by Will Durant
BOOK III
THE GOLDEN AGE
480-399 B.C.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE FOR BOOK III
NOTE: Where no city is named for a person, “of Athens” is understood.
B.C.
478:
Pindar of Thebes, poet
478-67:
Hieron I dictator at Syracuse
478:
Pythagoras of Rhegium, sculptor
477:
Delian Confederacy founded
472:
Polygnotus, painter; Aeschylus’ Persae
469:
Birth of Socrates
468:
Cimon defeats Persians at the Eurymedon; first contest between Aeschylus and Sophocles
467:
Bacchylides of Ceos, poet; Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes
464-54:
Helot revolt; siege of Ithome
463-31:
Public career of Pericles
462:
Ephialtes limits the Areopagus; pay for jurors; Anaxagoras at Athens
461:
Cimon ostracized; Ephialtes killed
460:
Empedocles of Acragas, philosopher; Aeschylus’ Promotheus Bound
459-54:
Athenian expedition to Egypt fails
458:
Aeschylus’ Oresteia; the Long Walls
456:
Temple of Zeus at Olympia; Paeonius of Mende, sculptor
454:
Delian treasury removed to Athens
450:
Zeno of Elea, philosopher; Hippocrates of Chios, mathematician; Callimachus develops the Corinthian order; Philolaus of Thebes, astronomer
448:
Peace of Callias with Persia
447-31:
The Parthenon
445:
Leucippus of Abdera, philosopher
443:
Herodotus of Halicarnassus, historian, joins colonists founding Thurii (Italy); Gorgias of Leontini, Sophist
442:
Sophocles’ Antigone; Myron of Eleutherae, sculptor
440:
Protagoras of Abdera, Sophist
438:
Pheidias’ Athene Parthenos; Euripides’ Alcestis
437:
ThePropylaea
435-34:
War between Corinth and Corcyra
433:
Alliance of Athens and Corcyra
432:
Revolt of Potidaea; trials of Aspasia, Pheidias, and Anaxagoras
431-04:
Peloponnesian War
431-24:
Euripides’ Medea, Andromache, and Hecuba; Sophocles’ Electra
430:
Plague at Athens; trial of Pericles
429:
Death of Pericles; Cleon in power; Sophocles’ Oedipus the King
428:
Revolt of Mytilene; Euripides’ Hippolytus; death of Anaxagoras
B.C.
427:
Embassy of Gorgias at Athens; Prodicus and Hippias, Sophists
425:
Siege of Sphacteria; Aristophanes’ Acharnians
424:
Brasidas takes Amphipolis; exile of Thucydides, historian; Aristophanes’ Knights
423:
Aristophanes’ Clouds; Zeuxis of Heraclea and Parrhasius of Ephesus, painters
422:
Aristophanes’ Wasps; death of Cleon and Brasidas
421:
Peace of Nicias; Aristophanes’ Peace
420:
Hippocrates of Cos, physician; Democritus of Abdera, philosopher; Polycleitus of Sicyon, sculptor
420-04:
The Erechtheum
419:
Lysias, orator
418:
Spartan victory at Mantinea; Euripides’ Ion
416:
Massacre at Melos; Euripides’ Electra(?)
415-13:
Athenian expedition to Syracuse
415:
Mutilation of the Hermae; disgrace of Alcibiades; Euripides’ Trojan Women
414:
Siege of Syracuse; Aristophanes’ Birds
413:
Athenian defeat at Syracuse; Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris
412:
Euripides’ Helen and Andromeda
411:
Revolt of the Four Hundred; Aristophanes’ Lysistrata and Thesmophoriazusae
410:
Restoration of the democrary; victory of Alcibiades at Cyzicus
408:
Timotheus of Miletus, poet and musician; Euripides’ Orestes
406:
Athenian victory at Arginusae; deaths of Euripides and Sophocles; Euripides’ Bacchae and Iphigenia in Aulis
405-367:
Dionysius I dictator at Syracuse
405:
Spartan victory at Aegospotami; Aristophanes’ Frogs
404:
End of the Peloponnesian War; rule of the Thirty at Athens
403:
Restoration of the democracy
401:
Defeat of Cyrus II at Cunaxa; retreat of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand; Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus
399:
Trial and death of Socrates
CHAPTER XI
Pericles and the Democratic Experiment
I. THE RISE OF ATHENS
“THE period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle,” wrote Shelley,1 “is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effect which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilized man, the most memorable in the history of the world.” Athens dominated this period because she had won the allegiance—and the contributions—of most Aegean cities by her leadership in saving Greece; and because, when the war was over, Ionia was impoverished and Sparta was disordered by demobilization, earthquake, and insurrection, while the fleet that Themistocles had created now rivaled with the conquests of commerce its victories at Artemisium and Salamis.
