The fifth century b. c.e. is the first period of Greek history known fully from written texts. Herodotus of Halicarnassus recorded the events of the early fifth century in his "Inquiries" ("Historia" in Greek), which mainly focused on the rise of Persia and the events leading up to, and through, the Persian Invasions. These "Inquiries" are considered to be the earliest purely historical narratives in the European tradition (as opposed to the more fanciful "histories" preserved in Homer), and thus Herodotus has been dubbed the Father of History. The period following, from the retreat of the Persians and the rise of the Athenian Empire until the middle of the Peloponnesian War, was recorded by Herodotus's protege Thucydides, an Athenian general who wound up in exile in Sparta. The end of the Peloponnesian War and the events following it in the fourth century were preserved by Xenophon, who also wrote about the Persian royal family. These data are augmented by other written sources, such as epigraphy, plays, and philosophical works referring to the events of this period.
This bounty of written material is a great aid to historians, who no longer find themselves trying to extrapolate civic ideology from, say, the study of the tripods. However, the written histories are never as simple and clear-cut as they appear, and they must be used in conjunction with other sources of data, as well as with a lot of reading between the lines.
For one thing, the majority of written records from the fifth century come from Athens. This gives a rather biased slant to the accounts, especially those concerning Athenian relations with Persia and Sparta. We get no sense of the Spartan, Theban, and Corinthian points of view, except for what the Athenians may have chosen to invent or propagandize for their own purposes. Likewise, by the middle of the fifth century, it was considered impolite to write about women, especially those still alive. As almost no women, and certainly no Athenian women, wrote during this period, this can make it rather difficult to get accurate written information about one-half of the people under study. Finally, Greek historians generally only wrote about "important and interesting" events, tending to exclude the day-to-day activities that form the matrix in which the "important and interesting" events took place. To study the Greeks of the fifth century b. c.e., then, and not just their wars or their ambassadorial embassies, other sources of data are needed.
For this reason, historians augment their study of Greek texts with art, archaeology, and epigraphy. Sometimes these alternate sources confirm the written records, such as the inscriptions that honor those Athenians killed at the Battle of Marathon. Sometimes the artifactual sources contradict those on the written page, as with an inscription from Corinth, which records those citizens who died at Salamis in 480 b. c.e. (Meiggs and Lewis 1992, #24). This inscription contradicts the Athenian version of the battle recorded in the writings of Herodotus, who claimed that the Corinthian fleet fled as soon as the actual fighting started and only returned once the battle was won.
Greece did not evolve in a vacuum. Although Greece's political and national consciousness was growing during the Archaic Age, the great Near Eastern powers were rising, falling, and rising again. The Assyrian Empire, which had dominated western Asia from Iran to Egypt, fell to a combined force of Babylonians, Medes, and Persians in 612 b. c.e. The Babylonian Empire, which replaced it, fell to the Persians under Cyrus the Great (559-530) in 539 b. c.e., after the Persians had already conquered and absorbed the Medes. Farther west, the Lydian Empire of western Turkey expanded under King Croesus (as in the expression "Rich as Croesus"), dominating the Ionian Greek poleis by the middle of the sixth century b. c.e. In 547, Cyrus the Great was victorious over Croesus of Lydia, and in one fell swoop eastern Greece came under the control of the Persian Empire.
At first, this was not really a problem. The eastern Greeks were already used to being under the supervision of an eastern monarch, such as the aforementioned Croesus, and the Persian means of rule consisted of keeping local rulers in their places, making sure only that they were loyal to the Persian king. So the Greek political, legislative, and religious structures were not affected, and life continued as usual. The problem lay in the fact that Cyrus and his heirs wished to maintain political stability in Ionia, and thus they supported tyrants (see chapter 7) who were unpopular with the citizens. Unable to oust these tyrants due to Persian interference, in 499 b. c.e. the Ionian poleis revolted against the Persian Empire, summoning aid from Athens and Eretria. This Ionian Revolt lasted until 494, when it was definitively crushed by King Darius I (522-486 b. c.e.) of Persia and his general Mardonios, whom Darius subsequently placed in charge of Ionia. For the record, Darius and Mardonios were sympathetic to the grievances of the Ionians, and they removed the tyrants.
