READING HALL

THE DOORS OF WISDOM

ATHENS . 478—401 B.C.

CHAPTER III

ATHENS AND THE GREEK POWERS 462-445 B.C.

I

END OF THE COALITION

IN the winter following the fall of Thasos (463 b.c.) Cimon was brought to trial in connection with the audit of his official accounts as general during the siege. He was charged, as has been explained in the previous chapter, with having accepted a bribe from Alexander of Macedon. Such charges of corruption were part of the stock in trade of the Greek demagogues. They serve to illustrate the low level of probity in the public life of the ancient democracies, but they are not to be taken too seriously in any particular case. In view of Cimon’s wealth the charge brought against him seems peculiarly improbable, and it can hardly have been expected that the prosecution would succeed. It was intended as a test of the relative strength of the Conserva­tive Party and the Opposition, and herein lies the interest and importance of the trial. So far as we know, it was the first occasion on which the democratic party had ventured to try conclusions with Cimon and his followers. It was also the first occasion on which Pericles played a part in Athenian politics. His share in the prosecution was inconsiderable, and the manner in which his task was performed almost perfunctory. Yet the trial, though it ended in Cimon’s acquittal, was a turning-point in the history of Athens at this epoch. The appearance of Pericles on the side of the prosecution proclaimed to the whole world that the coalition of the great aristocratic houses was at an end. Aristides was dead, and his death must have been a serious blow to the party to which he had lent the great authority of his name. Xanthippus, too, was dead, and the leadership of the Alcmaeonidae had passed to his son Pericles. That Pericles should have thrown in his lot with the Opposition need not surprise us, for in so doing he was but reverting to the policy of Cleisthenes, his mother’s uncle. As yet, however, he was merely the head of the Alcmaeonid house, not the leader of the democratic party. To a later generation, indeed, it seemed a thing incredible that he could ever have been anything but the leader of the party to which he belonged. Thcopompus goes so far as to claim for him forty years of political supremacy, but these flights of rhetoric must not mislead us. If anything is certain, it is that Ephialtes was the leader of the party down to his assassination, and that Pericles was his subordinate. It was Ephialtes, not Pericles, who led the Opposition in the great debate on the Messenian question; it was he that conducted the series of prosecutions of the members of the Areopagus, which led up to the attack on the Areopagus itself; and he, not Pericles, was the author of the laws which deprived it of its prerogatives. Few things are to be more regretted in the history of this period than that we should know so little about him. His fame was so completely overshadowed by that of Pericles that he became to later writers little more than a dim and unsubstantial form. The most that we can gather is that his father’s name was Sophonides; that, in spite of his poverty, he was reputed honest; and that he showed himself relentless in the prosecution of his political opponents. It is not uncharitable to surmise that he was bitter and fanatical. We have no information as to when his political career began. He once held the office of General, and was given the command of a fleet of thirty vessels which ventured eastward of the Chelidonian Islands; but when this was we cannot guess.

II.

   THE REVOLT OF THE HELOTS AND THE FALL OF CIMON

It was not long before Ephialtes and his followers had a further opportunity of testing once more the strength of their opponents. In the year 464 b.c., towards the end of spring or the beginning of summer, Sparta had been visited by an earthquake of unusual severity. It was said that only five houses remained standing in the villages of which the city of Sparta was composed, and that 20,000 of the inhabitants lost their lives. Figures such as these have little value. Recent experience reminds us that in times of panic the imagination, even of eyewitnesses, is prone to run riot. It is certain, however, that the town was all but destroyed, and that the loss of life was heavy. By the Spartans themselves the earthquake was viewed as a visitation of the god Poseidon, the ‘earthshaker,’ for a recent violation of his sanctuary at Taenarus, from which some suppliant Helots had been dragged away for execution. However serious the losses occasioned by the earth­quake may have been, its indirect effects were even graver. The Helots in Laconia itself, who must have viewed the disaster as an encouragement of their cause given by the god himself, rose in revolt, and advanced against the ruined city. Some even of the Perioeci joined them, and the insurrection became general in Messenia. Thanks to the courage and presence of mind of the young king Archidamus, and to the timely aid of the Mantineans, the attack on Sparta was repulsed. As might have been expected, isolated bodies of Spartan troops were massacred, especially in Messenia; but a decisive success seems to have been won by the Spartans at a place called Isthmus, somewhere in Messenia, and in the course of the next year, 463 b.c., the insurgents were com­pelled to take refuge on Mt Ithome, a lofty hill which rises out of the Messenian Plain. It is a natural fortress, and it had been the stronghold of the Messenians in their long conflict with Sparta in days gone by. The Spartans were notoriously unskilful in siege operations, but in view of the area of Mt Ithome and of the steep, or almost precipitous, nature of much of the ground, it may well be that the forces at their disposal were insufficient for an effective blockade.

By the beginning of the next year, 462 b.c., it had become evident to them that the Helot stronghold was not likely to be reduced by their present methods. It was resolved to appeal for help to the general body of their allies, and in particular to the Athenians, from whose skill in siege work much was hoped. It must have been in the spring or early summer of 462 b.c. that the appeal of the Spartan government came before the Athenian Assembly. It was only to be expected that the appeal would meet with the fiercest opposition from Ephialtes and his friends, who saw in the embarrassment of Sparta a long-wished-for opportunity for her humiliation. The Spartan cause found its champion in Cimon, who pleaded, with all the force of a double metaphor, that Greece should not be allowed to go lame, and that Athens should not consent to lose her yoke-fellow. The result of this memorable debate furnished fresh evidence that the ascendancy of Cimon was still unshaken. The Assembly voted a force of 4000 hoplites, under the command of Cimon. The Athenian contingent arrived in Messenia and took part in the siege of Ithome, alongside of the other allies of Sparta who had come to her aid. Whatever the reason may have been, the Athenians failed to accomplish what had been expected of them, and the Spartan authorities, becoming suspicious of their intentions, abruptly dismissed Cimon and his troops. It may well seem surprising that the Spartan government should have taken a step which they must have known to be fatal to the political influence of one who had done so much to maintain intact the alliance between the two states. We must remember, however, that we have only the Athenian account of this incident. The suspicions of the Spartans may not have been without some foundation, for it is more than probable that in the Athenian ranks there was a good deal of latent sympathy with the insurgents. In any case, Spartan notions of discipline were different from Athenian, and this fact of itself was bound to give rise to friction. Our own experience in the South African War may remind us how easily misunderstandings may arise between the Regular soldier and those who have been trained in a different school.

The effect of Cimon’s dismissal from Ithome was instantaneous, and the triumph of the democratic party complete. Athens withdrew from the anti-Persian Confederacy which she had joined in 481 b.c., and at once concluded alliances with Thessaly in the north, and with Argos, Sparta’s rival claimant for the hegemony of the Peloponnese. Next spring Cimon was ostracized, and his party, demoralized by the loss of their leader and discredited by his fiasco in the field of foreign policy, found itself powerless to prevent the crowning triumph of the democratic party, the over­throw of the Areopagus itself.

