I was looking for something to teach me more about the Peloponnesian War, how Sparta and Athens fell, and the connection between that time to Alexander. This book definitely delivered. There might have been too many in-line citations and it was a little dry, but I thought it's method of covering the history was really cool. Instead of being purely chronological, it followed a generally chronological path while exploring different topics.
Greco-Persian Relations
Something that comes through in this book is that the relationships between the Greeks and the Persians varied tremendously. At different times, Sparta, Athens, and other states would align themselves with and against Persia. The Persian Wars are significant because all the Greeks briefly united against Persia, but before and after that Greeks allied themselves with Persia. The Greeks who most opposed Persia most consistently were the Asiatic Greeks in modern-day Turkey, but mainland Greeks often tried to use Persia against each other.
Major developments in Greece were a result of Persian involvement with the Greeks. The Delian League was formed by Athens expressly to protect Ionian Greeks/Asian Greeks from Persia after the Persian Wars, a time when Sparta and its Peloponnesian League, the incumbent Greek power, was unwilling to stand up to Persia.
Sparta and Athens and the Peloponnesian War
Sparta was a city ruled by two kings, with a council of elders and also an assembly of citizens. In the 500s, the state began to elect overseers who took over domestic functions from the kings. After conquering Messenia in the 8th century BC, Sparta enslaved its people, referred to as helots, and kept them as slaves until 370 BC, when Sparta was defeated. This enslavement required all Spartan men to form a class of militaristic land-owners, whose primary purpose was to keep the slaves down and conquer more land. Sparta had about 8,000 adult male citizens during the Persian Wars, but by its end in 371 BC at the Battle of Leuctra, Sparta had just 1,300, of which 400 died in that battle. This inability to create more citizens through births or grants of citizenship eventually doomed Sparta.
Athens became a major trading site in the sixth century and started to become a major player in the Greek world around the time of the Persian Wars, helping the Ionians in Asia Minor in 498 to rebel against the Persians and fighting the Persians at Marathon. In 480-79, Athens was sacked by the Persians, but Athens was ready to start leading Greeks again with the Delian League not long after. In the fifth century, Athens became the richest Greek city, since Sparta was rich in land and agriculture, but not in trade.
Once war began between Athens and Sparta in 431, Sparta attempted to gain assistance from Persia, but was unsuccessful until 412. They fought a war of attrition, in which hoplites were not so importance since much of it was fought on rough terrain. There were only actually two major hoplite battles throughout the war at Delium in 424/3 and Mantinea in 418. The war proceeded similar to other Greek wars, in which Sparta invaded Attica in the spring, destroyed the crops, and hoped the Athenians would be forced to come out of the city to confront the Spartans and be defeated. However, Athens, led by Pericles, only used cavalry to harass the attackers, but did not confront them. Long walls, built in the 450s and 440s now connected Athens to Piraeus, its port, and Pericles convinced the Athenians to abandon the countryside and use their sea control to import food. They should try to keep control of their overseas empire, but not increase it. Animals were sent out to live on islands. The author argues that Pericles likely believed that by waiting out the Spartans, he could get them to quit, but they proved more persistent than expected. These invasions were not the all-out war that we think of today. Sparta invaded almost every year from 431 to 425, but did besieged Plataea instead of Athens in 429, turned back in 426 because of earthquakes, and returned after just fifteen days in 425. The longest invasion only lasted forty days in 430. This did not cause enough damage to knock Athens out of the war like it would have done to weaker city-states.
At different times, both Athens and Sparta sued for peace, but each refused the other because they thought they had the advantage, which was true, and didn't think the peace was the best deal they could get. Athens was struck by a plague from 430 to 426/5, which killed even more people than it would have because they were cramped inside the city. It killed about a third of the hoplites and cavalry and probably a similar amount of Athenian civilians. Pericles died of that plague in 429. The war was "kind of" paused from 421 to 414 by the Peace of Nicias before resuming. During that pause, Athens and Sparta still fought one another, but just at a lower intensity level.
