athens and its empire - weeblymseastersclass.weebly.com/.../3/26138748/athens_and... · athens and...

Athens and Its Empire

Author(s): Chester G. Starr

Source: The Classical Journal, Vol. 83, No. 2 (Dec., 1987 - Jan., 1988), pp. 114-123

Published by: The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc. (CAMWS)

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297984

Accessed: 12-06-2016 12:37 UTC

REFERENCES

Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297984?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at

http://about.jstor.org/terms

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted

digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about

JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

The Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Inc. (CAMWS) is collaborating withJSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Classical Journal

This content downloaded from 71.82.215.226 on Sun, 12 Jun 2016 12:37:25 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ATHENS AND ITS EMPIRE

Historians have been described as people who think otherwise, but on the subject of this essay, oddly enough, there has been little diversity of opinion. The Athenian empire, as I shall suggest, has almost universally received the highest of praise, and its destruction is accounted a calamity. It is high time for another, heretical voice.

Let me begin by observing that in the modem liberal climate of opinion there are institutions and attitudes abhorred by all right-thinking people. One is imperialism, which obviously will be an important theme in my comments; but later on the equally unpopular concepts of elitism and slavery will surface.

As for imperialism, the use of force or the threat of its use to control a previously independent state is considered definitely improper, though that does not prevent its appearance in various quarters of the globe. In the ancient world there are empires aplenty to inspect; the control of large areas was scarcely feasible except in imperialistic forms.

The most famous ancient empire, partly because it "declined and fell," is the Roman Empire. In its palmier days this huge state has generally been eulogized as bringing peace and prosperity to all the Mediterranean world; in Gibbon's judgment:

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.I

Not all ancient witnesses were so favorable, and few of us nowadays would be so sweeping in our praise. To many historians, indeed, the word pax brings first to mind the biting comment of Tacitus, "They make a desert and call it peace," and recent discussions of the Roman Empire often damn it as an exploitive structure for the benefit of the Roman elite.2

The first great empire was that of the Assyrians. They have always had a bad press, though their conquests united the Near East in bonds rarely broken before Arab times. Principally this condemnation rests on the evidence in the Old Testament, which contains several vehement attacks on the Assyrian armies rolling down on Israel "gleaming in purple and gold," to quote Byron, and the equally fierce exultation of Nahum at the fall of the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 B.C.:

1Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. J. B. Bury, vol. 1 (London 1909) 85-86. 2Tacitus, Agricola 30 (borrowed verbally from Pliny, Natural History 6, 182); I have surveyed

changing views of the Empire in "The Roman Place in History," Aufstieg und Niedergang der riimischen Welt, vol. 1 (Berlin 1972) 3-11 (now in Essays on Ancient History [Leiden 1979] 213-21).

114This content downloaded from 71.82.215.226 on Sun, 12 Jun 2016 12:37:25 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

ATHENS AND ITS EMPIRE 115

Woe to the bloody city! It is all full of lies and robbery.

Nineveh is laid waste; Who will bemoan her?

Note the word "robbery"; empires always engage in extortion of men and money in the eyes of their subjects. The reputation of the Assyrians was not redeemed by the discovery in the nineteenth century of the annals of their monarchs recounting bloody and ruthless victories in honor of the god Assur; nor does it help to inspect the reliefs which decorated the Assyrian palaces, artistically magnificent though they are. In the British Museum there is a scene of a king and queen having a happy tea party in a garden-from the trees of which hang the heads of defeated enemies.

