Professor Donald
Kagan: Welcome back!
I wanted to let you realize
that the Peloponnesian War is
over.
What a relief,
twenty-seven bitter years,
but it's just one of those
times through history that you
discover no sooner is it over
than another kind of trouble
starts.
Of course, as you know,
the whole course has been
filled with that kind of trouble
and it will continue that way
right to the end.
Well, you remember what the
Spartans allegedly went to war
about back there in 431.
They were going to free the
Greeks, and the irony of that is
really quite extraordinary.
Remember Xenophon ends his tale
of the end of the Peloponnesian
War, how the Spartans and their
people were all tearing down the
walls of Athens to the music of
flute girls and everybody
thinking,
or it seemed,
I forget exactly how he puts it
that this represented the
beginning of freedom for the
Greeks.
Well of course,
he was writing these years
later and he knew perfectly well
that was an illusion,
because Spartan power,
which had grown to an
unprecedented degree in the
course of the war,
now presented the Spartans with
problems and opportunities.
I think that's a very important
thing to understand,
and I think not enough people
do.
Power has a certain life of its
own.
The capacity to be able to do
something without somebody
preventing you makes you think
about what you might do in ways
that you never thought about
before,
when you didn't have the power
to do it, and of course this is
what happens to the Spartans.
They find themselves presented
with choices that they could
take.
How were they to conduct
themselves and their state and
how were they to try to arrange
the structure of states in the
Greek world,
and including their relations
to Persia, because they really
had enough power to be able to
think of different things they
might do.
The logic of the situation
presented really three
possibilities.
They could, of course,
do what they had done much of
the time before the fifth
century,
mainly to confine themselves to
the Peloponnesus,
to maintain their control of
the Peloponnesian League,
and basically not to get
involved in anything outside the
Peloponnesus and much
recommended that in Spartan
tradition.
It meant that the helot
problem, which was always on
their minds, something they
couldn't forget,
they were desperately
outnumbered at all times by
people who hated them and whom
they lived off.
So, the notion of leaving with
an army from the Peloponnesus at
any time was always a
questionable proposition,
even though sometimes it was
necessary.
As we shall see,
changes had taken place in
Sparta in the course of the
Peloponnesian War,
of which I suppose the most
important was the appearance in
the hands of Spartans of a good
deal of money,
which was made available by the
Persians for wartime purposes,
both in the doing,
in the collecting of that money
and also in the taking of many
cities away from the Athenians,
very prosperous cities the
Spartans also gained a great
deal of booty.
So, for the first time there
were lots of Spartans,
who had lots of money and of
course,
as you know,
not only was that not a
characteristic feature of
Spartan society normally,
it was forbidden.
The laws in Sparta did not
permit coins.
The closest thing to coins were
these fistfuls of iron spits
which don't get you very far and
don't buy very much.
It was--see the point is that
the presence of that kind of
wealth, and really no
traditional way of coping with
it meant that there were other
uncertainties now and
opportunities that various
Spartans felt.
So, anyway the idea of staying
in the Peloponnesus certainly
appealed to many Spartans,
because they feared that
involvement outside the Spartan
world and certainly they fear
the arrival of money,
which would be necessary as
they begin to be engaged outside
that world, would undermine
those traditions which they
valued so much,
which were part of their
identity.
Living according to the laws of
Lycurgus was what it meant to be
a Spartan and made you feel
superior to other people.
So, there was a feeling of
danger in the minds of the
conservative Spartans who would
have preferred that.
But of course there was the
other possibility that the
Spartans could use this
new-found power,
and I suppose the money that
went with it to govern things,
and maybe to exploit
opportunities outside the
Peloponnesus and that choice
also could be divided up into
two.
At the extreme,
the Spartans had it in their
power to contest control of the
entire Greek world in the east.
I mean, I'm leaving out,
as we always do,
western Greeks who live in
Italy and Sicily,
except when they get involved
in the main theatre in the
Aegean.
But the Spartans could have and
some Spartans did want to
contest control of the Aegean
and of the coast of Asia Minor,
and of the Hellespont and the
waters beyond,
with the Persians,
who would otherwise have
controlled them now that the
Athenians were out of the way.
This would require money
but would also make money
available, and of course it
would take power but it would
also produce more power.
In a certain sense,
Spartans who took this point of
view had it in mind to take the
place of Athens as the great
imperial power in the Aegean and
beyond.
That was a possibility.
We know for sure that some
Spartans, and the chief figure
here was Lysander,
the Greek general,
admiral, who had been
responsible for winning the war,
we know for sure that he and
others around him liked that
idea and sought to pursue it but
they were not alone in that
opinion.
Then there's a third
possibility that the Spartans
had, and although the ancient
sources don't tell us that any
Spartan leader specifically had
this in mind,
the sheer logic of it suggests
that some of them must have
thought this was a good idea,
and certainly some of the
Spartan actions suggest that
they were pursuing such,
or tried to pursue such a
policy.
That was not to be confined to
the Peloponnesus,
but also not to engage in this
grander,
or you might even say grandiose
plan of supplanting of the
Athenians, which would include
necessarily,
somewhere down the road,
conflict with the Great Persian
Empire.
Of course,
the Great Persian Empire didn't
seem so scary as it had at one
time in the past.
Remember the Athenians had
defeated the Persians--first of
all, the Greeks had done that
back in 480,
479 but even so,
ever since then the Athenians
had repeatedly defeated the
Persians,
over and over again.
So, they weren't anything like
the scary thing they had been at
the beginning of the century.
