PERIPOLTAS the prophet, after he had led king Opheltas and his subjects from Thessaly into Boeotia, founded a line which remained famous for many generations. The majority of them settled in Chae-ronea, which was the first city they conquered when they drove out the barbarians. Now most of his descendants were men of great courage, natural fighters who spared themselves so little that after the Persian invasions and the campaigns against the Gauls the family almost died out. One of the survivors, however, was an orphan surnamed Peripoltas, whose first name was Damon, and who stood out among all the youths of his age for his proud spirit and exceptional physical beauty, although apart from this he was uneducated and harsh-tempered.
The Roman commander of a cohort which was quartered for the winter in Chaeronea fell in love with this Damon, who was only just past his boyhood. This officer found that he could not win over the youth by importunity or by offering him presents, but before long it became clear that he would not stop at using force, knowing as he did that our city’ fortunes at that time had sunk to a low ebb and that she was neglected because of her poverty and insignificance. This was just what Damon feared, and since he had been angered by the very attentions the Roman paid him, he laid a plot against him with some of his companions, though he kept their numbers small for the sake of secrecy. There were sixteen of them in all. One night they daubed their faces with soot, drank unmixed wine to nerve themselves, and at daybreak fell upon the Roman officer as he was offering sacrifice in the market-place. They killed him with a number of his men and then fled from the city. During the uproar which followed, the senate of Chaeronea met and pronounced sentence of death on the murderers, and this constituted the defence which was later offered to the Romans on the city’ behalf. But that evening, while the chief magistrates were dining together, according to their custom, Damon and his band broke into the city-hall, massacred them and once again made their escape.
It happened that at about that time1 Lucius Lucullus was passing by Chaeronea in command of a body of troops upon some expedition. He interrupted his march and held an inquiry while these events were still fresh in mind. His findings were that the city was not to blame for what had happened, but was rather itself the injured party, and he withdrew the Roman garrison and took them away with him. As for Damon, who was now making marauding raids, pillaging the countryside, and threatening the city itself, the Chaeroneans lured him back by sending a deputation and passing various decrees to conciliate him, and after his return they appointed him gymnasiarch: then, a little later, as he was anointing himself one day in the public baths, they killed him. Our ancestors tell us that for a long time afterwards apparitions were seen in the place and groans were heard, and so the doors of the baths were walled up. Even to this day those who live nearby believe that this building is still haunted by terrifying sights and sounds. There are other members of Damon’ family who are still living, mostly in the neighbourhood of Stiris in Phocis, and who speak the Aeolian dialect. They are known as the asbolomeni or sooty-faced, because of Damon’ having smeared his face with soot before he went out to commit the murder.
2. Now the people of Orchomenus, who were neighbours of the Chaeroneans and on bad terms with them, hired a Roman informer who laid a charge against the city, as if it were an individual, for the murder of the soldiers killed by Damon. The trial was held before the praetor of Macedonia, for the Romans at that time did not appoint praetors to Greece proper, and the counsel who were defending Chaeronea cited Lucullus’ findings. Lucullus, when the praetor wrote to him, gave the true version of the affair, and in this way the city escaped what had been a very serious danger of conviction on a capital charge. So the people, who owed their deliverance to Lucullus on that occasion, erected a marble statue to him in the market-place, next to the statue of Dionysus. And I, too, although several generations removed from him, believe that his favour extends to our people even down to the present day; and since I am convinced that a portrait which reveals a man’ character and inner qualities possesses a far greater beauty than one which merely reproduces his face and physical appearance, I shall describe Lucullus’ achievements in my Parallel Lives and report them exactly. Indeed, merely to mention them is to offer him thanks enough, since he himself would certainly refuse to accept a false or highly coloured account of his career in return for the true testimony he gave on our behalf.
When an artist has to paint a face which possesses fair and handsome features, we demand that he should neither exaggerate nor leave out any minor defect he may find in it, since in the first case this would make the portrait ugly, and in the second destroy the likeness. In the same way, since it is difficult, or rather impossible, to represent a man’ life as entirely spotless and free from blame, we should use the best chapters in it to build up the most complete picture and regard this as the true likeness. Any errors or crimes, on the other hand, which may tarnish a man’ career and may have been committed out of passion or political necessity, we should regard rather as lapses from a particular virtue than as the product of some innate vice. We must not dwell on them too emphatically in our history, but should rather show indulgence to human nature for its inability to produce a character which is absolutely good and uncompromisingly dedicated to virtue.
3. So when I considered whom I should compare to Lucullus, I concluded that it must be Cimon. Both of them were men of war, and both gained brilliant successes against the barbarians. Yet they were also moderate statesmen who succeeded better than any others in giving their countries a breathing space in which to recover from the violence of party strife, though each of them set up trophies and won resounding victories. Leaving aside the legends of Heracles, or Dionysus, or Jason, or those exploits of Perseus against the Ethiopians, the Medes, and the Armenians of which any credible record has come down to us, we may say that no Greek before Cimon and no Roman before Lucullus ever carried his wars into such distant lands. On the other hand in both men’ campaigns the element of finality was lacking. Each of them crushed his opponent without finishing him off. In particular we find in both the same open-handed abundance in their fondness for entertaining and their generosity to others, and the same youthful laxity in their way of living. I need not mention every point of resemblance between them, since the reader will find it easy to discover others in the course of my narrative.
