Professor Donald
Kagan: Okay,
we were talking about the
development of the Athenian
Empire changing from the
original character of the Delian
League.
I think we had gotten to the
Battle of Eurymedon,
which is generally dated to
469,
a great victory at land and sea
over the Persians and the
feeling that it generated,
certainly in some portions of
the empire, that the threat from
Persia was over,
and that created the problem of
keeping the allies satisfied and
willing to make the kind of
contribution that had been
necessary.
The Athenians certainly had no
plan of abandoning the league,
of abandoning their leadership,
of giving up their assaults on
the Persians and all of that.
So, that if there was a falling
away the Athenians would be
wanting to do something about
that.
Still another turning point
in the character of the league,
a very important one I think,
occurred in the year 465 when
the Island of Thasos in the
northern Aegean Sea rebelled,
and this time the quarrel was
not about doing the duty that
the members of the league had to
do.
It was not something about an
issue not wanting to take part
in campaigns,
not wanting to make payments,
no nothing like that.
There was a quarrel between the
Athenians and the Thasians about
some mines that were worked on
the land opposite Thasos.
Gold and silver,
very rich precious metal
sources for the ancient Greek
world,
of which there were not many,
located on Mount Pangaean on
the mainland opposite Thasos.
Both states claimed those mines
and it was a quarrel that was
really just about money.
It was also a trading post up
there that both sides claimed to
have.
The Athenians had
established a colony at a place
on the Strymon River up in that
region called
ennea-hodoi,
the nine roads,
which would later,
when the Athenians established
it as the colony would be called
Amphipolis.
All of that led to--and the
Thasians didn't like that.
The Athenians were moving into
their sphere of influence and
giving them trouble.
So Thasos, as a consequence of
all of these quarrels,
rebelled and it was a very
difficult siege that the
Athenians had to employ.
Thasos is a relatively big
island.
The Thasians were a pretty
tough group to put down,
and the siege actually,
the war between Athens and
Thasos actually took something
like two years,
which is quite a long stretch
for any Greek combat and
certainly had not been typical
of what the Athenians had been
able to do against other
rebellions.
When the Thasians were finally
forced to surrender,
the Athenians gave them the
usual treatment to rebellious
states.
They made them take down
their walls, to give up their
ships, and of course,
the Athenians took control of
the mines and placed an
indemnity on the Thasians,
requiring that they should pay
the costs of the war for Athens,
and imposed upon them
thereafter the same kind of a
tribute that they imposed on
what came more and more to be,
and we call subject states.
Well, that wasn't the first
time such a thing had happened
to one of the members of the
league,
but what made it different was
that the quarrel was not over
anything that had to do with the
league.
It could easily be seen and
certainly was a way in which the
Athenians used the forces and
the funds of the league to
achieve strictly Athenian
advantages.
After all, there was no way
that the league benefited from
having either Athens or Thasos
exploit those mines.
It was not an issue for the
league at all,
and yet the Athenians had taken
their position as leaders of the
league to gain that advantage,
and that's I think a very
important turning point.
We shall see that in the course
of that siege of Thasos,
important events were happening
back in the mainland at Greece,
which would change the nature
of things too,
but if we just think about the
league for a moment,
I think the Thasian rebellion
is a critical moment.
That is a good place for us to
look at the evaluation that the
ancient writers made of this
transition.
Our two sources,
our major source,
of course, Thucydides and then
also Diodorus of Sicily,
deriving his opinions from
contemporary writers too,
come up with descriptions and
explanations of why the league
changed from what had been a
free association of states
pursuing a common goal to what
was legitimately called an
empire.
Here is what Diodorus says,
"In general,
Athenians were making great
gains in power and no longer
treated their allies with
decency as they had done before.
Instead, they ruled with
arrogance and violence.
For this reason,
most of their allies could not
bear their harshness and spoke
to one another of rebellion.
Some of them even disdained the
league council and acted
according to their own wishes."
So, Diodorus depicts a combined
situation of which there are
thoughts of defection and actual
defections from Athens,
and blames this on the behavior
of the Athenians of a kind of a
tyrannical sort.
Here's what Thucydides
says, "Now, while there were
other causes of revolts,
the principal ones were the
failures in bringing in the
tribute or their quota of ships,
and in some cases,
refusal of military service.
For the Athenians exacted the
tribute strictly and gave
offense by applying coercive
measures to any who were
accustomed or unwilling to bear
the hardships of service.
In some other respects too,
the Athenians were no longer
equally agreeable as leaders.
They would not take part in
expeditions on terms of equality
and they found it easy to reduce
those who had revolted."
Now, here's where Thucydides
differs from Diodorus,
"For all this,
the allies themselves were
responsible for most of them on
account of their aversion to
military service,
in order to avoid being away
from home got themselves rated
in sums of money instead of
ships,
which they should pay in as
their proportion of
contribution.
Consequently,
the fleet of the Athenians was
increased by the funds which
they contributed,
while they themselves,
whenever they revolted entered
on the war without preparation
and without experience."
So, Thucydides certainly
agrees with what Diodorus says
about the high handed manner in
which the Athenians had become
accustomed to behave and the
offense they gave to their
allies.
Well, he points out that the
allies had gotten themselves
into that fix,
because many of them--and this
is an element Diodorus doesn't
mention,
voluntarily said,
okay, we're not going to do
this service anymore.
