AH1 Option 2 Delian League
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1 JACT Teachers’ Notes AH 1.2 Delian League to Athenian Empire 1.1 Books and Resources The best collection of sources is the Athenian Empire LACTOR no. 1 in its fourth edition, ed. R. Osborne. But it is much more than a collection of sources, as it includes excellent commentaries and editorial interventions. Note: these notes frequently refer to Osborne’s LACTOR 14. The still unsurpassed study of Athenian power in the fifth century BC is R. Meiggs’ Athenian Empire. An excellent introduction to the subject, its sources and the historical questions surrounding it is P. J. Rhodes (ed.), The Athenian Empire (Greece and Rome, New Surveys in the Classics no. 17), with addenda (1993). A recent and wide-ranging collection of articles is Polly Low’s Athenian Empire (Edinburgh, 2008) in the Edinburgh Readings series – this excellent collection republishes, updates and translates articles on the origins, development and chronology of the empire, its methods of control, the costs and benefits of empire for the Athenians and subjects, its popularity, and the forms of propaganda employed by the Athenians. The author of these notes has drawn extensively on this collection and on Low’s introductions. R. Parker (et al, eds), Interpreting the Athenian Empire (Duckworth, 2008) will contain useful articles on the chronology of development, historiography, politics, relations with the east. It draws heavily on the extended possibilities of using archaeology to write the history of the subject. Internet resources for the Athenian Empire are limited. If one can locate Athens’ allies on a map of the ancient world (such as the Barrington atlas), it is occasionally possible to get an aerial view of sites of those cities through Google earth. It is possible to do this for the ancient city of Erythrai (look for the modern Turkish town of Ildir, and move inland slightly, and you will see what was the fourth-century theatre and acropolis of Erythrai). There is an essay on the Delian League at livius.org (http://www.livius.org/de-dh/delian_league/delian_league.html), but it is very short and very basic. 1.2 Introduction to Sources The central text for the history of the early years of the Delian League is Thucydides’ Pentekontaetia (Thuc. 1.89-117) which, in the course of his description of the growth of Athenian power, describes the events which saw the Athenians go from being the leader of a free confederacy to the leaders of a coercive empire. Thucydides did not set out to write a history of the Athenian empire: his intention was to explain the origins of the Peloponnesian war. This means that his account is far from comprehensive, but it is often used as the backbone of accounts of the league. Indeed, the history of the Delian League and the Athenian empire plays an important part in Thucydides’ explanation of the war: it was the growth in Athenian power in the period after the Persian wars that, in his opinion, led to the outbreak of conflict between Athens and Sparta (1.23). The rest of Thucydides’ work is a history of the Peloponnesian war, but it gives us Thucydides’ own view on the transformation of the 2 JACT Teachers’ Notes nature of Athenian power. In 427, the Athenians were ready to rethink their decision to brutally massacre the inhabitants of Mytilene (3.26-50: the perpetrators of the revolt were ultimately the only ones executed), but their rhetoric and activity was more severe in 416 when the inhabitants of Melos refused to join the league (5.84- 116). But there are many key events that Thucydides does not mention: he fails to comment, for instance, on the transfer of the treasury of the empire from Delos to Athens, a move which symptomised the growing Athenocentricity of the organisation (see Plutarch Life of Pericles 12); this is thought to have taken place in 454 BC, at which point the Athenians start to write up on stone the Tribute lists preserving the amounts of money received by the treasury of Athena from the allies. The prescribed passages of Thucydides for this option leads us to the question of how far we take seriously the possibility that Thucydides’ speeches may reflect actual words spoken in debates at Athens. Famously, in Gomme’s translation, Thucydides said ‘I have given the speeches roughly as I thought the several individuals or groups would have said what they had to say, keeping as close as possible to the general sense of what was actually said. As Polly Low has noted (Athenian Empire, 5-6), this statement is ambiguous as it contains both a claim to accuracy and an admission that Thucydides’ own judgement has played a part in the shaping of the speeches. More recent scholarship tends to be less trusting of the verbatim accuracy of the speeches, and has viewed then as ‘sites of historical analysis rather than historical