XXII. THE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR…

XXII. THE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR

When the Persians had retreated from Europe after being conquered both by sea and land by the Greeks, and those of them had been destroyed who had fled with their ships to Mycale, Leotychides, king of the Lacedæmonians, returned home with the allies that were from the Peloponnesus, as we have already noted; while the Athenians, and the allies from Ionia and the Hellespont, who had now revolted from the king, stayed behind, and laid siege to Sestus, of which the Medes were in possession. Having spent the winter before it, they took it, after the barbarians had evacuated it; and then sailed away from the Hellespont, each to his own city. And the people of Athens, when they found the barbarians had departed from their country, proceeded immediately to carry over their children and wives, and the remnant of their furniture, from where they had put them out of the way; and were preparing to rebuild their city and their walls. For short spaces of the enclosure were standing, and, though the majority of the houses had fallen, a few remained in which the grandees of the Persians had themselves taken up their quarters.

ATHENS REBUILDS HER WALLS

[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]

The Lacedæmonians, perceiving what they were about to do, sent an embassy to them; partly because they themselves would have been more pleased to see neither them nor any one else in possession of a wall; but still more because the allies instigated them, and were afraid of their numerous fleet, which before they had not had, and of the bravery they had shown in the Persian War. And they begged them not to build their walls, but rather to join them in throwing down those of the cities out of the Peloponnesus; not betraying their real wishes, and their suspicious feelings towards the Athenians; but representing that the barbarian, if he should again come against them, would not then be able to make his advances from any stronghold, as in the present instance he had done from Thebes; and the Peloponnesus, they said, was sufficient for all, as a place to retreat into and sally forth from. When the Lacedæmonians had thus spoken, the Athenians, by the advice of Themistocles, answered that they would send ambassadors to them concerning what they spoke of; and they immediately dismissed them. And Themistocles advised them to send himself as quickly as possible to Lacedæmon, and having chosen other ambassadors besides himself, not to despatch them immediately, but to wait till such time as they should have raised their wall to the height most absolutely necessary for fighting from; and that the whole population in the city, men, women, and children, should build it, sparing neither private nor public edifice, from which any assistance towards the work would be gained, but throwing down everything. After giving these instructions, and suggesting that he would himself manage all other matters there, he took his departure. On his arrival at Lacedæmon he did not apply to the authorities, but kept putting off and making excuses. And whenever any of those who were in office asked him why he did not come before the assembly, he said that he was waiting for his colleagues; that owing to some engagement they had been left behind; he expected, however, that they would shortly come, and wondered that they were not already there.

When they heard this, they believed Themistocles through their friendship for him; but when every one else came and distinctly informed them that the walls were building, and already advancing to some height, they did not know how to discredit it. When he found this, he told them not to be led away by tales, but rather to send men of their own body who were of good character, and would bring back a credible report after inspection. They despatched them therefore; and Themistocles secretly sent directions about them to the Athenians, to detain them, with as little appearance of it as possible, and not to let them go until they themselves had returned back; (for by this time his colleagues, Abronychus, the son of Lysicles, and Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, had also come to him with the news that the wall was sufficiently advanced) for he was afraid that the Lacedæmonians, when they heard the truth, might not then let them go. So the Athenians detained the ambassadors, as was told them; and Themistocles, having come to an audience of the Lacedæmonians, then indeed told them plainly that their city was already walled, so as to be capable of defending its inhabitants; and if the Lacedæmonians or the allies wished to send any embassy to them, they should in future go as to men who could discern what were their own and the general interests. For when they thought it better to abandon their city and to go on board their ships, they said that they had made up their minds, and had the courage to do it, without consulting them; and again, on whatever matters they had deliberated with them, they had shown themselves inferior to none in judgment. And so at the present time, likewise, they thought it was better that their city should have a wall, and that it would be more expedient for their citizens in particular, as well as for the allies in general; for it was not possible for any one without equal resources to give any equal or fair advice for the common good. Either all therefore, he said, should join the confederacy without walls, or they should consider that the present case also was as it ought to be.

The Lacedæmonians, on hearing this, did not let their anger appear to the Athenians; for they had not sent their embassy to obstruct their designs, but to offer counsel, they said, to their state; and besides, they were at that time on very friendly terms with them owing to their zeal against the Mede; in secret, however, they were annoyed at failing in their wish. So the ambassadors of each state returned home without any complaint being made.

In this way, Thucydides continues, the Athenians walled their city in a short time. And the building shows even now that it was executed in haste; for the foundations are laid with stones of all kinds, and in some places not wrought together, but as the several parties at any time brought them to the spot: and many columns from tombs, and wrought stones, were worked up in them.[b]

THE NEW ATHENS

The first indispensable step, in the renovation of Athens after her temporary extinction, was now happily accomplished: the city was made secure against external enemies. But Themistocles, to whom the Athenians owed the late successful stratagem, and whose influence must have been much strengthened by its success, had conceived plans of a wider and more ambitious range. He had been the original adviser of the great maritime start taken by his countrymen, as well as of the powerful naval force which they had created during the last few years, and which had so recently proved their salvation. He saw in that force both the only chance of salvation for the future, in case the Persians should renew their attack by sea,--a contingency at that time seemingly probable,--and boundless prospects of future ascendency over the Grecian coasts and islands: it was the great engine of defence, of offence, and of ambition. To continue this movement required much less foresight and genius than to begin it, and Themistocles, the moment that the walls of the city had been finished, brought back the attention of his countrymen to those wooden walls which had served them as a refuge against the Persian monarch. He prevailed upon them to provide harbour-room at once safe and adequate, by the enlargement and fortification of the Piræus. This again was only the prosecution of an enterprise previously begun: for he had already, while in office two or three years before, made his countrymen sensible that the open roadstead of Phalerum was thoroughly insecure, and had prevailed upon them to improve and employ in part the more spacious harbours of Piræus and Munychia--three natural basins, all capable of being closed and defended. Something had then been done towards the enlargement of this port, though it had probably been subsequently ruined by the Persian invaders: but Themistocles now resumed the scheme on a scale far grander than he could then have ventured to propose--a scale which demonstrates the vast auguries present to his mind respecting the destinies of Athens.

Piræus and Munychia, in his new plan, constituted a fortified space as large as the enlarged Athens, and with a wall far more elaborate and unassailable. The wall which surrounded them, sixty stadia in circuit [about seven and a half miles], was intended by him to be so stupendous, both in height and thickness, as to render assault hopeless, and to enable the whole military population to act on shipboard, leaving only old men and boys as a garrison. We may judge how vast his project was, when we learn that the wall, though in practice always found sufficient, was only carried up to half the height which he had contemplated. In respect to thickness, however, his ideas were exactly followed: two carts meeting one another brought stones which were laid together right and left on the outer side of each, and thus formed two primary parallel walls, between which the interior space--of course, at least as broad as the joint breadth of the two carts--was filled up, “not with rubble, in the usual manner of the Greeks, but constructed, throughout the whole thickness, of squared stones, cramped together with metal.” The result was a solid wall, probably not less than fourteen or fifteen feet thick, since it was intended to carry so very unusual a height. In the exhortations whereby he animated the people to this fatiguing and costly work, he laboured to impress upon them that Piræus was of more value to them than Athens itself, and that it afforded a shelter into which, if their territory should be again overwhelmed by a superior land-force, they might securely retire, with full liberty of that maritime action in which they were a match for all the world. We may even suspect that if Themistocles could have followed his own feelings, he would have altered the site of the city from Athens to Piræus: the attachment of the people to their ancient and holy rock doubtless prevented any such proposition. Nor did he at that time, probably, contemplate the possibility of those long walls which in a few years afterwards consolidated the two cities into one.

Forty-five years afterwards, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we shall hear from Pericles, who espoused and carried out the large ideas of Themistocles, this same language about the capacity of Athens to sustain a great power exclusively or chiefly upon maritime action. But the Athenian empire was then an established reality, whereas in the time of Themistocles it was yet a dream, and his bold predictions, surpassed as they were by the future reality, mark that extraordinary power of practical divination which Thucydides so emphatically extols in him. And it proves the exuberant hope which had now passed into the temper of the Athenian people, when we find them, on the faith of these predictions, undertaking a new enterprise of so much toil and expense; and that too when just returned from exile into a desolated country, at a moment of private distress and public impoverishment. However, Piræus served other purposes besides its direct use as a dockyard for military marine: its secure fortifications and the protection of the Athenian navy, were well calculated to call back those metics, or resident foreigners, who had been driven away by the invasion of Xerxes, and who might feel themselves insecure in returning, unless some new and conspicuous means of protection were exhibited.

To invite them back, and to attract new residents of a similar description, Themistocles proposed to exempt them from the metoikion, or non-freeman’s annual tax: but this exemption can only have lasted for a time, and the great temptation for them to return must have consisted in the new securities and facilities for trade, which Athens, with her fortified ports and navy, now afforded. The presence of numerous metics was profitable to the Athenians, both privately and publicly: much of the trading, professional, and handicraft business was in their hands: and the Athenian legislation, while it excluded them from the political franchise, was in other respects equitable and protective to them.

We are further told that Themistocles prevailed on the Athenians to build every year twenty new ships of the line--so we may designate the trireme. Whether this number was always strictly adhered to, it is impossible to say; but to repair the ships, as well as to keep up their numbers, was always regarded among the most indispensable obligations of the executive government. It does not appear that the Spartans offered any opposition to the fortification of the Piræus, though it was an enterprise greater, more novel, and more menacing, than that of Athens. But Diodorus tells us, probably enough, that Themistocles thought it necessary to send an embassy to Sparta, intimating that his scheme was to provide a safe harbour for the collective navy of Greece, in the event of future Persian attack.

Works on so vast a scale must have taken a considerable time, and absorbed much of the Athenian force; yet they did not prevent Athens from lending active aid towards the expedition which, in the year after the battle of Platæa (478 B.C.), set sail for Asia under the Spartan Pausanias. Twenty ships from the various cities of the Peloponnesus were under his command: the Athenians alone furnished thirty, under the orders of Aristides and Cimon: other triremes also came from the Ionian and insular allies. They first sailed to Cyprus, in which island they liberated most of the Grecian cities from the Persian government: next, they turned to the Bosporus of Thrace, and undertook the siege of Byzantium, which, like Sestus in the Chersonesus, was a post of great moment, as well as of great strength--occupied by a considerable Persian force, with several leading Persians and even kinsmen of the monarch. The place was captured, seemingly after a prolonged siege: it might probably hold out even longer than Sestus, as being taken less unprepared. The line of communication between the Euxine Sea and Greece was thus cleared of obstruction.

THE MISCONDUCT OF PAUSANIAS

[Sidenote: [478 B.C.]]

The capture of Byzantium proved the signal for a capital and unexpected change in the relations of the various Grecian cities; a change, of which the proximate cause lay in the misconduct of Pausanias, but towards which other causes, deep-seated as well as various, also tended. In recounting the history of Miltiades, we noticed the deplorable liability of the Grecian leading men to be spoiled by success: this distemper worked with singular rapidity on Pausanias. As conqueror of Platæa, he had acquired a renown unparalleled in Grecian experience, together with a prodigious share of the plunder: the concubines, horses, camels, and gold plate, which had thus passed into his possession, were well calculated to make the sobriety and discipline of Spartan life irksome, while his power also, though great on foreign command, became subordinate to that of the ephors when he returned home. His newly acquired insolence was manifested immediately after the battle, in the commemorative tripod dedicated by his order at Delphi, which proclaimed himself by name and singly, as commander of the Greeks and destroyer of the Persians: an unseemly boast, of which the Lacedæmonians themselves were the first to mark their disapprobation, by causing the inscription to be erased, and the names of the cities who had taken part in the combat to be all enumerated on the tripod. Nevertheless, he was still sent on the command against Cyprus and Byzantium, and it was on the capture of this latter place that his ambition and discontent first ripened into distinct treason. He entered into correspondence with Gongylus the Eretrian exile (now a subject of Persia, and invested with the property and government of a district in Mysia), to whom he entrusted his new acquisition of Byzantium, and the care of the valuable prisoners taken in it. These prisoners were presently suffered to escape, or rather sent away underhand to Xerxes; together with a letter from the hand of Pausanias, himself, to the following effect: “Pausanias, the Spartan commander, having taken these captives, sends them back, in his anxiety to oblige thee. I am minded, if it so please thee, to marry thy daughter, and to bring under thy dominion both Sparta and the rest of Greece: with thy aid, I think myself competent to achieve this. If my proposition be acceptable, send some confidential person down to the sea-board, through whom we may hereafter correspond.”

Xerxes, highly pleased with the opening thus held out, immediately sent down Artabazus (the same who had been second in command in Bœotia) to supersede Megabates in the satrapy of Dascylium; the new satrap, furnished with a letter of reply bearing the regal seal, was instructed to further actively the projects of Pausanias. The letter was to this purport: “Thus saith King Xerxes to Pausanias. Thy name stands forever recorded in my house as a well-doer, on account of the men whom thou hast saved for me beyond sea at Byzantium: and thy propositions now received are acceptable to me. Relax not either night or day in accomplishing that which thou promisest, nor let thyself be held back by cost, either gold or silver, or numbers of men, if thou standest in need of them, but transact in confidence thy business and mine jointly with Artabazus, the good man whom I have now sent, in such manner as may be best for both of us.”

Throughout the whole of this expedition, Pausanias had been insolent and domineering, degrading the allies at quarters and watering-places in the most offensive manner as compared with the Spartans, and treating the whole armament in a manner which Greek warriors could not tolerate, even in a Spartan Heraclid, and a victorious general. But when he received the letter from Xerxes, and found himself in immediate communication with Artabazus, as well as supplied with funds for corruption, his insane hopes knew no bounds, and he already fancied himself son-in-law of the Great King, as well as despot of Hellas. Fortunately for Greece, his treasonable plans were not deliberately laid and veiled until ripe for execution, but manifested with childish impatience. He clothed himself in Persian attire--(a proceeding which the Macedonian army, a century and a half afterwards, could not tolerate, even in Alexander the Great),--he traversed Thrace with a body of Median and Egyptian guards,--he copied the Persian chiefs, both in the luxury of his table and in his conduct towards the free women of Byzantium. Cleonice, a Byzantine maiden of conspicuous family, having been ravished from her parents by his order, was brought to his chamber at night: he happened to be asleep, and being suddenly awakened, knew not at first who was the person approaching his bed, but seized his sword and slew her. Moreover, his haughty reserve, with uncontrolled bursts of wrath, rendered him unapproachable; and the allies at length came to regard him as a despot rather than a general. The news of such outrageous behaviour, and the manifest evidences of his alliance with the Persians, were soon transmitted to the Spartans, who recalled him to answer for his conduct, and seemingly the Spartan vessels along with him.

In spite of the flagrant conduct of Pausanias, the Lacedæmonians acquitted him on the allegations of positive and individual wrong; yet, mistrusting his conduct in reference to collusion with the enemy, they sent out Dorcis to supersede him as commander. But a revolution, of immense importance for Greece, had taken place in the minds of the allies. The headship, or hegemony, was in the hands of Athens, and Dorcis the Spartan found the allies not disposed to recognise his authority.

Even before the battle of Salamis, the question had been raised, whether Athens was not entitled to the command at sea, in consequence of the preponderance of her naval contingent. The repugnance of the allies to any command except that of Sparta, either on land or water, had induced the Athenians to waive their pretensions at that critical moment. But the subsequent victories had materially exalted the latter in the eyes of Greece: while the armament now serving, differently composed from that which had fought at Salamis, contained a large proportion of the newly enfranchised Ionic Greeks, who not only had no preference for Spartan command, but were attached to the Athenians on every ground--as well from kindred race, as from the certainty that Athens with her superior fleet was the only protector upon whom they could rely against the Persians. Moreover, it happened that the Athenian generals on this expedition, Aristides and Cimon, were personally just and conciliating, forming a striking contrast with Pausanias. Hence the Ionic Greeks in the fleet, when they found that the behaviour of the latter was not only oppressive towards themselves but also revolting to Grecian sentiment generally, addressed themselves to the Athenian commanders for protection and redress, on the plausible ground of kindred race; entreating to be allowed to serve under Athens as leader instead of Sparta. The Spartan government about this time recalled Pausanias to undergo an examination, in consequence of the universal complaints against him which had reached them. He seems to have left no Spartan authority behind him,--even the small Spartan squadron accompanied him home: so that the Athenian generals had the best opportunity for insuring to themselves and exercising that command which the allies besought them to undertake. So effectually did they improve the moment, that when Dorcis arrived to replace Pausanias, they were already in full supremacy; while Dorcis, having only a small force, and being in no condition to employ constraint, found himself obliged to return home.

ATHENS TAKES THE LEADERSHIP

This incident, though not a declaration of war against Sparta, was the first open renunciation of her authority as presiding state among the Greeks; the first avowed manifestation of a competitor for that dignity, with numerous and willing followers; the first separation of Greece--considered in herself alone and apart from foreign solicitations, such as the Persian invasion--into two distinct organised camps, each with collective interests and projects of its own. In spite of mortified pride, Sparta was constrained, and even in some points of view not indisposed, to patient acquiescence. The example of their king Leotychides, too, near about this time, was a second illustration of the same tendency. At the same time, apparently, that Pausanias embarked for Asia to carry on the war against the Persians, Leotychides was sent with an army into Thessaly to put down the Aleuadæ and those Thessalian parties who had sided with Xerxes and Mardonius. Successful in this expedition, he suffered himself to be bribed, and was even detected with a large sum of money actually on his person: in consequence of which the Lacedæmonians condemned him to banishment, and razed his house to the ground; he died afterwards in exile at Tegea. Two such instances were well calculated to make the Lacedæmonians distrust the conduct of their Heraclid leaders when on foreign service, and this feeling weighed much in inducing them to abandon the Asiatic headship in favour of Athens. It appears that their Peloponnesian allies retired from this contest at the same time as they did, so that the prosecution of the war was thus left to Athens as chief of the newly emancipated Greeks.

It was from these considerations that the Spartans were induced to submit to that loss of command which the misconduct of Pausanias had brought upon them. Their acquiescence facilitated the immense change about to take place in Grecian politics. According to the tendencies in progress prior to the Persian invasion, Sparta had become gradually more and more the president of something like a Panhellenic union, comprising the greater part of the Grecian states. Such at least was the point towards which things seemed to be tending; and if many separate states stood aloof from this union, none of them at least sought to form any counter-union, if we except the obsolete and impotent pretensions of Argos.

But the sympathies of the Peloponnesians still clung to Sparta, while those of the Ionian Greeks had turned to Athens: and thus not only the short-lived symptoms of an established Panhellenic union, but even all tendencies towards it from this time disappear. There now stands out a manifest schism, with two pronounced parties, towards one of which nearly all the constituent atoms of the Grecian world gravitate: the maritime states, newly enfranchised from Persia, towards Athens--the land-states, which had formed most part of the confederate army at Platæa, towards Sparta. Along with this national schism and called into action by it, appears the internal political schism in each separate city between oligarchy and democracy. Of course, the germ of these parties had already previously existed in the separate states, but the energetic democracy of Athens, and the pronounced tendency of Sparta to rest upon the native oligarchies in each separate city as her chief support, now began to bestow, on the conflict of internal political parties, an Hellenic importance, and an aggravated bitterness, which had never before belonged to it.

THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS

[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]

The general conditions of the confederacy of Delos were regulated in a common synod of the members appointed to meet periodically for deliberative purposes, in the temple of Apollo and Artemis at Delos--of old, the venerated spot for the religious festivals of the Ionic cities, and at the same time a convenient centre for the members. A definite obligation, either in equipped ships of war or in money, was imposed upon every separate city; and the Athenians, as leaders, determined in which form contribution should be made by each: their assessment must of course have been reviewed by the synod, nor had they at this time power to enforce any regulation not approved by that body. It had been the good fortune of Athens to profit by the genius of Themistocles on two recent critical occasions (the battle of Salamis and the rebuilding of her walls), where sagacity, craft, and decision were required in extraordinary measure, and where pecuniary probity was of less necessity: it was no less her good fortune now--in the delicate business of assessing a new tax and determining how much each state should bear, without precedents to guide them, when unimpeachable honesty in the assessor was the first of all qualities--not to have Themistocles; but to employ in his stead the well-known, we might almost say the ostentatious probity of Aristides. This must be accounted good fortune, since at the moment when Aristides was sent out, the Athenians could not have anticipated that any such duty would devolve upon him. His assessment not only found favour at the time of its original proposition, when it must have been freely canvassed by the assembled allies, but also maintained its place in general esteem, after Athens had degenerated into an unpopular empire.

Respecting this first assessment, we scarcely know more than one single fact--the aggregate in money was four hundred and sixty talents [equal to about £106,000 or $530,000].

Of the items composing such aggregate, of the individual cities which paid it, of the distribution of obligations to furnish ships and money, we are entirely ignorant: the little information which we possess on these points relates to a period considerably later, shortly before the Peloponnesian War, under the uncontrolled empire then exercised by Athens. Thucydides, in his brief sketch, makes us clearly understand the difference between presiding Athens, with her autonomous and regularly assembled allies in 476 B.C., and imperial Athens, with her subject allies in 432 B.C.; the Greek word equivalent to ally left either of these epithets to be understood, by an ambiguity exceedingly convenient to the powerful states,--and he indicates the general causes of the change: but he gives us few particulars as to the modifying circumstances, and none at all as to the first start. He tells us only that the Athenians appointed a peculiar board of officers, called the hellenotamiæ, to receive and administer the common fund,--that Delos was constituted the general treasury, where the money was to be kept,--and that the payment thus levied was called the phorus; a name which appears then to have been first put into circulation, though afterwards usual, and to have conveyed at first no degrading import, though it afterwards became so odious as to be exchanged for a more innocent synonym.

The public import of the name hellenotamiæ, coined for the occasion, the selection of Delos as a centre, and the provision for regular meetings of the members, demonstrate the patriotic and fraternal purpose which the league was destined to serve. In truth, the protection of the Ægean Sea against foreign maritime force and lawless piracy, as well as that of the Hellespont and Bosporus against the transit of a Persian force, was a purpose essentially public, for which all the parties interested were bound in equity to provide by way of common contribution: any island or seaport which might refrain from contributing, was a gainer at the cost of others: and we cannot doubt that the general feeling of this common danger as well as equitable obligation, at a moment when the fear of Persia was yet serious, was the real cause which brought together so many contributing members, and enabled the forward parties to shame into concurrence such as were more backward.

