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written permission from the JHU Press. Peter Goldstein, "The Walls of Athens and the Power of Poetry: A Note on Milton's Sonnet 8" (MQ 24 [1990]: 105-08), offers an original and intriguing interpretation of the final lines of Milton's Sonnet 8:
and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet had the power
To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare.
Milton's allusion is to Plutarch's Lysander. When Sparta and her allies had defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War, the victorious generals held a council to decide the conquered city's fate. Erianthus, a Theban, moved that Athens be razed to the ground and her citizens sold into slavery. This proposal prevailed in council, but later, when the delegates met at a banquet, a man from Phocis sang the opening chorus from Euripides' Electra. As he sang, "all were moved to compassion, and felt it to be a cruel deed to abolish and destroy a city which was so famous, and produced such poets" (Lysander 15. 3). Goldstein, following Thomas Warton's 1785 edition, detects a discrepancy between Milton's account and Plutarch's. Milton says that "the Athenian walls" were saved. Plutarch (according to Warton) says that "Lysander ordered the walls and fortifications to be demolished." Warton left it at that, and nineteenth-century editions simply reprinted his note. Twentieth-century critics have sought subtle explanations. Dennis Burden reads "walls" as a synecdoche for "houses." This reconciles Milton with Plutarch, but Burden knows better than to pretend that it removes the problem: "Milton's use of walls here for 'houses' is somewhat inept since Lysander did destroy the fortifications of Athens" (134). Where Burden sees ineptitude, Goldstein sees "a wry irony," which Milton employs "partly at his own expense." Like Burden, Goldstein takes "walls" to mean "houses," but he believes that Milton chose the word precisely because he wanted to remind his readers that the Athenian city wall was demolished. Goldstein sees Milton as deliberately subverting his own claim that poetry has the power to melt hard hearts:
Since the recitation from Euripides proved a partial failure, Milton could hardly expect his poem to do much better. And so a poet's house might perish even as did the walls of Athens--for failure to find fit audience, though few. (108)
Where most readers have seen a nostalgic--and somewhat bemused--contrast between the Athens of 404 BC and the London of AD 1643, Goldstein sees only a gloomy parallel. It follows that Sonnet 8 is not idealistic or nostalgic, but pessimistic and resigned.
Goldstein's argument is interesting, but it is finally unpersuasive because it is built on a false premise. Goldstein believes that Milton has got his facts wrong. But Milton's version of history is accurate. It is Warton, Burden and Goldstein who are in error. All three critics have misread a famous passage in Plutarch:
So then, after the Athenians had yielded in all points, Lysander sent for many flute-girls from the city, and assembled all those who were already in the camp, and then tore down the walls, and burned up the triremes, to the sound of the flute, while the allies crowned themselves with garlands and made merry together, counting that day as the beginning of their freedom. (Lysander 15. 4)
Walls were demolished, but Plutarch in this passage is not referring to the Athenian city wall. He is referring to the Long Walls and the Piraeus fortifications. This is clear [End Page 1] from the context. Just one paragraph earlier Plutarch had reported the Spartan terms for surrender:
"This is what the Lacedaemonian authorities have decided: tear down the Piraeus and the long walls; quit all the cities and keep to your own land; if you do these things, and restore your exiles, you shall have peace." (Lysander 14. 4)
Referring back to these conditions, Plutarch speaks of 
("the walls") for brevity's sake. By
Plutarch means 
(the Long Walls) and the Piraeus fortifications, but not the circuit wall of
Athens. In neither paragraph does Plutarch state or imply that Lysander
demolished the Athenian city wall. It follows that there is no contradiction
between Plutarch and Milton. Goldstein is led astray at this point by Thomas
North's elegant but inaccurate translation. North interpolates at the crucial
moment. Where Plutarch has ,
North has "the walles and fortifications of the city of ATHENS." Having quoted
North (not Plutarch), Goldstein confidently concludes: "According to Plutarch,
therefore, the performance from Electra saved Athens from sack, but it
did not save the city walls" (106). This conclusion is simply untenable when one
reads Plutarch--or an accurate translation--in context.
