Download PBS Empires Video – “The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization” Episode

PBS Empires Video – “The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Episode One – “The Birth of Democracy”
Written and Directed by Cassian Harrison, 1999
0:00 – Series Introduction: The Significance of the Greeks
The Greeks. A people glorious and arrogant, valiant and headstrong. These were the men and women
who laid the very foundations of Western Civilization. Their monuments still recall perhaps the most
extraordinary two centuries in history, a time that saw the birth of science and politics, philosophy,
literature and drama. [A time that] saw the creation of art and architecture we still strive to equal. And
the Greeks achieved all this against a backdrop of war and conflict, for they would vanquish armies,
navies, and empires many times their size, and build an empire of their own which stretched across the
Mediterranean. For one brief moment, the mighty warships of the Greeks ruled the seas, their prosperity
unequalled. These achievements, achievements which still shape our world, were made not by figures
lost to time, but by men and women whose voices we can still hear, whose lives we can follow, men such
as Themistocles, one of the world’s greatest military generals; Pericles, a politician of vision and genius;
and Socrates, the most famous philosopher in history. This is the story of these astonishing individuals,
of the rise and fall of a civilization that changed the world.
2:35 – Episode Introduction: The Revolution
508 BC. Five centuries before the birth of Christ. In a town called Athens, a tiny city in mainland
Greece, pandemonium ruled the streets. The ordinary people had turned on their rulers, demanding
freedom from centuries of oppression. At this moment, one man looked on, an Athenian nobleman
named Cleisthenes. Cleisthenes had been brought up from birth to be a ruler, to look down on these
common people with contempt. But this one night would be a turning point in his life, in the history of
Greece, and in the history of civilization. In a flash of inspiration, Cleisthenes would see that these
ordinary people should have freedom, a chance to shape their own destiny, to govern themselves. And
with this decision Cleisthenes would set his fellow Greeks on the path to empire.
4:37 – Cleisthenes’ Upbringing in Sixth Century Athens
Historians estimate that Cleisthenes was born around 570 BC. He was hardly the type to become a man
of the people, for he had been born into one of the richest families in Greece, his home a palace by the
standards of the day. Cleisthenes’ family were called the Alcmaeonids. They were a wealthy and longestablished political dynasty.
Josiah Ober: “He grew up in a world of great privilege, a world in which men of an elite background
would expect to have certain privileges just given to them.”
The origin of Cleisthenes’ family fortune is a tale typical of ancient Greece, a curious story lost half in
myth. The first Greek historian, Herodotus, claims that Cleisthenes’ grandfather once performed a favor
for a great king named Croesus, a king of immeasurable wealth. In return, he was told he could take a gift
of gold dust from Croesus’ treasury. But according to Herodotus, Cleisthenes’ ancestor couldn’t restrain
himself just to loading up his pockets. He stuffed every orifice of his body, his ears and his mouth, with
shimmering gold dust, and then poured more over his head and hair. And Herodotus writes that King
Croesus was so amused by this bravado that he let him take all the gold he was carrying and as much
again. But whatever the source of Cleisthenes’s family wealth, there was no doubt that they had used it
effectively, to gain power.
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From his earliest days, the young Cleisthenes was taught that he was an aristocrat, ancient Greek for a
member of the ruling class. In the sixth century BC, these aristocrats controlled everything that happened
in Cleisthenes’ hometown, a small settlement called Athens. Athens lay in the center of a Mediterranean
peninsula, which Cleisthenes knew as Hellas, and which we now call Greece. In the days of Cleisthenes’
youth, it would have seemed impossible that this city would soon rule an empire.
Paul Cartledge: “It is certainly not what we call a city. Forget Manhattan. Athens in the center has
public buildings, but otherwise, I think one should imagine more village style of accommodation and
habitation.”
The town was built around the Acropolis, a steep-sided outcrop of bare rock, a stronghold from which the
Athenians could fend off the attacks of their neighbors. In the narrow streets surrounding the Acropolis,
huddled the simple homes of farmers and tradesmen.
Keith Hopwood: “Most of the houses were perhaps mud brick, and there was no sewage, no waste
collection. We would find it very much like wandering through a third world village. You would
certainly be able to smell Athens as you approached it.”
For men, life was passed working in the fields, or in basic crafts. Women spent their days cloistered in
the home, cooking, spinning, and weaving. For these Athenians, reading and writing was a rare skill.
There was nothing we might call science or medicine. Life expectancy at birth was less than fifteen
years.
Paul Cartledge: “I think the idea that ancient Greek life was nasty, brutish, and short would be entirely
accurate. Certainly life was extremely tough.”
This was no society of equals. The common Athenians lived under the yoke of the aristocrats, men such
as Cleisthenes’ father.
Josiah Ober: “The traditional political milieu from which Cleisthenes arose was one in which all
effective political power was being dominated by a relative handful of people. The possibility that the
ordinary people of Athens would actually matter was the furthest thing from the mind of the traditional
Greek elites.”
For the Greek writer Aristotle, this was a world riven by injustice: “The whole country was in the hands
of a few people. The hardest and bitterest thing for the masses was their state of serfdom, not that they
weren’t discontented with anything else, for to speak generally, they had no part, no share in anything.”
Josiah Ober: “Athens was in a sense turned against itself. You had one part of the population, the
aristocratic elite, holding power at the expense of the rest of the citizen population.”
11:30 – Greece in the Sixth Century BC and the Pre-Eminence of Sparta
Dominated by aristocrats interested only in preserving their own power, Athens hardly seemed a state on
the verge of building a great empire. But then Greece also seemed an unlikely land to give rise to
greatness.
Josiah Ober: “If you look at the physical world of Greece, it’s not the kind of place you’d immediately
expect to produce a great civilization. Simply too many mountains. Greece does not have the obvious
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kind of physical unity that typically seems to be associated with the really great imperial civilizations of
the ancient world.”
The great civilizations of Cleisthenes’ day had grown up around rivers and the fertile plains stretching
from their banks. To the south of Greece lay Egypt, where the regular flooding of the Nile sustained a
civilization already two thousand years old. And to the east lay the Persians. At the heart of their empire
lay the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This was the very birthplace of civilization, the home of the world’s
first cities. But mainland Greece had no open plains. This was a landscape riven by mountain ranges.
Off her coast lay countless tiny islands. It seemed impossible for a single ruler to dominate this
fragmented world.
Instead, Greece was divided into countless tiny nations, called city-states, each fiercely independent, each
with its own culture and history. In Cleisthenes’ time, there were over a thousand of these city-states,
jostling with each other for land and power.
Josiah Ober: “They never were politically unified, or at least in the Classical period, never politically
unified. And indeed, each individual Greek city-state, each polis, sought to maintain its own
independence, sometimes successfully, sometimes unsuccessfully.”
In the early sixth century, Athens was not nearly the most powerful or important of these tiny nations.
Argos had stood for over a thousand years. Her citizens were able to trace their history back to the
mythical days of the Trojan War. The Corinthians dominated Greek trade. Their ships plied the
Mediterranean, ferrying goods back and forth from Egypt, Assyria, and Italy. But there was one city-state
that had military power, which appeared might come to dominate all of Cleisthenes’ Greece. In the south
of Greece, around the reed beds of the river Eurotas, lay the city-state of Sparta. The Spartans were
brought up from birth to be soldiers, raised in the field, separated from their families, their lives structured
around discipline and war.
Paul Cartledge: “The center of an average Spartan man’s life was his barracks, and he was brought up
to be a military man.”
The Spartans lived a life stripped of comforts, with few possessions, and their cloaks, dyed red to conceal
their or their victim’s blood.
Paul Cartledge: “Spartans were brought up to put up with anything, and all sorts of stories, the best
being of a visiting sybarite, visiting Sparta, eating the local food, and saying, now he understood why the
Spartans were so willing to die, because death was as nothing to eating their food.”
The Spartans were ruthless expansionists. By Cleisthenes’ time, they had conquered all of the
surrounding regions, more than four thousand square miles, and they had reduced these conquered
populations to a slave labor class, known as the helots. The helots were forced to work in the fields for
their Spartan overlords, and they were ruled by an iron fist.
Paul Cartledge: “The Spartans every year declared war on the helots, and the point of this, of course,
was partly to reinforce their sense of identity as a warrior community, but also, rather calculatingly, to
make it legitimate to kill a helot. And helot culling, as opposed to killing, was a regular practice.”
If there was any part of Cleisthenes’ Greece that looked likely to build an empire, it was Sparta. For the
rest of the Greeks, they were a threat, always on the horizon.
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17:40 – The Importance of Homer and the Heroic Ideal
This was the world of Cleisthenes’ childhood. Brought up a member of a self-interested elite, in a state
that was only a third-rate power, it was an unlikely beginning for the man who would set Greece on the
path to empire. But then Cleisthenes had always been a man fired by a dream, the uniquely Greek vision
of the greatness a man could achieve.
If there was one thing that inspired Cleisthenes and his fellow Greeks, it was their stories, ancient tales
and myths. The country was continually criss-crossed by hundreds of traveling bards, who recited these
stories to whoever would pay. These were people who, in an age without writing, had memorized over a
million lines of poetry
Edith Hall: “It’s very easy to underestimate the power of the human memory when we live in a culture
like ours that has so many means of recording things. Before the Greeks got the alphabet, they seem to
have been able to remember vast tracts of poetry, and pass it on over the generations, in a quite
remarkable way.”
These traveling bards would have regularly visited the Athens of Cleisthenes’ childhood, and their stories
would have influenced and shaped him from his earliest days. The most famous tales these singers told
are still preserved, the Iliad and the Odyssey. Composed by the legendary poet Homer, these works tell of
mighty battles and epic struggles, and at their heart lie the heroes, mythical figures whose strength had
won them power and glory.
Paul Cartledge: “Heroes, almost by definition, were doers of great deeds. The more heads you knocked,
and the more young women you deflowered, the greater your heroic status.”
Images of heroes are found all over Greek art. These warlike figures, valiant, beautiful, determined to
seize victory at all costs, were the Greek ideal.
Paul Cartledge: “The heroic ideal was absolutely central, for the whole world of Greek culture. Heroes
were terrific achievers, and one might hope to achieve heroic status by modeling oneself on the deeds of,
for example, Achilles.”
Achilles was the archetypal Greek hero. As a child, he had been offered the choice between a long,
ordinary life or a brief burst of glory on the battlefield. Achilles’ choice meant an early death, and an
eternal fame. This, the vision of a hero, the ideal of the man of action, was the model that Cleisthenes
was brought up to follow. To pursue a life of greatness and glory, won through strength and valor, to
seize power and victory for himself, and himself alone, to become a real life hero.
23:00 – Pisistratus and the Emergence of Athens
But Cleisthenes was not the only one to take the tales of the mythical heroes to heart.
Josiah Ober: “There’s a big change in the middle of the sixth century, when one man seizes control of
the government as, what the Greeks call, a tyrant.”
The story of how this tyrant, or sole ruler, came to power has been preserved by the historian Herodotus.
One day, a man of dignified and noble bearing rode into the city of Athens. Beside him stood a tall and
beautiful woman, a woman he claimed was the patron goddess of Athens, Athena. This dashing figure
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demanded that he be given the rule of Athens, for like one of Homer’s heroes, he had the protection of a
goddess. Surprisingly, he was welcomed by the Athenians as their new ruler, despite the fact that the
goddess was simply a particularly tall girl from a neighboring village. The heroic figure was an ordinary
man called Pisistratus, Cleisthenes’ own brother-in-law.
Keith Hopwood: “Pisistratus was, I think, an excellent politician. He was a man without doubt with an
eye for the main chance.”
But as he consolidated his rule, it became clear that Pisistratus had far greater ambitions than simply
gaining power.
Josiah Ober: “Pisistratus was an extremely intelligent man. He clearly understood that if he was going
to maintain control of Athens, if he was going to be able to consolidate his rule and pass it on to his sons,
which is clearly his ambition, he would have to find allies.”
Pisistratus took an extraordinary step. He turned to the common Athenians for support, undermining the
whole hierarchy of aristocrats and commoners that had endured for centuries. Pisistratus reduced taxes
and introduced free loans to allow the people to build up their farms. And by offering the Athenians the
chance for prosperity, Pisistratus began to transform his city.
Victor Davis Hanson: “With the rise of Pisistratus, we start to see the success of agrarianism
accelerated in Athens, and that’s going to be a kernel that’s going to grow and grow and grow in the
ensuing two centuries. And one of the results of that is that we see more vines and olives. Olive trees
manifest themselves in every aspect of Greek culture. Economically they allow a people to have cooking
oil, they allow people to eat olives, they allow people to use lubricants, soap, fuel, so it’s a valuable
economic commodity.”
The land around Athens produced excellent olives, the best in the Greek world. As production soared, the
Athenians found a ready market for this oil. Not only in the other Greek states, but across the sea, in
Egypt, and Phoenicia, Persia, and Assyria. For Athens was ideally situated to export to the entire eastern
Mediterranean.
Paul Cartledge: “Greece is in the middle of an extraordinary grouping of ancient civilizations. It’s
bounded on the east by the great Persian Empire, on the south by the age-old civilization of Egypt, on the
west, the Etruscans and the Romans. Greeks were scattered. Plato has a rather nice phrase, ‘like ants or
frogs round the pond.’”
The eastern Mediterranean was the greatest marketplace of the ancient world. It seemed that everyone
had something to sell. Grain from Scythia, swordfish from the Black Sea, wine from the great vineyards
of the island of Chios, gold, silver, art and finery from Egypt, and everyone was willing to trade for
Athenian olive oil. As goods flowed in and out of the Athenian harbor, the Athenians found their wealth
and prosperity on the rise. But the most astonishing consequence of Athens’ sudden expansion was to be
found in the darkest streets of the city. Athens’ first great artistic legacy, the vase.
Nigel Spivery: “For what I think is fascinating about the pottery is that in its own time it wasn’t a big
deal artistically. What was inside the pots was almost invariably worth more than the pot itself.”
Here in the area known as the Keramicos, ancient Athens’ red light district, could also be found the
potters’ workshops. These common artisans were amongst the lowest of the low in Athenian society.
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Nigel Spivey: “If you were a potter in Athenian society, I wouldn’t say you were the scum of the earth,
but you certainly had no especial respect. It was hard, incessant work, unenvied by the citizen
population.”
Pottery had been a staple across the Mediterranean world for hundreds of years, used in the kitchen at
home, and for transporting oils and food. But it had always been simple in design, using geometric
patterns and basic figures, designs based on Egyptian and Assyrian art. But Athenian potters, as they
decorated their work, began to develop a whole new style of painting, a freshness and a naturalism never
before seen, a style that is still astonishing today.
Nigel Spivey: “It’s now become almost commonplace for a Greek vase on the modern antiquities market
to fetch millions of dollars or pounds. And if the makers of those vases had any idea of what we were
shelling out for them, their graves would spin with either resentment or just absolute hilarity.”
These Athenian potters seem to have been motivated not by the idea of producing great art for eternity,
but of outdoing each other. On one particularly fine vase, we find the proud comment, “Euthymdes, son
of Polias, drew this.” And then underneath, “And I bet Euphronios couldn’t have managed it.”
For the first time in their history, the ordinary Athenians had tasted freedom, and they had shown their
capacity for extraordinary achievement.
32:00 – The Tyranny of Hippias
Cleisthenes grew to manhood under Pisistratus’ rule, and he saw how Athens changed. His home had
turned from a more or less rural settlement into an international economic power.
But Pisistratus’ rule of benevolent tyranny was not to last forever. In the year 527 BC, he died and was
laid to rest here, in the Athenian graveyard. His son, Hippias, took over. At first Hippias followed in his
father’s footsteps, ruling Athens with a fair hand. But soon the Athenians discovered the perilous nature
of tyranny. Historians tell us that, in the year 514 BC, Hippias’ brother was murdered. Aggrieved and
bitter, the tyrant’s behavior completely changed. Hippias not only executed the murderers, but cruelly
tortured one of their wives to death as well. Aristotle described the ruler’s slide toward madness: “After
this, the tyranny became much, much harsher, for Hippias ordered numerous executions and sentences of
exile in revenge for his brother, and he became embittered and suspicious of everybody.”
The freedoms the common Athenians had gained under Pisistratus were now stripped away.
Keith Hopwood: “There was now a real tyranny in the modern sense in Athens. Pisistratus had come
into power for a cause. His son now had no cause other than self-preservation.”
Life for Cleisthenes had now become increasingly dangerous. For the paranoid dictator knew that it was
from here, from the aristocrats, that the greatest threat to his power could come. And Hippias’ fears
would be proved right.
Keith Hopwood: “With the hardening of the attitude of the tyranny, the time now seemed to be ripe.”
Cleisthenes decided to take his first great gamble. He would try to overthrow Hippias, to gain power for
himself and his family.
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Keith Hopwood: “Cleisthenes’ ambition to make his mark upon the scene is something that of course
would have been impressed on him from a very early age, in the stories of the heroes, of their need to
succeed, and to strike at the right time. For Cleisthenes himself it would be an achievement.”
Cleisthenes assembled a conspiracy to overthrow the tyrant. Hippias was trapped in his stronghold,
captured, and banished from Athens forever. The year was 520 BC. Cleisthenes was now one of the
most powerful figures in Athens. He had lived up to the heroic myths he’d been brought up to follow
since childhood. But Greek society was changing. The heroic urge that drove Cleisthenes was no longer
reserved for the elite. It was now permeating every level of Greek society.
37:20 – The Olympics and the Heroic Ideal
This is Olympia, in southern Greece. Here, once every four years, men from across the Greek world
would gather to compete in a vast contest of athletic skill. This was the ancestor of the modern Olympic
games. For the ancient travel writer Pausanias, the Olympics were the highlight of any visit to Greece.
“Many are the sights to be seen in Greece, and many are the wonders to be heard, but on nothing does
heaven bestow more care than the Olympic games.” The Olympic games were founded in 776 BC, two
centuries before Cleisthenes had even been born. Then they had been an exclusive competition for the
wealthiest of the Greeks. But by Cleisthenes’ time, the games had evolved to allow anyone to take part.
A nobleman now could race against a potter, a king against a fishmonger.
Paul Cartledge: “The Olympic games were a chance for any Greeks to display the sort of heroic
qualities that the heroes of Homer had displayed.”
The competitions had their roots in the skills required on the ancient battlefield. Chariot racing, running,
wrestling, boxing. But here there was no real prize, just a wreath of olives, and fame throughout Greece.
Paul Cartledge: “A competitor would be surrounded by the largest gathering of Greeks in peace that he
would ever experience. Perhaps as many as 40,000 Greeks would gather for the Olympic games.”
Greeks would travel hundreds of miles to attend the Olympics, and during the festival, the land
surrounding the stadiums would be covered with encampments. But the games were very much a male
experience. Women were prohibited from entering the competitions, or even the stadium. But for the
Greek man, whatever his origin or class, to win here would be the highlight of his life.
Paul Cartledge: “You had briefly, a moment of glory, of extreme fame, which was what the competitive
culture of the Greeks valued so highly.”
Here the Greeks had perhaps found a civilized way to satisfy the heroic ideal. They had built a
meritocracy based on skill and ability, where anyone could win.
41:00 – Isagoras and the Exile of Cleisthenes
But a world where anyone could seize victory could only make Athens even more unstable. As soon as
Cleisthenes gained power, he found that others were conspiring against him. Here heroism still meant
one thing: seize power, whenever and however you can.
Keith Hopwood: “The only rule is that you get what you can, and that you fight. You have to go in there
and show that you can win.”
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The most ambitious of those conspiring against Cleisthenes was a man named Isagoras. Isagoras was
another Athenian aristocrat. He too had been brought up to believe that power was his right. But
Isagoras also knew that he could not gain power on his own. Isagoras took an unprecedented step: he
turned outside Athens for support. He sent a message to the Spartans, Greece’s most feared warriors.
Isagoras was an old friend of the Spartans. Rumor had it that he had shared his wife with the Spartan
king. The Spartans immediately provided a force of their finest troops to back up Isagoras’s bid for
power, to help him betray his city.
Josiah Ober: “Isagoras really was upping the stakes. He brought in the most powerful state in Greece.
It was pretty clear he was going to turn Athens into a subject state to Sparta.”
With his Spartan force, Isagoras staged a coup, seizing control of Athens. He and his troops would rule
from the high point of the city, the stronghold atop the Acropolis. The first targets of the new tyrants
were the other aristocrats, Cleisthenes most of all. Over 700 households were cast out of Athens,
including Cleisthenes and his entire family. Clesithenes would leave his city, living once again under the
hand of a despotic dictator, a dictator who now ruled with the support of the most fearsome power in
Greece, the Spartans. For Cleisthenes, all his childhood lessons seemed betrayed. He had been brought
up to be an aristocrat and a ruler, to emulate the mythical heroes, but all this had led to was conflict and
feuding, death and exile, power struggles amongst an aristocratic elite. How could Athens ever escape
from this pointless cycle of violence?
45:30 – Popular Uprising and Democratic Reform in Athens, 508 BC
But even as Cleisthenes agonized in exile, Athens was rocked by an extraordinary event. Like their
mythical heroes, the ordinary people of Athens now took their destiny into their own hands. They rose up
in revolution. Isagoras and his Spartan allies blockaded themselves atop the Acropolis, the high point of
the city. But even there they could not escape the fury of the common Athenians. For two days and two
nights, Isagoras held out against this extraordinary uprising, until finally on the morning of the third day,
he was forced to surrender.
The year was 508 BC. This would be Athens’ first step toward empire and glory. For the first time in
recorded history, the people had turned on their rulers and seized power for themselves.
Josiah Ober: “Athens at this point is in the control of the mob, the ordinary people who had risen up
without organized leadership. And then the question is: what happens now?
At this new dawn, the Athenian people now turned to one man, a figure whose life, whose experiences
and disappointments had given him a unique vision. Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to
build a government.
Josiah Ober: “When Cleisthenes returned to Athens after the expulsion of the Spartans, he faced a really
remarkable challenge. There was no possibility for just simply putting back in power a group of
aristocrats. There was no possibility for him to declare himself tyrant. In a sense, what Cleisthenes had
to do is design a revolutionary governmental solution for a revolutionary political situation.”
For Cleisthenes, the problem was how to give his fellow Athenians the say in their future that he knew
they now must have. On an Athenian hillside, he had a great meeting place carved out from the bare
rock. Here, in the shadow of the Acropolis, the citizens of Athens could now gather to discuss the future
of their state. On these very steps, rich and poor alike could stand and address their fellow citizens. This
is the ancestor of the British House of Commons, the American Congress, of parliaments across the
world. And where government had once been decided by the strength of a sword arm, or the thrust of a
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sharpened spear, Cleisthenes instituted the simple vote. A white pebble for yes, a black pebble for no.
And with this simple and elegant idea, Cleisthenes instituted the rule of the people, a system of
government which we now know as democracy. The great Athenian assembly would gather every nine
days on issues covering the entire administration of the state, from the raising of taxes to the building of
roads, from the price of figs to the declaration of war.
Paul Cartledge: “Athenian democracy is a very different sort of democracy from ours. One has a sense
as an Athenian citizen that you really can make a difference. There is no us and them, there is no
government separate from the ordinary Athenian citizen body. They are the government. Democracy
represented a sharp break, and originally an elitist, heroic culture was now turned on its head, and the
idea was that even ordinary Greeks who were not aristocratic, who were not rich, could be, as it were,
heroes in politics.”
It was a system of government that would transform this tiny state, and would set off one of the greatest
flowerings of civilization that world has ever seen.
The Athenians would take what had been the greatest achievements of the ancient world and transform
them. They would take the monumental pyramids and temples of the Egyptian pharaohs and with them
build an architecture of grace and splendor. They would take the myths and tales of the traveling bards
and transform them into theater, entertainment for a whole city. And the great stone sculptures of Assyria
and Egypt would be remade with an intimacy and emotion that still touches us today.
But just as Cleisthenes’ democracy was gaining strength, a new threat was gathering in the east, the
mighty Persian Empire. The Persians were the greatest power of the day. They ruled an empire that
stretched from India to the Mediterranean. But as Athens had grown in power and confidence, the
Persians realized that this tiny state on their eastern border might soon pose a threat. They mobilized a
force of 30,000 men to invade Greece immediately. Cleisthenes’ democracy, hardly born, was now to
face its greatest test
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PBS Empires Video – “The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Episode Two – “The Golden Age”
Written and Directed by Cassian Harrison, 1999
0:00 – Episode Introduction
Greece. The year 490 BC. Here a revolution has begun that will change the world. In a moment of chaos
and anarchy, the people of a tiny state named Athens have seized control of their city, and established
democracy for the first time in history. But now this tiny state will face a greater challenge. Athens will
be pitted against the greatest power of the day, the tyrannical Persian Empire. In a contest spread across
land and sea, that will last over a decade, Athenian democracy will be tested in the crucible of war. This
is the story of an extraordinary moment in history, and of two men who will change the course of
civilization. Themistocles, the military genius of the ancient world. And Pericles, a visionary whose
legacy still shapes the world today. This is the story of the Greeks.
1:45 – The Battle of Marathon, 490 BC
490 BC. A lone figure runs across the mountainous terrain of Greece. His name is Pheidippides, citizen
of a tiny democracy named Athens. On this day, Pheidippides will make one of the most astonishing
athletic feats in history, the inspiration for our modern marathon. But Pheidippides’ quest is not for glory,
but survival. His homeland is about to be conquered by the mighty Persian Empire. In the early fifth
century BC, the Persians were the greatest power on the world stage. Their vast empire stretched from
India in the east, to Turkey in the west. Now, out on their western frontier, the tiny state of democratic
Athens was gaining power. This was a threat the Persians would have to destroy. The Persians lived in a
culture of unbending tyranny. At the head of their empire sat Darius, known to the Greeks only as The
Great King. Suppliants had to cover their mouths in his presence just to avoid tainting the air he breathed.
For Pheidippides and the democratic Athenians, conquest by Darius and the Persians would mean the
destruction of their entire way of life.
Barry Strauss: “There is a huge cultural difference between the Greeks and the Persians. The Greeks
are a people who emphasize freedom. The Persians would put far more emphasis on obedience. It is a
struggle between freedom and slavery.”
The Persian force landed at a sandy bay called Marathon, just 26 miles from Athens. News of the
invasion spread through the streets like wildfire. This was a city without a standing army. Every male
citizen would have to come to defense of his state. The poorer citizens have spears, stakes, bows and
arrows, whatever weapons they can find. But the heart of the Athenian force would be the hoplites, men
who could afford heavy bronze armor, a shield, a spear, a sword. The Athenians would field a small but
determined force.
Victor David Hanson: “That’s probably the first time in the history of the Athenian state that the entire
population had been mustered, and for them to field 10,000 hoplites, out of a citizenry that might have
been only 20 or 30,000, is a level of involvement that’s astounding.”
But as they faced the Persians on the battlefield, the Athenians held out little hope of victory. They were
outnumbered by two to one. Pheidippides’ desperate mission was to run for help from one of Athens’
local rivals, the Greek state of Sparta. Even as he ran, Pheidippides must have imagined the horror that
his fellow Athenians now faced.
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Barry Strauss: “You’re dodging spears from men in your front, and your men behind. You probably
couldn’t see or hear. All you would feel would be pressure. You wouldn’t see the sword plunge that took
one of your testicles off. You wouldn’t see the spear thrust that took your head off. You would have no
idea what was going on, just the momentum that carried you ahead. All that you would be aware of is
that you had to push forward and keep stabbing and keep on your feet, and you would hope that
everybody else would do that.”
Pheidippides’ run was to become the stuff of legend. Fired by the terror that his fellow citizens were
being slaughtered, he ran 140 miles in just two days. But Pheidippides’ quest would end in failure. Help
would be refused. He was left only with the knowledge that his fellow Athenians would have to fight
alone. Pheidippides could never have imagined that the Greeks would in fact have won a glorious
victory. The Athenians had rushed at their foe in a headlong charge. And the Persians had scattered in
the face of their assault. The Athenians slaughtered over 6,000 Persians in one fateful day. The world’s
first democracy had survived its first great test.
Victor Davis Hanson: “Every Athenian knew that he had voted to fight and that this reflected the
majority vote of the citizens, and that this was not true of the Persians. Whatever you want to say about
democracy, it fields the most patriotic , enthusiastic, and often large armies.”
9:50 – Themistocles and the Construction of the Athenian Fleet
The Athenians returned to their city to celebrate their victory. But amongst them was one for whom the
war with Persia had only just begun, an Athenian general named Themistocles. Themistocles had fought
on the battlefield at Marathon. He was typical of a new generation of Athenian leaders, a man who had
risen to power through democracy.
Barry Strauss: “Themistocles is a fascinating character, very much an example of the effect of
democracy in Athens. It’s relatively clear that he doesn’t come from the inner circle of the landed
aristocracy that traditionally ruled in Athens.”
Tony Podlecki: “There were stories told about his feeling rather touchy about the fact that he hadn’t had
a traditional aristocratic upbringing, for example, in music and poetry, and that might have even given
him a spur to show that he could do as well as someone would had gone to all the right schools, as it
were.”
