Athens, the Original Eternal City

They say Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither was Athens. Though the Athenians never managed to build an empire the size of Rome’s, they did spread their culture and ideas throughout the Mediterranean. Athens during the Classical, or Hellenic, period (500-340 B.C.E) can easily be compared to Rome at its height in terms of art, and architecture, and far surpassed it in philosophy. While Rome was still struggling for independence from its Etruscan masters, Athens was the center of the Hellenic world. While Alexander the Great was learning from his Athenian tutor, Rome was putting down Latin rebellions. Even under Roman rule, Athens was favored for its ancient accomplishments. Rome may be the Eternal City, but it is simply a backwater pretender to Athens. Democracy is probably Athens most well known characteristic, but it was not always that way. Like every other Greek city during the Mycenaean period (1500-1200 B.C.E.), Athens was once ruled by a king. Little is known of Athens during this period, though the archeological record combined with popular myth from later periods may give us an insight. The names of several legendary kings of Athens have come down to us: in particular Erectheus, the first king, who was believed to have established the worship of the goddess Athena on the Acropolis, and Theseus, killer of the Minotaur, who (according to the Greek historian Plutarch) unified Attica (Connolly 10).
Legend tells of many kings in Athens during the Mycenaean period, but no evidence has been found to validate any of these mythical, heroic monarchs. Evidence of a wall around the Acropolis and traces of a Mycenaean palace do confirm the notion of a Bronze Age monarchy, however. Mycenaean Athens, like every other Greek city, vanished not long after 1200 B.C.E. The disappearance of Mycenaean civilization is often attributed to the Dorian invasion, and more recently to a natural disaster. Though the exact reason for this general breakdown of civilization is not known, it can most probably be attributed to a number of things. Rivalry and warfare between Greek cities, the decline of trade in the eastern Mediterranean, and over-population all lead to the eventual collapse of Mycenaean Greece. Following this collapse, all of Greece went through a period of societal decline and cultural regression known as the Dark Age (ca. 1100-800 B.C.E.). The “Dorian invasion” was actually a mass migration of different tribes of Greeks to all parts of the Aegean world. The Dorians were a tribe of people from northern Greece that moved into the Peloponnesus between 1200 and 1100 B.C.E., though they largely bypassed Athens and Attica. While the Dorians were moving south, other Greeks dispersed to the islands in the Aegean and to Asia Minor. Thus the Dorians settled in much of the Peloponnesus, Crete, and southwest Asia Minor. Ionians made Attica, Euboea, and the Aegean islands their home, while a mixed group called Aeolians began to migrate to central and northwest Asia Minor (Kishlansky 44).
It is not known what caused these migrations, though the downfall of Mycenaean civilization may be a prime motivator. Whatever the cause, the end result changed the entire Mediterranean world. Little is known of Greece during the Dark Age. With the exception of the poems of Hesiod and Homer, which were written towards the end of the Dark Age, writing was non-existent. The form of writing used by the Mycenaean Greeks, Linear B, was lost with them, and few Greeks living during the Dark Age missed it. Greeks lead a much simpler, more rural, and far from literate life during this period. When Mycenaean civilization collapsed, so did urban life. “All over Greece, people left the towns to live and work in hamlets; in Attica they went above all to the eastern coast” (Waterfield 37). Farming became much more important during the Dark Age and luxuries ceased to exist. Even art and pottery from the beginning of the Dark Age show no advances or innovation. Eventually, however, culture rebounds and people look for new and better ways to do things. It is during the Dark Age that Greeks begin using iron for tools and weapons during this period. Also during this time, Greeks adopt the Phoenician alphabet and add vowels to it in order to record poetry. One of the first areas of cultural advance was art, specifically painting of pottery, and Athens was in the forefront of the art revival. “Athenian geometric pottery styles and decorations were widely copied” (Waterfield 38). Its pottery made Athens a very prosperous trade center for over 100 years during the Dark Age of Greece. “It was the Greek colonizing movement, beginning in the eighth century, that more than anything else caused the Greeks to emerge from the Dark Age…” (Fine 68). If the Dark Age could be characterized by regression, then the Archaic period (800-500 B.C.E) could be characterized by expansion. It is during the Archaic period that Greeks start to colonize much of the Mediterranean. One of the primary causes for colonization was overpopulation. No Greek city-state was very big by modern terms, and few were larger than 500 square miles. The size of these city-states were sufficient for the small, herding populations of Dark Age Greece, but beginning around 800 B.C.E. the entire Greek world experienced a massive growth in population that could be attributed to a shift to an agrarian based society. “In Attica, for example, between 780 and 720 B.C.E. the population increased perhaps sevenfold (Kishlansky 47)”. This increase in population not only strained the resources of the rural communities in Greece, it also left many families without enough land to pass on to younger sons. These sons, among others, were the first people to begin searching out new. In order to reduce the pressure of overpopulation at home, many Greek cities began to found colonies throughout the Western Mediterranean and Black Sea. “The first noteworthy colony, Cumae near Naples, was founded by emigrants from Euboea” (Kishlansky 50). Another important result of the population increase in Archaic Greece was the formation of the polis, or citizen-state. Initially, polis meant simply ‘citadel’. Villages clustered around fortifications, which were both protective structures and cult centers for specific deities. These high, fortified sites - acropolis means ‘high citadel’ - were sacred to specific gods… (Kishlansky 49).
