Athenian Empire in the Golden Age

The struggle against the Persian invasion had occasioned a rare interval of inter-state cooperation in ancient Greek history. The two most powerful city-states, Athens and Sparta , had put aside their mutual suspicions stemming from their clash at the time of Cleisthenes' reforms¹ in order to share the leadership of the united Greek military forces. Their attempt to continue this cooperation after the repulse of the Persians, however, ended in failure. Out of this failure arose the so-called Athenian Empire, a modern label invented to point out the political and economic dominance Athens came to exercise over other Greek states in an alliance originally set up as a voluntary association of its members against Persia.

The Establishment of an Athenian Empire

The victorious Greeks decided in 478 B.C. to continue a naval alliance in order to attack the Persian outposts that still existed in far northern Greece and western Anatolia, especially Ionia. The Spartans naturally assumed leadership of this alliance, continuing the position that they had held at the had of the Greek coalition formed to resist the invasion of Xerxes. The conduct of the Spartan commander, Pausanias², soon caused disaffection among the Greek allies, however, and Athens soon took over the position of hegemon (leader by consensus) of the alliance. This change in leadership marked the beginning of the establishment of what would become an Athenian Empire.

The Misconduct of Pausanias the Spartan

The Spartan Pausanias, victor of the battle of Plataea, was chosen to lead the first expedition of the naval alliance against the remaining Persian outposts in Greek territory. His arrogant and violent behavior³, especially toward women, quickly led to dissatisfaction with Spartan leadership among the Greek allies. This kind of outrageous conduct was to prove common in the future for Spartan men in positions of power when away from home. Their regimented training in Sparta apparently left them ill prepared to operate humanely and effectively once they had escaped from the constraints imposed by their austere way of life as “ Equals⁴”, as Spartan adult male citizens were called, always under scrutiny by one another in their homeland. Spartan kings, too, who grew up under a freer regimen than did ordinary Spartan men, tended to lose sight of the Spartan tradition of austerity and just behavior when they campaigned abroad for long periods. Not even they were immune to the corrupting influence of the desire for luxury, which the austere life of Spartans at home in Sparta excluded as a matter of principle and law.

Spartan Approval of Athenian Leadership

By 477 B.C., the Athenian aristocrat Aristides⁵ (c. 525-465 B.C.) had successfully persuaded the other Greeks to request Athenian leadership⁶ of the continuing naval alliance against the Persians. The leaders at Sparta were happy to cede their position⁷ at the head of the alliance because, in the words of the Athenian historian Thucydides (c. 460-400 B.C.), “they were afraid any other commanders they sent abroad would be corrupted, as Pausanias had been, and they were glad to be relieved of the burden of fighting the Persians.... Besides, at the time they still thought of the Athenians as friendly allies.”⁸ It could be added that Sparta's ongoing need to keep its army at home most of the time to guard against helot revolts⁹ also made prolonged overseas operations difficult to maintain.

A Permanent Structure for the Alliance

Under Athenian direction, the Greek alliance against Persia took on a permanent organizational structure¹⁰. Member states swore a solemn oath never to desert the coalition. The members were predominately located in northern Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and along the western coast of Anatolia—that is, in the areas most exposed to Persian attack. Most of the independent city-states of the Peloponnese, on the other hand, remained in their traditional alliance with the Spartans. This alliance of Sparta and its allies, which modern historians refer to as the Peloponnesian League, had an assembly to set policy, but no action could be taken unless the Spartan leaders agreed to it. The alliance headed by Athens also had an assembly of representatives to make policy. Its structure was supposed to allow participation by all its members.¹¹

The Finances of the Alliance (Delian League)

The Athenian representatives came to dominate this erstwhile democracy, however, as a result of the special arrangements made to finance the alliance's naval operations. Aristides set the different levels of payments¹² the various member states were to pay each year, based on their size and prosperity. The Greek word describing the payments was phoros¹³, literally “that which is brought.” Modern historians refer to the payments as “tribute,” but the translation “dues” might come closer to the official terminology of the alliance, so long as it is remembered that these dues were compulsory and permanent. For their tribute payments, larger member states were assessed the responsibility of supplying entire warships¹⁴ complete with crews and pay; smaller states could share the cost of a ship, or simply contribute cash which would be put together with others' payments to pay for ships and crews. Over time, more and more of the members of the alliance chose to pay their dues in cash rather than go to the trouble of furnishing warships. The alliance's funds were kept on the centrally-located island of Delos ¹⁵, in the group of islands in the Aegean Sea called the Cyclades ¹⁶, where they were placed under the guardianship of the god Apollo, to whom the whole island of Delos was sacred. Historians today refer to the alliance as the Delian League because its treasury was originally located on Delos.