The next great empire, that of the Persians, does receive more neutral judgment, partly because the Hebrews were grateful for the release from their Babylonian Captivity and the grant of local self-government. The Greeks, however, coldly assessed the Persian empire as an absolute monarchy dominated by one master over slaves, and the majestic staircases of Persepolis illustrate in detail the variety of imperial dues exacted for the benefit of the Great King, the King of Kings, at the annual New Year's festival.3

My brief comments on these other ancient empires have been designed to throw into higher relief how remarkably evaluations change when we come to the Athenian empire in the fifth century B.C. George Grote, the Victorian banker who was the greatest student of Greek history down to the present day, admitted that Athens was an "imperial or despot city," but judged that if its empire had broken up "Greece generally would have been a great loser by such a proceeding," for then it would again have been open to Persian aggression. So W. S. Ferguson commented that "the empire stands approved by the fact that the sharpest accusation now made against the democracy is that it failed to make the empire enduring." Or finally the most recent careful exploration of the rise and fall of the Athenian empire by Russell Meiggs concludes, "The Aegean world gained considerably from the use made by Athens of the wealth that she drew from the cities, and as the Athenians claimed at Sparta in 432, they made considerably less use of force than imperial powers are expected to use; but they could have made more concessions to the general Greek passion for autonomy without undermining their position." I do not know any serious, unwaveringly hostile verdict on Athenian imperialism.4

3The evidence is assembled in my essay in Iranica Antiqua, 11 (1976) 48-69; cf. E. W. Hirsch, The Friendship of the Barbarians: Xenophon and the Persian Empire (Hanover, NH, 1985); R. Drews, The Greek Accounts of Eastern History (Cambridge, MA, 1973); J. M. Cook, The Persian Empire (London 1983).

4George Grote, History of Greece, vol. 6 (2d ed., London 1851) 4; W. S. Ferguson, Greek Imperialism (Boston 1913) 74; R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford 1972) 412. Note also the ambiguous judgment by the thoughtful scholar E. Will, Le Monde Grec et l'Orient: le Ve siecle (Paris 1972) 217: "At once vexatious and beneficial, Athenian imperialism must have aroused hatred in some and satisfaction in others but we can never determine the borders of these groups and the intensity of their feelings."


116 CHESTER G. STARR

Why such an unusual divergence from the normal hostility to imperialism? Modern students emphasize, as did Grote, that Athens protected the Aegean against Persian threats. Others take Athenian democracy as one of the most noble political systems ever devised by man, and accept the idealization of the Athenians sketched by Pericles in his Funeral Oration: "I say that Athens is the school of Hellas, and that the individual Athenian in his own person seems to have the power of adapting himself to the most varied forms of action with the utmost versatility and grace."5 The Athenians, in other words, were an intellectual and political elite who had the right to rule their empire without question or challenge. And finally there is always the visible testimony of the Parthenon, the greatest Doric temple ever built--and the most costly inasmuch as the Athenians could draw freely on the revenues of empire. Parthenon, Phidias the sculptor, Pericles the skillful and majestic leader of Athens-these weigh heavily in the balance.

Let us instead be true heretics: can we levy an indictment against Athenian imperialism? The answer, as I shall try to demonstrate, should be affirmative, but first we must get the empire into existence. This in turn involves a brief but essential detour into the fundamental characteristics of Greek political life. During the formative centuries of Hellenic civilization the inhabitants of the Aegean were free from outside pressures. As a consequence they could enjoy the luxury of dividing themselves into very small but independent states called poleis (in the singular, polis). This term is often badly mistranslated in English as "city-state," for the early polis did not yet have an urban center (and states such as Sparta never developed one). Moreover the polis was not an abstract entity as described by Machiavelli, Hobbes, and others, but must be treated as a union of citizens, bound especially by the religious sanction of worshipping a deity who protected them in peace and war; it was not Athens which made treaties or struck coins, but "the Athenians." Some poleis could muster 10,000 warriors, but most were very tiny; the typical state covered 50 to 100 square kilometers and had a population of no more than a thousand. Yet it was proudly independent; Hellas was a geographical, not a political term, just as are Europe and Asia today.

Culturally the Greeks did share a common form of life, but only as expressed in local contexts. If everyone spoke Greek, it was in a specific dialect such as Ionic, Doric, Attic, and so on. Pottery, statues, and temples were shaped by uniform esthetic principles but again in local styles, so one can easily distinguish an Athenian or Rhodian vase for example. This diversity was a very important fructifying force in the swift advance of Greek civilization.

