The age of Pericles is considered the undisputed apex of classical Greece. The almost thirty-year crisis that opened at the end of this period is characterized by an unprecedented war event for the Greek world: the Peloponnesian War .
It is in fact the greatest historical event after the expedition of Xerxes, the implications of which are still under discussion today since they concern very different geographical areas and cultures:from the Greek continent through the Aegean, the Macedonia, Thrace to Asia Minor to the east, passing through the Ionian to Sicily and southern Italy to the west.
The involvement of the Persian empire and Magna Graecia makes this event not only "Universal" but a real turning point in the political and economic equilibrium of the world at that time. Athens and Sparta were defeated. Greece, the center of the world after Salamis and Plataea, gradually saw itself pushed towards the periphery to passively observe the emergence of Persia (to the east) and Dionysus I of Syracuse (to the west). The Hellenic polis was also slowly dying. The Delian-Attic League showed all its weakness:the inability to reconcile the excessive local autonomy with the sense of a "common duty" not only determined the collapse of Athens, understood as a political and economic power, but also the dissolution of an idea of Greekness that was inextricably linked to the structure of the Athenian polis.
The political, economic and social situation was characterized by a strong crisis but in these dark years the Hellenic spirit was able to demonstrate an inexhaustible intellectual vivacity. “ Most of Euripides 'works (died 406) and Aristophanes' plays (the first of which was performed in 427) date back to the war period; they testify to a flourishing cultural life in Athens where the annual performances of tragedies and comedies did not cease, despite the clamor of the arsenals and workshops of the city and of Piraeus. Even the chisel and the carpenter's saw proceeded relentlessly in their work:the construction of the Erechtheion continued, and the treasurers, despite being pressured by the expenses for the war, did not fail to record the counts for the citizens, meteci and slaves ", (H. Bengtson, Ancient Greece, Il Mulino, p. 220).
But the most significant event is undoubtedly the entrance to sophistication on the Athenian scene. This new doctrine physically represented by Ambassador Gorgias' trip to Athens played a decisive role in the formation of the Greek spirit, both from an anthropological and scientific point of view. The leading man, precisely as measure of all things , becomes the fulcrum of a new vision of the mendo, a boost in scientific research:it is no coincidence that the writing of Thucydides has undergone both sophistic influences which derive from ancient medicine, in the figure of Hippocrates.
We are therefore faced with the process of building a new humanity that if on the one hand it is deeply marked by the ferocity of war, and remains entangled in the ambition of men like Alcibiades and Lysander and in the ineptitude of the demos, on the other hand, he manages to overcome his own limits, as shown by the courage and fidelity of Socrates.
Too often the Peloponnesian War is told as a sequence of dates, names and facts, too often we start with the triggering causes and proceed through the three phases into which historiography commonly divides it. And then it stops. We forget the context, the overall picture, we lose our awareness of the "philosophical" and more generally cultural meanings of this event. The birth of historiography and the death of the polis, of that polis understood as an expression of a direct democracy that failed to establish itself as a convincing political direction tool in times of crisis. In the podcast you find below I try to draw a general picture of the cultural situation that has humus to the Peloponnesian War.