The Warships of the Delian League

The warship of the time was a narrow vessel built for speed called a trireme¹⁷(“triple-banks-of-oars ship”), a name derived from its having three tiers of oarsmen on each side for propulsion in battle. One hundred and eighty rowers were needed to propel a trireme, which fought mainly by ramming enemy ships with a metal-clad ram attached to the bow and thus sinking them bypuncturing their hulls below the water line. Triremes also carried a complement of about twenty officers and marines; the marines, armed as infantry, could board enemy ships. Effective battle tactics in triremes required extensive training and physical conditioning of the crews. Most member states of the Delian League preferred to pay their annual dues in cash instead of furnishing triremes¹⁸ because it was beyond their capacities to build ships as specialized as triremes and to train crews in the intricate teamwork required to work triple banks of oars in battle maneuvers. Athens was far richer and more populous than most of its allies in the Delian League, and it not only had the shipyards and craftsmen to build triremes in numbers but also a large pool of poorer men eager to earn pay as rowers. Therefore, Athens built and manned most of the alliance's triremes, using the dues of allies to supplement its own contribution.

The Rebellion of Thasos

Since Athens supplied the largest number of warships in the fleet of the Delian League, the balance of power in the League came firmly into the hands of the Athenian assembly,¹⁹ whose members decided how Athenian ships were to be employed. Members of the League had no effective recourse if they disagreed with decisions made for the League as a whole under Athenian leadership. Athens, for instance, could compel the League to send its ships to force reluctant allies to go on paying dues if they stopped making their annual payments. The most egregious instance of such compulsion was the case of the city-state of the island of Thasos ²⁰ which, in 465 B.C, unilaterally withdrew from the Delian League after a dispute with Athens over gold mines on the neighboring mainland. To compel the Thasians to keep their sworn agreement to stay in the League, the Athenians led the fleet of the Delian League, including ships from other member states, against Thasos. The attack turned into a protracted siege, which finally ended after three years' campaigns in 463 B.C. with the island's surrender. As punishment, the League forced Thasos to pull down its defensive walls, give up its navy, and pay enormous dues and fines. As Thucydides observed, rebellious allies like the Thasians “lost their independence,” making the Athenians as the League's leaders “no longer as popular as they used to be.”²¹

The Military and Financial Success of the Delian League

The Athenian-dominated Delian League enjoyed success after success against the Persians in the 470s and 460s.²² Within twenty years after the rout of the Persian fleet in the battle of Salamis in 479, almost all Persian garrisons had been expelled from the Greek world and the Persian fleet driven from the Aegean. Although the Persian heartland was not threatened by these setbacks, Persia ceased to be a threat to Greeks for the next fifty years. Athens meanwhile grew stronger from its share of the spoils captured from Persian outposts and the dues paid by its members. By the middle of the fifth century B.C., League members' dues alone totaled an amount equivalent to perhaps $200,000,000 in contemporary terms (based on the assumption of $80 as the average daily pay of a worker today). For a state the size of Athens (around 30,000 to 40,000 adult male citizens at the time), this annual income meant prosperity.

Athenian Self-Interest in Empire

The male citizens meeting in the assembly²³ decided how to spend the city-state's income. Rich and poor alike had a self-interest in keeping the the fleet active and the allies paying for it. Well-heeled aristocrats like Cimon²⁴ (c. 510-450 B.C.), the son of Miltiades the victor of the battle of Marathon,²⁵ could enhance their social status by commanding successful League campaigns and then spending their share of the spoils on benefactions to Athens. The numerous Athenian men of lesser means who rowed the Delian League's ships²⁶ came to depend on the income they earned on League expeditions. The allies were given no choice but to acquiesce to Athenian wishes on League policy.²⁷ The men of Athens insisted on freedom for themselves, but they failed to preserve it for the member states in the alliance that had been born in the fight for just this sort of freedom from domination by others. In this way, alliance was transformed into empire, despite Athenian support of democractic governments in some allied city-states previously ruled by oligarchies. From the Athenian point of view, this transformation was justified because, by keeping the allies in line, the alliance remained strong enough to do its job of protecting Greece from the Persians.

The Democratic Reform of the Athenian System of Justice

Since poorer men powered Athens' fleet as rowers and since Athenian empire rested on naval power, the military and political importance of poorer men grew at Athens in the decades following the Persian Wars. As these poorer citizens came to recognize that they provided the foundation of Athenian security and prosperity, they evidently felt the time had come to make the administration of justice²⁸ at Athens just as democratic as the process of making policy and passing laws in the assembly,²⁹ which was open to all male citizens over eighteen years old. Equally democratic in its selection was the membership of the council³⁰ of 500 ( boule), which prepared the assembly's agenda and performed other public business including some judicial functions. The council was filled each year by drawing lots to select the year's membership in the council from among male citizens over thirty years of age. The use of the lot was felt to be democratic because it gave an equal chance to all eligible men to be selected for government office. Although at this time the assembly could serve as a court of appeals, most judicial verdicts were rendered by the city-state's nine annual magistrates³¹ ( archons) and the Areopagus³² council of ex-magistrates. The nine annual magistrates, officials who saw to much of the adminstration of the city-state, had been chosen by lot rather than by election since 487 B.C. The use of the lot made access to those offices a matter of random and therefore democratic chance rather than liable to domination by wealthy aristocrats, who could afford major electoral campaigns. But even democratically selected magistrates were susceptible to corruption, as were the members of the Areopagus. A different judicial system was needed if those men who decided cases were to be insulated from pressure by socially prominent people and from bribery by those rich enough to buy a favorable verdict. That laws were enacted by democratically constituted bodies meant little if those same laws were not applied fairly and honestly.

