The decisive battle of Philip's conquest of Greece occurred in 338 BC at Chaeronea in Boeotia, when Philip beat the Athenians and their allies. The military feat that won that day was a cavalry charge by Philip's eighteen year old son, Alexander. Alexander seems to have inherited much from his brilliant father: physical courage, arrogance, extreme intelligence, and, most importantly, unbridled ambition. For when his father died in 336 BC at an assassin's hand, Alexander quickly consolidated his power and set out to conquer the world. At the age of twenty-one.
He had been a youth of infinite promise. Physically handsome, strong, brave, and nothing short of brilliant, he had been schooled by no less a person than Aristotle. With all these qualities, he took up his father's ambition and prosecuted it with a swiftness that is almost frightening.
In 334 BC, Alexander crossed over into Asia Minor to begin his conquest of Persia. To conquer Persia was to conquer the world, for the Persian Empire sprawled over most of the known world: Asia Minor, the Middle East, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Iran. He didn't have much to go on: his army numbered thirty thousand infantry and only five thousand cavalry. He had no navy. He had no money.
His strategy was simple. He would move quickly and begin with a few sure victories, so he could gain money and supplies. He would focus on the coastal cities so that he could gain control of the ports; in that way, the Persian navy would have no place to make landfall. Finally, he took the battle right to the center of the opposing forces, and he threw himself into the very worst of the battle. His enemies were stunned and his troops grew intensely loyal to this man who threw both them and himself right into the teeth of the wolf.
He quickly overran Asian Minor after defeating the Persian forces that controlled the territory, and after seizing all the coastal cities, he turned inland towards Syria in 333 BC. There he engaged the main Persian army under the leadership of the Persian king, Darius, at a city called Issus. As he had done at Chaeronia, he led a astounding cavalry charge against a superior opponent and forced them to break ranks. Darius, and much of his army, ran inland towards Mesopotamia, leaving Alexander free to continue south. He seized the coastal towns along the Phoenician and Palestinian coasts. When he entered Jerusalem, he was hailed as their great liberator. He continued south and conquered Egypt with almost no resistance whatsoever; the Egyptians called him king and son of Re.
By this point, Darius understood that the situation was out of his control. As Alexander moved down the Phoenican coast, he managed to conquer the city of Tyre, which was absolutely central to Persian naval operations. Darius knew that he could never recover Asia Minor, Phoenicia, or Palestine, so he sent an offer to halt hostilities. If Alexander would cease, Darius would cede to him all of the Persian Empire west of the Euphrates River; Mesopotamia, Persia (modern day Iran), and the northern territories would remain Persian.
Alexander would have none of this. In 331 BC, he crossed the Euphrates river into Mesopotamia. Darius met him near the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh, the city that had been destroyed by the Chaldeans only three centuries earlier. This was the last battle between Darius and Alexander; the Macedonian king again put the numerically superior Persian army to flight, and Darius ran also. In January of 330 BC, Alexander entered Babylon: he had conquered Mesopotamia and now controlled its greatest and wealthiest city.
The Persians had amassed vast wealth from the tribute paid by the various states under them. Alexander, who had started with no money at all, was now in control of the fattest treasury that had ever existed.
Darius, meanwhile, met his death at the hands of a conspiracy. The Persian nobles no longer felt that he could effectively lead them and, under the leadership of his brother Bessus, the nobles killed Darius and left his body for Alexander to find. Alexander, however, pushed on, found Bessus, and killed him and as many Persian nobles as he could. The Persian Empire had officially come to a close.
Having conquered what was then the known world, Alexander had pushed his army to the very limits of civilization as he knew it. But he wanted more; he saw that the world extended further and partly out of curiosity, and partly out of a desire to conquer the enitre world within the boundaries of the river Ocean (the Greeks believed that a great river, called Ocean, encircled all the land of the world), Alexander and his army pushed east, through Scythia (northern Iran), and all the way to Pakistan and India. He had conquered Bactria at the foot of the western Himalayas, gained a huge Bactrian army, and married a Bactrian princess, Roxane. But when he tried to push on past Pakistan, his army grew tired, and he abandoned the eastward conquest in 327 BC.
In 324 BC, Alexander returned to Babylon. He was now, literally, king of the world, and began to lay down his strategies for consolidating his empire. He began to plan cities and building works, new conquests, and even considered deifying himself. But like so many human gods, his own death caught up with him. In 323 BC, at the age of thirty-three, he fell into a fever and died.
It's rare in history that human events become so focussed on a single individual; rarely is that focus justified. Alexander, however, is one of the notable exceptions. The age of Alexander was the age created by Alexander, and he would permanently stamp world culture with a Greek character. He was in many ways a brilliant and selfless person, quite possibly the most brilliant military leader in human history. With a small army, little or no supplies, and no money, he conquered the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire in the world. He never lost a battle, not once, and he flung himself into battle with intense physical bravery. He was also a tyrant and a bully, given to fits of uncompromising violence. He was certainly a drunkard and at times unstable. We will never know if he could have ruled or unified this huge empire, for it may have crumbled into nothing within a few years. His death, however, guaranteed that the empire he had built would never last.
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Showing posts with label ancient greece. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ancient greece. Show all posts
Friday, December 21, 2007
Philip of Macedon
Philip of Macedon ascended the throne of Macedon in his late twenties. He had found himself regent, that is, the individual in charge of the kingdom because the king was only an infant. As regent, he promptly overthrew his infant nephew, the king, and crowned himself king in 359 BC. In his early twenties, however, he had been a Macedonian hostage living in Thebes during the heyday of the Theban hegemony. Political hostages generally lived a good life, they were simply kept in order that they may be executed if hostilities commenced between the government the hostage came from and the government that held him (or her). Philip lived a good life in Thebes and was well-integrated into the politics and military. He grew to think of himself as a Greek rather than as a Macedonian, but he also learned Greek politics and Greek military strategy. Philip had learned to be a general.
When he assumed the throne of Macedon, he promptly pacified all the European tribes to his north, seized gold and silver mines by conquering the city of Amphipolis to his south, and began to build new cities and large standing armies.
He then turned his eyes to the south in 349 BC and began to systematically conquer all the Greek cities; after a great victory against Athens and its allies in 338 BC, Philip found himself in control of all Greece (except Sparta). Philip promptly went to work at securing his power in Greece, building garrisons at Corinth, Thebes, and Chalcis; in 338 BC, he created the Federal League of Corinth. Ostensibly an alliance of free city-states, Philip was its ruler and for all practical purposes had become king of Greece. The independent city-state, the polis, had ceased to exist. But Philip wasn't finished. The Persian Wars still festered in the Greek memory, and the Spartan invasion of Persia in 379 BC showed Philip that it was possible to defeat the mightiest empire known to humanity. So in 337, Philip announced the the League would attack Persia as revenge for the wars, and in 336 he stood poised to prosecute his mighty invasion of the Persian Empire, but an assassin's sword ended his great campaign. It should've ended the brief Macedonian control of Greece; but Philip's twenty-one year old son stepped into his father's shoes and became the conqueror of the world.
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When he assumed the throne of Macedon, he promptly pacified all the European tribes to his north, seized gold and silver mines by conquering the city of Amphipolis to his south, and began to build new cities and large standing armies.
He then turned his eyes to the south in 349 BC and began to systematically conquer all the Greek cities; after a great victory against Athens and its allies in 338 BC, Philip found himself in control of all Greece (except Sparta). Philip promptly went to work at securing his power in Greece, building garrisons at Corinth, Thebes, and Chalcis; in 338 BC, he created the Federal League of Corinth. Ostensibly an alliance of free city-states, Philip was its ruler and for all practical purposes had become king of Greece. The independent city-state, the polis, had ceased to exist. But Philip wasn't finished. The Persian Wars still festered in the Greek memory, and the Spartan invasion of Persia in 379 BC showed Philip that it was possible to defeat the mightiest empire known to humanity. So in 337, Philip announced the the League would attack Persia as revenge for the wars, and in 336 he stood poised to prosecute his mighty invasion of the Persian Empire, but an assassin's sword ended his great campaign. It should've ended the brief Macedonian control of Greece; but Philip's twenty-one year old son stepped into his father's shoes and became the conqueror of the world.
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the Spartans
After the unconditional surrender of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War, Sparta became the undisputed major power among the Greek city-states. Stripped of its navy and its empire, Athens simply became just one more city under the political control of its more powerful neighbor in the south. This period in Greek history is called the Spartan hegemony, for although Sparta didn't rule the city -states of Greece as if it were an empire, Sparta did exercise considerable influence over the domestic and foreign decisions of these independent states: it exercised, then, hegemonic control over these states.
In Athens, the Spartan general who defeated the city, Lysander, pulled down the democratic government and established an oligarchy. Members of the democratic factions fled the city and raised armies in Corinth and in Thebes. The oligarchy ruled with an iron fist, often ordering summary executions of its political opponents (as Socrates tells us in The Apology); for this, the thirty members of the oligarchy were called "the Thirty Tyrants," or simply, "the Thirty." Eventually the Athenians were allowed by Sparta to return to a democratic constitution.
Sparta, meanwhile, vigorously went about establishing an empire of its own. Shortly after the defeat of Athens, they entered into an alliance with Cyrus, who claimed the Persian throne against his brother, Artaxerxes II, who occupied the throne. The Persians the the Greeks, under the leadership of Sparta, managed to make it all the way to the center of Mesopotamia and the capital itself, where Cyrus was killed. The Greeks escaped, but the Spartans soon entered into defensive alliances with the Greek city-states of Asia Minor.
