The Peloponnesian War and Athenian Life
Athens and Sparta had cooperated during the Persian War, but relations between these two
most powerful states in mainland Greece deteriorated in the decades following the Greek
victories of 479 B.C. The deterioration had progressed to open hostilities by the middle
of the century.
The peace struck in 446/4451 formally ended
the fighting, supposedly for thirty years.
New disagreements that arose in the 430s
over how each of the two states should treat the allies of the other2 led to the collapse of the peace, however. When negotiations to settle the
disagreements collapsed, the result was the devastating war of twenty-seven years that
modern historians call the Peloponnesian War after the location of Sparta and most of its
allies in the
Peloponnese, the large peninsula that forms the
southernmost part of mainland Greece. The war dragged on from 431 to 404 B.C. and engulfed
almost the entire Greek world. This bitter conflict, extraordinary in Greek classical
history for its protracted length, wreaked havoc on the social and political harmony of
Athens, its economic strength, and the day-to-day existence of many of its citizens. The
severe pressures that the war brought to bear on Athens were expressed most prominently in
the
comedies produced by Aristophanes3 on the Athenian dramatic stage during the war years.
The course of the Peloponnesian War
The history of the Peloponnesian War reveals both the unpredictability of war in
general and the particular consequences of the repeated unwillingness of the Athenian
assembly to negotiate peace terms with the other side. The other side of that same coin,
of course, is the remarkable resilience shown by Athens in recovering from disastrous
defeats and losses of population. Athens kept fighting no matter how dismal the
situation until the very moment that an unbreakable Spartan blockade locked the city in
a strangle hold in 404. The losses in population and property that Athens suffered in
the war had a disastrous, albeit temporary, effect on its international power, revenues,
and social cohesiveness.
Thucydides, historian of the Peloponnesian War
Most of our knowledge of the causes and the events of this decisive war depends on
the history written by the Athenian
Thucydides4 (c. 460-400 B.C.).
Thucydides served as an Athenian
commander in northern Greece in the early years of the war until the assembly exiled
him for losing an outpost to the enemy.5 During his exile, Thucydides was able to interview witnesses from both sides
of the conflict. Unlike Herodotus, Thucycdides concentrated on contemporary history
and presented his account of the events of the war in an annalistic framework, that
is, by organizing his history according to the years of the war with only occasional
divergences from chronological order. Like Herodotus,
he included versions of
direct speeches6 in addition to the description of events. The speeches in Thucydides, usually
longer and more complex than those in Herodotus, deal with major events and issues of
the war in difficult and dramatic language. Their contents often address the motives
of the participants in the war and offer broad interpretations of human nature and
behavior. Historians disagree about the extent to which Thucydides has put words and
ideas into the mouths of his speakers, but it seems indisputable that the speeches
deal with the moral and political issues that Thucydides saw as central for
understanding the Peloponnesian War as well as human conflict in general. His
perceptive narrative and interpretation of the causes and events of the war made his
book a pioneering work of history as the narrative of great contemporary events and
power politics.
Thucydides on the causes of the Peloponnesian War
The Peloponnesian War7, like most wars, had a complex origin. Thucydides reveals that the immediate
causes centered on disputes between Athens and Sparta on whether they had a free hand
in dealing with each other's allies. Violent disputes broke out both concerning
Athenian economic sanctions against the city-state of
Megara8, an ally of Sparta, and the
Athenian blockade of
Potidaea9, a city-state formerly allied to Athens but now in revolt and seeking help
from
Corinth10,
a principal ally of Sparta. The
deeper causes11 involved the antagonists' ambitions for hegemony, fears of each other's power,
and concern for freedom from interference by a strong rival.
Immediate causes of the war
The outbreak of the war came when the Spartans issued ultimatums to Athens that the
men of the Athenian assembly rejected at the urging of Pericles. The
Spartan
ultimatums promised attack unless Athens lifted its economic sanctions against the
city-state of Megara,
12 a Spartan ally that lay just
west of Athenian territory, and stopped its
military blockage of Potidaea,
13 a
strategically located city-state in northern Greece. The Athenians had forbidden the
Megarians from trading in all the harbors of the Athenian empire, a severe blow for
Megara, which derived much income from trade. The Athenians had imposed the
sanctions in retaliation for alleged Megarian encroachment on sacred land along the
border between the territory of Megara and Athens. As for Potidaea, it been an ally
of Athens but was now in rebellion. Potidaea retained ties to
Corinth14, the city that had originally founded it, and Corinth, an
ally of Sparta, had protested the Athenian blockade of its erstwhile colony. The
Corinthians were already angry at the Athenians for having supported the city-state
of
Corcyra15 in its earlier quarrel with
Corinth and securing an alliance with Corcyra and its formidable navy. The Spartans
issued the ultimatums in order to placate the Megarians and, more importantly, the
Corinthians with their powerful naval force.