How it was that the confederacy came to be turned afterwards to the purposes of Athenian ambition, we shall see at the proper time: but in its origin it was an equal alliance, in so far as alliance between the strong and the weak can ever be equal, not an Athenian empire: nay, it was an alliance in which every individual member was more exposed, more defenceless, and more essentially benefited in the way of protection, than Athens.

We have here in truth one of the few moments in Grecian history wherein a purpose at once common, equal, useful, and innocent, brought together spontaneously many fragments of this disunited race, and overlaid for a time that exclusive bent towards petty and isolated autonomy which ultimately made slaves of them all. It was a proceeding equitable and prudent, in principle as well as in detail; promising at the time the most beneficent consequences, not merely protection against the Persians, but a standing police of the Ægean Sea, regulated by a common superintending authority. And if such promise was not realised, we shall find that the inherent defects of the allies, indisposing them to the hearty appreciation and steady performance of their duties as equal confederates, are at least as much chargeable with the failure as the ambition of Athens. We may add that, in selecting Delos as a centre, the Ionic allies were conciliated by a renovation of the solemnities which their fathers, in the days of former freedom, had crowded to witness in that sacred island.

[Sidenote: [477-470 B.C.]]

At the time when this alliance was formed, the Persians still held not only the important posts of Eion on the Strymon and Doriscus in Thrace, but also several other posts in that country, which are not specified to us. We may thus understand why the Greek cities on and near the Chalcidic peninsula,--Argilus, Stagiras, Acanthus, Scolus, Olynthus, Spartolus, etc.,--which we know to have joined under the first assessment of Aristides, were not less anxious to seek protection in the bosom of the new confederacy, than the Dorian islands of Rhodes and Cos, the Ionic islands of Samos and Chios, the Æolic Lesbos and Tenedos, or continental towns such as Miletus and Byzantium: by all of whom adhesion to this alliance must have been contemplated, in 477 or 476 B.C., as the sole condition of emancipation from Persia. Nothing more was required for the success of a foreign enemy against Greece generally than complete autonomy of every Grecian city, small as well as great--such as the Persian monarch prescribed and tried to enforce ninety years afterwards, through the Lacedæmonian Antalcidas, in the pacification which bears the name of the latter. Some sort of union, organised and obligatory upon each city, was indispensable to the safety of all. Nor was it by any means certain, at the time when the confederacy of Delos was first formed, that, even with that aid, the Asiatic enemy would be effectually kept out; especially as the Persians were strong, not merely from their own force, but also from the aid of internal parties in many of the Grecian states--traitors within, as well as exiles without.

THE TREASON OF PAUSANIAS

Among these, the first in rank as well as the most formidable, was the Spartan Pausanias. Summoned home from Byzantium to Sparta, in order that the loud complaints against him might be examined, he had been acquitted of the charges of wrong and oppression against individuals; yet the presumptions of medism, or treacherous correspondence with the Persians, appeared so strong that, though not found guilty, he was still not reappointed to the command. Such treatment seems to have only emboldened him in the prosecution of his designs against Greece, and he came out with this view to Byzantium in a trireme belonging to Hermione, under pretence of aiding as a volunteer without any formal authority in the war. He there resumed his negotiations with Artabazus: his great station and celebrity still gave him a strong hold on men’s opinions, and he appears to have established a sort of mastery in Byzantium, from whence the Athenians, already recognised heads of the confederacy, were constrained to expel him by force: and we may be very sure that the terror excited by his presence as well as by his known designs tended materially to accelerate the organisation of the confederacy under Athens. He then retired to Colonæ in the Troad, where he continued for some time in the farther prosecution of his schemes, trying to form a Persian party, despatching emissaries to distribute Persian gold among various cities of Greece, and probably employing the name of Sparta to impede the formation of the new confederacy: until at length the Spartan authorities, apprised of his proceedings, sent a herald out to him, with peremptory orders that he should come home immediately along with the herald: if he disobeyed, “the Spartans would declare war against him,” or constitute him a public enemy.

[Sidenote: [ca. 470 B.C.]]

As the execution of this threat would have frustrated all the ulterior schemes of Pausanias, he thought it prudent to obey; the rather, as he felt entire confidence of escaping all the charges against him at Sparta by the employment of bribes, the means for which were abundantly furnished to him through Artabazus. He accordingly returned along with the herald, and was, in the first moments of indignation, imprisoned by order of the ephors; who, it seems, were legally competent to imprison him, even had he been king instead of regent. But he was soon let out, on his own requisition, and under a private arrangement with friends and partisans, to take his trial against all accusers. Even to stand forth as accuser against so powerful a man was a serious peril: to undertake the proof of specific matter of treason against him was yet more serious: nor does it appear that any Spartan ventured to do either. It was known that nothing short of the most manifest and invincible proof would be held to justify his condemnation, and amidst a long chain of acts carrying conviction when taken in the aggregate, there was no single treason sufficiently demonstrable for the purpose. Accordingly, Pausanias remained not only at large but unaccused, still audaciously persisting both in his intrigues at home and his correspondence abroad with Artabazus. He ventured to assail the unshielded side of Sparta by opening negotiations with the helots, and instigating them to revolt; promising them both liberation and admission to political privilege; with a view, first, to destroy the board of ephors, and render himself despot in his own country, next, to acquire through Persian help the supremacy of Greece. Some of those helots to whom he addressed himself revealed the plot to the ephors, who, nevertheless, in spite of such grave peril, did not choose to take measures against Pausanias upon no better information--so imposing was still his name and position. But though some few helots might inform, probably, many others, both gladly heard the proposition and faithfully kept the secret: we shall find, by what happened a few years afterwards, that there were a large number of them who had their spears in readiness for revolt. Suspected as Pausanias was, yet by the fears of some and the connivance of others, he was allowed to bring his plans to the very brink of consummation: and his last letters to Artabazus, intimating that he was ready for action, and bespeaking immediate performance of the engagements concerted between them, were actually in the hands of the messenger. Sparta was saved from an outbreak of the most formidable kind, not by the prudence of her authorities, but by a mere accident, or rather by the fact that Pausanias was not only a traitor to his country, but also base and cruel in his private relations.

The messenger to whom these last letters were entrusted was a native of Argilus in Thrace, a favourite and faithful slave of Pausanias; once connected with him by that intimate relation which Grecian manners tolerated, and admitted even to the full confidence of his treasonable projects. It was by no means the intention of this Argilian to betray his master; but, on receiving the letter to carry, he recollected, with some uneasiness, that none of the previous messengers had ever come back. Accordingly he broke the seal and read it, with the full view of carrying it forward to its destination, if he found nothing inconsistent with his own personal safety: he had further taken the precaution to counterfeit his master’s seal, so that he could easily reclose the letter. On reading it, he found his suspicions confirmed by an express injunction that the bearer was to be put to death--a discovery which left him no alternative except to deliver it to the ephors. But those magistrates, who had before disbelieved the helot informers, still refused to believe even the confidential slave with his master’s autograph and seal, and with the full account besides, which doubtless he would communicate at the same time, of all that had previously passed in the Persian correspondence. Partly from the suspicion which, in antiquity, always attached to the testimony of slaves, except when it was obtained under the pretended guarantee of torture, partly from the peril of dealing with so exalted a criminal, the ephors would not be satisfied with any evidence less than his own speech and their own ears. They directed the Argilian slave to plant himself as a suppliant in the sacred precinct of Poseidon, near Cape Tænarus, under the shelter of a double tent, or hut, behind which two of them concealed themselves. Apprised of this unexpected mark of alarm, Pausanias hastened to the temple, and demanded the reason: upon which the slave disclosed his knowledge of the contents of the letter, and complained bitterly that, after a long and faithful service,--with a secrecy never once betrayed, throughout this dangerous correspondence,--he was at length rewarded with nothing better than the same miserable fate which had befallen the previous messengers. Pausanias, admitting all these facts, tried to appease the slave’s disquietude, and gave him a solemn assurance of safety if he would quit the sanctuary; urging him at the same time to proceed on the journey forthwith, in order that the schemes in progress might not be retarded.

All this passed within the hearing of the concealed ephors; who at length, thoroughly satisfied, determined to arrest Pausanias immediately on his return to Sparta. They met him in the public street, not far from the temple of Athene Chalciœcus (or of the Brazen House); but as they came near, either their menacing looks, or a significant nod from one of them, revealed to this guilty man their purpose; and he fled for refuge to the temple, which was so near that he reached it before they could overtake him. He planted himself as a suppliant, far more hopeless than the Argilian slave whom he had so recently talked over at Tænarus, in a narrow-roofed chamber belonging to the sacred building; where the ephors, not warranted in touching him, took off the roof, built up the doors, and kept watch until he was on the point of death by starvation. According to a current story, not recognised by Thucydides, yet consistent with Spartan manners, his own mother was the person who placed the first stone to build up the door, in deep abhorrence of his treason. His last moments being carefully observed, he was brought away just in time to expire without, and thus to avoid the desecration of the temple. The first impulse of the ephors was to cast his body into the ravine, or hollow, called the Cæadas, the usual place of punishment for criminals: probably, his powerful friends averted this disgrace, and he was buried not far off, until, some time afterwards, under the mandate of the Delphian oracle, his body was exhumed and transported to the exact spot where he had died. Nor was the oracle satisfied even with this reinterment: pronouncing the whole proceeding to be a profanation of the sanctity of Athene, it enjoined that two bodies should be presented to her as an atonement for the one carried away. In the very early days of Greece, or among the Carthaginians, even at this period, such an injunction would probably have produced the slaughter of two human victims: on the present occasion, Athene, or Hicesius, the tutelary god of suppliants, was supposed to be satisfied by two brazen statues; not, however, without some attempts to make out that the expiation was inadequate.

Thus perished a Greek who reached the pinnacle of renown simply from the accidents of his lofty descent, and of his being general at Platæa, where it does not appear that he displayed any superior qualities. His treasonable projects implicated and brought to disgrace a man far greater than himself, the Athenian Themistocles.

[Sidenote: [478-470 B.C.]]

The chronology of this important period is not so fully known as to enable us to make out the full dates of particular events; but we are obliged--in consequence of the subsequent events connected with Themistocles, whose flight to Persia is tolerably well marked as to date--to admit an interval of about nine years between the retirement of Pausanias from his command at Byzantium, and his death. To suppose so long an interval engaged in treasonable correspondence, is perplexing; and we can only explain it to ourselves very imperfectly by considering that the Spartans were habitually slow in their movements, and that the suspected regent may perhaps have communicated with partisans, real or expected, in many parts of Greece. Among those whom he sought to enlist as accomplices was Themistocles, still in great power--though, as it would seem, in declining power--at Athens: and the charge of collusion with the Persians connects itself with the previous movement of political parties in that city.

POLITICAL CHANGES AT ATHENS

[Sidenote: [478-476 B.C.]]

The rivalry of Themistocles and Aristides had been greatly appeased by the invasion of Xerxes, which had imposed upon both the peremptory necessity of co-operation against a common enemy. Nor was it apparently resumed, during the times which immediately succeeded the return of the Athenians to their country: at least we hear of both in effective service, and in prominent posts. Themistocles stands forward as the contriver of the city walls and architect of Piræus: Aristides is commander of the fleet, and first organiser of the confederacy of Delos. Moreover, we seem to detect a change in the character of the latter: he had ceased to be the champion of Athenian old-fashioned landed interest, against Themistocles as the originator of the maritime innovations. Those innovations had now, since the battle of Salamis, become an established fact; a fact of overwhelming influence on the destinies and character, public as well as private, of the Athenians. During the exile at Salamis, every man, rich or poor, landed proprietor or artisan, had been for the time a seaman: and the anecdote of Cimon, who dedicated the bridle of his horse in the Acropolis, as a token that he was about to pass from the cavalry to service on shipboard, is a type of that change of feeling which must have been impressed more or less upon every rich man in Athens. From henceforward the fleet is endeared to every man as the grand force, offensive and defensive, of the state, in which character all the political leaders agree in accepting it.

We see by the active political sentiment of the German people, after the great struggles of 1813 and 1814, how much an energetic and successful military effort of the people at large, blended with endurance of serious hardship, tends to stimulate the sense of political dignity and the demand for developed citizenship: and if this be the tendency even among a people habitually passive on such subjects, much more was it to be expected in the Athenian population, who had gone through a previous training of near thirty years under the democracy of Clisthenes. At the time when that constitution was first established, it was perhaps the most democratical in Greece: it had worked extremely well and had diffused among the people a sentiment favourable to equal citizenship and unfriendly to avowed privilege: so that the impressions made by the struggle at Salamis found the popular mind prepared to receive them. Early after the return to Attica, the Clisthenean constitution was enlarged as respects eligibility to the magistracy. According to that constitution, the fourth or last class of the Solonian census, including the considerable majority of the freemen, were not admissible to offices of state, though they possessed votes in common with the rest: no person was eligible to be a magistrate unless he belonged to one of the three higher classes. This restriction was now annulled, and eligibility extended to all the citizens. We may appreciate the strength of feeling with which such reform was demanded, when we find that it was proposed by Aristides, a man the reverse of what is called a demagogue, and a strenuous friend of the Clisthenean constitution. No political system would work after the Persian War, which formally excluded “the maritime multitude” from holding magistracy. We rather imagine that election of magistrates was still retained, and not exchanged for drawing lots until a certain time, though not a long time, afterwards. That which the public sentiment first demanded was the recognition of the equal and open principle: after a certain length of experience, it was found that poor men, though legally qualified to be chosen, were in point of fact rarely chosen: then came the lot, to give them an equal chance with the rich. The principle of sortition, or choice by lot, was never applied, as we have before remarked, to all offices at Athens--never, for example, to the strategi, or generals, whose functions were more grave and responsible than those of any other person in the service of the state, and who always continued to be elected by show of hands.

And it was probably about this period, during the years immediately succeeding the battle of Salamis,--when the force of old habit and tradition had been partially enfeebled by so many stirring novelties,--that the archons were withdrawn altogether from political and military duties, and confined to civil or judicial administration. At the battle of Marathon, the polemarch is a military commander, president of the ten strategi: we know him afterwards only as a civil magistrate, administering justice to the metics, or non-freemen, while the strategi perform military duties without him. The special and important change which characterised the period immediately succeeding the battle of Salamis, was the more accurate line drawn between the archons and the strategi; assigning the foreign and military department entirely to the strategi, and rendering the archons purely civil magistrates,--administrative as well as judicial. It was by some such steps that the Athenian administration gradually attained that complete development which it exhibits in practise during the century from the Peloponnesian War downward, to which nearly all our positive and direct information relates.

THE DOWNFALL OF THEMISTOCLES

[Sidenote: [476-472 B.C.]]

With this expansion both of democratical feeling and of military activity at Athens, Aristides appears to have sympathised; and the popularity thus insured to him, probably heightened by some regret for his previous ostracism, was calculated to acquire permanence from his straightforward and incorruptible character, now brought into strong relief from his function as assessor to the new Delian confederacy. On the other hand, the ascendency of Themistocles, though so often exalted by his unrivalled political genius and daring, as well as by the signal value of his public recommendations, was as often overthrown by his duplicity of means and unprincipled thirst for money. New political opponents sprang up against him, men sympathising with Aristides, and far more violent in their antipathy than Aristides himself. Of these, the chief were Cimon, son of Miltiades and Alcmæon; moreover, it seems that the Lacedæmonians, though full of esteem for Themistocles immediately after the battle of Salamis, had now become extremely hostile to him--a change which may be sufficiently explained from his stratagem respecting the fortifications of Athens, and his subsequent ambitious projects in reference to the Piræus. The Lacedæmonian influence, then not inconsiderable in Athens, was employed to second the political combinations against him. He is said to have given offence by manifestations of personal vanity, by continual boasting of his great services to the state, and by the erection of a private chapel, close to his own house, in honour of Artemis Aristobule, or Artemis of admirable counsel; just as Pausanias had irritated the Lacedæmonians by inscribing his own single name on the Delphian tripod, and as the friends of Aristides had displeased the Athenians by endless encomiums upon his justice.

But the main cause of his discredit was the prostitution of his great influence for arbitrary and corrupt purposes. In the unsettled condition of so many different Grecian communities, recently emancipated from Persia, when there was past misrule to avenge, wrong-doers to be deposed and perhaps punished, exiles to be restored, and all the disturbance and suspicions accompanying so great a change of political condition as well as of foreign policy, the influence of the leading men at Athens must have been great in determining the treatment of particular individuals. Themistocles, placed at the head of an Athenian squadron and sailing among the islands, partly for the purposes of war against Persia, partly for organising the new confederacy, is affirmed to have accepted bribes without scruple, for executing sentences just and unjust, restoring some citizens, expelling others, and even putting some to death. We learn this from a friend and guest of Themistocles, the poet Timocreon of Ialysus in Rhodes, who had expected his own restoration from the Athenian commander, but found that it was thwarted by a bribe of three talents from his opponents; so that he was still kept in exile on the charge of medism. The assertions of Timocreon, personally incensed on this ground against Themistocles, are doubtless to be considered as passionate and exaggerated: nevertheless, they are a valuable memorial of the feelings of the time, and are far too much in harmony with the general character of this eminent man to allow of our disbelieving them entirely. Timocreon is as emphatic in his admiration of Aristides as in his censure of Themistocles, whom he denounces as “a lying and unjust traitor.”

[Sidenote: [472-471 B.C.]]

Such conduct as that described by this new Archilochus, even making every allowance for exaggeration, must have caused Themistocles to be both hated and feared among the insular allies, whose opinion was now of considerable importance to the Athenians. A similar sentiment grew up partially against him in Athens itself, and appears to have been connected with suspicions of treasonable inclinations towards the Persians. As the Persians could offer the highest bribes, a man open to corruption might naturally be suspected of inclinations towards their cause; and if Themistocles had rendered pre-eminent service against them, so also had Pausanias, whose conduct had undergone so fatal a change for the worse. It was the treason of Pausanias, suspected and believed against him by the Athenians even when he was in command at Byzantium, though not proved against him at Sparta until long afterwards, which first seems to have raised the presumption of medism against Themistocles also, when combined with the corrupt proceedings which stained his public conduct: we must recollect, also, that Themistocles had given some colour to these presumptions, even by the stratagems in reference to Xerxes, which wore a double-faced aspect, capable of being construed either in a Persian or in a Grecian sense. The Lacedæmonians, hostile to Themistocles since the time when he had outwitted them respecting the walls of Athens, and fearing him also as a supposed accomplice of the suspected Pausanias, procured the charge of medism to be preferred against him at Athens; by secret instigations, and, as it is said, by bribes, to his political opponents. But no satisfactory proof could be furnished of the accusation, which Themistocles himself strenuously denied, not without emphatic appeals to his illustrious services. In spite of violent invectives against him from Alcmæon and Cimon, tempered, indeed, by a generous moderation on the part of Aristides, his defence was successful. He carried the people with him and was acquitted of the charge. Nor was he merely acquitted, but, as might naturally be expected, a reaction took place in his favour: his splendid qualities and exploits were brought impressively before the public mind, and he seemed for the time to acquire greater ascendency than ever.

Such a charge, and such a failure, must have exasperated to the utmost the animosity between him and his chief opponents,--Aristides, Cimon, Alcmæon, and others; nor can we wonder that they were anxious to get rid of him by ostracism. In explaining this peculiar process, we have already stated that it could never be raised against any one individual separately and ostensibly, and that it could never be brought into operation at all, unless its necessity were made clear, not merely to violent party men, but also to the assembled senate and people, including, of course, a considerable proportion of the more moderate citizens. We may well conceive that the conjuncture was deemed by many dispassionate Athenians well suited for the tutelary intervention of ostracism, the express benefit of which consisted in its separating political opponents when the antipathy between them threatened to push one or the other into extra-constitutional proceedings--especially when one of those parties was Themistocles, a man alike vast in his abilities and unscrupulous in his morality. Probably also there were not a few wished to revenge the previous ostracism of Aristides: and lastly, the friends of Themistocles himself, elate with his acquittal and his seemingly augmented popularity, might indulge hopes that the vote of ostracism would turn out in his favour, and remove one or other of his chief political opponents. From all these circumstances we learn without astonishment, that a vote of ostracism was soon after resorted to. It ended in the temporary banishment of Themistocles.

[Sidenote: [471-466 B.C.]]

He retired into exile, and was residing at Argos, whither he carried a considerable property, yet occasionally visiting other parts of the Peloponnesus, when the exposure and death of Pausanias, together with the discovery of his correspondence, took place at Sparta. Among this correspondence were found proofs, which Thucydides seems to have considered as real and sufficient, of the privity of Themistocles. According to Ephorus and others, he is admitted to have been solicited by Pausanias, and to have known his plans, but to have kept them secret while refusing to co-operate in them, but probably after his exile he took a more decided share in them than before; being well-placed for that purpose at Argos, a city not only unfriendly to Sparta, but strongly believed to have been in collusion with Xerxes at his invasion of Greece. On this occasion the Lacedæmonians sent to Athens, publicly to prefer a formal charge of treason against him, and to urge the necessity of trying him as a Panhellenic criminal before the synod of the allies assembled at Sparta. Whether this latter request would have been granted, or whether Themistocles would have been tried at Athens, we cannot tell: for no sooner was he apprised that joint envoys from Sparta and Athens had been despatched to arrest him, than he fled forthwith from Argos to Corcyra. The inhabitants of that island, though owing gratitude to him and favourably disposed, could not venture to protect him against the two most powerful states in Greece, but sent him to the neighbouring continent.