But in any case,
you'd have to take that on and
many a Spartan would have been
deterred by that prospect,
and again by the prospect of
having to have a fleet,
because there was no way to
pursue this third policy without
having a fleet that began to
approach the power of the
Athenian fleet when it had been
strong.
Well, what did that mean?
It meant using not the
traditional Spartan military
advantage--hoplite soldiers
fighting infantry battles,
but also rowers and expert
naval people.
I don't have the time to go
into a detailed account of how
naval warfare was carried on in
the Greek world,
but it's easy to forget that in
addition to the rowers of whom
there were 170 in each trireme,
who were the engine in a sense,
they made the thing move,
and officers and usually at
least ten or so marines,
who could be landed for
behaving like hoplites on land.
In addition to them,
there were critically skilled
people who made all the
difference in the world,
and whether you won or lost in
these naval battles--who were
well, they were sort of like
chief petty officers if you
think about it,
or its master sergeants in the
Army, professionals whose very
great skills are critical for
the functioning of the larger
army.
The Greek word for the most
important of these was
kubernetes,
which means steersmen.
They were that and they were
more than that.
By the way, it's a very nice
word, because all the words that
have to do with governor,
government, govern all derive
ultimately from the
kubernetes.
So, this would have meant
that all kinds of people who
were not Spartiates would be
critical for the success of such
a mission of the overseas type,
and so many a Spartan felt that
was too much of a derangement of
Spartan life and didn't like it
for that reason.
But you could still be in favor
of a middle policy which would
mean extending Spartan power or
maintaining Spartan power on the
Greek mainland,
outside the Peloponnesus,
and there were certain things
that recommended that.
For one thing,
Athens had been knocked out as
a main power in central Greece
and that meant,
and it had been demonstrated in
the course of the war that it
meant it, that Thebes,
the dominant power in Boeotia,
had already grown to
considerable power,
had developed a degree of
independence which allowed the
Thebans to challenge the
Spartans frequently and there
was a very real chance that
Thebes would seek to become at
least a power of the first rank,
at least somebody who could sit
equally at the table with the
Spartans rather than subordinate
to them.
The fear that some Spartans
surely had was that if the
Spartans simply stayed in the
Peloponnesus,
Thebes would become the master
of Attica, which was a neighbor
of Thebes, as well as of central
Greece as a whole and suddenly
they would become a real menace
to the Spartans,
and indeed, down the road,
if you go far enough,
that's exactly what did happen.
So, that would be the case;
well, we need to establish
ourselves on mainland Greece as
a hegemon,
the masters,
if not--I shouldn't say master,
a hegemon means leaders.
There's always a conflict there
too.
When you have a power which is
superior to that of the other
states, but you don't conquer
them,
the question is do you want to
relate to them as the Greeks
would have said as a
hegemon,
meaning the leader,
which implies a degree of
voluntary cooperation,
or do you want to dominate,
which means mastery and
Spartans disagreed among
themselves as to what was
necessary,
even if you were going to take
that path.
But these three roots were
theoretically,
and I think as a matter of fact
really,
things that the Spartans argued
about and there was a certain
amount of moving back and forth
as the Spartans shifted from one
to the other as different
individuals gained influence and
as circumstances changed.
It's easy to designate at least
two of the factions,
and I'm inclined to think there
were three that can be
identified and identified with
people.
The most aggressive,
overseas, let's conquer and
control everything in the
Aegean--Lysander is clearly the
leader of that faction.
But "let's stay in the
Peloponnesus and stay out of
interstate rivalries and
competitions and just go back to
our old ways" appears to have
been led by the King Pausanias,
and there's another King Agis,
and he is the one that's
unclear.
It can't be confident that he
represented a third faction but
I think there's some possibility
that he did and that that was
the faction that wanted to limit
Spartan power,
influence control to the
mainland of Greece and not to go
to sea.
There were great arguments
against the Lysander approach.
For one thing,
the number of Spartans was
pretty small to control too vast
a territory.
We can't be sure how many there
were by now, but it's pretty
well agreed that in the middle
of the Peloponnesian War there
was something like 3,500
Spartiates, only that many,
and the figure continues to go
down.
By the time we get to the
decisive Battle of Leuctra that
defeats Sparta finally in 371
there is perhaps about 1,000
Spartiates.
Well, how do you run an empire?
Forget about how do you conquer
one.
How do you run one with that
kind of population,
and also of course the Spartans
had traditionally not been a
naval power and had done very
poorly at sea compared to the
Athenians at least,
and it was an open question how
well they would do against the
forces that served the Persian
king at sea.
The fact was true that they
had no experience with money and
money was a critical part of
maintaining such an empire as
the Athenians could tell them,
and everything in the Spartan
tradition was based on land
power.
Now, we can over estimate that.
After all, the Spartans had
been sending fleets out to sea
throughout the Peloponnesian
War.
In the last part of the war
they won two important battles
of which the final battle was
critical,
the Battle of Aegospotami,
but if you really look at the
whole story it's not at all
clear that the Spartans ever
developed the kind of system
that would produce a navy that
would year after year,
after year have the capacity to
dominate the sea.
So, that was a practical
limitation.
Well anyway,
however that might be,
the man of the hour in 404 was
Lysander,
the great victor of the
Peloponnesian War and his policy
was the extreme policy,
the "let's conquer it all"
policy.
His policy was very much a
personal policy,
and here the personal is very
important.
The fact that Lysander was who
he was made a very great deal of
difference;
Lysander was not a pure,
legitimate Spartiate.
He was what the Spartans called
a mothax;
he was technically a bastard.
