4.6: The Classical Period
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The story of the Greeks in the Classical Period is best described as the strife for leadership of the Greek world. First, Athens and Sparta spent much of the fifth century BCE battling each other for control of the Greek world. Then, once both were weakened, other states began attempting to fill the power vacuum. Ultimately, the Classical Period will end with the Greek world under the control of Macedon.
4.6.1: From the Delian League to the Athenian Empire
In 478 BCE, a group of Greek city-states founded the Delian League, with the aim of continuing to protect the Greeks in Ionia from Persian attacks. Led by Athens, the league allowed member states the option of either contributing a tax (an option that most members selected) or contributing ships for the league’s navy. The treasury of the league, where the taxes paid by members were deposited, was housed on Delos.
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Over the next twenty years, the Delian League gradually transformed from a loose alliance of states led by Athens to a more formal entity. The League’s Athenian leadership grew to be that of an imperial leader. The few members who tried to secede from the League were subdued. Finally, in 454 BCE, the treasury of the Delian League moved to Athens. That moment marked the transformation of the Delian League into the Athenian Empire.
While only the Athenian side of the story survives, it appears that the Athenians’ allies in the Delian League were not happy with the transformation of the alliance into a full-fledged Athenian Empire. Once the treasury of the Empire had been moved to Athens, the Athenians had used some funds from it for their own building projects, the most famous of these projects being the Parthenon, the great temple to Athena on the Acropolis.
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Pericles (c. 426 BCE - 495 BCE) was instrumental in the development of a more popular democracy in Athens. In 451 BCE, Pericles sponsored a Citizenship Decree that restricted Athenian citizenship to individuals who had two freeborn and legitimately-wed Athenian parents. These parents had also to be born of Athenian parents. In c. 449 BCE, Pericles proposed a decree that allowed the Athenians to use Delian League funds for Athenian building projects. In c. 447 BCE, he sponsored the Athenian Coinage Decree that imposed Athenian standards of weights and measures on all states that were members of the Delian League. Later in his life, Pericles famously described Athens as “the school of Hellas;” in addition to the flourishing of art and architecture, the city was a center of philosophy and drama.
The growing wealth and power of Athens led to increasingly tense relations between with others. Sparta had steadily consolidated the Peloponnesian League in this same time. In the period of 460-445 BCE, the Spartans and the Athenians engaged in a series of battles, commonly referred to as the First Peloponnesian War. In 445 BCE, the two sides swore to a Thirty Years Peace. However, this trust was temporary, as the Great Peloponnesian War erupted in 431 BCE.
4.6.2: The Peloponnesian War (431 – 404 BCE)
A conflict that had been bubbling under the surface for fifty years finally broke out over a seemingly minor affair. In 433 BCE, Corcyra no longer wanted to be under the control of Corinth and asked Athens for protection. The Corinthians claimed that the Athenian support of Corcyra was a violation of the Thirty Years Peace. At a subsequent meeting of the Peloponnesian League in Sparta in 432 BCE, the allies voted that the peace had been broken and so declared war against Athens.
The Spartans expected that they would march with an army to Athens, fight a decisive battle, then return home. That plan did not work. The long duration of the war was partly the result of the different strengths of the two leading powers. Athens was a naval empire, with allies scattered all over the Ionian Sea. Sparta, on the other hand, was a land-locked power with supporters chiefly in the Peloponnese and with no navy to speak of at the outset of the war.
The Peloponnesian War forced the Greek city-states to support standing armies. While sieges of cities and attacks on civilians were previously frowned upon, they became the norm by the end of the Peloponnesian War. It is important to note that Greek siege warfare during the fifth century BCE was still quite primitive, as no tools existed for ramming or otherwise damaging the city gates or walls. Furthermore, catapults, so useful for targeting a city from the outside, first came into being in 399 BCE, five years after the war had ended.
