CHAPTER 1

The Postwar Settlement

If you were to overcome us and to take up an empire, you would swiftly lose all the goodwill which you have secured because of the fear we inspire—that is, if you hold to the pattern of conduct that you evidenced in the brief span when you were the leaders against the Mede. You have institutions, customs, and laws that do not mix well with those of others; and, in addition, when one of you goes abroad he follows neither his own customs and laws nor those employed in the rest of Hellas.

THUCYDIDES’ ATHENIANS

IN late September or very early October 479, when the Thebans had surrendered their leaders and matters of immediate import had been sorted out at Plataea, the Hellenic army disbanded, and the various civic contingents marched home. It was time for the farmers of the Peloponnesus and the others who had gathered to fight the Mede to begin thinking about planting their crops in time for the winter rains.

The Plataeans, for the most part, remained where they were. Of course, some journeyed to the Peloponnesus, where their families had found refuge. But bringing them back did not take long, and all soon began rebuilding their homes and the walls of the town in which they resided. The Athenians were in a similar plight. Their families had been evacuated to Troezen, Aegina, and Salamis; and they had to be ferried home. Only then could they deal with the destruction wrought in Attica by the Mede.

Xerxes’ stated aim had been to punish the Athenians for the damage that they had helped the rebellious Ionians inflict at Sardis in 498, and what he and the men under his command had failed to do when they briefly occupied Attica in 480 Mardonius and the soldiers whom Xerxes had left behind under his command did when they reoccupied Attica for a more extended period in the spring of 479. The city of Athens they left a shambles. The walls had for the most part been torn down and the temples leveled. Many of the houses had been destroyed.¹ Once the Athenians had retrieved their families, there was much for them to do.

The Persians were gone, and they were not apt to return any time soon. The Hellenes’ control of the sea precluded that. To make it possible for his army to march from Sardis in Anatolia to and across the Hellespont, then through Thrace and Macedonia to Thessaly in Hellas and points south within the Balkan peninsula, Xerxes had had to ship foodstuffs in massive quantities well in advance by sea to depots established at regular intervals along the Aegean coast of Thrace and Macedonia. He had also had to send a great fleet and a host of merchant ships to accompany his army. He could not ignore the logistical imperatives. A second invasion of Greece by land he could not even begin to contemplate until he had first regained the maritime dominance Persia had once possessed.

One might then suppose that the Athenians could afford, at least for a time, to relax their guard and concentrate on rebuilding their homes and sowing their crops. They were not, however, a trusting lot; and so, with an eye to the danger that might be posed by their Hellenic neighbors and allies, they began right away to rebuild their city’s walls.

Walls for Athens

Some of the Hellenes who lived in póleıs nearby took fright. Initially, as long as the Persians were a presence in Greece and an imminent threat to the liberty of the Hellenes, Athens’ neighbors regarded the two hundred triremes she had recently built as a great boon. Athens’ fleet had made the Hellenic victory at Salamis possible. Themistocles’ stratagem had worked. It was Athenian cunning that had drawn Xerxes’ navy into the narrows where the Greeks were at an advantage. But what was regarded as a godsend while the Persian peril loomed large was perceived as a threat thereafter. Such is the nature of humankind. Athens had provided nearly half of the allied triremes that had fought at Salamis and more than half of those deployed at Artemisium and Mycale, and the marines on Athens’ ships had won the last-mentioned of these three battles. Within Hellas, there had been a sudden, dramatic, deeply disturbing shift in the balance of power.

This cannot have pleased the Aeginetans. They had long been hostile to the Athenians. The two cities had fought a series of battles in the 490s and 480s, and they had made peace only because Xerxes was about to invade Hellas.² There was every reason to suppose that there would be trouble between the two communities down the line.

The Megarians may have been wary as well. A bit more than a century before, Athens had wrested the island of Salamis from Megara. On the mainland, the two cities bordered on one another; and, as was the norm in Hellas, the boundary between them was in dispute. It was only natural that the Megarians regard their neighbor with distrust.

The Corinthians may also have been nervous and even resentful. Their city was among the most powerful and wealthy in Hellas. It occupied an isthmus of great strategic importance, which separates the Saronic Gulf and the Aegean Sea more generally from the Corinthian Gulf, the Ionian Sea, the Adriatic, and the western Mediterranean as a whole; and this isthmus functioned also as the sole link by land between the Peloponnesus and the rest of the Balkan peninsula. In the Acrocorinth, which towers over the isthmus and the rich farmland within it, the Corinthians possessed an almost impregnable bastion. When occupied by troops, as Philip V of Macedon would later observe, this stronghold could be made to function as “fetters for Greece.” The Acrocorinth is, as Plutarch puts it, “a lofty height springing up from the very center of Hellas, which, when garrisoned, blocks and cuts off in its entirety—from intercourse, passage, and martial enterprise both by land and by sea—the territory to the southwest.”

