Theban Ascendancy
After Leuctra, the Boeotians wanted to finish the Spartans
off once and for all, but their ally, Jason of Pherae in Thessaly, persuaded
them to be content with driving them out of Boeotia, just as he would shortly
drive them out of their last outposts in Thessaly. He might well have thought
that the Spartans would destroy themselves. Strictly, all the Spartiate
survivors of Leuctra should have lost their citizenship and been treated with
contempt for the rest of their lives, as those who did not die or win in battle
traditionally were. But the reduction in citizen numbers would have threatened
Spartan society with collapse, so Agesilaus “allowed tradition to sleep for
that day.”
Jason was one of a new breed of warlords, lurking on the
margins of the Greek world and poised to expand into it if the opportunities
presented themselves; Evagoras of Salamis and Mausolus of Caria were cut from
the same cloth, and the most successful of them all would turn out to be Philip
II of Macedon. Over the past few years, Jason had, by force and intimidation,
united much of Thessaly under his rule, and even extended his influence into
Macedon. No doubt his advice to the Boeotians was self-serving: he wanted
hostility to continue between them and the Spartans so that he would remain
unmolested. On his assassination in 370, however, the Thessalian cities
returned to their habitual internecine strife. But Jason’s successor (after
another assassination or two), his nephew Alexander, inherited not just his
position, but also his ambitions.
Spartan weakness instigated a period of turmoil throughout
the Peloponnese, as helots and Perioeci rose in rebellion and anti-Spartan
factions seized the opportunity to gain or regain power in the cities. Much
blood was shed in the process, especially in Argos, where the poor rose up
against the rich, killed them (even the democrats among them), and seized their
land. More constructively, in 370 Mantinea was reformed as a polis, and along
with its old rival Tegea formed an Arcadian Confederacy out of the Arcadian and
Triphylian communities; the confederacy had a democratic constitution, and was
to be centered on a new city called Megalopolis (“Great City”) in southern
Arcadia, so as not to privilege any of the existing cities. Megalopolis
incorporated the populations of forty previous towns and villages.
The Spartans declared war on the Arcadians, and the
Arcadians appealed for help from Thebes. Epaminondas raised a large army from
central Greece, which was further swelled by contingents from Elis and Argos.
In the winter of 370/69, they launched a massive invasion of Laconia. Never
before, as Agesilaus had boasted, had the women of Sparta seen the smoke of an
enemy campfire. By dint of offering freedom to helots, the Spartans raised a
large enough army to save Sparta itself, but the invaders then crossed into
Messenia and liberated the helots and Perioeci, founding the city of Messene on
Mount Ithome and creating Messenia for the first time as a political entity in
its own right. Expatriate Messenians flocked home in joy.
The removal of fertile Messenia, the source of Spartan
prosperity—the foundation of its culture, in fact—was a terminal blow. At a
stroke, and within a generation of reaching the apex of its power, Sparta was
greatly reduced. The Peloponnesian League was effectively defunct, after about
two hundred years of existence. The previously unthinkable happened, and there
was unrest even among the Spartiates themselves, a number of whom had to be
executed. It was not a serious uprising, but what is remarkable is that it
happened at all. The Athenians (who must, for historical reasons, have been not
displeased by the reduction of Sparta) declared their opposition to the Thebans
by harassing their army as it returned from the Peloponnese.
While warfare between Thebes and Sparta continued in the
Peloponnese, the Athenians, who had gained recognition that Amphipolis was
rightly theirs—assigned to them by the Peace of Nicias in 421, but not yet
recovered—turned their attention Thraceward and renewed their attempt to secure
easy access to northern minerals and ship-quality timber. But obsessively
repeated efforts in the 360s came to nothing, as the crafty Amphipolitans
entered into alliances with the two strongest powers in the region—first with
Macedon, then the Olynthians (whose Chalcidian Confederacy had reformed as
Spartan power waned), and then Macedon again. The Athenians were scarcely more
successful on the Thracian Chersonese, where possession of the towns was being
contested by several powers—especially the kings of the Odrysians, the most
powerful Thracian people—and the Thebans and Alexander of Pherae were doing
their best to interrupt Athenian efforts there as well.