Down into the sixth century the Greeks lived free of major outside political contact; they did not know the Assyrian empire at all. The Persians, however, were more aggressive and from 550 on ruled the Greek states on the western seaboard of Asia Minor. For a time states such as Miletus and Ephesus prospered, but some elements did not like the Persian policy of supporting

5Thucydides 2. 40, echoed in the early plays of Euripides. A clear survey of fourth-century praises of Athens is given by J. de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism (Oxford 1963) 95; Meiggs, Athenian Empire 397-403.



tyrants as safeguards for local obedience. Just after 500 the lonians rebelled, and sent the Milesian leader Aristagoras to implore the aid of Sparta and Athens. At Sparta he made the mistake of producing a map of the world, a novel invention for the Spartans; when they discovered that the Persian capital was a three-month march inland they bade him go. Aristagoras tried to bribe the Spartan king Cleomenes, but his daughter Gorgo, aged 8 or 9, piped up and told her father, "Get up and go, or the stranger will certainly corrupt you."6 At Athens, on the other hand, the envoy secured the support of the nascent Athenian democracy for a time; as Herodotus observed, "It seems indeed to be easier to deceive a multitude than one man."7

After some initial successes the Ionian rebels had to face the full might of the Persians, who like all empires took time to assemble their forces; in 494 Miletus was taken and destroyed. To punish the Athenians for their aid the Persians sent a small amphibious operation which unexpectedly failed at the battle of Marathon in 490. Then the Persian king Darius died, and his son Xerxes had to spend some years consolidating his rule before he could deign to return to the Greek problem. This time he majestically decided to lead the expedition himself--he did need to gain some military glory after all, and the Greeks, divided as they were, were a fine target. So a huge army and navy were assembled for the task.

By this time Athena, the wise protector of her favorite city of Athens, had seen fit to work two miracles. The first was the discovery of a very rich silver lode in the state silver mines of Laurium. Normally such revenues were divided among the citizen body, as a profit-sharing society, but the second miracle intervened to secure a different result. That is, Themistocles had become the undisputed leader of Athens by ostracizing all opponents; praised by Thucydides as a leader who "could best divine what was likely to happen in the remotest future," he persuaded his fellow citizens not to take their due but to expend the money on building the first major Athenian fleet, two hundred warships in all.8 This step was to prove crucial in giving the Greeks a chance on the sea in the great battle of Salamis.

During the Persian invasion of 480-79 the Spartans by common consent provided leaders by land and sea for the miraculous repulse of the hordes led by Xerxes. But having done their duty they were ready to stop; to counter the strong possibility that the Persians would return, as they had done in the Ionian revolt, the Spartans suggested simply moving the people of the cities on the coast of Asia Minor to the Greek mainland. The lonians were reluctant to leave

the homes and graves of their ancestors, and Athens stepped forward, willing to serve as the leader in taking revenge on the Persians and securing the liberty of the Aegean states. As Thucydides put it, the Spartans "were anxious to be rid of the war against the Medes. They thought that the Athenians were capable of undertaking the leadership and that at that time they were well

6Herodotus 5. 50-51. 7Herodotus 5. 97.

8Thucydides 1. 138.



disposed towards them." This may be too simple, but the Spartans did have enough troubles at home to keep them preoccupied, and leadership at Athens by this point had passed to the aristocrat Cimon, a pro-Spartan figure.9

So a number of Asiatic and island states met at the sacred island of Delos in

478/7 and formed a league; each state was to provide warships or, in the case of smaller states, cash to help defray the expenses of war. Leadership was voluntarily assigned to Athens, which would furnish admirals (and the largest fleet), treasurers, and presidents of the league assembly. In flamboyant fashion the allies threw lumps of iron into the sea and swore to remain united until the iron floated, but in reality none of them probably expected lasting activity. As Ferguson dryly observed, "What they had neglected to stipulate was the time for which they were to remain allies."'o

