READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER VII

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE THIRTY YEARS PEACE b.c. 445-431

I

THE FIRST YEARS OE PEACE

THE Thirty Years Peace was for Athens a sign of exhaustion. Pericles, who had come to control Athenian foreign policy, recognized that it was no longer possible to maintain both her Empire overseas and her more recent acquisitions in Greece proper. The population of Attica was not large enough to provide a force which could face the Peloponnesian League and Boeotia in the field, and, before the days of mercenary armies, the treasures on the Acropolis could not make good this deficiency. The contingents of the Empire could not be at once so strong as to be useful and so weak as not to be dangerous. By sea Athens was invincible, but her fleets could not defend Megara or Troezen or Achaea. Pericles decided to hold no more for Athens than could be held with safety. Her one vital interest in Greece proper lay in Euboea, and the Euboeans, who had dared to bell the cat, were abandoned by Sparta to Athenian vengeance. The lands of Hestiaea were confiscated to provide farms for a garrison of Athenian cleruchs, and Chalcis was bound to Athens in naked subjection. The Thirty Years Peace recognized the Athenian Empire and bound the Peloponnesians not to interfere on behalf of the states scheduled as the allies of Athens. Greece, in fact, returned to the old dualism: Athens and her Empire predominant by sea, Sparta and her allies predominant by land. With Sparta unambitious by nature and Athens half-cured of ambition by adversity, there was a chance that the Thirty Years Peace would prove to deserve its name.

Sparta might well be content, for politically she had gained all that it was worth her while to gain. What she had missed was the chance to demonstrate the power of her military machine in a great battle which would have won for her no more than she gained without it, and would have weakened her army, already none too large to maintain the Spartan regime at home. For indeed the Spartan army was becoming something which her enemies dared not face and Sparta dared not use. It is true that the military party overwhelmed with reproaches the politic king Pleistoanax and drove him into exile, but his policy was not reversed. Equally at Athens Pericles had to face disappointment and disillusionment, but, after all, a great defeat on land had been averted, and Athens seemed secured in an empire which was as splendid as it was profitable.

The revenues of the Empire supplied far more than was enough to maintain a fleet to police the Aegean and conserve Athenian naval skill, and the Peace left Athens free to exact the full payment of the tribute by the pressure of her naval strength. To this temptation the Athenians fell. They had saved and protected the Greeks of Asia Minor and of the Aegean and now they claimed their reward. Pericles believed that the spiritual greatness of Athens was rooted in her political power, and the tough imperial conscience of a profit-sharing democracy was untroubled by the thought that it was sacrificing the virtue of honesty to teach the Allies the virtue of gratitude. The full tribute was extorted and spent, in part, on great buildings which made Athens splendid and brought work and wages to many Athenians.

It is true that this policy did not go unchallenged. In 447 B.C. the Athenians had begun to build the Parthenon, the visible symbol of their greatness, and before the end of 444 their own treasures were giving out. It was therefore proposed to divert to this purpose the balance accumulated or accruing from the tribute of the Allies. The aristocratic or oligarchical opponents of Pericles could not let this pass without a struggle. To do so was to betray their own principles and, still more, their fellow­ aristocrats throughout the Athenian Empire, who were ill-content to bear the burden of tribute to a state which everywhere upheld their democratic enemies. So their leader Thucydides son of Melesias, who was, at the least, an adroit party-manager, attacked the proposal on high grounds of principle. The tribute was paid to defend the cities from Persia; Athens had no moral right to take it ‘to deck herself like a courtezan with thousand talent temples'. Pericles was well able to supply whatever answer was needed, and was content to stake his career against that of his rival on such an issue. In February 443 the Athenians voted which of the two leaders they could spare. Thucydides was ostracized and Pericles remained the autocratic leader of the Athenian democracy.

The building of the Parthenon went on apace, until after nine years it was ready to receive the gold and ivory statue of the goddess, the masterpiece of Pheidias; and, before the temple sculptures were finished, the Athenians began to build the Propylaea, which were not completed when the Peloponnesian War broke upon Athens. The sanctuary for the mysteries at Eleusis, which the Persians had destroyed, was rebuilt on a grander scale by the skill of Ictinus, the architect of the Parthenon. Athens became daily more splendid and also more nearly what Pericles called it, ‘the School of Hellas’. A new building, the Odeum, served the needs of musical festivals. Not less imposing in their way were the works which added to the military strength of the city. A third Long Wall was built parallel with the northernmost of the two which had existed since 457. This inner wall made the whole system more defensible and the southern wall to Phalerum was abandoned. At the Piraeus the war-harbours were organized and equipped, and the triremes, the truest servants of Athena, were housed in fine new sheds where they lay against the day of battle. Aristophanes has described the bustle of life which filled the dockyards when the word went out to launch the squadrons. At the same time the mercantile harbour was im­proved to receive the increasing volume of Athenian trade, and the Piraeus itself was laid out with the ordered symmetry of a colony, by the town-planning expert Hippodamus of Miletus. All this involved vast outlay but most of it had been completed within ten years of the Peace. From that time onwards, as will be seen later, Pericles turned his energies to the building up of a great war reserve fund.

The vigour of Athens may well have aroused the admiration and possibly the envy of her neighbours. Her favour was well worth purchasing. As early as 445-4 b.c. the Libyan prince Psammetichus, perhaps at the request of the Athenian government, sent a gift of some 45,000 bushels of corn to be distributed among the citizens. His object may have been not only political, to conciliate Athenian favour against a possible attack by Persia, but also commercial, to secure a larger market at Athens for Egyptian corn. So striking an example of the value of Athenian citizenship led to the retrospective enforcement of the law passed in 451 b.c. which limited civic rights to those born of citizen parents on both sides. A scrutiny was held, and, according to an ancient calculation which we cannot control, nearly 5000 persons were struck off the list of citizens, doubtless from among the poorer classes who would claim a share in this corn. No doubt the vast majority of them remained at Athens with the status of resident aliens. But even so this narrow policy was a grievous error. The limit of Athenian greatness was the limit of her devoted citizens, and this action is a great reproach on the state-craft of Pericles, a denial of Athens’ past, and a menace to Athens’ future.

The more the democracy was organized to share the spoils of empire, the more natural it was to organize the Empire to produce them. The struggle between Thucydides and Pericles raised acutely the whole question, and Pericles followed up his victory by dividing the cities for the purposes of tribute into five groups or districts, Ionia, the Hellespont, the ‘Thraceward regions,’ Caria, and the Islands. This division facilitated the control of payments, and the quota-lists which have survived show that for two or three years the payments were regular. At the same time it was a further visible sign of the subordination of the cities to Athens, and it must have suggested the satrapies of Persia imposed on what had been a free Greek alliance. But Pericles remained unmoved. His policy was ‘to keep the allies in hand,’ and to exploit to the full what the Thirty Years Peace granted him, while abiding loyally by its restrictions. He was under no illusions about the envy which Athens inspired and he had not forgotten old and new grudges, but for the time being what Athens needed was peace.