That means he had a Spartan
father and non-Spartan mother,
typically such women would have
been helots,
but in any case he was brought
up, nonetheless as a Spartan,
but not as a Spartiate and how
to put these pieces together is
very hard to know.
But he did, as a few others
like him in the last years of
the war, rose to be a general
and the very best general of
all,
and the man who was put in
command of the forces.
But he was a man of
extraordinary ambition,
and the ancient writers tell us
that he had developed the notion
of actually bringing about a
revolution in Sparta and
changing the constitution in
such a way that would allow him
to become effectively the ruler
of Sparta,
and the kings,
the traditional kings,
who were born to the purple to
be put aside.
Well, if he was going to do
anything like that,
even if he was only going to
try to retain the position he
had achieved of tremendous
influence and power,
he would need to have a
command, he would need to have
money, he would need to have
supporters of every kind,
and his policy,
therefore, for Sparta was very
much a policy that fit the needs
of Lysander.
Wherever he liberated a
city in Asia Minor,
which had been under the
Athenian Empire,
part of the Athenian Empire,
he established a different kind
of government.
It consisted of ten men chosen
from the local people who were
friendly to him,
who were reliant on him,
his people, his puppets,
if you will.
The name for these
establishments was
decarchies,
rules of ten,
groups of ten,
and they were his people.
To make sure that they were
safe he placed a Spartan
garrison, or at least a
Peloponnesian garrison in that
city led by a Spartan commander
called a harmost.
It comes from the same word
from which we get harmony,
somebody who preserved order
who was the military commander
of that region.
All of these people,
the harmosts,
the decarchs were all
his creatures,
not anybody who had any
independent power or influence,
simply his people who did the
job for him and liberators of
the Greeks,
as they had claimed to be,
Lysander did not abandon
collecting the money from these
cities that he had allegedly
liberated;
the same amount apparently that
they had given the Athenians,
because our sources tell us
that the Spartans were
collecting 1,000 talents a year
from the newly acquired empire
which is something like what the
Athenians got from it.
So, all of that is in place.
This newly founded Spartan
Empire was different from the
Athenian Empire in a variety of
ways.
Remember the Athenian Empire,
it started out as a voluntary
association with a very clear
common purpose,
to liberate those Greeks who
were still under Persian rule
and to preserve their freedom
from their Persian neighbors and
former conquerors.
On the other hand,
this new empire under Lysander
had no purpose and it was not
voluntary in any shape,
manner or form;
it was thoroughly compulsory.
I think it's fair to say that
the Spartans had simply betrayed
the Asiatic Greeks whom they had
engaged in the rebellion against
the Athenians and instead of
liberating them,
put them under Spartan rule.
In many cases,
frequently, these governments
established by Lysander were
tyrannical and rapacious in
which these governors and the
harmosts and so on
basically stole what they could
from the natives;
this is apart from the official
payments they made to the
Spartans.
They enriched these Lysandrian
creatures.
As one of our ancient
sources writes,
the will of any Spartan was
regarded as law in the subject
cities.
It is clear from all the
ancient writers that the
Spartans were not easy people in
their dealings with other
Greeks.
Everything in their tradition
made them feel superior to other
Greeks and they didn't mind
acting in that way.
You remember the stories of how
it was that the Athenian Empire
was founded,
or rather that Delian
League--the Spartans had so
alienated all the Greeks in that
region by the way they treated
them that they were glad to send
the Spartans away and replace
them by the Athenians,
who did not treat them that
way, at least they didn't do it
for some years before they
developed into an empire.
So this was another problem,
Spartans were not good at this
job, but at the beginning what
was decisive was Lysander.
He was at the height of his
power and influence,
and I guess it's fair to say,
he reached heights that no
mortal ever had reached in the
Greek world.
The oligarchs whom he had
restored to power in Samos loved
him so much, and were so
grateful for what he had done,
that they held religious
ceremonies on the island and
literally worshipped Lysander,
as a god.
This is the first time in Greek
history that anybody had
received such treatment.
On the one hand,
this elevated his influence and
power, everybody wondered at him
and so on.
On the other hand,
it presented a problem,
because you can imagine how
that went down among the
aristocrats of Sparta,
and most particularly with the
Kings of Sparta,
to see that this--I use a
technical term not a street
curse word,
this bastard was now being
worshipped as a god,
and of course that kind of
eminence was unheard of for a
non-king in the Spartan world.
So, that had all kinds of
trouble down the road.
He was as ambitious as he
could be, and it was as obvious
as it could be.
So, there was jealousy and
resentment and fear at Sparta
that something bad was going to
happen to the Spartan way of
life,
to the Spartan constitution,
and Pausanias and his
tradionalists bided their time
for the opportunity to put a
spike into this development.
There were other things that
were flowing from what I've
already described that were
threatening the traditional
character of Spartan life.
This money, of course,
allowed for corruption.
Now, people who had money could
buy people's support,
could buy people's help in
their own endeavors for
influence and power in Sparta.
One of the things that we
hear about that most scholars
would like to place in this
period,
and it seems reasonable to me,
was a new law about
inheritance;
that's the Law of Epitadeus.
He is the man who proposed it.
It used to be that inheritance
automatically went in a certain
direction, nobody had any
choice.
You couldn't make out a will
and leave it to anybody you
liked.
It went through the family
according to a certain pattern.
The Law of Epitadeus changed
that.
You know could write a will and
select your successors however
you wished, your inheritors.
That meant that there were ways
you could work around that so as
to buy somebody right while you
were still alive.
If you wrote somebody into
your will, you were in effect
giving him money after you died.
