The organization of the mainland Greeks into cities inaugurated a period of stability, wealth, further population expansion, and social and economic experimentation which made of Greece a great force in the Mediterranean. Greek traders and colonists ranged over the entire Mediterranean basin in the late seventh century BC, spreading westward to Sicily, southern Italy, France and Spain; eastward to Asia Minor; southward to North Africa in the areas not already claimed by the Phoenicians; and northward to the Black Sea. Trade with the colonies allowed many of the cities in Hellas to transform themselves into manufacturing centers or to concentrate on the development of specialized crops such as the grape and the olive, products that could be traded for grain, minerals, and furs with the colonial frontiersmen.
Professor Arnold J. Toynbee has suggested that Greek expansion during this period was made easier by the fact that the great powers of the eastern Mediterranean were temporarily distracted by a contest between Assyria and Persia for control of the entire Fertile Crescent, a contest that had affected Phoenician shipping adversely and had, therefore, led to the decline of Carthage for the moment. When the Persians finally triumphed over Assyria, Toynbee suggests, Greek expansion eastward was halted.
At the same time, in the middle of the sixth century, an alliance between Carthage in North Africa and the Etruscans in central Italy cut off the western Greeks from their homeland. But the original period of intense economic activity and expansion had already caused radical changes in Greek life on the mainland. The population of Greece continued to grow, causing land-hunger, inflation, and depression of the peasantry and those parts of the aristocracy dependent upon the wealth produced by landed holdings, but, at the same time, sudden prosperity for the manufacturer and trader. This situation generated feelings of resentment between the agricultural and commercial sectors of the population, and revolutions soon rocked the Greek city states. Sparta was not affected by these pressures, but Athens was; her responses to them set the course of her history for the next two hundred years.
Sometime in the eighth century BC, the Spartans had determined to meet the challenge of land-hunger, not by trade and colonization, like the Athenians, but by expansion at the expense of their neighbors, the Messenians. They conquered the land of Messenia, subjugated the population, and tied them to the land as serfs (helots) of the Spartan state. In order to maintain their control over the helots, however, the Spartan citizens had to subject themselves to the harshest kind of political and military discipline. Male Spartans were trained for war from the age of seven and they lived their lives as keepers of an armed citadel in the midst of a hostile and potentially rebellious alien population ln return for the lands they had appropriated from the Messenians, the Spartans had to surrender their own individual liberties. They channeled all of their energies into the maintenance of their state. This gave them an exceptional stability, but it was the stability of the barracks -and as little creative. They did not have face the pressures the Athenians faced in the sixth century BC, but neither did they enjoy the period of creativity that those pressures induced in the Athenian populace.
The pressures of class struggle in Athens caused the temporary abrogation of Solon's reforms. For a while full power was exercised by popular leaders from the depressed aristocracy supported by the disgruntled peasantry. Yet in Athens the rule of a number of tyrants--of whom Pisistratus (561-527) is an example which did not result in permanent dictatorship. Pisistratus used his popularity with the masses to effect political reforms that ultimately completed the work begun by Solon. Under his leadership Athens was transformed into a limited democracy. Increasingly power was vested in the economically self-sufficient sectors of the population, but the poorer citizens were not denied a voice in civic affairs. By 508 BC ' his successor Cleisthenes had completed this work of transforming athens from a chaotic jumble of conflicting factions into an integrated political unit.
Cleisthenes divided Attica into ten local divisions, composed alike of aristocrats, artisans and traders, and peasants. These were used as a basis for voting on all political and military affairs and discouraged the division of the populace along class lines. Next, he founded the Council of the Five Hundred as the chief organ of government. The council prepared the business of the Popular Assembly in which every citizen had a voice and a vote. He also reformed the courts to guarantee justice to every Citizen and to secure to the individual his right of testament' which finally cut the cords that bound the individual to the family Finally, he placed the army, composed of free citizens rather than of slaves or mercenaries, under the direction of ten generals democratically elected, one from each ward. By the time of cleisthenes' death. the Athenian government was in good working order. Athens was ready to resume her expansionist policies and to contend with the mighty Persian Empire itself if necessity required.
