Thomas R. Martin, An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander

The Aftermath of the Peloponnesian War

Strife among prominent city-states contending with one another for power continued to plague Greece in the years following the Peloponnesian War. The losses of population, the ravages of the plague¹, and the financial difficulties² brought on by the war caused severe hardships for Athens. Not even the amnesty that accompanied the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 B.C. could quell all the social and political animosities that the war and the rule of the Thirty Tyrants³ had exacerbated, and the most prominent casualty of this divisive bitterness was the famous philosopher Socrates⁴, whose trial for impiety in 399 B.C. resulted in a sentence of death. The Athenian household— the family members and their personal slaves— nevertheless survived the war as the fundamental unit of the city-state's society and economy.

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Economic Strains on the Family

Many Athenian households lost fathers, sons, or brothers to the violence of battle in the Peloponnesian War, but resourceful families found ways to compensate for the economic strain that such personal tragedies could create. An Athenian named Aristarchus⁵, for example, is reported by the writer Xenophon (c. 428-354 B.C.) to have experienced financial difficulty because the turmoil of the war had severely diminished his income and also caused his sisters, nieces, and female cousins to come live with him. He found himself unable to support this swollen household of fourteen, not counting the slaves. Aristarchus's friend Socrates (469-399 B.C.) thereupon reminded him that his female relatives knew quite well how to make men's and women's cloaks, shirts, capes, and smocks, “the work considered the best and most fitting for women,” although they had always just made clothing⁶ for the family and never had to try to sell it for profit. But others did make a living by selling such clothing or by baking and selling bread, Socrates pointed out, and Aristarchus could have the women in his house do the same. The plan was a success, but the women complained that Aristarchus was now the only member of the household who ate without working. Socrates advised his friend⁷ to reply that the women should think of him as sheep did a guard dog— he earned his share of the food by keeping away the wolves from the sheep.

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Manufacture and Trade

Many Athenian manufactured goods were produced in households like that of Aristarchus, which turned to the production of cloth⁸ after the Peloponnesian War, or in small shops⁹, although a few larger enterprises did exist. Among these were metal foundries¹⁰, pottery workshops¹¹, and the shield-making business employing one-hundred twenty slaves owned by the family of Lysias¹² (c. 459-380 B.C.); businesses larger than this were unknown at this period. Lysias, a metic ( metoikos ¹³ , resident alien) from Syracuse whose father had been recruited by Pericles to come live in Athens, had to use his education and turn to writing speeches for others to make a living after the Thirty Tyrants seized his property in 404 B.C. Metics could not own land in Athenian territory without special permission, but they enjoyed legal rights in Athenian courts that foreigners without metic status lacked. In return metics paid taxes and served in the army when called upon. Lysias lived near the harbor of Athens, Piraeus, where many metics were to be found because they played a central role in the international trade in such goods as grain, wine¹⁴, pottery, and silver from Athens' mines¹⁵ that passed through Piraeus¹⁶. The safety of Athenian trade was restored to prewar conditions when the long walls¹⁷ that connected the city with the port, destroyed at the end of the war, were rebuilt by 393 B.C. Another sign of the recovering economic health of Athens was that the city by this time had resumed the minting of its famous silver coins¹⁸ to replace the emergency bronze coinage¹⁹ minted during the financial pressures of the last years of the war.

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Agriculture and Private Property

The importation of grain²⁰ through Piraeus²¹ was crucial for fourth-century Athens. Even before the war Athenian farms had been unable to produce enough²² of this dietary staple to feed the population. The damage done to farm buildings and equipment during the Spartan invasions of the Peloponnesian War made the situation worse until the Athenians could make repairs. The Spartan establishment of a year-round base at Decelea²³ near Athens from 413 to 404 B.C. had given these enemy forces an opportunity to do much more severe damage in Athenian territory than the usually short campaigns of Greek warfare ordinarily allowed. The invaders had probably even had time to cut down Athenian olive trees²⁴, the source of valuable olive oil. These trees took a generation to replace because they grew so slowly. Athenian property owners after the war worked hard to restore their land and businesses to production not only to restore their present incomes but also to provide for future generations. Athenian men and women felt strongly that their property, whether in land, money, or belongings, represented resources to be preserved for the benefit of their descendants. For this reason, Athenian law allowed prosecution of men who squandered their inheritance²⁵. The same spirit lay behind the requirement that parents must provide a livelihood for their children, by leaving them income-bearing property or training them in a skill²⁶. Most working people probably earned little more than enough to clothe and feed their families.