Not that the war was quite over: intermittently the struggle between Greece and Persia continued from the conquest of Ionia by Cyrus to the overthrow of Darius III by Alexander. The Persians were expelled from Ionia in 479, from the Black Sea in 478, from Thrace in 475; and in 468 a Greek fleet under Cimon of Athens decisively defeated the Persians on land and sea at the mouth of the Eurymedon.* The Greek cities of Asia and the Aegean, for their protection against Persia, now (477) organized under Athenian leadership the Delian Confederacy, and contributed to a common fund in the temple of Apollo on Delos. Since Athens donated ships instead of money, it soon exercised, through its sea power, an effective control over its allies; and rapidly the Confederacy of equals was transformed into an Athenian Empire.
In this policy of imperial aggrandizement all the major statesmen of Athens—even the virtuous Aristides and later the impeccable Pericles—joined with the unscrupulous Themistocles. No other man had deserved so well of Athens as Themistocles, and no one was more resolved than he to be repaid for it. When the Greek leaders met to give first and second awards to those men who had most ably defended Greece in the war, each of them voted for himself first, and for Themistocles second. It was he who set the course of Greek history by persuading Athens that the road to supremacy lay not on land but on the sea, and not by war so much as by trade. He negotiated with Persia, and sought to end the strife between the old and the young empire in order that unimpeded commerce with Asia might bring prosperity to Athens. Under his prodding the men, even the women and children, of Athens raised a wall around the city, and another around the ports at the Piraeus and Munychia; under his lead, carried forward by Pericles, great quays, warehouses, and exchanges were erected at the Piraeus, providing every convenience for maritime trade. He knew that these policies would arouse the jealousy of Sparta, and might lead to war between the rival states; but he was stirred on by his vision of Athens’ development, and his confidence in the Athenian fleet.
His aim
s were as magnificent as his means were venal. He used the navy to force tribute from the Cyclades, on the ground that they had yielded too quickly to the Persians, and had lent Xerxes their troops; and he appears to have accepted bribes to let some cities off.2 For like considerations he arranged the recall of exiles, sometimes keeping the money, says Timocreon, though he had failed to obtain the recall.3 When Aristides was placed in charge of the public revenue he found that his predecessors had embezzled public funds, and not least lavishly Themistocles.4 Toward 471 the Athenians, fearing his unmoral intellect, passed a vote of ostracism upon him, and he sought a new home in Argos. Shortly thereafter the Spartans found documents apparently implicating Themistocles, in the secret correspondence of their regent Pausanias, whom they had starved to death for entering into traitorous negotiations with Persia. Happy to destroy her ablest enemy, Sparta revealed these papers to Athens, which at once sent out an order for Themistocles’ arrest. He fled to Corcyra, was denied refuge there, found brief asylum in Epirus, and thence sailed secretly to Asia, where he claimed from Xerxes’ successor some reward for restraining the Greek pursuit of the Persian fleet after Salamis. Lured by Themistocles’ promise to help him subjugate Greece,5 Artaxerxes I received him into his counsels, and assigned the revenues of several cities for his maintenance. Before Themistocles could carry out the schemes that never let him rest he died at Magnesia in 449 B.C., at the age of sixty-five, admired and disliked by all the Mediterranean world.
After the passing of Themistocles and Aristides the leadership of the democratic faction at Athens descended to Ephialtes, and that of the oligarchic or conservative faction to Cimon, son of Miltiades. Cimon had most of the virtues that Themistocles lacked, but none of the subtlety that ability must depend upon for political success. Unhappy amid the intrigues of the city, he secured command of the fleet, and consolidated the liberties of Greece by his victory at the Eurymedon. Returning to Athens in glory, he at once lost his popularity by advising a reconciliation with Sparta. He won the Assembly’s reluctant consent to lead an Athenian force to the aid of the Spartans against their revolted Helots at Ithome; but the Spartans suspected the Athenians even when bringing gifts, and so clearly distrusted Cimon’s soldiers that these returned to Athens in anger, and Cimon was disgraced. In 461 he was ostracized at the instigation of Pericles, and the oligarchic party was so demoralized by his fall that for two generations the government remained in the hands of the democrats. Four years later Pericles, repentant (or, rumor said, enamored of Cimon’s sister Elpinice), secured his recall, and Cimon died with honors in a naval campaign in Cyprus.
The leader of the democratic party at this time was a man of whom we know strangely little, and yet his activity was a turning point in the history of Athens. Ephialtes was poor but incorruptible, and did not long survive the animosities of Athenian politics. The popular faction had been strengthened by the war, for in that crisis all class divisions among freemen had for a moment been forgotten, and the saving victory at Salamis had been won not by the army—which was dominated by the aristocrats—but by the navy, which was manned by the poorer citizens and controlled by the mercantile middle class. The oligarchic party sought to maintain its privileges by making the conservative Areopagus the supreme authority in the state. Ephialtes replied by a bitter attack upon this ancient senate.* He impeached several of its members for malfeasance, had some of them put to death,7 and persuaded the Assembly to vote the almost complete abolition of the powers that the Areopagus still retained. The conservative Aristotle later approved this radical policy, on the ground that “the transfer to the commons of the judicial functions that had belonged to the Senate appears to have been an advantage, for corruption finds an easier material in a small number than in a large one.”8 But the conservatives of the time did not see the issue so calmly. Ephialtes, having been found unpurchasable, was assassinated in 461 by an agent of the oligarchy,9 and the perilous task of leading the democratic party passed down to the aristocratic Pericles.