The one sphere in which Athens might pursue a policy of adventure without infringing the terms of the Peace was in the West. In 445 Athenian colonists had gone out, together with other settlers from Greece, to help to refound a new Sybaris in South Italy. But the remnant of the Sybarites claimed privilege over the newcomers and were driven out, leaving the new settlers with more territory than they could occupy. They appealed to Athens, and now was the opportunity to plant in southern Italy an outpost of Athenian power, perhaps a stepping-stone to Athenian empire. But Pericles, without entirely rejecting the appeal, refused to adopt a provocative forward policy, lie declared the undertaking open to all the Greeks and, when a new band of colonists set out, only two-fifths of them came from Athens and the Empire. They planted in 443 the city of Thurii, which was laid out by the skill of Hippodamus. It is possible that the work provided by the new buildings and the growing trade of Athens left no great surplus population willing to emigrate; it is possible, too, that it was an honest piece of broadminded states­manship. At the least, it was a gesture that while Athens claimed the Aegean for herself, she claimed no predominance in the West. Nor did Pericles make any attempt to secure permanent Athenian influence in Thurii itself, but allowed the colony to be managed by the non-Athenian settlers and to be driven, after a war, to a disadvantageous peace with Dorian Tarentum. An Athenian who visited Olympia might see a dedication of the Tarentines commemorating their war with Thurii, but Athens made no attempt to protect the new city. In Sicily Syracuse had been increasingly dominant since 445, and her close relations with Corinth might make her a potential enemy of Athens; but Pericles was content with a promise of possible support to Rhegium and Leontini, the two Chalcidian cities who might be trusted to watch with jealous care the growing strength of their Dorian neighbour. Not even the news that Syracuse was building a great navy moved Pericles from his course of watchful and defensive quietism.

II.       

THE SAMIAN REVOLT

For the last decade Athens’ imperial policy had been successful. Timely relaxations of tribute had eased the difficult moments of 446 and then after the Peace her hold upon the cities had tightened again. But ‘in the sixth year of the Peace  (the winter of 441 b.c.) Samos, which with Lesbos and Chios still possessed both inde­pendence and a fleet, was driven into open secession. It began with a dispute between Samos and her neighbour Miletus over the possession of Priene which lies between them on the mainland of Asia Minor: Athens, not wishing to see her independent ally strengthened, favoured Miletus, and when the latter, hard pressed in the war which followed, appealed to the Athenian democracy against her oligarchic enemy, Pericles himself set out with a fleet and took occasion to establish in Samos a pro-Athenian democracy. But Samian oligarchs, who had thought it prudent to retire before the Athenian triremes arrived, turned for help to Pissuthnes the restless Persian satrap of Sardes and he allowed them to hire mercenaries in his satrapy. Hardly had Pericles sailed for home than they landed in Samos, attacked the democrats, and gained control of the city. The hostages whom Pericles had taken and placed in the island of Lemnos were recovered, and the Athenian garrison in Samos surrendered and were handed over to Pissuthnes. The Samians may have hoped to engage the wholehearted support of Persia; they may, too, have realized that to massacre the prisoners would mean that there was no hope of mercy, should Athens prevail. And then, as if Athens would be slow to strike, they turned to renew the war with the Milesians.

But Pericles was quick to take up the challenge, and was soon at sea again with a fleet of sixty triremes. Fourteen of these were dispatched to summon the squadrons of Chios and Lesbos and to watch for a possible naval attack by the Phoenician fleet. For the actions of Pissuthnes, the Great King’s nephew, might be the prologue to a new war with Persia. With the remainder Pericles intercepted the Samian fleet as it was returning from Miletus. The Samians had seventy ships, twenty of them transports crowded with troops. There was an engagement off the island of Tragia some fourteen miles south of Samos. The forces with Pericles failed to win the decisive victory that might have ended the revolt. The Samians broke through and part at least reached home and were blockaded by the Athenian fleet which was soon reinforced from Athens and from Chios and Lesbos. The reinforcements brought enough troops to drive the Samians from the field and lay close siege to the city. The one immediate hope was now from Persia and it was known that the Samians had sent begging for help. To meet this danger Pericles took the risk of dividing his forces and with sixty triremes sailed off to Caunus which lay on the regular route of fleets from Phoenicia to the Aegean. The fleet of the Great King did not appear, but meanwhile the Samians under the philosopher Melissus plucked up courage and surprised and defeated the blockading squadrons. For a fortnight they held the seas and used the time to provision their city. Then Pericles returned and the blockade was restored.

New squadrons arrived from Athens under Hagnon, Phormio and others, and thirty ships from the Allies. Before such a concentration of triremes and notable commanders Samos was helpless. The siegecraft of Artemon, an engineer from Clazomenae was baffled, but after eight months the city was starved into surrender (spring, 439 b.c.). The walls were dismantled, the Samian fleet surrendered, and the cost of the siege was repaid, partly by the surrender of land, partly by annual instalments in money. The island of Amorgos was taken from Samos and appears in the quota-lists as a tributary of Athens. The oligarchic leaders were exiled and settled at Anaea on the coast opposite, perhaps under Persian protection. Thence they were to give trouble during the Peloponnesian War both to the Athenians and to the demo­cracy which was set up in their place.

The course of the campaign, if not creditable to Pericles or to the Athenian higher command, showed how overwhelming was the power of Athens at sea. Persia had not dared to strike. The Samians had appealed to Sparta and the Peloponnesians had discussed intervention, how seriously we do not know. Corinth some seven years later took credit for declaring on the side of peace. Anyhow nothing was done. Apart from some disorders in the Thracian Chersonese, the cities of the Empire remained quiescent except Byzantium, and on the surrender of Samos Byzantium came meekly to heel. Athens had weathered a severe crisis and stood unshaken. Her finances had stood the strain and her treasury had provided no less than 1400 talents for the expenses of the siege. Pericles himself delivered the funeral oration over the Athenian fallen, and generations remembered his fine phrase of the young men who had died for Athens, that it was as if the spring had been taken from the year. Many of the allies were secretly disappointed, and the scandalmonger Ion of Chios retails the story of Pericles’ boast, that while Agamemnon had taken ten years to reduce a barbarian city, he in nine months had subdued the proudest and strongest state of Ionia.

III.     

PROBLEMS OF EMPIRE

During the revolt of Samos there had been some fighting in the Thracian Chersonese which may have been due to the presence of the Athenian cleruchs whom Pericles had established there some ten years before. This trouble was quickly suppressed and Madytus and Sestos were visited with an increase of tribute, as was Parium on the opposite coast. The Athenian hold in the Hellespont proved too firm to be shaken. Far otherwise was the action of Athens on the south-eastern borders of her Empire, in the tribute-province of Caria. The little Carian communities had taken the side of Athens in the conflicts fought off their coasts during the last thirty years, but they were not by nature willing tributaries and they were open to Persian intrigue and Persian pressure. In 440 b.c. forty-three Carian towns or communities paid tribute; of these some twelve do not appear again in the quota-lists. An attempt to coerce the recalcitrants might well have cost more than it was worth—for the annual loss involved was about ten talents—and it might besides have led to a war with Persia, the destruction of the modus vivendi with which Athens was well content. Wisely enough, the Athenians decided to cut their losses, and when the tribute was re-assessed in 438 b.c. the remnant of the Carian province was merged in the Ionian.

