Rational analysis, which had begun in Ionia1 with the Milesian philosophers with reference to the universe, gradually extended to include the recording of human events. Historie, the Greek word from which our word "history" is derived, means `inquiry' and indicates the nature of this new way of dealing with the past. The recording of human events is no longer the uncritical retelling of traditional myths and legends, but an account which is the result of critical evaluation applied to what the author himself and others have seen and heard.
1Ionia consists of the central portion of the western coast of Asia Minor along with the islands off the coast. This area was inhabited by the Ionian Greeks who had come from the Greek mainland to escape the Dorian invasions around 1000 B.C. They spoke Ionic Greek, the basic dialect of the Homeric poems, which were composed in Ionia. Miletus, the home of the Milesian philosophers, was one of the principal cities of Ionia.
As in the case of the Iliad, the medium for myth and legend was poetry. The artistic language of poetry adorned with various verbal ornaments suited well the recreation of a legendary world which transcended ordinary experience. On the other hand, an account of the world, as everyone contemporary with the author saw and experienced it, needed prose, a less artificial language and the vehicle of everyday communication. Thucydides uses the term "logographers" to refer to the prose writers who came before and were contemporary with his great predecessor Herodotus (c 480-425 B.C.), and criticizes them because they are (1.21 2):
less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.2Although the writings of the logographers were flawed as history when judged by Thucydides's high standards, nonetheless they did not consider themselves as story tellers in the epic tradition, but as inquirers, whose aim was to convey the truth to their readers through the application of rational criticism to their evidence.
2Quotations from Thucydides are translated by R. Warner (Penguin translation). All other quotations are translated by the author. The number before the period refers to the book, and the number(s) after, to the section(s) of a particular book.
Only a few fragments of these prose writers survive, but there is one particular logographer about whom we know more than any other, Hecataeus of Miletus. He was actively involved in Ionian politics during the time of the Ionian revolt against the Persians in the early fifth century and had traveled much in Asia and Egypt. His writings are typical of the logographers. He wrote a work called Trip Around the World, which was a description of places and people he saw on a sea voyage along the coasts of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. He also wrote a book named Genealogies, which dealt with the legends of various heroes and the families (including his own) that claimed descent from them. The most remarkable thing about his writings is the spirit of rational criticism which he applies to his subject matter. Hecataeus refused to accept gullibly the fantastic stories which had been handed down from time immemorial. His attitude is evident in the following fragment from his work: "I write what I consider to be the truth, since it seems to me that the Greeks tell many stories which are absurd".
Like Hecataeus, Herodotus, known as "the father of history", was also a traveler. He was born in the Greek city of Halicarnassus in south-west Asia Minor, but left because of political troubles there and lived for a while on the Ionian island of Samos, in Athens, and finally in Thurii, an Athenian colony in southern Italy. His travels outside the Greek world took him to southern Russia, Egypt and the Middle East. In the manner of the logographers, his travels are reflected in his Histories which contain accounts of various non-Greek places and peoples. Although Herodotus depended very heavily on the oral traditions of lands he visited, he also used literary sources. For example, he shows a knowledge of Homer and Hesiod and of the logographers, especially Hecataeus, of whom he is very critical.
Herodotus's history owes much to the spirit and organization of the Homeric epic. Like the Homeric poems, his work centers around various heroes, is characterized by a looseness of structure brought about by numerous digressions, and is organized around a central theme, the great conflict between the Greeks and the Persians in the early part of the fifth century B.C. Herodotus's purpose, However, is not only to preserve the memory of the great deeds of the past, but also to give a rational account of the cause of the wars. In the introduction of his work he refers to his history as "the publication of his inquiry (historie)". His purpose is not merely to chronicle3 events; he strives to find through inquiry a meaningful pattern in the events he narrates in order to make their significance clear.
3A chronicler is a writer who merely records events in chronological order.
