READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER II

THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS 478-463 B.C.

I.

SPARTAN LEADERSHIP

WHILE the Athenians, with those of the islanders and Ionians who had been liberated from Persia, set sail for Sestos in the autumn of 479 b.c., the Peloponnesian part of the fleet returned to Aegina, and after a few weeks spent in preparation for an expedition to Thessaly transported the troops under the command of the Spartan king Leotychidas to Pagasae. It was part of the Athenian case for the justification of their Empire that after Mycale they had endured the rigours of winter in the Dardanelles, in order to reduce Sestos and open the straits once more to Greek navigation, while the Spartans and the other Peloponnesians had selfishly sailed home. This is not the only instance in which the history of Greece has suffered from being written and studied from the Athenian point of view. It was not so easy for the Greeks at the time, as it was some years later, to realize the completeness of their victory over Persia. Even after the reduction of Sestos, the other route between Asia and Europe, that by the bridge over the Bosporus, was still open to the Persians; and with the line of fortified posts which stretched from the Propontis to the frontiers of Macedonia still intact, it might well have appeared to the Spartans that, so long as Thessaly was in the hands of a dynasty friendly to Persia, a great and effectual door was opened into the very heart of Greece in the event of a renewed Persian offensive. To secure Thessaly for the national cause must have seemed to them only second in importance to the opening of the Dardanelles. It is true that Sparta had private interests of her own to promote in Thessaly, for the expulsion of the Aleuadae would have meant the ascendancy of the philo-Laconian party; but it is equally true that Athens had private interests of her own in the prosecution of the siege of Sestos, where an Athenian colony had been established in the time of the elder Miltiades.

It is alleged by Herodotus, who is our primary authority, that the expedition failed in its object because Leotychidas accepted a bribe from the Aleuadae. It was natural that when the expedition was unsuccessful it should be assumed that its commander must have been bribed. Spartan kings were often venal, but in the present case any such hypothesis is otiose. Thessaly throughout its history was a house divided against itself, and the evacuation of Tempe in 480 b.c. was probably dictated as much by political as by military considerations. Both before and after the expedition of Xerxes, the Thessalian peasantry recognized in the rule of the Aleuadae their strongest safeguard against the oppression of the Hippes (Knights), who formed the oligarchical and philo-Laconian party. A few initial successes were won by Leotychidas, but no real headway was made against the reigning house. In the following spring the expedition was recalled.

It must have been about the time that the fleet under the command of Leotychidas set sail for Pagasae that an incident occurred which revealed the latent rivalry of the two leading states in the Greek world. On the morrow of the victory at Plataea Athens was in ruins and defenceless. Only a few fragments of the city-walls remained standing. It was the policy of Themistocles both to extend the area of the former city, and to convert it into one of the strongest fortresses in Greece. It was not unnatural that Sparta should suspect that the fortification of Athens was a measure directed against herself. Owing to her geographical position Sparta had no need of walls, and nothing could have suited her interests better than the razing of the fortifications of other Greek cities. Consequently she proposed to Athens that the two states should join in imposing this policy on the rest of Greece north of the Isthmus; a policy which would have left Athens, as well as the other states, at the mercy of Sparta and the Peloponnesian League. It was not a policy that was likely to find favour at Athens, and Themistocles was resolved that Athens should be put into a state of defence before Sparta could prevent it. According to the story as told by Thucydides, Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to dispatch Aristides, Abronichus, and himself, as envoys to Sparta in order to discuss the matter with the ephors. He would himself proceed at once to Sparta, but his colleagues were to stay behind at Athens until, by the efforts of the whole population, men, women, and children, the walls had been raised to a height which would permit of the defence of the city. On his arrival at Sparta he succeeded, on one pretext or another, in postponing his interview with the authorities; and when the ephors grew restive on receiving in­formation from various sources that the walls were being rebuilt and had already reached a considerable height, he flatly denied the truth of these allegations. He urged them to send envoys to Athens who could bring back to Sparta a trustworthy report of the real position, while at the same time he sent instructions to the Athenians to detain the Spartan envoys until he and his colleagues, who had in the meantime reached Sparta, had been allowed to return home. The Spartans fell into the trap, and sent the envoys to Athens; whereupon, Themistocles laid aside the mask, and openly justified the policy of fortifying his city. The Spartans, not being prepared for a breach with Athens, accepted the inevitable, and allowed Themistocles and his colleagues to return.

There are points in this narrative which appeared improbable even to the ancient mind. Theopompus represented Themistocles as having effected his purpose by bribing the ephors. Not a few modern critics are prepared to deal still more drastically with the tale as told by Thucydides. We are not, however, justified in treating the story as in the main a mere invention. It may be regarded as certain that Sparta attempted to prevent the fortification of Athens, and that her efforts were foiled by the diplomacy of Themistocles. It seems not less certain that there was at Sparta a party friendly to Athens, on whose support Themistocles could rely, and by whose aid he effected his purpose. It is inconceivable that the Spartan authorities could have been such simpletons as is presupposed by the narrative of Thucydides. The historian himself makes some significant admissions; that the Spartans were prompted to their action by the importunity of their allies, that Themistocles was popular at Sparta, and that a warm feeling of friendliness between the two cities had been created by the patriotism displayed by the Athenians in the War. An open breach with Athens was the last thing desired by any responsible statesman at Sparta.

If Plutarch is to be believed, Sparta made one more effort at this period to secure her ascendancy north of the Isthmus of Corinth. He attributes to Sparta the design of reorganizing the Amphictyonic League by excluding from it those states which either had joined Xerxes, or had remained neutral. The effect of the proposed change would have been felt chiefly in northern and central Greece, as Thessaly and Boeotia, as well as a number of smaller states whose votes were controlled by the Thessalians, would have lost their seats in the Council; but it would have extended to the Peloponnese where Sparta’s great rival, Argos, would have been excluded. As the majority of the patriotic states were members of the Peloponnesian League, and therefore allies of Sparta, the proposal, if carried, would have given her the control of the Council. It was Themistocles, according to Plutarch, who detected the insidious designs of Sparta and induced the Pylagori, the deputies of the League, to reject the scheme. It may well be doubted if there is any historical foundation for the alleged proposal of the Spartans. It is generally assumed that Plutarch’s authority in this passage is Theopompus, the historian of the reign of Philip of Macedon, and it may be surmised that we have here a typical instance of a method in favour with the writers of the fourth century b.c., that of eking out the scanty annals of an earlier period by the adaptation of well-known incidents of their own age. To a contemporary of Philip of Macedon nothing was more familiar than the idea of employing the Amphictyonic League as a political instrument, but it is an idea which seems quite foreign to the mind of the fifth century.

Sparta had made two attempts to establish her supremacy north of the Isthmus; she had endeavoured to expel the Aleuadae from Thessaly, and to prevent the rebuilding of the walls of Athens. Both attempts had failed, and for the next twenty years her efforts in Greece itself are confined to the Peloponnese. It is not till 457 b.c. that another Spartan expedition is dispatched to northern Greece.

Before the beginning of spring in the year 478 b.c. Sestos had been reduced by the Athenians, and the Persians had been deprived of the control of the Hellespont. The liberation of the four great islands off the western coast of Asia Minor, Lesbos, Chios, Samos, and Rhodes, was a direct result of the battle of Mycale, and it may be assumed that some of the cities on the mainland of Ionia, as well as several of those on the shores of the Hellespont and Propontis, were recovered by the end of 479 b.c. Much, however, still remained to be done before the task which the allies had set themselves could be regarded as accomplished. At the beginning of summer, the regent Pausanias was given the command of a fleet composed of twenty Peloponnesian vessels, thirty Athenian, and of a contingent drawn from Ionia and the islands. It might have been expected that the command would have been entrusted to Leotychidas, the victor of Mycale, but the discredit into which he had fallen owing to his mismanagement of the Thessalian campaign left the ephors no alternative but the appointment of his colleague. Pausanias had indeed incurred momentary unpopularity by a boastful inscription which he had engraved on the tripod which the Greeks had dedicated at Delphi as a thankoffering for their victory over the Persians; an incident of this kind, however, could hardly have effaced the memory of the services which he had rendered to the national cause. The objective assigned to the expedition of 478 b.c. was twofold: the liberation of Cyprus, and the recovery of Byzantium. It proved an easy task to expel the Persian garrisons from the Greek cities in Cyprus, but the force at the disposal of Pausanias must have been quite inadequate for the reduction of the Phoenician cities of the island. In any case, the hold of the Greeks on the island could only have been precarious so long as the Phoenician fleet had its base so near at hand. From Cyprus the expedition sailed to the Bosporus, and Byzantium fell before the end of the summer.