It has been the general tendency of writers on Greek history since the days of Grote to brand Cimon’s policy towards Sparta in the crisis of the Helot Revolt as a piece of quixotic generosity. Nothing could be more unfair. It must be remembered that Athens was still a member of the alliance which had been formed against Persia under the presidency of Sparta, and that it was on the ground of this alliance that the ephors appealed to Athens. It follows, therefore, that a refusal to send a force to the assistance of Sparta would have amounted to a repudiation of the alliance. It should, further, be remembered that the whole foreign policy of Cimon was based on the maintenance of this tie between the two Great Powers in the Greek world. It is true that it is alleged, and that by no less an authority than Thucydides himself, that the Spartans played the Athenians false at the time of the revolt of Thasos. He asserts, not merely that the Spartans gave a promise to the Thasians that they would invade Attica, but that they would have fulfilled their pledge had it not been for the earthquake. The statement is precise, but it presents great difficulties. It would be natural to suppose that the moment when the fact of the Spartan promise would be disclosed would be the morrow of the surrender of the island. What is quite certain, however, is that not a rumour of the promised invasion can have reached Athens at the time of the Messenian debate. Had Ephialtes been able to point to any evidence of such bad faith on the part of Sparta, Cimon’s eloquence would have fallen on deaf ears. It may be conjectured that the story was derived from the Thasian Stesimbrotus; but how much, or how little, of truth there is in it cannot perhaps be determined. It is clear that the ephors who were in office at the time belonged to the anti-Athenian party, and it may be that they gave some such pledge. Can we be certain, however, even if we grant that the pledge was given, that it would have been fulfilled but for the Helot Revolt? An invasion of the Athenian territory must have been preceded by the convening of a congress of the members of the Peloponnesian League, and a declaration of war against Athens by a vote of the congress.

III.

PERICLES’ ACCESSION TO POWER

Within a few months of the ostracism of Cimon Ephialtes was assassinated after carrying through his reform of the Areopagus. It may be taken for granted that the assassin, Aristodicus of Tanagra, was the agent of one of those secret societies whose activities in the interests of the oligarchic cause can be detected from time to time in the course of the fifth century b.c. It was the death of Ephialtes that gave Pericles his opportunity. In him the democratic party found a leader whose fame was destined to eclipse that of Ephialtes; and the eclipse was to prove all but total.

There have been few statesmen, either in ancient or modern times, who have combined in so high a degree the qualities of birth, character, and intellect. On his mother’s side he belonged to the Alcmaeonidae, whose influence in this and the preceding century appears to have been greater than that of any other of the Athenian Clans. His father was Xanthippus, the commander of the Athenian fleet at Mycale, while his mother Agariste was the niece of Cleisthenes the reformer, and the granddaughter of that other Agariste, the daughter of Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon, whose wooing by a goodly company of suitors forms the subject of one of the most famous passages in ancient literature. In the combination of these three qualities he presents a striking contrast to the other two most notable names in the political history of Athens in the fifth century b.c. In respect of pure genius Themistocles may well have been his superior; but Themistocles was a novus homo, and his character was more than suspect. In birth Alcibiades was not inferior to Pericles, and his intellect, though undisciplined, was brilliant; but his lack of principle and his levity of conduct were to prove ruinous to his career. The two teachers to whose influence Pericles seems to have owed most were the musician Damonides, of the deme Oea, and the philosopher Anaxagoras of Clazomenae. The former of these, who was interested in political speculation as well as in the theory of music, is said to have suggested to him the introduction of that system of payment for public service which forms one of the most striking features of the Athenian constitution. The story may well be apocryphal, but it is not unlikely that it was from Damonides that he derived his bias in favour of democracy. It has, indeed, been maintained that Pericles attached himself to the popular cause from no higher motive than the furtherance of his personal ambition, but for this there is little evidence and less probability. The hypothesis that explains most simply the whole of his political career is that of the sincerity of his democratic creed.

From Anaxagoras he derived his interest in philosophy. He had as little belief in the popular religion and in the superstitions of the multitude as the historian Thucydides himself. The fact that he was a free-thinker does not seem to have affected his influence with the masses during the greater part of his career, although the masses were far from friendly to free-thinkers; but a time came when his opponents succeeded only too well in making political capital out of his association with so notorious a sceptic as Anaxagoras. In temperament there was much of the aristocrat about him. He was distant and reserved in his intercourse with his fellows, and even his opponents could not impute to him the arts of the demagogue. At least in the latter part of his career, when his authority was unassailable, he did not hesitate to tell the people truths, however unpalatable they might be. There was something almost of ostentation, alike in his avoidance of society, and in his devotion to public duty. It is reported that the only occasion on which he was seen at a social gathering was at the wedding of a near relative, and that even then he left before the ceremonies were half over; and it was a common saying that the only streets in Athens that he habitually traversed were those that led to the market-place and the Council Chamber. The modest estate which he had inherited was entrusted to the management of a steward, and his household was administered with so rigid an economy that he was freed from all fear of pecuniary embarrassment.

As a speaker he was ranked by his contemporaries as unrivalled in his power of swaying the multitude by his words. From this verdict of his contemporaries there can be no appeal, for there have never been better judges of oratory than the Athenians of the Periclean Age. In his eloquence there is to be found one of the chief secrets of his influence with the Assembly. It was eloquence of the kind in which clear expression is but the outcome of clear thought. It was an eloquence, too, that was reserved for great occasions; he spoke only when it was necessary for Pericles to speak. There is as little reason to doubt his love of art as to question the sincerity of his democratic professions. We may believe the ancients when they assert that Pheidias the sculptor was as intimate a friend as Anaxagoras the philosopher. It must be admitted, however, that in the discharge of his military duties he proved himself little more than a competent commander. He has no claim to rank with Cimon, Myronides, or Alcibiades. His foreign policy, too, down to the conclusion of the Thirty Years Peace, was based on a complete miscalculation, both of the re­sources of Athens, and of the attractive power of the democratic ideal; in spite of its initial successes, it brought Athens to the brink of the abyss. It was in his domestic, rather than in his foreign, policy that his genius stood revealed. In his constitutional reforms we see the democratic principle carried out to its legitimate conclusions with an inexorable logic. If by democracy we mean government by the people, as well as for the people, we can but recognize in the constitution which was the creation of his in­tellect a democracy the most complete that the world has ever known. Yet it was that constitution which in the long run proved the undoing of Athens. On what, then, rests the claim of Pericles to greatness? His fame is Inseparable from that of the Athens which he ruled. The epoch of Athenian history to which he belongs is known, and must always be known, as the Periclean Age. It is an age in which we see the whole energies of a society, and that the most gifted known to history, consciously directed by a single will to a given end. There is no need to dwell on what we owe to the art and letters of this Periclean Age. If anything is certain, it is that our debt would have been appreciably less had there been no Pericles.

IV.     

OUTBREAK OF THE FIRST PELOPONNESIAN WAR.

