The Sophistic Moral Decline Of Athens And The Fall Of The Athenian Democracy

When one thinks of Classical Greece, the first city that usually comes to mind is Athens, with its poets, playwrights, architects and philosophers. An element that defined Athens, bringing it the power and wealth without which all the others would be improbable, was its superior navy. This is sometimes considered the most important element of Athenian greatness. The Athenian navy made possible the growth of an Athenian empire, and fueled the growth of the Athenian economy, which resulted in a climate ideal for art and philosophy to flourish. Dependence upon a naval doctrine of war caused Athens to become a major power in the Greek world, and the abandonment of this doctrine speeded Athens’ demise. When the fleet was destroyed in 404 B.C., the loss of independence to Sparta soon followed, though independence was later regained and the end did not fully come until the Macedonian hegemony. Of more importance to the abandonment of the naval doctrine in Athens’ decline was their acceptance of moral relativity, which came with the Gnostic teachings of the Sophists and was fueled by a sense of anxiety caused by a growth of the government and the eroding of old principles. Civic virtue was the truly defining aspect of Athens, and it was the decline of morality and civic virtue that truly doomed Athens in the end.

In about 483, B.C., or perhaps a little earlier, the people of Athens decided that they needed more ships to counter the growing threat from Persia. On the urging of men such as Themistocles, they began building a new kind of ship known of as the trireme, which replaced the earlier pentekontor, a simpler ship with single rows of twenty-five rowers on each side of the ship. [1] The trireme was much larger, and had either three banks of superimposed oars on each side or three rowers to a single oar with fewer oars than would be possible with the superimposed banks. The second view is more commonly accepted now, but the first has not been ruled out and both views have their proponents. The Persians used triremes in their navy, and the fleet that carried the Persian invasion force to land at Marathon had consisted of six hundred of these ships. Ten years later, when Xerxes invaded, the Persian naval force was twice as large. [2]

Themistocles had urged the building of triremes for the Athenian navy to begin with, and these ships were used to wrest naval power away from the city-state of Aegina. In 487 B.C., the Athenian navy was still so small (only fifty ships) that they had to borrow twenty ships from the Corinthians before they faced Aegina in battle. [3] The expansion was soon under way, however, and Themistocles was able to convince the Athenians to pay for this fleet using the silver from the mines of Laurion. When the Persian armies under the command of Xerxes began to threaten Greece in 480 B.C., however, many Athenians wanted to focus on building a much larger force of hoplites. They felt that since an Athenian force of hoplites had defeated the Persian army of Darius they could defeat future Persian armies using only hoplites. What they were not taking into account was that the next Persian army would be many times larger, and with a fleet of their own triremes they could keep their armies in Greece re-supplied indefinitely. When the Athenians consulted the oracle of Delphi, they were told to rely on wooden walls. According to Herodotus, the priestess Aristonice gave this prophecy:

Why sit you, doomed ones? Fly to the world’s end, leaving Home and the heights your city circles like a wheel. The head shall not remain in its place, nor the body, Nor the feet beneath, nor the hands, nor the parts between; But all is ruined, for fire and the headlong god of war…

Dismayed by this prophecy, the Athenians requested a better one and were given a second prophecy by the oracle:

…Though all else shall be taken within the bound of Cecrops And the fastness of the holy mountain of Cithaeron, Yet Zeus the all-seeing grants to Athene’s prayer That the wooden wall only shall not fall, but help you and your children… …Divine Salamis, you will bring death to women’s sons When the corn is scattered, or the harvest gathered in. [4]

Many Athenians thought this prophecy meant that they should build palisade walls of wood to protect them from the Persians, but Themistocles argued convincingly that the “wooden wall” referred to naval vessels, not to an actual wall. [5] Perhaps Themistocles realized, as Herodotus did, that to fight the Persians only on land was folly. By challenging the Persians at sea and defeating the Persian fleet, Themistocles knew that he could cut off their means of re-supply and reinforcement.

