The rule of Sparta finally caused such dissatisfaction that the Greeks revolted from 395 to 387 B.C. following Sparta undertaking to invade Persian territory in Asia Minor. At the beginning of what became known as the Corinthian War in 395 B.C., Thebes was able to organize an alliance that included Argos, Corinth and Athens. The Persian fleet destroyed Sparta’s maritime empire in 394 B.C., , and the Athenians, who had killed or expelled the Thirty Tyrants, rebuilt their walls, enlarged their navy, and recovered some of their lost empire in the Aegean. Meanwhile, the Persians began to fear that Athens could become strong enough to endanger its control in Asia Minor. The Spartans therefore found it easy to arrange a peace with Persia, while the Greek states fighting Sparta were equally willing to come to terms. Peace was established in Greece at the hands of the Persian king in 387 B.C. Sparta continued to be the leader of the Greek states, and the Greek cities of Asia Minor were abandoned to Persia. Hence, there remained discontent with Sparta’s tyranny, which was more hated than Athens had ever been. The king of Sparta, Agesilaos, broke up all alliances except the Peloponnesian league, and used or threatened to use the Spartan army to interfere in other states to force them to become allied to Sparta, such as seizing Thebes without warning or pretext in 382 B.C.
Renewed war between Sparta and the Greek city of Thebes broke out later in 379 B.C., after a group of patriotic citizens succeeded in killing the oligarchs and the Spartan garrison there surrendered. A democracy was then restored, which gained the leadership of all of Boeotia, a region north of Attica. Athens, which was militarily threatened by Sparta, and Thebes then led an alliance against Sparta, which was met by disaster for Sparta on land after the Theban commander, Epaminondas, devised a plan that offset the only strategy that the Spartans had ever used. Another defeat followed at sea, which was followed by the Spartans calling for peace.
When arranging the peace, all of the Greek states met at Sparta, where Sparta refused to give every state equal rights. Sparta also refused to allow Thebes to speak for all of Boeotia, and the peace was concluded without them, leaving Sparta and Thebes still in a state of war. This led to the Battle of Leuctra in 371 B.C. under the military leadership of Epaminondas, in which the Thebans were most unexpectedly victorious in this decisive conflict. Epaminondas thereupon invaded the Peloponnese the following year, and having Sparta at his mercy, was able to set up Messenia as an independent state. This act deprived the Spartans of nearly half their land and a majority of their helots, and thus deprived it of its economic base.
Sparta never recovered from this blow. After more than thirty years of leadership since 404 B.C, Spartan power was ended. However, Theban hegemony lasted only as long as Epaminondas commanded the Theban armies. He made Thebes dominant over all of Greece north of Athens and the Corinthian Gulf, and challenged Athenian possessions in the Aegean. All this activity provoked resistance, and by 362 B.C. Thebes faced a Peloponnesian coalition as well as Athens. The power of Thebes collapsed in a later battle at Mantinea in 362 B.C. in which Epaminondas was killed. Greece then fell into a state of political chaos with no one state clearly dominating the rest, and Athens having to abandon most of its empire by 355 B.C as it did not have the power to put down resistance. Thus, the only powerful Greek states that may have welded the Greek world into a nation crushed each other, and it became doomed to fall to a conqueror from the outside. This condition opened the door to Macedonia, which had developed into a formidable military power under Philip II (359-336 B.C.)
In addition to the development of popular political life and in spite of the political decline, the Greeks produced writers and thinkers that contributed to the understanding of the world. Unfortunately, only a fraction survives from the classical age. In terms of literature, the poet Homer, who lived in the 700s B.C. is credited with writing the epic poem called The Iliad, which is the story of Troy, set during Mycenaen civilization, in which a Greek princess called Helen married Menelaus, the king of Sparta, but soon thereafter slipped away over the sea to the city of Troy with Paris, the son of King Priam of Troy. Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae, organised a vast army of all of the kings of Greece to sail to Troy and get Helen back. This ensued in a war that raged for ten years in which the Greeks could not enter into Troy, and the Trojans could not get out. King Odysseus of Ithaca eventually thought of a plan to pretend to sail away and leaving a large wooden horse on the beach. The Trojans would think this was an offering from the gods and take it into the city, whereupon Greek soldiers hidden inside it would attack the city from within. As desperate as this might seem, according to Homer, it worked, and Menelaus got Helen back before setting off back to Greece.
This however, is merely a story, without evidence that these events actually happened, apart from the real Mycenaens launching raids overseas when they were desperately short of food. One of these raids could have been the origin of this story. Homer is also credited with writing The Odyssey, which is a continuation of The Illiad. Greeks used these epics to teach the values of Hellenic culture to their youth – excellence, loyalty, dignity, and the importance of heritage.
