Classical Greece
Classical Greece was a period of roughly 200 years, stretching across the 5th and 4th centuries BC, and its fingerprints are on nearly every institution the modern world takes for granted. From the mathematics used to build bridges, to the theatre that fills seats every weekend, to the democratic assemblies that govern nations, the debt runs deep. Will Durant wrote in 1939 that "excepting machinery, there is hardly anything secular in our culture that does not come from Greece," and conversely, "there is nothing in Greek civilization that doesn't illuminate our own."
Yet the story of Classical Greece is not a story of serene philosophers in sunlit courtyards. It is a story of two rival city-states locked in a death grip for decades, of a Spartan commander who switched sides twice in one generation, of a silver mine discovered at just the right moment, and of a Macedonian king educated by Aristotle who would eventually make the entire era obsolete. The period opens with a tyrant being expelled from Athens in 510 BC and closes with the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC in Babylon. In between lies one of the most turbulent and generative stretches of time in human history. How did democratic Athens rise and fall? Why did Sparta, the era's most feared military power, collapse within a generation of its greatest triumph? And how did a kingdom on the northern fringe of the Greek world swallow everything that had come before?
In 510 BC, Spartan troops marched into Athens and helped the Athenians remove their own king, the tyrant Hippias, son of Peisistratos. The Spartan king Cleomenes I installed a pro-Spartan oligarchy under Isagoras, expecting to control the city. What followed instead was a political revolution that neither city anticipated.
Cleisthenes, backed by the middle class and citizens who wanted something new, drove out both Isagoras and Spartan influence. He then built a democratic architecture unlike anything that had existed before. Athens was reorganized into roughly 130 demes, which became the basic civic unit. Around 10,000 citizens exercised power through an assembly, the ekklesia, guided by a council of 500 chosen by lot.
The design of this system was deliberately anti-factional. Cleisthenes divided the territory of Athens into thirty sections called trittyes: ten along the coast, ten in the urban centre, and ten in the rural interior. Each tribe was composed of one trittyes from each zone, selected at random, so that no tribe could ever be captured by purely coastal, urban, or farming interests. A declaration of war, for example, would always be decided by a coalition that included fishermen, city merchants, and farmers in equal measure.
Cleomenes intervened again in 508 BC and 506 BC but could not reverse what had been set in motion. The isonomic institutions Cleisthenes established, granting equal rights to all male citizens, and the principle of isegoria, equal freedom of speech in public deliberation, became the foundation on which a wider Athenian democracy would flourish in the 460s and 450s BC.
In 499 BC, the Greek cities of Ionia, including great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus, rose against Persian rule in the Ionian Revolt. Athens sent aid, but the revolt was crushed by 494 BC at the Battle of Lade, and Asia Minor returned to Persian control.
Persian retaliation came in 490 BC. Darius the Great sent a fleet to punish the Greeks. The Persian forces landed in Attica intending to take Athens, but were defeated at the Battle of Marathon by a Greek army of 9,000 Athenian hoplites and 1,000 Plataeans, led by the Athenian general Miltiades. Historians record that accounts of Persian numbers vary from 18,000 to 100,000, so the exact scale of the confrontation remains disputed. The Persian fleet sailed on toward Athens, saw it garrisoned, and chose not to attack.
In 483 BC, during the lull between the two invasions, a vein of silver ore was discovered in the Laurion mountain range near Athens. The hundreds of talents mined there were used to build 200 warships, ostensibly to combat Aeginetan piracy, but the fleet would shortly prove decisive against a far larger enemy.
Darius' successor Xerxes I came in 480 BC with a reported force of 300,000 troops by land and 1,207 ships in support, crossing into Europe via a double pontoon bridge over the Hellespont. The Spartan king Leonidas I of the Agiad Dynasty held the pass at Thermopylae with a force that included 300 Spartans, buying time for the Greek world before being overwhelmed. Xerxes captured and burned Athens, whose population had already evacuated by sea. Then Themistocles commanded the Greek fleet into the narrow straits near Salamis, where the smaller Greek navy neutralized Persian numbers and inflicted a decisive blow on the Persian fleet. A year later, the Greeks under the Spartan Pausanias defeated the Persian land army at Plataea. Persia never attempted another invasion.
