Lecture Nine The Athenian Empire and Democracy Teacher: Wu Shiyu Email: [email protected].

Lecture Nine

The Athenian Empire and Democracy

Teacher: Wu Shiyu Email: [email protected]

A Review Battle of Salamis:Decisive Greek victory.

Like the Battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, Salamis has gained something of a 'legendary' status (unlike, for instance, the more decisive Battle of Plataea), perhaps because of the desperate circumstances and the unlikely odds.

Salamis is one of the most significant battles in human history.

Much of modern western society, such as philosophy, science, personal freedom and democracy are rooted in the legacy of Ancient Greece.[

Greek Trireme

Lecture Nine

The Athenian Empire and Democracy

Teacher: Wu Shiyu Email: [email protected]

9.1 The Establishment of the Athenian Empire

The collaboration in fighting against the Persians evoked a rare interval of interstate cooperation in ancient Greek history. Athens and Sparta, the two most powerful city-states, had put aside their mutual suspicions.

During the Persian Wars, they had shared the leadership of the united Greek military forces.

Later this cooperation after the defeat of the Persians failed. Out of this failure arose the Athenian Empire.

9.1.1 The Troubles of Sparta

In 479 B.C., the Greek coalition decided to continue to drive out the Persian outposts (哨站 ) that still existed in northern Greece and western Anatolia (小亚红细亚 ).

Spartan general, Pausanias was chosen to lead the united army and began the first expedition in 478 B.C. This proved to be a mistake.


Spartan men in positions of power, once away from home, inescapably behaved badly. In Sparta, they were always under regimented training and under the scrutiny of one another, but outside Sparta, with no constraints imposed on them, they were ill prepared to operate humanely and effectively.

As a result, the Greek forces under his control could not tolerate his arrogant and violent behavior toward his allies as well as local Greek citizens.


In addition, away from the rigid virtue, Pausanias took to living luxuriously. He would wear elaborate Persian costumes. And he even began to negotiate with Xerxes in an attempt to gain greater power with Persian help.

Eventually, he was recalled to Sparta and tried for treason but was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence.


Pausanias committed a most unforgivable sin to Spartans: to organize a revolt of helots. The plot was discovered and Pausanias fled to a temple for safety, where he was surrendered and starved to near death.

He did not die in the temple, a sacred ground. He was removed and died outside.

9.1.1 The Troubles of Sparta The Spartans lost their prestige among the members

in the Greek coalition and eventually the Athenians came to lead the alliance.

Yet the leaders at Sparta was happy to be free of the leadership because, in the words of the Athenian historian Thucydides, “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.

Also, Spartans had to be alert to guard against the helot revolts, and prolonged overseas operations were difficult to maintain.

9.1.2 The Delian League In 477 B.C., the other Greeks were persuaded to requ

est Athenian leadership of the alliance against the Persians. The Greek alliance against Persia now took on a new form under Athenian leadership.

Member states, located in northern Greece, on the islands of the Aegean Sea, and along the western coast of Anatolia, would swear a solemn oath never to desert the coalition.

Sparta, on the other hand, was still leading a league long since established, referred to as the Peloponnesian League by modern historians. Thus, Athens and Sparta each had its own coalition (联盟 ) of allies. Each of the alliances had an assembly to set policies, but the final say went to the head of the alliances, namely, Sparta and Athens.

The Delian League

Athenian domination over the alliance was promoted by special arrangements made to finance naval operations of the Athenian-led alliance.

Aristides set the standards of dues (会费 , 捐费 ) to be paid by the member states every year, based on their size and prosperity. Larger member states were to supply whole warships, triremes at the time, with crews and their pay; smaller states were to share the cost of a ship or simply contribute cash, which would be pooled with others’ dues to pay for the ship and its crew.

The alliance’s funds were put in the sacred temple of Apollo on the Aegean island of Delos, and consequently the alliance was later referred to as the Delian League.

