The Aftermath of the Peloponnesian War
Strife among prominent city-states contending with one another for power continued to
plague Greece in the years following the Peloponnesian War. The losses of population, the
ravages of the
plague1, and the financial
difficulties2 brought on by the war caused severe hardships for Athens. Not even the amnesty
that accompanied the restoration of Athenian democracy in 403 B.C. could quell all the
social and political animosities that the war and the rule of the
Thirty
Tyrants3 had exacerbated, and the most prominent casualty of this divisive
bitterness was the famous philosopher
Socrates4, whose trial for impiety in 399 B.C. resulted in a sentence of death. The Athenian
household— the family members and their personal slaves— nevertheless
survived the war as the fundamental unit of the city-state's society and economy.
Economic Strains on the Family
Many Athenian households lost fathers, sons, or brothers to the violence of battle in
the Peloponnesian War, but resourceful families found ways to compensate for the
economic strain that such personal tragedies could create. An Athenian named
Aristarchus5, for example, is reported by the writer Xenophon (c. 428-354 B.C.) to have
experienced financial difficulty because the turmoil of the war had severely diminished
his income and also caused his sisters, nieces, and female cousins to come live with
him. He found himself unable to support this swollen household of fourteen, not counting
the slaves. Aristarchus's friend Socrates (469-399 B.C.) thereupon reminded him that his
female relatives knew quite well how to make men's and women's cloaks, shirts, capes,
and smocks, “the work considered the best and most fitting for
women,” although they had always just made
clothing6 for the family and never had to try to sell it for profit.
But others did make a living by selling such clothing or by baking and selling bread,
Socrates pointed out, and Aristarchus could have the women in his house do the same. The
plan was a success, but the women complained that Aristarchus was now the only member of
the household who ate without working.
Socrates advised his friend7 to reply that the women should think of him as sheep did a guard dog—
he earned his share of the food by keeping away the wolves from the sheep.
Manufacture and Trade
Many Athenian manufactured goods were produced in households like that of Aristarchus,
which turned to the
production of cloth8 after the Peloponnesian War, or in
small
shops9,
although a few larger enterprises did exist. Among these were
metal
foundries10,
pottery
workshops11, and the shield-making business employing one-hundred twenty
slaves owned by the family of
Lysias12 (c. 459-380 B.C.); businesses larger
than this were unknown at this period. Lysias, a metic (
metoikos
13 , resident
alien) from Syracuse whose father had been recruited by Pericles to come live in Athens,
had to use his education and turn to writing speeches for others to make a living after
the Thirty Tyrants seized his property in 404 B.C. Metics could not own land in Athenian
territory without special permission, but they enjoyed legal rights in Athenian courts
that foreigners without metic status lacked. In return metics paid taxes and served in
the army when called upon. Lysias lived near the harbor of Athens, Piraeus, where many
metics were to be found because they played a central role in the international trade in
such goods as grain,
wine14, pottery, and silver from Athens'
mines15 that passed through
Piraeus16. The safety of
Athenian trade was restored to prewar conditions when the
long
walls17 that connected the city with the port, destroyed at the
end of the war, were rebuilt by 393 B.C. Another sign of the recovering economic health
of Athens was that the city by this time had resumed the minting of its
famous
silver coins18 to replace the
emergency
bronze coinage19 minted during the financial pressures of the last years of the war.
Agriculture and Private Property
The importation of
grain20 through
Piraeus21 was crucial for fourth-century Athens.
Even before the war Athenian
farms had been unable to produce enough22 of this dietary staple to feed the population. The damage done to farm buildings
and equipment during the Spartan invasions of the Peloponnesian War made the situation
worse until the Athenians could make repairs.
The Spartan establishment of a
year-round base at Decelea23 near Athens from 413 to 404
B.C. had given these enemy forces an opportunity to do much more severe damage in
Athenian territory than the usually short campaigns of Greek warfare ordinarily allowed.