THE GREAT EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION

The alliances which Athens had concluded towards the end of 462 b.c. with Argos and Thessaly were a direct challenge to Sparta. The step which had been taken could only mean that Athens was prepared for war with the Peloponnesian League. But if Athens were going to be involved in hostilities with Sparta and her allies, an effort must be made to secure peace with Persia. Since the battle of the Eurymedon both sides appear to have remained quiescent. Athens had had her hands full with the suppression of the revolt of Thasos, and Persia was, doubtless, only too glad to be left undisturbed. There was every prospect, however, that she would attempt to recover the seaboard of Caria and Ionia, when once the efforts of Athens were concentrated on the Peloponnesian War. A peace with Persia on any tolerable terms must have been the immediate object of the foreign policy of the democratic party. The alliance just concluded with Argos seemed to offer to the Athenian government a favourable opportunity of opening up diplomatic relations with Susa. There had been a secret understanding, if not a formal alliance, between Argos and the Persian Court at the time of Xerxes’ invasion, and the friendly relations between the two states seem to have continued down to the death of the Persian monarch. Now that Argos had entered into the Athenian alliance there was reason to anticipate that, in the event of a Peloponnesian War, she would have to bear the brunt of a Spartan offensive. It is intelligible that, under these circumstances, she should endeavour to secure the help of Persia, possibly in the form of subsidies. Even the moral support of the Great King might be of value. It was, perhaps, in the spring of 461 b.c. that the two embassies arrived simultaneously at Susa; the Argives to secure from Artaxerxes, who had succeeded Xerxes on the throne, the renewal of the former relations; the Athenians, whose spokesman was Callias, the son of Hipponicus, to conclude the treaty of peace. Nothing could have been more friendly than the response of Artaxerxes to the Argive envoys; it is evident, however, that the only terms that Persia was prepared to grant to Athens were such as no Athenian statesman could venture to commend to the Assembly. The least that Persia is likely to have asked was the recognition of her claim to the tribute of the Greek cities in Asia Minor; but the glories of the Eurymedon were too fresh in the memory of the citizens for any responsible statesman to advise the concession of this claim. The democratic leaders, therefore, saw themselves confronted with the prospect of a conflict on both sides of the Aegean at once.

The outbreak of hostilities was not long delayed. The alliances with Argos and Thessaly were followed a year or so later by one with Megara. This state had reason to complain of encroachment on its territory by its neighbour Corinth, and failing to obtain redress, it placed itself under the protection of Athens. No alliance could have been more welcome at the moment. The control of the Megarian territory secured to Athens two advantages of the utmost importance. In the first place, it enabled her to hold the difficult passes over Mt Geranea by a strong force of troops, and thus to render an invasion of Attica through the Megarid all but impracticable; in the second place, the Megarian port of Pegae gave her a naval base on the Corinthian Gulf. The price paid for the Megarian alliance was the ineradicable enmity of Corinth.

The first use that the Athenians made of this alliance was to connect Megara, which was built on a hill at a distance of about a mile from the coast, with Nisaea, its harbour on the Saronic Gulf, by building ‘Long Walls’ between the city and the port. Megara and Nisaea now formed parts of a single fortress, which the Athenians proceeded to occupy with a garrison of their own troops. So far as we know, this was the first instance of the building of ‘Long Walls’; a process afterwards repeated in other places, and on a larger scale. It was, as Grote puts it, ‘an ingenious invention for the purpose of extending the maritime arm of Athens to an inland city.’ Either in 460 b.c. or the year following (we cannot be quite certain which of the two it was), Athens struck the first blow by landing a force at Halieis, on the southern coast of the Argolic peninsula. In an engagement which followed with some Corinthian and Epidaurian troops the Athenians were defeated; but shortly afterwards in a sea-fight with a Peloponnesian fleet off the island of Cecryphaleia, midway between Aegina and the coast of the Argolid, they were victorious. Neither engagement was probably of much importance in itself. It was now apparent to Aegina that she must throw in her lot with the other allies of Sparta who were vitally interested in the control of the Saronic Gulf. Aegina had even more to fear than Corinth from the ambitious designs of the democratic party at Athens. The trade of Corinth had always been mainly with the West; that of Aegina was almost wholly with the East. Athens had not as yet stretched out her arms to the West, but in the East the growth of the Athenian Empire must have involved the decay of the commerce of any rival power. With the aid of the Aeginetans a large Peloponnesian fleet was assembled in the Saronic Gulf, and gave battle to the Athenians off Aegina. The defeat of the Peloponnesians was decisive, seventy of their vessels being sunk or captured. The Athenians were thus enabled to land a large body of troops upon the island, under the command of Leocrates, and to blockade the city both by land and sea.

Meanwhile the energies of Athens were diverted to another direction. Shortly before this time an insurrection had broken out in Egypt. The leader of the insurgents was Inaros, who was king of the Libyan territory, to the west of the Egyptian. He captured Marea near the site of the later Alexandria, and after this initial success had little difficulty in bringing the greater part of the country under his control. The revolt was clearly doomed to failure unless he could secure the support of an ally, and above all of an ally who held the command of the sea. It was inevitable that he should appeal to Athens. It may well have seemed to Pericles and the other leaders of the democratic party that here was a golden opportunity for teaching Persia the lesson that she needed. If Persia would not have peace with Athens, she should learn once more what war with Athens meant. At the moment (in 460 or 459 b.c.) a fleet of 200 sail, supplied partly by Athens and partly by her allies, lay off Cyprus. This fleet was at once dispatched to Egypt. It sailed up the Nile, and, with the help of his new allies, Inaros succeeded in capturing two-thirds of Memphis, the capital of the country, and in investing the citadel, known by the name of the ‘White Castle,’ in which the Persian troops had taken refuge. For the moment the Persian Court was content to rely on the methods of diplomacy. An envoy, Megabazus by name, was sent to Sparta to see what could be effected by a liberal use of Persian gold. It was hoped at Susa that Sparta might be induced to invade Attica at the head of a Peloponnesian army, and that an invasion of Attica would compel the recall of the fleet from the Nile. The embassy ended in failure. The bribes were freely accepted, but no invasion followed. The fact, however, remained that, while Athens was engaged in a conflict with the allies of Sparta which must ultimately involve the inter­vention of Sparta herself, a fleet of 200 vessels and a force of 50,000 men were engaged in an enterprise in Egypt which must ultimately involve a collision with the forces which the Persian Empire had at its command.

The victory of Athens in the sea-fight off Aegina was followed, at no long interval, by an invasion of the Megarid by the Corinthians. They calculated, not unnaturally, now that so large a part of the Athenian forces were either engaged in Egypt or occupied with the siege of Aegina, that Athens would have no troops available for the defence of Megara, and that consequently she would have to adopt one of two alternatives; either she must abandon Megara to her fate, or she must raise the siege of Aegina. In spite of the fact that practically the whole force which was usually employed for service in the field was absent, at the moment, either in I vpt or Aegina, Myronides, the Athenian general, did not hesitate to advance to the relief of Megara with such troops as he could raise. These consisted of ‘the youngest and the oldest’; that is, of the youths who were undergoing training, and of those who were past the age of active service. Two battles were fought outside Megara, the first of which was indecisive; but in the second Myronides compelled the Corinthians to evacuate the Megarid. That the mere rump of the Athenian army should have inflicted a defeat upon the best troops that Corinth could put into the field was a feat of arms of which Athens had good reason to be proud. There is conclusive evidence that the whole series of events, from the Athenian alliance with Inaros and the battle of Halieis down to the victories of Myronides, took place within the space of twelve months; perhaps between midsummer 459 and midsummer 458 b.c. On a marble slab on the walls of the Louvre in Paris there may still be read the names of those ‘who fell in the same year in Cyprus, Egypt, and Phoenicia, at Halieis, in Aegina, and in Megara’. The marble is a signal tribute to the spirit of a free people at a great epoch; it is not less signal evidence of the extent to which the states of antiquity overtaxed their resources in men and money.