The great figure of this age is Agesilaus, the king of Sparta from 396 to 360 BC. Agesilaus was an energetic and aggressive general who, though physically lame, was incomprehensibly physically brave whenever in battle. Soon the Spartan and Greek army was threatening Persia again, but the Persians destroyed the Spartan sea empire in 394 BC. The Spartans had been distracted by another war on the Greek mainland, the Corinthian War (395-387 BC), when Athens, Corinth, and Argos formed an alliance against Sparta. Athens rebuilt the walls of the city and its navy.
This war, like the Peloponnesian War, essentially accomplished nothing. In the end, all sides agreed to a peace established by the Persian king. Fearful of the Athenians, the Persian king put Sparta in charge of Greece, and Agesilaus promptly broke up the Corinthian alliance and any other alliances that didn't involve Sparta. From 387 BC onwards, Agesilaus and the Spartans closely controlled political decisions in the individual city-states and stacked their governments with individuals friendly to Sparta and its interests.
The period of Spartan hegemony saw the first years of the maturing of Greek philosophy. Socrates, who looms large as a principle foundation of Greek philosophy, had come to the end of his years when the Age of Pericles closed. He was put to death in 399 BC. However, his pupil, who more than anyone else is responsible for synthesizing earlier Greek philosophy int a single, overarching system, began his activities as a philosopher and teacher in these years. Based in Athens, his school, the Academy, would become the intellectual center of Greece in the decades to follow.
Agesilaus finally overstepped himself when he captured the city of Thebes without any provocation whatsoever. When he then turned on Athens, the Athenians allied themselves with the Thebans, and the Spartan control over Greece came to a final end in 371 BC.
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In Athens, the Spartan general who defeated the city, Lysander, pulled down the democratic government and established an oligarchy. Members of the democratic factions fled the city and raised armies in Corinth and in Thebes. The oligarchy ruled with an iron fist, often ordering summary executions of its political opponents (as Socrates tells us in The Apology); for this, the thirty members of the oligarchy were called "the Thirty Tyrants," or simply, "the Thirty." Eventually the Athenians were allowed by Sparta to return to a democratic constitution.
Sparta, meanwhile, vigorously went about establishing an empire of its own. Shortly after the defeat of Athens, they entered into an alliance with Cyrus, who claimed the Persian throne against his brother, Artaxerxes II, who occupied the throne. The Persians the the Greeks, under the leadership of Sparta, managed to make it all the way to the center of Mesopotamia and the capital itself, where Cyrus was killed. The Greeks escaped, but the Spartans soon entered into defensive alliances with the Greek city-states of Asia Minor.
The great figure of this age is Agesilaus, the king of Sparta from 396 to 360 BC. Agesilaus was an energetic and aggressive general who, though physically lame, was incomprehensibly physically brave whenever in battle. Soon the Spartan and Greek army was threatening Persia again, but the Persians destroyed the Spartan sea empire in 394 BC. The Spartans had been distracted by another war on the Greek mainland, the Corinthian War (395-387 BC), when Athens, Corinth, and Argos formed an alliance against Sparta. Athens rebuilt the walls of the city and its navy.
This war, like the Peloponnesian War, essentially accomplished nothing. In the end, all sides agreed to a peace established by the Persian king. Fearful of the Athenians, the Persian king put Sparta in charge of Greece, and Agesilaus promptly broke up the Corinthian alliance and any other alliances that didn't involve Sparta. From 387 BC onwards, Agesilaus and the Spartans closely controlled political decisions in the individual city-states and stacked their governments with individuals friendly to Sparta and its interests.
The period of Spartan hegemony saw the first years of the maturing of Greek philosophy. Socrates, who looms large as a principle foundation of Greek philosophy, had come to the end of his years when the Age of Pericles closed. He was put to death in 399 BC. However, his pupil, who more than anyone else is responsible for synthesizing earlier Greek philosophy int a single, overarching system, began his activities as a philosopher and teacher in these years. Based in Athens, his school, the Academy, would become the intellectual center of Greece in the decades to follow.
Agesilaus finally overstepped himself when he captured the city of Thebes without any provocation whatsoever. When he then turned on Athens, the Athenians allied themselves with the Thebans, and the Spartan control over Greece came to a final end in 371 BC.
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The Peloponnesian War
Suspicious and fearful of Athenian power and wealth, the Spartans were not happy with the thirty year peace they had agreed to. The Athenians themselves had become chauvinistic and power hungry, and seemed ready to begin to reassert their power on the mainland of Greece. In 431, spurred on by a relatively trivial event in a distant part of the Greek mainland, Sparta and Athens fell into another war which is simply called, The Peloponnesian War.
The Spartans wished to fight a land war, which they were very good at. They outnumbered the Athenians two to one, odds they believed the Athenians could stand up to only for a very short time. At the outbreak of the war, then, they invaded Attica and began burning crops in order to starve the Athenians into submission.
The Athenians, however, had a harbor and a powerful navy. Pericles knew that they could hold out against the Spartans for several years on the tribute money from the Empire. He also knew that he could take the war right to the doorsteps of Spartan allies, by sailing troops along the coast of Greece and landing them far from Athenian lines. Although Pericles died in the second year of the war in a plague that devestated Athens, the Athenians, nevertheless, kept to the Periclean strategy of prosecuting the war.
Both sides believed that their strategy would wear down the other side and force a surrender. However, this really didn't happen. After ten years of fighting and some disastrous events among allied cities, the situation was no different than it was at the beginning of the war. Both sides had become worn down, so Sparta and Athens signed a fifty year peace called the Peace of Nicias, after the Athenian politician and general who was leading Athens at the time. Essentially similar in view and ability to Pericles, Nicias was a brilliant and cautious man who managed to pull off an effective truce. Everyone was allowed to go home, and the territorial status as it stood at the time of the peace, was allowed to remain in place. Athens kept its continental territories and allies, and Sparta got to keep all the territories it had acquired.
Nicias, however, had rivals in the democratic assembly. Perhaps the most talented of these rivals was a young, brilliant follower of the philosopher Socrates named Alcibiades. With creativity, energy, and immense oratorical ability, Alicibiades in 415 BC convinced the Athenians to attack the Greek city-states on the island of Sicily and bring them under the glove of the Athenian Empire. Although the expedition was in part under the leadership of Nicias, it soon turned into a disaster. In 413 BC, the entire army was defeated and captured and a large part of the great, powerful fleet of the Athenians was destroyed in the harbor of Syracuse. Athenian power since the Persian Wars had rested solely on the power of the navy; the disastrous Sicilian expedition left Athens almost completely powerless.
Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the Spartans soon attacked Athens and—worse news piled on top of bad news—they were soon joined by the Persians who were still smarting from the war Athens had so vigorously prosecuted in the first half of the fifth century. For awhile the Athenians hung on, even enjoying tremendous victories when the war was shifed to the Aegean Sea. But in 405, the rest of their navy was destroyed in a surprise attack, and by the next year the situation was hopeless. In 404 BC, the Athenians surrendered totally to the Spartans, who tore down the walls of the city, barred them from ever having a navy, and installed their own oligarchic government, the Thirty. The Age of Athens, the Age of Pericles, the Classical Age, the Athenian Empire, had come to an end.
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The Spartans wished to fight a land war, which they were very good at. They outnumbered the Athenians two to one, odds they believed the Athenians could stand up to only for a very short time. At the outbreak of the war, then, they invaded Attica and began burning crops in order to starve the Athenians into submission.
The Athenians, however, had a harbor and a powerful navy. Pericles knew that they could hold out against the Spartans for several years on the tribute money from the Empire. He also knew that he could take the war right to the doorsteps of Spartan allies, by sailing troops along the coast of Greece and landing them far from Athenian lines. Although Pericles died in the second year of the war in a plague that devestated Athens, the Athenians, nevertheless, kept to the Periclean strategy of prosecuting the war.
Both sides believed that their strategy would wear down the other side and force a surrender. However, this really didn't happen. After ten years of fighting and some disastrous events among allied cities, the situation was no different than it was at the beginning of the war. Both sides had become worn down, so Sparta and Athens signed a fifty year peace called the Peace of Nicias, after the Athenian politician and general who was leading Athens at the time. Essentially similar in view and ability to Pericles, Nicias was a brilliant and cautious man who managed to pull off an effective truce. Everyone was allowed to go home, and the territorial status as it stood at the time of the peace, was allowed to remain in place. Athens kept its continental territories and allies, and Sparta got to keep all the territories it had acquired.
Nicias, however, had rivals in the democratic assembly. Perhaps the most talented of these rivals was a young, brilliant follower of the philosopher Socrates named Alcibiades. With creativity, energy, and immense oratorical ability, Alicibiades in 415 BC convinced the Athenians to attack the Greek city-states on the island of Sicily and bring them under the glove of the Athenian Empire. Although the expedition was in part under the leadership of Nicias, it soon turned into a disaster. In 413 BC, the entire army was defeated and captured and a large part of the great, powerful fleet of the Athenians was destroyed in the harbor of Syracuse. Athenian power since the Persian Wars had rested solely on the power of the navy; the disastrous Sicilian expedition left Athens almost completely powerless.
Knowing a good thing when they saw it, the Spartans soon attacked Athens and—worse news piled on top of bad news—they were soon joined by the Persians who were still smarting from the war Athens had so vigorously prosecuted in the first half of the fifth century. For awhile the Athenians hung on, even enjoying tremendous victories when the war was shifed to the Aegean Sea. But in 405, the rest of their navy was destroyed in a surprise attack, and by the next year the situation was hopeless. In 404 BC, the Athenians surrendered totally to the Spartans, who tore down the walls of the city, barred them from ever having a navy, and installed their own oligarchic government, the Thirty. The Age of Athens, the Age of Pericles, the Classical Age, the Athenian Empire, had come to an end.