The invaders had probably even had time to cut down Athenian
olive
trees24, the source of
valuable olive oil. These trees took a generation to replace because they grew so
slowly. Athenian property owners after the war worked hard to restore their land and
businesses to production not only to restore their present incomes but also to provide
for future generations. Athenian men and women felt strongly that their property,
whether in land, money, or belongings, represented resources to be preserved for the
benefit of their descendants. For this reason, Athenian law allowed
prosecution of
men who squandered their inheritance25. The same spirit lay behind the requirement that parents must
provide a livelihood for their children, by leaving them income-bearing property or
training them in a skill26. Most working people probably earned little more than enough to clothe and feed
their families.
The Daily Diet
All indications are that the Greek diet remained much the same over time; after the
Peloponnesian War people perhaps had less than before, at least until a modicum of
prosperity was restored. Athenians usually had only two meals a day, a light lunch in
mid-morning and a
heavier meal in the evening27. Bread baked from barley or, for richer people, wheat, constituted the main part
of the diet. A family could buy its
bread28 from small bakery stands, often run by women, or make it at home, with the wife
directing and helping the household slaves to grind the
grain29, shape the dough, and bake in it in a pottery oven heated by charcoal. Those
few households wealthy enough to afford
meat30 from time to time often grilled it over coals on a pottery brazier shaped
much like modern picnic grills. For most people, vegetables, olives,
fruit31, and cheese represented the main variety in their diet, and meat was available
only as part of animal
sacrifices32 paid for by the state. The
wine33 that everyone drank, usually much diluted with water, came mainly from local
vineyards.
Water34 from public fountains had to be carried into the house with
jugs, a task that the women of the household had to perform themselves or see that the
household slaves did.
The Loss of Slaves
The war had hurt the Athenian state economically by giving a chance for escape to many
of the
slaves35 that worked in the
silver mines36 in the Attic countryside, which had
provided a substantial revenue to the public coffers. The output of the mines apparently
never regained its previous heights, but it is not clear whether this
decline in
production37 of silver was the result of an enduring shortage of slaves to work in the mines
or a petering out of the veins of precious metal, or perhaps a combination of these
factors. The Peloponnesian War had given few opportunities for domestic slaves to
escape their servitude38, and practically no privately owned slaves had tried to run away during the war.
(Since runaway slaves were usually resold by those with whom they sought refuge in any
case, escape was by no means a reliable route to freedom.) All but the poorest families,
therefore, continued to have at least a slave or two to do chores around the house and
look after the children. If a mother did not have a slave to serve as a
wet
nurse39 to suckle her infants, she would hire a poor free woman for
the job, if her family could afford the expense.
Socrates
The conviction and execution of
Socrates40 (469-399 B.C.), the most famous philosopher of the late fifth
century B.C., became perhaps the most infamous event in the history of Athens after the
Peloponnesian War because his life had been devoted to combating the idea that justice
should be equated with power to work one's will. Coming, as it did, during a time of
social and political turmoil, his death indicated the fragility of Athenian justice in
practice. His passionate concern to discover valid guidelines for leading a just life
and to prove that justice is better than injustice under all circumstances gave a new
direction to Greek philosophy: an
emphasis on ethics41. Although other thinkers before him had dealt with moral issues, especially the
poets and dramatists, Socrates was the first of those thinkers called philosophers to
make ethics and morality his central concern.
Compared to the sophists, Socrates lived in
poverty42 and publicly disdained material possessions, but he nevertheless managed to
serve as a hoplite in the army and support a wife and several children. He may have
inherited some money, and he also received gifts from wealthy admirers. He paid so
little attention to his physical appearance and clothes that many Athenians regarded him
as eccentric. Sporting, in his words, a stomach
“somewhat too large to
be convenient,”43 he wore the same nondescript cloak summer and winter and scorned shoes no matter
how cold the weather. His physical
stamina44 was legendary, both from his tirelessness when he served as a soldier in
Athens's citizen militia and from his ability to outdrink anyone at a symposium.
Socratic Ways
Whether participating at a symposium, strolling in the agora , or watching young men exercise in a gymnasium, Socrates
spent
his time45 in conversation and contemplation. In the first of these characteristics he
resembled his fellow Athenians, who placed great value on the importance and pleasure of
speaking with each other at length. He wrote nothing; our knowledge of his ideas comes
from others' writings, especially those of his pupil
Plato46. Plato's dialogues, so called because they present Socrates and
others in extended conversation about philosophy, portray Socrates as a relentless
questioner of his fellow citizens, foreign friends, and various sophists. Socrates's
questions had the unsettling aim of making his interlocutors— his partners in
the conversation— examine the basic assumptions of their way of life.
