ABSTRACT
Freedom is the watchword of Greek politics in the fifth century. We have already met Demaratos, the ex-king of Sparta, telling Xerxes that by Sparta’s valour Greece now keeps both poverty and bondage at bay and that the Dorian Greeks, at least, will not under any circumstances accept terms which would mean slavery for Greece. In his own voice Herodotus praises Athens on the grounds that it was her decision to preserve Greek freedom that determined that the Persians would be resisted and beaten. In 432 the Spartans went to war with Athens again to preserve Greek freedom, but at the end of the first year of the war, at the annual burial of the war dead, it is the Athenian political leader Pericles who is recorded by Thucydides as having given the speech that has come to be the centrepiece of defences of western liberty. The exposition, and usually the extolling, of Greek freedom has proved irresistible to generations of ancient historians.
