Delian League Research Articles

Tradition and Invention in Attic Reliefs

NO one today can say why it was that the graves of the Athenians who died fighting the Persian invaders were not surmounted by carved stone stelai such as marked the resting places of their fathers and grandfathers. Near Marathon the mounded earth still stands; and we know that ten marble slabs, one for each Attic tribe, bore the names of the one hundred and ninety-two men of Athens who were slain in the famous encounter; but there seems never to have been any statuary over their gathered bodies. The unusual honor of a common sepulchre on the very field of battle may explain the absence of individual gravestones for the warriors of Marathon; but this could hardly have set a precedent for refusing sculptural monuments to every Athenian slain during the next fifty years. Still less would it account for the complete omission of grave-reliefs during that period in the cemetery of the Kerameikos; yet none have been found, although the district has been widely and deeply explored. To be sure, we hear in Cicero of a sumptuary law passed at Athens after Solon, forbidding such ornamentation of Attic graves; but either Cicero was in error by a century or he was referring to some earlier and transitory edict; for we have Attic grave-reliefs from shortly after Solon and for many decades after that, but none that we can surely identify as native Attic from the fifth century until approximately the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. We had best admit that we know only the fact of their absence and not the reason for it, and reconcile ourselves to tracing fifth century Attic sculpture without the help of any immediately pre-Periclean grave-reliefs. And it so happens that, except for the tiny temple on the Ilissos, there are no immediately pre-Periclean architectural reliefs, either. The damage and distress of the Persian occupation made it inevitable that prior attention should be given to houses and city-walls, leaving neither money nor energy for greater projects until the high-handed device of transferring to Athens and there absorbing the common treasure of the Delian League released a flood of new money for materials and wages with which to inaugurate the stupendous building program of Parthenon, Propylaea, and Erechtheum. It is an obvious consequence of these two important lacunae that anyone who treats of Attic relief sculpture from the Athens before Pericles will have to treat his theme in broader fashion, lest he find himself in the predicament of the writer on Snakes in Ireland. The choice is to retreat into the archaic period of the late sixth century or to include the Periclean achievement itself in the survey. And since the more extensive view may prove to be the more repaying, we shall do better to set the Periclean reliefs as the

Garrisons in the Athenian Empire

'A0rlPVaioL Te7y 7E P religion, too, may have an important part to play in consolidating various peoples under the rule of a central state. Athens neglected none of these means of securing and extending her authority,' but it is the purpose of this paper to survey the evidence for the specifically military control which she exercised over the allies. The most recent (but very brief) discussion of the subject is by Gomme2 who says: For the Pentekontaitia there is no certain evidence for universal or systematic garrisoning. . While this statement is formally correct, I consider that it implies an under-estimate of the significance of what evidence there is. Thucydides does not dwell upon such military precautions as Athens may have taken to secure her conquests. He does make several definite references to Athenian garrisons, but these references are, for the most part, not to garrisons in towns which had belonged to the Delian League, and gradually found themselves dependent members of a tribute paying empire. Thus, after Tolmides conquered Chaironeia in Boeotia in 447/6, the Athenians withdrew, having established a garrison (I. 113. 1). Its purpose was to protect the city from the anti-Athenian Boeotians whom he had driven out. It is natural to suppose that the new proAthenian leaders in Chaironeia had requested a garrison to support them, inasmuch as Boeotian cities were predominantly oligarchic and antiAthenian. When Perikles was in Euboea following the disaffection of that island, the Megarians revolted and cut off the Athenian garrison

Some Remarks on Ion of Chios

For the life of the poet Ion we have more certain dates than for most of the Other writers of the fifth century. He produced his first tragedy in the 82nd Olympiad, 452–448 B.C., another in the year of the archon Epameinon 429/428 B.C. —after the death of Perikles and when the revolt of Lesbos was imminent—and his death is fixed for us by a passage in thePeaceof Aristophanes, which we may well call an obituary, in summer 422 or even in winter 422/421 B.C. The approximate date of his birth we learn from his own words in a story preserved by Plutarch, and deriving no doubt from the book to which later librarians gave the title 'Επι7dgr;ημίαι or 'Υπομνήμαтα:5συδειπν⋯σαι δè т⋯ι Κίμωνί ϕησιν ⋯ Ἴων πανάπασιν μειράκιον ἢκων εἰς 'Aθήνας Χίου παρà Ααομέδονтι. Hence he was about fifteen years of age when he first came to Athens, apparently in order to get his higher education there—a fact which seems significant of the position which Athens had won for herself by the foundation of the Delian League. At the same time this fact clearly indicates that his father Orthomenes, whom they called Xuthos, had whole-heartedly espoused the cause of Athens. He bequeathed his loyalty to his son Ion, who adhered to Athens through all vicissitudes of fortune, and he in his turn bequeathed it to his son Tydeus, who paid for it with his life.