Employing what has come to be called the Socratic method, Socrates never directly
instructs his conversational partners; instead, he leads them to draw conclusions in
response to his probing questions and refutations of their assumptions.
Socrates typically began one of his conversations by asking the interlocutor for a
definition of an abstract quality such as happiness or a virtue such as courage. For
instance, in the dialogue entitled
Laches
47 after the Athenian general of
that name who appears as one of the dialogue's interlocutors, Socrates asks Laches and
another distinguished military commander what makes a citizen a brave soldier. Socrates
then proceeds by further questioning to show that the definitions of courage and
instances of courageous behavior stated by the interlocutors actually conflict with
their other beliefs about the behavior that constituted courage.
Socrates' Search for Justice
This indirect method of searching for the truth often left Socrates's interlocutors in
a state of puzzlement because they were forced to conclude that they were ignorant of
what they began by assuming they knew very well. Socrates insisted that he, too, was
ignorant of the best definition of virtue but that
his wisdom consisted of knowing
that he did not know.48 He was trying to
improve rather than undermine his interlocutors' beliefs in morality, even though, as
one of his conversationalists put it, a conversation with Socrates made a man feel numb
just as if he had been stung by a
stingray49. Socrates wanted to discover through reasoning the universal standards that
justified morality. He especially attacked the view of the sophists that proclaimed
conventional morality the
“fetters that bind nature.”50 This view, he asserted, equated human happiness with power and
“getting more.”
Socrates passionately believed that just behavior was better for human beings than
injustice and that
morality51 was justified because it created happiness. Essentially, he seems to have argued
that
just behavior, or virtue, was identical to knowledge52 and that true
knowledge of justice would inevitably lead
people to choose good over evil and therefore to have truly happy lives53, regardless of their material success. Since Socrates believed that knowledge
itself was sufficient for happiness, he therefore asserted that no one knowingly behaved
unjustly and that behaving justly was always in the individual's interest. It might
appear, he maintained, that individuals could promote their interests by cheating or
using force on those weaker than themselves, but this appearance was deceptive. It was
in fact ignorance to believe that the best life was the life of unlimited power to
pursue whatever one desired. Instead, the most desirable human life was concerned with
virtue and guided by rational
reflection54. Moral knowledge was all one needed for the good life, as Socrates defined
it.
The Effect of Socrates
Although Socrates, unlike the sophists, offered no courses and took no
fees55, his effect on many people was as upsetting as the relativistic doctrines of the
sophists had been. Indeed, Socrates's refutation of his fellow conversationalists' most
cherished certainties, indirectly expressed through his method of questioning, made some
of his interlocutors decidedly uncomfortable. Unhappiest of all were the fathers whose
sons, after listening to Socrates reduce someone to utter bewilderment, came
home to try the same technique on their parents56. Men who experienced this reversal of the traditional hierarchy of
education between parent and child— the son was supposed to be educated by the
father— had cause to feel that Socrates's effect, even if it was not his
intention, was to undermine the stability of society by questioning Athenian traditions
and inspiring young men to do the same with the passionate enthusiasm of their youth. We
cannot say with certainty what Athenian women thought of Socrates or he of them.
His thoughts about human capabilities and behavior could be applied to women as
well as to men57, and he perhaps believed that women and men both had the same basic capacity for
justice. Nevertheless, the realities of Athenian society meant that Socrates circulated
primarily among men and addressed his ideas to them and their situations. He is,
however, reported to have had numerous conversations with
Aspasia58, the courtesan who lived with Pericles for many years, and
Plato has Socrates attribute his ideas on love to a woman, the otherwise-unknown
priestess
Diotima59 of Mantinea. Whether these contacts were real or fictional devices remains
uncertain.
