The Classical World

by Robin Lane Fox

  In the Greek West, the Greeks' trouncing of Carthage's forces in 480 was followed by a decade of splendour, not for democracy but for Sicily's Greek tyrants. Their major tyrant-families intermarried, and so the main political tensions were those between the tyrants' family members: we can see evidence of them even in the most famous surviving work of art in their honour, the bronze Charioteer at Delphi. Significantly, its dedicatory inscription by one brother was changed and replaced by another brother's name. In mainland Greece, how­ever, the years of 'punishment' for Persia coincided with a real political choice, the continuing split between two opposed styles of Greek life: the harsh oligarchy of Sparta's military peer group and the increasingly confident democracy of the Athenians. Feebly, the Spartans presented the governments which they favoured in their allied cities as 'isocracy' ('equal rule'), a response to the Athenians' proud and very different 'democracy'.1 To placate their allies, since c. 506 bc the Spartan kings had had to agree to discuss all proposed allied wars in a joint synod.

  Against the Persians in Greece, nonetheless, the two powers had sunk their differences. From 478 to 462 the Athenians then led the Hellenic Alliance by sea, the Spartans by land, as the Spartans lacked any trained fleet and any coinage with which to pay one. They could hardly risk recruiting their helot-serfs as fighting oarsmen. On many fronts, they ran into severe problems. Their kings were brought to trial in Sparta after military failures or complaints about their policies. Even the young regent Pausanias, hero of the Persian Wars, was dismissed and put on trial. Within the Spartans' southern Greek orbit, there was continuing opposition among the Arcadians on their door­step; democracy began to infect important allies in the Peloponnese; in 465 a major revolt broke out among the Spartans' dependent helots. They were not alone. In the West, in the late 460s, the Greek cities also confronted a major war against non-Greek Sicels who lived beside them near Mount Etna. It persisted until 440 and created a Sicel hero, the leader Ducetius, who founded a lasting settlement, Kale Akte (Fair Coastline). But unlike the Sicels, Sparta's helots were oppressed fellow Greeks, and so the long Spartan serf-war was the more dangerous of the two. After three years, under the terms of the Hellenic Alliance, the Spartans summoned Athenians to help them, because they valued their general Cimon's skills in siege-warfare. The summons was a turning point. Before long, in Sparta, Athenian soldiers realized the uncomfortable truth, that the Spartans, supposedly their fellow liber­ators, were suppressing their neighbouring Messenian Greeks. Many of them had never realized this truth about a 'helot'. The Spartans then dismissed their Athenian helpers because they feared their aud­acity and capacity for causing a revolution. This cardinal rebuff broke up the Hellenic Alliance and soon led to war in Greece between 'the Athenians and their allies', as the old League became, and 'the Spart­ans and their allies', what we now call the 'Peloponnesian League'. On their return, the Athenians ostracized the pro-Spartan Cimon, adopted reforms which further entrenched democratic principles in their constitution and accepted alliance with the Spartans' allies, the Megarians, and a traditional Spartan enemy (Argos). For some four­teen years war would persist between the Athenians and, in particular, Sparta's allies, the oligarchic Corinthians.

  While a helot revolt was going on in their own land, these years were desperate for the Spartans. They could seldom help their allies, even when they were in dire need. There were also Spartan fears that the Athenians would influence control of the Delphic shrine and once again manipulate the priestess of Apollo into giving them favourable oracles. Eventually, Spartan counter-attacks in central Greece became possible and in 446 a peace for thirty years was sworn between the Athenians, Spartans and their respective allies. Ominously, one wing of opinion in Sparta was still dissatisfied, and the young king and an adviser who were responsible for the peace settlement had to go into exile.

  In Athens, by contrast, these decades saw a new dynamism. The arts of painting, drawing and sculpture had already begun to change at Athens before the Persians' invasion and sack of the city in 480. The move to a severe, classical style was not interrupted by this shock, and in the post-war years of victory its exponents enjoyed major new commissions. So, too, tragic dramas had been performed before 480 but it is to the following decades that we can trace our knowledge of complete plays, the masterpieces of Aeschylus (his Persians was put on in 472). Politically, the years after the great victory at Marathon in 490 also showed a new polarization. In the 480s Cleisthenes' device of ostracism began to be used by the people against prominent nobles. On many of the surviving bits of potsherd, candidates were accused of 'Medism', or favouring Persia, which the events of 490 had made into such an unambiguous crime. In 487 access to the Athenians' yearly magistracy, or archonship, was widened (among other duties, an archon would preside over ostracisms and the important counting of their 'votes'). In 486 comic dramas became part of the public festivals: in due course they made fun of personal and political targets, a sign (like the personalized ostraka) of increasing democratic freedom.