9.1.2 The Delian League

9.1.2 The Delian League Over time, more and more states found that

contributing cash was easier than going to the trouble of supplying warships. Most of these states opted for this because they had difficulty in building ships as specialized as triremes and training crews to operate them. However, as Athens was far larger than most of the allies, it had the capacity to build triremes in large numbers. More importantly, it had a large population of men eager to earn pay as rowers.

As a result, Athens built and manned most of the warships, using the dues of other states to complement its own contribution.

The Athenian rowers on these warships came from the poorest social class, the class of the laborers, and as they contributed to the navy, they earned money and also gained more political importance.

Though Athens continued to maintain its hoplite army, over time its fleet became its most powerful force. As the fleet gained more importance militarily, so did the rowers politically, which would later influence the political structure in Athens.



The Delian League did achieve it principal goal: within the next twenty years since its foundation, league forces succeeded in expelling almost all of the Persian garrisons (守备部队 )out of the city-states along the northeastern Aegean coast and driving the Persian fleet from the Aegean Sea, ending the Persian threat to Greece for the next fifty years.

9.1.3 The Athenian Empire Meanwhile Athens grew stronger from its share of the spoils (战利品 ) captured from the Persians and the dues paid by other members of the Delian League.

By the middle of the fifth century B.C., the dues alone amounted to 600 talents. This annual income meant general prosperity for people living in a state the size of Athens (about thirty or forty thousand adult male citizens).

9.1.3 The Athenian Empire However, over time, as Persian threat was minimized,

other members were beginning to doubt on the necessity of retaining the Delian League.

The Athenians, of course, would not allow any desertion (放弃 ) of the league to happen. They would not even tolerate the disagreement with the decisions made for the league as a whole under Athenian leadership. As most allies eventually lacked the warships of their own, Athenians were able to use their fleet to compel discontented allies to adhere to league policy and to continue paying their dues

As Thucydides observed, rebellious allies “lost their independence”, and the Athenians were “no longer as popular as they used to be” .

9.1.3 The Athenian Empire

The most astounding instance of Athenian compulsion of a reluctant ally was the case of the island of Thasos in the northern Aegean Sea.

In 465 B.C., Thasos unilaterally withdrew from the Delian league after it disputed with Athens.

To force the Thasians to keep their sworn agreement that they should never desert the league, the Athenians, leading allied forces, besieged them. The Thesians had to surrender in 463 B.C.. As punishment, Thasos was forced to dismantle its defensive walls, give up its naval force and pay enormous tribute and fines.

9.1.3 The Athenian Empire

In this way, the originally voluntary Delian League was eventually transformed into an empire, the so-called Athenian Empire, a term invented to point out the harsh dominance Athens came to exercise over other members.

To Athenians, this transformation was justified because it was Athens that kept the alliance strong enough to perform the principal mission of the Delian League: to protect Greece from the invasion of the Persians.

The Athenian Empire

9.2 Athenian Democracy In the decades following the Persian wars, as the

poorer men of the thete class were manning the Athenian fleet, the political importance also increased. And they began to recognize that it was they who provided the basis for Athenian security and prosperity. Apparently it was the time to make administration of justice as democratic as the process of making laws in the assembly.

It was true that the assembly could serve as a court of appeals at this time, but it was the archons (执政官 ), the annual magistrates (执法官 ), and the Areopagus council (最高法院 )of archons who were rendering the judicial verdicts (裁决 ).

9.2 Athenian Democracy

Since 487 B.C., the nine archons had been chosen by lot instead of the previous election, making those offices filled by random chance and not to be dominated by wealthy men from higher classes. Thus it was felt to be democratic as it gave an equal chance to all eligible (有资格的 )citizens.

9.2.1 The Democratic Reform of System of Justice

Still the democratically chosen archons were likely to be corrupted by bribery (受贿 ) or under pressure of socially prominent (显赫

的 ) men. If the laws were to be applied fairly and honestly, it should be administrated in a different judicial system instead of by the archons. A reform of the judicial system was needed.

