ABSTRACT
In 490 BC the Athenians defeated the Persians at Marathon. In 480 the Persian fleet was defeated at Salamis. Although the Persian Wars were not formally concluded until 449, the generation who had witnessed these two fateful battles was marked by unparalleled national and religious exaltation; to the Athenians it was the gods who had interfered and granted freedom to their city. Before 480 Athens had been a somewhat old-fashioned agrarian society still fairly unaffected by the new cultural currents in Ionia. Now the city claimed its place as a leading naval power, and for fifty years Athens’ dominant position was maintained with increasing brutality. From about the middle of the century Pericles was the uncrowned king of democratic Athens, and also in cultural matters he conducted imperialistic politics. Philosophers, historians, and rhetors (for example Anaxagoras, Herodotus, and Protagoras) took up residence in Athens for brief or sustained periods, and the flowering of Attic tragedy is indissolubly tied to this age of greatness. It was concluded abruptly by the debilitating Peloponnesian War (431-404) with Sparta, the rival city, which led to the total defeat of Athens and to moral and political dissolution, embodied in the brilliant opportunist Alcibiades and the tyrants’ regime (‘the thirty tyrants’) put in power by Sparta in 404 BC.
