Meanwhile, the soldiers of the Delian League, led by Athenian commanders, set about recapturing various islands and cities from the Persians. The Persians fought back, but not with a whole lot of conviction. The Persian empire had begun to grow unwell from internal canker. Xerxes’s imperious refusal to take responsibility for the defeat at Salamis was just a symptom of a personality that would not brook any restraint, and accounts from several different sources suggest a man sinking deeper and deeper into sybaritic corruption. The biblical book of Esther tells of a week-long orgy hosted by Xerxes at his palace in Susa, at the end of which Xerxes (who, like his guests, had been drunk out of his mind for days) ordered his favorite wife to come out and parade in front of the entire party of men, so that they could admire her beauty. She refused; Xerxes, furious, sent word to her that she would never again come into his presence, and decided to replace her. He sent out word to all of his satraps to send the most beautiful girls in their satrapies to the court. Once they were in court, he spent a few pleasurable months calling them into his bedchamber, one per night, so that he could sample them all before choosing his favorite.11 Xerxes’s appetite for women is also mentioned by Herodotus, who says that he developed a great passion first for his brother’s wife, and then for his brother’s daughter.12
These stories are not written by friends. However, Xerxes was clearly not popular with either his court or his family by the time he died. The Greek historian Ctesias, who spent time at the Persian court some fifty years later, says that Xerxes was sleeping when the head eunuch, a trusted man who guarded his bedchamber, allowed a Persian army commander named Artabanos (a chiliarch, which meant that he commanded a thousand of the elite Persian fighters) in to see the king. Minutes later, Xerxes was dead. The year was 465.
When the body was discovered, Artabanos accused the oldest son, Darius, of the deed, and turned to the youngest son, the eighteen-year-old hothead Artaxerxes, exhorting him to avenge his father’s murder. “With much shouting,” Ctesias says, “Darius protested that he did not kill his father, but he was put to death.”13
This left Artaxerxes as heir apparent, since the middle brother, Hystaspes, had been sent off to be satrap of the northern province Bactria and was nowhere around. Didorus Siculus picks up the story: as soon as Artabanos found himself alone with the brand-new king, he dropped all pretense and attacked Artaxerxes. The young man fought back, though, and although wounded managed to kill the treacherous captain.14 As soon as the news travelled to Bactria, Hystaspes came charging down to try to get the throne for himself, but Artaxerxes met him in battle and was fortunate. A sandstorm came down while the battle raged, and behind its screen Artaxerxes killed his other brother and emerged victorious.15
As usual, chaos in the royal house produced rebellion all over the empire. The most serious was in Egypt, where news of Xerxes’s death convinced one of Psammetichus III’s surviving sons, Inaros (now well past middle age and living at Heliopolis), to drag his royal heritage out of the closet. Inaros sent to the Athenians, who were very happy to sail down and give him a hand with a rebellion.16
This combined guerilla force took Artaxerxes eleven years to defeat. When Persian forces finally managed to capture Inaros, who had been behaving like an elderly Egyptian Zorro for over a decade, Artaxerxes ordered him crucified.
Back in Greece, more Athenian troops were carrying on battles of their own. The Delian League had not been easy to hold together, and Athens found itself, perhaps without realizing it, using more and more force against its own allies. In 460, the island of Naxos declared that it no longer wanted to take part in the League (which meant “follow Athenian orders”), and war followed: “She had to return [to the League] after a siege,” Thucydides writes. “[T]his was the first instance of the confederation being forced to subjugate an allied city.”17 It was not, however, the last. Other Delian League cities protested against the Athenian demands for tribute and ships, and Athens responded with force. They marched into Thrace; the Athenian navy fought against the city of Aegina and captured seventy ships; when the city of Megara, a member of the Peloponnesian League, complained loudly about a border dispute with Corinth (another Peloponnesian city), the Athenians not only welcomed Megara into the Delian League but helped the Megarans build new defensive walls and (unasked) sent Athenian troops to occupy the city. “They made themselves offensive,” Thucydides concludes. “…. The Athenians were not the old popular rulers they had been at first.”18
Athens and Sparta seemed to have exchanged places; the Athenians had become the bullies of the Aegean. The Delian League was still called the Delian League, but it had become something closer to an Athenian empire.183 The beautiful city was also looking more and more like a fortress. Xanthippus’s son Pericles had been elected to military command, and proposed that the Athenians build walls out from Athens down to the port of Pireus, a distance of eight miles, so that goods and soldiers could get to the water without fear of attack.19 In 457, the construction on these “Long Walls” began.