V.      

THE BATTLES OF TANAGRA AND OENOPHYTA

The moment had come for Sparta to take action. Hitherto her energies had been absorbed in the suppression of the Helot revolt, and she had been compelled to remain a passive spectator of the success of Athens, and of the humiliation of her own allies. By the beginning of the year 457 b.c. the resistance of Ithome was breaking down, and Sparta might venture to dispatch an army outside the Peloponnese. It had become by this time evident to the ephors that, if the progress of Athens were to be checked, an ally must be discovered north of the Isthmus who could serve as a counterpoise to her influence. As Thessaly was on the Athenian side, it could only be to Boeotia that Sparta must turn. A generation earlier the Boeotian League under the presidency of Thebes had been one of the chief military powers in Greece; but the edifice of the federation now lay in ruins. The discredit into which Thebes had fallen, in consequence of the active support which she had lent to the Persian cause, had led to the virtual dissolution of the League. The other Boeotian cities repudiated her supremacy, and, by way of asserting their in­dependence, proceeded to issue coins of their own. In order to restore the League, and the influence of Thebes in its councils, it was resolved to send into Boeotia so large a force as would crush all opposition.

A pretext for sending an army into northern Greece lay ready to hand in the appeal addressed to Sparta by the little state of Doris, which had recently had reason to complain of the aggression of her more powerful neighbour Phocis. According to the legend of the return of the Heraclids Doris had been the starting­point of the movement which led to the conquest of so much of the Peloponnese by the Dorians, and, as far back as the time of the poet Tyrtaeus, it was regarded by the Spartans as their metropolis, or mother-city. That the Phocian attack on Doris was a mere pretext, and that the real objective was Boeotia, is proved by the numbers of the expedition. The army, which was placed under the command of Nicomedes, who was regent for King Pleistoanax who was a minor, consisted of 1500 Lacedemonian hoplites and 10,000 Peloponnesian allies (a third of this force would have sufficed for the coercion of Phocis), and found its way, it would appear, by sea, across the Corinthian Gulf into Northern Greece. Having effected its object in Phocis, the army entered Boeotia. The League was restored under the supremacy of Thebes, the fortifications of which were extended and strengthened.

It was inevitable that the Athenians should take alarm at these proceedings. They occupied the passes of Mt Geranea with a strong force to prevent the return of the expedition by way of the Isthmus, and they were on the watch to intercept its return by sea across the Corinthian Gulf. Nicomedes could not fail to realize that, in order to effect his retreat through the Megarid, he must give battle to the Athenian army. With this end in view, he advanced on Tanagra, which was not far from the frontiers of Attica. His object, however, in taking up this position was not merely strategical. The Athenians were at the moment engaged in building ‘Long Walls’ of their own. The new invention, which had been employed a year or two before at Megara, was now to be applied to Athens, but on a far more stupendous scale. Two walls were being built to connect the city with the sea; one to the harbour of Piraeus, a distance of four and a half miles, and the other, somewhat shorter, to the open roadstead of Phalerum. The design was a legitimate development of the plan of Themistocles in fortifying the Piraeus, and, if carried into effect, it would render it impossible for a Peloponnesian army to reduce Athens to surrender by a blockade on land, so long as she retained the command of the sea. The scheme formed an integral part of the policy of the democratic party, and was for this very reason obnoxious to the opposition. The secret societies saw their opportunity in the presence of the Peloponnesian army in Boeotia. They managed to get into touch with Nicomedes, by whose aid they hoped, not only to arrest the building of the ‘Long Walls’, but also to effect the overthrow of the democratic constitution.

Rumours of these plots reached the ears of Pericles and the other leaders of his party, and impelled them to anticipate the projected invasion by launching an offensive against the Peloponnesian army in Boeotia. The force employed amounted to 14,000 men, and consisted partly of the Athenians and partly of their allies, amongst whom were 1000 Argives and some Thessalian cavalry. These are the figures attested by Thucydides, and it is evident that no Athenian general would have risked an engagement with upwards of 11,000 of the best troops in Greece, unless he had at his disposal a force superior in numbers and not much inferior in quality. Yet they are figures that present a grave difficulty. A year or so before, in the battles in the Megarid, Myronides had been unable to oppose to the Corinthians any troops but ‘the youngest and the oldest,’ and we are expressly told that the reason for this was that the rest of the Athenian army (i.e. those of the usual age for service in the field) were serving at the time in Egypt or Aegina. It is possible that by the summer of 457 b.c. it was deemed safe to withdraw from Aegina some of the hoplites engaged in the blockade; none, however, can have been withdrawn from Egypt. If we allow one thousand for the Argives and another thousand for the Plataeans, we have still to account for 12,000 ‘Athenians and Allies’. If these consisted mainly of ‘the oldest and the youngest,’ and of contingents from Ionia and the islands, we should have expected that the Spartans would have made short work of such indifferent stuff.

The two armies came into conflict in the neighbourhood of Tanagra in May or June 457 b.c. The engagement was protracted, and the loss on both sides heavy. In the end the Athenians suffered a defeat, chiefly owing to the defection of the Thessalian cavalry. The victory, however, was not sufficiently decisive to encourage the Spartans to march on Athens itself, or to attempt to interfere with the building of the Long Walls. They were content with effecting their return to the Peloponnese by the Isthmus, and with ravaging the Megarian territory on the way. The Athenians seem to have thought it prudent to allow them to retire unmolested. We may well be surprised that the victory of the Spartans was not decisive, and that the Thebans took no part in the battle, but no light is thrown by our ancient authorities on either of these points. On the eve of the engagement, as soon as the Athenian army had crossed the frontier, Cimon, who had now been in exile for more than four years since his ostracism, appeared on the scene, and begged to be allowed to take his place in the ranks. When the Council instructed the Generals to refuse his request, he conjured his friends to disprove any suspicion that might rest on his loyalty and theirs by their conduct on the field of battle. They took his suit of armour, and set it up on the spot where he would himself have stood, and fell fighting desperately to the number of a hundred. The story was current in antiquity that in consequence of their heroism Cimon was recalled from exile, and it was even said that the decree which permitted his return was proposed by Pericles himself. It seems more probable, however, that he was not recalled, and that he did not return to Athens until the spring of 451 b.c., when his ten years of ostracism had run out.