4. Cimon was the son of Miltiades and his mother was Hegesipyle, a woman of Thracian descent, the daughter of king Olorus, as we learn from the poems of Archelaus and Melanthius addressed to Cimon himself. This explains the fact that Thucydides the historian was also connected with Cimon’ family as the name of Olorus, their common ancestor, had descended to his father, and also how he was the owner of gold mines in Thrace.1 It is said, too, that Thucydides was murdered at Skapte Hyle, a place in Thrace: but his remains were brought to Athens and his monument is to be seen among those of Cimon’ family near the tomb of Cimon’ sister, Elpinice. Thucydides, however, belonged to the deme of Halimus, while Miltiades’ family belonged to the deme of Lacia.
Miltiades had been condemned by the Athenians to pay a fine of fifty talents. He was thrown into prison until he could find the money, and there he died.2 Cimon, who was scarcely more than a boy, was thus left with his sister, who was also young and unmarried. For some time his career was entirely undistinguished, except that he earned a bad name for disorderly behaviour, heavy drinking, and in general for taking after his grandfather, Cimon, who was said to have been so stupid that he was nicknamed Coalemus, or The Booby. Stesimbrotus of Thasos, who was a near contemporary of Cimon’, says that he never acquired a literary education3 or any other of the liberal accomplishments which a Greek normally possessed, and that he was without a spark of the true Attic cleverness and eloquence; on the other hand he adds that his manner gave an impression of great nobility and candour and that the spirit of the man seemed altogether more Peloponnesian than Athenian,
His nature was unadorned
Forthright and at its best in times of crisis.
as Euripides wrote of Heracles, and we may add this judgement to the character Stesimbrotus has given Cimon.
While he was still a young man, he was accused of having committed incest with his sister. Indeed, Elpinice is said to have been careless of her virtue on other occasions, too, and to have been the mistress of Polygnotus the painter. This is the origin of the story that when he was painting the Trojan women in what was then called the Peisianacteum, but is now the Painted Colonnade, he introduced Elpinice’ features into the portrait of Laodice. Polygnotus was far from being a mere craftsman and he did not make a contract to decorate the Colonnade, but undertook the work for nothing simply out of the desire to honour his city. We learn this from the historians and from the poet Melanthius, who wrote:
He at his own expense adorned the Cecropian market
And the gods’ temples: his theme told of the heroes’ great deeds.
Others have said that there was nothing clandestine about Elpinice’ relations with Cimon, but that she lived quite openly with him as his wife, because she was too poor to find a husband worthy of her noble birth, and that when Callias, one of the richest men in Athens, fell in love with her and offered to pay off the fine which had been inflicted on her father, Miltiades, she accepted his proposal and Cimon gave her away to Callias.
In spite of this there is no doubt that Cimon was especially prone to form passionate attachments to women. The poet Melanthius, in some playful elegiac verses addressed to Cimon, refers to Asteria, who belonged to a family from Salamis, and also to Mnestra as having been courted by him. We know, too, that he was deeply, almost extravagantly devoted to Isodice, the daughter of Euryptolemus and grand-daughter of Megacles, who was his lawful wife, and was left inconsolable when she died, if we may judge from the elegy written to comfort him in his grief. Panaetius thinks that the author of this was Archelaus, the writer on natural science, and the date, at least, makes this a reasonable surmise.
5. All the other elements in Cimon’ character are noble and deserve our admiration. He was as brave as Miltiades and as intelligent as Themistocles, and he is generally admitted to have been a juster man than either. In all the qualities which war demands he was fully their equal, and in statesmanship he showed himself immeasurably their superior, even when he was quite young and inexperienced in military matters. When the Medes invaded Greece and Themistocles was urging the people to hand over their city, abandon their country, mobilize their forces on board the fleet off Salamis, and fight out the issue at sea, the majority shrank from the audacity of his scheme. But Cimon was the first to set a public example, and cheerfully led a procession of his comrades through the Cerameicus up to the Acropolis. He carried in his hands a horse’ bridle to offer up to the goddess, in token of the fact that what the city needed at that moment was not knightly valour, but men to fight at sea. When he had dedicated the bridle, he took one of the shields that were hanging up around the temple, uttered a prayer to the goddess, and then went down to the sea; and because of this action many of his countrymen began to take heart again.
His physical presence was imposing, too, as Ion the poet tells us, for he was tall with a thick and curly head of hair. And as he proved himself a brilliant and courageous soldier in the battle of Salamis, he quickly won not only the praise but also the hearts of his countrymen. Many of them flocked to him and urged him to plan and carry out at once some enterprise which would be worthy of his father’ exploits at Marathon. So when he first entered politics the Athenians welcomed him gladly; they had had enough of Themistocles and they proceeded to promote Cimon to the highest honours and offices in the state, for his gentleness and simplicity greatly endeared him to the people. But it was Aristides, the son of Lysimachus, who contributed more than anyone else to his advancement. He had recognized the innate excellence of Cimon’ character and he now set him up as a counterpoise to the cleverness and audacity of Themistocles.