As a consequence of her favorable situation and of the dangers associated with attempting to sail around the Peloponnesus, Corinth had long been the crossroads of the northeastern Mediterranean, and she was the chief emporium in the region. The safest way to transport goods from the Black Sea, Asia Minor, and the Aegean to Italy and other points west and vice versa was to take them to Corinth and convey them by one means or another across the isthmus separating the two gulfs. This could be done by carts operating between her port at Cenchreae on the Saronic Gulf and the one at Lechaeum on the Corinthian Gulf, but there was also a slipway [díolkos] by which galleys and other small vessels could be shifted from one side to the other. In consequence of their position, the harbor taxes they levied, the goods they produced, and the commerce in which they engaged as middlemen at home and as venturers abroad, the Corinthians grew wealthy.

Theirs was, as one would expect, a mercantile mentality. The city was known for the work done by her artisans, and Herodotus tells us the Corinthians were less disdainful of those who engaged in the manual arts than any people in Hellas. Corinth was also famous for the quality and number of her prostitutes. Her citizens tended to know more about developments abroad and sooner than any other community on the Greek mainland, and like modern merchant venturers they were exceedingly alert to the drift of events.

In the early archaic period, the Corinthians had been great colonizers, and for the most part they maintained extraordinarily close ties not only with the various colonies they had established to the west in Sicily and along the trade route that ran through the Corinthian Gulf, the Ionian Sea, and the Adriatic but also with the one colony that they had settled to the northeast on the Pallene peninsula in western Thrace in the region we now call the Chalcidice. In keeping with their situation and the extensive connections they maintained abroad, the Corinthians had from very early on established themselves as the leading naval power in the Greek heartland, and they paid close attention to their security environment and did what they could to shape it.³

To this end, when Athens was relatively weak, the Corinthians had consistently championed her cause. In the sixth century—when, at the suggestion of the Spartan king Cleomenes, the Athenians formed an alliance with the Plataeans on the northern side of Mount Cithaeron, and the Thebans, who were intent on uniting Boeotia under their leadership, mobilized—the Corinthians had intervened in defense of Athens and Plataea with an eye to limiting Theban power. Later, in 506, when Cleomenes sought to impose a narrow oligarchy on Athens and make of her a Spartan satellite, they had dug in their heels and balked. Later still, in 504, when that same Agiad king attempted to reinstall Hippias son of Peisistratus as tyrant at Athens, the Corinthians had publicly chided the Lacedaemonians for abandoning the opposition to tyranny that had long served as a justification for their hegemony. Then, they had ostentatiously withdrawn their contingent from the allied army, and this had precipitated a withdrawal by Sparta’s other Peloponnesian allies fatal to Cleomenes’ ill-considered scheme. Finally, in the 490s, when the Athenian fleet proved to be inferior to the Aeginetan navy, the Corinthians had sold them used warships at a nominal price.⁴ The fact that Athens’ navy now greatly overshadowed their own fleet may, however, have altered all prior perceptions and given the Corinthians pause.

In his description of the battles of Artemisium and Salamis in 480, Herodotus has much to say about an antagonism that had purportedly grown up between Athens and Corinth. That decades later such an antagonism existed there can be no doubt. But it is by no means clear that Herodotus’ reportage regarding the Corinthians in 480 can fully be trusted—for, in connection with this account, he repeats slander that we know to be untrue. He tells us, for example, that the Corinthians fled the Persian attack at Salamis, and we know that they were singled out and honored for their contribution to the Hellenic victory on this very occasion. He claims that the mound built for their dead at Plataea was empty, and Plutarch tells us that this was not the case.