Here, however, being still tracked and followed by the envoys, he was obliged to seek protection from a man whom he had formerly thwarted in a demand at Athens, and who had become his personal enemy--Admetus, king of the Molossians. Fortunately for him, at the moment when he arrived, Admetus was not at home; and Themistocles, becoming a suppliant to his wife, conciliated her sympathy so entirely, that she placed her child in his arms, and planted him at the hearth in the full solemnity of supplication to soften her husband. As soon as Admetus returned, Themistocles revealed his name, his pursuers, and his danger, entreating protection as a helpless suppliant in the last extremity. He appealed to the generosity of the Epirotic prince not to take revenge on a man now defenceless, for offence given under such very different circumstances; and for an offence too, after all, not of capital moment, while the protection now entreated was to the suppliant a matter of life or death. Admetus raised him up from the hearth with the child in his arms, an evidence that he accepted the appeal and engaged to protect him; refusing to give him up to the envoys, and at last only sending him away on the expression of his own wish to visit the king of Persia. Two Macedonian guides conducted him across the mountains to Pydna, in the Thermaic Gulf, where he found a merchant ship about to set sail for the coast of Asia Minor, and took a passage on board; neither the master nor the crew knowing his name. An untoward storm drove the vessel to the island of Naxos, at that moment besieged by an Athenian armament: had he been forced to land there, he would of course have been recognised and seized, but his wonted subtlety did not desert him. Having communicated both his name and the peril which awaited him, he conjured the master of the ship to assist in saving him, and not to suffer any one of the crew to land; menacing that if by any accident he were discovered, he would bring the master to ruin along with himself, by representing him as an accomplice induced by money to facilitate the escape of Themistocles: on the other hand, in case of safety, he promised a large reward. Such promises and threats weighed with the master, who controlled his crew, and forced them to beat about during a day and a night off the coast, without seeking to land. After that dangerous interval, the storm abated, and the ship reached Ephesus in safety.

[Sidenote: [466-460 (?) B.C.]]

Thus did Themistocles, after a series of perils, find himself safe on the Persian side of the Ægean. At Athens, he was proclaimed a traitor, and his property confiscated: nevertheless, as it frequently happened in cases of confiscation, his friends secreted a considerable sum, and sent it over to him in Asia, together with the money which he had left at Argos; so that he was thus enabled liberally to reward the ship-captain who had preserved him. With all this deduction, the property which he possessed of a character not susceptible of concealment, and which was therefore actually seized, was found to amount to eighty talents [about £16,000 or $80,000] according to Theophrastus, to one hundred talents according to Theopompus. In contrast with this large sum, it is melancholy to learn that he had begun his political career with a property not greater than three talents. The poverty of Aristides at the end of his life presents an impressive contrast to the enrichment of his rival.

The escape of Themistocles, and his adventures in Persia, appear to have formed a favourite theme for the fancy and exaggeration of authors a century afterwards: we have thus many anecdotes which contradict either directly or by implication the simple narrative of Thucydides. Thus we are told that at the moment when he was running away from the Greeks, the Persian king also had proclaimed a reward of two hundred talents for his head, and that some Greeks on the coast of Asia were watching to take him for this reward: that he was forced to conceal himself strictly near the coast, until means were found to send him up to Susa in a closed litter, under pretence that it was a woman for the king’s harem: that Mandane, sister of Xerxes, insisted upon having him delivered up to her as an expiation for the loss of her son at the battle of Salamis: that he learned Persian so well, and discoursed in it so eloquently, as to procure for himself an acquittal from the Persian judges, when put upon his trial through the importunity of Mandane: that the officers of the king’s household at Susa, and the satraps on his way back, threatened him with still further perils: that he was admitted to see the king in person, after having received a lecture from the chamberlain on the indispensable duty of falling down before him to do homage, etc., with several other uncertified details, which make us value more highly the narrative of Thucydides. Indeed, Ephorus, Dinon, Clitarchus, and Heraclides, from whom these anecdotes appear mostly to be derived, even affirmed that Themistocles had found Xerxes himself alive and seen him: whereas, Thucydides and Charon, the two contemporary authors, for the former is nearly contemporary, asserted that he had found Xerxes recently dead, and his son Artaxerxes on the throne.

According to Thucydides, the eminent exile does not seem to have been exposed to the least danger in Persia. He presented himself as a deserter from Greece, and was accepted as such: moreover,--what is more strange, though it seems true,--he was received as an actual benefactor of the Persian king, and a sufferer from the Greeks on account of such dispositions, in consequence of his communications made to Xerxes respecting the intended retreat of the Greeks from Salamis, and respecting the contemplated destruction of the Hellespontine bridge. He was conducted by some Persians on the coast up to Susa, where he addressed a letter to the king couched in the following terms, such as probably no modern European king would tolerate except from a Quaker: “I, Themistocles, am come to thee, having done to thy house more mischief than any other Greek, as long as I was compelled in my own defence to resist the attack of thy father--but having also done him yet greater good, when I could do so with safety to myself, and when his retreat was endangered. Reward is yet owing to me for my past service: moreover, I am now here, chased away by the Greeks, in consequence of my attachment to thee, but able still to serve thee with great effect. I wish to wait a year, and then to come before thee in person to explain my views.”

Whether the Persian interpreters, who read this letter to Artaxerxes Longimanus, exactly rendered its brief and direct expression, we cannot say. But it made a strong impression upon him, combined with the previous reputation of the writer, and he willingly granted the prayer for delay: though we shall not readily believe that he was so transported as to show his joy by immediate sacrifice to the gods, by an unusual measure of convivial indulgence, and by crying out thrice in his sleep, “I have got Themistocles the Athenian,”--as some of Plutarch’s authors informed him. In the course of the year granted, Themistocles had learned so much of the Persian language and customs as to be able to communicate personally with the king, and acquire his confidence: no Greek, says Thucydides, had ever before attained such a commanding influence and position at the Persian court. His ingenuity was now displayed in laying out schemes for the subjugation of Greece to Persia, which were eminently captivating to the monarch, who rewarded him with a Persian wife and large presents, sending him down to Magnesia, on the Mæander, not far from the coast of Ionia. The revenues of the district round that town, amounting to the large sum of fifty talents [£10,000 or $50,000] yearly, were assigned to him for bread: those of the neighbouring seaport of Myus, for articles of condiment to his bread, which was always accounted the main nourishment: those of Lampsacus on the Hellespont, for wine. Not knowing the amount of these two latter items, we can not determine how much revenue Themistocles received altogether: but there can be no doubt, judging from the revenues of Magnesia alone, that he was a great pecuniary gainer by his change of country. After having visited various parts of Asia, he lived for a certain time at Magnesia, in which place his family joined him from Athens. How long his residence at Magnesia lasted we do not know, but seemingly long enough to acquire local estimation and leave mementos behind him. He at length died of sickness, when sixty-five years old, without having taken any step towards the accomplishment of those victorious campaigns which he had promised to Artaxerxes. That sickness was the real cause of his death, we may believe on the distinct statement of Thucydides; who at the same time notices a rumour partially current in his own time, of poison voluntarily taken, from painful consciousness on the part of Themistocles himself that the promises made could never be performed--a further proof of the general tendency to surround the last years of this distinguished man with impressive adventures, and to dignify his last moments with a revived feeling, not unworthy of his earlier patriotism. The report may possibly have been designedly circulated by his friends and relatives, in order to conciliate some tenderness towards his memory (his sons still continued citizens at Athens, and his daughters were married there). These friends further stated that they had brought back his bones to Attica, at his own express command, and buried them privately without the knowledge of the Athenians; no condemned traitor being permitted to be buried in Attic soil. If, however, we even suppose that this statement was true, no one could point out with certainty the spot wherein such interment had taken place: nor does it seem, when we mark the cautious expressions of Thucydides, that he himself was satisfied of the fact: moreover, we may affirm with confidence that the inhabitants of Magnesia, when they showed the splendid sepulchral monument erected in honour of Themistocles in their own market-place, were persuaded that his bones were really enclosed within it.

[Sidenote: [468 B.C.]]

Aristides died about three or four years after the ostracism of Themistocles; but respecting the place and manner of his death, there were several contradictions among the authors whom Plutarch had before him. Some affirmed that he perished on foreign service in the Euxine Sea; others, that he died at home, amidst the universal esteem and grief of his fellow-citizens. A third story, confined to the single statement of Craterus, and strenuously rejected by Plutarch, represents Aristides as having been falsely accused before the Athenian judicature and condemned to a fine of fifty minæ [£180, or $900], on the allegation of having taken bribes during the assessment of the tribute on the allies--which fine he was unable to pay, and was therefore obliged to retire to Ionia, where he died. Dismissing this last story, we find nothing certain about his death except one fact,--but that fact at the same time the most honourable of all,--that he died very poor. It is even asserted that he did not leave enough to pay funeral expenses, that a sepulchre was provided for him at Phalerum at the public cost, besides a handsome donation to his son Lysimachus, and a dowry to each of his two daughters. In the two or three ensuing generations, however, his descendants still continued poor, and even at that remote day, some of them received aid out of the public purse, from the recollection of their incorruptible ancestor. Near a century and a half afterwards, a poor man, named Lysimachus, descendant of the just Aristides, was to be seen at Athens, near the chapel of Iacchus, carrying a mysterious tablet, and obtaining his scanty fee of two oboli [3d. or 6 cents] for interpreting the dreams of the passers-by: Demetrius the Phalerean procured from the people, for the mother and aunt of this poor man, a small daily allowance.

On all these points the contrast is marked when we compare Aristides with Themistocles. The latter, having distinguished himself by ostentatious cost at Olympia, and by a choregic victory at Athens, with little scruple as to the means of acquisition, ended his life at Magnesia in dishonourable affluence greater than ever, and left an enriched posterity both at that place and at Athens. More than five centuries afterwards, his descendant, the Athenian Themistocles, attended the lectures of the philosopher Ammonius at Athens, as the comrade and friend of Plutarch himself.[c]

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XXIII. THE GROWTH OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE

Athens! thou birthplace of the great, the free! Though bowed thy power, and dimmed thy name may be, Though old Renown’s once dazzling sun hath set, Fair beams the star of Memory o’er thee yet. City! where sang the bard, and taught the sage, Thy shrines may fall, thou ne’er wilt know old age; Fresh shall thy image glow in every heart, And but with Time’s last hour thy fame depart.

--NICHOLAS MICHELL.

The history of this time with its rush of events and its startling changes exhibits on the Athenian side a picture of astonishing and almost preternatural energy.[b] The transition from the Athenian hegemony to the Athenian empire was doubtless gradual, so that no one could determine precisely where the former ends and the latter begins: but it had been consummated before the thirty years’ truce, which was concluded fourteen years before the Peloponnesian War, and it was in fact the substantial cause of that war. Empire then came to be held by Athens,--partly as a fact established, resting on acquiescence rather than attachment or consent in the minds of the subjects,--partly as a corollary from necessity of union combined with her superior force: while this latter point, superiority of force as a legitimate title, stood more and more forward, both in the language of her speakers and in the conceptions of her citizens. Nay, the Athenian orators of the middle of the Peloponnesian War venture to affirm that their empire had been of this same character ever since the repulse of the Persians: an inaccuracy so manifest, that if we could suppose the speech made by the Athenian Euphemus at Camarina in 415 B.C., to have been heard by Themistocles or Aristides fifty years before, it would have been alike offensive to the prudence of the one and to the justice of the other.

The imperial state of Athens, that which she held at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, when her allies, except Chios and Lesbos, were tributary subjects, and when the Ægean Sea was an Athenian lake, was of course the period of her greatest splendour and greatest action upon the Grecian world. It was also the period most impressive to historians, orators, and philosophers, suggesting the idea of some one state exercising dominion over the Ægean, as the natural condition of Greece, so that if Athens lost such dominion, it would be transferred to Sparta, holding out the dispersed maritime Greeks as a tempting prize for the aggressive schemes of some new conqueror, and even bringing up by association into men’s fancies the mythical Minos of Crete, and others, as having been rulers of the Ægean in times anterior to Athens.

[Sidenote: [479-466 B.C.]]

Even those who lived under the full-grown Athenian empire had before them no good accounts of the incidents between 479-450 B.C.; for we may gather from the intimation of Thucydides, as well as from his barrenness of facts, that while there were chroniclers both for the Persian invasion and for the times before, no one cared for the times immediately succeeding. Hence, the little light which has fallen upon this blank has all been borrowed--if we except the careful Thucydides--from a subsequent age; and the Athenian hegemony has been treated as a mere commencement of the Athenian empire: credit has been given to Athens for a long-sighted ambition, aiming from the Persian War downwards at results which perhaps Themistocles may have partially divined, but which only time and successive accidents opened even to distant view. But such systematic anticipation of subsequent results is fatal to any correct understanding, either of the real agents or of the real period; both of which are to be explained from the circumstances preceding and actually present, with some help, though cautious and sparing, from our acquaintance with that which was then an unknown future. When Aristides and Cimon dismissed the Lacedæmonian admiral Dorcis, and drove Pausanias away from Byzantium on his second coming out, they had to deal with the problem immediately before them; they had to complete the defeat of the Persian power, still formidable, and to create and organise a confederacy as yet only inchoate. This was quite enough to occupy their attention, without ascribing to them distant views of Athenian maritime empire.

In that brief sketch of incidents preceding the Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides introduces as “the throwing off of his narrative,” he neither gives, nor professes to give, a complete enumeration of all which actually occurred. During the interval between the first desertion of the Asiatic allies from Pausanias to Athens, in 477 B.C., and the revolt of Naxos in 466 B.C., he recites three incidents only: first, the siege and capture of Eion, on the Strymon, with its Persian garrison; next, the capture of Scyros, and appropriation of the island to Athenian cleruchs, or out-citizens; thirdly, the war with Carystus in Eubœa and reduction of the place by capitulation. It has been too much the practice to reason as if these three events were the full history of ten or eleven years. Considering what Thucydides states respecting the darkness of this period, we might perhaps suspect that they were all which he could learn about it on good authority: and they are all, in truth, events having a near and special bearing on the subsequent history of Athens herself; for Eion was the first stepping-stone to the important settlement of Amphipolis, and Scyros in the time of Thucydides was the property of outlying Athenian citizens, or cleruchs.

Still, we are left in almost entire ignorance of the proceedings of Athens, as conducting the newly established confederate force: for it is certain that the first ten years of the Athenian hegemony must have been years of most active warfare against the Persians. One positive testimony to this effect has been accidentally preserved to us by Herodotus, who mentions, that “before the invasion of Xerxes, there were Persian commanders and garrisons everywhere in Thrace and the Hellespont, all of whom were conquered by the Greeks after that invasion, with the single exception of Mascames, governor of Doriscus, who could never be taken, though many different Grecian attempts were made upon the fortress. Of those who were captured by the Greeks, not one made any defence sufficient to attract the admiration of Xerxes, except Boges, governor of Eion.” Boges, after bravely defending himself, and refusing offers of capitulation, found his provisions exhausted, and further resistance impracticable. He then kindled a vast funeral pile, slew his wives, children, concubines, and family, and cast them into it, threw his precious effects over the wall into the Strymon, and lastly, precipitated himself into the flames. His brave despair was the theme of warm encomium among the Persians, and his relatives in Persia were liberally rewarded by Xerxes. This capture of Eion, effected by Cimon, has been mentioned, as already stated, by Thucydides; but Herodotus here gives us to understand that it was only one of a string of enterprises, all unnoticed by Thucydides, against the Persians. Nay, it would seem from his language, that Mascames maintained himself in Doriscus during the whole reign of Xerxes, and perhaps longer, repelling successive Grecian assaults.

The valuable indication here cited from Herodotus would be of itself a sufficient proof that the first years of the Athenian hegemony were full of busy and successful hostility against the Persians. And in truth this is what we should expect: the battles of Salamis, Platæa, and Mycale, drove the Persians out of Greece, and overpowered their main armaments, but did not remove them at once from all the various posts which they occupied throughout the Ægean and Thrace. Without doubt, the Athenians had to clear the coasts and the islands of a great number of different Persian detachments: an operation never short nor easy, with the then imperfect means of siege, as we may see by the cases of Sestus and Eion; nor, indeed, always practicable, as the case of Doriscus teaches us. The fear of these Persians, yet remaining in the neighbourhood, and even the chance of a renewed Persian invading armament, formed one pressing motive for Grecian cities to join the new confederacy: while the expulsion of the enemy added to it those places which he had occupied. It was by these years of active operations at sea against the common enemy, that the Athenians first established that constant, systematic, and laborious training, among their own ships’ crews, which transmitted itself with continual improvements down to the Peloponnesian War: it was by these, combined with the present fear, that they were enabled to organise the largest and most efficient confederacy ever known among Greeks, to bring together deliberative deputies, to plant their own ascendency as enforcers of the collective resolutions, and to raise a prodigious tax from universal contribution. Lastly, it was by these same operations, prosecuted so successfully as to remove present alarm, that they at length fatigued the more lukewarm and passive members of the confederacy, and created in them a wish either to commute personal service for pecuniary contribution, or to escape from the obligation of service in any way. The Athenian nautical training would never have been acquired, the confederacy would never have become a working reality, the fatigue and discontents among its members would never have arisen, unless there had been a real fear of the Persians, and a pressing necessity for vigorous and organised operations against them, during the ten years between 477 and 466 B.C.

But after a few years several of the confederates becoming weary of personal military service, prevailed upon the Athenians to provide ships and men in their place, and imposed upon themselves in exchange a money payment of suitable amount. This commutation, at first probably introduced to meet some special case of inconvenience, was found so suitable to the taste of all parties that it gradually spread through the larger portion of the confederacy. To unwarlike allies, hating labour and privation, it was a welcome relief, while to the Athenians, full of ardour and patient of labour, as well as discipline, for the aggrandisement of their country, it afforded constant pay for a fleet more numerous than they could otherwise have kept afloat. It is plain from the statement of Thucydides that this altered practice was introduced from the petition of the confederates themselves, not from any pressure or stratagem on the part of Athens. But though such was its real source, it did not the less fatally degrade the allies in reference to Athens, and extinguish the original feeling of equal rights and partnership in the confederacy, with communion of danger as well as of glory, which had once bound them together.

The Athenians came to consider themselves as military chiefs and soldiers, with a body of tribute-paying subjects, whom they were entitled to hold in dominion, and restrict, both as to foreign policy and internal government, to such extent as they thought expedient, but whom they were also bound to protect against foreign enemies. The military force of these subject-states was thus in a great degree transferred to Athens, by their own act, just as that of so many of the native princes in India was made over to the English.

Under such circumstances several of the confederate states grew tired even of paying their tribute, and averse to continuance as members. They made successive attempts to secede, but Athens, acting seemingly in conjunction with the synod, repressed their attempts one after the other, conquering, fining, and disarming the revolters; which was the more easily done, since in most cases their naval force had been in great part handed over to her. As these events took place, not all at once, but successively in different years, the number of mere tribute-paying allies as well as of subdued revolters continually increasing, so there was never any one moment of conspicuous change in the character of the confederacy: the allies slid unconsciously into subjects, while Athens, without any predetermined plan, passed from a chief into a despot. By strictly enforcing the obligations of the pact upon unwilling members, and by employing coercion against revolters, she had become unpopular in the same proportion as she acquired new power, and that, too, without any guilt of her own. In this position, even if she had been inclined to relax her hold upon the tributary subjects, considerations of her own safety would have deterred her from doing so; for there was reason to apprehend that they might place their strength at the disposal of her enemies. It is very certain that she never was so inclined; it would have required a more self-denying public morality than has ever been practised by any state, either ancient or modern, even to conceive the idea of relinquishing voluntarily an immense ascendency as well as a lucrative revenue: least of all was such an idea likely to be conceived by Athenian citizens, whose ambition increased with their power, and among whom the love of Athenian ascendency was both passion and patriotism. But though the Athenians were both disposed and qualified to push all the advantages offered, and even to look out for new, we must not forget that the foundations of their empire were laid in the most honourable causes: voluntary invitation, efforts both unwearied and successful against a common enemy, unpopularity incurred in discharge of an imperative duty, and inability to break up the confederacy without endangering themselves as well as laying open the Ægean Sea to the Persians.

There were two causes, besides that which has just been adverted to, for the unpopularity of imperial Athens. First, the existence of the confederacy, imposing permanent obligations, was in conflict with the general instinct of the Greek mind, tending towards separate political autonomy of each city, as well as with the particular turn of the Ionic mind, incapable of that steady personal effort which was requisite for maintaining the synod of Delos, on its first large and equal basis. Next,--and this is the great cause of all,--Athens, having defeated the Persians, and thrust them to a distance, began to employ the force and the tribute of her subject-allies in warfare against Greeks, wherein these allies had nothing to gain from success, everything to apprehend from defeat, and a banner to fight for, offensive to Hellenic sympathies. On this head, the subject-allies had great reason to complain throughout the prolonged wars of Greek against Greek for the purpose of sustaining Athenian predominance: but on the point of practical grievances or oppression they had little ground for discontent and little feeling of actual discontent. Among the general body of citizens in the subject-allied cities, the feeling towards Athens was rather indifference than hatred: the movement of revolt against her proceeded from small parties of leading men, acting apart from the citizens, and generally with collateral views of ambition for themselves; and the positive hatred towards her was felt chiefly by those who were not her subjects.

It is probable that the same indisposition to personal effort, which prompted the confederates of Delos to tender money payment as a substitute for military service, also induced them to neglect attendance at the synod. But we do not know the steps whereby this assembly, at first an effective reality, gradually dwindled into a mere form and vanished. Nothing, however, can more forcibly illustrate the difference of character between the maritime allies of Athens, and the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta, than the fact that, while the former shrank from personal service, and thought it an advantage to tax themselves in place of it, the latter were “ready enough with their bodies,” but uncomplying and impracticable as to contributions. The contempt felt by these Dorian landsmen for the military efficiency of the Ionians recurs frequently, and appears even to have exceeded what the reality justified: but when we turn to the conduct of the latter twenty years earlier, at the battle of Lade, in the very crisis of the Ionic revolt from Persia, we detect the same want of energy, the same incapacity of personal effort and labour, as that which broke up the confederacy of Delos with all its beneficial promise. To appreciate fully the indefatigable activity and daring, together with the patient endurance of laborious maritime training, which characterised the Athenians of that day, we have only to contrast them with these confederates, so remarkably destitute of both. Amidst such glaring inequalities of merit, capacity, and power, to maintain a confederacy of equal members was impossible: it was in the nature of things that the confederacy should either break up, or be transmuted into an Athenian empire.