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The Daily Diet

All indications are that the Greek diet remained much the same over time; after the Peloponnesian War people perhaps had less than before, at least until a modicum of prosperity was restored. Athenians usually had only two meals a day, a light lunch in mid-morning and a heavier meal in the evening²⁷. Bread baked from barley or, for richer people, wheat, constituted the main part of the diet. A family could buy its bread²⁸ from small bakery stands, often run by women, or make it at home, with the wife directing and helping the household slaves to grind the grain²⁹, shape the dough, and bake in it in a pottery oven heated by charcoal. Those few households wealthy enough to afford meat³⁰ from time to time often grilled it over coals on a pottery brazier shaped much like modern picnic grills. For most people, vegetables, olives, fruit³¹, and cheese represented the main variety in their diet, and meat was available only as part of animal sacrifices³² paid for by the state. The wine³³ that everyone drank, usually much diluted with water, came mainly from local vineyards. Water³⁴ from public fountains had to be carried into the house with jugs, a task that the women of the household had to perform themselves or see that the household slaves did.

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The Loss of Slaves

The war had hurt the Athenian state economically by giving a chance for escape to many of the slaves³⁵ that worked in the silver mines³⁶ in the Attic countryside, which had provided a substantial revenue to the public coffers. The output of the mines apparently never regained its previous heights, but it is not clear whether this decline in production³⁷ of silver was the result of an enduring shortage of slaves to work in the mines or a petering out of the veins of precious metal, or perhaps a combination of these factors. The Peloponnesian War had given few opportunities for domestic slaves to escape their servitude³⁸, and practically no privately owned slaves had tried to run away during the war. (Since runaway slaves were usually resold by those with whom they sought refuge in any case, escape was by no means a reliable route to freedom.) All but the poorest families, therefore, continued to have at least a slave or two to do chores around the house and look after the children. If a mother did not have a slave to serve as a wet nurse³⁹ to suckle her infants, she would hire a poor free woman for the job, if her family could afford the expense.

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Socrates

The conviction and execution of Socrates⁴⁰ (469-399 B.C.), the most famous philosopher of the late fifth century B.C., became perhaps the most infamous event in the history of Athens after the Peloponnesian War because his life had been devoted to combating the idea that justice should be equated with power to work one's will. Coming, as it did, during a time of social and political turmoil, his death indicated the fragility of Athenian justice in practice. His passionate concern to discover valid guidelines for leading a just life and to prove that justice is better than injustice under all circumstances gave a new direction to Greek philosophy: an emphasis on ethics⁴¹. Although other thinkers before him had dealt with moral issues, especially the poets and dramatists, Socrates was the first of those thinkers called philosophers to make ethics and morality his central concern.

Compared to the sophists, Socrates lived in poverty⁴² and publicly disdained material possessions, but he nevertheless managed to serve as a hoplite in the army and support a wife and several children. He may have inherited some money, and he also received gifts from wealthy admirers. He paid so little attention to his physical appearance and clothes that many Athenians regarded him as eccentric. Sporting, in his words, a stomach “somewhat too large to be convenient,”⁴³ he wore the same nondescript cloak summer and winter and scorned shoes no matter how cold the weather. His physical stamina⁴⁴ was legendary, both from his tirelessness when he served as a soldier in Athens's citizen militia and from his ability to outdrink anyone at a symposium.