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the athenian ancient empire
The First Peloponnesian War
In 461 BC, under the leadership of Pericles, Cimon was ousted from power. Athens overnight changed direction in domestic and foreign politics. In foreign affairs, Athens began to define its role in direct relationship with Sparta rather than in relationship with Persia. Immediately after the exile of Cimon, the Athenians formed an alliance with Argos, a long-standing rival of Sparta. They later formed an alliance with Megara, the city which lay directly in the path of the route from Athens to the Peloponnesus, the southern part of Greece. To get at Athens, then, the Spartans would first have to go through the Megarans. The Spartans, as you can imagine, grew suspicious of these moves, particularly the alliance with Megara, and began a campaign against the Athenians: the First Peloponnesian War.Athens dominated the war in its early years, but a disastrous campaign against the Persians in Egypt decimated the Athenian navy and inspired several members of the Delian League to revolt. For the Delian League had imperceptibly become the Athenian Empire; the alliance was less about the security of the League as equal states, and more about Athenian power politics in Greece. Reeling from the Egyptian defeat and the various rebellions, Athens made peace with the Spartans. In 449 BC, Athens stopped the war with Persia that it had been aggressively pursuing since 478 BC.
The Athenian empire, though, which was maintained not so much through good will as through the threat of force, began to fray at the edges. When Megara and a neighboring state, Boeotia, revolted from the alliance, Athens no longer had a buffer zone between it and the Peloponnesian states allied with Sparta. In 445 BC, Pericles, however, diverted disaster by making a thirty year peace with Sparta. Both sides got they wanted. Athens gave up political power over the states on the Greek mainland; in return, Sparta recognized the Athenian Empire as a legitimate political institution. The Athenian Empire, which had been gradually forming, was now official.
The Empire
Before the peace with Sparta, Athens benefitted from the taxes paid into the League and began growing quite wealty; after the peace, the Athenians moved the treasury to Athens and began keeping one sixtieth of all the revenue. The Athenians began to grew especially wealthy. The League, after all, was no longer at war with Persia, but the tribute money kept rolling in. At this stage, when the League had lost its military justification and when the tribute money was no longer really going for defense, the League in reality had become an Athenian empire. Reaction among the tribute states was mixed; some city-states eagerly participated in the empire, but most fumed under the onerousness of Athenian control and taxation. As Athens grew more and more powerful and the city more opulent, discontent grew among the tribute states. However, the Spartans, in particular, grew increasingly distrustfull of Athenian power and wealth. They had agreed to recognize the Athenian Empire in exchange for Athens giving up claims to continental territories; however, it was becoming apparent that even without the continental territory, the Athenians were a major threat to Sparta and its influence. Democracy and the Age of Pericles
The great Athenian leader of this age, Pericles, was swept into power in a popular democratic movement. A member of a noble and venerable family, Pericles led the Athenians against Cimon for harboring autocratic intentions. Pericles had been the leader of the democratic faction of Athenian politics since 462 BC. Ephialtes was the Athenian leader who had finally divested the Areopagus of all its power; Athens was now solely governed by the council and the democratic Assembly. Pericles quickly brought forward legislation that let anyone serve as the archon (one of the nine central leaders of the country) despite birth or wealth. The Assembly became the central power of the state. Consisting of all the free-born (no freed slaves) male citizens of Athens, the Assembly was given sole approval or veto power over every state decision. The Assembly was not a representative government, but instead consisted of every male citizen. In terms of numbers, this still was not a democratic state: women weren't included, nor were foreigners, slaves, or freed slaves. Pericles also changed the rules of citizenship: before the ascendancy of Pericles, anyone born of a single Athenian parent was an Athenian citizen; Pericles instituted laws which demanded that both parents be Athenian citizens. So, in reality, the great democracy of Periclean Athens was in reality only a very small minority of the people living in Athens. It was, however, the closest human culture has come to an unadulterated democracy.The Assembly was given unprecedented power over the selections of officials; elected officials, such as military generals, were not chosen by the Assembly, but the Assembly did hire and fire all other public officials. In addition, the Assembly served as a law court hearing major cases. Any decision made in a court of law could be appealed to the Assembly where a court of free citizens would hear the case. There was no standing army, either, as there was in Sparta; free citizens could choose to serve in the military.
One figure towers over this new democratic state: Pericles. This Age of Athens, which begins either in 462 or 450 or 445 BC and lasts until 404 BC, when Athens is defeated by Sparta, is called the Athenian Age, the Classical Age, or, after its most important political figure, the Age of Pericles. Just about everything that you associate with Greek culture is squeezed into this half century of wealth, energy, creativity, and chauvinism in Athens. All the great works of Greek tragedy and comedy, the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, were written in this time in the city of Athens. Most of the monumental works of architecture, built off of the wealth that literally poured into Athens from her imperial possessions, were built at this time: the Acropolis, the rebuilding of the Agora. Flush with wealth and at peace with Persia and Sparta, the Athenians had nothing better to do with this wealth then invest it in a massive cultural flowering of art, poetry, philosophy, and architecture.
And still there remains the figure of Pericles himself. There is no question that the democratic reforms of the Age of Pericles owe their existence to the energy of this political figure. He was a man of immense persuasiveness and an orator of great power. Although he was eventually ostracized by the Athenians (he later returned), he dominated the democratic government of Athens with his formidable capacity to speak and to persuade. He had two central policies: democratic reform and the maintenance of the empire.
Sparta, however, growing increasinly wary of Athenian prosperity, would soon find itself entangled once again with its old rival. The thirty year peace managed to hang on for only fourteen years before hostilities broke out again. In 431, a second war broke out, called simply The Peloponnesian War; this war would see the death of Pericles in its second year, but eventually witness the foolish destruction of the Athenian navy, the defeat of Athens, and the end of Athenian democracy.
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the Greek League
When the Persians retreated from Greece, the Greek League began show tensions. Although Sparta had contributed the most to the war and had fought the deciding battle at Plataea, the victory over the Persians would not have been possible without the Athenian navy, which remained powerful after the war. All the Greek cities in Asia Minor lived under the direct threat of Persian invasion and revenge; Sparta, being a land-based military, was in no position to defend these city-states. So these city-states, and the city-states of the islands in the Aegean, turned to Athens and her powerful navy for protection and alliance. The city-states in the south of Greece, and some in the north, turned to Sparta, which had led the Greek League in the war against the Persians. Thus was set up the great rivalry between these two diametrically opposed Greek states and cultures, a rivalry that would lift Athens to the height of empire only to be finally defeated by an increasingly distrustful Spartan alliance.
The Persians had become a permanent fixture in Greek life; Greek experience throughout the fifth century BC was lived under the shadow of a possible Persian return. For Persia remained powerful and revenge was always on the horizon. In 478 BC, one year after the final defeat of the Persians, representatives from the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and the islands scattered throughout the Aegean Sea, met on the island of Delos—a sacred island associated with the cult of Apollo—to discuss an alliance with the Athenians. They swore oaths of alliance to each other and to Athens; thus was born the Delian League. This new league had several purposes besides defense; one of these was to wage a military campaign against the Persians to free those Greek cities that were still under the control of the Persians. Alhtough Athens was the leader of the League, each city-state had one vote—the League was essentially a democratic alliance between equals.
The League busily set about fighting the Persians, freeing city after city until they achieved a decisive victory against the Persians in 467 BC. This battle freed several Greek cities, all of which joined the league. Many cities joined unwillingly; they were coerced by the League members sometimes under threat of destruction. Although the League was essentially democratic, they believed that the safety of the League and its objectives would be seriously compromised by states independent of the League.
Athens during all this time was led by a powerfully brilliant political leader named Cimon, who was the son of Miltiades, the great hero of the battle of Marathon. Under his leadership, Athens and the League constantly and aggressively attacked the Persians; as the League grew, the power of Athens, as leader of the League, grew proportionately.
Athens itself grew tremendously wealthy during this time; part of the agreement of the League involved tax payments by other members of the League to Athens for maintaining the fleet. With all that wealth, Athens began to invest in large building projects (such as the Acropolis), in drama, in art, and in crafts. The great flowering of Athenian culture begins in the heyday years of the Delian League, as wealth and power seemed to flow to Athens as if it were the center of the world.
The turning point in the Delian League came with the revolt of a small island city, Thasos. Unhappy with the League and payments to Athens, Thasos rebelled against the League. Cimon promptly squashed this revolt; however, the reaction to the Thasos rebellion was the first time in the League history where a decision was made only in regard to the interests of Athens rather than the interests of the League as a whole. At home, Cimon became unpopular, and a radical democratic movement, under the leadership of Pericles, challenged his authority. As Athens stood on the brink of becoming a democratic state, Pericles stood ready to move the Delian League into an Athenian Empire.
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The Persians had become a permanent fixture in Greek life; Greek experience throughout the fifth century BC was lived under the shadow of a possible Persian return. For Persia remained powerful and revenge was always on the horizon. In 478 BC, one year after the final defeat of the Persians, representatives from the Greek city-states of Asia Minor and the islands scattered throughout the Aegean Sea, met on the island of Delos—a sacred island associated with the cult of Apollo—to discuss an alliance with the Athenians. They swore oaths of alliance to each other and to Athens; thus was born the Delian League. This new league had several purposes besides defense; one of these was to wage a military campaign against the Persians to free those Greek cities that were still under the control of the Persians. Alhtough Athens was the leader of the League, each city-state had one vote—the League was essentially a democratic alliance between equals.
The League busily set about fighting the Persians, freeing city after city until they achieved a decisive victory against the Persians in 467 BC. This battle freed several Greek cities, all of which joined the league. Many cities joined unwillingly; they were coerced by the League members sometimes under threat of destruction. Although the League was essentially democratic, they believed that the safety of the League and its objectives would be seriously compromised by states independent of the League.