On the other hand, despite Herodotus's more scientific approach to the writing of history, his view of the world is basically Homeric. Gods are still seen as involved in human actions. According to Herodotus, the Persians lost the war due to their king's attempt to exceed the limitations of his humanity, an act which arouses the jealousy of the gods and brings about his downfall. The distinction between myth and actual historical events is not yet as clear-cut in Herodotus as it is later in Thucydides. In the beginning of his work Herodotus cites the Persian account of the origins of the conflict between the Greeks and Persians involving the stealing of two Greek women, Io and Helen, by Asiatics and of two Asian women, Europa and Medea, by the Greeks in retribution. The rape of Helen led to the destruction of Troy which aroused the hatred of all Asia (including the Persians) against the Greeks. All these events are quite clearly legendary, but Herodotus does not reject them on these grounds. Instead he refuses to express any judgment on their truth or falsity and then proceeds to assign the origin of the Persian wars to the injury which Croesus, an historical king of Lydia (in Asia Minor) in the sixth century B.C., did to the Greeks. Although Herodotus does not brand legend as mostly fiction, his work, as in the previous example, is more often than not on a solid historical basis. It remained for Thucydides to banish mythology totally from history and thus create the first scientific history.
The Greeks under the leadership of Sparta decided to make a stand against Xerxes's land forces in northern Greece at the narrow pass of Thermopylae. There 300 Spartans fought bravely, but were overwhelmed by the great numbers of the Persians, who were aided by a Greek traitor. The Athenians, realizing that the Persians were unstoppable on land, abandoned their city to the enemy, who burned the Acropolis. The Athenians, However, were able to fall back on their large fleet, which formed almost half of the Greek navy. Through the machinations of the wise Athenian leader Themistocles, the Greeks were forced to engage the Persians on the bay of Salamis (see Salamis #3) just off the coast of Attica, and in the ensuing battle defeated Xerxes's fleet. The victory was followed by the Greek defeat of the land army left behind by Xerxes at Plataea in 479.
The Greeks, led by the Spartan commander Pausanias (see Pausanias #4), decided to pursue their advantage and liberate the eastern Greeks (chiefly the Ionians) from the domination of the Persians. After a significant Greek victory over the Persians in Asia Minor, the Ionians, who had been pressed into service in the Persian army, joined the Greeks. But the Greeks, soon finding Pausanias's dictatorial behavior intolerable, rebelled against their leader and asked Athens to lead them against the Persians. Athens gladly accepted the role of leader and undertook to form an alliance under their own presidency as an offensive and defensive pact against Persia. The Spartans welcomed the Athenian acceptance of this responsibility because they were not eager for a long-term involvement in eastern affairs and were, at that time, on good terms with the Athenians. The basic purpose of the alliance was to take revenge on the Persians for their invasions of Greece. The alliance has come to be known as the Delian League because the temple of Apollo on the island of Delos, a traditional center of Ionian worship, served as a meeting place for its Assembly and as the location of the League's treasury. The Delian League included the islands of the central Aegean, the islands off the coast of Asia Minor, a few cities on the coast of Asia Minor, Rhodes, and some cities in Cyprus, Euboea and the northern Aegean. At its height the League numbered 200 member states. Most of these states were assigned a monetary contribution to the common fund of the alliance while the more powerful states contributed manpower and ships. Although Athens would take the lead in case of war, in peacetime she was considered only a first among equals. She had only one vote in the Assembly of allies which determined policy of the league. In the ten year period 477-467 the alliance freed many Greek cities on the coasts of the northern Aegean and Asia Minor and expelled Persian garrisons.
