The Emptiness of Attica

In anticipation of Xerxes’ imminent arrival in the wake of Thermopylae the Athenian fleet landed in Attica where it was announced that every man should save his family as best he could (Hdt. 8.41). Herodotus implies that the countryside was wholly evacuated before the Athenians rejoined the rest of the Greek fleet at Salamis (cf. 7.144.3); so too does the later tradition (ML 23.6-18, Thuc. 1.73.4, Isoc. 4.96, and Diod. 11.13.4). The one exception was the Acropolis, which the treasurers and some poor men attempted to defend (Hdt. 8.51.2). The fact that the poorest Athenians were, according to Herodotus, left behind has never been sufficiently examined. The Acropolis’ impoverished defenders are generally written off as being synonymous with the old men left behind in Plutarch’s account (Them. 10.9; see Knight 174f. and Burn 429ff.), contested as a misunderstanding or fabrication (Bury 417, Grundy 357, and Sealey 184), or, when accepted, treated unproblematically (most recently, Bowie 138). But Herodotus’ troubling account should not be so quickly dismissed. He is quite clear that the poor could not evacuate “because of their poverty” (8.51.2; contra Arist. Ath. Pol. 23.1 and Plut. Them. 10.6-7 where a subvention is provided). Even if only modest means were needed to convey an individual and his family to safety, those who could not meet that sum must not have been inconsiderable (think Hurricane Katrina). True, Herodotus says the Acropolis defenders were “few”, but we have reason to believe that those in the city were not the only Athenians left behind. Herodotus later notes in passing that the Samians ransomed 500 Athenian prisoners captured “throughout Attica” during Xerxes’ invasion (9.99.2). The Persians had not been in a merciful frame of mind, as evinced by the slaughter of the Acropolis defenders (8.53). If 500 were captured, it is hard to imagine that only 500 were on hand to resist or that all those who resisted were captured or killed. In light of these passages the completeness of the evacuation of Attica should be reconsidered. The most striking implication of this conclusion comes into focus when it is recalled that at Salamis the Athenian fleet of 180 ships (Hdt. 8.44.1) with 200 men per trireme (8.17) required a complement of 36,000 able-bodied men – a total already in excess of the likely number of adult citizen males in Athens at the time (about 30,000: Hdt. 5.97.2). If Athenian manpower had been further reduced by the failure to evacuate the poorest citizens (the backbone of the Athenian fleet), the number of slaves, metics, defectors, and allied rowers under Athenian command may have been uniquely high at Salamis (cf. Hunt 40f.). Such heterogeneous crews bring us, I believe, to the root of the myth that the full citizen body departed Attica. Salamis was used to justify democracy and empire precisely because the Athenian demos could claim exclusive credit (Raaflaub). To protect this claim, the messy details of the evacuation and its unsightly ramifications about who actually did save Greece were progressively simplified in the popular tradition, a process Herodotus’ narrative captures in flux. Bibliography: Bowie, A. M. 2007. Herodotus: Histories, Book VIII. Cambridge. Burn, A. R. 1962. Persia and the Greeks: The Defense of the West, c.546-478 B.C. London. Bury, J. B. 1896. “Aristides at Salamis”, CR 10.9: 414-18. Grundy, G. B. 1901. The Great Persian War and Its Preliminaries: A Study of the Evidence, Literary and Topographical. New York. Hunt, P. 1998. Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians. Cambridge. Knight, W. F. J. 1931. “The Defense of the Acropolis and the Panic before Salamis”, JHS 51.2: 174-8. Raaflaub, K. A. 2007. “The Breakthrough of Dēmokratia in Mid-Fifth-Century Athens”, in id., J. Ober, and R. W. Wallace (eds.) Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece. Berkeley. Sealey, R. 1972. “Again the Siege of the Acropolis, 480 B.C.”, CSCA 5: 183-94.