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The Thirty Years' Peace was first tested in 440 BC, when Athens's powerful ally, Samos, rebelled from its alliance with Athens. The rebels quickly secured the support of a Persian satrap, and Athens found itself faced with the prospect of revolts throughout its empire. If the Spartans intervened at that moment, they would be able to crush the ...
In Pericles: Revolts within the empire …arrangement was ratified by the Thirty Years’ Peace (winter 446–445). For Athens, the essential loss was that of Megara, which meant that a Spartan army could appear in Attica at any time. That Pericles doubted the stability of the settlement and saw the need to develop an alternative basic strategy…
- Overview
- Restoring Athens’s preeminence
- Revolts within the empire
- Political and military achievements
Hostilities among the Greek states had also come to an end in the Five Years’ Truce of 451. Pericles now embarked on a policy designed to secure Athens’s cultural and political leadership in Greece. It had already dominated the alliance that had continued the Persian War after Sparta’s withdrawal in 478, a leadership strengthened by the transfer of the alliance’s considerable treasury from Delos to Athens in 454. If peace with Persia did not end the alliance, it may have ended the annual tribute paid to that treasury.
Whether to regain this tribute, or simply to assert Athenian leadership, Pericles summoned a conference of all Greek states to consider the questions of rebuilding the Greek temples destroyed by the Persians, the payment of sacrifices due to the gods for salvation, and the freedom of the seas. Sparta would not cooperate, but Pericles continued on the narrower basis of the Athenian alliance. Tribute was to continue, and Athens would draw heavily on the reserves of the alliance for a magnificent building program centred on the Acropolis. In 447 work started on the temple later known as the Parthenon and on the gold and ivory statue of Athena (by Phidias), which it was to house; the Acropolis project was to include, among other things, a temple to Victory and the Propylaea (started 437), the entrance gateway, far grander and more expensive than any previous Greek secular building.
Hostilities among the Greek states had also come to an end in the Five Years’ Truce of 451. Pericles now embarked on a policy designed to secure Athens’s cultural and political leadership in Greece. It had already dominated the alliance that had continued the Persian War after Sparta’s withdrawal in 478, a leadership strengthened by the transfer of the alliance’s considerable treasury from Delos to Athens in 454. If peace with Persia did not end the alliance, it may have ended the annual tribute paid to that treasury.
Whether to regain this tribute, or simply to assert Athenian leadership, Pericles summoned a conference of all Greek states to consider the questions of rebuilding the Greek temples destroyed by the Persians, the payment of sacrifices due to the gods for salvation, and the freedom of the seas. Sparta would not cooperate, but Pericles continued on the narrower basis of the Athenian alliance. Tribute was to continue, and Athens would draw heavily on the reserves of the alliance for a magnificent building program centred on the Acropolis. In 447 work started on the temple later known as the Parthenon and on the gold and ivory statue of Athena (by Phidias), which it was to house; the Acropolis project was to include, among other things, a temple to Victory and the Propylaea (started 437), the entrance gateway, far grander and more expensive than any previous Greek secular building.
There was also some initial allied resentment at the continuation of tribute, and some scattered revolts. Pericles met the situation in part by extending a network of Athenian settlements throughout what may now be called the empire, thus strengthening Athenian control and providing new land for the growing Athenian population. In establishing one ...
There was a break in tensions for the moment. After Thucydides’ ostracism, Pericles had little domestic opposition. His position rested on his continual reelection to the generalship and on his prestige, based, according to the historian Thucydides, on his manifest intelligence and incorruptibility. From his youthful demagogy, he had moved to a more middle ground in politics, and there are traces in his later life of his being outflanked by more radical spokesmen. Athens was, Thucydides says, in name a democracy but, in fact, governed by its first man. Though Athenian democracy never gave more than severely limited powers to the executive, the assembly gave Pericles what he wanted. Thucydides, obsessed with the power of intellect, takes little note of the need of a statesman to work hard, and it is Plutarch who provided the glimpses of a man who took no interest in his own estates, who was never seen on any road but that to the public offices, and who was only recalled to have gone to one social occasion, which he left early.
This picture is softened somewhat by what is known of his personal life. The identity of his wife, however, though certainly of wealth and high birth, is unknown. He married her in his late 20s but, as they were incompatible, divorced her some 10 years later. Close to 50, he took Aspasia of Miletus into his house. By his own law, marriage was impossible, and, after the death of his two legitimate sons, their son Pericles had to be legitimated. Although Aspasia is clouded by scandal and legend, it is easy to believe she possessed great charm and intelligence. There is no reason to doubt that she was free and of good birth in her own city with its great intellectual traditions. It is clear that her own behaviour and Pericles’ attitude toward her were surprising phenomena in Athens, where upper class women were kept secluded. That Pericles was known to kiss her on leaving for and returning from work gave rise to speculation about her influence on him and, thus, on Athenian politics.
As the building program continued, Pericles demonstrated Athenian superiority in other ways. In 443 a Panhellenic colony was founded under Athenian auspices at Thurii, in southern Italy, but did not form a continuing centre of Athenian influence in the west, as may have been hoped. At an unknown date, Pericles took a fleet into the Black Sea to demonstrate Athenian power and secure the grain route from the Tauric Chersonese (the Crimean Peninsula in modern Ukraine). As the buildings on the Acropolis rose, celebrations of the festival of the Panathenaea grew more and more elaborate, and much was done to enhance the splendour of the Mysteries of Eleusis, symbolic, among other things, of the Athenian claim to have brought corn and civilization to mankind.
Pericles’ last major campaign was the one interruption in these years. In 440, Samos, one of Athens’s principal allies with a substantial fleet of its own, revolted, and, despite a victory by Pericles against superior numbers, the revolt nearly succeeded. The campaign to recover Samos, although long and costly, was ultimately successful, and it became a model against which later Athenian generals measured their achievements.
The details were never fully known, but, possibly by bribery and certainly by negotiation, it was arranged that Athens would give up its mainland possessions and confine itself to a largely maritime empire. The Spartan army retired, Euboea was quickly reduced, and the arrangement was ratified by the Thirty Years' Peace (winter 446445).
Thirty Years of Peace. The Thirty Years of Peace started in 446 B.C. While it sounds like an amazing time in ancient Greek history, it wasn’t as great as it sounds. The treaty is thought to have favored the Athenians more than the Spartans. Also, during this time, Athens was forced to handle certain kingdoms rebelling against the treaty.
May 25, 2022 · The expedition failed, and thereafter Pericles adopted the policy of the Themistocles to win the world by commerce rather than war.” [4] This was a major defeat, the Athenians lost over two hundred triremes when the channel they had sailed into was drained, Thucydides notes that “this was the end of the great expedition against Egypt made by the Athenians and their Delian allies.”
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Pericles - Athenian Statesman, War, Politics: There had been a serious possibility that Sparta and its allies might intervene on this occasion, but they did not, and the Thirty Years’ Peace was upheld until the end of the 430s. Tension grew as the decade progressed, particularly with regard to Corinth, Sparta’s ally, whose interests conflicted more obviously with those of Athens. By 433 ...
