The Classical World (24 page)

Through all of these innovations runs a principled belief that the citizens of Athens are special, that each adult male is capable of responsible political duties, that they should be rewarded for their role, and that the arts help to honour the gods and to civilize their beneficiaries. Pericles himself served prominently on the commission to oversee the splendid new buildings on the Acropolis. He was a close friend of the great sculptor Pheidias and he was identified with the proper conduct of the building-programme. Under his general guidance, the robe which young Athenian girls wove for the goddess
Athena was transferred to her new ‘house’, the Parthenon, where it would hang as a huge backcloth behind Pheidias’ enormous new statue of the goddess.
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Just below the Acropolis, Pericles also proposed the building of a special Odeon, supported on a forest of columns. It became a venue for musical contests in the great festivals, although comic poets alleged that it was a conceit, modelled on the captured tent of the Persian King Xerxes.

Between
c.
560 and 510 the Athenian tyrants had had a vision of a grander Athens; now for the first time, we find a vision for Athenian citizens. No previous Athenian politician, not even Cleisthenes, is known to have associated with philosophers and intellectuals. Unlike previous aristocrats, Pericles asked for no poems or texts in his honour: he did not even try to inscribe his name on what were seen as the entire citizenry’s buildings. He had an idea of a new community, enhanced by power and by the equal participation of male Athenians. His intellectual contacts extended to Protagoras the philosopher who was invited, posterity said, to write the laws for the new settlement which was sent out to Thurii in south Italy under Pericles’ guidance. In music or political theory, in the use of oratory and sheer reason, Pericles applied a new intellectual clarity. It was the outcome of the Athenians’ new prominence in his lifetime, which drew talented and intelligent experts to his city, attracted by its new power and rewards. He and his friends did not believe in that old archaic bogey, the gods’ willingness to punish them for a distant ancestor’s misdeeds. They had a new classical clarity.

In this company, the random ‘anger’ of the gods was not a convincing ‘explanation of misfortune’: descendants would not be considered liable for their ancestors’ crimes. This clearer understanding of responsibility is for us a hallmark of the change from an archaic to a classical age. At Athens, Pericles and his friends had such understanding, and the important point for our sense of a change is that a few people had it at all, not that most other people in ‘classical Greece’ still entertained the older archaic ideas. In the Greek West, at Selinus, citizens still feared ‘avenging spirits’ in their midst; at Cyrene, they believed a legend of the ‘wrath’ of Apollo which accounted for the city’s foundation and they bothered about rituals to cope with their fears of pollution. At Locri, citizens were still sending a group of their
virgin daughters yearly to Troy so as to atone for a ‘wrong’ perpetrated by their ancestors in the mythical age of the heroes.
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The Periclean age was not an age of general Greek enlightenment, but it was an age when intellectuals and their enlightened thinking first flourished around a like-minded political leader.

We hear some of it still in Pericles’ Funeral Speech for 430
BC
, which Thucydides presents in his own words while claiming to keep ‘as close as possible’ to the ‘gist of what was actually said’. Thucydides himself heard the speech and, behind Pericles’ fine claims, we can also catch an answer to contemporary critics. ‘We are lovers of beauty, yes, but without extravagance; we are lovers of wisdom, yes, but without being soft.’ In our democracy, any man can contribute, whatever his background, but Athenians are tolerant of fellow Athenians’ private ways and do not resent them if they act for personal pleasure. Freedom pervades both political and private life, but it is a freedom under the law. Athenian liberty is not ‘licence’. The man, however, who refuses to participate in public life is ‘useless’.
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The ideal is not, as theorists have sometimes pretended, ‘public splendour, private squalor’. It is no disgrace to be poor, but it is a disgrace not to try to escape being poor in the first place. Throughout the 430s, the comic poets of Athens and the rival politicians tried to satirize and even to prosecute Pericles, Aspasia and his intellectual and artistic friends. The ‘Olympian’ Pericles, the comedians alleged, was under the sway of his mistress: he started the war with Sparta – why not? – to avoid scandal: his head, even, was ‘squill-shaped’.
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As a ‘squill’, in the ancient Greek flora, was a flower with a rounded, smooth bulb, the meaning is that Pericles had a round, prematurely bald head. He was said to wear a military helmet very often in public, perhaps to hide his baldness as much as to evoke his constant service as a general. The comic satire and the attempted prosecutions are evidence of the freedom for which Pericles spoke so wonderfully. The public loved the poets’ bold ‘tabloid’ humour, but it is Pericles’ vision which has outlived theirs.