Corinth had threatened to
withdraw from the Peloponnesian League16 and join a different international alliance if the Spartans delayed any
longer in backing them in their dispute with the Athenians over Potidaea. In this
way, the actions of lesser powers nudged the two great powers, Athens and Sparta,
over the brink to war in 431 B.C.
Deeper causes of the war
The disputes over Athenian action against Megara and Potidaea reflected the larger
issues of power motivating the hostility between Athens and Sparta. The Spartan
leaders feared that the Athenians would use their superiority in long-distance
offensive weaponry—the naval forces of the Delian League—to
destroy Spartan control over the members of the Peloponnesian League. The majority
in the Athenian assembly, for their part, resented Spartan interference in their
freedom of action. For example,
Thucydides portrays Pericles as making the
following arguments in a speech17 to convince his fellow
male citizens to reject the Spartan demands even if that means war: “If we
do go to war, harbor no thought that you went to war over a trivial affair. For you
this trifling matter is the assurance and the proof of your determination. If you
yield to their demands, they will immediately confront you with some larger demand,
since they will think that you only gave way on the first point out of fear. But if
you stand firm, you will show them that they have to deal with you as equals ...
When our equals, without agreeing to arbitration of the matter under dispute, make
claims on us as neighbors and state those claims as commands, it would be no better
than slavery to give in to them, no matter how large or how small the claim may
be.”
Athenian strategy in the Peloponnesian War
Athens' fleet and fortifications made its urban center impregnable to direct attack.
Already by the 450s the Athenians
had encircled the city center with a massive
stone wall and fortified a broad corridor with a wall on both
sides18 leading all the way to the main harbor at
Piraeus19
seven kilometers to the west. The technology of military siege machines in this period
was unequal to the task of broaching such walls. Consequently, no matter what damage
was done to the agricultural production of Attica in the course of the war, the
Athenians could feed themselves by importing food by ship through their fortified
port. They could pay for the food with the huge financial reserves they had
accumulated from the dues of the Delian League and the income from their
silver mines.
20 The Athenians could also retreat safely behind their walls in the case of
attacks by the superior Spartan infantry. From this impregnable position, they could
launch surprise attacks against Spartan territory by sending their ships to land
troops behind enemy lines. Like aircraft in modern warfare before the invention of
radar warning systems, Athenian warships could swoop down unexpectedly on their
enemies before they could prepare to defend themselves. This
two-pronged
strategy, which Pericles devised for Athens,21 was therefore
simple: avoid set battles with the Spartan infantry even if it ravaged Athenian
territory but attack Spartan territory from the sea. In the end, he predicted, the
superior resources of Athens in money and men would enable it to win a war of
attrition.
Losses through Spartan invasions
The difficulty in carrying out
Pericles22'
strategy23 for winning the war was that it
required the many Athenians who resided outside the urban center to abandon their
homes and fields to the depredations of the Spartan army during its regular invasions
of Attica. As Thucydides reports, people hated coming in from the countryside where
“most Athenians were born and bred; they grumbled at having to move
their entire households [into Athens] ... , abandoning their normal way of life and
leaving behind what they regarded as their true city.”24 When in 431 B.C. the Spartans invaded Attica for the first time and began to
destroy property in the countryside, the country dwellers of Attica became enraged as,
standing in safety on Athens' walls,
they watched the smoke rise from their
property as the Spartans put it to the torch.25 Pericles only barely managed to stop the citizen militia from rushing out
despite the odds to take on the Spartan hoplites.
The Spartan army returned home
after about a month26 in Attica because it lacked the structure for resupply over a longer period
and could not risk being away from Sparta too long for fear of
helot27 revolt. For these reasons, the annual invasions of Attica
that the Spartans sent in the early years of the war never lasted longer than forty
days. Even in this short time, however, the Spartan army could inflict losses on the
Athenian countryside that were felt very keenly by the Athenians holed up in their
walled city.
The effects of epidemic
The innate unpredictability of war undermined Pericles' strategy, especially as an
epidemic disease ravaged Athens' population28 for several years beginning in 430 B.C. The disease struck while the Athenians
were jammed together in unsanitary conditions to escape Spartan attack behind their
walls. The symptoms were gruesome: vomiting, convulsions, painful sores,
uncontrollable diarrhea, and fever and thirst so extreme that sufferers threw
themselves into cisterns vainly hoping to find relief in the cold water. The rate of
mortality was so high it crippled Athenian ability to man the naval expeditions
Pericles' wartime strategy demanded.