Athens during all this time was led by a powerfully brilliant political leader named Cimon, who was the son of Miltiades, the great hero of the battle of Marathon. Under his leadership, Athens and the League constantly and aggressively attacked the Persians; as the League grew, the power of Athens, as leader of the League, grew proportionately.
Athens itself grew tremendously wealthy during this time; part of the agreement of the League involved tax payments by other members of the League to Athens for maintaining the fleet. With all that wealth, Athens began to invest in large building projects (such as the Acropolis), in drama, in art, and in crafts. The great flowering of Athenian culture begins in the heyday years of the Delian League, as wealth and power seemed to flow to Athens as if it were the center of the world.
The turning point in the Delian League came with the revolt of a small island city, Thasos. Unhappy with the League and payments to Athens, Thasos rebelled against the League. Cimon promptly squashed this revolt; however, the reaction to the Thasos rebellion was the first time in the League history where a decision was made only in regard to the interests of Athens rather than the interests of the League as a whole. At home, Cimon became unpopular, and a radical democratic movement, under the leadership of Pericles, challenged his authority. As Athens stood on the brink of becoming a democratic state, Pericles stood ready to move the Delian League into an Athenian Empire.
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persian wars
Like the Trojan War, the Persian Wars were a defining moment in Greek history. The Athenians, who would dominate Greece culturally and politically through the fifth century BC and through part of the fourth, regarded the wars against Persia as their greatest and most characteristic moment. For all their importance, though, the Persian Wars began inauspiciously. In the middle of the sixth century BC, the Greek city-states along the coast of Asia Minor came under the control of the Lydians and their king, Croesus (560-546 BC). However, when the Persians conquered the Lydians in 546 BC, all the states subject to the Lydians became subject to the Persians. The Persians controlled their new subject-states very closely; they appointed individuals to rule the states as tyrants. They also required citizens to serve in the Persian army and to pay fairly steep taxes. Smarting under these new burdens and anxious for independence, the tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras, began a democratic rebellion in 499 BC. Aristagoras was an opportunist. He had been placed in power by the Persians, but when he persuaded the Persians to launch a failed expedition against Naxos, he began to fear for his life. So he fomented a popular rebellion against the Persians and went to the Greek mainland for support. He went first to the Spartans, since they were the most powerful state in Greece, but the Spartans seem to have seen right through him. When he approached the Athenians, they promised him twenty ships. In 498 BC, the Athenians conquered and burned Sardis, which was the capital of Lydia, and all the Greek cities in Asia Minor joined the revolt. The Athenians, however, lost interest and went home; by 495 BC, the Persians, under king Darius I (521-486 BC), had restored control over the rebellious Greek cities.
And there it should have ended. But Athens had gotten the attention of the Persians, who desired that Athens be punished for the role it played in the destruction of Sardis. The Persians also had Hippias, the tyrant of Athens who had been deposed by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. So in 490 BC, the Persians launched an expedition against Athens. They were met, however, by one of their former soldiers, Miltiades. He had been an outstanding soldier in the Persian army, but he took to his heels when he angered Darius. Unlike other Athenians, he knew the Persian army and he knew its tactics. The two armies, with the Athenians led by Miltiades, met at Marathon in Attica and the Athenians roundly defeated the invading army. This battle, the battle of Marathon (490 BC), is perhaps the single most important battle in Greek history. Had the Athenians lost, Greece would have eventually come under the control of the Persians and all the subsequent culture and accomplishmenst of the Greeks would probably not have taken the form they did.
For the Athenians, the battle at Marathon was their greatest achievement. From Marathon onwards, the Athenians began to think of themselves as the center of Greek culture and Greek power. This pride, or chauvinism, was the foundation on which much of their cultural achievements were built. The first great dramas, for instance, were the dramas of Aeschylus; the principle subject of these dramas is the celebration of Athenian greatness. The great building projects of the latter half of the fifth century were motivated by the need to display Athenian wealth, greatness, and power.
The Persians, however, weren't done. For the Persians, Marathon barely registered; the Persians, after all, controlled almost the entire world: Asia Minor, Lydia, Judah, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. While Marathon stands as one of the greatest of Greek military accomplishments, it was really more of an irritation to the Persians. The Persian government, however, was embroiled in problems of its own, and it wasn't until Xerxes (486-465 BC) became king, that the Persians really got down to business and launched a punitive expedition against Athens. This time the Persians were determined to get it right. In 481 BC, Xerxes gathered together an army of some one hundred fifty thousand men and a navy of six hundred ships; he was determined that the whole of Greece would be conquered by his army.
The Athenians, however, were prepared. While many Athenians celebrated their victory at Marathon and thought that the Persians had gone home permanently, the Greek poitician, Themistocles, convinced the Athenians otherwise. So while Persia delayed through the 480's, Themistocles and the Athenians began a navy-building project of epic proportions. Themistocles convinced the Athenians to invest the profits from a newly discovered silver mine into this project; by 481 BC, Athens had a navy of two hundred ships.
When Xerxes gathered his army at the Hellespont, the narrow inlet to the Black Sea that separates Asia Minor from Europe, most Greeks despaired of winning against his powerful army. Of several hundred Greek city-states, only thirty-one decided to resist the Persian army; these states were led by Sparta, Corinth, and Athens: the Greek League. Sparta was made leader of all land and sea operations.
Themistocles, however, understood that the battle would be won or lost at sea; he figured that the Persian army could only succeed if it were successfully supported by supplies and communications provided by the fleet. He also understood that the Aegean Sea was a violent place, subject to dangerous winds and sudden squalls. While he kept the Athenian fleet safe in harbor, many of Xerxes' boats were destroyed at sea. He also waited his time; if the Persians could be delayed on land, then he could destroy the Persian fleet when the time was right.
That time came in a sea battle off the island of Salamis. The Greeks had slow, clumsy boats in comparison with the Persian boats, so they turned their boats into fighting platforms. They filled their boats with soldiers who would fight with the opposing boats in hand-to-hand combat; it was a brilliant innovation, and the Athenians managed to destroy the majority of the Persian fleet. The Persians withdrew their army.
However, one Persian general, Mardonius, remained. He wintered in Greece, but he was met in 479 BC by the largest Greek army history had ever known. Under the leadership of the Spartan king, Pausanias, Mardonius was killed in the battle of Plataea, and his army retreated back to Persia.
It's difficult to assess all the consequences of the Greek victory over the Persians. While the Spartans were principally responsible for the victory, the Athenian fleet was probably the most important component of that victory. This victory left Athens with the most powerful fleet in the Aegean, and since the Persians hadn't been completely defeated, all the Greeks feared a return. The majority of Greek city-states, however, didn't turn to Sparta; they turned, rather, to Athens and the Athenian fleet. The alliances that Athens would make following the retreat of the Persians, the so-called Delian League, would suddenly catapult Athens into the major power of the Greek city-states. This power would make Athens the cultural center of the Greek world, but it would also spell their downfall as the Spartans grew increasingly frightened of Athenian power and increasingly suspicious of Athenian intentions.
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And there it should have ended. But Athens had gotten the attention of the Persians, who desired that Athens be punished for the role it played in the destruction of Sardis. The Persians also had Hippias, the tyrant of Athens who had been deposed by Cleisthenes in 508 BC. So in 490 BC, the Persians launched an expedition against Athens. They were met, however, by one of their former soldiers, Miltiades. He had been an outstanding soldier in the Persian army, but he took to his heels when he angered Darius. Unlike other Athenians, he knew the Persian army and he knew its tactics. The two armies, with the Athenians led by Miltiades, met at Marathon in Attica and the Athenians roundly defeated the invading army. This battle, the battle of Marathon (490 BC), is perhaps the single most important battle in Greek history. Had the Athenians lost, Greece would have eventually come under the control of the Persians and all the subsequent culture and accomplishmenst of the Greeks would probably not have taken the form they did.
For the Athenians, the battle at Marathon was their greatest achievement. From Marathon onwards, the Athenians began to think of themselves as the center of Greek culture and Greek power. This pride, or chauvinism, was the foundation on which much of their cultural achievements were built. The first great dramas, for instance, were the dramas of Aeschylus; the principle subject of these dramas is the celebration of Athenian greatness. The great building projects of the latter half of the fifth century were motivated by the need to display Athenian wealth, greatness, and power.
The Persians, however, weren't done. For the Persians, Marathon barely registered; the Persians, after all, controlled almost the entire world: Asia Minor, Lydia, Judah, Mesopotamia, and Egypt. While Marathon stands as one of the greatest of Greek military accomplishments, it was really more of an irritation to the Persians. The Persian government, however, was embroiled in problems of its own, and it wasn't until Xerxes (486-465 BC) became king, that the Persians really got down to business and launched a punitive expedition against Athens. This time the Persians were determined to get it right. In 481 BC, Xerxes gathered together an army of some one hundred fifty thousand men and a navy of six hundred ships; he was determined that the whole of Greece would be conquered by his army.
The Athenians, however, were prepared. While many Athenians celebrated their victory at Marathon and thought that the Persians had gone home permanently, the Greek poitician, Themistocles, convinced the Athenians otherwise. So while Persia delayed through the 480's, Themistocles and the Athenians began a navy-building project of epic proportions. Themistocles convinced the Athenians to invest the profits from a newly discovered silver mine into this project; by 481 BC, Athens had a navy of two hundred ships.
When Xerxes gathered his army at the Hellespont, the narrow inlet to the Black Sea that separates Asia Minor from Europe, most Greeks despaired of winning against his powerful army. Of several hundred Greek city-states, only thirty-one decided to resist the Persian army; these states were led by Sparta, Corinth, and Athens: the Greek League. Sparta was made leader of all land and sea operations.
