Other Narratives

Finally, we can construct, albeit patchily, a variety of non-Thucydidean narratives of the period between the wars.

Our knowledge of internal Spartan affairs suggests a number of recurrent themes, but little evolution: problems with their helot population (even before Ithome, 1.128); a lack of any clear leadership, due to various difficulties in the two royal houses (the exile of Demaratos, the disgrace of Leotychidas and of the regent Pausanias, the minority of Pleistarchos and Archidamos); the beginnings of a decline in Spartan manpower (Cawkwell 1983, Hodkinson 1983); a renewed rash of conflict with her allies in the Peloponnese in the 470s and 460s. This last we learn of from a surprising source. Herodotos records an oracle given to the mantis Teisamenos of Elis, prophesying that he would win five important ‘contests’; these were not, as he thought, athletic victories but military ones (9.33; 35): the battle of Plataiai, the battle against the Messenians at Ithome, Tanagra, and (between Plataiai and Ithome apparently) ‘that at Tegea, against the Tegeans and the Argives... that at Dipaia against all the Arkadians except the Mantineans’. These clashes may be linked to developing democratic movements in some of the cities of the Peloponnese as well as to the mischief-making of the Athenian Themistokles, now exiled in Argos but known to have visited other parts of the Peloponnese (Thuc. 1.135; Forrest 1960). Some insight into the nature of Sparta’s leadership can be gained from Thucydides’ account of the Spartan decision to go to war (1.79-87), setting the measured caution of Archidamos against the tub-thumping speech of the ephor Sthenelaidas (‘let no one try to tell us that when we are being attacked we should sit down and discuss matters’, 1.86); the Spartans’ vote was only narrowly in favour of war, but the impression given is that Sthenelaidas’ boorish voice was the dominant one. By contrast, the Athenians are apparently united behind the stance of (the unopposed) Perikles (1.140-4) - who already has the kind of grasp of his city’s resources to which Archidamos aspires.

Of Athens’ internal affairs much more can be said (esp. above, Chapter 17). On the basis of the Aristotelian Athenaion Politeia (supplemented, in particular, with details from Plutarch’s Lives of prominent Athenians), we can construct a narrative both of a series of political leaderships (or of pairings of popular and conservative politicians, e. g., [Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 41) and of a series of democratic reforms - all again intertwined with Athens’ relationships with Sparta and with her own allies. The dominance of Themistokles (a period associated with imperial expansion and an uncompromising approach to Sparta) gives way, especially in the light of Themistokles’ ostracism in the late 470s, to the Kimonian era of further expansion but rapprochement with Sparta. Kimon’s fall, probably in the light of his support of Sparta’s suppression of the helots (see above), leads to a realignment of Athens vis-a-vis Sparta, in particular an alliance with her enemy Argos (reflected in the eternal friendship of Argos and Athens in Aischylos’ Suppliants; cf. Thuc. 1.102), and may have given impetus to the democratic reforms of Ephialtes (462/1). The principles of Ephialtes’ reforms, and an uncompromising attitude to Sparta, were then consolidated in the subsequent years of Perikles’ dominance.

Such a demarcation of the period into distinct political phases and the classification of leading political figures into two opposed camps may, however, have been less clear in reality than on the pages of the Athenaion Politeia. Modern narratives of Athenian politics in the period are often based on a fragile tissue of hypothesis. So, for example, that Perikles as a young man was choregos for (i. e., the sponsor of) Aischylos’ 472 play the Persians (seen by some as a play written in support of Themistokles) is taken as evidence that Perikles was, in some sense, his political successor (e. g., Podlecki 1999: ch. 2). It is by no means obvious, however, that sponsorship should be construed as implying political support (Wilson 2000), that political alignments were ever anything other than shifting and provisional (e. g., Connor 1971), or indeed that the Persians can be legitimately interpreted as a ‘party political’ play (Harrison 2000: chapters 2; 9). Later ancient sources often seem to embellish the contrasts between two leading figures: Plutarch’s picture, for example, of the principled opposition of Thoukydides son of Melesias to the Periklean building programme ascribes anachronistic motives to his characters (Plutarch Perikles 11-14). Occasionally, moreover, we are reminded that our evidence is almost hopelessly fragmentary: the mention, for example, of the otherwise unknown Archestratos as a collaborator (with Perikles) of the democratic reformer Ephialtes should make us wary of supposing that Perikles was somehow the inevitable or natural successor of Ephialtes’ position ([Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 35; cf. 25).

