The Rise of Athens

Virtue was its own regard, one might say.

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So now through the fog of time we discern the shape of Greekness. The very fact of an expedition journeying a long distance by water is evidence of the importance of seafaring to a people inhabiting a rocky landscape with few roads. Hellenes shared a language, with mutually intelligible dialects, and gods. They believed profoundly in honor or personal status (timē). They were committed to fairness and the rule of law. They saw the cruelty and waste of war, but celebrated bravery. They recognized the harm done by rashness, but felt at the same time that there was something splendid about it.

We cannot call a society headed by impulsive rulers such as Agamemnon or Achilles democratic, but these were no despots. They had to consult public opinion and called regular mass meetings to advise on matters of importance, a tradition maintained in later centuries.

They were religious without doctrine; their family of unpredictable deities felt the same “human” passions as they did. What we see as myths and legends were real to the Greeks; their gods truly existed and heroes from the remote past were historical figures.

There was no sacred code handed down for mortals to follow. They could only hope to control the Olympians through prayer and sacrifice. There was a limit, though, to what could be done, for the course of men’s and women’s lives was foredoomed by the Fates, three old crones who spun the future from the threads of human lives.

The competitive pursuit of excellence was an essential attribute of a fine man. But, as Homer shows, this disputatious rivalry had its dark side and in later centuries was reflected in poisonous quarrels that disfigured the many independent city-states that made up Hellas. The Greeks made a point of disagreeing with their neighbors, a habit that led ultimately to their downfall.

Despite the flow of blood that is shed in the pages of the Iliad, the underlying atmosphere is optimistic. This is partly due to Homer’s sense of humor; as we shall see, comedy and laughter are to infuse Athenian, if not Greek, culture. Also, in the Iliad, man-made objects—ships or tools or furniture—are always found to be well made. When mentioning by name one of his characters, Homer likes to add a descriptive phrase or adjective. So Paris is “godlike” even when he is being cowardly. These epithets describe a man’s true character, especially when he is not living up to it.

If Hellenes were united on anything it was the abiding enmity between them and the successors of Troy. From about the middle of the sixth century these were the Great Kings who founded and maintained the Persian Empire, stretching at its greatest extent from Egypt and Anatolia to the frontier of India. These decadent orientals, as they regarded them, were the bogeymen of the Hellenic world.

In a word, Greece was not a place, as today’s nation-state in the Balkans is, but an idea. And wherever he lived a Greek was someone who spoke the same tongue—and knew his Homer.

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Although the great philosopher Aristotle tutored him in the latest thinking about the world, Alexander the Great felt himself to be a throwback. He was a Homeric warrior, a latter-day Achilles, a man of action rather than of intellect. It is ironic that this lover of all things Greek brought to a violent end the liberties of the civilization he so admired and halted the great democratic experiment that the city of Athens had pioneered.

It is the extraordinary story of that experiment which the following pages tell. First of all, we must meet the three leading powers in the Eastern Mediterranean, Athens itself, Sparta, and the empire of Persia, for it was their interwoven rivalries and opposing values that led, one after another, to their triumphs—and to their ruin.

1

National Hero

The geography of their homeland helped mold the collective character of the ancient Athenians and of all the other sporadic communities that shared the Greek peninsula. Rocky, bare mountains are interspersed with numerous, small, fertile plains. But much of the soil is dry and stony, and more suitable for olive trees than fields of wheat. Travel by land between the meager centers of habitation was laborious.

Athens was the chief city of Attica, a triangular tract of level ground about nine hundred square miles in extent. This plain is punctuated by hills and surrounded by mountains on two sides and on a third by the sea. Mount Hymettus was famous for its honey, and still is, and Pentelicon for its honey-colored marble, from which it built its temples to the gods. Rich lead and silver deposits at Laurium in the southeast were found and mined. Summers are hot and dry and heavy outbursts of rain mark the fall.