It has already been mentioned that the first aggregate assessment of tribute, proposed by Aristides, and adopted by the synod at Delos, was four hundred and sixty talents in money (about £92,000, or $460,000). At that time many of the confederates paid their quota, not in money but in ships; but this practice gradually diminished, as the commutations above alluded to, of money in place of ships, were multiplied, while the aggregate tribute, of course, became larger. It was no more than six hundred talents at the commencement of the Peloponnesian War, forty-six years after the first formation of the confederacy; from whence we may infer that it was never at all increased upon individual members during the interval. For the difference between four hundred and sixty talents and six hundred admits of being fully explained by the numerous commutations of service for money, as well as by the acquisitions of new members, which doubtless Athens had more or less the opportunity of making. It is not to be imagined that the confederacy had attained its maximum number, at the date of the first assessment of tribute: there must have been various cities, like Sinope and Ægina, subsequently added.

Without some such preliminary statements as those just given, respecting the new state of Greece between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, beginning with the Athenian hegemony, or headship, and ending with the Athenian empire, the reader would hardly understand the bearing of those particular events which our authorities enable us to recount; events unhappily few in number, though the period must have been full of action, and not well authenticated as to dates.

[Sidenote: [470-468 B.C.]]

The first known enterprise of the Athenians in their new capacity,--whether the first absolutely or not, we cannot determine,--between 476 B.C. and 466 B.C., was the conquest of the important post of Eion, on the Strymon, where the Persian governor, Boges, starved out after a desperate resistance, destroyed himself rather than capitulate, together with his family and precious effects, as has already been stated. The next events named are their enterprises against the Dolopes and Pelasgi in the island of Scyros, seemingly about 470 B.C., and the Dryopes in the town and district of Carystus, in Eubœa. To the latter, who were of a different kindred from the inhabitants of Chalcis and Eretria, and received no aid from them, they granted a capitulation: the former were more rigorously dealt with, and expelled from their island. Scyros was barren, and had little to recommend it, except a good maritime position and an excellent harbour; while its inhabitants, seemingly akin to the Pelasgian residents in Lemnos, prior to the Athenian occupation of that spot, were alike piratical and cruel. Some Thessalian traders, recently plundered and imprisoned by them, had raised a complaint against them before the Amphictyonic synod, which condemned the island to make restitution: the mass of the islanders threw the burden upon those who had committed the crime; and these men, in order to evade payment, invoked Cimon with the Athenian armament who conquered the island, expelled the inhabitants, and peopled it with Athenian settlers.

Such clearance was a beneficial act, suitable to the new character of Athens as guardian of the Ægean Sea against piracy: but it seems also connected with Athenian plans. The island lay very convenient for the communication with Lemnos, which the Athenians had doubtless reoccupied after the expulsion of the Persians, and became, as well as Lemnos, a recognised adjunct, or outlying portion, of Attica: moreover, there were old legends which connected the Athenians with it, as the tomb of their hero Theseus, whose name, as the mythical champion of democracy, was in peculiar favour at the period immediately following the return from Salamis. It was in the year 476 B.C., that the oracle had directed them to bring home the bones of Theseus from Scyros, and to prepare for that hero a splendid entombment and edifice in their new city: they had tried to effect this, but the unsocial manners of the Dolopians had prevented a search, and it was only after Cimon had taken the island that he found, or pretended to find, the body. It was brought to Athens in the year 469 B.C., and after being welcomed by the people in solemn and joyous procession, as if the hero himself had come back, was deposited in the interior of the city; the monument called the Theseum, with its sacred precinct being built on the spot, and invested with the privilege of a sanctuary for men of poor condition who might feel ground for dreading the oppressions of the powerful, as well as for slaves in case of cruel usage. Such were the protective functions of the mythical hero of democracy, whose installation is interesting as marking the growing intensity of democratical feeling in Athens since the Persian War.

THE VICTORIES OF CIMON

[Sidenote: [468-465 B.C.]]

It was about two years or more after this incident, that the first breach of union in the confederacy of Delos took place. The important island of Naxos, the largest of the Cyclades,--an island which thirty years before had boasted a large marine force and eight thousand hoplites,--revolted; on what special ground we do not know: but probably the greater islands fancied themselves better able to dispense with the protection of the confederacy than the smaller--at the same time they were more jealous of Athens. After a siege of unknown duration by Athens and the confederate force, it was forced to surrender, and reduced to the condition of a tributary subject; its armed ships being doubtless taken away, and its fortifications razed: whether any fine or ulterior penalty was levied, we have no information.

Though we know no particulars respecting operations against Persia, since the attack on Eion, such operations must have been going on; but the expedition under Cimon, undertaken not long after the Naxian revolt, was attended with memorable results. That commander, having under him two hundred triremes from Athens, and one hundred from the various confederates, was despatched to attack the Persians on the southwestern and southern coast of Asia Minor. He attacked and drove out several of their garrisons from various Grecian settlements, both in Caria and Lycia: among others, the important trading city of Phaselis, though at first resisting, and even standing a siege, was prevailed upon by the friendly suggestions of the Chians in Cimon’s armament to pay a contribution of ten talents and join in the expedition. From the length of time occupied in these various undertakings, the Persian satraps had been enabled to assemble a powerful force, both fleet and army, near the mouth of the river Eurymedon, in Pamphylia, under the command of Tithraustes and Pherendates, both of the regal blood. The fleet, chiefly Phœnician, seems to have consisted of two hundred ships, but a further reinforcement of eighty Phœnician ships was expected, and was actually near at hand, and the commanders were unwilling to hazard a battle before its arrival. Cimon, anxious for the same reason to hasten on the combat, attacked them vigorously: partly from their inferiority of numbers, partly from discouragement at the absence of the reinforcement, they seem to have made no strenuous resistance. They were put to flight and driven ashore, so speedily, and with so little loss to the Greeks, that Cimon was enabled to disembark his men forthwith, and attack the land-force which was drawn up on shore to protect them.

The battle on land was long and gallantly contested, but Cimon at length gained a complete victory, dispersed the army with the capture of many prisoners, and either took or destroyed the entire fleet. As soon as his victory and his prisoners were secured, he sailed to Cyprus for the purpose of intercepting the reinforcement of eighty Phœnician ships in their way, and was fortunate enough to attack them while yet they were ignorant of the victories of the Eurymedon. These ships too were all destroyed, though most of the crews appear to have escaped ashore on the island. Two great victories, one at sea and the other on land, gained on the same day by the same armament, counted with reason among the most glorious of all Grecian exploits, and were extolled as such in the inscription on the commemorative offering to Apollo, set up out of the tithe of the spoils. The number of prisoners, as well as the booty taken by the victors, was immense.

A victory thus remarkable, which thrust back the Persians to the region eastward of Phaselis, doubtless fortified materially the position of the Athenian confederacy against them; but it tended not less to exalt the reputation of Athens, and even to popularise her with the confederates generally, from the large amount of plunder divisible among them. Probably this increased power and popularity stood her in stead throughout her approaching contest with Thasos, and at the same time it explains the increasing fear and dislike of the Peloponnesians.[c]

Athens, become, within a very few years, from the capital of a small province, in fact though not yet in avowed pretension, the head of an empire, exhibited a new and singular phenomenon in politics, a sovereign people; a people, not, as in many other Grecian democracies, sovereign merely of that state which themselves, maintained by slaves, composed, but supreme over other people in subordinate republics, acknowledging a degree of subjection, yet claiming to be free. Under this extraordinary political constitution philosophy and the arts were beginning to make Athens their principal resort. Migrating from Egypt and the east, they had long been fostered on the western coast of Asia. In Greece itself they had owed some temporary encouragement principally to those called tyrants; the Pisistratidæ at Athens, and Periander at Corinth. But their efforts were desultory and comparatively feeble till the communication with the Asian Greeks, checked and interrupted by their subjection to Persia, was restored, and Athens, chief of the glorious confederacy by whose arms the deliverance had been effected, began to draw everything toward itself as a common centre, the capital of an empire. Already science and fine taste were so far perfected that Æschylus had exhibited tragedy in its utmost dignity, and Sophocles and Euripides were giving it the highest polish, when Cimon returned in triumph to his country.

MITFORD’S VIEW OF THE PERIOD

It was the peculiar felicity of Athens in this period that, of the constellation of great men which arose there, each was singularly fitted for the situation in which the circumstances of the time required him to act; and none filled his place more advantageously than Cimon. But the fate of all those great men, and the resources employed, mostly in vain, to avert it, sufficiently mark, in this splendid era, a defective constitution, and law and justice ill assured. Aristides, we are told, though it is not undisputed, had founded his security upon extreme poverty: Cimon endeavoured to establish himself by a splendid, and almost unbounded, yet politic liberality. To ward against envy, and to secure his party with that tremendous tyrant, as the comic poet not inaptly calls the sovereign people, he made a parade of throwing down the fences of his gardens and orchards in the neighbourhood of Athens, and permitted all to partake of their produce; a table was daily spread at his house for the poorer citizens, but more particularly for those of his own ward, whom he invited from the agora, the courts of justice, or the general assembly; a bounty which both enabled and disposed them to give their time at his call whenever his interest required their support. In going about the city he was commonly attended by a large retinue, handsomely clothed; and if he met an elderly citizen ill clad, he directed one of his attendants to change cloaks with him. To the indigent of higher rank he was equally attentive, lending or giving money, as he found their circumstances required, and always managing his bounty with the utmost care that the object of it should not be put to shame.[42]

His conduct, in short, was a continual preparation for an election; not, as in England, to decide whether the candidate should or should not be a member of the legislature; but whether he should be head of the commonwealth or an exile.[43] In his youth he had affected a roughness of manners, and a contempt for the elegances generally reckoned becoming his rank, and which his fortune enabled him to command. In his riper years he discovered that virtue and grossness have no natural connection: he became himself a model of politeness, patronised every liberal art, and studied to procure elegant as well as useful indulgences for the people. By him were raised the first of those edifices which, for want of a more proper name, we call porticos, under whose magnificent shelter, in their torrid climate, it became the delight of the Athenians to assemble, and pass their leisure in promiscuous conversation. The widely celebrated groves of Academia acknowledged him as the founder of their fame. In the wood, before rude and without water, he formed commodious and elegant walks, and adorned them with running fountains. Nor was the planting of the agora, or great market-place of Athens, with that beautiful tree, the oriental plane, forgotten as a benefit from Cimon; while, ages after him, his trees flourished, affording an agreeable and salutary shade to those who exposed their wares there, and to those who came to purchase them. Much, if not the whole of these things, we are given to understand, was done at his private expense; but our information upon the subject is inaccurate. Those stores, with which his victories had enriched the treasury, probably furnished the sums employed upon some of the public works executed under his direction, as, more especially, the completion of the fortification of the citadel, whose principal defence hitherto, on the southern side, had been the precipitous form of the rock.

While with this splendid and princely liberality Cimon endeavoured to confirm his own interest, he was attentive to promote the general welfare, and to render permanent the superiority of Athens among the Grecian republics. The citizens of the allied states grew daily more impatient of the requisitions regularly made to take their turn of service on shipboard, and longed for uninterrupted enjoyment of their homes, in that security against foreign enemies which their past labours had, they thought, now sufficiently established. But that the common interest still required the maintenance of a fleet was a proposition that could not be denied, while the Persian empire existed, or while the Grecian seas offered temptation for piracy. Cimon therefore proposed that any commonwealth of the confederacy might compound for the personal service of its citizens, by furnishing ships, and paying a sum of money to the common treasury: the Athenians would then undertake the manning of the fleet. The proposal was at the moment popular; most of the allies acceded to it, unaware or heedless of the consequences; for, while they were thus depriving themselves of all maritime force, making that of Athens irresistible, they gave that ambitious republic claims upon them, uncertain in their nature, and which, as they might be made, could now also be enforced, at its pleasure.

[Sidenote: [465-463 B.C.]]

Having thus at the same time strengthened itself and reduced to impotence many of the allied states, the Athenian government became less scrupulous of using force against any of the rest which might dispute its sovereign authority. The reduction of Eion, by the confederate arms under Cimon, had led to new information of the value of the adjacent country; where some mines of gold and silver, and a lucrative commerce with the surrounding Thracian hordes, excited avidity. But the people of the neighbouring island of Thasos, very anciently possessed of that commerce, and of the more accessible mines, insisted that these, when recovered from the common enemy by the arms of that confederacy of which they were members, should revert entire to them. The Athenians, asserting the right of conquest, on the contrary, claimed the principal share as their own. The Thasians, irritated, renounced the confederacy. Cimon then was commanded to lead the confederate armament against them. They venturing an action at sea, were defeated; and Cimon, debarking his forces on the island, became quickly master of everything but the principal town, to which he laid siege. The Athenians then hastened to appropriate that inviting territory on the continent, which was their principal object, by sending thither a colony of no less than ten thousand men, partly Athenian citizens, partly from the allied commonwealths.

The Thasians had not originally trusted in their own strength alone for the hope of final success. Early in the dispute they had sent ministers to Lacedæmon, soliciting protection against the oppression of Athens. The pretence was certainly favourable, and the Lacedæmonian government, no longer pressed by domestic troubles, determined to use the opportunity for interfering to check the growing power of the rival commonwealth, so long an object of jealousy, and now become truly formidable. Without a fleet capable of contending with the Athenian, they could not send succour immediately to Thasos: but they were taking measures secretly for a diversion in its favour, by invading Attica, when a sudden and extraordinary calamity, an earthquake which overthrew the city of Sparta, and in its immediate consequences threatened destruction to the commonwealth, compelled them to confine all their attention at home. Nevertheless the siege, carried on with great vigour, and with all the skill of the age under the direction of Cimon, was, during three years, obstinately resisted. Even then the Thasians obtained terms, severe indeed, but by which they obviated the miseries, death often for themselves and slavery for their families, to which Grecian people, less able to defend themselves, were frequently reduced by Grecian arms. Their fortifications however were destroyed; their ships of war were surrendered; they paid immediately a sum of money; they bound themselves to an annual tribute; and they yielded all claim upon the opposite continent, and the valuable mines there.

The sovereignty of the Athenian people over the allied republics would thus gain some present confirmation; but in the principal object their ambition and avarice were, apparently through over-greediness, disappointed. The town of Eion stood at the mouth of the river Strymon. For the new settlement a place called the Nine Ways, a few miles up the river, was chosen; commodious for the double purpose of communicating with the sea, and commanding the neighbouring country. But the Edonian Thracians, in whose territory it was, resenting the encroachment, infested the settlers with irregular but continual hostilities. To put an end to so troublesome a war the whole force of the colony marched against them. As the Greeks advanced, the Edonians retreated; avoiding a general action, while they sent to all the neighbouring Thracian tribes for assistance, as in a common cause. When they were at length assembled in sufficient numbers, having engaged the Greeks far within a wild and difficult country, they attacked, overpowered, and cut in pieces their army, and annihilated the colony.

Cimon, on his return to Athens, did not meet the acclamations to which he had been accustomed. Faction had been busy in his absence. Apparently the fall of the colony of the Nine Ways furnished both instigation and opportunity, perhaps assisted by circumstances of which no information remains. A prosecution was instituted against him, on the pretence, according to the biographers, that he ought to have extended the Athenian dominion by conquest in Macedonia, and that bribes from Alexander, king of that country, had stopped his exertions. The covetous ambition indeed of the Athenian people, inflamed by interested demagogues, was growing boundless. Cimon, indignant at the ungrateful return for a life divided between performing the most important services to his country, and studying how most to gratify the people, would enter little into particulars in refuting a charge, one part of which he considered as attributing to him no crime, the other as incapable of credit, and therefore beneath his regard. He told the assembled people that “they mistook both him and the country which it was said he ought to have conquered. Other generals have cultivated an interest with the Ionians and the Thessalians, whose riches might make an interference in their concerns profitable. For himself, he had never sought any connection with those people; but he confessed he esteemed the Macedonians, who were virtuous and brave, but not rich; nor would he ever prefer riches to those qualities, though he had his satisfaction in having enriched his country with the spoils of its enemies.” The popularity of Cimon was yet great; his principal opponents apparently found it not a time for pushing matters to extremity against him, and such a defence sufficed to procure an honourable acquittal.

[Sidenote: [464-462 B.C.]]

Meanwhile Lacedæmon had been in the utmost confusion and on the brink of ruin. In the year 464 B.C. the earthquake came suddenly at mid-day, with a violence before unheard of. The youths of the principal families, assembled in the gymnasium at the appointed hour for exercise, were in great numbers crushed by its fall: many of both sexes and of all ages were buried under the ruins of other buildings: the shocks were repeated; the earth opened in several places; vast fragments from the summits of Taygetus were tumbled down its sides: in the end only five houses remained standing in Sparta, and it was computed that twenty thousand lives were lost.

The first strokes of this awful calamity filled all ranks with the same apprehensions. But, in the continuance of it, that wretched multitude, excluded from all participation in the prosperity of their country, began to found hope on its distress: a proposal, obscurely made, was rapidly communicated, and the helots assembled from various parts with one purpose, of putting their severe masters to death, and making the country their own. The ready foresight and prudent exertion of Archidamus, who had succeeded his grandfather Leotychides in the throne of the house of Procles, preserved Lacedæmon. In the confusion of the first alarm, while some were endeavouring to save their most valuable effects from the ruins of the city, others flying various ways for personal safety, Archidamus, collecting what he could of his friends and attendants about him, caused trumpets to sound to arms, as if an enemy were at hand. The Lacedæmonians, universally trained to the strictest military discipline, obeyed the signal; arms were the only necessaries sought; and civil rule, dissipated by the magnitude of the calamity, was, for the existing circumstances, most advantageously supplied by military order. The helots, awed by the very unexpected appearance of a regular army instead of a confused and flying multitude, desisted from their meditated attempt; but, quitting the city, spread themselves over the country, and excited their fellows universally to rebellion.

[Sidenote: [462 B.C.]]

The greater part of those miserable men, whom the Lacedæmonians held in so cruel a bondage, were descendants of the Messenians, men of the same blood with themselves, Greeks and Dorians. Memory of the wars of their ancestors, of their hero Aristomenes, and of the defence of Ithome, was not obsolete among them. Ithome accordingly they seized and made their principal post; and they so outnumbered the Lacedæmonians that, though deficiently armed, yet, being not without discipline acquired in attendance upon their masters in war, they were capable of being formidable even in the field. Nor was it thus only that the rebellion was distressing.[44] The Lacedæmonians, singularly ready and able in the use of arms, were singularly helpless in almost every other business. Deprived of their slaves they were nearly deprived of the means of subsistence; agriculture stopped, and mechanic arts ceased. Application was therefore made to the neighbouring allies for succour. The zealous friendship of the Æginetans upon the occasion we find afterwards acknowledged by the Lacedæmonian government, and assistance came from as far as Platæa. Thus re-enforced the spirited and well-directed exertions of Archidamus quickly so far reduced the rebellion that the insurgents remaining in arms were blockaded in Ithome. But the extraordinary natural strength of that place, the desperate obstinacy of the defenders, and the deficiency of the assailants in the science of attack, giving reason to apprehend that the business might not be soon accomplished, the Lacedæmonians sent to desire assistance from the Athenians, who were esteemed, beyond the other Greeks, experienced and skilful in the war of sieges.

This measure seems to have been on many accounts imprudent. There was found at Athens a strong disposition to refuse the aid. But Cimon, who, with a universal liberality, always professed particular esteem for the Lacedæmonians, prevailed upon his countrymen to take the generous part; and a considerable body of forces marched under his command into the Peloponnesus. Upon their arrival at the camp of the besiegers an assault upon the place was attempted, but with so little success that recourse was again had to the old method of blockade. It was in the leisure of that inactive and tedious mode of attack that principally arose those heartburnings which first occasioned an avowed national aversion between the Athenians and Lacedæmonians, and led, not indeed immediately, but in a direct line, to the fatal Peloponnesian War. All the prudence and all the authority of Cimon could not prevent the vivacious spirit of the Athenians from exulting, perhaps rather insultingly, in the new pre-eminence of their country; wherever danger called, they would be ostentatiously forward to meet it; and an assumed superiority, without a direct pretension to it, was continually appearing.

The Spartan pride was offended by their arrogance; the Spartan gravity was disturbed by their lively forwardness: it began to be considered that, though Greeks, they were Ionians, whom the Peloponnesians considered as an alien race; and it occurred that if, in the continuance of the siege, any disgust should arise, there was no security that they might not renounce their present engagements, and even connect themselves with the helots; who, as Greeks, had, not less than the Lacedæmonians, a claim to friendship and protection from every other Grecian people. Mistrust thus arose on one side; disgust became quickly manifest on both; and the Lacedæmonians shortly resolved to dismiss the Athenian forces. This however they endeavoured to do, as far as might be, without offence, by declaring that an “assault having been found ineffectual, the assistance of the Athenians was superfluous for the blockade, and the Lacedæmonians would not give their allies unnecessary trouble.” All the other allies were however retained, and the Athenians alone returned home; so exasperated by this invidious distinction that, on their arrival at Athens, the party adverse to Cimon proposing a decree for renouncing the confederacy with Lacedæmon, it was carried. An alliance with Argos, the inveterate enemy of Sparta, immediately followed; and soon after the Thessalians acceded to the new confederacy.

While Lacedæmon was engaged with this dangerous insurrection, a petty war arose in the Peloponnesus, affording one of the most remarkable, among the many strong instances on record, of the miseries to which the greater part of Greece was perpetually liable from the defects of its political system. Argos, the capital of Argolis, and formerly of the Peloponnesus under the early kings of the Danaan race, or perhaps before them, lost its preeminence, as we have already seen, during the reigns of the Persidæan and Pelopidæan princes, under whom Mycenæ became the first city of Greece. On the return of the Heraclidæ, Temenus fixed his residence at Argos, which thus regained its superiority. But, as the oppressions, arising from a defective political system, occasioned very generally through Greece the desire, so the troubles of the Argive government gave the means for the inferior towns to become independent republics. Like the rest, or perhaps more than the rest, generally oppressive, that government was certainly often ill-conducted and weak; and Lacedæmon, its perpetual enemy, fomented the rebellious disposition of its dependencies. During the ancient wars of Sparta and Messenia, the Argives had expelled the people of their towns of Asine and Nauplia, and forced them to seek foreign settlements; a resource sufficiently marking a government both weak and oppressive. Mycenæ was now a much smaller town than Argos; but its people, encouraged by Lacedæmon, formed lofty pretensions. The far-famed temple of Juno, the tutelar deity of the country, situated about five miles from Argos, and little more than one from Mycenæ, was considered by the Argives as theirs; and, from the time, it was supposed, of the Heraclidæ, the priestess had been appointed and the sacred ceremonies administered under the protection of their government. Nevertheless the Mycenæans now claimed the right to this superintendency. The games of Nemea, from their institution, or, as it was called, their restoration, had been under the direction of the Argives; but the Mycenæan government claimed also the prior right to preside there. These however were but branches of a much more important claim; for they wanted only power, or sufficient assistance from Sparta, to assert a right of sovereignty over Argos itself and all Argolis; and they were continually urging another pretension, not the less invidious to Argos because better founded, a pretension to merit with all the Greek nation for having joined the confederacy against Persia, while the Argives allied themselves with the common enemy of Greece. The favourable opportunity afforded by the helot rebellion was eagerly seized by the Argives for ridding themselves of such troublesome and dangerous neighbours, whom they considered as rebellious subjects. Laying siege to Mycenæ they took the place, reduced the surviving people to slavery, and dedicating a tenth of the spoil to the gods destroyed the town, which was never rebuilt.