Themistocles’ opinion of his common origins was blunt and straightforward: “I may not know how to play
the lyre of flute, but I do know how to make a city great.” Themistocles had learned the skills of
leadership here, the democratic assembly of Athens. Here, any Athenian could stand before his fellow
citizens and try to convince them to follow his leadership. From this very podium, Themistocles would
now show himself to be one of history’s greatest leaders, the savior of his city. For Themistocles alone
recognized that the Persians might still be a danger, and that next time victory for the Athenians might not
prove so easy.
Tony Podlecki: “Themistocles realized that the Persians, if they came again, it would be in a way that
made sure that they weren’t going to be defeated by land again. There was no way that the Athenians
could rely on traditional hoplite fighting techniques.”
Themistocles began to form a bold new strategy, employing the most advanced weapon of the day, the
trireme. Triremes had been developed by the Greek state of Corinth, the ancient world’s finest
shipbuilders. Stacking 170 oarsmen on three levels, their combination of light weight and raw power
gave them astonishing and maneuverability. There was nothing else like them on the water.
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Barry Strauss: “In contemporary terms, a trireme is a missile. The object of a trireme is to ram the
enemy ship. It is a very narrow, very light, very sleek, very fast weapon.”
But these triremes were also exceedingly expensive. Themistocles’ vision of a vast Athenian navy might
never have come to pass if it had not been for one stroke of luck. In the year 483 BC, the Athenians
discovered a great vein of silver in their territory, worth a hundred talents, a vast amount in the ancient
world. The Athenians wanted to divide these new found riches among themselves. But then
Themistocles stood up in the Assembly. He wanted to spend the money on ships. But he also knew that
this would be a hard proposal to sell. And so Themistocles played a complex bluff.
Barry Strauss: “His argument is not that the money should be used to build a fleet against Persia. But
rather it should be used to build a fleet against Athens’ local rival, the Greek city-state of Aegina. The
reason Themistocles does this is that he knew it would simply be too upsetting to remind people of the
Persian threat. It’s a difficult argument to make, and a tribute to his political skills that he’s able to do
it.”
Themistocles convinced the Athenians to build the greatest naval force in Greece. And not a moment too
soon.
15:20 – The Persian Invasion and Themistocles’ Strategy
The great Persian king Darius died in 486 BC, and his son Xerxes assumed his father’s throne. Xerxes’
first action was to vow vengeance for his father’s defeat at the hands of the Athenians. Xerxes: “On my
father’s behalf, and on behalf of all my subjects, I will not rest until I have taken Athens and burnt it to
the ground.”
Barry Strauss: “As an imperial power, the Persians cannot allow regional states like this to beat them
with impunity.”
Xerxes began to gather his forces. He conscripted troops from every corner of his empire. Arabians,
Egyptians, Phoenicians, as well as Persians. Rumors began to leak back to Athens, that Xerxes’ army
numbered nearly two million men, that it was the greatest force the world had ever seen, that soon it
would be ready to march. And then finally in the spring of 480 BC, news reached Athens: the Persian
army had set out for Greece. History records that Xerxes’ troops drank rivers dry, trampled fields to the
raw earth, ravaging the land as they marched on toward Greece. Xerxes was confident of victory: “We
shall so extend the empire of Persia that its boundaries will be god’s own sky, so that the sun will not look
on any land that is not ours.”
When the Greeks realized that the Persians were invading again, terror gripped the whole country. For
the Athenians, who knew that they would be Xerxes’ first target, it seemed that this could only be the end.
As panic gripped the city, they turned desperately to their gods. They sent a messenger to the oracle to
find out their fate. Here, high in the Greek mountains can still be found the site of Delphi, the most
famous of the Greek oracles. Built around a vast chasm in the mountain from which a sacred spring still
flows. Here the Greeks would come to discover their future. They would ask questions of the Pythia, the
mysterious priestess who spoke with a voice of the god Apollo.
Helen King: “People came from all over the Greek world to consult Delphi, and sometimes came from
outside the Greek world as well. It was considered that the center of the universe, the omphalos, the
navel stone of the whole world was at Delphi. People asked questions about their private life, which are
just the sort of questions people want answers to now.”
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Archaeologists have discovered copies of the questions asked of these ancient oracles: “Has Aristos stolen
the wool from the mattress?” “Hermion asks, ‘What should I do to have useful children?’” But as the
Athenians walked up this path two and half thousand years ago, their question was simple and grave:
What could they do to save themselves? The oracle’s response could not have been more negative: “Why
sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the end of the earth. All is ruin, for fire and the headlong god of war shall
bring you low.” When this message came back to Athens, the democratic assembly dissolved into uproar.
It seemed that even the gods had deserted them. But Themistocles refused to panic. He had spent every
day since the battle of Marathon waiting for this moment. He sent the envoys back to Delphi for a second
prophecy. “Though all else will be taken, Zeus grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail.”
Argument raged as what this wooden wall could be. Some said that it meant the stronghold at the center
of Athens, the Acropolis, but Themistocles had a different idea.
Tony Podlecki: “He read the oracle and he understood that it had a different interpretation. He said the
ships are the wooden barricade which are going to be the key to our success.”
Themistocles’ plan was daring. Avoid a conflict on land, and fight the Persians at sea. He ordered the
evacuation of Athens for the first time in her history. This order for evacuation, carved into a stone tablet
for public display, is still preserved, discovered in the back of a Greek coffeehouse: “The Athenians shall
send their children and wives to the village of Troezen. All the men should embark on the two hundred
ships that have been prepared to fight the barbarian.” Themistocles ordered that his fleet of triremes
should gather at Salamis, a tiny island off the Athenian coast.
Barry Strauss: “Themistocles’ strategy is remarkable, not only because it is innovative and because it is
bold, but because it requires an extraordinary self-sacrifice on the part of the Athenian people. He wants
every man, woman and child to leave their homes and possessions and to go into exile.”
23:00 – The Battle of Salamis, 480 BC
With Athens abandoned, Xerxes’ mighty force entered the city.
Barry Strauss: “The Persians march in and go onto the Athenian Acropolis, the symbol of Athens. And
they burn it. They burn the temples to the ground—then you can see the smoke rising from Salamis. This
would have been a devastating sight, and a humiliating one. They would have seen their country
occupied by a fearsome foreign invader. Surely they would have wondered if they would ever be able to
go home again.”
As night fell, Themistocles met the leaders of the other Greek city-states on the island of Salamis. They
had also assembled their much smaller fleets here. Their scouts reported back: the Persians now no
longer held Athens, but had also gathered a mighty fleet four times the size of the Greek forces. But
Themistocles’ plans were laid.
Barry Strauss: “Themistocles sticks to his guns and his plan is to defeat the Persians at sea. He wants to
fight in this narrow body of water between the island of Salamis and the Athenian mainland. The trick is
going to be to get the enemy to fight there, because the Persians aren’t stupid.”
Themistocles sent his servant to Xerxes with a seemingly traitorous message: “The Greeks are afraid, and
are planning to slip away. They are squabbling with each other, and will offer no opposition, You have
at this moment an opportunity of unparalleled success.” So eager was Xerxes for a crushing victory, he
was happy to believe Themistocles’ ploy.
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Barry Strauss: “Xerxes marshals his admirals, and they embark, and they spend the night rowing. They
sent a contingent along the eastern defile, the strait there. They try to block up the straits.”
Only as the dawn rose did the Persians realize the true nature of Themistocles’ plan. They discovered the
Greeks not in disarray, but arranged in a battle line across the narrows in front of them. The Persian fleet
had been lured so far up the straits that it had no room to maneuver. Powerful Greek triremes bore down
on them without mercy. The Greek playwright Aeschylus took part in the battle and lived to tell the tale.
“We heard from every part this voice of exultation. ‘Advance, ye sons of Greece. From slavery save your
country. Save your wives, your children save. This day the common cause of all demands your valor.’”
The Greek forces smashed into the cornered Persian fleet. Xerxes himself watched the carnage from his
golden throne placed on the shore. At the end of the battle, the Persians had lost two hundred ships. For
the Greeks it was a stunning and conclusive victory.
Barry Strauss: “Victory at Salamis is tremendously important for the Greeks and the Athenians. It
breaks the Persian navy. The Persians can no longer guarantee that they can feed their army, nor can
they guarantee the safety of the Persian king. He must immediately get back to Asia Minor while the
going is good. In practical terms, the game is over, and the Greeks have won.”
Themistocles’ triumph is complete. He had persuaded the Athenians to build a navy. He had convinced
them to sacrifice their entire city, to bring them victory at sea. His instincts had been proved right. He
had defeated the greatest empire of the day. And he had now placed Athens in position where she could
build an empire of her own.
29:00 – The Athenian Empire and the Ostracism of Themistocles
After the years of conflict, this was a new dawn for Athens. Flush with victory, equipped with the largest
fleet in the eastern Mediterranean, the tiny democracy began to grow.
Barry Strauss: “The Athenians are going to have naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean, and
that is how great their victory over the Persian fleet is. And this has a momentum of its own. Before you
know it, the Athenians are the head of a naval confederacy, and they’re on the road to becoming a
superpower.”
The Athenians founded the Delian League, an alliance of Greek states designed to keep the Persians in
check. Its treasury was located here, on the island of Delos. The ruins still remain. By 450 BC, this
league had more than two hundred member states, but Athens was the undisputed leader. The Delian
League had become Athens’ empire in all but name. But Athens’ naval supremacy also gave her
economic power. She became a city at the center of a vast trading network. Goods from all over the
Mediterranean flooded into her harbors.
Barry Strauss: “In its heyday, Athens was ‘The Big Apple,’ or, if you will, ‘The Big Olive.’ of the eastern
Mediterranean. Constant coming and going of traders. The wharves would be busy, full of people and a
cacophony of language.”
One contemporary author gave an account of the diversity of goods in the Athenian marketplace: “From
Cyrenia, foxhounds. From the Hellespont, mackerel and all kinds of salted fish. Libya provides
abundant ivory. Pagasei provides tattooed slaves. Carthage, rugs and many-colored cushions.”
Donald Kagan: “The Athenian empire was unprecedented in the degree of prosperity that came to it
because of its role as a center of trade. The Athenians had access to a quality of life that probably no
Greek had ever had before.”
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Athens’ rise to economic and political supremacy occurred at lightning speed. After the Battle of
Salamis, she became the dominant power in the eastern Mediterranean in less than a generation. And at
the city’s heart still lay her unique system of government: democracy. The system of voting using
pebbles, olive leaves, or a show of hands that decided every aspect of the city’s government.
Donald Kagan: “Democracy gave the Athenians a great advantage of unleashing talents, powers,
opportunities that other cultures simply cannot match.”
The Athenians keenly protected their democracy from any threat, foreign or domestic. Once a year, any
Athenian could scratch the name of an individual onto a shard of pottery known as an ostrakon, and place
it into a pot in the Assembly. The person whose name came up most would then be ostracized, banished
from the city. This was the Athenians’ method of protecting their government, expelling any person they
felt might become too powerful. But Athenian democracy could turn on any citizen, even its greatest war
hero. Themistocles now found himself under attack.
Tony Podlecki: “The threat was gone now. His raison d’être has been been taken away. This is
something he cannot understand. Themistocles reacts, perhaps in an uncharacteristically crude way. He
reminded the Athenian voters of what they owed him. Voters don’t want to be reminded in any period of
what they owe to their politicians. They want to be told what their politicians can do for them.”
The Athenian people turned on the aging politician. Calculated, cruel, but deeply democratic, they
ostracized the man who had led them to their greatest victory.
Josiah Ober: “Themistocles was ostracized, I believe, because he was simply regarded as having gotten
too big for his boots.”
Some of the ostraka with Themistocles’ name still inscribed upon them have been found, hidden down an
ancient well. Archaeologists believe that these had been prepared by Themistocles’ enemies, to be
handed out to Athenian voters who couldn’t write. Themistocles never recovered from this humiliation.
He was to spend the rest of his years wandering from state to state, finally dying in exile in Persia, the
country whose defeat had been his greatest triumph.
36:30 – Pericles and the Golden Age of Athens
The Athenians were now looking for a leader who might fulfill their new-found sense of imperial glory.
They found a man who seemed the perfect reflection of this new ideal, a man who would change the face
of Athens forever, a man named Pericles.
Donald Kagan: “There’s probably not a more important figure in the history of Classical Greece than
Pericles. He was the leader of Athens at the height of its power and of its artistic achievement. He was
the figure associated appropriately with bringing Athenian democracy to its climax, to its height.”
But Pericles was no obvious democrat like Themistocles. For he had been born into one of Athens’ most
elite families.
Donald Kagan: “No one had bluer blood than Pericles. His father was a famous and successful general.
His mother came from one of the most distinguished political families. Pericles was born with
advantages and eminence that Themistocles lacked.”
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And perhaps because of his aristocratic origins, Pericles knew what the people of Athens now wanted: a
city fit to rule an empire.
Donald Kagan: “It seems clear that what Pericles had in mind was to create a city whose greatness
would be admired by the people who lived there, by everybody else in the Greek world, well into the
future.”
Pericles announced a glorious new vision to the Athenian Assembly: “All kinds of enterprises should be
created which will provide inspiration for every art, find employment for every hand. We must devote
ourselves to acquiring things that will be the source of everlasting fame.” Pericles turned his attention to
the Acropolis, the sheer peak in the center of Athens, home of the city’s patron goddess, Athena. Twenty
years earlier, the Persians had burnt down the temples that stood here. Ever since, the Athenians had left
these ruins untouched, as a memorial to those killed in the war. But Pericles had other ideas. He
proposed a massive reconstruction plan. At its center would be a new Parthenon, a temple to Athena, and
it would be one of the most astonishing buildings of the ancient world.
Donald Kagan: “This new construction program was of unprecedented magnitude and expense. The
Parthenon in particular was extraordinarily expensive. It was filled with all sorts of architectural
refinements.”
Pericles planned to spend over five thousand talents in the first year alone, a total of more than a billion
dollars in today’s terms. His project would require 20,000 tons of marble. The quarries at Mount
Pantelicus resounded as hundreds of workmen traced and carved great blocks of marble out of the
mountain. This temple would be decorated like none before. Sculptors and craftsmen were gathered
from all over the Greek world. With them stood Pericles, for he treated the building of the Parthenon as
his own personal project.
Donald Kagan: “He selected architects, he selected the men who designed the plans. Pericles was
directly involved in the planning process.”
Some protested that he was decking out the city like a prostitute. But when the building was completed,
in only fifteen years, his critics were silenced. The Parthenon was and still is the most glorious symbol of
Athens’ empire. Here was the spiritual heart of the city, the mark of her wealth, power, and artistic
genius.
Donald Kagan: “When you first came through the door, you would have been just stunned. You’d have
been confronted immediately by an enormous, forty foot high statue of Athena, in gold and ivory and
studded with jewels. I think the impression of the statue of that size and with that kind of dressing must
have been truly overwhelming.”
Pericles had embellished his temple like no other. Though this astonishing statue has since been lost to
history, other treasures from the Parthenon have survived for over two thousand years. Most famous is
the Parthenon frieze, a five hundred foot long stretch of carved marble which ran around the inner wall of
the temple. The Parthenon frieze is only two and half inches thick at its maximum depth, and yet in this
space the sculptors carved rank upon rank of crowded figures, a great procession of Athenians glorious
and elegant. Her Pericles offered his fellow citizens a vision of themselves and their democratic state at
the height of their glory.
Nigel Spivery: “Democracy itself becomes heroized in that monument. It’s a very democratic thing that
wants to include all those citizens who participated in beating off the first great threat to democracy,
which was from Persians. These are ideals to which you can aspire.”
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The monuments that Pericles built for his fellow Athenians still stand on the peak of the Acropolis. They
remain the most striking legacy of Classical Athens, of one of the great empires of the ancient world.
20,000 tons of perfectly proportioned marble, carved to sub-millimeter accuracy. The entire design of the
Parthenon is subtly designed to compensate for optical distortion. There isn’t actually a single right angle
in the entire temple. Pillars swell, the floor is curved, all to give the appearance of perfection. It is an
astonishing testament to the achievements of Athenian democracy.
48:00 – Intellectual Life in Athens in the Golden Age
But Pericles was not simply concerned with astonishing construction projects. Under his leadership,
Athens would also become the intellectual center of the ancient world. The traditional center of Athenian
upper class life had always been the symposium, or dinner party, where guests would gather to eat, drink,
and talk. In these years, Pericles played host to an astonishing generation of individuals, figures whose
achievements would shape Western Civilization.
Donald Kagan: “Pericles was remarkable in that he associated with the leading minds of his day in just
about every field of endeavor.”
Pericles was acquainted with the world’s first scientists, figures such as Anaxagoras, the first man to
realize that the moon was lit by reflected sunlight. He knew Herodotus, the world’s first historian, who
wrote one of the earliest records of Greek life, and poets and authors such as Aeschylus and Euripides,
whose works are still standards of world literature. Pericles was well aware of his city’s stature: “Our
whole city is an education, for our citizens excel all men in versatility, resourcefulness, and brilliance.”
Even Pericles’ partner, a woman named Aspasia, was unique and distinguished. Pericles had divorced his
wife and set up home with a foreign woman, a woman whose occupation was hardly to be expected. For
Aspasia was what was known as an hetaira, Greek for a companion.
Donald Kagan: “Yes, she was, in a technical sense I guess, a prostitute, but she was more than that: a
woman of charm, of style, of intellect. She really was very extraordinary. She had an extraordinary
mind.”
This relationship caused scandal throughout Athena, not just because of Aspasia’s profession, but because
Pericles treated her as an equal, something deeply unusual in fifth century Athens.
Donald Kagan: “One of the things that created such a stir was that Pericles had her participate in
conversations that he had with some of the most important individuals with whom he talked. There are
jokes to suggest that Aspasia was the person who wrote Pericles’ speeches.”
Pericles and his circle were to become one of the most famous and influential groups in western history.
But in fifth century Athens, the highest achievements of art and culture were not restricted to the elite.
49:30 – Tragedy in Golden Age Athens
Here in the shadow of the Acropolis sits the world’s first theater. Twice a year the Athenian population
would gather here to watch a great festival, a festival of drama. Television, cinema, theater, all owe their
existence to this place. For here is the home of popular entertainment.
Edith Hall: “There’s one huge difference between the ancient theater and our own, and that is that it was
incredibly noisy. We hear stories of how when they didn’t like a play, the audience booed and hissed and
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they actually got actors driven off the stage. But there are other stories that when they were going with
the story and deeply involved in it, they actually all collectively burst into tears.”
The favorite tales of the Greek stage were called tragedies. These were stories as shocking as a
contemporary horror movie. The tragedies of great men falling from the heights, losing everything they
owned.
Edith Hall: “Greek tragedy shows human beings, however able, however brilliant, however intelligent,
quite unable to alter the destinies which have been decreed for them.”
These tragedies have fascinated audiences ever since. This nineteenth century painting shows the story of
the mythical ruler Agamemnon, who was murdered by his own wife. Another tragedy told of King
Oedipus, who gouged out his eyes when he discovered that he had married his own mother. These
Athenians, natives of the greatest city in the ancient world, seemed to revel in seeing how frail greatness
could really be.
Edith Hall: “I don’t think we can use Greek tragedy to tell us exactly what happened in reality, it’s not a
document of Athenian social life. But what it does do is take us directly and immediately into the
psychological heart of those Athenian men. The kinds of dreams and fantasies and fears and imaginary
scenarios that they came up with in the theater have to tell us just as much about them as any document of
everyday reality could.”
Theaters were built in every major Greek city. In Sparta, in Corinth, on the island of Delos, here in
Delphi. Athens was the heart of a cultural revolution that would spread across the Mediterranean and
echo around the world.
Donald Kagan: “Periclean Athens seems to me to belong in the smallish collection of cities where truly
great moments in the human experience took place. Culture in the broadest sense reaches a peak.”
But after twenty years of building the cultural capital of the western world, Pericles and his fellow
Athenians would now find that their theater and their tragedies would hold a bitter sting.
Donald Kagan: “It is possible to think of Pericles, indeed I think of him, as a man with a tragic flaw, as
the sort of man whose greatest qualities, the ones that make him most admirable and successful, turn out
to be the seeds of his own destruction. Ultimately, it can be said, they lead to the destruction of the
Athens that he prized more than anything else.”
In the coming years, Pericles would embroil his city in the greatest war in the history of Classical Greece.
He would see her devastated by siege and plague. And he himself would fall victim to a fate the equal of
any tragic hero.
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PBS Empires Video – “The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Episode Three – “Empire of the Mind”
Written and Directed by Cassian Harrison, 1999
0:00 – Episode Introduction
Athens. The world’s first democracy. The most glorious city in ancient world, a city of wealth and
power, center of a mighty naval empire. At the head of the state stood one man, a man who seemed to
embody all of the Athenians’ achievements: Pericles. But Pericles now risked everything he and the
Athenians had built in one great gamble, a war that he hoped would make Athens the undisputed ruler of
the Mediterranean. This conflict would indeed transform Athens, but in a way that Pericles could never
have imagined. It would make a common Athenian, Socrates, into the ruler of a new empire, an empire
that remains the Greeks’ last great legacy, an empire of the mind.
A prison cell in the city of Athens. The year, 399 BC. Socrates, the world’s most famous philosopher,
prepares for his execution. Around him lies a city ruined by war, a nation stripped of glory and empire, a
people who have lost everything. Socrates is perhaps the one man who perhaps could have saved his
fellow citizens from the greatest defeat in their history. Instead they have condemned him to death. How
could the Athenians come to execute one of their most brilliant minds? How could they lose everything
that had made them great? It is a tale that begins three decades before.
3:00 – Pericles’ Strategy for War with Sparta, 431 BC
In the year 431 BC the city-state of Athens was the greatest power in the Mediterranean. Under the
leadership of the patrician Pericles, this tiny state had built a naval empire that stretched across the
Aegean. Her mighty fleet of trireme warships was the most powerful of the day. Athens lay at the center
of a great trading network that lay as far afield as Britain in the west and India in the east, bringing untold
wealth into the city. And Pericles had personally devoted himself to making this city the most glorious of
the ancient world. He had commissioned the Parthenon, a mighty temple to the goddess Athena, one of
the most extravagant monuments of ancient history. But for all his power and sway, Pericles did not rule
the city, for Athens was a democracy.
This is the assembly area of the Pnyx, home of the Athenian democracy, a system that gave every
Athenian citizen a say in the running of their state. Here Pericles had to stand before his fellow citizens
and win the right to lead. One day in the year 431 BC Pericles took the podium and presented the
Athenians with a bold, new plan, a proposal that would offer Athens her final crowning glory. Pericles
intended to vanquish Athens’ last great rival, the city-state of Sparta. Sparta was the only other Greek
state that matched Athens’ power. The Spartans ruled all of southern Greece, and they were a fearsome
military force. Their citizens were trained from birth in the arts of war. Tension had been building
between Athens and Sparta for decades.
To Pericles, it was now time to take on this dangerous adversary, to make Athens the undisputed leader of
the Mediterranean: “If we go to war, as I think we must, be determined that we are not going to climb
down, for it is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glory is to be won.” The assembly embraced
Pericles’ plan. The Athenians were never ones to shrink from a fight.
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Paul Cartledge: “The Ancient Greeks as a whole were not by any stretch of the imagination a peaceloving people. Peace was an interruption of war, rather than vice versa, and the Athenians were as
bellicose as any other Greeks.”
But Pericles knew that any war with Sparta would not be easy to win, for the Spartan infantry were far
superior to Athens’ forces. Athens’ strength lay in her navy. So Pericles proposed a strategy of
astonishing complexity and sophistication. He convinced the Athenians to abandon all the land around
Athens and retreat behind the long walls that stretched down to its harbor at Piraeus. Pericles would
supply the city by sea. Merchantmen would bring in grain, wheat and other essential supplies from
Athens’ colonies and allies acres the Mediterranean, protected by the mighty Athenian fleet. And Pericles
would use this great navy to attack the Spartans from the coast. It was a strategy based on a set finely
judged assumptions.
Donald Kagan: “Pericles’ expectation was that after a year or two, but no more than three, the Spartans
would realize that they could not win the war because the Athenians would never give them the infantry
battle they needed in order to win and they had no other device available.”
9:00 – Socrates and the Revolution in Thought
Athens’ fleet had always been key to the city’s success. It had won the city great military victories, and it
had built her an empire. Pericles was sure that this fleet could now bring Athens her greatest triumph.
The Athenians crowded behind the city walls. Confident in their vision of imperial power and glory, they
assumed that Pericles’ strategy could only bring them victory. But among this teeming multitude could
be found one man who refused to assume anything. A man unique in Athenian society, a man called
Socrates.
Alexander Nehamas: “If you were an ancient Athenian citizen, the first thing you would see is a man who
was unbelievably ugly. His head was too big, his eyes were too large, his nose was all the wrong shape.
Socrates’ appearance breaks every rule of Classical Greek aesthetics, of the idea of proportion and
measure.”
Socrates walked the streets of Athens barefoot, clad only in a dirty robe. He cared nothing of appearance,
or of any of the other conventions of his day. Socrates was interested only in the mind. This unlikely
figure would become the leader of a revolution, a revolution in thinking that had been gathering strength
across the Greek world.
For thousands of years, mankind had assumed that the world around them, the sun, the stars, and the
moon, were gods and spirits. Believing they were recording messages from their gods, ancient
civilizations such as the Babylonians had gathered great catalogs of astronomical data. This detailed
calendar from Babylonia records the ring and falling of the constellations and the gods they represented.
This knowledge and study of the heavens had been slowly spreading across the ancient world until it
reached Greek colonies on the coast of what is modern day Turkey. There a shattering change occurred,
for the Greeks took this astronomical knowledge and transformed it. They took the gods out of the
heavens and replaced them with reason.
Alexander Nehamas: “Gradually the Greeks begin to say, ‘These are not persons, these are things.
There is an orderly world which the human mind can actually capture. It is subject to our
understanding’”
These Greeks began to calculate and predict the movement of the moon and the stars through
mathematics and logic, rather than using gods and spirits to explain everything. It was the birth of
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science. The first great Greek scientist, a man called Thales, wrote the earliest book of navigation and
how to sail using the stars as a guide. And on a journey to Egypt, Thales was the first man to measure the
height of the Great Pyramid.
Alexander Nehamas: “Brilliant idea. He stood next to the pyramid until high noon when his shadow was
exactly the same length as his height, and at that point he measured the shadow of the pyramid, and
accordingly knew the height of the pyramid, which is actually an application of a sophisticated
geometrical theorem.”
These Greek scientists would go on to measure the circumference of the world when most people still
thought it was flat, and to devise steam engines, water pumps, and suspension bridges.
But Socrates was not interested in the mechanics of the physical world. He would use this new way of
thinking, using reason and logic to study people.
Alexander Nehamas: “The great change comes with Socrates, who turns his back, so to speak, to the
world of nature. What he cares about is the individual. You become an object of study and care.”
Socrates spent his days in conversation, walking the streets of Athens, talking and debating with anyone
he met. With over 150,000 people now packed behind Athens’ walls, he was in his element.
Alexander Nehamas: “One of the amazing things about Socrates is that he is the first fanatical urban
individual. He loves the city. He makes life in the city one of his major concerns.”
Socrates’ life was spent questioning the assumptions his fellow Athenians held about their lives, what
they felt was right and wrong, what was good and bad, and he was happy to turn convention upside down.
One of Socrates’ followers records how, at the end of a drunken dinner party, Socrates proved to a fellow
guest that he in fact was the better looking of the two: “My eyes must be more beautiful because they
bulge out, and therefore I can see better. And by the same account, my nose is more beautiful, because
my nostrils flare out and therefore I can gather in more smells.” This is typical Socrates, using reason
and logic to examine the world anew.
Alexander Nehamas: “Socrates says, you must make every decision based on your own understanding of
what is good, and what is not good, what is right and what is wrong.”
For Socrates, this freedom of thought was paramount, even if it meant upsetting the whole notion of a
beautiful nose: “I tell you, let no day pass without discussing all the things about which you hear me
talking. A life without this sort of examination is not worth living.”
17:15 – The Early Years of War and the Plague in Athens
But as Socrates spent his days in debate, his city was fighting a war. The Spartans invaded Athenian
territory and set about burning all of the farmland around the city. The Athenians became increasingly
anxious. They could only watch from the city walls as their fields and crops were destroyed. But such
was Pericles’ reputation that he managed to convince the Athenians to stick with his plan. The city could
rely on her fleet and shipments from overseas to survive. Little did Pericles know that this fleet now
carried an even greater threat. One year into the war, the grain boats that fed the city brought with them
an additional cargo, plague, a disease that would now devastate Athens.
Donald Kagan: “Pericles’ plan couldn’t anticipate difficulties that we now would suggest were rather
likely in those circumstances of crowding. And the results were horrendous.”
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With the population crammed behind the city walls, the affliction spread like wildfire. The symptoms
were horrific. The Athenian historian Thucydides, who lived through these years, recorded its effects:
“The body was suddenly seized, first with violent heats around the head and redness and inflammation of
the eyes, and then the disease descended into the bowels, producing violent ulceration and uncontrollable
diarrhea. The suffering of individuals seemed almost beyond the capacity of human nature.”
Donald Kagan: “The city must have looked terrible, smelled terrible, been awful to be in, and terror must
have reigned everywhere.”