The Peloponnesian War

The [five] Spartan judges considered that their original question would be right, whether they had had anything good from them in the war… so they took each one [of the Plataeans] aside and asked them the same thing again, whether they had done the Spartans and their allies any good in the war, and when they could not say that they had, they took them off and killed them, and they made not a single exception.

Thucydides, 3.68.1, as the siege of Plataea ended in 427
BC

During the last three decades of the fifth century
BC
the Athenians and the Spartans, with their respective allies, were at war again with one another. This war, known as the ‘Peloponnesian War’, may seem clear evidence of the ancient Greeks’ political failure. More than twenty years of fighting, with seven years’ ‘uneasy truce’ in the middle, killed tens of thousands of Greeks (perhaps half of the Athenian male population), destroyed homes and trees and cost large sums of money and manpower. The war was only resolved by help given by the Persian king to the Spartans which required, in return, the abandonment of all the Greek cities in Asia again to the Persian sphere. War, observers themselves said, increased human cruelty. There were spectacular acts of ferocity on either side, including the killing of prisoners by Spartan commanders and the massacre, after due warning, of the island population of Melos by the Athenians because the islanders had refused to join their Empire. The theme of freedom was sadly prominent throughout. It was promised initially to the Athenians’ ‘enslaved’ allies by Spartan rhetoric, but it was grossly betrayed by the outcome.
The eastern Greeks in Asia were handed over to the Persian king as tribute-paying subjects, while communities in the Aegean found themselves under the rule of hideous pro-Spartan juntas, the decarchies or the ‘rule of ten’ pro-Spartan men.

This war and all its ferocity were not driven by religion or nationalism: there were no crusades and there was no genocide. There were, however, real principles at stake, rather than killing for killing’s sake. At first sight, the conflict appears to be one only of power. The war arose from the continuing expansion of the Athenians’ power, especially as it turned in more detail to opportunities in Sicily and the Greek West. During the 430s these foreign ambitions increasingly alarmed Sparta’s important ally Corinth, the mother-city of the dominant state in Sicily, Syracuse. Corinth also had important colonies on the coast of north-west Greece, which lay on the natural route for warships to the West. Against this background of anxiety, the Corinthians were in no mood to give Athenian ambitions the benefit of any doubt. Suspicions intensified during a diplomatic clash over the Corinthian colony Corcyra (modern Corfu). Unless the Spartans would go to war against Athenian interventions, Corinthian envoys threatened to desert the Spartans’ alliance, an act which would expose the Peloponnese to a much greater risk of subversion and the consequent breaking of the Spartans’ hold on it. A chain of events unfolded, in which the Athenians did not technically break the prevailing treaty, sworn in 446, with the Spartans and their allies. But without Athenian ambitions outside this treaty’s area, the pressure for war would not have arisen at this point. The final flashpoint was Corinth’s neighbour Megara, an ally of the Spartans. The Athenians issued a decree with commercial intent against her, banning Megarians from walking in to Athens’ market-place or sailing into the harbours of her many allies. The aim, surely, was to destabilize the Megarians’ ruling oligarchy indirectly, without actually declaring war. If the Megarians could be turned into a democracy, they might become allies of the Athenians. The recent wars between 460 and 446 had shown what a vital strategic ally they could be, as they could block their mountain-passes against Spartan invaders and close the natural route for invasions of Attica.