This was a serious blow to Persia. Several Persians of high rank were amongst the garrison that was forced to surrender; but of even greater importance than this were the strategical results of the fall of this great stronghold. The communications between Persia and its garrisons in Thrace were cut, and the Greeks acquired complete control of the route to the Black Sea, from which region the supplies of imported corn had been largely drawn. This success of Pausanias, following on his brilliant victory at Plataea n the preceding year, appears to have turned his head. He conceived the ambition of making himself master of the Greek world by the aid of Persia, and of marrying the daughter of the Great King. He adopted the Persian dress and manners, surrounded himself with a bodyguard of Persians and Egyptians drawn from the prisoners captured at Byzantium, and he showed himself insolent and oppressive towards the officers under his command. At length he entered into a treasonable correspondence with Xerxes, in which he promised to become his agent in the sub­jugation of Greece. So grave were the reports of his doings which reached Sparta that the ephors were compelled to insist on his immediate return. Of some of the particular charges alleged against him he was found guilty, and in consequence he was deprived of his command of the allied fleet; but the more serious charge of medism was held to be not proven, and he was allowed to return to Byzantium in an unofficial capacity. Next spring (477 b.c.) a Spartan named Dorcis was sent out by the ephors to take over the command of the fleet. On his arrival he found that the misconduct of his predecessor had had the most momentous consequences. Even before the recall of Pausanias the discontent among the Allies had given rise to a movement for the transference of the command from Sparta to Athens, but it was not until he was about to start on his return to Sparta that the transference was effected. The Peloponnesians alone of the allies refused to accept the change of leadership.

Thucydides represents this change of leadership in the opera­tions against Persia as the outcome of two factors: the misconduct of Pausanias, and the sense of kinship which existed between the Athenians and the Greeks of Ionia and the Hellespont. He expressly says that the command was offered by the latter to the former on the ground of their common Ionian race. It has often been maintained that it was inevitable that the direction of the operations against Persia should have passed from Sparta to Athens, even if there had been no misconduct on the part of Pausanias, and no tie of blood between the Ionians and Athenians. As the war against Persia had to be carried on by sea, it was clearly impossible, so it is argued, that the command could be entrusted to any power other than Athens, which had contributed by far the largest number of vessels to the fleet which had won the battle of Salamis, and to whose navy there was now no rival in the Aegean It may be admitted that the ultimate transference of command from Sparta to Athens was inevitable, but it is well to remember that in Greek History it is seldom indeed that the personal facto: can be eliminated. Had Pausanias been a Brasidas, the change might even so have come, but it would have come in a different form, and it would have had very different results. As it was, the change of leadership, coming at the time and in the manner that it did, involved the humiliation of Sparta, and tended to the ultimate estrangement of the two leading states. The immediate effect, however, was to strengthen the influence of the party at Sparta which was friendly to Athens.

In order to understand the policy of Sparta not only at this moment, but throughout the fifth and fourth centuries down to the rise of Macedon, it must be borne in mind that there were two rival parties at Sparta whose influence upon her political action can clearly be traced. One of these was a party whose view was for the most part confined to the Peloponnese. It was opposed to a policy of adventure; above all, it was opposed to distant enterprise across the sea. Its consistent aim was the maintenance of a good understanding with Athens. The influence of this party at this crisis is clearly visible in the narrative of Thucydides. The recall of Pausanias may have been due to a suspicion of his intrigue with the Persian Court, and his removal from the command may have been prompted as much by a sense of his unfitness for the post as by the desire to avoid a rupture with Athens. It can only have been the influence of the party friendly to Athens that led Sparta to acquiesce in the repudiation of the claims of Dorcis to the command, and it is Thucydides himself who asserts that the Spartans accepted the formation of the new Confederacy under the leadership of Athens because they were weary of the war against Persia, because they were apprehensive of the effect of distant service upon the character of Spartan commanders, and because they regarded the Athenians as their friends. In the language of Thucydides we seem to hear an echo of the argu­ments advanced at Sparta by the party whose influence has been assumed. But Sparta had been humiliated, and deeply humiliated. She had failed to expel the Aleuadae from Thessaly; she had failed to prevent the fortification of Athens; and she had failed to maintain that unity of command to which, as much as to any other cause, the repulse of Xerxes had been due. Her policy had failed, and it had failed very largely owing to the fault of those to whom its execution was committed. Leotychidas had proved incompetent; Pausanias had proved impossible. Such failures and such humiliations were bound to discredit the party which was responsible for the policy. They could not fail, however, to leave behind bitter memories which that party would know how to exploit to the full when the occasion should arise.

II.

THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS

As early as the autumn of 479 b.c. the Athenians had taken common action with the Greeks of Ionia and the Hellespont in the siege of Sestos, and had exercised over them a command that was independent of Sparta. Thus in the siege of Sestos, directed by an Athenian general, Xanthippus, and conducted by a fleet of which none of the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta formed part, we cannot fail to find one of the principal antecedents of the formation of the new Confederacy. The maritime league which was formed in the winter that followed the capture of Byzantium is known as the Confederacy of Delos. It was here in the temple of Apollo and Artemis that the treasury of the League was established, and that the meetings of its synod were to be held. The choice of the sacred island of Delos, the ancient centre of Ionian worship, was probably dictated by considerations of sentiment as much as of convenience; and at any rate it served to throw into relief that common Ionian kinship on which the League was originally based.

In dealing with the Confederacy of Delos we are called upon to answer three questions of the first importance: what was its original constitution; what was its original extent; and what was the amount of the tribute (phoros) as first assessed?

It would appear that the constitution was not embodied in a document, nor expressed in any precise terms. It was more in the nature of a treaty of alliance, to which there were two parties: Athens on the one side, and the Allies on the other. It was between these two parties that the oaths were exchanged. The alliance was offensive as well as defensive, and the casting into the sea of masses of iron which accompanied the exchange of the oaths was intended to be symbolic of a determination which should last until the metal floated to the top. The object of the alliance is defined by Thucydides as retaliation for the losses inflicted by the Persians in their invasion of Greece. The task, however, of Athens and her allies must have been interpreted from the start as going far beyond a policy of mere reprisals. It must have been realized that the ultimate aim of their efforts was the liberation from the Persian yoke of the whole Greek fringe of Asia Minor. The obligations imposed upon the Allies were alternative in character. They bound themselves either to furnish their quota of ships and crews for the prosecution of the war against Persia, or else, in lieu of this, their quota of tribute. There was to be a synod of the Allies which was to meet at Delos periodically, but what its powers and duties were it is not easy to determine. Grote attributes to it the two functions of reviewing the assessments of tribute and of sitting as a court of justice for the trial of charges, either of remissness of service or of failure to pay tribute, which might be brought against individual states. He treats it as self-evident that in the early days of the Confederacy Athens had no power to enforce any regulation not approved by the synod. ‘We may be certain’, he says, ‘that all which was done at first was done by general consent, and by a freely determining authority’. For these assumptions there is little evidence. It may be inferred from a passage in Thucydides that the synod had some control over the general policy of the League, and some say in the coercion of recalcitrant members such as Naxos or Thasos. That it acted as a court of appeal from the assessments proposed by the Athenians, or from the measures taken by Athenian commanders against defaulting states, is a view for which the authority of no ancient writer can be quoted.

In the constitution there were two defects which were to prove fatal to the success of the League as a union of free and independent allies. In the first place, Athens was unmistakably the ‘predominant partner’. The contract was not between allies on a footing of equality, of whom Athens was one, but, as has been pointed out already, between two parties, of which Athens was one and the general body of the Allies was the other. To this predominant partner powers were entrusted from the first which rendered it inevitable that Athens should become the mistress of the League. It was left to her to decide which of the states included in the Confederacy should furnish ships, and which should pay tribute. To an Athenian statesman, Aristides, was committed the delicate task of determining the individual assessments of tribute. It would appear that the fleets of the League were invariably commanded by Athenian Generals, and if Thucydides is to be believed the Hellenotamiae ‘Stewards of the Greeks’, the officials to whom the payments of tribute were made, were Athenian magistrates from the first. It was a singular piece of good fortune for Athens that the commander of her fleet in the Hellespontine waters at the moment when the Allies approached Athens happened to be Aristides, whose ‘ostentatious probity’, to borrow Grote’s phrase, inspired universal confidence.