The evacuation of Central Greece by the Peloponnesians left the Athenians a free hand in Boeotia. The political conditions of this state present a striking contrast to those which prevailed in the rest of Greece. The factor which elsewhere was of primary importance, the opposition of ‘the Many’ and ‘the Few’, is here but secondary. In Boeotia the fundamental question was that of federalism or autonomy. The federal party, with Thebes at its head, was in alliance with Sparta, and for this reason it was oligarchical in sympathy; the anti-federal party looked to Athens for support, and was therefore democratic. Sixty-one days after the battle of Tanagra the Boeotians were decisively defeated by the Athenians under Myronides at Oenophyta, which was probably in the neighbourhood of Tanagra and not far from the Athenian border. This reverse was fatal to the power of Thebes, and to the ascendancy of the oligarchical party in Boeotia. The other cities seceded from the League, which had been so recently reconstituted under pressure from Sparta, and the whole of Boeotia, with the exception of Thebes, passed under the control of Athens. Democracies were everywhere set up, even at Thebes itself. From Boeotia Myronides advanced into Phocis, which at once joined the Athenian alliance. The resentment felt at the intervention of Sparta must have secured him a welcome from the Phocians. Finally he invaded the territory of the Eastern or Opuntian Locrians, which lay to the north of Phocis, and commanded the communications with Thessaly, which was still regarded as an ally of Athens in spite of the desertion of the cavalry at Tanagra. The government of Locris was in the hands of a landed aristocracy, and was vested in a body numbering one thousand selected from this class. The oligarchical character of the constitution rendered an alliance with Athens distasteful to the population; coercion therefore had to be employed, one in ten of the governing body being carried captive to Athens as hostages for the good behaviour of the rest. It was probably before the end of the year that the Long Walls were finished, and Aegina compelled to surrender. The terms were harsh. The island had to enter the Confederacy of Delos as a subject-ally, and to pay a tribute of thirty talents, the same as that imposed on Thasos, but much in excess of that paid by any other of the members of the League.

The power of Athens had now reached highwater mark. On land, the whole territory from the Isthmus of Corinth to the Malian Gulf was under her control, and even to the north of the Gulf Thessaly was her ally, at least in name. The possession of Aegina, Megara, and Troezen on the coast of Argolis, gave her complete command of the Saronic Gulf. The foreign policy of the democratic party had not as yet met with failure in any direction. It remained to bring the Corinthian Gulf as completely under the control of Athens as the Saronic now was. It was probably in 455 b.c. that the Athenian general Tolmides was sent on an expedition round the Peloponnese. He burnt the Spartan arsenal of Gytheum, and ravaged the territory of Sicyon. The expedition served not only to display the naval power of Athens, but also to achieve results of substantial value. Achaea, on the southern shore of the Gulf, was brought into alliance, and a garrison of Messenian Helots established on the opposite coast at Naupactus, which had recently been captured from the Ozolian Locrians. It was a position of great strategical importance, commanding as it did the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf. Ithome had surrendered earlier in the year, and by the terms of capitulation its defenders had been permitted to go free where they would outside the Peloponnese. It was a piece of singular good fortune for Athens that some of the best fighting material in Greece should thus at this juncture have become available for its purpose.

VI.     

THE FATE OF THE EGYPTIAN EXPEDITION

Meanwhile the tide had turned. After the failure of Megabazus’ mission to Sparta, the Persian Court roused itself to a great effort for the reduction of Egypt. Early in the year 456 b.c. a large army was raised, and placed under the command of Megabyxus, the son of Zopyrus. It marched through Syria, and succeeded in penetrating into Egypt. It looks as if Charitimides (or possibly Charmantides), the Athenian general, must have been singularly incompetent, for the invasion of Egypt by the land route is proverbially difficult for a power which has not the control of the sea. We hear indeed at a later stage of the Phoenician fleet, and it may have lent its support to Megabyxus during his march; but the narrative of Thucydides suggests that Charitimides had allowed his ships to be locked up in the Nile. Whatever the ex­planation may be, the success of Megabyxus was complete. The Persian garrison in the White Castle was relieved, Memphis recovered, and the Athenian troops driven into the island of Prosopitis, which was formed by a canal that intersected two branches of the Nile. Here they were blockaded for eighteen months, until at length Megabyxus drained the canal, which separated the island from the mainland, by diverting the water. The Athenian ships were left high and dry, and the capture of the island and the capitulation of the Athenians followed as a matter of course. Only a small body of troops succeeded in making their way across the desert to Cyrene. Shortly after this, a fresh force of fifty vessels which had been sent in order to relieve the original expedition, in part at least, and had sailed into the Mendesian mouth of the Nile in ignorance of the disaster, was captured by the Phoenician fleet, only a few ships escaping. The insurrection was suppressed, and the whole country was reduced, with the exception of a district in the delta known as ‘the Fens’, where an Egyptian prince named Amyrtaeus still held out. Inaros surrendered to the Persians, and was later, by a breach of faith, crucified or impaled. Thucydides has devoted two whole books to the great Sicilian Expedition, while he disposes of the Egyptian in a couple of pages. It is not easy to view things in their true proportions when the scale of the narrative differs so much. For all that, the expedition had lasted six years, and it meant the loss of something like 250 vessels and 50,000 men, Athenians and Allies together. Beyond all doubt, the Egyptian disaster is the greatest in Athenian history until we come to the battle in the Great Harbour of Syracuse and the surrender on the banks of the Assinarus.

Although the precise dates cannot be determined, it is probable that the news of the disaster reached Athens early in the summer of 454 b.c. Even before the news of the final catastrophe had been received, it had been thought prudent to remove the treasury of the Confederacy from Delos to Athens, in view of a possible descent of the Phoenician fleet upon the island. At the beginning of the campaigning season, the Athenians had sent an army, reinforced on its way northwards by contingents from Boeotia and Phocis, into Thessaly, where things were going badly for their cause. The politics of Thessaly are never easy to follow, but it would appear that at this period the country was divided between two interests; the oligarchical, the party of the Knights or landed aristocracy, and the monarchical, which had the support of Athens. The leader of the latter party had been Echecratides, but he was now dead, and his son Orestes had been driven into exile. The Athenian expedition was undertaken in the hope of restoring him to power, and its immediate objective was the capture of Pharsalus. The Thessalian cavalry proved too strong for the Athenian force, which must have consisted mainly of hoplites. Orestes was not restored, and Pharsalus was not taken. The expedition was compelled to make its way back to Athens, having accomplished nothing. On its return, it was met with the news from Egypt. A few weeks later, in the latter half of the summer, a fresh expedition, although on a small scale, was undertaken, and this time Pericles himself took the command. A thousand hoplites were embarked at Pegae, and landed on the coast of Sicyon. After a skirmish with the Sicyonians, in which the Athenians had the advantage, Pericles re-embarked his force, and sailed along the coast to Achaea, from which he obtained some troops by way of reinforcement. His ultimate aim was the capture of Oeniadae, a place of some importance near the mouth of the river Achelous, in Acarnania. He failed, however, to take the town and he returned home at the end of the summer. This expedition was as abortive as that to Thessaly; but it is probable that it was intended merely as a demonstration. Athens would prove to the rest of Greece that her spirit was not yet crushed, in spite of the calamity which had befallen her in Egypt.

VII.    

THE FIVE YEARS TRUCE AND THE DEATH OF CIMON

For the next three years there was a lull in the operations on both sides. Early in 451 b.c. the term of Cimon’s ostracism ran out, and he returned to Athens. Reference has already been made to the story which was current in antiquity of Cimon’s recall from exile after the battle of Tanagra by a decree proposed by Pericles himself. It was part of this story that, before Pericles consented to propose the decree, a compact had been arranged, through the skilful diplomacy of Cimon’s sister Elpinice, to the effect that Cimon should have a free hand against Persia, while Pericles’ control of domestic policy was to go unchallenged. Such facts as we know point in an opposite direction. The return of Cimon to Athens seems to have been the signal for the renewal of the old struggle for supremacy between him and Pericles. There are reasons for assigning to the year 451 b.c. two measures, both of them proposed by Pericles, which are most naturally interpreted as a bid for popular support. The first of these measures is the introduction of payment for the jurors, and the second the limitation of the franchise to those who could prove Athenian parentage on both sides. The latter is expressly assigned to the archonship of Antidotus (451—50 b.c.), and it is implied in Aristotle’s Constitution of Athens that the former was introduced at a moment when Pericles and Cimon were the leaders of the two opposing factions. Thanks to these measures Pericles was enabled to maintain his position so far as domestic policy was concerned.