Of course, Herodotus may well be correct in reporting that the Corinthians favored abandoning Salamis and concentrating the Hellenic fleet in the vicinity of the Corinthiad, where the Peloponnesians were building a wall to keep the Persians out. It is easy to see why they might wrongly suppose such a repositioning in their interest. His claim, however, that their commander Adeimantus expressed seething contempt for the Athenians at the time is apt to be yet another apocryphal tale—for, in the circumstances, such a diatribe would have been impolitic in the extreme. Given the size of Athens’ contribution to the allied fleet, it was not in the interest of the Corinthians to infuriate the Athenians at this time. The former could not hope to fend off the Persians without the cooperation of the latter.⁵

Herodotus was a partisan of Athens, and he may have fallen prey to self-justifying tales concocted by the Athenians in later years. Thucydides claims that the deep-seated hatred that the Corinthians later directed at Athens had its beginning almost two decades after 479,⁶ and there is evidence suggesting that he was right. We know that Themistocles was chosen to arbitrate a dispute between Corinth and Corcyra. Although we are not told when this took place, it is hard to believe that the Athenian possessed the requisite stature prior to the formation of the Hellenic League. After Salamis, however, Themistocles would have been the natural choice for such a task.⁷ But he certainly would not have been selected had his exchanges with Adeimantus on the eve of the battle of Salamis been as bitter as Herodotus claims.

Of course, none of this rules out the possibility that Athens’ sudden rise to maritime preeminence worried the Corinthians. When Thucydides tells us that Sparta’s allies were “afraid” because of “the number” of ships in Athens’ navy and “the daring” that the Athenians had displayed in the war against the Mede and when he adds that they stirred up the Lacedaemonians and persuaded them to try to nip Athenian power in the bud by preventing the Athenians from rebuilding the walls of their city, it is no surprise that there is evidence strongly suggesting that Aegina was involved. Her pre–Persian Wars conflict with Athens virtually guaranteed as much. The fact, however, that decades thereafter the Corinthians pointedly criticized the failure of the Lacedaemonians to act decisively on this particular occasion strongly suggests a sense of grievance on their part, which would make especially good sense if they, too, had at the time lodged a complaint. The arrangement proposed—which would have rendered Athens defenseless on land—was, in any case, just the sort of thing that the Lacedaemonians, who were supreme in war on that element, would have preferred; and we can easily imagine their doing precisely what they are said to have done: which was to urge that the Athenians not rebuild their walls but join with them in tearing down the walls of every city on the Greek mainland outside the Peloponnesus.⁸

Figure 2. Bust of Themistocles (Museo Ostiense in Ostia Antica: Photographer: Sailko, Wikimedia Commons; Published 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported).

That this Lacedaemonian appeal was disingenuous was no doubt obvious to all concerned. No one who bothered to think about the matter could seriously suppose that there was any real danger that the Persians would soon launch another invasion of Hellas by land and make use of its fortified cities, as the Spartans claimed. What the request they made to the Athenians did do, however, was offer an opening to Themistocles son of Neocles.

The architect of the Hellenic victory in the battle of Salamis had in the aftermath of that great achievement quickly lost the confidence and support of his compatriots. When, near the gap between Andros and Euboea, Eurybiades, the Spartan commander of the allied fleet, had called off its pursuit of the departing Persian armada, Themistocles had persuaded the Athenians to comply with the man’s orders, urging them to put off further campaigning until the spring and to return home and sow their crops. What this man of uncanny foresight failed on this occasion to foresee was that Xerxes would leave Mardonius and an army behind in northern Greece to renew Persia’s effort to conquer Hellas. When the Athenians learned that this was the case and, anticipating another invasion of Attica, realized that there was no point in their sowing crops, they were furious—furious at the Spartans and the Peloponnesians for their reluctance to confront the Mede to the north of Attica in Boeotia, and even more furious at the Athenian commander who had so persistently subordinated Athens’ efforts in the war to those of these same Spartans and Peloponnesians. It did not help that, at the time, Themistocles himself was lionized at Lacedaemon and elsewhere in the Peloponnesus; and it did not help that, at home, he put on airs and became insufferable. Athens was a democracy. Given his achievements, this great man would, in any case, have been an object of envy. Now, however, he became an object of anger and resentment as well. In consequence, the Athenians deprived Themistocles of his generalship late in 480, and when the time came for the election of those who would hold command in 479, he was passed over.⁹

Now, however, the war was finished and done. The time for fury had passed. His fellow Athenians were once again appreciative of the great statesman who had persuaded them to build their fleet and who had tricked the Persians into fighting in the narrows at Salamis—and, in the circumstances they were even willing once again to heed his advice. When Athens’ Odysseus, as he came to be called, took the lead in the assembly, urging that Sparta’s ambassadors be dismissed, his compatriots complied. They adopted his suggestion as well when—either in the assembly or, more likely, as one source suggests, in private before the probouleutic Council of 500 that set its agenda and functioned for Athens as an executive—he proposed an elaborate stratagem designed to fool the Lacedaemonians and buy time. On his advice, the Athenians sent him off immediately on an embassy to Lacedaemon. In the meantime, they labored on the walls with their wives, children, and slaves and the city’s metics by day and by night, using whatever materials were ready to hand. And they refrained from sending his fellow ambassadors to join him and address the Lacedaemonians until those walls had been raised to a level that made Athens defensible. In places, the surviving remnants of the walls that they constructed at this time reflect the haste with which they had to work and the absence of genuinely suitable materials.¹⁰

