The World

Pericles praised Athenian democracy, but it went hand in hand with a new sort of empire. Since Salamis, Sparta in the Peloponnese and Athens on the Aegean had been increasingly vicious rivals for hegemony over Greece, each building a league of allied cities. Pericles expanded the huge fleet that had defeated the Great King, creating the Delian League of tribute-paying cities, using the revenues to embellish the Acropolis with the Temple of Athena known as the Parthenon and to extend the city walls to enclose the Piraeus harbour: Athens was almost impregnable as long as grain arrived via the Black Sea, from Scythia (Ukraine was already the bread-basket of the eastern Mediterranean). By the 450s, Athens had developed such confidence – other Greeks would call it overweening arrogance – that it believed its democracy, empire and culture made it the natural leader of the civilized world. Yet it also led to the rise of slavery. Athenians disdained farm work and toil in the navy. Since the enslaved worked the farms, silver mines, triremes and households, they needed to be replenished in war: some were from Scythia but others must have been Greek.^* Athens’s thalassocracy placed the metropolis, the mother city, on a collision course with the land power Sparta. Love of its power – and fear of losing it – led Athens to bully smaller cities that defied it. The more powerful it became, the more Sparta feared and loathed it.

In 451 the Athenians again defeated the Persians in Cyprus. Finally King Artaxerxes agreed a truce with the Greeks – but the removal of the ancestral enemy undermined Hellenic solidarity and led to war with Sparta.

After Sparta had invaded Attica, Pericles bribed the Spartans to withdraw and negotiated a treaty. But the rivalry was exacerbated by clashes between smaller allies of the chief players. In 431, the Spartans dispatched an ultimatum: expel Pericles and the Alcmaeonids and halt Athens’s heavy-handed measures to enforce economic control – or fight! Pericles advocated war since it was inevitable and Athens was stronger and could win. The Spartans returned to Attica, but Pericles brought Attican farmers inside the city walls. ‘Remain quiet,’ he advised, ‘take care of the fleet, refrain from putting the city in danger,’ while he led raids against the Peloponnese. After the first year, he honoured Athenian dead in resounding if hubristic style. But within a year the very span of Athenian naval power rebounded on the city: an illness, a symptom of Afro-Eurasian trade networks though we do not know its origins, reached the metropolis through sailors. Life expectancy was already low: the mean age at death for men was forty-four, for women thirty-six; now this disease, probably a haemorrhagic fever, its symptoms ranging from fever and dysentery to vomiting and a bleeding throat, was exceedingly infectious and those who cared for the sick were the most likely to die. Some people, including an aristocrat and general, the thirty-year-old Thucydides, recovered and sensing that they were now immune (though immunity was not understood) they looked after the sick: later Thucydides wrote the history of all he had seen. A third of the city, 100,000 Athenians, died. Soon there were so many bodies that pyres were lit, on which random people would just throw loved ones. Pericles organized mass graves: one has been found containing 240 bodies with ten children.

The plague undermined confidence. ‘The catastrophe,’ wrote Thucydides, ‘was so overwhelming that men, not knowing what would happen to them next, became indifferent to every rule of religion or law,’ and it stretched the limits of early government, impairing the ability to feed the city and undermining its religious system that was designed to keep natural disasters at bay. The Spartans withdrew, a move which saved them: the plague did not hit the Laconian homeland. The disease respected no elites. Pericles was blamed, deposed as general and fined. Aspasia was denounced, and Pericles wept in public. But he was not out for long. Within months, the people recalled him, but his two legitimate sons died of the plague and he asked the Assembly to grant citizenship to his illegitimate son by Aspasia.

Then came the ultimate blow.

ALCIBIADES AND SOCRATES

Pericles himself contracted the plague.

Already dying, in a last speech he declared that the role of the statesman is ‘to know what must be done and be able to explain it; to love one’s country and be incorruptible’. He died disappointed but claiming, ‘I have never caused an Athenian to put on mourning clothes.’ The plague eased, but a second wave hit in 426 BC, three years after Pericles’ death. Athens took the war to the Peloponnese, fostering a helot revolt, while Sparta captured the silver mines that funded Athens. In 421, both sides agreed to a truce, by which time another extraordinary leader had emerged from the Alcmaeonids.