At Athens, after the banishment of Themistocles, Cimon remained long in possession of a popularity which nothing could resist; and his abilities, his successes, and his moderation, his connection with the aristocratical interest, and his favour with the people, seemed altogether likely to insure, if anything could insure, permanency and quiet to his administration. But in Athens, as in every free government, there would always be a party adverse to the party in the direction of public affairs: matters had been for some time ripening for a change; and the renunciation of the Lacedæmonian alliance was the triumph of the opposition.[d]

FOOTNOTES

[42] Plutarch says that “Cimon’s house was a kind of common hall for all the people; the first fruits of his lands were theirs; whatever the seasons produced of excellent and agreeable, they freely gathered; nor were strangers in the least debarred from them: so that he in some measure revived the community of goods, which prevailed in the reign of Saturn, and which the poets tell so much of.”

[43] Gorgias the Leontine gave him this character: “He got riches to use them, and used them so as to be honoured on their account.”

[44] [This war has been called the Third Messenian War.]

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XXIV. THE RISE OF PERICLES

This was the ruler of the land When Athens was the land of fame: This was the light that led the band When earth was like a living flame; The centre of earth’s noblest ring-- Of more than men the more than king.

--GEORGE CROLY.

Cimon was beyond dispute the ablest and most successful general of his day: and his victories had shed a lustre on the arms of Athens, which almost dimmed the glories of Marathon and Salamis. But while he was gaining renown abroad, he had rivals at home, who were endeavouring to supplant him in the affections of the people, and to establish a system of domestic and foreign policy directly counter to his views, and were preparing contests for him in which his military talents would be of little avail. While Themistocles and Aristides were occupying the political stage, an extraordinary genius had been ripening in obscurity, and was only waiting for a favourable juncture to issue from the shade into the broad day of public life. Xanthippus, the conqueror of Mycale, had married Agariste, a descendant of the famous Clisthenes, and had left two sons, Ariphron and Pericles. Of Ariphron little is known beside his name: but Pericles, to an observing eye, gave early indications of a mind formed for great things, and a will earnestly bent on them.

In his youth he had not rested satisfied with the ordinary Greek education, but had applied himself, with an ardour which was not even abated by the lapse of years, nor stifled by his public avocations, to intellectual pursuits, which were then new at Athens, and confined to a very narrow circle of inquisitive spirits. His birth and fortune afforded him the means of familiar intercourse with all the men most eminent in every kind of knowledge and art, who were already beginning to resort to Athens as a common seat of learning. Thus, though Pythoclides taught him to touch the cithara, he sought the elements of a higher kind of music in the lessons of Damon, who was believed to have contributed mainly to train him for his political career: himself no ordinary person; for he was held up by the comic poets to public jealousy, as a secret favourer of tyranny, and was driven from Athens by the process of ostracism. But Pericles also entered with avidity into the abstrusest philosophical speculations, and even took pleasure in the arid subtleties of the Eleatic school, or at least in the ingenuity and the dialectic art with which they were unfolded to him by Zeno. But his principal guide in such researches, and the man who appears to have exercised the most powerful and durable influence on his mind and character, was the philosopher Anaxagoras, with whom he was long united in intimate friendship. Not only his public and private deportment, and his habits of thought, but the tone and style of his eloquence were believed to have been formed by his intercourse with Anaxagoras. It was commonly supposed that this effect was produced by the philosopher’s physical speculations, which, elevating his disciple above the ignorant superstition of the vulgar, had imparted to him the serene condescension and dignified language of a superior being. But we should be loth to believe that it was the possession of such physical secrets as Anaxagoras was able to communicate, that inspired Pericles with his lofty conceptions, or that he was intoxicated with the little taste of science which had weaned him from a few popular prejudices. We should rather ascribe so deep an impression to the distinguishing tenet of the Anaxagorean system, by which the philosopher himself was supposed to have acquired the title of Mind.

It was undoubtedly not for the mere amusement of his leisure that Pericles had enriched his mind with so many rare acquirements. All of them were probably considered by him as instruments for the use of the statesman: and even those which seemed most remote from all practical purposes, may have contributed to the cultivation of that natural eloquence, to which he owed so much of his influence. He left no specimens of his oratory behind him, and we can only estimate it, like many other fruits of Greek genius, by the effect it produced. The few minute fragments preserved by Plutarch, which were recorded by earlier authors because they had sunk deep in the mind of his hearers, seem to indicate that he loved to concentrate his thoughts in a bold and vivid image: as when he called Ægina the eyesore of Piræus, and said that he descried war lowering from the Peloponnesus. But though signally gifted and accomplished for political action, it was not without much hesitation and apprehension that he entered on a field, where he saw ample room indeed for the display of his powers, but also many enemies and great dangers. The very superiority of which he could not but be conscious, suggested a motive for alarm, as it might easily excite suspicion in the people of views adverse to their freedom: and these fears were heightened by some circumstances, trifling in themselves, but capable of awakening or confirming a popular prejudice.

His personal appearance was graceful and majestic, notwithstanding a remarkable disproportion in the length of his head, which became a subject of inexhaustible pleasantry for the comic poets of this day: but the old men who remembered Pisistratus, were struck by the resemblance which they discovered between the tyrant and the young heir of the Alemæonids, and not only in their features, but in the sweetness of voice, and the volubility of utterance, with which both expressed themselves. Still, after the ostracism of Themistocles, and the death of Aristides, while Cimon was engaged in continual expeditions, Pericles began to present himself more and more to the public eye, and was soon the acknowledged chief of a powerful party, which openly aimed at counteracting Cimon’s influence, and introducing opposite maxims into the public counsels.

To some of the ancients indeed it appeared that the course of policy adopted by Pericles was entirely determined by the spirit of emulation, which induced him to take a different ground from that which he found already occupied by Cimon: and that, as Cimon was at the head of the aristocratical party which had been represented by Aristides, he therefore placed himself in the front of that which had been led by Themistocles. The difference between these parties, after the revolution by which the ancestor of Pericles had undermined the power of the old aristocracy, was for some time very faintly marked, and we have seen that Aristides himself was the author of a very democratical measure, which threw the first officers of the state open to all classes of the citizens. The aristocracy had no hope of recovering what it had lost; but, as the commonalty grew more enterprising, it became also more intent on keeping all that it had retained, and on stopping all further innovation at home. Abroad too, though it was no longer a question, whether Athens should continue to be a great maritime power, or should reduce her navy to the footing of the old naucraries, and though Cimon himself had actively pursued the policy of Themistocles, there was room for great difference of opinion as to the course which was to be followed in her foreign relations. The aristocratical party wished, for their own sake at least as much as for that of peace and justice, to preserve the balance of power as steady as possible in Greece, and directed the Athenian arms against the Persian empire with the greater energy, in the hope of diverting them from intestine warfare. The democratical party had other interests, and concurred only with that part of these views which tended towards enriching and aggrandising the state.

It is difficult wholly to clear Pericles from the charge of having been swayed by personal motives in the choice of his political system, as it would be to establish it. But even if it were certain that his decision was not the result of conviction, it might as fairly be attributed to a hereditary prepossession in favour of the principles for which his ancestors had contended, and which had probably been transmitted in his family, as to his competition with Cimon, or to his fear of incurring the suspicion that he aimed at a tyranny, or unconstitutional power; a suspicion to which he was much more exposed in the station which he actually filled. But if his personal character might seem better adapted to an aristocratical than to a democratical party, it must also render us unwilling to believe, that he devoted himself to the cause of the commonalty merely that he might make it the instrument of his own ambition. There seems to be much better ground for supposing that he deliberately preferred the system which he adopted, as the most consistent, if not alone reconcilable, with the prosperity and safety of Athens: though his own agency in directing and controlling it might be a prominent object in all his views. But he might well think that the people had gone too far to remain stationary, even if there was any reason why it should not seize the good which lay within its reach. Its greatness had risen with the growth of the commonalty, and, it might appear to him, could only be maintained and extended by the same means: at home by a decided ascendency of the popular interest over that of the old aristocracy, and every other class in the state; abroad by an equally decided supremacy over the rest of Greece.

The contest between the parties seems for some time to have been carried on, without much violence or animosity, and rather with a noble emulation in the service of the public, than with assaults on one another. Cimon had enriched his country with the spoil and ransom of the Persians; and he had also greatly increased his private fortune. His disposition was naturally inclined to liberality, and he made a munificent use of his wealth.

The state of things had undergone a great change at Athens in favour of the poorer class, since Solon had been obliged to interpose, to protect them from the rigour of creditors, who first impoverished, and then enslaved them. Since this time the aristocracy had found it expedient to court the commonalty which it could no longer oppress, and to part with a portion of its wealth for the sake of retaining its power. There were of course then, as at all times, benevolent individuals, who only consulted the dictates of a generous nature: but the contrast between the practice which prevailed before and after the age of Solon, seems clearly to mark the spurious origin of the ordinary beneficence. Yet Isocrates, when he extols the bounty of the good old times, which prevented the pressure of poverty from being ever felt, speaks of land granted at low rents, sums of money advanced at low interest, and asserts that none of the citizens were then in such indigence, as to depend on casual relief. Cimon’s munificence therefore must have been remarkable, not only in its degree, but in its kind: and was not the less that of a demagogue, because he sought popularity, not merely for his own sake, but for that of his order and his party.

Such was the light in which it was viewed by Pericles; and some of the measures which most strongly marked his administration were adopted to counteract its effects. He was not able to rival Cimon’s profusion, and he even husbanded his private fortune with rigid economy, that he might keep his probity in the management of public affairs free both from temptation and suspicion. His friend Demonides is said first to have suggested the thought of throwing Cimon’s liberality into the shade, and rendering it superfluous, by proposing a similar application of the public revenue. Pericles perhaps deemed it safer and more becoming, that the people should supply the poorer citizens with the means of enjoyment out of its own funds, than that they should depend on the bounty of opulent individuals. He might think that the generation which had raised their country to such a pitch of greatness, was entitled to reap the fruits of the sacrifice which their fathers had made, in resigning the produce of the mines of Laurium to the use of the state.

Very early therefore he signalised his appearance in the assembly by becoming the author of a series of measures, all tending to provide for the subsistence and gratification of the poorer class at the public expense. But we must here observe, that, while he was courting the favour of the multitude by these arts, he was no less studious to command its respect. From his first entrance into public life, he devoted himself with unremitting application to business; he was never to be seen out of doors, but on the way between his house and the seat of council: and, as if by way of contrast to Cimon’s convivial tastes, declined all invitations to the entertainments of his acquaintance--once only during the whole period he broke through this rule, to honour the wedding of his relative Euryptolemus with his presence--and confined himself to the society of a very select circle of intimate friends. He bestowed the most assiduous attention on the preparation of his speeches, and so little disguised it, that he used to say he never mounted the bema, without praying that no inappropriate word might drop from his lips. The impression thus produced was heightened by the calm majesty of his air and carriage, and by the philosophical composure which he maintained under all provocations.[45] And he was so careful to avoid the effect which familiarity might have on the people, that he was sparing even in his attendance at the assembly, and, reserving his own appearance for great occasions, carried many of his measures through the agency of his friends and partisans. Among them the person whose name is most frequently associated with that of Pericles was Ephialtes, son of Sophonides, a person not much less conspicuous for his rigid integrity than Aristides himself, and who seems to have entered into the views of Pericles with disinterested earnestness, and fearlessly to have borne the brunt of the conflict with the opposite party.

Immediately after the conquest of Thasos an occasion occurred for the two parties to measure their strength. As has been described, Cimon had received instructions, before he brought home his victorious armament, to attempt some further conquest on the mainland between the newly conquered district and Macedonia. Plutarch says, that he was expected to have invaded Macedonia, and to have added a large tract of it to the dominions of Athens. Yet it does not clearly appear how the conquest of Thasos afforded an opportunity of effecting this with greater ease: nor is any motive suggested for such an attack on the territories of Alexander. We might hence be inclined to suspect, that the expedition which Cimon had neglected to undertake, though called for by the people’s wishes, if not by their express orders, was to have been directed, not against Macedonia, but against the Thracian tribes on its frontier, who had so lately cut off their colonists on the Strymon: a blow which the Athenians were naturally impatient to avenge, but which the king of Macedonia might well be supposed to have witnessed without regret, even if he did not instigate those who inflicted it. However this may be, Cimon’s forbearance disappointed and irritated the people, and his adversaries inflamed the popular indignation by ascribing his conduct to the influence of Macedonian gold. This part of the charge at least was undoubtedly groundless; and Pericles, though appointed by the people one of Cimon’s accusers, when he was brought to trial for treason, seems to have entered into the prosecution with reluctance. The danger however was great, and Elpinice came to the house of Pericles to plead with him for her brother. Pericles, playfully, though it would seem not quite so delicately as our manners would require, reminded her that she was past the age at which female intercession is most powerful; but in effect he granted her request; for he kept back the thunder of his eloquence, and only rose once, for form’s sake, to second the accusation. Plutarch says that Cimon was acquitted; and there seems to be no reason for doubting the fact, except a suspicion, that this was the trial to which Demosthenes alludes, when he says that Cimon narrowly escaped with his life, and was condemned to a penalty of fifty talents: a singular repetition of his father’s destiny.

THE AREOPAGUS

This however was only a prelude to a more momentous struggle, which involved the principles of the parties, and excited much stronger feelings of mutual resentment. It appears to have been about this time that Pericles resolved on attacking the aristocracy in its ancient and revered stronghold, the Areopagus. We have seen that this body, at once a council and a court of justice, was composed, according to Solon’s regulation, of the ex-archons. Its character was little altered after the archonship was filled by lot, so long as it was open to none but citizens of the wealthiest class. But, by the innovation introduced by Aristides, the poorest Athenian might gain admission to the Areopagus. Still the change which this measure produced in its composition was probably for a long time scarcely perceptible, and attended with no effect on its maxims and proceedings. When Pericles made his attack on it, it was perhaps as much as ever an aristocratical assembly. The greater part of the members had come in under the old system, and most of those who followed them probably belonged to the same class; for though in the eye of the law the archonship had become open to all, it is not likely that many of a lower station would immediately present themselves to take their chance. But even if any such were successful, they could exert but little influence on the general character of the council, which would act much more powerfully on them. The poor man who took his seat among a number of persons of superior rank, fortune, and education, would generally be eager to adopt the tone and conform to the wishes of his colleagues; and hence the prevailing spirit might continue for many generations unaltered. This may be the main point which Isocrates had in view, when he observed that the worst men, as soon as they entered the Areopagus, seemed to change their nature. Pericles therefore had reason to consider it as a formidable obstacle to his plans. He did not however attempt, or perhaps desire, to abolish an institution so hallowed by tradition; but he aimed at narrowing the range of its functions, so as to leave it little more than an august name. Ephialtes was his principal coadjutor in this undertaking, and by the prominent part which he took in it exposed himself to the implacable enmity of the opposite party, which appears to have set all its engines in motion to ward off the blow.

It is not certain whether this struggle had begun, or was only impending, at the time of the embassy which came from Sparta to request the aid of the Athenians against Ithome. But the two parties were no less at variance on this subject than on the other. The aristocratical party considered Sparta as its natural ally, and did not wish to see Athens without a rival in Greece. Cimon was personally attached to Sparta, possessed the confidence of the Spartans, and took every opportunity of expressing the warmest admiration for their character and institutions; and, to mark his respect for them, gave one of his sons the name of Lacedæmonius. He himself was in some degree indebted to their patronage for his political elevation, and had requited their favour by joining with them in the persecution of Themistocles. When therefore Ephialtes dissuaded the people from granting the request of the Spartans, and exclaimed against the folly of raising a fallen antagonist, Cimon urged them “not to permit Greece to be lamed, and Athens to lose her yoke-fellow.” This advice prevailed, and Cimon was sent with a large force to assist the Spartans at the siege of Ithome.

The first effect produced by the affront Sparta later gave to Athens, was, as we have seen, a resolution to break off all connection with Sparta, and, to make the rupture more glaring, they had entered into an alliance with Sparta’s old rival, Argos.

This turn of events was extremely agreeable to the democratical party at Athens, not only in itself, on account of the assistance which they might hope to receive from Argos, but because it immediately afforded them a great advantage in their conflict with their domestic adversaries, and in particular furnished them with new arms against Cimon. He instantly became obnoxious, both as the avowed friend of Sparta, and as the author and leader of the expedition which had drawn so rude an insult on his countrymen. The attack on the authority of the Areopagus was now prosecuted with greater vigour, and Cimon had little influence left to exert in its behalf. Yet his party seems not by any means to have remained passive, but to have put forth all its strength in a last effort to save its citadel: and it was supported by an auxiliary which had in its possession some very powerful engines to wield in its defence.

[Sidenote: [525-456 B.C.]]

This was the poet Æschylus, who was attached to it by his character and his early associations. Himself a Eupatrid, perhaps connected with the priestly families of Eleusis, his deme, if not his birth-place, he gloried in the laurels which he had won at Marathon, above all the honours earned by his sword and by his pen, though he had also fought at Salamis, and had founded a new era of dramatic poetry. He was an admirer of Aristides, whose character he had painted in one of his tragedies, under the name of an ancient hero, with a truth which was immediately recognised by the audience.

The contest with Persia, which was the subject of one of his great works, probably appeared to him the legitimate object for the energies of Greece. Beside this general disposition to side with Cimon’s party, against Pericles, the whole train of his poetical and religious feelings was nourished by a study of the mythical and religious traditions of Greek antiquity. In his tragedy, entitled the Eumenides, he exhibits the mythical origin of the court and council of Areopagus, in the form which best suited his purpose, tracing it to the cause first pleaded there between the Argive matricide Orestes, who pledges his country to eternal alliance with Athens, and the “dread goddesses,” who sought vengeance for the blood which he had shed. The poet brings these terrible beings on the stage, as well as the tutelary goddess of the city, who herself institutes the tribunal, “to last throughout all ages,” and exhorts her people to preserve it as the glory and safeguard of the city; and the spectators are led to consider the continuance of the blessings which the pacified avengers promise to the land, as depending on the permanence of the institution which had succeeded to their function.[b]

Owing to a misunderstanding as to the date of this tragedy, it was long believed that Æschylus wrote it in reproof of Pericles for diminishing the power of the Areopagus. When it became certain that the play was not produced till 458, a new light was thrown on the affair, showing Æschylus as a defender of the merely judicial function of the Areopagus, for Pericles and Ephialtes left the Areopagus its judicial dignity and merely removed its political weight, as will be more fully shown in a later chapter. Æschylus therefore appears as one in no sense protesting, but rather as showing the true origin and strictly judicial function of the Areopagus, and approving Ephialtes who carried the day and reduced its pretensions.[a]

CIMON EXILED

[Sidenote: [461-460 B.C.]]

This triumph of Pericles and his party over the Areopagus seems to have been immediately followed by the ostracism of Cimon, which took place about two years after the return of the Athenians from Messenia: and it is therefore not improbable that his exile may have been not so much an effect of popular resentment, as a measure of precaution, which may have appeared necessary even to the moderate men of both parties, for the establishment of public tranquillity.[b]

The new character which Athens had assumed, as a competitor for landed alliances not less than for maritime ascendency, came opportunely for the protection of the neighbouring town of Megara. It appears that Corinth, perhaps instigated like Argos by the helplessness of the Lacedæmonians, had been making border encroachments--on the one side upon Cleonæ, on the other side upon Megara: on which ground the latter, probably despairing of protection from Lacedæmon, renounced the Lacedæmonian connection, and obtained permission to enrol herself as an ally of Athens. This was an acquisition of signal value to the Athenians, since it both opened to them the whole range of territory across the outer Isthmus of Corinth to the interior of the Crissæan gulf, on which the Megarian port of Pegæ was situated, and placed them in possession of the passes of Mount Geranea, so that they could arrest the march of a Peloponnesian army over the isthmus, and protect Attica from invasion. It was moreover of great importance in its effects on Grecian politics: for it was counted as a wrong by Lacedæmon, gave deadly offence to the Corinthians, and lighted up the flames of war between them and Athens; their allies the Epidaurians and Æginetans taking their part. Though Athens had not yet been guilty of unjust encroachment against any Peloponnesian state, her ambition and energy had inspired universal awe; while the maritime states in the neighbourhood, such as Corinth, Epidaurus, and Ægina, saw these terror-striking qualities threatening them at their own doors, through her alliance with Argos and Megara. Moreover, it is probable that the ancient feud between the Athenians and Æginetans, though dormant since a little before the Persian invasion, had never been appeased or forgotten: so that the Æginetans, dwelling within sight of Piræus, were at once best able to appreciate, and most likely to dread, the enormous maritime power now possessed by Athens. Pericles was wont to call Ægina the eyesore of Piræus: but we may be sure that Piræus, grown into a vast fortified port within the existing generation, was in a much stronger degree the eyesore of Ægina.

