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.
The Fourth Century. Philip II and Alexander
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來自 Wesleyan University 的課程
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從本節課中
The End of the War, the End of the Century
The final Module brings us to the end of the fifth century and beyond. The charismatic Alcibiades persuaded his fellow citizens to invade Sicily. Eventually they were routed. Along with the events of the end of the war, we will consider the social and economic importance for Athens of foreign residents (metics) and slaves. Despite the catastrophe in Sicily, the Athenians kept fighting for almost a decade. After their final defeat, they endured a period of oligarchic domination and a brief but vicious civil war. Although they resolved it with a general amnesty, it is likely that the lingering anxiety contributed to the prosecution and conviction of Socrates in 399 BCE. In response to prior learners’ requests, the module ends with a lecture about Philip II and Alexander the Great. The Macedonians also offer a salutary reminder that Greek history is a capacious subject that should not be artificially limited to the Classical period.
與講師見面
Andrew Szegedy-Maszak, PhDProfessor
Classical Studies
As we move toward the conclusion of our course, it
occurred to me that the title is in some ways misleading.
It's called The Ancient Greeks.
And to be much more honest, it should have been called something
like Some Ancient Greeks at a Certain Specific Period in Their History.
Because obviously Greek history both preceded to some extent the periods
we've talked about and certainly went on for a long time afterward.
What I'd like
to do in this lecture is give to you some
sense of what happened after the death of Socrates in 399.
Of course the Greeks themselves were not aware that they were moving into a
new era, still less that they were moving from the fifth into the fourth century.
But what is clear is that there were some
large systemic changes that occurred in the Greek world.
One of them is military.
We're looking now at our old friend from the kagee vase the picture of hoplite.
And hoplite warfare had been the standard kind of military engagement
for the Greeks for a very, very long time as you know.
But now, what we see is that the hoplites, while still there.
Are increasingly supplemented
by light armed troops called peltasts, archers and slingers and the like.
And also by much more specialized troops.
Engineers who specialized among other things in building weapons
of war, and in building engines to stage and to ward off seizures.
Because another thing that we have seen happening
is that the old hoplite engagement of a
limited number of troops in a limited area.
Is no longer the way warfare is being conducted.
Now warfare is general.
Not limited to a season, or
a location, but increasingly involving civilian populations.
Another big change connected with this, both military and now social,
is the increase, the tremendous increase in the number of mercenary soldiers.
Now mercenaries were not new at this point in the Greek experience.
If you think back you remember the lyric
poet Archilochus talks about having served as a
soldier for hire, but the hoplite ideal was
the citizen-soldier fighting on behalf of his city.
After decades of warfare however,
there were huge numbers of men whose profession had become fighting.
And who were available, if I can put it this way, to the highest bidder.
They were not constrained by local loyalties by patriotism,
but they would fight for who ever paid them.
And this is again a big change. In addition.
I have, on occasion, referred to something as diaphanous or
as broad or as vague as the fatigue of the Polis.
The intensity of Polis identification, Thucydides, the Athenian, Herodotus of
Halicarnassus, just to name two that we've become familiar with.
Now starts to waver and to weaken. So that for
example, in 392 BCE, the two Polleis
of Corinth and Argos confederated.
They allied with one another not just in a
military sense, but they actually joined their civic bodies.
These used to be called federated states, and
some people still refer to them that way.
The more common term of art nowadays is a
koinon, or the plural is koina, which means
something shared in common, and these communities actually,
[FOREIGN].
The high sort of genus headed entity here. They tore up the boundary stones
between the communities and citizens of one had equal rights in another.
Why would this happen?
One reason is certainly military.
That is to say weakened, as I have said a moment ago, by decades of war.
These communities could support one another against external threats.
There's also economic interdependence, with one supplying goods or
services that the other could not and vice versa.
So there's a sort of economic exchange, and interdependence, and reliance.
And there's also cultural and religious ties.
Shared cult shared rites and observances, shared temples.
This would
have been difficult, I think, for a
citizen of the high fifth century to imagine.
But it's certainly what's happening now.
In the aftermath of the Peloponnesian War the Spartans enjoyed, if I can put it
that way, a brief hegemony and they
oversaw something that was called the King's Peace.
In 387 signing on behalf of the Greeks what did the Spartans do?
In exchange for Persian wealth, they yielded to the Persians
the right of control over the Greek Cities in Ionia.
Yep, the places that where Herodotus had come
from where Thales and the other Milesian philosophers.
These communities that had been Greek for, since their inception.
Were now put back under the control of the Persian king.
This, as we'll see, turns out to be one of the motives eventually, for the
the planned invasion of Persia first by Philip and then by his son, Alexander.
New military. New kinds of civic and communal
configuration. And also, the rise of a new kind of
leader, they're called charismatic leaders.