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Socratic Ways

Whether participating at a symposium, strolling in the agora , or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium, Socrates spent his time⁴⁵ in conversation and contemplation. In the first of these characteristics he resembled his fellow Athenians, who placed great value on the importance and pleasure of speaking with each other at length. He wrote nothing; our knowledge of his ideas comes from others' writings, especially those of his pupil Plato⁴⁶. Plato's dialogues, so called because they present Socrates and others in extended conversation about philosophy, portray Socrates as a relentless questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and various sophists. Socrates's questions had the unsettling aim of making his interlocutors— his partners in the conversation— examine the basic assumptions of their way of life. Employing what has come to be called the Socratic method, Socrates never directly instructs his conversational partners; instead, he leads them to draw conclusions in response to his probing questions and refutations of their assumptions.

Socrates typically began one of his conversations by asking the interlocutor for a definition of an abstract quality such as happiness or a virtue such as courage. For instance, in the dialogue entitled Laches ⁴⁷ after the Athenian general of that name who appears as one of the dialogue's interlocutors, Socrates asks Laches and another distinguished military commander what makes a citizen a brave soldier. Socrates then proceeds by further questioning to show that the definitions of courage and instances of courageous behavior stated by the interlocutors actually conflict with their other beliefs about the behavior that constituted courage.

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Socrates' Search for Justice

This indirect method of searching for the truth often left Socrates's interlocutors in a state of puzzlement because they were forced to conclude that they were ignorant of what they began by assuming they knew very well. Socrates insisted that he, too, was ignorant of the best definition of virtue but that his wisdom consisted of knowing that he did not know.⁴⁸ He was trying to improve rather than undermine his interlocutors' beliefs in morality, even though, as one of his conversationalists put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb just as if he had been stung by a stingray⁴⁹. Socrates wanted to discover through reasoning the universal standards that justified morality. He especially attacked the view of the sophists that proclaimed conventional morality the “fetters that bind nature.”⁵⁰ This view, he asserted, equated human happiness with power and “getting more.”

Socrates passionately believed that just behavior was better for human beings than injustice and that morality⁵¹ was justified because it created happiness. Essentially, he seems to have argued that just behavior, or virtue, was identical to knowledge⁵² and that true knowledge of justice would inevitably lead people to choose good over evil and therefore to have truly happy lives⁵³, regardless of their material success. Since Socrates believed that knowledge itself was sufficient for happiness, he therefore asserted that no one knowingly behaved unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual's interest. It might appear, he maintained, that individuals could promote their interests by cheating or using force on those weaker than themselves, but this appearance was deceptive. It was in fact ignorance to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to pursue whatever one desired. Instead, the most desirable human life was concerned with virtue and guided by rational reflection⁵⁴. Moral knowledge was all one needed for the good life, as Socrates defined it.

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The Effect of Socrates

Although Socrates, unlike the sophists, offered no courses and took no fees⁵⁵, his effect on many people was as upsetting as the relativistic doctrines of the sophists had been. Indeed, Socrates's refutation of his fellow conversationalists' most cherished certainties, indirectly expressed through his method of questioning, made some of his interlocutors decidedly uncomfortable. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose sons, after listening to Socrates reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came home to try the same technique on their parents⁵⁶. Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional hierarchy of education between parent and child— the son was supposed to be educated by the father— had cause to feel that Socrates's effect, even if it was not his intention, was to undermine the stability of society by questioning Athenian traditions and inspiring young men to do the same with the passionate enthusiasm of their youth. We cannot say with certainty what Athenian women thought of Socrates or he of them. His thoughts about human capabilities and behavior could be applied to women as well as to men⁵⁷, and he perhaps believed that women and men both had the same basic capacity for justice. Nevertheless, the realities of Athenian society meant that Socrates circulated primarily among men and addressed his ideas to them and their situations. He is, however, reported to have had numerous conversations with Aspasia⁵⁸, the courtesan who lived with Pericles for many years, and Plato has Socrates attribute his ideas on love to a woman, the otherwise-unknown priestess Diotima⁵⁹ of Mantinea. Whether these contacts were real or fictional devices remains uncertain.