The turning point in the war came in the disastrous Athenian expedition to Sicily to intervene in a conflict at Syracuse. Thucydides called it the greatest success for the victors and the greatest disaster for the defeated in Greek history. The Athenians wasted massive amounts of money, lives, and ships on the expedition and it turned the war decisively against them. The Athenians seemed to think that during the Peace of Nicias that they would have the bandwidth to intervene in a Sicilian conflict, but they were obviously proven wrong. Something interesting about the siege of Syracuse is that it was a massive construction project. Both attackers and defenders built a series of walls to gain angles on the other and protect themselves during the siege.
Athens' exhaustion at Syracuse led to eventual defeat ten years later. The final terms demanded that Athens destroy its long walls to the Piraeus, lose all but twelve ships and all overseas possessions, and take back its exiles and become a subordinate ally of Sparta. The first period of the war, known as the Archidamian War from 431-421, confirmed that Athens was invulnerable to Sparta so long as it maintained sea superiority. Similarly, Athenian attempts to destabilize Sparta were unsuccessful. So the Peace of Nicias, if truly implemented, would have benefited Athens by maintaining the status quo. However, it was not fully implemented, and a low-level conflict remained. Athens squandered its resource advantage in the Sicilian expedition, and when the Athenians backed a Spartan rebel, Sparta agreed to a deal with the Persians to let the Persians have the Asiatic Greek territories in exchange for support against Athens. Within just a few years of Sparta's victory, the other Greek states were forming an anti-Spartan alliance.
Athens' democracy collapsed twice, once in 411 and again in 404 at the end of the war. I am honestly confused by those events and will need to read something else about how and why that all happened. After the war, Sparta resisted Persian attempts to make good on their agreement to hand over the Asiatic Greeks to Persia, but Sparta eventually acquiesced in 386. This gave Sparta control of Greece, but it would only last until 370, when Thebes rebelled and defeated Sparta once and for all. Sparta's land had been concentrated in the hands of the few, reducing the number of citizens who received top-notch military training, and by the end was a shell of its former self for lack of citizen manpower. In the end, I would probably say that the Peloponnesian War was a pyrrhic victory for the Spartans that left a power vacuum in Greece to be filled by Philip II of Macedon.
The Macedonians
Philip became the leader of Greece through military and diplomatic force. He reformed his military, equipping the foot soldiers with the sarissa, a spear that was twice as long as Greeks were using before, from 9 feet up to 18 feet. Philip also maintained a variety of forces that he used year round, not citizen soldiers who would only fight in the summer when not harvesting, a weakness of the Spartans. Because he was king and there was no democracy, Philip was able to use his forces without getting permission, which also made him faster and empowered him to act in secrecy. As a non-military leader, Philip drained the plain of Philippi, opening it to agriculture, and his conquests enabled him to found cities that he could use to grant land as a reward to allies. After capturing Amphipolis and Philippi, Philip controlled critical gold and silver mines, and his coinage became the most desirable in the Greek world. He confronted a Theban-Athenian alliance but defeated them.
However, having united Greece under his banner, Philip was assassinated just before setting out to conquer Persia. His son, Alexander, who had commanded infantry in battle before, took his place. The Greeks, led by Macedon, portrayed the conquest of Persia as a revenge for Persia's fifth-century invasion of Greece. After 330, when Persepolis was destroyed, Alexander portrayed himself a legitimate "King of Asia," not the Emperor of Persia. He appointed Persians at satraps and used eastern troops. He also have Darius a royal funeral. Alexander adopted Persian forms of dress and attempted to extend the practice of proskynesis, the practice of prostrating oneself and kissing the ground in submission, to his followers, which was resisted. He and all his courtiers took Persian wives in 324 (although only one marriage would last). However, Alexander did not observe the cult of Ahura Mazda, and satraps led by Europeans were treated more like places to be garrisoned or looted. Alexander also saw himself as more and more godlike. His mother, who claimed descent from Achilles, also claimed after falling out with Philip that Alexander's father was not Philip but Zeus. Alexander even went to an oracle to ask about his divinity, but it seems like the answer he got is not recorded in this book at least. It seems lucky for Alexander's historical legacy that he died at his peak, since Greece was already on the point of rebellion and he may have found himself fighting rebels instead of conquering more lands had he not died.
Conclusion
Good book although a little dry. I liked getting the connections through this period. Next I would like to explore something more focused on Athenian government over this same period now that I have the survey of the big events involving Greece as a whole.
Miscellaneous facts:
- The earliest account of the life of Alexander the Great is from the first century BC.