Pericles himself died of the
disease29 in 429 B.C. He apparently had not anticipated the damage to
Athens which the loss of his firm leadership could mean. The epidemic also seriously
hampered the war effort by destroying Athenian confidence in their relationship with
the gods.” As far as the gods were concerned, it seemed not to matter
whether one worshipped them or not because the good and the bad were dying
indiscriminately,” was
Thucydides' description of the population's
attitude at the height of the epidemic.30
Athenian resilience after the epidemic
The epidemic thus hurt the Athenians materially by devastating their population,
politically by removing their foremost leader,
Pericles31, and psychologically by damaging their self-confidence. Nevertheless, they
fought on resiliently. Despite the loss of manpower inflicted by the epidemic, the
Athenian military forces proved effective.
Potidaea, the ally whose rebellion had exacerbated the hostile
relations between Athens and Corinth, was compelled to surrender in
430.32 The Athenian navy won
two major victories in 429 off
Naupactus33 in the western
Gulf of Corinth under the general Phormio. A
serious revolt in 428-427 on the
island of Lesbos, led by the city-state of
Mytilene,34 was forcefully put down.
One of the most famous passages in Thucydides is the set of vivid speeches on the fate
of the Mytilenians presented by Cleon and Diodotus. The opposing speeches respectively
argue for capital punishment based on justice and clemency based on expediency. Their
arguments represent stirring and provocative positions that bear on larger
political and ethical questions than the immediate issue of what to do about the
rebels of Mytilene.35
The success of Cleon at Pylos
In 425 B.C. the Athenian general
Cleon won an unprecedented victory by
capturing some 120 Spartan Equals and about 170 allied troops in a battle at
Pylos36 in the western Peloponnese. No Spartan soldiers had ever
before surrendered under any circumstances. They had always taken as their martial
creed the sentiment expressed by the legendary advice of a Spartan mother as she
handed her son his shield as he went off to war: “Come home either with this
or on it,” meaning he should return either as a victor carrying his shield
or as a corpse carried upon it. By this date , however, the population of Spartan
Equals had been so reduced that the loss of even such a small group was perceived as
intolerable. The Spartan leaders therefore offered the Athenians favorable peace terms
in return for the captives. Cleon's success at Pylos had vaulted him into a position
of political leadership, and he advocated a hard line toward Sparta. Thucydides, who
apparently had no love for
Cleon, called him “the most violent of the
citizens.”37 At Cleon's
urging the
Athenian assembly refused to make peace with
Sparta.38
The unexpected tactics of Brasidas
The lack of wisdom in the Athenian decision to refuse the Spartan offer of peace
after the
battle of Pylos in 425 B.C39 became clear with the next unexpected development of the war: a sudden
reversal in the Spartan policy against waging military expeditions far from home.
In 424 the Spartan general Brasidas led an army on a daring campaign against
Athenian strongholds in far northern Greece40 hundreds of miles from Sparta. His most important victory
came with the
conquest of Amphipolis,
41 an important Athenian colony near the coast that the
Athenians regarded as essential to their strategic position. Brasidas' success there
robbed Athens of access to gold and silver mines and a major source of timber for
building warships. Even though he was not directly involved in the battle at
Amphipolis,
Thucydides lost his command and was forced into exile because he was
the commander in charge of the region42 when the city was lost and was held responsible for the
catastrophe.
The Peace of Nicias
Cleon, the most prominent and influential leader at Athens after the Athenian
victory at Pylos in 425, was dispatched to northern Greece in 422 to try to stop
Brasidas.43 As it
happened,
both he and Brasidas were killed before Amphipolis in 422
B.C.44 in a battle won by the Spartan army.
Their deaths deprived each side of its most energetic military commander and opened
the way to negotiations.
Peace came in 421 B.C.45 when
both sides agreed to resurrect the balance of forces just as it had been in 431 B.C.
