This is the Athens I evoke, beginning with its early centuries of kings, tyrants, and aristocrats, moving on to the invention of democracy and the city’s political and cultural heyday, and concluding with its decline into a pleasant “university town.”
The story is much less well known than that of Rome, but it had just as great an influence on posterity, on today’s Western civilization, in a word, on us. The Athenians laid the foundations of the house in which we live today. We ought to remember and celebrate what they built. And what a story it is—crammed with adventure and astounding reversals of fortune.
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On the game board of Eastern Mediterranean politics from the sixth to the fourth century B.C., there were three main players.
The first of these was Athens. It was a maritime rather than a land power and encouraged trade throughout the known world. Its fleets came to dominate the Aegean Sea. Its citizens bought and sold goods and services, were devoted to culture and the arts, and were inquisitive and open-minded.
Sparta was different in every way, one of the strangest societies in the history of the world. A city-state in the Peloponnese, the peninsula that makes up southern Greece, it was highly disciplined and dedicated to warfare. It was widely recognized as the leading Greek power. Male citizens lived collectively and spent much of their lives in communal messes. Called Spartiates or (to deny them their individuality) Equals, they were forbidden to farm or trade, and were brought up to be professional soldiers. They conquered much of the Peloponnese and enslaved its population as serfs, or helots. These helots served their masters by working their estates for them; they were regularly humiliated and could be put to death at will.
Young Spartiates were trained brutally to be brutal. The aim was to turn them into pitiless fighters, to abjure personal wealth, and to be silent, modest, and polite. Theirs was a self-sufficient community—closed, dour, and totalitarian—with little interest in the outside world.
The third player was the vast Persian Empire on the far side of the Aegean Sea. In the mid-sixth century an Iranian nobleman, Cyrus the Great, conquered and annexed all the great kingdoms of the Middle East. Ultimately Cyrus’s domains stretched from the Balkans to the Indus, from Central Asia to Egypt. He was an absolute monarch.
The prosperous Greek cities along the littoral of Asia Minor fell under his sway. This was a standing insult to the entire Greek world, which saw foreigners as barbarians—that is, barbaroi or people who make noises sounding like “bar bar” instead of speaking proper Greek. Here the tectonic rock layers of two cultures met and ground against each other.
Conflict was inevitable. As in a complicated ballet, these dancers would entwine their bodies, exchanging friends and enemies, moving in turn from war to peace and to war again.
The three great powers enjoyed golden zeniths, but all three ended up facing defeat and disaster. Their progress conveys all the thrills of a historical roller-coaster ride.
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I write narrative history. I never reveal future outcomes or endings during the telling, for I want readers to have no better idea of what is to happen next than those who lived through the events I describe. If they are unfamiliar with ancient history, they are in for a lively time.
Some of the stories in the ancient sources have a suspiciously fictional ring, or so picky scholars claim. Solon’s encounter with King Croesus of Lydia (see this page) is a good example. We cannot always say at this distance of time whether they are true or false. But, like the myths and legends, they are good stories and even if some of them have been embellished they cast a bright light on how Greeks saw themselves. So I happily retell them.
I do my best to sketch the Athenian record in the fields of philosophy and the arts, but a sketch is all I have space for. Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides are represented by masterpieces, including The Oresteia, Antigone, and The Trojan Women, and the ideas of Plato and Aristotle are only adumbrated. Lysistrata speaks up for Aristophanes. But I hope to have done enough to illustrate their greatness.
Ancient historians are very variable in quality, with part of the fifth century being much more fully covered than the fourth. The work of many writers has been wholly or partly lost thanks to the corrosive passage of time. Thucydides is the greatest writer of history in history. In fact, he is so good that we are trapped inside his version of events. Lesser authors give themselves away, offer some purchase for the modern scholar, and allow corrections and new interpretations. What Thucydides does not write about is an empty space that usually we cannot fill, and what he does write about is usually irrefutable.
There are topics that even the finest chroniclers, such as Thucydides, do not touch except tangentially—for example, economics and social life. Also we know far more about Athens than any other of the many city-states and their Mediterranean colonies that made up ancient Greece. One way or another, we have less to say than we would like about wider developments.
There are many matters on which today’s experts disagree. In general, I touch on their debates only in the Endnotes and leave the main narrative clean of scholarly controversy.
How should I spell the names of people and places? In Western Europe we were first introduced to the literature and history of ancient Greece via the Romans and their language, Latin. The convention was established of using Latinate spelling for Hellenic proper nouns. It was only in the Renaissance that most Europeans came into direct contact with Greek as a language, and by then the practice was too ingrained to change.
So most of us speak of Achilles and not Achilleus, Alcibiades and not Alkibiades, Plato and not Platon. I have decided to keep to these Roman forms because of their familiarity; readers would be puzzled and daunted by a strictly accurate transliteration from the Greek to the European alphabet. A few esoteric technical terms are exempted from this rule.
Also some very famous names have anglicized versions that most people use and I prefer—for example, Athens to Athenai (Greek) or Athenae (Latin), Corinth (English) to Korinthos (Greek) or Corinthus (Latin), and Sparta (Latin) to Sparte (Greek). I borrow the Greco-Latin versions of foreign and mostly Persian names: so I refer to Astyages, the Median king, rather than Ishtumegu. Lesser-known places in the Greek world take their original form. In sum, every rule has an exception and I have followed my taste.
In proper names ending with “e,” the “e” is pronounced in the English way as “ee” (in Greek it would be “ay” as in hay); and in those ending with “es” as “ees.”
It is hard to be precise about the value of money, because the relative worth of different products varies from time to time and from economy to economy. The principal units of the Athenian currency were
6 obols = 1 drachma
100 drachmas = 1 mina
60 minas = 1 talent
One drachma was a day’s pay for a foot soldier or a skilled worker in the fifth and fourth centuries. From 425 B.C. a juror received from the state a daily allowance of half a drachma or three obols, just enough to maintain a family of three at a basic level of subsistence. So the payment was adequate rather than extravagant. A talent was a unit of weight and equaled twenty-six kilograms; it also signified the monetary value of twenty-six kilograms of silver. The two hundred rowers who crewed a trireme during the Peloponnesian War were paid a talent for one month’s worth of work.