This is a survey of ancient Greek history from the Bronze Age to the death of Socrates in 399 BCE. Along with studying the most important events and personalities, we will consider broader issues such as political and cultural values and methods of historical interpretation.
From Delian League to Athenian Empire
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古希腊
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從本節課中
"The Great 50 Years" (ca. 480-431 BCE)
Module 5 surveys the period between the end of the Persian Wars and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, which came to be known as Athens’ “Golden Age.” After the Persian Wars, there grew an alliance of Greek states that was meant to maintain security. The allies asked the Athenians to lead the confederation, called the Delian League. We will examine how the league was gradually transformed into an empire dominated by Athens. We will also discuss the extraordinary Pericles, who was a leader in the expansionist Athenian democracy and shaped many of its policies. In addition we will pay some overdue attention to the role of women in Greek society, with a consideration of the character of Antigone and a more general assessment of women’s status. We will conclude with an – again, too brief – account of the great building program that produced the Parthenon and the other renowned monuments on the Athenian Acropolis.
與講師見面
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
We've seen how the allies got together and requested that Athens take over a, the
leadership of this voluntary confederation which we call the Delian League to remind
ourselves very quickly of what the principles were.
Main goal, was to defend against Persia. Withing the league itself, there was to be
equality and autonomy, for all of the member states.
And there were annual contributions expected from each member state.
We've also seen that Athens was first among equals, and had the, had the
conditions set up to come to dominate. What we're going to talk about in this
lecture is some of the steps that, that domination took.
But one of the things I want to emphasize before we even get to that is that the
Athenian ability to build these ships, to man these ships, reflects the democratic
presence of a lot of free labor, that is, citizen labor, not slave labor.
The Athenians had a lot of men who were willing and able to do this kind of work
and this gave them an enormous advantage over a lot of the other states.
This map shows us the composition of the Athenian empire we can call it that now.
On the eve of the war against Sparta, which well come to in a while.
The, you can see that virtually all of the states are either islanders or on the
coast. So, can almost make this into a, kind of,
little equation. The insuler and coastal composition of the
league plus the Athenian dominated fleet equals Athenian domination.
And again to repeat just very quickly something that we talked about last time
this is a new condition for warfare. The sort of year round, the year round
presence of the fleet in the Aegean. What happens next I should say is very
difficult to disentangle. The chronology of the next decades is
really tough to figure out. We have some sources, the main one is
in[UNKNOWN] in book one, his sort of very compressed account of the great 50 years
between the end of the Persian war and the beginning of the war between Athens and
Sparta. But it is very compressed.
And it seems to leave out a lot of important things.
We also have the evidence from inscriptions, we'll be talking about one
of the most important sets in a little while.
We also have some literary evidence from contemporary writers mainly the Athenian
tragedians. And then from some later writers, but we
have to be very, very careful hence always in how we construct our story.
And as always, I am going to give you what is the generally expected version of this.
But with the caution that there are always disputes and doubts and possibilities for
alternative interpretations. So with that said, the chronology as I say
is difficult, but one of the first events is that Cimon.
The personable, skillful Athenian general leads a fleet to a place called Eurymedon.
And this is on the south coast of Turkey. This map doesn't show it, doesn't go far
enough East. But it does seem that the Persians were
trying perhaps to put together some kind of new attacking force.
And some time, and you'll see, there's this huge, sometime between 469 and 466
Cimon led a Greek force and won a smashing victory over the Persians at the mouth of
the Eurymedon both in the sea and on the land.
Perhaps as a consequence of that, sometime around 467 the island of Naxos, which is
right here, decides to exercise it's autonomy and leave the league.
Perhaps the Naxians believed that the Persian now really done, done with, gone.
But whatever the reason, Naxos occupies strategically a very important location.
It's a big island. And it was one of the places that had
contributed ships rather then money. Remember that, you know, the two different
forms of annual contribution and their different effects within the league.
Naxos announces that they're going to leave the league.
The Athenians say, not so fast. And they use league ships to surround
Naxos, to force the Naxians to abandon their plan to leave the league and,
moreover, their annual contributions it seems were now changed from ships to cash.
The Athenian heavy hand is starting to manifest itself.
Nonetheless, there may have been some argument that it was for the collective
benefit of the league that the Naxians be compelled to stay.
What happens next is not nearly so defensible along those lines.
Way up north in the Aegean, is the island of Thasos.
This is the place that the lyric poet Archilochus had described with such
distaste. He said, bristling like a donkey's back,
what an ugly island. But around 465, you can see the pace is
picking up. The Athenians get into a quarrel with the
island of Thasos over access to some rich gold mines on the mainland here.
This is, one might put it this way, a kind of private quarrel, between Athens and
Thasos. It doesn't even have the sort of fig leaf
of collective benefit that the Naxion event had.
And it gets even more complicated. Not only do the Athenians enlist league
troops in this quarrel against Thasos but Thasos appeals to Sparta for help.
