338 Philip marches down into Greece. Philip defeats Thebes and Athens at Chaeronea. End of Greek independence.
336 Philip assassinated, Alexander succeeds him. Alexander’s first descent on Greece, elected general of the Greeks.
335 Alexander’s second descent into Greece. Destruction of Thebes.
334 Alexander leaves for the Persian Empire.
c.331 Foundation of Alexandria.
331 Alexander wins decisive battle at Gaugamela, assumes the Persian throne.
323 Alexander dies.
322 Greeks revolt (Lamian War), are defeated. Demosthenes kills himself.
286 Athens rebels against Macedon.
146 Roman conquest of Greece.
86 Sulla sacks Athens.
A.D.
c.120–35 Hadrian restores and rebuilds Athens.
1687 Venetians blow up Parthenon.
1801 Lord Elgin removes carvings from Parthenon.
1821–33 Greek War of Independence.
1834 Athens becomes capital of Greece.
For John Brunel Cohen,
my ever-loyal stepfather
—from Salamis to D-Day—
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My warmest thanks go to Roddy Ashworth for his advice throughout and assistance with research. I am greatly indebted to my editor at Penguin Random House, Will Murphy, and to my literary agent, Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson, for their guidance and enthusiasm. Grateful thanks are also due to Mika Kasuga, assistant editor at Penguin Random House, for her support. As in the past, Professor Robert Cape of Austin College, Texas, has very kindly read a draft and given me useful comments and suggestions. Professor Sulochana Asirvatham, associate professor of classics and humanities, Montclair State University, has also offered helpful advice. Any errors, of course, must be laid at my door.
SOURCES
The sources for the story of Athens vary in quality and many of them survive only as fragments or as quotations in other books. What we have is mainly related to Athenian affairs, and relatively little is known about the rest of Greece.
Two very great writers dominate the field. The first of these is Herodotus (c. 484–25) from Halicarnassus in Asia Minor, in the eyes of the ancient world the “father of history.” The word “history” derives from the Greek term for investigation and his book is the product of his inquiries as he traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean. He describes the various peoples in the region and sets the scene for a comprehensive narrative of the two Persian invasions of Greece in the early fifth century.
Herodotus is essentially a storyteller and he will cheerfully give space to a good yarn whether or not it is plausible. He wrote an epic in prose and the towering figure of Homer lies behind his literary enterprise; he too was concerned with a titanic struggle between Hellenes and an oriental power.
Herodotus describes what he has seen for himself and what he has been told in conversations with apparently well-informed individuals. He is open-minded about different cultures, although he does not always understand the real meaning of what he is describing. However, he recognized the importance of disinterested research and tried to give an accurate record of events. He wrote a generation after the Persian Wars, and so will have been able to gather information from those who took part or at least their close descendants.
If Herodotus is not an altogether reliable guide to what happened, he gives a completely truthful picture of how an intelligent Greek might see the world around him.
By contrast, his contemporary Thucydides (c. 500–c. 399), an Athenian aristocrat, chose another conflict as his subject, the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. He believed that this war, closely studied, would be an example to future generations. His history was to be “a possession for all time” and not something “written for display, to make an immediate impression” (in other words, like Herodotus).
He was determined to report events as accurately as possible and took trouble to interview those who took part in them. He is quite exceptionally impartial, exact, responsible, and trustworthy—so much so that he leaves little room for scholarly interpretation. We are obliged to accept what he says (where available, other sources almost invariably confirm his narrative). An innovative feature was his reporting of public speeches given by military and political leaders. While keeping as close as possible to what was said, he wrote what he believed the situation required. Readers must bear this in mind when they encounter quotations from speeches in this book—for instance, the great funeral address of Pericles at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War.
After a brief summary of early Greek history, Thucydides reports on the rise of the Athenian Empire between 479 and 435. He then covers in detail the first ten years of the war, the Peace of Nicias, the renewal of hostilities, and the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. He takes the story to 411 and breaks off in mid-sentence (presumably overtaken by illness or death).
A number of historians wrote continuations of Thucydides, none of which has survived except for the Hellenica of Xenophon. The book has a certain freshness and directness, but what does not interest the author is ignored. He is heavily biased in favor of Sparta and cannot even bring himself to mention the name of Epaminondas, architect of the Theban victory of Leuctra. He omits some incidents altogether, but was an eyewitness of some scenes in his book which he describes well.
Xenophon’s Anabasis is an exciting narrative of the author’s days as a mercenary in the service of Cyrus the Younger. He was a friend of the Spartan king Agesilaus, and wrote a eulogy of him. He produced numerous other works, including dialogues featuring Socrates and essays on horsemanship, hunting, and home economics. His Education of Cyrus is a curious mixture of romance and documentary.
The main continuous narrative source for the period is the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus, a Sicilian who flourished in the middle of the first century B.C. This “universal history” is an assembly of summaries of other historians. His coverage of the years 480 to 302 has survived in toto. He is invaluable, but only as trustworthy as the source he happens to be using at the time.
Behind Diodorus and the rest stand the shadowy figures of historians and chroniclers, all of whose books have vanished but who appear indirectly in the writings of their successors or in late epitomes (Theopompus, for instance, or Pompeius Trogus).
The trouble with all these ancient authors is that they concentrate more or less exclusively on military and political affairs. The dismal science of economics had not been invented, nor the more cheerful one of sociology. Little is said of the lives of women or slaves. To gain an idea of everyday life we have to scavenge passing references in all kinds of surviving text.
The biographies and essays of the Greek author Plutarch (c. A.D. 46–120) are not history, strictly speaking, but are gold mines of historical data and offer fascinating insights into the personalities of Athenian and a few other leaders.
Literary masterpieces illumine moral attitudes—Homer, above all, and the epic farmer Hesiod, the Athenian tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comic author Aristophanes, and a range of other poets, often represented only by fragments. Speeches by orators and pamphlets, especially dated to the fourth century, are useful political and social documents, but have to be interpreted with caution. The many works of Plato and Aristotle allow us to track the intellectual development not only of Athens, but of Greece as a whole. Two studies of the Athenian constitution were misattributed to Aristotle (probably written by a pupil) and Xenophon, but offer a mass of detail about the democratic process.