In the Thraceward district the Athenians were faced by a more complicated problem which, to the end, baffled their statecraft. The little towns of Chalcidice found themselves between the reviving power of Macedon on the north-west, a new and vaguely formidable Thracian empire on the north-east, and the exigent navalism of Athens on the south. Their natural instinct was to coalesce into some kind of league and then to lean on the least dangerous of these three powers. Events were to show that the right policy for Athens was to encourage such unification and support it, in return for the economic advantages to be gained from trade with the Thracian hinterland. But the expansive power of Macedon was underrated in the person of its shifty king Perdiccas, and the timid statecraft of ancient Imperialism forbade the Athenians to trust to goodwill instead of to the maxim divide et impera. And so the incipient movement towards coalescence among these towns was checked by the device of apotaxis, that is, the breaking up of the little groups into yet smaller units for the purposes of tribute. As a further fortification of Athenian power, a colony was sent out in 437 b.c. to resume die old plan of occupying ‘The Nine Ways’, the crossing of the river Strymon. There was founded a city, Amphipolis, to be a centre of Attic political influence, to block the road to Thracian expansion westwards and to monopolize for Athens the exploitation of the mines and the forests which lay behind it. Communications with the sea were secured by the port of Eion which lay at the mouth of the river. The quota-lists of the years 438—4 b.c. show more increases of tribute than reductions in this area, and at the assessment of 434, the city of Potidaea was compelled to pay fifteen talents instead of six, an increase which was to cost Athens dear. We may assume that Athenian power in the North-East seemed to be secured, and Amphipolis rapidly became a flourishing and peculiarly prized possession.

East of the Strymon there were the cities which now bordered the new Thracian empire of the Odrysian king Teres, which stretched from the Aegean to the Danube and the shores of the Black Sea and Propontis. With this power Athens had good reason to be friendly, for the plain between the Hebrus and the Ergines was rich in corn which might be shipped to Athens from the port of Aenus. We may attribute to this time the beginnings of friendship with the king of the Odrysians (whom some Athenians affected to connect with the Tereus of Attic legend) and a shrewd concession which lowered the tribute of Aenus from ten talents to four. An even more striking reduction from five talents to 900 drachmae was granted to Selymbria, which might be a useful neighbour to the Odrysians and a watchful neighbour of Byzantium.

But Athenian policy ranged farther afield. On the coasts of the Black Sea lay Olbia and the state which the Greeks called the realm of the Cimmerian Bosporus, the modern Crimea. Here were inexhaustible supplies of the staple foods of the Greeks, bread and fish. The steppes of southern Russia grew wheat which travelled and kept peculiarly well, and from the Black Sea ports came jars of fish-pickle, a delicacy like caviare, and piles of stock­fish for less sophisticated palates. A century before, Athens had had trade-dealings with these regions, as is attested by the black-figured and early red-figured Attic vases which have been found in southern Russia. Then with the Persian Wars came a break; the exploitation of these regions which had begun to pass definitely from Miletus to Athens was in the main enjoyed by Heraclea Pontica. Now Athens, at peace with all the world, might revive and increase her old commercial interests.

The prime motive was the need for security and privilege in the purchase of food. For a hundred years Attica had grown more and more olive-trees and less and less wheat and barley, and the population of Athens itself had grown with increasing speed as the city became more prosperous and attractive. The cleruchies had done something to relieve the pressure of population, and Athenian settlers in the Chersonese and in Lemnos, Imbros and Euboea might not only feed themselves but send foodstuffs to their parent-city. But there was a limit to the exportation of citizens, and more and more cargoes of wheat were needed to fill the new grain-warehouses at the Piraeus. There was corn in Egypt, but high policy forbade Athens to interfere between the Egyptian and Libyan chiefs and Persia. Sicily produced corn as well as cheese, but Syracuse, the Dorian colony of Corinth, was a potential enemy and her rapidly growing power might set an embargo on export to Athens or give priority to other customers. The Thracian wheat was within the borders of the king of the Odrysians, too powerful to be coerced, too barbarous to be trusted. While, for the present, Athens might buy in all these markets, she could not be sure of controlling any of them. And so, not without reason, Pericles turned his attention to the North-East.

The moment was opportune. In 437 b.c. sovereign power in the realm of the Cimmerian Bosporus had passed to a successful soldier Spartocus, and the new dynast proved willing to give to Athens commercial advantages in return for recognition. So began a friendship which was to benefit both parties for a century. The corn-barons of the Crimea soon became amateurs of Attic pottery and terracottas, and from this time onwards Athenian wares are found in their houses and Attic writing in their Inscriptions. To achieve this friendship was a task worthy of Pericles’ diplomatic skill and he himself (c. 437 b.c.) led a splendid squadron into the Propontis and Black Sea to reinforce his persuasions. An Athenian post was established at Nymphaeum, which became so prosperous that at some later date, perhaps in 425 b.c., its tribute was assessed at one talent. Athenian citizens were planted at Sinope after room had been made for them by the expulsion of the local tyrant Timesilaus. Amisus received Athenian colonists and a significant new name, Piraeus. In 435—4 Astacus in the Propontis, which had been harried by its Bithynian neighbours, was saved for Hellenism and secured for Athens by a garrison of Athenian settlers. From the cornlands of South Russia to the wharves of the Piraeus the food of Athens could pass in safety sheltered by Athenian power, and when the Peloponnesian War broke out, it was easy for her to ration those of her Aegean subjects who had come to depend on the importation of Pontic corn.

So much had been done to strengthen and consolidate Athenian power within the Empire and to secure the food and promote the trade of Athens. In the city itself the Parthenon was nearing completion and in 438 the Athena of Pheidias took her place in her new temple. The temple was the embodiment in marble of Athenian pride and love of beauty; its creation was the achievement of Pericles the aesthete and the realist. To the Allies a more comfortable symbol was the statue of Athena Promachos which stood to protect as well as to rule. This moment marks the summit of the splendour if not of the power of Athens. The great days of the Erechtheid inscription when Athens faced Persia and half Greece in arms had passed: the spring had gone out of the year, but this was the high summer of Athenian greatness. In the words which Thucydides puts into the mouth of his hero Pericles, all mortal power is doomed to decline, but the memory of greatness stands for ever.