Darius was not, however, especially sympathetic to Athens and Eretria for assisting the Ionians in their revolt. This derived particularly from the fact that, only a few years previously, Athens had somewhat willingly subjected itself to Persian authority. In 507 b. c.e., the Athenians had sent to Darius to form a common alliance against Athens's greatest rival in Greece—Sparta. The Persian response was "Who in the world are you and where do you come from?" (Herodotus 5, 73). The Persians had never even heard of Athens. Nevertheless, as they did with any political entity seeking audience, the Persians demanded that the Athenian ambassadors offer earth and water to the Persian king, which, it turned out, carried the symbolic meaning of subjugation to Persia. The Athenian ambassadors enacted the ritual as a matter of protocol, but they in no way felt themselves actually owing allegiance to Persia. Thus the considerable slap in the face to Darius when he, in 499, found himself being attacked by his own subjects with the support of what he believed to be his other avowed subjects. This was not to be tolerated.
In 490 b. c.e., Darius led the Persian army into Greece. First, he burned Eretria for helping the Ionians. Then he headed for Athens via the field of Marathon, just north of the city.
This was the most massive army the Athenians, or any Greeks, ever faced. The combined forces of an empire stretching from India to Egypt were converging on one polis in the middle of Greece. The Athenians prepared their hoplites under General Miltiades (c. 550-489 b. c.e.). They sent a runner to summon assistance from Sparta; he covered the roughly 224 kilometers between Athens and Sparta in less than two days with only mild hallucinations along the way (Herodotus 6, 105). Unfortunately for the Athenians, however, the Spartans were in the middle of a religious festival and could not leave the city to aid in the battle. In the end, only the Boiotian city of Plataia sent a contingent to help fight the Persians.
The Greeks faced the Persians on the field of Marathon. In spite of their far fewer numbers, the Greeks defeated the Persian army by dint of superior training and not having just marched several hundred miles before fighting. Once the battlefield was clear, the Athenians and Plataians ran the more than 30 kilometers back to the city to defend it from the Persian navy, which was also attacking Athens. This arduous trek is today commemorated by the athletic competition called the marathon. In the end, the Greeks were completely victorious. The Persians were driven from the Greek mainland, and the Athenian navy, still under Miltiades, ousted the Persian fleet from Greek waters as far as Ionia.
Darius was irked. He planned a larger retaliation against the Greeks, but he did not live long enough to see the preparations brought to completion. His son Xerxes I took up the cause and, in 480 b. c.e., led a much larger army and navy to Greece. This was to be another two-pronged attack, hitting the Greek mainland by both land and sea. The navy sailed directly over from western
Asia, but the army spent seven days crossing the Hellespont (also called the Dardanelles, a strait dividing Asian Turkey from European Turkey) on a series of boats lashed together to form a makeshift bridge.
The Greeks, never having seen such a large contingent before, panicked. Some, especially those to the north such as Thebes, willingly offered earth and water to the Persian king in exchange for being left alone. But to the south, thirty-one poleis formed a coalition headed by Sparta to hold off and fight the Persians. The Spartans were chosen as leaders because they had the best-trained hoplite army in Greece.
An important concern was where to hold off the Persians. Clearly, the Greeks would have to choose some narrow pass to minimize the difference in numbers between the Greek and Persian armies. The Spartans voted for the isthmus at Corinth, it being the narrowest point in Greece and still well north of their own city (the Spartans were never famous for their selflessness). This was hardly pleasing to the Athenians, who happened to live north of Corinth, not to mention the Corinthians themselves, who were not eager to have the battle occur on their own front steps. So the Greeks opted for the narrow mountain pass at Thermopylai ("Warm Gates") just north of Lokris. A troop of 300 Spartans plus their allies under General Leonidas defended the pass. Xerxes was amazed that so few soldiers were sent to confront him, not to mention the fact that much of their battle preparation consisted of hair maintenance.
But the Spartans, who had spent their entire lives preparing for war, held off the Persian army for several days, only falling when a Spartan exile named Ephialtes showed the Persians a secret passage by which they could sneak behind, outflank, and surround the Spartans. The Spartan army was killed to a man. According to Herodotus (7, 277), an inscription set up in their honor told future travelers:
O, passer-by, tell them in Lakedaimon [Sparta]
That here we lie, obedient to their word.
While the Spartans fought the Persians on land, the Athenians and their allies fought them at sea. Ever since 483 b. c.e., when they had discovered a new vein of silver in their mines at Laurion, the Athenians had been building a fleet. Sailing up to the straits of Salamis, east of Attica, the Greek navy used the narrowness of the place to counteract the larger numbers of the Persian fleet. At first, the Persians planned to hold off from battle, waiting for better light and a broader space. But Themistocles (who was also responsible for both the new ships and the coalition under the Spartans) sent one of his slaves to Xerxes, ordering the slave to pretend that he was a runaway with no love for his former Greek masters and to "inform" Xerxes that the Greek naval forces were completely bogged down with internal bickering. If Xerxes struck now, the slave told him, Xerxes would catch the Greeks completely unawares and was sure to win the day.