While Athens was consolidating her leadership in the east, at home the walls around the city, which had been destroyed by the Persians were rebuilt and the harbor of Piraeus was fortified. Sparta was alarmed by these fortifications. It was a clear sign that Athens with her strong navy and the resources of her allies was aiming to challenge Sparta for the leadership of the Greek world. Sparta's fears were soon justified. Athens openly revealed her imperialistic designs when she began to use the Delian League against other Greek states. In 472 she forced Carystos in Euboea to join the alliance on the grounds that this city was too near Athens to remain independent. Two revolts of member states followed in 469 and 465, which were dealt with effectively by the Athenians. Both cities suffered a fate which was to become typical of rebellious members of the Delian League: they lost their autonomy and were forced to pay tribute to Athens instead of making contributions to the alliance's treasury. Athens welcomed the opportunity to reduce free states to the status of subject states because through governors or overseers and garrisons they could exercise tighter control over these governments. Athens was also anxious to decrease the number of allies who contributed ships. It was more advantageous for her that free allies contribute money instead of ships because she could use that money to build ships, which nominally were the property of the whole alliance, but in effect became part of her own fleet. Many allied states, which originally contributed ships and manpower, gradually became less and less willing to endure the expense and rigors of military service. These states played into Athenian hands by voluntarily substituting money contributions for ships. Ultimately only three states contributed ships and for this reason remained for most of the fifth century important independent members of the League: Lesbos, Chios and Samos.
After a disaster suffered by the Athenians at the hands of the Persians in Egypt, Athens dropped all pretense of equal alliance. The common treasury of the League was transferred from Delos to Athens (454). The treasury, which had been under the allies' control, now became part of the Athenian treasury to be used in Whatever way Athens saw fit. Other evidence of Athenian domination was the requirement that members of the League use only Athenian coinage, weights and measures and that all significant court trials involving citizens of League member states be held in Athens. Perhaps the most offensive practice in the eyes of the member states was the settlement of Athenians, who retained their citizenship and allegiance to Athens, on purchased or confiscated land in allied states. These settlements enabled Athens through the surveillance of her citizens to maintain tighter control in important parts of their empire. This practice not only served to keep subject allies in line, but was extremely popular at Athens because it provided land and financial opportunity for the poor at Athens.
In the early years of the Delian League, Athens was led by the democratic anti-Spartan Aristides, who was renowned for his fair assessment of allied monetary contributions to the alliance, and the pro-Spartan Cimon, who was one of the many aristocratic enemies of the democracy at Athens. After the death of Aristides in the early 460's, Cimon was left as the most influential man in Athens, but the democratic movement at Athens was too strong for him to maintain his influence. His power at Athens came to an end in the following way. While Cimon led an expedition to Sparta to help that city put down a revolt of her serfs, Pericles and a democratic colleague named Ephialtes introduced reforms which ended the political influence of a council made up of the two richest classes in the state. These reforms left the popular Assembly, which was open to every male over the age of 18, in full control of Athens' destiny and were welcomed by the middle and lower class Athenians as greatly diminishing aristocratic influence in government. Two other reforms of Pericles, pay for political offices and for service on juries, were enormously popular because they gave poorer citizens the opportunity for greater participation in the affairs of state. Cimon upon his return, in a general atmosphere of pro-democratic and anti-Spartan feeling, was ostracized 4
4Ostracism was a political process whereby a politician whose policies had become unpopular could be banished from Athens for a period of ten years by a vote of the popular Assembly. Ostracism was voted upon by scratching the name of a politician on a broken piece of pottery (ostrakon) which served as a ballot.
After the mysterious murder of Ephialtes in 461, Pericles, a strong advocate of imperialism, was now the most influential leader at Athens. Under his leadership Athens extended her empire to include Athens' immediate neighbors, Boeotia and Megara, the rich island of Aegina just south of Salamis, and the Achaean cities in the Peloponnesus. In 448, no doubt at the instigation of Pericles, Athens made peace with Persia. The purpose of this truce, in which Persia in effect acknowledged Athens' sea empire, was to allow Athens to maintain her present control over her allies and subjects and to pursue any further imperialistic designs without the distraction of the Persian threat. With the conclusion of the Peace there was no longer any reason for the existence of the Delian League, but the Athenians were more determined than ever to hold on to their empire and to exploit the financial advantages it provided them.