6. After the Medes had been driven from Greece, Cimon was sent out as one of the commanders of the Greek expeditionary force,1 at a time when the Athenians had not yet won their supremacy at sea and were still under the orders of Pausanias and the Spartans. During these campaigns the soldiers whom Cimon sent out on operations were not only a byword for their discipline, but also far excelled the others in the enterprise they showed. At that time, too, Pausanias was carrying on treasonable negotiations with the barbarians and writing letters to the king of Persia, but treating his own allies harshly and arrogantly and scattering insults far and wide with his officiousness and absurd pretensions. Cimon, on the other hand, had a kind word for all who brought grievances to him and dealt with them so sympathetically that almost before people knew what was happening he had taken over the command of the Greeks, and he achieved this not by force of arms but simply by virtue of his character and his skill in handling men. Most of the allies, finding they could not endure the harshness and contempt with which they were treated by Pausanias, put themselves under the orders of Aristides and Cimon, who as soon as they had won this following, sent word to the ephors to recall Pausanias, since he was bringing dishonour to Sparta and disunity to Greece.
There is a story that Pausanias sent for a Byzantine girl of noble family named Cleonice to seduce her, and that her parents, believing they had no choice, and too frightened to refuse, abandoned their daughter to him. Cleonice begged the attendants outside his door to take away the lights, and crept silently in the darkness towards the bed on which Pausanias was asleep, but then she accidentally stumbled against the lamp-stand and knocked it down. Pausanias was alarmed at the noise, and thinking that some enemy was about to set upon him, snatched up the dagger at his side and struck the girl down, giving her a mortal wound. After her death, her spirit would not let Pausanias rest, but kept appearing to him at night in his sleep, remorselessly repeating the words
Go to the doom which pride and lust prepare.
This outrageous affair provoked the allies beyond endurance and under Cimon’ leadership they drove Pausanias out of the city. He fled from Byzantium, but finding himself still haunted by the apparition, so the story goes, he consulted the oracle of the dead at Herac-leia. There he summoned up the spirit of Cleonice and implored her to pardon him. She then appeared to him and declared that he would soon be delivered from his troubles once he reached Sparta, in this way mysteriously hinting, it seems, at his approaching death. This, at any rate, is the story which many authors tell.
7. Now that the allies had come over to his side, Cimon assumed command and sailed to Thrace,1 as he had heard that the Persians, led by some of their nobles, including some kinsmen of the king, were holding the city of Eion on the banks of the Strymon and were harassing the Greeks in the neighbourhood. He began by defeating the Persians in a pitched battle and shutting them up inside the city. Next he drove the Thracian tribes who lived above the Strymon out of their territory, since they had been keeping the Persians supplied with provisions. Finally, by patrolling the whole region, he reduced the besieged garrison to such straits that the Persian general Butes decided his position was hopeless, set fire to the city, and perished with his whole family and his property in the flames.
For this reason when Cimon captured the city he found nothing of any value, as almost everything had been destroyed in the fire along with the barbarians. On the other hand the surrounding country was beautiful and extremely fertile, and this land he handed over to the Athenians to found a colony there. So the people authorized him to dedicate three stone statues of Hermes at Athens, the first of which bears the inscription:
They too were men of stout heart, who beside the swift current of Strymon
Under Eīon’s walls fought with the sons of the Mede:
Pitiless famine and fire they brought to beleaguer the city,
Death-dealing Ares they followed, and harried their foes to despair,
the second:
This shall stand as the tribute which Athens paid to her leaders,
Homage to hard-fought victories, earned by their valiant deeds.
Those who come after may read and from this memorial take courage,
And in their country’ cause march no less bravely to war,
and the third:
From this city. Menestheus once marched out with the Atridae,
Leading his army to war on the divine plains of Troy.
None knew better than he, of the bronze-armoured Greeks, Homer tells us,
How to manoeuvre the line or draw up the battle array.
So the proud title has clung ever since to the children of Athens,
Masters of warlike arts and leaders of valiant men.
8. Although Cimon’ name does not appear in any of these inscriptions, his contemporaries regarded this memorial as a supreme mark of honour for him. Neither Themistocles nor Miltiades could boast of any comparable distinction; indeed, when the latter asked for nothing more than a crown of olive, Sophanes of Decelea rose to his feet in the Assembly and protested. His speech was ungracious, but it won the people’ applause at that moment. ‘When you have fought and conquered the barbarians by yourself, Miltiades,’ he said, ‘then you can ask to be honoured by yourself.’
What was it, then, in Cimon’ achievements which gave such intense pleasure to the people? The answer is probably that under their other generals they had merely been defending themselves against attack and fighting for self-preservation, whereas under Cimon they had the opportunity to carry the war into their enemies’ country and ravage it, and besides this they won new territory which they could colonize, not only Eīon, but Amphipolis as well.
They also colonized Scyros, which Cimon captured for the following reason. The Dolopians, who lived on the island were quite unskilled at cultivating the soil. They had traditionally practised piracy on the high seas and at length they could not resist plundering even those ships which put into their ports and traded with them. Finally they robbed and imprisoned some Thessalian merchants who had anchored at Ctesium. These men escaped and secured a verdict against Scyros at the Amphictyonic Congress, whereupon the people of Scyros refused to pay compensation out of the public funds and ordered this to be done by the men who had actually stolen the goods and were still in possession of them. The robbers became frightened and sent a letter to Cimon urging him to come with his fleet and capture the city, which they offered to surrender to him. In this way Cimon made himself master of the island, expelled the Dolopians and freed the Aegean from pirates.