In Thebes down here in Boetia For example, there were two great
generals, Pelopidas, and Depenonandus.
After the Spartans had as I said, risen to a kind of hegemony.
Pelopidas and Depenonandus started organizing thieves and one of the ways
they had of organizing it, you'll be interested in this I think, is military.
They created something called the sacred band.
This was a troop of hoplites, 300 in number, composed of a 150 pairs of lovers.
One older and one younger man on the theory that you would never
fight so intensely, so bravely, as when somebody you loved was in danger.
And in fact the sacred band became for
a time the most formidable land force in Greece.
But I was talking a moment ago about charismatic leaders
and Thebes is a sort of old, old line state.
But they start to arise in places that had heretofore
not played much of a role in mainline history, like Thessaly.
Mountanous, remote, it was famed in the ancient world
for its excellent horses and its extremely capable witches.
But up to this point, it hadn't, as I
said, played much of a role in Greek history.
And then suddenly in the 370's there arose a man
named Jason, of Phari, one of the main communities there.
And under his leadership, Thessaly became a real power.
Their cavalry, was as I said, second almost to none.
And Jason managed to infuse
the otherwise quarrelsome barons and nobles with a sense of Thesalian identity.
Can see this most clearly in 371. The Spartans and the
Thebans had been engaged in a kind of long desultory war.
This is a period, this is a grim period, let me put it that way.
There are these long, kind of inclusive wars,
short-lived treacherous alliances. It's very, very difficult to disentangle.
But in 371, the Spartans and the Thebans met on the battlefield of Leuctra.
And the Theban sacred band, smashed through the Spartan line.
The Spartans we're forced to retreat, and Jason flew
down from Pharii, at the head of
his cavalry, and negotiated a Spartan withdrawal.
The Thebans were ready to annihilate them.
Jason persuaded them not to.
And he would have been a major power broker.
Except that he was assassinated.
And with his death, and as you will see, this is something that happens.
With no provision for succession. The organization of Thessaly that
had focused on his person, his charismatic leadership, crumbled.
Instead,
power shifted to a place even farther north
and farther away, and that is Macedon.
In the person of Philip the second. His idealized, heroized picture on a coin.
Philip was born around 382, he lived for a couple of
years in Thebes as a hostage, came back. And became
regent in 359. In other words, he was about
23 years old. By a combination of
diplomacy, treachery and bribery he solidified his rule.
Macedon. Was an unusual place, in that
there is a fairly broad expanse of very good agricultural
land, surrounded by a mountainous region, and it really
resembles in terms of society, much more the world of homer.
Where you have lords with their retainers, their little areas.
Engaged in a constant kind of, either openly violent, or at least
[UNKNOWN]
relationship.
Being king of Macedon was a little bit like being Agamemnon at Troy.
That is sort of first among equals.
And it was not a position that had a lot of job security.
Between 400 and 360, there were no fewer than eight kings, who had rapidly deposed.
rapidly raised and then deposed in succession.
When Philip
took over, how did he decide to rule? Well, very powerfully.
I'm sorry, I've already said that.
But he chose as one of the main ways of solidifying Macedonian
command, a new military tactic. In fact a new weapon,
we've talked about the hoplites and their spears which were probably
between maybe three meters, about nine feet long.
What Phillip introduced was the use of this massively long pike,
called the sarissa. Somewhere around 15
to 17 feet, that is to say five almost six meters
long with a sharpened point at one end and a weighted
butt at the other, it could be used in an attack.
The butt could be planted in the ground to create a
kind of palisade, and when held upright the sarissa
could be moved back and forth in unison to deflect
arrows. Obviously to wield this kind of weapon,
you have to have intensive training.
And the Macedonian phalanx was under constant training and drill.
The one place that a phalanx was vulnerable was on the side and the
soldiers had to be ready to pivot as one and get their weapons ready.
But you can see that in terms of land combat, in terms of a, the on rushing,
what we've talked about is the collision of
land forces these guys would've been pretty much unbeatable.
And indeed they were.
Philip then set about expanding Macedonian rule.
Here in this little map, you can see
this area is Macedon at the outset of the Peloponnesian War in 431.
And then almost a century later it is vastly expanded.
Philip began. By imposing Macedonian rule over the
area called the Calceta Sea and then he just kept on growing.
In Athens, the reaction was generally one of a sort of impotent alarm.
But it's also in Athens that there arose one of
the greatest orators of the ancient world and that's Demosthenes.
I hope you will have had a chance to
read the sections from his first philippic, the word
that has come to mean a powerful political speech
just in its own right, at first directed against Philip.
But in his first philippic.
Delivered in 351, that is some eight years after Philip took power.
Demosthenes rails at his fellow Athenians for what
he sees as their passive response to Philip's aggression.
Philip has taken Athenian territories up here in the Calsita sea.
