Tag Archives: Lyceum

In the first years of Spartan peace, Greece was filled with wandering soldiers. Their little cities needed them no more. The new governments, which Spartans appointed, looked on them as men who might make trouble and were quick to get rid of them. Homeless and with no way to earn a living, the old campaigners roamed from place to place. They became soldiers of fortune, men who fought for any general or city that offered pay and three meals a day. In 401 B. C., ten thousand of them hired themselves out to Cyrus, a prince of Persia, who hoped to steal his brother’s throne. The Army of Ten Thousand was an odd lot. There were officers and men from a dozen or more Greek states, soldiers who had fought with and against each other during the thirty years of war that had torn Greece apart. Yet, under a foreign commander, they worked well together. They made a strong force which no Asian army could begin to match. Cyrus led them far into Persia and wherever they went they were victorious. Then Cyrus was killed in battle and the Greek officers were tricked and treacherously murdered. The great army suddenly found itself stranded, with neither money nor leaders. The men were not even sure where they were, except that it was hundreds of miles from the coast of Greece. Election of Xenophon The Persian king waited for them to lose heart and surrender, as any Asian army did when it had no officers to give it orders. The Army of Ten Thousand was Greek. After a day of confusion, the soldiers called an Assembly and elected a new general, Xenophon, a young Athenian who had been the assistant of one of the dead officers. For four months he led them …

About 425 B. C., a lonely man, in a country that was not his own, sat down to write the story of a war that had begun six years before. Thucydides, an Athenian, had fought in the war’s first battles. He had been a general, in command of thousands of his city’s troops. Then he was ordered to go to the aid of another commander whose men were outnumbered. When he arrived, the battle had already been fought and lost. It was not his fault but the people of Athens were too anxious about the war to consider that. They stripped Thucydides of his command and forced him to leave his homeland. Now, while the war raged on, he could only watch and he was troubled by the things he saw. Athens and its rival Sparta were caught in a deadly struggle to see which would be the master of the Greek world. Men died, cities were destroyed and nothing was gained, but the war went on. Thucydides began to write about the senseless fighting, hoping that he might teach the men of another time to avoid war. He wrote about the ambassadors from the city of Corinth, who spoke to the Spartans in their assembly, warning them about Athens. “You have no idea what kind of people these Athenians are”, the Corinthians said, “how altogether different from you. They are always thinking up new schemes and they are quick to make plans and to do something about them; but you are happy with what you have and slow to do even what is necessary. The Athenians are bold and adventurous; you Spartans are cautious and afraid to trust your own strength. They love foreign adventure, which you hate, because they think there is something to win, while you think …

When Themistocles and the people of Athens came home from Salamis, they found only the ashes of a city. Their houses and shops were gone. The Acropolis was littered with chunks of broken limestone and smoke-blackened statues, the ruins of their sacred temples. The years of war had taught the Athenians courage and victory gave them pride and hope. They began to build again. While the citizens planned new houses, Themistocles planned new walls – walls around the city, walls to protect the harbour at Piraeus and walls along the four miles of road that connected the two. When they were finished, Athens would be an island, surrounded by ramparts of stone instead of the sea and as safe as Salamis. The Spartans already jealous of the Athenian navy, wanted badly to stop the work on the walls. They wrote to Themistocles and asked him to join them in a pact to outlaw all city walls in Greece. Themistocles knew well enough what they were after, but he agreed to go to Sparta to talk. Once he was there, he kept the talk going for weeks. When the Spartans heard that the walls were still going up, they complained. Themistocles suggested that they send ambassadors to Athens to look for themselves. When the ambassadors returned, they said that the walls were indeed being worked on. “No” Themistocles said, “by now they are finished” and he left the conference. It was a Spartan sort of trick and no one blamed Themistocles for it. In fact, many of the Greeks were pleased, not only because Sparta had been fooled, but Athens was the city they looked to as their defender against the Persians. The Spartans had lost interest in fighting Persians, once their own land was safe. Athens, however, had carried the …