He also learned that the ancient hero Theseus, the son of Aegeus, had taken refuge in Scyros after being exiled from Athens, but had been treacherously killed there by the king Lycomedes who was afraid of him. The Athenians had once been given an oracle commanding them to bring back the bones of Theseus to Athens and pay them the honours due to a hero; but they did not know where he was buried, since the people of Scyros would neither admit that the story was true nor allow any search to be made. Cimon, however, attacked the task with great enthusiasm and after some difficulty discovered the sacred spot. He had the bones placed on board his trireme and brought them back with great pomp and ceremony to the hero’ native land, almost four hundred years after he had left it. This affair did more than any other achievement of Cimon’ to endear him to the people.
They also remembered him for a verdict he gave in the contest between the tragic poets which afterwards became famous. When Sophocles, who was still a young man, presented his first trilogy, Apsephion the archon noticed that the spirit of rivalry and partisanship was running high among the audience and decided not to appoint the judges of the contest by lot, as was usually done. Instead, when Cimon and his fellow-generals entered the theatre and made the usual libation to the god Dionysus, he did not allow them to leave, but obliged them to take the oath and sit as judges, one from each tribe and ten of them in all. In consequence, the fact that the judges were so distinguished raised the whole contest to a far more ambitious level. Sophocles won the prize, and it is said that Aeschylus was so distressed and indignant that he stayed only a little while longer in Athens, before retiring in anger to Sicily. He died there, too, and is buried near the city of Gela.
9. Ion says that when he was still only a boy and had come from Chios to Athens, he met Cimon at a dinner at the house of Laomedon. After the meal, when the libations had been poured, Cimon was invited to sing and did so very agreeably, whereupon the company praised him as a more accomplished man than Themistocles. He, so the story went, had declared that he had never learned how to sing or play the lyre, but that he knew how to make a city rich and great. Later, Ion tells us, as was natural over the cups, the conversation turned upon Cimon’ own achievements and the guests went on to recall the greatest of these. Cimon himself described one particular ruse, which he thought the cleverest thing he had done. The Athenians and their allies had taken a great number of barbarian prisoners at Sestos and Byzantium and had handed them over to him to divide between their various captors. Cimon placed the prisoners on one side and all their clothes and ornaments on the other. The allies then blamed him for distributing the shares unfairly, but he told them to make their own choice first and the Athenians would be content with whatever share they left. On the advice of Herophytus of Samos, who told them to choose the Persians’ possessions rather than the men themselves, the allies took the ornaments and left the prisoners to the Athenians. At the time Cimon was regarded as having made a fool of himself and come away with the worst of the bargain, since the allies could go about with gold anklets, bracelets, collars, jackets, and robes of purple, while the Athenians had gained nothing but a lot of naked bodies of men who were not even trained to work. But a little while after, the friends and relatives of the prisoners came down from Phrygia and Lydia and ransomed every one of them at a high price, so that Cimon received the equivalent of four months’ maintenance for his fleet and still had a large sum of gold from these ransoms left over for the city.
10. Cimon was already a rich man, and so he saw to it that the money which he was credited with having won honourably from the enemy in his campaigns was spent even more honourably on his fellow-citizens. He had all the fences on his fields taken down, so that not only poor Athenians but even strangers could help themselves freely to whatever fruit was in season. He also provided a dinner at his house every day, a simple meal but enough for large numbers. Any poor man who wished could come to him for this, and so received a subsistence which cost him no effort and left him free to devote all his attention to public affairs. However, according to Aristotle, he did not provide this free dinner for all Athenians, but only for the members of his own deme, the people of Lacia. He always went about attended by a number of young men fitted out with good new clothes, each of whom was ready, if Cimon met some elderly and poorly dressed citizen, to change clothes with him, and this custom made a deep impression. The same attendants also carried with them plenty of ready money, and would go up to the better class of the poor in the marketplace and quietly slip some small change into their hands. This generosity is no doubt what Cratinus the comic poet is referring to in hisArchilochi, when he says:
I too, Metrobius, the public scribe, had hopes
That I might pass away a sleek old age
Feasting in comfort for the rest of my days
With the godlike Cimon, most generous of men,
In all his qualities the noblest son
Of Greece. But he has gone ahead and left me.
Again Gorgias of Leontini says of Cimon that he made money only to spend it and spent it in a way that did him honour. And Critias, one of the Thirty Tyrants, utters a prayer in his elegiac verses for ‘the wealth of the Scopadae, the magnanimity of Cimon and the victories of Arcesilaus of Sparta’.