In the second place, it was left undetermined whether each individual state had, or had not, the right to withdraw from the League at its pleasure. It may be surmised that the right of secession was left in uncertainty, because, had it been expressly denied, the Confederacy might never have been formed. When the right to secede was claimed, first by Naxos and then by Thasos it was easy for Athens to argue that the concession of this right could only end in the disruption of the League and the abandonment of the task which it had accepted, but when once the principle was admitted that secession was equivalent to rebellion, it was within the discretion of Athens to impose as the penalty for unsuccessful revolt such terms as were bound to make her within a few years the complete mistress of her allies. History is rich in examples of the dangers that are inseparable from such ambiguities If the right of secession had been expressly denied by an article of the American constitution, that constitution might never have been accepted by the parties to the contract. Consequently, the right in question was neither affirmed nor denied, and the price paid for this deliberate equivocation was the Civil War of 1861.

At a later date we find the members of the Confederacy o Delos divided for the purposes of assessment into five groups: the Islands, Thrace, the Hellespont, Ionia, and Caria. Of the insular district the nucleus was formed by the Cyclades, with the exception of the two Dorian islands of Thera and Melos. In addition to the Cyclades, there were in eluded in this group the two important islands of Euboea and Aegina, as well as Lemnos and Imbros. The Thracian, or Thrace ward district as it should more properly be called, consisted of the three peninsulas of Chalcidice, together with the cities on the northern coast of the Aegean from the Strymon to the Hebrus and the two islands of Thasos and Samothrace. The Hellespontine district comprised both the European and the Asiatic shores of the Hellespont proper, of the Propontis, and of the Bosporus as well as the island of Tenedos. The western coast of Asia Minor from the south-western point of the Troad to the mouth of the Meander, together with the adjacent islands, formed the Ionian district. Finally, the Carian district included the whole coastline of south-western Asia Minor, from a point just south of Miletus to the city of Phaselis, in addition to a number of neighbouring islands of which the most important were Cos, Carpathus, and Rhodes.

How much of what was subsequently included in these five groups or districts formed part of the original Confederacy, when it was formed not later than midsummer 477 b.c.? From the Islands there must be excluded Aegina, Scyros, Carystus in Euboea, and possibly Andros. It may be assumed that in the Thraceward district the two islands of Thasos and Samothrace had been recovered, and it is possible that the same may be said of the three peninsulas of Chalcidice. It may, however, be in­ferred with certainty from a comparison of a passage in Herodotus with a statement in Thucydides that the whole coastline from the Hebrus to the Strymon, or more probably to the peninsula of Acte, was still in Persian hands. We gather from Herodotus that Persian garrisons and commandants had been established, even before the expedition of Xerxes, in all the Greek cities on the coast of Thrace and of the Hellespont, and that their reduction was not effected until the Thracian campaign of Cimon, in 476 b.c. and the following year. It is generally admitted that the Persians retained their hold on the Carian district, with the exception of Rhodes and some of the adjacent islands, until the campaign of the Eurymedon. It is more than probable that from the two remaining districts, Ionia and the Hellespont, serious deductions have to be made. It is not disputed that Ephesus and Myus in the former, and Byzantium, Lampsacus, and the greater part of the Thracian Chersonese, in the latter, were not yet in the possession of the League. Byzantium was still held by Pausanias, while more than a dozen years later it was in the power of the Great King to make a grant to Themistocles of Lampsacus and Myus.

It is commonly assumed that, with these exceptions, the whole of Ionia and the Hellespont had been secured by the beginning of 477 b.c.; but any such assumption seems hard to justify. It is by the merest accident that we happen to know that the places mentioned were still in Persian hands, and yet Ephesus, Lampsacus, and Myus are cities which might well have been expected to have fallen into the hands of the Greeks after Mycale. Ephesus was probably at the time the most important place on the mainland of Ionia; Myus lay next door to Miletus, while Lampsacus was a position of great strategical importance on the Dardanelles. If cities such as these were still in the possession of the Great King, what warrant can there be for the assertion that from every other place in these two districts the Persian garrisons had been expelled? We may conclude then that the Confederacy of Delos at the time of its first assessment (in the first half of 477 b.c.) comprised the whole of the insular district—with the exception of Aegina, Scyros, Carystus, and perhaps Andros—,the islands lying off the western coast of Asia Minor, and most, although by no means all, of the cities on the mainland of Ionia, and a majority of the cities in the Hellespontine district. On the other hand, the League held nothing in Caria except some of the islands, and in the Thracian district the most that it can have claimed was Chalcidice and the islands of Thasos and Samothrace.

The answer to the third question depends very largely on the answer to the second. If the original area of the Confederacy was at most three-fifths of what it was at the time of the Thirty Years Peace (445 b.c.), it seems reasonable to conclude that the first assessment must have produced a total sum appreciably less than those of a later period. Thucydides’ answer to the question is at once precise, and unequivocal. He states that the tribute when first assessed amounted to 460 talents. He is clearly referring to the first assessment of Aristides, although the ‘assessment of Aristides’ occurs only in a clause of the Peace of Nicias, and not in the passage in question. There are minds which cannot allow an appeal from the authority of Thucydides; there are others which are not content to answer the question by the aid of the simple formula, ‘Thucydides cannot be mistaken.’ If once this formula is ruled out, it must be admitted that there are grave difficulties in the way of accepting the figure which he gives. It is not merely that there were fewer cities included in the League in 477 b.c. than in 450 or 445 b.c.; we have also to take into account the fact that there were cities included in the League from the first which paid tribute after the middle of the century, but at the time of the first assessment supplied ships in lieu of tribute. Naxos and Thasos are the two cases known to us, but it is clear from the language of Thucydides that they were not the only states which were compelled to exchange service for tribute. It has been calculated from the evidence afforded by the quota-­lists that the amount of tribute received by Athens between 450 b.c. and 436 b.c. never exceeded the sum of 460 talents, which is Thucydides’ figure for the first assessment. The highest figure during these years is 455 talents, and the lowest 414. It is generally agreed that 460 talents was the average amount of the assessment at this period, although for various reasons the amount actually received in any one year might fall below, and even considerably below, this sum. If, how­ever, the total aimed at when the Confederacy had reached its greatest extent was no more than 460 talents, one of two conclusions must follow. Either the tribute must have been assessed on a much higher scale at the outset, when the members of the League were fewer in number, and when many of the larger states were exempt from assessment in virtue of supplying ships, or else the amount produced by the first assessment must have been little more than half the total given by Thucydides. If we take only four of the cities which in 477 b.c. either were not included in the League or were not liable to tribute, Aegina, Thasos, Byzantium, and Abdera, we shall find that between them they account for more than 90 talents in the later assessments, i.e. for a fifth of the total sum. The former of the two alternatives may be excluded, partly on the ground of the popularity of Aristides’ assessment, partly because there is no trace of the Athenians ever having claimed credit for themselves for such a reduction in the scale of assessment, and partly because the clause in the Peace of Nicias renders it certain that the assessment of Aristides was regarded as a minimum rate of payment. It follows, therefore, that we cannot escape from the other alternative. The tribute when first assessed by Aristides cannot have amounted to anything like so large a sum as 460 talents. It looks as if Thucydides had assumed that the total which Athens sought to secure after the transference of the treasury from Delos to Athens was also the total aimed at by Aristides. If this is so, it is probable that a similar instance of his confusing the conditions of the later period of the League with those of the earlier may be found in the same chapter. It is there stated that the office of Hellenotamiae was then (i.e. at the time of the formation of the League) first instituted at Athens. The quota-lists, however, are arranged in a consecutive series, in relation to a certain magistracy or board and the series starts with the year 454 b.c., which can only be the date of the institution of the board. The mention of a particular Hellenotamiae in the heading of certain of these inscriptions suggests that the office in question was that of the Hellenotamiae. If this inference is correct, it is clear that the office of Hellenotamiae as an Athenian magistracy must have been instituted at the time of the removal of the treasury to Athens in 454 b.c.; from which it follows that the Hellenotamiae of the earlier period must have been Delian and not Athenian magis­trates, or else that the office was not constituted until the removal of the treasury to Athens.