Xerxes bought the lie and ordered his fleets to attack in spite of the clear disadvantages of the site. First, the Persians lost several ships off the southern coast of Aigina in a freak storm. What was left of the fleet attempted to pin in the Greek ships in the narrows that separate Aigina from Attica. But the Greek ships were far more maneuverable than the clunkier Persian vessels, and the Greeks were highly successful in ramming and sinking the more numerous Persians, who, due to their ships' size, could not maneuver out of each other's way. One captain in the Persian service, Queen Artemisia of Caria (southwestern Turkey), got so frustrated with this state of affairs that she rammed and sank another Persian ship so she could get away from an advancing Greek vessel. This action proved highly successful, as the Greeks, seeing her action, believed that she had changed sides and was fighting for the Greeks, and they left her alone. Xerxes believed she had succeeded in sinking a Greek ship, and subsequently he held her in very high regard.
By this point the Persian army, victorious on land after having defeated the Spartans at the pass of Thermopylai, marched southward to burn, devastate, and destroy Athens. The Greek navy was victorious at sea and succeeded in seeing Xerxes return to Persia. Nevertheless, the Persian king left behind a portion of his army and fleet to continue harassing Greece. By 479 b. c.e., Athens was devastated. Then, after the city burned, the Athenians under the direction of Themistocles and Aristides succeeded in defeating the Persians on land at the Battle of Plataia and by sea at Mykale in Ionia. After that, the Persians finally left Greece for good.
Physically, Greece was in minor shambles, with Athens the hardest hit. Psychologically, though, Greece had never been better. A handful of Greek soldiers and sailors had held off the largest military force any of them had ever seen. Greece was to be a major player in world events henceforth.
The next fifty years (480-430 b. c.e.) marked the rise of the Athenian Empire, starting with Athens and Sparta leading the anti-Persian alliance of Greek poleis, and ending with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. In Book 1, 18, 2-3 of his History, Thucydides relates:
By a common effort the Barbarian was repelled. But not long afterwards both those Greeks who fought against the King and those in the alliance parted ways, either siding with the Athenians or the Lakedaimonians [Spartans]. For it became apparent that these were the most powerful states, the one strong on land, the other in ships. And for a short time the defensive league endured; then the Lakedaimonians and Athenians splitting apart waged war with each other along with their respective allies. Concerning the other Greeks, if any should stand aloof, the war was brought to them anyway. So from the time of the Persian Invasion to the present war, they were continually making treaties and fighting either with each other or with allies who revolted, so they became well-prepared and trained for war by constantly dealing with the real thing.
Right after the Persian invasions, Athens, having been trounced, was in utter shambles. Rebuilding began immediately, but there was a problem concerning the erection of a city wall. Sparta encouraged Athens and the other Greek poleis not to wall their cities, as this would give the Persians a lodging place if they ever returned and took a city. The Athenians had no mind to leave their city undefended, but they also did not wish openly to disregard, and possibly insult, the Spartans. Once again, Themistocles saved the day (the same fellow who had encouraged the construction of the Athenians' fleet and caused Xerxes to attack at Salamis). He told the Athenian assembly to send him to Sparta as part of a diplomatic group to discuss the wall issue, but not to send the rest of the group until much later. Meanwhile, the Athenians were to throw together a city wall as fast as possible, using all the rubble left over from the Persian destructions. Themistocles would stall the Spartans, who would therefore not learn about the wall until it was already complete (i. e., until it was too late). Archaeology has verified this story—the remnants of the fifth-century city wall are composed of ruble, broken sculpture marble, and other debris, just as Thucydides described. These walls were built not only surrounding the city, but also extending down to the harbors at Phaleron and Pireus, guarding the Athenians' access to the sea.
In the meantime, an alliance of Greeks under General Pausanias of Sparta were still routing the Persians from the eastern Mediterranean, attacking them at such places as Cyprus. Unfortunately, Pausanias quickly won the hatred of the united Greeks and even the disapproval of the Spartans. Soon he was recalled home to stand trial, and the Greeks gleefully handed control of the alliance over to the Athenians, who had the better navy anyway. (Thucydides 1, 96-97), "The Athenians, having gotten leadership in this way with willingness on the part of the allies through their hatred of Pausanias, established which cities would supply money to fight the Barbarian, and which ships. The pretext was to avenge themselves for what they had suffered by ravishing the King's land. And at that time the office of the Treasurers was first set up by the Athenians. They received the tribute, as they called the monies received. After these events they waged war on the Naxians who had revolted and took them by siege. This was the first allied city to be enslaved contrary to the established rule, and then each of the other cities followed in turn."