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Modern historians divide the Peloponnesian War into three distinct stages:
- Archidamian War (431 – 421 BCE) proposed the strategy of annual invasions of Attica at the beginning of the war. In 430 BCE, the crowded conditions within Athens resulted in the outbreak of a virulent plague which by some estimates killed as much as twenty-five percent of the city’s population over the following three years. Among the dead was none other than Pericles himself. Subsequent Athenian leaders were 'war-hawks'.
- Peace of Nicias (421-413 BCE) was supposed to be a fifty years’ peace. It allowed both sides to return to their pre-war holdings, with a few exceptions. One problem with the treaty was that several key allies of Sparta, including Corinth and Thebes, refused to do sign it. Furthermore, Athens made the disastrous decision to launch the Sicilian Expedition, which lead to the destruction of its navy.
- Decelean War (413-404 BCE) started when Spartans occupied Decelea and transformed it into a military fort. This occupation cut Athens from most supply routes, effectively crippling the Athenian economy. In 411 BCE, an oligarchic coup briefly replaced the democracy with the rule of the Four Hundred. While this oligarchy was quickly overthrown and the democracy restored, this incident highlighted the city-state's internal instability.
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The Athenians had managed to rebuild a navy after the Sicilian Expedition. In 405 BCE, the Spartan general Lysander defeated Athens in the naval battle of Aegospotami. He proceeded to besiege Athens, and the city finally surrendered in 404 BCE. The Athenian democracy was overthrown, to be replaced this time by the Spartan-sanctioned oligarchy known as the Tyranny of the Thirty. A year later, an army formed largely of Athenian democrats in exile marched on the city and overthrew the Thirty. The democracy was restored in 403 BCE, and the painful process of recovery from the war and the oligarchic rule could begin.
4.6.3: Athenian Culture during the Peloponnesian War
Because it drained Athens of manpower and financial resources, the Peloponnesian War proved to be an utter practical disaster for Athens. Nevertheless, the war period was also the pinnacle of Athenian culture, most notably its tragedy, comedy, and philosophy. Tragedy and comedy in Athens were very much popular entertainment, intended to appeal to all citizens.
Sophocles' tragedies dealt with the darker side of fighting, for both soldiers and generals, and the cities that are affected. By tradition, tragedies integrated mythical stories. So, his two mythical wars were the
- Trojan War, as in Ajax and Philoctetes
- the aftermath of the war of the Seven against Thebes, in which Polynices, the son of Oedipus, led six other heroes to attack Thebes, a city led by his brother Eteocles, as in Oedipus at Colonus.
Sophocles’ younger contemporary, Euripides, had a similar interest in depicting the horrors of war and wrote a number of tragedies on the impact of war on the defeated, such as in Phoenician Women and Hecuba; both of these plays explored the aftermath of the Trojan War from the perspective of the defeated Trojans.
The comic playwright Aristophanes was far less subtle. For instance, in the Acharnians (425 BCE), the main character is a war-weary farmer who, frustrated with the inefficiency of the Athenian leadership in ending the war, brokers his own personal peace with Sparta. Similarly, in Peace (421 BCE), another anti-war farmer fattens up a dung beetle in order to fly to Olympus and beg Zeus to free Peace. Undeniably funny, the jokes in these comedies have a bitter edge, akin to the portrayal of war in the tragedies.
While the playwrights were dreaming of the things of this world, Socrates was dreaming of difficult questions. He did not leave us any of his writings. Rather, his student, the fourth-century philosopher Plato, recorded the ideas. In Plato’s writings, Socrates comes across as someone who loved difficult questions and who was not above confronting any passers-by with such questions as “What is courage?”; “What is moral?”; “What would the ideal city look like?”
Using what became known ever since as the “Socratic method,” Socrates continued to probe further every definition and answer that his conversation partners provided. As a result of his love of such debates, Socrates was seen as connected to the Sophists, philosophical debate teachers, who (as Aristophanes joked) could teach anyone to convince others of anything at all, regardless of reality or truth. But Socrates radically differed from the Sophists by not charging fees for his teaching and encouraged all with whom he spoke to keep thinking and questioning.