In Athens, the Acropolis served as a focal point for the population growth. The villages surrounding it banded together for protection, and eventually became a single town, which then united the whole of Attica into a single polis. Thus, much like every other Greek city, Athens emerged from the Dark Age with an oligarchy, or rule by the few, in place of its Mycenaean monarchy. The oligarchy in Athens was controlled by clans of aristocratic landowners, such as the Alcmaeonids, who called themselves the Eupatrids, or well-born. “Only the members of the clans could participate in the aeropagus, or council, which they entered after serving a year as on of the nine archons, magistrates who were elected yearly” (Kishlansky 63). Though it may seem like a reasonable and organized form of government, the oligarchy in Athens was actually anything but just. The dominant way of life was rural, and Attica was a mass of small villages. But individual households or householders acknowledged themselves members of several larger units. All those households which traced their lineage back to a common ancestor formed a clan. At the same time, by virtue of certain shared cults and rites, they were members of phratries, literally, ‘brotherhoods.’ At the top of the pinnacle all Athenians were divided among four tribes, again with common rites and functions (Waterfield 43).
Participation in government was limited to clan families, but less than half of Attica actually belonged to a clan. These clans banded together to control the oligarchy by maintaining Eupatrid dominance. The aristocratic control of Athenian government could not last forever. The pressures of overpopulation and defense would soon prove the oligarchy ineffective and obsolete. Athens began to feel the effects of a huge population increase sometime in the seventh century B.C.E. With the population of the entire Greek world increasing, more contact was occurring between different city-states. This contact lead to, among other things, improved communication, an increase in trade, and a greater need for defense. One of the major commodities traded among the cities of the Aegean was iron. Iron allowed the cities of Archaic Greece to develop better weapons and stronger armor. This readily accessible, improved weaponry forced cities to attempt to overpower their rivals with numbers. The need for larger armies lead to the creation of the hoplite phalanx. The phalanx was a line formation of infantrymen wearing bronze armor and carrying iron weapons. “Properly disciplined, the phalanx could withstand attacks of better-equipped aristocratic warriors” (Kishlansky 50). Thus the dominant form of warfare in Mycenaean Greece, single combat between aristocratic champions, gave way to large-scale battles between opposing phalanges. Though the aristocratic control of Athenian government was tolerated by the masses in Attica for many years, it eventually became too much to bear. The clan families continuously sought more land and wealth, often at the expense of less fortunate families. Their quest for power forced many householders to mortgage themselves and their families as slaves just to pay off debts. So, as is the norm in aristocratic society, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Another factor in the change of government was the pride of the hoplite. Prior to the Archaic period, aristocrats were the only people who could afford weapons and armor, so they were charged with the defense of the city. With iron becoming so readily available, more people were able to afford weaponry and fight alongside the aristocratic warriors. Trade also played a large role. With the increase in population, there was a higher demand for commodities not readily available in Attica, and a great desire in other parts of Greece for, among other things, Athenian pottery. Thus, a new class of wealthy merchants and artisans emerged. All of these people, the poor, landless farmers, the proud hoplites, and the newly rich merchants and artisans eventually got tired of being second-class citizens. The first attempt at overthrowing the Athenian oligarchy came from man named Cylon. Cylon was an aristocratic, Olympian