Just after the walls were finished, the Athenian and Spartan armies themselves clashed. In 457, a Spartan army marched into the area called Boeotia, northwest of Attica, on the pretext that they had been invited in by the people of Doris, even farther to the northwest. This was not their only motivation: “Secret encouragement had been given to them by a party in Athens,” Thucydides says, “who hoped to put an end to the reign of democracy and the building of the long walls.”20
The Athenians marched out into Boeotia too, with fourteen thousand troops. When the dust had cleared, the Spartans claimed victory. Certainly they did cut down all the fruit trees they could find, before marching home; but since the Athenians went back out into Boeotia and claimed the area for themselves only two months later, it could hardly have been a decisive victory. In fact, the two forces were more or less equal. Athens, which had begun with the upper hand, had lost enough men in the unsuccessful fight in Egypt to even the balance.
In 446, the Athenians proposed a peace. The treaty itself has not survived, but remarks of various Greek politicians suggest that the Athenians were willing to give up some of the land they had seized on the Isthmus of Corinth and along the shore of the Peloponnese for an end to fighting. Both cities agreed not to interfere with the other’s allies. This arrangement was supposed to hold for thirty years; and so the treaty became known as the Thirty Years’ Peace.
Shortly after this, Herodotus left Athens. He had found the constant frenzy of politics uncongenial, and preferred to go to Thurii, a new pan-Hellenic colony that was drawing citizens from all across Greece.
Despite the frenzy, Athens was blooming. The commander Pericles, who had gained more and more popularity as a public speaker, oversaw the building of a new temple to Athena on top of the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was decorated with sculpted stone friezes showing legendary Greek victories over semihuman centaurs: a celebration of Greek triumph over non-Greek enemies. A forty-foot seated statue of Zeus was carved from ivory and placed at the temple at Olympia, where it became so well known that later list-makers called it one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. The philosopher Socrates spent his days talking and teaching, attracting scores of followers; like the Buddha, evolving a coherent and influential philosophy without writing a word, since all of his teachings were set down by his students.
But this beauty was all rotten at the core. Hatred between Athens and Sparta had not gone away. The Thirty Years’ Peace held for fourteen years; and then it splintered.
THE FIRST FIGHTING actually broke out between Athens and one of Sparta’s allies, the city of Corinth. In 433, a Corinthian colony called Corcyra tried to break away from Corinthian rule, and asked Athens for help.
Corcyra itself technically didn’t belong to either the Peloponnesian or Delian League, so the Athenians could answer the call without breaking the peace. On the other hand, since Corcyra was a colony of Corinth, and Corinth was an ally of Sparta, the Spartans would undoubte
dly take offense if Athens joined in a battle against Corinth.
The Athenians were unable to resist this chance to weaken the power of Corinth. After two full days of public debate, the Assembly decided to send ten ships.21 In an attempt to have their cake and eat it too, the Assembly also warned the captain who was given command of this little fleet not to attack unless the Corinthians actually landed in Corcyra, or threatened Corcyra’s own ships.22
The Corinthian ships, arriving, sailed directly into the ships that Corcyra had massed to meet them. The Athenian captain, trying to follow his orders, held back until the Corinthian ships had driven the Corcyreans well back and were pressing forwards, inflicting casualties. In Thucydides’s words, they “butchered” the men “as they sailed through, not caring so much to make prisoners.”23
At this, the Athenian ships not only joined the battle, but summoned reinforcements. Now Athens was at war with Corinth, and Corinth was an ally of Sparta. The Thirty Years’ Peace had ended.