Themistocles, however, understood that the battle would be won or lost at sea; he figured that the Persian army could only succeed if it were successfully supported by supplies and communications provided by the fleet. He also understood that the Aegean Sea was a violent place, subject to dangerous winds and sudden squalls. While he kept the Athenian fleet safe in harbor, many of Xerxes' boats were destroyed at sea. He also waited his time; if the Persians could be delayed on land, then he could destroy the Persian fleet when the time was right.
That time came in a sea battle off the island of Salamis. The Greeks had slow, clumsy boats in comparison with the Persian boats, so they turned their boats into fighting platforms. They filled their boats with soldiers who would fight with the opposing boats in hand-to-hand combat; it was a brilliant innovation, and the Athenians managed to destroy the majority of the Persian fleet. The Persians withdrew their army.
However, one Persian general, Mardonius, remained. He wintered in Greece, but he was met in 479 BC by the largest Greek army history had ever known. Under the leadership of the Spartan king, Pausanias, Mardonius was killed in the battle of Plataea, and his army retreated back to Persia.
It's difficult to assess all the consequences of the Greek victory over the Persians. While the Spartans were principally responsible for the victory, the Athenian fleet was probably the most important component of that victory. This victory left Athens with the most powerful fleet in the Aegean, and since the Persians hadn't been completely defeated, all the Greeks feared a return. The majority of Greek city-states, however, didn't turn to Sparta; they turned, rather, to Athens and the Athenian fleet. The alliances that Athens would make following the retreat of the Persians, the so-called Delian League, would suddenly catapult Athens into the major power of the Greek city-states. This power would make Athens the cultural center of the Greek world, but it would also spell their downfall as the Spartans grew increasingly frightened of Athenian power and increasingly suspicious of Athenian intentions.
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great leaders in ancient athens
The Areopagus
Athens entered the Archaic Period in the same way so many of its neighbors, as a city-state ruled by a basileus , or "king." Unlike Sparta, however, Athens' history was not dominated by invasion of a neighbor, for the land around Athens was agriculturally rich and the city had a harbor so that it could trade easily with city-states around the Aegean. The power of the basileus slowly faded; underneath the basileus was a council of nobles, which were called the Areopagus, from the name of the hill on which they met. In the eighth century BC, these nobles gradually became very wealthy, particularly off of the cash crops of wine and olive oil, both of which require great wealth to get started. As their wealth increased, the nobles of the Areopagus slowly stripped the king of power until Athenian government imperceptibly became an oligarchy. The Areopagus consisted of a varying number of members, and it elected nine archons, or "rulers," to run the state. The archons, however, always had to submit to the approval or veto of the Areopagus, and they also became members of the Areopagus when their term in office expired, so, in reality, the Areopagus ruled the country.Rule by the wealthy, however, is often inherently unstable. In Athens, the farmers in the surrounding countryside produced mainly wheat, while the wealthy and nobility owned estates that produced wine and olive oil. Wheat-farming was badly managed, however; the average Athenian farmer didn't rotate crops or let fields lie fallow. Production of wheath plummeted at the same time that Athenians began to import wheat and to export olive oil and wine. So not only did production of wheat fall, so did its price. Pretty soon, even though the wealthy farmers were making money hand over fist, the average farmer had fallen deeply into debt to the wealthiest members of society. To pay for that debt, farmers sold their children, their wives, and even themselves into (limited) slavery both in Athens and abroad. The situation was a powder-keg waiting to go off; suffering under unmanageable debts, sold into slavery, with the government under the control of the wealthy people that were the causes of their problems, the average Athenian farmer was primed for revolution.
The Reforms of Solon
But history takes strange turns sometimes. Recognizing the danger of the situation, in 594 BC, the Areopagus and the people of Athens agreed to hand over all political power to a single individual, Solon. In effect a tyrant, Solon's mission was to reform the government to stem the tide of privation and exploitation and set up a system to guarantee that Athens didn't slip into such a situation again.Solon immediately dismissed all outstanding debts, and he freed as many Athenians as he could from the slavery they had sold themselves into. He banned any loans that are secured by a promise to enter into slavery if the loan is defaulted, and he tried to bring people who had been sold into slavery abroad back to Athens. In addition, he encouraged the development of olive and wine production, so that by the end of the century, most of Athenian land was dedicated to these lucrative crops.
As far as government is concerned, he divided Athenian society into four classes based on wealth. The two wealthiest classes were allowed to serve on the Areopagus. The third class were allowed to serve on an elected council of four hundred people. This council was organized according to the four tribes making up the Athenian people; each tribe was allowed to elect one hundred representatives from this third class. This council of four hundred served as a kind of balance or check to the power of the Areopagus. The fourth class, the poorest class, was allowed to participate in an assembly; this assembly voted on affairs brought to it by the council of four hundred, and even elected local magistrates. This class also participated in a new judicial court that gradually drew civil and military cases out of the hands of the wealthiest people, the Areopagus.
Peisistratus and the Tyranny
The Athenians considered Solon the great hero of their state and pointed to the reforms of Solon as the basis of their state. Solon's new state, however, lasted very briefly. Although he brilliantly reformed the government, he really didn't solve the economic crisis, and within a few years, Athens was collapsing in anarchy. A nobleman, Peisistratus, swept into power during this anarchy and set about restoring order. The tyranny of Peisistratus, however, was as important to the foundation of Athenian democracy as Solon's reforms had been. Although he was a military leader who backed up his power with a frightening mercenary army, Peisistratus began to actively build in and around Athens, and actively reform Athenian religion and religious practices, and, in particular, devoted his government to cultural reform. He sought out poets and artists in order to make Athens a culturally sophisticated and dynamic society. But, in particular, he launched a full attack on the power of the nobility. He increased the power of the Assembly and the courts associated with the poorest classes, and used all his power to make sure that the Solonian government worked smoothly and that elections were held (provided his supporters were elected).Like most tyrants, Peisistratus had monarchical ambitions; on his death, the tyranny fell to his son, Hippias. The life of a tyrant is not a comfortable one, and although Hippias began in the mold of his father, the assassination of his brother caused him great fright and consternation. He became suspicious and withdrawn and increasingly arbitrary. His enemies, which were many, if they hadn't already started, began plotting his overthrow. In particular, a wealthy family, the Alcmaeonids, who had been exiled by Peisistratus, prevailed on Sparta to assist them in the overthrow of Hippias. Under the Spartan king, Cleomenes I, Athens was overcome in 510 BC and Hippias ran to exile in Persia
Cleisthenes
The Spartans followed their usual practice and entered into a truce with Athens and installed their own hand-picked Athenians to lead the government. The Spartans, however, were too clever for their own good. They chose an individual, Isagoras, whom they felt was the most loyal to Sparta; Isagoras, however, was a bitter rival of the Alcmaeonids, who had been the original allies of Sparta. Isagoras, for his part, set about restoring the Solonic government, but he also set about "purifying" Athenian citizenship. Under Solon and later Peisistratus, a number of people had been enfranchised as citizens even though they weren't Athenian or who were doubtfully Athenian. For in the Greek world, you could only be the citizen of a city-state if you could trace your ancestorship back to the original inhabitants of the state. Isagoras, however, began to throw people off the citizenship rolls in great numbers. Cleisthenes, an Alcmaeonid noble, rallied popular support and threatened the power of Isagoras, who promptly called for the Spartans again. The Spartans invaded a second time, and Cleisthenes was expelled, but soon a popular uprising swept Isagoras from power and installed Cleisthenes.From 508 to 502 BC, Cleisthenes began a series of major reforms that would produce Athenian democracy. He enfranchised as citizens all free men living in Athens and Attica (the area surrounding Athens). He established a council which would be the chief arm of government with all executive and administrative control. Every citizen over the age of thirty was eligible to sit on this council; each year the members of the council would be chosen by lot. The Assembly, which included all male citizens, was allowed to veto any of the council's proposals and was the only branch of government that could declare war. In 487, long after Cleisthenes, the Athenians added the final aspect of Athenian democracy proper: ostracism. The Assembly could vote (voting was done on potsherds called ostra ) on expelling citizens from the state for a period of ten years. This ostracism would guarantee that individuals who were contemplating seizing power would be removed from the country before they got too powerful.
So by 502 BC, Athens had pretty much established its culture and political structure, just as Sparta had pretty much established its culture and political structure by 550 BC. Athens was more or less a democracy; it had become primarily a trading and commercial center; a large part of the Athenian economy focussed on cash crops for export and crafts; it had become a center of art and literature; the city had become architecturally rich because of the building projects of Peisistratus—an architectural richness that far outshone other Greek city-states; and Athenian religious fesitivals were largely in place. The next one hundred years would be politically and culturally dominated by Athens; the event that would catapult Athens to the center of the Greek world was the invasion of the Persians in 490 BC.
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History of Athens
The History of Athens is one of the longest of any city in Europe and in the world. Athens has been continuously inhabited for at least 3,000 years, becoming the leading city of Ancient Greece in the first millennium BC; its cultural achievements during the 5th century BC laid the foundations of western civilization. During the Middle Ages, the city experienced decline and then recovery under the Byzantine Empire, and was relatively prosperous during the Crusades, benefiting from Italian trade. After a long period of decline under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, Athens re-emerged in the 19th century as the capital of the independent Greek state.
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Etymology
The name of Athens in Ancient Greek was Athḗnai (Ἀθῆναι, pronounced [ʔaˈtʰɛːnai], or roughly "at-heh-nye"). There is a legendary Myth on how Athens acquired this name. Both Athena and Poseidon requested to be patrons and give their name to the city, so they competed, offering the city one gift each. Poseidon produced a spring by striking the ground with his trident, symbolizing naval power. Athena created the olive tree, symbolizing peace and prosperity. The Athenians under Cecrops accepted the olive tree and named the city after Athena. Athḗnai is a plural form: the city was called "The Athenses" since it was originally a group of ten cities which Theseus unified into one city. In his dialogue Cratylus, Plato gives the etymology of Athena's name based on the view of the ancient Athenians:
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| Plato, Cratylus, 407b |
Thus for Plato her name was to be derived from Greek Ētheonóa (Ή-θεο-νόα) or Atheonóa (Ἀθεονόα) — which the Greeks rationalised as from god's (theos) mind (nous).
