Creators, Conquerors, and Citizens: A History of Ancient Greece

518 Pages·2018·9.08 MB·English

by  Robin Waterfield

CREATORS, CONQUERORS, AND CITIZENS
OTHER BOOKS BY ROBIN WATERFIELD PUBLISHED BY
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Dividing the Spoils: The War for Alexander the Great’s Empire (2011) Taken at
the Flood: The Roman Conquest of Greece (2014) Translations
Plato: Republic (1993)
Plato: Symposium (1994)
Plato: Gorgias (1994)
Aristotle: Physics (1996)
Herodotus: The Histories (1998) Plutarch: Greek Lives (1998)
Plutarch: Roman Lives (1999)
The First Philosophers: The Presocratics and the Sophists (2000) Euripides:
Orestes and Other Plays (2001) Plato: Phaedrus (2002)
Euripides: Heracles and Other Plays (2003) Plato: Meno and Other Dialogues
(2005) Xenophon: The Expedition of Cyrus (2005) Plato: Timaeus and Critias
(2008) Polybius: The Histories (2010) Demosthenes: Selected Speeches (2014)
Lives of the Attic Orators: Texts from Pseudo-Plutarch, Photius, and the Suda
(2015) Plutarch: Hellenistic Lives (2016) Aristotle: The Art of Rhetoric (2018)
CREATORS, CONQUERORS, AND
CITIZENS
A HISTORY OF ANCIENT GREECE
ROBIN WATERFIELD
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© Robin Waterfield 2018
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You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any
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CIP data is on file at the Library of Congress
ISBN 978-0-19023430-0
eISBN 978-0-19-023432-4
For Kathryn, with love
impossible without you
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Conventions and Abbreviations
Chronology and King Lists
Maps
Introduction I: Environmental Background
Introduction II: Historical Background
ACT I: THE ARCHAIC PERIOD (750–480): THE FORMATION OF
STATES
1. The Emergence of the Greeks
2. Aristocracy and the Archaic State
3. The Archaic Greek World
4. Early Athens
5. The Democratic Revolution
6. Sparta
7. Greek Religion
8. The Persian Wars
9. The Greeks at War
ACT II: THE CLASSICAL PERIOD (479–323): A TALE, MAINLY, OF
TWO CITIES
10. The Delian League
11. The Economy of Greece
12. Athens in the Age of Pericles
13. Women, Sexuality, and Family Life
14. The Peloponnesian War
15. The Instability of Syracuse
16. Socrates and the Thirty Tyrants
17. The Futility of War
18. The Macedonian Conquest
19. Alexander the Great
ACT III: THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD (323–30): GREEKS,
MACEDONIANS, AND ROMANS
20. The Successor Kingdoms
21. A Time of Adjustment
22. The Greek Cities in the New World
23. Social Life and Intellectual Culture
24. The Roman Conquest
25. A Feat of Imagination
Glossary
Recommended Reading
Index
Preface and Acknowledgments
Aristophanes, who lived and worked at the end of the fifth and beginning of the
fourth century BCE, was the greatest writer of humorous plays in Athens.
Alongside amusing the audience, it was his job, and that of his fellow writers of
Old Comedy (as this style is known), to comment on current affairs, often with a
sarcastic tongue. At one point in his hilarious Lysistrata, produced in 411, he has
the protagonist, Lysistrata herself, say this to the warring Athenians and
Spartans:1
Now that I’ve got you here I’m going to tick you off
For all to hear, and with good reason, because although
At places like Olympia, Thermopylae, and Delphi
(And so on and so forth: I’ll keep it short)
You purify altars with the same holy water
As though you were kin, and although the enemy
Is looming with his barbarian horde, it is
Fellow Greeks and their cities that you destroy.
Aristophanes had a good point. Other writers and other events could be adduced
to the same effect: the Greeks recognized their kinship and their common
culture, but failed to make these shared features a foundation for a common
political life. They were culturally one, but politically many.
The primary purpose of this book is to provide an engaging, accessible, and
up-to-date history of the ancient Greeks, but exploration of the Greek world very
quickly brings one up against this one–many issue. If I were writing the history
of ancient Rome or medieval Spain, I would be writing about a single place, but
in the ancient world there was no single place called “Greece” (“Hellas” to the
Greeks, then as now). The land that currently makes up the modern country of
Greece was occupied by a large number of peoples, living typically in city-states
(that is, towns with their surrounding farmland), and other city-states, equally
populated by peoples who called themselves “Greeks,” were dotted all the way
around the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. In the Classical