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...longer pose threat to Greece. But Sparta soon withdrew from the Greeks' strategic alliance, with the result that Athens was left the indisputable leader of the Greek world. Athens had a naval force in the Aegean and the Mediterranean strong enough to guarantee the security of Greece. Athens' Greek allies simply paid Athens for their protection and safety. And Athens, under the leadership of Perikles, used that new treasure to rebuild Athens, in particular erecting the magnificent Parthenon and the other temples on the Acropolis.
But in the absence of a unified Hellas, the monopoly of Greek power by Athens had other consequences, one of which proved fatal to Greek liberty. Athens tried her own 'Athenaisation' project. She spread her products and hegemony everywhere. The fertile lands bordering the Black Sea became her granary. Her military might was felt all over Persia, the Greek states on the Ionian coast of Asia, those in Italy, Sicily, France, Spain and North Africa and in Greece proper. Promising students and intellectuals from all over the Greek world went to Athens to study and teach. Perikles was right: Athens was the school of Hellas.
Yet, with the ascendancy of Athenian influence and power and not a little arrogance on the part of Athens, there also arose jealousy, hatred, antagonisms, ideological warfare between Athens, her faithful or fearful allies and Sparta and her followers. The entire Greek world sided either with Athens or Sparta. Indeed, fifty years after the Greeks crippled the vast Persian empire, they declared war against each other. Sparta, with most of the states of Peloponnesos joining her anti-Athenian coalition, decided in 431 BCE to humble Athens, thus launching the Greeks into the fatal Peloponnesian War. The Greeks, 2,500 years later, are still paying a humiliating price for that deadly confrontation.
Lessons of Greek history
The first lesson of Greek history is for the Greeks: Athens made an unsuccessful bid to create one nation, one political Hellas. Sparta was left out of that experiment and she wrecked it. The tragedy is that the Greeks failed to realise a nation despite their discovery of political theory and practice of democracy, and, most tragic of all, despite their common culture. After all, all Greeks, no matter where they lived, spoke Greek, worshipped the...
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