So, meanwhile he could serve
you and be your political
supporter.
That was happening and people
who had been raised as Spartans
and expected to inherit their
father's property would
sometimes find that they had
been cut out and now they were
Spartiates by birth,
but they lacked the necessary
wealth, necessary land to
provide for their meals at the
common mess and so they could no
longer be Spartiates in the full
sense.
A term was discovered for them,
they were called
hypomeiones, which means
inferiors and some of the guys
who rose to power late in the
Peloponnesian War as generals,
because they were just good at
it, came from some such class.
So, you have a variety of
Spartans who are important,
who are not helots,
who are not people you could
just do what you want to.
They play a significant role in
society but they don't have the
position of honor,
the position of belonging that
was necessary and these were
disruptive and troubling
developments in the Spartan
state.
We get a clue about this;
in 398.
We hear about the planning of a
revolution in the city.
A man by the name of Cynadon,
who was one of these
hypomeiones,
was planning to have an
uprising in which they would
kill lots of Spartans and set up
a new regime that would give
room to the people who were
outsiders.
Well, the plot was prevented,
because one of the people that
Cynadon approached told the
story to Spartan magistrates and
the plot was averted.
But the story he told was this.
He was standing one day in the
agora in Sparta,
and Cynadon approached him and
he said look around you he said,
how many Spartiates do you see?
Well, the answer was forty.
He said, and how many people
are there around here who are
not Spartiates?
He said about 4,000.
He was talking about
hypomeiones,
neodamodes,
various other sub-species but
also helots and also
perioikoi,
and said Cynadon to the men he
was trying to recruit,
these 4,000 as regards to
Spartans would gladly eat them
raw.
So, his message was why
don't we have a little
revolution?
Well, the answer was he was
forestalled, but it does tell
you that the situation had
become sufficiently dangerous
that such a possibility existed.
So, there is Sparta coping with
these various problems and
trying to decide how to handle
their future and I'd like to
shift the scene now to Athens.
Athens, which had been the
greatest empire that the Greeks
had ever seen,
had been reduced now to total
defeat,
absolutely at the mercy of the
Spartans, and indeed,
the Athenians feared and
certainly had reason to fear
that the same fate they had
visited upon some states that
had defied them and there were
two that fit the category I'm
about to mention,
Melos, the island that was
conquered by the Athenians.
Thucydides describes how the
Athenians spoke to them in the
famous Melian dialogue,
and also a place that most
people don't remember but
another town in Thrace.
In both places,
the Athenians killed all the
adult males on the island when
they had finally put an end to
the siege and sold the women and
children into slavery.
The Athenians had every
reason to fear that that might
be what happened to them.
As a matter of fact,
Corinth and Thebes,
in the conference they had at
the end of the war said let's do
that.
Thebans especially said,
let's turn Attica into pasture
land.
Well, the Spartans didn't do it
and the reason they gave was
well it would be wrong to treat
such a people that way,
such a people who helped us in
such a critical way as our
partner against the Persians
when we won our freedom.
Well, if you can believe that,
you can believe anything.
More to the point I think was
their fear, that if they did
destroy Attica--I mean the
houses and the people and all
that, what would have happened?
This would really be a vacuum
of people, of everything else
and it's certainly a vacuum of
power, and it wouldn't stay that
way very long.
Thebes and its Boeotian
subordinates would come in and
occupy it and that was not a
desirable thing.
So, the Spartans didn't do
that.
Instead, with Lysander very
much in charge of the settlement
that was going to be imposed on
the Athenians,
they placed in power a small
group of oligarchic Athenians
just as--by the way he had the
same kind of people in the rest
of the empire,
but not ten.
Athens was a very big place.
Turned out that there were to
be thirty of these new rulers of
Attica, all of whom had to meet
the criterion of being
acceptable to Lysander,
and the leaders of which,
the really important top gun
was a man by the name of
Critias,
a nobleman who had participated
in democracy,
but had turned very sharply
against it.
He was a brilliant man
apparently, he had been trained
by the great rhetorician and
sophist Gorgias and he was also
in the circle of Socrates,
along with Plato and Xenophon
and various other bright young
men of the upper classes in
Athens.
Also, he was a poet,
an orator himself,
a philosopher and so on and
some of his fragments,
of some of his works remain for
us to look at,
but one thing that he was by
404 was a bitter enemy of the
democracy.
He had been exiled or had
voluntarily taken exile,
in order to get away from the
democracy,
and he was determined now that
there should be no democracy in
Athens.
Just to say a word about that
for a moment.
It was an easy point of view to
arrive at in 404.
People who were not friendly to
the democracy could simply point
to the fact that the democracy
had just lost this great war and
nobody could really understand
how that had happened given the
great power of Athens,
and of course it was easy to
point to the great event that
turned the tide against Athens,
the Sicilian Expedition,
and to say this was an idiotic
idea.
And it was exactly the kind
of idiotic idea that a democracy
would come up with so that
democracy itself was seen to be
not just--how can I put--Let me
say it was seen to be inherently
wicked,
because it violated what seemed
to be the truth about human
beings and which was very much a
part of all Greek tradition from
the first time we hear about it
in Homer until--well forever,
which was, contrary to the
principle of democracy which is
that all men,
adult male citizens are equal
in some very fundamental way or
should be,
was the contrary view which had
much greater support in Greek
tradition, that no,
men were in fact divided into
different kinds of people,
and in fact the Greeks thought
a division into two kinds was
the right kind,
the most important kind,
a division between the high and
the low, between the good and
the bad,
between the noble and the base,
and each of those pairs they're
all the same people.
