A History of Greece from the Persian to the Peloponnesian War

This on-and-off conflict is now known as the Peloponnesian War —Sparta is in the Peloponnese southern Greece and we today see the war from the Athenians' perspective since their records preserve the history of this conflict—it was essentially a civil war among Greek city-states, ending with Sparta's defeat of Athens in BCE. The ultimate result was even worse. Weakened by incessant in-fighting, all southern Greece fell to a foreign power in the next century.

The lesson to be learned about the consequences of a nation's failure to achieve compromise and resolve peaceably its internal disagreements is as yet not fully understood by many world leaders today: In this so-called Post-Classical Age the fourth century, i. In Greek, barbaros means " foreign," purportedly from the nonsense syllables "bar bar" which is the way non-Greek languages sounded to the Greeks.

During the first half of the fourth century, the Macedonians gradually consolidated their power in northern Greece and under the leadership of Philip II , a crafty and ruthless ruler and a general of great skill, began to extend their influence south. In BCE, Philip succeeded in defeating the combined forces of the southern Greeks—Athens, Thebes, and Sparta all fighting together for the first time since the Persian Wars well over a century before!

He would surely have become one of the best known figures in history, had he not created a son whose name and glory resound through all time, Alexander the Great. Still barely out of his teens, Alexander not only succeeded Philip as ruler of Greece but over the course of the next decade BCE went on to conquer many lands, including Asia Minor modern Turkey , Egypt, and Persia, and even made incursions into India. When he died suddenly of a mysterious ailment in BCE, he left behind a very different world. The period after Alexander is called the Hellenistic Age.

Peloponnesian War

Alexander had died without siring a legitimate heir, giving his generals carte blanche to seize and divide up his vast realm. These so-called diadochoi "successors" inaugurated three centuries of internecine conflict in the eastern Mediterranean area. Governed by one of Alexander's generals Ptolemy and a long line of his descendants, Egypt was the only of these "successor states" to thrive and enjoy any stability, and indeed a Hellenized "Greek-ified" Egypt did prosper, becoming a home-away-from-home for many post-Classical Greek authors.

The discovery there of thousands of papyri scraps of "paper" with Greek writing on them, dating to the third century BCE onward, is evidence of the large number of Greek speakers who moved into Egypt in the Hellenistic Age. Thus, the Greeks' business interests continued to expand even after the Macedonian conquest, many becoming very wealthy in the course of their cosmopolitan commercial adventures. But, if well-fed and secure, they were also lost and unhappy amidst their materialistic bliss.

One of the consequences of Alexander's dominion was to show what a small and insignificant place Greece actually was in the larger—the much larger! Ironically, then, as the Greeks' monetary worth rose, their sense of self-importance declined. It grew ever harder, for instance, to believe that the Greek gods who presumably controlled the whole planet—and such an expansive domain it had proven to be!

The Olympian religion, which had already suffered severe setbacks during the intellectual turmoil of the Classical Age, started to falter seriously. While not wholly discarding their ancestors' religion, many Hellenistic Greeks joined foreign cults in a search for greater meaning and direction in life.

Some put religious structures aside altogether and indulged in "philosophies," essentially cults based on logical argumentation but in reality belief systems of a sort. Spawned in the wake of Socrates and Plato, these philosophies dictated ways of living that could be "deduced" through proper reasoning. The most important of these in the long run was Stoicism , a philosophy centering around the premise that the universe is essentially "good" and, therefore, suffering exists for the very purpose of building a better tomorrow.

The "logical" response to this situation, the Stoics preached, is to distance oneself from any feelings of pain or remorse, to push aside emotion and understand that things will turn out for the better even if they do not seem that way at the moment. Thus, people should focus on their duty and ignore as much as possible the pain encountered in the passage through life. Stoicism has influenced a wide range of people then and now, from Saint Paul's conception of Christianity to Gene Roddenbery's depiction of Vulcans in Star Trek.

Eventually, the internal conflicts of these Hellenistic kingdoms spelled their doom. Yet another conqueror came along and took them down one by one. Unlike the Greeks, this new regime had avoided for a long time the fatal pitfall of internal bickering and thereby created the most powerful and long-lasting empire yet in Western Civilization.

These conquerors were, of course, the Romans who began incorporating the Hellenistic Greek world into their realm around BCE. Henceforth, Roman and Greek civilization would merge to form "Greco-Roman" culture, the hybrid we know as classical antiquity. The history of Greece is a tale of glory and folly, of inordinate success and incalculable waste. Perhaps because our strengths as humans almost invariably come from the same sources as our weaknesses—to wit, the blindness that leads many to be taken in by others also makes them brave in the face of overwhelming danger—the same things that had fostered the civilization of the ancient Greeks precipitated its fall, their unwavering belief in themselves and the conviction that their ways were the right ways, the best ways, and finally the only ways.

