The End of the Peloponnesian War to the Death of Philip II of Macedon: 403 BC to 336 BC

Greek History in the years immediately after the Peloponnesian War is no longer dominated by the two super-powers, Athens and Sparta. Cities which in the fifth century had been constrained by them acquired independence and power, groups of small cities, such as Arcadia and Boiotia, co-ordinated their actions to become significant players in inter-city politics. Areas in which the city was not highly developed, particularly Thessaly and then Macedon, were sufficiently united by energetic rulers to play a major role in the politics of mainland Greece, and the manipulation of relations with Persia preoccupied much of Greek diplomacy. This society gave rise to the political theorising of Plato and Aristotle.

The absence of dominant cities in the fourth-century is paralleled by the absence of a single dominant source. Students of this period have at their disposal works which imitate Thucydides, Xenophon’s Hellenica and the Hellenica Oxyrhynchia, pamphlets and speeches by Isokrates and Demosthenes aimed at influencing Athenian politics, specialist studies of military matters, such as Aeneas’ Poliorcemata, and of particular cities, such as Xenophon’s account of the Spartan Constitution, and an abundance of epigraphic material. The compilations of later historians and biographers, such as Diodorus and Plutarch, who worked from earlier texts now lost to us, provide further information: through these later works we have access to contemporary accounts of high quality that illuminate the history of such places as Thebes and Syracuse. The wealth of varied information, the multiplication of sources, and the need to weave together the stories of many different cities, present a challenge quite distinct from that offered by earlier periods of Greek history. The importance of the events of the period for our understanding of Plato and Aristotle, on the one hand, and of the history of Greek art, on the other, ensures that the complexities of the study bring ample rewards.

If you offer this period as a text-based subject, passages for compulsory comment and translation will be set from: Xenophon, Hellenica III and V, Constitution of the Spartans; Plutarch, Life of Pelopidas; Demosthenes, Philippics I and III; On the Peace.

A document on WebLearn (‘Documents Greek HistoryI.3.doc’) lists key documents, some of which will be set (with a translation) among the optional gobbets (qu. 16).

Lectures on this period of Greek History will normally take place in Trinity Term.

Choosing your combinations - this period makes a natural pair with the preceding one, since both the Peloponnesian war and Thucydides’ reflections on it shape our understanding of what follows. The subject studies the political history of the heyday of the democratic institutional and social system which is thematically presented in I.7 Athenian Democracy.  Here you will also meet the main problems which shape the age of Alexander and the early Hellenistic period, so that it makes an excellent introduction to I.8 Alexander the Great and his early Successors and I.9 The Hellenistic world: societies and cultures. This period also offers excellent historical background to work on both fourth-century literature (III.7) and on classical Greek art (IV.2), while illuminating the milieux in which fourth-century philosophy developed (II.130-3).