The interpretation I have outlined is confirmed by all the ancient sources. Xenophon (an eye-witness) reports that the Spartans initially required the Athenians to "tear down a portion ten stadia long of each of the two long walls" (Hellenica 2.2.15). The Athenians rejected this generous offer, and so provoked Sparta into imposing stiffer terms when famine finally forced the city into submission. But the Spartans still stopped short of the city wall:
They offered to make peace on these conditions: that the Athenians should destroy the long walls and the walls of Piraeus
, surrender all their ships except twelve, allow their exiles to return, count the same people friends and enemies as the Lacedaemonians did, and follow the Lacedaemonians both by land and by sea wherever they should lead the way. (Hellenica 2. 2. 20)
Like Plutarch, Xenophon refers more briefly to
("the walls") when he describes how the Athenians complied with these terms:
After this Lysander sailed into Piraeus, the exiles returned, and the Peloponnesians with great enthusiasm began to tear down the walls to the music of flute girls, thinking that day was the beginning of freedom of Greece. (Hellenica 2. 2. 23).
By ,
Xenophon, like Plutarch, means the Long Walls and the Piraeus circuit, not the
Athenian city wall. Further confirmation, if it is needed, may be found in
Lysias 14 and Diodorus Siculus 13.107.4. The interpretation I have offered is
standard among classicists. Robert Garland, in the most thorough historical and
archeological study of the Piraeus yet written, succinctly notes of the Long
Walls that "they and the Piraeus fortifications, but not the circuit wall of
Athens" were "razed to the ground" (24). Milton's claim that "the Athenian
walls" were saved is consistent with this view.
Since Miltonists have confused the Athenian walls with the Long Walls, it is worth taking a moment to clarify the distinction. The city of Athens ("the Asty") was in ancient times a separate community from the harbour town of the Piraeus. Athens had not always been a sea power, and the Asty did not lie directly on the coast. It was on Themistocles' advice that the Athenians had decided, in Thucydides' memorable phrase, "to attach themselves to the sea" (1. 93. 4). Themistocles urged the Athenians to fortify the Piraeus, with its three natural harbours, so as to consolidate the base of their naval power. Work on the Piraeus fortifications began under Themistocles' archonship, in about 493 BC, and was completed in about 477/6 BC after the Persians had been expelled from Athens. Robert Garland believes that the Athenians at this time should have abandoned the Asty and built a new city on the coast: [End Page 2]
It is my belief that Themistoklean strategy logically called for the abandonment of the Asty in favour of a settlement on the coast. Such a move, had it been effected, would have permitted an exclusive concentration of military resources in one centre. But the Asty was not abandoned and Athens' military forces were thereafter divided in the defence of two communities. Thus by strengthening Athens' offensive capability Themistokles ultimately undermined her defences, her Achilles' heel being the distance between the Asty and the harbour town, linked from c. 456 onwards by the umbilical Long Walls. These walls, approximately 7km in length, are for me the symbol par excellence of the Asty's schizophrenic identity as an inland city with a coastal suburb. (2-3)
By the time of the Peloponnesian War there were two Long Walls--the Northern Long Wall and the Southern (or Middle) Long Wall. 1 They ran parallel to each other, enclosing what Garland calls "a narrow corridor of communication between two walled cities" (25). Milton would have been quite familiar with this picture. Ancient authors often refer to the Long Walls in a way that makes it easy to visualize them. A famous instance is Xenophon's description of how news of the decisive Athenian naval defeat at Aegospotami passed from the Piraeus to the Asty:
It was at night that the Paralus arrived at Athens with tidings of the disaster, and a sound of wailing ran from Piraeus through the long walls to the city, one man passing on the news to another. (Hellenica 2. 2. 3)
No one reading this could mistake the Long Walls for the walls surrounding the Asty. Since the Athenian city walls were spared in 404 BC, it is reasonable to suppose that Milton is referring to them, and not the Long Walls, when he proclaims that Euripides' poetry "had the power to save th' Athenian walls from ruin bare." As Goldstein himself points out (unwittingly dismantling his own argument), Milton chooses a phrase "which one would naturally interpret as referring to the walls surrounding the city" (106).