At Sparta, where Themistocles was still revered for his foresight and resoluteness, for a time he was apparently believed when he begged off speaking to the assembly on the grounds that his colleagues were on their way. When reports came in from Lacedaemon’s allies about what was really going on, he lied shamelessly, denying what he knew to be true, and urging the Lacedaemonians to send some Spartans to look things over and report on what was taking place. These men—three former ephors, Cornelius Nepos implies—he then in a message urged the Athenians to detain until he and his fellow ambassadors should return. And so—when Habronichus son of Lysicles, a close friend of Themistocles who had worked with him at Artemisium, and Aristeides son of Lysimachus, who had been the Athenian commander at Plataea, arrived with word that the walls were of sufficient height—Themistocles felt free boldly and brazenly to tell the Spartans that Athens was now sufficiently fortified to be defensible and that in the future they should, in sending embassies, presume that the Athenians were capable of discerning both their own interests and those that were shared. Along the way, he pointedly reminded the Lacedaemonians that the Athenians had decided to abandon their city and embark on their ships without consulting them, and he argued that the Athenians’ possession of a fortified city was better not only for them but also for the rest of the Hellenes. “In the absence of a military establishment rivaling those of others,” he insisted, “it would not be possible for” his compatriots “to deliberate regarding the common good [of the Hellenes] in like fashion or with equal weight.”¹¹

If Thucydides’ report regarding what Themistocles had to say is at all correct, the latter’s brusque manner and tone must have left the Lacedaemonians nonplussed. They may have refrained from openly displaying anger, as the historian reports. But, despite the friendliness they undoubtedly felt with regard to their comrades in arms against the Mede, they surely were “in secret vexed,” as he also claims.¹² This would not be the last time that the audacity of Athenian ambassadors reinforced the warnings concerning Athens pressed on the Spartans by their allies.

If the Lacedaemonians nonetheless refused to be provoked and stood idly by while the Athenians reasserted their independence in so blunt and impudent a fashion, they had their reasons. They also looked the other way while—at Themistocles’ instigation and with full support from his erstwhile rivals Aristeides and Xanthippus—his fellow citizens went on to complete in a magnificent fashion the walls of the Peiraeus they had begun building in the year of his archonship more than a decade before. If the Spartans watched and waited while the Athenians fortified the three natural harbors on that small peninsula and decided to add annually twenty triremes to their fleet, it was not out of pusillanimity. As the ambassadors sent to Lacedaemon explained, these fortifications were being built in anticipation of a Persian resurgence.¹³

Though spirited and gripped by phılotımía, “the love of honor,” the Spartans were not hotheads. For the most part, despite their martial character, they were a sensible and sober lot. Thanks to the helot threat, they had a lively sense of their limits. Moreover, they were taught via the agṓgē, the elaborate system of public education established for their moral formation, an exaggerated respect for the old; and at Lacedaemon the propensities of the young were reined in by the city’s nómoı and by her constitution. Men under the age of forty-five were barred from public office, denied military commands, and prohibited from traveling abroad. The agenda for what Diodorus Siculus, no doubt following the fourth-century historian Ephorus of Cumae, pointedly calls “the common assembly [hē koınḗ ekklēsía]” was set by the gerousía, a “council of elders” elected for life from among the well-born over the age of sixty; and this august body was also empowered, if the assembly got out of hand, to veto its decrees.¹⁴

Age matters. Young men may be “spirited, sharp-tempered, and apt to give way to anger,” as Aristotle asserts. They may find it difficult to restrain the spirited part of their souls; and “owing to phılotımía,” they may be unable to “endure being slighted and become indignant when they suppose that they have been wronged.” The old are differently constituted. “Because they have lived through many years,” the peripatetic observes, “they have often been deceived and have made many more blunders than the young.” Moreover, most matters involving humankind turn out badly, so that their experience of the world causes the aged to be hesitant.

They “suppose” only; nothing do they “know.” And being of two minds, they always add a “possibly” or a “perhaps.” They speak of everything in this fashion and say nothing without reservations. The old are, in addition, ill-disposed—for this trait is grounded in the assumption that all things tend to get worse. They are suspicious because of mistrust and mistrustful because of experience. And because of these things, they neither love nor hate with any vehemence, but . . . they are always loving in the expectation of hating and hating in the expectation of someday loving again. . . . They foresee danger from everything—for they are in temperament opposed to the young. Where the latter are hot-blooded, the former are cold-blooded.