We know that Lichas the Spartan became famous throughout Greece for no other reason than that he entertained the foreign visitors at the Gymnopaedia, the athletic festival in Sparta, at which the boys compete naked; but Cimon’s generosity was on a scale that surpassed even the traditional hospitality and benevolence of the ancient Athenians. The city can justly boast of these men that they imparted the knowledge of how to sow corn, to discover springs and to kindle fire to the rest of the Greeks, who knew none of these things. But Cimon turned his home into a place of public resort for his fellow citizens, while on his country estates he allowed even foreigners to take the pick of the ripe fruit and to enjoy the best of whatever was in season. And so, in a sense, he restored to human experience the fabled conditions of the golden age of Cronos, when men owned everything in common. Those who spread the story that all this was only done to flatter the masses and curry favour with them were given the lie by his political principles, which were aristocratic and tended to be influenced by Sparta. Thus, for example, he joined with Aristides in opposing Themistocles, when the latter began to extend the authority of the people beyond its due limits; and later on he also resisted Ephialtes when, to please the people, he tried to dissolve the Council of the Areopagus. And though he saw all the other politicians, with the exception of Aristides and Ephialtes, filling their pockets from the public revenues, he kept himself incorruptible and inaccessible to any bribe and invariably acted and spoke with integrity and without any thought of reward.
It is said that a certain Rhoesaces, a barbarian who had deserted the king of Persia, came to Athens with large sums of money. He was hunted down by the public informers and took refuge with Cimon, at whose door he left two platters, one filled with silver and the other with golden darics. Cimon smiled when he saw these and asked the man whether he preferred to have Cimon as his hired agent or as his friend. ‘As my friend,’ he replied. ‘Well, then,’ said Cimon, ‘take this money away with you. If I am your friend, I shall be able to use it whenever I want.’
11. As time went on, the allies continued to pay their contributions to the war against Persia, but they did not provide men or ships on the scale that had been laid down for them. They soon became tired of foreign expeditions, for they felt they no longer needed to fight, and only wanted to live in peace and till their lands. The barbarians had gone away and no longer troubled them and so they neither provided crews for their warships nor sent out troops. The Athenian generals tried to force them into fulfilling their duties, and by penalizing the defaulters and punishing them they soon made the authority of Athens an imposition which was thoroughly disliked. Cimon, however, when he was general, did exactly the opposite. He did not bring force to bear upon any of the Greeks and he accepted money or empty ships from all those peoples who were unwilling to serve abroad. In this way he let the allies yield to the temptation of taking their ease and attending to nothing but their private affairs, until they had lost all their military qualities and become unwarlike farmers and traders through their own folly and love of comfort. On the other hand he obliged a large part of the Athenian population to take turns in manning their ships and hardened them on his various expeditions, and thus in a short while, using the funds the allies had contributed, he made the Athenians the rulers of the very men who paid them. Those Greeks who did no military service came to fear and even to flatter men who were regularly at sea or constantly training or under arms, and so before they knew it, they had sunk into the position of tributaries and subjects instead of allies.
12. It is certain that no man did more than Cimon to humble the pride of the Great King himself. He never relaxed the pursuit, so as to let the Persians escape from Greece at their leisure, but followed close at their heels, and before the barbarians could halt or draw breath, he had sacked or destroyed some cities, and induced others to revolt or annexed them, until not a single Persian soldier was left on the mainland of Asia Minor from Ionia to Pamphylia. He got word that the king’s generals were lying in wait for him with a large army and fleet on the coast of Pamphylia, and he thereupon resolved to make the waters to the west of the Chelidonian Islands so formidable to them that they would not dare to venture out there. So he sailed from Cnidus and Triopium with 200 triremes.1These ships had been built under Themistocles and were especially well constructed from the point of view of speed and manoeuvrability, but Cimon now widened their beam and built bridges between their decks, so that when they attacked the enemy they could make more effective use of the large number of hoplites they carried. He put in at the city of Phaselis, but the people, although they were Greeks, refused to admit his fleet or to revolt against the king, and so he devastated their land and attacked the city’s walls. However, the Chians who were serving in his fleet and were old friends of the people of Phaselis tried to pacify Cimon, and at the same time shot arrows over the walls with papers attached to them telling the people inside what they were doing. Finally, Cimon came to terms with them, on condition that they paid him ten talents and took part in his campaign against the barbarians.
According to the historian Ephorus, Tithraustes was in command of the royal fleet and Pherendates of the land forces. However, Callisthenes’ version is that Arimandes, the son of Gobryas, was in command of the whole force, that he stayed at anchor with the fleet off the mouth of the Eurymedon and was not at all anxious to engage the Greeks, but was waiting for eighty Phoenician ships to arrive from Cyprus. Cimon planned to attack before this contingent could reach him and put to sea prepared to bring the enemy to battle if they tried to avoid it. At first the Persians retired up the river to avoid being forced into an action, but when the Athenians bore down on them they sailed out to meet Cimon. Phanodemus credits them with 600 ships and Ephorus with 350. At any rate, in the naval battle they certainly achieved nothing worthy of such a strong force, in fact, they immediately turned tail and ran for the shore. The leading crews abandoned their ships and took refuge with the land forces, which were drawn up close by, while the rest were overtaken and killed and their ships destroyed. From this it is clear that the number of the barbarians’ ships which went into action must have been very great, since although many probably escaped and many were destroyed, the Athenians still captured 200 prizes.
13. When the Persian land forces moved down to the shore against him, Cimon thought that the prospect of forcing a landing and then leading the exhausted Greeks against fresh troops many times their number was altogether too formidable. But then he saw that his men were buoyed up by the strength and courage that victory had given them and were eager to come to grips with the barbarians. So he landed his hoplites, still hot from their fighting in the naval battle, and they raised a loud shout and charged the enemy at a run. The Persians stood their ground and met the attack resolutely and a furious battle developed, in which the Athenians lost some of the bravest and highest in rank of their soldiers. But at last, after a fierce struggle, they threw back the barbarians with great slaughter and captured the army and its camp which was full of all kinds of spoil.
