Persian Fire (68 page)

42
Critias, 88B37 D-K.

43
Herodotus, 7.104.

44
Tyrtaeus, Fragment 2.

45
Homeric Hymns,
3.214—15.

46
When precisely this occurred is unclear. The story that the Pythia had originally been a young girl was much repeated, but all the writers of the classical period took it for granted that she was old. The state of our knowledge of the history of archaic Greece being so patchy, it is perfectly possible that she always had been.

47
Homeric Hymns,
3.538.

48
The so-called Sacred War is traditionally dated 595-591
bc.
There is an eeriness about the details as they are found in the sources that has suggested to some historians that the entire episode may be legendary.

49
Pausanias, 10.5.

50
Ibid., 10.4.

51
Heraclitus, quoted by Plutarch,
Why the Pythia No Longer Prophesies in Verse,
404E.

52
The Odyssey,
17.323-4.

53
Plutarch,
Agis,
11.

54
Thucydides, 1.70.

55
The date is approximate. Cleomenes was certainly king by 519
bc,
at the latest.

56
Herodotus, 5.42.

IV Athens

1
  
From Pericles' famous funeral speech (Thucydides, 2.36). The sentiments here derive from the golden age of Athenian self-confidence, in the mid-fifth century
bc
, but the Athenians' belief that they were earth-born seems to be genuinely ancient, and can be traced, albeit vaguely, at least as far back as Homer.

2
  
From the Acharnes Stele, a copy of the oath sworn by the ephebes, young Athenians who were obliged by the city to undergo two years' military training. The formal nature of such a programme was a fourth-century
bc
innovation, but the words of the oath are traditional, and date back at least to the time of the Persian Wars.

3
  
The precise name of the Athenians' earliest hero is beset by one of those confusions so typical of archaic Greek history. The Athenians of the late fifth

century called him Erichthonius, and identified Erechtheus with his grandson. The close similarity of the two names and the fact that 'Erechtheus' is much the older one, however, strongly suggest that grandfather and grandson were originally one and the same. A further layer of confusion comes from the fact that Cecrops, another Athenian king, and sometimes held to be Erechtheus' son, was also earth-born and snake-tailed. Erechtheus himself long continued to be worshipped as a god on the Acropolis. His legend is a further fragment of evidence that the Athenian belief in their own earth-born status was ancient. As Shapiro (p. 102) has pointed out, 'Generally, myths involving the legendary Kings of Attika are genuinely old.'

4
 
The Iliad,
2.549-51.

5
 
Herodotus, 7.161.

6
 
The question of when Attica was formally unified, so that the citizens of communities beyond Athens came to be identified as 'Athenian', has never been answered definitively. Orthodox opinion would accept that the process was completed, at the latest, by the end of the seventh century
Be,
although Greg Anderson, in a brilliant if controversial book, has argued that it was completed only by 500
BC,
as part of the reforms that also helped establish the democracy.

7
 
The evidence for the backward-looking nature of Athenian exceptionalism during the seventh century
bc
derives principally from archaeology. See Morris (19S7), in particular.

8
 
Sappho, 58.25.

9
 
Ibid., 1-13.

10
Alcaeus, 360. A poet from Lesbos, in the Aegean, he is quoting Aristodemus of Sparta.

11
The most commonly accepted date. See R. Wallace. Some historians have speculated that Solon's reforms post-dated his archonship.

12
Solon, 3.

13
Ibid., 36. It is likely that the lifting of the boundary-stones signalled less a straight cancellation of debt than a reform of the system of share-cropping, whereby tenants paid a sixth of their produce to their landlords.

14
Ibid., 5.

15
Ibid., 4.

16
Aristotle,
Politics,
1274al6—17.

17
The Iliad,
6.208.

18
Pindar,
Fifth Isthmian Ode,
12—13. The poem was written in 478
BC,
when noblemen could still be described in terms that evoked the gods on Olympus, but only with stern caveats. Pindar's poem, having described the glory won by a victor in the games at Corinth, next gives him a stark warning: 'Do not try to become Zeus.'

19
Plutarch,
Table Talk,
2.5.2.

20
Although, according to the uncorroborated evidence ofThucydides (1.126), Cylon and his brother managed to escape.

21
For the dating, see Rhodes (1981), p. 84.

22
Such, at any rate, is the traditional story. The chronology is a trifle awkward.

23
Herodotus, 6.125.

24
Whoever inaugurated the Great Panathenaea, with its grand procession to the summit of the Acropolis, must surely also have been responsible for the construction of the ramp. Other names have been proposed (see Shapiro, pp. 20—1), but Lycurgus, with his responsibilities towards the cult statue of Athena, to say nothing of his clearly attested political dominance in the 560s
bc
, appears overwhelmingly the likeliest candidate.

25
This description of Athena's statue derives from Pausanias (1.26.7), who appears to be implying that the holy image was a meteorite. Confusingly, however, it is also described in a speech by Demosthenes
(Against Androtion,
13) as being fashioned out of olive wood. The truth has been lost.

26
At issue is the question of whether the so-called 'Bluebeard Temple' -named after a figure found among the rubble of its pediments — was built as a replacement for the seventh-century temple of Athena Polias or in competition with it. If the former, then the Boutads were probably responsible for its construction; if the latter, the Alcmaeonids. The scholarly consensus, having originally favoured the first hypothesis, has now swung in favour of the second. See Dinsmoor, for the archaeological evidence, and Greg Anderson (pp. 70—1), for the part played by the Alcmaeonids.

27
Such, at any rate, on the principle of
cui bono,
appears the likeliest explanation of the muddled descriptions of the episode that have survived.

28
Almost certainly. The epitaph comes from the 'Anavyssos Kouros', a memorial statue raised to a young man named Croisos, who is conventionally assumed to have been an Alcmaeonid killed at Pallene.

29
Aristotle,
The Constitution of the Athenians,
15.5.

30
Solon, 36.

31
Aristotle,
The Constitution of the Athenians,
16.2.