Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome (12 page)

hope to compensate for the loss. For with them alone it is the

same thing to hope and to have, when once they have invented a

scheme, because of the swiftness with which they carry out what

they have planned. And in this way they wear out their entire

lives with labor and dangers, and they enjoy what they have least

of all men—because they are always engaged in acquisition and

because they think their only holiday is to do what is their duty

and also because they consider tranquil peace a greater disaster

than painful activity. As a result, one would be correct in saying

that it is their nature neither to enjoy peace themselves nor allow

it to other men.33

Pericles emphatically disputed such analyses. He did not believe that

the Athenian naval empire needed to expand without limit or that the

democratic constitution and the empire together had shaped an Athe-

nian citizen who could never be quiet and satisfied. This is not to say that

he was blind to the dangers of excessive ambition. He knew there were

Athenians who wanted to conquer new lands, especially in the west-

ern Mediterranean, Sicily, Italy, and even Carthage. But he was firmly

against further expansion, as his future actions would clearly demon-

strate. During the great Peloponnesian War, he repeatedly warned the

Athenians against trying to increase the size of the empire. It is also

revealing that he never spoke of the tremendous potential power of

the naval empire until the year before his death, when the Athenians

were despondent and needed extraordinary encouragement. He held

back from this not merely, as he said, to avoid boastfulness, but chiefly

to avoid fanning the flames of excessive ambition.

54 Kagan

If Pericles ever had planned to expand the empire, the disastrous

result of the Egyptian campaign in the 450s seems to have convinced

him otherwise. Its failure shook the foundations of the empire and

threatened the safety of Athens itself. From that time forward, Pericles

worked consistently to resist the desires of ambitious expansionists and

avoid undue risks. He plainly believed that intel igence and reason could

restrain unruly passions, maintain the empire at its current size, and use

its revenues for a different, safer, but possibly even greater glory than the

Greeks had yet known. Pericles considered the Athenian Empire large

enough and its expansion both unnecessary and dangerous. The war

against Persia was over; now the success of Pericles’ plans and policies

depended on his ability to make and sustain peace with the Spartans.

Thus, Pericles’ defense of the Athenian Empire required a complex

strategy. The Athenians needed to deter rebellions by the great power

of their fleet and the readiness to crush uprisings when they occurred,

as Pericles did against Euboea in 446–445 and Samos in 440, and other

places at other times. At the same time, the policy of controlling the

empire was firm but not brutal, as it became after the death of Peri-

cles in 429. His successors killed all the men and sold the women and

children into slavery at Scione and Melos. Neither Cimon nor Pericles

ever permitted such atrocities. At the same time as he counseled keep-

ing the allies under firm control, he also resisted the pressure toward

further expansion, fearing that it would endanger the empire Athens

already had. Finally, he continued to make the effort to persuade Athe-

nian critics and the other Greeks that the Athenian Empire was neces-

sary, justified and no menace to other states. Although Thucydides was

doubtful that a democracy could restrain its ambition and conduct an

empire with moderation for long, he believed that it could so under an

extraordinary leader like Pericles.

Further Reading

The nature and elements of the Athenian Empire are best outlined in the classic survey

of Russel Meiggs,
The Athenian Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), updated

by Malcom McGregor,
The Athenians and Their Empire
(Vancouver: University of Brit-

ish Columbia Press, 1987), and P. J. Rhodes and the Classical Association,
The Athenian

Empire
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). Controversy arises over whether the

Pericles and the Defense of Empire 55

Athenians were exploitive imperialists or enlightened democrats who protected the

poor abroad through their advocacy of popular government. The arguments for both

views are set out well in Loren J. Samons II,
The Empire of the Owl: Athenian Impe-

rial Finance
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), and Donald W. Bradeen,

“The Popularity of the Athenian Empire,”
Historia
9 (1960): 257–69. G.E.M. de Ste.

Croix most forcefully advanced the argument of Athens as a well-meaning protector

of the underclasses; see “The Character of the Athenian Empire,”
Historia
3 (1954):

1–41, which should be read alongside the classic account of Athenian imperial finance

by M. I. Finley, “The Fifth-Century Athenian Empire: A Balance Sheet,” in
Imperialism

in the Ancient World
, ed. P.D.A. Garnsey and C. R. Whittaker, 103–26 (Cambridge: Cam-

bridge University Press, 1978).

Notes

1 Thucydides 1.97.1.

2 Thucydides 3.10.5.

3 Thucydides 1.99.2–3.

4 B. D. Meritt, H. T. Wade-Gery, and M. F. McGregor,
The Athenian Tribute Lists
, vol.

2 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1949), 69.

5 Thucydides 5.105.

6 Phocylides frag. 5.

7 Pseudo-Xenophon
Respublica Atheniensium
2.7–8. This work was falsely attributed

to the historian Xenophon, and its true author is unknown. He is generally referred

to as “the Old Oligarch” because of this work’s antidemocratic views, but we do not

know his age or the purpose of his work, which is usually dated by internal evidence

to the 420s.

8 Hermippus in Athenaeus 1.27e–28a.

9 Pseudo-Xenophon
Respublica Atheniensium
1.18.

10 Diodorus Siculus 12.4.5–6.

11 Raphael Sealey, “The Entry of Pericles into History,”
Hermes
84 (1956): 247.

12 Eduard Meyer,
Forschungen zur alten Geschichte
, vol. 2 (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1899),

19–20.

