Athens Builds an Empire

      The Greeks repulsed the mighty Persian invasion of 480-479 BCE and took a small piece of land along the coast of Asia Minor from Persia's huge empire. As the Persians were expected to attack again, at least to recover their lost territory, the Greeks discussed a permanent alliance to continue fighting them. Sparta refused to participate in affairs outside the Peloponnese, and so Athens needed a strong fleet and leaders with vision. Aristeides, acting for Athens, helped organize the Dalian League to defend the Greek states should Persia attack again. Each state signed a defense treaty with Athens and agreed to pay an annual tribute toward maintaining a common fleet. Aristeides was the first to calculate how much tribute each member of the League should pay, and his fairness earned him the name, "Aristeides the Just." Athens provided all the officials and commanders of the League, and swore not to interfere in the internal affairs of its allies. The treasury and meetings were held at the great sanctuary of Apollo on the island of Delos, hence the name Delian League.
      This League was originally a voluntary association but soon became a forced union. some states that did not want to join were compelled to enter the alliance while others that wanted to drop out when the Persian threat receded were forced to remain and pay their share. Kimon, the son of Miltiades, who won the  Battle of Marathon, moulded the League into an effective force to fight the Persians. As the fleet's commander, Kimon beat the Persians decisively in 467 BCE to keep them from any further attacks in the Aegean Sea. After this success, the League, led by young Pericles of Athens, felt strong enough to try to free te Greeks on the island of Cyprus and help in a new revolt against the Persians in Egypt. The Egyptian expedition ca. 450 BCE turned into a catastrophe when a Persian force trapped the Greek fleet in one branch of the Nile River and wiped it out. Fearing a Persian reprisal by sea, in 454 BCE, Pericles moved the League's treasury from the island of Delos back to Athens. This was taken as final proof that the League had now become an empire controlled by Athens.

Pericles and Democracy

      The city of Athens, just one of more than 300 Greek city-states, enjoyed its greatest period of wealthy and power -- 30 years -- under the guidance of Pericles. To us today, the term democracy means an opportunity to elect politicians who share our views and to voice opinions through the media and public meetings. in the Athens of Pericles's day, democracy meant far more. Every citizen could speak and vote on every piece of legislation in the Assembly. Every citizen had an equal chance to hold public office, with the exception of offices such as army general, which were elected positions. All law cases were decided by majority vote of citizen juries of between 201 and 1501 people. The law and the government were firmly in the hands of the citizens. Pericles proclaimed, "We judge the man who takes no part at all [in public affairs] a useless, not just a quiet person."
      Pericles himself was elected annually to the Board of Generals in Athens and so maintained his leading position in the city. Te other civic offices, even the archonships, were only one-year positions and candidates were selected by lottery from a list proposed by the tribes. The introduction of pay for serving on the Council of 500, on juries, and in the various civic offices, allowed even the poorest citizen to take time away from his work. Paid civil service was a radical departure from the earlier system for government.
      In his funeral oration for the Athenian dead at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, Pericles declared:

Our constitution is called a democracy, because power is in the hands not of a minority but of the whole people. When it is a question of settling private disputes, everyone is equal before the law; when it is a question of putting one person before another in positions of public responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class, but the actual ability which a man possesses. No one, so long as he has it in him to be of service to the state, is kept in political obscurity because of poverty.  

Thucydides The Peloponnesian War 11.37

      There were far more opportunities for citizens to participate in political affairs in ancient Athens than in our modern democracies. There was no pay for attending the Assembly until the fourth century BCE, s at this time many poor people could not afford to attend. Women, slaves, and foreign residents could still not hold citizenship, and Pericles himself introduced a law that limited citizenship to only those men whose parents had been born of citizen fathers.

Rivalry between Sparta and Athens

      While he held office as general, Kimon had acted to defuse the long-standing rivalry between Sparta and Athens, the two main powers in Greece. Things had changed when Sparta asked Athens for help during a dangerous Helot revolt in 462 BCE, Kimon convinced  the Athenians to send soldiers to help Sparta, but when they arrived, Sparta refused their help and sent the Athenians home. This insult led to Kimon's ostracism the following  year, and the quick rise of Pericles to political prominence.
      During the 450s BCE, under the leadership of Pericles, Athens tried to build a land empire in central Greece that truly was a threat to Sparta's traditional power base, although it did not last long, the attempt by Athens increased tensions between the two states. To try to ease the increasingly bitter rivalry, Athens and Sparta signed a 30-year peace treaty in 445 BCE, agreeing to stay out of each other's internal affairs. Sparta still led the Peloponnesian League, which included some members or allies in central Greece, while Athens held tight rein on the many coastal and island states of her empire in the Aegean. Despite the peace treaty, the rivalry between Athens and Sparta continued, leading them into all-out war.
      There were basic differences between Sparta and Athens. Sparta was a land power, with a conservative oligarchic government, backward in terms of trade, wealthy, and recent advances in Greek culture such as rhetoric, philosophy, and literature. it sought leadership among Greek states simply in order to protect itself and its narrow interests, rather than out of a desire for wealthy, power, or expansion. Athens was the opposite. A sea power governed by a radical democracy, Athens was at the forefront of advances in culture. It was a progressive, wealthy, trading nation. Athens maintained and tried to expand its empire for the sake of the power and income it provided. These differences lone caused suspicion and dislike between the two states, but it was the other states, especially Corinth, that finally pushed the two toward war.
   

Writing: ECHOES from the past published by McGraw-Hill Ryderson Ltd.