champion who was married to the daughter of the tyrant of Megara. Around 630 B.C.E., Cylon and his followers, with the help of troops sent by his father-in-law, seized control of the Acropolis and attempted to establish their own tyranny. Neither the Athenian aristocrats, nor the general populace was behind him, though for different reasons. The aristocracy was obviously not willing to loss power, but the Athenian people were more offended by Cylon’s use of foreign troops. “His attempt failed, but when he was murdered by one of the Alcmaeonids, popular revulsion drove the Alcmaeonids from the city” (Kishlansky 63). Though the first attempt at a revision of government came to naught, the days of oligarchic power in Athens were clearly numbered. The changes taking place across Greece threatened the traditional rule of the aristocrats. As a short-term measure, in 621 the aristocrats appointed a man to draw up a legal code for the city. Drakon was not a reformer, but for the first time the unwritten laws of Athens were written down and set in stone (Waterfield 46). Real change came with Solon. “In 594 he was elected arkhon with plenipotentiary power to deal with a crisis” (Waterfield 48). Though he was an Eupatrid himself, Solon established a form of government that almost completely eliminated the aristocratic rule in Athens. His reforms, though not perfect, set the stage for Athenian democracy. He freed the peasantry by eliminating debt bondage and passing a law prohibiting the mortgaging of free men and women. Solon also reorganized the rest of the social hierarchy and broke the aristocracy’s exclusive control of the areopagus by dividing the society into four classes based on wealth rather than birth and opening the post of archon to the top two classes. He further weakened the areopagus by establishing a council of 400 members, drawn from all four classes, to which citizens could appeal decisions of the magistrates (Kishlansky 63).
Though Solon was urged by many Athenians to become a tyrant in order to block the still powerful aristocracy, he refused. It wasn’t until after Solon’s death that Athens would see its first tyrant. Shortly after Solon’s reforms, about 580 B.C.E, there was another abortive attempt, by an aristocrat named Damasias, to establish a tyranny. For nearly fifty years after Solon weakened aristocratic control, various Eupatrids sought to regain control. There were three factions. One was made up of the men of the coast; they were led by Megakles the son of Alkmaion, and they wanted above all to see a balanced constitution. Another was made up of men of the plain; their goal was oligarchy and their leader was Lykourgos. The third was made up of the men beyond the hills; their leader was Peisistratos, who was regarded as being the most inclined towards democracy (Aristotle in Waterfield 54).
It was Peisistratus who, with the help of a mercenary army and the support of the peasants against his fellow aristocrats, seized the Acropolis and became Athens’ first tyrant. Though he gained his power through force, Peisistratus was not a harsh ruler. Instead, he – and later his son Hippias (d. 490 B.C.E.), who succeeded him until 510 B.C.E – continued to rule through Solon’s constitution but simply ensured that the archons elected each year were their agents. Thus the Athenian tyrants strengthened Solon’s constitution even while they further destroyed the powers of the aristocracy (Kishlansky 63). Peisistratus, and later his son Hippias, contributed much to Athens during their reign. They promoted festivals, supported trade and commerce, and introduced the silver coin that became the first Greek currency used internationally. The tyrants also directed a series of popular nationalistic public works programs that beautified the city, increased national pride, and provided work for the poor. They rebuilt the temple of Athena on the acropolis, for which both the statues of the Rampin Horseman and the Calf-Bearer were commissioned. The tyrants also constructed a system of terra-cotta pipes by which clear mountain water was brought into the agora, and they built public halls and meeting places (Kishlansky 64).