The Spartans have probably been watching the growing Athenian activity with some
alarm. And it seems that the Spartans agreed to
help, perhaps by coming overland and mounting some kind of distracting
semi-invasion here to the southwest. Before they could do that, however, there
is a natural catastrophe. Around 464, we think, there was a huge
earthquake in Sparta, and that long-dreaded event finally occurred And
that is that the Helots rebelled. Those descendants of the native Nycenians
who had been forced into state serfhood, who had been kept in line as you remember
by a condition of constant state terrorism, now used the disruption caused
by the earthquake to fight for their freedom.
This was a threat to Sparta's very existence.
And just as a sign of how odd things are getting, remember now, the Spartans had
been willing to help Thasos against Athens, but the crisis in Sparta was so
severe that the Spartans asked the Athenians to come help them.
You can't make this stuff up. In Athens, the leader of the pro Spartan
party was same General Cimon, son of Miltiades.
The victor at marathon, etc, etc, Cimon himself the victor at Eurymedon.
And Cimon is said to have persuaded his fellow Athenians to send help on the
ground that Sparta was the great yolk mate that is, that these two states had been
primarily responsible for fending off the Persians.
What happens next is again a little bit difficult to decipher.
But Cimon goes down to Sparta with a troop of four thousand Athenian Hoplites.
And when they get near Sparta, Spartan envoys come out and send them home.
Later authors say they sent them home because they were worried about the
Athenian's democratic proclivities. They were worried that the Athenians might
introduce some novelty, that is revolution, into, among the Spartans
themselves. We don't know what it really, what really
happened or what the causes really were. But Cimon was forced to go back without
having fought on the Spartan's side, and this was a tremendous insult.
And Cimon's pro-Spartan policy was discredited.
The pace picks up even more. In 462, a young politician named Pericles,
working with a political ally named Ephialtes, engineered a reform.
Put the word in air quotes, because it's really a diminution in power of the
Areopagus, and we'll come back to that when we talk about Pericles.
But to finish the story of Cimon, in the following year, in 461, he was ostracized.
Have you seen this before? Of course.
In other words, the leader of what one might think of as a sort of moderate
democratic or pro-Spartan faction was removed from the political scene.
And what we're going to see now is the continuing transformation of this
voluntary confederacy of independent poleis into a network of ostensibly free
but in fact Athenian-dominated tribute paying allies.
One of the great sources of information that we have is a magnificent set of
inscriptions called the Athenian Tribute Lists.
Again, we're going to talk about this in somewhat more detail in the next lecture,
but in the mid 450s. The Athenians decided to move the treasury
of the Delian league from Delos to Athens "for safe keeping".
And at this point they started keeping meticulous records of how much each state
paid every year. That's actually 1 60th of the tribute,
which was skimmed off, quote, for Athena, end quote.
And these allow us to track sort of internal relations within the league.
How did Athens control the allies? The answer first, of course, is to flee.
The insular and coastal composition of the league meant that Fleet ships could get
virtually anywhere and generally very fast.
But there are other means of control as well.
So for example, the Athenians had official friends in a number of the allied states,
they're called [unknown]. And they serve both as gathering, to
gather intelligence about what's happening there, to one might say lobby for the
Athenians. And the Athenians tended to support
democratic factions in states where there was political struggle.
They also exercised legal control. Eventually Certain cases especially
capital cases, had to be heard in Athens by an Athenian jury.
Even if they involved citizens from a league state.
There was economic control, as well. The fleet played a great role, it can
control trade with this kind of navy. And trade as we'll see becomes one of the
causal factors in the war that breaks out between Athens and Sparta.
Eventually, the Athenians force the allied states to use Athenian coins, weight and
measures. Both psychologically and economically
very, very, significant. In cases of states that rebelled or where
there was extra land, moreover, the Athenians established colonies, now, not
the kind of colonies that we saw back in the archaic age.
But these were called cleruchies and they were meant to be Athenian outposts
constantly in contact with and beholden to the mother city.
Political, legal, economical control, all of these things working together.
I've put on our list a sort of outline of the major events here, and there's one
more, which is that around 460, the Athenians allied with the neighboring
state of Megara. You can see Megara occupies a very
uncomfortable position, sort of between Corinth on one side and Athens on the
other. But it's also strategically a very
important position, dominating this part of the land bridge, the Isthmus of
Corinth. When the Athenians allied with Megara, the
Corinthians were outraged and began to form alliances with the Peloponnesian
states, and there ensued about a 15 year war.
I put that, I say it in that way because there were no climactic battles.
There was a series of bloody and, or a set of bloody and inconclusive skirmishes.
But certainly tensions were mounting. Athenian domination over the league was
getting more and more complete. Resistance to Athenian domination on the
part of non-members like Corinth, and like Thebes was getting stronger and stronger.
And there also emerged at this time in Athens.
One of the most powerful leaders of in, within Athenian history and that of course
is the famous Pericles and we'll talk about him next.