Athens duly marshalled Greek strength to sweep the Persians out of the Aegean and then the south coast of Asia Minor, also largely occupied by Greek states; the greatest triumph was the destruction by Cimon of the renascent Persian fleet at the battle of the Eurymedon river, early in the 460s. By this time, however, the nature of the league was subtly altering. Thus the small state of Carystus on the island of Euboea had been liberated and then, against its will, forced to join the league; the crusade must not be weakened by local unwillingness to participate. Then the island of Naxos grew weary of the annual burden of providing ships; Athens could not tolerate any effort to avoid the common duty. Worst of all was the "revolt" of Thasos, a large state, in 464, which had to be recalled to its fealty by a siege. Voluntary league, in sum, slowly, almost unconsciously, was becoming empire. Modem students date the point at which the process was complete to 454, when the treasury of the league, safeguarded at the temple of Apollo on Delos, was moved to Athens, where Athena and her priests could better protect it on the Acrop- olis."I

This peculiar pattern of imperialism does not fit neatly modem theories of the rise of imperialist powers as explicable entirely in economic terms. Hobson, the fountainhead of this view, who was followed by Lenin, built his thesis almost entirely on the career of Cecil Rhodes, a very untypical example of English expansion; perhaps we should keep in mind an alternative explanation. Schumpeter, for instance, described the rise of the Persian empire as a good illustration of the ambition of upper classes throughout history; a recent powerful assessment of Roman imperialism by W. V. Harris attributes Roman expansion to an "ideology of laus and gloria" among the leading Roman families and only secondarily to the profits gained from victory.'12 To

9Thucydides 1. 95, placed in perspective by Meiggs, Athenian Empire 40-43. 'OFerguson, Greek Imperialism 24. "I omit here the vigorous discussion of the Peace of Callias and the Congress Decree, which

has been most recently assessed by J. Walsh, "The Authenticity and the Dates of the Peace of Callias and the Congress Decree," Chiron 11 (1981) 31-63; as Meiggs, Athenian Empire 598, sadly observes, "statistically an article on the Peace of Callias can be expected every two years."

12J. Flint, Cecil Rhodes (Boston 1974) 228-29; J. Schumpeter, "The Sociology of Imperi- alism," Imperialism and Social Classes (New York 1955) 3-98; W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70 B.C. (Oxford 1978) 30 ff.



return to Athens, the main objective driving the Athenians was, in the words of Jacqueline de Romilly, "the desire which they have for fame, renown, and honours. ... In its highest form, their ambition aims at glory, in its lowest at the use of power." Here too economic profit in the form of tribute from the subject states was an incidental, if desirable by-product.13

As she also points out, the same aims moved the men in the street and their leader Pericles, who directed Athenian policy from at least 450 down to his death in 429. Not all Athenians, to be sure, had exactly the same admiration for imperial power. There were a few die-hards who regretted the turn of Athens to the sea, which encouraged the rise of democratic elements; but in 445 their leader Thucydides, son of Melesias (not the historian), who assailed the use of imperial monies for the decoration of Athens itself, was ostracized in a decisive contest with Pericles.14 Others, such as the comic poet Aristophanes, accepted imperialism in general but had reserves about the growing harshness of Athenian power; in one play he could even urge that the "allied cities" be woven together in an over-all unity, i.e., that they be treated with respect and justly.'5 Most citizens, however, followed Pericles without hesitation and passed decree after decree in their assembly interfering ever more minutely in the independence of the subjects.