In this way Cimon, like a champion athlete, carried off two victories in a single day. But although he had already surpassed the triumph of Salamis with a land battle and that of Plataea with another at sea, he went on to compete for yet another success. He learned that the eighty Phoenician ships which had taken no part in the battle had put in at Syedra, and so he sailed there at full speed, before the enemy commanders had learned of the fate of the main fleet and were still in a state of anxious suspense. For this reason they were all the more panicstricken when he attacked. All their ships were destroyed and most of the crews perished with them. This blow so dashed the king’s hopes that he accepted the terms of that notorious peace, whereby he agreed to stay away the distance of a whole day’s ride from the Greek seaboard of Asia Minor and not to let a single warship or armoured vessel1 sail west of the Cyanean and the Chelidonian Islands.
Callisthenes, however, maintains that the Persians never agreed to observe any such terms. He says that this was merely how they behaved in practice, because of the fear which the victory of the Eurymedon had implanted in them; and, indeed, they kept so far away from Greece that Pericles with a squadron of fifty and Ephialtes with no more than thirty ships sailed far beyond the Chelidonian Islands without meeting anything resembling a barbarian fleet. On the other hand the collection of Athenian decrees made by Craterus includes in its proper place a copy of the articles of this treaty, as though it had actually been concluded.2 It is said, too, that the Athenians built an altar to Peace to commemorate this event and conferred high honours upon Callias who negotiated the treaty.
So much money was raised from the sale of the captured spoils that the Athenians were enabled to meet various public expenses and in particular to construct the southern wall of the Acropolis, all out of the treasure which they won from this campaign. It is said, too, that while the building of the Long Walls, known as ‘The Legs’, was completed at a later date, yet the original foundations were securely laid by Cimon: the work was obstructed by swamps and marshy ground, but he had huge quantities of rubble and heavy stones tamped down and paid for all this himself.
He was also the first to adorn the city with those spacious and elegant places of public resort, which not long after became popular to the point of abuse; he did this by planting the market-place with plane-trees and by transforming the Academy from a parched and barren wilderness into a well-watered grove, which he provided with shady paths to walk in and clear tracks for races.
14. Meanwhile, a number of the Persians who had been left in the Chersonese refused to surrender the territory, but called in the Thracian tribes from the interior to help them. They were contemptuous of Cimon, who had sailed up from Athens with only a very few triremes all told.1 But in spite of this he took the offensive with his four ships and proceeded to capture their thirteen, drive out the Persians, subdue the Thracians, and secure the whole territory for the Athenians to colonize. Soon afterwards, when the people of Thasos revolted from Athens,2 he defeated them at sea, captured thirty-three of their ships, besieged their city and forced it to surrender, annexed the gold-mines on the mainland opposite for Athens, and took over the neighbouring territory which had been ruled by the Thasians.
From this base he might easily, so the Athenians considered, have invaded Macedonia and seized possession of a large part of her territory. But because he had no wish to do this, he was accused of having been bought off by King Alexander, and his enemies combined to impeach him.3 In his defence at the trial he told the judges that he was not, like some Athenians, the paid representative of rich Ionians or Thessalians, to be courted or rewarded for his services: if he were to represent anybody’s interests it would be the Spartans’, whose simplicity and moderation he was glad to imitate. He added that he preferred these qualities to any amount of riches, but took pride in enriching his own city with the spoils he won from her enemies. In mentioning this trial Stesimbrotus says that Elpinice came to Pericles’ house to plead with him for her brother, since he was the most determined of Cimon’s accusers, and he adds that Pericles smiled and said: ‘You are long past the age, Elpinice, to take a hand in affairs like this.’ However, at the trial he proved the mildest of Cimon’s prosecutors and rose only once to press the charges against him, as though his doing so were a mere formality.
15. So Cimon was acquitted1 on this occasion. During the rest of his political career he succeeded in arresting and even reducing the encroachments of the people upon the prerogatives of the aristocracy, and in foiling their attempts to concentrate office and power in their own hands, but only for as long as he was at Athens. The next time that he sailed away on foreign service,2 the people broke loose from all control. They overthrew the established order of the constitution and the ancestral customs which they had always observed up to that moment, and following Ephialtes’ lead they deprived the Council of the Areopagus of all but a few of the issues which had been under its jurisdiction. They took control of the courts of justice and transformed the city into a thorough-going democracy with the help of Pericles, who had now risen to power and committed himself to the cause of the people. So it was that when Cimon came home and, in his disgust at the humiliation of the once revered Areopagus, tried to restore its judicial powers and revive the aristocratic regime of Cleisthenes, the democratic leaders combined to denounce him and tried to stir up the people against him by bringing up all the old scandals about his sister and accusing him of pro-Spartan sympathies. These are the slanders referred to in Eupolis’s well-known verses:
He was not such a scoundrel as they go,
Only too lazy and too fond of drinking,
And often he would spend the night in Sparta
And leave Elpinice to sleep alone.
