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The High Point of Greek Civilization:

Classical Greece

World History, Comprehensive Volume, 3^rd Edition, by William J. Duiker & Jackson J. Spielvogel.

Classical Greece is the name given to the period of Greek history from around 500 B.C. to the conquest of Greece by the Macedonian king Phillip II in 338 B.C.E. It was a period of brilliant achievement, much of it associated with the flowering of democracy in Athens under the leadership of Pericles. Many of the lasting contributions of the Greeks occurred during this period. The age began with a mighty confrontation between the Greek states and the mammoth Persian Empire.

The Challenge of Persia

As Greek civilization grew and expanded throughout the Mediterranean, it was inevitable that it would come into contact with the Persian Empire to the east. The Ionian Greek cities in western Asia Minor had already fallen subject top the Persian Empire by the mid-sixth century B.C.E. An unsuccessful revolt by the Ionian cities in 499 B.C.E., assisted by the Athenian navy, led the Persian ruler Darius to seek revenge by attacking the mainland Greeks in 490 B.C.E.  The Persians landed an army on the plain of Marathon, only 26 miles from Athens. The Athenians and their allies were clearly outnumbered, but led by Mitiades, one of the Athenian leaders who insisted on attacking, the Greek hoplites charged across the plain of Marathon and crushed the Persian forces. Although a minor defeat to the Persians, the Battle of Marathon was of great importance to the Athenians, who had proved that the Persians could be beaten.

Xerxes, the new Persian monarch after the death of Darius in 486 B.C.E., vowed revenge and renewed the invasion of Greece. In preparation for the attack, some of the Greek states formed a defensive league under Spartan leadership, while the Athenians pursued a new military policy by developing a navy.  By the time of the Persian invasion in 480 B.C.E., the Athenians had produced a fleet of about 200 vessels.

Xerxes led a massive invasion force into Greece: close to 150,000 troops, almost 700 naval ships, and hundreds of supply ships to keep the large army fed. The Greeks decided to fight a delaying action at the pass of Thermopylae along the main road into central Greece, probably to give the Greek fleet of 300 ships the chance to fight the Persian fleet. The Greeks knew that the Persian army was dependant on the fleet for supplies. A Greek force numbering close to 9,000, under the leadership of the Spartan king, Leonidas, and his contingent of 300 Spartans, held off the Persian army for two days. The Spartan troops were especially brave. When told that the Persian arrows would darken the sky in battle, one Spartan warrior supposedly responded, ”That is good news. We will fight in the shade!” Unfortunately for the Greeks, a traitor told the Persians how to use a mountain path to outflank the Greek force. King Leonidas and his 300 Spartans fought to the last man.

The Athenians, now threatened by the onslaught of the Persian forces, abandoned their city. While the Persian sacked and burned the Athenians, the Greek fleet remained offshore near the island of Salamis and challenged the Persian navy to fight. Although the Greeks were outnumbered, they managed to outmaneuver the Persian fleet and utterly defeat it. A few months later, early in 479 B.C.E, the Greeks formed the largest Greek army seen up to that time that and decisively defeated the Persian army at Plataea, northwest of Attica. The Greeks had won the war and now are free to pursue their own destiny.

The Growth of an Athenian Empire in the Age of Pericles

After the defeat of the Persians, Athens stepped in to provide new leadership against the Persians by forming a confederation called the Delian League. Organized in the winter of 478-477 B.C.E., the Delian League was dominated by the Athenians from the beginning g. Its main headquarters was on the island of Delos, but its chief officials, including the treasurers and commanders of the fleet, were Athenian. Under the leadership of the Athenians, the Delian League pursued that attack against the Persian Empire. Virtually all of the Greek states in the Aegean were liberated from Persian control. Arguing that the Persian threat was now over, some members of the Delian League wished to withdraw. But the Athenians forced them to remain in the league to pay tribute. In 454 B.C.E., the Athenians moved the treasury of the league from the island of Delos to Athens. By controlling the Delian League, Athens had created an Empire.

At home, Athenians favored the new imperial policy, especially after 461 B.C.E., when a political faction, led by a young aristocrat named Pericles, triumphed. Under Pericles, who was a dominant figure in Athenian politics until 429 B.C.E., Athens embarked on a policy of expanding democracy at home and its new empire abroad. This period of Athenian and Greek History, which historians have subsequently labeled the age of Pericles, witnessed the height of Athenian power and the culmination of its brilliance as a civilization.

In the age of Pericles, the Athenians became deeply attached to their democratic system. The will of the people was embodied in the assembly, which consisted of all male citizens over 18 years of age. In the 440’s, that was probably a group of about 43,000. Not all attended, however, and the number present at the meetings, which were held every ten days on a hillside east of the Acropolis, seldom reached 6,000. The assembly passed all laws and made final decisions on war and foreign policy. Pericles expanded the Athenians’ involvement in their democracy by making lower-class citizens eligible for the public officers formerly closed to them and introducing state pay of officeholders, including those who served on the large Athenian juries. Poor citizens could now afford to participate in public affairs.

