From the Beginning to Plato

THE POLIS AND ITS CULTURE 33
specific items of domestic or foreign policy are rarely alluded to (scholars debate
the extent to which Aeschylus’ Eumenides is an exception to this rule). Although
tragedy avoids replaying Homeric stories, its explorations of clash between
individual and group, of religious duty and political expediency, of deceptive
means to worthwhile ends, and of representation, blindness, and the problems of
communication, are very much extensions of the Homeric task. 46 Tragedy takes
further the self-analysis present already in the Homeric poems, with extensive
exploration of the way in which people are persuaded and of the power and
problems of linguistic communication. Like the Homeric poems, tragedy was for
a mass audience in a festival context, as thousands of Athenians sat through three
days of tragic drama, each day featuring three tragedies and a satyr play by a
single playwright, possibly followed by a comedy—some eight hours or more of
performance. Even once divorced from ‘history’ it was myth that continued to
dominate the cultural life of the polis.
POLITICAL AND CULTURAL IMPERIALISM
Both Athens and Sparta engaged in imperialistic activities in the wake of the
Persian Wars, so creating the possibility of what Thucydides, with some
justification, regarded as the greatest war ever to have engulfed the Greek world,
the long struggle which eventually reduced Athens, if only briefly, to being tied
to Spartan foreign policy, no stronger than any other Greek city. But it was
Athens, not Sparta nor any other Greek city, which was the home of Thucydides,
of the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, of Socrates and of
Plato. Although a leading centre of the visual arts in the sixth century, Athens
can boast only one significant literary figure before the fifth century-Solon. I have
suggested above that we should not neglect the importance of the Persian Wars
in changing the way in which cities related one to another and changing how
cities related to their own past, but the Persian invasions and their consequences
will not of themselves explain the way in which Athens became the cultural
centre of the Greek world, both attracting leading intellectuals from elsewhere—
men like Anaxagoras or Protagoras in the fifth century, Aristotle and
Theophrastus in the fourth—and also herself nurturing innovative thinkers.
Contemporary observers had little doubt about the secret of Athenian success:
Herodotus (V.78) observes that the military transformation of Athens which
followed the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias in 510 demonstrates what an
important thing it is that people should have an equal say in the running of their
city. The Athenians themselves turned the annual ceremony to mark those who
had died in war into the occasion for a heavily stylized speech in praise of
Athenian democracy and liberty, attributing Athenian foreign policy successes
and cultural hegemony alike to her constitution47 ‘Democracy’ currently carries
with it a self-satisfied glow very like that which Athenian funeral orations for the
war dead evoked, yet historically Athens has more frequently been held up as an
example of how not to run a constitution than how to do so, and the principles