reportage’. There are some other literary sources: Aristophanes, the comic playwright, gives us some insight into attitudes to empire, making jokes about Athenian interventionism in Birds 1035-55). Aristophanes’ Birds provides us with evidence for some specific imperial institutions and implies their resentment by allies. Consideration of these institutions, of the other evidence for them, and of Aristophanes’ treatment of them should form one focus. But this is also an opportunity to discuss the project of Birds more generally—the formation of a new city and one free of the institutions which mark Athens. It is worth noting that Birds is as much an indictment of state interference generally as it is an indictment of the running of empire: many of the institutions which appear in Birds being visited upon the new city were also institutions familiar in Athens itself—summoners, vexatious litigants, new legislation, dithyrambic poets, retailers of oracles, and so on; perhaps only the ‘Inspector’ is a character without parallel in Athens itself. Tragedy may contain less direct allusions to Athenian power: Tom Harrison (The Emptiness of Asia) has argued that Aeschylus’ Persians of 472 BC may be read as a reflection on Athenian power. [Aristotle]’s Athenaion Politeia (the Constitution of the Athenians) (translated by P. Rhodes in a Penguin edition and also by J. Moore in Aristotle and Xenophon on Democracy and Oligarchy) of the 320s BC tells us about its initial organisation (section 23).Another highlight of the ancient sources is the Old Oligarch (LACTOR edition revised by Robin Osborne), a political pamphlet of unknown date (usually thought to be fifth century; but Hornblower has recently suggested an early fourth- century context) which offers insight into how a nondemocratic Athenian may have viewed Athenian imperialism. Plutarch’s biographies (written in the late first century 3 JACT Teachers’ Notes and early second century AD) give us insight into the initial organisation (especially the life of Aristides) and the later development and expansion (especially the life of Pericles) of the organisation. While he often distorts the nature of Athenian institutions, he certainly gives us some extra nuggets of information about areas of expansion not touched on by other sources. Inscriptions: Fifth-century imperialism is also well-attested in the inscriptional record; the significance of these documents for the history of the Athenian empire justifies some discussion of the ways in which they can be read. In the mid 450s, the Athenians started publishing decrees of their assembly on stone (it is unlikely that the publication was comprehensive however), and many of these documents concerned the administration of the empire. To say that the Athenians used inscriptions as a tool of control in their administration of empire would be an oversimplification. From 454/3 BC onwards, the Athenians recorded the amount of tribute (1/60th of the total) dedicated to the treasury of the goddess Athena on stone slabs set up on their acropolis (see LACTOR 14 pp. 86-97). These documents were about piety and power, but they also reflected a very Athenian infatuation with accountability. It was at this time that the Athenians started to write up documents which imposed regulations upon their allied states. At first such documents affected only individual cases (such as those relating to Phaselis, Erythrai, and Chalcis), but by the 420s, the Athenians were erecting inscriptions containing decrees which concerned the regulation of the empire as a whole: the Standards (Coinage) decree was to be set up ‘in the agora of each city, in front of the mint’ (LACTOR 14 no. 198). Athenian inscriptions offer a great deal to the historian of the fifth-century Aegean Greek world: they tell us about the ways in which the Athenians attempted to control their allies and they offer us insight into the rhetoric that the Athenians employed in the negotiation of power. Deciphering the messages of ancient Greek inscriptions is often a tricky business, and requires several layers of reconstruction. For one thing, the stones are often worn or broken, and it can be physically hard to make sense of the letters. Once the words have been deciphered, we often find ourselves reading about institutions or practices about which we know little or nothing, and we have to rely on parallels and extrapolation to understand the documents. Furthermore, the meaning of inscriptions is often made more enigmatic by the potential gap between the tone of the things said (that is, the stated intention) and the deep-seated intentions of the writer or producer of the inscription. A document may be written with the intention of softening the blow of an absolutist political imposition, in which case the language of the document would be more mild than the imposition of power.