Chapter IV: AGE OF PERICLES AND GREEK LUXURY.--This period includes the

portion from the close of the Persian war to the Supremacy of
Philip, B. C. 337. At the beginning of this period the general
affairs of Greece were in a highly prosperous condition, and Athens
was unrivaled in wealth and magnificence under the influence of
Pericles. But a spirit of luxurious refinement soon took the place
of the disinterested patriotism of the preceding age, and the
manners of all classes became signally marked by corruption and
licentiousness. The events of most prominent interest were: (1) the
Peloponnesian war between Athens and Sparta; (2) the accusation of
Socrates, disgraceful to the city and all concerned; (3) the
expedition of Cyrus the Younger which involved the Greeks in another
war with Persia; (4) the successive downfall of Athens, Sparta and
Thebes, and the rise of Macedon.

The half-century following the battle of Salamis (480-430 B. C.) forms the most brilliant period of Athenian history, and one of the greatest eras in the history of the world.

ATHENS UNDER CIMON

After the fall of the great Athenian Themistocles,--who was banished by ostracism in 469 B. C., at the instance of the aristocratic party,--the rich, able, and popular Cimon, son of Miltiades, the victor at Marathon, was at the head of affairs. In 466 B. C. he gained a great victory, by land and sea, over the Persians, at the mouth of the river Eurymedon, in Pamphylia, on the south coast of Asia Minor. A part of the value of the plunder taken was devoted to the adornment of the city of Athens, which Themistocles had rebuilt and fortified. Cimon spent large sums of his own on the city, and under his direction the defenses of the famous Acropolis (the citadel of Athens) were completed. In 461 B. C. the democratic party at Athens banished Cimon by the ostracism, and the illustrious Pericles, for some years his rival, came to the front.

PERICLES AND HIS GREAT ACHIEVEMENTS

Pericles began to be distinguished in Athenian politics about 470 B. C. as leader of the democratic party.

In the constitution of Athens a wide scope was given for the development of great political characters, because the system not only allowed the display of a man’s powers, but summoned every man to use those powers for the general welfare. At the same time, no member of the community could obtain influence unless he had the means of satisfying the intellect, taste, and judgment, as well as the excitable and volatile feelings, of a highly cultivated people.

Such a man was Pericles. From the force of his personality, and his majestic oratory, he was called “the Zeus of the human Pantheon of Athens.” For over thirty years (461 to 429 B. C.) this great man swayed the policy of Athens. Pericles was at once a statesman, a general, a man of learning, and a patron of the fine arts. He recovered for Athens (445 B. C.) the revolted island of Eubœa; he was the friend of the famous sculptor Phidias, and in his age the great dramatic compositions of Sophocles were presented on the Athenian stage. To him Athens owed the Parthenon, the Erechtheum, left unfinished at his death, the Propylæa, the Odeum, and numberless other public and sacred edifices; he also liberally encouraged music and the drama; and during his rule industry and commerce were in so flourishing a condition that prosperity was universal in Attica.

THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR

The supremacy over the other states of Greece which Athens attained after the Persian War, and maintained during the Age of Pericles, with her constant prosperity and unparalleled growth, raised up jealousy and hatred against her, and during that brilliant period were sown the seeds of a civil warfare which was destined to destroy the power and splendor of Greece. After the death of Pericles, Athens had trusted to unworthy demagogues, of whom the most notorious was Cleon.

The other leading state of Greece was Sparta, and there was a general gravitation in the different cities to these two centers of Grecian life, those in which democratic sentiments prevailed looking to Athens for leadership, the rest (those in which the aristocratic or oligarchical element prevailed) regarding themselves as the natural allies of Sparta. The conflict between these two opposing principles, democracy and oligarchy, broke out in 431 B. C., and is known as the Peloponnesian War. Athens was the stronger by sea, Sparta by land.

Propylæa, or Porch.

Nike Apteros.

Parthenon, or Temple of Athena Parthenos.

=THE ACROPOLIS OF ATHENS AS IT APPEARED DURING THE AGE OF PERICLES=

Pericles, with the sculptor Phidias, covered the Acropolis with a mass of beautiful buildings, making it the glory of Athens, if not of the whole ancient world. No finer structure has ever been known than the Parthenon. It is to be seen on the highest point of the Acropolis, on the right hand of the picture.]

CHIEF LEADERS IN THE WAR

The chief generals on the Athenian side were Demosthenes (not the great orator of a later time) and Nicias; the Spartan chief was the famous Brasidas, who had much success against the Athenian colonies on the coast of Thrace. The brilliant Alcibiades began to display his powers as a statesman at Athens. In 422 B. C. a battle near Amphipolis, on the coast of Thrace, ended in the defeat of the Athenians, and the deaths of Cleon and of Brasidas, the latter an irreparable loss to Sparta. In the place of Cleon, the mild Nicias became one of the leading statesmen at Athens, and his efforts resulted in a truce between Athens and Sparta, in 421 B. C.

SECOND PERIOD OF WAR

Questions as to keeping the truce, and the mutual distrust and jealousy between these states increased their antagonism. Athens, now mistress of the sea, had the ambition, under the incitement of the great Alcibiades, to acquire complete sway in the Mediterranean.

Perhaps the most important and decisive event of the war was an attack made (415 B. C.) by Athens upon Syracuse in Sicily, when the Spartans helped the Syracusans, and which resulted in the total failure of the expedition (413 B. C.), and great damage to the power of Athens. The Athenians had sent a more powerful armament against Sicily than had ever before been turned out in the history of Greece. The consequences of the defeat of this force were felt all over Greece, the enemies of Athens were stimulated to much greater activity, and thought that the fate of that city was sealed.