On the other hand, if in spite of his indolent good nature and his fondness for the bottle he could still capture so many cities and win so many battles, there can be no doubt that had he been normally sober and attentive to business, no Greek before or after him could have surpassed his exploits.
16. It is certainly true that from the very beginning of his career he was sympathetic to the Spartans. He actually named one of his three sons Lacedaemonius and another Eleius. These were the children whom a woman of Cleitor bore him, as Stesimbrotus tells us, and for this reason Pericles often reproached them with their descent on their mother’s side. However, Diodorus the Topographer maintains that these two, as well as Cimon’s third son, Thessalus, were born to Isodice, the daughter of Euryptolemus, and grand-daughter of Megacles. The Spartans on their side did much to strengthen Cimon’s position, as they soon became bitterly hostile to Themistocles and were therefore concerned that Cimon, young as he was, should exercise greater power and influence at Athens. At first the Athenians were well pleased at this, since the goodwill the Spartans showed them was very much to their advantage. So in the early days of their empire, and while they were still engaged in building alliances, they welcomed the honours and favours that were shown to Cimon, since it was through him, in fact, that most of their negotiations with other Greek states were carried on, for the reason that he treated the allies with consideration and enjoyed a privileged position with the Spartans. But afterwards, when their power had grown and they saw that Cimon was wholeheartedly attached to the Spartans, they resented this, not least because of his tendency to sing the praises of Sparta to the Athenians whenever he had occasion to reproach them or spur them on. At these moments, so Stesimbrotus tells us, he would say: ‘But that is not what the Spartans would do.’ This habit alone created a great deal of jealousy and dislike of him among the Athenians, but the most serious of the charges brought against him arose as follows.
In the fourth year1 of the reign of King Archidamus, the son of Zeuxidamus, at Sparta, the country suffered the most terrible earthquake in all its history. The earth opened in many places, several of the peaks of Mt Taygetus were torn away and the whole city of Sparta was destroyed, with the exception of five houses. It is said that while the young men and boys were at exercise inside the colonnade a few moments before the earthquake began, a hare suddenly appeared, and the boys, still naked, and covered with oil, dashed out to chase it, while the young men remained behind and were all killed when the gymnasium collapsed on them. Their tomb is called Seismatias to this day, that is the tomb of those who perished in the earthquake.
Archidamus at once understood that the immediate disaster harboured yet another for the state. He saw the citizens trying to rescue their most valuable belongings from their houses and ordered the trumpet to be sounded as though an enemy were about to attack, so as to make every Spartan seize his arms and rally round the king in the shortest possible time. It was this action alone which saved Sparta at that crisis, for the Helots1 quickly gathered from the surrounding country to fall on the surviving Spartans. When they found them armed and ready to fight, they withdrew to the cities, waged open war and persuaded many of the Perioeci to do the same. The Messenians also joined them in attacking the Spartans.
In this situation the Spartans sent Pericleidas to Athens to ask for help. This is the man whom Aristophanes makes fun of in Lysistrata, where he shows him sitting by the altars, with a white face and a red cloak, begging for an army.2 Ephialtes opposed the request and exhorted the Athenians not to attempt to rescue or restore a city which was their rival but rather to let Sparta’s pride be trampled underfoot. Cimon, on the other hand, put Sparta’s interests before his own country’s aggrandisement and persuaded the Athenians to send a large force of hoplites to her aid. Ion actually records the phrase used by Cimon which did most to sway the people: he appealed to them ‘not to allow Greece to go lame, or their own city to be deprived of its yoke-fellow’.
17. After helping the Spartans, Cimon was on his way back with his army and was passing through the Isthmus of Corinth, when Lachartus accused him of leading his troops into Corinthian territory before he had asked the people’s permission. ‘People who knock at doors,’ he said, ‘do not go in before the owner invites them.’ Cimon retorted: ‘We did not hear you Corinthians so much as knock at the gates of Cleonae or Megara: you simply broke them down and pushed your way in by force of arms, on the principle that everything must be thrown open to the stronger.’ After this timely show of spirit towards the Corinthians, he passed on his way with his army.
Soon afterwards the Spartans again appealed to Athens to help them against the Messenians and the Helots at Ithome. The Athenians once more came to their support, but their boldness and enterprise frightened the Spartans, who singled them out from among all the allies as dangerous revolutionaries and sent them away. They returned home in a fury and proceeded to take public revenge upon the friends of Sparta in general and Cimon in particular. They seized upon some trifling pretext to ostracize him and condemned him to exile for ten years,1 which is the period laid down for all those who are banished by ostracism.
During this period, the Spartans, after liberating the people of Delphi from the Phocians, encamped at Tanagra on their way home and there the Athenians marched out to meet them in a pitched battle. Cimon arrived fully armed to join his own tribe of Oeneis and was anxious to play his part with his fellow citizens in resisting the Spartans. But when the Council of Five Hundred heard of this, they took fright: Cimon’s enemies made out that his object was to create confusion in the army and then lead the Spartans against the city, and so the Council ordered the generals not to receive him. Cimon had to depart, but not before he had impressed upon Euthippus of Anaphlystus and his other friends, who were especially under suspicion for their prospartan sympathies, that they must fight bravely and disprove by their own actions the charges that had been made against them. His friends then took his armour and set it up in the midst of their ranks. They grouped themselves into a single company, fought with desperate courage and were finally killed to the last man, 100 of them all told. The Athenians bitterly lamented their loss and were plunged into remorse for having so unjustly accused them. For this reason the people’s resentment against Cimon quickly died down, partly because, as was natural, they remembered his services to them, and partly because the turn of events now moved in his favour. The Athenians had suffered a major defeat at Tanagra and as they fully expected to be invaded by a Peloponnesian army the following spring, they recalled Cimon from exile and the decree providing for his return was actually moved by Pericles. This only goes to show how far in those days the differences between party leaders were a matter of political opinion: their private feelings were kept under control and could easily be set aside in the public interest, while even ambition, the most powerful of all human passions, was subordinated to the country’ welfare.
