Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (8 page)

the leader: all the members, about 140 in the beginning, swore a per-

petual oath to have the same friends and enemies as Athens, in this

way forming a permanent offensive and defensive alliance under Athe-

nian leadership. Hegemony, however, was not domination. In the early

years of the league, the Athenians were “leaders of autonomous allies

who took part in common synods.”1 In those years, those synods deter-

mined policy and made decisions at meetings at Delos, where Athens

had only one vote. In theory, Athens was only an equal partner in the

32 Kagan

synod, with the same single vote as Samos, Lesbos, Chios, or even tiny

Seriphos. In fact, the system worked in Athens’s favor. Athenian mili-

tary and naval power, the enormous relative size of Athens’s contribu-

tion, and the city’s immense prestige as
hegemon
guaranteed that the

many small and powerless states would be under its influence, while

the larger states that might have challenged the Athenians were easily

outvoted. Many years later, the embittered and rebellious Mytilene-

ans would say, “The allies were unable to unite and defend themselves

because of the great number of voters.”2 In the early years, however,

there appears to have been harmony and agreement among the mem-

bers, large and small, and the degree of Athens’s influence was propor-

tionate to its contribution. From the beginning, then, Athens was in the

happy position of controlling the Delian League without the appear-

ance of illegality or tyranny.

The early actions of the league must have won unanimous and en-

thusiastic support: the allies drove the Persians from their remaining

strongholds in Europe and made the sea lanes of the Aegean safe by

expelling a nest of pirates from the island of Scyros. As victory fol-

lowed victory and the Persian threat seemed more remote, some al-

lies thought the league and its burdensome obligations were no longer

needed. The Athenians, however, rightly saw that the Persian threat

was not gone and that it would increase to the degree that Greek vigi-

lance waned. Thucydides makes it clear that the chief causes for the

later rebellions were the allies’ refusal to provide the agreed-upon ships

or money and to perform the required military service. The Athenians

held them strictly to account and

were no longer equally pleasant as leaders. They no longer be-

haved as equals on campaigns, and they found it easy to reduce

states that rebelled. The blame for this belonged to the allies

themselves: for most of them had themselves assessed in quotas

of money instead of ships because they shrank from military ser-

vice so that they need not be away from home. As a result, the

Athenian fleet was increased by means of the money they paid in,

while when the allies tried to revolt, they went to war without the

means or the experience.3

Pericles and the Defense of Empire 33

Less than a decade after its formation, perhaps in 469, the forces

of the Delian League won smashing victories over the Persian fleet

and army at the mouth of the Eurymedon River in Asia Minor. This

decisive Persian defeat intensified the restlessness of the allies and the

harshness and unpopularity of the Athenians. The rebellion and siege

of Thasos from 465 to 463, which arose from a quarrel between the

Athenians and the Thasians and had no clear connection with the pur-

poses of the league, must have had a similar effect.

The first Peloponnesian War (ca. 460–445) strained Athenian re-

sources to the limit and encouraged defection. The destruction of the

Athenian expedition to Egypt in the mid-450s provided the shock that

hastened the transformation from league to empire. To many, it must

have seemed the beginning of the collapse of Athenian power, so it

provoked new rebellions. The Athenians responded swiftly and effec-

tively to put them down, and then took measures to ensure they would

not be repeated. In some places they installed democratic governments

friendly to and dependent on themselves. Sometimes they posted mili-

tary garrisons, sometimes they assigned Athenian officials to oversee

the conduct of the formerly rebellious state, and sometimes they used

a combination of tactics. All were violations of the autonomy of the

subject state.

The Athenians tightened their control of the empire even more in

the 440s. They imposed the use of Athenian weights, measures, and

coins, closing the local mints and so depriving the allies of a visible

symbol of their sovereignty and autonomy. They tightened the rules

for collection and delivery of tribute payments, requiring that the trials

for those accused of violations be held in Athens. They used military

force against states that rebelled or refused to pay tribute. Sometimes

the Athenians confiscated territory from the offending state and gave

it as a colony to loyal allies or Athenian citizens. When such a colony

was composed of Athenians it was called a cleruchy. Its settlers did not

form a new, independent city but remained Athenian citizens. When

the Athenians suppressed a rebellion, they usually installed a demo-

cratic regime and made the natives swear an oath of loyalty. The fol-

lowing is the oath imposed on the people of Colophon:

34 Kagan

I will do and say and plan whatever good I can with regard to the

people of the Athenians and their allies, and I will not revolt from

the people of the Athenians either in word or deed, either myself

or in obedience to another. And I will love the people of the Athe-

nians and I will not desert. And I will not destroy the democracy

at Colophon, either myself or in obedience to another, either by

going off to another city or by intriguing there. I will carry out

these things according to the oath truly, without deceit and with-

out harm, by Zeus, Apollo, and Demeter. And if I transgress may

I and my descendants be destroyed for all time, but if I keep my

oath may great prosperity come to me.4

A bit later they imposed a similar oath on the Chalcidians, but in

this one allegiance was sworn not to the alliance but to the Athenian

people alone.