But there was in Athens, besides the resolute Olympian will-to-power, the lively, critical, ungenerous spirit of the everyday Athenian. The dedication was followed by a cause célèbre. Pheidias was promptly accused of embezzling the gold and ivory bought for the making of Athena’s statue, and, like so many great servants of the Athenian people, he was driven into exile. The brilliant circle which surrounded Pericles was assailed by scandal, envy, and prejudice. The tradition that good women should be neither seen nor heard had resulted in the presence at Athens of a group of polished Ionian courtezans like the Thargelia who, in the interest of the Persian secret service, was the mistress of a generation of Athenian notables. The most brilliant of this group, Aspasia the Milesian, became Pericles’ concubine, for Attic law forbade her to be his wife. That she was clever and sympathetic is beyond doubt, but we need not follow Attic gossip either about the lowness of her morals or the highness of her mind. Pericles had no need of an Aspasia to teach him eloquence, and there is no reason to suppose that her attractions deflected the compass by which he steered the ship of state. Of more influence with Pericles on the intellectual side was the physical philosopher Anaxagoras, on the political side an early friend, the musician Damon (or Damonides) of Oea. Both of these were driven from Athens, probably before this time. To be the friend of Pericles was little protection from the Athenian courts which were no respecters of persons and slight respecters of justice. Again and again he had to see his friends baited before jealous dicasts, perhaps a fair retribution for the cynicism with which he had used the beliefs of others for the ends of art and empire. During the crisis of the Samian revolt a decree had forbidden the mockery of living persons in comedy; but within three years this was repealed, and jests which the serious in antiquity and modern times have sought to translate into history were showered upon the ‘Olympian’ ‘squill-headed’ autocrat. For the Athenians might offer to their leaders obedience, admiration, even affection, but hardly ever respect.

But in matters of state Pericles was supreme. Fifteen times in succession he was elected General-in-chief. He had outlasted all possible rivals—Cimon, Tolmides, Thucydides the son of Melesias. He stood alone and indispensable with one lieutenant, a brilliant admiral, Phormio the son of Asopius. Nowhere else in Athens was there a sign of political genius, though in the house of Pericles there was a boy Alcibiades, whose abilities and weak­nesses were to conspire for the destruction of the power which his guardian was so laboriously building up.

The policy of Athens was that of Pericles, a policy steady and farsighted. The age of adventures was over; now came a quiet determined increase of influence, prestige and financial strength against an evil day. The Athenian fleet was kept efficient by constant practice, and every summer a squadron took the sea and displayed the invincible power of Athens. About 437 b.c. Phormio was sent to north-western Greece, which had long been the preserve of Corinthian influence and trade. The city of Amphilochian Argos had been in dispute between the Acarnanians and Ambracia, the chief Corinthian colony in those parts. The Ambraciotes had brought to this more barbarous Argos the blessings of Greek civilization and had ended by ousting the Argives from their own city. The refugees had appealed to the Acarnanians and they in turn asked for help from Athens: the intervention of Phormio’s squadron turned the scale and the northern Acarnanian communities who had been concerned in the war became the allies of Athens. The incident was in itself unimportant, for such treaties of alliance might mean little more than the registration of an Athenian claim to gratitude. There is no evidence that Corinth protested or that this intervention was made a grievance. At the cost of slight exertions Athens had made friends who might be useful one day, but the mere fact that states in north-western Greece had seen another power active besides Corinth was soon to have serious consequences.

Far more significant was a reform to secure financial preparedness. We may assume that the Athenians, in particular for the building of the Parthenon, had begun by drawing upon the accumulated treasures of Athena and the lesser funds of the other gods. When these were exhausted the funds of the Empire were used, after the great controversy of 444-3 b.c. The Assembly, as a set-off to this use of the tribute, decreed that any surplus in each year should accumulate on the Acropolis until the sum of three thousand talents was reached, and that then the other gods should receive repayment. By the year 435-4 the Parthenon and most of the other buildings in the Periclean programme had been practically finished and paid for, and, despite the heavy cost of the Samian War, the three thousand talents were deposited on the Acropolis. Now came the turn of the other gods. A decree was passed on the proposal of Callias to collect evidence of the amounts due to these gods and make repayment from the funds set aside for the purpose. Any balance left over from these funds was to be spent on the dockyards and the walls, and the treasures of the other gods were to be placed in the care of a special board (the Treasurers of the other Gods) like the existing Treasurers of Athena. The whole financial reserves of the Athenian State were now under the care of these two boards of Treasurers and any surplus of tribute passed automatically into their keeping. Thus was created a consolidated reserve which was rapidly increasing. After the completion of the Parthenon there was little building apart from the Propylaea, and when in 431 Athens found herself at war, Pericles could point to an accumulation of six thousand talents which the state might borrow for her military expenditure. There was no question of a separate treasure of the Confederacy of Delos available only for the purposes of the Confederacy. What Athena guarded, Athens might use.

IV.     

CORINTH AND CORCYRA

We may therefore attribute to Pericles as early as 435 b.c. and possibly as early as the action of Phormio in 437 b.c. the consciousness that a general war might come. To this moment may belong one of his few recorded sayings, that he saw a cloud of war advancing from the Peloponnese. But the day of conflict can hardly have seemed either inevitable or very near at hand. The Peloponnesians had resisted the temptation to strike at Athens, while she was embarrassed by the Samian revolt. Athens herself had done nothing to challenge the position of Sparta, had not revived her claim to dominate Greece proper, and by the partial diversion of her trade-interests to the far north-east must have reduced rather than increased her competition with other Greek states in other markets. Such Peloponnesian cities as may have needed to import corn or other necessities had less reason to be alarmed than at any time in the last thirty years. On the other hand, the growing strength and prosperity of Athens was as apparent as the sanguine spirit of the Athenians, who seemed born ‘neither to be at peace themselves nor to leave mankind at peace.’ The Athenian Empire was the negation of Greek ideas of right and, when the moment came, envy, anger, timidity, and militarism might reinforce themselves with righteous indignation. For the present, however, the Peloponnesian League was passive, almost dormant. Its most influential member, after Sparta, was Corinth and so long as Corinth did not make for war, it was most improbable that the League would move.

Corinth was a commercial state, and, as such, inclined to peace. She might, however, see in Athens a successful trade-rival (though that was now an old story), and if she found her trade decaying, she might be tempted to prefer war to a slow decline. Yet if the remedy was war, it might well seem worse than the disease. Next to Megara, Corinth of all Greek states stood to suffer most from a war with Athens, for her overseas trade must pass either through the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf where lay the Athenian Gibraltar, Naupactus, or within easy reach of the war­harbours of the Piraeus. There is no good reason to suppose that the trade of Corinth was at the moment especially threatened by Athens. The Corinthians might hope to gain from the increasing power and prosperity of Syracuse, however complete became the Athenian monopoly of trade with Asia Minor and the Black Sea. Their true embarrassment was elsewhere, in the unfilial conduct of their colony Corcyra, which by the use of its geographical position both hampered Corinthian commerce with Sicily and South Italy and challenged the Corinthian monopoly of trade with the hinterland of north-west Greece.