The agreement made in that year is known as the
Peace of Nicias46 after the name of the
Athenian general Nicias,47 who was
instrumental in convincing the Athenian assembly to agree to a peace treaty. The
Spartan agreement to the peace revealed a fracture in the coaltion of Greek states
allied with Sparta against Athens and its allies because the
Corinthians and the
Boetians refused to join the Spartans in signing the treaty.48
An uneasy peace
The Peace of Nicias failed to quiet those on both sides of the conflict who were
pushing for a decisive victory over the enemy. A brash Athenian aristocrat named
Alcibiades49 (c. 450-404 B.C.) was especially active against the uneasy peace. He was a
member of one of Athens' richest and most distinguished families, and he had been
raised in the household of Pericles50 after his father had died in battle against allies of Sparta in 447 when his
son was only about three years old. By now in his early thirties—a very
young age at which to have achieved political influence, by Athenian
standards—
Alcibiades rallied some support51 at Athens for action against Spartan interests in the Peloponnese. Despite the
ostensible conditions of peace between Sparta and Athens,
he managed to cobble
together a new alliance52 between Athens, Argos, and some other Peloponnesian city-states that were
hostile to Sparta. He evidently believed that Athenian power and security, as well as
his own career, would be best served by a continuing effort to weaken Sparta. Since
the geographical location of
Argos53 in the northeastern Peloponnese placed it astride the
principal north-south route in and out of Spartan territory, the Spartans had reason
to fear this alliance created by Alcibiades. If the alliance held, Argos and its
allies could virtually pen the Spartan army inside its own borders. Nevertheless,
support for this new coaltion seems to have been shaky in Athens, perhaps because the
memory of the ten years of war just concluded was still vivid. The Spartans,
recognizing the threat to themselves, met and defeated the forces of the coalition in
battle at Mantinea54 in the northeastern Peloponnese in 418. The Peace of Nicias
was now certainly a dead letter in practice, whatever its notional continuance in
theory.
Attack on Melos
In 416
an Athenian force beseiged the tiny city-state on the island of
Melos55 situated in the Mediterranean south
of the Peloponnese, a
community sympathetic to Sparta56 that had taken no active part in the war, although it may have made a monetary
contribution to the Spartan war effort. In any case, that Athens considered Melos an
enemy had been made clear earlier when
Nicias had led an unsuccessful attack on
the island in 426.57 Now once again Athens in 416 demanded that Melos support its alliance
voluntarily or face destruction, but the Melians refused to submit despite the
overwhelming superiority of Athenian force. When Melos eventually had to surrender to
the beseiging army,
its men were killed and its women and children sold into
slavery.58 An Athenian community was then established on the island. Thucydides portrays
Athenian motives in the affair of Melos as concerned exclusively with the amoral
politics of the use of force, while the Melians he shows as relying on a concept of
justice to govern relations between states. He represents the leaders of the opposing
sides as participating in a private meeting to discuss their views of what issues are
at stake.
This passage in his history59, called the Melian Dialogue, offers a chillingly realistic insight into the
clash between ethics and power in international politics.
Launching the Expedition to Sicily
In 415 B.C.
Alcibiades convinced the Athenian assembly to vote to launch a
massive naval campaign against the large island of Sicily60 to seek the
great riches awaiting a conqueror there and prevent any Sicilian cities from aiding
the Spartans. Formally speaking, Athens was responding to a request for support from
the Sicilian city of Egesta (also known as
Segesta61), with whom an alliance had been
struck more than thirty years earlier.
The Egestans encouraged Athens to prepare
a naval expedition62 by misrepresenting the extent of the
resources that they had to devote to the military campaign against non-allies in
Sicily. The
prosperous city of Syracuse63 near the southeastern corner of
the island represented both the richest prize and the largest threat. In the debate
preceding the vote on the expedition, Alcibiades and his supporters argued that the
numerous war ships in the fleet of Syracuse represented an especially serious
potential threat to the security of the Athenian alliance because they could sail from
Sicily to join the Spartan alliance in attacks on Athens and its allies. Nicias led
the opposition to the proposed expedition, but his arguments for caution failed to
counteract the enthusiasm for action that Alcibiades generated with his speeches. His
aggressive dreams of martial glory especially appealed to young men, who had not yet
experienced the realities of war for themselves. The assembly resoundingly backed his
vision by voting to send to Sicily the greatest force ever to sail from Greece. The
arrogant flamboyance of Alcibiades' private life and his blatant political
ambitions had made him many enemies in Athens,64 and
they managed to get him recalled from the expedition's command by accusing him of
having participated in a sacrilegious
mockery of the Eleusinian Mysteries and
being mixed up in the sacrilegious vandalizing of statues65 called
Herms66 just before the sailing of the expedition. Alcibiades' reaction to the charges
certainly was unforeseen:
he deserted to Sparta.67
The mutilation of the Herms
Herms68, stone posts
with sculpted sets of erect male organs and a bust of the god Hermes, were placed
throughout the city as protectors against infertility and bad luck. A Herm stood at
nearly every street intersection, for example, because crossings were, symbolically
at least, zones of special danger. The vandals outraged the public by knocking off
the statues' phalluses.
Athenian defeat in Sicily
The desertion of Alcibiades left the
Athenian expedition against
Sicily69 without a strong and decisive
leader. The Athenian fleet was so strong that it won initial victories against
Syracuse and its allies even without brilliant leadership, but eventually the
indecisiveness of Nicias undermined the attackers' successes.
