[[1]] Xenophon: Memorabilia.
[[2]] Homeric Hymn to Athena.
[[3]] Author Unknown: From Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology, translated by J. W. Mackail.
CHAPTER XVI
THE DOWNFALL OF ATHENS
I. RIVALRY BETWEEN ATHENS AND SPARTA AND THE
BEGINNING OF THE PELOPONNESIAN WAR
Athens in the middle of the fifth century B.C. was in very truth as Pericles had said, the "school of Hellas." For half a century after the Barbarian had been driven out of Greece, Athens went forward on the wings of youth and hope and aspiration towards the fulfilment of her great ideal, that of the perfect citizen in the perfect state. Everything that was worth while in human life lay in that direction: Freedom, Order and Progress; Truth and Beauty; Knowledge, Virtue and Religion; and in the Greek world it was Athens who was the leader in all these things.[[1]]
And Athens realized this. The ideals set forth by Pericles in the Funeral Speech placed her in the position of a chosen people in the midst of a barbarian world, and it was to be her mission to save civilization for the world. Athens was a democracy, and her freedom, her thought and her art were not the special possession of a small privileged group but of the whole body of citizens. Yet there was a flaw in the Athenian ideal of democracy; it was built upon slavery. The result of this was that in some things the Athenians were able to reach a point of perfection from which they could make no further advance. Their greatest sculpture and architecture were flawless in their simplicity and beauty. They have been copied and imitated, but never surpassed. The Greek stage set certain limitations to the drama, but within these limitations the dramas of the great Athenian dramatists were well-nigh perfect. Other small nations in the history of the world have fought for their freedom just as passionately and with as much self-control, unbroken will and self-sacrifice, and have obtained it, but it was Athens who first showed the world that right is stronger than might and will ultimately prevail. In their search for truth, the Athenian philosophers went as far as it was possible for them to go, but the very fact that they accepted the institution of slavery as a normal condition of life, made any further advance in political thinking impossible. The history of the world shows that progress in political thought has always come from the struggle of an unprivileged class to obtain its just rights, and this could not take place in Athens, for the unprivileged were slaves, and slaves were slaves and slaves they must always remain.
Athens fell, but her fall did not only or even chiefly come about because her democracy was founded upon slavery. In her great days Athens had been the Liberator of all the enslaved Greeks. Sparta had never been interested in the fate of the Greeks who were still under the Persian yoke, and it was Athens who had created the Delian League, and who had delivered the Ionians from their foreign rulers. But from being their Liberator, Athens gradually became their Mistress, and little by little she used her position in the League as a means to increase her own power. That which in the beginning had been organized by the statesman who was called by his fellow-citizens the Just, that which had symbolized the Athenian ideal of freedom, became the instrument by which Athens became not only an Empire, but a Tyrant. And Pericles permitted it to be so.