The war between Athens and Sparta that broke out in 431 BC was not a quarrel between two cities. It was a collision between two coalitions. The Delian League, led by Athens, had grown from the post-Persian alliance whose treasury was kept on the sacred island of Delos. The Peloponnesian League, though modern in name, was bluntly an instrument of Spartan dominance; contemporaries called it simply "Lacedaemonians and their Allies."
The immediate triggers were incremental. Corinth and its colony Corcyra, modern-day Corfu, went to war in 435 BC over the colony of Epidamnus. Corcyra offered Athens the use of its navy, then the third-largest in Greece, in exchange for an alliance. Athens accepted. In 432 BC Corinth and Athens clashed over Potidaea. Then Athens issued the Megarian Decrees, placing economic sanctions on the Megarian people. Sparta declared war.
Sparta's opening strategy was to invade Attica, but the Athenians retreated behind their walls. A plague broke out during the siege, killing many Athenians, including Pericles. The Athenian fleet struck back with landings on the Peloponnesus, winning at Naupactus in 429 BC and at Pylos in 425 BC. Neither side could land a decisive blow. In 425 BC, Athenian general Cleon attacked the island of Melos to force it into the Delian League; Melos held off. Thucydides later recorded the confrontation between Athens and Melos in his Melian Dialogue, capturing the naked logic of empire: that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. Athens returned to Melos in 416 BC and this time occupied it.
The war's second phase ended in catastrophe for Athens. In 415 BC, Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian Assembly to launch a major expedition against Syracuse in Sicily. On the eve of the fleet's departure in June 415 BC, vandals in Athens defaced statues of the god Hermes throughout the city. The act was blamed on Alcibiades. Before the fleet reached Sicily, word came that Alcibiades was to be arrested for sacrilege. He fled to Sparta instead. The Sicilian expedition was a complete disaster: the entire expeditionary force was lost, and the general Nicias was captured and executed.
Alcibiades in Sparta became a chief advisor to Athens' enemies, counseling them on the best way to defeat his homeland. He persuaded Sparta to build a real navy for the first time, large enough to challenge Athenian dominance at sea. He then persuaded Sparta to ally with Persia, their old enemy, a strategically extraordinary reversal.
Alcibiades did not remain in Sparta long. He was accused of having seduced Timaea, the wife of the Eurypontid king Agis II, and was forced to flee to the Persian court. There he played a longer game, encouraging Persia to fund Sparta's navy while simultaneously keeping both city-states weakened and at war, so that Persia could dominate the Greek peninsula at leisure.
Back in Athens, a strange demand arose from the war party: despite his treachery, Alcibiades should be allowed to return. The belief was that the Sicilian disaster could have been avoided had he been permitted to lead the expedition himself. Alcibiades negotiated his return from the Athenian-controlled island of Samos, on the condition that Athens replace its radical democracy with an oligarchy. In 411 BC, the group known as "the 400" carried out a successful coup. Alcibiades was made a naval commander. He led a fleet of 18 triremes against the Persian-financed Spartan fleet at Abydos near the Hellespont in early 410 BC, turning an Athenian advantage into a rout so decisive that only approaching nightfall and Persian troops on the shoreline saved the Spartan navy from total destruction. He followed this with a significant victory at the Battle of Cyzicus later that spring.
None of it was enough. With Persian financial support, Sparta built a new fleet under the admiral Lysander. Lysander seized the Hellespont, threatening Athens with starvation by cutting its grain supply. Athens sent its last fleet in response and was decisively defeated at Aegospotami in 405 BC. In 404 BC Athens surrendered, losing its walls, its fleet, and all of its overseas possessions. Lysander installed an oligarchy of thirty men to govern Athens. Meanwhile Timaea, whose alleged affair with Alcibiades had sparked a political crisis, gave birth to a child named Leotychidas. Agis II refused to acknowledge the child as his son until he relented on his deathbed in 400 BC.
Sparta in 405 BC was the master of all Greece. By the end of the 4th century BC, it could not defend its own city. The collapse began almost immediately after the victory.