But the Athenians gained a number of new allies in the
north, including Potidaea, which received a cleruchy at its request, as a
defense against Olynthus. This was the second cleruchy to be established in
just a few years. In 366, in support of a rebel Anatolian satrap, the
Athenians, after a ten-month siege, had driven a Persian garrison off Samos,
which had been annexed by Mausolus, the aggressive satrap of Caria. The Persian
garrison infringed the terms of the King’s Peace, but it was clear to everyone
that the Athenian action was not disinterested. They wanted Samos for its
fertile fields and its harbor (it once again became the Athenians’ main naval
base in the Aegean), and they established a huge Athenian cleruchy on the
island, partly made up of restored Samian democrats.
While Epaminondas had been leading the Thebans’ campaigns in
the Peloponnese, Pelopidas was responsible for their attempt to regain
influence in Thessaly, which meant checking their former ally, Alexander of
Pherae. In 364, after several attempts, Pelopidas invaded in greater force,
only to die in battle—but his troops and their Thessalian allies succeeded in
confining Alexander to Pherae itself. But Alexander was assassinated in 358,
Thessaly returned to impotent chaos, and the Thebans never tried to revive
their control there.
In the Peloponnese, a critical point had been reached. Despite
a crushing defeat by the Spartans in 368 (in the Tearless Battle, so called
because there was no loss of life on the Spartan side), the Arcadians had gone
to war with the Eleans over the Triphylian issue. But the war, which lasted
from 366 to 362, had fractured the young Arcadian Confederacy along traditional
fault lines (Mantinea versus Tegea), and in the end the Thebans, as current
protectors of the King’s Peace, had no choice but to return to the Peloponnese
to impose order. The Thebans and their central Greek allies were joined in the
Peloponnese by the rump Arcadian Confederacy, Argos, and Messenia. They were
opposed by the Mantineans, Spartans, Eleans, Achaeans, and Athenians, under the
command of octogenarian Agesilaus. The Corinthians had adopted a policy of
neutrality a few years earlier, and stuck with it, but otherwise this was close
to being a pan-Greek war.
In 362 the two sides met at Mantinea, for the battle that
was supposed to decide the question of which of the two alliances would be the
leaders of the Greeks. But it did no such thing. The Thebans won—but
Epaminondas was killed, and with Pelopidas dead as well there was no longer a
strong hand on the Theban helm. Since Theban leadership outside of central
Greece depended not on its institutional position in any league but on its
prestige and ability to win battles, and since Pelopidas and Epaminondas had
been chiefly responsible for both of these factors, their deaths spelled the
end of the brief Theban ascendancy. With nothing resolved, the exhausted Greeks
made peace, but Sparta refused to sign, since the only issue in which it was
interested—the autonomy of Messenia—was not up for negotiation. But within a
few years, one of the chief belligerents, Agesilaus, was dead. He died in 359 on
his way home from Egypt, where, despite his advanced age, he had been working
as the commander of a mercenary force, aiding the rebels against the Persians.
The Social War
By 375, the Second Athenian League, with over seventy
members and a modest annual income of about sixty talents, was an entity of
some strength and importance. All had joined of their own accord, voluntarily
or by invitation, without apparent Athenian coercion. But it was primarily an
anti-Spartan coalition, and after Leuctra it lost purpose and direction, not
least because it was the Thebans who had humbled Sparta, not the Athenian
alliance after all. Some members drifted away, and new allies were not required
to join the league.
But Athens never gave up seeking to renew its influence in
the Aegean. And, gradually, some of the old fifth-century habits re-emerged.
League money was used to pay for specifically Athenian ventures in the north
(the obsession with Amphipolis); rather than being ad hoc payments to cover the
costs of particular campaigns, the Athenians wanted to introduce fixed annual
payments—tribute, by any other name. Attempts by allies to secede—Ceos in 364,
Euboea in 357—were suppressed. At least there were no cleruchies on allied
land; the Athenians had kept their promise in that respect. But there were
cleruchies on Scyros, Lemnos, Imbros, and Samos, and at Potidaea and Sestus,
and it must have seemed that it was only a matter of time before one was
planted on allied territory; after all, they had been promised no garrisons,
but the Athenians had had no choice but to garrison towns temporarily that were
near war zones, even if this was done “in accordance with the resolutions of
the allies.” As Xenophon said, Athenian poverty was forcing them to treat their
allies “with less than total fairness.”
