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CHAPTER II
ATHENIAN PARTIES BEFORE THE WAR

Who were the people on the Athenian side who made the war and why did they make it? Who caused the `alarm of the Lacedaemonians' and `forced' them to fight? We must look behind the official utterances of Pericles, and attempt an analysis of the majority with which he worked. We must stop speaking of `the Athenians', as Thucydides does; not every Athenian was a Pericles in miniature.

Much has been written about the state of parties at Athens during the war--the state reflected in the earlier extant comedies of Aristophanes. One point, however, of great importance, is easily overlooked. It is that the state of parties during the war must have been very different from what it was before the war. The annual invasions of Attica caused an influx of the rural population into Athens, and so altered the balance of parties. Aristophanes shows us only the later, transformed condition. To answer our question we must go back to the previous state of affairs. Further, we must avoid obscuring the whole discussion by the use of irrelevant terms, such as oligarch and democrat.

The unknown author of the tract On the Athenian Constitution (note 1) tells us in a few pages more about the Athenian Demos than we shall find in the whole of Thucydides, and he shows us how the difference of parties looked to an old-fashioned aristocrat. He uses three antitheses. (1) The commons (d[[infinity]]mow) are opposed to the men of birth (genna>oi)--a reminiscence of the old days of patrician rule; (2) the base mechanics (ponhro[[currency]], which seems to have some of its original meaning, `working men') are opposed to the leisured and

[1. Ps.-Xen. de Rep. Ath.]

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educated classes, naively called `the best' (ofl xrhso[[currency]] or ofl bdeg.ltstoi); (3) the poor (pdeg.nhtew) are contrasted with the rich (ploÊsioi) or men of position and substance (duvat~teroi).It will be seen that the division is not constitutional--democrat against oligarch--but a division of class interest--poor against rich. This author, however, is criticizing the democratic constitution which gives too much power to the poor; he is not considering mainly the division of parties from the point of view of war. The conditions of war bring out a different conflict of interests. The antithesis of country and town here becomes significant. It cuts across the division of rich and poor; in the country rich and poor alike shared certain risks in war-time which set them against rich and poor alike in the town.

The same author, (note 1) when speaking of war, says (almost in Pericles' words, Thuc. i. 143): `If Athens were only an island, she could escape having her lands ravaged by invaders. As it is, the farmers and the rich (ofl gevrgoËntew ka< ofl ploÊsioi) dread the incursions of the enemy, whereas the people (i d[[infinity]]mow), having nothing to lose, live in security.' In this passage `the people'--so shifting are these terms (note 2)--means the town poor, contrasted with the owners of land, whether large holders (ploÊsioi) or small farmers (gevrgoËntew). In Aristophanes (note 3) the same class, the town demos, are called `the poor'. It is from this antithesis of country and town that we must start.

The strength of the landed interest was, on paper, very considerable. Thucydides, (note 4) in describing the removal of the country folk into Athens, says that it was very painful, because the Athenians, more than any other Hellenic people, bad always been acclstomed to live on the soil. Although united by Theseus in a single pÒliw, most of them (ofl ple[[currency]]ouw),

[1. Ps.-Xen. de Rep. Ath. ii. 14.

[2. Thuc. ii. 65, speaking only of the country popuiation, uses d[[infinity]]mow to mean the peasantry with small holdings, as distinguished from ofl dunato[[currency]] who have large estates.

[3. Eccl. 197 naËw de> kaydeg.lkein t" pdeg.nhti mcentsn doke>, | to>w plous[[currency]]oiw ka< gevrgo>w oÈ doke>. Cf. Plut. vii. Nik. 9 ofl eÎporoi ka< presbÊteroi and most of ofl gevrgo[[currency]] favoured peace.

[4. ii. 16.]

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down to the time of this war, resided from old habit in the country. They had just restored their country houses after the Persian invasion, and now they were called upon to forsake their ancient manner of life and leave the village which to them was a city.The country people, as is implied when the term `poor' is specially used of the town demos, were comparatively well-to-do. The larger owners worked their farms by slave-labour; and even the small holders would have one or two slaves. (note 1) They grew, probably, enough corn to supply their own needs, though not those of the town, which depended chiefly on importation. They sent fruit and vegetables to the Athenian market, and olive-oil across the seas. This class had little interest in commerce or in empire; and they had everything to lose by war, which meant the destruction of their olive trees. (note 2) If they were so numerous, why did they not prevent the war?