You're rich,
you're wise,
you're well born or I should
say, you're rich and well born
therefore you're wise,
or you are not.
If you're not,
you're obviously not equal to
the other guys and therefore you
shouldn't have anything to do
with ruling anybody.
So, that was the basic
widespread view of what was
natural in the Greek world.
Now, you add to that that
they've just lost this terrible
war and you could point to what
seemed to you to be both a
wickedness and foolishness.
How in the world could anybody
think democracy was a good thing
after that?
Lest you think there's
something special about that,
that's such a characteristic of
the human race.
Whenever you have a great war,
and if you have two different
kinds of political systems vying
with each other,
winning has an amazing effect
on what people think.
So, take the First World War
when the--let me just say that
those countries who lost the war
were very open to the idea--they
typically had been monarchies
and so on,
but they had been rather,
relatively speaking,
liberal monarchies.
They had legislatures and
elections and things like that,
and this came to be seen as a
losing proposition and so
fascism of one sort or another
took root across Europe in
states that had had that
misfortune.
And it was felt that success or
failure had to do with the
rightness or the wrongness of
wisdom of the foolishness of the
kinds of arrangements that you
had.Then while the Soviet
Union was powerful and expanding
around the world,
it was expanding in part,
along with the idea of
communism, which was thought in
the circles where it succeeded
to be superior to the
competition,
and observed that when the
Soviet Union finally collapsed,
there may be communists around
the world anymore but they don't
admit it.
I mean, they call themselves
something else.
The idea has been discredited
by success of the competition,
by failure of that thing.
So, it's a phenomenon that is
not amazing, even if this looks
like the earliest example,
I think, that we know.
So Critias, in any case,
was determined that Athens in
the future would not be a
democracy.
In fact, it looks like he was
very much taken--again,
this is typical,
with the virtues of Sparta,
because Sparta had won the war.
So, it's easy to say the
characteristics that the Spartan
state had must be good ones,
because they can do the most
critical thing that a state can
do, win in competition with the
other states.
So, he had in mind a very
narrow oligarchy.
One scholar has suggested he
actually had in mind to
establish in Athens the closest
facsimile he could of the
Spartan Constitution;
it could never be exactly the
same, but he was trying to do
something like that.
That could be true,
but it was going to be narrow,
a smallish number of people
were going to control the city.
In fact--well, let me back up;
I'll come back to what I was
about to say.
Now, however,
when they set up the Thirty to
rule Athens in 404,
it was apparent to people who
could judge matters pretty
sensibly that given that Athens
had been a democracy for over
100 years that it would not be
easy to impose such a regime,
and that if you made the regime
too narrow and too oligarchical,
you might find yourself having
trouble in keeping your new
regime in power.
So, Lysander agreed to the idea
of making the Thirty compose of
twenty men who were Critias'
men,
very extreme oligarchs,
but allowing Theramenes,
an Athenian general,
who had flourished during the
democracy,
but who was very clearly not an
old fashioned democrat.
He had taken part in bringing
about the oligarchic revolution
of 400 in the year 411 and
again,
the group who had made that
revolution was divided in
something like the same way with
the Thirty would be,
that is to say,
extreme oligarchs and people
like Theramenes,
whom I guess it's fair to call
moderate oligarchs,
although oligarchs only,
I think, in comparison with a
thorough going democracy.
If you asked Theramenes,
what would be the right number
of people in Athens to
participate in the government,
his answer was,
as it turned out 5,000,
but he really wasn't interested
in that number.
What he was interested in was
the criteria for participation
in government and that was to be
a hoplite,
to have the wealth necessary to
fight in the infantry for your
city.
In a later sense,
it's not too much later,
it was discovered that the
number of men in Athens who
actually fit that description
was not 5,000,
but 9,000 and at a time when
the Athenian population of adult
males was something like 21,000,
so that nine out of twenty one
would have been the people who
participated in the regime;
twelve out of the twenty one
would have been too poor for
that, would not have been
allowed to participate;
well, that's not a democracy.
It is an oligarchy but it's a
very broad oligarchy.
The word "moderate," I think,
applies.
So anyway,
Theramenes was to be given the
opportunity to appoint nine
others besides himself,
so there were ten Theramenians,
twenty supports of Critias in
the Thirty, and that was to turn
out to be a problem for the
Thirty,
as it had been for the 400,
because when Theramenes saw
that his colleagues in the 400
were trying to establish a
narrow oligarchy,
he led an uprising that
overthrew that oligarchy and
ended up finally restoring the
democracy.
So, that's the picture of
what's going on in Athens.
But Athens, of course,
was also inhabited at that time
by all of the exiles who had
been sent into exile during the
democracy,
and they were bitter enemies of
the democrats,
at least lots of them were.
So, you had a kind of a
confrontation of different ideas
and feelings that was a little
unusual in Athens.
Athens had been a pretty easy
going place before the war and
even throughout the war,
through larger Greece,
but now there were very hard
divisions and very tense
feelings between the different
groups.
The Thirty ruled between
September of 404 and May of 403,
just a matter of months as it
turned out,
although nobody,
of course, knew it was going to
be so short when things got
started.
They established a council of
500--well, that's the same
number as the Athenian council,
but it was quite different.
It was made up of extreme
oligarchs;
they were given judicial powers.
Men who were identified as
sycophants, and the Greek use of
that term, you remember,
is people who made money out of
denouncing people on false
charges in the courts and then
winning payments as a result.