Let us draw up a bill of charges against the perfected system of Athenian mastery at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431. At its height, to put matters in perspective, Athens ruled directly 179 states, divided into five administrative districts, which included perhaps two million Greeks according to Ferguson; the most remote of these were only an eight-day voyage (200-250 miles) from Athens. But as he also notes Athenian naval power could be projected over the Mediterranean from Sicily to Egypt and the Black Sea, so that the world which had to consider Athenian policy seriously embraced perhaps twenty million people.16

The most evident burden on the empire itself was the requirement of paying tribute to Athens. As I observed with regard to the Assyrians, empires exact a price from their subjects, and by 431 the voluntary contributions set half a century earlier had turned into forced payments. Very few states still had the option of furnishing ships, and by the time of the Currency Decree of 449, which ordered the use of Athenian coinage, weights, and measures throughout the empire, the funds now came in the form of standardized Athenian tetradrachms, the "owls," struck in greater abundance than any previous Greek coinage.17 These funds were safeguarded by Athena and like a good banker she took her fees by exacting one-sixtieth of each state's payment. These amounts were duly inscribed on stone slabs which fortunately have survived more or less intact and give us a detailed picture of imperial

13De Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism 79; on pp. 71-73 she adequately discounts the efforts of G. B. Grundy and others to find economic motives for Athenian imperialism.

14A. Andrewes, "The Opposition to Pericles," Journal of Hellenic Studies 98 (1978) 1-8, is a recent survey, though I cannot accept all his views.

15Lysistrata 579 ff. 16Greek Imperialism 42-43. 17The change is discussed in my Athenian Coinage 480-449 B.C. (Oxford 1970) 64-71.



receipts.18 From the treasury came the costs of the Parthenon, Erechtheum, unfinished Propylaea, and other buildings on the Acropolis and in the Agora.

Unlike the Roman Republic, which exacted from its Italian "allies" not cash but men for the Roman wars, the Athenian empire does not appear as a rule to have levied contingents of subjects for its galleys. There is one reference to impressment for the great expedition to Syracuse; otherwise considerable numbers of allies were tempted by pay to serve as mercenaries alongside the poorer Athenian citizen drafted for the rowers' benches.19 Athens could never have manned its major fleets in the Peloponnesian War out of its own citizen body.

To supervise the empire, however, the Athenians made considerable use of garrisons and settled clumps of families (cleruchs) on the lands of doubtful subjects; "residents" also served as standing checks, and traveling inspectors (episkopoi), whose arrogance was mocked by Aristophanes, toured the empire. The fourth-century work, Constitution of the Athenians, reckons these supervisors at seven hundred a year. In various decrees the independence of local courts was trimmed to require that major penalties (death, exile, and loss of public rights) could be inflicted only by Athenian juries - as a bitter critic of Athenian democracy called the Old Oligarch observed, this was good for the Athenian hotel business.20 Finally, Athens did tolerate any form of local government from tyranny onwards, but in the case of a revolt often imposed democracy on the rebel state.

These measures, largely in place by 431, helped safeguard Athenian mastery, but they also directly violated the basic principle of Greek political life: autonomia, the right of a state to use its own laws.21 In an ingenious article some years ago Ste Croix sought to prove that the subjects generally were happy at Athenian rule inasmuch as it protected local democracy, but a number of rebuttals have properly carried the day in opposition.22 Stripped to its essence the Athenian empire produced "slavery" (douleia), and in the Peloponnesian War the Spartans were able to raise the battle cry of liberation from that enslavement by an Athenian elite. The true judgment of the subjects is evident in the fact that whenever they saw a chance to escape from Athenian naval domination they revolted, and in 404 toppled the Athenian empire.

18B. D. Meritt, H. T. Wade-Gery, and M. F McGregor, The Athenian Tribute Lists, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1939-53) is the fundamental publication of this evidence.

19Thucydides 7. 13; Meiggs, Athenian Empire 222, notes that Miletus was required to provide infantry soldiers to serve in the Athenian phalanx.

20G. E. M. de Ste Croix, "Jurisdiction in the Athenian Empire," Classical Quarterly 11 (1961) 94-112, 268-80.

21M. Ostwald, Autonomia: Its Genesis and Early History (Chico, California, 1982); V. Ehrenberg, The Greek State (Oxford 1960).

22G. E. M. de Ste Croix, "The Character of the Athenian Empire," Historia 3 (1954-55) 1-41; promptly rebutted by H. B. Mattingly, Historia 12 (1963) 251-73; T. J. Quinn, Historia 13 (1964) 257-66; D. W. Bradeen, Historia 9 (1960) 257-69; H. W. Pleket, Historia 12 (1963) 70-77.