The answer is simple. Their leaders, the territorial aristocracy, had little political influence. `Oligarchs' by tradition, they were suspected of laconism and of intrigues to subvert the democracy. The great majority of the country people were, like Aristophanes' Acharnians, peasants who took no interest in politics, and seldom or never came to Athens. Their hatred of the confinement of town-life is illustrated by Dikaiopolis' complaints:

'Looking in vain to the prospect of the fields,
Loathing the city, longing for a peace,
To return to my poor village and my farm,
That never used to cry "Come buy my charcoal!"
Nor "Buy my oil!" nor "Buy my anything!"
But gave me what I wanted, freely and fairly,
Clear of all cost, with never a word of buying
Or such buy-words.' (note 5)

Many of the citizens, says Isocrates, did not even come to the city for festivals, but preferred to stay at home and enjoy the pleasures of the country. (note 4)

[1. Hence Thuc. calls the Peloponnesians by contrast, aÈtourgo[[currency]].

[2. A point frequently mentioned: Thuc. ii. 72, 75; Ar. Ach. 182, 232, 512; Pax 628, &c.

[3. Ar. Ach. 32. Frere.

[4. Isocr. Areop. 52. Cf. Eur. Or. 918 Ùligãkiw êstu kégorçw xra[[currency]]nan kÊklon, | aÈtourgÒw, Supp. 420 gapÒnow d' énØr pdeg.nhw, | efi ka< gdeg.noito mØ énayÆw, [[paragraph]]rgvn Ïpo oÈk ín dÊnaito prÚw tå ko[[currency]]n' épobldeg.tein.]

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The `men of Marathon', now, as always, settled on the soil, were a generation behind the townspeople, and hated the new growth of the `democratic' Piraeus. They cared for the Empire only on its original, anti-Persian basis, and for the Parthenon not at all. They did not want to exploit the allies. By traditional sentiment they were not hostile to the Spartans. They were out of touch with the new school in politics, and so long as peace allowed them to stay quietly on their farms, they were a negligible factor in political combinations. In Aristophanes we only see them in much altered circumstances, exasperated by being driven into the town, and enraged against the invaders who had ravaged their homes. The more sober and far-sighted joined the peace party. Others in time would become assimilated to the town-poor, and in the desperation of ruin would reinforce the party of war. But all this was after the war had begun; before it broke out their numerical strength was not felt. The country-folk, anyhow, were not the people who made the war. To find them we must look to the town.

Athens was not one town, but two. The new factor in fifth-century politics is the Piraeus. The port had been created by Themistocles, who substituted for the exposed, sandy bay of Phalerum the rock-defended harbour on the other side of Acte. It had been fortified, and the new town was laid out on the best modern principles by Hippodamus. By the beginning of the Peloponnesian war it had become the chief commercial centre of the Greek world. Even after the fall of Athens its yearly export and import trade was reckoned at 2,000 talents, and before the war it must have been much greater. From 510 to 430 B.C. the population of Athens and the Piraeus together is said to have increased from 20,000 to 100,000. This increase must have been chiefly due to the influx of a cominercial and industrial population into the Piraeus. The new-comers were, of course, aliens. While a majority of the citizens were, as Thucydides says, country people, a great majority of the

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`resident aliens' must have been townspeople, engaged in industry or commerce down at the port. The strength of the alien element in the town population is often ignored in spite of the evidence.The encouragement of alien immigrants dates from Solon (note 1) who `saw that Attica had a barren and poor soil and that merchants who traffic by sea are not wont to import their goods where they can get nothing in exchange, and accordingly turned the attention of the citizens to manufactures'. `He ordered that trades should be accounted honourable.' His law for the naturalization of foreigners granted the citizenship only to such as transplanted themselves with their whole family to Athens, to exercise some manual trade. The intention was not to deter but to encourage immigrants, by the hope of civic rights, to settle permanently and start industries. This recruiting of the native population must have gone on steadily through the sixth and fifth centuries. Of course, foreign families who migrated to Athens before the Persian war would be quite Athenianized by the end of the fifth century. But the great influx must have been after the foundation of the Piraeus. From 480 to 450 Athens granted citizenship freely. Pericles, perhaps in alarm at this increasing infiltration of foreign blood, made the conditions of naturalization harder. But the unnaturalized alien was still, for industrial purposes, as free as the citizen, and had the protection of law. At the beginning of the Peloponnesian war there were 9,000 adult men in this condition, who, with their families, made up an alien population of 30,000. Although not politically on the same level, these people belonged to the same social class, and had the same interests as the other recent immigrants who had been admitted to citizenship. United with them they formed a solid body with definite ends to gain, and with the business man's practical sense of the means to gaining them.