In foreign politics, however, the victory remained with Cimon. Within six months of his return he had procured the Five Years Truce from Sparta, and the renunciation on the part of Athens of the alliance with Argos. By the beginning of the next year (450 b.c.) the Assembly had voted him a fleet of 200 vessels for the resumption of the war with Persia, and had appointed him to its command. The meaning of all this can hardly be mistaken. The alliance with Argos had been the keystone of the anti-­Laconian policy of the democrats; its conclusion had been the outward and visible sign of Cimon’s fall. This policy was now reversed. In the latter part of 451 b.c., probably at the same time as the signing of the Five Years Truce, a treaty of peace for thirty years between Sparta and Argos was concluded, on the understanding that the alliance between the latter state and Athens should be dissolved. The assumptions on which Cimon’s policy had been based before his ostracism, that if Athens were to prosecute the war with Persia, she must be secure against attack at home, and that the prosecution of the war with Persia was her primary duty, were those which underlay the policy to which the Assembly was now committed. That at so critical a moment a respite of five years should have been granted to Athens suggests that the reappearance of Cimon in the political arena had gone far to restore the influence of the moderate party at Sparta.

At the beginning of the summer of 450 b.c. Cimon set sail for Cyprus with a fleet of 200 triremes, furnished partly by Athens and partly by the Allies. After detaching sixty of these vessels for the support of Amyrtaeus, who still held out in ‘the Fens’, he employed the rest of his fleet in the siege of Citium, on the south­eastern coast of the island. He died, either of disease or wounds, before the place had fallen, and shortly after his death the siege was raised. At the end of the summer, or early in the next year, the Athenians won a decisive victory, both by sea and land, at Salamis in Cyprus. The fleet which was defeated in this engagement consisted of Phoenician and Cilician vessels. No further effort was made to complete the conquest of the island, and the Athenian forces returned home. Cyprus remained in undisturbed possession of the Persians, but the expedition had achieved its primary object. Athens had proved that, in spite of the over­whelming disaster which she had sustained in Egypt, she could still hold her own against Persia on the sea. The prestige of the Eurymedon was revived, and it was owing to the prestige thus restored that the authority of Athens in the Greek fringe of Asia Minor was to remain unchallenged for another generation.

Cimon was dead, and his policy died with him. Even his followers must have recognized that no further successes against Persia could be looked for, now that the great commander to whose genius so much of the past successes had been due had passed away. To Pericles, who still clung to the hope of maintaining the Empire on land, a cessation of the hostilities with Persia would be welcome. He, too, at length had learnt the lesson that the conduct of war on two fronts at once was far beyond the resources of the state. It is not disputed that warfare between Athens and Persia ceased soon after the death of Cimon, and that for the future Athens abstained from any intervention in Cyprus or Egypt, or any aggressive action against Phoenicia and Cilicia, and that Persia on her side sent no fleets into the Aegean. What is in dispute is the conclusion of a formal treaty. In the fourth century b.c. the belief was current, although it did not go unquestioned, that a treaty was concluded (which was sometimes called the Peace of Cimon, and sometimes the Peace of Callias), by which Persia bound herself not to send a fleet into the Aegean or troops within three days’ march of the coast of Ionia, while Athens bound herself to refrain from attacking the territories of the Great King. This treaty is a commonplace with the Orators, and it was accepted by Ephorus. The authority, however, of Theopompus and Callisthenes, two of the greatest names among the historians who were his contemporaries, can be set on the other side, and even those moderns who believe in a Peace of Callias are compelled to admit that there is no agreement, either as to its terms or its author, among the ancients on whom they rely.

VIII.   

COLLAPSE OF THE LAND EMPIRE. INVASION OF ATTICA BY THE PELOPONNESIANS

Meanwhile in Greece an incident occurred, which although dignified by the name of a Sacred War, was of little importance in itself, and did not constitute a violation of the Truce. It was ominous, however, of what might happen on its expiration, now that the moderating influence of Cimon was removed. It was probably in 448 b.c. that the Spartans sent an army across the Corinthian Gulf to expel the Phocians from the temple at Delphi of which they had taken possession. The status of Delphi was at all times a burning question in the politics of Greece. The Phocian claim was that Delphi was an integral part of Phocis, and that the right to control the temple was consequently theirs; the Delphian, that the administration of the shrine was solely their concern. As soon as the Spartans had effected their object, and withdrawn, Pericles himself marched out at the head of an Athenian force, and reinstated the Phocians, who were still in alliance with Athens.

The first blow, however, was struck not by Sparta but by Thebes, and that a year before the Truce had run its course. The democracy which had been established at Thebes after the battle of Oenophyta was short-lived. Its misgovernment was such that it provoked a counter-revolution. Thebes now became the asylum of the oligarchs who had been expelled wholesale from the other Boeotian cities in which democracies had been set up by the aid of Athens. We may be quite sure that it also became an active centre of anti-Athenian propaganda throughout the country. The insurrection, which had been doubtless planned at Thebes, broke out in the extreme north-west of Boeotia, close to the borders of Phocis, where the important city of Orchomenus, together with Chaeronea and some other places, was seized by a body of oligarchic exiles. The Athenian Assembly failed to appreciate the significance of the movement, and, in spite of the warnings of Pericles, was content to dispatch the general Tolmides with a body of 1000 volunteers, mostly youths belonging to the best families, reinforced by a small number of Allies. Tolmides captured Chaeronea, into which he threw a garrison, but he did not attempt to recover Orchomenus. He then began his retreat, but at Coronea, which commands the communications between western and eastern Boeotia, he was met by a force consisting partly of the oligarchs who now held Orchomenus and partly of exiles from Locris and Euboea. The Athenians were defeated with heavy loss. Tolmides fell, and a large part of his army was captured. To recover the prisoners, Athens consented to evacuate the whole of Boeotia. But the loss of Boeotia was not the full measure of the disaster, as Phocis and Locris at once renounced their alliance. Thus the whole fabric of the empire of Athens north of Cithaeron collapsed at a single touch, like a house built of cards.

