Pericles died in the year 429 B.C., and in the years following his death the results of a long war began to be felt. Food became scarce and prices were high; it was difficult to get servants, for in the general disorganization of life that had come with the plague, slaves had escaped in large numbers; the young men of Athens were no longer to be seen in the Agora and other public places, for all men capable of bearing arms were with the army.
Four years after the death of Pericles, Sparta made offers of peace, but feeling ran very high in Athens and it was believed that a peace then would not be lasting, so the offer was rejected and it was determined to carry on the war to the bitter end.
There is nothing that so well describes conditions in Athens during these war years as the comedies of Aristophanes. They carry us back to those exciting days and it is amazing to see how much freedom of speech was allowed. The Knights, the Clouds, and the Wasps were all written in these years, and they are full of the excitement of the time, and often of outspoken criticism of those responsible for the carrying on of the war. But the war brought a lowering of ideals, and even where there was victory, there was also sorrow and loss and the ruin of homes. Euripides, one of the great dramatists of the time, in the Trojan Women, a play written during the war, stripped war of all its glamour and showed the misery that comes to the conquered:
And they whom Ares took,
Had never seen their children: no wife came
With gentle arms to shroud the limbs of them
For burial, in a strange and angry earth
Laid dead. And there, at home, the same long dearth
Women that lonely died, and aged men
Waiting for sons that ne'er should turn again,
Nor know their graves, nor pour drink-offerings,
To still the unslaked dust. These be the things
The conquering Greek hath won!
* * * * * * *
Would ye be wise, ye Cities, fly from war!
Yet if war come, there is a crown in death
For her that striveth well and perisheth
Unstained: to die in evil were the stain![[6]]
Pericles was dead, and Cleon who had succeeded him as leader of the people had no power to inspire the Athenians to be true to their highest ideals, and as conditions grew more and more difficult, Athens was forced at length to give herself up to a fight for her life. Anger, suspicion and hatred took the place of the old ideals, and it seemed as if her strength had turned to weakness and despair. And then Athens sealed her own doom, for to save her own citizens from heavy taxation in order to carry on the war, without asking their consent she doubled the amount of the tribute paid to her by her allies every year, and so she broke the Charter once made in good faith between them.
But the end had not yet come. For a time success lay with the Athenians, and they forced a Spartan garrison to surrender to them at Sphacteria on the west coast of the Peloponnesus, a victory which greatly encouraged them. But the years dragged on and the war continued and there seemed no end in sight. Then it was that Brasidas, a Spartan general, marched North from the Peloponnesus through Boeotia and Thessaly until he reached Amphipolis, an Athenian colony on the borders of Thrace and Macedonia, which he besieged. Cleon had gone to Amphipolis to help the Athenians and he was expecting assistance from an Athenian general who was marching to the relief of the city. But he did not arrive in time, and Amphipolis was taken by the Spartans. Both Cleon and Brasidas were killed, and Athens exiled the general who had failed to arrive in time. He devoted the period of his exile to gathering materials for a history of the war, and though he may have been unsuccessful as a general, he became one of the greatest historians, not only of Greece, but of the world. His name was Thucydides.[[7]]
The surrender of Amphipolis brought a lull in the war, and owing to the efforts of the Athenian general, Nicias, in 421 B.C. a peace was made, which was to last for fifty years.