The Rise of Athens: The Story of the World’s Greatest Civilization

495 Pages·2016·19.68 MB·English

by  Anthony Everitt

Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
List of Maps
Introduction
Three’s Company
Chapter 1: National Hero
Chapter 2: A State of War
Chapter 3: The Persian Mule
The Invention of Democracy
Chapter 4: The Shaking-Off
Chapter 5: Friend of the Poor
Chapter 6: Charioteers of the Soul
Chapter 7: Inventing Democracy
The Persian Threat
Chapter 8: Eastern Raiders
Chapter 9: Fox as Hedgehog
Chapter 10: Invasion
Chapter 11: “The Acts of Idiots”
Chapter 12: “O Divine Salamis”
The Empire Builders
Chapter 13: League of Nations
Chapter 14: The Falling-Out
Chapter 15: The Kindly Ones
Chapter 16: “Crowned with Violets”
The Great War
Chapter 17: The Prisoners on the Island
Chapter 18: The Man Who Knew Nothing
Chapter 19: Downfall
Chapter 20: The End of Democracy?
A Long Farewell
Chapter 21: Sparta’s Turn
Chapter 22: Chaeronea—“Fatal to Liberty”
Chapter 23: Afterword—“A God-Forsaken Hole”
Photo Insert
Glossary
Time Line
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Sources
Bibliography
Notes
By Anthony Everitt
About the Author
PREFACE
As a small child I devoured a Victorian storybook that told tales of Greek and
Roman mythology. I read every word, except for the sickly sweet poems that
were scattered across its pages.
My paternal grandmother noticed my interest in the ancient world and bought
me three Penguin Classics, then a new publishing enterprise. She chose E. V.
Rieu’s versions of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey and a translation of Plato’s
Symposium. A farmer’s wife, she was no classicist, and the last of these books
came a little early for a prepubertal child, who was mystified by the references to
Hellenic homosexuality. But I could not have been given a better sense, smell,
flavor, of Greek civilization. Homer and Plato introduced me to a world that was
new and ravishing, which, for all the tragedy and the bloodshed, radiated the
sunlight and luminous skies of free thought.
For a span of two hundred years in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., the
ancient Athenians pioneered astonishing advances in almost every field of human
endeavor. They invented the only real or complete democracy (the word itself is
Greek) that has ever existed outside the classical age. Whereas we merely elect
representatives to act on our behalf, citizens then met in assembly and took every
important decision themselves. (I need to enter a reservation here: the franchise
was limited to adult males and so excluded two large social groups—women and
slaves.)
The Athenians believed in reason, and its power to solve the mysteries of the
human condition and of nature. They established the concepts and language of
philosophy, and raised issues with which today’s thinkers still wrestle. They
pioneered the arts of tragedy and comedy, architecture and sculpture. They
invented history as the accurate narration and interpretation of past events. With
their fellow-Greeks they developed mathematics and the natural sciences.
We must beware of exaggeration. The Athenians were part of a general
Hellenic advance and borrowed ideas and technologies from their non-Greek
neighbors—for example, the Egyptians and the Persians—in spite of their
vaunted scorn for “barbarians.” If only we knew as much about other societies in
and around the Eastern Mediterranean in classical times as we do about them,
they might not look to be quite so exceptional. We would probably have to make
a lesser claim.
Nevertheless, even if the Athenians were not unique, that takes nothing away
from the fact of what they did achieve. The greatness of Socrates will not be
compromised by the discovery of a mute, inglorious counterpart.
Although Athenians were indeed rationalists, they were also deeply religious.
Worship of the Olympian gods was integrated into every corner of daily life.
Most of them believed these anthropomorphic divinities to be players in the great
game of history quite as much as human beings.
We in the West complacently note that a fully independent Athenian
democracy lasted only two hundred years or so. It is well to remember that our
own democracies, in their complete form, have yet to last that long.
The mechanics of the Athenian democratic system are relevant to today’s
electronic world: the arrival of the computer means that should we so wish we
could move back from representative to direct democracy. As in the heyday of
classical Athens the people would genuinely be able to take all important
decisions. Each citizen would, in effect, be a member of the government. Are we
brave enough to take such a rational step?
