But the fact was that both sides were insensibly edging towards war, whatever the wishes of the politicians. Some Athenians happened to be in Sparta ostensibly on other business and won leave to speak. They made no concessions to their audience. Thucydides has them say: “We have done nothing extraordinary, nothing against the way of the world, in accepting an empire when it was offered to us—and then in refusing to give it up.”
The Spartans asked everyone else to withdraw and considered the matter among themselves. King Archidamus, who was a personal friend of Pericles and a moderate, advised caution, but a hardline ephor, Sthenilaidas, disagreed: “Others may have a lot of money and ships and horses, but we have good allies, and we ought not to betray them to the Athenians.” As with elections, serious decisions at Sparta were decided in assembly by acclamation. Those who shouted loudest won the decision. In this case the roar was for war.
The Spartans then issued an ultimatum that they knew could not be accepted. Remembering that Pericles was an Alcmaeonid, they told Athens to drive out the “Cylonian pollution.” In other words, they were to exile the family of Megacles, who had massacred the supporters of Cylon in the seventh century (see this page). The Athenians repaid the compliment by calling on the Spartans to expel the “curse of Taenarum”; some suppliant helots had been sacrilegiously forced from sanctuary in the temple of Poseidon at Cape Taenarum in the southern Peloponnese and executed.
Neither side budged. The Hellenic world gathered its forces for a letting of blood. Fourteen years had passed since the Thirty Years Peace had been agreed.
Preparations against the invasion of Attica by a Peloponnesian army went ahead. Valuable artifacts from countryside shrines were moved to the Acropolis, and sheep and cattle were transferred to Euboea and other islands off the coast. People brought their movable property into the city. The disruption was unpopular, according to Thucydides:
Most Athenians still lived in the country with their families and households and as a result were not at all inclined to move, especially as they had only just re-established themselves after the Persian invasion. It was anxiously and resentfully that they now abandoned their homes and the time-honoured temples of their historic past, that they prepared to change their whole way of life.
Some of the rural incomers had houses of their own in the city and others were able to stay with friends. But most had to settle down on land that had not been built over or in temples and shrines (although not on the Acropolis, which was out of bounds). There was terrible overcrowding.
The first hostilities—and another glaring violation of the peace—were the siege of the valiant little town of Plataea by Thebes; as we have seen, this longtime ally of Athens distinguished itself in the battle of the same name, which saw off the Persians in 479. The Plataeans resisted the Thebans, but in 427 following an attack by the Peloponnesians they surrendered, not before reminding their conquerors that, in the aftermath of the battle, the Spartan general Pausanias had decreed that Plataea was holy ground and should never be attacked.
“You will get no glory, Spartans, from such behavior—not for breaking the common law of the Hellenes, nor for sinning against your ancestors, nor for killing us, who have done you good service,” Thucydides has a Plataean spokesman tell the Spartans. Nevertheless, their commander had all his prisoners put to death. Some two hundred Plataeans had escaped earlier and were given Athenian citizenship in compensation for the loss of their polis.
For most Athenians the reality of war only struck home in the last days of May 431 when the corn was ripe. King Archidamus led a huge army of about sixty thousand heavy infantry into Attica, albeit without much enthusiasm. In case Archidamus spared his estate, whether out of genuine friendship or to make mischief, Pericles made it over to the polis. Meanwhile, tit for tat, an Athenian fleet sailed round the Peloponnese ravaging coastal settlements. The old rival, Aegina, was ethnically cleansed. The inhabitants were driven out and replaced by Athenian settlers. The island was annexed.
These were minor victories when compared to the psychological impact of the invasion of Attica. This was far greater than the actual damage done. Citizens were outraged at having to watch their farms being torched while being forbidden to offer any resistance (although some Thessalian cavalry were sent out to do what they could to harry the enemy).
Pericles remained certain of the rightness of his war strategy, but could see that the demos was furious with him for not leading them out to fight the Peloponnesians. So he took care not to summon the ecclesia in case “a general discussion resulted in incorrect decisions being taken.”
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On a winter’s day every year a ceremony was held in honor of the glorious dead. It must have held a special meaning in 431, the first year of the war. The bones of those who had fallen were brought into a tent where relatives could make offerings in their honor. They were then placed in cypress coffins, one for each of the ten tribes. For those whose remains had not been recovered an empty bier was provided.
Two days later a procession of wagons, carrying one coffin apiece, made its way to the Cerameicus suburb that lay just outside the city’s Dipylon or Double Gate. Here was the public burial place where all the city’s military dead were interred, with the exception of the men killed at Marathon: their achievement was so signal that they were buried with full honors on the battlefield itself.
Once the bones had been laid to rest, a distinguished citizen was invited to deliver an oration in praise of the fallen. This year Pericles was chosen and, at a crisis in the city’s affairs, he delivered a ringing encomium of Athens itself and its values. It must have lifted morale and, in the hands of Thucydides, the speech as it has come down to us was a literary masterpiece.
At the heart of the Athenian achievement, Pericles claimed, lay its democratic constitution.
When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; as for social standing, what counts is not membership of a particular class but a person’s ability. Class is not allowed to interfere with merit, nor is poverty an obstacle. If a man is qualified for public service, his humble origins will not count against him.
Pericles extended the principle of meritocracy to an Athenian’s private life. Provided he obeyed the law, he could do as he liked. The city was culturally rich and commercially, too, for it imported the world’s produce.
We are lovers of beauty with economy; and of things of the mind without growing soft….For us wealth is for use rather than ostentation and poverty is no disgrace, unless we are not doing anything about it.
His message was that out of democracy grew the vitality that led to empire, to wealth, and to the benefits of civilization.
I declare that our city is a liberal education to Greece and each one of our citizens excels all men in versatility, resourcefulness, brilliance and self-reliance. That this is no hollow boast for the occasion, but the actual truth, our city’s power bears witness.
Pericles’ rhetoric rose to an extraordinary metaphor of sexual desire; he saw the city as an eromenos and the citizens as a collective erastes.
Think of the greatness of Athens, as you actually see it day by day, till you fall in love with your