Instead of supplying ships,
manning them,
doing the service ourselves,
we'll pay the equivalent sum
into the league treasury and
when they did so,
the Athenians took that money
and used it to pay for Athenian
ships with Athenian rowers,
so that as the league forces
grew smaller,
the Athenian navy grew bigger.
So, Thucydides says,
it's their own fault.
In some cases it was not,
but certainly in many a case,
it was.
I think we should not think of
Diodorus and Thucydides as
contradicting each other,
they really are complimentary.
They're both telling the same
story, but emphasizing a
different perspective.
One looked at it from the
Athenian point of view,
one from the allied point of
view.
But they certainly are telling
it as it was,
and if we look ahead toward the
end of the fifth century,
by the time we get to the
Peloponnesian War,
of all the hundred and fifty or
more states that were members of
the original Delian League,
only three still had a navy and
real autonomy by the time the
war broke out.
The three great islands off the
coast of Asia Minor,
Lesbos, Chios,
and Samos were those states,
and sorry, I should have said
two, because by 440-439 Samos
lost its independence.
So, there were only two states
in that category.
Looking ahead that's what will
happen, that's will be the end
of the Delian League,
it will be the Athenian empire
in every respect.
Now, while this development
was taking place we need to take
a look at what was happening
back in the Greek world on the
mainland,
and chiefly I think we should
focus on Athens at this time.
There was right after the
Persian War, as I said a few
words about it before,
a rising competition for a
place of standing in the Greek
world.
That is to say,
before the Persian Wars were
over, Sparta had been
unquestionably the leader of the
Greeks, when challenged by an
outside force.
After the war,
Themistocles,
you recall, and obviously with
the Athenians at his back
asserted at the very least
equality with the Spartans,
and certainly independence of
any position following the
Spartans or any grant of
leadership to the Spartans.
As I think I mentioned last
time, the next fifty years or so
are the story of the competition
between these two great powers
within the Greek world for who
would be the leader and there
would be many a clash in the
course of that time.
In Athens, the remarkable thing
is, if you look at the internal
development of Athens,
I think you would have said in
479, Themistocles is bound to
rise to the top and become the
dominant politician in Athens,
because of his extraordinary
role in bringing victory to the
Greeks.
But these things don't always
happen that way.
I think of course about the
Second World War,
where one might have thought
the same thing about Winston
Churchill's future in English
politics,
but no sooner was the war won
and I think Churchill would have
had to gain and was given
enormous credit for bringing
about that victory.
There was an election,
almost immediately after the
war, and Churchill was thrown
out and replaced by his
opponents,
which tells you about the first
rule of democratic politics,
the first important question
that has to be put to all
politicians which is,
what have you done for me
lately?
Well, he had done quite a
lot lately.
So, there's another question
that you have to put is,
what are going to do for me
next?
I think that was really what
was Churchill's problem.
That was not Themistocles
problem, Themistocles ran into
trouble because he was a kind of
a maverick in Athenian politics
anyway,
although on at least on one
side of his family he was a
nobleman like the typical
Athenian leader.
He was not of the real sort of
center of the aristocracy;
he was some kind of a less than
extraordinary nobility in part
of his family,
and his personality amid his
rivals found troubling,
because he was not averse to
basking in the glory that he had
won.
But think back,
in the eighties,
in the years between Marathon
and Salamis, on the one hand
Themistocles had been able to
convince the Athenians to do
what they needed to do to
survive,
to build that great fleet out
of the silver mines that they
had been lucky enough to have.
But also, he had managed,
if my reading of the facts is
correct, to get rid of everyone
of his major political opponents
by making use of the device of
ostracism.
If you look at the eighties,
you will see that just about
every important Athenian
political figure is ostracized
with the exception of
Themistocles,
who was left in great shape
while the other folks are gone,
and when the Persians come the
ostracized men are recalled and
play a role in the war,
and when the war is over it's
obvious, I think,
that they are both not happy
with what Themistocles had
achieved against them and also
worried about their prospects
for the future with Themistocles
being a bigger hero than he ever
was.
So what,
I think, we need to understand
is in Athenian politics in the
years after the Persian War,
we must understand that there
is some kind of a coalition,
formal or otherwise,
in which all the great leaders
of the Athenian political world
combine to keep Themistocles
down.
Amazingly enough,
when we take a look at the
early actions of the Delian
League,
and which in every case,
you remember,
the commander of every
expedition is an Athenian,
it's never Themistocles whom
you would have imagined would
have been leading all these
expeditions.
He just didn't have the
political clout to get the
assignment.
The man who did was a
relatively young man by the name
of Cimon, a nobleman,
he was the son of Miltiades,
the great hero at Marathon and
he started out his political
career with problems.
His father had been condemned
just before his death,
he had also left a very great
debt that Cimon had to repay,
but Cimon established himself
as a great figure in the Persian
Wars and very soon afterward,
we see him taking the lead in
every campaign pretty much that
the Delian League launches.
He is stunningly successful;
he's obviously a great
commander on land and at sea.
He's in charge of the great
victory at Eurymedon.
So, as Athens goes from
greatness to greatness,
from success to success,
and glory to glory,
and from wealth to wealth,
Cimon becomes this
extraordinarily popular with the
masses.
It's interesting,
because he was not the sort of
a man, who appealed to the lower
classes.
He was a nobleman himself and
he never backed off that,
and as we shall see in a
moment,
his prejudices about foreign
relations were not the popular
ones.
He was a great supporter of
Sparta, a great friend of
Sparta, who regularly spoke
about the virtues of Sparta and
the Spartan system,
and how Athens could learn
something from Sparta.