Nevertheless, everyone could see that Athens did not have
the strength to be as dominant as it had been in the past. And some Athenian
allies therefore concluded that they would be better off in a different
alliance. It was this, rather than concerns about Athenian abuses, that led a
number of important allies—including Rhodes, Chios, and Byzantium (the last two
founder members of the league)—to rise up against Athens in a “social” (allied)
war in 357.
The Athenians had a large fleet of almost three hundred
ships, but lacked the resources to man more than a few dozen at a time, and
they suffered a series of naval defeats, which drove home the fact that others
had acquired the skills that once had been virtually an Athenian monopoly. Once
again, it was Persian intervention that brought the war to an end. At one
point, the Athenian General Chares was forced by lack of money to work for a
rebel Persian satrap in Anatolia. The Persian king responded by threatening to
enter the Social War on the side of the rebels, and so the Athenians recalled
Chares and accepted defeat. A number of former allies gained their independence
or were absorbed by, chiefly, Mausolus or Philip of Macedon, leaving Athens
with only a rump alliance. Athens accepted the necessity of pursuing a more
cautious and defensive foreign policy, suitable for its limited resources.
Athenian Democracy in
the Fourth Century
Against the background of the futile fighting of the fourth
century, the Athenians made certain institutional changes designed, above all,
to increase efficiency. One major area of inefficiency was the legal code,
which had grown haphazardly throughout its history, until it was hard to
determine the order in which laws had been made, or where they were stored, or
even if they had been written down at all. Some laws contradicted others; many
had become redundant. The redundancies led to the important distinction between
“laws” (nomoi), which were binding on everyone and assumed to be permanent, and
“decrees” (psēphismata), which applied to particular people or situations, and
so could become redundant:
The authorities are not to use an unwritten law in any case.
No decree of either the Council or the Assembly is to be more authoritative
than a law. It is not permitted to make a law for an individual if the same law
does not extend to all Athenian citizens and if it is not voted by six thousand
people, in a secret ballot.
A committee had been formed in 410 to collect and collate
existing laws. The work was interrupted by the Thirty, and then in 403 two
boards of Legislators (nomothetai) were established. The job of the first was
to complete the collection and collation, while the second, which had five
hundred members, was to scrutinize every single existing law and decide whether
or not it should go forward as part of the legal code for the renewed
democracy.
Once the Legislators had fixed the code, the two boards made
way for one, and no law could be made, repealed, or amended without the
approval of this board, which was given only after a deliberately complex and
lengthy review (the process was later somewhat simplified). Board members were
chosen from the six thousand jurors empanelled for that year, because the oath
the jurors had sworn was taken to apply also to this kind of work. The
Thesmothetes were given the job of regularly reviewing the laws and reporting
problems to the Assembly.
None of this was much of a restriction on the Assembly,
since few new laws were made, and most business, including all foreign-policy
decisions, was conducted by means of decrees. In 362 the Assembly had its
judicial function—trying Generals and politicians for crimes against the
state—removed and given to the courts. Since the courts were just the people
sitting in another context, this was not felt to be a restriction either. It
was a cost-cutting exercise, so that hundreds of jurors rather than thousands
of assemblymen would be paid. And the number of cases heard by the courts was
reduced by another frugal measure, the ruling that certain cases had to be
heard first by an arbitrator (a senior man, in his sixtieth year), and would go
to court only if the litigants disagreed with the arbitrator’s verdict.
Yet another cost-cutting exercise was the reduction of the
number of Assembly meetings from four a month to three, although that was
offset by the sensible decision to allow important debates to be carried over
for a second day’s discussion. The Areopagus Council seems to have been
resurgent or potentially resurgent in the 340s and 330s, but it was kept in its
place by a tough law in 336 that made it impossible for the council to usurp
the place of the democratic Council in the event of a temporary lapse of
democracy in Athens—that is, an oligarchic coup: “They shall not deliberate,
not even about one matter.”