The Peloponnesian War was the subject of the majestic history of Thucydides, who is adjudged the greatest historian of antiquity, perhaps of all times (or so von Ranke asserted).23 A heretic may doubt this unvarying eulogy; Thucydides was not impeccable and omitted from his taut, bare pages much which we should like to know. In many ways he was the worst disaster ever to corrupt the historical discipline, for from his example onwards historians limited their scope to political and military events set forth in a purely chronological fashion. Yet he was one of the most powerful, driving intellects ever to grace history. For him the root cause of the Athenian defeat was the ever more ruthless imperialism of the Athenians, a topic which he illuminates in several set speeches. Not for him the comforting gloss that the Athenians deserved their rule because they drove back the Persians or were culturally the school of Hellas. Thucydides strips off all masks and shows that their power rested directly on force, perhaps more bluntly than Athenian audiences generally were accustomed to hear if we may judge from Aristophanes' more muted tones.24

So the demagogue Cleon tells the assembly, "What you do not realize is that your empire is a tyranny exercised over subjects who do not like it and who are always plotting against you; you will not make them obey you by injuring your own interests in order to do them a favor; your leadership depends on superior strength and not on any good will of theirs."25 Earlier Pericles himself had sounded the same theme: "It is right and proper for you to support the imperial dignity of Athens. This is something in which you all take pride, and you cannot continue to enjoy the privileges unless you also shoulder the burdens of empire. ... Your empire is now like a tyranny; it may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go."26 The greatest exploration of the nature of Athenian imperialism in Thucydides, however, occurs in a remarkable dialogue between Athenian and Melian spokesmen when the Athenians were seeking to conquer Melos. Very possibly this dialogue was designed to counter a pamphlet denouncing Athenian brutality after Melos was taken-all the males were killed, the women sold into slavery--but Thucydides minces no words in setting forth the Athenian position that they have the power and so the right to do as they wish. When the Melians argue that the gods protect the just, their opponents bluntly counter, "So far as the favor of the gods is concerned, we think we have as much right to that as you have. . . . Our opinion of the gods and our knowledge of men lead us to conclude that it is a general and necessary law of nature to rule wherever one can." One may be reminded of the jingle by Clarence Day, Jr.:

23My reserves can be found in The Flawed Mirror (Lawrence, Kansas, 1983) c. 2. 24So H. Strasburger, "Thukydides und die politische Selbstdarstellung der Athener," Hermes

86 (1958) 17-40 (now in Studien zur Alten Geschichte, vol. 2 [Hildesheim 1982] 676-708). Meiggs, Athenian Empire 385, is doubtful about his argument.

25Thucydides 3. 37. 26Thucydides 2. 63.



Might and Right are always fighting. In our youth it seems exciting, Right is always nearly winning. Might can hardly keep from grinning.27

More seriously, the Melian debate is one of the greatest sections in Thucydides' history; when the famous Princeton mathematician John von Neumann lay dying, a colleague also trained in an European gymnasium visited him, and von Neumann's one request was that he read the debate in Greek-and von Neumann was still alert enough to correct faulty pronuncia- tions.28

Pericles, as I have noted, was Thucydides' hero, and the historian seeks to distinguish between Pericles' conservative political and military policies and the headlong abandon of caution by his successors. This will not do. Plutarch, Thucydides, and the comic poets are agreed that Pericles was the master of Athenian political life after 450,29 and it was in the succeeding decades that the decrees which consolidated Athenian mastery of its empire were enacted. Pericles also must bear a heavy share of responsibility for the machinations which led to the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. The longer I have meditated on this apparently noble patron of arts and letters the more harshly I have come to judge his leadership; of all ancient political figures he was perhaps the most devastating influence on his state, first by helping to set off the war and then by already having led the Athenian assembly into open imperialism which made inevitable the eventual destruction of Athens. Internally as well the critics grouped around Thucydides, son of Melesias, had some justification in opposing his policies which led the Athenians, as Plato later put it, into becoming "idlers, cowards, talkers, and moneygrubbers."30