How such a man could have
been elected general year after
year by the masses of the
Athenians is a question we need
to approach.
But the virtues that he had
were to some considerable degree
personal, that is,
not only was,
I think first and foremost,
was the enormous success he had
in commanding the Athenian
forces that brought all the
things I had mentioned and
wealth,
because the league expeditions
attacking various Persian
territories brought booty,
which was to some extent,
divided up among the armies
that did the fighting.
So, the Athenian soldiers and
sailors actually made a profit
out of these conquests of the
Persian territory,
or raids on Persian territory.
Naturally, their commander was
popular on that score,
but he had those personal
skills that are successful in
democratic politics.
People liked him.
I'm reminded of the same
political phenomenon in America
in the case of Eisenhower.
Eisenhower, of course,
had first become a popular
politician because of his
victory in the Second World War.
He was in command of the
European theater and got all the
credit or a lot of the credit
for the victory,
but he had these qualities that
made people like him,
of which trivial things can be
very important.
In Eisenhower's case they liked
his smile, people talked about
it all the time.
It turned out he was unbeatable
in politics and it was a little
bit like that in the case of
Cimon.
Even though,
again, Eisenhower was not on
the sort of the populous side of
these things,
he was after all a republican
and it turned out he was pretty
orthodox in that sense.
Well, Cimon held to a very
conservative position,
as I will tell you about in
just a moment,
but the fact is he becomes the
dominant politician in Athens.
If you think of him rising to
the top as early as 479 when the
war is over and then we know
that his period of political
success in Athens ends in the
year 462;
that's a seventeen-year
stretch, which is a very,
very long time for a politician
to continue to be the leading
figure in the state in Athens.
Remember, an Athenian general,
and it turns out that the
development of the Athenian
democracy was that it was the
generals,
who came to be the leading
figures politically in the
state, and the generals have to
be elected every year.
So think about how consistently
you have to be popular with the
masses in order to achieve the
leadership that Cimon did.
His pro-Spartan foreign
policy I think is a very
critical part of the tale,
and I think things would have
been very,
very different,
if Themistocles had been the
dominant politician,
because it was clear that from
what he'd already done and what
he will do later that he was
anti-Spartan and urging Athenian
independence from Sparta and
really hostility between the two
sides.
Cimon--to the contrary;
he was the official
representative of Sparta in
Athens.
He had long family associations
with them;
he went around explaining,
as I said, the virtues of the
Spartans and how good it would
be for Athens to emulate some of
them,
but more important than that,
he was always in favor of a
policy that had Athens and
Sparta allies together,
equals as they had been in his
mind, in the great Persian War
when fundamentally the Spartans
had led and won the great
victory on land at Plataea,
the Athenians had led and won
the victory at Salamis at sea,
and the two states
collaborated,
cooperated, that's how the
Greeks were free from the
Persian menace,
and that's how Greece would
prosper and be safe in the
future and it worked.
Some part of the fact that
the Spartans did not object to
the developments in the Aegean
and across the Aegean in which
Athens moved from being merely
the leader of the coalition to
becoming an imperial power,
stronger everyday.
The Spartans didn't do a thing
about it in those early years.
Why not?
I think a major reason was
because Cimon was the dominant
figure in Athens.
They trusted Cimon;
they knew that so long as he
was in that position he would
not be a menace to Sparta and
that they could indeed live side
by side in this way.
It was a stretch of time
fifteen, seventeen,
something like that years,
which was peaceful and as I say
probably would not have been
without the phenomenon of the
internal developments in Athens
itself.
Cimon also--his control of
Athenian affairs by virtue of
his personal standing and his
persuasive abilities are also
surprising.
Marathon was a victory for
hoplites.
It was the farmers,
the middling group,
and those above them that had
won that battle,
but Salamis was a victory for
the poor in Athens.
Of course that vast fleet was
rode by poor Athenians,
and now they had the glory for
the victory and,
of course, after the war,
when the fleet became the basis
of Athenian strength and glory,
it was the common man and the
poorest of the Athenians,
who was involved in achieving
that desirable status.
So, you would have thought,
and if Themistocles had been in
control, I'm sure he would have
been right that there would be a
movement towards greater
democratization of the state.
Remember where we are before
the wars begin is Cleisthenic
democracy, which is pretty much
a hoplite democracy,
which excludes the poor from
many of the activities of the
state.
Cimon ran against that.
He never tried to unravel
Athenian democracy.
He was not an enemy of Athenian
democracy;
he was in favor of keeping it
the way it was and in some ways
actually rolling back some
degree of democracy.
The way it was somewhat rolled
back was that--and not by any
legal position,
legal action,
but rather by sort of the way
events went forward.
Aristotle in the
Constitution of the Athenians
describes the stretch of time
that I'm talking about,
about 479 to 462,
as the period of the
Areopagites' constitution.
What that means is the old
aristocratic council,
consisting of former top
magistrates, gained unofficial,
informal, but very real power.
Scholars have had a hard time
understanding exactly what it
was that was the nature of that
power,
but it looks as though a couple
of elements were certainly there
and they were very critical.
That is, the Areopagus,
it was said,
sort of regained the oversight
of magistrates.
They were, as in the
aristocratic past,
in the position of being able
to criticize magistrates and to
take action against them,
if they acted in a way that the
Areopagus did not approve.
