2 - Europe in the mid-fifth century B.C.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Summary
In the middle years of the fifth century B.C. the long war between the Greeks and the Persians was drawing to a close. Hostility was deepening between Athens and Sparta, the foremost protagonists on the Greek side, but the Delian League, over which Athens had presided since its foundation in 478 B.C., was still intact, though a couple of its members had rebelled against the growing control which Athens was exercising over it. In 454 its treasury had been transferred from the island of Dhílos to the city of Athens, an event which marked the final transformation of a voluntary league of Greek states into an instrument of Athenian imperialism. Athens had at the same time become, by the standards of classical Greece, an exceedingly wealthy city, and its riches were matched by its pride and its self-assurance. Work was beginning on the cluster of buildings on the Acropolis – the Parthenon was begun in 447 – which was to make Athens the most beautiful city of antiquity. The last of the plays of Aeschylus had just been presented; Herodotus, Sophocles and Euripides were in middle life, and Thucydides and Aristophanes were children. The quarter of a century which began in 450 saw the climax of Athenian civilisation.
At this time Rome was a small town spread over the low hills that rose above the Tiber marshes. The Etruscan kings had been driven from south of the river, but their threat to the city was far more real than that presented at this time by the Persians to Athens.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- An Historical Geography of Europe 450 B.C.–A.D. 1330 , pp. 26 - 94Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1973