Foreword

By the mid fifth century B.C. , Athens had emerged as the most powerful city-state in all of Greece. As a democracy in control of an empire consisting of tributary states, she had become a great sea power with financial resources that appeared inexhaustible and were without parallel in a land that, by contrast with the east, was notoriously poor. Her new status, and the ambition it promoted, made her a natural enemy of the Lacedaemonians, hitherto the leading power in Hellas. Under the leadership of Pericles, Athens's imperial power, her democracy, and her militant opposition to Sparta were all of them extended to the limit, making her the most dangerous city-state, as she was the most splendid, of her time.

The history of Athens from Cleisthenes' time to that of Pericles is therefore the complex story of simultaneous developments on many fronts—the institution of democracy and its subsequent radicalization under Ephialtes and Pericles; Athens's acquisition of an empire during and after her struggle with Persia; the contest with Sparta for mastery of Greece. But the special complexity of this story does not so much consist in the fact that Athens's evolution was multifaceted, comprising, domestically, a transformation of the nature of her government and, externally, the prosecution of a double-edged foreign policy. To be sure, these developments contain genuinely problematical features that arise from the inadequacy, tendentiousness, elusive meaning, and even the outright disagreement of our ancient sources, all of which inevitably renders interpretation tentative and hypothetical. But an even greater

complexity arises from the circumstance that none of these subjects can properly be understood in isolation from the others. Foreign and domestic policy are merely two sides of the same coin, the interrelated ramifications of an integral program. The Athenian democracy unfolded in the context of the acquisition of empire and involved the repudiation of good relations with the Spartans, and each of these developments conditioned and was conditioned by the other. For instance, the domestic political revolution of 462 associated with Ephialtes' name brought about an abrupt cessation of alliance between Athens and Sparta; or, to put it another way, the repudiation of Cimon, the friend of Sparta and, until Ephialtes, Athens's leading statesman, carried with it the discreditation of both his foreign policy and the civic institutions that guaranteed his supremacy at home. Again, the extension of democracy under Pericles by means of state payment for public service required a deliberate decision to rely on the permanent availability of imperial treasure. Thus it presumes the strict interdependence of the Athenian democracy and the Athenian empire. To cite a third example, open hostility with Sparta presupposed Athens's rule of the sea—that is, the inviolability of the empire—for otherwise the Athenians would have been incapable of withstanding a Peloponnesian siege of their city.

The problem faced by the historian, therefore, is to find a method of presenting this material that will allow the reader to comprehend the set of interrelationships in an orderly and natural fashion, and to that end we repeatedly traverse the same chronological ground (roughly the time of Cleisthenes to Pericles) in an attempt to juxtapose four major lines of analysis. In that way, we hope, progressive illumination will be shed upon our subject, the political history of Athens, as each new strand is braided into place. We begin with the Alcmeonid family, for it is the family of Cleisthenes and Pericles (on his mother's side) and possesses a distinctive and peculiar history, which without doubt left its mark on the policies pursued by both statesmen. In chapter 2 we examine the nature and development of the democracy established by Cleisthenes and perfected by Pericles, though now from the point of view of its ideology and metamorphosis into the instrument of the "power of the people." Discussion of the Athenian empire follows, with special attention paid to its origins in the Delian League and the relevance of the "Peace of Callias." In chapter 4 we watch the antagonism grow between Athens and Sparta, chiefly because of Athens's increasing ability and willingness to contest with Sparta for dominance in Greece.

It will be apparent from this description that we have adopted a somewhat innovative approach to our subject, presenting as separate chapters material that has often enough been cast by other scholars in the form of special monographs. Russell Meiggs, for instance, has produced a valuable and comprehensive study of the Athenian Empire. Martin Ostwald in more than one book has clarified the conceptual basis of Athenian democracy as it developed from the sixth century to the fifth; Donald Kagan and G. E. M. de Ste. Croix have focused their attention on the causes of the Peloponnesian War. Such studies as these, however, naturally allocate their attention to a comparatively narrow and specific subject, which has the inevitable effect of diminishing the importance of relevant parallel phenomena standing outside the defined field of inquiry. If our combination of subjects normally treated separately contains any special merit, it will be to stress time and again the material convergence of family history, domestic politics, the history of the empire, and the antagonism of Athens and Sparta.

Finally, a word should be said about the methodology we have employed in dealing with our subject. Chiefly we have occupied ourselves with the sources, using these as the touchstone for judging the validity of modern work. For though it goes without saying that the ancient testimonia are the foundation of all modern reconstruction, and are very well known, it is nevertheless the case that they need constant reassessment, not only in the light of new knowledge, but because sometimes their amalgamation into ever more complex hypotheses, aiming at the categorical expansion of our knowledge, subtly or grossly distorts their ostensible meaning. As every scholar knows, the hypotheses of yester-year eventually solidify into an opinio communis that, acquiring momentum of its own, insensibly transcends the evidence when it does not pervert it, thus yielding a picture that less and less reproduces the original lineaments of the ancient tradition. Hence the need for periodic realignment of the one and the other by the pursuit of "source-based" historical criticism. For this reason, it has been necessary for us repeatedly to examine and debate the views of such seminal writers as Busolt, Wade-Gery, and the editors of ATL, scholars whose treatment of the sources has been particularly influential in subsequent work. By the same token, it should occasion no surprise that we largely ignore the work of those scholars whose interest in these underpinnings is secondary to their imposition on Athenian history of modern historical "models" inspired by the social sciences and strictly irrelevant to our own purpose of letting the sources speak for themselves.