Helot Revolt at Sparta

The pressure to reform the judicial system reached the boiling point when a crisis in foreign affairs heated up Athenian politics. The crisis began in 465 B.C. with a tremendous earthquake in Laconia, the territory of the Spartans in the Peloponnese. It killed so many Spartans that the helots in Messenia instigated a massive revolt.³³ Messenia³⁴ was the large region of the Peloponnesus bordering Spartan territory on the west, which the Spartans had conquered in the eighth and seventh centuries and whose formerly free inhabitants they had enslaved as helots to farm the land for the benefit of the Spartans. By 462 B.C. the revolt had become so serious that the Spartans, swallowing their considerable pride, appealed to Athens for military help, despite the chill that had fallen over relations between Athens and Sparta since the days of their cooperation against the Persians. The tension between the former allies was caused by rebellious members of the Delian League like the Thasians, who had received at least moral support from the leaders at Sparta.³⁵ Spartan leaders apparently felt that Athens, as the head of the Delian League, was growing powerful enough someday to threaten Spartan interests in the Peloponnese. Cimon, the hero of the Delian League's campaigns, marshalled all his prestige to persuade a reluctant Athenian assembly to send hoplites to help the Spartans in 462 B.C. Cimon, like many Athenian aristocrats, had always admired the Spartans, and he was renowned for registering his opposition to proposals in the assembly by saying, “But that is not what the Spartans would do.”³⁶ (This quotation is attributed to the fifth-century author Stesimbrotus) His Spartan friends let him down, however, by soon changing their minds and sending him and his army home. The Spartans feared that the democratically inclined Athenian soldiers might decide to help the helots (who were fellow Greeks) escape from Spartan domination.

The Reforms of Ephialtes

The humiliating rejection by Sparta of their help outraged the men of Athens³⁷ and provoked hostile relations between the two states. The disgrace the rejection brought to Cimon carried over to his fellow aristocrats in general, thereby establishing a political climate ripe for further democratic reforms. An Athenian named Ephialtes promptly seized the moment in 461 B.C.³⁸ and convinced the assembly to pass measures limiting the power of the Areopagus.³⁹ More importantly, his reforms set up a judicial system of courts⁴⁰ manned by male citizens over thirty years old chosen by lot for each case. The reforms made it virtually impossible to influence or bribe the citizen jurors because 1) all trials were concluded in one day, and 2) juries were large (from several hundred to several thousand). There was no judge to instruct the jurors, nor any lawyers to harangue them—only an official to keep fights from breaking out. Jurors made up their own minds after hearing speeches made by the plaintiffs and defendants, who spoke on their own behalf and sometimes called their friends and supporters to do so. The accuser and the accused, although they were required to speak for themselves, might pay someone else to compose their speech to the court, which they then delivered as if it consisted of their own words. A majority vote of the jurors ruled, and there was no appeal from the decision of the court.

Athenian Radical Democracy

The structure of the new court system reflected the underlying principles of what scholars today call the “radical” democracy of Athens in the Golden Age of the mid-fifth century B.C. In that system, candidates for the office of general⁴¹ ( strategos) and a few other offices competed in elections for their annual offices because their posts required special competencies. Most posts in Athenian government, however, were filled by lot⁴² from among the adult male citizen body. All adult male citizens could attend the assembly⁴³, which met in regular session about forty times a year, to propose, discuss, and vote on legislation. The egalitarian nature of Athenian radical democracy depended on a set of principles, which was not without its own internal tensions: 1) wide-spread participation by a cross-section of male citizens in government and the administration of justice, 2) selection of participants at random for most public offices, 3) elaborate precautions to prevent corruption and strict procedures for reviewing the performance in office of officials, 4) equal protection under the law for citizens regardless of wealth, 5) some legal restrictions on citizen women, 6) privilege being given to the interest of the majority when that interest was in conflict with the interest of any minority or individual, while maintaining at the same time 7) a firm respect for the freedom of the individual.