Out of a petty quarrel with Corcyra was to spring the first of the two ‘grievances’ which were to lead to a war which in the end was to be ruinous alike to Corcyra, Corinth and Athens. Epidamnus, a colony which Corcyra had planted to the northward on the coast of Illyria, had become a considerable city by ex­ploiting the trade which came down from the hinterland along what was later the Via Egnatia. Many years of internal strife had ended in a war with the neighbouring barbarians helped by the aristocracy who had been expelled from the city. The democrats, harried by land and sea, appealed to Corcyra to intervene and make peace between them and their enemies. The Corcyraeans refused, and in their despair the Epidamnians bethought themselves of Corinth. According to Greek practice, that city, as the mother-city of Corcyra their immediate founder, had supplied the oecist or leader of the settlement. Fortified by a ruling from Delphi, the source of law on these matters, envojs were sent to Corinth. The merchant princes of Corinth, though no democrats, seized the opportunity of injuring Corcyra and making Epidamnus in fact a colony and dependency of their own. Possibly, too, they realized that it might serve as an alternative half-way house to Italy such as Dyrrhachium, which took the place of Epidamnus, became three centuries later. Accordingly, in the full consciousness of profitable benevolence, they sent out colonists and troops of their own as well as from their dependencies of Ambracia and Leucas. These were dispatched overland and arrived at Epidamnus unchallenged. The news of their coming, brought by fugitives from the exiled oligarchs, roused Corcyra to a counter-intervention and a squadron was sent to demand the dismissal of the new settlers. The Epidamnians naturally refused and the Corcyraeans besieged their city, whereupon the Corinthian government began to collect a fleet, requesting help of their maritime neighbours and inviting further colonists, thus proclaiming their persistence in their policy.

Corcyra, sobered by the news of these preparations, sought to settle matters peaceably. In the spring of 435 b.c. their envoys, with the moral support of Sparta and Sicyon, appeared at Corinth. They offered to submit the whole question to the arbitration of agreed Peloponnesian states, but refused to abandon their case beforehand by admitting the right of Corinth to send settlers to what they claimed to be a Corcyraean colony. If Corinth forced them into war, they would be driven to seek new allies not where they wished but where they could. The Intention of the hint is plain. As the Acarnanians had called in Athenian help against the Ambraciotes some two years before, so now the Corcyraeans might invite help from the same quarter. It is significant that at this time Spartan policy had showed itself pacific and sought to avoid complications which might endanger a settlement that suited Spartan interests sufficiently well.

But Corinth cared for none of these things, and in the summer (435 B.C.)a fleet of seventy-five triremes, thirty of them Corinthian, the others drawn from her allies, set sail. Such a force was small indeed in the face of the Corcyraean navy which was reported to be a hundred and twenty ships strong, though many of these were in bad repair. Brusquely as negotiations had been broken off, the Corcyraeans had time to put their fleet in some sort of trim, and eighty ships faced the Corinthians while forty maintained the blockade of Epidamnus. The Corinthians forced on a battle near the promontory of Leucimne, were defeated, and drew off with the loss of fifteen ships. Of such prisoners as they took the Corcyraeans kept the Corinthians in bonds while they put to death the allies of Corinth who had joined in a quarrel which was not theirs. On the very day of the victory Epidamnus capitulated. Here, too, the Corinthian settlers were handed over to be kept prisoners, the other new colonists were sold into slavery. Thus, while Corcyra had staved off the attack, her harshness made certain a renewal of the war, for Corinth could find allies whose desire for revenge would serve her own desire to make good her humiliating failure. For the rest of that cam­paigning season Corcyraean squadrons held the sea, harried the nearer allies of Corinth, especially Leucas, and burnt Cyllene, the dockyard of the Eleans, who had supplied the Corinthians with ships. Corinth presently replied by establishing troops and a squadron at Actium and near Cheimerium in Thesprotis to cover their chief allies in the West. Throughout the next year, the two powers watched each other, but all the time Corinth was busy preparing a yet stronger fleet and spending her wealth in hiring rowers throughout the Greek world. The Athenians, who so far had made no sign, did not forbid to them the Athenian recruiting ­ground, the maritime states of the Eastern Aegean.

V.

   ATHENIAN INTERVENTION

By the spring of the year 433 the Corinthian preparations were so far advanced that the Corcyraeans were forced to act upon the hint which they had given, and seek help where they could. The splendid isolation which had been their pride was now their danger, and they sent envoys to Athens to sue for help. Corinthian envoys followed them and the Athenian Assembly met to listen to the rival suitors. Thucydides has given us two speeches which appear to present the substance of the con­tending arguments, though their form is an essay in sophistic sententiousness. We shall not err in supposing that this whole group of events was recorded by the historian soon after they occurred and that to Thucydides at the time this debate seemed of crucial importance. The arguments are set out under the two topics of Justice and of Expediency. On the narrower ground of legal correctness Athens was justified in accepting Corcyra as an ally, for the Thirty Years Peace allowed her to make an alliance with any state not scheduled as belonging to the Peloponnesian group. On this point the arguments of Corinth fail. On the broader issue of Justice Corinth pleaded past services, but against these might be set the activity with which Corinth had made war against Athens some twenty-seven years before. The issue of Expediency was not so clear. The Corinthians made in effect a diplomatic offer. Let Athens and Corinth agree that the common interest of imperial states is to be obeyed, and Corinth will facilitate the pursuit of that Athenian interest in the Aegean, if Athens will do the like for Corinth in the Corinthian sphere of influence, western Greece. Such a bargain is in the spirit of the Peace; to refuse it, to use the power of Athens to cross the purposes of Corinth, is the road to war. Such an argument might well give the Athenians pause, but the Corcyraeans urged a point which in the end proved more convincing. Their navy was the second in Greece. If Corinth mastered them, that fleet might be used against Athens in the general war which, they represented, was near at hand. But if Athens made Corcyra her ally, she trans­ferred to her own scale the weight of the Corcyraean navy, and gained the strategic advantage to be derived from the position of the island on the route from and to Italy and Sicily.

The Corcyraeans who had taken the initiative spoke first and the Corinthians followed. In the debate which lasted throughout the remainder of the meeting the balance of the opinion went with the Corinthians but the Assembly was adjourned and next day we may suppose that the governmental policy was declared. The Corcyraean arguments had prevailed, but the alliance that was made was to be only defensive, as offensive action against Corinth would constitute a breach of the Thirty Years Peace. Whether the Athenians, or Pericles who probably swayed the Assembly, did wisely, it is hard to say. There is no evidence which justifies us in supposing that a general war was in reality inevitable. Thucydides does not commit himself to that opinion as his own. The bargain which Corinth suggested would suit the interests of Athens but only if the bargain were kept. If, despite it, war did come, Corinthian control of Corcyra and of the Corcyraean fleet would cripple any Athenian offensive in western Greece, and would make it easier for Syracuse, the colony of Corinth in Sicily, to send naval help on which the Peloponnesians did in fact count when the war began. Pericles had in all probability already pigeon­holed his plan for a war if war should come, and an integral part of that plan was precisely the naval offensive in the West. His policy was unaggressive but unyielding, and once Greek states were at war, it was hard to foresee the future. The choice lay between a great risk of war and a small risk of defeat in a possible war, and that choice is easy for patriotic imperial statesmen. Pericles chose a great risk of war and in so far is responsible for what followed.

The alliance was made in the early summer. The Corinthians, none the less, pressed on with their preparations, and, on the news that their ships had started, the casus foederis arose. At the beginning of August the Athenians dispatched ten triremes, and, some three weeks later, a second squadron of twenty. The smallness of these forces was canvassed even in antiquity. Had the Athenians sent a hundred ships to Corcyra earlier, the Corinthian armada might well have turned back. But Athens must wait until the Corinthian offensive was under way, and, besides, the Athenians had no interest in preventing a collision between the opposing forces. They would, after all, gain more by the sinking of each Corinthian trireme than they would lose by the sinking of each Corcyraean trireme. It was better to allow the two sides to fight, provided only that Corinth did not win an inexpensive and decisive victory. The two squadrons, which, it was expected, would arrive in time, were, as it appeared, a sufficient force to save the Corcyraeans from complete disaster. Its very smallness was a claim to naval superiority; a touch of that panache so dear to the Athenians which Pericles sedulously fostered.

