Athens, Samos, and Alexander the Great
By Christian Habicht
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 140, No. 3. (1996)
Introduction: An unpublished document from Samos that came to my attention last year has added new meaning to a series of events involving Athens, Samos, and Alexander the Great. I shall present it in due course, once the background has been reviewed.
The collapse of Athens at the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 B.C left Sparta to deal with the allies of its defeated enemy. Prominent among them was Samos, off the coast of Turkey, where the democrats in power had to the end remained faithful to Athens. Lysander, the victorious Spartan admiral, drove them from the island and restored their previously exiled oligarchic opponents. They, in turn, voted him honors that had so far been reserved exclusively for the gods, among them a festival called Lysandreia; it replaced, at least temporarily, their main festival in honor of Hera.
Persian gold had made Sparta’s victory possible. Soon thereafter, the alliance turned to hostility, when Sparta supported the revolt of Cyrus against his brother, King Artaxerxes, and then to war, when it tried to protect (or restore) the freedom of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The parties finally settled their differences in the socalled King’s Peace of 386. Sparta abandoned the Greeks in Asia Minor in exchange for a free hand in Greece; the coastal islands, Samos among them, were to remain free from the king’s rule.
Within a few years, Spartan intemperance provoked a strong reaction by two major powers, Thebes and Athens. Athens founded its Second Naval Confederacy as a defensive alliance against Sparta in 378/7; membership rose quickly to some seventy states. To achieve this, Athens solemnly renounced its imperial past which had earned it so much hate. This time, there was to be no enforced monetary contribution (pharos) and all the allies had a vote in the common council. Most important, the territorial integrity of all member states was formally guaranteed. The charter (which is preserved)2 prohibited Athenian citizens from owning real estate wherever the ahes had jurisdiction. Athenian settlements on an ally’s soil (the heinous cleruchies) were formally condemned.
For some time things went well. Then occurred an event that was to have major repercussions. The Athenian general Timotheus, after a ten-month siege, conquered Samos in 365 B.C. and chased away a Persian garrison installed there in violation of the King’s Peace. If this could be regarded as laudable from the Greek point of view, the sequel could not. The Athenians drove out the Samian population and repopulated the island with Athenian settlers (cleruchs). They may have done so to protect its safety, or to alleviate the problem of providing sustenance for thousands of citizens, for whlch the Attic soil did not produce enough (overpopulation in Greece is a general problem of the fourth century, driving many thousands as mercenaries into the service of the Persian king – a problem solved only when Alexander opened the East to Greek settlers). In any event, the expulsion of the Samians was a case of ethnic cleansing in antiquity.
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