This sea engagement, the Battle of Sybota, was the first in a string of minor battles over the next year and a half. In 431, the string ended when the city of Thebes (a Spartan ally) attacked Plataea, the city in Boeotia which had been the site of the famous battle with the Persians and which was now under Athenian protection. This was the first attack to threaten a city’s actual walls, and Thucydides says that this “overt act” finally broke the treaty beyond repair. “Athens at once prepared for war,” he writes, “as did Sparta and her allies.”18424
The Spartans whipped themselves up into fighting frenzy (“The Athenians aspire to rule the rest of the world!”) and established their front line on the isthmus, ready to march into Attica. Athens made a hasty alliance with the king of Macedonia, Amyntas’s grandson Perdikkas II, and Pericles ordered the country folk of Attica to come inside the walls of Athens for protection. When the first Athenians died in battle, Pericles gave a funeral oration to honor them, a speech in which he listed the superiorities of Athenian civilization: Athenian freedom, Athenian education (which gives its men “knowledge without effeminacy”), the ongoing Athenian war against poverty, the ability of its citizens to understand public matters. He ended with a patriotic call unlike any in history so far: “You must yourselves realize the power of Athens,” he told them. “Feed your eyes on her from day by day till love of her fills your hearts; and then, when all her greatness shall break upon you, you must reflect that it was by courage, sense of duty, and a keen feeling of honor in action that men were enabled to win all this.”25 It was a call for loyalty not to a king, but to a concept; to identify themselves as Athenians, based not on race, but on a willing and voluntary association with an idea.
It was a stirring call, but most Athenians who died in the first two years of the Peloponnesian War met a less glorious, less patriotic death. In 430, plague struck Athens.
Thucydides himself, living in the city, survived it and gives an account:
…[P]eople in good health were all of a sudden attacked by violent heats in the head, and redness and inflammation in the eyes, the inward parts, such as the throat or tongue, becoming bloody and emitting an unnatural and fetid breath. These symptoms were followed by sneezing and hoarseness, after which the pain soon reached the chest, and produced a hard cough…. Externally the body was…reddish, livid, and breaking out into small pustules and ulcers…. [T]hey succumbed, as in most cases, on the seventh or eighth day, to the internal inflammation…. But if they passed this stage, and the disease descended further into the bowels, inducing a violent ulceration there accompanied by severe diarrhea, this brought on a weakness which was generally fatal….[T]he disorder…settled in the privy parts, the fingers and the toes, and many escaped with the loss of these, some too with that of their eyes.26
Quite apart from the loss of able-bodied fighting men (“They died like sheep”), this was an unbearable blow to a city already apprehensive about its future. “By far the most terrible feature in the malady was the dejection which ensued when anyone felt himself sickening,” Thucydides says, “for the despair into which they instantly fell took away their power of resistance, and left them a much easier prey to the disorder.”27
The despair was worsened by the grim condition of the city. The residents of the Attica countryside were still making for the shelter of Athens. But when they arrived, the makeshift shelters built for them along the inside of the walls proved to be death pits: “stifling cabins where the mortality raged without restraint. The bodies of dying men lay one upon another…the sacred places also in which they had quartered themselves were full of corpses of persons that had died there.”28 Bodies burned in huge heaps at all hours of the day and night; petty thieves had free range through deserted households; no one bothered to sacrifice or observe any rituals. The distance between sacred and profane had been reduced by the need of survival.185 Among the victims was Pericles, the great Athenian general, on whom the city had been depending.
The war, begun badly, continued to go badly. Thucydides, once recovered, was put in command of an Athenian force charged with protecting Thrace, but his soldiers were driven into retreat, and Thucydides was sent into exile as punishment. Greek ships, preoccupied at home, were unable to come to the aid of the Greek cities on the Italian peninsula when tribes from the Apennines (pushed, perhaps, by the Celtic waves from the north) came down from the slopes and attacked them. The Greek settlers were driven out; the Greek presence in the Italian peninsula almost disappeared.