So the Assembly’s powers remained pretty much as they had
been, and in other respects Athenian democracy was extended, not curtailed. In
403 the Pnyx, the meeting-place of the Assembly, was enlarged and improved, and
before long pay for attendance was introduced, since entrance to the Pnyx could
now be controlled. This was a bold move, showing great commitment to democracy
at a time when Athens had lost the resources of the Delian League and its
financial situation was precarious. The rate was one obol a day, but that was
soon raised to three; by the 320s it was one drachma (six obols) for the two
less important meetings per prytany, and nine obols for the principal meeting.
Remuneration was introduced not just as an affirmation of democratic principles
after the regime of the Thirty, but also as a way to encourage attendance (and
punctuality) when the population was low as a result of the Peloponnesian War,
and as a form of poor relief.
In the fourth century, the Athenians were not turning their
backs on democratic principles so much as refounding Athens after the horrors
of civil war. The democracy was more self-conscious, not less democratic. Other
current debates point in the same direction. I mentioned earlier that
Thrasybulus had offered the slaves and metics in his rebel army citizenship
when the democracy was restored. When the matter came up for debate in 403,
Thrasybulus’ proposal was more or less shot down. This seems unfair, but it was
the result of an intense discussion about citizenship. Thrasybulus’ proposal
came to nothing, but neither did an alternative proposal, that, as in many
other states, citizenship should be restricted to landowners, which would have
disenfranchised several thousand of the poorest Athenians. And another outcome
of the debate was the reinstatement of Pericles’ strict citizenship law of
451/0, which had lapsed during the manpower shortage of the last decade of the
war. In fact, the law was soon strengthened by an outright ban on a male
citizen’s marrying a female noncitizen. The effect of all this was to bolster
the democracy by creating a sense of insiders and outsiders, and the effect was
enhanced by the prominent placement of inscriptions honoring those who had
supported the democracy in one way or another.
A New Professionalism
Lack of allied tribute left fourth-century Athens strapped
for cash and heavily reliant on its wealthy citizens, who naturally protested.
They were not as well off as their predecessors in the fifth century. The whole
financial system needed taking in hand. In the first place, a census was taken
of the value of every landowner’s property, so that taxation could be fairly
distributed. Then, by the 350s, there were two powerful new treasuries, the
Military Fund and the Theoric Fund (which was, in origin, a fund to pay for
citizens’ attendance at festivals and public entertainments). A new form of
budgeting had been introduced a decade or two earlier, whereby every spending
authority was allocated a fixed proportion of the money available for each
prytany, depending on projected needs—a rather rigid system, which tended to
leave the boards short of money in those years (and there were many of them in
the fourth century) when Athenian revenues were low. In the 360s, trials
sometimes had to be canceled for lack of money to pay jurors.
If there was any surplus, at a time of peace it went to the
Theoric Fund, and at a time of war to the Military Fund; both funds received
their own regular allocations as well. The Military Fund was always controlled
by a single official, and the post was elective, not subject to sortition, and
could be repeated year after year. Just as ambitious men in the fifth century had
exploited the fact that the Generalship was an elected post to gain personal
power, so financial managers now began to exploit the same feature of their
posts. The Theoric Fund was originally run by a board of ten, but in the 340s a
single treasurer began to be elected for this fund too. Both funds—sometimes in
parallel, sometimes alternately—grew to be very rich, and their treasurers
correspondingly powerful. The Treasurer of the Theoric Fund at some point
gained control of all the former financial committees of the Council as well.
But his power no more threatened democracy than Pericles had in the fifth
century. These men could always be brought low if they behaved irresponsibly.
Eubulus of Probalinthus, re-elected as financial controller almost every year
from 353 to 342, used his authority to introduce a greater degree of fiscal
caution.