By the first half of September 433 b.c. the Corinthian fleet of a hundred and fifty ships anchored off Cheimerium on the main­land south of Corcyra, and thence, cleared for action, they advanced. At dawn next day they came upon the Corcyraeans who were at sea with a hundred and ten ships of their own, many of them old and not so well manned as those of their enemies and, besides, the first Athenian squadron of ten triremes; the second had not yet arrived. The result was a fleet-action off the islands of Sybota. The Athenian commanders, in accordance with their orders, at first only threatened attack, but when the Corcyraeans were defeated, they were forced to act to cover them from pursuit. Late in the day, as it was growing dusk, the Corinthians formed line to deal the coup de grace. The remnant of the Corcyraean fleet and the ten Athenian ships prepared to fight to the last, when suddenly the Corinthians stayed their attack and backed water. They had caught sight of the second Attic squadron advancing through the gathering darkness. It was, for all they knew, the advance guard of the main battle-fleet of Athens. On the next day the united Attic squadron with such Corcyraean ships as were still capable of manoeuvre offered battle. The Corinthians refused the engagement, and sailed home, erecting a trophy on the way for the victory which they had won, while the Corcyraeans raised a like memorial of the victory which they would have won. This, Thucydides says, was the first grievance from which the Peloponnesian War arose, because Athenians as allies of Corcyra had fought with Corinthians though still at peace with Corinth.

The Attic squadrons returned. They had resisted the Cor­cyraeans’ wish to force on a second engagement which might have led to the destruction of the Corinthian fleet, but equally might have resulted in a reverse damaging to Athenian prestige. Instead they had allowed the Corinthian armada to return baffled by thirty Athenian triremes. This was a lasting injury to the morale of the Peloponnesian sailors, and at Athens the returned sailors talked of the clumsy, antiquated tactics of their friends and enemies alike.

The Athenian government might now assume as beyond question the tactical superiority of their squadrons which for more than twenty years had not been tested against a Peloponnesian fleet. This was a gain, but the price was the active resentment of Corinth. Some twenty-seven years before, Athens had crossed the path of the Corinthians by admitting Megara to her alliance. The result had been the first Peloponnesian War. Now a second time Attic intervention had snatched victory from their grasp. Twenty-seven years before they had conceived against Athens what Thucydides calls ‘their extreme hatred’. The Thirty Years Peace had lulled it to sleep: now it awoke. A second time their shrewd quietism was interrupted by unreasoning passion, and they forgot what it would mean to be at war with the Athenian fleet. The merchants of Corinth set their wits at work to find a means of striking at their enemy. As yet it was vain to appeal to Sparta. No doubt the Spartans had already intimated that they did not regard the Athenian alliance with Corcyra as an open violation of the Thirty Years Peace. Two years before, Sparta had urged upon Corinth a peaceful settlement with Corcyra. All the Corinthians would have got from Sparta would have been good advice two years old from the shrewd king Archidamus. If then the Corinthians wished to involve the Peloponnesian League in a war with Athens, they must find a second, more definite, grievance to reinforce their plea.

VI.     

POTIDAEA

The second grievance was soon found, in Chalcidice. The establishment of Amphipolis had strengthened Athenian power but had alienated both the Chalcidian cities and the king of Macedon. The Chalcidians saw in the new colony a favoured rival in trade which made them less able to pay a tribute which had ceased to be justifiable now that Persia was a hypothetical as well as a distant danger. The movement towards union was too strong to be checked and it was shrewdly encouraged by King Perdiccas who offered land for settlements near the lake of Bolbe. Many of the small cities on the coast were deserted by the bulk of their inhabitants who migrated to the city of Olynthus and so escaped from the immediate reach of Athenian naval power. Perdiccas was the ally of Athens, but the Athenians, often too fond of being too clever in such matters, had allied themselves with his brother Philip who, with a chief named Derdas, was at enmity with the king, for the domesticities of the Macedonian royal house did not make for fraternal affection. The near approach of Athenian power must have been unwelcome and Amphipolis offered a permanent obstacle to Macedonian expansion eastwards. Accordingly Perdiccas began to intrigue with the Chalcidian cities to bring about a revolt. The Athenian alliance with Corcyra opened a new door to his activities for now he could hope to find in Greece itself enemies of Athens. On the news of Sybota, Macedonian envoys began their travels inciting the animosity of Corinth and undermining the placidity of Sparta. The Chalcidians were ready to support any state bold enough to declare against their common enemy, and Corinth seized her opportunity.

An old Corinthian colony, Potidaea, situated on the Isthmus of Pallene within reach of Macedonian help, had no cause to love Athens, which had more than doubled its tribute. It had the right to receive each year magistrates from its mother-city and these now became the agents of Corinthian hatred of Athens. Before the winter of 433 b.c. was over the Athenians had good reason to suspect that Potidaea was planning a revolt. They thereupon demanded the surrender of hostages and the dis­mantling of the walls on the side of Pallene, hoping to check the revolt before it could spread. The Potidaeate replied by sending envoys with dutiful protestations, for they were not ready and wished to wait until Corinth would implement her promises of gaining them support from the Peloponnesians. The farce went on until at last the Athenians prepared to dispatch a fleet, and the Potidaeate envoys took the road to Sparta. There they found the ephors inclining to war and lavish with promises; and when at last the Athenians sent the general Archestratus with 30 ships and 1000 hoplites to impose their will on Potidaea, the city with the support of its Chalcidian and Bottiaean neighbours openly revolted. The rebellion spread rapidly except in the three promontories of Pallene, Sithonia and Acte and among the Andrian colonies of the east coast. In Chalcidice proper the very union which the Athenians sought to prevent became a fact.

The expedition of Archestratus set out at the end of June or the beginning of July 432 b.c., just before the change of magistrates at Athens, a fact which suggests that the Athenians, as later at Mitylene, aimed at a surprise. It is possible that, until the last moment, Pericles had hoped either to detach Perdiccas by fair words or to hold him in check by supporting his brother or that Potidaea would find Sparta discouraging. But, apart from such hopes, the moment was well-chosen. It left Athens time enough to begin a siege before the winter and left the Peloponnesians little time to prepare an invasion of Attica. For, as Pericles well realized, the Peloponnesian League was ill-organized for swift action. But the Corinthians were ready to move and, the moment news of the revolt arrived, one of their leading citizens, Aristeus, set out by land with a force of 2000 Peloponnesian volunteers. Within forty days of the revolt this semi-official filibustering expedition had arrived at Potidaea. Meanwhile Archestratus’ army, which was too weak to act effectively against the Chalcidians, had taken Therma in order to isolate Potidaea on the north-west and had then turned against Pydna, for a demonstration in force might well daunt the unstable Perdiccas. By the end of August or the beginning of September a new general, Callias, was sent out with 40 ships and 2000 hoplites. Too late to intercept Aristeus, he joined the force at Pydna and patched up an arrangement with Perdiccas. By the end of September the combined armies were before Potidaea and won a victory outside the town which was then besieged with Aristeus leading the defence.