Thus began the Delian League, an alliance headed by Athens and centered on the small island of Delos in the Cyclades. Being Panhellenic, Delos was seen as neutral territory, much as Switzerland is today, so it was chosen as the center of the new alliance.
Under the command of Kimon, son of Miltiades, the Delian League did exact some retribution against the Persians. But soon, Athens found itself more interested in maintaining control of the poleis within the League, and the alliance soon became an empire under the Athenians' control. This first became apparent when, as stated above, the island of Naxos attempted to leave the League. Athens attacked Naxos and besieged the inhabitants, forcing them to rejoin and to continue paying their share of tribute.
While this was happening in the north, Sparta experienced an earthquake followed immediately by a revolt of the helots, their Messenian slaves. The revolt centered in Ithome, where the helots walled themselves in and withstood a long siege. The Spartans were never very good at siege warfare, preferring direct fighting, and they called in the Athenians to help them. The Athenians sent out a large force under Kimon, who was very pro-Spartan and good at maintaining diplomatic relations between Athens and Sparta. Once the Athenians arrived, however, their force's large size made the Spartans nervous, and the Spartans decided to send the Athenians home again, assuring the Athenians they had the situation under control. The Athenians felt justifiably insulted, and so began a long-growing distrust that eventually ended in hostilities between Athens and Sparta. (The Spartans did get the helots under control again without the help of Athens.)
In 451 b. c.e., the Greeks signed a mutual nonhostility treaty with Persia, called the Peace of Kallias. Technically, this removed the original purpose of the Delian League, which then should have dissolved. But the Athenians would not accept the loss of resources and prestige this would entail. The poleis were forcibly held in the League, and the treasury was moved from Delos to the Athenian acropolis (supposedly so the Athenians could guard it better, although they never did specify from whom). Adding insult to injury, the Athenians, under their head statesman Pericles (495-429 b. c.e.), began using Delian treasury funds to rebuild their own city instead of using the money to fund the navy, which protected all of Greece.
From this point on, most power struggles in Greece came one way or another to involve Athens and Sparta. A city would beseech aid from the one; that city's enemies would seek aid from the other. In most cases, though, the Spartans and the Athenians did not confront each other directly, but merely backed different squabbling groups.
All this changed in 431 b. c.e. with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. This conflict started when the citizens of the small island of Epidauros tried to expel their aristocracy. Epidauros was a colony of Corcyra, and Corcyra itself was a colony of Corinth. Once expelled, the aristocrats tried to get Corcyra to restore them to power, but Corcyra could not be bothered. So the aristocrats went to Corinth, their grandmother city of sorts, to seek aid. Corinth was happy to re-ally itself with the younger colony, and it stepped in to restore the aristocrats. Corcyra took offense, went right into Epidauros, and expelled the aristocrats and the Corinthians. The Corinthians prepared a larger fleet, and the Corcyrans, as was typical for that period, asked Athens for help. The Athenians were really not interested, especially as to offer aid would have violated the Thirty Years' Peace of 446-445 (a recent treaty they had made with Sparta that relegated both poleis to battle only within their own systems of alliances). Epidauros belonged to neither camp, so technically the Athenians did not have the right to get involved there. But the Athenians agreed to send a small fleet just to sit in the harbor and look menacing, so as to frighten away the Corinthian fleet—a bluff of sorts.
The Corinthians, who never liked the Athenians (being rivals of theirs in the ceramics production trade, among other things), immediately went to Sparta, accused the Athenians of breaking the treaty, and demanded that the Spartans put a stop to Athens's political and military power in Greece. The Spartans were persuaded, and so began the Peloponnesian War.
The Peloponnesian War (431-404 b. c.e.) was divided into three phases. The first decade was the Archidamian War, named after King Archidamus of Sparta, who led much of the fighting. This phase ended with the Peace of Nikias, signed between Athens and Sparta in 421 b. c.e. For the next eight years, there were occasional clashes (comprising the second phase of the war) between the two powers, despite the treaty they had just signed. In 415-413 b. c.e., Athens attempted to invade Sicily, which ended in the almost-entire annihilation of the Athenian navy, after which the war reheated. The last phase was the Ionian War, which ended with the defeat of Athens at the Battle of Aigospotamoi in 404 b. c.e.