And the Athenians haven't been able to do much.
And he says, you nurture each other on rumors.
Is Philip dead, no but I heard he's sick.
What does it matter, you'd raise up another Philip for yourselves.
And then in a vivid metaphor, he compares the Athenian
response to Philip as being like that of a barbarian boxer.
In a boxing match, who grabs the place he's most recently been hit
but doesn't take any, doesn't make any efforts to protect himself ahead of time.
There was a countervailing opinion embodied in the work of an old
rhetorician named Isocrates who saw Philip as leading potentially.
A United Greece against the age old enemy in Persia.
There's a long address by Isocrates to Philip encouraging him to do exactly that.
But the Greek states had finally. Managed
to organize a sort of unified resistance against Philip.
And in 338, at a place called Kayranea, near Thebes,
the forces clashed. The then 18 year old
Alexander, who'd been born in 356. Led his
father's cavalry, and the Macedonians won a decisive victory.
Some people have said that Kayranea marks the
end of the Polis as a viable institution.
I don't know if we have to go quite that far into an obituary.
But it certainly marked the absolute imposition of Macedonian hegemony.
Philip tried to
placate the Greeks. At least some of them.
And he formed something called the Corinthian league whose purpose
would be to lead, yes, a unified Greek expedition against Persia.
But, like so many charismatic leaders before him he
was cut down, in fact he was assassinated in 336.
How much was Alexander involved in this, well, rumors then
and now say who, who stood to gain the most?
I don't think we'll ever know.
But, I would like to talk with you just very
briefly about Alexander and his accomplishments, but before I do so.
I want to emphasize the fact that Philip
would have been perhaps just a more capable and
powerful successor to Jason of Pharie and the list of failed charismatic leaders.
Had it not been for his son, but likewise Alexander had a structure that he
could build on that his father had created and this is often overlooked.
Macedonian society as I said before, was different from the Greek.
From that is the
Greek of the Polis.
The Macedonians were not organized into polies.
And there is still a great deal of contention about their ethnicity.
One of the things that is clear, however, is that Philip wanted
very much to be identified with a kind of mainstream Greek culture.
When his son was born in 356, Philip's
wife who gave birth to him was one Olympias,
a princess from one of the tribes near near Macedon.
But Philip, as I said a moment ago, wanted to be
identified with Greek culture, and so who did he bring to Pella?
To the royal seat to be a tutor for the young prince, Aristotle.
The leading Greek philosopher of the time.
The influence of Aristotle on his young charge as you can
imagine, has been debated and discussed over and over and over again.
But one of the things that we can say with certainty.
Is that Aristotle did infuse in the young prince a love for Homer.
Legend has it that Alexander thought of himself as a kind of second Achilles,
and traveled on his campaign with a copy, always with a copy of the Iliad.
He had a beloved companion from youth
named Hephaestion, and the two styled themselves
as Achilles and Patroclus. the great warrior pair from the Iliad.
On the death of Philip it's worth noting, the generals
who had been in Philip's command unanimously acclaimed Alexander as king.
Some people have seen this as a
evidence of Alexander's innocence in the assassination.
I'm not so sure but what is true
is that Alexander swiftly set about solidifying his rule.
He first. Pacified some
of the, if I can use a euphemism, some of the barbarian tribes
nearby which had gone into revolt, swept into Greece, where
the Greek states had started to dream of their old autonomy.
Alexander defeated them, and actually ex, ex exercised a very harsh punishment on
Thebes, he destroyed Thebes. And then.
Treasure. But this is a little bit misleading.
This is actually not Persian treasure, because Alexander's
about to invade Persia, but this is the burial chest that was found
in a city Vargena in Macedon in 1977 with this gold chest and a
gold wreath. And scholars think that this is the burial
place of perhaps Philip himself, or certainly of that royal line.
But treasure is something that Alexander needed.
He certainly wasn't going to loot his father's tomb for it.
And he finally undertook that united Greek expedition against Persia.
In Persia.
The rule was held by a long descendent of
the first Darius whom we saw long ago in Herodotus.
This is Darius the third.
an exceptionally capable and apparently honorable ruler.
And, when Alexander invaded Persia it was with full heroic trappings.
The legend
has it that he threw a spear from the
ship into Persian soil and proclaimed it spear won land.
He and Hephaestion we are told, staged a race around the ruins of the walls of
Troy in honor of Achilles and Patroclus and perhaps even of Hector who knows.
But, the Persians had an enormous army, and in
333, in 334, forgive me, there was the first
collision between the two forces at the River Granicus.
And Alexander displaying the tactical brilliance that would
be the hallmark of his entire career, won.
The
Persians were badly shaken.
In the following year, at a place called Issus, there was
another collision between the two forces. And
this is what we think is represented in the famous Alexander mosaic.
First found at Pompei and now in the National Archeological Museum in Naples.