Thus in the autumn of 432 Athenian hoplites were attacking a city defended by Peloponnesian volunteers led by a Corinthian general. This, according to Thucydides, was the second grievance which preceded the war. The moment that Aristeus started from Corinth, one of two things was certain: either Sparta must lead the Peloponnesian League against Athens, or she must face the defection of Corinth, her most powerful ally, who was now deeply committed to save Potidaea. There was a third possibility: that Athens would abandon the attempt to subdue Potidaea rather than face a war with the Peloponnesian League, but to do so risked the break-up of her Empire, and there was no party at Athens prepared to choose that alternative.

VII.

THE DECISION OF PEACE OR WAR

Pericles was ready for war but also for peace, if peace could be kept without sacrifice. But what was needed was first a reply to Corinth which might daunt her friends. On the news that Aristeus had started, the Athenian Assembly passed the famous decree which excluded the Megarians from the markets of Attica and the harbours of the Athenian Empire. Pericles declared that this decree was not a violation of the Thirty Years Peace, and we may accept his testimony against that of the aggrieved Megarians. The Athenians had recent causes of complaint against Megara, and, besides, they had yet to revenge themselves for the massacre of their garrison fourteen years before. But, though anger may have chosen the victim, it was policy that directed the blow. The war which now seemed inevitable was to be a test of morale and Pericles chose this way of demonstrating from the very outset how formidable a power the enemies of Athens were daring to challenge. The decree was not what vulgar tradition came to see in it, a cause of war, it was an operation of war, the first blow at the courage and will of Athens’ adversaries. The state which could, by a single decree, close a hundred harbours despite all the hoplites of the Peloponnese, was not an enemy to be lightly challenged, least of all by Corinth.

This shrewd stroke displays, alike in its force and adroitness, the intellectual clarity of Pericles, who believed that the issue whether Sparta would move must be made plain and that at once. Pericles forced the issue, not because his personal position was shaken, but because, if war came, it must come before he was too old to guide Athens to victory. He was now sixty and it was no easy task to control for ever the sanguine fickle adventurous Athenian demos, and he foresaw how lightly they might squander the strength which he had built up.

The Athenians were thus ready to bring matters to a head but their zeal was cold beside that of the Corinthians. Even before the news came of the Athenian victory before Potidaea they had stirred up all the allies of Sparta who had grievances against Athens, and before the month of September ended they gathered at Sparta to persuade the Lacedaemonians that the Thirty Years Peace was at an end. The Megarians had their new grievance which they declared meant the breaking of the Peace, and envoys came secretly from Aegina complaining that Athens did not leave them autonomous as the Thirty Years Peace had provided. Their precise grievance is not revealed to us, but Aegina had once been a member of the Peloponnesian League and in the Thirty Years Peace there may well have been a clause providing that the Aeginetans should be autonomous so long as they paid their tribute to Athens. It was at least a strange interpretation of autonomy that the Athenian Assembly should, by its bare fiat, deny to Aeginetans the right to import desirable woollens from their Megarian neighbours.

These grievances were real enough, but more powerful was the Corinthian veiled threat which followed, that if Sparta would not fight for her allies, they must look elsewhere for a leader. Thucydides takes occasion to put into the mouth of the Corinthians a brilliant contrast between Lacedaemon and Athens, which illuminates not only the crisis itself but the ten years of war which followed it. The Corinthians did not go unanswered, for there is no reason to doubt the historian’s statement that Athenian envoys, on some pretext or other, were at Sparta at the time. These now gave the Periclean answer that Athens stood by her rights and her Empire, but was ready, as the Peace provided, to submit disputes to arbitration.

Opinion at Sparta was divided. As in every state with a proud military tradition, there was a party unwilling to see its bright sword rust, anxious to cut a straight road through the maze of statesmen’s calculations. But the Spartans were cautious legalists, especially while they viewed the grievances of others. On juridical grounds the offer to accept an arbitration placed Athens in the right. The offer might prove illusory, for there was no impartial state considerable enough to be judge in such a cause. But that did not justify its summary refusal. Athens and Corinth were not formally at war before Potidaea, or, if they were, Corinth was the aggressor. Sparta had condoned the Athenian intervention to protect Corcyra by a year of inactivity. And far more cogent were the arguments of the wise king Archidamus that Athens was no ordinary Greek power to be lightly attacked and quickly defeated. The Spartans should think long before they began a war which their children might inherit. Let Sparta test the truth of the Athenian protestations and meanwhile prepare for war if war must come. The answer to these politic considerations was given by the ephor Sthenelaidas who led the war-party. ‘Athens was plainly the offender; the Thirty Years Peace was at an end; Sparta must stand by her friends.’ This thesis, so manly and so intelligible, prevailed, and the Lacedaemonian Assembly voted that the Truce was at an end and that war was justified.

But the victory of the war-party was not yet complete, not yet even certain. For, according to Greek practice, Sparta was still far from a declaration of war, and the Peloponnesian League as a whole could only make war if a majority of its members voted for it. So a meeting of the League was summoned and meanwhile the Spartans sent to consult Apollo at Delphi ‘whether it would be better for them if they made war.’ ‘And the god replied, it is said, that “if they made war with all their might they would win, and that he himself would help when summoned or even uninvoked.”’ It was to take nearly thirty years to prove the god right and meanwhile the news from Potidaea was none too good. Corinthian envoys feverishly frightened or cajoled the Peloponnesian states, and when the conference met they ended the debate with a speech of resolute and resourceful optimism. Thucydides has put together, in their name, a masterly analysis of their advantages as against the Athenian position, the possibilities of attack, the glorious uncertainty of war, the claim to be fighting for Greek freedom against a city that had become a tyrant.

The decision was taken, a majority voted for war and, as it was now October or November, the Lacedaemonians settled down to a winter of diplomatic manoeuvring for position.

At this game they found their master. First came an antiquated gambit, the demand that the Athenians should expel the tainted house of the Alcmaeonidae, the family of Pericles. It was a test of Pericles’ personal position, which proved too strong to be shaken. The Athenians invited Sparta to clear herself of newer guilt, the killing of Helot suppliants and the death of Pausanias. Thucydides then describes more serious demands, first, the raising of the siege of Potidaea, second, the restoration of autonomy to Aegina, third, the repeal of the Megarian decree. ‘There would be no war if they repealed the decree.’ This can hardly be the whole truth, for Sparta was bound at least to satisfy Corinth, and the simple repeal of the Megarian decree would hardly do that.

The Athenian answer was to bring justificatory charges against the Megarians and to refuse the other demands. Whereupon Sparta sent three new envoys with the message: ‘The Lacedaemonians desire the peace to continue and it would continue, if you leave the Greeks autonomous.’ It is often said that this was an ultimatum which struck at the very existence of the Athenian Empire. But legalists might have debated for ever how far the Athenian Empire infringed the autonomy of each of its members. The studied vagueness of the proposal, perhaps due to a change of feeling in the Spartan ephorate, seems devised not so much to close the negotiations as to keep them open, and, to judge from the account of the debate which followed, that was the view of the Athenian Assembly.