The Athenians were at this time actively engaged in prosecuting the war against Persia, having a fleet of no less than two hundred sail, equipped by or from the confederacy collectively, now serving in Cyprus and on the Phœnician coast. Moreover the revolt of the Egyptians under Inarus (about 460 B.C.) opened to them new means of action against the Great King. Their fleet, by invitation of the rebels, sailed up the Nile to Memphis, where there seemed at first a good prospect of throwing off the Persian dominion. Yet in spite of so great an abstraction from their disposable force, their military operations near home were conducted with unabated vigour: and the inscription which remains--a commemoration of their citizens of the Erechthid tribe who were slain in one and the same year in Cyprus, Egypt, Phœnicia, the Halieis, Ægina, and Megara--brings forcibly before us that remarkable energy which astonished and even alarmed their contemporaries.

[Sidenote: [460-458 B.C.]]

Their first proceedings at Megara were of a nature altogether novel, in the existing condition of Greece. It was necessary for the Athenians to protect their new ally against the superiority of the Peloponnesian land-force, and to insure a constant communication with it by sea. But the city (like most of the ancient Hellenic towns) was situated on a hill at some distance from the sea, separated from its port Nisæa by a space of nearly one mile. One of the earliest proceedings of the Athenians was to build two lines of wall, near and parallel to each other, connecting the city with Nisæa; so that the two thus formed one continuous fortress, wherein a standing Athenian garrison was maintained, with the constant means of succour from Athens in case of need. These “Long Walls,” though afterwards copied in other places and on a larger scale, were at that juncture an ingenious invention, and were erected for the purpose of extending the maritime arm of Athens to an inland city.

THE WAR WITH CORINTH

The first operations of Corinth however were not directed against Megara. The Athenians, having undertaken a landing in the territory of the Halieis (the population of the southern Argolic peninsula, bordering on Trœzen and Hermione), were defeated on land by the Corinthian and Epidaurian forces: possibly it may have been in this expedition that they acquired possession of Trœzen, which we find afterwards in their dependance, without knowing when it became so. But in a sea-fight which took place off the island of Cecryphaleia (between Ægina and the Argolic peninsula) the Athenians gained the victory. After this victory and defeat--neither of them apparently very decisive--the Æginetans began to take a more energetic part in the war, and brought out their full naval force together with that of their allies--Corinthians, Epidaurians, and other Peloponnesians: while Athens equipped a fleet of corresponding magnitude, summoning her allies also; though we do not know the actual numbers on either side.

In the great naval battle which ensued off the island of Ægina, the superiority of the new nautical tactics acquired by twenty years’ practice of the Athenians since the Persian War--over the old Hellenic ships and seamen, as shown in those states where at the time of the battle of Marathon the maritime strength of Greece had resided--was demonstrated by a victory most complete and decisive. The Peloponnesian and Dorian seamen had as yet had no experience of the improved seacraft of Athens, and when we find how much they were disconcerted with it even twenty-eight years afterwards at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, we shall not wonder at its destructive effect upon them in this early battle. The maritime power of Ægina was irrecoverably ruined. The Athenians captured seventy ships of war, landed a large force upon the island, and commenced the siege of the city by land as well as by sea.

If the Lacedæmonians had not been occupied at home by the blockade of Ithome, they would have been probably induced to invade Attica as a diversion to the Æginetans; especially as the Persian Megabazus came to Sparta at this time on the part of Artaxerxes to prevail upon them to do so, in order that the Athenians might be constrained to retire from Egypt. This Persian brought with him a large sum of money, but was nevertheless obliged to return without effecting his mission. The Corinthians and Epidaurians, however, while they carried to Ægina a reinforcement of three hundred hoplites, did their best to aid her further by an attack upon Megara; which place, it was supposed, the Athenians could not possibly relieve without withdrawing their forces from Ægina, inasmuch as so many of their men were at the same time serving in Egypt. But the Athenians showed themselves equal to all these three exigencies at one and the same time--to the great disappointment of their enemies. Myronides marched from Athens to Megara at the head of the citizens in the two extremes of military age, old and young; these being the only troops at home. He fought the Corinthians near the town, gaining a slight, but debatable advantage, which he commemorated by a trophy, as soon as the Corinthians had returned home. But the latter, when they arrived at home, were so much reproached by their own old citizens, for not having vanquished the refuse of the Athenian military force, that they returned back at the end of twelve days and erected a trophy on their side, laying claim to a victory in the past battle. The Athenians, marching out of Megara, attacked them a second time, and gained on this occasion a decisive victory. The defeated Corinthians were still more unfortunate in their retreat; for a body of them, missing their road, became entangled in a space of private ground enclosed on every side by a deep ditch and having only one narrow entrance. Myronides, detecting this fatal mistake, planted his hoplites at the entrance to prevent their escape, and then surrounded the enclosure with his light-armed troops, who with their missile weapons slew all the Corinthian hoplites, without possibility either of flight or resistance. The bulk of the Corinthian army effected their retreat, but the destruction of this detachment was a sad blow to the city.

THE LONG WALLS

[Sidenote: [458 B.C.]]

Splendid as the success of the Athenians had been during this year, both on land and at sea, it was easy for them to foresee that the power of their enemies would presently be augmented by the Lacedæmonians taking the field. Partly on this account--partly also from the more energetic phase of democracy, and the long-sighted views of Pericles, which were now becoming ascendant in the city--the Athenians began the stupendous undertaking of connecting Athens with the sea by means of long walls. The idea of this measure had doubtless been first suggested by the recent erection of long walls, though for so much smaller a distance, between Megara and Nisæa: for without such an intermediate stepping-stone, the project of a wall forty stadia (about 4½ English miles) to join Athens with Piræus, and another wall of thirty-five stadia (nearly 4 English miles) to join it with Phalerum, would have appeared extravagant even to the sanguine temper of Athenians--as it certainly would have seemed a few years earlier to Themistocles himself. Coming as an immediate sequel of great recent victories, and while Ægina, the great Dorian naval power, was prostrate and under blockade, it excited the utmost alarm among the Peloponnesians--being regarded as the second great stride, at once conspicuous and of lasting effect, in Athenian ambition, next to the fortification of Piræus. But besides this feeling in the bosom of enemies, the measure was also interwoven with the formidable contention of political parties then going on at Athens. Cimon had been recently ostracised; and the democratical movement pressed by Pericles and Ephialtes (of which more presently) was in its full tide of success; yet not without a violent and unprincipled opposition on the part of those who supported the existing constitution.

Now the Long Walls formed a part of the foreign policy of Pericles, continuing on a gigantic scale the plans of Themistocles when he first schemed the Piræus. They were framed to render Athens capable of carrying on war against any superiority of land attack, and of bidding defiance to the united force of Peloponnesus. But though thus calculated for contingencies which a long-sighted man might see gathering in the distance, the new walls were, almost on the same grounds, obnoxious to a considerable number of Athenians: to the party recently headed by Cimon, which was attached to the Lacedæmonian connection, and desired above all things to maintain peace at home, reserving the energies of the state for anti-Persian enterprise: to many landed proprietors in Attica, whom they seemed to threaten with approaching invasion and destruction of their territorial possessions: to the rich men and aristocrats of Athens, averse to a still closer contact and amalgamation with the maritime multitude in Piræus: lastly, perhaps, to a certain vein of old Attic feeling, which might look upon the junction of Athens with the separate demes of Piræus and Phalerum as effacing the special associations connected with the holy rock of Athene. When to all these grounds of opposition we add the expense and trouble of the undertaking itself, the interference with private property, the peculiar violence of party which happened then to be raging, and the absence of a large proportion of military citizens in Egypt, we shall hardly be surprised to find that the projected long walls brought on a risk of the most serious character both for Athens and her democracy. If any further proof were wanting of the vast importance of these long walls, in the eyes both of friends and of enemies, we might find it in the fact that their destruction was the prominent mark of Athenian humiliation after the battle of Ægospotami, and their restoration the immediate boon of Pharnabazus and Conon after the victory of Cnidus.

[Sidenote: [457 B.C.]]

Under the influence of the alarm now spread by the proceedings of Athens, the Lacedæmonians were prevailed upon to undertake an expedition out of Peloponnesus, although the helots in Ithome were not yet reduced to surrender. Their force consisted of fifteen hundred troops of their own, and ten thousand of their various allies, under the regent Nicomedes. The ostensible motive, or the pretence, for this march, was the protection of the little territory of Doris against the Phocians, who had recently invaded it and taken one of its three towns. The mere approach of so large a force immediately compelled the Phocians to relinquish their conquest, but it was soon seen that this was only a small part of the objects of Sparta, and that her main purpose, under instigation of the Corinthians, was, to arrest the aggrandisement of Athens. It could not escape the penetration of Corinth, that the Athenians might presently either enlist or constrain the towns of Bœotia into their alliance, as they had recently acquired Megara, in addition to their previous ally Platæa: for the Bœotian federation was at this time much disorganised, and Thebes, its chief, had never recovered her ascendency since the discredit of her support lent to the Persian invasion. To strengthen Thebes and to render her ascendency effective over the Bœotian cities, was the best way of providing a neighbour at once powerful and hostile to the Athenians, so as to prevent their further aggrandisement by land: it was the same policy as Epaminondas pursued eighty years afterwards, in organising Arcadia and Messene against Sparta. Accordingly the Peloponnesian force was now employed partly in enlarging and strengthening the fortifications of Thebes herself, partly in constraining the other Bœotian cities into effective obedience to her supremacy; probably by placing their governments in the hands of citizens of known oligarchical politics, and perhaps banishing suspected opponents. To this scheme the Thebans lent themselves with earnestness; promising to keep down for the future their border neighbours, so as to spare the necessity of armies coming from Sparta.

But there was also a further design, yet more important, in contemplation by the Spartans and Corinthians. The oligarchical opposition at Athens was so bitterly hostile to the Long Walls, to Pericles, and to the democratical movement, that several of them opened a secret negotiation with the Peloponnesian leaders; inviting them into Attica, and entreating their aid in an internal rising for the purpose not only of putting a stop to the Long Walls, but also of subverting the democracy. The Peloponnesian army, while prosecuting its operations in Bœotia, waited in hopes of seeing the Athenian malcontents in arms, encamping at Tanagra on the very borders of Attica for the purpose of immediate co-operation with them. The juncture was undoubtedly one of much hazard for Athens, especially as the ostracised Cimon and his remaining friends in the city were suspected of being implicated in the conspiracy. But the Athenian leaders, aware of the Lacedæmonian operations in Bœotia, knew also what was meant by the presence of the army on their immediate borders--and took decisive measures to avert the danger. Having obtained a reinforcement of one thousand Argeians and some Thessalian horse, they marched out to Tanagra, with the full Athenian force then at home; which must of course have consisted chiefly of the old and the young, the same who had fought under Myronides at Megara; for the blockade of Ægina was still going on.

Near Tanagra a bloody battle took place between the two armies, wherein the Lacedæmonians were victorious, chiefly from the desertion of the Thessalian horse who passed over to them in the very heat of the engagement. But though the advantage was on their side, it was not sufficiently decisive to favour the contemplated rising in Attica. Nor did the Peloponnesians gain anything by it except an undisturbed retreat over the high lands of Geranea, after having partially ravaged the Megarid.

CIMON RECALLED

Though the battle of Tanagra was a defeat, yet there were circumstances connected with it which rendered its effects highly beneficial to Athens. The ostracised Cimon presented himself on the field, as soon as the army had passed over the boundaries of Attica, requesting to be allowed to occupy his station as a hoplite and fight in the ranks of his tribe--the Œneis. But such was the belief, entertained by the members of the senate and by his political enemies present, that he was an accomplice in the conspiracy known to be on foot, that permission was refused and he was forced to retire. In departing he conjured his personal friends, Euthippus (of the deme Anaphlystus) and others, to behave in such a manner as might wipe away the stain resting upon his fidelity, and in part also upon theirs. His friends retained his panoply and assigned to it the station in the ranks which he would himself have occupied: they then entered the engagement with desperate resolution and one hundred of them fell side by side in their ranks. Pericles, on his part, who was present among the hoplites of his own tribe the Acamantii, aware of this application and repulse of Cimon, thought it incumbent upon him to display not merely his ordinary personal courage, but an unusual recklessness of life and safety, though it happened that he escaped unwounded. All these incidents brought about a generous sympathy and spirit of compromise among the contending parties at Athens; while the unshaken patriotism of Cimon and his friends discountenanced and disarmed those conspirators who had entered into correspondence with the enemy, at the same time that it roused a repentant admiration towards the ostracised leader himself. Such was the happy working of this new sentiment that a decree was shortly proposed and carried--proposed too by Pericles himself--to abridge the ten years of Cimon’s ostracism, and permit his immediate return.

We may recollect that under circumstances partly analogous, Themistocles had himself proposed the restoration of his rival Aristides from ostracism, a little before the battle of Salamis: and in both cases, the suspension of enmity between the two leaders was partly the sign, partly also the auxiliary cause, of reconciliation and renewed fraternity among the general body of citizens. It was a moment analogous to that salutary impulse of compromise, and harmony of parties, which followed the extinction of the oligarchy of Four Hundred, forty-six years afterwards, and on which Thucydides dwells emphatically as the salvation of Athens in her distress--a moment rare in free communities generally, not less than among the jealous competitors for political ascendency at Athens.

So powerful was this burst of fresh patriotism and unanimity after the battle of Tanagra, which produced the recall of Cimon and appears to have overlaid the pre-existing conspiracy, that the Athenians were quickly in a condition to wipe off the stain of their defeat. It was on the sixty-second day after the battle that they undertook an aggressive march under Myronides into Bœotia: the extreme precision of this date (being the single case throughout the summary of events between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars wherein Thucydides is thus precise) marks how strong an impression it made upon the memory of the Athenians. At the battle of Œnophyta, engaged against the aggregate Theban and Bœotian forces, or, if Diodorus is to be trusted, in two battles, of which that of Œnophyta was the last, Myronides was completely victorious. The Athenians became masters of Thebes as well as of the remaining Bœotian towns; reversing all the arrangements recently made by Sparta, establishing democratical governments, and forcing the aristocratical leaders, favourable to Theban ascendency and Lacedæmonian connection, to become exiles. Nor was it only Bœotia which the Athenians thus acquired; Phocis and Locris were both successively added to the list of their dependent allies, the former being in the main friendly to Athens and not disinclined to the change, while the latter were so decidedly hostile that one hundred of their chiefs were detained and sent to Athens as hostages. The Athenians thus extended their influence, maintained through internal party-management, backed by the dread of interference from without in case of need, from the borders of the Corinthian territory, including both Megara and Pegæ, to the strait of Thermopylæ.

[Sidenote: [457-456 B.C.]]

These important acquisitions were soon crowned by the completion of the Long Walls and the conquest of Ægina. That island, doubtless starved out by its protracted blockade, was forced to capitulate on condition of destroying its fortifications, surrendering all its ships of war, and submitting to annual tribute as a dependent ally of Athens. The reduction of this once powerful maritime city marked Athens as mistress of the sea on the Peloponnesian coast not less than on the Ægean. Her admiral Tolmides displayed her strength by sailing round Peloponnesus, and even by the insult of burning the Lacedæmonian ports of Methone and of Gythium. He took Chalcis, a possession of the Corinthians, and Naupactus belonging to the Ozolian Locrians, near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, disembarked troops near Sicyon, with some advantage in a battle against opponents from that town, and either gained or forced into the Athenian alliance not only Zacynthus and Cephallenia, but also some of the towns of Achaia; for we afterwards find these latter attached to Athens without knowing when the connection began. During the ensuing year the Athenians renewed their attack upon Sicyon, with a force of one thousand hoplites under Pericles himself, sailing from the Megarian harbour of Pegæ in the Crissæan Gulf. This eminent man, however, gained no greater advantage than Tolmides, defeating the Sicyonian forces in the field and driving them within their walls. He afterwards made an expedition into Acarnania, taking the Achæan allies in addition to his own forces, but miscarried in his attack on Œniadæ and accomplished nothing. Nor were the Athenians more successful in a march undertaken this same year against Thessaly, for the purpose of restoring Orestes, one of the exiled princes or nobles of Pharsalus. Though they took with them an imposing force, including their Bœotian and Phocian allies, the powerful Thessalian cavalry forced them to keep in a compact body and confined them to the ground actually occupied by their hoplites; while all their attempts against the city failed, and their hopes of internal rising were disappointed.

Had the Athenians succeeded in Thessaly, they would have acquired to their alliance nearly the whole of extra-Peloponnesian Greece. But even without Thessaly their power was prodigious, and had now attained a maximum height from which it never varied except to decline. As a counter-balancing loss against so many successes, we have to reckon their ruinous defeat in Egypt, after a war of six years against the Persians (460-455 B.C.). At first they had gained brilliant advantages, in conjunction with the insurgent prince Inarus; expelling the Persians from all Memphis except that strongest part called the White Fortress. And such was the alarm of the Persian king Artaxerxes at the presence of the Athenians in Egypt, that he sent Megabazus with a large sum of money to Sparta, in order to induce the Lacedæmonians to invade Attica. This envoy however failed, and an augmented Persian force, being sent to Egypt under Megabyzus, son of Zopyrus, drove the Athenians and their allies, after an obstinate struggle, out of Memphis into the island of the Nile called Prosopitis. Here they were blocked up for eighteen months, until at length Megabyzus turned the arm of the river, laid the channel dry, and stormed the island by land. A very few Athenians escaped by land to Cyrene: the rest were either slain or made captive, and Inarus himself was crucified. And the calamity of Athens was farther aggravated by the arrival of fifty fresh Athenian ships, which, coming after the defeat, but without being aware of it, sailed into the Mendesian branch of the Nile, and thus fell unawares into the power of the Persians and Phœnicians, very few either of the ships or men escaping. The whole of Egypt became again subject to the Persians, except Amyrtæus, who contrived by retiring into the inaccessible fens still to maintain his independence. One of the largest armaments ever sent forth by Athens and her confederacy was thus utterly ruined.

It was about the time of the destruction of the Athenian army in Egypt, and of the circumnavigation of Peloponnesus by Tolmides, that the internal war, carried on by the Lacedæmonians against the helots or Messenians at Ithome, ended. These besieged men, no longer able to stand out against a protracted blockade, were forced to abandon this last fortress of ancient Messenian independence, stipulating for a safe retreat from the Peloponnesus with their wives and families; with the proviso that if any one of them ever returned to Peloponnesus, he should become the slave of the first person who seized him. They were established by Tolmides at Naupactus (recently taken by the Athenians from the Ozolian Locrians), where they will be found rendering good service to Athens in the following wars.

THE FIVE-YEARS’ TRUCE

[Sidenote: [455-448 B.C.]]

After the victory of Tanagra, the Lacedæmonians made no further expeditions out of Peloponnesus for several succeeding years, not even to prevent Bœotia and Phocis from being absorbed into the Athenian alliance. The reason of this remissness lay, partly, in their general character; partly, in the continuance of the siege of Ithome, which occupied them at home; but still more perhaps, in the fact that the Athenians, masters of the Megarid, were in occupation of the road over the high lands of Geranea, and could therefore obstruct the march of any army out from Peloponnesus. Even after the surrender of Ithome, the Lacedæmonians remained inactive for three years, after which time a formal truce was concluded with Athens by the Peloponnesians generally, for five years longer. This truce was concluded in a great degree through the influence of Cimon, who was eager to resume effective operations against the Persians; while it was not less suitable to the political interest of Pericles that his most distinguished rival should be absent on foreign service, so as not to interfere with his influence at home. Accordingly Cimon, having equipped a fleet of two hundred triremes from Athens and her confederates, set sail for Cyprus, from whence he despatched sixty ships to Egypt, at the request of the insurgent prince Amyrtæus, who was still maintaining himself against the Persians amidst the fens--while with the remaining armament he laid siege to Citium. In the prosecution of this siege, he died either of disease or of a wound. The armament, under his successor Anaxicrates, became so embarrassed for want of provisions that they abandoned the undertaking altogether, and went to fight the Phœnician and Cilician fleet near Salamis in Cyprus. They were here victorious, first on sea and afterwards on land, though probably not on the same day, as at the Eurymedon; after which they returned home, followed by the sixty ships which had gone to Egypt for the purpose of aiding Amyrtæus.

From this time forward no further operations were undertaken by Athens and her confederacy against the Persians. And it appears that a convention was concluded between them, whereby the Great King on his part promised two things: To leave free, undisturbed, and untaxed, the Asiatic maritime Greeks, not sending troops within a given distance of the coast: To refrain from sending any ships of war either westward of Phaselis (others place the boundary at the Chelidonean islands, rather more to the westward) or within the Cyanean rocks at the confluence of the Thracian Bosporus with the Euxine. On their side the Athenians agreed to leave him in undisturbed possession of Cyprus and Egypt. This was called the Peace of Callias.

We may believe in the reality of this treaty between Athens and Persia, improperly called the Cimonian Treaty: improperly, since not only was it concluded after the death of Cimon, but the Athenian victories by which it was immediately brought on, were gained after his death. Nay more--the probability is, that if Cimon had lived, it would not have been concluded at all. For his interest as well as his glory led him to prosecute the war against Persia, since he was no match for his rival Pericles either as a statesman or as an orator, and could only maintain his popularity by the same means whereby he had earned it--victories and plunder at the cost of the Persians. His death ensured more complete ascendency to Pericles whose policy and character were of a cast altogether opposite.

THE CONFEDERACY BECOMES AN EMPIRE

Athens was now at peace both abroad and at home, under the administration of Pericles, with a great empire, a great fleet, and a great accumulated treasure. The common fund collected from the contributions of the confederates, and originally deposited at Delos, had before this time been transferred to the Acropolis at Athens. At what precise time such transfer took place, we cannot state: nor are we enabled to assign the successive stages whereby the confederacy, chiefly with the free will of its own members, became transformed from a body of armed and active warriors under the guidance of Athens, into disarmed and passive tribute-payers defended by the military force of Athens: from allies free, meeting at Delos, and self-determining into subjects isolated, sending their annual tribute, and awaiting Athenian orders. But it would appear that the change had been made before this time. Some of the more resolute of the allies had tried to secede, but Athens had coerced them by force, and reduced them to the condition of tribute-payers without ships or defence; and Chios, Lesbos, and Samos were now the only allies free and armed on the original footing. Every successive change of an armed ally into a tributary, every subjugation of a seceder, tended of course to cut down the numbers, and enfeeble the authority of the Delian synod; and, what was still worse, it materially altered the reciprocal relation and feelings both of Athens and her allies--exalting the former into something like a despot, and degrading the latter into mere passive subjects.