III.     

THE RISE OF CIMON

It is not too much to claim that the Confederacy of Delos was the spiritual child of Themistocles. He was not, indeed, permitted either to have any share in its organization or to lead its fleets to victory, but it was his policy and his achievements that alone rendered possible the formation of the Confederacy and the. supremacy of Athens. It was he who had created the new Athenian navy, and it was his strategy which had won the battle of Salamis. It was he, too, who was responsible for the new naval base at the Piraeus without which her maritime hegemony could not have been maintained. As far back as his archonship in 493 b.c. he had planned, and begun to construct, the new harbour which was to take the place of the open roadstead of Phalerum, which had hitherto sufficed for the needs of the Athenian fleet. How much was effected, or how much of what was effected was destroyed by the Persians, we do not know. As soon, however, as the walls of Athens had been rebuilt, he set about the completion of his plan for the Piraeus. The site selected included the whole peninsula of Munychia with its three harbours; the large inner harbour known by the name of Cantharus and the two small outer harbours of Zea and Munychia. The whole of this peninsula was surrounded with a wall, which kept close to the shore and was continued along the north side of the harbour of Cantharus as far as the promontory of Eetionea. The entrances to all three harbours were protected by fortified moles. The walls were no less than 60 stadia, or 7 miles, in circuit, and the space enclosed was almost equal in extent to the enlarged Athens. While, however, the walls of Athens had been hastily built, those of the Piraeus were a model both of design and construction. Although the walls proved amply sufficient for defence, they were carried up to only half the height that Themistocles had contem­plated. It is probable that they were from fourteen to fifteen feet thick, and instead of the core being composed of rubble, according to the usual Greek practice, the whole breadth of the wall was formed of large stones, hewn square, and clamped on the outer face with iron and lead. Thus there were now two fortified cities four or five miles apart, each of which might be isolated from the other in case of invasion. So long as Athens retained her command of the sea, she could freely import her supplies of food into the Piraeus; but so long as an invading army could invest the city and cut it off from its port, there was the risk of Athens being reduced by blockade, even though it could not be taken by assault. This was the fatal flaw in the strategical position of Athens, a flaw which could only be remedied by building walls to connect the city with the Piraeus.

It seems certain that Themistocles was never again elected General after the year of Salamis, but the story of the rebuilding of the walls, as well as the completion of his plans for the Piraeus, proved that he still exercised great influence over the policy of Athens. How long this influence lasted, and how and why it was forfeited, is obscure. He was chosen to supply a tragic chorus for his tribe in the archonship of Adeimantus (477-6 b.c.), but we have no conclusive evidence either of his presence or of his activities at Athens after this date. The ancient writers have nothing better to offer by way of explanation for his fall from popular favour than an empty phrase. The decline of his in­fluence is at least in part accounted for by the fact that he was a novus homo. His rapid advance to power in the interval between the two Persian Invasions had been facilitated by the rivalry of the two great clans of Philaidae and Alcmaeonidae, which culminated in the prosecution of Miltiades. The success of the novus homo taught the old families a lesson. If they were to retain their is ascendancy, and if the democratic movement was to be checked, the Clans must present an unbroken front. In the marriage of Cimon with Isodice, the granddaughter of Megacles, we have an outward and visible sign of the reconciliation of the two great houses. By the marriage of his sister Elpinice with Callias, the head of the great family of Ceryces and the richest man at Athens, Cimon still further strengthened his connections. At the time of the formation of the Confederacy of Delos, Aristides was in com­mand of the Athenian fleet, and Cimon merely a subordinate; but by the year 476 b.c. Cimon had become commander-in-chief of the Athenian forces, a position which he appears to have held without a break down to his return from Ithome in 462 B.C. It was the solid support of the aristocratic interest that procured for Cimon the supreme command, but it was his skill in the art of war, and the popularity accruing to him from his victories, that account for his long tenure of office. The oppor­tunity was given him, and he knew how to make full use of it.

We owe it to Plutarch, whose Life of Cimon is one of the most valuable in the series of his biographies of Greek worthies, not only that we know something of his outward appearance—tall, with a great mass of thick curly hair—, but that we are in a position to appreciate the character of one who is admittedly the most prominent figure in one of the greatest periods of Athenian history, and to do justice to the greatness of the services that he rendered both to Athens and to Greece. It is seldom that we find in Plutarch a consistent picture of the subject of a biography, but what he has to tell us of Cimon is more than usually self­contradictory. In one passage he quotes Stesimbrotus of Thasos, a younger contemporary of Cimon’s, to the effect that the latter had never been taught music or any other of the usual accomplish­ments; Plutarch even goes so far as to assert that, in his earlier life, he not only was reputed to be drunken and dissolute, but was even compared by the popular voice to a grandfather who was nicknamed booby. That a great commander should be loose in his morals, or too fond of the bottle, or even uneducated, is not incredible. Parallels from other periods of history suggest themselves. What is incredible is that the policy of the most intelligent of peoples should have been directed during one of the most eventful of its epochs by one who was illiterate in any sense of the term.

Fortunately, there is evidence of a very different tenor to be found in Plutarch’s Life. He speaks of him as not inferior to Themistocles in sagacity, and he alleges that Aristides gave him his support because he had early perceived his good natural parts. What is decisive is an anecdote which rests upon the authority of the poet Ion, who was himself present at the scene. The whole point of the story of the supper party at the house of Laomedon is the contrast between Cimon, who could both play and sing, and Themistocles, who lacked these accomplishments. The appeal to the Assembly, in the course of the great Messenian debate, not to suffer Greece to go lame or Athens to pull without its yoke-fellow (one of the few genuine specimens of the oratory of this period which have come down to us) proves that, like many another soldier, he could speak with the eloquence of the heart. Cimon’s mother was the daughter of a Thracian prince named Olorus; nor was he the only famous Athenian at this period who had Thracian blood in his veins, the historian Thucydides being also connected with the family of Olorus. A typical Athenian he was not; as Stesimbrotus puts it, his soul was rather of the Peloponnesian type. What contemporaries were conscious of was the contrast between him and his rival Pericles; a contrast in its way as complete as that between Gladstone and Disraeli. It was a contrast, however, not only of character and views, but between two different types of culture. Cimon had been trained in music and gymnastic as those terms were understood in the epoch before the Persian Wars. His education was that of an Athenian country gentleman of the sixth century b.c.; an education in accomplishments. He had been taught to ride, to sing, and to play the harp. It may be presumed that he was not ignorant of the poets. Of the New Learning, of the culture which had come into fashion since the days of Salamis and Plataea, the culture of which Pericles was the fine flower—of all this he had no tincture. In his public speaking he was a stranger to the con­scious art of his great rival, and he would have been as little fitted to discuss the theory of music with Damonides, as to discuss the cause of an eclipse with Anaxagoras. It was left to a later genera­tion, with its love of antithesis, to exaggerate this contrast between the two statesmen until it presents us with the Booby Cimon. Whatever verdict may be passed upon his statesmanship, there is hardly room for doubt as to his military genius. If he is to be, judged either by his unbroken career of success, or by the magni­tude of the results achieved, he must be ranked as one of the greatest, if not actually the greatest, of Athenian commanders.

IV.     

THE ACHIEVEMENTS OF THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS

By the end of 477 b.c. the Confederacy had been organized, the tribute assessed, and the Bosporus secured by the expulsion of Pausanias from Byzantium. Thus two results had been achieved; the communications between Greece and the Pontus had been restored, and those between Persia and Europe had been cut. It must have been clear to all that the next task that awaited Athens and her allies was the expulsion of the remaining Persian garrisons from the Thracian seaboard. In the spring of 476 bc Cimon set sail for the Strymon. We learn from Herodotus, who is our chief authority for this campaign, that little difficulty was experienced in the reduction of the Persian fortresses in this region. Only two of their commandants, he tells us, offered more than a feeble resistance. By this time the garrisons must have been thinned by desertion, and now that the communications were cut it was impossible for Persia to throw in fresh supplies either of troops or stores. The two commandants excepted by Herodotus from his general condemnation were Boges of Eion and Mascames of Doriscus. The latter succeeded in foiling all the efforts of the Athenians to capture the town, and Doriscus never formed part of their Empire. Ei’on was taken, but the resistance offered by Boges exhibits Persian courage at its highest. After Cimon had succeeded in isolating the fortress from the native tribes in the interior of the country from whom it obtained its corn, its surrender was merely a question of time. The garrison was reduced to the most desperate straits, but Boges held out till the spring, and the besiegers had to face all the terrors of a Thracian winter. At last, when endurance could go no farther, he slew his harem, his children, and slaves; threw into the river all the gold and silver in his possession; and then, having set fire to a lofty funeral pyre, himself leaped into the flames. It may be inferred from Thucydides that the capture of Eion was the first achievement of the allied forces in this campaign. They must, therefore, have concentrated their efforts on it, and delayed their operations against the other strongholds until the summer of 475 b.c. The strategical importance of the Strymon valley affords a sufficient explanation of their policy.