It also seems very
plausible that even though there
continued to be a council of
five hundred,
which was continuing to
function as it had,
ever since the Cleisthenic
Constitution had established it,
the fact is that more and more
the Areopagus was taking
decisions about foreign policy,
was putting to the assembly
when they desired motions,
they were usurping some of the
powers of the five hundred.
They were not doing this,
as I keep saying,
by any change of the law.
They were doing it,
because they thought they
could, and the people accepted
it.
One reason for it,
according to Aristotle,
is that they had played a
particularly heroic role in the
Persian Wars at the moment when
the Persians invaded Attica,
and the Athenians were forced
to flee their homes,
and to go to Salamis,
and to the Peloponnesus to
escape for that moment.
Now, the poor had no
wherewithal to keep themselves
alive when they went into exile
in this way,
and so the Areopagites used
their own money to keep the poor
alive and in good condition
during that period of time.
They volunteered that action,
and that generosity and
patriotism, and goodwill allowed
the development of this
Areopagite Constitution in the
years that came,
and that's what Cimon I think
really had in mind.
He wanted to have this sort of
dual policy of conservative,
moderate democracy.
Conservative in that it did not
take any recognition of the
changing circumstances that
would have given the poor a
better claim to political power
and also conservative in the
sense that it was not going to
challenge the dualism of Greek
international relations,
as it had emerged from the
Persian War, and that's the
policy that Athens followed with
tremendous success during the
late career of Cimon while he
was at the head of affairs.
Remember,
I keep saying he's at the head
of affairs and he's running
things, but remember he's just
one of ten generals,
who is elected every year.
So all his power--it's better
to speak of his influence
because it's all unofficial.
He is able to have these things
happen because people do what he
urges them to do,
when they don't need to.
There's no compulsion necessary;
he is the one who sets the tone
and they follow him.
Centuries later,
when Augustus becomes the boss
of the Roman world,
his own statement of the
situation put the way he wanted
people to think about it,
was that he was foremost not in
power, potestas is the
Latin word, but rather in terms
of his influence.
He wanted to say it was not a
tyranny, it was not a monarchy,
it was a republic as it had
always been and,
I Augustus, as the leading
citizen in the eyes of my fellow
Romans am able persuade them to
do these things,
not because they have to,
but because they want to.
Well, that was his story and it
wasn't true, because he had a
great big army at his back,
and if you wanted to move him
out of anything,
you would just have to get
yourself killed.
This was not the situation with
Cimon.
Cimon could have made that
speech and it would have been
true.
So, all that cruises along
until we get to the Thasian
Rebellion.
Cimon is in charge of that
expedition and it proves to be a
much tougher problem than any
that he has had to face before.
The war extends for a long time;
there's no success.
There's expense and no payoff,
and of course,
there's some question as to the
legitimacy and decency of what
is going on here.
So the enemies of Cimon--in a
moment I'll tell you about them,
take advantage of the
discontent that the Thasian
Rebellion is causing to launch
an attack on Cimon politically
for the first time in anybody's
memory.
The opponents,
these enemies of Cimon,
are in the first instance a man
called Ephialtes and very soon
it becomes clear that he has,
as a kind of a lieutenant,
a younger man who was important
but subordinate to Ephialtes.
That young man is Pericles,
the son of Xanthippus,
Xanthippus the great Persian
War hero.
We are told--it's very hard
to disentangle the effects from
the stories here,
but Ephialtes was supposed to
have been associated with
Themistocles,
and that's very plausible
because certainly Ephialtes
deserves to be thought of as a
democratic leader with the
underlining of the democrat.
He is clearly attempting to
make a change in the
constitution,
de facto at the very
least,
which would allow the naval
crowd, the poor people of
Athens, who row in the fleets to
have more political power and
opportunity,
and he is also very strongly
anti-Spartan,
so that he is opposed to both
halves of the Cimonian approach
to things,
and he works at trying to
undermine and to defeat Cimon.
He had no luck at all until
Thasos, and then they bring
charges against Cimon.
He hadn't done anything wrong.
All he had done was not win the
war very quickly,
but you know you make up
charges in the world of
politics.
You've heard of that once or
twice, and they said,
well, the reason he hadn't won
the war so quickly was because
had been bribed by the King of
Macedonia,
which is right behind the
territory we're talking about;
not to conquer Macedonia.
Well, guess what?
He wasn't under orders to
conquer Macedonia.
He had no plan to conquer
Macedonia, didn't need to be
bribed not to conquer Macedonia,
on top of which it would be
pretty hard to bribe Cimon,
because although he had started
out poor from his father's
debts,
he was now an enormously rich
guy, because of the booty which
he had legitimately acquired in
his role as commander of those
expeditions.
Everybody knew he was
incredibly rich and he was very
generous with his riches and
gave it away in all sorts of
ways.
If you want to say that a
Rockefeller is a no good,
low down polecat;
that's fine.
But if you want to say he's
being bribed with money all
you're going to do is get
laughter out of something like
that,
and in some way that is the
situation with Cimon.
So, a trial is nonetheless
launched against Cimon,
the complainant is Pericles,
this young up and coming
democratic politician who makes
the case against Cimon.
He loses;
of course, he loses.
Cimon has not lost his support
and the case is absurd.
It's just a sign that for the
first time, there's some kind of
serious political opposition and
who is involved in it.
Even before that trial
Ephialtes had tried another
technique by attacking the
Areopagus through a tax on
particular Areopagites.
