Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

30 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
b.c.e. Its citizens expected that the city would be totally destroyed,
as many of Sparta’s allies urged. The historian Xenophon tells us
that the Spartans did not adopt this course, however, because “they
did not wish to destroy a city that had done so much for Greece
when she was facing her greatest dangers” (History of Greece 2.2.20).
The more cynical might argue that Sparta, thinking with foresight,
wanted Athens to continue to exist as a counterweight to the growing
power of its own allies.
The course and outcome of the Peloponnesian War inevitably
fills the student of history with a sense of tragedy. When it breaks
out, Athens, the city-state par excellence, is at the height of power.
Its final defeat, which followed after a bitter period of civil war,
provided the Greek world with no lasting peace but merely led
to further attrition and fragmentation. And yet the war, though it
solved nothing, had been inevitable, because Athens’s empire had
represented a challenge to the autonomy of the Greek city-states. It
is scarcely possible to imagine what it must have been like to have
lived through such extremes of success and misery.
THE RISE OF MACEDON
The early fourth century saw the rise of Thebes at the expense
of Sparta, which quickly squandered its dominance by arousing
resentment among its erstwhile allies. When Philip II came to the
throne of Macedon in 359 b.c.e. , the focus suddenly switched to
northern Greece. Previously Macedon had played no significant
part in Greek history. Situated north of Thessaly, its fortunes had
been determined mainly by its neighbors. From this date onward,
however, Macedon was destined to dominate Greek affairs until
the Roman conquest.
Philip gained control of mainland Greece not by embarking on an
all-out war of aggression but by exploiting the rivalries between the
city-states. When a dispute broke out over the control of the sanctuary
of Delphi, Philip marched south at the invitation of the Thessalians.
Some years later, he made peace with Athens, his main rival,
and then again marched south to take over control of Delphi, celebrating
the Pythian Games under his presidency. The final showdown
between Macedon and Athens took place in 338 b.c.e. , when
Athens, in alliance with Thebes, was overwhelmingly defeated at
Chaironeia in central Greece. This year also marks the terminal point
for the political freedom of the mainland Greek city-states, which
henceforth were greatly reduced in political and military power.