4.6.4: The Fourth Century BCE
In 399 BCE, Socrates, the philosopher who had spent his life wandering the streets of Athens engaging in endless dialogues regarding the meaning of life, was put on trial for impiety and for corrupting the youth, convicted, and speedily sentenced to death. Why did the Athenians suddenly turn against this public teacher and judge him worthy of execution? Socrates had taught Critias, who became one of the Thirty in 404 BCE. Fueled by their hatred of all enemies of the democracy and anyone who had associated with the Thirty, the Athenians condemned Socrates to death. This trial shows how difficult it was for the Athenians to forget the terrible end of the Peloponnesian War.
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Defeated in the war, Athens was no longer an Empire. Meanwhile, the winner, Sparta, had suffered a catastrophic decline in its population over the course of the Peloponnesian War. At the same time, Thebes had revamped its military, introducing the first two significant changes to the hoplite phalanx way of fighting since its inception: slightly longer spears, and wedge formation. They continued an aggressive program of military expansion over the next decade, a period known as the Theban Hegemony.
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Sometime in the 360’s BCE, a young Macedonian prince stayed for several years in Thebes as a hostage. Circa 364 BCE, the prince returned to Macedon, and, in 359 BCE, he ascended to the throne as King Philip II. Up until that point in Greek history, the Macedonians had largely been known for two things: drinking their wine undiluted, which had marked them as complete and utter barbarians in the eyes of the rest of the Greeks, and being excellent horsemen. As soon as Phillip came to the throne, he began transforming the Macedonian military into a more successful image of what he had seen at Thebes. One way was the Macedonian sarissa, a spear of about eighteen feet in length, double that of the traditional Greek hoplite spear. He also added a calvary to the Theban wedge formation.
Over the next twenty years, Philip systematically conquered all of mainland Greece, with the exception of Sparta, which he chose to leave alone. Philip’s final great victory was at the Battle of Chaeronea (338 BCE), in which the Macedonian armies defeated the combined forces of Athens and Thebes. Philip’s conquest of the entire mainland was the end of an era. For the first time, the entire territory was united under the rule of a king.
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In 336 BCE while on his way to a theatrical performance, Philip was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards. His 20-year old son Alexander continued his father’s ambitious program of conquests. Alexander’s first target was the Persian Empire. Moving farther and farther East in his campaigns, Alexander conquered the Balkans, Egypt, and the territories of modern-day Lebanon, Syria, and Israel before he achieved a decisive victory over Darius III at the Battle of Gaugamela in 331 BCE.
Continuing to move eastwards, Alexander invaded India in 327 BCE, planning to conquer the known world. (The Greeks of his day were not aware of China’s existence). However, his war-weary troops rebelled and demanded to return home. This mutiny forced Alexander to give in. Leaving several of his officers behind as satraps, Alexander turned back. In 323 BCE, he and his army reached Babylon, the city that he had hoped to make the new capital of his world empire. There, Alexander fell ill and died at the ripe old age of thirty-three.
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While Alexander’s rule only lasted thirteen years, his legacy reshaped Greece and the rest of ancient Eurasia for the next several centuries. A charismatic leader, albeit one prone to emotional outbursts, Alexander redefined what it meant to be king and general. His coinage reflects this reinvention. On one coin minted during his lifetime appears Alexander dressed as the hero Heracles, while Zeus, whom Alexander alleged to be his real father, appears on the other side.
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In addition, by conquering territories that were previously not part of the Greek world, Alexander spread Greek culture farther than had anyone else before him. By marrying several non-Greek princesses and encouraging such marriages by his troops, Alexander helped create a “meltingpot” empire. He founded new cities named after himself all over his new empire. In particular, Alexandria, in Egypt, became a center of Greek civilization—albeit with an Egyptian twist—and was seen as a new Athens well into the Roman Empire.
Alexander’s brief time in India produced a significant impact as well. In 321 BCE, Chandragupta Maurya was able to unify India into a single kingdom for the first time, establishing the Mauryan Empire. Finally, in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Greek world, Alexander’s generals divided his conquests into several kingdoms that they and their descendants continued to rule until the Romans conquered these respective areas.