A sceptical critic might concede this point, yet still feel that Milton's word "walls" is tactless or provocative when Plutarch attaches so much significance to the razing of the Long Walls. This suspicion evaporates when one reads Plutarch with careful attention to his timing of events. Milton does want us to think of the Long Walls, but their destruction only enhances the miracle by which the Asty was saved. According to Plutarch, the council and banquet in which Athens' fate hung in the balance took place after the Spartans had offered terms and the Athenians had accepted them. A crisis arose when Lysander set about changing the Athenian form of government, and the Athenians showed their resentment. Lysander then
sent word to the people that he had caught the city violating the terms of its surrender; for its walls [
It was in this context that the council met to decide Athens' fate. Having reneged on their promise to dismantle the Long Walls and the Piraeus fortifications, the Athenians found that they had placed the city itself in great peril. All hope of saving the Piraeus circuit and the Long Walls was now lost. The only question was: would the city walls--and everything within them--be destroyed? Xenophon reports that the Athenians expected to be treated as they themselves had treated the Melians, the Histiaeans, the Scionaeans, the Toronaeans, and the Aeginetans earlier in the war (Hellenica 2. 2. 3). All of these peoples had been massacred, exiled, or enslaved. The Athenians' treatment of the Melians had provoked special bitterness. When Melos surrendered to the Athenians in 416 BC, the men were slaughtered, and the women and children sold into slavery. The Athenians had every reason to fear that they would suffer the same fate when they surrendered. The implications for Milton's sonnet are clear. Milton's word "walls" refers both to the city walls and to the houses, but there is no contradiction between the two senses, and so nothing inept about [End Page 3] Milton's usage. The city and its wall stood--and they very nearly fell--together. Euripides' ode may not have saved the Long Walls--but it did save the city--and it did so at a moment when everything seemed to be lost. Milton's word "walls" perfectly captures the miracle of the moment. I can see no hint of a wry or ironic or cynical intent in Milton's allusion, and I think that Sonnet 8 would be a lesser poem than it is if such an intent were there.
So far I have argued that Milton's sonnet accords with Plutarch's exalted notion of the power of poetry. I must now turn to the more difficult question of whether that exalted notion is inherently naive. It is certainly unfashionable at the present time--which probably accounts for Goldstein's wish to distance Milton from it. But we should be wary of projecting our own jaded brand of pessimism onto the Greeks or Milton. It is difficult, even impossible, at this distance in time, to speak with any confidence about the Spartans' "real motive" for sparing Athens. Historians and classicists (even those hostile to Sparta) have often praised the Spartans for their magnanimity toward a fallen foe. In recent years, however, some classicists have suggested that Sparta's clemency may have been motivated by self-interest. Anton Powell and Paul Cartledge believe that Sparta's merciful treatment of Athens was consistent with the traditional Greek policy of "divide and conquer." According to this argument, Sparta needed Athens to be a check on Thebes, even though (or rather because) Thebes had been Sparta's valuable ally throughout the Peloponnesian War. Thus the dispute between Sparta and Thebes over Athens' fate was not really a dispute about mercy but a veiled power struggle for control of central Greece. Powell writes:
[Sparta] had won the war with a stroke of characteristic opportunism, economy and military deception. She now set about dominating the peace with another favoured technique, creating rivalries to keep Greece divided and ruled. For this, the survival of Athens was necessary. (198) 3
This argument rings true to modern ears, but we should treat it with caution precisely because it chimes with our own political experience. The Greeks did not always think and act as we do. Both in mercy and in cruelty they were more spontaneous than we are. In 427 BC, after Athens had subjugated a revolt in the Lesbian city of Mytilene, the Athenian people angrily voted to put the entire adult male population to death and to make slaves of the women and children. A trireme was sent out carrying orders to put this decision into immediate effect. But the very next day the Athenians had a change of heart and debated the question anew. This time Diodotus (who had opposed the earlier decision) persuaded the assembly to repeal its penalty, and a second trireme was sent out in all haste, twenty-four hours after the first one had left. The crew of the first ship rowed slowly, for they too now regretted the verdict they were carrying. The second crew rowed continually, taking turns to sleep, and eating their meals while they rowed. The first trireme arrived at Mytilene, the Athenian commander read the baleful decree, and was about to put it into force, when the second ship put into the harbour and prevented the massacre (Thucydides 3. 36-49). Powell cites this episode as "exceptionally good evidence . . . for the view that tender-hearted morality has some influence in inter-state politics" (163). If this argument holds for the Athe-nians' treatment of Mytilene, why can't it also apply to the Spartans' treatment of Athens? Sparta might have had selfish motives for sparing Athens, but this does not prove that her clemency was devoid of all genuine compassion.