For the events of the next ten years no exact chronology can be attempted. The relative order of these events is not in dispute; the conquest of Scyros, the reduction of Carystus, the revolt of Naxos, and finally the battle of the Eurymedon. We have been able so far to reckon forward from Plataea and Mycale to the capture of Eion, and the data supplied by Thucydides, supplemented here and there by the evidence of Diodorus’ chronological source and of the Scholiasts, will enable us to reckon backwards from the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War to the revolt of Thasos in 465 b.c. No sufficient data, however, are available for filling in the dates between the capture of Eion and the revolt of Thasos. It may be regarded as fairly certain that the conquest of Scyros and Carystus fall before 470 b.c., and the revolt of Naxos and the battle of the Eurymedon after that date. It is significant of the imperfect character of our knowledge of this period of Greek history that the name of Cimon is connected by no ancient writer, either with the war with Carystus, or with the siege of Naxos. It is conceivable that the conduct of the war with Carystus should have been committed to a subordinate, but it is in the highest degree improbable that the command against Naxos should have been entrusted to any lesser man than Cimon. It may be conjectured that the reason why his name is not connected with either Scyros or Naxos is to be found in the silence of Thucydides. The only events with which the historian connects the name of Cimon are the capture of Eion, the victory of the Eury­medon, the siege of Ithome, and the last expedition to Cyprus. There were special reasons why his connection with some other events could not be forgotten. His prosecution on his return from the reduction of Thasos was sufficient proof of his command against that island; in the same way, the popularity that he acquired by bringing back the bones of Theseus established the fact that it was he that reduced Scyros. It looks as if no similar evidence in regard to Carystus and Naxos was at the disposal of later writers.

Although Scyros is a barren and rocky island, its conquest was of importance to Athens for two reasons. In the first place, its inhabitants, who were Dolopians by race, were notorious for piracy, and so long as they retained their independence there could be no effective policing of the seas. In the second place, it was a position of considerable strategical importance, lying as it did on the route to Thrace and the Hellespont. Pretexts for an attack on the island were readily found. A Delphic oracle which had been given to the Athenians in the archonship of Phaedo (476—5 b.c.) commanded the Athenians to bring back the bones of Theseus from the island, and it was easy to allege that the Dolopians refused proper facilities for the search for his tomb. It would also appear that the islanders had been imprudent enough to refuse compliance with a sentence of the Amphictyonic Council which had condemned them to make reparation for an act of piracy against some Thessalian traders. The reduction of the island was doubtless no difficult task. The inhabitants were expelled, and Scyros re-peopled with Athenian colonists. It became a colony of the type peculiar to Athens, the cleruchy, and along with the cleruchies in Lemnos and Imbros it came to be regarded as a sort of annexe of Attica. It was, of course, indispensable that the tomb of Theseus should be found. It was not long before the Athenians lighted upon a grave of the Bronze Age, in which the bones of a warrior of imposing stature were discovered with his weapons by his side. The excavator is not always so fortunate. These relics were brought back to Athens by Cimon, and were solemnly interred in the city. An even greater popularity seems to have accrued to Cimon from the recovery of the bones of Theseus than from the conquest of Scyros.

The next event recorded in the annals of the League is the coercion of Carystus. The territory of this state formed the southern portion of the island of Euboea, and its inhabitants were Dryopians, and consequently of a different race from those of the rest of the island with the exception of Styra. This difference of race may account for the different policy which it pursued, and it would explain why it could not count on support from the other Euboean cities, such as Chalcis or Eretria. It was one of the states which had suffered at the hands of Themistocles after the battle of Salamis, and it had refused to join the Confederacy of Delos. The motive for employing the resources of the League against a state so insignificant must have been the desire to round off the territories of the League in this part of the Aegean. Its proximity to Attica must have rendered its annexa­tion all the more welcome in Athenian eyes. The attack on Carystus was delivered a year or two after the conquest of Scyros. There could be but one end to the conflict between sides so unequally matched. Carystus was forced to capitulate, but it received com­paratively lenient treatment. Its inhabitants were neither expelled nor enslaved. The Athenians were content that the city should join the League. However unimportant the conquest may have been in its military aspect, the coercion of Carystus from another point of view is the reverse of unimportant. A free and sovereign community had been constrained to enter into the Confederacy against its will. The first step had been taken on the broad and easy way that was to lead from the voluntary union of independent allies to an autocracy exercised over reluctant subjects.

A year or two later, the second step was taken. Thirty years earlier, Naxos had been reputed the most opulent and powerful of the Cyclades, although Herodotus’ statement that it could put into the field a force of 8000 hoplites may be suspected of exaggeration. The prosperity of the island must have been affected by the destruction of the town by the Persians on their way to Marathon; it is, however, surprising to find that the contingent which they supplied to the navy of Xerxes numbered only four triremes. If this was a fair measure of its maritime strength when it joined the Confederacy of Delos, it is difficult to understand how it should have ventured on secession. The mere fact of its secession suggests that discontent at the burdens imposed upon the Allies was already rife in the League, and that alarm had begun to be felt at the menacing position of Athens. Thucydides gives us no information as to the motives of Naxos, or as to the length of the siege. He does not even tell us what were the terms of capitulation. It may be taken for granted that Naxos had to surrender its fleet as well as its autonomy, and that it had to covenant to pay tribute for the future. A precedent had now been established, and the meaning of the original terms of alliance had been determined, once and for all, by the arbitrament of force. The Allies had not the right to secede.

The time had now come for Athens to complete the task which, in effect, had been imposed upon her when she accepted the headship of the Confederacy. There was one region still left in which little progress had been made in the liberation of the Greek fringe. The whole coastline of south-western Asia Minor, from a point just south of Miletus to Phaselis in Lycia, was still in Persian hands. It was probably either in 467 or in 466 b.c. that it was decided to deal the final blow to the authority of the Great King on the shores of the Aegean. At the opening of the season of navigation, Cimon collected a fleet of 200 triremes at Cnidus. In the course of a few months he reduced the fortresses which were defended by Persian garrisons; the unfortified towns appear to have entered the League without compulsion. The territory thus acquired included not only the purely Greek cities on the coast, but many, both on the coast and in the interior of the country, which were either purely Carian, or only semi-Hellenic, as well as those which were members of the Lycian League. The Dorian colony of Phaselis on the coast of Lycia, which was one of the most important centres of trade on the south coast of Asia Minor, at first held out. Terms, however, were arranged through the agency of the Chians, and it capitulated on condition of paying an indemnity of ten talents and supplying a contingent to the allied fleet. Meanwhile the Persian Court had been, at length, goaded into action. It seems to have made no effort since the battle of Mycale to check the progress of the Athenian cause, but the attack on Caria was a direct menace to their hold on the whole southern coast of Asia Minor. By the end of the summer a considerable force both on land and sea had been assembled in Pamphylia near the mouth of a small river, the Eurymedon by name. The fleet consisting of 200 vessels, mainly Phoenician, was stationed at its mouth, and the command of the whole force was given to a Persian of high rank, Ariomandes the son of Gobryas.