Among the great philosophers of ancient Greece was Socrates. He taught the importance of careful and skeptical questioning in order to find out the truth and knowledge about human affairs that he believed reason could discover. He taught that by keen questioning and discussion, it is possible to reject error and discern these abilities, beginning with a philosophical problem and then narrow the matter to its essentials with continuous questioning. He believed in searching for the absolute rather than a relative truth, which he thought was the most important thing that a person can do. Without desire for office or a political career, Socrates’s greatest interest nevertheless was the state. He believed that the state could be purified and saved from its mistakes only by the improvement of the individual citizen through the education of their mind so that they could recognize virtue and right. Inspired by this belief, Socrates went about in Athens discussing these matters with his fellow citizens, convinced that he might thus lead each citizen in turn to see and love the right. His supreme achievement was his unshakable conviction that the human mind is able to recognize and determine what are virtue and right, truth, beauty, and honesty, and all the other great ideas that mean much to human life. In his view, these ideas had reality. Inspired by this belief, Socrates went about in Athens engaging all his fellow citizens in such discussion, convinced that he might thus lead each citizen in turn to knowledge of the leading and compelling virtues. Furthermore, he firmly believed that the citizen who had recognized these virtues would shape every action and all his life by them. Socrates thus revealed the power of virtue and of similar ideas by argument and logic. However, the aims and noble efforts of Socrates were misunderstood by the rulers of the state, since he seemed to be undermining the old beliefs while exposing them for seldom having knowledge of the fundamental principles of human behaviour. His unconcealed contempt for democracy that seemed to rely on ignorant amateurs to make important political decisions without any certain knowledge created further hostility. In 399 B.C., he was condemned to death by drinking hemlock for allegedly “corrupting” the city’s youth with his ideas with all sorts of doubts and impious teachings that did not honour the state’s gods, and introducing new divinities.
His most famous student, Plato (427-347 B.C.), later founded a famous school called the Polis Academy in 386 B.C. to carry on his teacher’s ideas. The ideas that Socrates maintained the human mind could discern became for Plato eternal realities. He developed the theory that there are two worlds: the impermanent changing world of appearance that people knew through their senses, and the eternal unchanging world of “forms” that constitute the essence of true reality. Only the mind could perceive eternal forms, and the intellectual journey consisted of moving from the realm of appearances to the realm of forms. He also taught the mind had always existed, and in an earlier state had held the great ideas of goodness, beauty, evil and similar ideas, and had gained an intuitive vision of them in which in this earthly life the mind now recalled and recognized again. The elect individuals, gifted with such vision, were the ones to control the ideal state, for they would necessarily act in accordance with the ideas of virtue and justice that they had discerned. Plato thought that by education, it was possible to lead the souls of men to a clear vision of these ideas.
He was the first systematic philosopher, and therefore the first to place political ideas in their full philosophical context. Among his writings, his most enduring work was a book called The Republic, which was the first book in which anyone stressed the importance of ideals and truths while setting out a scheme for a society directed and planned to achieve an ethical goal. This was written in partial reaction to his ideas about democracy, which he maintained should not be in the hands of the type of citizens that condemned Socrates to death, and argued that states should be run by properly educated “Guardians” who possessed true and unchanging wisdom, and whose training, character and wisdom allowed them to see reality. The ideal ruler of a city-state would be a philosopher king who would have great knowledge of the truth and the state’s ideals. The ideal polis would be a place where the individuals of the city state would place the welfare of the polis above their own. Property was to be held in common, and marriage and births were to be carefully geared to the requirements of the state to ensure harmony by destroying anything that stood between the individual citizen and the state, and thereby produce good citizens.
In turn, his most famous student was Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), who was more interested in the meaning of life than politics, and lectured on everything from politics to music. Having more faith in people that Plato had, he thought extremes would cancel each other out and a sensible middle course would remain. He also taught and practiced a life of moderation, or the “Golden Mean.” He argued against his former teacher Plato and his forms in his book Metaphysics, writing that all matter is form and substance, or ideal and reality. He disagreed with Plato’s idea of a separate, supernatural reality and believed genuine knowledge was derived through close examination of the natural world. Whereas Plato suggested that man was born with knowledge, Aristotle argued that knowledge comes from experience. He believed that the universe operated according to principles, and laws that could be discovered through scientific reasoning.
