Introduction to the Fifth Century
Athens1 achieved its greatest international power, economic prosperity,
and cultural flowering during the fifth century B.C. The enduring fame of the drama, art,
architecture, historical writing, and philosophy produced at Athens in these years by
Athenians and non-Athenians, who had been attracted to the city by its economic and
cultural vitality, has impelled historians to refer to the fifth century after the Persian
Wars as the “Golden Age of Athens.” This Athenian Golden Age coincides
with the first part of the so-called Classical period of ancient Greek history, a modern
designation that is conventionally fixed between about 500 B. C., when the Greeks began to
come into conflict with the kingdom of Persia to the east, and the death of the Macedonian
king and conqueror Alexander the Great in 323 B.C. This section of the Overview will
concentrate on the military, political, economic, and cultural history of Athens during
this most famous span of Greek history, the Golden Age. The focus on Athens in this period
reflects both the traditional fame that the city and its people have acquired in later
times and the undeniable fact that far more ancient evidence has survived concerning
Athens than any other ancient Greek state.
The Major Conflicts of Fifth-Century Greece
As the association of the Classical period's opening chronological boundary with
clashes against Persian forces and of its close with the military expeditions of
Alexander reveals, the Classical period of Greek history was an age often marked by
turbulence and war. The Golden Age of Athens was no exception, and one bloody conflict
after another raged in mainland Greece during the fifth century, beginning with war
against the great kingdom of Persia, whose heartland lay in what is today southern Iran.
The kingdom of Persia had by around 500 expanded far enough westward that the Greeks
were becoming aware of its enormous might, but neither the Persians nor the Greeks,
especially those on the mainland, yet knew much about each other. Their mutual ignorance
opened the door to explosive misunderstandings and a deadly war. When the Greeks allied
against the Persians managed by 479 to defeat their more numerous foe and expel its
invading army from the Greek mainland, the way was opened to the full blossoming of the
Golden Age. After their success in the war with the Persians, however, the two major
powers in mainland Greece—
Sparta and Athens, who had
cooperated in fighting the Persians—gradually became more and more
hostile to each other in the course of the fifth century. Eventually, their mutual
suspicions and hostilities erupted into open warfare of Greek against Greek, culminating
in the drawn-out and destructive Peloponesian War (431-404) between Athens and Sparta
and their allies. This catastrophic struggle lasted for twenty-seven bitter years.
Athens' defeat in this war brought an end to the Athenian Golden Age.
Sources of Strife betweeen Athens and Sparta
The sources of the strife2 between these two major powers of the Greek mainland are significant for an
understanding of the history of the Athenian Golden Age because that greatest era of
Athens' prosperity and cultural achievement came to an end as a result of the terrible
defeat inflicted on Athens by Sparta and its allies in the Peloponnesian War. Sparta,
dominated politically by a conservative
oligarchy3 that was always suspicious of change, had already become concerned by the end of
the sixth century by the development of greater democracy at Athens under the leadership
of Cleisthenes after 507. The Spartan leaders feared that the increasing
democratization of Athenian government under the reforms of Cleisthenes4 would lead Athens to contest Spartan predominance in Greece. After seeing the
military power, epecially the
navy5, that Athens marshalled against the Persian army, the Spartan leaders
increasingly saw Athens as more than just a theoretical threat to their state's
dominance. The majority of men at Athens reciprocated this feeling of suspicion and
feared the Spartan army, Greece's most formidable infantry force, as a threat to their
international ambitions and security. The allies of Athens and Sparta also contributed
signficantly to the friction between the two powers by complaining to their respective
leaders about real and imagined grievances against the other leading state.