If you don't have any success
in the general political arena,
one device that is as old as
the hills and as new as
yesterday,
is you try to discredit
individuals in the regime that
you're trying to unseat,
and so various charges were
brought against,
in particular,
Areopagites.
They have had merit;
they might not.
The goal was to discredit the
Areopagus as a whole.
Again, did not succeed in the
years that I am talking about,
these are just the signs of
what we're talking about,
which takes us to the years
just after the putting down of
the Thasian Rebellion.
This is an enormous
argument among scholars that
never will go away about just
what is the date of the terrible
earthquake that hit the
Peloponnesus in whatever time.
The most common opinion is that
it was around 464 and that
appeals to me too.
The earthquake was so serious
as to disrupt life in Sparta and
in Spartan territory in general,
and thereby to encourage a
great helot rebellion,
so that the latter even after
the earthquake was over,
was what occupied and terrified
the Spartans,
and it was serious enough that
they sent out to their allies,
and I'm not now talking merely
about their allies in the
Peloponnesian League,
in their allies who had joined
them in the Greek League against
Persia, which was still on the
books,
asking them to send help
against the helots,
and a number of them did.
It's indicative of what the
relationship between Athens and
Sparta was that they also asked
for help to Athens.
There was a great debate in the
Athenian assembly as to what
answer to give the Spartans in
their request for help,
and Cimon of course,
made the case for doing so,
and in fact,
he proposed that the Athenians
send a very large force as these
things go in the Greek world of
four thousand hoplites.
That's a very big army,
the Athenians very rarely sent
an army of that size outside of
Athens into the Peloponnesus to
help the Spartans against the
helots.
He made the case that
Athens should not abandon its
former ally;
he spoke in panhellenic terms
using a nice folk expression he
said, Greece should not allow
this kind of a split.
Athens should not lose its yoke
fellow, and the image was a team
of oxen drawing a plow,
Athens and Sparta being that
team, and so long as they're in
the same yoke and doing the
thing,
all will be well;
Greece will be safe.
There will be no internal
strife.
There will be no war;
that's what we ought to do.
Ephialtes spoke bitterly
against that and spoke in terms
of--this story is all told in
Plutarch's Life of Cimon,
if you want to have a look at
that.
He seems to have evidence about
what was said at this debate in
the assembly,
and Ephialtes is supposed to
have said something like the
arrogance of Sparta must be
trampled underfoot and he lost
the argument.
Cimon once again won the
argument.
Athens sends a force of the
four thousand hoplites down into
the Peloponnesus.
They were called on
especially--The Spartans wanted
them, because the helots had run
away to Mount Ethoni in Mycenae,
which was a fortified place on
a mountain, very hard to attack.
The Spartans had failed in
their efforts to besiege or to
storm the position there,
and the Athenians had a
reputation now of being very
good at siege warfare,
which they had gained at the
end of the Persian War.
As you remember,
Xanthippus had besieged and
taken Sestos in a very effective
way.
Well, the Athenians went and
had a shot at it and failed,
at which point,
the Spartans were a little bit
less keen on having them there,
and then very soon after that
the Spartans went to the
Athenians and said,
thank you very much for your
contribution,
we have no further need of your
services, have a nice trip home.
Instead of being very grateful
and happy that they didn't have
to fight anymore,
the Athenians were insulted.
None of the other allies was
asked to leave;
none of the others were gone.
The Athenians clearly had been
sent away not out of friendly
reasons, and Thucydides tells us
what was on the mind of the
Spartans who made these
decisions.
They had developed a fear
of the Athenian soldiers who
were in the Peloponnesus.
Typically, Spartans don't get
to see or know anybody else.
The only time they ever get to
see foreigners is if they happen
to be fighting side by side
briefly.
But now you can imagine the
scene where these ordinary
everyday Athenians having been
born and raised in a democracy
where there was absolute freedom
and freedom of speech,
and where their style of life
is not bad for Greeks by Greek
standards, and you can imagine
inviting these Athenian soldiers
in for a meal and feeding them a
Spartan meal,
black soup and the Athenians
think, this is what you give the
helots, right.
You're not going to eat that
stuff.
You want us to eat that stuff?
I wouldn't feed it to a pig.
I'm inventing the
conversation,
but you got the general idea,
and the Spartans couldn't have
enjoyed that very much.
Then as they looked around and
saw what kind of state this was
in which there were all these
enslaved people,
these vast numbers of enslaved
people, not the kind of slaves
they knew about,
the ones who were like a
handyman who assisted you on the
farm--vast numbers of them doing
all the work while the Spartans
didn't do any.
Then they saw that business was
run by a small group of people,
that the average Spartan
solider had nothing to say about
what was going on,
and being Athenians they no
doubt said something about that.
Thucydides says that the
Spartans became fearful that
they would in fact help the
helots in a rebellion against
the Spartans and that in general
the Spartans feared their
revolutionary spirit,
and it was on that ground that
they sent them away.
In any case,
there was no doubt in the minds
of the Athenians,
they had been sent away not in
an honorable way,
in which friends treat friends,
but they had been dismissed.
When they came home they were
furious that they had gone in
the first place,
angry with Cimon for sending
them and for,
of course, his pro-Spartan
position in general.
In the spring of 462--461 is it?
I think it's 461.
They ostracized Cimon and off
he went.
That was the deadly stroke
in what was now--what could
fairly be called a political
revolution in Athens.