More than five hundred years later the Emperor Hadrian still met memories of this famous feud. On visiting Megara, he found that,
only recently in his reign, the Megarians had been refusing to allow Athenians and their families, ancestral enemies, into their houses. Behind these territorial conflicts lay something more fundamental, the complete difference of lifestyle, culture and mentality between Pericles’ Athenians and the Spartans to whom Megara in that era had been aligned. Hadrian would have needed reminding how in the 430s classical Spartans had continued to crush and occupy their Greek neighbour, Messenia, and to maintain the harsh way of life which had been imposed by their lawgivers since the seventh century
BC
. Around Sparta’s vulnerable territories, her kings and elders worked to maintain a cordon of loyal oligarchies, in which a relatively few citizens ruled firmly over all others and denied them political rights. Athens, by contrast, was the great democracy, the seat of a culture which could be said to be the ‘education of Greece’. The thinking, the theatre, the arts, the varied lifestyle which we still admire were all Athenian or based in Athens. The Spartans did not trust it, fearing it would infiltrate and overthrow the protective cordon of allies on which their own way of life depended. If only the few oligarchs who ruled her northern Peloponnesian allies, especially Corinth, could have had the nerve to desert Sparta and join the Athenian allies, their fellow seafarers. Forty years later brave democrats were indeed active among the Spartans’ Isthmian allies, even in Corinth. Together with the Athenians, they could have mounted an unstoppable expedition to Sicily, south Italy and beyond. With the Greeks of Sicily as their allies, they could then have attacked the furthest point of Athenian ambitions, Carthage. Carthage’s dependence on hired troops would probably have failed her; the Greek community in Carthage would have helped the Greek allies, and Carthage, the richest, most powerful alternative to the Greek way of life in the Mediterranean, would have submitted. Athenian values, democracy and prosperity would have blossomed all the way from north Africa to the Black Sea. Eminent Athenians would have found a new outlet abroad for their talents. The flamboyant aristocrat Alcibiades, the suspect hero of Athenian audiences, would have fitted well as the governor of Athenian Carthage, among the gold, the girls and the city’s famous carpets.

By contrast, the years of war became a dull, damaging stalemate. In 431
BC
Greek opinion had expected a swift Athenian surrender,
but the Athenians, on Pericles’ advice, retreated behind their city’s Long Walls which were far too strong for the Spartans’ poor grasp of siege-warfare. Like the Peninsular War between England and Napoleon’s France, the war became one of a sea-bound ‘whale’ against a land-bound ‘elephant’. The Athenians’ fleet was some three hundred warships strong and was still brilliantly manned and trained (even if a few slave-‘attendants’ sometimes rowed too). It continued to dominate the sea, to assist imports of food into the city and to maintain security among the Athenians’ allies. The Spartans’ naval skills, by contrast, were minimal and they lacked the money to build and maintain first-class ships. They had helot-serfs, but no free lower-class citizens to serve as rowers. Their supreme strength lay in traditional hoplite warfare by land, conducted by their superb infantry who marched in step to music, still chanting the repulsive verses of the poet Tyrtaeus, with their purple cloaks still fluttering in the wind. From 431 to 424 the theatre of war spread to north-west Greece, up to northern Greece, throughout the Aegean and eventually out to Sicily and south Italy. The Spartans’ successes in subverting Athenian allies remained limited, not least because the Spartans’ own system and the harshness of most of the Spartan commanders were such a grim alternative. The Spartans’ main impact lay in their yearly invasion of Attica when they cut down the local trees and burned the land. Nobody could beat them in a pitched battle, but the Athenians denied them one, merely harassing their raiders and foragers with their recently enlarged cavalry. Sparta’s allies could not stay long in Attica: they lacked a workforce of helots at home, and so they needed to return to gather in their own harvest with their own hands.

After ten years of fierce but inconclusive fighting, the Spartans agreed a truce in 421
BC
which left them with no real gain and no popularity among their allies. The events of the war give a fascinating glimpse of the weaknesses in Spartan culture and society. The numbers of Spartiate soldiers were already declining and the outlying ‘Dwellers Around’ were being used to fill up infantry units which had previously been for Spartans only. The Spartan state was financially feeble (she still refused to strike coins) and at sea, her commanders were incompetent. In 425 a genuine Spartan cavalry was introduced, but it was not a success. Once outside Sparta, most of the Spartan governors
were detestable men, trained to be harsh, not tactful, with a tendency to homoerotic affairs with their subjects and excessive use of the military baton. No Greek army marched without a strong sense of the gods as onlookers and guides, but the Spartans were exceptionally conscious of them. Like every Greek army, they respected the possible wrath of ‘gods and local heroes’, but they respected them in a more prominent way. They had a heightened sense of these gods’ anger and their ‘punishment’ of any Spartans who transgressed them. It was not just that ‘behind a Spartan army there trotted a mixed herd of sacrificial animals, ready for use to test the will of the gods at any time’. Before crossing Sparta’s borders, Spartans were distinctive in their practice of offering ‘crossing-sacrifices’ and would even withdraw if the omens proved unfavourable. Like other field commanders, Spartan kings and generals could sometimes treat the gods, the omens and the yearly calendar of religious festivals as flexible factors, whose rules could be bent or evaded. But they became very conscious of such manipulations if events proved their decisions wrong. More than those of their Athenian opponents, Spartans’ activities were limited by fear of the gods.