True, the Spartans allowed Athens to continue to exist in 404, and Athens quickly recovered its democratic structure, its economic strength, and its cultural activity. The other Greek states soon discovered that Spartan mastery was as ruthless and even more erratic than had been Athenian domination; as the Athenian envoys had told the Melians, "The Spartans are most conspic- uous for believing that what they like doing is honorable and what suits their

interests is just.'"31 In the next few decades Sparta was irretrievably weakened; Athens in the fourth century was far more the commercial and cultural center of the Greek world than it had ever been, though the Greek states of Asia Minor, once again under Persian rule, also burgeoned. Yet commonly the defeat of 404 is accounted one of the worst disasters to affect Greek history;

27Thucydides 5. 105; cf. generally de Romilly, Thucydides and Athenian Imperialism, pp. 273 ff., who surmises that this section was written after 404; A. W. Gomme, Historical Commentary on Thucydides, vol. 6 (1970) 166-67, is not convinced it is to be so dated. Clarence Day, Jr., After All (New York 1936) 277.

28S. M. Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician (New York 1976) 244. 29So the comic poet Teleclides frr. 42, 44 (T. Koch, Comicorum Atticorum Fragmenta, vol. 1

[Leipzig 1880] 220); Plutarch, Pericles 7, 9; Thucydides passim. 30Gorgias 515e. 31Thucydides 5. 105.



Toynbee went so far as to call it a "catastrophe that brought the growth of the Hellenic Civilization to an end and set in motion the long and tragic movement of decline and fall."32 This is cosmic thinking indeed, inasmuch as the classical outlook remained dominant for another millennium.

What would have happened had Athens won the Peloponnesian War? Here I must confess that decades ago I wrote a popular essay on this subject, and after three rejections threw it away; historians do not like to play the game What If? Yet it can be a useful game to set in higher relief the consequences which did occur after a major event.

Certainly Athens would have continued its emphasis on unchecked imperialism, spread now over all the Greek states. Very probably it would have interfered even more forcefully in local affairs and thus weakened that patriotism which, as I noted earlier, supported the cultural diversity and vitality of Hellenic civilization as a whole.

At Athens itself life would have been very different for the well-to-do, who profited from the prosperity of empire. Early in the fourth century, for instance, there was an orator called Lysias, who produced some of the greatest examples of judicial oratory; had Athens won the war his father, who owned a large shield factory, would not have been ruined, and Lysias would not have been forced to earn his livelihood by writing speeches for the courts. Even more important a cultural leader in the fourth century was Isocrates, the son of a rich man who attended Socrates and rhetorical leaders; he too was ruined and had to resort to his pen and to teaching. His contributions to all later Western civilization down into the nineteenth century cannot be overstated; he set the system of moral education, based on rhetoric, which became standard through its Roman and early modem adaptations, and his balanced prose style served as a model on to the days of Gibbon and Macaulay.

And finally Plato, whom we usually considered the most influential thinker of the fourth century. If Athens had won its war, it is very doubtful that Socrates would have been tried in 399 for corrupting the youth and denying the gods of state, in a veiled witchhunt. Plato certainly would already have been much impressed by Socrates, but his initial ambition was to be a political leader; if he had not felt revulsion at the condemnation of Socrates, would he have turned away from the life temporal to the life contemplative? And if no philosophical Plato, then surely no Aristotle.

Despite the Parthenon, then, we need not judge Athenian imperialism favorably, based as it was on the elitism of the Athenians themselves and the enslavement of the subjects, nor need we grieve deeply at its final collapse.

CHESTER G. STARR University of Michigan

32A. J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. 3 (Oxford 1934) 291; cf. also pp. 140, 166, 367.


athens and its empire - weeblymseastersclass.weebly.com/.../3/26138748/athens_and... · athens and...

Documents