Of course the palpable manifestation of the change must have been the transfer of the confederate fund from Delos to Athens. The only circumstance which we know respecting this transfer is, that it was proposed by the Samians--the second power in the confederacy, inferior only to Athens, and least of all likely to favour any job or sinister purpose of the Athenians.

Such transition, arising spontaneously out of the character and circumstances of the confederates themselves, was thus materially forwarded by the acquisitions of Athens extraneous to the confederacy. She was now not merely the first maritime state in Greece, but perhaps equal to Sparta even in land-power, possessing in her alliance Megara, Bœotia, Phocis, Locris, together with Achaia and Trœzen in the Peloponnesus. Large as this aggregate already was, both at sea and on land, yet the magnitude of the annual tribute, and still more the character of the Athenians themselves, superior to all Greeks in that combination of energy and discipline which is the grand cause of progress, threatened still further increase. Occupying the Megarian harbour of Pegæ, the Athenians had full means of naval action on both sides of the Corinthian isthmus: but what was of still greater importance to them, by their possession of the Megarid and of the high lands of Geranea, they could restrain any land-force from marching out of the Peloponnesus, and were thus (considering besides their mastery at sea) completely unassailable in Attica. Ever since the repulse of Xerxes, Athens had been advancing in an uninterrupted course of power and prosperity at home, as well as of victory and ascendency abroad--to which there was no exception except the ruinous enterprise in Egypt.

[Sidenote: [448-446 B.C.]]

Looking at the position of Greece therefore about 448 B.C.--after the conclusion of five years’ truce between the Peloponnesians and Athens, and of the so-called Cimonian Peace between Persia and Athens--a discerning Greek might well calculate upon further aggrandisement of this imperial state as the tendency of the age; and accustomed as every Greek was to the conception of separate town-autonomy as essential to a freeman and a citizen, such prospect could not but inspire terror and aversion. The sympathy of the Peloponnesians for the islanders and ultra-maritime states, who constituted the original confederacy of Athens, was not considerable. But when the Dorian island of Ægina was subjugated also, and passed into the condition of a defenceless tributary, they felt the blow sorely on every ground. The ancient celebrity, and eminent service rendered at the battle of Salamis, of this memorable island, had not been able to protect it; while those great Æginetan families, whose victories at the sacred festival-games Pindar celebrates in a large proportion of his odes, would spread the language of complaint and indignation throughout their numerous “guests” in every Hellenic city. Of course, the same anti-Athenian feeling would pervade those Peloponnesian states which had been engaged in actual hostility with Athens--Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, etc., as well as Sparta, the once-recognised head of Hellas, but now tacitly degraded from her pre-eminence, baffled in her projects respecting Bœotia, and exposed to the burning of her port at Gythium without being able even to retaliate upon Attica. Putting all those circumstances together, we may comprehend the powerful feeling of dislike and apprehension now diffused so widely over Greece against the upstart despot-city; whose ascendency, newly acquired, maintained by superior force, and not recognised as legitimate, threatened nevertheless still further increase. Sixteen years hence, this same sentiment will be found exploding into the Peloponnesian War. But it became rooted in the Greek mind during the period which we have now reached, when Athens was much more formidable than she had come to be at the commencement of that war: nor shall we thoroughly appreciate the ideas of that later period, unless we take them as handed down from the earlier date of the five years’ truce (about 451-446 B.C.).

COMMENCEMENT OF DECLINE

Formidable as the Athenian empire both really was and appeared to be, however, this widespread feeling of antipathy proved still stronger, so that instead of the threatened increase, the empire underwent a most material diminution. This did not arise from the attack of open enemies; for during the five years’ truce, Sparta undertook only one movement, and that not against Attica: she sent troops to Delphi, in an expedition dignified with the name of the Sacred War--expelled the Phocians, who had assumed to themselves the management of the temple--and restored it to the native Delphians. To this the Athenians made no direct opposition, but as soon as the Lacedæmonians were gone, they themselves marched thither and placed the temple again in the hands of the Phocians, who were then their allies. The Delphians were members of the Phocian league, and there was a dispute of old standing as to the administration of the temple--whether it belonged to them separately or to the Phocians collectively. The favour of those who administered it counted as an element of considerable moment in Grecian politics; the sympathies of the leading Delphians led them to embrace the side of Sparta, but the Athenians now hoped to counteract this tendency by means of their preponderance in Phocis. We are not told that the Lacedæmonians took any ulterior step in consequence of their views being frustrated by Athens--a significant evidence of the politics of that day.

[Sidenote: [447 B.C.]]

The blow which brought down the Athenian empire from this its greatest exaltation was struck by the subjects themselves. The Athenian ascendency over Bœotia, Phocis, Locris, and Eubœa, was maintained, not by means of garrisons, but through domestic parties favourable to Athens, and a suitable form of government--just in the same way as Sparta maintained her influence over her Peloponnesian allies. After the victory of Œnophyta, the Athenians had broken up the governments in the Bœotian cities established by Sparta before the battle of Tanagra, and converted them into democracies at Thebes and elsewhere. Many of the previous leading men had thus been sent into exile; and as the same process had taken place in Phocis and Locris, there was at this time a considerable aggregate body of exiles, Bœotian, Phocian, Locrian, Eubœan, Æginetan, etc., all bitterly hostile to Athens, and ready to join in any attack upon her power. We learn further that the democracy established at Thebes after the battle of Œnophyta was ill conducted and disorderly, which circumstance laid open Bœotia still further to the schemes of assailants on the watch for every weak point. These various exiles, all joining their forces and concerting measures with their partisans in the interior, succeeded in mastering Orchomenos, Chæronea, and some other less important places in Bœotia.

The Athenian general Tolmides marched to expel them, with one thousand Athenian hoplites and an auxiliary body of allies. It appears that this march was undertaken in haste and rashness. The hoplites of Tolmides principally youthful volunteers and belonging to the best families of Athens, disdained the enemy too much to await a larger and more commanding force: nor would the people listen even to Pericles, when he admonished them that the march would be full of hazard, and adjured them not to attempt it without greater numbers as well as greater caution. Fatally indeed were his predictions justified. Though Tolmides was successful in his first enterprise--the recapture of Chæronea, wherein he placed a garrison--yet in his march, probably incautious and disorderly, when departing from that place, he was surprised and attacked unawares, near Coronea, by the united body of exiles and their partisans.

No defeat in Grecian history was ever more complete or ruinous. Tolmides himself was slain, together with many of the Athenian hoplites, while a large number of them were taken prisoners. In order to recover these prisoners, who belonged to the best families in the city, the Athenians submitted to a convention whereby they agreed to evacuate Bœotia altogether: in all the cities of that country the exiles were restored, the democratical government overthrown, and Bœotia was transformed from an ally of Athens into her bitter enemy. Long indeed did the fatal issue of this action dwell in the memory of the Athenians, and inspire them with an apprehension of Bœotian superiority in heavy armour on land. But if the hoplites under Tolmides had been all slain on the field, their death would probably have been avenged and Bœotia would not have been lost--whereas in the case of living citizens, the Athenians deemed no sacrifice too great to redeem them. We shall discover hereafter in the Lacedæmonians a feeling very similar, respecting their brethren captured at Sphacteria.

[Sidenote: [447-445 B.C.]]

The calamitous consequences of this defeat came upon Athens in thick and rapid succession. The united exiles, having carried their point in Bœotia, proceeded to expel the philo-Athenian government both from Phocis and Locris, and to carry the flame of revolt into Eubœa. To this important island Pericles himself proceeded forthwith, at the head of a powerful force; but before he had time to complete the reconquest, he was summoned home by news of a still more formidable character. The Megarians had revolted from Athens. By a conspiracy previously planned, a division of hoplites from Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, was already admitted as garrison into their city: the Athenian soldiers who kept watch over the Long Walls had been overpowered and slain, except a few who escaped into the fortified port of Nisæa. As if to make the Athenians at once sensible how seriously this disaster affected them, by throwing open the road over Geranea, Plistoanax, king of Sparta, was announced as already on his march for an invasion of Attica. He did in truth conduct an army, of mixed Lacedæmonians and Peloponnesian allies, into Attica, as far as the neighbourhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain. He was a very young man, so that a Spartan of mature years, Cleandridas, had been attached to him by the ephors as adjutant and counsellor. Pericles, it is said, persuaded both the one and the other, by means of large bribes, to evacuate Attica without advancing to Athens. We may fairly doubt whether they had force enough to adventure so far into the interior, and we shall hereafter observe the great precautions with which Archidamus thought it necessary to conduct his invasion, during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, though at the head of a more commanding force. Nevertheless, on their return, the Lacedæmonians, believing that they might have achieved it, found both of them guilty of corruption. Both were banished: Cleandridas never came back, and Plistoanax himself lived for a long time in sanctuary near the temple of Athene at Tegea, until at length he procured his restoration by tampering with the Pythian priestess, and by bringing her bought admonitions to act upon the authorities at Sparta.

So soon as the Lacedæmonians had retired from Attica, Pericles returned with his forces to Eubœa, and reconquered the island completely. With that caution which always distinguished him as a military man, so opposite to the fatal rashness of Tolmides, he took with him an overwhelming force of fifty triremes and five thousand hoplites. He admitted most of the Eubœan towns to surrender, altering the government of Chalcis by the expulsion of the wealthy oligarchy called the hippobotæ. But the inhabitants of Histiæa at the north of the island, who had taken an Athenian merchantman and massacred all the crew, were more severely dealt with, the free population being all or in great part expelled, and the land distributed among Athenian cleruchs or out-settled citizens.

[Sidenote: [445-440 B.C.]]

Yet the reconquest of Eubœa was far from restoring Athens to the position which she had occupied before the fatal engagement of Coronea. Her land-empire was irretrievably gone, together with her recently acquired influence over the Delphian oracle; and she reverted to her former condition of an exclusively maritime potentate. Moreover, the precarious hold which she possessed over unwilling allies had been demonstrated in a manner likely to encourage similar attempts among her maritime subjects; attempts which would now be seconded by Peloponnesian armies invading Attica. The fear of such a combination of embarrassments, and especially of an irresistible enemy carrying ruin over the flourishing territory round Eleusis and Athens, was at this moment predominant in the Athenian mind. We shall find Pericles, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War fourteen years afterwards, exhausting all his persuasive force, and not succeeding without great difficulty, in prevailing upon his countrymen to endure the hardship of invasion--even in defence of their maritime empire, and when events had been gradually so ripening as to render the prospect of war familiar, if not inevitable. But the late series of misfortunes had burst upon them so rapidly and unexpectedly, as to discourage even Athenian confidence, and to render the prospect of continued war full of gloom and danger. The prudence of Pericles would doubtless counsel the surrender of their remaining landed possessions or alliances, which had now become unprofitable, in order to purchase peace; but we may be sure that nothing short of extreme temporary despondency could have induced the Athenian assembly to listen to such advice, and to accept the inglorious peace which followed. A truce for thirty years was concluded with Sparta and her allies, in the beginning of 445 B.C., whereby Athens surrendered Nisæa, Pegæ, Achaia, and Trœzen--thus abandoning the Peloponnesus altogether, and leaving the Megarians (with their full territory and their two ports) to be included among the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta.

It was to the Megarians, especially, that the altered position of Athens after this truce was owing: it was their secession from Attica and junction with the Peloponnesians, which laid open Attica to invasion. Hence arose the deadly hatred on the part of the Athenians towards Megara, manifested during the ensuing years--a sentiment the more natural, as Megara had spontaneously sought the alliance of Athens a few years before as a protection against the Corinthians, and had then afterwards, without any known ill-usage on the part of Athens, broken off from the alliance and become her enemy, with the fatal consequence of rendering her vulnerable on the land-side. Under such circumstances we shall not be surprised to find the antipathy of the Athenians against Megara strongly pronounced, insomuch that the system of exclusion which they adopted against her was among the most prominent causes of the Peloponnesian War.[d]

THE GREATNESS OF PERICLES

Athens now rested six years, unengaged in any hostilities; a longer interval of perfect peace than she had before known in above forty years elapsed since she rose from her ashes after the Persian invasion. It is a wonderful and singular phenomenon in the history of mankind, little accounted for by anything recorded by ancient, or imagined by modern writers, that, during this period of turbulence, in a commonwealth whose whole population in free subjects amounted scarcely to thirty thousand families, art, science, fine taste, and politeness should have risen to that perfection which has made Athens the mistress of the world through all succeeding ages. Some sciences indeed have been carried higher in modern times, and art has put forth new branches, of which some have given new helps to science: but Athens, in that age, reached a perfection of taste that no country has since surpassed; but on the contrary all have looked up to, as a polar star, by which, after sinking in the deepest barbarism, taste has been guided in its restoration to splendour, and the observation of which will probably ever be the surest preservative against its future corruption and decay.

One great point of the policy of Pericles was to keep the people always either amused or employed. During peace an exercising squadron of sixty trireme galleys was sent out for eight months in every year. Nor was this without a further use than merely engaging the attention of the people, and maintaining the navy in vigour. He sometimes took the command in person: and, sailing among the distant dependencies of the empire, settled disputes between them, and confirmed the power and extended the influence of Athens. The Ægean and the Propontis did not bound his voyages: he penetrated into the Euxine; and finding the distant Grecian settlement of Sinope divided between Timesileus, who affected the tyranny, and an opposing party, he left there Lamachus with thirteen ships, and a land-force with whose assistance to the popular side the tyrant and those of his faction were expelled. The justice of what followed may indeed appear questionable. Their houses and property, apportioned into six hundred lots, were offered to so many Athenian citizens; and volunteers were not wanting to accept the offer, and settle at Sinope. To disburden the government at home, by providing advantageous establishments, in distant parts, for the poor and discontented among the sovereign citizens of Athens, was a policy more than once resorted to by Pericles. It was during his administration, in the year, according to Diodorus, in which the Thirty Years’ Truce was concluded, that the deputation came from the Thessalian adventurers who had been expelled by the Crotoniats from their attempted establishment in the deserted territory of Sybaris, in consequence of which, under his patronage, the colony was settled with which the historian Herodotus then, and afterward the orator Lysias, passing to Thurii, both established themselves there.

A GREEK FEDERATION PLANNED

Plutarch has attributed to Pericles a noble project, unnoticed by any earlier extant author, but worthy of his capacious mind, and otherwise also bearing some characters of authenticity and truth. It was no less than to unite all Greece under one great federal government, of which Athens should be the capital. But the immediate and direct avowal of such a purpose would be likely to raise jealousies so numerous and extensive as to form insuperable obstacles to the execution. The religion of the nation was that alone in which the Grecian people universally claimed a clear common interest; and even in this every town and almost every family claimed something peculiar to itself. In the vehemence of public alarm, during the Persian invasion, vows had been, in some places, made to the gods for sacrifices, to an extent beyond what the votaries, when blessed with deliverance beyond hope, were able to perform; and some temples, destroyed by the invaders, were not yet restored; probably because the means of those in whose territories they had stood were deficient. Taking these circumstances then for his ground, Pericles proposed that a congress of deputies from every republic of the nation should be assembled at Athens, for the purpose first of inquiring concerning vows for the safety of Greece yet unperformed, and temples, injured by the barbarians, not yet restored; and then of proceeding to concert measures for the lasting security of navigation in the Grecian seas, and for the preservation of peace by land also between all the states composing the Greek nation. The naval question, but still more the ruin which, in the Persian invasion, had befallen northern Greece, and especially Attica, while Peloponnesus had felt nothing of its evils, gave pretensions for Athens to take the lead in the business. On the motion of Pericles, a decree of the Athenian people directed the appointment of ministers to invite every Grecian state to send its deputies. Plutarch, rarely attentive to political information, has not at all indicated what attention was shown, or what participation proposed, for Lacedæmon. His prejudices indeed we find very generally adverse to the Lacedæmonian government, and favouring the Athenian democracy. But, judging from the friendship which, according to the authentic information of Thucydides, subsisted between Pericles and Archidamus, king of Lacedæmon, through life, it is little likely that, in putting forward the project for the peace of Greece, Pericles would have proposed anything derogatory to the just weight and dignity of Sparta; which indeed would have been, with peace the pretence, only putting forward a project of contest.

Pericles, when he formed his coalition with Cimon, seems to have entered heartily into the enlarged views of that great man; and, with the hope that, through their coalition, both the oligarchical and the democratical powers in Athens might be held justly balanced, had early in view to establish the peace of Greece on a union between Athens and Lacedæmon. It is however evident, from the narrative of Thucydides, that Archidamus rarely could direct the measures of the Lacedæmonian government. On a view of all information, then, it may seem probable that the project of Pericles was concerted with Archidamus; and that the opposition of those in Lacedæmon, of an adverse faction concurred with opposition from those in Athens, who apprehended injury to their interests from a new coalition with the aristocratical party, to compel the great projector to abandon his magnificent and beneficent purpose.[f]

FOOTNOTES

[45] Plutarch tells a story--characteristic if not true--of a rude fellow who, after railing at Pericles all day, as he was transacting business in public, followed him after dusk with abusive language to his door, when Pericles ordered one of his servants to take a light, and conduct the man home.

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XXV. ATHENS AT WAR

Peace between Lacedæmon and Athens was indispensable towards the quiet of the rest of the nation, but, in the want of such a union as Pericles had projected, was unfortunately far from being insured; and, when war began anywhere, though among the most distant settlements of the Grecian people, how far it might extend was not to be foreseen. A dispute between two Asiatic states of the Athenian confederacy led Athens into a war which greatly endangered the truce made for thirty years, when it had scarcely lasted six. Miletus and Samos, each claiming the sovereignty of Priene, originally a free Grecian commonwealth, asserted their respective pretensions by arms. The Milesians, not till they were suffering under defeat, applied to Athens for redress, as of a flagrant injury done them. The usual feuds within every Grecian state furnished assistance to their clamour; for, the aristocracy prevailing at that time in Samos, the leaders of the democratical party joined the enemies of their country in accusing the proceedings of its government before the Athenian people.

THE SAMIAN WAR

[Sidenote: [440-439 B.C.]]

The opposition at Athens maliciously imputed the measures following to the weak compliance of Pericles with the solicitations of Aspasia in favour of her native city; but it appears clearly, from Thucydides, that no such motive was needful: the Athenian government would of course take cognisance of the cause; and, as might be expected, a requisition was sent to the Samian administration to answer, by deputies at Athens, to the charges urged against them. The Samians, unwilling to submit their claim to the arbitration of those who they knew were always systematically adverse to the aristocratical interest, refused to send deputies. A fleet of forty trireme galleys however brought them to immediate submission; their government was changed to a democracy, in which those who had headed the opposition of course took the lead; and to insure permanent acquiescence from the aristocratical party, fifty men and fifty boys, of the first families of the island, were taken as hostages, and placed under an Athenian guard in the island of Lemnos.

What Herodotus mentions, as an observation applicable generally, we may readily believe was on this occasion experienced in Samos, “that the lower people were most unpleasant associates to the nobles.” A number of these, unable to support the oppression to which they found themselves exposed, quitted the island, and applied to Pissuthnes, satrap of Sardis. The project of conquering Greece by arms appears to have been abandoned by the Persian government; but the urgency for constantly watching its politics, and interfering, as occasion might offer, with a view to the safety, if not to the extension, of the western border of the empire, was obvious; and it appears that the western satraps were instructed accordingly. The Samian refugees were favourably received by Pissuthnes. They corresponded with many of their party yet remaining in the island, and they engaged in their interest the city of Byzantium, itself a subject ally of Athens. Collecting then about seven hundred auxiliary soldiers, they crossed by night the narrow channel which separates Samos from the continent, and, being joined by their friends, they surprised and overpowered the new administration. Without delay they proceeded to Lemnos, and so well conducted their enterprise that they carried off their hostages, together with the Athenian guard set over them. To win then more effectually the favour of the satrap, the Athenian prisoners were presented to him. Assured of assistance from Byzantium, being also not without hopes from Lacedæmon, they prepared to prosecute their success by immediately undertaking an expedition against Miletus.

Information of these transactions arriving quickly at Athens, Pericles, with nine others, according to the ancient military constitution, joined with him in command, hastened to Samos with a fleet of sixty trireme galleys. Pericles met the Samian fleet and defeated it. He debarked his infantry on the island of Samos, and laid siege to the city by land and sea.

In the ninth month from the commencement of the siege, it capitulated: the ships of war were surrendered, the fortifications were destroyed, the Samians bound themselves to the payment of a sum of money by instalment for the expenses of the war, and gave hostages as pledges of their fidelity to the sovereign commonwealth of Athens. The Byzantines, not waiting the approach of the coercing fleet, sent their request to be readmitted to their former terms of subjection, which was granted.

This rebellion, alarming and troublesome at the time to the administration of Athens, otherwise little disturbed the internal peace of the commonwealth; and, in the event, contributed rather to strengthen its command over its dependencies. Pericles took occasion from it to acquire fresh popularity. On the return of the armament to Athens the accustomed solemnities, in honour of those who had fallen in the war, were performed with new splendour; and, in speaking the funeral oration, he exerted the powers of his eloquence very highly to the gratification of the people. As he descended from the bema, the stand whence orations were delivered to the people, the women presented him with chaplets; an idea derived from the ceremonies of the public games, where the crowning with a chaplet was the distinction of the victors, and, as something approaching to divine honour, was held among the highest tokens of admiration, esteem, and respect.

THE WAR WITH CORCYRA

[Sidenote: [439-435 B.C.]]

The threatened renewal of general war in Greece having been obviated by the determination of the Peloponnesian congress not to interfere between the Athenians and their Asiatic allies, peace prevailed during the next three years after the submission of the Samians; or, if hostilities occurred anywhere, they were of so little importance that no account of them remains. A fatal spark then, raising fire in a corner of the country hitherto little within the notice of history, the blaze rapidly spread over the whole with inextinguishable fury; insomuch that the further history of Greece, with some splendid episodes, is chiefly a tale of calamities, which the nation, in ceaseless exertions of misdirected valour and genius, brought upon itself.