Their excessive caution and their propensity to concern “themselves less with the noble than with the useful” may render the old less than fully useful in the heat of combat. But in deliberations, in the conduct of diplomacy, and in the management of war these qualities can be of benefit to a political community. Nestor was no match for Achilles on the battlefield, but in council he was greatly superior to the young man, as Homer makes abundantly clear. If the Spartans were in fact cautious on the battlefield, if they were more concerned with minimizing losses than with capitalizing on victories, if they were exceedingly cold-blooded in their conduct of foreign affairs, and if they were notorious for supposing the expedient honorable and for being slow to go to war, it was no doubt largely due to their sensitivity to the helot threat. But it also derived from the extreme subordination at Lacedaemon of the young and sanguinary to those old and calculating.¹⁵

To this, one can add another observation. The Lacedaemonians had never been a people of the sea. Nor were they going to become one anytime soon, and by this point they knew as well as did Themistocles that it would be far, far easier for the Mede to effect a return to Hellas by sea than by land.¹⁶ Put simply, a majority of the leading members of Lacedaemon’s ruling order possessed what the Eurypontid king Leotychidas evidently lacked: a good grasp of the geopolitical situation. They desperately needed what the Athenians had to offer, and they knew it. In 479, they were no doubt vexed, as Thucydides claims. They were as apt as any of their allies to resent upstarts; and, more than most human beings, they were prickly and inclined to take offense. But they were by no means fools, and they were anything but suicidal. They knew their strengths. They knew their weaknesses—and they were not apt to be led astray by pique. The Spartans were, as the Athenians later pointedly told the Melians, “conspicuous for thinking the pleasant noble [kála] and the advantageous just [díkaıa].” So in good diplomatic fashion, on this occasion, they consulted their interest, they bit their tongues, and they acquiesced.¹⁷

Maritime Hegemony

The following spring, the Lacedaemonians dispatched the regent Pausanias son of Cleombrotus, who had led the Hellenic forces to victory at Plataea, to command the Hellenic fleet. Thucydides reports that the Peloponnesians sent twenty ships to accompany him; Diodorus Siculus, who is likely to have been following Ephorus, claims that there were fifty such ships. Both Thucydides and Diodorus report that the Athenians, who were no doubt still preoccupied with rebuilding their homes and with fortifying the Peiraeus, dispatched thirty. This latter flotilla was led by Aristeides and by Cimon, son of the Miltiades who had defeated the Persians at Marathon. The “multitude” of additional ships said by Thucydides to have been provided by the “other allies” were supplied for the most part, we must suppose, by the islanders just off the Anatolian coast and in the Cyclades and by the Greeks living in what we now call the Chalcidice and on and just off the Thracian coast to that peninsula’s east.¹⁸

Pausanias was fully aware of the geopolitical imperatives, and he did not display any of the reluctance and hesitation that had characterized Leotychidas the year before. Initially, he led the Hellenic fleet to Cyprus—where, in at least some of the Greek cities on the island, there appears to have been an uprising against Persian rule comparable to the one that had taken place twenty years earlier in response to the Ionian revolt. Thucydides tersely reports that he subdued most of the island. Diodorus tellingly adds that his assignment was to liberate the Greek cities “still garrisoned by barbarian troops” and that on Cyprus—where, we have reason to suspect, Soli, Salamis, and Paphos were still held in this fashion—this is precisely what he did.¹⁹

There was nothing fanciful about this expedition to distant parts. As the Greeks understood only too well, Cyprus was prosperous and strategically located, and the cities on the island were capable of fielding a sizable fleet.²⁰ Pausanias’ aim was presumably to deprive Achaemenid Persia of the considerable contribution which these Cypriot cities could make to its navy, to add their strength to that supplied by the Hellenes, and to bottle up in the Levant and place permanently at risk the fleets deployed on the Great King’s behalf by Sidon, Tyre, and the other Phoenician ports.

