J. K. Davies

Mainland Greece, 479–451 b. c.

Spartans had commanded at the two great victories of 479, Plataea and Mycale. These victories pointed forward to the two main directions in which they could be followed up, the punishment of the medizers of northern Greece and the liberation of the eastern Greeks. Tegea, the first substantial community to come into contact with Sparta will always have had a focus in the cult of Athena Alea which goes back to Mycenaean times. The main evidence about Spartan troubles in the Peloponnese after 479 lies in a list of five battles. The first is Plataea, the second at Tegea against the Tegeates and the Argives, the third at Dipaea against all the Arcadians except the Mantineans, the fourth against the Messenians at Isthmus, the fifth at Tanagra against the Athenians and Argives. According to Thucydides, Themistocles, though living at Argos, had been making visits to the rest of the Peloponnese.

Greece after the Persian Wars

To identify the Greek world as a cultural system is at first sight fairly easy. For all the divergences of phonology and vocabulary among and within the four major dialect groupings, Attic/Ionic, Arcado-Cypriot, Aeolic, and Doric/North-west Greek, the dialects were mutually intelligible. If one now thinks of the Greek world of the 470s not as a cultural system but as an economic system, its unity is much less perspicuous. Developments of a rather different kind were affecting the public, intellectual, and social life of the 470s and were exposing the strains and contradictions inherent in the very institution which had shaped Greek political life for so long, the republican polis. To diagnose crisis, at a moment when the Persian Wars had just been fought in defence of and in terms of the polis and when their outcome had to all appearance vindicated it as a system of government.

The Archidamian War

Open warfare between Athens and the Peloponnesian League began in 431. Thucydides oscillates between two beginnings of the war, the Theban attack on Plataea in the spring and the Spartan invasion of Attica eighty days later. Archidamus analysis of the strengths of the Athenian position is hardly different from that of Pericles. During the Archidamian War there were five invasions, only hampered by Athenian cavalry who kept the light-armed away from the city itself. The longest invasion, in 430, lasted forty days, the shortest, in 425, lasted fifteen days. The invasions of 430 and 427 were said to be particularly damaging. National characters and institutions played their part in the way in which war policies were formed. The name of Plataea meant much for Spartan sentiment, and Archidamus made some attempt at a settlement on the basis of a Plataean return to neutrality.

The Spartan Resurgence

At Sparta envoys from Chios and Erythrae were supported by one from Tissaphernes, satrap of Sardis. At the end of summer a major Athenian force reached Samos under Phrynichus. Near the end of winter the Athenian conference with Tissaphernes took place, at which Pisander and his colleagues first agreed to surrender all Ionia but at the third session they baulked at the demand that the King should be allowed to build and sail as many ships as he wished along his Aegean coast. In the spring of 407 the Athenian envoys on their way up-country met a Spartan embassy on its way down, under one Boeotius, claiming to have obtained all that they could wish from the King, together with Cyrus the Kings younger son coming as satrap of Lydia, Great Phrygia and Cappadocia, and commander of all Persian forces in the west.

Panhellenic Cults and Panhellenic Poets

Many of the innumerable ancient Greek festivals included athletic and cultural contests. The four Panhellenic game festivals namely, the Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean, were in origin very different in size and significance from each other. The Olympic Games, which were held in honour of Zeus, seem to have acquired a wider importance quite early in the Archaic period. The Pythian Games at Delphi began as a purely musical event. The Isthmian and Nemean Games also took their classical form in the early sixth century. The gods in whose honour these festivals were held were panhellenic deities, and in gathering at their sanctuaries the Greeks felt very strongly the bonds of a common religion and culture. The poems of Pindar and Bacchylides demonstrate in another important way the unifying force of these great festivals, in that so many of them were composed for Sicilian patrons.

Athenian Religion and Literature

For the fifth-century Athenian audience the dominant literary phenomenon was the drama. Drama emerged from a context of ritual celebration and remained even in its developed form an act of worship, honouring the god in his precinct. The relation between religion and literature was a phenomenon unique in the history of the West. There are some aspects of the religious element in Sophoclean tragedy which seem to stem from sources darker and deeper than the final Aeschylean vision of civic order based on divine reconciliation. The focus of his tragedy is often not the community but the lonely, stubborn protagonist who defies it, recalcitrant to the end, impervious to persuasion or threat. Comedy was first included in the programme of the Dionysia in 486 BC. From fear and reverence for the gods, even for Dionysus himself, comedy brought the worshipper a momentary dispensation.

Art: Archaic to Classical

The naturalism of the late Archaic period was distinctly untypical of the Greek artistic tradition as a whole. From the Geometric period onward every successive style of Greek art has regularly been disciplined by strict canons of formal order. The conflict with the Persians, as Herodotus and Aeschylus make clear, was as much a moral as a military one. The story of high classical Greek art is for the most part the story of Athenian art, and it is in the great monuments of the Periclean building programme that the emerging dual nature in the art of the time is most apparent. The clear, patterned forms of Archaic and the simple solidity of Early Classical drapery are replaced by irregular eddies, furrows and shadows. Capturing impressions seems to have become an end in itself in much of the art of the last three decades of the fifth century.

Sources, chronology, method

The source material of the first Classic age of European civilization, the fifth century BC, falls into three sections. For the period from 435 to 411 BC, Thucydides provides a firm framework. For the period from 478 to 435, he gives some relatively full narrative on special points and a sketchy narrative from 477 to 440; the only connected narrative of any size is that by Diodorus Siculus. For 411 to 404, there are two connected narratives, by Xenophon and Diodorus. Xenophons own attempts at chronological accuracy are sporadic and inefficient. There are events in the Peloponnesian War for which very close dates in the Julian calendar can be plausibly argued on the basis of the inter-relationship between the two Athenian calendars and on epigraphic evidence. Problems do multiply after the end of Thucydides, because of the nature of the sources.