They were very widely unpopular
even in the democracy,
and so the Thirty began with an
act that was not unpopular by
putting to death all the
sycophants that they could find
and identify,
but they also put to death well
known leaders of the democracy,
people whom they knew would be
their political opponents.
So, it was bloody from the
first, but it was only limited
to a certain small portion of
the population.
The Thirty--just to make
the case that--actually a man
who makes his case,
a man named Peter Krentz,
and he is an old Yalie,
so, we ought to give him
credit.
If you look at the Thirty,
if you look at Sparta,
what comes to your mind?
The gerousia.
Ultimately, in the course of
these months,
the Thirty limited citizenship,
active participation in the
government of any kind to only
3,000 Athenians out of what
would have been at least 21,000
and probably more.
Only these had citizen rights.
The rest of the Athenians did
not.
Well, that's about how many
Spartans there were at this time
in history.
Another thing they did was
to--at a certain point when life
got tough, they drove from the
city of Athens all those who
were not part of the 3,000.
Well, what do you call people
like that who don't live in the
capital city but who live
around?
PerioIikoi.
And so that's why Krentz
suggests that this is not an
accident;
that it's a conscious effort to
model the future Athenian state
upon the great successful,
admirable, Spartan state.
Well, Theramenes didn't
like that.
This was far too narrow and far
too troubling for the future for
Theramenes.
Indeed, he pointed out the
contradiction,
he says, how clever is this?
Here you are,
a minority in the state,
and instead of trying to bring
on more people to make
yourselves stronger,
you're driving out people and
guaranteeing that you will have
more people against you than you
have for you.
He, himself,
favored as he had in the time
of the 400, he favored a hoplite
census.
Anybody who could be a hoplite
could be a full fledged citizen,
and I've told you about the
numbers.
Well, pretty soon people
objected to what the Thirty was
doing, made complaints,
and the Thirty began to go
after them.
One of the problems about
talking about the Thirty is that
it is not perfectly clear what
is the chronology of events,
and I can't tell you with
certainty in what order these
things happened,
but at some point in here the
Thirty began to attack a larger
group of Athenians,
sometimes because they were
seen to be political opponents,
or thought to be political
opponents,
or related to political
opponents.
Sometimes when things got
really bad, when the Thirty
needed money they actually put
people to death just because
they were rich,
so that they could take their
money away and this of course
increased the amount of
resistance on unhappiness,
so that finally a small,
I want to emphasize small,
very small group of Athenians
fled the city and went into
exile to neighboring cities,
and this is interesting I think
and important,
the cities that were most
receptive to these anti-Thirty,
anti-oligarchical,
anti-Spartan people,
the one who received them most
readily were Corinth,
Megara, and Thebes,
all enemies of Athens,
all enemies of democracy.
Why are they doing this?
The answer is,
they are both angry at the
Spartans and I think fearful
that the Sparta that is arising
now will be a menace to their
autonomy.
These particular towns were
angry about different things.
Corinth and Thebes,
you remember,
had wanted to destroy Athens
entirely, and the Spartans
hadn't listened to them.
They all shared in the fighting
during that long war,
but they did not share equally
and not enough to suit them in
the booty that was taken at the
end of the war.
So, there were grievances that
these towns had,
and so they accepted this small
number of Athenians and the one
town that was most important
from this purpose was Thebes.
In Thebes they were given a
decent home.
The Spartans,
knowing about this,
sent out an order saying that
no state should give any home to
these exiles,
whereupon, the Theban regime at
the moment voted that anybody
who didn't give help to these
Athenians would be punished.
They simply were defying the
Spartans on this question.
The leader,
the most important of the
leaders of this group of
exiles--it's fair to call them
democratic exiles,
they wished to restore the old
democracy, the most important
man was Thrasybulus,
who had been a general,
his best fighting had been done
as an admiral during the latter
part of the Peloponnesian War.
He was present at all the great
Athenian victories,
and he was not present at the
great defeat that ended the war.
He and another important
politician by the name of Anytus
actually began a counter
revolution and the--with a very
small number of men.
The sources differ but the
accounts that seem to be most
plausible, with only 70 men they
went from Thebes to a natural
fortress in the mountains
between Boeotia and Attica,
a placed called Phyle,
and built a fort there to which
they hoped other discontented
Athenians would flee and join
them in the resistance.
I'm using the word
resistance, and it brings to
mind of course an analogy that
has always struck me as helpful
in comprehending the situation
confronting the Athenians at
this time.
To my mind, it is helpful to
think about France in June of
1940 after the Germans had
defeated France and occupied
part of it and left the other
part unoccupied,
but absolutely beholden to the
Nazi Regime.
Now, a Frenchmen had three
choices, just as the Athenians
did.
One possibility would be to
join up with the new regime and
try to prosper as part of it and
some Athenians did that.
Others would do what
Thrasybulus did,
and in France it was the De
Gaulle who did this,
he happened to be in London at
the time this happened and he
began to organize,
to undue what had happened,
and to throw the Germans out,
established the free French
forces.
It's important to realize that
after the war was over,
it's amazing how large that
free French force had grown in
people's minds.
In reality, it was a handful of
people.
That's the way it always is and
that's the way it was in Athens
as well.
It was a terrifying
prospect to tackle this regime,
which looked like it was
unbeatable.
Remember, they had been put in
place by the Spartans.
The Spartans ruled the world.
What could anybody expect to
change that situation?
Just as the Nazis looked like
they were in business for the
thousand years that Hitler had
claimed he was going to have.
So, it didn't look like you
were a very courageous man if
you joined De Gaulle.
How many of you have seen
Casablanca?