The Athenian
assembly responded to the setbacks by authorizing large reinforcements led by the
general Demosthenes,70 but these new forces proved incapable of defeating Syracuse, which enjoyed
effective military leadership to complement its material strength. Alcibiades had a
decisive influence on the quality of Syracusan military leadership because Sparta
adopted
his suggestion to send an experienced Spartan commander to
Syracuse71 to combat the invading expedition. The Athenian forces were eventually trapped
in the harbor of Syracuse and completely crushed in
a climactic naval
battle72 in 413 B.C. When the
survivors of the
attacking force tried to flee overland to safety,73 they
were either slaughtered or captured almost to a man. The Sicilian expedition ended in
ignominious defeat for Athens74 and the crippling of
its navy, its main source of military power.
The aftermath of the defeat in Sicily
Alcibiades' desertion turned out to cause Athens more trouble after the catastrophic
end of the Sicilian expedition in 413.
While at Sparta he advised the Spartan
commanders to establish a permanent base of operations in the Attic
countryside.75 In 413 they acted on his advice. Taking advantage of Athenian
weakness in the aftermath of the enormous losses in men and equipment sustained in
Sicily, they installed a garrison at
Decelea76 in
northeastern Attica, in sight of the walls of Athens itself only a few miles distant.
Spartan forces could now raid the Athenian countryside year around instead of only for
a limited time, as in the earlier years of the war when the annual invasions
dispatched from Sparta could never linger longer than forty days in Athenian
territory. The presence of the garrison made agricultural work in the fields of Attica
too dangerous and forced Athens to rely on food imported by sea even more heavily than
in the past. The
damage to Athenian fortunes increased77 when twenty thousand slaves owned by the state and who worked in Athens'
silver mines78 ran away to seek refuge in the Spartan camp. The loss of these slave miners
put a stop to the flow of revenue from the veins of silver ore. So immense was the
distress caused by the crisis that an extraordinary change was made in Athenian
government:
a board of ten officials was appointed to manage the affairs of the
city, virtually supplanting the council of five hundred.79
Revolts among the allies of Athens
The disastrous consequences of the Athenian defeat in Sicily in 413 were further
compounded when Persia now once again took a direct hand in Greek affairs. The present
Athenian weakness seemed to make this an opportune time to reassert Persian dominance
in western Anatolia by stripping away the allies of Athens there. The
satraps
governing the Persian provinces in the region therefore began to supply money to
help outfit a fleet for the Spartans and their allies.80 Led by the powerful city-state of the island of
Chios, some restless allies of Athens in Ionia and elsewhere took advantage of
the depleted state of their erstwhile hegemon to revolt from the Delian League
alliance.81 Their
defections were urged on by Alcibiades,82 whom the Spartans had sent to
Ionia in 412 to foment rebellion among the members of the Athenian alliance there. A
particularly dangerous result of these latter developments was the threat to the
shipping lanes by which Athens imported grain from Egypt to the southeast and the
fertile shores of the Black Sea to the northeast.
Athenian resilience after defeat in Sicily
Athens demonstrated remarkable resilience in the face of the great hardships that had
begun in 413, however, by beginning to rebuild its fleet and train new crews to man
it.
The emergency reserve funds83 that had been stored on the acropolis since the beginning of the war were
tapped to finance the rebuilding. By 412-411 Athenian naval forces had revived
sufficiently that they managed to prevent a Corinthian fleet from
sailing to aid
Chios84, lay siege to that rebellious island ally, and win some
other battles along the Anatolian coast.
The oligarchic coup of 411
The turmoil in Athenian politics and revenues resulting from the Sicilian defeat
opened the way for some influential Athenian men, who had long harbored contempt for
the broad-based democracy of their city-state, to stage what amounted to an oligarchic
coup d'état. They insisted that a small group of elite leaders could manage
Athenian policy better than the democratic assembly.
Alcibiades furthered their
cause by promising to make an alliance with the Persia satraps in western Anatolia
and secure funds from them for Athens if only the democracy would be overturned and
an oligarchy installed.85 He apparently hoped that the abolition of the democracy would
led to the possibility of his being permitted to return to Athens. He had reason to
want to go home again because his negotiations with the satraps had by now aroused the
suspicions of the Spartan leaders, who rightly suspected that he was intriguing in his
own interests rather than theirs.
He had also made Agis, one of Sparta's two
kings, into a powerful enemy by seducing his wife.86 Alcibiades' promises helped the oligarchical sympathizers in
Athens to play on the assembly's hopes by holding out the lure of Persian gold.