II. PERICLES
The man who acted as commander in chief of all the physical and spiritual forces of Athens during her greatest age was born some three years before Marathon. His father, Xanthippus, had fought at Salamis, had led the Athenian fleet in the battle of Mycale, and had recaptured the Hellespont for Greece. Pericles’ mother, Agariste, was a granddaughter of the reformer Cleisthenes; on her side, therefore, he belonged to the ancient family of the Alcmaeonids. “His mother being near her time,” says Plutarch, “fancied in a dream that she was brought to bed of a lion, and a few days after was delivered of Pericles—in other respects perfectly formed, only his head was somewhat longish and out of proportion”;10 his critics were to have much fun with this very dolicocephalic head, The most famous music teacher of his time, Damon, gave him instruction in music, and Pythocleides in music and literature; he heard the lectures of Zeno the Eleatic at Athens, and became the friend and pupil of the philosopher Anaxagoras. In his development he absorbed the rapidly growing culture of his epoch, and united in his mind and policy all the threads of Athenian civilization—economic, military, literary, artistic, and philosophical. He was, so far as we know, the most complete man that Greece produced.
Seeing that the oligarchic party was out of step with the time, he attached himself early in life to the party of the demos—i.e., the free population of Athens; then, as even in Jefferson’s day in America, the word “people” carried certain proprietary reservations. He approached politics in general, and each situation in it, with careful preparation, neglecting no aspect of education, speaking seldom and briefly, and praying to the gods that he might never utter a word that was not to the point. Even the comic poets, who disliked him, spoke of him as “the Olympian,” who wielded the thunder and lightning of such eloquence as Athens had never heard before; and yet by all accounts his speech was unimpassioned, and appealed to enlightened minds. His influence was due not only to his intelligence but to his probity; he was capable of using bribery to secure state ends, but was himself “manifestly free from every kind of corruption, and superior to all considerations of money”;11 and whereas Themistocles had entered public office poor and left it rich, Pericles, we are told, added nothing to his patrimony by his political career.12 It showed the good sense of the Athenians in this generation that for almost thirty years, between 467 and 428, they elected and re-elected him, with brief intermissions, as one of their ten strategoi or commanders; and this relative permanence of office not only gave him supremacy on the military board, but enabled him to raise the position of strategos autokrator to the place of highest influence in the government. Under him Athens, while enjoying all the privileges of democracy, acquired also the advantages of aristocracy and dictatorship. The good government and cultural patronage that had adorned Athens in the age of Peisistratus were continued now with equal unity and decisiveness of direction and intelligence, but also with the full and annually renewed consent of a free citizenship. History through him illustrated again the principle that liberal reforms are most ably executed and most permanently secured by the cautious and moderate leadership of an aristocrat enjoying popular support. Greek civilization was at its best when democracy had grown sufficiently to give it variety and vigor, and aristocracy survived sufficiently to give it order and taste.
The reforms of Pericles substantially extended the authority of the people. Though the power of the heliaea had grown under Solon, Cleisthenes, and Ephialtes, the lack of payment for jury service had given the well to do a predominating influence in these courts. Pericles introduced (451) a fee of two obols (34 cents), later raised to three, for a day’s duty as juror, an amount equivalent in each case to half a day’s earnings of an average Athenian of the time.13 The notion that these modest sums weakened the fiber and corrupted the morale of Athens is hardly to be taken seriously, for by the same token every state that pays its judges or its jurymen would long since have been destroyed. Pericles seems also to have established a small remunerat
ion for military service. He crowned this scandalous generosity by persuading the state to pay every citizen two obols annually as the price of admission to the plays and games of the official festivals; he excused himself on the ground that these performances should not be a luxury of the upper and middle classes, but should contribute to elevate the mind of the whole electorate. It must be confessed, however, that Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch—conservatives all—were agreed that these pittances injured the Athenian character.14
Continuing the work of Ephialtes, Pericles transferred to the popular courts the various judicial powers that had been possessed by the archons and magistrates, so that from this time the archonship was more of a bureaucratic or administrative office than one that carried the power of forming policies, deciding cases, or issuing commands. In 457 eligibility to the archonship, which had been confined to the wealthier classes, was extended to the third class, or zeugkai; soon thereafter, without any legal form, the lowest citizen class, the thetes, made themselves eligible to the office by romancing about their income; and the importance of the thetes in the defense of Athens persuaded the other classes to wink at the fraud.15 Moving for a moment in the opposite direction, Pericles (451) carried through the Assembly a restriction of the franchise to the legitimate offspring of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. No legal marriage was to be permitted between a citizen and a noncitizen. It was a measure aimed to discourage intermarriage with foreigners, to reduce illegitimate births, and perhaps to reserve to the jealous burghers of Athens the material rewards of citizenship and empire. Pericles himself would soon have reason to regret this exclusive legislation.