Origins and setting
Athens began its history as a Neolithic hill-fort on top of the Acropolis ("high city"), some time in the third millennium BC. The Acropolis is a natural defensive position which commands the surrounding plains. The settlement was about 20 kilometers inland from the Saronic Gulf, in the centre of the Cephisian Plain, a fertile dale surrounded by rivers. To the east lies Mount Hymettus, to the north Mount Pentelicus.
The River Cephisus flowed in ancient times through the city. Ancient Athens occupied a very small area compared to the sprawling metropolis of modern Athens. The walled ancient city encompassed an area measuring about 2 km from east to west and slightly less than that from north to south, although at its peak the city had suburbs extending well beyond these walls. The Acropolis was just south of the centre of this walled area. The Agora, the commercial and social centre of the city, was about 400 m north of the Acropolis, in what is now the Monastiraki district. The hill of the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly met, lay at the western end of the city.
One of the most important religious sites in Athens was the Temple of Athena, known today as the Parthenon, which stood atop the Acropolis, where its evocative ruins still stand. Two other major religious sites, the Temple of Hephaestus (which is still largely intact) and the Temple of Olympian Zeus or Olympeion (once the largest temple in Greece but now in ruins) also lay within the city walls.
Based on Thucydides, the Athenian citizens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War were 40.000, making with their families a total of 140.000. The metics, i.e. those who did not have citizen rights and paid for the right to reside in Athens were 70.000 while slaves were estimated between 150.000 to 400.000.[1] Hence, approximately 6,5 to 11% of the population were adult male citizens, eligible to meet and vote in the Assembly and be elected to office. After the conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC the city's population began to decrease as Greeks migrated to the Hellenistic empires in the East.
Early History
The Acropolis of Athens was inhabited from Neolithic times. By 1400 BC Athens had become a powerful center of the Mycenaean civilization. Unlike other Mycenaean centers, such as Mycenae and Pylos, Athens was not sacked and abandoned at the time of the Doric invasion of about 1200 BC, and the Athenians always maintained that they were "pure" Ionians with no Doric element. However, Athens lost most of its power and probably dwindled to a small hill fortress once again.
By the 8th century BC Athens had re-emerged, by virtue of its central location in the Greek world, its secure stronghold on the Acropolis and its access to the sea, which gave it a natural advantage over potential rivals such as Thebes and Sparta. From early in the 1st millennium, Athens was a sovereign city-state, ruled at first by kings (see Kings of Athens). The kings stood at the head of a land-owning aristocracy known as the Eupatridae (the "well-born"), whose instrument of government was a Council which met on the Hill of Ares, called the Areopagus. This body appointed the chief city officials, the archons and the polemarch (commander-in-chief).
Before the concept of the political state arose, four tribes based upon family relationships dominated the area. The members had certain rights, privileges, and obligations:
- Common religious rites.
- A common burial place.
- Mutual rights of succession to property of deceased members.
- Reciprocal obligations of help, defense and redress of injuries.
- The right to intermarry in the gens in the cases of orphan daughters and heiresses.
- The possession of common property, an archon, and a treasurer.
- The limitation of descent to the male line.
- The obligation not to marry in the gens except in specified cases.
- The right to adopt strangers into the gens.
- The right to elect and depose its chiefs.[2]
During this period Athens succeeded in bringing the other towns of Attica under its rule. This process of synoikismos – bringing together in one home – created the largest and wealthiest state on the Greek mainland, but it also created a larger class of people excluded from political life by the nobility. By the 7th century BC social unrest had become widespread, and the Areopagus appointed Draco to draft a strict new lawcode (hence "draconian"). When this failed, they appointed Solon, with a mandate to create a new constitution (594).
The reforms of Solon dealt with both political and economic issues. The economic power of the Eupatridae was reduced by abolishing slavery as a punishment for debt, breaking up large landed estates and freeing up trade and commerce, which allowed the emergence of a prosperous urban trading class. Politically, Solon divided the Athenians into four classes, based on their wealth and their ability to perform military service. The poorest class, the Thetes, who were the majority of the population, received political rights for the first time, being able to vote in the Ecclesia (Assembly), but only the upper classes could hold political office. The Areopagus continued to exist but its powers were reduced.
The new system laid the foundations for what eventually became Athenian democracy, but in the short term it failed to quell class conflict, and after 20 years of unrest the popular party led by Peisistratus, a cousin of Solon, seized power (541). Peisistratus is usually called a tyrant, but the Greek word tyrannos does not mean a cruel and despotic ruler, merely one who took power by force. Peisistratus was in fact a very popular ruler, who made Athens wealthy, powerful, and a centre of culture, and founded the Athenian naval supremacy in the Aegean Sea and beyond. He preserved the Solonian constitution, but made sure that he and his family held all the offices of state.
Peisistratus died in 527, and was succeeded by his sons Hippias and Hipparchus. They proved much less adept rulers, and in 514 Hipparchus was assassinated after a private dispute over a young man (see Harmodius and Aristogeiton). This led Hippias to establish a real dictatorship, which proved very unpopular and was overthrown, with the help of an army from Sparta, in 510. A radical politician of aristocratic background, Cleisthenes, then took charge. He was the one who established democracy in Athens.
The reforms of Cleisthenes replaced the traditional four "tribes" (phyle) with ten new ones, named after legendary heroes and having no class basis: they were in fact electorates. Each tribe was in turn divided into three trittyes while each trittys had one or more demes (see deme) - depending on the population of the demes -, which became the basis of local government. The tribes each elected fifty members to the Boule, a council which governed Athens on a day-to-day basis. The Assembly was open to all citizens and was both a legislature and a supreme court, except in murder cases and religious matters, which became the only remaining functions of the Areopagus. Most offices were filled by lot, though the ten strategoi (generals) were, for obvious reasons, elected. This system remained remarkably stable, and with a few brief interruptions remained in place for 170 years, until Alexander the Great conquered Athens in 338 BCE.
Early Athenian Military History
Prior to the rise of Athens, the city of Sparta considered itself the leader of the Greeks, or hegemon. In 499 BC Athens sent troops to aid the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor, who were rebelling against the Persian Empire (see Ionian Revolt). This provoked two Persian invasions of Greece, both of which were defeated under the leadership of the Athenian soldier-statesmen Miltiades and Themistocles (see Persian Wars). In 490 the Athenians, lead by Miltiades, defeated the first invasion of the Persians, guided by the king Darius at the Battle of Marathon. In 480 the Persians returned under a new ruler, Xerxes. The Persians had to pass through a narrow strait to get to Athens. A call had been sent via a runner to Sparta for help. The Spartans were in the middle of a religious festival, and so could only send three hundred men. The 300 Spartans and their allies blocked the narrow passageway from the 200,000 men of Xerxes (the Battle of Thermopylae). They held them off for a number of days, but eventually all but one Spartan was killed (see Aristodemus (Spartan)). This forced the Athenians to evacuate Athens, which was taken by the Persians and seek the protection of their fleet. Subsequently the Athenians and their allies, lead by Themistocles had defeated the still vastly larger Persian navy at sea in the Battle of Salamis. It is interesting to note that Xerxes had built himself a throne on the coast in order to see the Greeks defeated. Instead, the Persians were routed. Sparta's hegemony was passing to Athens, and it was Athens that took the war to Asia Minor. These victories enabled it to bring most of the Aegean and many other parts of Greece together in the Delian League, an Athenian-dominated alliance.
Artists and philosophers
The period from the end of the Persian Wars to the Macedonian conquest marked the zenith of Athens as a center of literature, philosophy (see Greek philosophy) and the arts (see Greek theatre). Some of the most important figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides and Sophocles, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Phidias, The leading statesman of this period was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens. The city became, in Pericles's words, "the school of Hellas [Greece]."
Peloponnesian War
Resentment by other cities at the hegemony of Athens led to the Peloponnesian War in 431, which pitted Athens and her increasingly rebellious sea empire against a coalition of land-based states led by Sparta. The conflict marked the end of Athenian command of the sea. The war between the two city-state Sparta had defeated Athens.
Athenian coup of 411 BC
The democracy was briefly overthrown by a coup in 411 due to its poor handling of the war, but quickly restored. The war ended with the complete defeat of Athens in 404. Since the defeat was largely blamed on democratic politicians such as Cleon and Cleophon, there was a brief reaction against democracy, aided by the Spartan army (the rule of the Thirty Tyrants). In 403, democracy was restored by Thrasybulus and an amnesty declared.
Corinthian War and the Second Athenian League
Sparta's former allies soon turned against her due to her imperialist policy and soon Athens's former enemies Thebes and Corinth had become her allies. Argos, Thebes, Corinth allied to Athens fought against Sparta in the indecisive Corinthian War (395 BC - 387 BC). Opposition to Sparta enabled Athens to establish a Second Athenian League Finally Thebes defeated Sparta in 371 in the Battle of Leuctra. Then the Greek cities (including Athens and Sparta) turned against Thebes whose dominance was stopped at the Battle of Mantinea (362 BC) with the death of its military genius leader Epaminondas.