In 411 they succeeded in having the assembly members turn over all power to a
group of four hundred men,87 hoping that this smaller body would provide better guidance for foreign policy
in the war and improve Athens' finances. These four hundred were supposed to choose
five thousand to act as the city's ultimate governing body, but they in fact kept all
power in their own hands. The oligarchic regime did not last long, however. In Athens,
the oligarchs soon lost their unity in struggling with each other for dominance. In
the Athenian fleet, which was currently stationed in the harbor of the island
city-state of
Samos88, a staunch ally of democractic Athens,
the crews threatened to sail home to restore democracy by force unless the oligarchs
stepped aside. In response,
a mixed democracy and oligarchy called the
constitution of the Five Thousand was created,89 which Thucydides praised as “the best form of government that the
Athenians had known, at least in my time.”
This new government voted to
recall Alcibiades and others in exile90 in the hope
that they could improve Athenian military leadership.
The restoration of democracy
With Alcibiades as one of the commanders, the
revived Athenian fleet won a
great victory91 over the Spartans in 410
at
Cyzicus92 on the southern shore of the Black Sea. The Athenians intercepted the
plaintive and typically brief dispatch sent by the defeated Spartans to their leaders
at home:
“Ships lost. Commander dead. Men starving. Do not know what
to do.”93 The pro-democratic fleet now demanded the restoration of full democracy at
Athens, and in this year
Athenian government returned to the form94 and membership that it had possessed before the oligarchic coup of 411. It
also, according to a later source, returned to the same uncompromising bellicosity
that had characterized the decisions of the Athenian assembly in the mid-420s.
Just as after the defeat at Pylos in 425, the Spartans offered peace after
their defeat at Cyzicus in 410. Athens refused. 95 In any case, the Athenian fleet went on to reestablish the safety of the grain
routes to Athens and to compel some of the allies who had revolted to return to the
alliance.
The end of the war
The aggressive Spartan commander
Lysander96 ultimately doomed Athenian hopes in the war by using Persian money to rebuild
the Spartan fleet and by ensuring that it was well led. When in 406 he inflicted a
defeat on an Athenian fleet at
Notion97, near Ephesus on the Anatolian coast,
Alcibiades, who had not been
present but was held to have been reponsible for the safety of the Athenian
forces,98 was forced into exile for the
last time. The Athenian fleet nevertheless won a victory off the islands of
Arginusai
99, south of the island of
Lesbos, later in 406, but a storm prevented the rescue of the crews of wrecked ships.
The Athenian commanders were condemned to death for alleged negligence in a mass trial
at Athens that contradicted the normal guarantee of individual trials. Once again the
assembly rejected a Spartan offer of peace on the basis of the status quo. Lysander
thereupon secured more Persian funds, strengthened the Spartan naval forces still
further, and decisively eliminated the Athenian fleet in 405 in a
battle at
Aegospotami,100 near Lampsacus on the
coast of Anatolia. He subsequently blockaded Athens and finally
compelled Athens
to surrender in 404 B.C.101 After twenty-seven years of near-continuous war, the
Athenians were at the mercy of their enemies.
The rule of the Thirty Tyrants
The Spartan leaders resisted the
demand of their allies the Corinthians102, the bitterest enemy of the Athenians, for the utter destruction of Athens.
They feared
Corinth103, with its large fleet and strategic location on the isthmus
potentially blocking access to and from the Peloponnese, might grow too strong if
Athens were no longer in existence to serve as a counterweight. Instead of ruining
Athens, Sparta installed as the conquered city's rulers a collaborationist regime of
anti-democratic Athenian aristocrats, who became known as the
Thirty
Tyrants.104 These men came from
the class of aristocrats that had traditionally despised democracy and admired
oligarchy. Brutally suppressing their opposition and stealing shamelessly from people
whose only crime was to possess desirable property, these oligarchs embarked on an
eight-month-long period of terror in 404-403 B.C. The metic and famous
speechwriter-to-be, Lysias, for example, whose father had earlier moved his family
from their native Syracuse at the invitation of Pericles, reported that the henchmen
of the Thirty
seized his brother105 for execution as a way of stealing the family's valuables. The plunderers even
ripped the
gold earrings106 from the ears of his brother's wife in their pursuit of loot. As a result of
political divisions among their leadership, the Spartans did not interfere when
a
prodemocracy resistance movement came to power in Athens after a series of
street battles in 403 B.C.107 To put an end to the
internal strife that threatened to tear Athens apart, the newly restored democracy
proclaimed an
amnesty108, the first known in Western history, under which all further charges and
official recriminations concering the period of terror in 404-403 B.C. were forbidden.