You can see this is a massive
work of art. And it shows the king at the moment
when the battle has turned. And his charioteer
is whipping the horses into action to get him out of harm's way.
And nearby.
Completely focused on him is the young King Alexander.
If Darius had been shaken by his loss at Granicus,
his loss at Issus was almost devastating.
Among other things, Alexander captured his family, and of course there are all these
stories about how he treated them with complete propriety, et cetera, et cetera.
Darius withdrew into the interior of his empire and Alexander then kept on going.
We've gotten to here Alexander then proceeds down the coast.
The modern middle east.
Goes to Egypt. Where he is proclaimed Pharaoh.
And addressed by one priest or prophet as the son of Amun.
we'll see this has certain effects afterward.
But he also does something else that will be characteristic of his rule.
He founds a city. And that is of course Alexandria.
This will become.
One of the the most important economic and cultural centers
of the Mediterranean world for really half a millennium or more.
Alexander then pursued, took up his pursuit of Darius
and at a final battle, a place called Gaugamela.
Darius was defeated, he got away again, but this time, Persian rule was smashed.
I can't trace with you, we don't have time.
Alexander's extraordinary route which took him all
the way across central Asia over the
Hindu Kush mountains.
And even to the banks of the, in India, and finally his at the
[UNKNOWN]
his troops said this far and no farther.
They rebelled and despite Alexander's throwing a colossal sulk, they were not
to be moved, so he headed back and made his way back west.
He would not arrive there.
Instead of talking about all of these stories
which of course deserve a course of their own.
I want to just talk about a couple of features of Alexander's conquests.
One I've already mentioned which is the finding of cities.
Many of these were meant to be garrisons so he would leave, he would station.
Soldiers there.
Eventually the soldiers would intermarry with the
local woman, set up a community et cetera.
There are dozens and dozens of such cities along Alexander's route, the
most famous being the one Alexandria in Egypt, there are other Alexandria's
as well. This blending of populations.
Replicated itself in Alexander's army.
Where he had Macedonians and Greeks and eventually
Persians, fighting side by side under his command.
Alexander's policy was if he met with acquiescence from
the local governor, he would usually leave him in place.
With a garrison nearby just to ensure good behavior.
But his response to resistance was to crush it.
We don't know how many hundreds of
thousands of people died during Alexander's campaign.
We never will know.
But it's worth remembering that this map doesn't show all the
blood that was spilled en route. Another effect as well was economic.
The Persians had been hoarding wealth for well over a century.
Had it come in from all of their possessions.
And as Alexander went through,
he found unbelievable amounts of treasure. He could use it to pay his troops.
It was one of the ways he could keep them motivated.
But he also released this currency into the
economy of this Mediterranean and some people have
speculated that the Persian gold that was so
to speak, unleashed or let, let, let loose.
what's the word?
Powered the Mediterranean economy for five or six hundred years afterward.
Alexander, we don't know how far he intended to go.
The ancient sources are baffled about his motivation
And often ascribe to it just an overwhelming desire.
What is true is that in 323, just shy of his 33rd birthday we think he died.
Probably some combination of alcoholism and disease, maybe poison.
We don't know.
But even in his lifetime a kind of legend had
grown up and it only got bigger after he died.
This was a coin that was struck in the century after he died and
it shows him in the guys of Heracles with Heracles as lion skin.
He becomes a sort of a demigod and he becomes in that way
a sort of type for a number of the rulers who followed him.
Who supported their claims to kingship with at least claims to semi-divinity.
The period after his death is called the Hellenistic Age.
On his death his empire fragmented, and
was divided into big chunks, many of which were taken over by his generals.
Probably the most famous was Ptolemy in Egypt.
And the Hellenistic age saw great changes in culture and art.
I just wanted to show you one of
the most famous sculptures called the Apollo Belvedere.
this is Roman copy of a Greek original.
I want you to look carefully at the face and the hair because.
You will find it remarkebly
similar to a statue of Buddha.
Now this is in the Tokyo national museum, found in central Asia.
It's one of the earliest representations of Buddha.
And if you look closely at it, you'll see that the
hair and the face are very much like that of the Apollo.
And this Buddha is dressed in a Greek, himation, a man's cloak.
And what we're seeing here is Hellenization,
which most simply, if I could put it
over simply, is the blend of Greek with indigenous culture.
We already saw a sort of prelude to this in the
cities that Alexander founded, with their mixed Greek and indigenous population.
But this too is far too big a topic
for our time so, I'll just conclude with Alexander again.
The trend of history nowadays, of the study of history,
is to take large, impersonal forces, economic and social and cultural.
The long du rae as the French call it. But with Alexander we are reminded once
again that for better or for worse there are occasionally individuals
without whom the course of history would have been vastly different.
And with that. We will move
gradually toward
our conclusion.