Ostracism

The potential conflict between Athenian radical democracy's principle of privileging the interest of the majority while valuing the freedom of the individual can be seen most dramatically in the official procedure for exiling a man from Athens for ten years. Every year the assembly voted⁴⁴ whether to go through this procedure, which was called ostracism⁴⁵ (from the word ostrakon, meaning a piece of broken pottery, the material used for ballots). If the vote was affirmative, all male citizens on a predetermined day could cast a ballot on which they had scratched the name of the man they thought should be exiled. If 6,000 ballots were cast, whichever man was mentioned on the greatest number of them was compelled to leave Attica for ten years. He suffered no other penalty, and his family and property could remain behind undisturbed. It is important to emphasize that ostracism was not a criminal penalty: men returning from ostracism enjoyed undiminished rights as citizens. Ostracism served different purposes. The first ostracisms⁴⁶, for example, which occurred in the 480s B.C., were intended to protect democracy, after the appearance of the ex-tyrant Hippias with the Persians at Marathon in 490 B.C.⁴⁷ had spread the fear that someone might try to reestablish tyranny in place of democracy. Ostracism could also serve as a mechanism for placing blame on an individual for a failed policy that the assembly had orginally supported. Cimon, for example was made the scapegoat for the disastrous Athenian attempt to cooperate militarily with Sparta during the helot revolt of the late 460s and therefore ostracized.⁴⁸ Ostracism was not undertaken casually, it seems, at least not if one judges from the number of men ostracized in the fifth century. The total of men ostracized probably amounted to no more than a total of a dozen or two. Ostracism fell into disuse after about 416 B.C. because the procedure was discredited by the discovery of a conspiracy by two prominent politicians, Alcibiades and Nicias,⁴⁹ to manipulate the process to keep themselves from being ostracized.

The Ostracism of Aristides

The threat ostracism was meant to combat could also come from a man's great personal prominence, if he became so prominent that he could appear to overshadow all others on the political scene and thus threaten the egalitarian principles of Athenian democracy, in which no one man was supposed to dominate the making of policy. This point is illustrated by a famous anecdote concerning Aristides,⁵⁰ who set the dues for the Delian League. This Aristides had the nickname “The Just" because he was reputed to be so fair-minded. On the balloting day for an ostracism, an illiterate man from the countryside handed Aristides a potsherd, asking him to scratch on it the name of the man's choice for ostracism. “Certainly,” said Aristides; “Which name shall I write?” “Aristides,” replied the countryman. “Very well,” remarked Aristides as he proceeded to inscribe his own name. “But tell me, why do you want to ostracize Aristides? What has he done to you?” “Oh, nothing; I don't even know him,” sputtered the man. “I'm just sick and tired of hearing everybody refer to him as ‘The Just.’”

Ostracism and personal prominence

The anecdote about Aristides and the illiterate voter may well be apocryphal, but Aristides was indeed ostracized in 482 B.C. (and recalled early in 480 B.C. to fight the Persians⁵¹). Nevertheless, it makes a valid point: the Athenian political system assumed that the right way to protect democracy was, even in cases in which an individual might be unfairly penalized, to rely on the judgment of the mass of ordinary male citizens as expressed in a majority vote. This conviction required making allowances for irresponsible types like the kind of man depicted in the story about Aristides. It rested on the belief that the cumulative political wisdom of the majority of male citizens would outweigh the eccentricity and irresponsibility of the few. And personal prominence certainly did not usually lead to ostracism. Pericles⁵², the most prominent and famous of Athenian political leaders of the fifth century, was never ostracized, even though his political opponents apparently tried to use that procedure against him on at least one occasion. Pericles presumably avoided ostracism because the majority of the voters approved of his policies and because he was able to outmaneuver his opponents by rallying popular support when they tried to get him ostracized.

The Policies of Pericles

The idea that democracy was best served by involving a cross-section of the male citizenry received further backing in the 450s B.C. from the measures proposed to the assembly by a wealthy aristocract named Pericles (c. 495-429 B.C.), whose mother had been the niece of the famous democratic reformer Cleisthenes. Pericles successfully proposed that state revenues be used to pay a daily stipend⁵³ to men who served on juries, in the Council of the Five Hundred, and in other public offices filled by lot. The stipend was modest, in fact less than a skilled worker could have made on a good day. Without the stipend, however, poorer men would have found it virtually impossible to leave their regular work to serve in these positions, which required much of a man's time. By contrast, the board of ten annually elected generals⁵⁴—the most influential public officials, who had broad responsibilities for the city-state's military, civil, and financial affairs—were to receive no stipends despite the heavy demands of their post. Mainly rich men like Pericles won election as generals because they were supposed to have been able to afford the education and training required to handle this top job and to have the personal wealth to serve without financial compensation. They were compensated by the prestige conferred by election to their office. Like Cleisthenes before him, Pericles was an aristocrat who became the most influential leader in the Athens of his era by devising innovations to strengthen the egalitarian tendencies of Athenian democracy. Pericles and others of his economic status had inherited enough wealth to spend their time in politics without worrying about money, but remuneration for poorer men serving in public offices was an essential foundation of Athenian democracy, if it was truly going to be open to the majority of men, who, along with their wives and children, had to work to support themselves and their families. Above all, Pericles' proposal that jurors receive state stipends made him overwhelmingly popular with the mass of ordinary male citizens. Consequently, he was able to introduce dramatic changes in Athenian domestic and foreign policy beginning in the 450s B.C.