Athens' government was once again a functioning democracy; its financial and military
strength, however, was shattered, and its society harbored the memory of a bitter
divisiveness that no amnesty could completely dispel.
Social and cultural life at Athens in war time
The Peloponnesian War exacted a toll on the domestic life of Athenians as well as on
their city-state's political harmony and international power. The Spartan invasions of
the Athenian countryside forced crowds of country dwellers into the cramped confines of
the city behind its defensive walls. Many people both urban and rural found their
livelihoods threatened by the economic dislocations of the war. Women without wealth
whose spouses or male relatives were killed in the war experienced particularly
difficult times because dire necessity forced them to seek work outside the home to
support themselves and their children. The expenses of the war drained the state
treasury. Often reflecting in its plots the social, economic, and political tensions
created by the war, Athenian comedy as a public art form revealed the depth of anxiety
that the war's difficulties created and an indomitable confidence in the ingenuity and
initiative of the people of Athens in finding solutions to their problems.
Crowding in the city of Athens
Perhaps the most ruinous personal losses and disruptions caused by wartime conditions
at Athens were imposed on the the many people who usually lived in the countryside
outside the walls of the urban center.
These country dwellers periodically had
to take refuge inside the city walls109 while the Spartan invaders wrecked their homes and damaged their fields. If
they did not also own a house in the city or have friends who could take them in,
people whose normal residences were outside the walls of Athens simply had to camp in
public areas in the city in uncomfortable and unsanitary conditions. The crowded
conditions in the city created by the influx of uhnappy and anxious country dwellers
led to friction between city dwellers and the refugees from the rural areas.
The economic problems of farmers, workers, and business owners
The Peloponnesian War meant drastic changes in their way of making a living for many
men and women of Athens whose incomes depended on agriculture or their own small
businesses. Wealthy families that had money and valuable goods stored up could weather
the crisis by using their savings, but most people had no financial cushion to fall
back on.
When their harvests were destroyed by the enemy110, farmers used to toiling in their own
fields had to scrounge for work as day laborers in the city, but these kinds of jobs
became increasingly hard to obtain in proportion to the increase in the pool of men
looking for them.
Men who rowed the ships of the Athenian fleet could earn
regular wages,111 but they had to spend long periods away from their families and faced death in
every battle and storm at sea. Men and women who worked as
crafts producers and
small merchants112 or business owners in the city still had their livelihoods, but their
income levels suffered because consumers had less money to spend.
The economic effects of war on Athenian women
The pressure of war on Athenian society became especially evident in the severe
damage done to the prosperity and indeed the very nature of the lives of many
previously moderately well-off
women113 whose husbands and brothers died
during the conflict.
Such women had traditionally done weaving at home for
their own families and supervised the work of household slaves114, but the
men had earned the family's income by farming or practicing a
trade115. With no one to provide for them and their children now,
these women were forced to work outside the home to support their families. The only
jobs open to them were low-paying occupations traditional for women such as
baby
nurse or weaver, or in some cases laboring jobs, such as being a vineyard
worker116, for which there were not enough men to meet the need. These circumstances
brought more women into public view, but they did not lead to a woman's movement in
the modern sense, or to any inclusion of women in Athenian political life.
War and the finances of Athens
The financial health of the city-state of Athens suffered during the Peloponnesian
War from the many interruptions to agriculture and from the catastrophic loss of
income from the state's
silver
mines117 that occurred
after the Spartan army took up a permanent presence in 413 B.C. Work could thereafter
no longer continue at the mines, especially after the
desertion of thousands of
slave mine workers118 to the Spartan fort at
Decelea119. Some public building projects in the city itself were kept going, like the
Erectheum temple to Athena on the acropolis, to demonstrate the Athenian will to carry
on and also as a device for infusing some money into the crippled economy. But the
demands of the war depleted the funds available for many non-military activities. The
scale of the great annual dramatic festivals, for example, had to be cut back. The
financial situation had become so desperate by the end of the war that Athenians were
required to turn in their silver coins and exchange them for an emergency
currency of bronze120 thinly plated with silver. The regular silver coins, along with gold coins
that were minted from golden objects borrowed from Athens' temples, were then used to
pay war expenses.
Athenian comedy during the war
The stresses of everyday life during the exceedingly trying times of the
Peloponnesian War were reflected in Athenian comedies produced during this period.