In 480 B.C., the next invasion came. A vast Persian army, numbering perhaps as much as two million but at least a couple hundred thousand, crossed the Hellespont and marched into northern Greece. Most of the Greek city-states in the north of Greece capitulated to the Persians, but those in the south chose to resist. Aid was requested from Syracuse, but was only offered at too high a price for the leaders of Athens and Sparta to accept, as the ruler of Syracuse wanted full control. It is doubtful that the people of Syracuse would have been able to help anyway as they were busy fighting off an invasion of their own by the Carthaginians. Some have even suggested that Xerxes may have coordinated his campaign with that of the Carthaginians. [6]

While the land forces of the allied Greek city-states, under the command of King Leonidas of Sparta, held off the advance of the Persians through the pass of Thermopylae, the naval forces attacked the Persian fleet at Artemisium. The fighting was indecisive, but a Persian attempt to circle around the island of Euboea and attack the Greek fleet from behind ended in disaster when the Persians were caught in a storm and blown against the rocks. The Athenians, having faced the Persian fleet in battle and survived were encouraged and now felt that victory against the Persian fleet was possible. The Persians, having lost many ships to another storm before having faced the Athenians the first time, were greatly demoralized. Themistocles was able to trick the Persians into entering the straits between the island of Salamis and the mainland shortly after this, and, having bottlenecked the Persian fleet, proceeded in its destruction. [7] Some of the Persian ships escaped, but the fleet was shattered and could no longer support a large army in Greece. There may have been as many as two hundred Persian ships destroyed in the battle, while the combined Greek fleet led by Athens had lost only forty. [8] A year later the Persian troops that remained were defeated at Plataea, and Greece was free. The wooden walls of Athens had faced their first major test and emerged triumphant.

Athens now came to be more prominent in the Greek world than she had ever been before. The power the Athenians now had allowed them to venture to ports throughout the Mediterranean and trade silver from the mines of Laurion for the goods they needed to thrive and grow, without fear of pirates and hostile navies. Olive oil was also a commodity that the Athenians were able to trade for grain and livestock. The most important trading areas were Egypt, Italy and the Black Sea coast. [9]

Another benefit to the Athenians’ new power was the position it afforded them in the Delian League. This was a naval alliance that was organized by Athens, but officially had its headquarters on the island of Delos. Each member contributed a set amount of ships and men to the league, or in some instances an equivalent amount of money. Soon the Athenians transformed this league into their personal empire, refused to allow any other city-state to secede from the league, and even compelled others to join who were not initially members. Money collected in dues from the league members went into building projects in Athens. Pericles, who had become the most prominent citizen by this time, justified these expenditures by mentioning that Athens needed rebuilding after having been destroyed by the Persians. He also said that the Athenians were entitled to this since they had been the only ones to sacrifice their city for the cause of the freedom of all Greeks. [10]

Foremost among the new building projects was the Parthenon, a temple to the goddess Athena, who was the patron goddess of the Athenians. The Parthenon cost the city of Athens what today would be the equivalent of billions of dollars, but most of this was paid out of the treasury of the Delian League. [11] Inside the temple, a large statue of Athena was placed, which may have cost more than the temple itself. Athena had been the patron goddess of Athens for a long time, but due to influence from Egypt and Persia she had become associated with Gnostic ideas. She was sometimes associated with the female aspect of the unity of opposites or "Sophia," and with the mother figure of the Gnostic trinity. She carried a spear, and was known as a “spear shaker,” [12] the spear representing the esoteric knowledge of the Gnostics, to which the Stoic sect was connected. She and Apollo were sometimes represented as the male and female halves of the divine, and were used by the stoics to teach their humanist ideals, namely that man is god. R. Swinburne Clymer said of this humanist doctrine:

To the Occult, Alchemic and Arcane Initiates, the ancient injunction, Know Thyself, as inscribed upon the Temple of Apollo, attributed by some to Pythagoras, by others to the Greeks, and yet by others to the Egyptians, was the sum and substance of all Wisdom. In this knowledge of self was found, they believed, the knowledge of God; the knowledge that God lies in the nature of man. [13]

One might ask what all this has to do with the subject at hand. During this time, there was treachery afoot amongst some of the Athenians. Another project upon which Pericles had embarked was the construction of two long walls stretching from the city of Athens down to the coast. The purpose of these walls was to keep the city connected to its naval port at Piraeus, so that even if the city was under siege they could still bring goods into the city with their navy. There were some in Athens who wished to bring an end to democratic government in Athens and were willing to conspire with the Spartans. Their conspiring was suspected, and nothing ever came of it at the time because the leaders of Athens were proactive and faced the Spartans in battle. Though they were defeated, the Spartans did not follow up on their victory and withdrew, perhaps for the same reason Robert E. Lee withdrew his army into northern Virginia after Antietam. They knew the Athenians were ready for them and that they would not be able to achieve their means by stealth. This allowed the Athenians to conquer Boeotia and Phocis unopposed by the Spartans. [14]