Peisistratus ruled well and, in the beginning, his son was equally as popular. However, after Hippias’ younger brother was assassinated by two Eupatrids, he became oppressive and “tyrannical”. He quickly eliminated or drove out all of his aristocratic opponents, but they returned. The primary force behind Hippias’ removal from power was the Alcmeaonids. They received military help from Sparta, and in 510 B.C.E. they defeated Hippias and overthrew the Athenian tyranny. After Hippias was removed, the aristocracy, under an Eupatrid named Isagoras, made an attempt to return to an oligarchy, but the people of Athens were not willing to regress. The people backed an Alcmeaonid named Cleisthenes, who was the primary opponent of a return to aristocratic rule. In 508 B.C.E., Cleisthenes “pushed through a final constitutional reform that became the basis for Athenian democracy” (Kishlansky 64). In essence, he reorganized the political units of Attica from the wealth-based tribes to regionally based trittyes, or territorial units. “…this reorganization destroyed the traditional kin-based social and political pattern and integrated people of differing social, economic, and regional backgrounds” (Kishlansky 64). Cleisthenes’ reforms forced the various classes of Athens to work together for the good of the city. “With this new, integrated democracy and its strong sense of nationalism, Athens emerged from the Archaic Age as the leading city of the Hellenic world” (Kishlansky 64). While Greeks of the mainland were establishing themselves as small, but independent, self-governing city-states, the Greeks of Asia Minor were living under the control of the Persian Empire. At first, the Asiatic Greeks accepted the rule of the Persian satraps, though that did not last very long. In 499 B.C.E., the passion for democracy that had swept much of mainland Greece reached Ionia. Cities such as Miletus, Ephesus, Chios, and Samos revolted, expelled their Persian-appointed tyrants, established democracies, and sent ambassadors to the mainland to seek assistance. Eretria and Athens, two mainland cities with Ionian roots, responded (Kishlansky 65).
Not only did Athens share roots with the Ionian cities of Asia Minor, the Athenians also sought to spread their own form of democracy to other Greek cities. By meddling in the affairs of the Asiatic Greeks, however, Athens set the stage for its own destruction. The rebellion of the Asiatic Greeks against the Persian Empire was short lived, and by 494 B.C.E., the Persian king, Darius I, had recaptured all the rebellious cities and had slaughtered or sold into slavery most of the Greeks in them. Once the rebels had been disposed of, Darius set out to punish their supporters on the mainland, Eretria and Athens. With the same meticulous planning and deliberate pace, the Persian king turned his vast armies toward the Greek mainland (Kishlansky 65). In 490 B.C.E., the Persians destroyed the city of Eretria, and then landed a force of approximately 20,000 infantry and horse archers at the Bay of Marathon. Through an excellent use of strategy, superior arms, and first-hand knowledge of the Persians strengths and weaknesses, the Athenian general Miltiades led his forces to a decisive victory. Outnumbered two-to-one, the combined Athenian-Plataean hoplites pushed the Persians back to the beach and forced them to retreat to their ships. In a few hours time, they killed over 6,000 Persians with fewer than 200 Greek casualties. The surviving Persian forces attempted to sail around Attica to the Bay of Phalerum hoping to cut off the Athenian army before it could return to the city. However, the Athenians, though exhausted from the battle, rushed the 23 miles home in less than eight hours, beating the Persian fleet. When the Persians learned that they had lost the race, they turned their ships for Asia (Kishlansky 72). Though Marathon was a stunning victory for the Athenians, it only bought the Greeks a decade of respite. By 480 B.C.E., Darius’s son, Xerxes, who had taken power following the unexpected death of his father, had reformed his army and the Persians once again turned their sites toward Greece. The ten-year lull, however, gave Athens enough time to prepare itself. During the break in fighting, “…a man was becoming prominent in Athens who would become a byword for the peculiarly Greek virtue of cunning intelligence” (Waterfield 67). That man, Themistocles, though not an Eupatrid, gained importance at the expense of his peers through political maneuvering and the Athenian practice of ostracism, or ten year exile without loss of property or citizenship, that had been introduced by Cleisthenes. Not only was Themistocles an exceptional politician, he deeply believed in the Athenian democracy. One of Themistocles’s greatest accomplishments was to pass a reform that “…decreed that even the nine archons were not to elected but chosen by lot” (Waterfield 68). This essentially closed all Athenian public office, with the exception of the ten generalships instituted around 500 B.C.E., to ambitious, careerist politicians. It also weakened the power of the areopagus, or assembly, which was made up of former archons, and placed more executive power in the hands of the people. During his ascendancy, Themistocles also managed to strengthen the Athenian defenses and help prepare them for Persia’s imminent invasion. “His first major coup, in 493, was to move the center of Athens’s seafaring activities a few kilometers north, from the old harbor of Phaleron to the Peiraieus peninsula, with with three natural harbors was better suited to future requirements as was easier to fortify” (Waterfield 67). He also convinced the Athenians to use the rich silver deposits recently discovered in the hills of Laurium to develop a war fleet. These actions, though