  Behind this political ferment there were real contrasts of political outlook and political choices which members of the Athenian upper class confronted. The ostracisms were symptomatic of a changing political culture. On the one side were those who merely 'found themselves living under a democracy', well-born men who valued athletic prowess and military skill, who prized the all-Greek arena of the Olympic Games, who talked airily of 'all Greeks together' with their noble friends in other cities and who saw artists and monuments as sources of personal glory, while thinking that they could still fix things politically by their own prestige before a deferential audience. In Athens in the 470s the champion of such men was Cimon, son of the great Miltiades, the general who had done the most to help the Athenians to win at Marathon. Cimon's world was the older world of all-Greek glory which did not care unduly for most of the Greeks before whom it shone. It is the world which we meet most splendidly in the victory odes of the poet Pindar who so often composed poems for men of Cimon's class. 'I am grieved', Pindar wrote in his poem for the ultimate Athenian aristocrat Megacles, 'that envy requites fair deeds'.2 Megacles' four-horsed chariot had won in the games at Delphi, yet the people at Athens had just ostracized Megacles from their midst for ten years.

  On the other side were well-born men who had seen, since Cleisth­enes, how the popular tide was sure to run in a new democratic age. Political influence could not be fixed with a few like-minded friends and judicious intermarriages in the upper class: it must be earned and accountable before a public audience of equals. The Spartans, hostile to their Greek helots' freedom, must be curbed and mistrusted.

  Nebulous all-Greek, 'Panhellenic' rhetoric was a poor second to the Athenians' democratic freedom. Themistocles, the great victor at Salamis, was perhaps the quickest to see how the future might develop, not least because he had visited Sparta on a 'victory tour' in 479 bc: the Spartans gave him 'the most beautiful chariot' and escorted him back on the road home, but dark thoughts about his hosts surely gathered in his mind as the prize 'car' rolled northwards.' Ostracized in the late 470s, he went south across the Isthmus again and helped to provoke political dissent among some of the Spartans' allies: then in c. 466/5 he was forced to flee Greece, finally taking refuge in western Asia by courtesy of his former enemy, the Persian king.

  Back at Athens, his mantle passed to others who were willing to challenge the old guard's supremacy, to cutb the revered Areopagus council and to put open and accountable government more freely in the people's hands. In 463/2, when Cimon returned humbled from his rejection as helper of the Spartans against theit helots, further democratic freedoms were approved in the Athenian assembly. They marked significant changes in the process of justice. Outgoing magis­trates were now to be vetted by the big public council, not the cosier Areopagus, most of whom would be sympathetic members of their class. Magistrates were no longer to have a primary power of judge­ment in Athenian lawsuits. From now on they had to pass them after a first hearing to on
e of the panels of public jurors whose members were usually to number several hundreds, chosen yearly from 6,000 of the Athenian citizenry. It was an unprecedented victory for popular, impersonal justice. Henceforward, to be an active Athenian was to be willing to sit and listen, and sometimes barrack, as a juryman while orators on either side pleaded civil or criminal cases for hours on end. 'Lawyers' were out of the question.

  These changes to a yet more popular style of government and justice were highly distasteful to the old-fashioned minority in Attica. In 458/7, while a Spartan army was nearby, a small disaffected group of Athenians even attempted to betray their city to the enemy. Spring 458 was the occasion of our great surviving trilogy of tragic dramas, Aeschylus' Oresteia. In the final play, Aeschylus includes an implicit comment on the recent curbing of the Areopagus, approving of it (in my view) but also implying 'enough is enough'. Significantly for spring 458, he also includes a plea for civil strife to stay away from the Athenians.

  While the Hellenic Alliance had set about freeing the eastern Greeks, Athenian power benefited greatly in the generation from c. 490 to c. 440. In 479 strong defensive walls were quickly built up to protect the city and link it to the sea. The Spartans, such poor besiegers, would soon regret their existence. Then, the 'all-Greek' campaigns against the barbarians continued to capture points on the map which were precious for Athenian economic interests, above all for the supply of grain which was being imported into Attica by sea-routes from Egypt and especially from the Crimea in the northern Black Sea. At first, the allies (in my view, including the Athenians) paid tribute into a common Treasury, but in the mid-450S this Treasury was moved to Athens for 'security' reasons. What had been joint payments for a war effort became tribute paid from allies only: it persisted after the fragile 'peace' had been agreed with the Persian king in 450/49. From the start, defection by Greek allies had been forbidden as contrary to their Hellenic Alliance's oaths. It occurred nonetheless, and from the 440s onwards the Athenians' suppression was increasingly represented as 'subjection' or even 'servitude'. In a vivid use of metaphor, the Athenians' allies in the war of liberation were said to have become 'slaves' of the Athenians' leading power. At first their delegates had met and voted in common meetings; by the 440s, at the latest, these meetings had ceased.

  The greatest beneficiaries of this growing power were the Athenians themselves. From many sources, a richer style of life became available in their city. One, importantly, was treasure captured from the Per­sians in 480/79. Major Oriental trophies found their way into the Athenian Treasury, including Xerxes' travelling throne. Despite the hostile comments on Persian 'softness' and excessive splendour, well-off Athenians responded to the styles of dress and metalwork, fine textiles and precious armour which they saw in the prizes taken from the Persian invaders. Soft, comfortable shoes even became known at Athens as 'Persian' slippers. The greatest beneficiaries were Greek horses. The invading Persians had brought the rich 'Median grass', or lucerne, with them into Greece in 490 (it was said) with Darius' army:4 seeds, perhaps, came in with their cavalry's fodder. This fine 'blue grass' from the horse-studs back in Media then became a food-crop for horses on rich Greek soil.