While the treachery shown by the Athenian traitors was nothing new, as there have been traitors throughout recorded history (indeed, shortly before this time Pausanius may have conspired to deliver the Spartan fleet over to the Persians [15]) [16], it is quite likely that the moral climate of Athens spurred this treachery to some extent, much more than it had done in the past. Since the stoics taught that man was the measure of all things, a teaching often attributed to Protagoras, those who followed them came to believe that personal interests came ahead of those of the city-state. If a course of action benefited themselves as individuals they would follow that course. During the Age of Pericles, which was also the golden age of Athens, the rich Athenians came to embrace such a view, for it made them feel important. The old gods were no longer held in high respect. Peter Levi said of this age:

The ancient ritual forms of Greek religion, the public and collective rituals which were integral to a whole society and way of life, had lost their force to some degree at the end of the 6th century. They had lost their “natural” context, and many crucial functions had been taken over by the state. The Athenians no longer understood what rituals they were performing (hence the mock rationalism of the sophistic generation of the tragic poet Euripides) and widespread anxiety was the result as well as the cause. It was accompanied at a later stage by an otherwise unaccountable increase in wild and exotic cults, and in private religious and magical indulgence. [17]

Even such influential citizens as Sophocles were drawn into the Gnostic traditions. Sophocles was part of the Eleusinian mystery religion, and was known of as a servant of a holy snake [18], which is reminiscent of the Gnostic symbol of the ourobouros, or snake biting its tail (this was used to represent a cycle of creation and destruction in the pantheist teachings of Heraclitus of Ephesus, a Gnostic). [19] One Athenian who spoke out against the hypocrisy of Athens, though he himself associated with Sophists, [20] was Euripides, who once said, “It is slow to stir, but nonetheless it never fails, the strength of gods; and it brings to correction those of men who honor foolishness and fail to foster things divine in the madness of their judgment.” [21] Euripides was shunned by many of his fellow Athenians, and was eventually banished. The will of the majority was triumphant.

With the new attitudes of the citizens of Athens came a decline in the quality of their navy. There were few improvements made to Athenian triremes, while other city-states were starting to build triremes with harder hulls and better rams. The Corinthians in particular made vast improvements, and, though at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War they were still outclassed by the Athenians, by the time of the Battle of Naupactus they were able to severely damage seven Athenian triremes while losing only three of their own. The English classical historian George Grote said of the Athenian triremes at the time:

Accordingly, when the fleet of Diphilus came across from Naupaktus, it remained for some time close in front of the Corinthians, neither party venturing to attack; for the straightforward collision was destructive to the Athenian ships with their sharp, but light and feeble beaks- while it was favourable to the solid bows, and thick epotids or ear-projections, of the Corinthian trireme. [22]

This change in the fortune of the Athenian navy brought dismay to many Athenians, but it had been inevitable. Beginning around the middle of the fifth century B.C., Athens and Sparta and their allies had been moving ever closer to full-scale war. Sparta, according to Themistocles, was jealous of the growth of Athenian power and longed for a return to the days when they were the only major power in Greece. [23] Many did not long for war, including the Spartan king Archidamus, and did everything in their power to keep it from coming. Many of the allies of both Sparta and Athens, however, tried to pit each against the other for their own self-interests. Deceit was rampant among the city-states at the time. Even where personal selfishness was frowned upon, selfishness on behalf of the state was looked upon with favor and even encouraged. [24] Of course, things are little different today. Even nations that claim to pursue idealistic goals usually have secret goals in mind that fuel their own national self-interests.

Plato noted three faculties, which drive man: the intellect, the spirit, and the appetite. In the ideal government, the intellect rules with help from the spirit and appetite. In democracy he recognized the danger of the appetite ruling and making decisions, which look good in the short term, yet cause destruction in the end. [25] Pericles probably saw the same thing, and tried to use his intellect to counter the appetites of the Athenian mob, which was led by Cleon.

