of the Empire, a speech in honour of the Athenians who had died in
the war with Sparta; and it has become famous as an expression of
the ideals which excited Athens in the generation before Plato. Plato
parodies this speech in his Menexenus. The ideals are high, but not
exclusively moral according to our way of thinking. Naked imperial-
ism plays a large part in them, and Pericles is more concerned with
the fine figure that Athens is cutting than with justice to the allies
whom she was turning into subjects. She ruled them in an ever more
grasping and tyrannical fashion, and used their tribute to build the
temples on the Acropolis which still amaze us, as well as for the navy
which was the basis of her power. Recalcitrant cities were punished
with increasing severity as the fear of successful rebellion began to
bite: Mytilene was threatened with massacre but reprieved at the
eleventh hour; Melos actually suffered total extinction.

Reading dialogues like the Gorgias with the history of the
Athenian Empire in mind, we can see that Plato was reacting with
moral revulsion to an attitude of mind current in Greece at the
national as well as the personal level: an attitude which valued
honour and glory above the virtues which enable people to 'dwell
together in unity'. Of the founders of the Empire he says 'Not
moderation and uprightness, but harbours, and dockyards, and
walls, and tribute-money, and such nonsense, were what they filled
the city with' (519a).

For nearly all the last third of the fifth century, until her defeat in
405 BC, Athens was almost constantly at war with Sparta, which
with her allies resisted and in the end brought down the Athenian
power. Plato was old enough to have fought in the last part of the
war, as all citizens were required to, but we have no reliable record
of his military service. A man of his class would naturally have
served in the cavalry; and his brothers are said in the Republic to
have fought well (368a).

The mention of Plato's social position may remind us that there
was another dimension to the struggles of the Greek cities during
this and the next century. The warfare was not merely between but
within the cities. Almost every city was divided politically between
the upper class and the rest of the free citizens (the numerous slaves
can be left out of this political reckoning). This must not be taken as
implying that there were no well-born democrats; indeed patrician

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