When he was done with Cyprus, Pausanias shifted his attention and that of the Hellenes some distance away to Byzantium, a city also garrisoned by the Mede, which was situated on the European shore where the Propontis ends, the Bosporus begins, and the current from the Black Sea drives ships toward the great harbor we now call the Golden Horn. Here, too, Pausanias displayed geopolitical acumen. Like Cyprus, Byzantium—which would later be renamed Constantinople; then, eventually, Istanbul—was a location of no small strategic importance. Whoever held it was in a position to regulate all trade between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea and to deprive the cities of the Aegean of their chief source of imported grain. This city Pausanias seized.²¹

But if no one could fault the strategic judgment of Cleombrotus’ son, much that was critical could be said with regard to his handling of the Hellenic coalition. His high-handed conduct, especially in the wake of his seizure of Byzantium, elicited tremendous resentment—particularly on the part of the Ionians and of the other eastern Greeks newly liberated from the Persian yoke, whom he roundly abused. To his fellow commanders, he displayed little but anger. Some of the marines and rowers he had whipped. Others he forced to stand all day with an iron anchor on their shoulders. Under his command, no one was allowed to gather bedding or fodder or to draw water from a spring before his fellow Spartiates had done so; and, if anyone tried, the servants of the latter, armed with whips, would drive him away. Thucydides tells us that, in desperation, the Ionians eventually turned to the enterprising Athenian commanders, begging them for protection and asking that they take over the leadership of the Hellenic forces. They cannot have found Leotychidas, with his marked reluctance to take on responsibility for their defense, to their liking; and Pausanias they evidently regarded as worse. Diodorus reports that, in their frustration, these eastern Greeks were not alone. According to his report, some of the Peloponnesians actually deserted from the fleet, went home, and had envoys sent to Lacedaemon to complain about Pausanias’ conduct. The young man was evidently out of control.²²

There was also another dimension to the complaints lodged at Lacedaemon. Pausanias was suspected of Medism. When he took Byzantium, the son of Cleombrotus captured a number of Persian notables—some of them close relatives of the Great King. These men and Byzantium itself he left for a time in the care of his friend Gongylus of Eretria; and in the Spartan regent’s absence, unbeknownst to the other Greek commanders, this Gongylus slipped off with these valuable prisoners in tow and made his way to the Great King. He almost certainly journeyed first to the fortified town of Dascyleium—nearby in Anatolia, inland roughly twenty miles from the Propontis—where Darius’ cousin the sometime admiral Megabates held court as the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia. In the absence of formal sanction from a high official, Gongylus could never have traveled to Xerxes past the elaborate network of guard posts, inns, warehouses filled with provisions, stables, and courier stations spread out at regular intervals along the royal road. Nor could he have made use of the royal pony express to dispatch a message to the Achaemenid monarch.²³

The story told by Thucydides concerning the Medism of Pausanias has given rise to skepticism and a great deal of speculation.²⁴ But there can be no doubt that Gongylus did precisely what he is said to have done. More than three-quarters of a century later, his descendants were still living the high life on a fief in the Caicus valley in western Asia Minor that had been awarded the Eretrian by a grateful Great King.²⁵

Otherwise, however, it was difficult at the time to separate fiction from fact, and it is virtually impossible to do so now. What can be said with confidence is that many of the Greeks involved in this expedition suspected that it was at the behest of his friend and associate, the son of Cleombrotus, that Gongylus did what he did. Their suspicions were reinforced by a shift that took place in their commander’s mode of conduct. When he marched out from Byzantium and through Thrace at this time, Pausanias flamboyantly dressed in Median garb in the manner of a Persian noble and surrounded himself with a bodyguard of Egyptians and Medes drawn from among those captured in the town. Even more to the point, he is said to have dined sumptuously and ostentatiously in the Persian fashion and to have made himself as difficult of access as an Oriental despot. The man—who at Plataea had expressed such astonishment that those who kept table in the manner of Mardonius should come to Hellas to deprive the Greeks of the “dreary mode of living” they possessed—evidently knew which of the two ways of life he preferred.

At this time, Pausanias also apparently conducted negotiations of some sort with Megabates—for Herodotus was told that, as a consequence of “his lust [érōs] to become tyrant over Greece,” the Spartan regent had actually arranged to marry the man’s daughter; and he is said also have had dealings soon thereafter with Megabates’ immediate successor as satrap, Artabazus son of Pharnaces, who was also a cousin of Darius. Whatever assessment one reaches concerning the ancient evidence—and Herodotus harbored doubts about the betrothal—there is one conclusion that it is hard to avoid: Pausanias son of Cleombrotus was one strange bird.²⁶

At Lacedaemon, the Agiad and Eurypontid kings reigned. They did not rule. They were hereditary magistrates of a sort, endowed with certain political, military, and religious prerogatives and blessed with the prospect of permanence in office; and the powers and prestige they possessed were such that Spartan politics tended to revolve about the two royal houses. The kings were by no means above the law, and they were regularly reminded of the fact. Once a month they exchanged an oath with five annually selected magistrates called ephors or “overseers.”

