M. Ostwald

The Ionian Revolt

The narrative of the Ionian Revolt marks the beginning of the full-scale account in Herodotus of political and military events shows that he and his contemporaries regarded it as an intrinsic part of the series of wars between Greece and Persia. For the Ionian Revolt, Herodotus is our only surviving literary source; yet his narrative has generally been regarded as one of the most problematical sections of his history. Many attempts have been made to place Herodotus in a literary context that would provide him with written sources for his information, and also perhaps explain the origins of his conception of history. The absence of a politically oriented oral tradition in Ionia may reflect certain characteristics of Ionian society, where aristocratic dominance was perhaps less marked than on the Greek mainland. The immediate cause of the Ionian Revolt lay in the failure of the Persian attack on Naxos.

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 Corinthian War

The outcome of the Peloponnesian War had left many of the victors discontented. Sparta had totally disregarded the wishes and interests of her allies and had pursued a policy of aggressive expansion in the Peloponnese, central and northern Greece and the Aegean which had at times seemed directed specifically against them. By 14 August 394, the young king Agesipolis had crossed the borders of Boeotia and was encamped at Chaeronea. There he received news of a different kind: the report that Spartan naval power in the Aegean had been shattered by the victory of Conon and Pharnabazus at Cnidus. Until the first Spartan invasion of the Argolid in 391, the land war was confined to the neighbourhood of Corinth, which served as a base for the allies, while the Spartans operated from Sicyon. Conon certainly financed and perhaps organized the establishment of an Athenian mercenary force at Corinth, the first commander of which was Iphicrates.

The consolidation of the empire and its limits of growth under Darius and Xerxes

Darius and his successors ruled a large land mass containing a bewildering variety of ethnic groups for almost two hundred years. They did it with very little violence and without the need for the almost annual military activity characteristic of the smaller Assyrian empire. Xerxes was a powerful figure, but it would seem that he never lived up to his early promise and was certainly never the king, or perhaps the man, that his father Darius had been. Early in the reign of Xerxes rebellion broke out in Babylon. Whatever the timing or cause of the revolt in Babylon, it is put down with a firm hand. Xerxes sends Megabyxus in command of troops to crush the revolt, which is apparently accomplished in almost no time at all. In the end, Xerxes has the honour to be the first of the great Achaemenid kings to be assassinated.

Sources and their uses

No guide comparable to Thucydides exists for the fourth century. This means that we have no firm framework for political and military events, and this lack is a serious obstacle to one sort of knowledge. Thucydides’ mind, however, was limited as well as powerful, or perhaps we should say its limits were the price of its power; and in the fourth century certain types of history which he had treated only selectively, particularly social, economic and religious topics, can actually be better studied than was possible in the Thucydidean period. Xenophon, for instance, has glaring faults when judged as a political reporter but is a prime source for the modern historian of religion. In general, fourth-century literary sources (Xenophon, Aeneas Tacticus and others) are less preoccupied than Thucydides had been with the polar opposites, Athens and Sparta. This probably reflects the new multi-centred reality. But we should recall that Thucydides, especially in books IV and V, had allowed us peeps at the politics of Argos, Macedon, Thessaly and Boeotia. A history of the Peloponnesian War written by Xenophon might have told us more about second-class and minor city states than Thucydides did: compare the remarkable detail about the minor cities Sicyon and Phlius at Xen. Hell. VII. 1–3. But a Xenophon with only Herodotus, not Thucydides, for a predecessor and model would have looked very different anyway.

The Bosporan Kingdom

INTRODUCTION: TOPOGRAPHY AND SOURCES Exposed on the extreme north-eastern rim of the classical Greek, and later of the hellenistic, world, was the Bosporan state, ruled from about 438 B.C. for 330 years by dynasts bearing Greek and Thracian names – Spartocus, Leucon, Satyrus, Paerisades. The ruler styled himself ‘archon of Bosporus and Theodosia’, and ‘king of the Sindi, Toreti, Dandarii and Psessi’, or sometimes ‘king of all the Maeotians’. From the early fourth century B.C. the state comprised the eastern portion of the Crimea (Kerch Peninsula) and the opposing part of the northern Caucasus (Taman Peninsula), separated by the sea current flowing through the then Cimmerian Bosporus (present-day Straits of Kerch). On the Asiatic side in Taman were once five islands in the delta of the Antikeites/Hypanis (now River Kuban); here the Sindi, agriculturally very productive, lay immediately inland of the Greek cities in the lower valley of the Hypanis. In the Kerch Peninsula a native population of sedentary Scythians, and perhaps some remaining Cimmerians left behind from their wanderings of the late eighth century B.C., exploited the areas noted fertility. The main cities in the area were three in the Kerch Peninsula, Panticapaeum, Nymphaeum, Theodosia, which last was annexed to Bosporus some years after 390 B.C., and three on the islands and in the Kuban delta to the east of the straits, Phanagoria, Hermonassa, and Gorgippia, in the hinterland of which lay the Sindi who were incorporated in Bosporus between 400 and 375 B.C. A number of other small townships flourished by the Bosporus, situated near salt-water lakes or inlets (limans) or under rocky headlands – Porthmieus, Myrmecium, Tyritace, Cimmericum, Acra, Cytaea, and a lost Hermisium on the Crimean side.

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.

Mesopotamia, 482–330 B.C.

Xerxes and his successors succeeded in consolidating imperial control over Mesopotamia. There is, at least, no explicit record of Babylonian resistance to Achaemenid rule after the revolts in the early years of Xerxes’ reign ( CAH iv 73–5, 133–5). Later political disturbances were not matters of provincial reaction, but struggles among members of the Achaemenid dynasty and the imperial aristocracy. Even these left few plain marks in Babylonian texts. The available Babylonian texts are similar in kind to those from the early Achaemenid reigns, but there are fewer of them. They include few fragments of historiographic texts and royal inscriptions. Most are legal and administrative documents. Among about 1,100 published texts of these kinds from the last 150 years of the Achaemenids, a few are temple records, but most belonged to the private archives of Babylonians – in fact, nearly two thirds of them come from a single source, the Murashu archive (454–404 B.C.) – and, although they record contacts with agencies of the provincial government, they are not documents from the conduct of government as such. What they divulge is limited by the concerns of city-based businessmen. They are conservative in form, almost oblivious to political events, and often enigmatic in their allusions to contemporary institutions. They are a rich source of detail on local conditions, but an episodic source on the history of their times.