Athens under Macedon
- Further information: Alexander the Great, Antigonid dynasty, and Seleucid Empire
By mid century, however, the northern Greek kingdom of Macedon was becoming dominant in Athenian affairs, despite the warnings of the last great statesman of independent Athens, Demosthenes. In 338 BC the armies of Philip II defeated the other Greek cities at the Battle of Chaeronea, effectively ending Athenian independence. Further, the conquests of his son, Alexander the Great, widened Greek horizons and made the traditional Greek city state obsolete. Athens remained a wealthy city with a brilliant cultural life, but ceased to be an independent power. In the 2nd century, after 200 years of Macedonian supremacy, Greece was absorbed into the Roman Republic.
Roman Athens
In 88-85BC, most Athenian houses and fortifications were leveled by Roman general Sulla, while many civic buildings and monuments were left intact.[3] Under Rome, Athens was given the status of a free city because of its widely admired schools. Various Roman emperors would construct a concert hall, a law court, a library, a gymnasium, a small temple on the Acropolis, the Temple of Olympian Zeus, and an aqueduct which is still in use today.[3]
The city was sacked by the Heruli in 267 AD resulting in the burning of all the public buildings, the plundering of the lower city, and the damaging of the Agora and Acropolis. After this the city to the north of the Acropolis was hastily refortified on a smaller scale with the Agora left outside the walls. Athens remained a centre of learning and philosophy during 500 years of Roman rule, patronised by emperors such as Nero and Hadrian. But the conversion of the Empire to Christianity ended the city's role as a centre of pagan learning; the Emperor Justinian closed the schools of philosophy in 529 AD. This is generally taken to mark the end of the ancient history of Athens.
Byzantine Athens
- Further information: Byzantine Empire and Byzantine Greece
By 529 AD, Athens was under rule by the Byzantines and had grown out of favor.[3] The Parthenon and Erechtheion were transformed into churches. During the period of the Byzantine Empire Athens was a provincial town, and experienced fluctuating fortunes. In the early years many of its works of art were taken by the emperors to Constantinople. Furthermore, although the Byzantines retained control of the Aegean and its islands throughout this period, during the seventh and eighth centuries direct control did not extend far beyond the coast. From about 600 the city shrank considerably due to barbarian raids by the Avars and Slavs, and was reduced to a shadow of its former self. As the seventh century progressed, much of Greece was overrun by Slavic peoples from the north, and Athens entered a period of uncertainty and insecurity.
By the middle of the 9th century, as Greece was fully reconquered again, the city began to recover. Just as other cities benefited from improved security and the restoration of effective central control during this period, so Athens expanded once more.
The invasions of the Turks after the battle of Manzikert in 1071 and the ensuing civil wars largely passed the region by, and Athens continued its provincial existence unharmed. When the Byzantine Empire was rescued by the resolute leadership of the three Komnenos emperors Alexios, John and Manuel, Attica and the rest of Greece prospered. Archaeological evidence tells us that the mediaeval town experienced a period of rapid and sustained growth, starting in the eleventh century and continuing until the end of the twelfth century. The agora or marketplace, which had been deserted since late antiquity, began to be built over, and soon the town became an important centre for the production of soaps and dyes. The growth of the town attracted the Venetians, and various other traders who frequented the ports of the Aegean, to Athens. This interest in trade appears to have further increased the economic prosperity of the town.
The 11th and 12th centuries were the Golden Age of Byzantine art in Athens. Almost all of the most important Byzantine churches around Athens were built during these two centuries, and this reflects the growth of the town in general. However, this medieval prosperity was not to last. In 1204, the Fourth Crusade conquered Athens and the city was not recovered from the Latins before it was taken by the Ottoman Turks. It did not become Greek in government again until the 19th century.
- Further information: Duchy of Athens
From 1204 until 1458, Athens was ruled by Latins in three separate periods. It was initially the capital of the eponymous Duchy of Athens, a fief of the Latin Empire which replaced Byzantium. After Thebes became a possession of the Latin dukes, which were of the Burgundian family called De la Roche, it replaced Athens as the capital and seat of government, though Athens remained the most influential ecclesiastical centre in the duchy and site of a prime fortress. In 1311, Athens was conquered by the Catalan Company, a band of mercenaries called almogávares. It was held by the Catalans until 1388. After 1379, when Thebes was lost, it became the capital of the duchy again. In 1388, the Florentine Nerio I Acciajuoli took the city and made himself duke. His descendants ruled the city (as their capital) until the Turkish conquest of 1458. It was the last Latin state in Greece to fall.
Burgundian period
Under the Burgundian dukes, a bell tower was added to the Parthenon. The Burgundians brought chivalry and tournaments to Athens; they also fortified the Acropolis. They were themselves influenced by Greek culture and their court was a syncretistic mix of classical knowledge and French knighly haute couture.
Catalan period
The history of Catalan Athens, called Cetines (rarely Athenes) by the conquerors, is most obscure. Athens was a veguería with its own castellan, captain, and veguer. At some point during the Catalan period, the Acropolis was further fortified and the Athenian archdiocese received an extra two suffragan sees.
Florentine period
The Florentines had to dispute the city with the Republic of Venice, but they ultimately emerged victorious after seven years of Venetian rule (1395–1402).
Ottoman Athens
Finally, in 1458, Athens fell to the Ottoman Empire. As the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II the Conqueror rode into the city, he was greatly struck by the beauty of its ancient monuments and issued a firman (imperial edict) forbidding their looting or destruction, on pain of death. The Parthenon was converted into Athen's main mosque.[3]
Despite the initial efforts of the Ottoman authorities to turn Athens into a model provincial capital, the city's population severely declined and by the 17th century it was a mere village. Great damage to Athens was caused in the 17th century, when Ottoman power was declining. The Turks would begin a practice of storing gun powder and explosives in the Parthenon and Propylaea. In 1640, a lighting bolt would strike the Propylaea, causing its destruction.[4] In 1687, Athens was besieged by the Venetians, and the temple of Athena Nike was dismantled by the Ottomans to fortify the Parthenon. A shot fired during the bombardment of the Acropolis caused a powder magazine in the Parthenon to explode, and the building was severely damaged, giving it the appearance we see today. The occupation of the Acropolis continued for six months, but even the Venetians participated in the looting of the Parthenon. One of the west pediments of the Parthenon would be removed causing even more damage to the structure. The following year Turkish forces set fire to the city. Ancient monuments were destroyed to provide material for a new wall with which the Ottomans surrounded the city in 1778. Between 1801 and 1805 Lord Elgin, the British resident at Athens, removed reliefs from the Parthenon (see Elgin marbles for more detail.) Along with the Panatheniac frieze, one of the six caryatids of the Erechtheion was extracted and replaced with a plaster mold. All in all, fifty sculptural pieces were carried away from the Parthenon including three fragments purchased by the French.[3]
Independence from the Ottomans
In 1822 a Greek insurgency captured the city, but it fell to the Ottomans again in 1826. Again the ancient monuments suffered badly. Partially funded by Lord Byron, the Greeks continued to fight. Ottoman forces remained in possession until 1833, when they withdrew and Athens was chosen as the capital of the newly established kingdom of Greece. At that time the city was virtually uninhabited, being merely a cluster of buildings at the foot of the Acropolis, where the Plaka district is now.
Modern Athens
In 1832, Otto, Prince of Bavaria was proclaimed King of Greece. He adopted the Greek spelling of his name, King Othon as well as Greek national dress, and moved the capital of Greece back to Athens. Othon's first task as king was to make a detailed archaeological and topographical survey of Athens. He assigned Gustav Eduard Schaubert and Stamatios Kleanthes to complete this task.[3] At that time Athens had a population of roughly 4,000-5,000 people, located in what today covers the district of Plaka in Athens.
Athens was chosen as the Greek capital for historical and sentimental reasons, not because it was a large city: there are few buildings in Athens from the period of Byzantine Empire and the 18th century. Once the capital was established there, a modern city plan was laid out and public buildings erected. The finest legacy of this period are the buildings of the University of Athens (1837), Old Royal Palace (now the Greek Parliament Building) (1843), the National Gardens of Athens (1840), the National Library of Greece (1842), the Greek National Academy (1885), the Zappeion Exhibition Hall (1878), the Old Parliament Building (1858), the New Royal Palace (now the Presidential Palace) (1897) and the Athens Town Hall (1874).
Population Influx
 | This short section requires expansion. |
Athens experienced its first period of explosive growth following the disastrous war with Turkey in 1921, when more than a million Greek refugees from Asia Minor were resettled in Greece. Suburbs such as Nea Ionia and Nea Smyrni began as refugee settlements on the Athens outskirts.
Athens Under the Nazis
| This short section requires expansion. |
Athens was occupied by the Germans during World War II and experienced terrible privations during the later years of the war. In 1944 there was heavy fighting in the city between Communist forces and the royalists backed by the British.
Postwar Athens
After World War II the city began to grow again as people migrated from the villages and islands to find work. Greek entry into the European Union in 1981 brought a flood of new investment to the city, but also increasing social and environmental problems. Athens had some of the worst traffic congestion and air pollution in the world. This posed a new threat to the ancient monuments of Athens, as traffic vibration weakened foundations and air pollution corroded marble. The city's environmental and infrastructure problems were the main reason Athens failed to secure the 1996 centenary Olympic Games.
Athens Today
After this, both the city of Athens and the Greek government, aided by European Union funds, undertook major infrastructure projects such as the new Athens Airport and a new metro system. The city also tackled air pollution by restricting the use of cars in the centre of the city. As a result, Athens was awarded the 2004 Olympic Games. Despite the scepticism of many observers, the games were a great success and brought renewed international prestige (and tourism revenue) to Athens.
