vernant (1988a) speaks of tragedy’s ‘‘historical moment’’ and tries to explain why Greek tragedy ‘‘is born, flourishes, and degenerates in Athens, and almost within the space of a hundred years’’ (25), he ignores the role that chance played in preserving the fewer than three dozen plays that have survived (see Kovacs, chapter 24 in this volume).
Tragedy did not end with Athens’ defeat in 404, nor did it spring full grown from the head of Aeschylus in democratic Athens following the battles of Salamis and Plataea. The sixth-century tyrant Pisistratus and his sons may very well have set the stage for the political and cultural developments of fifth-century Athens. Nonetheless, the series of conflicts between Greeks and Persians culminating in Persia’s defeat in 478 was a cultural as well as historical turning point. Recently discovered fragments of an elegy by Simonides on the battle of Plataea suggest that the feats performed by the Greeks against the Persians quickly became matter for poetry on a level with the heroic deeds of the Trojan War (Boedeker 2001; on Simonides’ poem on Salamis see Plutarch, Themistocles 15). Tragedy, too, recognized the potential of this theme. An early failed experiment was Phrynichus’ Capture of Miletus (Herodotus 6.21.2). Aeschylus was more successful with Persians, whose subject is the battle of Salamis.
Salamis was one of the final engagements of the Persian Wars, but, according to the boast of Athenian speakers in Thucydides (1.74.1), it was the first to show the extent to which ‘‘the affairs of the Greeks depended on their ships’’ - by which they mean Athenian ships. War with Aegina (around 505-491) is said to have forced the Athenians to become seamen (Herodotus 7.144). Athens’ shift in military strategy from hoplites to a large state-owned fleet of triremes was unusual, at least for a Greek city. Given the manpower required by triremes (a full complement was 170 rowers per ship), a fleet of these warships was enormously expensive to maintain. Persia, of course, could finance its fleet with tribute from its subjects (Wallinga 1987).
Ancient writers characteristically attribute innovations to a single individual, and the Athenian fleet is no exception. Seven years after the Athenians helped to repel the first Persian assault on Hellas at Marathon, Themistocles advised the Athenians to use the profits of a newly discovered vein of silver at Laurium in southern Attica to expand their fleet for the war against Aegina. While Herodotus (7.144) says merely that the ships were never used against Aegina, Plutarch is more explicit: Themistocles’ real motive was to prepare a defense against the Persians (Themistocles 4). A leader less shrewd than Themistocles could have anticipated a renewed Persian assault. Only the fortuitous destruction of Darius’ ships off the Chalcidic coast (in 492) had saved Athens from the Persian navy. When Xerxes began the excavation of a canal through the peninsula of Mount Athos around 483 (Herodotus 7.22), he made clear his intention to take up where his father left off, to punish the Greeks who had assisted in the rebellion of the king’s Ionian subjects (contra, Wallinga 1993, 160-61).
Soon after the final battle at Plataea (479), the Spartans abdicated leadership of the Greek alliance formed to repel the Persians. Thucydides says that the allies wanted the Athenians to assume leadership of the alliance and that the Spartans conceded, in part because they wanted to be done with the war against Persia, in part because they were still friendly toward Athens (1.95-96; cf. Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 23-24). The role that Athenian ships and soldiers played at Salamis and their willingness to pursue the enemy in the aftermath of that battle made them the likely candidates to assume leadership of an alliance of Greeks, primarily islanders, against Persian aggression.
In Thucydides’ condensed (and tendentious) account of the approximately fifty years between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, the so-called Pentecontaetia (1.89-118), Athens methodically expands its power and control over its allies. Other sources tend to support Thucydides’ picture. Immediately following the battle of Salamis, for example, Themistocles tried (in vain) to extort money from the island of Andros; he was more successful with Carystus and Paros (Herodotus 8.111-12). Around 476 the Athenians captured Eion and Scyros and sold their inhabitants (non-Greeks) into slavery. Nor was membership in the new alliance, the so-called Delian League, always voluntary. After the capture of Scyros, and not long before Aeschylus produced Persians, the Athenians forced the Greek city of Carystus on Euboea to join the league (around 474-72). Soon afterwards (around 471-65) they prevented Naxos from withdrawing from the alliance (Thucydides 1.98). Not all of the cities of Asia Minor may have been eager to exchange Persian for Athenian control (on Phaselis see Plutarch, Cimon 12).
The Persian threat may not have been dormant in the 460s. The forces the Athenians defeated at the Eurymedon could have represented an attempt by the Persians to reestablish themselves in the Aegean. Perhaps as late as 465 the Athenians routed Persians from the Chersonese, just before the revolt of another ally, Thasos (Thucydides 100.1-3). Diodorus (11.60) implies that Persian military activity was a response to Athenian aggression, although modern scholars are less certain (e. g., Meiggs 1972, 77-79). By the second half of the 470s, however, the line between offensive and defensive operations had been blurred. The war to save mainland Greeks from Persian aggression was increasingly presented as a war of liberation, protracted in order to extend freedom to the Greeks of Asia Minor (see, e. g., Raaflaub 2004, 58-65, 84-89). Regardless of whether the Athenians were justified in extending their power, by the time that Aeschylus produced Persians they had taken the initial moves to transform their alliance into empire.
World History