Okay, at least you've seen one
movie in your life;
that's great.
But you remember,
what are Claude Raines and
Bogey doing at the end of the
war when he says,
Louie I think this is the
beginning of a beautiful
friendship.
When he says that they're going
to Brazzaville to join the free
French.
Well great, but what did people
think about De Gaullel?
They thought he was a goddamn
fool, there was no chance,
this was idiocy,
sensible men--what are they
trying to do?
They tried to win as much as
they could in collaborating with
the Germans just to make
their--the fate of the Frenchman
less hard and to help France in
the future in that way.
That's the way it was with most
Athenians;
most Frenchman and most
Athenians didn't do either of
those things.
They kept their heads down and
tried to live their lives as
best they could.
I think what you need to
understand is happening and this
all puts what Thrasybulus and
Anytus,
and their friends did in a very
special kind of a light.
These were extraordinarily
brave, extraordinarily rash,
and extraordinarily optimistic
people,
and as it happened in this
case, it worked for them
amazingly.
They begin to gather forces
that are helping them.
Another interesting point is
that it's remarkable how few of
the people with Thrasybulus were
actually Athenian citizens.
A surprising number of them
were permanent resident aliens,
metics,
who,
of course, were great targets
for the Thirty,
because they were typically
well off and had money,
and of course they had no
rights and no power,
so many of them,
most of the meyics were
certainly on the democratic side
of this argument;
many of them went to fight.
Others, like Lysias the
orator, used his money to hire
mercenary soldiers to fight for
the Thrasybulus democrats as
well.
Well, the first test came in
the month of January.
There were these seventy guys
or so up in the fortress on
Phyle.
By now the Thirty were worried
enough about this nascent army
to send an army of their own,
much bigger,
to try to get them and it's at
this point that I'm always
reminded,
again, talk about analogies of
the events of Great Britain in
the sixteenth-century England,
I should say really,
when the Spanish Armada was
heading for England trying to
gain control of the island for
the Pope and Catholicism and one
thing and another.
And what happened was that
nature, if you will,
or as the British thought of
it,
maybe God intervened as the
Armada was coming out a great
wind came up and it blew the
ships out of their path and
wrecked many of them.
And really the British--the
English fleet didn't do anywhere
near as much damage to the
Spanish fleet as did the winds.
So, from that day forward there
sprang up the legend in England
of the Protestant Wind,
which had come along to save
the new English faith against
the forces of the Pope.
Well, if they can invent a
Protestant Wind I think it's
okay for me to speak about the
democratic snow that fell on
Phyle that went--that's just
what happened.
A big snow storm came up,
and so when the forces of the
Thirty came after Thrasybulus,
they just couldn't do it.
They just couldn't get there;
they were fought off and they
had to retreat.
And as they retreated the
seventy came down after them and
chased them, and killed them as
they fled,
and did a certain amount of
damage, and the time,
the passage of time was very
important,
because more and more Athenians
were becoming hostile to the
regime that they had fallen
under.
And they, more and more of
them, although again,
it's amazing how few actual
Athenians joined Thrasybulus,
but by this time Theramenes had
come into the picture.He was
more and more unhappy with what
was happening,
he stood up in the council and
argued against Critias,
and Critias finally had him put
to death.
That was an indication of how
far the reactionary forces in
the state had come,
and we might mention also that
the ancient sources estimate
that something like 1,500
Athenians may have been killed
by the Thirty tyrants.
Well, that's a very large
percentage of the population
when you think about how many
Athenians there were.
And finally,
that caused so many of their
relatives and friends to turn
against the Thirty and to join
forces,
even if they didn't go out
there and fight,
to be on the side of the
democrats.
A second attack on Phyle,
taken at a later time,
failed and now suddenly
Thrasybulus had a large enough
force,
he marched to the Piraeus and
gained control of that.
When the Thirty brought an army
out to try to defeat him there
he defeated them.
They were forced to flee to
Eleusis on the northwestern
frontier of Attica,
and the democrats were in
position to take control of the
city again.
The Thirty were deposed by the
3,000, because it was obvious
they were losers and now the
3,000, the successor government
to the Thirty,
appealed to Sparta for help
against this democratic army
that Thrasybulus had put out.
Well, think about what
should Sparta do?
Now, you might have thought it
would be obvious.
Certainly what Lysander wanted
to do is no surprise.
He wanted to send a big army to
restore the oligarchs to put his
own people back in power,
and of course,
that was fine,
but there were people in Sparta
who didn't want to do that,
who saw this as an opportunity
to deprive Lysander of his power
and influence and to restore a
more normal situation in Sparta.
So the Spartans did vote to
send an army in there to deal
with Thrasybulus,
but they did not put Lysander
at the head of the army or even
one of his people.
Instead King Pausanias was sent
out to do the job.
Well, they met the Athenian
army under Thrasybulus and
defeated Thrasybulus,
but they did not try to
obliterate that army,
or as we shall see,
treat them as very serious
enemies.
For one thing,
the Athenians again as they had
in the past, fought bravely and
well and inflicted serious
losses on the Spartan army,
but also it was obvious that
Pausanias was willing to
negotiate a settlement.
He wasn't insistent upon
defeating the Athenians and
imposing a settlement.
So, they worked out an
agreement whereby a moderate
group of ten would be chosen in
Athens and Pausanias and a
commission sent from Sparta to
sit with Pausanias sat down with
these Athenians and worked out a
reconciliation for the future.
Here's the essence of what was
worked out.