Of the battle of the Eurymedon we have two accounts, in addition to the brief notice in Thucydides. In the version of Ephorus, Cimon engaged the Persian fleet off the island of Cyprus, and defeated it with heavy loss, capturing no less than 100 vessels. On the very same day he set sail for Pamphylia, landed his troops at the mouth of the Eurymedon, and defeated the Persian army which was encamped on the banks of the river. Cimon’s victory on land was achieved by means of a ruse by which the Persian commanders were misled. He picked out his best troops, dressed them up in Persian uniforms, and put them aboard the vessels which he had captured earlier in the day off Cyprus. The Persians, imagining the vessels to be a detachment from their own fleet, allowed the troops to enter their camp. In the confusion that followed, which was rendered all the greater by the approach of night, the annihilation of the Persian army was inevitable. The more this account is examined, the more in­credible does it appear. A glance at the map will show that it was beyond the bounds of possibility for Cimon’s fleet, after fighting and winning a naval engagement of the first order of magnitude off the coast of Cyprus, to reach the Eurymedon on the same day, in time for an army to be landed, and the Persian camp stormed, before nightfall. Difficulties almost as great are raised by the story of the ruse. The great victories of great generals are not gained by stratagems so fatuous. There can hardly be a doubt that Ephorus was led to this amazing theory of the battle by the epigram which forms the peroration, as it were, of his narrative. The epigram really related to the defeat of the Persian fleet off Cyprus in 450 b.c., but Ephorus connected it with the Eurymedon, and thus was led to make the coast of Cyprus the scene of the naval victory.

Very different in quality is the story of the battle which is to be found in Plutarch. His account is probable in itself, and his statements accord both with the topographical conditions and with strategical considerations. Meyer may or may not be right in his conjecture that Callisthenes is the historian whom Plutarch follows in these chapters; what is certain is that the account is ultimately derived from contemporary sources.

By Plutarch’s aid it is not difficult to reconstruct the history of the campaign. The choice of Pamphylia by the Persians is proof that their strategy was defensive, not offensive. Had an offensive movement against Ionia been contemplated, Pamphylia would hardly have been chosen as the headquarters of the army. Both fleet and army were designed for the protection of Lycia and Pamphylia. The Persian plans were upset by the rapidity of Cimon’s movements. His attack was launched while his oppo­nents were still waiting for a reinforcement of eighty vessels from Cyprus. The Persian fleet was, therefore, unwilling to give battle, and in the confined space of the embouchure of the river there was no opportunity for manoeuvring. The commanders had no alternative but to run their ships aground under cover of the force drawn up on the shore. Cimon followed up his success at sea by landing his troops and engaging the Persian army, which was completely routed. The victory was rendered even more decisive by Cimon’s success in capturing the reinforcement of 80 vessels for which the Persian commanders had been looking. The victory of the Eurymedon must rank as one of the most glorious in the annals of Athens, or of Greece. To have defeated so large a Persian force both on land and on sea on the same day, and to have followed this up by cutting off the reinforcements, was a feat which left a profound impression on the mind of the ancients. It is a conclusive proof of the military genius of Cimon. More than that, it is the victory of which Athens had most reason to be proud after those of Marathon and Salamis. The Eurymedon was won over a foreign enemy; it is a moment in the eternal con­flict of East and West. Cimon’s is not the last great name on the roll of Athenian commanders, nor is the Eurymedon the last great victory that stands to the credit of Athens. But these other commanders were to win their victories over the forces of other Greek states, and the victories which they won served to exhibit the disunion of the Greek nation, if not to sap its powers of resistance. The glory of the Eurymedon is one; the glory of Oenophyta or Cyzicus is another.

The Eurymedon marks the climax of Cimon’s career. It may be that he intended to follow up a success so decisive by a fresh expedition to Cyprus. For the moment, however, he was content that Phaselis should be the outpost of the Confederacy on the east. Little, indeed, would have been gained by the reduction of Pamphylia or Cilicia; countries which might have been conquered but could hardly have been held. The immediate task for Athens was felt to be the consolidation of the territory under its control, rather than the further extension of the League. It was to the north, rather than to the south, that the next efforts of Athens were directed. Although Sestos, and probably some other positions on the coast, had been securely held since the year after Mycale, the Athenians had been unable to dislodge the Persians from the interior of the Thracian Chersonese, just as they had failed to capture the fort of Doriscus at the mouth of the Hebrus. That the Persian troops should have had the support of the Thracian tribes of the Hinterland is only what we should have expected; that they should have been able to maintain a fleet in these waters is more difficult to explain. It was probably in the spring of 465 b.c. that Cimon with only four triremes under his command attacked the enemy’s squadron, and took thirteen of their vessels. He then defeated the Persian troops and their Thracian allies, and gained possession of the whole peninsula.

At this point we pass from a chronology which is approximate and conjectural to one which is, for the most part, precise and certain. A passage in the fourth book of Thucydides, supplemented by the data afforded by Diodorus’ chronological source and the Scholiast on Aeschines, enables us to date the attempted colonization of Amphipolis, and consequently the revolt of Thasos, to the year 465 b.c.; and from this point to the conclusion of the Thirty Years Peace the dates of all the principal events can be ascertained, either exactly, or within a margin of a couple of years.

In the region known as ‘the Thrace-ward region’ the key position was the site on which the Athenian colony of Amphipolis was ultimately established. The position is one of great natural strength, and of great strategical importance. Its strength was due to the fact that it was almost encircled by a horse-shoe bend of the river Strymon. It was a natural fortress which may be compared to sites such as Shrewsbury or Durham in our own country. Its strategical importance is illustrated both by the fact that the bridging of the river at this point was one of the three great works preparatory to the expedition of Xerxes that were undertaken by the Persian engineers, and by its earlier name ‘The Nine Ways.’ It was here, and here only, that the Strymon could be bridged. Below Amphipolis the river was too wide for a bridge to be thrown across it, while above the city the river expanded into Lake Cercinitis, the shores of which were marshy and trackless. Hence the site commanded not only the sole line of communication between Chalcidice and the Thracian coast east of the Strymon, but also the only route practicable by land between the Hellespont and Greece. From this point, too, there radiated the roads round the rich mining district of Mt Pangaeus. The connection of Athens with this district can be traced back to Peisistratus, and the establishment of a cleruchy at Eion in 475 b.c. had given Athens control of the approach to the valley of the Strymon. If the Scholiast on Aeschines is to be believed, the Athenians followed up the capture of Eion by an attempt to plant a colony at ‘The Nine Ways’, although the attempt proved unsuccessful, the colonists being massacred by the neighbouring Thracian tribes. If the statement is correct, it is strange that this attempted colonization should find no mention in the passage in Thucydides. It is, however, dangerous to argue from the silence of an ancient historian, and it may be that the Scholiast is right. In the summer of 465 b.c. an attempt was made to occupy the place with a body of colonists sufficiently numerous to overawe the native tribes. The settlers, only a part of whom were Athenians, were ten thousand in number; it was, in fact, to be a colony on the largest scale known to the practice of the Greeks.

Little difficulty was encountered in expelling the Edonians, a Thracian tribe who inhabited this district, and in taking possession of ‘The Nine Ways’. In order to secure the plain that lay to the north of the new colony, and to obtain access to the mining region to the east of it, the whole body of settlers advanced into the interior of the country, and found themselves compelled to give battle to a strong force of confederate Thracian tribes, at a place called Drabescus. The Athenian force was annihilated, and in consequence of this defeat the colony had to be abandoned. Can it be that Alexander, the king of Macedonia, had a hand in bringing about this disastrous defeat of the Athenians? When Cimon was brought to trial after the reduction of Thasos, the charge brought against him was that he had been bribed by Alexander to desist from the invasion of his country. This in­vasion can only have been punitive in character, and, as Alexander had been hitherto in alliance with Athens, one is tempted to connect it with the disaster at Drabescus. Since the defeat of Xerxes, Alexander had succeeded in advancing his frontiers from the Axius to the Strymon, and in annexing the whole Hinterland of Chalcidice. The next object of his ambition must have been the bridge-head across the Strymon. To Macedonia, therefore, the design of the Athenian colony conveyed in the plainest terms the intimation ‘Thus far and no farther’. It was not the last time that Macedonian and Athenian interests were to cross at this point.