From the beginning, the war did not go well for Athens. Pericles persuaded the Athenians that the best strategy against the Spartans was to abandon their farms in the countryside and to hide within the walls of Athens. The long walls connecting the city to the harbors provided some living space for the population. The Spartans, never good at siege warfare and never pleased to stay away from Sparta too long (the helots might revolt again), would eventually become frustrated and leave Attica. Meanwhile, the Athenians could use the city's fleet to import food from the city's colonies and to strike at the Spartans and their allies. So, for a while, Sparta was fighting a land war, and Athens a sea war.
All the crowding in Athens led to less than sanitary conditions, and a plague broke out in 429 b. c.e. Thucydides reports that a large percentage of Athenians died, including Pericles. This was especially disastrous to Athens, as Pericles had been the most popular and level-headed statesman they had; after his death, Athenian policy began to crumble.
The lack of competent leadership became acute in the second phase of the war, when the Athenians decided to attack Sicily, having no idea how large that island actually was. The original aim was to harass the Spartan allies on the island and possibly to acquire additional funds in the form of loot and booty. The leader of this Sicilian Expedition was Nikias (the same man responsible for the Peace of Nikias), who stood out among the Athenians as the most vocal objector to the entire plan. Yes, the Athenians placed in charge of the expedition the one man who specifically did not want to go. Another leader was Alcibiades, nephew of Pericles. Right before the expedition set out, a crime occurred in Athens: The city's herms (statues of the god Hermes placed at intersections and property entrances) were mutilated, and Alcibiades was implicated in the crime. Rather than trying Alcibiades before he left for Sicily, when all his friends were present and might rescue him, the Athenians decided to wait until the expedition had left Athens and then recall Alcibiades to stand trial, while all his friends were heading to Sicily. Of course, Alcibiades refused to return to Athens and instead defected to Sparta.
This was not a bad decision, considering how the Sicilian Expedition ended. It turned out that Sicily was very big and quite wealthy, and the Athenians were not prepared to deal with that much space and wealth. At first, they intended merely to sail around the island looking menacing. But when they saw that the Sicilians might send out a navy to confront them, the Athenians decided just to go home. However, at this time there was an eclipse, and Nikias, a religious man, believed that they should wait nine days before sailing. While so waiting, the Athenian ships became waterlogged, and the fleet was surrounded and captured. This, after the plague, was the second great blow to Athens during the war.
Things got worse for Athens by the start of the Ionian War. Alcibiades had informed the Spartans that Athens was completely dependent on its Black Sea colonies for food. So, rather than attacking Athens directly, the Spartans could simply attack or blockade these colonies and starve Athens into submission. In Athens, meanwhile, the democracy was crossing that fine line into mob rule, especially when a gruff commoner named Kleon was suddenly made head of the Athenian army (usually, such posts were held by the more aristocratic families). At first, Kleon did not seem to be so bad a choice; under him the Athenians achieved their greatest success against the Spartans, by capturing an entire retinue of Spartan soldiers on the island of Sphakteria off the western coast of the Peloponnese. If Athens had simply made a peace treaty with Sparta then, it would have emerged from the war victorious. But such level-headedness and practicality were not the strong suits of Kleon or any of the other Athenians at this point, and they decided to continue the war, convinced of their invulnerability.
In the end, Athens lost. Thucydides does not record this part of the war, so we must rely on Xenophon and later Athenian authors such as Plato for our knowledge of what occurred during this period. The Spartans were by now under the command of Lysander, who had—amusingly enough, considering how all these events were set in motion—the backing of the Persian king. In 405 b. c.e., Lysander lured the Athenian fleet into a region of the Dardanelles called Aigospotamoi ("Goat Rivers"). Lysander attacked while the Athenians were still beached for the night, and he took 170 of their 180 ships almost without a fight. Having lost their navy twice within a decade, the Athenians no longer had the resources to fight the Spartans and were forced to admit defeat. The Peloponnesian War thus ended.
The Spartans graciously chose not to slaughter the Athenians wholesale, due to the latter's efforts to protect Greece during the Persian Invasions. They merely undid the final vestiges of the Delian League and replaced, temporarily, the Athenian democracy with a pro-Spartan oligarchy. Athens never fully restored its political power, although it continued to be the Greek center of learning and the arts for centuries. Meanwhile, as the following section of this chapter will show, the Spartans became so obnoxious that many Greeks started rooting for Athens again.
World History