Lysander wanted to rebuild the Athenian empire for Sparta's benefit. He established tributary arrangements and had festivals called the Lysandreia organized in his honour on the island of Samos. Sparta's own tradition forbade private citizens from holding precious metals, conducting transactions instead with iron ingots; now wealth was flowing in, and it corroded old Spartan discipline. Sparta recalled Lysander and quietly reversed his directives.
The king who emerged to lead Sparta into the 4th century was Agesilaus II, whose accession was itself an accident of politics. When Agis II died, the question of who would inherit the Eurypontid throne fell to Lysander to decide. Lysander argued that the young Leotychidas was a bastard, and backed instead the claim of Agesilaus, a son of Agis by another wife. Agesilaus expelled Leotychidas from Sparta entirely and took over all of Agis' estates.
Agesilaus launched a successful campaign against Persia, exploiting pan-Hellenic sentiment to build support. But in 394 BC, the Spartan authorities ordered him back to mainland Greece. While his army had been in Asia Minor, a coalition led by Corinth had attacked the Spartan homeland, and at the Battle of Haliartus the Spartans had been defeated by Theban forces. Lysander was killed in that battle. The resulting Corinthian War, fought from 395 BC to 387 BC, revealed the limits of Spartan power. Sparta eventually ended it by doing the unthinkable: concluding the Treaty of Antalcidas with Persia in 387 BC, handing back the Greek cities of Ionia and Cyprus and reversing a hundred years of Greek victories. The Spartan diplomat Antalcidas negotiated a settlement that was, in effect, a surrender to Persian interests, which Persia's Great King Artaxerxes II then declared binding on all Greek city-states.
Thebes had been building toward a moment of its own. The Boeotian confederacy, which Thebes had led since the 5th century BC, had been dissolved by the King's Peace in 386 BC. Sparta had even seized the Theban fortress of the Cadmea in an expedition through the Chalcidice. In 378 BC, a popular uprising inside Thebes broke Spartan control. Another Spartan general, Sphodrias, tried a surprise attack on the port of Piraeus and failed. Though acquitted at trial, the attempt drove Athens and Thebes into alliance.
The Theban generals Pelopidas and Epaminondas then rebuilt their army and their confederacy. Pelopidas won a significant victory over a much larger Spartan force at the Battle of Tegyra in 375 BC. In 371 BC at Leuctra, Epaminondas led the Theban army to a decisive victory against Sparta. Sparta lost 400 of its 2,000 citizen-troops in a single engagement. That battle ended the era of Spartan military prestige.
Epaminondas pressed further, invading Laconia and liberating the helots, the enslaved population that had been Sparta's agricultural workforce and perpetual source of domestic fear. He gave them the city of Messene as a capital. He built new democratic cities across the Peloponnesus. He also persuaded the Thebans to fund a fleet of 100 triremes, attempting to extend Theban influence into the Aegean.
But Theban hegemony was short-lived by design and by tragedy. In 362 BC, Epaminondas led a Theban army at the Battle of Mantinea against a coalition of Athenian, Spartan, and other forces. The Thebans won. As Epaminondas died in the battle he reportedly said, "I bequeath to Thebes two daughters, the victory of Leuctra and the victory at Mantinea." The historian Xenophon, writing about this moment, concluded that the history of the Greek world had become, in his word, "no longer intelligible." From 362 BC onward, no single city could exert lasting power over the rest. The cycle of hegemony was broken, and in its place came civil wars, proliferating conflicts, and hostilities that now continued even through winter for the first time, as in the Theban invasion of Laconia in 370 BC.
Philip of Macedon became regent for his nephew Amyntas in 359 BC, and within a short time had been acclaimed king as Philip II in his own right. What he built in the following decades was not merely a military machine but a new kind of Greek power, one that drew on the innovations of Epaminondas while preserving elements of Mycenaean palace culture at his capitals of Aegae and Pella.
Philip recognized the new phalanx tactics that Epaminondas and Pelopidas had developed in Thebes and incorporated them into his army. He then brought a Theban military tutor to Macedon to teach his son the Theban method of fighting. That son, Alexander, was born in Pella in 356 BC. Philip also brought Aristotle to Pella to serve as Alexander's teacher.