The Greeks did not appear to their contemporaries as a puny And inconsequential people upon whom the mighty Persians fell in the hope of an easy victory. By the beginning of the sixth century BC the Greek commercial network was potentially as powerful as any other force in the Mediterranean, even if it lacked a single political center or a unified economic purpose. lt might even be argued that it was the Greeks who pressed the Persians into war and continued the offensive long after the Persians had sought to withdraw from the contest for control of the Aegean and Black seas. nor was the Greek Offensive limited to the eastern Mediterranean. At about the same time that the Ionian Greeks, supported by mainland cities such as )athens, decided to rebel against their Persian overlords in the east, the western Greeks on Sicily, under the leadership of Syracuse, came into conflict with the Carthaginians and Etruscans. The Greeks appeared to be making their bid for total hegemony in the Mediterranean against the most powerful heirs of the great civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, which had dominated the area for over a thousand years.
The Greeks almost succeeded in uniting the Mediterranean world in a single great system, as the Romans actually succeeded in doing four centuries later. their failure was more a result of flaws intrinsic to Greek political values than of the strength and inventiveness of their enemies' the Greek cities of j Ionia had been subdued by the r Persians in the late sixth century as part of a general plan to secure the northern and western) frontiers of the empire against possible barbarian invasion from the falka rs fhe Persian conquest of western Asia Minor threatened the trade of the Greeks with their colonies on the Black Sea and gave cities such as Miletus good reason to promote rebellion among the Persians.
By 494 BC the Ionian city of Miletus, which had rebelled against Persian rule was subdued and its population deported. The Persian king Darius then moved aqainst the Greeks on the mainland, banking not only on his superior force but also on the divisions among the Greek cities. When the Persian invasion was finally launched in 490 BC , Greek resistance was organized with only indifferent success at first. Nevertheless, an Athenian army under the command of Miltiades met the Persian force at h Marathon and repulsed it with extremely heavy losses .
A period of ten years ' restive peace followed' owing to the death of Darius and the necessity of his successor, Xerxes, to put down revolts against Persian rule in Babylonia and Egypt. When, in 480 BC ' a new Persian attack was mounted This time most of the Greek cities joined in the defense of Hellas, although Sparta sent only a small force and Thebes defected to the Persians--an augury of things to C()me. The Athenians, however, had discovered rich silver deposits in Attica; with this new wealth and their commercial resources' they were able to purchase both ships and allies for the second great encounter with their Persian foes.
When the Persian army descended upon Greece, the athenians evacuated most of the p(Population of their city to the nearby island of Salamis: although the city was sacked, a combined Greek fleet destroyed the Persian navy at the battle of Salamis (4 )0 BC) and saved the Athenian population from destruction. In 479 BC the Persian army, which had wintered in northern Greece, attacked once more. This time the (Athenians were joined by the Spartans in two great battles, a land engagement at Plataea and a naval engagement at Mycale, the r persians were hurled back, and Greece was freed from further Persian pressures fOr over a half-century.
The Ionian cities now rose against their Persian masters and drove them from most of the coastal towns . Simultaneously, the Syracusans defeated the Carthaginians in a great battle at Himera (480 BC) in Sicily. The way was now open once More for expansion westward nothing seemed to stand in the way of the unification of the entire Mediterranean under Greek rule. Unfortunately' however, the unity that had been] maintained (with only the greatest difficulty) during the time of the Persian invasion could not withstand the new pressures of peace and prosperity.