Goldstein gives the Spartans very short shrift in his reading of Sonnet 8. He sees a deliberate ambiguity in Milton's statement that Euripides' lines "had the power" to save the Athenian walls. These three words are usually (and I think rightly) taken to mean that Euripides' verses did what they had the power to do. Goldstein counters that interpretation with this argument:
Milton tells us only that the performance "had the power" to perform an action, not that the action was performed. An equally valid interpretation is: "the recitation from Euripides had the power to save the walls of Athens, although it did not do so." (107)
Goldstein believes that Euripides' verses failed to translate their "latent power" into "effective power" because the Spartans were an unworthy audience:
Milton does not identify what was missing, but if the performance "had the power," the logical conclusion is that the fault lay with the audience. I believe the sonnet implies that the walls would have been saved had the Spartans possessed the ability to appreciate fully the greatness of Euripides's lines. (107)
This is unfair to the Spartans, who were never the chief obstacle to the Athenians' reprieve. As Plutarch tells the [End Page 4] story, it was the Theban Erianthus, not the Spartan Lysander, who was determined to destroy Athens. Xenophon says that the Spartans consistently opposed the extreme proposals of their allies:
the ephors called an assembly, at which the Corinthians and Thebans in particular, though many other Greeks agreed with them, opposed making a treaty with the Athenians and favoured destroying their city. The Lacedaemonians, however, said that they would not enslave a Greek city which had done great service amid the greatest perils that had befallen Greece. (Hellenica 2. 2. 19-20)
Goldstein, refusing to give the Spartans any credit, asserts that his reading of Sonnet 8 "accords with what we know of Milton's views on the Spartans" (107). He cites Milton's comment in Areopagitica that the Spartans were "muselesse and unbookish" (Complete Prose 2: 496). But this is not Milton's sole verdict on the Spartans. In Eikonoklastes Milton refers approvingly to "the most just and renowned Laws of Lycurgus" (3: 590), and in The Reason of Church Government he remarks that Lycurgus's laws, like those of Solon, proved "durably good to many ages" (1: 779). In The Readie and Easie Way he cites the Spartan Gerousia, or council of "the Ancients," alongside the Athenian Areopagus, the Roman Senate, and the Jewish Sanhedrin, as a respectable precedent for his own proposal of a perpetual Senate for England (7: 436). In his first Defence of the People of England Milton praises the Spartan King Theopompus for raising the power of the ephors above his own (4: 401). In Paradise Lost he twice echoes Plutarch's famous description of the Spartan army marching to flutes (Lycurgus 22). He first applies Plutarch's description to the rebel angels, as they march "In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood / Of flutes and soft recorders" (1: 550-1), but later he tells how the good angels marched "to the sound / Of instrumental harmony that breathed / Heroic ardour to adventurous deeds" (6: 63-6). I am not suggesting that Milton admired Sparta unreservedly. Athens clearly held first place in his heart. But Milton's position on the city that he called "That other leading City of Greece, Lacedaemon" (Areopagitica 2: 496) was never simple or straightforward. Goldstein is overconfident when he refers to "what we know of Milton's views on the Spartans" (107).