In 431 B.C. the fighting broke out, and at first the war went well for Athens, despite the burning of the Attican countryside by the Spartan expeditions. The Spartans were not strong enough to breach the defenses of Athens, and they could not conduct a successful siege due to their naval inferiority. The Athenians refused to meet them in battle, and this was the only means the Spartans had for devastating the Athenians. Many of them would have been frustrated at the unusual strategy of the Athenians, for to deny a land battle to the enemy was almost unheard of in Greece at this time. Archidamus, the king of Sparta, however, expected this strategy from the Athenians. He knew that to get the Athenian allies to rebel and win in that manner he would need a navy large enough to challenge the Athenians at sea, and the Spartans did not have that kind of money. Pericles seemed inclined to prove Archidamus’ point for him, and might have done so had the conditions of the first year of the war persisted for two more years. [26]

Unfortunately for Pericles, only a year into the war a plague broke out in Athens. Thucydides described people who had been in perfect health suddenly having burning feelings in their head, followed by inflamed red eyes, bleeding from the throat and tongue inside their mouths, and irregular breathing. This was followed, he reported, by sneezing, hoarseness of voice, and pain in the chest accompanied by coughing. Next there were stomachaches and vomiting of bile, accompanied by violent spasms. The body became hot to the touch, and the skin was red and livid, with small pustules and ulcers. The people suffering from the disease felt a burning inside and tore off all their clothing, plunging themselves into the city fountains and drinking water in an effort to relieve an unquenchable thirst that accompanied the plague. Some seemed to recover from the effects of the disease, only to lose their memory because the disease had affected their minds. [27]

One might think that the Athenians would have sought divine help during this time, but Thucydides said that in the end the people were “…so overcome by their sufferings that they paid no further attention to such things.” [28] They turned instead to opposing the policies of Pericles and falling in line with Cleon, the demagogue who opposed the policies of Pericles and wanted to engage the Spartans in the field. The ever-fickle populace, however, having found Pericles guilty of malfeasance, was swayed back to his point of view temporarily.

The one bright spot for the Athenians was that Potidaea, which the Athenians had been besieging since a year before the war officially broke out, finally surrendered in 429. Coming as it did on the heels of the plague (which had still not fully run its course), however, the victory must have seemed hollow to the Athenians besieging the city, many of whom had fallen victim to the plague during the siege. Before the end, according to Thucydides, many of the inhabitants of Potidaea had stooped to cannibalism. [29] Also, during this time, Pericles himself succumbed to the plague, and the whole nature of the war changed.

Cleon re-emerged as the leader of the Athenians, and his staunch opposition to any kind of settlement kept peace from being achieved for several years. In 422 B.C. he was killed in battle fighting the Spartan general Brasidas (who was also killed in the battle). After this, a settlement was reached in 421 B.C., to which both Athens and Sparta agreed. Sparta’s allies deserted her, formed an alliance with Argos, and Athens joined this alliance. The allies attacked Epidauros, which was allied with Sparta and the war was on again after only two years of relative peace. In 418 B.C. the Spartans won a major victory over Athens, and the new allies deserted the Athenian camp and returned to alliance with Sparta. Athens then launched an unprovoked attack on the neutral island of Melos, massacred most of the males, and enslaved the few people who remained. [30] This was shortly followed by an unsuccessful campaign against the town of Syracuse in Sicily, (which ended in disaster) and the defeat by the Corinthians at Naupactus, which was mentioned earlier.

During this time, an exiled Athenian named Alcibiades (formerly a pupil of Socrates) conspired with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, and counseled him on how to play the Spartans and Athenians against each other. Through Tissaphernes he counseled the Spartans to bribe the Athenian trireme crews. Secretly, however, he was planning his return to Athens and was conspiring with friends in Athens to stage a coup and install an oligarchy. Many leading men in the Athenian army and navy helped Alcibiades achieve this goal and they overthrew the Athenian democracy in 411 B.C., replacing it with a council of four hundred men who ruled the city tyrannically for three months. The Athenians lost a major battle off the island of Euboia shortly after this, the four hundred were deposed, and democracy was restored. [31] They then dealt the Peloponnesians a severe blow at the battles of Cynossema, [32] and Cyzicus. After their defeat at the Battle of Cyzicus, the Spartans requested a peace settlement with the Athenians, but the Athenians rejected it. [33]

In 405 B.C. the Athenians reaped the reward for their stubborn pride when they were defeated by Lysander the Spartan at the Battle of Aegospotami near Lampsakos in the Hellespont. The Spartans caught the Athenians unprepared on the shore and destroyed most of the Athenian fleet. The Athenian commander Conon escaped with only about twenty ships out of one hundred and eighty. [34] Alcibiades, who was living in exile on the Gallipoli peninsula, had approached the Athenian fleet before the battle and encouraged them to relocate to a better position, and even told them of a couple of Thracian kings who were willing to fight for the Athenians and attack Lysander’s camp from the land, but he was ridiculed, mostly due to disbelief and the fact that he had betrayed Athens in the past. [35]