Sufferers, wracked with fever and unquenchable thirst, would crawl into the city systems and water mains
to die. Thucydides witnessed the scene in Athens’ streets: “The bodies of dying men lay one upon
another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets. The catastrophe became so overwhelming that
men cared nothing for any rule of religion or law.”
Helen King: “The plague’s effects on Athens were absolutely devastating. The whole fabric of Athenian
society broke down. Morally, people saw no point in being good. Why be good, if the good and the evil
die just as easily?”
The plague would kill over a third of Athens’ population. And then it struck the city’s figurehead,
Pericles. Plutarch, Pericles’ biographer, describes his symptoms: “The plague seized Pericles, not with
sharp and violent fits, but with a dull and lingering distemper, wasting the strength of the body, and
undermining his noble soul.”
By the end, the patrician hero of the city was reduced to relying on potions and magic in an attempt to
cure himself. Plutarch: “He showed one of his friends a charm a woman had hung around his neck, as if
to say he was very sick indeed, if he would admit of such foolery as this.”
Finally, after six months of lingering illness, Pericles died in 429 BC. Pericles had planned to make
Athens into the Mediterranean’s greatest power, but his carefully calculated strategy had brought only
disease and death.
Donald Kagan: “Like most brilliant men, like most people who have had great success all their lives,
Pericles simply underestimated the degree to which some things are out of the control of the very best
intelligence and thievery best knowledge that there are.”
23:00 – Athenian Democracy after Pericles and the Trial of the Generals
Pericles’ death would have far-reaching consequences. It soon became clear that this one man had been
the linchpin of the Athenian state. Plutarch records that the changes were and dramatic: “Those, who
while he lived had resented Pericles’ great authority, now realized that he had been the main protector of
public safety, so great a corruption, and so great a flood of mischief and vice followed.”
The flaws in Athenian democracy now became apparent. Without a single strong leader, countless
figures now scrambled for the top position, and they were prepared to do anything the people wanted, if it
gave them power.
Plutarch: “Pericles’ successors, who now wanted to occupy the top position, simply followed the
prejudices and passions of the masses in order to gain support.”
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Athenian democracy now revealed a new and terrifying potential, the potential to slide into mob rule,
crippling her ability to fight a war. As the conflict raged on, an Athenian naval force won a skirmish with
the Spartans in rough and storm-tossed seas. The generals who had commanded the force returned to
Athens expecting a hero’s welcome. Instead, they were thrown into prison. The storm had forced the
Athenian commanders to sail straight back to Athens without picking up any of the soldiers who had
fallen overboard during the battle. Rabble-rousing speakers had convinced the Assembly that this failure
to rescue the men was a crime so appalling that all the generals should be summarily tried and executed.
We know of only man who stood up and attempted to calm the fevered assembly, Socrates.
Alexander Nehamas: “Socrates, alone and against the very, very serious and vocal, aggressive and mad
and furious reaction of the public, stood his ground and said it was the wrong thing to do. He was going
to vote against it.”
Socrates’ principle of questioning the society he lived in now had a real and practical purpose.
Alexander Nehamas: “He refused to bow to any pressure, and thought for himself, and do the thing his
conscience and reasoning told him was the right thing to do.”
But in the end, Socrates was only one voice among the multitude, and he could not sway the assembly.
The generals were condemned to death by drinking poisonous hemlock. It would be a terrible loss to
Athens’ war effort. With the assembly in the hands of self-interested despots, once-mighty Athens began
to lose her way.
Donald Kagan: “After the death of Pericles, Athens never again had a political leader with a well
thought out, general picture, or a set of goals, that he could pursue with reasonable hope of bringing
them to fruition.”
The war against Sparta degenerated into a bitter, dragging conflict that spread over a decade. The
Spartans ravaged the land around Athens, and the Athenian fleet kept the city supplied. Neither side was
able to defeat the other. Deprived of victory, the Athenians grew increasingly frustrated. Were they not
the greatest state in all of Greece? Surely the time must come for Athens to prove her power, once and
for all.
29:00 – The Failure of the Sicilian Expedition, 415 BC
Then, in the year 416 BC, a daring proposal was put before the Assembly, a proposal which, even if it did
not defeat the Spartans, would at least satisfy Athens’ hunger for glory. A small Greek colony on the
island of Sicily had asked for protection, protection from a neighbor allied with Sparta. Why should the
Athenians not come to their aid, humiliate their Spartan adversary, and perhaps conquer all of Sicily at the
same time? As one Athenian addressed the Assembly: “This is the way we won our empire, and this is
the way all empires have been won. Let us set out on this expedition, for it will destroy the arrogance of
the Spartans and at the same time, we shall become rulers of all Greece.”
It was a bold plan, to be executed on a vast scale, requiring a great fleet of warships, and landing force of
over 10,000 men. The Athenians threw themselves in the project with fervor. Armorers beat out new
weapons, soldiers tested out their equipment, stores were loaded onto a fleet of Athenian triremes, and the
shipwrights prepared their vessels for the sea. Then, to great fanfare, the mighty invasion force set out to
Sicily. Six months later, word came back. The campaign was not going as quickly as hoped, they needed
reinforcements. And then, nothing, no news at all.
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Then, in the autumn of 413 BC, a sailor arrived in the city, a man who needed a haircut. And as he talked
to his barber, he told an appalling tale of a vast and terrible slaughter. It was the story of an invading
army that had been pinned where it had landed, of how its leaders had argued with each other about
strategy, of how their food and water had run out, of how they attempted to ford a great river in a
desperate attempt to escape. “They rushed into it, all discipline lost, and every man wanting to cross
first. They fell over each other, and trod each other underfoot, and they drank thirstily, the water was
could, but still they went on drinking, mud, blood and all, the dead lying thick in the riverbed.”
This was how the Athenians discovered they had been the victims of one of the greatest defeats in ancient
history. Over 50,000 men had been killed, or taken prisoner. Two entire fleets of Athens’ prized triremes
had been destroyed.
Victor Davis Hanson: “The Sicilian campaign is a mess for a variety of reasons. First of all, it’s a long
way away, over six or seven hundred miles. Once they arrive, they squabble and fight about what to do.
But perhaps the biggest problem is that there is not a tactical reason to do it, there’s not a strategic
reason to do it. The motivation is highly self-interested.”
The Athenians, entrained by a vision of imperial glory, had in fact engaged in a pointless and vain
campaign.
Victor Davis Hanson: “They believed wrongly that they could go quickly in, raze the countryside, and
win a quick victory and a rich tributary subject state.”
Thucydides recorded the scale of the devastation: “This was the most notorious action that we know of in
Greek history, for they were absolutely, calamitously defeated. The losses were total. Army, navy,
everything was destroyed.”
With Athens’ military power now crippled, her enemies began to close in. The Persians, whom the
Athenians had humiliated fifty years before, now saw the ideal opportunity for revenge. They approached
the Spartans with the offer of help.
Victor Davis Hanson: “The Persians had been watching this carefully and they decide to intervene and
subsidize the Spartans, and that subsidy is in the form of manpower for rowing and fleet construction.”
Where previously the Spartans had never been a naval nation, now they had a fleet, paid for with Persian
gold. With Athens’ navy devastated by the defeat in Sicily, the Spartans could now blockade the
Athenian harbors. The great grain convoys from Egypt and the colonies could no longer get through.
And finally the Athenians began to starve in the streets. The people turned to their patron goddess,
Athena. At the height of Athens’ glory, only thirty years before, Pericles had honored her with the most
glorious temple ever seen. The goddess could offer no help now. Athens, once so sure of her preeminence in the Greek world, was now home to a population ravaged by plague and war, besieged and
starving, with her treasuries empty and her once-proud fleet crippled.
In 404 BC, Athens finally surrendered to the Spartan commander, Lysander. The Spartans’ terms were
heavy. The great walls which had defended the city, were to be torn down, her fleet was to be destroyed.
Victor Davis Hanson Hanson: “We have this wonderful scene of Lysander sailing into the Piraeus, and
dismantling the Athenian fleet. That’s important, because the destruction is symbolically the destruction
of the Athenian empire.”
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What remained of Athens’ might navy was put to the torch, with only twelve ships allowed to remain. No
longer would she rule the Mediterranean.
Josiah Ober: “The Athenians became convinced that they could do, finally, in the end, more than they
really could. And I think this is the point in which the potential that Athenian democracy brought about,
could turn to tragedy. They could achieve great things they could not achieve all great things.”
But it would still take one more act of vanity and violence before the Athenians could redeem themselves,
and their city could be reborn.
39:50 – The Search for a Scapegoat and the Trial of Socrates, 399 BC
Humiliated, their empire lost, the Athenians looked for someone to take the blame for their defeat. They
searched for an enemy within their city walls, someone who had dared to question their dreams of
supremacy. They searched for Socrates.
Josiah Ober: “Socrates was a critic. He was critical of the thinking and the thought processes of his
fellow citizens, and he was critical about the public affairs of Athens.”
For over fifty years, Socrates had been openly questioning and attacking the traditions of Athenian life,
and around him he had gathered a group of youthful followers. Surely this must have weakened the city’s
moral character, undermined her hunger for victory. On the command of the Assembly, Socrates was
arrested on charges of questioning the state religion and corrupting the youth of the city.
Alexander Nehamas: “I am quite sure, that especially in a relatively small society like Athens, someone
who is constantly questioning the principles by which the society has traditionally governed itself, will be
perceived as a very major danger, by at least some people in the society. You can easily see that a few
hundred people might want him out, and they did.”
The Athenians would now put to trial the one who dared to question the way they lived their lives.
Socrates’ trial would be held in Athens’ central marketplace, under a canopy to shade the fierce heat of
the Greek sun. He would be tried b a jury of his fellow citizens, chosen at random. But this would not be
a trial that we would recognize.
Josiah Ober: “The Athenian legal system was remarkably different from a modern system. There are no
lawyers involved with this. There is no trained judge involved with this. It is, in some ways, a very
frightening system, from a modern point of view. The law did not have the same stature in Athens that it
has in a modern society.”
Socrates would be judged by the same kind of group he had watched condemn six generals to summary
execution seven years before. He would be given only a limited time to defend himself. All speeches in
the Athenian courts were timed by a water clock, one jar of water steadily running into another. But
Socrates shows no fear in the face of his accusers. In fact, he is positively stubborn. He explains that, far
from corrupting Athens, his life of questioning has done nothing but improve the city.
Socrates: “To put it bluntly, I have been assigned to this city, as if to a large horse, which is inclined to
be lazy, and is in need of some great stinging fly. And all day long, I’ll never cease to settle here, there,
and everywhere, rousing and reproving everyone of you.”
It is not an approach designed to win sympathy. Socrates is setting himself and his life against the entire
Athenian state.
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Alexander Nehamas: “He is doing what he thinks is the right thing to do. He thinks the life he has
chosen, this life of thinking for yourself, is the best life. As he says in his speech, ‘The unexamined life is
not worth living for a human being.’”
If Socrates had simply apologized to the court, he might have well have been acquitted. But instead he
demands free dinners for life, for all the work he has done.
Alexander Nehamas: “I can just imagine what the jury and the audience must have thought at the time, as
they must have been absolutely speechless.”
When the final vote came, the verdict could hardly have been a surprise. The court found Socrates guilty,
with the penalty of death. But Socrates reacted with calm and serenity.
Socrates: “Well now, it is time to be off. I am to die, and you to live, but which of us has the happier
prospect is unknown to anyone but heaven.”
Socrates was taken from the court to Athens’ prison. The site of this prison still exists. We can still trace
the layout of the cell in which Socrates was probably held. And we still have accounts of Socrates’ last
days from friends who visited him in his cell. They are among the most famous Greek writings. For with
his death, Socrates would transform Athens. He would show his fellow citizens that the principles of
reason, of questioning the world, were something worth dying for.
Socrates would be executed in the traditional Athenian manner, by drinking hemlock. Some of the
hemlock cups used for the poison are still preserved. Death by hemlock is excruciatingly painful, causing
gradual paralysis of the central nervous system. But as the moment of his execution drew near, Socrates
turned to his friends, treating the whole affair as if it were nothing at all.
Socrates: “For me the fated hour calls. In other words, I think it is about time I took my bath. I prefer to
wash before drinking the poison, rather than give the women the bother of washing me when I am dead.”
But as the hemlock was poured, his friends broke down. We have the account of one named Phaedo: “In
spite of myself, the tears came pouring down so that I covered my face and wept brokenheartedly. And
then everyone in the room broke down, except Socrates himself, who said, ‘Really, my friends, what a way
to behave. I am told that one should make one’s end in a reverent silence. Calm yourselves, and be
brave.’”
As Socrates lay back on his bed and let the poison take effect, his friends watched in silence. Here was a
man who was dying, not for glory, not for fame and honor, but for the sake of his principle, because he
believed that man should question the world around him. It was a sight they would never forget.
Alexander Nehamas: “Socrates, in his life and in his death, becomes a completely new Greek hero. From
now on, the hero is a person of conviction, a person who will follow nothing but the dictates of his
intellectual conscience. And that is a new conception of what a human being is lie, and what a good
human being must be like.”
For centuries the Athenians had believed in one ideal, the vision of a martial warrior hero. It had driven
them to conquer great foes, to build a mighty empire. But now, in the depths of defeat, they discovered a
new figure to venerate. Effigies of Socrates have been found amongst the ruins of the Athenian prison,
perhaps offerings to the dead philosopher.
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Josiah Ober: “Perhaps the most important lesson that Socrates left, is the need to be critical, and the
need to be self-critical. The interesting that I see in Athens in the years after the execution of Socrates, is
this same capacity to look at themselves and recognize that they have perhaps gone too far in the past,
and indeed to embrace a certain kind of maturity.”
Athens was never again a great imperial power, but neither did her democracy lapse again into mob rule.
Instead, she became a city of intellectual inquiry, a haven of study and discussion, where Socrates’
students and his students’ students, slowly began to build a world based on reason. Plato tried to
formulate the ideal society. Aristotle studied nature, establishing biology and zoology. And slowly the
ideas and work of these Greek thinkers began to spread across the known world.
Alexander Nehamas: “One could say that one major part of the energy of the Athenians turns into
building what one might call ‘empires of thought.’ So where before you had Athens sending its ships to
the various islands in order to collect taxes, here you have reason extending its dominion over all areas
in which our lives are actually lived.”
Socrates’ principles of reason, of questioning assumptions and the world around you, still endure.
In the space of less than two hundred years, the ancient Greeks transformed their world, for amongst these
ruins a few great figures carved a mighty empire. They invented democracy and politics, science and
philosophy. They gave us literature and drama, art and monuments which still take our breath away. And
ultimately these Greeks taught us how to reason and think. Two and a half thousand years later, their
astonishing achievements continue to shape our world.
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Biography of CLEISTHENES
“The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Written by Cassian Harrison
Credited with having established democracy in Athens, Cleisthenes' reforms at the end of the 6th Century
BC made possible the Golden Age of Athenian civilization that would follow in the 5th Century BC.
Born into one of the city's foremost political dynasties, he became the unlikely champion of the people
when they rebelled against tyranny.
Cleisthenes - 570 BC - Early Life
Born into the rich and aristocratic Alcmaeonid clan around 570 BC, Cleisthenes was raised as a nobleman
at a time when the city was deeply divided between ordinary commoners and their wealthy noble rulers.
Named after his grandfather, the young boy had a great deal to live up to. His grandfather had ruled the
city of Sicyon, won the Olympics as a chariot racer, and become famous all over Greece for the year long
competition he held for suitors seeking to marry his daughter. The eventual winner of the contest was an
Athenian nobleman called Megacles - the younger Cleisthenes' father - but all the other participants
received generous consolation prizes.
Megacles became one of Athens' most important statesmen and would have brought up his son to
embrace the traditional heroic virtues embodied in the works of Homer. To be a leader and to achieve
glory and fame were what counted in life, only through individual deeds could a man hope to achieve
immortality.
But there was another important influence at work in the city, one that the highly intelligent young boy
was almost certainly aware of...
560 BC - Athens During Cleisthenes’ Youth
In the years before Cleisthenes' was born, the most influential man in the city had been Solon, an
unselfish and model aristocratic reformer who became known as one of the Seven Wise Men of Greece.
Solon had sought to limit the excessive powers of the nobility and restore Athens to a state of 'eunomia',
or 'good order'. To achieve this he had created a Council of Four Hundred men whose job was to
represent the population as a whole, and encouraged the people, especially the aristocrats, to be
responsible for their city, not just themselves.
Solon's ideas were, however, ahead of their time and the ordinary people still had little political influence.
Their main role in the politics of the city was to act as the supporters of their aristocratic leaders, not act
for themselves.
So when Cleisthenes was only 10 years old and his brother-in-law Pisistratus, a popular general, seized
power there was little opposition from the ordinary Athenians. After several failed attempts, Pisistratus
ultimately established himself as 'tyrant', the undisputed leader of the city.
510 BC - Hippias is Driven Out of Athens
Pisistratus died in 527 BC. His reign would be remembered as a 'Golden Age' of Athenian progress and
development. His son, Hippias, ruled successfully at first, and like his father avoided interfering in the
private affairs of the people.
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Cleisthenes was now over forty years old and an established politician with a reputation for flexibility and
clever strategy. For reasons that are still unclear, but possibly because of the political plotting of his father
Megacles, he had already spent a period in exile - a time he spent touring the other city-states of Greece.
Then in the year 514 BC Hippias' brother and right-hand man, Hipparchos, was assassinated in a lovers
quarrel. In response Hippias became an increasingly brutal and savage dictator.
After long years of waiting, Cleisthenes at last saw his opportunity. Calling in a favour owed him by the
Oracle of Delphi, the greatest shrine in all Greece, he managed to obtain Spartan help and overthrew
Hippias, who fled to Asia Minor.
The year was 510 BC, the traditional date of Athens' liberation from the tyrants. However, almost
immediately Cleisthenes' bid for power was thwarted…
510 BC: Cleisthenes First Period of Power
When Hippias was driven out of the city in 510 BC, Athens celebrated its liberation from tyranny. Now in
his 60s, Cleisthenes, the man who more than anyone had brought that liberation about, could sense power
was within his grasp. He had at last lived up to the heroic myths he'd been brought up with since
childhood.
But almost immediately another nobleman, Isagoras, emerged to challenge his power.
Cleisthenes responded by appealing for supporters far beyond the normal factions of the aristocracy,
proposing a series of sweeping reforms that would appeal to the ordinary people of Athens. It was a bold
move that forced his opponent Isagoras to dramatically up the stakes.
An old friend of the Spartan King, Cleomenes, with whom he was rumored to have shared his wife,
Isagoras turned to the king for help. Cleomenes duly dispatched a contingent of Spartan troops to aid
Isagoras and his aristocratic conspirators.
For Cleisthenes, the intervention of the Spartans spelt defeat. In the year 508, before Spartan troops had
even reached the city, he was forced to flee, probably in the vain hope that with him gone the Spartans
would not need to occupy Athens.
508 BC - Isagoras Seizes Power
Isagoras was appointed as 'archon', chief civil official, in 508 BC. Supported by a faction of Athens’ most
conservative aristocrats, his new regime appeared to be a return to tyranny. In reality Isagoras ruled as the
head of an oligarchy of three hundred noblemen, who in turn relied upon the military backing of Sparta.
Under instructions from the Spartan king, Cleomenes, the first task of the new government was to banish
Cleisthenes' most powerful allies. Altogether over 700 households were brutally cast out of the city,
including the whole of Cleisthenes' clan, the Alcmaeonids. Calling them 'The Accursed', the justification
used by Isagoras and his allies was based on an ancient misdeed the clan had been responsible for.
To the ordinary people of Athens, Isagoras was clearly putting an end to all opposition so that he and his
allies could rule unhindered, even if that meant relying on Spartan help. Isagoras' next target was one of
the last vestiges of Solon's rule, the Council of Four Hundred; a sort of consultative assembly with little
real power.
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But though the Council was largely symbolic, disbanding it was the beginning of the end of Isagoras' rule
507 BC - Revolution in Athens
In the year 507, Athens shook under an extraordinary event.
As the reformer Cleisthenes agonized in exile with the 700 families called 'The Accursed', his arch-enemy
and current ruler of Athens, Isagoras, continued to dismantle the last vestiges of the city's traditional
government with the help of his Spartan allies.
Neither man had quite realized the power or feelings of the ordinary Athenians. So when a riot turned into
a full-scale revolt both leaders were taken by surprise.
For two days and nights, people who they had always considered their inferiors trapped Isagoras and his
Spartan allies on the Acropolis. Unprepared and overwhelmed by the united opposition against them, they
were forced to agree to a humiliating truce. The Spartans left Athens, while Isagoras' allies were executed.
The would-be tyrant somehow managed to escape.
It was a new dawn for Athens. The ordinary Athenians had rescued their city and seized power for
themselves. Now they turned to the man whose unique experience and disappointments had helped give
them a new vision of themselves.
Cleisthenes was recalled from exile and asked to build the world's first government of the people - the
demos - a system of government we now know as democracy.
507 BC - Cleisthenes Recalled
When Cleisthenes returned from exile to Athens in the year 507 BC, he faced a situation for which there
was no precedent in history. Having proposed reform before Isagoras usurped power, he now had to make
good on his promises and forge a government that genuinely reflected the will of all Athenians; aristocrats
and commoners.
His solution was to form a general assembly of all Athenian free men, with each man having one vote - a
type of government we now call direct democracy. These men would then meet regularly to discuss and
vote on all aspects of their city, from the price of olives to the raising of taxes and declarations of war.
Though we do not know for sure, it was probably Cleisthenes who established the Pnyx, the small hill in
the shadow of the Acropolis, as the location of this general assembly.
The impact of Cleisthenes' reforms was felt almost immediately, revolutionizing all aspects of Athenian
life. Democracy released unheard of potentials in its citizens and ushered in an age of achievement and
prosperity.
What happened to Cleisthenes after instituting his reforms is, however, a mystery.
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Biography of THEMISTOCLES
“The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Written by Cassian Harrison
Themistocles was an Athenian general and politician of superlative skill and foresight. He fought against
the Persians at the Battle of Marathon while a young man, and distinguished himself as the savior of all
Greece by persuading Athens to build a navy which went on to defeat Persia at Salamis in 480 BC.
c. 523 BC - Themistocles’ Rise to Power
As a politician Themistocles appears to have had no tutor other than himself, but rather than prove a
hindrance, this was to become his greatest asset. His ability to innovate and to think of a new ways of
doing things suited the times.
Athens was experiencing the after-effects of a democratic revolution and many of the old certainties were
disappearing. This was evident at all levels of society, from the lowly craftsmen who competed to create
the finest examples of pottery, to the new types of sculptures being produced by Athenian artists.
In the political arena, Themistocles' introduced an innovation of his own. He made an effort to know as
many citizens as possible by name, adding to his speeches what modern politicians would call "the
personal touch".
In 493 BC, at the age of about 30, Themistocles was elected to the post of archon, one of the city's most
important elected officials. He began his term by supervising the fortification of the Piraeus, which would
later become Athens' main harbour.
The reasons were clear. The Persian Empire was on the march and Greece was its target.
491 BC - King Darius Demands Greek Submission
In 491 BC the 'Great King', Darius, who ruled the vast Persian Empire, sent envoys to the Greek citystates seeking 'earth and water' - tokens of submission to Persian authority. Darius had been provoked by
the assistance the city-states, particularly Athens, had given to an unsuccessful revolt by the Ionian
Greeks - the colonies of Greeks living on the western coast of Turkey. In retaliation he now sought to
establish his authority over all Greece.
In Athens, Darius' envoys were thrown into a pit reserved for those condemned to death and Themistocles
lobbied unsuccessfully to have them executed on a charge of defiling the Greek language with their
'barbarian demands'.
Elsewhere in Greece, many city-states simply submitted. Only Sparta dared to treat the envoys with the
same disregard as Athens. They threw the envoys down a well and told them to find their water there.
A furious King Darius readied his forces...
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490 BC - The Battle of Marathon
In September of the year 490, the Persian forces landed at the sandy harbor of Marathon with an invasion
force of 600 ships, 20,000 or more foot soldiers, and 800 cavalry. Also with them was the deposed tyrant
of Athens, Hippias.
The Athenians immediately dispatched Pheidippides to run to Spartan and seek their aid. But when he
arrived there Pheidippides found them in the middle of a religious festival. They would not send help
until the festival had finished.
The Athenian hoplites would have to face the massed ranks of the Persians alone.
Outnumbered by 2:1, the Athenians at first took fright at their vast enemy, with its multicolored costumes,
turbans, and unfamiliar armor. However, after a heated debate amongst the Athenian generals, they opted
to engage the enemy, advancing toward them at a run under a hail of arrows. But after a long and
protracted struggle the Greeks emerged victorious. Aided by superior tactics, better equipment, and sheer
determination they had achieved the impossible.
Over six thousand Persians lay dead. In contrast only 192 hoplites had perished on the Athenian side.
487 BC- Themistocles and His Rivals
The stunning victory at Marathon gave the Athenians a new sense of their city's power and potential, but
also led to overconfidence and a series of unnecessary confrontations with rival city-states.
During this turbulent time Themistocles faced a number of powerful political rivals. The most important
of these was Aristides. A wealthy aristocrat known for his education, even-temper and honesty, he was
the opposite of Themistocles in almost every respect. The rivalry between them was said to have begun
when both men had competed for the affections of the most beautiful youth in Athens, but more
importantly, they had come to represent two different factions within the popular assembly.
Whereas Aristides spoke for the hoplite class - the well-off conservative farmers who could afford their
own armor - Themistocles appealed to the lower classes, mainly made up of poorer urban craftsmen,
called thetes.
By 487, both men were at the height of their influence. It was also the first year the assembly used the
power of ostracism, an institution invented for banishing dangerous politicians, but never before used.
Suddenly, the stakes had increased dramatically and it was clear neither would rest until he had imposed
banishment on the other…
483 BC - Athens Builds a Navy
In 483 a rich vein of silver was discovered at Laurion, near Athens. Its estimated value was 100 Talents,
roughly equivalent to 100 million dollars in modern money. Normal procedure would be to mine the
silver and divide the spoils equally among the citizenry.
Themistocles had other ideas. For some time he had warned that the Persians still remained a threat, as
did those city-states, like nearby Aegina, who had taken the Persian side in the war. Themistocles now
argued that this newly found windfall be devoted to building a navy.
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The assembly split in two factions. Conservatives, represented by Aristides, argued against Themistocles,
convinced that the Athenians should stick with what they knew: land-based infantry warfare. Radicals,
mainly made up of poorer citizens, sided with Themistocles believing the building of a fleet would not
only make Athens a great sea power, but provide them with jobs building the ships!
A vote on ostracism was to decide the outcome.
Ultimately, the Athenians sided with Themistocles and Aristides went into exile. Immediately work began
at break neck speed to build a navy of 200 triremes, the most advanced ships of the Ancient World.
But time was running out...
480 BC - Attica in Panic - The Oracle at Delphi
When the Persian king, Xerxes, invaded Greece in the spring of 480 BC, he did so at the head of a vast
army. Once the Spartan force at Thermopylae had been defeated, his route by land to Athens was virtually
undefended. Attica was seized by panic.
The Athenians sought the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi. According to Herodotus the Oracle's response
could hardly have been more negative:
'Why sit you doomed one? Fly to the ends of the earth. All is ruin for fire and headlong god of war shall
bring you low.'
When the message reached Athens the popular assembly fell into uproar and another envoy was quickly
dispatched to the Oracle. The second prophecy was less apocalyptic:
'Though all else shall be taken, Zeus, the all seeing, grants that the wooden wall only shall not fail.'
Argument raged as to what this 'wooden wall' could mean, with many believing it to be the thorn bushes
surrounding the Acropolis. Themistocles had an answer of his own: the wooden wall, he argued, was
nothing less than the fleet they had spent these last few years hurriedly constructing. He won the day and
then gave the order for Athens itself to be abandoned…
480 BC - Athens Evacuated
In the late summer of 480 BC, almost the entire population of Athens abandoned their city in a fleet of
ships bound for the town of Troizen on the Peloponnese. Crammed into every sea-worthy vessel that
could be found, over 100,000 people left their homes, not knowing if they would ever see them again.
Just across the water, off the coast of the island of Salamis, the Athenian navy and its allies congregated.
Salamis was perhaps the only place off Greece where the Persians could not make use of their vastly
superior numbers. The narrowness of the channel would also maximize the greater maneuverability of the
superior Greek triremes.
A Spartan was appointed commander in chief because of the respect and decisiveness such seasoned
warriors evoked in their men, but few were under any illusion as to the real mastermind behind the plan.
Themistocles of Athens had spent years preparing for this fateful confrontation with Persia, and now his
moment had arrived. But as the days of waiting wore on, and the flames of ravaged Athens gathered in
the distant skies, the war council began to lose its nerve…
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480 BC - The Battle of Salamis
With his plan under threat, Themistocles was forced to take the initiative. By night he sent a messenger to
the Persian king, Xerxes, informing him that the Greeks intended to flee. Unless he acted now, Xerxes
would lose the opportunity to defeat the Greeks in one fell swoop. The Persian king took the bait.
As dawn broke Xerxes sat upon his portable throne overlooking the sea, and prepared to relish his victory
over the defiant Greeks. However, as his vast armada sailed into the narrow straits between Salamis and
the coast, they were met not by a fleet in disarray, but a well-ordered line of triremes, packed with Greek
crewmen singing battle songs. Themistocles had forced them to fight.