they seemed trivial at the time, played a very important role in the Athenian future. “In 481, faced with the imminent invasion of a Persian army consisting of, at a conservative estimate, two hundred thousand land troops and a navy of eight hundred warships, the Greeks convened an emergency conference in Corinth” (Waterfield 68). In the summer of 480 B.C.E., the Persians began their march on Athens, which was their primary target. The Greek hoplites met the Persians in the pass at Thermopylae, while the fleet, following Themistocles’ plan, attempted to engage the Persian ships at Artemisium. Though the Greek army, lead by the Spartan king Leonidas, held for days in the pass, they were eventually defeated when the Persian forces, guided by their Greek allies, managed to flank the Greek position. Even in defeat, however, the heroism of Leonidas and his troops bought the Greek allies valuable time. The Greek ships, the majority being Athenian, came into contact with the Persian fleet after it had been battered by a storm in transit through the Euboean straits. The heavier Greek ships succeeded in harrying, and even sinking a few, the Persian fleet of Artemisium, but after receiving word of the fall of Thermopylae it withdrew to Salamis. “Nothing could now stop the Persian advance, and the Athenian fleet was used, on Themistokles’ orders, to evacuate the city and ferry its inhabitants to safety” (Waterfield 69). While the Persian army was sacking Attica and burning the Acropolis, Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into the narrow straits between the island of Salamis and the mainland. There, the Athenian navy won a complete and decisive victory over the Persians. “After Salamis, Xerxes lost his appetite for fighting Greeks. Without his fleet, he could not supply a vast army far from home in hostile territory. Leaving a force to do what damage it could, he led the bulk of his forces back to Persia” (Kishlansky 74). The Athenians convinced the Greek allies to attack Xerxes’ remaining forces, and in 479 B.C.E. the Persians were finally defeated at Plataea. When the Athenians returned to their beloved city, they found it burned and in ruins. It was said in later years that the Greeks had made a vow at Plataea. The oath is quoted by the Athenian statesman Lycurgus, writing towards the end of the fourth century BC: I will rebuild none of the shrines burnt and overthrown by the barbarians; I will allow them to remain as a memorial to barbarian impiety for future generations. The Athenian shrines and temples lay in ruins for thirty years, though a temporary shrine must have been erected on the Acropolis for the sacred wooden statue of Athena, which had been evacuated to Salamis (Connolly 12). For reasons known only to them, though the Persian destruction of their city may have been a factor, the Athenians decided to press the war with Persia. Sparta, with its constant threat of rebellion by its helots, or state serfs, was left with too many internal issues to resume control of the Greek alliance. “Athens, on the other hand, was only too ready to take the lead in bringing the war home to the Persians. With Sparta out of the picture, the Athenian fleet was the best hope of liberating the Aegean from Persians and pirates” (Kishlansky 75). The Greek alliance, which came to be known as the Delian League, under Athenian control soon drove the Persians from the Aegean and liberated the Ionian cities of Asia Minor. The league continued to push the Persians back until an expedition to Egypt in 454 B.C.E. was defeated. The Greeks finally relented and negotiated a peace treaty with Persia in 449 B.C.E. “For a brief moment it appeared that the Delian League might disband. But it was too late. The league had become an empire, and Athens’s allies were its subjects” (Kishlansky 75). Athenian control of the Delian League was made possible by the use of its vast navy to control shipping throughout the Aegean and Black seas, and thus impose cooperation from its “allies”. The fleet that Themistocles had urged them to create gave the Athenians mastery of the Greek world for most of the Hellenic period. Most of what we today call Greek is actually Athenian: throughout the Hellenic age (the fifth and early fourth centuries B.C.E, as distinct from the Hellenistic period of roughly the later fourth through second centuries B.C.E.), the turbulent issues of democracy and oligarchy, war and peace, hard choices and conflicting obligations found expression in Athenian culture even as the glory of the Athenian empire manifested in art and architecture. The great dramatists Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were Athenian, as were the sculptor Phidias, the Parthenon architects Ictinus and Callicrates, and the philosophers Socrates and Plato. To Athens came writers, thinkers, and artists from throughout the Greek world (Kishlansky 81). During the Hellenic period, Athens was the center of Greek civilization. It was one of the wealthiest, due to the tribute from its over 150 subject cities, and most populous cities in the western world. It was also the most powerful city in the Greece for over a hundred years. Ironically, the democratic Athenians remained determined throughout the Hellenic period to prevent individuals within its citizenry from acquiring the kind of power that it exercised over its fellow Grecian cities. This made political leadership a much contested and volatile affair in Athens. Since most offices were filled by lot and turned over frequently, real political leadership came not from officeholders but from generals and from popular leaders. These so-called demagogues, while at times holding high office, exercised their power through their speaking skills, informal networks, and knowledge of how to get things done (Kishlansky 78).