In the military sphere, Generals continued the trend begun
during the Peloponnesian War and tended to specialize in military matters more
than politics, just as Eubulus and other specialized in politics. Athenian
Generals even hired themselves out abroad, in between their appointments in
Athens. The age of the amateur was passing. Another important step toward
professionalism was taken by the development of the ephēbeia (the Cadet
Corps—literally, “those on the threshold of adulthood”). This was a corps of
young men who, at the age of eighteen, embarked on two years of disciplined
training, as a kind of National Service; the practice came to be imitated by
many other states. They took an oath to defend the fatherland, obey the laws
and the authorities, and honor the state’s cults.
In the first year, which consisted largely of basic
training, they were posted in fortresses in Piraeus; in the second, they were
based in fortresses out in the Attic countryside, with the job of patrolling
the borders against enemy incursions and runaway slaves. They were trained to
fight both as hoplites and as light-armed troops. As in the Spartan agōgē, the
young men were bound together by athletic competition, communal dining, and
shared performance at religious festivals. Each ephebe received a stipend, and
at the end of the first year of training he was given a shield and a spear by
the state. In Athens, for the period when the ephēbeia was funded like this by
the state (335–322), it seems that over half of the available
eighteen-year-olds joined up, between five and six hundred a year, giving the
army a good core of trained soldiers but not reaching out to the poorest
families. But when the ephebate was revived in 306, it was reduced to one year
and, with a focus on cultural as well as military activities, it gradually
became a kind of finishing school for a few dozen sons of rich households.
The new professionals of the fourth century were staking out
their fields. Technical treatises were written on medicine (the ample corpus of
works attributed, nearly always wrongly, to fifth-century Hippocrates of Cos),
architecture, siegecraft, rhetoric, music, town-planning, art theory, and the
theater. In his earliest works, written in the 390s and 380s, Plato had his
mentor, Socrates (or a fictionalized version of him), engage with a wide range
of experts—poets, sophists, orators, Generals, and politicians—and show them
all up as ignorant about the fundamental issues of their work. Plato was trying
to demonstrate that philosophy as he understood it, or rather as he was in the
process of inventing it, was the only true source of education and even of
self-perfection. Meanwhile, Isocrates, with his school of rhetoric, was making
the same educational claim for what he called “philosophy”; the details are
unknown, but he had a method designed to inculcate appropriate (by his lights)
moral and political views in his students. Aristotle, who came to Athens from
Chalcidice in 367 to study at Plato’s Academy, marks the culmination of this
trend toward the systematization of knowledge. Starting from a few principles
(but otherwise rejecting the kind of theoretical speculations that
characterized the Academy), he intended to say the last word on everything from
the ideal political constitution to the nature of God.
The fourth century was the time when philosophy as we
understand it was invented; between the time of Socrates and Aristotle, the
fundamental rules of logical reasoning were laid down, and great advances were
made in every other branch of philosophy as well, from epistemology to ethics.
It was the time when the rules of elegant and persuasive speaking and writing
were developed, culminating in Aristotle’s The Art of Rhetoric, in which the
three main kinds of public speaking are identified (speaking for display, or in
the law courts, or in a mass political assembly) and the manner of speaking
appropriate to each kind is thoroughly explained, as well as the general
principles of rhetoric. Poets and playwrights differentiated themselves to an
increasing extent from prose-writers by focusing more on entertainment than
instruction.
Lysippus of Sicyon, who was working between about 370 and
310 (and who was to become the favorite sculptor of Alexander the Great, the
one who portrayed him as he liked to be seen), invented a new canon for
portraying the human body:
He made the head
smaller than his predecessors had, and the body more slender and firm, so that
his statues appeared to be taller than they were. … He used to say that he made
men as he visualized them, whereas his predecessors made them as they were.
Despite this final quip, realism was Lysippus’ object: the
new canon, for all its slight distortions of the human body, allowed statues to
be more lifelike to the viewer. Artists were still portraying men as generalizations—man
of courage, man of destiny, king—but as the century progressed
individualization made more of a mark on their work, and we will see this
blossom within a few decades. The fourth century was a time of futile and
brutal warfare, but it was also a time of great inventiveness and creativity,
when human knowledge was being systematized even as new fields were being
opened up.