  Other new sources of luxury were imports by sea, which were assisted now by the Athenians' growing naval power abroad. It was not that the Athenians took direct control of overseas sources of supply, like imperial 'colonies': rather, their growing city-population and its centrality became the obvious magnet for traders who were exporting the good things in life. Carpets and cushions came in from Carthage, fish from the Hellespont and excellent figs from Rhodes; all sorts of delicacies arrived for sale, including quantities of slaves for use down the Attic silver-mines, in the citizens' households and even on the smaller farms. The houses of the Athenian rich were magnificent and finely decorated in this era. Sadly, none survive, but we can form some idea of their interior paintings from scenes on Athenian painted pottery. In public, extreme distinctions of dress may have been moder­ated, at least the distinctions between the dress of the upper class and that of others. But from c. 460 onwards there was not a general abandonment of stylish living by the upper class in an age of enhanced democracy.5

  In Syracuse, the introduction and abuse of a form of 'ostracism' in the 450s was said to have caused upper-class dignitaries to withdraw into private luxury. In Athens, it did nothing of the sort. Even before democracy began in 508, the rich citizens had been liable to expensive services, or 'liturgies' (leitourgiai), which paid for parts of the state's naval force, for the festival-displays and the training of the choruses for theatrical plays. On these 'voluntary' contributions, much of Athenian cultural splendour depended. As the Athenians' cultural life developed under the democracy, there was ever more prestige and honour to be won by paying up as a liturgist. The rich, therefore, took a deep civic pride in their increasingly pre-eminent city, whatever they thought of its constitution: peer-pressure impelled them to give generously to the liturgies and not to disgrace their families or their own fame by a poor show. Anyone who tried to dodge their turn as a liturgist would be resented by his own class. In these cultural displays, the rich enjoyed the glory which 'mob-rule' had diluted in the political assembly. Even the ostracized Athenians remained keen to return and have another chance to shine in the city-state which, basically, they loved.

  By the 440s alliances existed between the Athenians and more than two hundred other Greek communities and constituted the most powerful 'empire' yet known in Greek history. In contemporary texts, we hear most about its 'enslavement' of its members and its arrogance, yet arguably it assured more Greek freedom and justice than it ever removed. Most of its member-states had their own internal conflicts developing between the options of democratic and oligarchic rule. The Athenians never intervened unasked to impose or export a democ­racy onto a stable allied state. Instead, they and the democrats among their subject-allies knew that Athenian power was the people's most solid support for popular rule. The tribute paid to Athens was low and adjustable and, in an allied democracy, most of it would be voted to be paid by the local rich anyway. Even after the fragile peace of 449 bc the threat from Persia and her western satraps was far from dead. Athenian ships, meanwhile, prevented piracy on the seas and promised anti-Persian defence in a crisis, all for a relatively low yearly payment. Allied supporters of Athens were protected by a right of legal appeal against any major sentences imposed on them at home; they could demand a hearing at Athens, just as Athenians, meanwhile, could transfer cases involving an ally and themselves to their own law courts. The Athenian courts did not always side with Athenian suitors: compared with a small allied city's system of justice, the big popular Athenian juries were incorruptible and increasingly experienced.

  Through such 'empire', Athenian power, finance and public splen­dour were transformed: reserves of tribute piled up in the city and it was because of them that the people could vote to rebuild the ruined temples on their Acropolis with the greatest splendour. From 449 onwards a brand new Parthenon temple was joined by an imposing entrance-gate, yet more temples and some stunningly big and precious statues of the goddess Athena: they made the hilltop the artistic wonder of the world. They are the defining monuments of 'classical art', and even though they were built with allied tribute, there were surely allied visitors who marvelled at what had been made with a bit of their money. There would also, as nowadays, be grumblers and pessimists, but in antiquity even they would remember that the alternatives for the member-states of the Athenian alliance were the likelihood of Persian revenge or a brutal coup by their city's oligarchic fringe. An ally's worst enemy was most often another ally, a local oligarch or a long-hated ally in a city-state nearby. For most people in most places, obedience to Athens was the better alternative available to them. The Athenians themselves had few illusions. They, too, could profit individually, not least by acquiring land in their allied states, an intrusion which was later widely (not always justly) resented. Quite openly, their leadi
ng politicians endorsed the view that their Empire was 'like a tyranny'.6 So, in one sense it was, as it tended to curb the allies' most prominent individuals and to favour the people's rule instead. But the 'tyranny' also offered fair trials to its friends, freedom from Persia and freedom, too, from the plottings of oligarchic cliques who had the money and skill to overthrow their fellow citizens' free political rights.