The Temple Of Hephaestus In Athens, Seen From The South-West. This IS the best preserved of all Doric temples of mainland Greece; it owes
its survival to its conversion to a Christian church. It was completed while the Parthenon was being built, in the third quarter of the fifth
century B.C., and dedicated to Hephaestus with Athena, as joint patrons of crafts in Athens. It overlooks the Agora, which lies to its south-east.
Empire: Athens and the Alternatives
'Shared blood, shared language, shared religion, and shared customs.' These, according to Herodotus, were the ingredients of to hellenikon,
'Greekness'. This definition of nationality, which would not disgrace a modern anthropologist, proves that by the middle of the fifth century
some Greeks recognized what they had in common. That common feeling had been most strengthened by the I menace of the common enemy,
Persia, in the wars of 499-479. However, the Greeks of the classical period never managed to translate their psychological awareness of their
'Greekness' into political unity. The history of the classical Greek city-states is a history of failure to achieve unity: Sparta would not, and
Athens could not, impose it indefinitely by force as Macedon and Rome were to do. There is a way of achieving unity without force, namely
by federalism, and this method was experimented with in the fourth century by a third great Greek power, Boeotian Thebes, which in the time
of Epaminondas (below, pp. 149 f.) exported federalism beyond the frontiers of Boeotia (but not without a compulsion which was fatal to
Theban popularity). The classical Greek cities valued their independent traditions too highly to be prepared to subordinate themselves to a
system in which their vote would be one among several. (The Athenians and Spartans both found ways of controlling decision-making within
their leagues so effectively that they might better not be called leagues at all.) We call this attitude 'valuing independence'; a candid Greek
might have called it phthonos, envy. It is above all the phthonos felt by Sparta for Athens which determines the course of fifth-century Greek
history. Unwilling, for reasons we shall discuss, to lead the Greek world herself, Sparta (or rather, some Spartans, some of the time) could not
bear to see Athens do the job instead: the 'dog in the manger' is in origin a Greek story, one of the fables of Aesop. As Arrian makes the
Spartans say at the beginning of Alexander the Great's reign, Sparta traditionally leads, she does not follow.
Greece, and especially the east-Greek islands still threatened by the Persians, needed a leader in 478. There were not many candidates. Sparta
was the most obvious, because in the recent fighting she had led the Greek League against Persia, a temporary coalition distinct from any so
far mentioned. Sparta was certainly unwilling to let Athens lead: the rebuilding of Athens' walls - a precondition of any active foreign policy -
drew a protest from Sparta in the form of a delegation, which was nullified only by the wit of Themistocles. More positively, Sparta can be
detected in pursuit of expansionist goals in the period after 479, but by land (in central Greece) rather than at sea, an element on which she had
little experience. Thus her king Leotychidas intervened in Thessaly, resuming a line of policy begun, perhaps, by King Cleomenes I in the late
sixth century. This interest in Thessaly on the part of Sparta and her rivals, including fourth-century Thebes and Macedon, will run right