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Aristophanes on Socrates

The feeling that Socrates could be a danger to conventional society gave the comic playwright Aristophanes⁶⁰ the inspiration for his comedy Clouds ⁶¹ of 423 B.C., so named from the role played by the chorus. In the play Socrates is presented as a cynical sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in the Protagorean technique of making the weaker argument the stronger⁶². When the protagonist's son is transformed by Socrates's instruction into a rhetorician able to argue that a son has the right to beat his parents⁶³, the protagonist ends the comedy by burning down Socrates's Thinking Shop, as it is called in the play.

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Socrates' Guilt by Association

Athenians with qualms about Socrates found confirmation of their fears in the careers of Alcibiades⁶⁴ and, especially, Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants⁶⁵. Socrates's critics blamed him for Alcibiades's contempt for social conventions because Alcibiades had been one of Socrates's most devoted followers. Critias, another prominent follower, played a leading role in the murder and plunder perpetrated by the Thirty Tyrants in 404-403 B.C. In blaming Socrates for the crimes of Critias⁶⁶, Socrates's detractors chose to overlook his defiance of the Thirty Tyrants when they had tried to involve him in their violent schemes and his utter rejection of the immorality Critias had displayed.

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The Prosecution of Socrates

The hostility some Athenians felt toward Socrates after the violence of the Thirty Tyrants encouraged the distinguished Athenian Anytus⁶⁷, who had suffered personally under this regime, to join with two other men of lesser prominence in prosecuting Socrates in 399 B.C. Since the amnesty prevented their bringing any charges⁶⁸ directly related to the period of tyranny, they accused Socrates of impiety⁶⁹. Since Athenian law did not specify precisely what offenses constituted impiety, the accusers had to convince the jurors in the case that what Socrates had done was a crime. No judge presided to rule on what evidence was admissible or how the law should be applied, as usual in Athenian trials. Speaking for themselves as the prosecutors, as also required by Athenian law, the accusers argued their case against Socrates before a jury of 501 men that had been assembled by lot from that year's pool of eligible jurors, drawn from the male citizens over thirty years old. The prosecution had both a religious and a moral component. Religiously, they accused Socrates of not believing in the gods of the city-state and of introducing new divinities. Morally, they charged, he had led the young men of Athens away from Athenian conventions and ideals. After the conclusion of the prosecutors' remarks, Socrates spoke in his own defense, as required by Athenian legal procedure. Plato presents Socrates as taking this occasion not to rebut all the charges or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected in serious cases, but to reiterate his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their preconceptions⁷⁰. This irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help them learn to live virtuous lives. Furthermore, they should care not about their material possessions but about making their true selves— their souls— as good as possible⁷¹. He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to himself.

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The Execution of Socrates

After the jury narrowly voted to convict, standard Athenian legal procedure required the jurors to decide between alternative penalties proposed by the prosecutors and the defendant. Anytus and his associates proposed death. In such instances the defendant was then expected to offer exile as the alternative, which the jury would then usually accept. Socrates, however, replied that he deserved a reward rather than a punishment⁷², until his friends at the trial prevailed upon him to propose a fine as his penalty. The jury⁷³ chose death. Socrates accepted his sentence with equanimity because, as he put it in a famous paradox, “no evil can befall a good man either in life or in death.”⁷⁴ In other words, nothing can take away the knowledge that is virtue, and only the loss of that wisdom could ever count as a true evil. He was executed in the normal Athenian way⁷⁵, by being given a poisonous drink concocted from powdered hemlock. The silencing of Socrates did nothing, however, to restore Athenian confidence to the level of the fifth century B.C., and a later source reports that the Athenians soon came to regret the condemnation of Socrates⁷⁶ as a tragic mistake that left a blot on their reputation.