In particular, the greed that drove the Peloponnesian War and fomented all its disasters for Athens and Greece alike was part and parcel of the Athenians' determination to improve themselves and their way of life. That is, the fire that sparked the Classical Age also incinerated it. Likewise, the Greeks' visionary art with all its grandeur and glory is tightly bound up with the egotism that led them early on to trust their own divine instincts but then also to underestimate the power of "barbarians" and eventually fall to beings they looked down upon as inferior.

The Parthenon is a perfect example of how this all worked.

Peloponnesian War

It is a temple designed to please the human eye, not some god looking down from above. Amphipolis was of considerable strategic importance, and news of its fall caused great consternation in Athens. Because of his failure to save Amphipolis, he was exiled: I lived through the whole of it, being of an age to comprehend events, and giving my attention to them in order to know the exact truth about them.

It was also my fate to be an exile from my country for twenty years after my command at Amphipolis ; and being present with both parties, and more especially with the Peloponnesians by reason of my exile, I had leisure to observe affairs somewhat particularly.

Using his status as an exile from Athens to travel freely among the Peloponnesian allies, he was able to view the war from the perspective of both sides. Thucydides claimed that he began writing his history as soon as the war broke out, because he thought it would be one of the greatest wars waged among the Greeks in terms of scale:. Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians, beginning at the moment that it broke out, and believing that it would be a great war, and more worthy of relation than any that had preceded it.

This is all that Thucydides wrote about his own life, but a few other facts are available from reliable contemporary sources. Herodotus wrote that the name Olorus , Thucydides's father's name, was connected with Thrace and Thracian royalty. Cimon's maternal grandfather's name also was Olorus, making the connection exceedingly likely.

Another Thucydides lived before the historian and was also linked with Thrace, making a family connection between them very likely as well. Combining all the fragmentary evidence available, it seems that his family had owned a large estate in Thrace , one that even contained gold mines, and which allowed the family considerable and lasting affluence.

Once exiled, Thucydides took permanent residence in the estate and, given his ample income from the gold mines, he was able to dedicate himself to full-time history writing and research, including many fact-finding trips. In essence, he was a well-connected gentleman of considerable resources who, after involuntarily retiring from the political and military spheres, decided to fund his own historical investigations.

The remaining evidence for Thucydides's life comes from rather less reliable, later ancient sources. According to Pausanias , someone named Oenobius was able to get a law passed allowing Thucydides to return to Athens, presumably sometime shortly after the city's surrender and the end of the war in BC. Many doubt this account, seeing evidence to suggest he lived as late as BC.

Plutarch claims that his remains were returned to Athens and placed in Cimon 's family vault. The abrupt end to Thucydides's narrative, which breaks off in the middle of the year BC, has traditionally been interpreted that he died while writing the book, although other explanations have been put forward.

Inferences about Thucydides's character can only be drawn with due caution from his book. His sardonic sense of humour is evident throughout, as when, during his description of the Athenian plague , he remarks that old Athenians seemed to remember a rhyme which said that with the Dorian War would come a "great death". Thucydides then remarks that should another Dorian War come, this time attended with a great dearth, the rhyme will be remembered as "dearth", and any mention of "death" forgotten.

Thucydides admired Pericles , approving of his power over the people and showing a marked distaste for the demagogues who followed him. He did not approve of the democratic commoners nor the radical democracy that Pericles ushered in, but considered democracy acceptable when guided by a good leader. Occasionally, however, strong passions break through, as in his scathing appraisals of the democratic leaders Cleon [23] [24] and Hyperbolus.

Thucydides believed that the Peloponnesian War represented an event of unmatched importance.

Thucydides

This facet of the work suggests that Thucydides died whilst writing his history and more so, that his death was unexpected. After his death, Thucydides's History was subdivided into eight books: His great contribution to history and historiography is contained in this one dense history of the year war between Athens and Sparta , each alongside their respective allies. This subdivision was most likely made by librarians and archivists, themselves being historians and scholars, most likely working in the Library of Alexandria.

The History of the Peloponnesian War continued to be modified well beyond the end of the war in , as exemplified by a reference at Book I. Thucydides is generally regarded as one of the first true historians. Like his predecessor Herodotus , known as "the father of history", Thucydides places a high value on eyewitness testimony and writes about events in which he probably took part. He also assiduously consulted written documents and interviewed participants about the events that he recorded. Unlike Herodotus, whose stories often teach that a hubris invites the wrath of the deities, Thucydides does not acknowledge divine intervention in human affairs.

Thucydides exerted wide historiographical influence on subsequent Hellenistic and Roman historians, although the exact description of his style in relation to many successive historians remains unclear. Such readings often described Xenophon's treatises as attempts to "finish" Thucydides's History. Many of these interpretations, however, have garnered significant scepticism among modern scholars, such as Dillery, who spurn the view of interpreting Xenophon qua Thucydides, arguing that the latter's "modern" history defined as constructed based on literary and historical themes is antithetical to the former's account in the Hellenica , which diverges from the Hellenic historiographical tradition in its absence of a preface or introduction to the text and the associated lack of an "overarching concept" unifying the history.

