Part 17 - The appearance and construction of Democracy - childhood to maturity in Greece

After the alliance with Sparta, initial military action was inclusive and sporadic.  Athens began to move to re-establish its empire with limited success. Then, after some success by both sides, a crucial battle took place.  Armies from Athens, Sparta, Elis, Achea, and some Arcadian cities faced off against Thebes, Argive, Messenia, and some other Arcadian cities.   The Thebes alliance carried the day but they did not complete their victory fully.  By this time, the Second League had nearly collapsed. Throughout this period, the Athenian Assembly was not at all pleased with the military.   There were several major prosecutions of generals and two Athenian senior statesman were also put on trial.  The people of Athens were not happy - their empire had not been regained. 

By 357, just twenty years after the Second League was formed and twelve years after the new alliance with Sparta, the League had fully collapsed.  There were two primary reasons that for this.  First, Athens had declared war on the most powerful member of the League (Thebes) and taken the side of the state (Sparta) that the League had been established to resist.  Second, Athens had embarked on a unilateral effort to gain control over states that were posing no threat to the League and who had a right to independence under the agreed upon conditions of the King’s Peace.  “Nothing could be more at variance with the defensive mission of the league, or could have more fatally undermined its functioning as intended. Athens and squandered an opportunity to lead a powerful coalition of the willing that could have been a stabilizing influence in Greece and an effective protection against external enemies.” (Mitchell)

Athens continued to attack other states as part of its endless empire quest.  This did not go well and at the same time Macedonia began to rise as a great power after Philip II became King.   He “was a leader of extraordinary energy and ability and ruthless ambition. He quickly managed to unify Macedonia and reorganize the army, creating the famed Macedonian Phalanx, and he was intent on extending Macedonian control along its borders.” (Mitchell)  By the mid 350s, Athens was quite weakened - the democracy remained stable but foreign policy and the state’s finances were in terrible shape.  Isocrates provided a contemporary analysis focusing on the darkness of imperialism focusing on three main issues: “the evil and folly of imperialism, the continuing addiction of Athenians to this form of rule, and the need for a new direction based on a commitment to peace and justice.” (Mitchell)  Isocrates condemns despotism and describes it as forcing rather than leading, favoring injustice over justice, coveting what others have, believing that the strong ought to rule the weak, and advocating war and interventionism.  He sees both despots and imperial states as stemming from the same source:  the corruption of absolute power and the resulting injustice, license, and arrogance.   

Not surprisingly, Isocrates names Athens and Sparta as the prime examples of the time of the corruption and destruction wrought by imperialism. “it brought the ruin of Athens, which proceeded to abuse the hegemony freely given to it by its allies in the Delian league, and to engage in such extreme behavior as the insane adventures of the Sicilian expedition. It ended in the near destruction of the state. Imperialism similarly brought the ruler of Sparta, which wronged almost every state in Greece before its insolence brought it to disaster.” (Mitchell)

It is a sobering testimony to our species addiction to the concentration of power to see that while we might expect imperial behavior from the central and non-democratic power structure of Sparta, we might hope that this would be less so in the case of Athens.   

At the time, Isocrates (and Xenophon) could clearly see that “one of the great failures of the Greek states as a whole during what was in many ways a golden age of Greek civilization in the fifth and fourth centuries, namely the failure to find a way of halting the endless cycle of internecine warfare and create national agreement and structures that would work for unity and peace and the common welfare of all Greeks. There were alliances in abundance, but they were generally leagues of neighboring or kindred states designed to protect their members against other Greek coalitions, and we're almost invariably led by a dominant hegemon whose chief concern was its own power.” (Mitchell)

The aggressive, imperialist focus of Athenian foreign policy in the first half of the fourth century came directly from the demos itself.  The will to power so evident in earlier eras had not diminished. Even lessons that had apparently been learned, did not stick.  The people themselves had a powerful hunger for empire and the riches that might accrue back to them.   Just at the time that revolutionary and unique changes in the conduct of human affairs were taking place domestically, we can see that the hard-wired addiction to power and its accompaniments continued.  This was despite the fact that so much of the motive force for democracy’s development was to break down and dilute the centralized power of autocracy and oligarchy.  It is clear and highly ironic that Athenian democracy, motivated by a desire to dilute and spread out power, did nothing to alter a lust for imperial power in foreign affairs.

In the next post, I will outline the beginning of the end for democracy in Greece.  The Athenians had managed to keep their system developing and did not ever lose internal control for hundreds of years.  They came close to the end a number of times but managed to continue to hold on to their independence.  Due to being repeatedly weakened by imperial adventures, and despite successfully resisting more powerful empires (particularly Persia), the Athenian’s luck/skill finally ran out.