At the end of the next summer (446 b.c.) the Five Years Truce was due to expire, and the plans of the Peloponnesians were carefully laid in view of this date. As soon as the Truce had run out, Euboea rose in revolt. Pericles crossed over into the island with the bulk of the Athenian army to suppress the insurrection; but before he had time to effect anything he received the news that Megara had also risen and that the Athenian garrison had been massacred. Only the two fortified ports of Pegae and Nisaea were still held. The three regiments which alone remained at Athens were dispatched against Megara under the command of Andocides, the grandfather of the orator of the same name; but so small a force could not venture on an engagement with the Megarians, who had received reinforcements from Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, and Andocides, who found his retreat cut off by the enemy’s army, was compelled to make his way back by the difficult road that ran from Pegae through Aegosthena, Creusis, and the Boeotian border. The evacuation of Euboea was now inevitable. Pericles crossed back into Attica, only to receive news even worse than that of the revolt of Megara. The Peloponnesian army under the Spartan king Pleistoanax had already crossed the frontier, and had reached Eleusis. It looked as if a Spartan invasion of Attica might well prove fatal to the power of Athens. Pericles could not risk a battle against forces far superior to his own, and, although Athens was invulnerable now that the Long Walls had been completed, her Empire was not. Discontent was rife amongst her allies, and the example of Euboea might prove infectious. The Peloponnesian army, however, withdrew from Eleusis without striking a blow. It was alleged at Sparta that the young King Pleistoanax and Cleandridas, who had been appointed by the ephors as his adviser, had been bribed by Pericles; and the War Party procured the deposition of the king and the exile of his counsellor. The allegation may have been true or it may have been false, but it is evident that it does not explain the facts. That which needs explanation is, not merely the evacuation of Attica, but the readiness of Sparta to grant to Athens terms so generous as those of the Thirty Years Peace. If she had been bent upon the ruin of Athens, she could not have signed a treaty which was based upon the recognition of the Athenian Empire. The terms embodied in the Treaty must have been substantially the same as those arranged between Pericles and Cleandridas.

The retirement of the Peloponnesian army left Euboea at the mercy of Athens. Pericles crossed once more into the island with an army of 5000 hoplites, supported by a fleet of 50 triremes. With a force such as this he made short work of the insurrection. The whole island was compelled to surrender, terms of exceptional severity being reserved for two of the leading cities, Chalcis and Histiaca. From the former the Hippobotae, a landed aristocracy, were banished; at Histiaca the territory was confiscated, the inhabitants expelled, and an Athenian cleruchy established under the name of Oreus.

IX.     

THE THIRTY YEARS PEACE. FAILURE OF THE FOREIGN POLICY OF PERICLES

In the winter the Peace Conference assembled at Sparta. The basis of the negotiations agreed to by both sides was the surrender by Athens of what remained to her of the Empire on land (the two Megarian ports of Pegae and Nisaea, together with Achaea and Troezen in the Peloponnese), and the recognition by Sparta of the Athenian Empire in the Aegean. Controversy must have centred on Naupactus and Aegina. Corinth must have resisted the Athenian claim to a fortress which commanded the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf; Sparta was bound by every consideration of honour to secure the independence of Aegina. In the end, Athens gained her point on both these issues. Corinth was induced to concede the Athenian claim to Naupactus; Sparta saved her face by the proviso that Aegina was to enjoy autonomy, although she was to pay tribute to Athens and to be included in her Empire. This proviso was a safeguard of a kind that is not unfamiliar to the diplomacy of our own days. Athens had no intention of carrying out this article of the Treaty, and Sparta had no desire to find a casus belli in its non-fulfilment. The further provisions of the Treaty were that neither of the contracting parties should give help to the allies of the other in case of revolt, but that states at present neutral should be free to join either confederacy; and that, if any occasion of conflict should arise between the two parties to the Treaty, recourse should be had to arbitration. Although Argos, as being no longer an ally of Athens, was not a party to the Treaty, it was specifically provided that Athens and Argos might conclude a separate alliance with each other, if they wished it. As Argos was bound by the terms of the thirty years truce which had been made between her and Sparta in 451 b.c., it was necessary to assert explicitly that she was free to enter into alliance with Athens. Such an alliance could not, of course, be directed against Sparta till the truce of 451 b.c. had expired. If the Treaty was a humiliation for Athens, it was a triumph for Pericles. He had appreciated with the utmost nicety the strength of the motives which would determine the action, not only of Sparta, but of Corinth. However unwilling the latter might be to leave Naupactus in the hands of Athens, she could not fail to see that the Treaty restored to her the freedom of the Corinthian Gulf. The grip of Athens on that Gulf during the past few years must have almost throttled the trade of Corinth with the West.

For the humiliation which was involved in the terms of the Treaty the Athenian public can hardly have failed to find some degree of compensation in the fate of Euboea. In spite of the services which the island had rendered to the Peloponnesians by its revolt at so critical a moment, it was abandoned to the mercy of the Athenian Assembly, and left to feel the full measure of its resentment.

Naupactus and Aegina were all that Athens retained as the result of her efforts since the breach with Sparta. And at what a price had these gains been purchased! It had now been demonstrated by the relentless logic of events that it was far beyond the capacity of Athens to fight both Sparta and Persia at once. The number of Athenian citizens available for service in the field at this epoch can hardly have been greater than at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War, when it is computed by Thucydides as 13,000 hoplites. Aristotle puts the loss in hoplites during this period of Athenian history as high as two or three thousand a year. This is, doubtless, an exaggeration, but there must have been years in which the losses fell not far short of the higher figure. The inscription in the Louvre, to which reference has been made above, shows that in a single tribe close upon 170 fell in a single year; and if it is permissible to argue from one tribe to the rest, this would give a total of 1700 for the whole army. The year in question was a heavy one, but there were others in which the total must have been even greater.

The policy pursued by Pericles, however, stands condemned not merely on account of the inadequacy of his resources. An Athenian empire on the mainland of Greece was a vain dream. It is to be remembered that at the time of the breach with Sparta democracy was, so to speak, a new thing in the experience of the Greeks. It was, at least, enough of a novelty to excuse the belief in those who were themselves convinced democrats that the population of every state in Greece would choose the ‘government of the many’, if once they got their chance. The leader of a popular party in all ages is apt to indulge in the illusion that ‘the flowing tide is with him’. It was as natural for Pericles to imagine that the states in which oligarchies were established in power would declare for democracy as soon as Athens intervened, as it was for the Jacobins in France to persuade themselves that all Europe would embrace the principles of the Revolution when once the malign influence of priests and princes was removed. The policy pursued by Pericles broke down for two reasons. In the first place, in some of the states at any rate (e.g. in Boeotia and Locris), both the economic conditions of the country and the traditional sentiment of the people were favourable to the rule of ‘the Few’, rather than to that of ‘the Many’. In the second place, it was beyond the strength of Athens to maintain her ascendancy by force. Coronea showed that it was beyond her strength even to coerce Boeotia. Athens had been driven to hold Megara and Troezen with a garrison of her own troops, and to exact hostages from Locris. The result could only be that she would have to reckon with one of the strongest of all forces in Greek life, the sentiment of autonomy. When a state was confronted with the alternative of democracy or autonomy, there could be little doubt as to what its choice would be.

It is commonly argued that the policy of Cimon was bound to fail because a breach between Athens and Sparta was inevitable. It may be that a breach was inevitable in the long run; but, after all, Ithome was an accident. Had there been no Ithome, there would still have been an Inaros, and then how differently the history of Athens might have read. It is true that the great Egyptian expedition ended in disaster; but is it unscientific to conclude that, if all the conditions had been reversed—if Athens had been at the time of one heart and of one mind; if her energies had been concentrated on a single task; above all, if Cimon had been in command instead of the incompetent Charitimides—, the least that would have been accomplished would have been the permanent detachment of Egypt, and perhaps of Cyprus, from the Persian Empire? If this had been achieved, a day would have come when it would have been recognized even by Sparta that Athens was now supreme in Hellas.