Even the nature of Ephialtes’ democratic reforms is uncertain. It hinges on one short passage of the Athenaion Politeia:

Ephialtes, son of Sophonides, became champion of the people, a man who appeared to be uncorrupt and upright in political matters. He attacked the Council of the Areopagos. First he eliminated many of its members, bringing them to trial for their conduct in office. Then in the archonship of Conon (462/1), he took away from the council all those powers which it had accrued which gave it guardianship of the constitution, giving some to the council of the 500, some to the people and some to the jury-courts. (trans. P. J. Rhodes)

The emphasis on Ephialtes’ incorruptibility and the fact that his reforms were prefaced by attacks on the Areopagites’ ‘conduct in office’ suggests that ‘those powers which [the council of the Areopagos] had accrued’ consisted (but perhaps not exclusively) in the right to conduct the processes of dokimasia and euthynai, the scrutiny of officials before and after their term of office (Sealey 1964, Wallace 1974, Cawkwell 1988, Rihll 1995). An underlying cause may have been a decline in the Areopagos’ reputation following the introduction in 487 of election by lot to the archonship (the Areopagos was made up of former archons; cf. Badian 1971). Other, broader conclusions can also be reached. First, the framing of Ephialtes’ reforms in terms of the removal of accretions is suggestive of a need to represent democratic reforms as conservative. Aischylos’ Eumenides (458), similarly, represents in its conclusion the foundation of the Areopagos by Athena with precisely the limited role (judging homicide) ascribed to it after Ephialtes’ reforms. Second, it should not be supposed that the issue of accountability was - as in contemporary democracies - one that failed to engage the broader public. Their importance is clear, not only from Ephialtes’ subsequent assassination by an Aristodikos of Tanagra ([Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 25: cf. Stockton 1982), or from Thucydides’ report of oligarchic plotting (1.107) - of a party in Athens ‘who hoped to put an end to the democracy and the building of the Long Walls’ - but also from dark references in the Eumenides: the chorus’ prayer, for example, that ‘the growling of factional strife, hungry for evil, never be heard in this city, and that the earth not drink citizens’ black blood’, or that the ‘citizens might enjoy shared pleasures, a unanimity of thought in their loves and hatreds’ (Aischylos Eumenides 976-88). If Aischylos’ dream of unanimity also implied a recommendation to go no further (cf. Dover 1957; Dodds 1960; Macleod 1982), however, or in Athena’s words to ‘make no innovations in the laws’ (681-710), it was not a warning that was heeded. The Ephialtic revolution initiated a wave of subsequent changes recorded by the author of the Athenaion Politeia: the opening of the archonship to the Zeugite class (the third of Solon’s property classes), the introduction of jury pay to compensate the poorer Athenians for lost income, and finally the citizenship law of 451/0, intended to limit the bounty of empire to those born of two Athenian parents (cf. Patterson 1981).

Finally, this account so far might suggest a straightforwardly binary view of the fifth-century Greek world as dominated by two superpowers (and which envisages the fourth century as untidily fragmented in the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War). This is a view that is encouraged by our inevitable reliance on Thucydides (and our own desire for a controllable narrative), and one that was perhaps attractive in the era of the Cold War; it does not, however, adequately describe the reality of fifth-century history. The central events of Thucydides’ narrative of the causes of war could be told from a Korinthian perspective. But from the account of Diodoros and from Pindar’s homages to leading figures of the Greek world, we can see glimmers of yet other perspectives: the Syracusan Gelon’s victory over the Carthaginians at Himera, represented by Pindar as equivalent to Salamis or Plataiai (Pythian Odes

I. 72-80; cf. Diodoros 11.1.4,20.1,24.1-2) and the decline of the Syracusan dynasty from a position of dominance in Sicily at the time of Gelon’s victory (Diodoros

II. 25.5) to moral decrepitude only 14 years later (Diodoros 11.67-8; Asheri 1992); or the jostling for position of the different cities of Boiotia, climaxing in our period in the formation of a federal organization in Boiotia after the Athenians’ expulsion (Hellenika Oxyrhynchia 16). In addition, however, to telling the narratives of other cities, we might also tell different types of narrative: of a new wave of federal organizations (Hellenika Oxyrhynchia 16; M&L 42; cf. Lewis 1992a: 120) foreshadowing those of the Hellenistic period and indicative of our areas of ignorance; of the appropriation of aristocratic ideals by the masses and the erosion of an archaic elite culture (Ober 1989); of the intellectual revolution of the Sophists and medical writers (e. g., de Romilly 1992, Lloyd 1979); of the formation of a Panhellenic cultural identity forged in the Persian wars (E. Hall 1989, J. Hall 2002); or of the sudden expansion in geographical knowledge, reflected in the writings of Hekataios, Herodotos and others (Davies 1992: 25-7). If the Peloponnesian War was, in Thucydides’ words, ‘the greatest movement (kinesis) yet known in history’ for Greeks and Barbarians, that was in part because of these last two developments.

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