XXXIX. End as of 11/1/95
To Notes as of 11/1/95
A. Brief note on that Orphic stuff and the threat it posed to Greece:
1. Bewildering, wasn't it? Consider Christianity: Does mysticism necessarily contradict reason? Well, those Anglicans...
2. Xenophanes the philosopher vs. art, literature (Homer and Hesiod), and religion in favor of... philosophy.
3. The Historian's Credo: NOBODY gets special treatment vs. the facts. That works as often for you as against you!
XL. The League of Delos: We Ionians...
A. The war had set the precedent of contributing ships to the common fleet, which in 478 was under the command of Aristides "the Just."
B. Pausanias's efforts can be seen as an effort to keep the old Hellenic league going, but unsuccessfully.
C. No single power, not even Athens at that time, could hope to keep the Persians out of the Aegean or away from the cities of Ionia. All together, though, there was a chance, hence the meeting at Delos, the Panionian shrine and the assault of Sestos to weaken the Persian's ability to wage war(cf. Ionian league and Didyma, Hecateus's advice finally getting followed).
D. Reputations can work for you: Aristides got to set a quota (initially 460 talents--explain) for how much of the joint war effort for which each member of the Delian league was responsible:
1. Hellenotamiai--like the Athenian state treasurers for all the Greeks appointed in 477 to make sure that the quotas were met.
2. Here's the big question: How early was the ships/money equivalent set? Thu. 1.99 says early, and, whatever the motive, it did allow the participation/protection of the inland states.
3. BUT: As Thu. notes, bit by bit the independent fleets die (or get killed!) while the "League" fleet, (based, strangely, at Athens) grows...
4. And by equating the ships built in an emergency for wartime to what a state could provide yearly, that assessment in effect kept the Allies' tribute on a war basis. See Thu. 1.99, noting the stupidity of the allies, but not mentioning the reasons in f avor of a single league fleet:
a) Necessity of facilities
b) Lack of manpower
c) Sense of having a single unified command!
E. Worth noting, though, that the early league fleet justified its existence BIG TIME: Cimon, son of Militiades.
1. Cimon's bridle: Aristocratic involvement in the Navy, Aristocratic party, policy, vs. democratic radicals--Aristorcrats dominant until 461:
a) Trireme regattas
b) Chance to establish rapport with voting crew
c) Prestige resulting from well-groomed ship
d) Cimon's Commands and the conversion of Themistocles' ships for more marines
2. Which were:
a) Sestos--478
b) Pausanias expelled from Byzantium, 476?
c) Eion, Persian suicides, Macedonian timber and silver, Pisistratid tradition, 476-5 (Thu. 1.98).
d) Skyros, pirate island, encouragement of trade, 474, and bones of Theseus (Mention Marathon sighting).
e) League included Rhodes, Athenian amphibious victory at the Eurymedon (Thu. 1.100)
(1) Persian ships destroyed
(2) Plus Cyprian squadron
(3) Persians cut off from the Phoenician navy and virtually helpless to defend their seaboard from Cimon's raids
XLI. What a shame it didn't end there: The Athenian Empire
1. The problem with fighting that well and that successfully is that your allies start feeling that you've won the war and
2. They start to act in their own interests again:
a) Carystus was forced into the league in 472/1--why should we fight Athens' local foes?
b) Revolt of Naxos, 469, destruction by league fleet, subjugation by Athens. Cimon and Aristides never quit putting their own city first.
c) Revolt of Thasos, 465-3, Thu. 1.100-102
(1) Fight with Athens over Thracian mines
(2) Another powerful "ships not money" fleet destroyed. The last was Mytilene in 428, during the war, see Thu. 3.27, 3.50.2 for the pattern:
(a) Democratic factions in the cities support/supported by Athens
(b) Fleet confiscated
(c) Walls opened to insure submission
(d) "Subject ally.
(3) Thasians had sucessfully pleaded for Spartan aid, but didn't get it... Remember that earthquake I told you about? Remember what I told you about the Helots? (Thu. 1.101-4)
A. Sparta was in the throes of its worst Helot revolt in centuries, possibly because they had ALSO fought and died at Thermopylae (600 of them) and Plataea for the freedom of the Greeks, but then discovered that they weren't counted as Greeks.
