III. FROM THE PLAGUE TO THE PEACE
Nearly all Greece ranged itself on one or the other side. Every state in the Peloponnesus except Argos supported Sparta; so did Corinth, Megara, Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis. Athens, at the outset, had the half-hearted help of the Ionian and Euxine cities and the Aegean isles. Like the World War of our own time, the first phase of the struggle was a contest between sea power and land power. The Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil. Pericles called the population of Attica within the walls of Athens, refused to let his troops go out to battle, and advised the excited Athenians to bide their time and wait for their navy to win the war.
His calculations were strategically sound, but they ignored a factor that almost decided the conflict. The crowding of Athens led (430) to a plague—probably malaria11—which raged for nearly three years, killing a fourth of the soldiers and a great number of the civilian population.* The people, desperate with the combined sufferings of epidemic and war, accused Pericles of responsibility for both. Cleon and others indicted him on the charge of misusing public funds; since he had apparently employed state money to bribe the Spartan kings to peace, he was unable to give a satisfactory accounting; he was convicted, deposed from office, and fined the enormous sum of fifty talents ($300,000). About the same time (429) his sister and his two legitimate sons died of the plague. The Athenians, finding no leader to replace him, recalled him to power (429); and, to show their esteem for him, and their sympathy in his bereavement, they overrode a law that he himself had passed, and bestowed citizenship upon the son that Aspasia had borne to him. But the aging statesman had himself been infected by the plague; he grew weaker day by day, and died within a few months after his restoration to office. Under him Athens had reached her zenith; but because that height had been attained in part through the wealth of an unwilling Confederacy, and through a power that invited almost universal hostility, the Golden Age was unsound in its foundations, and was doomed to disaster when Athenian statesmanship failed in the strategy of peace.
Perhaps, as Thucydides suggests, Athens might have come through to victory nevertheless, if it had pursued to the end the Fabian policy laid down by Pericles. But his successors were too impatient to carry out a program that required a proud self-control. The new masters of the democratic party were merchants like Cleon the dealer in leather, Eucrates the rope seller, Hyperbolus the lampmaker; and these men demanded an active war on land as well as sea. Cleon was the ablest of them, the most eloquent, unscrupulous, and corrupt. Plutarch describes him as “the first orator among the Athenians that pulled off his cloak and smote his thigh when addressing the people”;12 Cleon made it a point, says Aristotle, to appear on the rostrum in the garb of a workingman.13He was the first in a long line of demagogues that ruled Athens from the death of Pericles to the loss of Athenian independence at Chaeronea (338).
Cleon’s ability was proved in 425 when the Athenian fleet besieged a Spartan army on the island of Sphacteria, near Messenian Pylus. No admiral seemed capable of taking the stronghold; but when the Assembly gave Cleon charge of the siege (half hoping that he would be killed in action), he surprised all by carrying through the attack with a skill and courage that forced the Lacedaemonians to an unprecedented surrender. Sparta, humbled, offered peace and alliance in return for the captured men, but Cleon’s oratory persuaded the Assembly to reject the offer and continue the war. His hold on the populace was strengthened by a proposal, easily carried, that the Athenians should henceforth pay no taxes to the support of the war, but should finance it by raising the tribute exacted of the subject cities in the Empire (424). In these cities, as in Athens, the policy of Cleon was to get as much money out of the rich as he could find.
When the upper classes of Mytilene rebelled, overthrew the democracy, and declared Lesbos free of allegiance to Athens (429), Cleon moved that all adult males in the disaffected city be put to death. The Assembly—perhaps a mere quorum—agreed, and sent a ship with orders to that effect to Paches, the Athenian general who had put down the revolt. When word of the ruthless edict got about Athens the steadier heads called for another meeting of the Assembly, secured the repeal of the decree, and dispatched a second ship which reached Paches just in time to prevent a massacre. Paches sent to Athens a thousand ringleaders, who, at Cleon’s suggestion, and in accordance with the custom of the age, were all put to death.14
Cleon redeemed himself by dying in battle against the Spartan hero Brasidas, who was capturing one after another of the cities subject or allied to Athens in the mainland north. It was in this campaign that Thucydides lost his naval commission and his Athenian residence by coming up too tardily to the relief of Amphipolis, which commanded the gold mines of Thrace. Brasidas having died in the same campaign, Sparta, left leaderless in the face of a threatened Helot revolt, offered peace again; and Athens, for once taking the advice of the oligarchic leader, signed the Peace of Nicias (421). The rival cities not only declared the war ended, but signed an alliance for fifty years; and Athens committed herself to go to the help of Sparta should the Helots rise.15