By 357 BC, Philip had taken the Thracian port of Amphipolis from Athens, a city at the mouth of the Strymon River that had been a major Athenian trading post. A year later, Macedonians took the Athenian-controlled port of Pydna. In Athens, the orator Demosthenes delivered speech after speech against the Macedonian threat, declaring Philip II Athens' greatest enemy. The leader of the Athenian peace party, Phocion, argued that confrontation would be catastrophic. In 338 BC the question was settled at the Battle of Chaeronea, where the Macedonian army defeated a coalition led by Athens and Thebes.
Philip II was assassinated at the wedding of his daughter Cleopatra of Macedon with King Alexander I of Epirus in 336 BC. Alexander, who was twenty years old when he assumed the throne, immediately eliminated all rival claimants, including Caranus, his half-brother by Philip's wife Cleopatra Eurydice, and his cousin Amytas. In 334 BC Alexander crossed the Hellespont into Asia with about 30,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. He never returned to Macedonia. He conquered the Achaemenid empire through three major battles at Granicus, Issus, and Gaugamela, defeated the Indian king Porus at the Hydaspes, and died in Babylon in 323 BC. The classical period ends with that death, after which Alexander's empire was divided among his successors, the Diadochi, and what followed became the Hellenistic world.
Common questions
When did Classical Greece begin and end?
Classical Greece is conventionally dated from 510 BC, when the last Athenian tyrant fell and Cleisthenes introduced his democratic reforms, to 323 BC, when Alexander the Great died in Babylon. The period covers roughly 200 years, encompassing the 5th and 4th centuries BC.
What reforms did Cleisthenes introduce in Classical Greece?
Cleisthenes reorganized Athens into roughly 130 demes as the basic civic unit, with an assembly of around 10,000 citizens and a council of 500 chosen at random. He divided Athenian territory into thirty trittyes across coastal, urban, and rural zones, assigning one of each to every tribe so that no single economic interest could dominate political decisions. His reforms established isonomia, equal rights for all male citizens, and isegoria, equal freedom of speech.
How did Athens defeat the Persian invasion in 480 BC?
After the Spartan king Leonidas I delayed Xerxes' army of 300,000 at the Battle of Thermopylae with a force including 300 Spartans, the Athenians evacuated their city and Themistocles commanded the Greek fleet into the narrow straits at Salamis, where the smaller Greek navy neutralized the Persians' numerical advantage and inflicted a decisive defeat. The following year, Greek forces under the Spartan Pausanias destroyed the Persian land army at Plataea. Persia never attempted another invasion of Greece.
What caused the fall of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War?
The decisive blow came in 405 BC at the Battle of Aegospotami, where the Spartan admiral Lysander destroyed Athens' last fleet after seizing the Hellespont and threatening the city's grain supply. In 404 BC Athens surrendered, losing its city walls, its fleet, and all overseas possessions. Lysander then abolished Athenian democracy and installed the oligarchy known as the Thirty Tyrants.
Why was the Battle of Leuctra in 371 BC significant in Classical Greece?
At Leuctra, the Theban general Epaminondas defeated the Spartan army, killing 400 of Sparta's 2,000 citizen-troops in a single engagement. The battle ended Sparta's long period of military dominance over Greece and the era of Spartan hegemony. It also opened the way for Epaminondas to liberate the helots and reconstitute democratic cities across the Peloponnesus.
How did Philip II of Macedon bring Classical Greece to a close?
Philip II became king of Macedon by 359 BC and expanded into territories held by Athens and other city-states, taking the port of Amphipolis in 357 BC and Pydna a year later. In 338 BC he defeated a coalition of Athens and Thebes at the Battle of Chaeronea. Philip was assassinated in 336 BC and his son Alexander the Great crossed into Asia in 334 BC, eventually conquering the Persian Empire and dying in Babylon in 323 BC, the conventional end date of the Classical period.
All sources
4 references cited across the entry
- 2BookThe Complete Aeschylus: Volume II: Persians and Other PlaysAeschylus et al. — Oxford University Press — 17 February 2009
- 4BookThe Fall of the Athenian EmpireDonald Kagan — Cornell University Press — 1987