1. Earthquake of 464, Helot destruction of 300 Spartans (a lochos)
2. Counter-attack, Messenians yet again back to Ithome, Spartans ask for Athenian assault experts:
3. Cimon's political gamble: override support of democracy in favor of international policitics: Yoke-fellow
4. Spartan stupidity yet again: dismissal of Athenians, ostracism of Cimon, victory of political democrats, retaliatory murder of Ephialtes 461.
B. The rewards of imperialism had been popular, and so that policy had to continue, under hands much less able than Cimon's... And with Sparta now an enemy, defenses were in order: (v. Her. 3.50.2 for the vulnerability of Attica to invasion)
1. Settlement of Messenians by Athenians at Naupactus, revenge and getting ready for the war... c. 459
2. More of the Same: Seizure of Megara on the isthmus, c. 459, long walls from Megara to Pagae, Thu. 1.103
3. Construction of the Long Walls, c. 458: Much the same, defense against land attack, "The Iron Triangle."
4. Naval skirmishes, the FIRST Peloponnesian war, c. 459-447.
a) In briefest: Athens has successes against Corinth and Aegina (conquered 457
b) Spartans reversed themselves and tried to raise up Thebes against Athens, whic failed completely and the Athenians (pumping in the Delian revenues)
c) First beat a combined Peloponnesian army at Tanagra, on its way into Attica and then
d) The Athenians conquered Thebes at Oenophyta in 457.
5. Then the HEIGHT of folly: The Egyptian Expedition of 458-454 (Thu. 1.104-109): Inaros's revolt
a) Keep the Persians reeling and the grain flowing.
b) It ALMOST worked, major losses thanks to skill of Persian general Megabyzus.
c) Transfer of treasury from Delos to Athens "in light of the disaster," Athena gets 1/60th.
d) Fortunately for Athenian imperialists, Megabyzus had the decency to revolt on his own after subduing Egypt.
e) Cimon recalled in 451, successful expedition to Cyprus and death in 450/49 after two victories.
XLII. End as of 11/6/95
a) Peace with Persia after two years to convince themselves it was over, "Peace of Callias," 449: Persians not to cross the Erythraid promontory. Good thing we moved the treasury!
A. Meanwhile, disasters at land to match the disasters at sea...
1. Theban oligarchs gather strength against installed (discredited) Athenian democratic government and defeat Tolmides at Coronea, 447.
2. Megarean oligarchs revolt, supported by King Pleistoanax and Spartan troops, and Athens loses its line on the isthmus.
3. From now on until 404 Athens will be trying like fun to keep what it had. It had made a lot of enemies, v. Thu. 4.100.2-3.
4. Take a look at the defense of Athenian Imperialism "of a lofty kind" on p. 226, B3.
a) Hindsight faulting the Athenians for not doing to Greece what Rome had done for Italy? But nobody ever managed that for the Greeks.
b) Defense of the British Empire?
c) Just right?
XLIII. Meanwhile, Athens at Home
A. Militiades at Marathon had been an aristocrat, as you know (Cimon the charioteer)
B. Themistocles was supposedly the son of a vegetable peddler (Yeah, she owned Birdseye!) but he knew how to get the aristocracy behind him:
1. The trierarchs
2. The decree and the Areopagus's use of personal funds to supply the people
C. Cimon has used this legacy and kept the people and the nobles together by
1. Careful leadership and profitable victories
2. Voluntary public largesse: pulling down his orchard fences
3. As I said, the trierarchies allowed this sort of thing, as did the other
D. Liturgies, which gave the poor a chance to get something from the rich without violence and the rich a chance to win popularity by doing a good job of them
1. The choregia, which involved funding the production costs and hiring the choruses for three tragedies and a satyr play at the Greater Dionysia is the most famous.
a) Themistocles (I think) had used the Fall of Miletus to warn the Athenians of the Persian menace
b) Anyone who just put on a good show and/or won the prize was going to look good come election time (one per tribe)
2. The arcitheoria paid for the sacred pilgramages
a) Which were quite expensive and good for public morale AND
b) Gave the people in charge a chance to make friend abroad: Pericles and Archidamus
E. The Opposition to Cimon and his timocrats had to make innovations and reforms in order to disrupt a disadvantageous status quo!
