Stephen V. Tracy - Pericles

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the Classical Literature Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation, which is supported by a major gift from Joan Palevsky.

PASSAGES TRANSLATED

ILLUSTRATIONS

ABBREVIATIONS AND PRIMARY SOURCES

In addition to explaining abbreviations used in this book, the following list includes, for students wishing to consult the original Greek sources, the Greek texts used or cited in the book. Greek texts of the authors listed are also available in the Loeb Classical Library series published by Harvard University Press. The Loeb editions provide the Greek text and an English translation on facing pages.

This book is intended for students who have no knowledge of Greek and who also are likely to have very little knowledge of ancient Greece. Thus I have deliberately kept the notes and scholarly apparatus to a minimum, referring mainly to the primary sources. Basic information students will need to know I have tried to include in the text or in the glossary. The translations throughout are my own. My goal in translating is to be both accurate and clear. Strict accuracy occasionally has been sacrificed in favor of a turn of phrase that is understandable to contemporary students. In the case of the historian Thucydides, that most difficult of Greek stylists, I have out of necessity greatly simplified his complex sentence structure, but I have not tried to give him a false clarity. His meaning is at times opaque, and I have not disguised that fact in translating him.

The directors of the University of California Press some years ago paid me the compliment of inviting me to contribute this book. I trust this slim volume does not belie their confidence. I am indebted to the College of Humanities of the Ohio State University for the grant of a research leave for most of the 2000-2001 academic year, which enabled me to write an initial draft. Despite heavy administrative duties as Director of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2002-2007), duties that left little time for writing, I have now (five years later) finished the book. As I look back, my greatest debt is to my students, who over the last thirty years have shared their thoughts and questions with me. They are truly the coauthors of this volume. I also am indebted to the anonymous readers of the Press for detailed and helpful suggestions. Lastly, my wife, Professor June Allison, a fine Thucydidean scholar, and my son, Ben, now a senior in collegeit is students his age and a bit younger for whom this book is primarily intendedhave offered invaluable criticism of the manuscript in its various stages. For good or ill, however, I alone am responsible for what is on these pages.

The American School of Classical
Studies I St. Augustine Beach
Athens, Greece I St. Augustine, Florida
December 2006 August- September 200J

In the interim between these wars two interlocking phenomena made Athens a cultural and political power that would influence the rest of Western history: the creation of the Athenian empire and the development of the so-called golden age of Athens under Pericles. Following the defeat of Persia, the Greek city-states formed a defensive alliance, the Delian League, which the Athenians led and dominated almost from the beginning. This was probably inevitable because the Spartans, an infantry power, naturally had little interest in a naval league whose purpose was to keep the Persians out of the Aegean. League members contributed either ships or money, depending on their size and resources. The League had its center and treasury on Delos, the sacred island of Apollo, which was essentially the geographical hub among the participating cities (see map 2). Since the Athenians contributed the largest number of ships, they came to dictate policy to its membership. By midcentury they had turned the League into their empire. In 454 the Athenians transferred the treasury from Delos to Athens, allowing them to control expenditures as well as the collection of monies. The payments had by this time become tribute exacted from subject states, not con tributions from free allies. Defections from the new empire were not tolerated. The revolts of larger islands like Thasos in the mid-46os and Samos in the 440s were put down harshly. Allies that revolted were brought back into the fold and heavily fined in the form of increases in their annual tribute. Thasos, for example, had its payment increased from 3 to 27 talents, an enormous sum.