The island of Corcyra had been occupied, in an early age, by a colony from Corinth. The political connection of colonies with the mother-country will always depend upon their respective strength; and the Grecian colonies, all having been the offspring of very small states, in many instances acquired more than the parent’s force. Corcyra, already populous, had not yet entirely broken its connection with Corinth, when the resolution was taken by its government to settle a colony on the Illyrian coast. An embassy was therefore sent, in due form, to desire a Corinthian for the leader. Phaleus, of a family boasting its descent from Hercules, was accordingly appointed to that honour: some Corinthians and others of Dorian race accompanied him; and Phaleus thus became the nominal founder of Epidamnus, which was however considered as a Corcyræan, not a Corinthian colony.

But in process of time Epidamnus, growing populous and wealthy, followed the example of its mother-country, asserted independency, and maintained the claim. Like most other Grecian cities, it was then, during many years, torn by sedition; and a war supervening with the neighbouring barbarians, it fell much from its former flourishing state. But the spirit of faction remaining in spite of misfortune untamed, the commonalty at length expelled all the higher citizens. These, finding refuge among the Illyrians, engaged with them in a predatory war, which was unremittingly carried on against the city by land and sea. Unable thus to rest, and almost to subsist, the Epidamnians in possession requested assistance from Corcyra. This humble supplication however being rejected, they hastened a deputation to Corinth.

Fortunately for their object, though peace had not yet been broken, yet animosity between Corinth and Corcyra had so risen that the Corcyræans, who had long refused political dependency, now denied to the Corinthians all those honours and compliments usually paid by Grecian colonies to their parent states. Under stimulation thus from affront, and with encouragement from the oracle, the prospect of an acquisition of dominion was too tempting, and the proposal of the Epidamnians was accepted. But Corinth had at this time only thirty ships of war, whereas Corcyra was able to put to sea near four times the number; being, next to Athens, the most powerful maritime state of Greece. Application for naval assistance was therefore made to the republics with which Corinth was most bound in friendship, and thus more than forty vessels were obtained. It had been the settled policy of the Corcyræans, islanders and strong at sea, to engage in no alliances. They had avoided both the Peloponnesian and the Athenian confederacy; and hitherto with this policy they had prospered. But, alarmed now at the combination formed against them, and fearing it might still be extended, they sent ambassadors to Lacedæmon and Sicyon; who prevailed so far that ministers from those two states accompanied them to Corinth, as mediators in the existing differences. In presence of these the Corcyræan ambassadors proposed to submit the matters in dispute to the arbitration of any Peloponnesian states, or to the Delphian oracle, which the Corinthians had supposed already favourable to them. The Corinthians however, now prepared for war, and apparently persuaded that neither Lacedæmon nor Sicyon would take any active part against them, refused to treat upon any equal terms, and the Corcyræan ambassadors departed (435 B.C.).

[Sidenote: [435-433 B.C.]]

The Corinthians then hastened to use the force they had collected. The Corcyræans had manned those of their ships which were already equipped, and hastily prepared some of those less in readiness, when their herald returned, bearing no friendly answer. With eighty galleys then they quitted their port, met the enemy off Actium, and gained a complete victory, destroying fifteen ships. Returning to Corcyra, they erected their trophy on the headland of Leucimme, and they immediately put to death all their prisoners, except the Corinthians, whom, as pledges, they kept in bonds. Epidamnus surrendered to their forces on the same day.

The opportunities now open, for both revenge and profit, were not neglected by the Corcyræans. During that year, unopposed on the sea, there was scarcely an intermission of their smaller enterprises; by some of which they gained booty, by others only gave alarm, but by all together greatly distressed the Corinthians and their allies (434 B.C.).

But since their misfortune off Actium the Corinthians had been unremittingly assiduous in repairing their loss, and in preparing to revenge it. Triremes were built, all necessaries for a fleet were largely collected, rowers were engaged throughout Peloponnesus, and where else in any part of Greece they could be obtained for hire. The Corcyræans, informed of these measures, notwithstanding their past success were uneasy with the consideration that their commonwealth stood single, while their enemies were members of an extensive confederacy; of which, though a part only had yet been induced to act, more powerful exertions were nevertheless to be apprehended. In this state of things it appeared necessary to abandon their ancient policy, and to seek alliances. Thucydides gives us to understand that they would have preferred the Peloponnesian to the Athenian confederacy; induced, apparently, both by their kindred origin, and their kindred form of government. But they were precluded by the circumstances of the existing war, Corinth being one of the most considerable members of the Peloponnesian confederacy; and it was beyond hope that Lacedæmon could be engaged in measures hostile to so old and useful an ally. It was therefore finally resolved to send an embassy to Athens. As soon as the purpose of the Corcyræans was known at Corinth, ambassadors were sent thence to Athens to remonstrate against it.

The Athenian people were assembled to receive the two embassies, each of which, in presence of the other, made its proposition in a formal oration. The point to be determined was highly critical for Athens. A truce existed, but not a peace, with a confederacy inferior in naval force, but far superior by land; and Attica, a continental territory, was open to attack by land. But next to Athens Corcyra was the most powerful maritime republic; and to prevent the accession of its strength, through alliance, or through conquest, to the Peloponnesian confederacy, was, for the Athenian people, highly important. In the articles of the truce moreover it was expressly stipulated, that any Grecian state, not yet a member of either confederacy, might at pleasure be admitted to either. But, notwithstanding this, it was little less than certain that, in the present circumstances, an alliance with Corcyra must lead to a rupture with the Peloponnesians; and this consideration occasioned much suspense in the minds of the Athenians. Twice the assembly was held to debate the question. On the first day, the arguments of the Corinthian ambassadors had so far effect that nothing was decided: on the second, the spirit of ambition, ordinary in democracy, prevailed, and the question was carried for alliance with Corcyra.

[Sidenote: [433 B.C.]]

Meanwhile the earnestness with which the Corinthians persevered in their purpose of prosecuting war against the Corcyræans, now to be supported by the power of Athens, appears to mark confidence in support, on their side, from the Lacedæmonian confederacy; some members of which indeed were evidently of ready zeal. The Corinthians increased their own trireme galleys to ninety. The Eleans, resenting the burning of Cyllene, had exerted themselves in naval preparation, and sent ten triremes completely manned to join them. Assistance from Megara, Leucas, and Ambracia made their whole fleet a hundred and fifty: the crews would hardly be less than forty thousand men. With this large force they sailed to Chimerium, a port of Thesprotia, over against Corcyra, where, according to the practice of the Greeks, they formed their naval camp.

The Athenian government meanwhile, desirous to confirm their new alliance, yet still anxious to avoid a rupture with the Peloponnesian confederacy, had sent ten triremes to Corcyra, under the command of Lacedæmonius, son of Cimon; but with orders not to fight, unless a descent were made on the island, or any of its towns were attacked. The Corcyræans, on receiving intelligence that the enemy was approaching, put to sea with a hundred and ten triremes, exclusive of the Athenian, and formed their naval camp on one of the small islets called Sybota, the Sow-leas or Sow-pastures, between their own island and the main. Their land-forces at the same time, with a thousand auxiliaries from Zacynthus, encamped on the headland of Leucimme in Corcyra, to be prepared against invasion; while on the opposite coast of the continent the barbarians, long since friendly to Corinth, assembled in large number. The Corinthians however, moving in the night, perceived in the dawn the Corcyræan fleet approaching. Both prepared immediately to engage.

So great a number of ships had never before met in any action between Greeks and Greeks. The onset was vigorous; and the battle was maintained, on either side, with much courage but little skill. Both Corcyræan and Corinthian ships were equipped in the ancient manner, very inartificially. The decks were crowded with soldiers, some heavy-armed, some with missile weapons; and the action, in the eye of the Athenians, trained in the discipline of Themistocles, resembled a battle of infantry rather than a sea-fight. Once engaged, the number and throng of the vessels made free motion impossible: nor was there any attempt at the rapid evolution of the diecplus, as it was called, for piercing the enemy’s line and dashing away his oars, the great objects of the improved naval tactics; but the event depended, as of old, chiefly upon the heavy-armed soldiers who fought on the decks. Tumult and confusion thus prevailing everywhere, Lacedæmonius, restrained by his orders from fighting, gave yet some assistance to the Corcyræans, by showing himself wherever he saw them particularly pressed, and alarming their enemies. The Corcyræans were, in the left of their line, successful: twenty of their ships put to flight the Megarians and Ambracians who were opposed to them, pursued to the shore, and, debarking, plundered and burnt the naval camp. But the Corinthians, in the other wing, had meanwhile been gaining an advantage which became decisive through the imprudent forwardness of the victorious Corcyræans. The Athenians now endeavoured, by more effectual assistance to their allies, to prevent a total rout; but disorder was already too prevalent, and advantage of numbers too great against them. The Corinthians pressed their success; the Corcyræans fled, the Athenians became mingled among them; and in the confusion of a running fight acts of hostility passed between the Athenians and Corinthians. The defeated however soon reached their own shore, whither the conquerors did not think proper to follow.

In the action several galleys had been sunk; most by the Corinthians, but some by the victorious part of the Corcyræan fleet. The crews had recourse, as usual, to their boats; and it was common for the conquerors, when they could seize any of these, to take them in tow and make the men prisoners: but the Corinthians, in the first moment of success, gave no quarter; and, unaware of the disaster of the right of their fleet, in the hurry and confusion of the occasion, not easily distinguishing between Greeks and Greeks, inadvertently destroyed many of their unfortunate friends. When pursuit ceased, and they had collected whatever could be recovered of the wrecks and the dead, they carried them to a desert harbour, not distant, on the Thesprotian coast, called, like the neighbouring islets, Sybota: and depositing them under the care of their barbarian allies, who were there encamped, they returned, on the afternoon of the same day, with the purpose of renewing attack upon the Corcyræan fleet.

The Corcyræans meanwhile had been considering the probable consequences of leaving the enemy masters of the sea. They dreaded descents upon their island, and consequent ravage of their lands. The return of their victorious squadron gave them new spirits: Lacedæmonius encouraged them with assurance that, since hostilities had already passed, he would no longer scruple to afford them his utmost support; and they resolved upon the bold measure of quitting their port and, though evening was already approaching, again giving the enemy battle. Instantly they proceeded to put this in execution. The pæan, the song of battle, was already sung, when the Corinthians began suddenly to retreat. The Corcyræans were at a loss immediately to account for this; but presently they discovered a squadron coming round a headland, which had concealed it longer from them than from the enemy. Still uncertain whether it might be friendly or hostile, they also retreated into their port; but shortly, to their great joy, twenty triremes under Glaucon and Andocides, sent from Attica, in the apprehension that the small force under Lacedæmonius might be unequal to the occurring exigencies, took their station by them.

Next day the Corcyræans did not hesitate, with the thirty Athenian ships, for none of those under Lacedæmonius had suffered materially in the action, to show themselves off the harbour of Sybota, where the enemy lay, and offer battle. The Corinthians came out of the harbour, formed for action, and so rested. They were not desirous of risking an engagement against the increased strength of the enemy, but they could not remain conveniently in the station they had occupied, a desert shore, where they could neither refit their injured ships, nor recruit their stock of provisions; and they were encumbered with more than a thousand prisoners; a very inconvenient addition to the crowded complements of their galleys. Their object therefore was to return home: but they were apprehensive that the Athenians, holding the truce as broken by the action of the preceding day, would not allow an unmolested passage. It was therefore determined to try their disposition by sending a small vessel with a message to the Athenian commanders, without the formality of a herald. This was a service not without danger. Those Corcyræans, who were near enough to observe what passed, exclaimed, in the vehemence of their animosity, “that the bearers should be put to death;” which, considering them as enemies, would have been within the law of war of the Greeks. The Athenian commanders however thought proper to hold a different conduct. To the message delivered, which accused them of breaking the truce, by obstructing the passage of Corcyra, they replied that “it was not their purpose to break the truce, but only to protect their allies. Wherever else the Corinthians chose to go, they might go without interruption from them; but any attempt against Corcyra, or any of its possessions, would be resisted by the Athenians to the utmost of their power.”

Upon receiving this answer, the Corinthians, after erecting a trophy at Sybota on the continent, proceeded homeward. In their way they took by stratagem Anactorium, a town at the mouth of the Ambracian Gulf, which had formerly been held in common by their commonwealth and the Corcyræans; and, leaving a garrison there, proceeded to Corinth. Of their prisoners they found near eight hundred had been slaves, and these they sold. The remainder, about two hundred and fifty, were strictly guarded, but otherwise treated with the utmost kindness. Among them were some of the first men of Corcyra; and through these the Corinthians hoped, at some future opportunity, to recover their ancient interest and authority in the island.

The Corcyræans meanwhile had gratified themselves with the erection of a trophy on the island Sybota, as a claim of victory, in opposition to the Corinthian trophy on the continent. The Athenian fleet returned home; and thus ended, without any treaty, that series of actions which is distinguished among Greek writers by the name of the Corcyræan, or, sometimes, the Corinthian war.[b]

THE WAR WITH POTIDÆA AND MACEDONIA

[Sidenote: [433-432 B.C.]]

The Corinthians had incurred an immense cost, and taxed all their willing allies, only to leave their enemy stronger than she was before. From this time forward they considered the Thirty Years’ Truce as broken, and conceived a hatred, alike deadly and undisguised, against Athens; so that the latter gained nothing by the moderation of her admirals in sparing the Corinthian fleet off the coast of Epirus. An opportunity was not long wanting for the Corinthians to strike a blow at their enemy, through one of her widespread dependencies.

On the isthmus of that lesser peninsula called Pallene, which forms the westernmost of the three prongs of the greater Thracian peninsula called Chalcidice, between the Thermaic and the Strymonic gulfs, was situated the Dorian town of Potidæa, one of the tributary allies of Athens, but originally colonised from Corinth, and still maintaining a certain metropolitan allegiance towards the latter: insomuch that every year certain Corinthians were sent thither as magistrates under the title of Epidemiurgi. On various points of the neighbouring coast, also, there were several small towns belonging to the Chalcidians and Bottiæans, enrolled in like manner in the list of Athenian tributaries. The neighbouring inland territory, Mygdonia and Chalcidice, was held by the Macedonian king, Perdiccas, son of that Alexander who had taken part, fifty years before, in the expedition of Xerxes. These two princes appear gradually to have extended their dominions, after the ruin of Persian power in Thrace by the exertions of Athens, until at length they acquired all the territory between the rivers Axius and Strymon. Now Perdiccas had been for some time the friend and ally of Athens; but there were other Macedonian princes, his brother Philip, and Derdas, holding independent principalities in the upper country, apparently on the higher course of the Axius near the Pæonian tribes, with whom he was in a state of dispute. These princes having been accepted as the allies of Athens, Perdiccas from that time became her active enemy, and it was from his intrigues that all the difficulties of Athens on that coast took their first origin. The Athenian empire was much less complete and secure over the seaports on the mainland than over the islands: for the former were always more or less dependent on any powerful land-neighbour, sometimes more dependent on him than upon the mistress of the sea; and we shall find Athens herself cultivating assiduously the favour of Sitalces and other strong Thracian potentates, as an aid to her dominion over the seaports. Perdiccas immediately began to incite and aid the Chalcidians and Bottiæans to revolt from Athens, and the violent enmity against the latter, kindled in the bosoms of the Corinthians by the recent events at Corcyra, enabled him to extend the same projects to Potidæa. Not only did he send envoys to Corinth in order to concert measures for provoking the revolt of Potidæa, but also to Sparta, instigating the Peloponnesian league to a general declaration of war against Athens. And he further prevailed on many of the Chalcidian inhabitants to abandon their separate small town on the seacoast, for the purpose of joint residence at Olynthus, which was several stadia from the sea. Thus that town, as well as the Chalcidian interest, became much strengthened, while Perdiccas further assigned some territory near Lake Bolbe to contribute to the temporary maintenance of the concentrated population.

The Athenians were not ignorant either of his hostile preparations or of the dangers which awaited them from Corinth after the Corcyræan sea-fight immediately after which they sent to take precautions against the revolt of Potidæa; requiring the inhabitants to take down their wall on the side of Pallene, so as to leave the town open on the side of the peninsula, or on what may be called the sea-side, and fortified only towards the mainland--requiring them further both to deliver hostages and to dismiss the annual magistrates who came to them from Corinth. An Athenian armament of thirty triremes and one thousand hoplites, under Archestratus and ten others, despatched to act against Perdiccas in the Thermaic gulf, was directed at the same time to enforce these requisitions against Potidæa, and to repress any dispositions to revolt among the neighbouring Chalcidians. Immediately on receiving the requisitions, the Potidæans sent envoys both to Athens, for the purpose of evading and gaining time, and to Sparta, in conjunction with Corinth, in order to determine a Lacedæmonian invasion of Attica, in the event of Potidæa being attacked by Athens. From the Spartan authorities they obtained a distinct affirmative promise, in spite of the Thirty Years’ Truce still subsisting: at Athens they had no success, and they accordingly openly revolted (seemingly about midsummer 432 B.C.), at the same time that the armament under Archestratus sailed. The Chalcidians and Bottiæans revolted also, at the express instigation of Corinth, accompanied by solemn oaths and promises of assistance. Archestratus with his fleet, on reaching the Thermaic gulf, found them all in proclaimed enmity, but was obliged to confine himself to the attack of Perdiccas in Macedonia, not having numbers enough to admit of a division of his force. He accordingly laid siege to Therma, in co-operation with the Macedonian troops from the upper country, under Philip and the brothers of Derdas; after taking that place, he next proceeded to besiege Pydna. But it would probably have been wiser had he turned his whole force instantly to the blockade of Potidæa; for during the period of more than six weeks that he spent in the operations against Therma, the Corinthians conveyed to Potidæa a reinforcement of sixteen hundred hoplites and four hundred light-armed, partly their own citizens, partly Peloponnesians, hired for the occasion--under Aristeus, son of Adimantus, a man of such eminent popularity, both at Corinth and at Potidæa, that most of the soldiers volunteered on his personal account. Potidæa was thus put in a state of complete defence shortly after the news of its revolt reached Athens, and long before any second armament could be sent to attack it. A second armament, however, was speedily sent forth--forty triremes and two thousand Athenian hoplites under Callias, son of Calliades, with four other commanders--who on reaching the Thermaic gulf, joined the former body at the siege of Pydna. After prosecuting the siege in vain for a short time, they found themselves obliged to patch up an accommodation on the best terms they could with Perdiccas, from the necessity of commencing immediate operations against Aristeus and Potidæa. They then quitted Macedonia, first crossing by sea from Pydna to the eastern coast of the Thermaic Gulf--next attacking, though without effect, the town of Berœa--and then marching by land along the eastern coast of the gulf, in the direction of Potidæa. On the third day of easy march, they reached the seaport called Gigonus, near which they encamped.

[Sidenote: [432 B.C.]]

In spite of the convention concluded at Pydna, Perdiccas, whose character for faithlessness we shall have more than one occasion to notice, was now again on the side of the Chalcidians, and sent two hundred horse to join them, under the command of Iolaus. Aristeus posted his Corinthians and Potidæans on the isthmus near Potidæa, providing a market without the walls, in order that they might not stray in quest of provisions. His position was on the side towards Olynthus--which was about seven miles off, but within sight, and in a lofty and conspicuous situation. He here awaited the approach of the Athenians, calculating that the Chalcidians from Olynthus would, upon the hoisting of a given signal, assail them in the rear when they attacked him. But Callias was strong enough to place in reserve his Macedonian cavalry and other allies as a check against Olynthus; while with his Athenians and the main force he marched to the isthmus and took position in front of Aristeus. In the battle which ensued, Aristeus and the chosen band of Corinthians immediately about him were completely successful, breaking the troops opposed to them, and pursuing for a considerable distance; but the remaining Potidæans and Peloponnesians were routed by the Athenians and driven within the walls. On returning from pursuit, Aristeus found the victorious Athenians between him and Potidæa, and was reduced to the alternative either of cutting his way through them into the latter town, or of making a retreating march to Olynthus. He chose the former as the least of two hazards, and forced his way through the flank of the Athenians, wading into the sea in order to turn the extremity of the Potidæan wall, which reached entirely across the isthmus with a mole running out at each end into the water: he effected this daring enterprise and saved his detachment, though not without considerable difficulty and some loss. Meanwhile, the auxiliaries from Olynthus, though they had begun their march on seeing the concerted signal, had been kept in check by the Macedonian horse, so that the Potidæans had been beaten and the signal again withdrawn, before they could make any effective diversion: nor did the cavalry on either side come into action. The defeated Potidæans and Corinthians, having the town immediately in their rear, lost only three hundred men, while the Athenians lost one hundred and fifty, together with the general, Callias.

The victory was, however, quite complete, and the Athenians, after having erected their trophy and given up the enemy’s dead for burial, immediately built their blockading wall across the isthmus on the side of the mainland, so as to cut off Potidæa from all communication with Olynthus and the Chalcidians. To make the blockade complete, a second wall across the isthmus was necessary, on the other side towards Pallene: but they had not force enough to detach a completely separate body for this purpose, until after some time they were joined by Phormion with sixteen hundred fresh hoplites from Athens. That general, landing at Aphytis, in the peninsula of Pallene, marched slowly up to Potidæa, ravaging the territory in order to draw out the citizens to battle: but the challenge not being accepted, he undertook, and finished without obstruction, the blockading wall on the side of Pallene, so that the town was now completely enclosed and the harbour watched by the Athenian fleet. The wall once finished, a portion of the force sufficed to guard it, leaving Phormion at liberty to undertake aggressive operations against the Chalcidic and Bottiæan townships. The capture of Potidæa being now only a question of more or less time, Aristeus, in order that the provisions might last longer, proposed to the citizens to choose a favourable wind, get on shipboard, and break out suddenly from the harbour, taking their chance of eluding the Athenian fleet, and leaving only five hundred defenders behind. Though he offered himself to be among those left, he could not determine the citizens to so bold an enterprise, and therefore sallied forth, in the way proposed, with a small detachment, in order to try and procure relief from without--especially some aid or diversion from Peloponnesus. But he was able to accomplish nothing beyond some partial warlike operations among the Chalcidians, and a successful ambuscade against the citizens of Sermyla, which did nothing for the relief of the blockaded town: it had, however, been so well provisioned that it held out for two whole years--a period full of important events elsewhere.

From these two contests between Athens and Corinth, first indirectly at Corcyra, next distinctly and avowedly at Potidæa, sprang those important movements in the Lacedæmonian alliance which will be recounted later.[c]

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