Miltiades, Themistocles, Aristeides “the Just”, who set the original tribute given to Athens by the members of the Delian League, and Cimon, the son of Miltiades, who led the Athenian forces to final victory over the Persian fleet are some of the most well known demagogues. Perhaps the most well known demagogue, however, was Pericles. Although not an original thinker, he was a great orator and a successful military commander who proved to be the man most able to win the confidence of Athens and to lead it during the decades for its greatest glory. The Athenian political system of radical democracy reached its zenith under the leadership of Pericles, even while its imperial program drew it into a long and fatal war against Sparta, the only state powerful enough to resist it (Kishlansky 79). Pericles was not only an Eupatrid, he was a descendent of the Alcmaeonids, and the great-nephew of Cleisthenes. Pericles first entered Athenian society as a supporter of Themistocles. He gained first-hand knowledge of politics as a result of extensive service on various public works projects, which made him immensely popular with the poorer citizens who provided the labor for those endeavors. He served on various commissions, including those responsible for building the Lyceum and the Parthenon, and even headed the commission that constructed the statue of Athena Parthenos. He used his influence to convince the Athenians to use the tribute paid to them by their subject states to rebuild and beautify the city and the surrounding region of Attica. The buildings that still stand on the Acropolis are, perhaps, Pericles’ greatest legacy. He proved himself an able commander during the First Peloponnesian War, and held a generalship every year from 443 B.C.E till his death in 429 B.C.E. While in office, Pericles used his skill as an orator, and his unrivaled power of persuasion to extend democracy to all free citizens of Athens. With his guidance, Athens finally removed the property requirement for holding public office, and even made it possible for the poorest citizen to participate in government by persuading the state to pay jurors. For all his great accomplishments, his reforms were not beneficial to all. His influence brought into being a law that restricted citizenship to those of Athenian parentage, and “…prevented citizens of Athens’s subject states from developing a real stake in the fate of the empire” (Kishlansky 79). It could be said that Pericles presided over Athens in its prime, and was directly responsible for its fall. Athenian policy regarding its “allies” had never been beneficial to them, and Pericles’ reforms only increased anti-Athenian feelings throughout Greece. In part due to its unique form of government, Athenians felt themselves superior to other Greek states. Pericles played on this attitude, and even strengthened it, with his public works projects and political reforms. Pericles had been an opponent of the aristocratically oriented Cimon at home and disputed Cimon’s foreign policy, which saw Athens and Sparta as “yoke mates” against Persia. Pericles had little fear of Persia but shared Cimon’s view that the Athenian empire had to be preserved at all costs. This policy ultimately drew Athens in deadly conflict with Sparta (Kishlansky 79). The conflict began, around 460 B.C.E., as a border dispute between Megara and Corinth that soon drew Athens, on the side of Megara, and Sparta, in response to Athenian involvement, into the fray. This first clash ended in an Athenian victory, which put Megara, Aegina, and Boeotia under Athenian rule. In 446 B.C.E., after Athens lost to the Persian forces in Egypt, Megara and Boeotia threw off their Athenian yoke and Sparta moved in to occupy the region. After two successive defeats, the Athenians under Pericles signed a treaty with Sparta, in 445 B.C.E., in which Athens relinquished its mainland holdings. “The treaty was meant to last for 30 years. It held for 14” (Kishlansky 79). In 435 B.C.E., Corinth and Corcyra came to blows and Athens interceded on Corcyra’s behalf, which caused Corinth, in 432 B.C.E, to once again call upon its Spartan allies for assistance. In response, Sparta invaded Attica the following year, and so began the Peloponnesian War. The Peloponnesian War was