[lit-ideas] Re: I really hate the Lacedaemonians
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 2 Jan 2008 17:05:28 -0330
Quoting Lawrence Helm <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> I just read someone who wrote on his blog that one of the things he intended
> to do during retirement was complete his education.
Sounds like he has a long ways to go.
Walter O.
Still incomplete after all these years.
>I know what he means.
> One of the other subjects I never studied before (besides the Middle East,
> Islamic history etc) was the Peloponnesian War (431-404). It lacked the
> epic nature of the Trojan war and didn't seem to have any heroes like
> Leonidas at Thermopylae. It just went on and on with Greeks doing stupid
> things to each other. Why would anyone want to study that? One of the
> reasons is that so much was written about it. We have Thucydides who wrote
> voluminously on the war, year by year and then when he stopped abruptly in
> the middle of a sentence we have Xenophon picking it up. Another thing is
> that so much of what is interesting about Athenian Greece took place during
> this war. Socrates fought in it for example and the legal concerns that
> forced him to drink the hemlock in 399 grew in its shadow.
>
>
>
> One of the stupid things that occurred was a result of a decision made by
> Pericles. He recalled the hardship of the days when the Athenians abandoned
> Athens in the face of the Persian threat and went to some Islands they had
> colonized until the Spartans at Thermopylae and the Athenian navy at Salamis
> sorted the Persians out. Since then, the Athenians had made Athens
> Persian-proof. They created some walls that protected Athens all the way
> down to the sea. Their powerful navy could protect that port and the walls
> would make Athens impregnable. This sounded like a smart thing to
> Pericles, but when all the outlying Athenian farmers got behind the Athenian
> walls, it overtaxed the sewage capabilities. A plague resulted that killed
> something like 25% of all those living in Athens at the time. They would
> have been better off deserting Athens as they did in 480 BC. Pericles
> himself was a victim of that plague. He died in the second year of the
> Peloponnesian War and left Athens without effective leadership during the
> rest of it.
>
>
>
> What was it like to live in Athens during this siege?
>
>
>
> "In the comedies Acharnians (425) and Peace (421), Aristophanes presented
> smart-alecky Athenian farmers as wiser than their leadership and slowly
> radicalized in their anger at the enemy, their own political leadership, and
> the war in general. These unsung stalwarts were furious that beloved
> estates were allowed to be overrun by enemy vandals. 'I really hate the
> Lacedaemonians,' the hero-farmer Dicaepolis ('Just City') laments in
> Acharnians, 'for in my case too there have been vines cut down.'. . ."
> [Hanson, A War Like No Other, p 36]
>
>
>
> When we check the dates of Euripides plays we see that most of them were
> written during this war: Hippolytus (428 BC), Andromache, Hecuba (425 BC),
> The Suppliant Women (c420 BC), The Children of Heracles (420BC?), The
> Madness of Heracles (c 416 BC), Ion (between 413 and 408 BC), The Trojan
> Women (c415 BC), Electra (413 BC), Iphigenia in Tauris, Helen (412 BC), The
> Phoenician Maidens (409 BC), and Bacchae (also produced after his death in
> 405 BC). His only extant work that was written outside the scope of this
> war was Cyclops, Rhesus, Alcestes (438 BC) and we might count Media which
> was produced in the first year of the war (431) but may have been written
> prior to the Spartan invasion.
>
>
>
> Sophocles was born in 496 BC and so was too old to fight in the war but he
> was a general in the war Pericles led against Samos in 440 and in 413
> Sophocles was one of the Ten Commissioners appointed after the failure of
> the expedition to Sicily, to govern Athens. Apparently the dates of most
> of Sophocles plays (the seven that survived) aren't known. Ajax is
> considered the earliest and then Antigone in 440BC, but some of the
> remaining five might have been written during that war. Philoctetes was
> produced in 409 BC and Oedipus at Colonus in 401 BC by Sophocles son.
> Sophocles died in 406 BC, the same year as Euripides.
>
>
>
> In short, it won't do to remain ignorant of the Peloponnesian War if you are
> interested in the Athenian Greece. Too many great works of literature took
> place during this war and it would be sloppy scholarship to avoid studying
> it - if one is retired and has the leisure and wishes to continue if not
> complete his education.
>
>
>
> Lawrence Helm
>
> San Jacinto
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
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