ABSTRACT
The first discussion, by any historian, of the effects of the Peloponnesian War is near the beginning of book ii of Thucydides, who tells us what it meant to the Athenians to evacuate Attica (ii.14ff.). As we saw in chapter 12, that evacuation is not likely to have been complete; but for many of the inhabitants of the rural demes (and for those with homes in the town but fields to work in the country), the beginning of the war did mean a change in immemorial living habits. This concentration of human beings within the city is perhaps a cause of the more aggressive character which Athenian oratory and politics take on in the age ofKleon (chapter 11). And the war created a captive readership for a profusion of pamphlets ofwhich the Old Oligarch is the only fully surviving example (but note the discussion of the merits of different constitutions at Hdt. iii.80ff: 420s?). Even in Thessaly, political life was beginning to intensify evidently under Athenian intellectual influence, judging from a surviving speech known as the 'peri politeias of Herodes', a plea to Thessalian Larisa to join Sparta in fighting Archelaus, king of Macedon (404). The vogue for monographs survived the end of the war: in every sphere we find attempts to put down specialist knowledge, or the results of theorizing, in permanent form, on paper. To continue where we have begun, with the political type of treatise: after the Old Oligarch, which is a piece of negative analysis by a critic pretending to be impressed by the efficiency with which the Athenian democracy looks after its own interests, we enter in the fourth century a period of system-building in political theory, the most influential work in this sphere being the Republic and the Laws of Plato.