Aristophanes on Socrates
The feeling that Socrates could be a danger to conventional society gave the comic
playwright
Aristophanes60 the inspiration for his comedy
Clouds
61 of 423 B.C., so named from the role played by the chorus. In the play Socrates
is presented as a cynical sophist who, for a fee, offers instruction in the Protagorean
technique of making the
weaker argument the stronger62. When the protagonist's son is transformed by Socrates's instruction into a
rhetorician
able to argue that a son has the right to beat his parents63, the protagonist ends the comedy by burning down Socrates's Thinking Shop, as it
is called in the play.
Socrates' Guilt by Association
Athenians with qualms about Socrates found confirmation of their fears in the careers
of
Alcibiades64 and, especially, Critias, one of the
Thirty
Tyrants65. Socrates's critics blamed him for Alcibiades's contempt for social conventions
because Alcibiades had been one of Socrates's most devoted followers. Critias, another
prominent follower, played a leading role in the murder and plunder perpetrated by the
Thirty Tyrants in 404-403 B.C. In blaming Socrates for the
crimes of
Critias66, Socrates's
detractors chose to overlook his defiance of the Thirty Tyrants when they had tried to
involve him in their violent schemes and his utter rejection of the immorality Critias
had displayed.
The Prosecution of Socrates
The hostility some Athenians felt toward Socrates after the violence of the Thirty
Tyrants encouraged the distinguished Athenian
Anytus67, who had
suffered personally under this regime, to join with two other men of lesser prominence
in prosecuting Socrates in 399 B.C. Since the amnesty prevented their bringing any
charges68 directly related to the period of tyranny, they accused Socrates of
impiety69. Since Athenian law did not specify precisely what offenses constituted impiety,
the accusers had to convince the jurors in the case that what Socrates had done was a
crime. No judge presided to rule on what evidence was admissible or how the law should
be applied, as usual in Athenian trials. Speaking for themselves as the prosecutors, as
also required by Athenian law, the accusers argued their case against Socrates before a
jury of 501 men that had been assembled by lot from that year's pool of eligible jurors,
drawn from the male citizens over thirty years old. The prosecution had both a religious
and a moral component. Religiously, they accused Socrates of not believing in the gods
of the city-state and of introducing new divinities. Morally, they charged, he had led
the young men of Athens away from Athenian conventions and ideals. After the conclusion
of the prosecutors' remarks, Socrates spoke in his own defense, as required by Athenian
legal procedure. Plato presents Socrates as taking this occasion not to rebut all the
charges or beg for sympathy, as jurors expected in serious cases, but to reiterate
his unyielding dedication to goading his fellow citizens into examining their
preconceptions70. This irritating process of constant questioning, he maintained, would help them
learn to live virtuous lives. Furthermore, they should care not about their material
possessions but about
making their true selves— their souls—
as good as possible71. He vowed to remain their stinging gadfly no matter what the consequences to
himself.
The Execution of Socrates
After the jury narrowly voted to convict, standard Athenian legal procedure required
the jurors to decide between alternative penalties proposed by the prosecutors and the
defendant. Anytus and his associates proposed death. In such instances the defendant was
then expected to offer exile as the alternative, which the jury would then usually
accept.
Socrates, however, replied that he deserved a reward rather than a
punishment72, until his friends at the trial prevailed upon him to propose a
fine as his penalty. The
jury73 chose death. Socrates accepted his sentence with equanimity because, as he put
it in a famous paradox,
“no evil can befall a good man either in life or
in death.”74 In other words, nothing can take away the knowledge that is virtue, and only the
loss of that wisdom could ever count as a true evil.
He was executed in the normal
Athenian way75, by being given a poisonous
drink concocted from powdered hemlock. The silencing of Socrates did nothing, however,
to restore Athenian confidence to the level of the fifth century B.C., and a later
source reports that the
Athenians soon came to regret the condemnation of
Socrates76 as a tragic mistake that left a blot on their reputation.
The Struggle for Dominance after the Peloponnesian War
In the fifty years after the Peloponnesian War, Sparta, Thebes, and Athens fought to
win a dominant position of international power in the Greek world. Athens probably never
regained the same economic and military strength that it had formerly wielded in the
fifth century B.C., perhaps because its
silver mines77 were no longer producing at the same level. Nevertheless, it did recover after
the
re-establishment of democracy78 in 403 B.C. and soon became a major force in international politics once again.