The Citizenship Law of Pericles

In 451 B.C. Pericles introduced one of most striking proposals with his sponsorship of a law stating that henceforth citizenship would be conferred only on children whose mother and father both were Athenians.⁵⁵ Previously, the offspring of Athenian men who married non-Athenian women were granted citizenship. Aristocratic men in particular had tended to marry rich foreign women, as Pericles' own maternal grandfather had done. Pericles' new law enhanced the status of Athenian mothers and made Athenian citizenship a more exclusive category, definitively setting Athenians off from all others. Not long thereafter, a review of the citizenship rolls was conducted to expel any who had claimed citizenship fraudulently. Together these actions served to limit the number of citizens and thus limit dilution of the advantages which citizenship in Athens' radical democracy conveyed on those included in the citizenry. Those advantages included, for men, the freedom to participate in politics and juries, to influence decisions that directly affected their lives, to have equal protection under the law, and to own land and houses in Athenian territory. Citizen women⁵⁶ had less rights because they were excluded from politics, had to have a male legal guardian⁵⁷ ( kurios), who, for example, spoke for them in court, and were not legally entitled to make large financial transactions on their own. They could, however, control property and have their financial interests protected in law suits. Like men, they were entitled to the protection of the law regardless of their wealth. Both female and male citizens experienced the advantage of belonging to a city-state that was enjoying unparalleled material prosperity. Citizens clearly saw themselves as the elite residents of Athens.

Periclean Foreign Policy

Once he had gained political prominence in the 450s at Athens, Pericles devoted his attention to foreign policy as well as domestic proposals. His intial foreign policy encompassed dual goals: 1) continuing military action against the Persian presence in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean and 2) greater attention to Athenian relations and disputes with other Greek states. This latter part of his policy reflected above all the growing hostility between Athens and Sparta. Hostilities with Sparta and its allies⁵⁸ had become more and more frequent following the rebuff of Cimon's expedition to Sparta in 462 B.C.⁵⁹ The former part of the policy suffered a severe setback when a campaign to liberate Egypt from Persian control⁶⁰ ended with the catastrophic loss of over two hundred ships and their crews in 454 B.C. The Delian League treasury was thereupon transferred to Athens from Delos ⁶¹ to move it farther away from a potential Persian raid. The decision to move the alliance's funds, apparently taken unilaterally, confirmed Athens' absolute superiority over the other allies. Even after the Egyptian disaster the Athenian assembly did not immediately renounce further action against the Persians. Cimon, now returned from the exile imposed by his ostracism, was in fact sent out in charge of a major naval expedition⁶² to the eastern Mediterranean to try to pry the large island of Cyprus from Persian control. When he was killed on this campaign in 450 B.C., however, the assembly apparently decided not to send out any further overseas expeditions against Persian territory. Rather, Athens would focus its military efforts on containing Spartan power in Greece and preventing the Delian League from disintegrating through revolts of allies. ⁶³ When neither Sparta nor Athens was able to achieve a clear-cut dominance in Greece in the battles that followed in the early 440s, Pericles in 445 engineered a peace treaty with Sparta⁶⁴ designed to freeze the current balance of power in Greece for thirty years and thus preserve Athenian dominance in the Delian League.

The Breakdown of Peace

After making peace with Sparta in 445,⁶⁵ Pericles was free to turn his attention to his political rivals at Athens, who were jealous of his dominant influence over the board of ten annually elected generals⁶⁶, the highest magistrates of Athenian democracy. When the voters in 443 expressed their approval of Pericles' policies by choosing to ostracize not him but rather his chief political rival, Thucydides⁶⁷ (not the same man as the historian of the same name), Pericles' overwhelming political prominence was confirmed. He was thereafter elected general fifteen years in a row.⁶⁸ His ascendency was again challenged, however, on the grounds that he mishandled the revolt in 441-439 of Samos ,⁶⁹ a valuable and consistently loyal Athenian ally in the Delian League. Instead of seeking a diplomatic solution to the dispute, Pericles quickly opted for a military response. A brutal struggle ensued that extended over three campaigning seasons and inflicted bloody losses on both sides before the Samians were forced to capitulate. With his judgment under attack for this incident, Pericles soon faced an even greater challenge as relations with Sparta worsened in the mid-430s. When the Spartans finally threatened war unless the Athenians ceased their support of some rebellious Spartan allies,⁷⁰ Pericles prevailed upon the assembly to refuse all compromises. His critics claimed he was sticking to his hard line against Sparta and insisting on provoking a war in order to revive his fading popularity by whipping up a jingoistic furor in the assembly. Pericles retorted that no accommodation to Spartan demands was possible because Athens' freedom of action was at stake.⁷¹ By 431 B.C. the Thirty Years' Peace made in 445 B.C. had been shattered beyond repair. The protracted Peloponnesian War (as modern historians call it) began in that year, not to end until 404 B.C., and ultimately put an end to the Athenian Golden Age.