Although it seemed that Athens had now very effectively consolidated her power, unrest threatened the stability of her empire. Boeotia, Megara and Euboea soon revolted (447). To add to Athens' problems, Sparta took the occasion of the Euboean revolt to invade Attica, but inexplicably the Spartan forces withdrew without engaging the Athenians. Pericles, who had come back with his army from Euboea to deal with the Spartan threat, was thus able to return to Euboea and put down the revolt. The Athenians now realized that they must insure themselves against attack by the Spartans, as they had done with the Persians, and concluded a thirty year peace treaty with the Spartans.
It was around this time that Pericles embarked upon a program of rebuilding the temples that had been burned in the Persian invasion. It was his policy that, since these temples had been destroyed in an invasion which was directed against all Greece, the building program should be financed from the treasury of the Delian league, which was now located at Athens. There was some resistance to this policy at Athens among politicians who not only disliked the democracy, but also were offended by the blatant imperialism of Pericles. This opposition, However, could not succeed in defeating an immensely popular building program which would beautify the city and provide employment for the masses. The Assembly approved Pericles's plan and, as a result, the great classical monuments were built which survive as symbols of Athenian imperialism: the Parthenon with the colossal chryselephantine statue of Athene, the Erechtheum, the temple of Athene Nike `victory', the impressive entrance to the Acropolis (Propylaea), the temple of Hephaistos, and the temple of Poseidon at Sounion.
During the last fourteen years of his life (443-429) Pericles with his political wisdom and eloquence completely dominated Athenian politics. He was elected one of the panel of ten generals every year during this period and although nominally his power was no greater than that of each of the other nine, the Athenians willingly committed their destiny to his direction. As Thucydides writes of the government of Athens at this time: "so in what was nominally a democracy, power was really in the hands of the first citizen" (2.65). Pericles's policies were based on a simple idea: Athenian control over her empire must be maintained at all costs. In pursuance of this aim, Pericles, after a long siege, subdued the revolt of Samos (439), an important independent ally and one of the few member states still contributing ships to the alliance. Pericles dealt harshly with this threat to Athenian interests and returned home a military hero.
Sparta and her Peloponnesian league decided not to intervene in the conflict between Athens and Samos, but two incidents involving the Corinthian colonies of Corcyra and Potidaea brought Athens and the Peloponnesians to the brink of war. In both cases Corinth (a member of the Peloponnesian league) took offense at Athenian action. first, in 433, as a result of a dispute between Corinth and Corcyra involving the latter's colony Epidamnus, Corcyra formed a defensive alliance with the Athenians, who then intervened in a naval engagement between Corcyra and Corinth. secondly, late in 433, Potidaea in the north Aegean, a member of the Delian league, encouraged and militarily supported by her mother city Corinth, attempted to revolt from Athens. The rebellion was put down by Athens only after a difficult two-year siege. Corinth, motivated by these offenses in addition to her traditional commercial rivalry with Athens, instigated the Spartans, already distrustful of Athenian power, to initiate the hostilities which are the subject of Thucydides's Peloponnesian War
5Attica is an area of about 1000 square miles, of which Athens is the capital.
How was Agamemnon able to gather together the expedition against Troy (9)? Read carefully Thucydides's account of the logistical problems of the Greek army at Troy (11). Briefly compare in a very general way this account of the war with that of Homer in the Iliad. What is the most important difference in the way these two authors view the Trojan war? How did Corinth achieve prominence (13)? What was the most important result of the development of naval power (15)? After the Greek victory over Persia What alliances developed in the Greek world (18-19)?
What criticism does Thucydides make of Greek oral tradition (20)? of poets and logographers (21)? What is Thucydides's method with regard to the speeches included in his work (22)? With regard to his evidence (22)?What is his purpose in writing history (22)? What is his view of the cause of the war (23)?