In the battle that followed, the Persian armada was devastated. The Greeks lost 40 ships, the Persians 200.
Unable to keep his land army supplied Xerxes was forced to flee back to his empire, parts of which,
encouraged by the Greeks' success, had already started to rebel.
The victory at Salamis has often been described as one of the greatest naval victories of all time, and a
key event that shaped the whole future of European civilization.
479 BC - Themistocles: The Aftermath of War
After the stunning victory at Salamis, Themistocles received a wreath of olive leaves in acknowledgement
of his brilliance. A vote to decide who should receive the award for achieving the victory fell into dispute.
It seems that Themistocles' characteristic ability to make enemies remained with him, even at the moment
of his greatest glory.
The next few years were extremely eventful in Athens. The city needed to be rebuilt and the Persians
remained a threat on land for the next year or so, before finally being decisively beaten at Plataea by a
Spartan led army. The Athenians now found themselves at the head of an anti-Persian naval alliance,
which in time would prove to be the springboard for an Athenian empire.
Once again though, Themistocles' shrewd foresight had alerted him to dangers his fellow Athenians could
still not see. Sparta, he argued, would not easily accept the new pre-eminence of Athens. Opportunity to
prove his suspicions correct came only a year after the victory at Salamis.
479 BC - Themistocles & The Walls of Athens
After the devastation wrought on their city by the Persians, the Athenians were intent on rebuilding and
enlarging their city walls. Hearing of their plans, the Spartans, who had no city walls, demanded to be
consulted.
Once again, Themistocles came up with a cunning plan. He traveled to Sparta, informing them that he
couldn't negotiate until the rest of the Athenian delegation arrived. Meanwhile, the delegation itself was
instructed to wait in Athens until the walls were high enough to protect the city. When news reached
Sparta that the walls were still being built, Themistocles suggested that the Spartans should send their
own envoys to see for themselves, rather than relying on rumour.
At the same time he secretly sent word back to Athens to detain the Spartan envoys until he returned. The
situation had almost become a hostage crisis when the Athenian envoys finally arrived in Sparta, led by
Aristides. With the walls now complete, the old rivals united and flattered their Spartan hosts with praise
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for their efforts against the Persians. Placated for the time being, the Spartans released them, allowing the
delegation home.
470 BC - Themistocles’ Ostracism
Themistocles remained one of the most powerful politicians in Athens for the next decade, though little
mention is made of him in the surviving records.
He does not seem to have played a major role in the formation of the Delian League, the great naval
alliance that would ensure the city's future greatness. Nor does he seem to have occupied any of the major
elected posts of the city, though the very nature of the popular assembly meant citizens could enjoy
considerable power without formal office. That was its purpose: everyone had a voice.
Themistocles must still, though, have enjoyed considerable power because otherwise he would never have
become a target for what happened to him next. As Athens reaped the benefits of peace, her populace
began to tire of their demanding war hero and his scathing criticism of the new order:
'They treat me like a spreading plain tree, to which they run for shelter under in a storm, but which, when
the weather is fair, they tear and pluck at as they walk by.'
In retaliation the assembly ostracized Themistocles in the year 470 or 471 BC. He would never return.
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Biography of PERICLES
“The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Written by Cassian Harrison
For over 20 years, at Athens' height, the city was dominated by the aloof, 'Olympian' figure of Pericles. A
magnificent orator with a reputation for scrupulous honesty, Pericles deepened and extended the reforms
that Cleisthenes had set in motion some 50 years before.
A keen patron of learning and the arts, he masterminded the construction of the Parthenon. However, in
glorifying Athens, he set it upon a collision course with Sparta that would ultimately lead to its ruin.
c. 493 BC - Pericles’ Early Life
Pericles was born around 493 BC into a rich aristocratic family. On his mother's side he was related to the
great reformer Cleisthenes. His father was a famous general.
Little is known of his early life and this may be partly to do with the great events going on all around him.
These were tumultuous times for Athens. When Pericles was only three years old the Persians made their
first bid to conquer the Greeks, being soundly defeated at Marathon. By the time he was 13 they had
returned again, and undoubtedly the teenage Pericles would have been among the many women and
children evacuated from Athens during the battle at Salamis.
472 BC - Pericles Enters Public Life
In 472 BC, eight years after the defeat of the Persians at Salamis, the young Pericles, now in his late 20s,
sponsored a major dramatic production for the festival of Dionysus. As well as providing entertainment
for the whole city, this annual event was also an opportunity for sponsors to bring their name to wider
public attention.
Pericles was lucky enough to be assigned to sponsor Aeschylus, the first of the great tragic playwrights.
Aeschylus' play, 'The Persians' was considered a masterpiece and won first prize, bringing its sponsor,
Pericles, to widespread public prominence.
Around this time he also married, though, as with so much about male-dominated ancient Greece, we
don't even know the name of his wife. She bore him two sons.
Pericles' first real involvement in politics began a decade later, in 461. He became involved with a
politician called Ephialtes. Together they organized a vote in the popular assembly that deprived the
Areopagus, the old noble council, of its remaining powers. It was an action that would have huge
consequences, and many historians believe it to mark the defining moment of Athenian democracy.
460 BC - Pericles’ Rise to Power
In the stormy aftermath of the old noble council losing its powers, Pericles' ally, Ephialtes, was
assassinated. It was a dangerous time for the budding leader as Cimon, the pro-Spartan politician who had
probably organized the ostracism of Themistocles ten years before in 470, tried to re-assert himself as
Athens' foremost politician.
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But Cimon underestimated the power of the common people and was ostracized. As a result Pericles now
joined the front rank of Athenian politicians. Over the next ten years he led several important military
expeditions, helped reinforce Athens' control over the naval alliance called the Delian League, approved a
final peace with Persia, and introduced payment for jury service. This last act marked a major step
forward for the poor, since they too could now afford to take time off their normal work to become
involved in politics.
Athenian democracy was entering its most radical phase.
451 BC - Pericles’ Citizenship Law & Aspasia
In 451 Pericles introduced a new citizenship law which prevented the son of an Athenian father and a
non-Athenian mother becoming a full citizen. The law's main effect was to curb the power of the
aristocrats since if their heirs could not be legally recognized they could no longer forge alliances with
aristocrats from other cities. Ironically, it would have major consequences for Pericles own private life.
A few years later Pericles divorced his wife and started to live with a beautiful foreign courtesan called
Aspasia, described by Socrates as one of the most intelligent and witty women of her time. The
relationship scandalized polite society, especially because they remained unmarried and Pericles treated
her as an equal, an almost unthinkable action for most Greek men.
But though Pericles became the butt of vicious jokes about his private life, in public office he was known
for his incorruptibility and refusal to accept gifts from other aristocrats, as was the normal custom. Instead
he kept to himself, limiting his public appearances before the assembly, but slowly coming to dominate it
with his aristocratic style and superb oratory skills.
447 BC - The Acropolis Rebuilt
In 447 Pericles began the project he is most famous for: the building program on the Acropolis. Through
its great naval alliance the city controlled an empire - Pericles now insisted his countrymen support him in
constructing a building whose magnificence, architectural genius, and sheer brilliance would reflect the
prestige of imperial Athens:
'All kinds of enterprises should be created which will provide an inspiration for every art, find
employment for every hand... we must devote ourselves to acquiring things that will be the source of
everlasting fame.'
The most ambitious building program in Greek history, the building of the Parthenon was Pericles'
greatest triumph and he oversaw the project personally. Costing 5000 talents in the first year alone - a
figure equivalent to some $3 billion in today's money - the building was completed in less than 15 years,
despite attempts to derail the projects by Pericles' political opponents. Made from 20 thousand tons of
marble quarried from nearby Mount Pentelicus, the huge cost of the building was partly financed from the
treasury of the Delian League, which caused great resentment among many of Athens' allies, who were to
be the source of many future troubles.
443 BC - Pericles Defeats His Rivals
In the early years of Pericles' power he was constantly challenged for the leadership of Athens. One
opponent, Thucydides (not the historian of the same name), a relative of the ostracized Cimon, tried a
novel way to subvert Pericles' influence. Rather like a modern political party, he arranged for all his
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supporters to sit in one block in the assembly in order to strengthen his cause. Sadly for Thucydides, the
plan backfired by exposing just how little support he really had. A champion wrestler who had won the
Olympics, he later said of Pericles:
'If I wrestle him to the ground he will deny this and deny it so vigorously that he will convince even those
who witnessed the fight.'
Thucydides was Pericles' main rival for a number of years but eventually followed Cimon into exile in
443, having also lost an ostracism vote.
With the politician Thucydides gone, Pericles remained secure as Athens' leading statesman for the rest of
his life. As the historian Thucydides observed of Athens during Pericles' long rule over it: 'In name
democracy, but in fact the rule of one man.'
438 BC - Pericles Triumphant
Nicknamed 'The Olympian' because of his aloof manner, Pericles brought a new authority and stability to
Athenian politics. It was a unique moment in Western history and at the center of it all was Pericles.
Tutored by the philosopher Anaxagoras, whose studies in natural science are said to have made the great
statesman renounce all superstition, Pericles became a patron and fervent supporter of the arts and new
advances in learning. The city hummed with great thinkers like Socrates and his opponents the Sophists;
was captivated by the playwrights like Euripides and Sophocles; and marveled at the designs of Phidias
and the new Parthenon. Athens had become the school of Greece.
Pericles' was by now far too popular for his rivals to topple him as the city's leader. So instead, they
attacked his close associates in the courts. Anaxagoras and Phidias were eventually exiled from Athens.
Aspasia survived, but only after Pericles himself publicly pleaded her innocence in a legal case.
Elsewhere in Greece, the new magnificence of Athens was greeted with less enthusiasm. Mighty Sparta,
the traditional overlord of Greece, looked on with grave suspicion at the upstart naval power. Rumors
began of war.
431 BC - Athens Goes to War
In the year 431 BC Pericles stood before the popular assembly and urged them to make a momentous
decision: 'If we go to war, as I think we must, be determined that we are not going to climb down. For it
is from the greatest dangers that the greatest glories are to be won.'
The assembly responded by declaring war on Sparta.
Pericles insisted that Athens would win the war by superior planning. To be successful the Athenians
must abandon the surrounding land and retreat behind their impenetrable city walls. Supplied by a fleet of
ships that could bring provisions from as far afield as Egypt and the Black Sea, they should avoid all land
battles with Sparta. Instead their navy would launch surprise attacks from the coast.
The war began slowly and appeared to follow the pattern Pericles had predicted. It was during a
commemoration speech for those who had already died that he made one of the most famous speeches of
Ancient Greek history, called the Funeral Oration.
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Tragically, for all his meticulous planning, not even Pericles could have foreseen the cataclysm that was
about to strike the city he so loved.
430 BC - The Plague Strikes Athens
Pericles' plan to defeat Sparta seemed to have taken account of everything. With a fleet of 300 triremes;
13,000 hoplite infantrymen; 1,200 cavalry and 16,000 reserves; the Athenians believed themselves to be
invincible. Such was their confidence that Pericles' main problem was preventing the assembly from
rushing overconfidently into land battles, when his carefully constructed strategy relied on Athens
weakening the enemy from the sea.
Then in 430, barely a year after the war began, Athens was struck by a disaster even Pericles could not
have foreseen. The grain boats that fed the city brought with them an additional and deadly cargo plague.
The plague spread through the overcrowded city of Athens like wildfire. Sufferers racked with fever and
overcome with unquenchable thirst dived into the city's water cisterns, and there would die. Law and
order broke down as the corpses of the dead piled up in the streets. An estimated 100,000 or more people
were contained within Athens' great walls. By the time the first outbreak of the plague had run its course
at least 20,000 of them were dead, including Pericles' two legitimate sons.
429 BC - The Long Death of Athens
One of the victims of the plague that swept Athens in 430 BC was Pericles himself. According to the
historian Thucydides:
'...The plague seized Pericles, not with sharp and violent fits, but with a dull lingering distemper, wasting
the strength of his body and undermining his noble soul.'
The city was devastated; morale was at its lowest ebb. In despair the popular assembly sent a peace
delegation to Sparta, and turned on the man they blamed for starting the war: Pericles.
Tried in the courts he had helped to reform, Pericles was stripped of his office and heavily fined. Yet even
now the people were reluctant to be rid of the man who had guided them for so long. Soon after they
reinstated him.
But Pericles was a broken man. The plague had claimed his two legitimate sons and in an attempt to have
his son by Aspasia declared as his heir he sought to repeal his own citizenship law. The man who had
renounced all superstition also turned to charms to ward off the plague. In the fall of 429, at the age of
about 65, Pericles, the mastermind of Athenian glory, died.
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Biography of ASPASIA
“The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Written by Cassian Harrison
Described as one of the most beautiful and educated women of her era, Aspasia became the consort of
Pericles, leader of democratic Athens. Their relationship caused scandal in the male-dominated world of
Classical Athens, not only because the couple remained unmarried, but because of her determination to be
treated as an equal. Mixing with some the greatest minds of her generation, and at the very center of
Athenian political life, Aspasia's story is unique among the women of her time… Aspasia 'First Lady of
Athens'
c. 460 BC - Aspasia of Miletus
In cities such as Athens women had few rights and little opportunity to take part in sports, theatre, or
public life. Because of this we know only the most general details of their lives, interests, and pursuits.
But life would be different for Aspasia. Born in Miletus, an Ionian Greek settlement on the coast of
Western Turkey, she would not be bound by the same rules that restricted Athenian citizen women, and
would eventually attain the sort of fame and prominence usually associated only with men.
Aspasia's father, Axiochus, had insisted his daughter be raised and schooled by her mother and household
slaves; an education which seems to have been unusually thorough, especially for a girl. It was probably
during her childhood that she discovered the great power women often possessed in myths and heard
stories of the those few other real women who had left a lasting impression on her age; women like
Artemesia, Queen of Halicarnassus.
Exposed to a melting pot of ideas, cultures, and influences, Aspasia's decision to leave her home city and
journey east to Athens would have been quite remarkable for a man, for a young, unmarried woman it
was almost unheard of.
c. 445 BC - Aspasia - A Hetaira?
Aspasia arrived in Athens probably around the middle 440s BC, and soon after achieved instant fame
through her association with Pericles, the city's democratic leader. Divorcing his wife, who he left with
two sons, he took up residence with Aspasia setting tongues wagging all over the city.
As the companion of Athens' leading politician, Aspasia quickly became the target of much malicious
gossip, and she was soon accused of being a hetaira: a high-class courtesan, rather like a Japanese Geisha
girl. These women would entertain wealthy men during their symposia, or dinner parties, but were not
considered suitable as wives or companions. Whether Aspasia had actually been a hetaira is unclear.
Still more upsetting for Athenian traditionalists was the great respect their city's leader showed to his
lover. Women were meant to be unseen and unheard, yet Pericles consulted Aspasia as an equal, made no
effort to prevent her mixing with important men, and openly showed her great affection.
Malicious gossip that Aspasia was a cheap prostitute, that she procured young girls for Pericles, secretly
wrote his speeches, and persuaded him to enter wars to protect her home city, would follow Aspasia for
the rest of her life.
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440 BC - A Marriage Forbidden
Pericles never married Aspasia, probably for the simple reason he could not. In an effort to prevent
aristocratic families making alliances with other cities he had introduced a new citizenship law in 451 BC.
As a result the sons of non-Athenian women could not become full citizens. Pericles would therefore be
risking his whole political career if he married Aspasia in defiance of the very law he had introduced.
With two sons already Pericles' family line seemed secure, so Aspasia lived as his pallakis, his
companion. In 440 BC she bore him a son, named after his father. Also living with them was Pericles'
ward, Alcibiades. In years to come both children would rise to greatness and come to play pivotal roles in
the Peloponnesian War, though both would leave mixed legacies.
Independently minded, witty, and with a gifted intellect even the philosopher Socrates acknowledged as
being among the best of the city, Aspasia enjoyed a life of constant stimulation and excitement. No doubt
with her help and encouragement, Pericles made Athens the greatest city of its day, the very epicenter of
learning, art, politics and achievement. Just to walk around it was described as an education in itself.
431 BC - Athens’ First Couple
When war began between Athens and Sparta, Aspasia, as was usual, received more than her fair share of
blame. Her critics argued that by helping her home city of Miletus over a decade before, Pericles had
provoked Sparta, who had supported Miletus' enemies.
Other gossip maintained the war had started because allies of Sparta had kidnapped the best girls from
Aspasia's brothel, a tall story later made into a comic play by Aristophanes. Another comic playwright
actually tried to have Aspasia prosecuted for impiety and only Pericles' personal intervention spared her
from possible exile.
But there were compensations. Having lived with Pericles for nearly two decades, borne him a son, and
helped raise his ward, Aspasia now enjoyed almost all of the privileges of an Athenian noblewoman, with
none of the normal restrictions.
In 431 BC, Pericles delivered his famous 'Funeral Oration', glorifying the war dead, a speech written by
Aspasia as Plato later joked. The couple were at the height of their power, but within a year tragedy
would shatter their lives irreparably.
429 BC - Triumph to Tragedy
War brought unmitigated disaster for Athens and Aspasia. Soon after its outbreak, plague swept the
overcrowded city, killing as much as a quarter of all its citizens. In their fury and panic the citizens turned
on Pericles, stripping him of his office, only to reinstate him soon after.
Pericles' fell ill and struggled for long months against the plague. A broken man, his carefully thought out
war strategy in ruins, he now wore magical charms in an effort to ward off the pestilence that had claimed
so many lives. With both his legitimate sons dead he also tried to do the unthinkable and have his son by
Aspasia declared as heir. He lingered at death's door for long months until finally, in 429, he died.
Left alone in a foreign city devastated by disease and war, the outlook for Aspasia and her young son
seemed bleak. But deprived of their great leader, and with both his legitimate heirs dead, the Athenians
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responded with a kindness that they had never shown their great leader's mistress while he still lived. The
popular assembly voted to allow Pericles' son full citizenship.
406 BC - Aspasia after Pericles
In time, Aspasia found herself a new partner. His name was Lysicles, a self-made man from a very
different social background to Pericles, but who seems to have shared the great leader's radical
democratic credentials. Aspasia it seems, remained a politically progressive woman to the last.
Twenty-three years after his father's death, the younger Pericles, was elected general in 406 BC. Sadly it
was his grave misfortune to be one of the leaders of a major naval fiasco in which the Athenians defeated
the Spartans only to be caught in bad weather. Forced to flee home, two thousand sailors who had fallen
overboard during the battle were lost. The popular assembly responded by putting the commanders on
trial, and despite the protests of the philosopher Socrates, executing every one of them.
History doesn't record if his mother was still alive at the time; but she would have been in her sixties if
she had survived the many hardships of the long Peloponnesian War. Her son's early death would have
been a tragic end to an otherwise inspirational and unconventional life.
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Biography of SOCRATES
“The Greeks: Crucible of Civilization”
Written by Cassian Harrison
The most famous philosopher of Classical Greece, Socrates was an Athenian citizen who revolutionized
the way people thought about themselves and the world. Famous for his questioning teaching method and
dogged search for the truth, he eventually provoked the fury of the Athenians and was found guilty of
impiety and corrupting the city's youth. His execution profoundly changed ideas about what it meant to be
heroic since he died only because he refused to abandon his principles.
469 BC - Socrates’ Birth and Early Life
Socrates was born in 469 BC. His father was a stonemason and his mother was a midwife, a profession he
would later use to characterize himself, since he would later describe himself as a midwife who helped
give birth to truth.
During Socrates' youth Athens was a city at the height of its power and the intellectual center of the Greek
world. The spirit of openness which democracy encouraged had given rise to new fields of thought and
enquiry. Playwrights were exploring new depths of human experience and exposing the hopes, fears, and
vanities of both the great heroes of the past, and the leading politicians of the present. The first scientists
were building on the insights already made by Ionian Greeks such as Thales, while the world's first
historian, Herodotus, had begun his famous 'Histories': our first record of Ancient Greek life.
Undoubtedly the young Socrates absorbed many of these exciting new influences as he walked through
Athens' teeming streets, played sports in the gymnasia, and discoursed with people in the market-place,
but before he began his career as a philosopher, he was destined for more deadly pursuits...
431 BC - Socrates and the War
In 431 BC war broke out between Athens and Sparta - the two superpowers of the Greek world. Socrates
was enlisted as a hoplite, a wealthy and well-equipped infantryman. Shunning personal comfort and able
to endure great personal hardship without complaint, he was to make quite a name for himself.
One story, in Plato's 'Symposium', describes how Socrates remained oblivious to harm even in retreat.
After one disastrous battle, this total lack of concern is said to have intimidated the pursuing enemy so
much that he was left completely untouched while hundreds of his fellows were picked off and
slaughtered.
Plato also recounts that when Socrates returned to Athens after a long tour of duty, he refused to answer
his friends' questions about the war. Instead he insisted they first tell him the more important news about
how the search of truth was going.
c. 420s BC - Socrates and the Oracle of Delphi
After his service in the war, Socrates devoted himself to his favorite pastime: the pursuit of truth.
His reputation as a philosopher, literally meaning 'a lover of wisdom', soon spread all over Athens and
beyond. When told that the Oracle of Delphi had revealed to one of his friends that Socrates was the
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wisest man in Athens, he responded not by boasting or celebrating, but by trying to prove the Oracle
wrong.
So Socrates decided he would try and find out if anyone knew what was truly worthwhile in life, because
anyone who knew that would surely be wiser than him. He set about questioning everyone he could find,
but no one could give him a satisfactory answer. Instead they all pretended to know something they
clearly did not.
Finally he realized the Oracle might be right after all. He was the wisest man in Athens because he alone
was prepared to admit his own ignorance rather than pretend to know something he did not.
c. 420 BC - Socrates and his Method
Admitting your own ignorance was at the heart of Socrates' method. Through a process of repeatedly
questioning, he would always attempt to tease the truth out of the people he was conversing with.
Asked about whether an action was just or not, he would never simply say 'yes' or 'no'. Instead Socrates
would ask the questioner what he actually meant when he used the word 'justice' and then invite him to
explain how different understandings of justice might lead to different conclusions. Frequently, this
process would come to no real conclusion and hit a frustrating dead end, called 'aporia' by the Greeks.
Nevertheless to Socrates such conversations were still valuable, because only when someone admitted
that he didn't know could he hope to learn anything at all.
Some people have jokingly said that Socrates learnt his unique questioning method by arguing with his
nagging wife, Xanthippe. If he did, she had good reason to be angry with him. Never at home or at work,
Socrates spent his time either arguing in the marketplace or accepting numerous invitations to dinner
parties. Meanwhile, like most respectable Greek wives, Xanthippe was stuck at home with the children,
and only allowed out in public on special occasions!
423 BC - Socrates and the Sophists
The Sophists were a loose collection of thinkers who taught wealthy Athenians to argue convincingly: a
useful skill for anyone who wanted to do well in politics. Because they accepted payment for revealing
their insights, Socrates strongly disapproved of them, and he made it his personal quest to expose the lazy
thinking and unexamined assumption many of their ideas were based upon.
Unfortunately, his constant arguing with the Sophists made Socrates a figure of ridicule and in 423 BC
his activities became the subject of a famous play. Written by the comic playwright Aristophanes, 'The
Clouds' portrayed Socrates as a master of pointless wordplay and verbal trickery. The head of an institute
called 'The Thinkery,' he literally had his head in the clouds.
Unfazed by such notoriety, Socrates continued his pursuit of the truth, but the charges made against him
in the 'The Clouds' would come back to haunt him in the future.
c. 420s?- Socrates and the Symposium
Though his disciple Plato always made strenuous efforts to point out that Socrates was no sophist, there
were times when his challenges to common sense came very close to the pointless wordplay he so
opposed. Plato's book 'The Symposium', about a drunken dinner party, is one of the most famous Ancient
Greek books about love, romance and friendship, and records just such an incident.
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During the party a handsome but very vain young man named Alcibiades does his best to win
compliments from the wisest man in Athens. Yet despite his fondness for Alcibiades, Socrates ignores
him. Instead he demonstrates why, in fact, he is more handsome man:
"My own eyes must be more beautiful, because they bulge out, and therefore I can see better. And by the
same account my nose is more beautiful, because my nostrils flare out and so I can therefore gather in
more smells."
Unfortunately, the comfortable existence enjoyed by the wealthy men of Athens was about to be
shattered.
406 BC - Socrates & The Generals
As the Peloponnesian War dragged on, political life in Athens became extremely unstable and dangerous.
For a brief period democracy was overthrown by an oligarchy of aristocrats only to be replaced a year
later, in 410 BC, by a new democratic regime.
Four years later, in 406, the Athenian navy won an important battle against the Spartan fleet. With a storm
brewing, the Athenians immediately set sail for home, worried that by stopping to pick up the sailors who
had fallen overboard they might risk losing the entire fleet.
Back in Athens the congratulations quickly turned into accusations. When the popular assembly learnt
that 2000 men had been lost at sea the citizens demanded the fleet's leaders be executed for cowardice.
Appointed as President of the assembly for that day, Socrates denounced the decision as wrong: mass
trials were illegal.
Sadly, the greatest conversationalist in Athens was a poor public speaker. His protests came to nothing
and the generals were executed by being forced to drink hemlock. Socrates, by standing up for what was
right, had made himself dangerous political enemies.
404 BC - Socrates and the Thirty Tyrants
In 404 BC, Sparta finally defeated Athens and occupied the city, replacing the city's democracy with an
oligarchy of thirty tyrants. A period of savage repression followed, including hundreds of political
killings and the exile of thousands.
The Thirty Tyrants put an end to many of the privileges enjoyed under democracy, and reduced the
number of full citizens from over 20,000 to only 3,000 of their most loyal supporters. Though the details
are vague, many historians believe Socrates was one of these specially appointed citizens, since several of
his former pupils were also members of the Thirty Tyrants. His association could not have lasted long.
When the new regime insisted he arrest a prominent foreign resident, he refused on legal grounds, just as
in the case of the generals.
Credited with the phrase 'the majority is always wrong', Socrates' unique style of thinking relied upon
turning commonly accepted ideas upside-down. But by also associating with tyrants, Socrates had
unintentionally made himself appear as an enemy of democracy.
A year later, when Sparta allowed democracy to be restored, he became one of its first scapegoats...
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399 BC - The Trial of Socrates
In the year 399 BC, seventy years after he was born, Socrates was brought before the Athenian court on
charges of impiety and corrupting the city's youth.
His belief that the gods must be good or otherwise not be gods ran contrary to almost all Greek
mythology, which is filled with jealous and self-serving deities, and the jury had little difficulty in finding
him guilty.
The second charge of corrupting the city's youth raised a dilemma. Should Socrates be held responsible
for the actions of his pupils, particularly those among them who had joined the tyrants?
Timed by a water clock, the old philosopher remained as stubborn as ever. Far from corrupting the city,
he argued, his life of questioning had done it nothing but good.
Plato's 'Apology' records what Socrates said:
'To put it bluntly I've been assigned to this city as if to a large horse which is inclined to be lazy and is in
need of some great stinging fly and all day long I'll never cease to settle here, there, everywhere, rousing
and reproving every one of you.'
The huge jury was infuriated, finding him guilty by 281 votes to 220. But worse was to come...
399 BC - Socrates Sentenced
After Socrates had been found guilty of impiety and corrupting the morals of the city's youth, he was next
invited to propose a suitable punishment.
This was a legal tradition in Athens and an opportunity for him to show remorse, and hopefully lessen his
sentence. But asked what sort of punishment he thought he should receive, he responded with an answer
that was nothing short of a death wish.
He argued that he should receive the highest honors of the city and be granted free meals at the public's
expense, an honor reserved for Olympian athletes.
The outraged jury voted for his death by even greater majority than had found him guilty of his alleged
crimes.
Led away to the city's prison house, his trial and last days became the subject of Plato's 'Crito & Phaedo'.
Visited by many people, he faced the prospect of death with characteristic unconcern, and even refused to
be rescued and smuggled abroad by a group of friends.
399 BC - The Death of Socrates
Like the generals he had defended many years before, the manner of his execution was to be the drinking
of hemlock. As the hour drew near, everyone in the room broke down and wept except for Socrates
himself, who continued to treat the affair as if it were nothing at all, at one point turning to them and
saying almost in humor:
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'For me the fated hour calls. In other words I think it's about time I took my bath. I prefer to wash before
drinking the poison rather than give the women the bother of washing me when I'm dead.'
His final request was to ask a friend to sacrifice a cock to Asclepius, the god of healing, as a way of
thanking him for being delivered from the painful disease of life.
Having maintained that 'the unexamined life isn't worth living' and by always insisting upon obeying his
own conscience, Socrates had shown the Athenians a new way to live, and to die. Rather than honor he
believed in principle, and through his sacrifice he helped create a new sense of what it meant to be human
being, leaving a deep impression not only on the Athenians, but all of Western civilization.
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BBC Video – “The Spartans”
Witten and Directed by Bettany Hughes, 2002
0:00 – Introduction: The Importance of the Spartans
The Spartans are, I think, just irresistible. They are one of the most extreme civilizations that ever walked
on this earth. And I’ve always thought they deserved the same white heat of attention that’s normally
reserved for the Romans and the ancient Egyptians. After all, these are people who bathe their babies in
wine in order to toughen them up. They throw weeping newborns off the mountains that range around
Sparta like a fortress. These are men who scorn luxury. They ban coined money and prostitutes, and they
ate the most disgusting national dish, which is basically a black broth made of pig’s blood. In the military
messes, homosexuality was compulsory between grown boys and older men. It’s all pretty hot stuff.