The Periclean Building Program

The Peloponnesian War put a stop to the most spectacular demonstration of the confidence and pride that Pericles and his fellow citizens felt in their city-state during the height of the Golden Age in the 440s and 430s B.C. In the early 440s B.C. the assembly accepted Pericles' recommendation to initiate a public building program⁷² of temples and other structures in public religious sanctuaries on a scale seldom before seen in a Greek city-state. The new buildings seemed spectacular not only because they were expensive but also because their large scale, decoration, and surrounding open spaces contrasted so vividly with the private architecture of Athens in the fifth century B.C.

Athenian Private Dwellings

Athenians lived in a variety of different kinds of private dwellings in the city proper⁷³, in its densely populated suburb around the main harbor of Piraeus ⁷⁴, in villages of varying sizes scattered throughout the countryside of Attica, and, occasionally, in isolated farmsteads. The majority of city and suburban dwellers lived in apartment buildings⁷⁵, which could be several stories high. Most apartment dwellers probably crowded themselves and their families into no more space than a room or two, which they rented from the building's owner, because they could not afford a very high rent. Wealthier people in the city owned individual homes, but they frequently had a house and land in the countryside, too. Dwellers in the countryside owned or rented houses that varied in size from tiny bungalows to larger structures perhaps on the scale of a small modern house that might be accompanied by other farm buildings such as sheds. Indeed, Athenian private houses in both in the city and the country were generally modest in size.

City Houses

Archaeology has not been able to reveal much detail about the homes of residents of Athens⁷⁶ because the modern city covers the remains of almost all the residential districts of the ancient city and thus inhibits excavation. Nevertheless, we know that homes in ancient Athens were wedged haphazardly against one another along narrow, winding streets.⁷⁷ Even the residences of rich people followed the same basic design of bedrooms, storerooms, and dining rooms grouped around open-air courtyards. Some houses had more than one story. The women and men of the household usually had rooms set apart for their separate use⁷⁸, especially if there were infants or small children⁷⁹ in the family. These youngsters would be looked after in the women's quarters, but all members of the household would see each other frequently despite the notional division of the interior space of the home by gender and age. The architectural tradition of grouping the house's rooms around a courtyard facilitated contact among all the members of the household, who included the slaves of the family. Wall paintings or works of art were as yet uncommon as decoration in private homes. Sparse furnishings⁸⁰ and simple furniture were the rule. Water for household needs had to be fetched from public fountains.⁸¹ This onerous and constant work was performed by women and the household's slaves. Sanitary facilities usually consisted of a pit dug just outside the front door. The pits were emptied by collectors paid to dump manure⁸² outside the city at a distance set by law.

Liturgies and Benefactions

The rich citizens of Athens were expected to benefit the public as a whole by spending their own money to increase the amenities of life for all. In the case of the civic duties called liturgies⁸³ (“work for the people; public service”), the wealthy were legally obligated to provide financial benefits to the city-state. Especially costly liturgies included duties such as paying the costs⁸⁴ of putting on drama in the annual public festivals⁸⁵ of Athens or financing and serving as an officer on a warship⁸⁶ in the city-state's fleet. In other cases the wealthy provided benefactions that were not obligatory but nevertheless also displayed their civic mindedness and generosity toward their fellow citizens. Such benefactions included providing animals for public sacrifices and the feasting on their roasted meat that followed and constructing public buildings and other architectural improvements in the city⁸⁷. Although the costs of liturgies and benefactions, which could be heavy, obviously were a drain on the resources of a family as a whole, they were normally peformed in the name of the male head of the household. Spending generously to provide benefits for the common good was regarded as a primary component of male aristocratic virtue. Generous benefactors of the public earned increased social eminence as their reward and perhaps greater favor with their fellow male citizens when they ran for elective office, such as that of general. Liturgies and benefactions performed by the rich in the interest of the city compensated to a certain extent for the lack of any regular income or property taxes.

Benefactions by Cimon and his family

Cimon,⁸⁸ an aristocratic and wealthy man, gained great fame for his costly benefactions to his fellow citizens. He was renowned, for example, for opening his orchards to let others pick whatever they wanted,⁸⁹ but his most famous benefactions were architectural. He paid to have landscaping with shade trees and running tracks installed in open areas of Athens, and he also footed the enormous bill for the construction of footings for defensive walls⁹⁰ to link the urban center of Athens and the harbor at Piraeus ⁹¹ some seven kilometers away. Cimon's brother-in-law also participated in the family tradition of benefiting Athens by paying for highly-visible public building projects. He had built as a gift to the city the renowned Painted Stoa. ⁹² Stoas were narrow, colonnaded buildings open along one side, whose purpose was to provide shelter from sun or rain for these conversations. The Painted Stoa stood on the edge of the central open area, ⁹³ the agora, at the center of the city. The agora served both as a market area where merchants could set up small stalls and as a gathering place for Athenian men to discuss politics and every other issue affecting their lives in the city-state. It was the commercial and social heart of Athens. The crowds of men who came to the agora daily for conversation would cluster inside the Painted Stoa⁹⁴, whose walls were decorated with paintings of great moments in Greek history commissioned from the most famous painters of the time, Polygnotus and Mikon. That one of the stoa's paintings portrayed the battle of Marathon in which Cimon's father, Miltiades, had won glory was only appropriate, since the building had been paid for by the husband of Cimon's sister, probably with financial assistance from Cimon himself.