For all the wonders of ancient Athens, or rather because of them, I faced a
fundamental question. How was it that this tiny community of 200,000 souls or so
(in other words, no more populous than, say, York in England or Little Rock in
Arkansas) managed to give birth to towering geniuses across the range of human
endeavor and to create one of the greatest civilizations in history? Indeed, it laid
the foundations of our own contemporary intellectual universe.
In my account of the city’s rise and fall I seek to answer this question—or at
least to point towards an answer.
—
If we were able to travel back more than two millennia and walk the streets and
alleys of ancient Athens, we might very well come across the master playwrights
Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; the sculptor Pheidias; the comedian
Aristophanes; and the bad boy of Athenian politics, Alcibiades. Perhaps we
overhear a class in ethics that Socrates is giving in a shoe shop on the edge of the
agora and meet two of his students, Plato and Xenophon. At a citizens’ assembly
we listen to a speech by that greatest of statesmen, Pericles.
This is the Athens I evoke, beginning with its early centuries of kings, tyrants,
and aristocrats, moving on to the invention of democracy and the city’s political
and cultural heyday, and concluding with its decline into a pleasant “university
town.”
The story is much less well known than that of Rome, but it had just as great an
influence on posterity, on today’s Western civilization, in a word, on us. The
Athenians laid the foundations of the house in which we live today. We ought to
remember and celebrate what they built. And what a story it is—crammed with
adventure and astounding reversals of fortune.
—
On the game board of Eastern Mediterranean politics from the sixth to the fourth
century B.C., there were three main players.
The first of these was Athens. It was a maritime rather than a land power and
encouraged trade throughout the known world. Its fleets came to dominate the
Aegean Sea. Its citizens bought and sold goods and services, were devoted to
culture and the arts, and were inquisitive and open-minded.
Sparta was different in every way, one of the strangest societies in the history
of the world. A city-state in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up
southern Greece, it was highly disciplined and dedicated to warfare. It was widely
recognized as the leading Greek power. Male citizens lived collectively and spent
much of their lives in communal messes. Called Spartiates or (to deny them their
individuality) Equals, they were forbidden to farm or trade, and were brought up
to be professional soldiers. They conquered much of the Peloponnese and
enslaved its population as serfs, or helots. These helots served their masters by
working their estates for them; they were regularly humiliated and could be put to
death at will.
Young Spartiates were trained brutally to be brutal. The aim was to turn them
into pitiless fighters, to abjure personal wealth, and to be silent, modest, and
polite. Theirs was a self-sufficient community—closed, dour, and totalitarian—
with little interest in the outside world.
The third player was the vast Persian Empire on the far side of the Aegean Sea.
In the mid-sixth century an Iranian nobleman, Cyrus the Great, conquered and
annexed all the great kingdoms of the Middle East. Ultimately Cyrus’s domains
stretched from the Balkans to the Indus, from Central Asia to Egypt. He was an
absolute monarch.
The prosperous Greek cities along the littoral of Asia Minor fell under his
sway. This was a standing insult to the entire Greek world, which saw foreigners
as barbarians—that is, barbaroi or people who make noises sounding like “bar
bar” instead of speaking proper Greek. Here the tectonic rock layers of two
cultures met and ground against each other.
Conflict was inevitable. As in a complicated ballet, these dancers would
entwine their bodies, exchanging friends and enemies, moving in turn from war
to peace and to war again.
The three great powers enjoyed golden zeniths, but all three ended up facing
defeat and disaster. Their progress conveys all the thrills of a historical roller-
coaster ride.
—
I write narrative history. I never reveal future outcomes or endings during the
telling, for I want readers to have no better idea of what is to happen next than
those who lived through the events I describe. If they are unfamiliar with ancient
history, they are in for a lively time.
Some of the stories in the ancient sources have a suspiciously fictional ring, or
so picky scholars claim. Solon’s encounter with King Croesus of Lydia (see this
page) is a good example. We cannot always say at this distance of time whether
they are true or false. But, like the myths and legends, they are good stories and
even if some of them have been embellished they cast a bright light on how
Greeks saw themselves. So I happily retell them.