These magistrates—who were chosen from the entire body of the Spartiates who had reached the appropriate age—are said to have exercised an almost tyrannical power. They supervised every aspect of Lacedaemonian life, and, as we shall see, they played a prominent role in the formulation of public policy. Had they been directly elected, as most scholars now assume, and had they been in a position to campaign for office, as we know the gérontes did, Sparta would have quickly become a democracy—for the ephors would frequently have come into office endowed with a mandate. They were, however, chosen by a procedure in which chance played so important a role that Plato once remarked that theirs came “near to being an allotted power,” and they do not appear to have been eligible to serve a second time. In consequence, the majority of those selected were, as Aristotle repeatedly notes, “nonentities [hoı túchontes]”; and, while in office, they tended toward caution and a defense of the existing order. When these magistrates met with the two kings, the latter swore to uphold the laws, and the ephors swore in turn to uphold their prerogatives as kings if they honored their pledge.²⁷

This friendly exchange of oaths disguised—or, rather, ostentatiously displayed—a threat. For a king who broke the law, who exhibited softness and cowardice [malakía] on the field of battle, or was thought to have betrayed Lacedaemon was subject to trial; and he could be fined, removed from office, exiled, and, in principle, even executed should the ephors bring charges and should a jury made up of the five ephors, the two kings, and the twenty-eight gérontes or elders elected for life to the gerousía find against him. Nor was this threat merely notional. In the course of the fifth century, there were only three kings who are not known to have been tried on a capital charge.²⁸ Leonidas, whose reign lasted barely a decade, if that, was one. His son Pleistarchus, who died not long after he came of age and took up his responsibilities as king, was another. And Leotychidas’ grandson Archidamus—about whose forty-two-year reign we know only a little, most of it pertaining to the last five years of his life—was the third.²⁹

In conducting himself in the outlandish fashion in which he did, Pausanias was trading on his prestige as victor at the battle of Plataea. But that prestige was not enough. As their propensity to put kings on trial suggests, the Spartans were extremely sensitive to the dangers of tyranny; and the arrogance displayed by the son of Cleombrotus had inspired suspicion and dismay. Late in the winter of 477 or early in the spring, the Agiad regent was summarily recalled from his posting. Soon thereafter, he was tried for treason and misconduct, censured and fined for his mistreatment of those under his command, then acquitted on the charge of Medism.³⁰ The Lacedaemonians were not about to condemn on a capital charge a man of his rank and achievements unless they possessed positive, indisputable proof of his treason—which, at this time, they evidently lacked.

The Lacedaemonians were, however, more than willing to cut this arrogant young man down to size. Pausanias had had inscribed on the tripod dedicated at Delphi as the first fruits of Persia’s defeat two lines of verse composed by Simonides, which would most naturally be read as an assertion not only that the dedication was his alone but that the same was also true of the defeat recently inflicted on the Mede. It was at this time or soon thereafter that the authorities at Lacedaemon—spurred on by a complaint lodged by the Plataeans and approved at a meeting of the Amphictyonic League—intervened and substituted for the elegiac couplet their general had chosen a list of the thirty-one Hellenic communities that had helped “save their cities from a hateful subjection” by battling the Mede.³¹

Nor did the authorities at Lacedaemon cease to regard Pausanias as suspect. The fact that the evidence was not, in the judgment of a majority on the jury, sufficient to warrant his conviction for medizing did not mean that it fell short of what was required to justify his trial. Tellingly, they did not restore him to his command but sent another—a Spartan named Dorcis—as navarch in his place.

This newcomer was not, however, destined to take charge. Before Pausanias’ recall, the anger directed at him had grown to the point that a leading Chian and a leading Samian were prepared to make a display of their wrath against the Spartan regent by ramming his trireme and forcefully preventing him from taking the lead; and, when Dorcis appeared, the Ionians bluntly refused to accept him as their commander. It is telling that, when their navarch returned home in disgrace, the Spartans sent no one in his stead. “They wished,” Thucydides explains, “to be rid of the war with the Mede.”³²

Counsels at Lacedaemon were clearly divided. Some, such as Leotychidas, were reluctant to pay the penalty for sustaining Spartan hegemony on the high seas. Others, such as Pausanias, were eager that Lacedaemon remain at the helm. Many were, we must suspect, of two minds. Pride and a concern with prestige argued powerfully for insisting on Sparta’s primacy.³³ Prudence argued for leaving the leadership at sea to the Athenians. More than one powerful argument pointed to the latter conclusion.