But the Spartans aren’t just odd. They’re really important. Relatively early in Greek history, before the
Classical World has begun, they drive through a radical political and social revolution. In effect, all
Spartan men are meant to be equal. And they developed really key concepts that we still use today, about
the importance of self-sacrifice, of the common good, values, duties, and of rights. All Spartans aimed to
be as perfectly human as was humanly possible to be. Every single one of our ideas about utopia stems
from the Spartan example.
The Spartans was the first series I made for Channel 4 in 2002, and it’s great to see how this civilization
has seemed to really capture the popular imagination. There are brilliant, best-selling books about the
Battle of Thermopylae, the famous battle where 301 Spartans stood against the Persians. In the end it was
a suicidal stand, the last man fighting with his bare hands and his teeth. And Zach Snyder’s film, The
300, has brought the Spartan story to an international audience of millions. But for a historian, the
Spartans pose a problem because they just left so few written records. Unlike the Athenians, they were
terrible at their own P.R. They didn’t build grand architecture that we can then analyze to try to get to
know them better. That makes them all the more intriguing and all the more reason to tell their story
afresh.
But I need to confess that I’m particularly attracted to the Spartans because of their women. Spartan girls
simply were different. They enjoyed a degree of freedom and equality that was unparalleled anywhere
else in the ancient world. Young Spartan girls, oiled head to toe in olive oil, would exercise naked in the
gymnasia and sing to one another of their beauty. They were allowed to drink wine, they were allowed to
ride horses, and they were allowed to own land. But then, when you got older, if you thought that a
younger man would sire healthier offspring then you were allowed to take him as your lover. They were
fit, and they were feisty. While the men were off in their training camps, women dominated the Spartan
streets, and they had a real say in the running of their state. You know how people say to you, “Is there
another time you would like to live in history?” I have to say, I think we’re pretty lucky to live when we
do now. But I would just love to spend one day as a Spartan girl.
So, if you want to witness the heady extremes that human civilization is capable of, then meet the
Spartans.
3:55 – The Spartan Pursuit of Perfection
When we think of Ancient Greece, this is the image that most of us have in mind: The Parthenon in
Athens. This is where the blueprint for western civilization received its first draft. Philosophy and
science, art and architecture, democracy itself, have their roots here, and they’re embodied in the serene
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lines of one of the most famous buildings, a monument to a very different kind of Greek city. It’s the
burial mound of 300 warriors from Sparta, who in 480 BC, made a heroic last stand in the pass at
Thermopylae, resisting a massive invasion force of the Persian Empire. Surrounded, and outnumbered by
about forty to one, they put up a spectacular fight before they were hacked to pieces. They’re interred
here, and honored by this inscription, which still echoes down the centuries. “Go tell the Spartans,
stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.”
Unlike Athens, Sparta can’t boast of its philosophers and politicians and artists. It’s famous for two
things: its frugality, which is where we get our word “Spartan” from, and its fighters. In everyday
Spartan life, these two were intimately linked. The whole of Spartan society conformed to a strict code of
discipline and extreme self-sacrifice. Their aim: to create the perfect state, protected by perfect warriors.
The pursuit of perfection made Sparta a strange place, where money was outlawed, equality was enforced,
and weak children were exterminated. Male homosexuality was compulsory, and women enjoyed a
degree of social and sexual freedom that quite simply was unheard of in the ancient world. Its history was
one of ruthless militarism, slavery on a massive scale, and a system that sometimes can seem like a
premonition of modern day totalitarian regimes. But Sparta was the first Greek city to define the rights
and duties of its citizens, and it can also claim, alongside Athens, to have saved the western world from
enslavement by the Persian Empire. Although Spartan hardline ideals don’t have the charisma of
Athenian culture, they’ve meant as much to western civilization as the ideals represented by the
Parthenon. So in a sense, the story of the Spartans is the story of ourselves, and how some of the ideas
that have molded western civilization were first tried out in a warrior state on the Greek mainland over
two-and-a-half thousand years ago.
8:20 – The Setting and Early History of Sparta
The story of the Spartans takes me on a journey through some dramatic history, and there’s a setting to
match. Over there is the Peloponnese, a huge peninsula, crowned by rugged mountains and scored by
deep gorges, that forms the southernmost part of the Greek mainland. The Ancient Greeks thought of it
as an island, and you can see why. It does have a brooding, closed-in feel, cold-shouldering the outside
world. But long before the Spartans of our story arrived on the scene, this part of the world was making
history. Many of the Greeks who fought in the Trojan War, some three thousand years ago, came from
here. Agamemnon, the leader of the Greeks, ruled over Mycenae in the eastern Peloponnese. And to the
south in Sparta was the palace of Menelaus and his wife Helen. For Helen of Troy, whose beauty caused
the Trojan War, was once Helen of Sparta.
But at some point around 1100 BC, it all disappeared. No one knows for sure what happened.
Earthquakes, slave revolts, even asteroids have been blamed. But all over the eastern Mediterranean, the
world of Helen went under in a cataclysm of fire and destruction. A remnant clung on for a few hundred
years, but finally the Dark Ages came to Greece, and the thread of history snapped.
And during those centuries of darkness, out of the north new people came, seeking more hospitable lands.
They brought with them a new Greek dialect, their sheep and goats, and a few simple possessions. They
settled all over the Peloponnese, and some found their way to the lands that once belonged to King
Menelaus. It was a journey worth making. The people who came here must have thought they had found
a Shangri-La. Down there is the plain of the Eurotas River, fifty miles north to south of precious, fertile
farmland. And a river runs through it, all year round. In land-hungry Greece, where 70 per cent of the
land can’t be farmed and the rest is squeezed between the mountains and the sea, that’s a lot of elbow
room. To the west are the spectacular Taygetus Mountains, rising to more than 8,000 feet in places.
Patches of snow still linger, while down on the plain, spring is turning into summer. The slopes once
teemed with game, deer, hare, and wild boar, rich pickings for the new arrivals. But what statistics can’t
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convey is the striking quality of this place, a fantastic sense of security. Everywhere you look, on every
horizon, you’re bounded by hills and mountains. It’s not claustrophobic, just safe. You feel that
everything you could possibly want is here, if you could just lay claim to it and keep the rest of the world
at bay. And so the herdsmen traded in their sheep for olive trees and settled down here. A new Sparta
came into being, and the new Spartans built this temple, the Menelaean, to honor the legendary king and
his wayward wife.
In the period of renewal following the Dark Ages, new cities like Sparta appeared all over Greece. They
varied in size and power, but had one thing in common: they were all governed by a mutually agreed set
of laws and customs. The rules by which people agreed to live varied, but the aim was broadly the same:
to create good order and justice, and to protect against chaos and lawlessness. Today in Sparta,
archaeologists are still piecing together the story of the people who first came here some three thousand
years ago and built an ideal city, a utopia. It’s not an easy task because they left few clues behind them,
and much of what they did leave was buried or destroyed when the modern day city was built. But
whenever there’s a building program, precious new pieces of the puzzle are revealed. Every find is
precious because the Spartans didn’t leave us much in the way of stuff. Unlike the Athenians, they were
famous for not building, for not making things, and for not writing about themselves. So of all the cities
and civilizations in the ancient world, the Spartans remain the most intriguing and mysterious.
Take for example Sparta’s kings. Since time immemorial, Sparta had not one but two kings at the same
time, two royal houses, twice the potential for the rows that all monarchies are prone to. The Spartans
explained this unique arrangement by claiming that their kings were direct descendants of the great, great
grandsons of Heracles, the strongman of Greek myth. According to legend, it was this pair of twins who
rested control of the Peloponnese from the descendants of Agamemnon. The stories that people tell about
themselves are always revealing. And this tale of a land grab by a pair of aggressive usurpers, themselves
descended from the most macho man in mythology, sent out a worrying message to the neighbors. And it
wasn’t long before the Spartans started throwing their weight around, seizing control of the whole Eurotas
valley, enslaving non-Spartans, or categorizing them as perioikoi, meaning “those who live around.” The
perioikoi became a disenfranchised caste of craftsmen and traders, Sparta’s economic muscle. But sorting
out their immediate neighbors was just the start of Sparta’s aggressive expansionism. Despite the
generous acres of the Eurotas valley, Sparta like the rest of Greece was always hungry for more farmland.
Other cities dealt with this by founding colonies, satellite settlements that would eventually spread as far
west as the Straits of Gibraltar, and as far east as the Crimea and the Black Sea.
The Spartans came up with their own take on colonization. They turned their eyes west, and began to
discover what opportunities there were beyond the mountains. It was there they would go to satisfy their
land hunger. It was there that Shangri-La would reveal its darker side, because it was there that a slave
nation would be created to serve the Spartan master race.
16:40 – Slaves and Citizen-Soldiers
The journey through the gorges of the Taygetus Mountains is as spectacular now as it must have been
some 2,800 years ago, when the armies of Sparta headed west in search of conquest. Several days of hard
march through the mountains would bring them to the territory of the Messenians. The Spartans weren’t
just coming for their land. They wanted their freedom too. They intended to turn the Messenians en
masse into helots. The word translates into captives, but it means more bluntly, slaves. Slavery in
Ancient Greece was an accepted fact of life. But slaves were supposed to be foreigners, barbarians who
spoke no Greek and so were obviously suited by nature for servitude. The enslavement of fellow Greeks,
and on a massive scale, was something else again. And the crushing of Messene would set Sparta apart
from the rest of Greece. It also shaped the kind of place Sparta became, wary of unrest, paranoid about
revolt. Enslaving the Messenians was no easy task. It took two full-scale wars, each lasting twenty years
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or more. We know something about the second war because we have an eyewitness to the events, one of
the first identifiable eyewitnesses known to history. He was called Tyrtaeus, a Spartan soldier and, just as
importantly, a poet.
“It is a fine thing for a brave man to die when he has fallen among the front ranks while fighting for his
homeland. Let us fight with spirit for this land, and let us die for our children, no longer sparing our
lives. Come on you young men, make the spirit in your heart strong and valiant, and do not be in love
with life when you are a fighting man.”
Tyrtaeus was a war poet, but hardly of the Wilfred Owens school. I doubt that he had any concept of the
pity of war. His verses were more like battles cries, barked out with the directness of a sergeant-major,
putting backbone into the shirkers and faint hearts. “Look, if you want this land, you’re gonna have to
fight for it.”
This is the kind of fighter that Tyrtaeus addresses in his poems. He was called a hoplite, an infantryman
armed with an eight foot spear and round shield. By the end of the seventh century, practically all Greek
cities had their own contingent of hoplites. These weren’t full time professional soldiers. They were
farmers who swapped plows for spears in defense of their communities. By standing side-by-side with
their neighbors, these militiamen demonstrated not just their courage, but their status as citizens.
20:15 – Hoplite Warfare
This is Olympia, home of the famous games. It was also the unofficial shrine of the hoplite fighter, for
this was where you’d come to dedicate your arms to the gods in thanks for victory. That’s the hoplon, or
round shield, the cardinal item for a hoplite, and probably where he got his name. You’d have held it by
thrusting your left arm through the central armband, then grasping onto the leather thing at the rim. It was
made of wood and metal and would have weighed about twenty pounds, which is a hell of a weight if you
think of carrying that for a day’s fighting. But to let your arm fall and the shield drop was the ultimate
disgrace.
Hoplite fighting was a team effort. Half your shield was for you, the other half for the man to your left.
The hoplites would form into densely packed ranks, called a phalanx, seven or eight deep, and perhaps
fifty shields across. Coordination and discipline were important, but most important of all was trust. If
your neighbor broke and ran, you’d be exposed to the spear points of the enemy. When two phalanxes
met, the tendency was for each line to shift to the right. The natural instinct was always to tuck yourself
as tight as possible behind your neighbor’s shield. At that moment, the discipline of the phalanx
threatened to collapse. To be effective, you just had to grit your teeth and stand your ground. Tyrtaeus
had some typically helpful advice: “Those who dare to stand fast at one another’s side and to advance
toward the front ranks in hand to hand combat, they die in smaller numbers, and they keep the troops
behind, safe.”
There wasn’t much in the way of tactics once the shield walls came together. The battlefields all but
disappeared in a dust cloud, as the two opposing masses of bronze and muscle heaved against each other.
The rear ranks provided the traction, pushing forward, like rugby players in a scrum. It was in the front
three ranks, within range of the enemy’s spear points, that things got deadly. It was there that you’d have
come face to face with this, a gorgon, emblazoned on your enemy’s shields. This was the goddess whose
gaze had the power to turn men into stone, and in the sweaty, stabbing frenzy of the battle, ending up
inches from her must have been a literally petrifying experience.
Ultimately Sparta would surpass all other Greek cities in the art of this particular kind of fighting. But
first they had to beat and enslave their neighbors, the Messenians. This was finally achieved around the
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year 650 BC. For the next three hundred years, the Messenians would be forced to slave in the fields of
their Spartan masters, like asses worn out by heavy burdens, according to Tyrtaeus. But now that
Messene had been won, the critical question for the Spartans became then, and for centuries to come:
How do we keep it? Elsewhere in Greece cities were being torn apart by civil wars between rich and
poor. With the spoils of Messene up for grabs, the chances of that happening in Sparta were greatly
increased. To keep their paradise safe, the Spartans chose to act in a totally radical way. From now on,
utopia was their aim. They would dedicate themselves to the creation of a perfect society, and it would be
modeled on the hoplite phalanx: disciplined, collective, and unselfish. There was going to be a revolution
in Shangri-La.
25:30 – Lycurgus and Sparta’s Radical Institutions, @650 BC
Every revolution needs its great leader, and this is Sparta’s: Lycurgus, the wolf-worker. I can’t put my
hand on my heart and say that he existed, but the Spartans believed in him. For them he was a miracle
worker, someone who created heaven on earth following the advice of the gods themselves. Whether it
was him, or a bunch of people, or a whole generation, who knows? But someone here embarked on a
social experiment that would create one of the most extreme civilizations in the ancient world.
The revolution that transformed Sparta took place around 650 BC, when Sparta’s neighbors, the
Messenians, were finally defeated and enslaved. In order to keep the helots quiet, and, as importantly, to
stop themselves falling out over the spoils of war, the Spartans set out to become the most formidable,
disciplined, and professional hoplite warriors Greece had ever seen. The whole of Spartan society
became, in effect, a military training camp.
Spartan men would neither fish nor farm, neither manufacture nor trade. They would simply fight. And
if they weren’t fighting, they were training. And if they weren’t training, they were hanging out with
their fellow fighters. The family unit counted for very little. What mattered was bonding with their male
peers, fostering the solidarity of the phalanx. It was a program they pursued with typical singlemindedness.
Being born Spartan was not enough. All male Spartans had to earn their citizenship through long years of
competitive struggle, and the survival of one of the most grueling training systems ever invented. The
first test came early. This ravine a few miles outside of Sparta was known as the apothetai, or deposits.
It was also called the place of rejection, because it was down there that a newly born child would be
thrown if he did not match up to Spartan standards of physical perfection. In fact, infanticide was
common throughout Ancient Greece. Unwanted babies, usually girls, were left on a hillside. Sometime
they’d be placed in a basket or a protective pot so that there was at least a chance of someone or
something coming along and taking the child in. In Sparta, as ever, things were very different. Boys
rather than girls were the usual victims, and it wasn’t the parents, but the city elders who decided whether
they lived or died. And there was absolutely no possibility of a brooding vixen or kindly shepherd
rescuing the newborn child once they had been tossed down there. The city elders’ decision was final and
absolute.
Surviving the apothetai was just the start for the boys. At the age of seven, they were taken from their
families and placed in a training system called the agoge. It means literally “the rearing,” and the
children were treated little better than animals.
For Spartan boys, this was a classroom: the wild hills of Mount Taygetus, where they would have spent
much of their time. They were organized into bouai, which was the Spartan word for “herd of cattle.” An
older child was put in charge of them, responsible for their discipline and punishment, and he was known
as a “boyherd.” Emphasis was on surviving, coping on the minimum. Each child was given one cloak, to
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last them all year round, which seems fine on a afternoon like this, but in winter here, it drops to minus
six. Food supplies were short, and they were encouraged to steal their rations. If they were caught, they
were flogged, not for the act of stealing, but simply for not getting away with it. It was as much a trial by
ordeal as it was an education.
The mountains also provided the backdrop for one of Sparta’s most controversial and disputed
institutions, the krypteia, or secret service brigade, membership in which was reserved for the boys who’d
shown particular promise. The really hard cases were singled out, given a knife, and turned loose into the
wilds. By day they’d lie low, but at night they’d infiltrate the valley, hunting down and murdering any
helots that they’d caught. Exactly how the krypteia operated, and the kind of “hit rate” it had, has always
been a mystery. But the mere rumor of bloodthirsty, adolescent death squads roaming the countryside,
was enough to institute a reign of terror, the perfect tactic to keep a slave population quiet and obedient.
31:30 – Military Training for Spartan Soldiers
Though Sparta encouraged the collective spirit, it placed as high a value on individual achievement. The
boys were tested constantly, against each other, and against their own limitations.
This is the site of the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, and it was here that the competitive nature of Spartan
society had its most extreme form of expression. Assuming you’d survived the first five years of the
agoge system. At age twelve, you were brought here for a brutal rite of passage. The altar up there was
piled high with cheeses. Your challenge was simple: steal as many cheeses as possible. In front of the
altar was a line of older boys, each armed with a whip. Their instruction: to defend the altar, showing
neither mercy nor restraint. Indoctrinated with the tents of endurance and perseverance, desperate to
excel in a public display, the 12 year-old boys braved the gauntlet again and again and again. Meeting the
whips head on, they sustained the most horrific injuries, and some, we’re told, were beaten to death.
It’s easy to find yourself reeling back at the sheer brutality of a system that seems as alien and violent as
these clay masks, found at the sanctuary of Artemis Orthia. And it’s not just modern audiences that find
the Spartans shocking. The philosopher Aristotle argued that they turned their children into animals,
while other Greeks pictured them as bees, swarming around a hive, creature stripped of their
individuality. It’s been a popular conception of Sparta through centuries, but one that misses an
important point. Being a part of any mass activity can be fantastically liberating. If you’ve ever been in a
Mexican wave in a football ground, or sung in a choir, or taken part in a protest march, you’ll know that
being part of a crowd doesn’t diminish you, it makes you stronger. Your reach is greater, your sense of
self is magnified. And that was the fundamental attraction of the Spartan system: the possibility of
transcending your limitations as an individual and becoming part of something bigger and better.
From the age of twelve onwards, the boys’ training became, if possible, even more exacting. Reading and
writing, we’re told, were taught no more than was necessary, but music and dancing were regarded as
essential. The battlefields on which hoplites clashed were once memorably described as “the dancing
floors of war.” And a phalanx that was able to move together in a coordinated way made for a formidable
dancing partner. So the Spartans spent many hours perfecting what was known as war music, a rhythmic
drill in which changes in direction and pace were communicated musically. The Spartans earned the
reputation for being the most musical and the most warlike of people.
At the age of 20, with their training nearing completion, Spartan males faced their most crucial test:
election to one of the common messes, or dining clubs, where they’d be expected to spend most of their
time when they weren’t training or fighting. But entry to these exclusive gentlemen’s clubs was not
guaranteed. Election to the common mess was by the vote of the existing members. If you failed to
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measure up, you’d be blackballed and then that was that: you were a failed Spartan, publicly humiliated,
excluded from the society into which you’d been born. It must have been a living hell.
If, on the other hand, you were elected, you were given a big, fat portion of land by the State, and a quota
of helot slaves to support you and your family. You were now one of the homioi, the equals, the warrior
elite at the top of Sparta’s hierarchy. The common messes, which lay a mile or so outside of the center of
Sparta, were an essential part of the city’s social engineering, intended to keep discord and civil strife at
bay. Old and young mixed here, easing generational conflicts, a constant source of friction elsewhere in
Greece. More importantly, rich and poor met on an equal footing, the differences between them hidden
by a rigorously enforced code of conspicuous non-consumption.
In egalitarian Sparta, the rule was: even if you have got it, don’t flaunt it. And it was applied to
everything, from houses to clothes, even to food. Elsewhere in Greece, rich men would lay on a couple of
prostitutes, crack open some amphoras of wine, and invite their mates round to feast on locked tongues
and honey-roasted tuna. In Sparta, there was no time for fine dining. In the common messes, the dish of
the day, every day, was a concoction of boiled pig’s blood and vinegar, known as melas zoumas, black
soup. An old joke goes: There’s a man from Sybaris in southern Italy, a town infamous for its luxury and
gluttony, who was told the recipe for black soup. “Ah,” he said, “now I understand why the Spartans are
so willing to die.”
Spartan frugality may have shocked their contemporaries, but to a modern audience, their diet, leaving
aside the black soup, sounds nutritious and healthy. Judging from the contented expression on the face of
this Spartan diner, Lycurgus’s system paid off. Well nourished, and free from the need to make a living,
or keep up with the neighbors, this is someone who despite the demands of Spartan society, knew the
good life. It’s also the face of an entirely new kind of human being, a citizen. Spartan society was one of
the first to introduce a form of social contract, where the duties of an individual were balanced by certain
privileges and rights. It’s a profound concept, and one that was current in Sparta a hundred years or so
before any other Greek city was even beginning to think along similar lines.
But utopias need protecting, and in the year 480BC, disturbing news reached Sparta. The Persian Empire
was on the move. A huge invasion force was heading west by land and sea. The time had come to see
whether Sparta's celebrated warriors would live up to their fearsome reputation, and save the Greek world
from destruction.
39:20 – Leonidas and the Persian Invasion, 480 BC
Archeology came relatively late to Sparta. It wasn't until 1906 that a British team began the first
systematic digs. In 1925 there was a major find: a striking life size bust of a Spartan warrior dating from
the 5th century BC. These lantern slides record the moment of discovery.
When the bust was inched out of the earth, and it became clear that he was a magnificent warrior, one of
the Greek workmen said without a moment's hesitation, "This is Leonidas." Leonidas was Sparta's super
hero, the king who with 300 warriors made a doomed last stand against the mighty Persia in the pass at
Thermopylae. There isn't any hard evidence for that identification, although he is from the right period,
but I think we can forgive the wishful thinking. After all, everyone wants a legend to have a face.
These days the warrior presides over the museum in Sparta. They still call him Leonidas, the name is
safely in quote marks. But whoever he was, he remains an impressive piece of work. That enigmatic
smile is typical of the sculpture of the period, and it gives him a Mona Lisa-like quality. His eyes are
blank now, but in their day, they had been inlaid with rock crystal and seashells, and would have glittered
out of the stone. His torso is fantastically fit and toned. His hair is very elaborately dressed, and his
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upper lip is clean-shaven. It was one of Lycurgus’s most fussy reforms that Spartan men should not have
mustaches. So, if you want a picture of the ultimate Spartan, here he is.
We know very little of the real Leonidas. He was a member of the Agidae, one of the two aristocratic
families that supplied Sparta with her kings. He had been on the throne for 10 years when the Persian
juggernaut began to roll west.
Persia was the regional superpower of the eastern Mediterranean, a vast empire, stretching from present
day Afghanistan to the Aegean Sea. The Greeks were an insignificant but increasingly troublesome
presence on the western limits of their empire, inciting rebellion among the king's subjects in the cities of
Asia Minor. It was the Persian king Darius who made the first move. He sent punitive forces to land at
Marathon, only to see them routed by Athens and its allies. The King died before he could avenge the
insult, and it was left to his son Xerxes to sort out the troublesome Greeks once and for all.
The Persians set out by land and sea early in the year 480. The army was so vast, that according to the
Greek historian, Herodotus, it drank whole rivers dry. Herodotus also reckons the combined Persian
forces had more than one and a half million. A more sober estimate would put the ceiling at 300,000, big
enough to crush the minnow-like cities of Greece.
When the Spartans learned the Persian invasion was on its way, they sent for advice of the oracle at
Delphi. Oracles were thought of as messages from the gods, delivered through the mouth of the
possessed priestess. The Spartans were deeply pious and they treated oracles as though they were
military orders. On this occasion the orders made for sobering reading.
"Hear, hear your fate, o dwellers in Sparta, of the wide spaces. Either your famed great town must be left
by Perseus’s sons, or the whole land must mourn the death of a king of the house of Heracles.”
Beneath the flowery language, a simple choice was offered: capitulate or fight to the death. The Spartans
being Spartans chose the latter and put themselves at the head of the resistance to the invasion. As the
Persian army swung south towards the Greek heartland, a Greek force, under the leadership of King
Leonidas headed north to stop their advance at Thermopylae, the gates of fire.
In 480 Thermopylae was a natural bottleneck. Now the sea has receded miles in that direction, but then
the road south was squeezed between the shoreline and these mountains. It was here that between seven
and eight thousand hoplites came from all over Greece. The first thing they did was to rebuild a wall that
crossed the most narrow point of the pass. Hunkering down behind it, they aimed to stop the Persian
advance in its tracks. The Greeks were hopelessly outnumbered, but they did have geography on their
side. If they could just slow down the Persians, it would allow others to organize more formidable
defenses on land and sea. But for Leonidas and for the 300 Spartan warriors who had accompanied him,
Thermopylae was more than a strategic strong point. It was the place where they intended to show the
world what it meant to be a Spartan.
As a whole, the Greeks made a great deal of noise about the nobility of dying for your country. But for
the Spartans, it was far more than just a platitude. In battle, they were ordered to seek out “a beautiful
death.” It encompassed everything that the poet Tyrtaeus spoke of – advancing calmly in meeting your
enemy. Never fleeing the battlefield, and embracing death like a lover. In fact on campaign, the Spartans
would make offerings to Eros, the god of love. The beautiful death was a sacrifice in the true sense of the
word, turning something mortal into something sacred. The men that Leonidas chose to do the job for
him here were all married, older, and with sons. He knew none of them would be coming back. The
Spartans who fought at Thermopylae were a 300-strong kamikaze squad.
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46:40 – Leonidas and the Final Stand at Thermopylae, 480 BC
For three days, the Greeks held off the Persian advance, sheltering behind their wall and then counter
attacking in hoplite formation. Three times the Persians attacked; three times they were beaten back.
Xerxes had almost given up, but then he was told of a secret path that went through the mountains and
came out behind the Greek wall.
When Leonidas discovered the Persians were on their way, he knew the game was up. Before long the
Greeks would be surrounded. While there was still time for them to escape, Leonidas dismissed most of
the Greek allies, setting the stage for one of history’s most celebrated last stands.
On the final morning the Spartans followed their normal pre-battle rituals. They stripped naked and
exercised. They oiled their bodies, and combed each other’s long hair. They wrote their names out on
little sticks and fastened them to their arms like dog tags so their bodies could be identified later. Persian
spies observing these strange activities, reported them back to Xerxes, who found them laughable. It was
said it looked as though they were getting ready for a party. In fact they were making themselves:
“greater, more noble, more terrible.”
Herodotus describes the final act: “In the morning, Xerxes poured a libation to the rising sun and the
ordered the advance. The Greeks under Leonidas, knowing that the fight would be their last, pressed
forward into the widest part of the pass. They fought with reckless desperation, with swords if they had
them, and if not, with their hands and teeth. Until the Persians, coming in from the front and closing in
from behind, overwhelmed them.”
Militarily speaking, Thermopylae was insignificant. The Persian advance, delayed for less than a week,
was soon rolling south again. Shortly afterwards, another battle took place, here in the Bay of Salamis,
where a Greek fleet led by Athens destroyed the Persian ships. It was a scrappy hit-and-miss affair, but
Salamis finished what Thermopylae had started. And the following year the Persians were finally driven
out of Greece. In the aftermath of victory, it was the doomed heroism of Thermopylae that captured the
imagination of the Greeks. Thermopylae was a stage upon which the Spartans played out the role they’d
spent their lives preparing for. They’d shown the world the kind of place that Sparta was, and the kind of
men it produced. They’d fulfilled the ideals of their city, and justified the claims of their utopia. And, by
doing that, according to Herodotus, they had “laid up for the Spartans a treasure of fame, in which no
other city could share.”
“Go tell the Spartams
Stranger passing by
That here, obedient to
Their laws, we lie”
51:25 – The Rise of the Athenian Empire, 479-431 BC
For Sparta and Athens, the experience of the Persian invasion had been very different. Hundreds of miles
from the front line, in the idyllic countryside of Laconia, the Spartan homeland had been untouched by
the war. Whereas Athens itself had been invaded and its Acropolis destroyed, here in Sparta, in the
rugged, enclosed peninsula of the Peloponnese, the war had seemed a distant affair.
With peace restored, the Spartans quickly returned to their usual routines, the pursuit of physical and
military perfection. This society was disciplined, obedient, and above all, willing to sacrifice the needs of
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the family and the individual for the good of the state. If necessary, to die for the cause. The cause was
simple: protection of the utopia the Spartans thought they’d created. To do that, they needed to produce
more of their famed hoplite warriors. But beyond that, the Spartans had few other ambitions. All they
wanted was to maintain the status quo.