A large body of city magistrates, usually chosen by lot without regard to class, handled routine administrative tasks. The overall directors of policy, a board of ten officials known as generals, were elected by public vote and were usually wealthy aristocrats, even though the people were free to select otherwise. The generals could be reelected, enabling individual leaders to play an important political role. Pericles, for example, was elected to the generalship thirty times between 461 and 429 B.C.E. The Athenians, however, has also devised the practice of ostracism to protect themselves against overly ambitious politicians. Members of the assembly could write on a broken pottery fragment (ostrakon) the name of the person they most disliked or considered most harmful to the polis. A person who received a majority (if at least 6,000 votes were cast) was exiled for ten years.

Under Pericles, Athens became the leading center of Greek Culture. The Persians had destroyed much of their city during the Persian Wars, but Pericles used the treasury money of the Delian League to set in motion a massive rebuilding program. New temples and statues soon made visible the greatness of Athens. Art, architecture, and philosophy flourished, and Pericles broadly boasted that Athens had become the “school of Greece.” But the achievements of Athens alarmed the other Greek states, especially Sparta, and soon all Greece was confronted with a new war.

The Great Peloponnesian War and the Decline of the Greek States

During the forty years after the defeat of the Persians, the Greek world came to be divided into two major camps: Sparta and its supporters and the Athenian maritime empire. In his classic History of the Peloponnesian War, the great historian Thucydides pointed out that the fundamental, long-range cause of the Peloponnesian War was the fear that the growing Athenian empire aroused in Sparta and its allies. Then, too, Athens and Sparta had created two very different kinds of society., and neither state was able to tolerate the other’s system. A series of disputes finally led to the outbreak of war in 431 B.C.E.

At the beginning of the war, both sides believed they had winning strategies. The Athenians planned to remain behind the protective walls of Athens while the overseas empire and navy would keep them supplied. Pericles knew perfectly well that he Spartans and their allies could beat the Athenians in pitched battles, which, of course, formed the focus of the Spartan strategy. The Spartans and their allies invaded Attica and ravaged the fields and orchards, hoping that the Athenians would send out their army to fight beyond the walls. But Pericles was convinced that Athens was secure behind its walls and retaliated by sending out naval excursions to ravage the seacoast of the Peloponnesus. In the second year of the war, however, plague devastated the crowded city of Athens and wiped out possibly 1/3 of the Athenian population. Pericles himself died the following year(429 B.C.E.) a severe loss to Athens. Despite the losses from the plague, the Athenians fought on in a struggle that witnesses numerous instances of futile destruction. War weariness finally ked to a truce in 421 B.C.E., but it proved to be short-lived.

The Athenians initiated a second phase of the war in 415 B.C.E., when they decided to invade the island of Sicily, believing that its conquest would give them a strong source of support to carry on a lengthy war. But the “great expedition” of the Athenians suffered a massive defeat outside the city of Syracuse. All of the Athenians were killed or sold into slavery. Despite this disaster, the Athenians refused to give up, but raised new armies and sent out new fleets. The final crushing blow came, however, in 405 B.C.E., when the Athenian fleet was destroyed at Aegospotami on the Hellespont. Athens was besieged and surrendered in 404 B.C.E. Its walls were torn down, the navy disbanded, and the Athenian empire destroyed. The great war was finally over.

The Great Peloponnesian Was weakened the major Greek states and certainly destroyed any possibility of cooperation among the Greek states. The next seventy years of Greek history are a sorry tale of efforts by Sparta, Athens, and Thebes, a new Greek power, to dominate Greek affairs. In continuing their petty wars, the Greek states remained oblivious to the growing power of Macedonia to their north and demonstrated convincingly that the genius of the Greeks did not lie in politics. Culture, however, was quite a different story.

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Athenian Democracy:

The Funeral Oration Of Pericles

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, the Greek historian Thucydides presented his reconstruction of the eulogy given by Pericles in the winter of 431-430 B.C.E. to honor the Athenians killed in the first campaigns of the Great Peloponnesian War. It is a magnificent, idealized, description of Athenian democracy at its height.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Our constitution is called a democracy because power is in the hands not a minority but the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the                                  actual ability, which the man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty. And, just as our political life is free and open, so is our day-to-day life in our relations with each other. We do not get into a state with our next-door neighbor if he enjoys himself in his own way, nor do we give him the kind of black looks, which, though they do no real harm, still do hurt people’s feelings. We are free and tolerant in our public lives; but in public affairs we keep to the law. This is because it commands our deepest respect.

We give our obedience to those whom we put in positions of authority, and we obey the laws themselves, especially those which are for the protection of the oppressed, and those unwritten laws, which it is an acknowledge shame to break… Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the states as well; even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics- this is a peculiarity of our: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all. We, Athenians, in our own persons, take our decisions on policy or submit them to proper discussions: for we do not think that there is an incompatibility between words and deed; the worst thing is to rush into action before the consequences have been properly debated. …Taking everything together then, I declare that our city is an education to Greece, and I declare that in my own opinion each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person, and do this, moreover, with exceptional grace and exceptional versatility.  And to show that this is no empty boasting for the present occasion, but real tangible fact, you have only to consider the power which our city possess and which has been won by those very qualities which I have mentioned.