The time was ripe for further democratic reforms. In 461 B.C., Ephialtes seized the moment to convince the assembly to pass measures limiting the power of the Areopagus.


Ephialtes

Ephialtes was an ancient Athenian politician and an early leader of the democratic movement there. In the late 460s BC, he oversaw reforms that diminished the power of the Areopagus, a traditional bastion of conservatism, and which are considered by many modern historians to mark the beginning of the "radical democracy" for which Athens would become famous.


Previously, the Areopagus had had authority to judge accusations of the archons’ misconduct, and this was referred to as “guardianship of the laws.” As the Areopagus was composed of former archons, it would presumably have been on good terms with the current archons. For the misconduct of the current archons, which deserved punishment, there existed possibility of the Areopagus’ forgiving.

The reforms abolished the guardianship of the laws from the Areopagus, although Ephiltes showed respect for its venerable history and long traditions, leaving it with jurisdiction over homicide and some religious matters and the council remained the court for premeditated murder and wounding, arson, and other offenses.


Most significantly for the Ephialtic reforms, a judicial system of courts was established. The courts were composed of juries of male citizens over thirty years old, selected by lot to serve for a year. Previously, it was the archons and the Areopagus that were exercising most of the judicial power. Now the power was largely transferred to the jurors (陪审员 ).

There were six thousand men in all, to be randomly chosen and distributed into individual juries as needed to handle the case load. Under this new judicial system, the archons were to treat minor offenses, the Areopagus had its few special judicial competencies, and the council and assembly could deal with certain cases concerning public interest, but the newly established courts were given an extraordinary jurisdiction.


In most cases the charges were brought to the court, and the only government official present was a magistrate to keep order during the trial. The jurors had sworn an oath to pay attention and judge fairly, and they were not instructed by any judge or harangued (高谈阔论 ) by prosecutors (原告 )or defense lawyers. Only when a magistrate was on trial for misconduct in office or when the case involved the public interest would a citizen be appointed to speak for the prosecution.


In criminal cases, persuasive speech was the most important element due to limitation of techniques used in modern trials such as blood tests or fingerprints. Both the accuser and the accused had to speak for themselves in the court.

Sometimes they could pay someone else to organize the speech for them to deliver, or they could ask others to support their arguments or prove their good character.

Therefore, their characteristics and reputations were always relevant, and the jurors expected to find out about truth partly from hearing about a man’s background and his conduct as citizen.


After hearing the speeches by the persons involved, the jurors made up their minds and decided on their own how the law should be applied in each case. A majority vote of the jurors was their decision and there was no higher court to overrule the decision. Also there was no appeal from their verdicts.

Such was the enormous power of the court system and in practice, the juries were defining the fundamental principles of Athenian public life. In Aristophanes’ comic play about the Athenian judicial system, The Wasps, produced in 422 B.C., a juror boasts, “our power in court is no less than royal!” .


At the end of their term of service, the jurors did not have to undergo a public scrutiny of their actions as jurors, unlike other officials in Athenian democracy. As there were so large juries, numbering from several hundred to several thousand, bribing jurors to improperly influencing the outcome of cases was very difficult. Later, the system was even further revised to assign jurors to cases by lot and not until the day of the trial.


The structure of the new court system reflected the underlying principles of the Athenian democracy in the mid-fifth century B.C. It was participated by a widespread cross-section of randomly selected male citizens, with corruption prevented by elaborate precautions. And individual citizens, regardless of their wealth, were equally protected under the law.


Significant though the Ephialtic reforms were, there were people who disliked the turn the government was taking. Shortly after the reforms were enacted, presumably these people arranged for the assassination of Ephialtes. Upon his death the leadership was transferred to his dynamic associate Pericles, who remained the most prominent politician in Athens from about 461B.C. to his death in 429 B.C.

Pericles Pericles is the son of Zenpos. For more than 30 years,

he has led the Athenian people, not a king, not a dictator, but as the embodiment of their will, this great democratic people.