The vast wealth the Greek cities now enjoyed, combined with the sense of unlimited potential for expansion that now seized them, resulted in a renewed period of growth and experimentation, which lasted until 431 BC . Many Greeks concluded that the new ideals and institutions that they had fashioned in the sixth century and that had become incarnated in the Dglig had withstood the severest test of all, contest with the mighty Persian Empire. Some of the leaders of the city-states, such as Pericles of Athens, faced the future with overriding self confidence and the belief that man, now released from the trammels of convention, superstition, and tradition' could surmount any challenge presented to him. The Greeks had taken it upon themselves to form a social universe of order and justice on their own. They had succeeded; and they had overcome the threat of the .'tyrannical'' East. They expressed this new Self-confidence and faith in man in a literary ' artistic, and intellectual activity that made of the FIFTH Century one of the greatest periods in world civilization--duplicated by the Italians two thousand years later during the Renaissance.
Unfortunately, however, the 'expansion in the range of their economic activity and their cultural vision was not accompanied by a commensurate expansion of their political perception. They remained wedded to the philosophy of political particularism. In the end' therefore the egocentrism of the city-state triumphed over the potentiality for Creating a world empire that their economic and intellectual inventiveness offered.
The high enthusiasm of the post-Persian War period soon disintegrated into petty bickering among the victors, the creation of alliance systems for confiscating the spoils of the victory' and internecine strife, which weakened all of the cities of Greece. Persia profited from this division among the Greeks to consolidate her hegemony in the southeastern Mediterranean and looked forward to the time when she could return to Greece to redeem the honor lost in the Persian Wars.
Athens sought to claim the leadership of all Hellas in the years immediately following the Persian wars. Many Greek cities, inspired by Athens' example, expelled tyrants and established democracies of the Athenian type. Moreover, fear of possible Persian reprisals led many of these cities to unite behind Athens in a defensive alliance, the Delian League (478-454 BC), to which every member contributed money or ships to be disposed by Athens in the common interest.
But as the Persian threat diminished, many of the original members of the League sought to withdraw from it. Athens opposed these attempts, for Athenian statesmen recognized that any weakening of the League must weaken Athenian power in the Aegean and Black seas. Within two decades, Athens had begun to turn the resources of the League to her own purposes, on one occasion even employing the fleet to support an Athenian expeditionary force against the naval powers of the southeastern Mediterranean (459 BC). In 454 BC the Athenians removed the treasury of the League from the island of Delos to Athens and assumed the right to determine autocratically the uses to which the common funds were to be put. For example, Pericles used the League's funds to rebuild Athens in a style appropriate to the capital of a great and expanding empire. At the same time the rules of League membership were changed to Athens' advantage. For example members were compelled to send money rather than ships or men and to allow Athens to provide out of her own industrial might and manpower the ships and sailors needed to man the fleet.
These changes naturally resulted in feelings of resentment against Athens, especially in those cities whose main interest lay in trade with Italy and Sicily, where the Persian threat was virtually nonexistent, and in Ionia, which, prohibited by Athens from trading with Persia, was suffering from her protectors even more than she had at the hands of her persecutors. Therefore, many of the members of the League began to look to Sparta, the only independent major power on the mainland, for aid and protection. They tried to convince the Spartans that in the long run the Athenians were every bit as dangerous to Greek freedom and prosperity as the Persians had once been.
Sparta, however, had been hit very hard by earthquakes shortly after the close of the Persian Wars (464 BC) . This disaster had been followed by a rebellion of the helot population (464-460). The Spartans had more than enough to do to maintain internal security, and they preferred to remain uninvolved in anything that did not directly affect the state of affairs in the Peloponnesian sub peninsula . By 431 BC ' however, the Spartans realized that isolation was no longer possible -that Athenian growth must ultimately threaten Spartan hegemOny in the Peloponnese.
The athenian thrust towards Palestine and Egypt, led by Pericles and financed by funds drawn from the treasury of the Delian League, had failed. now the =athenians turned envious eyes toward the rich farmlands of their sister cities in Sicily. The expansion eastward having been stopped, Pericles seems to have cOntemplated an expansion westward. Between )athens and Sicily, however, lay both Sparta and a number of cities on the northwestern coast (Of the Greek mainland that were either independent and desired to remain so or were tied by close bonds to Athens' commercial rivals, and especially to Corinth.