13 Plutarch
Pericles
17.1.

14 Some scholars have doubted the authenticity of the Congress Decree, as it is

called. For a good discussion, see Russel Meiggs,
The Athenian Empire
(Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1972), 151–52, 512–15. Plutarch does not give a date for the decree, but

the sequence adopted here is the one chosen by those who accept its reality.

15 Pericles 12.2.

16 Pericles 12:3–4.

17 Thucydides 2.8.4.

18 Thucydides 1.75.3–5.

19 Thucydides 1.76.2.

20 Thucydides 2.63.1–2.

21 Thucydides 2.38.

56 Kagan

22 Thucydides 2.43.1.

23 Thucydides 2.64.3–6.

24 Pseudo-Xenophon 1.2–3.

25 Pseudo-Xenophon 2.4–6, 11–13.

26 Thucydides 1.4–19.

27 Pericles 1.143.4.

28 Pericles 2.62.1–2.

29 Pericles 143.4–5.

30 Pericles 1.143.5.

31 Thucydides 6.18.2.

32 Thucydides 6.18.7.

33 Thucydides 1.70.

Pericles and the Defense of Empire 57

3. Why Fortifications Endure

A Case Study of the Walls of Athens

during the Classical Period

David L. Berkey

The history of Athens during the classical period of Greek his-

tory is closely related to the building and rebuilding of the city’s

walls, as well as the extension of its defensive perimeter along the bor-

der of Attica. With every phase of construction, the walls transformed

the landscape and symbolized Athenian power, both at its peak and

at its nadir.1 Thousands of Athenian citizens and slaves constructed

these walls and forts, many of whom toiled incessantly at moments of

danger and uncertainty in the polis’s history. Throughout the classical

period, their construction was a critical public works project of great

political and strategic significance to Athens. In our contemporary era

of sophisticated technology, fortifications seem to remain ubiquitous,

and they reappear in new and innovative forms even as each new gen-

eration of military strategists seems to dismiss their utility. A review of

the century-long history of Athenian fortifications illustrates why walls

endure, and how construction practices evolve over time to meet new

diverse military and political agendas.

These grand investments of the city’s resources, both human and

material, in the defense of Athens are associated with some of the

city’s most prominent politicians and military commanders, in particu-

lar Themistocles, Pericles, and Conon. Following a time of both crisis

and triumph at the end of the Persian Wars, Themistocles began the

enlargement of Athens’s defenses and positioned the city to become

the foremost naval power in the Greek world. In the following decades,

Pericles ushered in the next phase in the fortification, the building of

the Long Walls. By the end of the century, years of conflict during

the Peloponnesian War had led to the destruction of these walls. The

resilient Athenian democracy commenced the postwar period with

a vehement desire to rehabilitate the city’s position within the inter-

state system. Conon recognized the significance of the polis’s walls

and turned his attention to bolstering them. All of these leaders rec-

ognized the strategic value of strong defensive fortifications, but the

circumstances under which these projects were undertaken and their

significance to the polis at given points in time are unique. As the po-

litical context shifted, the walls served different strategic purposes. By

examining their history during the classical period, we are able to ascer-

tain their shifting strategic value and suggest contemporary historical

parallels to these ancient relics of Athens’s imperial glory.

Themistocles’ strategy with regard to the Persian invasion of Attica

provided for the safety of Athenian women and children and enabled

the men of the polis to stage an aggressive military response. The walls

of Athens were inadequate for the passive defense of the polis in the

face of the strength of Xerxes’ forces. While the Acropolis itself was

girded by a wall that employed Cyclopean masonry—so called because

the ancient Greeks believed that the massive blocks of stone used to

construct fortifications of this type had been placed there by the leg-

endary race of giants—the mass of Athenian citizens would certainly

have perished during a direct, let alone prolonged, Persian assault.2 The

decree of Themistocles of 480 BC demonstrates the extraordinary mea-

sures that the Athenians took to save their lives, evacuating Attica and

abandoning their territory to the barbarians:3

The
city
shall be
entrusted
to Athena, Athen||s’ [Protectress,

and to the]
other
gods, all of them, for protectio|n
and
[defense

against the]
Barbarian
on behalf of the country. The Athenian|s

[in their entirety and the aliens] who live in Athens | shall place

[their children and their women]
in
Troezen | [-21-] the Founder

of the land. [T||he elderly and (movable)] property shall (for

safety) be deposited at Salamis. | [The Treasurers and] the Priest-

esses are [to remain] on the Akropoli|s [and guard the possessions

Why Fortifications Endure 59

of the] gods. The rest of the Athe|[nians in their entirety and

those]
aliens
who have reached young manhood shall em|bark

[on the readied] two hundred ships and they
shall
repu||lse the

[Barbarian for the sake of] liberty, both their | own [and that of

the other Hellenes,] in common with the Lacedaimmonians,

Co|rin[thians, Aeginetans] and the others who wis||h
to have a

share
[in the danger].

As the Persians approached Attica, they burned the poleis of Thes-

piae and Plataea, whose citizens had refused to medize (that is, pro-

vide assistance to the Persians).4 Under these desperate circumstances,

Herodotus also mentions that in addition to those Athenians who had

been entrusted with the defense of the Acropolis,

some indigent people who, in an effort to ward off the invaders,

had barricaded themselves on the Acropolis with a rampart of

doors and planks of wood. They had refused to withdraw from

their country to Salamis not only because of their poverty but

also because of their conviction that they had discovered the true

significance of the oracle delivered by the Pythia: the prophecy

that the wooden wall would be impregnable was interpreted by

them to mean that this very place and not the ships was to be

their refuge.5

Themistocles’ interpretation of Aristonike’s oracular response,6