The Serpent Column: Greek Cities from Plataia to Syracuse

At Delphi after the battle of Plataia in 479 BC, the allies dedicated a tenth of their spoils to Apollo. A golden tripod rested on three intertwined bronze serpents; the surviving shaft, now in Istanbul, bears the names of thirty-one communities, beginning with the Lakedaimonians, Athenians, and Corinthians. This common offering returns us to Herodotus’ account of to Hellēnikon: shared descent, language, sanctuaries, sacrifices, and ways of life. Earlier lectures traced how these practices developed through movement and exchange. Here we consider how communities claimed to be Greek while maintaining separate civic identities.

The inscription also preserves a ranking among allies. Pausanias, the Spartan commander at Plataia, initially claimed personal credit in a verse that was removed. Thucydides records the dispute, allowing us to move from Herodotus’ Persian Wars into the changing alliances that followed. Sparta’s leadership depended on mainland commitments and control of helot labour. Athens supplied the ships for continuing operations against Persia. From 478 BC, the Delian League collected ships or money from members, but Athens increasingly controlled their use. Athens compelled Naxos and Thasos to remain, denying members an effective right to withdraw.

At Zea and Mounichia in the Piraeus, excavated slipways, shipsheds, and fortifications reveal the construction and maintenance behind naval power. Individual structures belong to different phases, and changes in sea level complicate their interpretation. The fleet required repeated spending on timber, equipment, repairs, and labour. Allied payments helped sustain the power concentrated at Athens, where the League treasury moved in 454 BC. Tribute lists give that administration a surviving material record. The Parthenon, begun in 447, belonged to the same imperial city, although its sculptures drew on older myths and religious practices.

Its metopes represented mythical battles, its pediments Athena’s birth and her contest with Poseidon, and its frieze a procession usually associated with the Panathenaia. Visible-induced luminescence imaging has detected Egyptian blue on surviving sculptures, including traces suggesting patterned clothing. These findings recover parts of the painters’ work without establishing a complete colour scheme. Women and girls participated visibly in civic religion, while political authority remained with men. Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/450 BC required an Athenian mother and father. Aristotle’s later argument that women’s deliberation lacked authority supplies another account of the relationship between household and community.

Athens’ institutions had changed through Solon’s reforms, tyranny, Cleisthenes’ reorganisation of citizens into demes and tribes, and fifth-century extensions of participation. Aristotle’s school attributed ostracism to Cleisthenes, although its first recorded use dates to 488/487 BC. Citizens could vote on pottery sherds to remove a prominent man for ten years without confiscating his property or convicting him of a crime. Thousands of surviving ostraka preserve names, handwriting, and comments. A deposit naming Themistocles was prepared by a small number of writers. Such finds suggest organisation, but cannot by themselves distinguish assistance to voters from attempts to influence them.

Sparta distributed authority among two kings, elders, ephors, and an assembly, supported by helot cultivation and the work of perioikic communities. Archaeological surveys and mapping reveal settlement and production beyond the citizen centre without identifying every household’s status. Corinth’s oligarchy occupied a different setting, between two gulfs and connected to overseas settlements. Chemical analysis of domestic pottery distinguishes manufacturing groups and changes in production that do not neatly follow political events. Aristotle’s constitutional categories describe offices and authority; these material records help us examine the land, labour, and exchange on which government depended.

Before the Peloponnesian War began in 431 BC, disputes involving Corcyra, Potidaia, and Megara brought particular interests into conflict. Thucydides distinguished these disputes from the underlying growth of Athenian power and Spartan fear. An Athenian participant, he compared reports and acknowledged the difficulty of recovering speeches, which he reconstructed. His speakers’ arguments therefore require interpretation alongside the events he narrates. At Corcyra, factional violence drew in outside powers. At Melos, Athens demanded submission, then killed surviving adult men and enslaved women and children. Shared Greek institutions and language did not prevent coercion.

Pericles’ strategy crowded people behind Athens’ walls while the fleet supplied the city. In 430 BC an epidemic reached the Piraeus and Athens; Thucydides fell ill and survived. His descriptions of symptoms, caregiving, and disrupted burials can be compared with a Kerameikos mass grave. DNA from three teeth prompted a disputed typhoid diagnosis in 2006; later studies have proposed other pathogens, without settling the question. The narrative follows the Funeral Oration, placing praise of civic participation beside conduct under pressure. Survivors still cared for others, so this comparison should not become a claim that every obligation disappeared.

In Sicily, Syracuse had developed from a Corinthian foundation into a large polis with its own territory and interests. Gelon’s movements of populations and employment of mercenaries complicate any assumption that its inhabitants shared one ancestry or civic status. At nearby Himera, isotope measurements from soldiers’ teeth indicate substantial non-local recruitment for the battle of 480 BC; ancient DNA adds evidence of distant origins. These findings extend our earlier discussion of Gelon. Neither ancestry nor a childhood signature identifies someone’s citizenship or determines whether that person considered himself Greek.

On Ortygia, the columns of Athena’s fifth-century temple survive within the cathedral. The theatre records several building phases, with much of its visible form belonging to the Hellenistic period. Syracusan coins show Arethusa, dolphins, and chariots, joining local places to religious and athletic practices shared with other Greek communities. Such objects widen the account beyond Athenian military history.

After the tyrants fell, Syracusans disputed the rights of men enrolled under their rule. Petalism, using names on olive leaves, invites comparison with Athenian ostracism. During Athens’ invasion of 415–413 BC, Thucydides gives Syracusan speakers arguments about popular judgement and describes a fleet and resources comparable to Athens’. Alcibiades’ ambitions and defection mattered alongside Athenian decisions, Syracusan resistance, allies, and harbour conditions. Aristotle later associated victory with movement towards democracy, a further change within an already participatory community. Athens survived the catastrophe until 404, when Sparta’s victory depended partly on Persian money. Syracuse continued into the Hellenistic period, extending our inquiry beyond mainland cities.

Lecture summary: 1,009 words