The Relationship between the Athenian Confederacy and the Persian Empire in the Fourth Century B.C.

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  • 前4世紀アテナイの海上同盟とペルシア帝国
  • ゼン 4セイキ アテナイ ノ カイジョウ ドウメイ ト ペルシア テイコク

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After two great wars -- the Peloponnesian War and the Corinthian War -- it was Sparta that held supremacy over the Greek states. In 377 B. C., against the Spartan hegemony, Athens formed a military alliance with Byzantion, Kios, Rhodes, Thebe and so on. This alliance, which is generally called the Second Athenian Confederacy, collapsed in 355 B. C. when Athens was defeated in the Social War. But it finished in its entirety in 338 B. C. when Philip of Macedon conquered the Greek states. Many scholars of the Second Athenian Confederacy, and especially of its foreign policies, had considered the alliance as "the Second Empire", or recovery of the Delian Alliance. In the 1980s, however, J. L. Cargill denied its significance as the Second Empire with his reexamination of historical sources. He argued that Athens had never acted against the rules agreed upon when the alliance was established. These views focused firstly, on the relationship between Athens and the Greek states, and secondly on the relationship between Athens and the Persian Empire. But, since the Peloponnesian War and throughout the 4th century B. C., Persian kings and satrapes sometimes intervened in the affairs of Greek states, either directly or indirectly. The so-called King's Peace, concluded as the peace of the Corinthian War, shows us that Persian kings were very influential in the Greek states. The author analyzes the Athenian foreign policies, giving careful consideration to the Achaemenid Empire. The author mainly pays attention to the political aims of two Persian kings -- Artaxerxes II and Artaxerxes III -- and analyzes the changes in the Greek world. As a result, though Persian kings were careful to prevent Greek states intervening in Asia Minor, they had no interest about which states dominated the Greek world. The author reaches the conclusion that the disruption of the subtle balance between the Persian Empire and the Greek states made one of the turning points of transition from the Classic period to the Hellenistic period.

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