Public Funding of Buildings

Although rich Athenians sometimes personally financed the construction of buildings for the use of the public in classical Athens in keeping with the tradition that the wealthy should benefit their city-state, the most conspicuous and ultimately most famous architectural monuments of the fifth century were paid for by public revenues. Athens received revenues from many indirect taxes such as harbor fees and sales taxes. The extent to which Athens may have benefited from the tribute paid by the allies in the Delian League⁹⁵ remains controversial because the ancient sources offer no detailed picture of the ways in which the tribute was expended. Some scholars think that Athens used part of the League funds, which were stored on the acropolis after the League's treasury was moved to Athens from the island of Delos in 454,⁹⁶ to help finance the massive public building program initiated by Pericles⁹⁷ in 447. Others argue, however, that the ancient evidence does not support this view.

The Scale of Athenian Public Buildings

The scale of Athenian public buildings varied according to the amount and kind of space required to fulfill their function. The complex of buildings on the agora's southwestern edge,⁹⁸ for instance, consisted of modest-sized structures such as that in which the city-state's council of 500 held its frequent meetings and the public archives were kept. The larger meetings of the assembly⁹⁹, for which 6,000 attendees seems to have represented a quorum, did not take place in a building at all but rather convened in the open air on a hillside above the agora.¹⁰⁰ There the architectural modifications were minimal: a speaker's platform hewn from the rock of the hillside, a retaining wall built up at the rear of the meeting area, and, eventually, a portico along the sides of the open area.

Pericles' Acropolis

In 447 Pericles instigated a building project in Athens¹⁰¹ whose scale, cost, and magnificence provoked comment and controversy in its own time and has contributed enormously in later ages to the reputation of the Golden Age of Greece. The focus of the project's construction was the Athenian acropolis.¹⁰² The acropolis (“upper city” or “city-height”) was the massive, mesa-like promontory that rose abruptly from the plain on which the city was built and towered over its center, the agora below. Here the original settlers of Athens had made their homes, and only slowly had the city expanded onto the plain at the foot of the looming citadel. A single access road, the “Sacred Way”, wound up the slope from the agora to the acropolis and passed through a gate near the top at its western end. The two most conspicuous monuments constructed on the acropolis under Pericles' program were a huge marble temple of Athena (called the Parthenon) and a mammoth gate building (called the propylaia¹⁰³) straddling the western entrance to the acropolis. The purpose of the Parthenon was to house a costly new image of the goddess¹⁰⁴, over thirty feet high and made of gold and ivory. Elaborate carved sculptures decorated the outside of the Parthenon¹⁰⁵, which was surrounded by a colonnade of fluted columns.¹⁰⁶ The propylaia, too, had columns, and one of its rooms apparently housed paintings¹⁰⁷, rather like a modern museum.

The Controversial Cost of the Periclean Program

The Parthenon and the propylaia alone easily cost more than the equivalent of a billion dollars in contemporary terms, a phenomenal sum for an ancient Greek city-state. The finances for the program ¹⁰⁸perhaps came in part from the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League, although scholars debate to what extent allied funds were used. Funds certainly came from the financial reserves of the goddess, whose sanctuaries, like those of the other gods throughout Greece, received both private donations and public support. Pericles' program was so expensive, however, that his political enemies among the aristocrats railed at him for squandering public funds and ruining the city-state's budget.¹⁰⁹ In response to the criticism, Pericles brought the issue before the assembly of male citizens: “Do you think I have spent too much?” he reportedly asked. “Entirely too much,” they shouted back. “Fine,” he retorted, “I will pay for the buildings myself and put my name on them instead of the people's.” Shamed by the implication that they lacked pride in their city-state, the men in the assembly immediately changed their minds. In an uproar they authorized Pericles to spare no expense in spending public funds to finish the project.

The Parthenon

The new temple built for Athena on the acropolis became known as the Parthenon, meaning “the house of the virgin goddess,” from the Greek word for a virginal female¹¹⁰, parthenos. As the patron godddess of Athens, Athena had long possessed another sanctuary on the acropolis.¹¹¹ Its focus was an olive tree regarded as the sacred symbol of the goddess, who was believed to provide for the economic health of the Athenians. Athena's temple in this earlier sanctuary had largely been destroyed by the Persians in the invasion of 480 B.C. For thirty years, the Athenians purposely left the Acropolis in ruins as a memorial to the sacrifice of their homeland in that war. When Pericles urged the rebuilding of the Acropolis' temples, the assembly turned not to reconstruction of the olive-tree sanctuary, but rather to construction of the Parthenon. The Parthenon honored Athena not in her capacity as the provider of economic prosperity but as a warrior serving as the divine champion of Athenian military power. Inside the Parthenon, the gold and ivory statue,¹¹² over thirty feet high, portrayed the goddess in battle armor and holding in her outstretched hand a six-foot statue of the figure of Victory ( Nike in Greek).