How the native-born Athenians regarded them we know from the rhetorical outbursts of Isocrates. Reviewing the days of maritime empire under the democracy, he says, (note 2) `Who

[1. Plutarch, Solon, xxii.

[2. de Pace, 79, 88,89.]

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could endure the brutality of our fathers who gathered from all Greece the laziest rascals to man their triremes, and so excited the hatred of all Hellenes; who ejected the best from other states, and divided their substance among the lowest ruffians in Greece!' `They filled the public tombs with citizens, and the public registers with aliens.' `A city will be happy, not when it collects a multitude of citizens at random from every nation in the world, but when it preserves above all the race of its original inhabitants.' So Xenophon (note 1) notes that the resident aliens include not only Greeks from other states, but many Phrygians, Lydians, Syrians, and barbarians of all sorts.This growing mass of commercial, industrial, and sea-going people, in the harbour town, must have been a factor of great and increasing importance. We hear little about them, except expressions of contempt from the aristocratic authors whose work has come down to us. Their occupations excited the disgust of the true Athenian gentleman who, whatever Solon might prescribe, never could think of trade as anything but dishonourable and degrading. The last thing he would admit, even to himself, would be that this class could have a decisive influence on the policy of Athens. But we ought not to allow our own view to be distorted by the prejudice of our authorities. Some of the wealthier of the unenfranchised aliens, it is true, were highly respected, and mixed on equal terms with the Athenian aristocracy. The house of Cephalus, Lysias' father, seems to have been a centre of intellectual society. Men of this sort, though excluded from civic life, must have exercised considerable influence, and could make their interests felt indirectly, through their citizen friends of the same social class. They had, moreover, an economic hold on a large number of free artisans in their employ, whose wages were kept down by the competition of slave labour. Many of these workmen were citizens, and their votes counted in the Assembly for just as much as the votes of the aristocrats who regarded working men as `incapable of virtue'. They were the sovereign Demos,

[1. de Vect. 11.3.]

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and if they and their employers, whose interests were theirs, knew what they wanted, they could be given a morning's holiday to go and vote for it.This, then, is the new force in Athenian politics, ignored and despised by the upper-class writers whose works we know; but bound, sooner or later, to make itself felt decisively.

What were their aims and ideals? We have no expression of them from any member of the class itself; but we can infer enough from the statements of their opponents. The Empire, to them, meant thalassocracy--command of the main arteries of trade; it meant also the tribute of the allies, which found its way into their pockets in wages or doles, and served to keep them on the right side of the narrow line which separated so many of them from starvation. We get a glimpse--one of the very rare glimpses in literature of what we call economic considerations-- in the tract already referred to, On the Constitution of Athens. (note 1) The writer is not making one of the ordinary aristocratic attacks on the Demos. He recognizes that the Demos understands its own interests and plays its game well; only he thinks the game a base one, and the players ponhro[[currency]]. `Wealth', he says, `can belong only to the Athenians among all Greeks and Barbarians. For, suppose a city is rich in timber for ship-building, how is it to dispose of its timber, unleas it prevails upon (pe[[currency]]yei) the power which controls the sea? Or suppose it has iron, or bronze, or flax, or any other commodity used in shipbuilding. We import these commodities, one from one place, another from another; and we will not allow other States, who are rivals, to import them, on pain of being excluded from the seas. (note 2) We sit at home and all these things come to us by sea; but no other city has all these commodities at once. One is rich in flax, but its land is bare and timberless; another has iron, but not bronze, and so on. Only at the Piraeus can you find them all.' (note 3)

[1. Ps.-Xen. de Rep. Ath. ii. 11.

[2. OÈ xrÆsontai t[[ordfeminine]] yalãtt[[dotaccent]]--a reference to the Megarian decrees?

[3. Isocrates Paneg. 42 says, Athens set up at the Piraeus an emporium in the midst of Greece, such that there can be obtained all the commodities which could scarcely be found singly in other states.]

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The class we are considering evidently regarded the Athenian navy as an instrument for controlling as they pleased the sea-borne trade in Greek waters. The third of the three imperial motives--profit--was dominant with them.

That Cleon's majority, after Pericles' death, was drawn chiefly from this commercial and industrial class, has always been recognized. Aristophanes speaks of them as tradesmen--leather-sellers, honey-sellers, cheese-mongers. (note 1) When Trygaeus (note 2) summons `farmers, merchants, carpenters, workmen, aliens, foreigners, islanders' to help in drawing up the image of Peace, only the farmers answer the summons; none of the rest will stir a finger. But the evidence of Aristophanes of course refers to a later date, when the war had already run through its first stage.

