The rule of the Thirty Tyrants in Athens lasted only as long as Lysander retained influence in Sparta. In 403 the Spartan king Pausanias negotiated a peace between the democratic exiles, in control of the Piraeus, and the men in the city (Xenophon, Hellenica 2.4). The restoration of democracy and a general amnesty soon followed. The city’s remarkable resilience may explain why Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, which celebrates Athens, could be produced five years after it was composed and three years after Athens’ defeat. Kirkwood (1986; also Blundell 1993) points to another reason. The play is set, not in the city itself, the seat of bygone imperial power, but in the deme of Colonus, praised in the choral odes for its fertility and bounty. As Kirkwood observes, when Oedipus arrives at Colonus he first asks, ‘‘What land have we come to?’’ and the power Oedipus offers to Theseus in exchange for accepting him as suppliant in the grove of the Eumenides is chthonic power, power in the land itself (1986, 104-9).
The emphasis on the city as a collection of citizens instead of the city as both its land and people marked the beginning of Athens’ naval hegemony and rise to imperial power. When the Athenians took to their ships under threat of a Persian invasion, they fought for a city that existed only in their ‘‘faintest hope’’ (Thucydides 1.74.4). On the final retreat from Syracuse the Athenian general Nicias tried to instill courage in his soldiers - the remnants of the rowers that manned the fleet - by telling them that men make the city, not walls or ships (7.77.7). When an oligarchy was established in Athens, the fleet in Samos became the democracy in exile (8.75).
At the end of his life Sophocles did not reject the city or its democracy. Rather he saw in Athens something more than the sum of its imperial power. In Theseus’ treatment of the suppliant Oedipus we find the return of epieikeia, the prized sense of fairness and justice, which the Athenians had forfeited at Melos and Scione (Kirkwood 1986, 100-103). The poet’s vision proved correct: the Peloponnesian War did not destroy Athens, or the Athenian democracy, or, for that matter, tragedy. All continued to flourish well into the fourth century.
World History