The Spartan government created by the Lycurgan reforms was a combination of different principles of political administration. Unlike most other Greek states, the Spartans still had a hereditary kingship shared by two kings who were the supreme commanders of the army. In addition to the kings, the government was administered by a council of elders, an Assembly, and five ephors (overseers) who were guardians of the people's rights. it is difficult to put one label on the Spartan constitution. Her hereditary kings suggest monarchy, but the sharing of the kingship was a contradiction of the term (`government by a sole ruler') and their powers were quite limited. the council, consisting of the two kings and twenty-eight elders over the age of sixty, which prepared business for the Assembly and had great influence in all governmental affairs, gave the appearance of oligarchy. Since there was an Assembly, in which every Spartan citizen (male) could vote, but not debate, Sparta might be called a democracy. but Spartan citizenship was restricted to a relatively small number who controlled a much larger subject population and the lack of debate was a serious curtailment of the Assembly's powers. Thus Sparta was certainly not a democracy in the same sense as Athens.
The physical appearance of Sparta was quite deceptive. The Spartans lived in modest villages with none of the impressive monuments of a city like Athens. As Thucydides points out (1.10):
Suppose, for example, that the city of Sparta were to become deserted and that only the temples and foundations of buildings remained, I think that future generations would, as time passed, find it very difficult to believe that the place had really been as powerful as it was represented to be.The physical aspect of Sparta is a good example of the conservative resistance to change which had become one of her most prominent characteristics. Her conservatism was also evident in her extreme suspicion of strangers, which resulted in an ordinance forbidding foreigners to reside in Sparta for any length of time.
Sparta had been leader of the Greek world and champion of Greek freedom since the sixth century. throughout that century she had driven out tyrannies on the Greek islands and mainland, including Athens. In the Peloponnesian war she again had the role of liberator with regard to the Greek states in the Delian league which had fallen subject to the tyranny of Athens. Sparta, being a rather poor city, did not have impressive financial resources to support their efforts against the Athenians, who could rely on a seemingly bottomless treasury. but Sparta did have the important resource of her own disciplined manpower and the aid of her allies in the Peloponnesian league, the oldest and ultimately the longest lasting alliance in the Greek world.
What is the purpose of the Athenian reply (72)? What is the main point of the Athenian mention of Marathon and Salamis (73-74)? How did the Athenians acquire their empire (75)? What were their motives in so doing (75)? How do they defend their acquisition of empire (76)? How do the Athenians evaluate their own imperial rule (76-77)? What warning do the Athenians give to the Peloponnesians (78)?
6The Dorians were a division of the Greek race, of the which the Spartans formed an important part.
What are the important results of Pericles's speech (65)? Summarize briefly Thucydides's estimate of Pericles's leadership by listing his most important qualities as a political leader (65)? According to Thucydides, How did leadership at Athens decline in the war years after Pericles's death (65)? According to Thucydides, Why did Athens ultimately lose the war (65)?
What criticism does Cleon make of democracy (37)? What are his views of law and citizenship (37)? How do his views of citizenship and political action contrast with those of Pericles (see 2.40)? How does Cleon view the motivation and rhetorical techniques of his opposition (38)? According to Cleon, what purpose will the decreed punishment serve (39)? What view does he express with regard to the claims of pity and decency (40)? to the relationship between justice and Athenian interests (40)? Look up the word "demagogue" in a good dictionary or reference work. In what sense can Cleon be called a demagogue?
What is Diodotus's view of discussion before political action (42)? How does he deal with Cleon's insinuations of bribery with regard to his opposition (42-43)? What is Diodotus's primary concern (44)? How does he view the role of justice in this discussion (44)? the effectiveness of the death penalty (45)? of human nature and the sanctions of law (45)? According to Diodotus, what will be the result if Cleon's arguments convince the Athenians (46)? What is a better method of ensuring the security of the empire (46)? Compare this method with Pericles's statement in 2.40. What does Diodotus see as the result if the original decree is carried out (47)? What is Diodotus's view of the claims of pity and decency (48)?
What was the decision of the Athenian Assembly (49)? How did the Athenians prevent the punishment originally decreed from being carried out (49)? What punishments did the Athenians impose on Mytilene and on Lesbos (50)?
Give two specific examples of the general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world (83). What is Thucydides's view of man's true nature (84)? What happens to the general laws of humanity in civil strife (84)?