I do my best to sketch the Athenian record in the fields of philosophy and the
arts, but a sketch is all I have space for. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are
represented by masterpieces, including The Oresteia, Antigone, and The Trojan
Women, and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle are only adumbrated. Lysistrata
speaks up for Aristophanes. But I hope to have done enough to illustrate their
greatness.
Ancient historians are very variable in quality, with part of the fifth century
being much more fully covered than the fourth. The work of many writers has
been wholly or partly lost thanks to the corrosive passage of time. Thucydides is
the greatest writer of history in history. In fact, he is so good that we are trapped
inside his version of events. Lesser authors give themselves away, offer some
purchase for the modern scholar, and allow corrections and new interpretations.
What Thucydides does not write about is an empty space that usually we cannot
fill, and what he does write about is usually irrefutable.
There are topics that even the finest chroniclers, such as Thucydides, do not
touch except tangentially—for example, economics and social life. Also we know
far more about Athens than any other of the many city-states and their
Mediterranean colonies that made up ancient Greece. One way or another, we
have less to say than we would like about wider developments.
There are many matters on which today’s experts disagree. In general, I touch
on their debates only in the Endnotes and leave the main narrative clean of
scholarly controversy.
How should I spell the names of people and places? In Western Europe we
were first introduced to the literature and history of ancient Greece via the
Romans and their language, Latin. The convention was established of using
Latinate spelling for Hellenic proper nouns. It was only in the Renaissance that
most Europeans came into direct contact with Greek as a language, and by then
the practice was too ingrained to change.
So most of us speak of Achilles and not Achilleus, Alcibiades and not
Alkibiades, Plato and not Platon. I have decided to keep to these Roman forms
because of their familiarity; readers would be puzzled and daunted by a strictly
accurate transliteration from the Greek to the European alphabet. A few esoteric
technical terms are exempted from this rule.
Also some very famous names have anglicized versions that most people use
and I prefer—for example, Athens to Athenai (Greek) or Athenae (Latin),
Corinth (English) to Korinthos (Greek) or Corinthus (Latin), and Sparta (Latin)
to Sparte (Greek). I borrow the Greco-Latin versions of foreign and mostly
Persian names: so I refer to Astyages, the Median king, rather than Ishtumegu.
Lesser-known places in the Greek world take their original form. In sum, every
rule has an exception and I have followed my taste.
In proper names ending with “e,” the “e” is pronounced in the English way as
“ee” (in Greek it would be “ay” as in hay); and in those ending with “es” as “ees.”
It is hard to be precise about the value of money, because the relative worth of
different products varies from time to time and from economy to economy. The
principal units of the Athenian currency were
6 obols = 1 drachma
100 drachmas = 1 mina
60 minas = 1 talent
One drachma was a day’s pay for a foot soldier or a skilled worker in the fifth
and fourth centuries. From 425 B.C. a juror received from the state a daily
allowance of half a drachma or three obols, just enough to maintain a family of
three at a basic level of subsistence. So the payment was adequate rather than
extravagant. A talent was a unit of weight and equaled twenty-six kilograms; it
also signified the monetary value of twenty-six kilograms of silver. The two
hundred rowers who crewed a trireme during the Peloponnesian War were paid a
talent for one month’s worth of work.
An obol was a small silver coin. It was placed in a dead man’s mouth so that he
had the wherewithal to pay the ferryman Charon for passage across the river
Acheron to the underworld.
I omit the term B.C. (or A.D.) with dates except in the rare cases where there
might otherwise be a misunderstanding.
—
In many respects we can recognize the people of Athens; this is no great surprise,
for they pioneered so many of the fields of knowledge that are current and alive
today. But in so many ways they inhabited a different moral and technological
universe. Their motto was “know yourself”; they simply would not have
understood the Christian command to “love your neighbor as yourself.”
If I have helped to bridge the gap between ourselves and our Hellenic forebears
and conveyed a little of my enthusiasm for the founders of our civilization, I shall
be well pleased.