A noteworthy difference between Thucydides's method of writing history and that of modern historians is Thucydides's inclusion of lengthy formal speeches that, as he states, were literary reconstructions rather than quotations of what was said—or, perhaps, what he believed ought to have been said. Arguably, had he not done this, the gist of what was said would not otherwise be known at all—whereas today there is a plethora of documentation—written records, archives, and recording technology for historians to consult.

Therefore, Thucydides's method served to rescue his mostly oral sources from oblivion. We do not know how these historical figures spoke. Thucydides's recreation uses a heroic stylistic register. A celebrated example is Pericles' funeral oration , which heaps honour on the dead and includes a defence of democracy:. The whole earth is the sepulchre of famous men; they are honoured not only by columns and inscriptions in their own land, but in foreign nations on memorials graven not on stone but in the hearts and minds of men.

Stylistically, the placement of this passage also serves to heighten the contrast with the description of the plague in Athens immediately following it, which graphically emphasizes the horror of human mortality, thereby conveying a powerful sense of verisimilitude:. Though many lay unburied, birds and beasts would not touch them, or died after tasting them [ The bodies of dying men lay one upon another, and half-dead creatures reeled about the streets and gathered round all the fountains in their longing for water.

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The sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons who had died there, just as they were; for, as the disaster passed all bounds, men, not knowing what was to become of them, became equally contemptuous of the property of and the dues to the deities. All the burial rites before in use were entirely upset, and they buried the bodies as best they could. Many from want of the proper appliances, through so many of their friends having died already, had recourse to the most shameless sepultures: Thucydides omits discussion of the arts, literature, or the social milieu in which the events in his book take place and in which he grew up.

He saw himself as recording an event, not a period, and went to considerable lengths to exclude what he deemed frivolous or extraneous. Paul Shorey calls Thucydides "a cynic devoid of moral sensibility". Thucydides' work indicates an influence from the teachings of the Sophists that contributes substantially to the thinking and character of his History. There is also evidence of his knowledge concerning some of the corpus of Hippocratic medical writings.

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Thucydides was especially interested in the relationship between human intelligence and judgment, [42] Fortune and Necessity, [43] and the idea that history is too irrational and incalculable to predict. Scholars traditionally view Thucydides as recognizing and teaching the lesson that democracies need leadership, but that leadership can be dangerous to democracy.

Leo Strauss in The City and Man locates the problem in the nature of Athenian democracy itself, about which, he argued, Thucydides had a deeply ambivalent view: For Canadian historian Charles Norris Cochrane — , Thucydides's fastidious devotion to observable phenomena, focus on cause and effect, and strict exclusion of other factors anticipates twentieth-century scientific positivism. Cochrane, the son of a physician, speculated that Thucydides generally and especially in describing the plague in Athens was influenced by the methods and thinking of early medical writers such as Hippocrates of Kos.

After World War II, classical scholar Jacqueline de Romilly pointed out that the problem of Athenian imperialism was one of Thucydides's central preoccupations and situated his history in the context of Greek thinking about international politics. Since the appearance of her study, other scholars further examined Thucydides's treatment of realpolitik.

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More recently, scholars have questioned the perception of Thucydides as simply, "the father of realpolitik". Instead they have brought to the fore the literary qualities of the History , which they see as belonging to the narrative tradition of Homer and Hesiod and as concerned with the concepts of justice and suffering found in Plato and Aristotle and problematized in Aeschylus and Sophocles. Thus his History could serve as a warning to future leaders to be more prudent, by putting them on notice that someone would be scrutinizing their actions with a historian's objectivity rather than a chronicler's flattery.

Bury writes that the work of Thucydides "marks the longest and most decisive step that has ever been taken by a single man towards making history what it is today". Kitto feels that Thucydides wrote about the Peloponnesian War, not because it was the most significant war in antiquity, but because it caused the most suffering.

Indeed, several passages of Thucydides's book are written "with an intensity of feeling hardly exceeded by Sappho herself". Thucydides's work, however, Popper goes on to say, represents "an interpretation, a point of view; and in this we need not agree with him". In the war between Athenian democracy and the "arrested oligarchic tribalism of Sparta", we must never forget Thucydides's "involuntary bias", and that "his heart was not with Athens, his native city":.

Although he apparently did not belong to the extreme wing of the Athenian oligarchic clubs who conspired throughout the war with the enemy, he was certainly a member of the oligarchic party, and a friend neither of the Athenian people, the demos, who had exiled him, nor of its imperialist policy.

Thucydides and his immediate predecessor, Herodotus , both exerted a significant influence on Western historiography. Thucydides does not mention his counterpart by name, but his famous introductory statement is thought to refer to him: To hear this history rehearsed, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful.

But he that desires to look into the truth of things done, and which according to the condition of humanity may be done again, or at least their like, shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession than to be rehearsed for a prize. Herodotus records in his Histories not only the events of the Persian Wars , but also geographical and ethnographical information, as well as the fables related to him during his extensive travels.



Typically, he passes no definitive judgment on what he has heard. In the case of conflicting or unlikely accounts, he presents both sides, says what he believes and then invites readers to decide for themselves.