The Growth of Athenian Imperialism

By 446/5 the Delian League had become the Athenian empire. Peace had been made with Persia, but Athens had firmly retained her hold over the allies. More important, Sparta recognised the Athenian claim in the Thirty Years' Peace. ‘We will allow the cities their independence,’ Pericles could say on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, ‘if they were independent when we made peace.’ So much is clear, but the chronology and nature of the development of Athenian imperialism are both uncertain. We are coming to know or reasonably to guess considerably more of the decisive transition to empire following the Peace of Callias, but the imperial measures of those crowded years can only be appreciated in true perspective if we have a right understanding of the preceding period. The main purpose of this study is to re-examine the development of Athenian imperialism in the fifties.In his concise summary of Athens' rise to power, Thucydides emphasises the significance of the reduction of Naxos: to contemporaries Athenian action may have seemed less questionable. The Persian danger was still serious, and history had shown that the largest of the Cyclades might be a menace to the Greek cause, if it got into the wrong hands. Certainly the League was still popular after the collapse of Naxos, as Cimon's Eurymedon campaign clearly shows. From Caria to Pamphylia the Greek cities welcomed freedom from Persia and gladly entered the League: only at Phaselis was the show of pressure needed.

The Constitution and Original Purpose of the Delian League

The Constitution and Original Purpose of the Delian League

The Erythrae Decree: Contributions to the Early History of the Delian League and the Peloponnesian Confederacy. Leo Ingemann Highby

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Erythrae Decree: Contributions to the Early History of the Delian League and the Peloponnesian Confederacy. Leo Ingemann Highby J. A. O. LarsenJ. A. O. Larsen Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 34, Number 3Jul., 1939 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/362266 Views: 3Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Erythrae Decree: Contributions to the Early History of the Delian League and the Peloponnesian Confederacy

The Erythrae Decree: Contributions to the Early History of the Delian League and the Peloponnesian Confederacy

The Tribute Lists and the Non-Tributary Members of the Delian League

THE purpose of this paper is to reexamine in the light of the so-called Athenian tribute lists the ancient evidence for the acceptance of tributary status by such members of the Delian League as had originally agreed to furnish ships for the allied fleet. This form of commutation was an important step in the transition by which the Athenian Empire was created out of the Delian League, and upon it ancient and modern historians have placed much emphasis. The tribute lists are audited records of the aparche (first fruits) paid in the name of the tributary members of the Delian League (Athenian Empire) to the goddess Athena out of the tribute which Athens collected. Since the aparche was one-sixtieth of the tribute paid by each city, it is easy to compute from these records the amount of tribute received from each tributary state, so far as the records are preserved. At the end of each year the names of all cities that had made a payment were inscribed in columns on stone, and the amount of aparche was set opposite each name. The series of tribute lists was begun in 454/3 and was continued for forty years, until Athens devised another method of collecting money from her subjects. The tribute lists therefore are documents of prime importance for the history of the Athenian Empire, and a knowledge of them is indispensable to the historian of the period. Unfortunately, the stones on which these documents were inscribed have suffered great damage since they were first erected on the Acropolis. The first stone, the one with which this paper is particularly concerned, is now broken into more than one hundred pieces, some of them scarcely larger than a man's fist; and in several of the fifteen annual lists which were inscribed on this block the lacunae are larger than the fragments now preserved. Four years ago Professor B. D. Meritt and I became convinced that published copies of the tribute lists on this block could not be used with safety for historical studies. Even the width and height of the block and the length of most of the lists were unknown. In fact, the very uncertainties had opened the way to extravagant theories as to the number of tributaries and the amount of tribute collected from year to year. We came to the problem as students of history, but when we turned to the actual stones for answers to our questions, we deserted

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Journal Article The Tribute Lists and the Non-Tributary Members of the Delian League Get access Allen Brown West Allen Brown West Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 35, Issue 2, January 1930, Pages 267–275, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/35.2.267 Published: 01 January 1930

The Early History of the Delian League

The Early History of the Delian League