Comic plays were the other main form of dramatic art in ancient Athens besides
tragedies. Like tragedies, comedies were composed in verse and had been presented
annually since early in the fifth century B.C. They formed a separate competition in
the Athenian civic festivals in honor of Dionysus in the same outdoor theater used for
tragedies. It is uncertain whether women could attend. The all-male casts of comic
productions consisted of a chorus of twenty-four members in addition to regular
actors. Unlike tragedy, comedy was not restricted to having no more than three actors
with speaking parts on stage at the same time. The beauty of the soaring poetry of the
choral songs of comedy was matched by the ingeniously imaginative fantasy of its
plots, which almost always ended with a festive resolution of the problems with which
they had begun. The story of the
Birds by Aristophanes121, for example, produced in
414 B.C., has two men trying to escape the hassles of everyday life at Athens by
running away to seek a new life in a world called Cloudcuckooland that is inhabited by
talking birds, portrayed by the chorus in colorful bird costumes.
The humor and plots of Athenian comedy
The immediate purpose of a comic playwright naturally was to create beautiful poetry
and raise laughs at the same time in the hope of winning the award for the festival's
best comedy. Much of the humor of Athenian comedy had to do with sex and bodily
functions, and much of its ribaldry was delivered in a stream of imaginative
profanity. The plots of fifth-century Athenian comedies primarily dealt with current
issues and personalities. Insulting attacks on prominent men such as
Pericles122 or
Cleon, the victor of Pylos,123 were a staple. Pericles apparently instituted a ban on such attacks in
response to fierce treatment in comedies after the
revolt of Samos in 441-439 B.C.124, but the measure was soon rescinded. Cleon was so outraged
by the way he was portrayed on the comic stage by
Aristophanes125,
(c. 455-385 B.C.), the only comic playwright of the fifth century from whose works
entire plays have survived, that
he sued the playwright126. When Cleon lost the case, Aristophanes
responded by pitilessly parodying him in
The Knights
127 of 424 B.C. as a reprobate foreign slave. Other well-known men who were not
portrayed as characters could come in for insults as sexually effeminate and cowards.
On the other hand, women characters who are made figures of fun and ridicule in comedy
seem to have been fictional.
Comedy as criticism of official policy
Slashing satire directed against the mass of ordinary citizens
seems to have
been unacceptable128 in Athenian comedy, but fifth-century comic productions often criticized
govermental policies that had been approved by the assembly by blaming political
leaders for them. The strongly critical nature of comedy was never more evident than
during the war years. Several of the popular comedies of
Aristophanes129 had plots in which characters arranged peace with Sparta ,
even though the comedies were produced while the war was still being fiercely
contested. In
The Acharnians
130 of 425 B.C., for
example, the protagonist arranges a
separate peace treaty131 with the Spartans for himself and his family while humiliating a character who
portrays one of Athens' prominent military commanders of the time. The play won first
prize in competition for comedies that year.
The
Lysistrata
of Aristophanes
The most remarkable of Aristophanes' comedies are those in which the main characters,
the heros of the story as it were, are women, who use their wits and their solidarity
with one another to compel the men of Athens to overthrow basic policies of the
city-state. Most famous of Aristophanes' comedies depicting powerfully effectual women
is the
Lysistrata
132 of 411 B.C., named after the female lead character of the play. It portrays
the women of Athens as teaming up with the women of Sparta to force their husbands to
end the Peloponnesian War. To make the men agree to a peace treaty, the women first
seize the Acropolis, where Athens' financial reserves are kept, and prevent the men
from squandering them further on the war. They then beat back an attack on their
position by the old men who have remained in Athens while the younger men are out on
campaign. When their husbands return from battle, the women refuse to have sex with
them. This sex strike, which is portrayed in a series of risqué episodes,
finally coerces the men of Athens and Sparta to agree to a peace treaty.
The
Lysistrata presents women acting bravely and aggressively against
men who seem bent both on destroying their family life by staying away from home for
long stretches while on military campaign and on ruining the city-state by prolonging
a pointless war. In other words, the play's powerful women take on masculine roles to
preserve the traditional way of life of the community. Lysistrata herself emphasizes
this point in the very speech in which she insists that women have the intelligence
and judgment to make political decisions. She came by her knowledge, she says, in the
traditional way:
“I am a woman, and, yes, I have brains. And I'm not
badly off for judgment. Nor has my education been bad, coming as it has from my
listening often to the conversations of my father and the elders among the
men.”133 Lysistrata was schooled in the traditional fashion, by learning from older
men. Her old-fashioned training and good sense allowed her to see what needed to be
done to protect the community. Like the heroines of tragedy, Lysistrata is literally a
reactionary; she wants to put things back the way they were. To do that, however, she
has to act like a revolutionary. Ending the war would be so easy that women could do
it, Aristophanes is telling Athenian men, and Athenians should concern themselves with
preserving the old ways, lest they be lost.