But in postwar Athens, things were changing fast. The trauma of occupation, followed by the euphoria of
victory, was transforming the city. Before the war, the foundations of democracy had been laid, but it
was democracy in name only. In reality, it was men with money who had the say. Now, a massive power
shift was taking place.
Welcome to the cradle of democracy, an Athenian trireme. Powered by nearly two hundred oarsmen, it
was seaborne battering rams like this that had annihilated the Persian fleet at Salamis. At the hour of
crisis for Greece, it was the poor of Athens who’d squeezed down onto these cramped rowing benches
and sent the triremes smashing into the hulls of their enemies.
These were the have-nots of the city, the bottom of the political pecking order. But after Salamis, all that
changed. The oarsmen who’d endured the sweat and the stench and the terror of being down here had
won an historic victory, and now they wanted to have their say. Athenian democracy was galvanized.
The champion of the Athenian oarsmen was Pericles. He was a wealthy aristocrat, exactly the sort who’d
ruled the so-called democracy in Athens for generations. He was also shrewd enough to sense that things
had changed, and ambitious enough to place himself at the head of that change. Pericles could see that in
order to secure power, he needed to distance himself from the nobles, play to the gallery, and ingratiate
himself with the people. He was a formidable orator, and his powers of argument and speech won them
over.
But it wasn’t just what Pericles said that impressed the citizens of Athens. He designed a mass civic
building program that in effect would be a job-creation scheme for the city’s poor. “All kinds of
enterprises and demands will be created, which will provide inspiration for every art, find employment
for every hand, and transform the whole people into wage-earners, so that the city will decorate and
maintain herself at the same time.”
True to his word, Pericles opened the coffers of Athens to pay for public festivals and grandiose
monuments like the Parthenon. But most significantly of all, he introduced state salaries for juries and
war service. Now the oarsmen could trade in their rowing benches for seats of power in the city. For the
first time in Athens, democracy was really coming to mean government by the people.
And this is where its voice could be heard: the Athenian Agora. If the Acropolis was the soul of Athens,
then the Agora was its beating heart. It was here that the day-to-day life of Athens took place. Artisans
and lawyers, shopkeepers and philosophers, men from all walks of life rubbed shoulders here, creating the
buzz and bustle of the most democratic city in Greece. Official posts were open to everyone, irrespective
of their wealth and status. And you were expected to pull your weight and participate. On days when
speeches and debates were heard, all the exits to the Agora were closed, apart from the one that led up to
the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly sat. Slaves with ropes dipped in red paint would shivvy citizens
up the slope, marking out for a fine any who dragged their feet or tried to slip away. In Athens,
democracy was enforced as rigorously as military discipline was in Sparta.
But it wasn’t just Athenian political life that had been revolutionized after the defeat of Persia.
Everything from commerce to culture was infused with energy and new thinking. Although the Greek
alliance had emerged victorious from the war, Persia remained a constant threat. The cities of Greece
needed a leader to carry on the fight against the enemy from the East. Sparta had no desire to take on the
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job. So while it turned its attentions inward, Athens, this confident, outgoing democracy, took the helm,
and set its course in a different direction.
Unlike Sparta, happily landlocked in the Peloponnese, Athens had always been half in love with the sea.
With the defeat of the Persians, that love affair was formalized. When the city was physically linked to
the Port of Piraeus by defensive walls, the walls meant that Athens now was officially a sea power, will
that implied in terms of trade, the movement of people in and out, an the potential for empire building.
The Athenians devoured their own city to build their walls, scavenging raw materials from public
monuments, even using headstones from graveyards. The result was twelve miles of imposing
fortifications, erected in record time. As a statement of intent, it certainly packed a punch. A defensive
shield designed to keep the wealth of Athens in, and unwanted busybodies from neighboring states out.
Athens became the policeman of the eastern Mediterranean. Its allies were expected to tow the line and
foot the bill, and if anyone objected, they’d soon find an Athenian fleet in their harbor. It was “trireme
diplomacy.”
This shift in the balance of power could hardly have been missed by Sparta. The burgeoning Athenian
fleet was evidence enough. But when Sparta discovered that Athens had been building walls, there was
even more cause for concern. The Spartans disliked walls, because walls defined cities. Cities, if you
weren’t careful, encouraged other things, like democracy, and if there was one thing Spartans distrusted
more than walls, it was democracy. Sparta famously had no walls. It was said, “Its walls were its young
men, and its borders, the tips of their spears.” For the Spartans, it wasn’t laws, or walls, or magnificent
public buildings that made a city. It was their own ideals. In essence, Sparta was a city of the head and
the heart, and it existed in its purest form in the disciplined march of a hoplite phalanx on their way to
war.
1:00:25 – Contrasts between Athens and Sparta: The Role of Women
Athens and Sparta represented two radically different ways of being. Choosing between them would
seem to present no difficulties. Sparta was militaristic and xenophobic. Athens was dynamic and open to
the world. But of course things are never that simple. Athens could be imperialist, arrogant, and
aggressive. And its democracy excluded women, foreigners, and slaves. But for the Greeks, their main
problem with Athenian politics was its volatility, and the threat that posed to their cherished value of
eunomia, or good order. Pindar, the fifth century poet, called êunomia the secure foundation stone of
cities, and the Greeks knew from bitter experience what happened when this foundation was threatened.
Civil war between the haves and the have-nots, fields left unharvested, blood in the streets.
The Spartan system, on the other hand, with its peculiar blend of equality and elitism, held many
attractions for the Greeks. Its emphasis on the common good, duty, and cohesion seemed to guarantee
good order. But, for the other Greeks, good order in Sparta was compromised by its extraordinary
attitude to sexual politics. Because when it came to women, conservative Sparta was positively radical.
If you were a woman, life in fifth century Athens can’t have been much fun. The city may have been at
the cutting edge of all that was good in art and architecture and democracy, but these were intended for
the consumption of men. Female achievement consisted primarily of playing the part of dutiful, shadowy
wife. In fact, in most of Ancient Greece, women were expected to be neither seen nor heard. The
historian Xenophon recommended that they stay indoors, and for the orator Pericles, it was shameful if
they were even mentioned in public. Athenian women led a very sheltered existence. Apart from training
for domestic duties, they were given as little education as possible. In a society where women had no say,
education must have seemed at best pointless, and at worst dangerous. As one comic poet put it: “Teach
women letters? A serious mistake, like giving extra venom to a terrifying snake.” An Athenian girl could
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be married off as young as twelve, to a man chosen for her. She’d be taken away from her family, and
would disappear into her husband’s house. A woman’s role was to manage the family and do the chores,
grind corn, wash, or bake bread. Rich women who had slaves to take care of the drudgery would spin and
sew. There would be the occasional sortie outside, to attend to domestic matters, or go a religious
ceremony. But basically, life was confined within four walls.
In Sparta, by contrast, women were everywhere. Imagine airlifting all the men between the age of seven
and sixty out of the street, and you get a feeling of what it must have been like. For a start, there were
more girls than boys, because they weren’t victims of a state program of infanticide. And if men weren’t
away fighting or training, they were relaxing with their male colleagues in the common messes. Women
would have dominated the day-to-day life of the city.
The simple visibility of Spartan women made them objects of fear and fascination to non-Spartan men.
Homer called Sparta “the land of beautiful women.” The beauty of Helen of Troy, originally Helen of
Sparta, was legendary. Of course, not every Spartan woman who looked at herself in a mirror like this
could have lived up to her standards, but they were uniquely fit. Spartan girls had an upbringing
unparalleled anywhere else in Greece. For starts, they were fed the same rations as boys, and allowed to
drink wine. The state taught them how to sing and dance, to wrestle, to throw the javelin and discus, and
they were encouraged to be every bit as competitive as the boys.
Girls and boys would exercise naked, but there was nothing immodest about it. Nudity was the norm
because it was thought to banish prudery and encourage fitness. It paid off. Physically they were
outstanding. There’s a great scene in the comedy Lysistrata by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes. A
group of Athenian women crowd around a Spartan woman called Lampeto. “What a gorgeous creature,”
they say, “what healthy skin, what firmness of physique.” And one of them adds, “I’ve never seen a pair
of breasts like that.” To which Lampeto proudly responds, “I go to the gym. I make my buttocks hard.”
When you see these lead votive offerings of dancers here in the Sparta museum, you can understand why
Spartan women were the subject of such lurid speculation amongst Athenian men. One of the most
important virtues of Athenian women was “wise restraint.” Well, there’s not much of that in evidence
here in these uninhibited dancers. Even after thousands of years, you can sense the energy and almost
smell the sweat. Spartan dancers were famous for their vitality. In one particularly athletic version,
women had to jump up and drum their buttocks with their heels as many times as possible. It’s incredibly
difficult, but most importantly for the ancients, it revealed a large amount of naked thigh, which is
probably where Spartan girls earned their nickname, “thigh flashers.”
As part of their state education, the “thigh flashers” would come down here to the banks of the Eurotas in
what one poet described as “the ambrosial night.” The poet goes on to evoke scenes of ritual ecstatic
dances and choral contests, the girls singing to each other of a limb-loosening desire, tossing their long
hair, being ridden like horses, and exhausted by love. It’s no surprise that Sparta was one of the few
ancient cities that had the reputation for encouraging girl on girl sex.
1:08:40 – Spartan Family Life: Marriage and Child Rearing
Women and men in Sparta were used to living separate lives. At the age of seven, boys would be sent
away to the agoge, the tough, uncompromising Spartan system where they’d be schooled in the art of war.
Male bonding wasn’t just encouraged; it was compulsory. At the age of twelve, a boy was paired with an
older man, usually on of the unmarried warriors, aged between twenty and thirty. This man would have
looked after the boy’s material needs, and was responsible for his care and conduct. He was a surrogate
mother and father, as well as a teacher and mentor. But he was also a lover. For institutionalized
pederasty was a part and parcel of life for the Spartan warriors. These intimate relationships seemed to
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have had lasting psychological and emotional effects on the men. When the time came for them to get
married, it must have been a difficult adjustment to make. But the pragmatic Spartans came up with an
unusual way to help them through their wedding night.
The Spartans practiced a custom called “marriage by capture.” On her wedding night, a bride would have
her head shaved like a small boy in the agoge. She’d be dressed in a man’s cloak and sandals and left
alone in a dark room. Meanwhile, her husband would quietly leave the common mess, come to her, lay
her down on a straw pallet, have sex with her, and then slip back to sleep with his comrades as usual.
This wasn’t just a quaint wedding night ritual. It could carry on for months, or even years. There’s much
debate about the significance of this bizarre ritual. But it seems obvious that it was a piece of sexual
theater designed to acclimatize men to the presence of women, when, up until then, their only experience
of sex had been with other men.
And yet, however hard the Spartans tried to make marriage familiar to their young men, persuading them
to do their duty could be problematic. According to one story, which is probably exaggerated but too
good not to repeat, Spartan women would beat men about the head and then drag them around an altar to
get them to commit. There’s another, more credible account, that goes something like this. Unmarried
men were stripped naked and forced to march round the marketplace in the middle of winter, singing a
humiliating song about how their punishment was just and fair because they’d flouted the laws. Sparta
was no place for a confirmed bachelor.
The treatment meted out to these men may seem extreme, but its severity stemmed from a very real need:
to produce the next generation of warriors. The obsession with competition and physical fitness for girls
reflected the same anxiety. Women were well fed and well treated because healthy women were more
likely to produce healthy babies.
This is probably a fragment of a sculpture of Lethea, the goddess of childbirth. What’s certain is that
she’s in labor. There are spirits on either side of her touching her belly, helping her get through those
terrible pains. Spartan women would have paid this image a lot of respect because of the constant
pressure on them to keep producing sturdy, male children. It was a huge priority for the Spartans to keep
the numbers of their warrior elite high. There were never that many of them, at most ten thousand, a
number which steadily declined throughout the fifth century. One reason was that Spartan girls wouldn’t
get married until they were eighteen, and boys until they were 28 or 29, incredibly late by Greek
standards.
But Spartan women weren’t just baby makers. At a time when Greek women were expected to be
invisible, they had power and responsibility in their own right. In fact, they were so cocksure, they dared
to take on the men in politics, on the streets, and even in that most sacred bastion, the sporting arena.
1:13:20 – Freedoms for Spartan Women
It wasn’t just Spartan women’s physicality that shocked the outside world. Their freedom was equally
notorious. Aristotle described the place as a “gynocratia,” a state run by women. And he didn’t mean it
as a compliment. In Athens and other Greek cities, women were not allowed to own land or control large
amounts of wealth. Heiresses and widows married according to the wishes of fathers or brothers, usually
to cousins or uncles, in order to keep the wealth in the family. And with the exception of traveling in oxdrawn carts to weddings and funerals, riding would have been out of the question. But in Sparta, women
had the keys to the coffers. They could be landowners and property holders in their own right. They
could inherit estates, and even seemed to have the right to choose who or even whether to marry. So you
have to imagine these economically independent women riding out to oversee their estates and slaves,
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cracking the whip and running things. Unless you believe the myth of the Amazons, this was a sight
unprecedented anywhere else in the ancient world.
Whereas laws in Athens were drawn up that restricted women’s visibility in public, some Spartan women
actually achieved the unthinkable: they became celebrities. The most famous example was Kyniska, a
Spartan princess and in her day, a sporting legend. Kyniska means “Little Hound,” and she was
obviously a tomboy from a sporty family. The names of her female relations translate as things like
“Well Horsed,” “Flash of Lightning,” and “She Who Leads from the Front.” But it would be Kyniska
who would go down in the history books as the owner of a champion of chariot team. Kyniska was an
equestrian expert and very wealthy, the perfect qualifications for a successful trainer. She didn’t race
herself, but employed men to drive, and she made no secret of her ambition. She entered her team at the
Olympic games, the showcase for outstanding athletes from all over the Greek world. It won. Men were
astounded. Four years later, she entered again. She won again. The bitter irony is that Kyniska probably
didn’t see her victories. At Olympia, the usual all-male rules applied. But she made certain that the
world wouldn’t miss out on her success. She dedicated a monument to herself, right in the heart of the
Olympic sanctuary. The inscription read: “I Kyniska, victorious with a chariot of swift footed horses,
have erected this statue, and declare that I am the only woman in all of Greece to have won this crown.”
But women weren’t only powerful in the sporting arena. Spartan women also played a role in the
political life of the city. They were trained to speak in public, and although they had no official place in
the decision-making process, they made sure their opinions were heard. And it was the women who
seemed to have been the most vociferous when it came to enforcing the warrior ethic. Sparta’s unwritten
laws were policed at street level by a kind of community based rough justice. Women were in the
forefront, praising the brace and insulting cowards as they passed. You get an idea of the kind of things
they’d have called out from a collection called “The Sayings of the Spartan Women.” In Athens, silence
was a mark of breeding. But Spartan girls were positively lippy. They were masters in the art of laconic
speaking, named after Laconia, heartland of Sparta. Deployed properly, a laconic phrase could draw
blood from the skin of even the most armor-plated warrior.
When a warrior was describing the brave death of a comrade, a woman said, “Such a noble journey.
Shouldn’t you have gone too?” A man complained that his sword was too short. His mother replied,
“Take a step forward and it would be long enough.”
Although Spartan women enjoyed freedom of speech and financial liberty, it would be a mistake to paint
a picture of Sparta as a kind of feminist wonderland. You should think of Spartan women as regimental
wives, the backbone of the system, breeding sons and then surrendering them to the agoge when they
turned seven. Because Sparta was constantly anxious about its decline in birthrate, every Spartan boy
must have been the apple of his mother’s eye. Helots were there to do the domestic chores, and there was
plenty of time to dote on little Leonidas. But when the time came to send him off to the agoge, though it
must have been a wrench, it was done without hesitation. This was Sparta, and maternal instincts came a
poor second to the interests of the state.
Our concept of motherhood is of a tender, supportive relationship between mother and child. But in
Sparta, there was little room for sentimentality. In a state where unswerving obedience to the warrior
code was rated more highly than life itself, mothers wanted to make absolutely sure their sons did their
duty. Their approach was more Nazi than nurture. When a son left for battle, his mother would issue a
traditional farewell: “With your shield, or on it.” In other words, either come back victorious, or come
back dead. But if a son failed to live up to this injunction, he could expect little sympathy from mom.
One story goes that a mother, confronting her runaway son, hitched up her skirts and asked him if he
intended to crawl back where he’d come from.
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Following the defeat of Persia, there’d been few opportunities for Spartan men to make their mothers
proud. But that was all about to change.
1:20:50 – Underlying Causes of War between Sparta and Athens, beginning 465 BC
Since the Persian invasion, Sparta and Athens had coexisted peacefully. Against all the odds, the alliance
had held firm. But given the huge ideological differences between these two Greek superpowers, it was
almost inevitable that at some point mutual mistrust would boil over into outright conflict. In the end, it
took one catastrophic event to shake the foundations of the alliance, and set Sparta and Athens on a
collision course.
In the year 465 BC, a series of massive earthquakes hit Sparta. The consequences were devastating. The
loss of life was immense. But the earthquakes also gave a golden opportunity to Sparta’s enemy within,
the huge population of helots, whose slave labor propped up the Spartan system. In the aftermath of the
earthquakes, the helots seized their chance and revolted. The rebel slaves came here to Mount Athone, at
the heart of Messene, the homeland that had been taken from them by the Spartans. They fortified the
position and waited for the Spartans to come. For all its fearsome reputation, Sparta failed to put down
the revolt. And with the conflict dragging on, it was forced to appeal to Athens and its other allies for
assistance.
Spartan allies sent over troops to put down the revolt, and the Athenians brought in siege equipment,
technology not developed by the hidebound Spartans. It was then that the Spartans began to fret.
Enslavement of the Messenians had always been a slightly sticky issue. As a whole, the Greeks had
absolutely no problem with slavery. But when it came to subjugating an entire native Greek population, it
was less easy to swallow. The Spartans knew this, and that’s when paranoia set in. What would happen
if the Athenians sided with the rebels, or even worse, spread the virus of democracy among Spartan
citizens themselves? It was a risk not worth taking, and they sent the Athenians home. Athens took
serious offense at its dismissal by the Spartans. Being summarily sent home with no explanation was not
the treatment they’d expected from an ally, who they’d only been trying to help. The Athenians tore up
the old treaty of alliance, and began to collude with Sparta’s enemies. And to add insult to injury, they
even helped the rebels who’d managed to escape by setting them up in a new city. It was the beginning of
open hostilities. Sparta and Athens would soon be at war. This time, with each other.
1:24:10 – The Peloponnesian War: The First Phase, 431-421 BC
When the war between Athens and Sparta finally came, it had many apparent causes. But the simple truth
was that over a period of fifty years, Sparta had allowed Athens to get so powerful that its own sphere of
influence on the mainland of the Peloponnese was now under threat. Seizing upon a rather flimsy pretext,
Sparta declared war in 431 BC. It sent troops to invade Athenian territory. They forced their way to
within seven miles of the hated city walls of Athens itself. The onetime allies were now mortal enemies.
The Athenian casualties of the first year of the war were given a ceremonial burial in this graveyard
outside the city. Here, in their honor, Pericles delivered an impassioned speech to the crowd. Pericles’
Funeral Oration has gone down in history as one of the all-time great war speeches. It’s based on a
simple and satisfying proposition: Everything that we the Athenians do is right, and everything our
enemies the Spartans do is wrong.
“The Spartans from their earliest boyhood are submitted to the most laborious training in courage. We
pass our lives without all these restrictions, and yet are just as ready to face the same dangers as they
are. We meet danger voluntarily, with natural rather than state-induced courage.”
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Pericles’ speech is a rally cry in defense of a way of being, a call to arms against an enemy whose social
system, politics, and even character were so alien as to make peaceful coexistence impossible. The
speech set the tone for an all-out war that would be unprecedented in its scale and savagery. History
would know it as the Peloponnesian War, but in fact it would rage from Sicily in the west to the
Hellespont in the east, and would last for more than two decades.
The vicious fighting dragged on as neither side was able to land the killer blow. The war quickly became
a stalemate, with Sparta dominant on land, and Athens at sea. Every year for five years, Spartan armies
laid waste to Athenian territory, burning farms and destroying crops. The Athenians fled from the
countryside, and withdrew behind the walls that connected their city to the Port of Piraeus. They became
in effect islanders, marooned and reliant on their fleet to keep them supplied.
Within a year, plague came to the overcrowded city. Corpses were piled high in the streets, and almost a
third of the population of Athens was wiped out. The historian Thucydides described the sufferings of the
Athenian plague victims as almost beyond the capacity of human nature to endure. Wealth and power
were no protection. Pericles himself succumbed to the virulent disease.
For Sparta, the decimation of Athens and its leaders was proof that the gods were on their side. But gods
can be fickle. According to Thucydides, who was an eyewitness to much of the war, nothing shocked the
Greeks so much as something that happened on that island in Sparta’s very own backyard. Pylos was a
port on the west coast of the Peloponnese, and of major strategic importance to the Spartans. In the year
425 BC, it was seized by the Athenian army, helped by the former slaves who’d revolted against Sparta
after the earthquake. The Spartans couldn’t stomach this provocation, and sent an army to retake Pylos.
They laid siege to the Athenians in the town, and set up a smaller unit on the mile-and-a-half of rock that
stretches across Pylos Bay, the island of Sphacteria. Their plan was to blockade the Athenians by land
and water. But I think they’d forgotten who they were dealing with.
The Athenians were totally at home on the sea, and within a few days had sent a large fleet into Pylos
Bay. They seized control of all of these waters. The tables had been turned. Sparta was forced to
withdraw, leaving behind the 400 or so troops who’d been posted on the island of Sphacteria. They were
trapped, and for 72 days there was a standoff. The stalemate was finally broken when the Spartans scored
a spectacular “own goal.” A group of soldiers stupidly let a campfire get out of control. It raged across
the island, burning off all the protective cover. The Spartans had nowhere to hide. The Athenians could
now see exactly how many they were and where they were. The Athenians decided to try and take the
island, with 800 archers and 800 lightly-armed troops. The Athenians landed, but they refused to fight
the Spartans at close quarters. Instead, they picked them off with javelins and arrows and rocks.
Whenever the Spartan phalanx advanced, the Athenians retreated. Soon it was the Spartans who were
backing off, leaving some 300 dead, while the survivors headed to a defensive position on the north end
of the island. An Athenian commander sent an detachment of archers to cut them off from behind. The
Spartans were surrounded. It looked as if this were going to be a mini-Thermopylae in the making.
Over 50 years before, King Leonidas and his 300 hand-picked troops had sacrificed their lives for the
glory of Sparta at the Battle of Thermopylae. For the Spartans on Sphacteria, there was no higher ideal to
aspire to. Hopelessly outnumbered by the Athenians, this was their chance to emulate the heroics of their
grandfathers and bring honor to the state. They knew exactly what was expected of them: a heroic
struggle, a beautiful death, and the final test passed. But that wasn’t what happened at all. The Athenians
were far too smart. They held back for a while, and then politely sent over a herald to ask if the Spartans
would like to surrender. And unbelievably, that’s exactly what they did.
If we were talking about anyone other than Spartans, surrender wouldn’t have been a surprise. After all,
these half-starved men had been trapped on the island for more than two months and used by the Athenian
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archers daily for target practice. But these were Spartans. They’d spent their lives preparing to die
fighting. Surrender shouldn’t have been an option. So maybe Pericles had been right in his famous
speech, with its mockery of the Spartans’ state-induced courage. On this occasion, that manufactured
bravery had been undermined by the tactical cat-and-mouse mind games of the Athenians. First, they’d
refused to give the Spartans what they wanted, a stand-up fight. And then they’d given them something
they’d never expected, an opt-out clause from their death-or-glory contract. The myth of Spartan
invincibility had been comprehensibly shattered. For Athens, it was a victory to savor.
There’s a remarkable relic from that shocking defeat here in Athens. It’s a shield, probably taken from
one of the hoplites who’d thrown in the towel. Judging from its condition, whoever it belonged to would
have been put through the mill. You can just about make out an inscription on its battered surface that
would have been punched in at a later date. It simply reads: “Taken by the Athenians from the Laconians
at Pylos.” It’s a terse, triumphant message. Along with this trophy, 120 Spartans were brought to the city
as hostages. If Sparta made so much as a move on Athenian territory, they were to be executed.
The Spartan hostages were objects of fascination in Athens, where they were displayed in public like
exotic animals. You can imagine the Athenians jostling to gawk a their strange captives, sizing them up,
jeering. Thucydides tells us that one of the crowd asked mockingly, if the real Spartans had died on the
island. “Spindles would be worth a great deal,” came the Spartan reply, “if they could mark out brave
men from cowards.” Spindles was the Spartan word for arrows, a weapon they considered wimpy and
womanish because they killed from a long distance. It was meant to be a crushing response delivered in
true laconic style, but it comes across as plain sulky.
Sparta was so rattled by the events on Sphacteria that it immediately sued for peace. But Athens was in
no mood to be generous. It capitalized on its advantage and held out for better terms. It would be five
years before the Spartan hostages saw their home again. But when they returned, they suffered none of
the punishments usually meted out to so-called tremblers. They were not stripped of their citizenship,
they were not forbidden to walk around with cheerful faces, and they were not beaten up in the streets.
For once, the women kept their cutting comments to themselves. Spartan society was pole-axed. But
before long the laughter and mockery of the Athenians would be silenced, as the final act of this bloody
war was played out.
1:35:45 – The Oracle at Delphi and the Interlude of Peace, 421-415 BC
This is Delphi, one of the most significant religious sites in ancient Greece. To the Greeks, it was the
omphalos, the navel of the world, an umbilical cord connecting them to their archaic past, when the
distance between heaven and earth didn’t seem so great. But as well as providing a link to the past,
Delphi was also a window on the future, thanks to its famous oracle. The oracle offered an appealing
combination of contact with the spirit world, and concrete day-to-day advice. If you had a question about
anything, from foreign affairs to love affairs, you’d come here. Should we invade Attica this summer?
Will I marry Leander or Leonidas? Your answers came via a strange phenomenon in the Greek world, a
Pythia. This prophetess was an old woman who wore young virgin’s clothes. She’d get herself into a
state of ecstatic frenzy by using hallucinogenic plants, chewing on laurel leaves or inhaling smoking
henbane. She’d babble away, and her utterances, which appeared to be divinely inspired, would be
written down by a priest. He’d then turn these into elegant hexameter verse, and, there was your oracle.
Oracles were notoriously ambiguous, and the true meaning of their utterances often became clear only
after the event. Perhaps that’s why places like Delphi were, by the end of the fifth century BC, becoming
just a little bit old-fashioned. A new spirit of skepticism and rationality was abroad in Greece. And
fundamental beliefs about men, the gods, and the universe were being called into question.
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Nowhere more so than in Athens, where philosophers speculated that the sun was a red hot rock, and the
playwright Aristophanes joked, thunder was just a bad case of cosmic indigestion. But elsewhere in
Greece, notions like this were simply unthinkable.
In Sparta, safe and secure in the Eurotas valley, it was still possible to believe that the gods were in their
heaven and all was right with the world. Sparta had once been a revolutionary society, but that was 250
years ago. Now, the revolution that had created its unique social system had become embalmed in
tradition. Sparta’s warrior elite had become suspicious of change, and hostile to the new.
For a decade now, Sparta had been at war with Athens, its former ally, the force of radical democracy
and, more and more these days, skepticism about the powers of the Delphic oracle. For the conservativeminded Spartans, on the other hand, oracles remained articles of faith. And when the Pythia gabbled,
they listened.
So, if in 415 BC, some Spartans had come here demanding to know what the future had in store for their
city, and assuming the Pythia was on form that day, they’d have come home with deeply disturbing news.
Soon they’d see the walls of the city of their greatest enemy reduced to rubble, and would gorge
themselves on the fruits of victory. But that victory would turn rotten. And it would be the turn of the
Spartans to taste the bitterness of total defeat.
1:40:00 – Renewal of the Peloponnesian War: The Athenian Invasion of Sicily, 415 BC
The war between Sparta and Athens had been bloody and inconclusive. Ten years of fighting had
produced plenty of killing, but no killer blow. Following devastating plague in Athens, and a military
humiliation for the Spartans on the island of Sphacteria, the two sides had finally concluded an armistice
and withdrew to lick their wounds. After six years of uneasy peace, the wounds would be spectacularly
reopened in Syracuse, on the island of Sicily. It was here hundreds of miles from Greece itself, that the
most significant battle in the conflict between Sparta and Athens took place. For Athens, it would end in
a defeat of seismic proportions. And what happened after, would surpass in brutality everything that had
gone before in this pitiless war.
Syracuse had been founded in the period of colonization which had created Greek cities all over the
Mediterranean and beyond. In the war that turned the whole of the Greek world into two armed camps, it
was allied to Sparta. In the year 415, war fever swept Athens, and its focus was Syracuse. One of the
loudest voices in the campaign for war against Syracuse belonged to Alcibiades. He was clever, goodlooking, and in many ways the quintessential Athenian. He was popular with the people, and a fan of the
new learning that had taken root in Athens. Socrates was one of his friends. But his enemies circulated
rumors about him, saying he was an atheist and mocked the gods.
Alcibiades was a hard liver, given to wine and women, despite the scoldings of his wise friend, Socrates.