Historical Population
Throughout its long history, Athens has had many different population levels. The table below shows the historical population of Athens in modern history.
| Year | City population | Urban population | Metro population |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1833 | 4,000[3] | - | - |
| 1870 | 44,500[3] | - | - |
| 1896 | 123,000[3] | - | - |
| 1921 (Pre-Population exchange) | 473,000[3] | - | - |
| 1921 (Post-Population exchange) | 718,000[3] | - | - |
| 1971 | 867,023[5] | - | - |
| 1981 | 885,737 | - | - |
| 1991 | 772,072 | - | 3,444,358[6] |
| 2001 | 745,514[7] | 3,130,841[7] | 3,761,810[7] |
Notable Athenians
- Aeschylus
- Alcibiades
- Aristophanes
- Aspasia
- Cimon
- Cleisthenes
- Cleon
- Demosthenes
- Ephialtes
- Euripides
- Herodotus
- Empress Irene
- Miltiades
- Nicias
- Peisistratus
- Pericles
- Pheidias
- Plato
- Simonides
- Socrates
- Solon
- Sophocles
- Themistocles
- Theseus
- Thrasybulus
- Thucydides
- Xenophon
Ancient sites in Athens
- The Acropolis, with the Parthenon
- Agora
- Arch of Hadrian
- Areopagus
- Kerameikos
- Lysicrates monument
- Philopappos monument
- Pnyx
- Temple of Hephaestus
- Temple of Olympian Zeus
- Tower of the Winds
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Tuesday, December 18, 2007
Acheron
The Acheron was one of the rivers of the Underworld. It was at the confluence of the Acheron and the river Styx that the hero Odysseus dug a pit and poured sacrificial blood into it to summon the ghosts of the dead. Odysseus needed to question the shade of the blind prophet Teiresias in order to find his way Home again after the Trojan War. Acheron is also the name of a river in modern Greece, still reputed to give access to Hades.
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Delphi
Delphi was the shrine of Apollo and site of the famous Oracle, whose often inscrutable advice was sought down through historical times. It was the Oracle of Delphi who advised King Croesus of Lydia that if he rebelled against the Persians as proposed, a mighty empire would fall. Croesus took this as an endorsement of his plan, and the prediction came true. Unfortunately the empire that fell was his own.
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Monday, December 17, 2007
Achaia greece library
Achaia is a region of Greece. The name goes back to the Heroic Age, as do the local legends. It was in Achaia's "Cave of the Lakes" that the daughters of the king of Tiryns took refuge when driven mad by the goddess Hera. They had been roaming the countryside thinking they were cows when the seer Melampus cured them of their mania. It was only in 1964 that the people of Kastria discovered the inner recess of the cave, which is unique for its string of cascading pools.
Ancient sparta
It's hard for textbooks to say anything nice about the Spartans. Take up any world history textbook and read; you'll find that the Spartans were "an armed camp," "brutal," "culturally stagnant," "economically stagnant," "politically stagnant," and other fun things. The reality, of course, lies somewhere behind the value judgements. Greek history does, after all, come down to us through the eyes of the other major city-state in Greece, Athens, a bitter enemy and rival of Sparta. The two represent diametrically opposed concepts of the Greek polis and its relations with other city-states; they also represent diametrically opposed concepts of the individual's relationship to the state. Despite all the rhetoric in Athens and in the European historical tradition, we should keep in mind that the Spartans believed they lived in the best of all Greek worlds, and many of their Greek neighbors agreed with them. The rivalry, then, between Sparta and Athens, which would erupt into a disastrous war for Athens, was also an ideological and cultural rivalry. The single, overwhelming fact of Spartan history is the Messenean War. In the eighth century BC, Sparta, like all her neighbors, was a monarchy with a limited oligarchy. In 725, however, needing land to feed a dramatically growing population, the Spartans marched over the Taygetus mountains and annexed all the territory of their neighbor, Messenia. The Messenians occupied a fertile plain and the Spartans found themselves with more than enough land to support themselves and their newly conquered people. However, like all conquered people, the Messenians did not appreciate the loss of their independence. With the help of the city-state of Argos, the Messenians revolted in 640 BC. This was no ordinary revolt, for not only did the Messenians almost win, they almost destroyed Sparta itself. Here's how the situation stood for Sparta at the end of the Messenian revolt. Almost defeated, controlling the territory of a subject population that outnumbered their population ten to one , it was only a matter of time before this subject population would overrun their conquerors. So the Spartans invented a new political system as dramatically revolutionary as Athenian democracy in the north: they turned their state into what amounts to a military state. The Messenians were turned into agricultural slaves called helots . We describe their lives as the life of a "serf," for they worked small plots of land on estates owned by Spartans; part of their produce went to the master of the estate, and the remainder went to the helot farmer and his family. There's no question that the life of the helots was a miserable life. Labor was long and hard and the helots always lived right on the border of subsistence. But Spartan society itself changed. The military and the city-state became the center of Spartan existence. The state determined whether children, both male and female, were strong when they were born; weakling infants were left in the hills to die of exposure. Exposing weak or sickly children was a common practice in the Greek world, but Sparta institutionalized it as a state activity rather than a domestic activity. At the age of seven, every male Spartan was sent to military and athletic school. These schools taught toughness, discipline, endurance of pain (often severe pain), and survival skills. At twenty, after thirteen years of training, the Spartan became a soldier. The Spartan soldier spent his life with his fellow soldiers; he lived in barracks and ate all his meals with his fellow soldiers. He also married, but he didn't live with his wife; one Athenian once joked that Spartans had children before they even saw the face of their wives. The marriage ceremony had an unusual ritual involved: at the end of the ceremony, the man carried his wife off as if he were taking her by force (this did not mean, however, that the status of women was bad in Sparta, as we shall see later). Only at the age of thirty, did the Spartan become an "equal," and was allowed to live in his own house with his own family—although he continued to serve in the military. Military service ended at the age of sixty. How did the soldier survive? How did Sparta afford to feed young men who did nothing but soldier in their twenties? Each soldier was granted a piece of land, which he probably never saw; this land was farmed, of course, by the helots. The life of a Spartan male was a life of discipline, self-denial, and simplicity. The Spartans viewed themselves as the true inheritors of the Greek tradition. They did not surround themselves with luxuries, expensive foods, or opportunities for leisure. And this, I think, is the key to understanding the Spartans. While the Athenians and many others thought the Spartans were insane, the life of the Spartans seemed to hark back to a more basic way of life. Discipline, simplicity, and self-denial always remained ideals in the Greek and Roman worlds; civilization was often seen as bringing disorder, ennervation, weakness, and a decline in moral values. The Spartan, however, could point to Spartan society and argue that moral values and human courage and strength was as great as it was before civilization. Spartan society, then, exercised a profound pull on the surrounding city-states who admired the simplicity, discipline, and order of Spartan life. The ideology of Sparta was oriented around the state. The individual lived (and died) for the state. Their lives were designed to serve the state from their beginning to the age of sixty. The combination of this ideology, the education of Spartan males, and the disciplined maintenance of a standing army gave the Spartans the stability that had been threatened so dramatically in the Messenean revolt. Paradoxically, this soldier-centered state was the most liberal state in regards to the status of women. While women did not go through military training, they were required to be educated along similar lines. The Spartans were the only Greeks not only to take seriously the education of women, they instituted it as state policy. This was not, however, an academic education (just as the education of males was not an academic education); it was a physical education which could be grueling. Infant girls were also exposed to die if they were judged to be weak; they were later subject to physical and gymnastics training. This education also involved teaching women that their lives should be dedicated to the state. In most Greek states, women were required to stay indoors at all times (though only the upper classes could afford to observe this custom); Spartan women, however, were free to move about, and had an unusual amount of domestic freedom for their husbands, after all, didn't live at home. Spartan society was divided into three main classes. At the top was the Spartiate, or native Spartan, who could trace his or her ancestry back to the original inhabitants of the city. The Spartiate served in the army and was the only person who enjoyed the full political and legal rights of the state. Below the Spartiates wer the perioeci , or "dwellers around or about." These were foreign people who served as a kind of buffer population between the Spartans and the helots. Because of this vital function, they were accorded a great deal of freedom. Most of the trade and commerce carried out in Sparta were performed by the perioeci . At the bottom, of course, were the helots. Spartan government was an odd affair, but its overwhelming characteristic was stability . The Spartans, in fact, had the most stable government in the history of ancient Greece (some historians call this stability, "political stagnation"). At the top of government was the monarchy; the monarchy, however, was a dual monarchy. Below the monarchy was a council which was composed of the two kings plus twenty-eight nobles, all of whom were over sixty, that is, retired from the military. The council debated and set legislative and foreign policy, and was the supreme criminal court. Below the council (or above it), was an assembly of all the Spartiate males (a democracy, in other words) that selected the council and approved or vetoed council proposals. Above them all, however, was a small group of five men known as the ephorate . For all practical purposes, Spartan government was the ephorate, for these five men led the council, ran the military, ran the educational system, ran the infant selection system, and had veto power over everything coming out of the council or the assembly. They even had power to depose the king; however, they needed powerful divine proof (in the form of omens or oracles) to exercise this power. So what kind of government was Spartan government? It was a democratic timocratic monarchical oligarchy. Chew on that a few times. The anxiety-ridden situation with the helots led the Spartans to fear even their neighbors, who were often sticking their spoons in that pot to brew up trouble. So in the sixth century BC, the Spartans began to set their military sights on neighboring states. However, when they conquered their neighbor, Tegea, they set up a truce with them rather than annex their land and people. They demanded instead an alliance. Tegea would follow Sparta in all its foreign relationships, including wars, and would supply Sparta with a fixed amount of soldiers and equipment. In exchange, the Tegeans could remain an independent state. This was a brilliant move on the part of the Spartans. In a short time, Sparta had formed alliances with a huge number of states in the southern part of Greece (called the Peloponnesus), and had become the major power in Greece when the Persians invaded in 490 BC. Their power eclipsed that of even their powerful neighbor in the north, Athens.
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