He was also a master of logic, arguing with logic and reason about the concept of a single God. In another book, Organan, Aristotle explained how people learned, and divided learning into two parts – deductive and inductive. In his book Politics, Aristotle described a good government as one should serve all citizens, such as the case of Athenian democracy. With the help of groups of his more advanced students in the school he founded, the Lyceum, Aristotle put together a kind of encyclopedia containing old and new facts in the different natural sciences, besides writing many treatises on other subjects, including logic, ethics, psychology, the drama, and government. The work was never completed, and many of the essays and treatises which it included have been lost. However, Aristotle’s works formed the greatest attempt ever made in ancient times to collect and to state clearly the whole mass of human knowledge.
The development of Greek philosophy also included science and mathematics, such as how Archimedes worked out the displacement of matter in water, and wrote a book called Plane Equilibrium, in which he detailed some basic principles of mechanics, including the lever. He also invented the compound pulley and Archimedean screw, used to pump water. Euclid worked out the principles of geometry, and Phythagoras tried to explain the nature of the world in mathematical terms, and worked out the intervals of the musical scale.
In addition, Greek civilization produced some of the first historians and history. One of the world’s first historians was Herodotus who wrote the world’s first historical work, The History of the Persian Wars. This was about Greece’s wars with Persia, which he saw as a clash between the civilised west, namely Greece, and the decadent east, or Persia. Herodotus was known to check his sources, but also coloured some facts in an epic way to add to the story, such as including the Greek gods as part of the narrative. Another historian at this time was Thucydides, known as “The Father of History,” wrote about the civil war between Athens and Sparta in The History of the Peloponnesian War, looking at it long term causes and the moral lessons that could be drawn from it. This was the world’s first true historical work in which the writer tried to be accurate and objective with the facts, with even travelling to the places where the events took place and interviewing participants.
Plays were initially written to be presented at religious festivals of the gods, and later became events on their own. They were emotional, but also instructive, such as the stories of Greek myths and Homer’s epics. Dramas usually revolved around the idea of fate and character flaws that led someone to greatness and then ruin.
The Greeks also developed great art and architecture, such as the Parthenon that was built as a temple to Athena from 447 to 432 B.C., which was perfectly balanced in form and surrounded by beautiful marble columns, while sculptors such as Myron portrayed idealised versions of what he thought people should look like, or Praxiteles who favoured grace in the subject rather than power.
Greek genius was to go on to many another future triumph, in spite of the loss of political leadership that would hereafter pass into new hands that never had any share in the advancement of Greek civilization. The backward northern people in Thrace and Macedonia spoke Indo-European languages that were similar to Greek, and another Greek civilization began to improve the rough and simple life of the people of Macedonia. The Macedonian kings also began to cultivate Greek literature and art. Philip of Macedon, who became ruler of Macedon in 360 B.C., himself had a Greek education and admired the Greeks, but he also knew how weak and disunited they were and how they were unable to resist a foreign power, and therefore planned to become the master of the Greeks.
He improved upon the standard Greek military tactics, and formed a permanent standing army of professional soldiers out of the peasant population of his kingdom. The infantrymen soon became famous as the “Macedonian phalanx” that was deeper and more massive than those he had seen in Greece. He also gave his men longer pikes that were thirteen rather than nine feet, and those who carried them stood slightly apart so that the pikes of the men in the rear struck between those in the front ranks. Cavalry had heretofore played but a small part of war in Europe, but Phillip drilled a large body of riders to move together and to attack in a single mass, either alone or with the phalanx of soldiers, so that the whole combined force, infantry and cavalry, moved as one great unit.
Philip then steadily extended the territory of his kingdom eastward and northward, conquering Thrace as far as the Danube and the Black Sea. His progress in the north of the Aegean soon brought him into conflict with the Greek states, which had colonies in this northern region. After a long series of hostilities, Philip utterly defeated the combined Greek forces of Athens and Thebes in a final battle at Chaeronea in 338 B.C. in Boetia He firmly established himself as head of a league of all the Greek states.
He used his position to establish a Pan-Hellenic League under the leadership of Macedon. War between member states was declared illegal, and Macedonian garrisons were installed at strategic points to assure the loyalty of the Greek cities. The professed purpose of the league was to carry war to Persia, liberate the Greek cities of Asia Minor, and revenge the insults to the gods that Xerxes had wrought a hundred and fifty years earlier. The member states were assigned quotas of ships and troops, and an advance party was sent across the Hellespont to prepare for full-scale invasion. However, before Philip himself could start against the Persians with all his forces, he was stabbed to death during the wedding festivities of his daughter in 336 B.C., possibly at the behest of his estranged wife.