A very important part of the
story was that they voted--the
Athenians did and Pausanias,
of course, would have insisted
on it too--an amnesty whereby
there would be no punishment for
people on one side or the other
of the quarrel in Athens.
Of course, the people who would
have been punished would have
been oligarchs and their friends
who were now the losing side.
There would be an amnesty for
anybody, no matter what,
except for the Thirty
themselves,
the ten that the Thirty had put
in charge of the Piraeus,
the eleven--the eleven were the
police force,
so to speak,
the head of the security forces
in Athens and so on.
Small groups of people who were
thought to be especially
responsible for the nasty things
that had happened in Athens,
but even they were not
summarily put to death.
They could submit their
accounts at an euthyna
and if they were cleared at
these jury trials--I shouldn't
call them jury trials,
tribunals really,
they could take up their
position as citizens in the new
Athens as well,
or they could be allowed freely
to leave Athens without any
harm.
So, it was a very moderate
conclusion.
What about real oligarchs,
what about them?
Well, even they were taken care
of, the town of Eleusis which
they had seized for their own
protection as things were going
badly,
they were allowed to stay there
after the settlement.
Now, that left Thrasybulus and
his friends in control in
Athens, and they immediately
reinstated the Democratic
Constitution pretty much as it
had been before all of this had
happened.
Briefly, in this period of
transition, citizenship was
limited to the top three
Solonian classes,
but that quickly fell through
and really the full democracy
was restored in the year 401.
In the same year the democrats
seized Eleusis and brought that
back into Attica.
So, if you're there in the year
400 Athens would seem to be
exactly as it had been
internally before the defeat in
the Peloponnesian War.
That newly restored
democracy behaved with
remarkable moderation.
Aristotle in his
Constitution of the
Athenians goes out of his
way to praise this successor
Athenian Regime.
They kept closely to the
amnesty;
they did not in fact,
prosecute people that they
should not have done.
On the other hand,
they and Aristotle praises this
too, because--I guess his
sympathies are very close to
those of Theramenes,
to moderate oligarchy or what
Aristotle would call
politeia,
moderate regime.
When Thrasybulus asked--this is
an amazing thing,
when he asked that those people
who had served in his army,
who had liberated Athens and
restored the democracy that
these people be granted Athenian
citizenship,
the Athenian people voted "no."
To me that is one of the most
striking evidences of how the
Greeks really felt about their
polis because even in a
situation like that,
the idea of sharing citizenship
with anybody who was not,
so to speak,
a member of the family,
was beyond what they would
contemplate, and even with
Thrasybulus, the great hero,
the great liberator,
asking them to do it,
they said "no dice."
They also repaid the debts that
the Thirty had accumulated.
What they were doing of course
was trying to get things calm as
fast as they could,
to achieve stability.
It's a very rare thing.
Imagine--well,
think of what the French did
when the war was over.
They took their collaborators,
they tried them,
and they killed them for the
most part.
That's what civilized people do.
I mean, look what they did in
Rwanda, and other places like
that where different sides in a
civil war simply butcher each
other.
That's a very normal situation.
What the Athenians did was very
abnormal.
It was evidence,
I think in part,
of a great deal of wisdom on
the part of the key leaders at
the time,
and I think it also shows you
that Athens over the many years
of its democracy had not had
sharp edges between the classes.
I think there was a general
kind of good feeling that made
that sort of mass execution
something that seemed foreign
and too undesirable.
So, if we look at Athens in
401, the democracy has been
completely restored and I'd like
to draw my comments about this
to a close by focusing on
Thrasybulus,
a man, who I think probably
none of you had ever heard his
name when you came into this
class.
You had heard of Pericles,
you may have heard of
Themistocles,
you heard lots of different
Athenians, but you never heard
of Thrasybulus.
So, you might be surprised to
hear the following.
Cornelius Nepos,
a Roman historian of the first
century B.C.,
in writing lives of famous
Greeks and Romans,
wrote the following about
Thrasybulus: "If excellence were
to be weighed by itself,
apart from luck,
I believe I would rank this man
first of all.
This much is certain,
I put no one ahead of him in
sense of honor,
steadfastness,
greatness of soul,
and love of country."
That isn't bad but it's not the
end.
A few years before 180
A.D., Pausanias the great travel
writer of antiquity,
wrote his guide to the famous
and historic places of ancient
Greece.
In the section on Athens,
he described the graves of the
heroes and men that lined the
roads outside the city beginning
with the one leading to the
place known as The Academy.
Here's what Pausanias the
travel writer says,
"The first is that of
Thrasybulus,
son of Lycus,
in every way the greatest of
all famous Athenians,
whether they lived before or
after him."
Think of all the names that are
involved in that and maybe the
weight of Pausanias' general
comparison is intensified by
something a little bit more
specific,
because the next words in
Pausanias' account are these:
"His is the first grave and
after it comes that of
Pericles,"
just in case you thought he
missed Pericles by mistake.
Now, that's extraordinary
and there's a great puzzle that
I can't solve and probably never
can be solved.
How could it be that these
fellows who lived centuries
afterwards said these things
about Thrasybulus and we have
never heard of him?
I mean barely heard of him.
I mean, the best answer I can
give you is there must have been
lost histories,
and we know there are of the
period, and they must have given
Thrasybulus the kind of credit
for his remarkable achievements
that don't show up in Xenophon
and Diodorus and the orators.
But we at last,
and you have an obligation to
future generations,
must not let the name of
Thrasybulus lie in obscurity
again,
and just so that you don't
forget him, remember he is the
only Greek I know whose name
fits a Yale fight
song--Thrasybulus,
Thrasybulus. 
 