Macedonia and Thrace were not the only states that saw their interests threatened by the foundation of Amphipolis. The im­portant island of Thasos, which was separated only by a narrow channel from the coast of Thrace, had hitherto derived a large revenue from the exploitation of the mines of Mt Pangaeus. It was inevitable that the Thasians should take alarm at the revival of the Athenian designs on this region. Thucydides assigns as the pretext of their revolt a dispute which had arisen between them and the Athenians about their rights over some dependent towns on the opposite coast and about the working of the mines of Mt Pangaeus. Here, as is so often the case, the cause was not identical with the pretext. The language of Thucydides appears to indicate that the revolt of Thasos preceded the dispatch of the colonists to Amphipolis, but the Athenian designs must have been known to the Thasians long before the ten thousand settlers landed at the mouth of the Strymon. The revolt of Thasos was far more formidable than that of Naxos. Their navy at the out­break of the revolt must have numbered considerably more vessels than the thirty-three which had to be surrendered at the end of the siege, and its position, so near to the coast of Thrace, must have rendered an effective blockade in the winter months almost impracticable. That the siege should have lasted more than two years is sufficient evidence of the difficulty of the Athenian task. The Thasians may have hoped that their example would be followed by other members of the League, but there is no reason to suppose that it was the prospect of assistance from Sparta that emboldened them to defy Athens. It is clear from Thucydides that an appeal to Sparta was not made until some time after the outbreak of the revolt. On hearing the news of the revolt the Athenians dispatched a fleet under the command of Cimon. An engagement was fought in which the Thasians were defeated, and this success enabled the Athenians to blockade the town of Thasos both by land and sea. It was then that the Thasians made their appeal to Sparta and received an assurance from the ephors that Attica should be invaded by a Peloponnesian army. The promise could not be fulfilled owing to the earthquake at Sparta and the revolt of the Helots. In the autumn of 463 b.c., after a siege of upwards of two years, the island was forced to surrender. The terms of capitulation were terribly severe; the razing of the fortifications of the city, the loss of their fleet, an immediate indemnity, and the payment of tribute, as well as the surrender of their dependent towns and of their rights in the mining district. In future even the most powerful of the Allies would hesitate before it ventured to revolt.

V.

CHANGES IN THE CHARACTER OF THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS

Less than fifteen years had now elapsed since the formation of the Confederacy of Delos. In this comparatively short space of time the Persians had been driven out of their last strongholds in Europe, and they had lost almost the whole coastline of Asia Minor from the Bosporus to Lycia. The Aegean had become a mare clausum. Such is the sum of Cimon’s achievements. But it was not only through the mere extension of the territories of the League that the power of Athens had grown. Her position was now, even more than before, that of the ‘predominant partner’. The Confederacy of Delos had not yet become the Empire of Athens, but it was a Confederacy which was more than half way on the road to empire. It was still a Confederacy, because the Synod still met at Delos, and because the great mass of the Allies were probably still in name autonomous; but all but a few had commuted service for tribute, and some at least were no longer autonomous in name. The change from service to tribute was almost inevitable. From the point of view of the Allies, the pay­ment of tribute was less inconvenient than the supply of ships; from the point of view of the Athenians, the more homogeneous the fleet became the greater its efficiency. The result, however, of the substitution of payment for service was not less inevitable than the change itself. At a later period, when the Confederacy had been converted into the Empire, the payment of tribute was synonymous with the loss of autonomy. In the early days of the League, there was no distinction between those who were subject and those who were autonomous, and no difference between the status of those who supplied ships and of those who paid tribute. The class of subject-allies must have come into existence quite gradually. The loss of autonomy must invariably have formed part of the penalty of unsuccessful revolt, and the status may have been introduced, even before the first revolt, to meet the case of Carystus. It may be inferred from Thucydides that failure to supply ships, and remissness in the payment of tribute, may also have been punished by the reduction of an Ally from the more to the less privileged class. How far this change of status had gone; in other words, how many of the Allies had become subject by the end of 463 b.c., it is impossible to say. Nor does the evidence at our command enable us to answer two other questions. By the era of the Peloponnesian War, the whole body of the Allies, with the exception of Chios and Lesbos, had been brought under the jurisdiction of the Athenian law-courts. By what means was this effected, and when did the process begin? Again, at the same era, no other form of constitution than the democratic was tolerated by Athens in her Empire. When did Athens first adopt this policy of interference? Whatever may have been the change in the relative position of Athens and her allies in the course of the first fifteen years of the League’s history, there is no reason to suppose that it was due to the policy of Cimon. He must have encouraged the substitution of tribute for ships as tending to the greater efficiency of the fleet, and the change was no doubt welcome to many at Athens for other than military reasons; but that Cimon himself deliberately aimed at the de­gradation of the Allies to the position of subjects is certainly not borne out by our evidence. The passage in Plutarch in which the moderation of Cimon is contrasted with the harsher methods of the other Athenian generals is rhetorical, and appears to be derived from a late and untrustworthy source; it correctly represents, however, his attitude towards the Allies. The party conflict between Thucydides, son of Melesias, who succeeded him in the leadership of the Conservative Party, and Pericles turned mainly on the issue of justice to the subject-allies.

VI.

THE POSITION IN THE PELOPONNESE. PAUSANIAS AND THEMISTOCLES

While the reputation of Athens was rising so rapidly, that of Sparta was not less steadily declining. On his expulsion from Byzantium by the Athenians in 477 b.c., Pausanias had established himself at Colonae in the Troad, a position admirably adapted for the further prosecution of his intrigues with Artabazus, the satrap at Dascylium, a town on the Propontis. How long these negotiations had been going on is uncertain, but they must have extended over a period of some years at least. The scandal became so notorious that the ephors were constrained to recall him to Sparta a second time. He hesitated to disobey the summons, which was peremptory in tone, and he was confident that, if he were brought to trial, he could procure his acquittal by a judicious use of bribery. On his return he was lodged in prison, but was soon released on the ground that the evidence against him was not conclusive. It was not long before information reached the ephors of a conspiracy more dangerous to Spartan interests than the alleged intrigue with the Persian Court. Pausanias had con­ceived a fresh design; that of subverting the Spartan constitution by the aid of the Helots and substituting the authority of the kings for that of the ephors. He had already approached several of the Helots with promises of freedom and the rights of citizen­ship. Yet the ephors still delayed to take action against him, until one of the messengers whom he had employed for the purposes of his correspondence with Artabazus, a slave from Argilus in the Thrace-ward region, betrayed him. Even then they refused to act until by an ingenious stratagem they had heard from Pausanias’ own lips the confession of his guilt. As they were on their way to arrest him, he fled for sanctuary to a building attached to the Temple of Athena of the Brazen House at Sparta. The ephors had the doors of the building walled up in order to starve him to death. Just before he expired, he was brought out still breathing, and died outside the sacred precinct. The only explanation that Thucydides assigns for the hesitation of the ephors, which is so remarkable a feature in the story, is that their reluctance to act was in accordance with an invariable principle of their government. They were always slow, he asserts, to take irrevocable action without incontestable proof, even against a private citizen. In view of the facts admitted in his narrative, this is an explanation which it is difficult to accept. He himself admits that when Pausanias was on the point of being arrested he was warned by one of the ephors. It is fairly evident that there were many at Sparta who could not forget the services which he had rendered to the national cause, and who were unwilling to believe that he was either a traitor to Greece or a conspirator against their own state. And there must have been still more who at the time of his deposition from the command of the fleet were indignant that the victor of Plataea should be sacrificed in the interests of an entente with Athens.