Power then passed into the hands of his son Alexander (336 – 323 B.C.), a youth only twenty years old, against whom the Greek states were unwilling to submit along with to Macedonian leadership. The Greek states were unwilling to submit to Macedonian leadership, and expected they could overthrow so youthful a leader as Alexander. When Thebes revolted against Macedonia after Philip’s death, Alexander knew he had to subdue the Greek states before it would be safe to march into Asia. He captured and completely destroyed the ancient city in 336 B.C. after the battle of Chaeronea, sparing only the house of the great poet Pindar. This example taught the Greeks to acknowledge and fear his power, while it showed them that he was a great admirer of their civilization, having been taught by the great philosopher Aristotle. The Greek states thereupon, with the exception of Sparta, formed elected Alexander as its leader and general and sent troops to increase his army.
Alexander then continued where his father left off in a twelve year campaign of conquest of the Persian empire and Egypt with about 35 000 men in the spring of 334 B.C. The Asian campaign that Alexander now planned was to make clear that he was the champion of Greece against Asia and its Persian rulers. He determined to lead the united Greeks against the Persian lord of Asia, as the Greeks had once united against Asian Troy.
Alexander faced the king of Persia who had hired thousands of Greek heavy-armed infantry to fight against their fellow Greeks in Asia Minor. In his first important battle at the river Granicus in 334 B.C., Alexander scattered his enemies by leading a cavalry charge against them. He then marched southward, taking the Greek cities one by one and freed all of Asia Minor from Persia, thus denying them to the Persian fleet. Then he pushed eastward and rounded the northeast corner of the Mediterranean, and looked toward the Fertile Crescent where was going to take over for the next ten years, from 333 to 323 B.C.
In 333 B.C. at Issus, near the Gulf of Issus, Alexander met the main army of Persia under the command of King Darius III. Using the tactic of always being on the offensive, with the cavalry forming the right wing nearest the enemy, Alexander led his Macedonian cavalry in such as fierce assault that the opposing Persian wing gave way, and then were attacked on the flank of the exposed centre. Alexander’s army swept the Persian army from the field until it made a disorderly retreat until it crossed the Euphrates.
In order to counter the danger from the Persian fleet, he marched his army southward along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, and captured all of the Phoenician seaports along the way with the use of siege machinery that his father had learned from the western Greeks, including the port of Tyre after a long siege, and thus put an end to the threat of the Persian navy. Egypt, which had long been a Persian province, then fell an easy victim to the Macedonian army. The Persian fleet, thus deprived of all of it home harbours and cut off from its home government, soon scattered and disappeared.
Darius III then sent a letter to Alexander requesting terms of peace, offering to accept the Euphrates as a boundary between them, while all of Asia west of that river was to be handed over to the Macedonians as well as offering his daughter in exchange for an alliance and an end to the invasion. Alexander’s advisers urged him to accept these terms, in the event that the huge Persian fleet should stir up the cities of Greece to revolt against him, but Alexander had the vision of a vast empire through which Greek civilization could be spread. He therefore decided to keep advancing and conquer the whole Persian Empire.
Having cut off the enemy’s fleet in the rear, Alexander returned from Egypt to Asia in 330 B.C., and marching eastward along the Fertile Crescent, he crossed the Tigris. At Gaugamela in 331 B.C., Darius III had gathered his forces for a last stand. Although greatly outnumbered, the Macedonians crushed the Persian army and forced them into flight due to superior tactics. In a few days, Alexander was living in the winter palace of the Persian king in Babylon. In the same year, as Darius III fled into the eastern mountains, he was stabbed by his relative Bessus, who was supported by Persian nobles who had lost faith in him. Alexander thereafter took over his vast realm. He then continued eastward through the original kingdom of the Persians, posing as the legitimate successor of the Persian kings after pursuing Bessus who was soon caught.
During the next five years, Alexander marched his army in one vast loop after another through the heart of the Iranian plateau, northward across the Oxus and Jaxartes rivers, southward across the Indus valley and the frontiers of India, into the valley of the Ganges, where he continued by subduing the Punjab, and then followed the Indus river down to the Indian Ocean in 326 B.C. Finally, the complaints of his weary troops forced him to turn back, refusing to march any further after conquering 2,000,000 square miles of territory and marching over 20,000 miles. In 325 B.C., he started back for Mesopotamia.