THE GREEKS, tearing each other to shreds, were mostly ignoring the imperial power to the east. In 424, Artaxerxes died an obscure death after a fairly uninteresting reign. His wife died on the same day (we have no details, but it’s a suspicious coincidence), and their one son, Xerxes II, reigned for a total of forty-five days. According to Ctesias (who, granted, generally puts the most interesting spin possible on Persian royal affairs), Xerxes II drank himself insensible one night, and while snoring in his bed was murdered by an illegitimate half-brother who then proclaimed himself king. This half-brother was violent, short-tempered, and unpopular. Messages must have gone out frantically from the household to the only possible rival to the throne: another illegitimate half-brother, who was married to his own illegitimate half-sister but at least was an experienced administrator who had been running a satrapy for some time in a competent manner.
This half-brother, Ochus, was also was on friendly terms with the satrap of Egypt, who sent him troops. He marched into Susa, caught the usurper, and had him put to death. He himself took the throne, giving himself a proper royal name to replace his bastard’s name: Darius II.29 His reign began near the end of the year 424, in which both his father and his half-brother had died: a year in which the Persian empire had had three different Great Kings.
BY 421, the Athenians and the Spartans found themselves back in the same position that they had been in back when the Thirty Years’ Peace was sworn: losing soldiers constantly, facing famine if regular planting and harvesting didn’t resume soon, neither of them with any hope of decisive victory. They agreed once more to a peace, known as the Peace of Nicias, after the Athenian leader who helped negotiate it.
The peace lasted for six years. Nicias’s colleague in Athenian government, Alcibiades, was not inclined to let a peace go on for long; he wanted fame.
Alcibiades was a hard-drinking, extravagant man whose reputation for beauty outlasted his youth, an affected libertine who carried on affairs with both sexes: “[He] minces along with his cloak trailing behind him, tilts his head to one side and speaks with a pronounced lisp,” Plutarch observes.30 He was also driven by an obsessive need for public acclaim, which made him a bad match for the times. Athens needed to rebuild its strength and ignore Sparta, but Alcibiades knew that there was no glory for him in that. In 415, he seized an opportunity to play hero.
A Greek settlement on Sicily, called Egesta, asked the Athenian navy for support against two other Greek cities in Sicily, the cities of Selinus and Syracuse. Syrac
use, originally a Corinthian colony, was one of the wealthiest Greek cities west of the Adriatic, and had kept its ties with the mother city. If the Athenians sailed to the aid of Egesta, they could replay the fight with Corinth and, perhaps, triumph.
65.2 The War on Sicily
Alcibiades convinced the Athenians to throw a huge fleet at this distant and pointless target: 25,000 soldiers, over 130 triremes, and an equal number of boats carrying supplies.31 A prank just before the fleet embarked (someone defaced a whole series of sacred images at the end of a long drunken evening) almost kept it on the shores, since many Athenians thought this to be a bad omen. But finally the ships were given their send-off and sailed towards Sicily, into total disaster.
Alcibiades and Nicias were in charge, along with a third experienced general. Almost at once, the three leaders quarrelled over when and how to attack. Then they received a message from Athens: Alcibiades was suspected of defacing those sacred images (he was probably guilty of this childish vandalism), and the Athenians had decided to haul him back to Athens to face trial.
No good ever came of such a summons, so Alcibiades took a ship and deserted the fleet. He sailed to Sparta, where he switched sides and offered to help the Spartans bring an end to their troubles with Athens once and for all. If he couldn’t get fame in one way, he’d try another.
Back off the shores of Sicily, Nicias—who was not a decisive man, although a good peacemaker—delayed and deliberated until the Syracusans had collected a force of their own, including reinforcements from their allies in the Peloponnesian League. By then it was too late to win, even though the Athenians had managed to convince the Etruscans to join them.32 Nicias wrote back to Athens, begging to be allowed to withdraw; given the size of the Syracusan opposition, he said, only a force twice as large as the one he currently commanded could win.
The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome Page 56