It was not brought about by
force;
it was brought about in the
constitutional way,
but it nonetheless put an end
to a whole stretch of time in
which the state was run in a
certain way and brought about a
new development let us say,
a development towards a fuller
democracy, but it's immediate
consequences were a complete
breach with Sparta.
The Athenians renounced their
old alliance made in the
Hellenic League in 481.
That was over.
They turned around and made
alliances with Argos,
Sparta's bitter Peloponnesian
enemy.
They made an alliance with
people in the north,
the Thessalians,
who were famous for their
cavalry,
and the implication of that
being that the Athenians had
warlike intentions against the
Spartans signing up,
first of all,
with their most famous local
enemy and then signing up for
the opportunity to have a
cavalry to use as well,
and indeed as we will see,
it did lead very soon to a war
between Athens and Sparta and
their two sets of allies in what
modern historians call the first
Peloponnesian War.
But before we get to that,
I think we want to attend to
the great changes in Athens
internally that were brought
about by this great revolution.
I think first thing we need to
do is, to dispose of Ephialtes,
which is what his enemies did
almost immediately.
He was murdered;
somebody came and stuck a knife
in him.
It's very interesting;
this is the only political
assassination that we know of in
the entire history of the
Athenian democracy.
When you think of how few were
the methods for protecting
anybody in the Athenian state,
it really is a remarkable
thing.
Sometimes I think when you look
back at the history of the
United States and the number of
presidents,
who have either been killed or
shot at, attempts made to kill
them;
it's quite extraordinary that
the Athenians--this is the only
case we know.
Nobody knows to this day who
committed it;
there were various rumors of
which one is obviously inspired
by political considerations and
hard to believe,
claims that Pericles killed him
in order to clear the way for
his own leadership of the
democratic faction.
I don't think we need to
take that seriously,
but that was one of the
charges.
More likely the murder was
brought about by disgruntled
Cimonians, disgruntled
conservatives,
disgruntled aristocrats,
people who were very angry at
the turn of events that had
changed everything in Athens.
But if we look at the situation
in Athens in 461,460 and so on,
we are seeing a movement
towards a democratic--I don't
want to say revolution,
I suppose, but a rapid movement
to make the city of Athens more
democratic than it ever had
been.
I'd like to turn next to the
story of what that full blown
Athenian democracy was like and
how it worked.
Let me just remind you that
in the decade before 500,
if we go back to the
Cleisthenic world,
the Greeks who lived in the
city state called Athens
established the world's first
democratic constitution.
But this new kind of government
was carried to its classical
stage by the reforms of Pericles
a half a century later in these
years between 460 and 450;
that's really when most of the
action took place.
It was in the Athens shaped by
Pericles that the greatest
achievements of the Greek world
took place.
We should remember that the
rest of the world continued to
be characterized by monarchical,
rigidly, hierarchical command
societies, while in Athens
democracy was carried as far as
it would go before modern times.
Perhaps,
if you look at it in a certain
way, further than at any other
place and time and I'm going to
start asking you to be aware of
your prejudices and to hold them
lightly,
so that you can have the most
full understanding of things
that may have the same names,
but really were very different
from things that we are
accustomed to.
One thing that's worth pointing
out right away was in Athenian
democracy the access to the
political process was limited in
Athens to adult males of native
parentage.
Athenian citizenship granted
full and active participation in
every decision of the state
without regard to the wealth or
the class of the citizen.
In the 450s,
under Pericles leadership,
the Athenian assembly passed a
series of laws that went far
towards establishing a
constitution that was as
thoroughly democratic as the
world has ever seen.
It gave direct and ultimate
power to the citizens in the
assembly and in the popular law
courts where the people made all
decisions by a simple majority
vote,
and it provided for the
selection of most public offices
by allotment for the direct
election of a very special few
and for short terms of office
and close control over all
public officials.
We need to have a clear
understanding of the kind of
regime Pericles reforms
produced.
For I don't think it's easy
for citizens of what are called
democracies in the twentieth
century,
twenty-first century,
to comprehend the character of
the democracy of ancient Athens
and the role that it played in
the life of its citizens.
To a degree that's hard for us
to grasp, politics was primary
in the ancient Greek city and
the form of the constitution was
understood and expected to shape
the character of its citizens.
The art, the literature,
the philosophy,
and all the great achievements
of Periclean in Athens cannot be
fully understood,
apart from their political and
constitutional context,
in the democracy established by
Cleisthenes and then extended by
Pericles later.
I think a place to start with a
description of the Athenian
democracy is with some attempt
at a definition of the term.
Developments in the modern
world make that really hard,
for the word has become debased
and is almost meaningless.
Few modern states will
admit to being anything but
democratic.
That is confusing enough,
but there are further
complications.
Many people today would insist
that to qualify as a democracy,
a state must offer full
constitutional and political
protections and opportunities to
all who have legal permanent
residence within its borders and
who desire citizenship.
But the Athenians limited the
right to vote,
to hold office,
to serve on juries to adult
males who were citizens.
Slaves, resident aliens,
women, and male citizens under
the age of twenty were denied
all these privileges.
Modern critics of ancient
Athens question the democratic
character of the Periclean
regime,
because of the presence of
slavery and the exclusion of
women from political life.
In excluding such groups,
the Athenians were like every
other society since the
invention of civilization about
3000 B.C.
until just recently.
So, it's really not too
interesting or amazing to point
out this shortcoming from our
point of view.
What sets the Athenians apart,
are not these exclusions,
but the unusually large degree
of inclusion as well as the
extraordinarily significant and
rewarding participation of those
who were included.