He has been ranked with Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill as one of the three democratic leaders in human history. He is a true statesman; Thucydides pays him the same high tribute he does to Themistocles. Extracting from that I will say to you that a true statesman is possessed of a bedrock of principles, beliefs. He has a moral compass of profound integrity and truth. And Thucydides tells us that Pericles was the very embodiment of integrity. Statesmen must have a vision. And he must be able to build a consensus to achieve that vision.

Pericles

Like Churchill and like Roosevelt, Pericles was an aristocrat, came from one of the most distinguished of all Athenian families, the Alcmeonid. He had been educated and he partook all the intellectual currents of one of the greatest ages of cultural creativity. For the prosperity and freedom, he attracted for the city, the finest minds of Greece, who probed all aspect of natural science, questions of ethics and morality. History itself was born there, and it was the freedom of Athens that attracted Herodotus.

Pericles Pericles was rich enough, and unlike

Themistocles, he didn’t have to take bribes. A man of calm, he persuaded the Athenians by the intellectual force of his rhetoric. Themistocles was inclined to give flowery speeches and passionate speeches. Pericles led Athenians in logic step by step. He never curried favor with them. He was a true leader. He did not use public opinion polls. He led and he had a vision. That vision is that Athens will be No. 1 power in the Greek world.

9.2.2 The Reforms of Pericles

In the 450s B.C., the Athenian democracy received further backing when Pericles (c. 495-429 B.C.) proposed that a daily stipend (津贴 ) be paid using state revenues (税收收入 ) to men who served on juries, in the council of five hundred, and in other public offices filled by lot.

With the stipend as suggested by Pericles, it was easy for poor men to leave their regular work to serve in these time-consuming positions. By contrast, the ten generals received no stipends.


The ten generals were elected rather than chosen by lot since their positions required expertise and experience, and they were the most influential public officials responsible for military and civil affairs, especially public finances. They were not paid because mostly it was the rich men like Pericles, who were able to receive education required for this top job and who had the free time that were expected to win the election as generals.

Though generals received no pay, they were compensated by the high prestige they held.

9.2.2 The Reforms of Pericles Pericles and other rich people had inherited enough

wealth so that they were able to plunge into politics without worrying about making money, but payment for public service was essential for democracy as the mass of working men had to think twice before they pushed their work aside and served for the public without payment.

The stipend paid to other officials and jurors was no more than an ordinary laborer could earn in a day, but it was able to enable poorer Athenians to serve in government. Pericles’ proposal for stipends for jurors earned him enormous popularity among ordinary citizens. As a result, He was able to carry out more reforms in the domestic policy.


In 451 B.C., Pericles sponsored a law regulating that henceforward citizenship would be granted only to children whose mother and father were both Athenians. Previously, the children of Athenian men and non-Athenian women had been Athenian citizens. With the passing of the new law, the notion of Athenian identity was solidified to be special and exclusive. More importantly, it emphatically recognized the special status of Athenian women as possessing equal citizenship with Athenian men in the important process of setting up the citizenship of new generations of Athenians.

9.2.2 The Reforms of Pericles Not long after the citizenship law was passed,

Athenians began a checkup of citizenship among them and those who had claimed citizenship fraudulently were expelled. For Athenian men, the advantages of citizenship included the rights to participate in politics and in juries, to influence decisions related with their lives, to be protected under the law, and to own land and property in Athenian territory.

Citizen women had fewer rights because they were excluded from politics, but they did enjoy the basic guarantees of citizenship: the right to control property and to be protected by law for their persons and their property. Both men and women citizens were sharing unparalleled material prosperity with an increased sense of communal identity.

Pericles pushed the Athenian democracy even further. Now together with the assembly, composed of all classes of citizens, the council of five hundred, the magistrates or archons chosen by lot, and ostracism ((古希腊 )贝壳流放法 ), with the authority of majority over any minority or individual when the vital interests of the state were at stake, Athenian democracy reached its height, and the city-state itself entered into a “Golden Age”.


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Lecture Nine The Athenian Empire and Democracy Teacher: Wu Shiyu Email: [email protected].

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