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The Struggle for Dominance after the Peloponnesian War

In the fifty years after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta, Thebes, and Athens fought to win a dominant position of international power in the Greek world. Athens probably never regained the same economic and military strength that it had formerly wielded in the fifth century B.C., perhaps because its silver mines⁷⁷ were no longer producing at the same level. Nevertheless, it did recover after the re-establishment of democracy⁷⁸ in 403 B.C. and soon became a major force in international politics once again. Sparta's widespread attempts to extend its power in the years after the Peloponnesian War gave Athens and the other Greeks states ample opportunity for diplomatic and military action. In 401 B.C., the Persian satrap Cyrus, son of a previous king, hired a mercenary army to try to unseat Artaxerxes II⁷⁹, who had ascended to the Persian throne in 404. Xenophon⁸⁰, who enlisted under Cyrus, wrote a stirring account in his Anabasis ⁸¹ of the expedition's disastrous defeat at Cunaxa⁸² near Babylon and the arduous and long journey home through hostile territory⁸³ of the terrified Greek mercenaries from Cyrus's routed army. Sparta had supported Cyrus's rebellion, thereby arousing the hostility of Artaxerxes. The Spartan general Lysander, the victor over Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian War, pursued an aggressive policy⁸⁴ in Anatolia and northern Greece, and other Spartan commanders meddled in Sicily⁸⁵. Thebes, Athens, Corinth, and Argos thereupon formed an anti-Spartan coalition⁸⁶ because they saw this Spartan activity as threatening their own interests at home and abroad.

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The Corinthian War and the King's Peace

In a reversal of the alliances of the end of the Peloponnesian War⁸⁷, the Persian king initially allied with Athens and the other Greek city-states⁸⁸ against Sparta in the so-called Corinthian War⁸⁹, which lasted from 395 to 386 B.C. But this alliance failed⁹⁰, too, because the king and the Greek allies were seeking their own advantage rather than peaceful accommodation. The war ended with Sparta once again cutting a deal with Persia. In a blatant renunciation of its claim to be the defender of Greek freedom, Sparta acknowledged the Persian king's right to control the Greek city-states of Anatolia in return for permission to secure Spartan interests in Greece without Persian interference. The King's Peace⁹¹ of 386 B.C., as the agreement is called, effectively returned the Greeks of Anatolia to the dependent status of a century ago before the Greek victory in the Persian Wars of 490-479 B.C.

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Spartan Aggression and Athenian Resurgence

Spartan forces attacked city-states all over Greece in the years after the peace. Athens, meanwhile, had restored its invulnerability to invasion by rebuilding the long walls⁹² connecting the city and the harbor. The Athenian general Iphicrates⁹³ also devised effective new tactics for light-armed troops called peltasts by improving their weapons. The reconstruction of Athens's navy built up its offensive strength, and by 377 B.C. the city had again become the leader of a naval alliance of Greek states⁹⁴, but this time the members of the league had their rights specified in writing to prevent high-handed Athenian behavior. Spartan hopes for lasting power were dashed in 371 B.C., when a resurgent Thebes defeated the Spartan army at Leuctra⁹⁵ in Boeotia and then invaded the Spartan homeland in the Peloponnese. At this point the Thebans seemed likely to challenge Jason⁹⁶, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, for the position of the dominant military power in Greece.

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Stalemate after the Battle of Mantinea

The alliances of the various city-states shifted often in the repeated conflicts that took place in Greece during these early decades of the fourth century B.C. The threat from Thessaly faded with Jason's murder⁹⁷ in 370 B.C., and the former enemies Sparta and Athens momentarily allied against the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C. Thebes won the battle but lost the war when its great leader Epaminondas⁹⁸ fell at Mantinea⁹⁹ and no credible replacement for him could be found. The Theban quest for dominance in Greece was over. Xenophon adroitly summed up the situation after 362 B.C. with these closing remarks¹⁰⁰ from the history that he wrote of the Greeks in his time (Hellenica ): “Everyone had supposed that the winners of this battle would be Greece's rulers and its losers their subjects; but there was only more confusion and disturbance in Greece after it than before.” The truth of his analysis was confirmed when the naval alliance led by Athens dissolved¹⁰¹ in the mid-350s B.C. in a war among the leader and the allies.

All the efforts of the various major Greek states to extend their hegemony over mainland Greece in this period therefore ended in failure. By the mid 350s B.C., no Greek city-state had the power to rule more than itself on a consistent basis. The struggle for supremacy in Greece that had begun eighty years earlier with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War had finally ended in a stalemate of exhaustion that opened the way for a new power— the kingdom of Macedonia.