The Athenians drew tangible benefits from the possession of an empire. Thucydides places the following words into Pericles’ mouth in the justly famous Funeral Oration:
On account of our city’s greatness all things from all the world are available to us, so that we enjoy other peoples’ products with just as much pleasure as we enjoy our own country’s. (Thuc. II 38).
Athens was the empire’s chief port and marketplace; and here people could buy anything they wanted.
More importantly, the Athenians had the advantage of the 460 talents which came in from the empire each year. In spite of controversy Pericles used the money on the construction of the Parthenon and the Propylaea, the entrance onto the Acropolis (Plut. Per. 12-14) (see Figure 11.1). The building accounts for the Propylaea survive and record how the Hellenotamiai, the treasurers of the League, steered funds towards its construction (Fornara, Nr. 118B). The exploitation of the allies - in what was, as has been suggested, effectively a vast state-run protection racket - paid for the enduring monuments of Athens.
Moreover, during these years philosophers and scholars flocked to Athens. Anaxagoras of Clazomenae, Protagoras of Abdera, Gorgias of Leontini, and many others of the so-called sophists arrived; so did a man from Halicarnassus called Herodotus. Here they found audiences willing to pay for their lectures because Athens - as Pericles describes in the Funeral Oration above - had become a wealthy city in these days, and the Athenians wanted the good things which the wider world had to offer. This included first-rate lectures from the leading thinkers of the day. Likewise, the leading sculptors and artisans arrived because the construction and decoration of, for example, the Parthenon created lucrative opportunities for them.
After humble beginnings in the time of the Peisistratid tyranny (see Box 7.2) the art of tragic drama, buoyed by the general cultural and economic upswing, reached new heights in the fifth century as well. The three greatest tragedians - Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides - produced play after play for the festival of the Greater Dionysia on the southern slope of the Acropolis. They too as Athenians were proud of their city and its institutions, and even if they generally drew their subject matter from mythology, they still found opportunity to praise Athens and the Athenian way of life. In his play Oedipus at Colonus, Sophocles depicts an encounter between the mythological kings of Athens and Thebes, Theseus and Creon respectively. When Creon attempts unjustly to lay hands on Oedipus, who has taken refuge on Athenian soil, Theseus stops him in his tracks with an affirmation of Athenian values and a reminder that Athens stood ready to defend them:
You have come to a city which obeys justice and which does nothing unauthorized by law. You have flouted this land’s sovereignty bursting in here, seizing what you want, and
Using violence. You apparently think that my city is bereft of men or servile. (Soph. OC 913-918)
In this time of prosperity and cultural achievement Athens had confidence in itself and its citizens, and it answered to no one but justice and its own laws.
World History