It is probably to the interval between the death of Cimon and the beginning of the building of the Parthenon, in 447 b.c., that we are to assign the proposal of Pericles for a Congress of delegates from the Greek cities, to discuss the rebuilding of the temples which had been burnt by the enemy in the course of the Persian Wars. Although Plutarch is our sole authority for this proposed Congress, there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of his statements, which may possibly have been ultimately derived from Craterus’ Collection of Decrees. The delegates were to be sent to all Greek cities, great and small, whether in Europe or in Asia, although the Greeks of Southern Italy and Sicily were naturally not included, as they lay outside the sphere of the Persian invasions. The Congress was to meet at Athens, and it was to discuss the payment of the vows made in the crisis of the Persian Wars and the policing of the seas, as well as the rebuilding of the temples. Twenty commissioners were dispatched to convey the invitation; five to the Dorians and Ionians in Asia Minor and to the islands in the Aegean, five to the Hellespont and the coast of Thrace as far as Byzantium, five to Boeotia, Phocis, and the Peloponnese, and thence to Locris, Acarnania, and Ambracia, and the remaining five through Euboea, to the Malian Gulf and Thessaly. The scheme failed at the very start, as the com­missioners sent to the Peloponnese met with a blank refusal. It is difficult to believe that any other result could have been expected by Pericles himself. A statesman of his sagacity could hardly have imagined that Sparta would accept the proposal for a Panhellenic congress to be held at Athens on the invitation of the Athenian State. Had Sparta accepted the invitation, her action could only have been interpreted as a tacit admission of the Athenian claim to the hegemony of Greece. It was a proposal which must have been received in the Assembly with rapturous applause, and it must have contributed in no small degree to the popularity of Pericles; but that he himself anticipated any further result may well be doubted.

X.      

THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE AT THIS EPOCH

In the last chapter it was pointed out that by the time of Cimon’s ostracism the Confederacy of Delos was well on its way to becoming the Empire of Athens. There can be little doubt that by the time of the Thirty Years Peace the process of transformation was complete, and that this transformation of Confederacy into Empire was the deliberate aim of Pericles and his party. The evidence at our command does not enable us to determine with precision how far the conditions which we find prevailing in the Peloponnesian War can be assumed for this earlier period; but it will be convenient to describe the status of the subject-allies, and to discuss their grievances, at this point rather than in a later chapter. What is true of the Empire in 425 b.c. holds good of it, in all essentials, twenty years earlier.

The synod had ceased to meet; the treasury of the League had been transferred from Delos to Athens, and the board of Hellenotamiae had been converted into an Athenian magistracy; the jurisdiction of the Athenian courts had been extended to the whole body of the Allies, and it probably included all the more important criminal cases as well as commercial suits; all the Allies, with the exception of Chios, Lesbos, and Samos, had lost their autonomy, had ceased to supply ships, and had become tributary. It can also be proved, although it has frequently been denied, that Athens tolerated no form of constitution other than the democratic in the cities that were subject to her. Where she did not find democracy already existing, she imposed it. It must be admitted that Athens rendered two great services to her subjects: she kept the Persians at arm’s length, and she suppressed the evil of piracy. Persia never abandoned her claim to the Greek fringe of Asia Minor and to the great islands off the coast. Had the Athenian Empire disappeared, she would certainly have been able to make good her claims. Piracy was rife in the Aegean except during the existence of the Empire. We have evidence of its prevalence on both sides of the sea in the early days of the Confederacy of Delos. On the western side the island of Scyros was a pirates’ nest from time immemorial, and on the eastern side the pirate was viewed as a public nuisance. In an inscription relating to Teos in Ionia, which may be put about 470 b.c., foremost amongst those against whom imprecations are decreed are those who practise piracy or harbour the pirates. The evil survived in the Thracian Chersonese as late as the middle of the century, but there is no trace of it elsewhere during the ascendancy of Athens. The moment the Empire of Athens was overthrown, the evil revived

In spite of the services which Athens thus rendered, her au­thority was resented. Both Herodotus and Thucydides have to admit that the Empire was unpopular. It cannot be denied that the subjects of Athens had more special grievances to complain of than the mere loss of autonomy. No doubt the jurisdiction of the Athenian courts was favourable to the commercial interests of the Allies, in so far as it rendered it possible to enforce a claim against the citizen of another state. Yet there is nothing that men cling to so tenaciously as their own legal system and their own courts of law; the independent jurisdiction of their own courts was to the Greek mind an integral part of the conception of autonomy. There is evidence, too, that the courts were made an engine of political oppression. It seems to have been no un­common thing for the aristocrats in the subject-states to be brought to trial at Athens, and convicted on some trumped-up charge, at the instance of the local party leaders. It must, again, have been deeply resented that Athens should claim the right to spend the tribute on any object that she pleased. The principle was expressly asserted by Pericles that, so long as Athens kept Persia at bay, she was under no obligation to render to her subjects any account of the monies contributed by them. He even claimed the right to spend these funds on the adornment of Athens, and the protest of the Conservatives, to which their leader Thucydides, son of Melesias, gave expression, was all in vain. If it be argued that the amount of the tribute before the great re-assessment of 425 b.c. was not excessive, it may be answered that, although this is true, there was a substantial grievance in the fact that it was assessed by Athens, and that this power of assessment might be used inequitably. It was indeed only to be expected that Athens would use this power of discrimination to the advantage of states like Miletus that were friendly, and to the detriment of those which, like Thasos and Aegina, were hostile.

Finally, there was the grievance of the cleruchies. The cleruchy was not the invention of Pericles. The earliest example of this peculiar species of colony goes back to the time of Cleisthenes, when no less than 4000 cleruchs were settled in the territory of Chalcis in Euboea. To the period between the Persian Invasion and the fall of Cimon there can be assigned the cleruchies at Eion and Scyros, and perhaps those at Lemnos and Imbros, if these latter are not of much earlier date. It was Pericles, however, who made the cleruchy an important part of the imperial system. It served two purposes, an economic and a military. On the one hand, it provided relief for the Athenian ‘unemployed’; on the other, it helped to secure some of the more important strategical positions in the Empire. To the Periclean period down to 445 b.c. belong the cleruchies in Naxos, Andros, the Thracian Chersonese, Brea, Oreus, and perhaps others in Euboea. By the time of the Sicilian Expedition the list is much enlarged. The cleruchy was not infrequently the penalty for revolt, as at Histiaca, Potidaea, and Lesbos; and sometimes it involved the expulsion of the whole population, as in the case of Scyros, Potidaea, Aegina, and Melos. In other instances the cleruchs were settled side by side with the native population, and there is some evidence to show that, where this happened, the cession of land required for the settlement was compensated for by a reduction of tribute. There is no need to dwell on the bitter feeling engendered by the expulsion of the rightful possessors of the soil; but where the native population was allowed to remain, and even where it received some compensation, there was still a grievance. The cleruchs were not, in the proper sense of the term, the subjects or the dependents of Athens. They were themselves Athenians, and the cleruchy constituted, so to speak, a detached portion of the Athenian State. They paid no tribute; they even remained members of their tribe and deme. They were thus a privileged order, and as such not exempt from the odium which privilege excites.

CHAPTER IV

THE PERICLEAN DEMOCRACY