Sparta's widespread attempts to extend its power in the years after the Peloponnesian
War gave Athens and the other Greeks states ample opportunity for diplomatic and
military action. In 401 B.C., the Persian satrap
Cyrus, son of a previous king,
hired a mercenary army to try to unseat Artaxerxes II79, who had ascended to the Persian
throne in 404.
Xenophon80, who enlisted under Cyrus, wrote a stirring account in his
Anabasis
81 of the expedition's disastrous
defeat at Cunaxa82 near Babylon and the
arduous and long journey home through hostile
territory83 of the terrified Greek mercenaries from Cyrus's routed army. Sparta had
supported Cyrus's rebellion, thereby arousing the hostility of Artaxerxes. The Spartan
general
Lysander, the victor over Athens in the last years of the Peloponnesian
War, pursued an aggressive policy84 in Anatolia and northern Greece, and other Spartan
commanders
meddled in Sicily85. Thebes,
Athens, Corinth, and Argos thereupon formed an
anti-Spartan
coalition86 because they saw this Spartan activity
as threatening their own interests at home and abroad.
The Corinthian War and the King's Peace
In a
reversal of the alliances of the end of the Peloponnesian
War87, the
Persian king
initially allied with Athens and the other Greek city-states88 against Sparta in the so-called
Corinthian War89, which lasted from 395 to 386 B.C. But
this alliance failed90, too, because the king and the Greek allies were seeking their own advantage
rather than peaceful accommodation. The war ended with Sparta once again cutting a deal
with Persia. In a blatant renunciation of its claim to be the defender of Greek freedom,
Sparta acknowledged the Persian king's right to control the Greek city-states of
Anatolia in return for permission to secure Spartan interests in Greece without Persian
interference. The
King's Peace91 of 386 B.C., as the agreement is called, effectively returned the Greeks of
Anatolia to the dependent status of a century ago before the Greek victory in the
Persian Wars of 490-479 B.C.
Spartan Aggression and Athenian Resurgence
Spartan forces attacked city-states all over Greece in the years after the peace.
Athens, meanwhile, had restored its invulnerability to invasion by rebuilding the
long walls92 connecting the city and
the harbor. The Athenian general
Iphicrates93 also devised effective new tactics for light-armed troops
called peltasts by improving their weapons. The reconstruction of Athens's navy built up
its offensive strength, and by 377 B.C. the city had again become the leader of a
naval alliance of Greek states94, but this time the members of the
league had their rights specified in writing to prevent high-handed Athenian behavior.
Spartan hopes for lasting power were dashed in 371 B.C., when a resurgent
Thebes defeated the Spartan army
at Leuctra95 in Boeotia and then invaded the Spartan homeland in the
Peloponnese. At this point the Thebans seemed likely to challenge
Jason96, tyrant of Pherae in Thessaly, for the position of the dominant military power
in Greece.
Stalemate after the Battle of Mantinea
The alliances of the various city-states shifted often in the repeated conflicts that
took place in Greece during these early decades of the fourth century B.C. The threat
from Thessaly faded with
Jason's murder97 in 370 B.C., and the former enemies Sparta and Athens momentarily allied against
the Thebans in the battle of Mantinea in the Peloponnese in 362 B.C. Thebes won the
battle but lost the war when its great leader
Epaminondas98 fell at
Mantinea99
and no credible replacement for him could be found. The Theban quest for dominance in
Greece was over. Xenophon adroitly summed up the situation after 362 B.C. with these
closing remarks100 from the history that he wrote of the Greeks in his time
(
Hellenica ): “Everyone had supposed that the winners of this
battle would be Greece's rulers and its losers their subjects; but there was only more
confusion and disturbance in Greece after it than before.” The truth of his
analysis was confirmed when the
naval alliance led by Athens dissolved101 in the mid-350s B.C. in a war among the leader and the allies.
All the efforts of the various major Greek states to extend their hegemony over
mainland Greece in this period therefore ended in failure. By the mid 350s B.C., no
Greek city-state had the power to rule more than itself on a consistent basis. The
struggle for supremacy in Greece that had begun eighty years earlier with the outbreak
of the Peloponnesian War had finally ended in a stalemate of exhaustion that opened the
way for a new power— the kingdom of Macedonia.