The association took a critical step in the transition from league to

empire in the year 454–453, when the treasury was moved from Delos to

the Acropolis in Athens. The formal explanation was the threat that the

Persians might send a fleet into the Aegean, following a catastrophic

Athenian defeat in Egypt and confronted with a war with Sparta. We

do not know whether that fear was real or merely a pretext, but the

Athenians did not waste time in turning the transfer to their advan-

tage. From that year until late in the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians

took one-sixtieth of the tribute paid by the allies as first fruits for the

goddess Athena Polias, patroness of the city and now of the reconsti-

tuted league. The Athenians were free to use the goddess’s share as

they liked, not necessarily for league purposes.

Changes so important and so radical that they transformed a volun-

tary league of al ies into a largely involuntary empire ruled by Athens de-

manded justification in the ancient world of the Greeks. In most respects

the Greeks resembled other ancient peoples in their attitudes toward

power, conquest, empire, and the benefits that came with them. They

viewed the world as a place of intense competition in which victory and

domination, which brought fame and glory, were the highest goals, while

defeat and subordination brought ignominy and shame. They always

Pericles and the Defense of Empire 35

honored the creed espoused by Achil es, the greatest hero of Greek leg-

end: “Always to be the best and foremost over al others.” When the leg-

endary world of aristocratic heroes gave way to the world of city-states,

the sphere of competition moved up from contests between individuals,

households, and clans to contests and wars between cities. In 416, more

than a decade after the death of Pericles, Athenian spokesmen explained

to some Melian officials their view of international relations: “Of the

gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature

they always rule wherever they have the power.”5

Yet the Melian Dialogue, as this famous passage in Thucydides

on international
Realpolitik
in the classical world came to be known,

was a dramatic presentation of the morally problematic status of the

Athenian Empire. The Athenians’ harsh statement is provoked by the

Melians’ claim that the gods will be on their side, because the Athe-

nians are behaving unjustly toward a neutral state. The Melian com-

plaint may refer to the specific actions taken or contemplated by the

Athenians, but it would have struck a deep vein of sympathy among

the Greeks. The Greeks were free from the modern prejudice against

power and the security and glory it could bring, but their own historical

experience was different from that of other ancient nations. Their cul-

ture had been shaped not by great empires but by small, autonomous,

independent poleis, and they came to think that freedom was the natu-

ral condition for men raised in such an environment. Citizens should

be free in their persons and free to maintain their own constitutions,

laws, and customs, and their cities should be free to conduct their own

foreign relations and to compete with others for power and glory. The

Greeks also believed that the freedom made possible by the life of the

polis created a superior kind of citizen and a special kind of power. The

free, autonomous polis, they thought, was greater than the mightiest

powers in the world. The sixth-century poet Phocylides was prepared

to compare it to the great Assyrian Empire: “A little polis living orderly

in a high place is greater than block-headed Nineveh.”6

When poleis fought one another, the victor typical y took control of

a piece of borderland that was usual y the source of the dispute. The

defeated enemy was not normal y enslaved, nor was his land annexed

or occupied. In such matters, as in many, the Greeks employed a double

36 Kagan

standard by which they distinguished themselves from alien peoples

who did not speak Greek and were not shaped by the Greek cultural

tradition. Since they had not been raised as free men in free communities

but lived as subjects to a ruler, they were manifestly slaves by nature, so

it was perfectly al right to dominate and enslave them in reality. Greeks,

on the other hand, were natural y free, as they demonstrated by creating

and living in the liberal institutions of the polis. To rule over such people,

to deny them their freedom and autonomy, would clearly be wrong.

That was what the Greeks thought, but they did not always act ac-

cordingly. At a very early time the Spartans had conquered the Greeks

residing in their own region of Laconia and neighboring Messenia and

made them slaves of the state. In the sixth century they formed the

Peloponnesian League, an alliance that gave the Spartans considerable

control over the foreign policy of their allies. But the Spartans gener-

ally did not interfere with the internal arrangements of the allied cit-

ies, which continued to have the appearance of autonomy. In the two

decades after the Persian War, the Argives appear to have obliterated

some towns in the Argolid and annexed their territory, yet such de-

viations from the pattern remained unusual and did not overcome the

general expectation that Greeks should live as free men in autonomous

poleis, not as subjects in great empires.

The Greeks shared still another belief that interfered with the com-

fortable enjoyment of great power and empire. They thought that any

good thing amassed by men to an excessive degree led, through a se-

ries of stages, to what they called
hubris
. Such men were thought to

have overstepped the limits established for human beings and thereby

to have incurred
nemesis
, divine anger and retribution. These were

the main ideas emerging from the oracle at Apollo’s shrine at Delphi,

where could be found the pair of divine warnings to man to avoid

hubris
:
“know thyself ” and “nothing in excess.” To the Greeks of the

fifth century, the great example of hubris and nemesis
was the fate of

Xerxes, Great King of the Persian Empire. His power filled him with a

blind arrogance that led him to try to extend his rule over the Greek

mainland and so brought disaster to himself and his people.

Therefore, when the Athenians undertook the leadership of a Greek

alliance after the Persian War, and that leadership brought wealth and

Pericles and the Defense of Empire 37

power and turned into what was frankly acknowledged as an empire,

traditional ways of thinking provided no firm guidelines. The advan-