During the plagues that had devastated Athens, it was said that dissipation had tipped over into something
worse. As the death toll mounted, and the city despaired, he was rumored to have shown his scorn for the
gods by profaning sacred rites. And yet despite his dubious reputation, when Alcibiades talked war, the
Athenians listened.
In a war between a city of soldiers and a democracy, it’s only too easy to assume it’s the warriors who are
spoiling for a fight. But in fact the Athenians were always keen to flex their imperial muscle. It was
actually said it was easier to get 30,000 Athenians to agree to fight than a single Spartan. So on this
occasion, Alcibiades’ gung-ho appeal pushed all the right buttons.
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But before the fleet could get underway, an outrageous act of sacrilege rocked the city. Over the course
of a single night, an attack was made by persons unknown on the Herme, good luck statues that could be
found all over Athens. According to the more polite accounts, the statues were left without noses. In
reality, the vandals targeted the Herme’s prominent phalluses, a double blow against the city’s good
fortune and virility. Despite the bad omens and the accusations flying around, the Athenian fleet set sail,
and Alcibiades went along too. But his enemies capitalized on his absence. They blackened his
reputation and spread rumors about him. Eventually, they got the city authorities to recall him, to face
charges of conspiracy and sacrilege.
Alcibiades knew all about the fickleness of the Athenians. He was, after all, a master at manipulating
them for his own ends. Reckoning his chances for a fair hearing as slim, he went on the run. Where he
ended up, amazed everyone.
He came to Sparta, and set about winning for himself a new, and highly unlikely following. Alcibiades,
the crowd-pleaser, pulled off the performance of a lifetime. His cloak was more ragged, his food poorer
than even the most hardline Spartan. But it wasn’t done completely cynically. He was a sworn enemy of
Sparta, but his background was riddled with Spartan connections. His family, like many other aristocratic
Athenians, were Lacono-philes, men who were in love with the values of Laconia, the Spartan homeland.
Alcibiades himself was given a Spartan name. He was even wet-nursed by a Spartan nanny. He could
play “the Spartan” with real conviction. And the real Spartans were simply bowled over.
And it wasn’t just the Spartan crowds that fell for Alcibiades’ formidable charms. The rumor was that he
also made a conquest of Timaea, the wife of the Spartan king, Agis. Sparta’s sexual codes were
notoriously at odds with the rest of Greece. Elsewhere, adultery was punishable by death. But in Sparta,
married women could, with the consent of their husbands, enjoy multiple sexual partners. Now, if you’re
thinking swingers, think again. Free love wasn’t the motivation. The Spartans were acutely anxious
about the decline in their population. Monogamy and the nuclear family weren’t important. What
mattered was producing healthy male children, and therefore you could choose your lover if he was
strong, courageous, and fertile. It’s not clear whether King Agis was a cuckold or an accomplice when
his wife put Spartan ideals into practice. But what’s certain is that the love affair would have
consequences long after Alcibiades left the scene.
Alcibiades repaid Spartan hospitality by revolutionizing their military thinking. He advised them to come
to the aid of their allies in Syracuse, something the Spartans had been reluctant to do. Alcibiades
convinced them to send a Spartan general, Gylippus, to help oversee the defenses, a low cost way of
honoring their commitments. The advice would prove fatal to thousands of his fellow Athenians.
The expedition against Syracuse started well, but with the arrival of the Spartan general Gylippus, things
began to go wrong for Athens. Gylippus wasn’t a brilliant tactician, he didn’t bring huge reinforcements,
and there was no secret weapon hidden underneath his scarlet cloak. But the mere presence of a Spartan
warrior raised the morale of the beleaguered Syracusans. They began to fight back.
Athens had to send reinforcements. They launched a massive night attack on a string of hill forts
overlooking the city. Inch by inch, they fought their way to the top, and at one point, it looked like they
might succeed. But by dawn, the Athenian soldiers were exhausted, and were pushed right back to their
camp in the harbor. Now, all they wanted was to get out of Syracuse.
But on the very eve of departure, nature, or the gods, took a hand. Though the Athenians had the
reputation for being the most godless of the Greeks, no one was rash enough to ignore an omen as
dramatic as an eclipse of the moon. The priests of the army camp advised them to hold tight, and
promised that by the time of the next full moon, the omens would be better. It was a bad call. Gylippus
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ordered a line of ships to be anchored across the narrow mouth of Syracuse harbor. The Athenians were
trapped.
In the fighting that followed, thousands of Athenian troops died. They were perhaps the lucky ones. It
would be the survivors who would pay the full price for Alcibiades’ treachery. The survivors, some
7,000 of them, were taken here to the stone quarries outside town. Now the quarries have been
landscaped, so you have to imagine how it was then. A narrow, rocky chasm, no shade, no water,
nothing. Thousands of prisoners were kept here for months. Many were wounded and dying, and spent
their last days baked by the sun in the dog days of summer, and then when summer turned to autumn,
frozen at night. They were given hardly any food and water. Diseases soon broke out. And because it
was impossible to bury the dead, corpses were stacked and left to rot. As well as hardship, hunger, and
disease, there were summary executions and torture. The Syracusans would bring their children to the
quarry’s edge to mock the defeated enemy. And, in this cathedral-sized mine, the Syracusans spiced up
the routine brutalities with a dash of high culture.
For the Athenians, there was only one path to survival. The Syracusans were passionate about the
playwright Euripides. Prisoners who could recite his verses were brought here to this natural concert hall.
If they performed in a style that pleased their tormentors, they were let out, to be sold on into slavery. If
you didn’t come up to scratch, you were left to die. There’s one line of Euripides that goes, “Unhappy
Greeks, barbarians to each other.” I wonder if any of them were brave or foolhardy enough to quote it.
1:51:20 – The Peloponnesian War: The Second Phase, 415-404 BC
On the night that news of the military disaster reached Athens, it was said that a wail of grief could be
heard passing along the walls, as the story was carried from the port up to the city itself. The failure of
the adventure plunged Athens into despair. The years of war were taking their toll. Athens was
weakened, and its citizens dragged down by the hardships of life on the home front. In the law courts of
the Agora, the pulsing heart of the city, one man complained that his mother was reduced to earning her
living as a nurse and a ribbon-seller. “We do not live as we would like,” he said, with poignant
understatement.
Syracuse should have paved the way for total victory for the Spartans. Slow-footed and cautious as ever,
they failed to capitalize on Athenian disarray. After a year of turmoil, Athens pulled itself back from the
brink, and turned to face the old enemy once again. But defeat for Athens had only been deferred.
The man who delivered the final blow was called Lysander. He was a Spartan, but by no means a typical
one. His origins were humble. He was a mothax. It translates as bastard. But it meant that, while his
father was a full Spartan citizen, his mother was a helot, possibly even one of the despised Messenians
whose mass enslavement provided the economic foundation of the Spartan utopia. Despite this mixed
parentage, Lysander qualified for admission to the agoge, the brutal training system that turned Spartan
boys into Spartan warriors. But what Lysander lacked in social standing, he made up for in very unSpartan “naous,” and soon emerged from the pack as a military leader and shrewd political operator.
Lysander’s politicking included wooing the Persian Empire, whose invasion 70 years before had briefly
united the fractious Greeks under the leadership of Sparta and Athens. Now that Greeks were killing
Greeks, Persia’s autocratic kings were content to stand on the sidelines, handing out gold to whichever
side seemed likeliest to serve their interests.
Most Spartans claimed to hate the Persians. They despised their dissipation and sycophancy. All that
bowing and scraping to one man who was himself above the rule of law. But Lysander was perfectly
happy to put traditional Spartan ideals behind him and suck up to the Persians, if that’s what it took to get
the coffers open. He forged a close, personal friendship with Cyrus, the king’s son. Funds materialized,
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and at a strike, the pay rate of the Spartan fleet increased by 25%. Freelance oarsmen and mercenaries
went with the money, and it was said that the Athenian ships were emptied overnight.
Fueled by Persian gold, Lysander’s fleet was able to defeat Athens and her allies time and time again.
Eventually, he was able to impose a naval blockade, cutting Athens off from its grain supplies. The
climax came in the year 405 BC, when Lysander encountered a large Athenian fleet. As ever, he
outfoxed them refusing to come to battle, making them think he was scared, and then striking when their
guard was down. The Athenians were routed, and their city was at Lysander’s mercy.
As soon as Athens capitulated, resentment and jealousy, simmering for decades within the Greek world,
boiled over into full-scale vengeance. One Theban said that the city should be razed to the ground, and
the land turned over to sheep. But the Spartans didn’t get hysterical. Despite the years of fighting and
huge loss of life, they calmly set out their terms: the removal of the democratic government, the reduction
of the Athenian fleet to three ships, and then, and this time you can sense their pleasure, the total
destruction of the city walls, the walls that Sparta had scorned for so long.
And as the city walls burnt down, and Sparta was recognized as the ruler of the Greek world, Lysander
watched the flute girls, Athenians prostitutes who camped round the city, changing sides, dancing in the
embers, serenading the death of an empire.
Pro-Spartan collaborators took over the city, and blood flowed in the streets as old scores were settled.
Among the victims was Alcibiades. In spite of his defection to Sparta, he’d somehow managed to sweet
talk his way back into the affections of the Athenians. In the wake of defeat, he was seen as someone
who might eventually lead a fight back, which was doubtless why the order came from Sparta to have him
quickly bumped off.
Lysander chose to mark the victory over Athens at Delphi. He built for himself a grandiose monument
that made a mockery of the Spartan code of understatement and self-effacement. Now all that’s left is the
base, but once this monument would have been crowded with thirty more-than-life-size bronze statues,
representing Lysander’s friends and supporters, the men who’d helped him his victory. And right in the
center stood Lysander himself, being crowned by none other than the god of the sea, Poseidon. As a
piece of self-advertisement, it was positively shameless.
Astute as ever, Lysander realized that victory over Athens had changed everything. Sparta was now the
most powerful city-state in the Greek world, an imperial power if it chose to go down that route. And
Lysander had big plans for his own place in the new Spartan world order.
1:59:00 – Rivalries in Sparta, @400 BC
This is Sparta, in the year 400 BC, four years after its defeat of Athens. On the surface, things were just
as Spartans liked them, unchanged. Their Shangri-La is safe and secure, the river Eurotas flows, the
mountains are full of game, the fields are fertile, the helot slaves are quiet, and the unique social system,
designed to produce the best warriors in the world, has emerged intact from decades of war. But within a
generation, the Spartans, who had boasted that their women had never withheld the campfires of their
enemies, would witness exactly that, and the dismantling of their utopia.
The collapse of Sparta didn’t exactly come out of the blue. Sometime in the year 400, an oracle, one of
those messages from the gods to which the Spartans paid strict attention, had started to circulate in the
city. “Boasting Sparta, be careful not to sprout a crippled kingship. Unlooked for ordeals and
numberless trials shall oppress you. And the stormy blows of man-killing war shall roll down upon you.”
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Most oracles were ambiguous to the point of meaninglessness, but this one was very explicit. It seemed
to refer directly to a power struggle that even then was being played out in Sparta.
King Agis was dead, and there were two contenders for the vacant throne. His son, Latyhedas, and his
half-brother, Agiselaus. The succession should have been straightforward. Latyhedas was the heir
apparent. The throne was him by right. And besides, Agiselaus had been born lame. This is the place
where Spartan children who were imperfect in any way would usually end up, as a small pile of bones in
the place of rejection. But if you were of royal blood, then normal rules didn’t apply. So, Agiselaus was
spared. At the age of seven, he was enrolled in the agoge, the Spartan education system that took boys
and turned them into warriors. No other member of the Spartan royal family had ever been subjected to
the agoge, but despite his disability, Agiselaus thrived in the competitive atmosphere. When King Agis
died, Agiselaus was confident enough to bid for the throne.
But it was just then that the troubling oracle began to circulate. The reference to a crippled kingship
seemed unambiguously to point to his own disability, and the threatened consequences were dire. But
oracles were only as good as the interpretations that were placed on them. And on this occasion, an
alternative was supplied by none other than Lysander. For an old fox like Lysander, twisting an oracle to
serve political sends presented no problems. All he had to do was remind the Spartans of a little bit of
recent history. Did anyone recall, he wondered, when that slippery poseur Alcibiades was in town the
rumors connecting him with the king’s wife, Timaea? And wasn’t it also said that, when she was nursing
her baby son, Lythedas, who incidentally arrived nine months or so after the Athenian left town, she
constantly whispered into his ear the name Alcibiades?
Lysander’s innuendoes did the trick, allowing the Spartans to believe that “crippled” could mean
illegitimate. The son was out; the uncle was in. And so Agiselaus came to the throne, the most Spartan
king Sparta had ever known. A typical product of the agoge, his belief in the rightness of the Spartan
system was absolute. Agiselaus was an archconservative, but Spartan society itself was changing. The
victory over Athens had brought with it the spoils of war, and temptation for the famously frugal warriors.
The war had shown them places where there was more to life than black broth, the traditional Spartan
dish made of pig’s blood and vinegar. Spartan commanders abroad gained the reputation for corruption,
and they brought their ill-gotten gains home with them. For the first time in centuries, the good times
were rolling in Sparta.
Agiselaus tried to put a stop to all that nonsense. He led by example. Even once he became king, he and
his family lived as simply as before. His ragged cloak became something of a trademark. But decadence
was only one of his problems. His more immediate concern was what to do about Lysander.
Lysander’s astute handling of the oracles had increased his power in Sparta, and it looked like payback
time. But for once, the consummate politician miscalculated. The new king had very definite ideas about
the dignity owed to a Spartan ruler. During his successful naval campaign against Athens, Lysander had
accumulated a crowd of hangers on and political climbers, men who treated him with more respect than
they did the lame king in the ragged cloak. Agiselaus decided to put him down, very publicly and very
definitely. Whenever Lysander recommended a course of action, Agiselaus did the opposite. If one of
his cronies sought a favor, the king refused it. He made it absolutely clear that association with Lysander
meant the kiss of death. The final breach came when Agiselaus ordered Lysander to serve at his table.
“You know well how to humiliate your friends,” Lysander said. The king replied, “Yes, I do, especially
those who set themselves up to be more powerful than myself.”
Lysander left Sparta under a cloud. He came to Delphi and began to plot against Agiselaus. He tried to
bribe the oracle into issuing alarming prophecies, knowing that these would destabilize the superstitious
Spartans. He was killed in battle before his plots could be realized. Only then was it discovered just how
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high he’d been aiming. Sorting through his papers after his death, Agiselaus found a speech written for
Lysander. It laid out a revolution for the Spartan constitution, a kind of elective kingship, open to all
comers, and offered to the best candidate. Clearly Lysander thought of himself as the most likely
contender. Agiselaus wanted to publicize it immediately, to prove what a threat Lysander had been. But
one of the city elders read it, and found the argument so persuasive, he urged Agiselaus not to bring
Lysander back from the grave, but to bury the speech with him.
The speech was hushed up, and Sparta continued as before. But the world around Sparta was changing
fast, and a series of disasters would soon prove the truth of the oracle’s gloomiest predictions.
2:07:15 – The Helot Uprising and the Defeat at Leuctra, 371 BC
The Spartan king Agiselaus was a magnet for gloomy omens. It was as if the archaic powers of Greece,
in retreat elsewhere, found a way back through this spirit-haunted king. A year after his accession, during
a routine sacrifice, the priest announced great alarm that, according to the signs, Sparta was even then
surrounded by enemies. In fact, this was hardly news, for nearly three centuries now, Sparta had
flourished thanks to its system of social hierarchy, with helot slaves at the bottom providing the sweat and
toil, and the perioikoi, the free but disenfranchised traders and artisans, providing the commercial muscle.
And at the top were the homioi, Sparta’s elite citizen-warriors, a tiny minority which kept its thumb
firmly on the majority beneath it. So the priest’s warning about Sparta being surrounded by enemies
might have been seen to be merely stating the obvious.
In fact, there was far more to it than that. A few days later, a plot was unmasked, to completely
overthrow the Spartan system. One of its leaders was king Cynedon. He was neither a helot nor a
perioikos, but what was known as a lower grade Spartan. There were a variety of ways you could be
reduced to this limbo-like state. Cowardice in battle made you a trembler. If you were a bastard or of
mixed blood, you were categorized a mothax, and you could eve be stripped of your citizenship for failing
to pay your subs to the common mess. The alarming thing about Cynedon’s conspiracy was its scope. It
appeared to involve everyone, from helot slaves through perioikoi to the lower grade Spartans, all of those
who’d been excluded from the full benefits of the Spartan utopia. According to Cynedon, they all wanted
to eat the Spartans raw.
Once they’d made their confessions, Cynedon and his fellow conspirators were driven through the city at
spear point, beneath a gauntlet of whips, to face their final punishment. They probably ended up here, a
crevasse a few miles outside of Sparta, called Chaodos, a place of execution.
Legends about this place have always been sinister, but for once it seems the locals aren’t exaggerating.
An archaeological survey has revealed that the cavern floor is many feet thick with human remains.
Down there is a subterranean charnel house. Only a tiny sample of the bones have been analyzed, but the
results show that they are from the fifth and sixth centuries, and belong to men, women, and children.
Some of the adult skeletons are crouched in crevasses, suggesting they were alive when they were thrown
down, and died trying to climb out. I should imagine that after Cynedon’s torturous punishment, he’d
probably have stayed put once he hit the bottom.
But the Cynedon conspiracy had highlighted the major flaw in the Spartan system: its pathological
elitism. Sparta may have been the first Greek city to define citizenship, but it had always been the
privilege of a small minority. This minority was further reduced by the Spartan instinct to exclude
anyone who failed to measure up to their exacting standards. The consequence, simply put, was that
Sparta was running out of Spartans. A hundred years before, at the time of Thermopylae, there’d been
perhaps 10,000 full Spartan citizens. Now, there was as few as one thousand.
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Spartan numbers were dangerously low. It produced a “body bag syndrome,” a reluctance to commit
large numbers of full citizens to battle. Now when the Spartans went to war, they formed an officer elite.
The fighting was done by helots promised their freedom, and allies increasingly reluctant and alienated
from the Spartan cause.
Sparta was living on borrowed time. When the walls of Athens had been pulled down to the sound of
flutes in 404, it was thought, according to one contemporary historian, that this day was the beginning of
freedom for Greece. Overbearing and arrogant, the Athenian empire had few friends by the end. But the
Spartan empire had proved just as oppressive. Where Athens demanded money to finance its fleet, the
Spartans demanded men to fight their wars. Athens had turned its allies into cash cows. The Spartans
turned theirs into battle fodder.
It was a bad time to fall out with your friends, because Sparta had a new enemy to deal with: Thebes.
Militarily speaking, it had never really been in the big league, but in recent years it had been getting more
and more experience, thanks almost entirely to the irrational grudge held against the city by King
Agiselaus.
Things came to a head in Sparta in the spring of 371 BC. A meeting of city-states had been called to try
to sort out a whole range of bitter rivalries and turf wars that had flared up. Diplomacy and tact would
obviously pay premiums, but these were never Agiselaus’s strong points. Sparta was supposed to be top
dog here, but Agiselaus noticed the respect with which the other Greeks treated the delegate from Thebes.
The king saw red and picked a fight with him. The Theban stood his ground, and even had the temerity to
answer back. This time Agiselaus completely lost his temper. He took the peace treaty and struck out the
name of Thebes. Within twenty days, the armies of the two cities clashed at a place called Leuctra. For
Sparta, it would prove to be a day of reckoning.
In those days, when you won a battle, you’d have erected one of these on the battlefield so the world
knew of your victory. This was put up by the Thebans in 371, after they’d crushed the Spartans here at
Leuctra. All that’s left now is the base, but in its day it would have towered up into the sky, dominating
the landscape around. But this doesn’t just mark the defeat of a Spartan army. It signals the death of
Sparta itself.
Agiselaus wasn’t there on the day. Having caused the fight, he refused to lead the Spartan forces into
battle. Apparently, he didn’t want it to be said that was too fond of fighting. It was left to Sparta’s other
king to take charge of a mixed bag of 700 Spartan warriors and 1,300 or so helot slaves an reluctant allies.
Against them were 6,000 Thebans, highly motivated and thirsty for revenge. The disparity in numbers
alone would be enough to explain the defeat, but the Thebans also employed a surprise tactic: phalanxes
fifty, rather than eight men deep, a staggering mass of bronze and muscle bearing down on you.
400 Spartans were killed that day. It doesn’t sound that many, but bear in mind that by this stage, that’s
close on half the male warrior population. As a military force, Sparta was effectively finished.
2:17:30 – The Consequences of Defeat: The Downfall of Sparta
The consequences of defeat were profound. This was a sight that no Spartan ever wanted to see: the walls
of the city of Messene, erected after Leuctra by helots who, for 300 years, had slaved for their Spartan
masters.
After Leuctra, the Thebans stormed into Laconia, the heartland of Sparta, and liberated the helots. The
Messenians, free for the first time in centuries, built six miles of walls around their new city. These are
walls built by people who have no intention of ever being enslaved again.
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As for Agiselaus, the last picture we have of him is in Egypt, hired out at the age of 80, as a mercenary
general in an attempt to fill Sparta’s empty coffers. When the Egyptians came to greet this legendary
warrior-king, they saw an old man in a ragged cloak, sitting on a a beach. And according to one historian,
they laughed.
Sparta never recovered from the defeat at Leuctra, and the loss of its Messenian helots. Relegation to the
second division of city-states was permanent.
In the centuries that followed, the Greeks ran up against the new regional powers of Carthage, Sicily, and
ultimately Rome. The city periodically tried to revive its fortunes by reinstating elements of the old
Spartan system. But without their Messenian slaves, Sparta just wasn’t Sparta. Utopia had been
dismantled, and no one could put it back together again.
400 years after Sparta collapsed, the city received an important visitor, the most powerful man in the
western world, in fact. Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome. He came here not on imperial
business, but on a personal mission to honor the society that Rome had cherry-picked for so many of its
ideas. And he wasn’t the only Roman tourist. This huge theater was built to accommodate all the others
who turned up to experience a kind of theme-park version of Spartan culture. In the theater, the Spartans
put on displays of the competitive dances and religious ceremonies that they’d once been famous for.
Stronger fare was on offer at the nearby sanctuary of Artemis Orthia, where young boys were flogged,
sometimes to death, in a crude parody of the rites of passage that once took place there. To end up as a
purveyor of sado-tourism to a bunch of Romans is a fate that not even the gloomiest oracle would have
predicted. But it’s a backhanded compliment to the enduring charisma of Spartan ideals.
It’s a long way from the rugged landscape of Sparta to the manicured perfection of an English country
estate. But here, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire, there is telling testimony to the spell cast by Sparta.
Looking round this Neo-Classical wonderland built for the 18th century Whig grandee, Lord Cobham, you
might assume it was the culture of Athens that was being celebrated. But in the Temple of Ancient
Virtues, you can see that it’s not all Athens’ show.
Lord Cobham obviously put a great deal of thought into the Greek figures he chose to honor with a place
here at the Temple of Ancient Virtues. In this exclusive group are the men he wanted the movers and
shakers of his age to emulate. And so of course you have Socrates, described up there as “the wisest of
men and encourager of good,” qualities his much-nagged friend Alcibiades would have attested to. Over
there is Homer, “the first of poets and herald of virtue.” But then you get a slightly less predictable
choice. It’s Lycurgus, the semi-mythical founder of the Spartan social system. The inscription reads: “A
father of his country, who having invented laws with the greatest wisdom and fenced them against all
corruption, instituted for his countrymen the firmest liberty and the soundest morality, banishing riches,
avarice, luxury, and lust.”
It’s a pretty fair summary of the Spartan ideal, with its puritanical appeal to self-discipline and self-denial.
Although of course there’s no mention of the less genteel aspects of Spartan society: the intimate
relationships between women, the brutal education system, the mass slavery, the endless fighting. But the
greatest omission of all is that it fails to recognize Sparta’s fatal flaw: that by committing to a radical idea,
pursuit of absolute perfection, Sparta made an enemy of change itself.
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BBC Video – “Athens: The Truth About Democracy”
Witten and Directed by Bettany Hughes, 2002
0:00-5:55 -- Major Themes in the “Athens: The Truth About Democracy”
You’d be hard pushed to find a more familiar image from the ancient world than the Parthenon on top of
the Acropolis in Athens. In our heads this has come to represent so many things - democracy, liberty,
freedom of speech, the human quest for beauty, the quest for the gods. And it is certainly true that the
place that spawned it - 5th century Athens - did generate many of the ingredients that we think is now
essential for civilization. This is where demos kratia - democracy - was born. It’s where we get classical
lines in architecture, science and philosophy, and drama emerges, and it is where we find the foundations
of our own legal system. Of course even the word political comes from the Greek for city state, polis.
There is no doubt that 5th century Athens was the most extraordinarily radical place. For the first time in
recorded history, the people, hoi polloi, acted as a political agent. So in the Athenian assembly you get
pastry sellers next to aristocrats, shoemakers sitting next to generals, and all of them voting how to run
their own lives. It’s no surprise, really, that the implements and the example of Athens has echoed down
the centuries. But what we mustn’t do is rush to embrace it as a model for all perfect societies. As well
as the beautiful art and the very high-minded public works we’re more familiar with, the Athenians in the
assembly also voted year in and year out to go to war. They enslaved huge numbers of the population of
the eastern Mediterranean. In Golden Age Athens Athenian citizens were outnumbered two-to-one,
possibly even three-to-one by slaves. And I think I would have had a pretty unsatisfying time there. As a
woman I would have had civic and religious duties. But I wouldn’t have been allowed to vote in the
assembly. I might well have been veiled. I would have been discouraged from speaking out in public.
And my name wouldn’t even be spoken.
So what we hoped to do in this film was to celebrate both the grit and the glory of Athens. And what we
want to do is to show you Athens in all its glorious warts and all humanity. Because this was not a
blueprint for society. The Athens of Socrates and Plato and Euripides and Aristotle was a very
tumultuous place. This was somewhere where they were dealing with huge changes in the arts and
science and philosophy and drama, in religion and politics. And doing so, I have to say, in a remarkably
tolerant way. So welcome to the brilliance and brutal place that is Golden Age Athens - the city as you
have never seen it before.
Two and a half thousand years ago, a Greek city flourished in a quite spectacular way. Out of this place
came extraordinary things - philosophy, theater, and a great political idea. The city was Athens, the idea
democracy. Democracy triumphed briefly, and then was forgotten. Yet today we venerate it as the
cornerstone of western civilization. In Washington, the greatest superpower of the world champions
Athenian ideals - liberty, equality and freedom of speech. But are we really the guardians of Greece’s
Golden Age? These perfect white columns seem to me to be a great metaphor for what we have done
with the classical past. We have taken the world of the ancient Greeks and we’ve whitewashed it. We
have turned it into a kind of fantasy. We look back at ancient Athens and we see what we want to see not what was actually going on.
I’m going back to ancient Athens to dig deeper to look at the grit as well as the glory, and to discover the
true story of democracy.
If you say the name Athens, certain images immediately spring to mind - a beautiful Greek vase,
enlightened philosophers, the Parthenon. This is a place that we cherish as the first free and equal society
- a good solid basis for our story of democracy. But beneath the Golden Age ideal was a city that
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constantly voted to go to war, and they ruthlessly carved out an empire to enrich itself. A city which
championed freedom of speech, but couldn’t tolerate criticism from within. And now is the perfect time
to dissect the idealized picture of Athenian democracy. Because so much has recently been discovered
that casts new light on what actually happened here in the Golden Age.
…
16:00-21:45 -- The Role of Slaves and Women in Athenian Society
A seismic shift had occurred. And in a world where rule by the many was confined to one city in a
thousand, the survival of the infant democracy was in peril. Only 20 years after its foundation, a timely
discovery would transform Athens’ fortunes, and turn it into the richest city in Greece.
At the dawn of the 5th century BC the ancient city of Athens sat perched on the edge of the civilized
world. Democracy might not have survived had it not been for a windfall that made Athens rich.
At the bottom tip of the Athenian peninsula lies Laurion, the industrial heart of ancient Athens. Even
today the landscape is littered with the spoil of hundreds of abandoned mine shafts. Although off the
tourist trail, Laurion has an important story to tell - that the Athenian Golden Age was actually built on
silver. People have been mining here since the early Bronze Age because the rock is so rich in mineral
deposits. But then in 483 BC the Athenians struck a giant seam of lead, carrying within it precious
particles of silver. Overnight democratic Athens was filthy rich.
Recent excavations have uncovered an complete settlement of tiny houses and streets. The conditions
here are pretty cramped. Actually it’s not that different from other towns and villages of the period.
What makes this place different is that - this building has just been identified by archeologists as the
remains of a watchtower. The living quarters surrounding the tower were not occupied by citizens, but by
slaves. It seems the Athenians wanted to keep their slaves under 24-hour surveillance. And it’s no
surprise they were jumpy. We are talking massive numbers. As many as one in three of the people who
lived in Athens were slaves. The Athenians could be such vigorous democrats because they had someone
else to do their dirty work for them. The Athenian citizens felt their freedom all the more keenly as the
owners of people who had lost theirs.
Paul Cartledge: In ancient Greece, liberty has an inflection, which it doesn’t have in our society, namely
there were an awful lot of unfree people - I mean slaves. And in fact not far from where we are standing
right now was one of the slave markets in the center of Athens. We mustn’t forget the dark underside of
the democratic achievement.