The fate of Pausanias involved that of Themistocles. It was alleged by the Spartan government that conclusive proof of the complicity of Themistocles had been found among the papers of Pausanias. The growing unpopularity of Themistocles had culminated in his ostracism. As to its date, opinions are divided. There are some grounds for connecting the year 471 b.c. either with it, or with his flight from Argos; but the evidence is not conclusive, and the date may be connected equally well with either event. It was certainly not later than the spring of 470 b.c., and it may well have been a year or two earlier, that he left Athens and took up his residence at Argos. The choice of Argos was dictated by its position on the flank of the Peloponnesian Confederacy, as well as by its perennial hostility to Sparta. Making Argos his headquarters, he visited from thence a number of the other Peloponnesian states in order to carry on an anti-Laconian propaganda which was to bear fruit in the near future. It is evident that he responded to the advances of Pausanias, and that, whatever his motive may have been, he allowed himself to be deeply compromised. It is scarcely probable that he should have wished for the subjugation of Greece by Persia, or that he should have imagined that Pausanias was a fit instrument for carrying out any such design, although he may well have welcomed his conspiracy against the Spartan constitution as promising the over­throw of the Lacedaemonian hegemony. There must, however, have been prima facie evidence of his complicity in the schemes of Pausanias, not only so far as they were directed against the authority of the ephors, but also in their relation to Persia. Envoys were dispatched to Athens by the Spartan government to prefer the charge of medism, and to demand his punishment. The leaders of the Conservative Party, the influence of which was now predominant at Athens, welcomed this opportunity of getting rid, once and for all, of so dangerous an opponent. The coalition of the great houses was still intact, and it was an Alcmaeonid, Leobotes son of Alcmeon, who acted as prosecutor. The charge was one of high treason, and the proceedings were to be before the Assembly, probably in the form of an Eisangelia, or im­peachment. Themistocles did not venture to return and stand his trial. He fled from Argos, and disappeared from view. Rumour carried him to Syracuse, to the court of Hiero. In reality he had sought an asylum in Corcyra, where he had some reason to anticipate protection. The Corcyraeans, being indis­posed to incur the enmity of the two leading states in the Greek world, conveyed him to the coast of the mainland. Here, in order to escape from the emissaries of Sparta and Athens who had been sent to effect his arrest, he was driven to appeal to the magnanimity of Admetus, the king of the Molossians, to whom he had formerly done some disservice. By the aid of Admetus he succeeded in making his way over the mountains to the coast of Macedonia. He took ship at Pydna, and reached Ephesus, which was still in Persian hands, after narrowly escaping capture by the Athenian Beet which was blockading Naxos at the time. From Ephesus he wrote to Artaxerxes, who had just succeeded to the throne of Persia, offering his services to the King for a fresh invasion of Greece. At the end of a year he went up to Susa, where he acquired a greater influence than any Greek refugee at the Persian Court had ever exercised before. Honours and rewards were showered upon him. He even received a grant of three cities: Magnesia on the Meander, Myus near the mouth of this river, and Lampsacus on the Hellespont. We may form some idea of what this meant from the fact that the revenue of Magnesia alone amounted to fifty talents a year. His promises, however, remained unfulfilled, as he died at Magnesia (probably about the year 450 b.c.) before any fresh invasion of Greece had been attempted. There were rival stories both as to the manner of his death and the place of his burial. It was a widespread belief at the time that he poisoned himself with bull’s blood in order to escape the fulfilment of his promises, but Thucydides prefers the more prosaic version of a death from natural causes. His place of burial appears to have been Magnesia, but it was asserted by his family that his remains had been carried back to Athens at his own request, and secretly buried there.

In this account of the flight of Themistocles the narrative of Thucydides has been followed, but it differs in some important points from the statements of other ancient authorities. According to Ephorus and Aristotle, there had been a previous prosecution of Themistocles for medism at the instance of the Spartans, and an acquittal before his ostracism; and according to Aristotle this first trial was before Ephialtes’ reform of the Areopagus in the year 462—1 b.c. According to Ephorus and a number of later writers it was not Artaxerxes, but Xerxes, to whom Themistocles addressed his letter, and according to the authorities followed by Plutarch Cyme, not Ephesus, was the port at which he landed on the coast of Asia Minor. There can hardly be a doubt that on all these points the verdict must be in favour of Thucydides. On the all-important question of which king it was to whom Themistocles appealed, Xerxes or Artaxerxes, Thucydides is supported by Charon of Lampsacus, the earliest of our authorities. The presence of Themistocles at Athens at the time of Ephialtes’ reform is chronologically impossible. Thucydides’ own version, however, is not altogether free from difficulty. The siege of Naxos cannot be put later than 467 b.c., and the previous year is not an unlikely date for it. Artaxerxes, however, did not come to the throne till the beginning of 464 b.c. There was, therefore, an interval of upwards of two years at least between Themistocles’ arrival at Ephesus and his appeal to Artaxerxes. The interval may be filled up in various ways, but the important point is that Thucydides is unaware of its existence.

‘Such was the end of Pausanias the Lacedaemonian, and The­mistocles the Athenian, the two most famous Hellenes of their day’. The fate of Pausanias makes little appeal to the modern mind. He was a capable commander, and at a great crisis in the nation’s history he had rendered it a great service, but his understanding of things did not extend beyond the art of war. Of statesmanship he was wholly destitute. The most that can be pleaded in his excuse is that his narrow Spartan training had unfitted him to deal with any but Spartans, or to play a part on the stage of international politics. With Themistocles it is different. It is to the modern mind, even more than to the ancient, that his career appeals as among the most tragic in Greek history. No man ever rendered his country, either in the narrow sense of Athens, or in the wider sense of Greece, a service more splendid; and yet he died an outlaw from Athens, and a pensioner of the Persian Court. Thucydides devotes a panegyric to his memory, and from the verdict of the historian there can be no appeal. It is a panegyric prompted by the calumnies that were current at the time; almost certainly it is a protest against Herodotus’ caricature of the great statesman. But Thucydides in his appreciation of Themistocles is concerned solely with his intellectual qualities. Here more than anywhere else it is true that the stand­point of the historian is non-moral. A non-moral standpoint cannot reasonably be expected of contemporaries. Themistocles’ ethics were neither better nor worse than those of many Athenian statesmen; but they were not better. He was unscrupulous in his choice of means, and his ends were not always disinterested. It is not surprising that he should have suffered by contrast, not only with the ‘ostentatious probity’ of Aristides, but even with the more commonplace qualities of Cimon.

About the time of the recall of Pausanias and the flight of Themistocles, Sparta found her headship of the Peloponnese seriously menaced, and she had to fight two battles, and to win two victories, before she could restore her authority. It is cha­racteristic of the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of this period of Greek history that we should owe the little information that we have about this crisis to an incidental allusion in Herodotus. His interest in soothsayers, and in the oracles given from Delphi, leads him to mention two Spartan victories which he ranks with Plataea and Tanagra. The first of these was at Tegea in a battle against the Tegeates and Argives, and the second at Dipaea in Arcadia against all the Arcadians except the Mantineans. To Dipaea there is a reference in Isocrates,—it would be an enigma apart from the notice in Herodotus—and that is all but all. From Herodotus it may be inferred that the two battles come in between the Persian invasion and the third Messenian War; i.e. between 479 b.c. and 464 b.c. It may also be inferred that Sparta was confronted by an alliance between Argos and Tegea, and that the victory at Tegea was not sufficiently decisive to restore her authority; for it was not long before she had to deal with a more formidable movement, the revolt of all Arcadia with the exception of Mantinea. But we cannot infer from Herodotus either the precise dates of the two battles, or the reasons for the absence of the Argive army at Dipaea and for the part played by Mantinea. The battles are usually assigned to the years 473—1 b.c., but the arguments in favour of these dates are inconclusive. If the Archidamus to whom Polyaenus makes reference is the king in the fifth century, and not his namesake in the fourth, it would follow that Dipaea, if not Tegea, must be put as late as 469 b.c.; and in that case it would be possible to find an explanation of the absence of the Argives from Dipaea in their desire to crush Mycenae while Sparta was unable to protect her ally. From Thucydides it may further be inferred that Themistocles had a hand in bringing about the alliance of Argos with Tegea and, not improbably, with the other Arcadian towns.

Dipaea was a decisive victory won against great odds. It proved, once more, the immeasurable superiority of the Spartan hoplite. It put an end to the anti-Laconian movement, and it enabled Sparta to strengthen the bonds that held the Peloponnesian League together. The success of Sparta, however, was not entirely due to the discipline and courage of her soldiers. Political causes contributed to the failure of the movement. The democratic revolution which had resulted in the foundation of the city of Elis in the year 471—70 b.c. had failed to impair the ties that bound the Eleans to Sparta. Both states had still a common interest in the Messenian question, for it was as much in the interests of Elis that Pisatis and Triphylia should find no support in Messenia as it was in the interest of Sparta that the Messenians should receive no aid from the subjects of Elis. It may be conjectured, too, that the revolution which seems to have taken place at Mantinea after the battle of Plataea had put into power a party friendly to Sparta, and that it was the influence of this party that prevented the secession of their state. Of even more importance to Sparta than her relations with Elis and Mantinea were the policy of Argos and the attitude of Athens. Had Argos thrown her whole weight into the anti-Laconian movement, the result of Dipaea might have been different, and the defeat of the Spartans in the field would have meant for Argos the annexation of Mycenae and Tiryns, and much more besides. As it was, she preferred the lesser but more immediate gain to the greater and more remote. Fortunately, too, for Sparta, the foreign policy of Athens was still directed by a statesman the steady aim of whose efforts was the maintenance of the alliance between the two leading states of Greece. Had the democratic party been in power at Athens at the time, Dipaea might have proved an anticipation of Leuctra.

CHAPTER III

ATHENS AND THE GREEK POWERS

462-445 B.C.