After the destruction of their fleet, the Athenians held out for a few months, but in 404 B.C. they were forced to surrender to the Spartans, and were made to tear down their walls to the sound of flutes playing. [36] They regained their freedom from the Spartans within a few years, and even set up another naval league, but their days of glory were past. The next century would be dominated by a contest between Sparta and Thebes, before Philip and Alexander, kings of Macedonia, overshadowed both. Athens finally lost its independence in the wake of the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., when their army went down to defeat fighting against Philip alongside Thebes. [37]

One can see lessons in Athens’ example in the dangers of power to a state, and how allowing power to corrupt the principles which made the state great to begin with tends to be the seed of the state’s eventual downfall. This problem persists to this day, for every nation that has had a golden age has seen an end to it because of moral degeneration and civic apathy. Athens rose to greatness during a time in which civic virtue was an admired trait, and the laws of Solon brought liberty tempered with the fire of legal responsibility. As the liberty of Athens grew along with its naval power, the liberty itself came to be seen as more important than the law, which accompanied the liberty, and legal principle was sacrificed in the name of liberty. Cecil B. DeMille said it best when he said:

Man has made 32 million laws since the Commandments were handed down to Moses on Mount Sinai … but he has never improved on God’s law … They are the charter and guide of human liberty, for there can be no liberty without the law. [38]

The Athenian democracy was great so long as they kept their liberty in perspective with legal principle, but as soon as they began to rely on their government to meet their needs and to change the laws at a whim to suit their fancy they met their end. That is when Athens truly fell.

________________________________________________________________________________________

[1] Ed. N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 1095.

[2] P.A. Silburn, The Evolution of Sea Power (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), 20-21.

[3] Peter Levi, Atlas of the Greek World (New York: Facts on File, Inc., 1997), 132.

[4] Herodotus, The Histories (London: Penguin Books, 2003), 461-462.

[5] http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/greekmenandwomen/a/themistocles.htm

[6] Thomas R. Martin, Ancient Greece: From Prehistoric to Hellenistic Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 103.

[7] Ed. John Boardman, Jasper Griffin and Oswyn Murray, The Oxford Illustrated History of Greece and the Hellenistic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 39.

[8] Peter Weller, Engineering an Empire: Greece, (New York: The History Channel, 2006).

[9] Charles Freeman, Egypt, Greece and Rome: Civilizations of the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 172.

[10] H.D.F. Kitto, The Greeks (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1951), 118-120.

[11] Weller, Engineering an Empire: Greece.

[12] Peter Dawkins, interview in Secret Mysteries of America’s Beginnings, Volume One: The New Atlantis (Los Angeles: Antiquities Research Films, 2006).

[13] http://www.denverspiritualcommunity.org/Wisdom/OccultLawChpt4.htm

[14] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 97-98 (I, 107-108).

[15] Eliza Robbins, Grecian History: Adapted to the Use of Schools, and Young Persons (New York: Roe Lockwood, 1833), 136.

[16] http://www.livius.org/pan-paz/pausanias/pausanias.html

[17] Levi, 128.

[18] Ibid.

[19] Christopher McIntosh, The Rosicrucians: The History, Mythology, and Rituals of an Esoteric Order (York Beach: Samuel Weiser, Inc., 1998), 2.

[20] http://www.iep.utm.edu/s/sophists.htm

[21] http://www.literary-quotations.com/e/euripides.html

[22] George Grote, A History of Greece; From the Earliest Period to the Close of the Generation Contemporary with Alexander the Great: In Ten Volumes- Vol. VI (London: John Murray, Albemarle Street, 1872), 191.

[23] Donald Kagan, The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking Penguin, 2003), 57.

[24] Robbins, 132-133.

[25] Anthony Esolen, The Politically Incorrect Guide To Western Civilization (Washington: Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2008), 31-32.

[26] Kagan, 59-63.

[27] Thucydides, 152-153 (II, 49).

[28] Ibid.

[29] Ibid., 167 (II, 70).

[30] Levi, 143.

[31] Thucydides, 562-599 (VIII, 45-98).

[32] http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/History/Battles/Cynossema.html

[33] http://www.mlahanas.de/Greeks/History/Battles/Cyzicus.html

[34] http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-7041/Battle-of-Aegospotami

[35] Kagan, 471-474.

[36] Levi, 143.

[37] Willis Mason West, The Ancient World: From the Earliest Times to 800 A.D. (Boston and Chicago: Allyn and Bacon, 1904), 216.

[38] Cecil B. DeMille, speech at beginning of The Ten Commandments, (Hollywood: Paramount Pictures, 1956).