Most slaves began their lives as free men and women, but were forced into a life of manual labor when
they became prisoners of war. They were bought and sold, separated from their families, sterilized so as
not to breed.
It wasn’t only slaves. In fact 9/10 of the population were barred from voting. There was an age
restriction, and it wasn’t enough to be born in Athens; both your father and your mother had to be born
there too. And of the remaining free Athenians, half, like me, were automatically disqualified. Women
weren’t just unequal, they were believed to be demonic, possessed by “demones" spirits. They needed to
be controlled, visibly restricted. In fact, the first hard evidence of the full-face veil comes from Athens.
Sue Blundell: “Women were not meant to be seen. All evidence from vase painting would suggest that the
woman is veiled. She has her cloak draped over her head.”
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Sue Blundell is researching the status of women in Athenian society. Sophocles said silence is the
greatest ornament of the woman. The message that is being sent out is that a married woman is the
possession of the man.
Sue Blundell: “Yes, he is the one person in her life for whom she will unveil herself.”
Simon Goldhill: “It wasn’t only Athens; almost every society until the 20th century has been fiercely
patriarchal. But there was in that searing mass of experimentation the possibility that something
different could have been done. Where do we hear about that? We hear about it as a joke. Aristophanes
imagines what would happen if women took over. We hear about it as philosophical thought. So Plato
imagines what happens if we got rid of the family and had women as well as men as guardians of his
republic.”
But of course it didn’t happen. Only the free men of Athens could belong to the democratic club, which
met together on the Pnyx. At dawn Athenian citizens would come here to sit around on the bare rock and
debate in the assembly how it was that they should run their own lives.
…
25:10-36:20 – Themistocles and the Persian War
This young woman is called Patho, persuasion. The Athenians worshipped her as a goddess. They
bestowed great honors on her in the hope that she in return would give them gift of a fine speaking voice,
sweet words, and a 5th century talent for spin.
In 483 BC, the citizen assembly had a weighty decision to make – what to do with the flood of silver
pouring in from the mines. Now there’s nothing like a discussion of how to spend a fortune to get the
creative juices flowing. And one day in 483 BC, a man called Themistocles stood up with a brave and
far-sighted plan. Themistocles wasn’t from one of the old aristocratic families. He was someone who
benefitted directly from the new opportunities of democracy. He was hungry and he had the verve and
focus of a man freshly empowered.
Themistocles’ vision was that Athens should command the seas. Persian power was a threat to Athens’
existence. Themistocles was well aware that they had already invaded Greek lands. To everyone’s
surprise, the Athenians defeated a massive army at Marathon. Although the Persians retreated,
Themistocles knew that it was only a matter of time before Persia’s King Xerxes returned to settle old
scores. He was intent this time Athens would take her enemies on at sea. Athenians needed a brand new
fleet of warships, not a tax break, he argued in the assembly.
It’s a tribute to Themistocles’ powers of persuasion and to the acumen of the assembly that they approved
his strategy. Over the next three years the Athenians would build themselves a fleet of over 200 triremes.
This was a fundamental shift in the way the Athenians made war. Triremes would be the new weapon of
democracy. The word “trireme” means three oars. Rowers were arranged in three banks, one above the
other.
Barry Strauss: “It’s faster, it’s more deadly than any warship that had been used before. This is the
technology that the Athenians have to master in order to defeat the largest navy in the world – the
Persian navy.”
Triremes offered the perfect balance of speed and weight. They are highly maneuverable, with twin
rudders.
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Barry Strauss: “Athens was already a democracy. It’s no accident they mastered this form of warfare.
The Greeks associated the word “techne” or technology with the triremes. And that is the great Athenian
strength – playing to technology, playing to innovation.”
There would have been about 170 oarsmen on a boat like this. Most of them would have been packed
down here. You can just imagine what the atmosphere would have been like – very cramped, very
sweaty. And then as you rowed, your face smacks up into the back of the man in front of you. But the
situation here forced a feeling of community and because these things were the engines of the fleet, you
knew that your muscle counted.
Barry Strauss: “The trireme is so perfect, it’s hard to think of a better symbol of Athens and its
democracy. The development of the fleet has remarkable political consequences, and I think the Athenians
knew it. We know that upper class Athenians were hostile to developing the fleet, and it is perhaps that
they saw what was coming. Once you had a fleet, Athenian power would rest on the shoulders of the
poorest people in society. The military power of Athens depended on the fleet, and so the political power
followed it inevitably, and Athens became more of a real democracy.”
In the East Xerxes’ preparations for conquest gathered pace. He mustered a colossal army from across his
empire.
Rational debate wasn’t enough to decide the Athenian strategy. They needed assurance from higher
powers. A hundred miles northwest of Athens, in Delphi, lies the sacred oracle of Apollo. In Apollo’s
temple, questions were put to the priestess, and her enigmatic replies were then translated by priests. The
Athenians came to ask advice. Their question: With what strategy could they best defeat the invading
Persians, the mightiest army in the known world? The answer came back: “Zeus grants to thrice-born
Athena a wooden wall. In this, and only this, shall she be secure.” The meaning of the wooden walls was
debated on the Pnyx. Some argued that it meant the protected palisades on the Acropolis. If the
Athenians took refuge there, they would be safe. Themistocles was in no doubt. The wooden walls
meant the navy. In a vote the Athenian generals agreed with their admiral. Man, woman, and child
evacuated their city for the nearby island of Salamis. They waited for the battle to begin.
In September 480, the Persian army entered Athens, hungry for revenge. Xerxes found the whole
territory deserted. The Persians razed the Acropolis to the ground, stole its treasures, and torched
whatever was left. These deformed statues, blistered and buckled, provided vivid evidence of the terrible
fires that raged on the Acropolis. All the Athenians could do was watch as their city burned. They waited
with their Greek allies on the nearby island of Salamis.
Barry Strauss: “The key was to get the Persians to fight where the Athenians wanted a battle. The only
way to do that was to trick them.”
Themistocles sent a message to the Persians, saying his men were deserting. Were the Persians to enter
the straight by dawn, they could capture his fleet without a fight. He was gambling the Persians would
believe him and row straight into a trap. At dawn on the 25th of September, the Persian ships filed into
the narrow waters.
The Greeks were outnumbered two to one. But the strait was so narrow that only half of the Persian fleet
could enter. Themistocles had lured the Persians into his trap.
Themistocles also knew that the morning currents and crosswinds would disorientate the Persian fleet.
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Barry Strauss: “The tactics of the battle were to ram the enemy and then to quickly back off before the
enemy could do damage to you. The Athenians faced the best part of the Persian fleet, and they defeat
them. The remaining Persian ships turn to flee. So what results is just an enormous and remarkably
bloody traffic jam. It’s a massacre. The blood in the water, men being speared like tuna fish. And it
goes on all day.”
Xerxes watched as the Persian fleet was steadily annihilated. This victory would underpin Athenian
democracy.
Paul Cartledge: “Once factor which made the democratic experiment the way it was, was the Persian
wars. Just having a bunch of people coming in and taking over Athens, smashing your statues up on the
Acropolis there. You start thinking, “Hey, why did we win? What makes us different from them?” And
so if there wasn’t a notion of them, the power of the people, as against dictatorship and tyranny before
the Persian invasion, there was after.”
All over the city public monuments were set up, eulogizing the victory. The message was clear: western
democracy could and should triumph over eastern tyranny. The schism between east and west had been
set in stone.
Barry Strauss: “Salamis is just a key event in western history. All the things we associate with the
Golden Age of 5th century Greece – the democracy, the art, the literature, the history, the philosophical
debates about empire and power above all – that wouldn’t have happened without Salamis.”
Having triumphed decisively over tyranny, democratic Athens set its sights on building an empire.
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Athenian Democracy: Solon and Cleisthenes
Written by Max Pfingsten
For most of history, humans have been ruled by either a monarchy, leadership by a single person, or an
oligarchy, leadership by a select few. This was as much the case in ancient Greece as anywhere else.
Yet the Greek city-states were different. Around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, city-states across
Greece overthrew their kings and established constitutional governments. While some city-states retained
the position of the king, the king’s power was greatly reduced, often purely religious or even symbolic.
More importantly, the king’s power derived not from a divine right to rule, but from the constitution.
Though constitutions might be mythologized, and some like the Spartans might consider their constitution
sacred, for the most part constitutions were still considered to be works of men, and therefore could be
changed and adapted to meet the needs of the city-state.
The coups that overthrew Greek monarchies mostly stemmed from the nobility, who, like Achilles in The
Iliad, refused to accept a subservient role to anyone. As such, it is no surprise that most Greek states took
the form of oligarchy, ruled by a few powerful aristocratic families. However, the vying of these
aristocratic families could paralyze the system of government, and even lead to civil war.
To counter this effect, most Greek constitutions made room for a temporary absolute ruler. They called
this position a tyrant. In times of crisis or civil war, Greek city-states would elect a tyrant to steer the
state until his term ended or the crisis had passed. Understandably, some tyrants refused to relinquish
their positions of absolute power at the appointed time. And some ambitious noblemen did not wait to get
elected to seize power. Thus the city-states of Greece were forever in flux between the monarchic rule of
tyrants and the oligarchic rule of the aristocracy.
Around 590 BCE, the Athenians were in the middle of an economic, social, political, and moral crisis.
On the economic side, Athens had grown to such a scale that is was barely able to feed itself. Small
farmers found themselves buried in debt, represented by a stone pillar erected on the debtors field, called
a “horos.” On the social side, the only way for a poor person to obtain a loan was for him to put himself
and his family down as collateral. As a result, more and more people were finding themselves in debt
slavery. On the political side, the vying of aristocratic families was tearing the city-state apart.
The city of Athens was ruled by nine “archons.” These archons were elected for one-year terms by a
counsel of former archons called the Areopagus. Archonships were available only to members of the
aristocracy. These aristocrats used their position and power to benefit only their own family.
The only political body capable of calling these people to task was the Areopagus. Since the only check
on aristocratic power was other aristocrats, the needs of the rest of the population went unnoticed.
To overcome these problems, the city of Athens elected a man named Solon to serve as tyrant. Solon
acted decisively. To solve Athens’ economic woes, he encouraged the planting and export of olive oil,
and forbade the sale of other foodstuffs abroad. To solve the social problems, Solon abolished debt
slavery and declared it illegal to for one Athenian to own another. He also went a step further and wiped
the slate clean, cancelling all former debts, and doing away with the hated horos.
Yet it was Solon’s political solutions that really made an impact. To undermine the power of aristocratic
families, Solon changed the qualifications for political power from lineage to wealth. You no longer had
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to be from a noble family to run for office, so long as you were rich. This did not disenfranchise the
aristocratic families, as they were usually wealthy, but it did extend political power to a much larger
group.
To ensure that the poor had a voice in politics as well, Solon expanded membership in the Athenian
General Assembly. He allowed all citizens of the realm to vote, whereas before the vote had been limited
to the citizens of the city of Athens itself. He also gave the General Assembly real power. He gave them
the final decision of electing public officials, and created a counsel of citizens to act as judges. Finally,
the citizens of Athens had a way to call their politicians to account.
Having completed his reforms, Solon relinquished his power and left the city, making the Athenians
promise to hold to his system for ten years before making any changes.
Yet in less than five years, the Athenian aristocrats had managed to undermine the system once again.
And Solon’s cousin, Pisistratus, seized control. Though Pisistratus ruled fairly, shared wealth and power,
and generally tried to protect the poor from the rich, his son, Hippias, was not so benign and began a reign
of terror.
In 510 BCE, Cleisthenes, the son of a prominent aristocrat and political leader, with the help of the
Spartans, drove Hippias from Athens. Like Solon, Cleisthenes was more interested in reforming the
system than in holding power. His program of reform and justice for the common people upset the
aristocratic families.
Under the leadership of Isagoras, the aristocrats drove Cleisthenes and his allies from the city, again with
the aid of Spartans. Isagoras ignored the reforms of Solon. He did away with the General Assembly and
imposed a new and decidedly un-Athenian system of government in which a few aristocratic families held
absolute power.
Robbed of their assembly, the Athenian people were furious. But Cleisthenes was unable to raise an army
to drive the Spartans and aristocrats from the city. With no nobility to save them, the people of Athens
took matters into their own hands. They revolted, besieged their leaders, and executed them.
To form a new government, they called Cleisthenes from his exile and gave him free rein to complete his
interrupted reforms. With the people of Athens behind him, Cleisthenes created the first government of
the people, by the people, and for the people. The result was the world’s first democracy.
To finally break the power of the Athenian aristocratic families, and to unify the disparate regions of
Attica, Cleisthenes divided the Athenian population into new tribes. These tribes spanned different
regions and broke up traditional ties to powerful families. Loyalty no longer belonged to one’s local lord,
but to one’s tribe. And that tribe represented a cross section of Athens, both in locale and in wealth.
To ensure that no ambitious aristocrat could decide to upset the running of the state again, Cleisthenes
invented the policy of “ostracism.” Once a year, the Athenian people could exile a single citizen, be he
too powerful, too dangerous, or just too unpopular. The exiled citizen’s property was maintained, and he
was allowed to return after a year. Thus, if the people thought someone might set himself up as a tyrant,
they politely asked him to leave for a year, and he was legally bound to obey.
With his new democratic state thus sheltered from the aristocracy, Cleisthenes placed the running of the
state in the hands of the Athenian General Assembly, in which every citizen, regardless of locale or
wealth, had just one vote. The old positions of archon, as well as the old council of the Areopagus, were
retained, yet their power was greatly reduced. Proposal of measures, deliberation, and even election of
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archons, was transferred to the General Assembly. The old oligarchic Areopagus was left with little to
except offer advice and oversee trials for murder, treason, and religion, though even then the final verdict
lay with the Assembly.
This direct democracy was unprecedented in history. Certainly other city-states had incorporated some
democratic elements, but these held little political power, acting as councils which the leaders could
easily ignore. Even the General Assembly of the Spartans was restricted to only a small percentage of the
population, and they only voted on measures presented to them by their oligarchic council of elders.
Athens was something new and exciting. It appealed to the fiercely independent nature of Greek culture.
Still, the other city-states assumed that this experiment would soon lead Athens to ruin. How can an
uninformed mob possibly hope to rule itself? The Spartans held their system together with brutal social
programming and ruthless militarism. Yet even this intensely stratified system was under constant threat
of slave revolt, and could be undermined by outside ideas. If the Spartans could barely hold their system
together, what chance did the Athenians’ radical system of democracy have?
Yet Athens failed to tear itself apart. By giving every citizen a stake in the state, the Athenians achieved a
unity and strength of purpose the Spartans had failed to create with training and terror. While Spartan
civilization stagnated, Athens flourished, accumulating wealth and power until it emerged as the region’s
second superpower, a free democratic counterbalance to the rigid, oligarchic culture of the Spartans. The
stage was set for a conflict that would bring Athens and Sparta to the brink of annihilation.
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Pericles, the Delian League, and the Athenian Golden Age
Written by Max Pfingsten
After the second defeat of the Persians, all of Greece rejoiced. Together they had overcome the mightiest
empire the world had ever seen. Fired up with Pnahellenic pride, the Athenians spearheaded an alliance
to take vengeance on the Persians. This alliance was called “The Delian League.” Islands and city-states
across the Aegean built ships, armed crews, and sent lavish donations to the league’s Treasury on the
island of Delos.
Always afraid of a slave revolt at home, Sparta declined to participate. Driving the Persians off was one
thing. Picking a fight with them was quite another.
Yet the Spartans need not have feared. The superior triremes of the Greeks allowed them to attack with
impunity. They sunk Persian ships and raided Persian towns. Worse yet, at least in the eyes of the
Persians, the Greeks staged revolutions in the cities they conquered, killing off rich aristocrats and
establishing democracies. Persian soldiers would arrive to reinforce the town, only to find the gates
barred to them, while the Greeks had sailed on to attack somewhere else.
The Delian League grew rich off this plunder. Working together, they would teach the Persians never to
mess with Greece again.
Yet this giddy Panhellenism did not last forever. As the years stretched on the, the members of the Delian
League began to wonder if Persia had not been punished enough. The constant warfare was exhausting.
People wanted to return to their normal lives.
But Athens would have none of it. As the head of the Delian League, Athens had become incredibly rich
and powerful. Establishing colonies and garrisons across the Aegean and Asia Minor. Moreover, the war
was just the thing the young democracy needed to cement itself.
As we’ve seen, usually political power came with military usefulness. With the offensive in Persia,
suddenly all those poor citizens could make an important contribution to the war effort. They could row
triremes, and in a month of rowing, they could earn more than in a year of farming.
The other members of the League were less gung ho about the whole arrangement. Yet they also did not
want the angry Persians to be able to come back and take revenge. So instead of providing ships and
crews, they started just providing gold, food, or raw materials, and letting the Athenians take care of
building and running the navy. And, just like that, the states who had just fought for their freedom from
Persia, were now paying tribute to the Athenian Empire.
This fact was not lost on the Athenians, least of all a leading statesman of the time, names Pericles.
Pericles looked at this bustle of activity and all this wealth and all this power. And then he looked at the
city of Athens. Athens had never been properly rebuilt after the last Persian invasion. The Athenians
were too busy running their empire to bother with imperial trappings. Their grand temples were burned
ruins, high atop the Acropolis for all to see. Their great assembly took place on a hill. This was no way
for the seat of an empire to look. This was no way for things to be run.
Someone needed to show the democratic Athenians how to be imperialists. And Pericles was the man for
the job.
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For starters, Pericles decided to hold the dissolving Delian League together by force. Though the Persians
posed no further threat, League members were still expected to pay their dues. The logic went something
like this:
“If you thought the Persian Navy was scary, you know very well how scary the Athenian Navy is… after
all, you pay for it.”
The League members were still paying for protection—just now it was not the protection of a united
league against a common enemy, but rather the sort of protection one pays the Mafia for. Just on a
grander scale.
“That’s a nice city ya got there… Would be a shame if someone were to kill everyone and burn it to the
ground.”
With the fiction of the Delian League out of the way, Pericles raided the Treasury at Delos and brought it
home to Athens. Now he had something to work with.
Flush with cash from the Treasury, Pericles rebuilt all the temples of Athens. To return beauty and
grandeur to the Acropolis, he commissioned the Parthenon with its huge golden statue of Athena. He also
built a new meeting hall for the General Assembly was well as several other public buildings.
Pericles’ enrichment of the Athenian state was not limited to building. He invited sculptors from around
the empire to beautify the city. Meanwhile he patronized a growing circle of philosophers, pots,
playwrights, and artists, giving rise to the glorious culture that came to be identified with all of Greece.
For the next two thousand years, Athens would remain a center of learning and art for the whole world.
Yet when Pericles called Athens “The School of Hellas,” he was not talking about its art, its philosophy,
or its architecture. He was talking about the Athenian system of government. Pericles believed
democracy was Athens’ greatest achievement, and the source of its power. This can be clearly seen in his
funeral oration:
“Our city does not copy the laws of our neighbors. We are not followers, but rather the pattern to follow.
We call our state a Democracy, because it serves all the people, and not just the few. All are equal under
the law, whatever their individual differences, and we select our public officials not based on their class,
but based upon their merits. Poverty will not keep an able man from serving the States, nor will the
obscurity of his position.”
With such high sentiments, Pericles sought to further the democratic spirit. He built a new, larger public
theater, and had the State cover the admission of poor people to the Pan-Athenaic festivals. He also
established the practice of paying people for serving on juries, encouraging even the poorest to
participate.
In his thirty years of leadership, the last vestiges of power were stripped from the old oligarchic
Areopagus, and Athens entered a period of radical democracy in which the people controlled every aspect
of the society.
Yet this glorious democracy was paid for by the servitude of Athens’ allies, and they would not tolerate it
forever. One by one, the members of the Delian League began to rebel. Terrified of Athens, they
appealed to Athens’ ancient rival, Sparta, for help.
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The result was the Peloponnesian War, which would strip Athens of its empire and power, and bring its
glorious experiment with radical democracy to an abrupt end.
Yet in the high-rolling years, before everything fell apart, Athens shone like a beacon of civilization, an
ideal that would persist through the ages, inspiring us to this day. This was Athens’ “Golden Age,” and at
its heart sat Pericles, the wise ruler.
Cleisthenes might have invented democracy, but Pericles not only perfected it, he spread it, he glorified it.
Pericles turned democracy from a system of government into a way of life. One that was free,
prosperous, and unbelievably powerful.
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The Peloponnesian War and Thucydides
Written by Max Pfingsten
Pretty much everything I know about the Peloponnesian War I learned from Thucydides. Thucydides was
a wealthy fellow from the suburbs of Athens. He served as a general in the Peloponnesian War and
actually managed to survive the whole bloody affair. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is
no memoir, though. In its day it was the most thorough historical account, and, in my humble opinion,
we haven’t made many improvements since then.
Thucydides has all the qualities that have come to define a great historian. He is unbiased—or at least
trying to be. He’s incredibly thorough. He’s not interested in the supernatural, only the rational. And
best of all, he was there.
The Peloponnesian War was a chaotic, messy conflict between Athens and Sparta that dragged on for
nearly thirty years. At the beginning of the war, Athens controlled a vast maritime empire. By the end of
the war, Athens had been stripped of its empire and did not even control itself. So, what happened to
bring the might Athenian Empire low?
The causes of the Peloponnesian War stretch back for decades. After the Persian Navy was destroyed at
the Battle of Mycale (479 BC), the Athenians founded the Delian League to punish the Persinas by taking
their colonies in the Aegean and adding them to the Athenian Empire (477). With no navy to defend
them, the Persians were soundly defeated, and within thirty years, the Athenians controlled a vast
maritime empire, containing most of the islands in the Aegean and much of the coast of Asian Minor.
Meanwhile, back at home, as Athens grew ever richer and more powerful, the Spartans were feeling
increasingly nervous about Athens’ imperial ambitions. As Thucydides wrote in his History, “the growth
of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon (Sparta), made war inevitable.”
Sparta had its own league, the Peloponnesian League, which included most of the city-states of mainland
Greece. And they did not appreciate the Athenians trying to poach their member states for the Delian
League.
In 465 BCE, Sparta’s slave class, the helots, attempted to throw off their Spartan oppressors. Every
Greek city-state sent soldiers to help put down the revolt. The Athenians sent a large contingent of over
5,000 soldiers, but the Spartans would not allow them into the country, fearing that so large a force
intended to take advantage of the chaos, not to help with it. This was but the first of many insults each
side offered each other.
The next major insult came in 449, when two members of the Peloponnesian League, Megara and Corinth
started fighting. Eager to gain a stronghold on the mainland, Athens formed an alliance with Megara and
entered the fighting. The result was a fifteen-year-long struggle between the Athenians and Spartans,
which some have called the First Peloponnesian War. This battle only concluded in 445 BCE with the
signing of the 30 Years’ Peace. The 30 Years’ Peace was basically an agreement between the Spartans
and the Athenians not to mess with each others respective empires. Yet the terms of this peace proved too
much for the Athenians to live by. For the next fifteen years, Athens started acting more and more like a
bully. They crushed revolting colonies (440 BCE Samian War). They sowed dissent among Sparta’s
allies (433 BCE Battle of Sybota). They vied with their neighbor Corinth for control of the islands of the
Aegean. And even imposed economic sanctions on their former allies, the Megarians. Until, in 431, the
rest of the world could take it no longer (431 BCE Peloponnesian War begins!).
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Athens had made enemies of the Spartans, the Peloponnesian League, the King of Macedon, the Emperor
of Persian, and even their own allies. Everyone was so mad at Athens that a conflict was inevitable. But
the Athenians were prepared for this fight. Their leader, Pericles, had been certain that the 30 Years’
Peace would not live up to its name. So as soon as the Spartans had left the lands surrounding Athens,
they had started building a long wall connecting the city of Athens to its port, the Piraeus. In this way,
Pericles said, Athens could behave like an island. It did not matter that the Spartan army was invincible;
Athens never had to meet Sparta on land. It did not matter if the Spartans burned their fields and stole
their flocks; Athens had an entire empire to import food from. As long as the Athenian navy reigned
supreme, it could keep the city supplied, even against the longest siege.
Moreover, that navy allowed the Athenians another advantage over their land-based foes, the Spartans.
An army is only useful in a battle. It spends most of its time moving from Point A to Point B. This might
take months. As a result, that amazing Spartan army was really only useful for a few days out of the
month. By contrast, with their ships, the relatively small Athenian army could show up anywhere, at
anytime. They could disembark, do their damage, and be back to sea before their enemies could muster
any resistance. The speed and mobility of the Athenian navy was especially dangerous to Sparta, since
their slaves, the helots, were always on the brink of revolt. The Spartans had to keep much of the army at
home, at all times, lest the Athenians sail around them and stir up a revolt in their homeland.
So, despite being surrounded by enemies, it seemed the Athenians were in an excellent position. They
could hold their empire, Pericles warned, so long as they did not try to expand upon it. Yet there were
things that Pericles did not account for. The first and foremost of these was that when you shove
thousands of people within city walls for months, with no room and only primitive forms of sanitation,
people tend to die. The walls protected Athenians from the Spartans, but the tight quarters made them
prone to disease. Within the first year of the war, a plague swept through the city of Athens, killing over
30,000 Athenians. It was a dreadful affair, not least because the plague took Pericles, the visionary who
turned Athens into an empire.
Without their leader, the democratic Athenians found it impossible to prosecute the war effectively. They
had no single mind, no single vision to unite them. Instead, Athenian strategy vacillated from aggressive
to defensive, as different demagogues rose to power and fell from grace. A demagogue is a leader who
follows the people instead of leading them. He tells them what they want to hear, and simply tries to keep
them happy so that they get re-elected. (We call those “politicians.”)
Pericles wasn’t like that. He taught the people. He reasoned with them. He encouraged them to reach
their full potential. The demagogues just rode the wind to whatever the mob drove them to. The worst of
these demagogues was Alcibiades. Alcibiades was everything the Athenians were looking for. He was
rich. He was sexy. He was even relatively clever—he had studied under Socrates. Alcibiades could
work up a crowd like a pro. Yet none of these characteristics made him trustworthy. Alcibiades
encouraged the Athenians to abandon Pericles’ excellent plan to not expand the empire. Instead,
Alcibiades suggested an ambitious campaign to Sicily, which was struggling to fight off an invasion from
Syracuse. Alcibiades led the expedition himself, yet when the Athenians recalled him, he defected to the
Spartans, and betrayed all of Athens’ plans. This would not be his last defection. Alcibiades switched
teams several times in the course of the war, from the Spartans to the Athenians, and then back again. He
even worked for Persia for a while. The Persians were all too eager to help Greeks kill other Greeks, and
the worldly Alcibiades acted as an intermediary. Eventually his dupes lost their fondness for him, and
killed Alcibiades for his treachery.
Yet Alcibiades was but one of a long list of ambitious men who sought to lead Athens. Any one of these
leader’s plans might have worked, but the constantly shifting Athenian war policy doomed every effort.
Without a firm hand to guide them, the Athenian populace made blunder after blunder. They switched
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commanders on a dime, yet held to disastrous strategies year after year. When the first expedition to
Sicily failed, they sent another, and then another until nearly the entire Athenian fleet had been destroyed,
and most of the Athenian navy had been sold into slavery.
Despite these catastrophes, the Athenians struggled on for another decade. They raised new armies and
built new ships. Yet their continued naval supremacy was mostly due to the genius of their commanders.
Unfortunately, in a fit of rashness, in 406 BCE, the Athenians executed their greatest naval commanders
after the Battle of Arginusae. Though the battle was a great victory, the generals had retreated to save
their fleet from a storm, instead of remaining behind to collect stranded soldiers and finish off the Spartan
fleet. And for this they were sentenced to death.
With no decent leaders left, the Athenians blundered hopelessly. In 405 BCE, their last fleet was
destroyed by a Sparta force sailing in Persian ships. And the following year (404), Athens surrendered.
The Spartans tore down the walls of Athens, disbanded its democracy, and set up an oligarchy, The Thirty
Tyrants. This group killed off many of the most prominent men of Athens.
Yet Sparta’s victory was short-lived. Within a year, the Athenians had felled the tyrants and reestablished a democracy. Yet the damage had been done. The two greatest powers in Greece had
weakened one another to such an extent that neither would ever fully recover. Over the following
decades, Athens and Sparta had to bend knee, first to their fellow Greeks, then the Thebans, and then to
the invading Macedonians.
To summarize: The Peloponnesian War was fought between Athens and Sparta. Both of these city-states
were heads of large legions of allied cities. Athens’ Delian League controlled he sea with a powerful
navy. Sparta’s Peloponnesian League controlled the mainland of Greece with a powerful army. Athens’
steady rise in power and wealth caused anger among the Spartans, but even among its own allies. When
war finally broke out, the Athenian leader, Pericles, suggested that Athens behave just like an island.
They should not try to meet the Spartans in open battle, but should stay inside the city. An unforeseen
result of these close quarters was a plague that killed off much of the Athenian population, including
Pericles. After losing Pericles to the plague, the Athenians made a series of grave strategic errors,
including a drawn-out expedition to Sicily, and the condemnation of some of their greatest leaders to
death. These mistakes, and Athens’ general inability to stick to a course of action, without a central
leader to guide them, ended up costing the Athenians their empire.
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