XLIV. The Athenian Reforms of the 450's:
A. Now, as had happened in the past, and is happening today, the opposition was itself an unlikely coalition of someone with the money and training getting influence at the expense of others of his class (the tyrants, the Kennedys)
1. Pericles, son of Xanthippus, was himself related to Cleisthenes, the inventor of the Trittyes
2. Both of them were related to the tyrants of Sicyon.
3. Money, then and now, brought education: Damon of Oa and the physicist Anaxagoras, here go B3 on "delusions of the masses" again.
4. Smart though: Pericles made Ebenezer Scrooge look like a Sybarite in the way he lived.
B. At the start of his political career, Pericles was a subordinate ally of one Ephialtes
1. Ephialtes had set out to destroy the Areopagus since he considered it either
a) An obstacle to further reform or
b) The upper class's way of keeping the lower classes obedient through fear or benevolence? Your call.
2. Ephialtes' tactic was to prosecute individual Areopagites for corruption and lessen the institution's prestige
3. When Cimon blew it in Messenia (461), he was able to transfer investigation of official conduct and supervision of the government to the Assembly.
a) That left the Areopagus with nothing but murder trials, which Hollywood (Aeschylus, Eumenides, 458) approved of and tried to make palatable
b) It ALSO gave whoever controlled the majority of voters an incredibly potent weapon against their opposition.
(1) Ephialtes never had a chance to use the weapon
(2) Pericles may have used it, or threatened to use it, but not very obviously
(3) It would be used against HIM in 430, when the Peloponnesian war started out badly
(4) And demagogues such as Cleon and Hyperbolus would wreck a great many things with it.
c) Ephialtes also may have inspired the reforms we know Pericles instituted after hired thugs killed Ephialtes.
C. Pericles completed the program that resulted in his LONG hold on power.
1. The archonship had long been an upper class institution, Pericles opened it to the Zeugitae (458/7)and instituted a salary--now anyone could be one, not that it mattered as much with
a) The Areopagus (where ex-archons went) gutted and
2. The lot weakened the chance for a rival (or a tyrant, admittedly) to arise.
a) Previously, the lesser officials had been chosen by "the bean" from candidates approved by the voters.
b) Now everybody elegible's name goes into the helmet, and the archons, prytaneis, members of the Boule are ALL chosen by random drawing!
c) Benefits:
(1) No more expensive and demoralizing elections (full turn out, too)!
(2) Better chance of a truly representative government
(3) Everybody has a chance to serve
d) Drawbacks:
(1) Possibility of corruption and manipulation
(2) Are the really best people going to be chosen? Particularly in the case of the military?
3. Is it any surprise to you that the elected office of strategos (commander) is going to rise in prestige?
4. Is it any surprise to you that that office will be held so many times by Pericles that they have to abolish the old 1/tribe ratio so that someone else from his tribe gets to be one?
D. How did Pericles stay in power?
1. His reforms WERE popular...with the mass of the voters, whom Pericles henceforth had to keep happy.
a) Flattery: the mass juries of the heliaea courts, with the pleaders groveling and scraping before the sovereign voter/jurors (seeds of the need for modern higher education--the edge!).
b) Payment for the jury duty and the political offices--from Empire funds!
c) Continuation of the overseas expansion
(1) Wages as rowers, shipwrights, and outfitters for the "Naval mob" <1NAUTIKOS O)XLOS>1 the "Old Timocrat (Oligarch) complained about in that Ps. Xenophon Athenaion Politea I told you about.
(2) LOOOT! Loot loot loot loot!
(3) Cleruchies abroad: one minute you're nothing in Athens, the next minute you've got a farm and the people who farmed it previously working to make you wealthier.
(a) Scyros, Eion had been Cimon's idea, but probably for military necessity
(b) Naxos, Andros, Carystos, the Thracian Chersonese (again!), Lemons and Imbros were all Pericles.
(4) Mind you, if you want to find something that people in the Athenian Empire RESENTED... And we have the evidence of that when the Athenian tribute lists inscribed every year (where the people could see them!) start losing entries or the numbers just don't add up.
XLV. End as of 11/8/95