Polemos as Kinêsis: the effects of the Peloponnesian War on Athenian society and culture

Abstract

This is a study of war as a force for socio-economic, demographic, and political change in late fifth-century Athens. Thucydides famously describes the Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC) as the greatest kinêsis, or upheaval, ever to affect the Greek world. This protracted war placed great stress on the traditional social systems and institutions of the polis and the generation-long conflict is commonly regarded by historians as the nadir of classical Greek civilization and culture that witnessed the decline of the Greek city-state. Drawing on the testimony of Thucydides and his literary contemporaries, archaeology and epigraphy, I offer a richly textured account of the impact of the Peloponnesian War on several key aspects of Athenian life. In the first half of my thesis, I consider the material effects of the war on Athenian agriculture and food supply, investigating how the Athenians, as individuals and as a state, adapted to the economic pressures generated by the war. I argue that the material deprivation of Attica throughout the war prompted adaptive economic strategies that hastened and intensified the monetization of Athens and that the rebuilding of the agricultural economy in the aftermath of the war was a key factor in the commercialization of Athenian society in the fourth century. In the second half of the thesis, I document, diachronically, the distribution of the various burdens and opportunities engendered by conditions of protracted warfare among different citizen groups. I then demonstrate how the performance of the two essential civic obligations, military and financial service, was invoked in renegotiations of social and political privilege in the last decade of the fifth century. While there was some centralization in respect of these two areas, I argue that military mobilization and state finance in Athens continued to reflect the organizational principles and civic commitments of the democratic citizen-state into the fourth century. Thus, while offering a fine-grained account of the ways in which the Peloponnesian War was seriously disruptive to life in Athens, I demonstrate that it did not destroy the material and political conditions that provided for the flourishing of the democratic polis.