18. At any rate, as soon as Cimon returned from exile,1 he put an end to the war and arranged a settlement between the two cities. However, once peace had been established, it soon became clear to him that the Athenians were incapable of settling down quietly but were bent on a policy of constant activity and expansion of their empire through foreign expeditions. As he was anxious not to provoke the other Greek states or, by cruising with a large fleet around the islands or the Peloponnese, to incur the charge of starting a war, he had 200 triremes manned, with the object of making another expedition against Egypt and Cyprus. His plan was to keep the Athenians in constant training through their operations against the barbarians, and to allow them to profit as they deserved from the wealth they took from their natural enemies and brought into Greece.
But when everything was ready and the troops on the point of embarking, Cimon had a dream, in which an angry bitch was baying at him and in the midst of its baying, it spoke in human tones and said:
Go your way: I shall find you a friend both to me and my puppies.
This was a difficult vision to interpret, but Astyphilus of Poseidonia, who possessed prophetic powers and was a close friend of Cimon’s, declared to him that it foretold his death and analysed it as follows. A dog is the enemy of the man it barks at: and one can do an enemy no greater service than to did. The blending of animal and human speech signifies that the enemy is the Mede, since their army is composed partly of Greeks and partly of barbarians. After this vision Cimon offered a sacrifice to Dionysus, and as the seer was cutting up the victim, swarms of ants seized upon the blood as it congealed. They carried it little by little over to Cimon and proceeded to cover his big toe with it for some time before he noticed them. Then just as he saw what they were doing, the priest came up and showed him that the victim’s liver was without that part known as the head.
However, there could be no withdrawing from the expedition, so he set sail and after detaching a squadron of sixty ships to proceed to Egypt, he made for Cyprus with the remainder. He defeated the king’s fleet of Phoenician and Cilician ships in a sea battle and won over the cities in the neighbourhood. Then he waited for his opportunity to attack the cities of Egypt, for he had in mind nothing less than the complete destruction of Persia’s supremacy, and he was all the more resolved upon this because of the knowledge that Themistocles had built up a position of great power and prestige among the Persians, and had promised the king that if a war were launched against Greece, he himself would take command. At any rate it is said that one of the principal reasons which made Themistocles take his own life was his despair of fulfilling his undertakings against the Greeks, and the knowledge that he would never be able to rival Cimon’s military genius and good fortune.
Cimon, on the other hand, while he was waiting with his fleet off Cyprus and turning over in his mind these vast schemes of conquest, sent a delegation to the shrine of Jupiter Ammon to put a secret question to the oracle there. What this was no one has ever discovered, nor did the god make any response: instead, as soon as they approached, the oracle commanded them to depart and said that Cimon himself was already with him. When they heard this, the messengers returned to the sea and no sooner had they arrived at the Greek camp, which was then on the Egyptian coast, than they learned that Cimon was dead. When they counted back the days to the moment when the oracle had replied to them, they understood that it had been alluding to the general’s death, since he was already with the gods.
19. According to most accounts,1 Cimon died of sickness while he was besieging Citium, but others say that it was from a wound he received in a battle against the Persians. As he was dying, he ordered his companions to sail away at once and keep his death a secret. In this way it was contrived that neither the allies nor the enemy knew what had happened and the expedition was brought back safely ‘through Cimon’s generalship’, as Phanodemus puts it, although he had in fact been dead for thirty days.
After his death no Greek general was to win another brilliant success against the barbarians. Instead, a succession of demagogues and warmongers arose, who proceeded to turn the Greek states against one another, and nobody could be found to separate or reconcile them before they met in the headlong collision of war. In this way the Persians gained a breathing-space, but the power of Greece was incalculably weakened. It was not until several generations afterwards that Agesilaus carried the Greek arms into Asia and fought a brief campaign against the king’s generals along the Ionian coast.1 Yet even he achieved nothing of great consequence before he was overwhelmed in his turn by a flood of dissensions and disturbances within Greece and a second empire was swept from his grasp. In the end he had to return, leaving the tax-gatherers of the Persian empire still collecting tribute among the allied and friendly cities, whereas before not one of these functionaries, nor even so much as a Persian horse, was to be seen within fifty miles of the sea, so long as Cimon was general.
His remains were brought home to Athens, as is proved by the monuments which are called after him to this day. But the people of Citium also pay homage to a so-called tomb of Cimon. Nausicrates the rhetorician tells us that once, during a period of plague and famine, the god charged them not to forget Cimon, but to revere and honour him as a superior being. Such was the nature of this Greek commander.