The Parthenon's design

Like all Greek temples, the Parthenon itself was meant as a house for its deity, not as a gathering place for worshippers. In its general design, the Parthenon was representative of the standard architecture of Greek temples:¹¹³ a rectangular box on a raised platform, a plan that the Greeks probably derived from the stone temples of Egypt. The box, which had only one relatively small door at the front, was fenced in columns all around.¹¹⁴ Normally only priests and priestesses could enter the boxlike interior of the temple; public religious ceremonies took place around the open-air altar,¹¹⁵ which was located outside the east end of the temple. The soaring columns of the Parthenon were carved in the simple style called Doric, in contrast to the more elaborately decorative Ionic or Corinthian styles that have often been imitated in modern buildings. The facade of the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington, D.C., for example, is built in the Corinthian-style.

The Parthenon's special architecture

The Parthenon was special in its great size and elaborate decoration. Constructed from 20,000 tons of Attic marble, it stretched nearly 230 feet in length and a hundred feet wide, with eight columns¹¹⁶ across the ends instead of the six normally employed in Doric style, and seventeen instead of thirteen along the sides. These dimensions gave it a massive look conveying an impression of power. Since perfectly rectilinear architecture appears curved to the human eye, the Parthenon's architects ingeniously designed subtle curves and inclines in its architecture to produce an optical illusion of completely straight lines: the columns were given a slight bulge in their middles; the corner columns on the corners of the temple's raised platform were installed at a slight incline and closer together; the platform itself was made slightly convex. These technical refinements made the Parthenon appear ordered and regular in a way a building built entirely on straight lines would not. By overcoming the distortions of nature, the Parthenon's sophisticated architecture made a confident statement about human ability to construct order out of the entropic disorder of the natural world.

Sculpture on the Parthenon

The sculptural decoration of the Parthenon ¹¹⁷ also proclaimed Athenian confidence about their city-state's relationship with the gods, whom the citizens regarded as their helpers and supporters. The Parthenon had sculptured panels along its exterior above the columns and tableaux of sculptures in the triangular spaces (pediments)¹¹⁸ underneath the roof line at both ends of the building. These decorations were part of the Doric ¹¹⁹ architectural style, but the Parthenon also presented a unique sculptural feature. Carved in relief around the top of the walls inside the porch formed by the columns along the edges of the building's platform was a continuous band of figures. This sort of continuous frieze was usually put only on Ionic-style buildings. Adding an Ionic¹²⁰ frieze to a Doric temple was a striking change meant to attract notice to its subject. The Parthenon's frieze depicted the Athenian religious ritual in which a procession of citizens paraded to the Acropolis to present to Athena in her olive-tree sanctuary a new robe woven by specially selected Athenian girls¹²¹ (the Panathenaic festival). Depicting the procession in motion, like a filmstrip in stone, the frieze showed men riding spirited horses¹²², women walking along carrying sacred implements, and the gods gathering together at the head of the parade¹²³ to observe their human worshippers. As usual in the sculptural decoration on Greek temples, the Parthenon frieze sparkled with brightly colored paint enlivening the figures and the background. Shiny metal attachments also brightened the picture, serving, for example, as the horsemen's reins.

The Significance of the Parthenon Frieze

No other city-state had ever before gone beyond the traditional function of temples in paying honor and glorifying its special deities by adorning, as the Athenians did on the Parthenon, a temple with representations of its citizens. Previously, the closest temples had come to a reference of such local significance had been to place sculptures in their pediments that depicted mythological scenes¹²⁴ with particular meaning for the people of the locale in which temple had been built. The Parthenon, indeed, had such scenes in its pediments. The sculptures of the east pediment¹²⁵ portrayed the birth of Athena, the patron deity of the Athenians, while the west pediment¹²⁶ portrayed Athena and Poseidon, god of the sea, engaged in a contest to see who would become the patron deity of the Athenians by bestowing on them the greater blessing. The Parthenon frieze, however, achieved a new level of local reference. It made a unique statement about the relationship between Athens and the gods by showing its citizens in the company of the gods, even if the assembled deities carved in the frieze at the temple's eastern end were understood to be separated from and perhaps invisible to the humans in the procession depicted in the frieze. A temple adorned with pictures of citizens, albeit idealized citizens of perfect physique and beauty¹²⁷, amounted to a claim of special intimacy between the city-state and the gods, a statement of confidence that these honored deities favored the Athenians. Presumably this claim reflected the Athenian interpretation of their success in helping to turn back the Persians, in achieving leadership of a powerful naval alliance, and in controlling, from their silver mines ¹²⁸ and the allies' dues, an amount of revenue which made Athens richer than all its neighbors in mainland Greece. The Parthenon, like the rest of the Periclean building program, paid honor to the gods with whom the city-state was identified and expressed the Athenian view that the gods looked favorably on their empire. Their success, the Athenians would have said, proved that the gods were on their side.

Thomas R. Martin An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander 9

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