THIRD AND LAST PERIOD

Henceforward Athens could only fight for her life as an independent state. In 412 B. C. many of her subject states revolted, including the wealthy Miletus, on the coast of Asia Minor, and the islands of Chios and Rhodes. Sparta formed an alliance with Persia, and used Eastern gold to furnish ships and mercenaries against Athens. Alcibiades, having quarreled with the Spartans, rejoined his country, and conducted her war, in some of its closing years, with brilliant success. In 411 B. C. a revolution took place in Athens which really swept away the democratic constitution of Solon, and substituted an oligarchical faction in power.

DOWNFALL OF ATHENS

The war was chiefly carried on in Asia Minor, where Alcibiades and others defeated the Spartans and their allies by land and sea; but in 405 B. C. the tide of success for Athens turned again, and the Athenian fleet was captured by the Spartan admiral Lysander, at Ægospotami, in the Hellespont, the Athenian galleys being seized, by surprise, on the beach. In 404 B. C. Athens, blockaded by the Spartans both by land and sea, surrendered to Lysander after a four months’ siege, and the war ended in the downfall of Athens, and the formal abolition of the great Athenian democracy.

RESULT OF PELOPONNESIAN WAR

Henceforward Athens was a subordinate power. Sparta was, for a time, supreme; a Spartan garrison held the Acropolis; Alcibiades, who might have restored Athens, was assassinated in Persia through the influence of Lysander; and though, after a brief period of rule by the Thirty Tyrants, set up by Lysander, a counter-revolution restored, in part, the constitution of Solon, the political greatness of Athens had departed.

Even the disastrous Peloponnesian War, which lasted twenty-seven years, did not destroy the impulse given to the Greek intellect during the preceding age, and literature, oratory, and philosophy flourished.

SOCRATES AND THE SHAME OF ATHENS

Socrates, the great and good Athenian philosopher, lived (469-399 B. C.) during a period covering much of the age of Pericles, and the whole time of the Peloponnesian war. Though opposed to the oligarchical tyranny of the Four Hundred and the Thirty, Socrates was even more adverse to the unmixed democracy, with its election by lot and its payment for political services. Accordingly, on the triumph of the demagogues, he was in 399 B. C. accused of denying the gods and corrupting the young, and being convicted by an overwhelming majority of the jury, was sentenced to death. He passed thirty days before execution in the noble discourses on the immortality of the soul, which are recorded in Plato’s Phædo, drank the cup of hemlock, and died.

SUPREMACY OF SPARTA AND THEBES

Sparta was now at the head of Greece, and for thirty-four years (405-371 B. C.) wielded power over the Greek states. Her sway was harsh and despotic.

RETREAT OF THE TEN THOUSAND

After the Peloponnesian War, some of the Greeks were hired by Cyrus, the Persian prince, to help him in an attempt to wrest the Persian throne from his brother Artaxerxes. The attempt failed, and the memorable retreat (400 B. C.) homeward of the Greeks is famous as the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand.”

THE RISE OF MACEDONIA

Macedonia, north of Thessaly, was not considered by the Hellenes as a part of Hellas, and had no political importance till now. Yet the peoples had elements in common, being Thracians and Illyrians, with a large mixture of Dorian settlers among them.

KING PHILIP OF MACEDON

The line of Macedonian kings being of Hellenic descent, Greek civilization had been cultivated by some of them.

Philip of Macedon was a prince of great ability, educated at Thebes during the Theban supremacy, and trained in war by Epaminondas, on whose tactics he founded his famous invention, the “Macedonian phalanx.” His fame has been overshadowed by that of his illustrious son, but he made Macedonia the leading power in Greece, and gave Alexander the basis for his great achievements. He was a man of unscrupulous character, determined will, prompt action, and patient purpose; and when he became King of Macedon, in 359 B. C., he designed making his country supreme in the Hellenic world, as Athens, Sparta and Thebes had successively been.

THE FIRST SACRED WAR

From 356 B. C. to 346 B. C. the Phocian or First Sacred War was waged between the Thebans and the Phocians, with allies on each side, the origin of the war being a dispute about a bit of ground devoted for religious reasons to lying perpetually fallow. Philip of Macedon was called in to settle matters, and thereby his ambition secured a firm foothold in Greece. He possessed himself by force of the Athenian cities Amphipolis, Pydna, Potidæa, and Olynthus, being vigorously opposed throughout by the great Athenian orator and patriot Demosthenes, who strove to rouse his countrymen against Philip’s dangerous encroachments, in the famous speeches known as the Olynthiac and Philippic orations.

THE GREATEST PERIOD OF GREEK ORATORY

This was the most brilliant time of Greek oratory, which reached its perfection in the contest between Æschines, who advocated the cause of Macedonia, and Demosthenes, who opposed the designs of Philip. It was also a period of great mental activity in the region of scientific inquiry and speculative thought. Plato, whose birth fell in the preceding century, founded the Academic school, which took its name from the groves of Academus in the vicinity of Athens, where the philosopher was accustomed to lecture. Aristotle (called the Stagyrite, from his birthplace, Stagyra, in Macedonia) was the instructor of Alexander the Great, and founded, at the Lyceum in Athens, what is known as the Peripatetic school, from his habit of walking about while conversing with his disciples.

After the battle of Chæronea, Philip, having made Greece subject to his power, planned to unite all the forces of that country in an aggressive war against the great power of Persia, but was murdered in 336 B. C.