The real issue for Sonnet 8, however, is not the magnanimity of the Spartans but the power of poetry. Goldstein writes as if Plutarch's story were self-evidently naive. Milton, we are led to believe, simply could not have placed any faith in it, and so must have subverted it with a worldly-wise allusion. We will never know whether Plutarch's story about Euripides' ode is true, but I for one do not share Goldstein's view that it is inherently implausible. We have seen that the Greeks could and did make cruel or merciful decisions spontaneously. In such a culture, the sudden singing of a beautiful choral ode just might suffice to move a council of war to show compassion to their fallen foes. Ancient Greek history records other alleged occasions when an impromptu recital of Euripides could make the difference between life and death. In his Nicias Plutarch reports an ancient tradition that some of the Athenian survivors of the disastrous Sicilian expedition owed their lives to their ability to quote Euripides by heart:
Some also were saved for the sake of Euripides. For the Sicilians, it would seem, more than any other Hellenes outside the home land, had a yearning fondness for his poetry. They were forever learning by heart the little specimens and morsels of it which visitors brought them from time to time, and imparting them to one another with fond delight. In the present case, at any rate, they say that many Athenians who reached home in safety greeted Euripides with affectionate hearts, and recounted to him, some that they they had been set free from slavery for rehearsing what they remembered of his works; and some that when they were roaming about after the final battle they had received food and drink for singing some of his choral hymns. (Nicias 29)
Plutarch goes on to cite another example of the power of Euripides' poetry. He tells of a Caunian ship that sought shelter in the harbour of Syracuse so as to escape pursuit by pirates. The Caunians were "not admitted at first, but kept outside, until, on being asked if they knew any songs of Euripides, they declared that they did indeed, and were for this reason suffered to bring their vessel safely in" (Nicias 29). These stories from Plutarch's Nicias are of course no more verifiable than the story from his Lysander. It is possible that all three stories are fanciful. Thucydides, in his account of the Sicilian expedition, says nothing about poetry saving Athenian soldiers. He says only that "few returned" (8. 87). Still, I trust that I have cited sufficient evidence to justify my view that Plutarch's story is not self-evidently absurd. In any case, the real point at issue is whether Milton in Sonnet 8 is making a genuine claim for poetry. I have tried to show that Milton is true to his source in Plutarch, and that his view of the [End Page 5] Greeks accords with other stories that are told about them. There is nothing ironic about Milton's reference to "sad Electra's poet." Milton is sincere in his praise of poetry and its power to awaken pity in angry hearts.
University of Western Ontario
1. A third wall (the Phaleric Wall) ran from the Asty to the east coast of Phaleron Bay. The Phaleric Wall was intact in 431 BC, but it had either been destroyed or had fallen into decay by the time of Athens' final defeat in 404 BC. See Garland 169.
2. Here there is a slight discrepancy between Plutarch and Xenophon. Plutarch says that the Athenians accepted the Spartan terms, but failed to dismantle the Long Walls and the Piraeus circuit by the agreed time. Xenophon says that the Spartans at first asked only that part of the Long Walls be razed. The Athenians rejected this offer, and imprisoned Archestratus when he advised them to accept it. They even passed a decree forbidding anyone to propose dismantling the Long Walls. Several months later, when famine had reduced the city to straits, the Athenians agreed to the complete dismantling of the Long Walls and the Piraeus (Hellenica 2. 2. 11-24).
3. See also Cartledge 348: "Men like the Agiad King Pausanias might genuinely have believed Sparta's officially expressed motive, namely that Sparta could not annihilate a city that had done so much to preserve Hellas during the Persian Wars of 480-479. But . . . Sparta's real reason for preserving Athens was rather less altruistic. For Athens was to serve as a watchdog of Spartan interests in central Greece against the two allies who had spoken most vehemently in favour of Athens' destruction and who were most aggrieved by the way in which Sparta appeared to them to be turning a joint victory to her sectional advantage: Corinth and (especially) the Boiotian Confederacy dominated by Thebes."
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/milton_quarterly/v032/32.1leonard.html