It's useful to remember
that what has been called the
Jacksonian Democracy in the
United States coexisted with
slavery in its fullest
moments--that women were
everywhere denied the right to
vote until the twentieth
century,
and that we continued to limit
political participation to those
of a specified age.
To deny the title of democracy
to Pericles in Athens,
because of those excluded would
be to employ a parochial and an
anachronistic set of criteria
that produced paradoxical
results.
Certainly no contemporary Greek
doubted that Athens was a
democracy.
The only argument was whether a
democracy was good or bad,
which is almost an unthinkable
question to put in our time.
To look at it from the
other end, the Athenians would
have been astonished at the
claim of modern states to that
title,
even such states as the United
States and Great Britain.
For, to them,
an essential feature of
democracy was the direct and
full sovereignty of the majority
of citizens.
Government by elected
representatives,
checks and balances,
separation of powers,
appointment to important
offices, unelected
bureaucracies,
judicial life tenure,
terms for elective office of
more than one year,
all of these would have seen
clear and deadly enemies of what
reasonable people might
understand by democracy.
So, these differences between
ancient and modern ideas require
a brief examination of how the
Athenian democracy worked,
if we are to shed our
prejudices and grasp the
character of a form of
government that is as rare as
any in the history of the world,
and that probably never existed
in anything like the same form
after the end of Athenian
autonomy.
So I like to use a helpful,
if an anachronistic advice by
considering the three familiar
branches into which we divide
government: legislative,
executive, and judiciary.
At the heart of what we would
call the legislative branch of
the Athenian democracy was the
assembly;
their word was ecclesia.
It was open to all the adult
male citizens of Athens,
during Pericles lifetime;
these may have been 40,000
possibly as many as 50,000 men.
Now, most Athenians lived many
miles from the city.
Few owned horses;
so attendance required a very
long walk to town.
So as a result,
the number taking part normally
was well short of that.
It was probably from 5,000 to
6,000 people.
One reason for saying that
is there was a quorum for some
actions that you had to have at
6,000 votes.
On the one hand that tells us,
I think, that there were
probably more than that who
attended the assembly.
You wouldn't make a quorum
being everybody who ever
attended the place,
but on the other hand,
it suggests that were many
assemblies with fewer than 6,000
votes.
The meetings took place
outside, on a hill called the
Pnyx, not far from the
Acropolis and overlooking the
agora.
Citizens sat on the earth of
this sharply sloping hill and
the speakers stood on a low
platform.
It was not easy for them to
make themselves heard.
You can imagine,
it's an outdoor place;
they don't have microphones.
The great fourth century
orators are said to have
practiced--well,
Demosthenes,
the greatest of them,
was said to have practices
speaking at the seashore over
the crashing surf to make his
voice strong enough to be heard
on the Pnyx.
A good loud voice was really a
terrific asset for an Athenian
politician.
You get some idea of the
opening of these meetings from a
comic version that is given to
us in Aristophanes' comedy,
Acharnians,
performed in the year 425.
The speaker is a typical
aristophanic comic hero,
an old fashioned farmer from
the back woods who complains
about the war,
the war is now about six years
old, because it keeps him in
Athens, away from his farm in
the country.
I quote now from the
aristophanic passage,
"it is the day of an assembly,"
he says--by the way,
he's sitting there all by
himself on the Pnyx,
nobody has come yet,
and there he is complaining.
"It is the day of an assembly
and already morning,
but the Pnyx is deserted.
They are chattering in the
agora,
dodging the rope dripping with
red dye"--that's a reference to
the fact the Athenians were
always slow to come from the
marketplace,
the agora,
the city center and make it up
the hill to the Pynx,
because they were so busy
talking that they just wouldn't
get going.
So, the officials had some guys
carrying a rope dipped in red
dye.
They circle the agora,
and they kept closing the
circle until everybody was out.
You would be running from them
in the first place,
because you wouldn't want to
get your coat full of red dye,
and so that's what he's
referring to.
He said,
"even the presidents of the
assembly have not arrived,
they will be late,
and when they finally come they
will push and fight each other
for a seat in the front row,
streaming down altogether,
you can't imagine how.
But they will say nothing about
making peace,
oh my Athens,
I am always the first to make
the return voyage to the
assembly and take my seat.
Since I am alone,
I groan, I yawn,
I stretch my legs,
I fart, I don't know what to
do,
I write, I pull out my loose
hairs, I add up my accounts,
looking off at my fields,
longing for peace,
hating the town,
sick for my village home which
never said,
buy my charcoal,
my vinegar, my oil,
the word buy is unknown there
where everything is free."
"So, I have come here fully
prepared to shout,
to interrupt,
to abuse the speakers,
if they talk about anything but
peace, but here come these
noon-time presidents.
Didn't I tell you?
Didn't I predict how they would
come?
Everyone jostling up to the
front seat.
Next, the herald of the
assembly says,
move up, move up within the
consecrated area,
and then he recites the formula
that regularly begins debate in
the assembly.
He simply says,
'Who wishes to speak?'"
At which somebody raises a hand
and the game gets started.
Okay, that's the comic
version;
but the real meanings on the
Pynx were rarely comic.
They dealt with serious
questions.
The assembly had four fixed
meetings in each of the ten
periods, into which the official
year was divided,
and also special additional
meetings were called for when
necessary.