He began his westward march again along the shores of the Indian Ocean, accompanied by the fleet that he had built on the Indus. The return march through the desert of Gedrosia cost many lives as thirsty and ill fed troops perished along the way. Over seven years after he had left the city of Babylon, Alexander entered it again. He had been in Asia for less than twelve years, and had carried Greek civilization into the very heart of Asia. At important points along his line of march, he had founded seventy Greek cities in strategic to retain contact with the Greek world behind him, as well as dominating the countryside around them. They were to be centres of Greek civilization as far as the frontiers of India, which led to spreading a uniform culture throughout the East with the prevailing institutions, laws and language of commerce becoming Greek, while the mingling of Greek and Eastern elements made Hellenistic culture unique and also created a broad commercial network. Greek ideas and language were spread across a huge territory, and Hellenistic culture combined the best of Greek and Persian cultures that grew out of the trade that flourished with the protection of the kingdoms of his former empire.
In an attempt to merge European and Asiatic civilization, Alexander organized and provided the proper government for his vast conquests. He was convinced of the superiority of Greek civilization, and was determined to Hellenize the world and to unite Asia with Europe by settling colonies of Greeks and Macedonians in the east. However, on the other hand, he realized that he could not successfully rule without permitting the Persians to retain their familiar habits and forms of government. He therefore appointed Persians to high offices and set them over provinces as satraps. He also adopted Persian clothing in part, and married Roxana, an Asian princess, and obliged his officers and friends to also marry the daughters of Asian nobles.
Upon his return, Alexander found his empire in serious disorder. Many of the satraps he had appointed, apparently assuming that he would never survive his distant enterprises, had abused their powers. He had set about strenuous reform, and at the same time prepared for further campaigns. In 323 B.C., when he was prepared for a campaign to subjugate the Arabian Peninsula and later undertake the conquest of the western Mediterranean, he died from a fever in Babylon at age of 33.
The empire he created was then divided into three administrative kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa, ruled by his former generals or one of their successors since Alexander did not leave an heir at the time of his death. Although his son was born after his death, there was no one in the immediate royal family that was capable of exercising any effective control over the Macedonian generals during the years of the child’s minority, and before he was killed in 310 B.C. By 263 B.C., three officers had split the empire into large monarchies. In Europe, Macedonia was in the hands of Antigonus, a grandson of one of Alexander’s commanders. In Asia, most of the territory of the former Persian Empire was under the rule of Alexander’s general Seleucus. In Africa, Egypt was held by Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s Macedonian leaders who succeeded in making himself king and became the founder of a dynasty that ruled an Egyptian empire under Macedonian leaders with a powerful fleet that controlled the eastern Mediterranean during the third century B.C. They fought among themselves and as a result the central power of the empire quickly became inffective.
The Asian empire of Selecucus and his descendants, known as the Seleucids, held the largest part of the empire that extended from the Aegean to the frontiers of India. Its boundaries were not fixed and its enormous extent made it very difficult to govern and maintain, and the fleet of the Ptolemies hampered commercial development and prosperity of the Seleucids, who found it difficult to reach Greece for trade, troops and colonists. However, its centre at Antioch eventually enjoyed great prosperity and became the business rival of the Ptolemies in Alexandria and became the greatest centre of commerce in the northern Mediterranean. In Macedonia, Antigonus II, a grandson of Alexander’s general, became king in 277 B.C. and fought a long naval war with the Ptolemies, by which he eventually freed the eastern Mediterranean from Egyptian control. Alexander the Great, as he came to be called, had thus carved through and subdued much of the Mediterranean, and left the previous world empires shattered, which included smashing the power of Persia, and much of the Middle East and North Africa were brought into the control of Greece and then Rome thereafter.
Greece began its decline after the victories of Alexander the Great, as population declined while Greek commercial colonists poured into favourable centres of trade, and the leadership in business and trade that Greece had enjoyed passed to Alexandria and Antioch. As the Greek cities lost their wealth, they could no longer support fleets or armies, and they soon became unable to protect themselves. Although they began to combine in alliances or federations for protection, they could not throw off Macedonian control, which did not include the membership of Athens and Sparta. The Romans, who built a stable political and social order in central Italy while the Greeks were witnessing the decline of the city-state, then also posed a new threat to Greece that was chronically divided.
What new developments occurred during these later periods in the history of Ancient Greece?
Buzz group discussion
1. Form separate groups
2.In addition to responding to responding to questions to consolidate the earlier questions, have separate groups generation questions or common ideas to be agreed on about the course readings thus far.
3. Shift group members to different groups to determine wider common ground, and form new groups who can agree on common solutions to problems or answers to questions.
4. Prepare written summaries to be presented as a class, and can be collected for evaluation for the class participation grade credit for all of the authors of separate summaries.
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