The impression left by ancient writers is that no representatives of this party--no members of this class--came to the surface till after Pericles' death. For this impression Thucydides is chiefly responsible; in his mind, as in those of his contemporaries, (note 3) the death of Pericles closed an epoch. When that great personal influence was withdrawn, it seemed to them as if the demos had undergone a critical change. Until Pericles' death, says the author of The Athenian Constitution, (note 4) the leaders of the people were all respectable. The list runs: Xanthippos, Themistocles, Ephialtes, Pericles--Cleon, Cleophon. Cleon, we know, was a tanner; Cleophon was a lyre-maker. What a fall, after the Olympian aristocrat! But it was not so sudden a fall as it looks in this account; Cleon was not the first of the `dynasty of tradesmen'. (note 5) There was the oakum-dealer and bran-seller, Eukrates, `the boar-pig from Melite,' who was condemned on the scrutiny of his accounts and retired into private life--`made a clean bolt to the bran-shop,' as Aristophanes puts it. Then there was the `sheep-seller', Lysicles, with whom, as Aeschines, the Socratic, (note 6) reported, Aspasia lived after Pericles' death. There

[1. Knights, 852 (425-424 B.C.).

[2. Pax, 296 and 508.

[3. Cf. Eupolis, Demoi, 15 (Mein. ii. 466), Poleis, 7 (Mein. ii. 510).

[4. Ath. Pol. 28.

[5. See Ar. Knights, 125 ff.

[6. Plut. Per. 24.]

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is no ground for believing that he was contemptible. Cleon was the next unofficial leader of the advanced section. We happen to know, from a comic fragment, that he began to attack Pericles as early as 431. He acted as prosecutor in a process against the generals in the winter 430-429. Thucydides, (note 1) in his first mention of him, calls him `at that time by far the first in the people's confidence'. This is less than two years after Pericles' death; he must have laid the foundations of his influence long before.

Almost all we know of Cleon comes from Aristophanes or Thucydides. The earliest extant play of Aristophanes dates from some years after the beginning of the war. Thucydides does not mention Cleon till he has become the official leader and spokesman of the demos; Eukrates he never names; Lysicles is barely mentioned, (note 2) and then only as the officer in command of an unimportant expedition. It is easy for us to slip into the assumption that the class represented by these leaders, and by others who are now hardly more than names, only became important after Pericles' death. But when it is realized that before the war the country-people were not a factor in politics, we see that the majority which Pericles had to work with must have largely consisted of this same commercial and industrial class. The opposition he had to fear came not from `oligarchs', who were a powerless minority, but from the advanced section of the demos itself, led by these low-born tradesmen whom Thucydides will not deign to mention. We described fifth-century history at Athens as a series of upheavals. The last of these had raised Pericles to undisputed supremacy, and at the same time had biought the constitutional question to a settlement. Democracy was achieved; reform could go no further. But time does not stand still; a new generation is growing up under Pericles' feet, with new aims and new demands. A period of peace has

[1. Thuc. iii. 36; cf. iv. 21.

[2. Thuc. iii. 19. Lysicles fell in battle in the winter 428-427. Thucydides omits to give his father's name--in contempt, perhaps, of his low birth.

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given a new impetus to commerce and industry; and the Piraeus is swelling to a size that threatens to overbalance the old town under the Acropolis. This teeming population, largely of alien birth or naturalized but yesterday, takes no stock of the hereditary feuds of Alcmaeonids and Philaidae. They have nothing in common, either by tradition or interest, with the autochthonous country-folk, who, on their side, despise them as a `seafaring rabble', an `undisciplined and vulgar mob'. They know nothing of the obsolete, anti-Persian ideal of the League; they care nothing for the Periclean ideal of Athens as the School of Hellas. The later part of Pericles' career can only be explained if we see that the demos he had to manage did not, most of them, share his exalted thoughts or understand a word of his magnificent Funeral Oration. Gradually and steadily they were getting out of hand. They extorted from him his socialistic measures. When he spent the allies' treasure on magnificent buildings, he was serving two ends--his own end, the beauty and glory of Athens, and his supporters' end, employment and maintenance out of public funds. By such dexterous compromises he could keep them in hand, till some man of the people arose to tell the demos that they could take as a right what was granted them as a favour. From the moment the sovereign people wakes up to its own power, Pericles must either go under or take the lead whither they will. He must walk at the head of the crowd, or be trampled under foot; but the crowd is going its own way.Whither? What were the aims of this obscure, inarticulate army of tradesmen and handworkers, leaders of commerce and industry, merchants and sea captains? We shall attempt an answer in the next Chapter.