This was the crucial debate and at this point Thucydides brings in a speech by Pericles. It is quite possible that he has put together what Pericles said on two occasions, the first at which the Megarian decree was more specifically the point at issue, the second the debate on this vaguer demand.

The attitude of Pericles is that Athens cannot yield to a threat of force, that the Athenians cannot hold their own in fear. They will accept an arbitration but until their case is tried they will neither cease to besiege Potidaea nor to exclude the Megarians from their markets and the harbours they control. This last may be the answer to a hint attributed to a Spartan envoy by Plutarch (Pericles, 30) that if the Athenians will not repeal the decree, they may at least disregard it. This unyielding attitude was justified by pertinent criticism of the Corinthian plans for the conduct of the war. Behind the question of formal right or wrong stands the shadow of a military calculation. And one factor in the calculation was the moral effect of confident unwavering acceptance of every challenge. Pericles prevailed; the Lacedaemonian envoys received their answer and returned, and after that no further embassies were sent.

The issue was only too plain. In the barren field of diplomatic dialectics Pericles had scored a notable success. It was logically impossible for Sparta to accept an arbitration under the Thirty Years Peace which it had already declared to be at an end. It was practically impossible, now that so many questions had been brought in and the Greek world was ranged in two camps, above all, Sparta could not now recede a step without admitting a diplomatic defeat which would have meant the loss of her leader­ship of the Peloponnesian League. The break-up of that League would enable the subtle and patient statecraft of Pericles to achieve for Athens all that a war could give to her. The ‘violent hatred’ conceived by the Corinthians, the fumbling policy of Sparta, following in order to lead, the resolution of Pericles to make no sacrifice of security or prestige for the sake of peace and to face the issue while he could control the event, had combined to make inevitable a war for which an unbiassed study of the ancient evidence can find no single cause which appears sufficient to the modern mind. Neither rivalry in trade, nor prejudice of race, nor the opposition of political ideas, nor a chivalrous sympathy on the part of the Peloponnesians with the subjects of Athens, can be promoted to be more than elements which went to make war possible but not inevitable. The ancient fiction that Pericles ‘set Greece in a blaze’ from vulgar personal motives rests on a naive evaluation of the jests of comedy and on a chrono­logical confusion which concentrated in the year 432 the attacks on Pericles’ friends which belonged to the past and the attacks on Pericles himself which belonged to the future.

‘The truest explanation (facia is),’ writes Thucydides, ‘though it appeared least in what was said, I consider to be the growing power of the Athenians which alarmed the Lacedaemonians and forced them into war.’ It has often been pointed out that neither the history of the ten years which preceded nor of the ten years which followed the outbreak of the war justifies this statement. It seems to explain more truly why the war began again in 413 and ended as it did than why it began at all in 431. In the opinion of the present writer, the words were written by Thucydides after the fall of Athens as he looked back to the Archidamian War and saw it darkened by the tragic shadows of the Sicilian Expedition and the Decelean War, after Alcibiades had made Athens more aggressive and Lysander had made Sparta more determined. But the historian’s conception of the whole period as a unity made one by the logic of events is not binding upon us, and we have the right to appeal from the Thucydides of the day after to the Thucydides of the day before. In the earlier stratum of the Thucydidian history on which the preceding narrative is based we have an account of the antecedents of the Archidamian War which is true to fact and true to the Greeks and Greek wars of that time. Angry men at Corinth had not feared fire, clever men at Athens had played with it, a generation of ill-will had lowered the flashpoint and a con­flagration was only too easy.

VIII.

THE FRONTIER INCIDENT

Negotiations between Athens and Sparta were broken off and both sides were pressing on their preparations for the next summer, but as yet there was no declaration of war. Some of the more ardent partizans of Corinth may still have had a suspicion that the peace party or the temporizing party at Sparta might at the eleventh hour postpone the war, possibly for ever. What was needed was an act of open hostilities, and this came from Thebes. The ambition of the Thebans to make a solid united Boeotia impervious to Athenian intrigue and with frontiers rectified in their favour was best served by war. And in Plataea, the renegade Boeotian city which was an ally of Athens, they found a most suitable objective. If it could be seized at this moment, Thebes would at once make the war actual and would have achieved part of her purpose. There was in Plataea, as in almost every Greek city, a party that would betray the city in order to gain power. A plot was laid with the chief of the Theban government to open the gates to a small force which would be supported by the whole force of Thebes. The other Boeotian cities took no part in the enterprise, no doubt for fear of news of it spreading abroad.

On an evening early in March 431 b.c. the advance party, three hundred strong, left Thebes and before midnight they had been admitted within the gates of Plataea, and the Plataeans were awakened by the voice of a herald summoning them to declare for Boeotia. For the Thebans, anxious to have a good title to the possession of Plataea, began with a proclamation instead of with the massacre that seemed wisdom to the Plataean traitors. The citizens remained in their houses until, plucking up courage, they realized how small a force had entered the town. Then they quietly prepared an attack and just before dawn they rushed the market-place where the Theban hoplites were collected. In a storm of rain, amid the shrieks of the Plataean women, pelted by tiles from the houses and attacked by superior numbers, the Thebans at last broke and were hunted through the streets, trapped within the walls of the city. A part of the invaders had held together and sought to cut their way out, but the gates which they forced led, not into the country, but into a building that was part of the city-wall. The Plataeans after debating if they should burn the building with the men within it, finally allowed these and other Thebans to surrender at discretion. They thus held hostages against the attack of the Theban reinforcements.

The news of the disastrous failure of the surprise reached the Theban main body as it pressed on delayed by the rain-swollen Asopus which it had to cross. They debated what to do and decided to seize as hostages for the safety of the prisoners within the city such Plataeans as were in outlying farms. Before they had done so, the Plataeans sent out a herald to denounce the Theban action and to threaten to kill their prisoners if the Thebans advanced. The Thebans retired on some kind of understanding about their comrades in the city and on their retirement the Plataeans hastily brought in their goods from the country-side and then put the prisoners to death. That the Thebans were tricked in some way is certain, though the Plataeans declared that all they promised was to negotiate about the fate of the prisoners and they denied that they had bound themselves by a solemn oath. Whether they added perjury to deceit may be left undecided. This affair, which crowded into twenty-four hours all the vices of war and of civil strife, was a fitting prelude to the struggle that went far to undermine the spiritual greatness of the Greek people.

The Athenians, who had received news first of the entry of the Thebans into Plataea and then of their defeat in the town, at once seized all Boeotians in Attica, rightly regarding this attack as an act of war against themselves. They sent a herald to instruct the Plataeans to take no action about their prisoners until they, the Athenians, were able to advise them. But hatred had outrun prudence and the herald found the prisoners already put to death. A second attack from Thebes might now be expected, and the Athenians sent troops to help to garrison Plataea and removed all but combatants to the safe shelter of Athens. The Thirty Years Peace was plainly at an end.

CHAPTER VIII