Greece in the 5th century BC

This century is essentially studied from the Athenian viewpoint, since Athens has left more narratives, plays and other written works than the other Greek states.

If one looks at Athens, our principal source, one might consider that this century begins in 510 BC, with the fall of the Athenian tyrant and Cleisthenes's reforms.

Athens' excesses caused several revolts among the allied cities, which were all put down by force, but Athenian dynamism finally awoke Sparta and brought about the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC.

[1] Cleomenes I, the king of Sparta, installed a pro-Spartan oligarchy led by Isagoras by claiming that his rival Cleisthenes was to be expelled from the city due to the old Cylonian curse.

In Ionia (the modern Aegean coast of Turkey) the Greek cities, which included great centres such as Miletus and Halicarnassus, were unable to maintain their independence and came under the rule of the Persian Empire in the mid-6th century BC.

During the subsequent period of peace, in 483 BC, a silver-bearing seam had been discovered in the Laurion (a small mountain range close to Athens), and the hundreds of talents mined there had paid for the construction of 200 warships to fight Aegina's piracy.

This army took Thrace, before descending on Thessaly and Boetia, whilst the Persian navy skirted the coast and resupplied the ground troops.

The leading statesman of this time was Pericles, who used the tribute paid by the members of the Delian League to build the Parthenon and other great monuments of classical Athens.

Some of the greatest figures of Western cultural and intellectual history lived in Athens during this period: the dramatists Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Euripides, and Sophocles, the philosophers Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates, the historians Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, the poet Simonides and the sculptor Phidias.

The other Greek city-states at first accepted Athenian leadership in the continuing war against the Persians, but after the fall of the conservative politician Cimon in 461 BC, Athens became an increasingly open imperialist power.

After the Greek victory at the Battle of the Eurymedon in 466 BC, the Persians were no longer a threat, and some states, such as Naxos, tried to secede from the League, but were forced to submit.

Soon after, Corinth and Athens argued over control of Potidaea (near modern-day Nea Potidaia), eventually leading to an Athenian siege of the city.

In 415 BC Alcibiades persuaded the Athenian Assembly to launch a major expedition against Syracuse, a Peloponnesian ally in Sicily.

After the affair of the sacrilege of Hermes, Alcibiades defected back to Sparta, leaving the expedition he had initiated in the hands of a reluctant Nicias.

By this time, Sparta had built a fleet (with the help of the Persians) to challenge Athenian naval supremacy, and had found a brilliant military leader in Lysander, who seized the strategic initiative by occupying the Hellespont, the source of Athens' grain imports.

Threatened with starvation, Athens sent its last remaining fleet to confront Lysander, who decisively defeated them at Aegospotami (405 BC).