Topics included the approval or
disapproval of treaties,
making declarations of war,
assigning generals to
campaigns, deciding what forces
and resources they should
command,
confirming officials or
removing them from office,
deciding whether or to not hold
an ostracism,
questions concerning religion,
questions of inheritance,
in fact, anything else that
anybody wanted to bring up in
the assembly.
It's especially amazing for
a citizen of a modern
representative democracy to read
of these great town meetings
dealing directly with questions
of foreign policy that could
mean life or death for those
present at the debate and for
their entire city.
To get some idea of the
distance between ancient and
modern democracy,
we need only to consider how an
emergency,
say the seizure of an American
embassy, would be dealt with
today in the United States.
It probably arrived first as
secret information at some
bureau of the government's vast
and complex intelligence
service,
although it could also just
show up on CNN before the
government knows.
But it would be treated as
highly confidential and revealed
only to a few people in the
White House, the state,
and defense departments.
Policy would be discussed
in a small closed group and the
decision made by one man
ultimately, the President of the
United States.
If there were no leaks,
a big if, people would hear of
it only when the die had been
cast.
A model for those of my vintage
was the Cuban Missile Crisis,
which was kept as a great
secret.
In those days the press
actually would keep secrets on
behalf of the national security.
Can you imagine such an old
fashioned approach?
Then they had been kicking it
around for a week when the
President got on television and
told us what the menace was and
what he was doing about it.
It was too late to have any
discussion or argument about,
but that's the way it works in
our system.
Questions of war and peace
rose more than once in Periclean
Athens and each time the popular
assembly had a full debate,
and made the decision by
raising their hands in a vote
determined by a simple majority.
I don't think there's any
stronger evidence of the full
and final sovereignty of the
Athenian people on the most
important questions than the
fact that that is the way they
made those decisions.
An assembly of thousands of
course could not do its business
without help.
For that it relied on the
council of five hundred chosen
by lot from all Athenian
citizens.
Although it performed many
public functions that the larger
body could not handle
efficiently,
its main responsibility was to
prepare legislation for
consideration by the people.
In this respect,
as in all others,
the council was the servant of
the assembly.
The assembly could vote
down a bill drafted by the
council, they could change it on
the floor,
they could send it back with
instructions for redrafting,
or they could replace it with
an entirely different bill.
Full sovereignty and a real
exercise of public authority
rested directly with the
assembly.
Almost no constitutional
barrier prevented a majority of
the citizens,
assembled on the Pynx,
on a particular day from doing
anything they wanted to do.
Turning to the executive,
as what we would call the
executive, these distinctions
did not exist for the Athenians.
They didn't make these
divisions, but to help us
understand it I'm using these
terms.
What we might call the
executive was severely limited
in extent, in discretion,
and power.
The distinction between
legislative and judicial
authority was far less clear
than in our own society.
To begin with,
there was no president,
no prime minister,
no cabinet;
there was not any elected
official responsible for the
management of the state in
general for formulating or
proposing a general policy.
Nothing that Americans would
call an administration or that
the British would call a
government.
The chief elected officials
were ten generals,
voted for a one year term.
As their title indicated,
they were basically military
officials, who commanded the
army and the navy.
They could be reelected without
limit and extraordinary men like
Cimon and Pericles were elected
almost every year,
but they were very exceptional.
The political power such men
exercised was limited to their
personal ability to persuade
their fellow citizens in the
assembly to follow their advice.
They had no special political
or civil authority,
and except on military and
naval campaigns,
they couldn't give orders to
anybody.
Even in military matters the
powers of the generals were
severely limited.
Leaders of expeditions were
selected by vote of the full
Athenian assembly,
which also determined the size
of the force and what goals it
should pursue.
Before the generals took office
they were subjected to a
scrutiny of their qualifications
by the council of five hundred.
After completing their year
of service, their performance on
the job, and especially their
financial accounts were subject
to audit in a special process
called euthuna.
Nor was this the only control
by the people over the few
officials chosen by election.
Ten times a year the popular
assembly voted to determine
whether the general's conduct of
military affairs appears
satisfactory,
and if the people vote against
someone's confirmation in
office, he is tried in a law
court.
If he is found guilty they
assess his punishment or fine.
If he is acquitted,
he resumes office.
Since elected office conferred
prestige, elected officials were
carefully controlled,
rather, lest they should
undermine the rule of the
people.
That's what's behind all of
this careful check on the
generals.
Even with these severe
controls, the Athenians
fulfilled only a few public
offices by election.
Choosing their military
officials, their naval
architects, and only some of
their treasurers,
as well as the superintendent
of the city water supply in that
manner;
all other officials,
and there were a good number of
them, were chosen by lot.
Allotment was the
characteristic device by which
the Athenians chose their
officials,
in accordance with the dominant
democratic principle,
which was equality,
which held that any citizen who
is capable of performing civil
responsibilities well enough,
and it's corollary that feared
allowing executive or
administrative power to fall
into the hands of a few men,
even those who were
experienced, or had special
abilities.
For these reasons,
the Athenians filled the bulk
of their offices by lot and
limited tenure to one term per
man in each office except for
the council of five hundred,
where a man could serve twice
in the course of his life.
Generals, however,
could be reelected forever,
because it was so obvious that
issues of skill and ability were
literally vital in that job and
so that was the one real
exception to being limited to a
very short term.
To a degree that is amazing to
the modern mind,
the Athenians kept the
management of their public life
in the hands of ordinary
citizens,
away from professors,
professionals,
experts, bureaucrats,
and politicians.
I'll pick up the rest of the
story next time.