To begin with, Pausanias’ misconduct was a reminder of something that members of the ruling order at Lacedaemon instinctively understood. The virtue and the discipline on which they so prided themselves were hothouse flowers. They flourished in the favorable climate of what we now call Laconia, where the citizens were subject to oversight—that of the ephors, of course, the “overseers” par excellence, but, more important, that of everyone else as well. For there, as a consequence, shame held sway. But this virtue and discipline were apt to wither in the larger world, where temptation abounded and Spartans not subject to the purview of their peers operated beyond the reach of reproach. Knowing the fragility of the remarkable qualities fostered and sustained by the Spartan agṓgē, the Lacedaemonians, in most circumstances, prohibited foreigners, apart from a favored few, from visiting their homeland; and they denied their fellow citizens the freedom to travel abroad when and where they wished. The Spartiates “feared,” Thucydides tells us, “that those going out would deteriorate,” and these fears were redoubled when they “perceived” that this was “the very thing that had happened in the case of Pausanias.”³⁴

A fear of corruption was not the only motive dictating reluctance on the part of the Lacedaemonians. As we have seen, they were few in number, and their domestic duties were daunting. For obvious reasons, they were inclined to be extremely parsimonious when it came to the expenditure of Spartiate manpower. They had long been prepared, even eager, for others to do their fighting for them. They were, moreover, skilled in getting others to do this, and the Athenians had proved to be exceedingly serviceable in the recent past. In 477, moreover, none but the Athenians had the requisite ships. They had the desire; and, though their pride and assertiveness made them insufferable, they were also indispensable. According to Thucydides, the Spartans not only wished to rid themselves of the war with Persia. “They regarded the Athenians as sufficient for its conduct and they thought them of use to themselves in the present instance.”³⁵

Some Lacedaemonians were no doubt annoyed, and they may well have been numerous. But to most it seemed obvious how the difficulties they faced should be resolved. In consequence, the members of Sparta’s ruling order opted for caution and gave way to the wishes of the Ionians, conceding maritime hegemony to the Athenians—who had arguably earned it at Artemisium, Salamis, and Mycale, and who had long been itching to take it on.³⁶

Itching might, in fact, be an understatement. The truth, as we have seen, is that the Athenians connived in Pausanias’ fall and arranged for Dorcis’ rejection. In and after 478, Aristeides and, at his urging, his much younger colleague Cimon had deliberately handled themselves in their dealings with the Ionians and those newly liberated from Persian rule in a mild and respectful manner designed to inspire confidence and elicit trust. Initially, they had stood idly and to all appearances innocently by while Pausanias blotted his copybook. Then, when the Spartan regent had successfully enraged many of those subject to his command, the two Athenian generals had discreetly encouraged discontent and stoked resentment on the part of those who approached them, while offering Athens’ hegemony as an alternative.

The ramming of Pausanias’ trireme appears to have taken place at Aristeides’ instigation. To those who asked that the Athenians assume the leadership, he reportedly responded that they would have to establish their trustworthiness by a deed which, once done, would by dint of the depth of hostility it evinced rule out their reversing course a second time.³⁷ It is a reasonable guess that Dorcis’ rejection was similarly staged.

A Dual Hegemony

In the aftermath, we are told, almost certainly in the late spring or early summer of 477, the Athenians—with Aristeides in the lead—organized the islanders in the Aegean, the Greeks on the Thracian coast, and those on the Anatolian mainland into a formal alliance, which met in assembly in the temple of Apollo on the island of Delos and there also lodged its treasury. The founding members of what we now call the Delian League began by swearing an oath to have the same friends and enemies as the Athenians, who were accorded the hegemony and given the authority to name both the alliance’s commanders and the Hellenotamíaı entrusted with its funds. As the title of its treasurers suggests, this new league claimed to be acting on behalf of all the Hellenes. Its stated aim was aggression. Its members were to continue the war against the Persians. Their explicit purpose was liberation and revenge. They were pledged to free the Greeks still living under the dominion of the Mede and to ravage and plunder the territory possessed by the Great King in retaliation for the suffering he and his minions had inflicted on the Hellenes.

The larger, if unspoken, purpose of the league was, however, Hellas’ defense. Everyone understood that the defeats inflicted on the Great King’s forces at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale might well be, from his perspective, a mere setback. They were not such as to rule out his return. The Persians had staying power. No one at the time contemplated taking from them the vast continental empire they ruled, and the resources they drew from that empire beggared the imagination. Given that money was, even then, the sinews of war—especially, of war at sea—there was every likelihood that Xerxes would rebuild his navy, augment its size, and try once more. There was certainly nothing to prevent him from mounting such an enterprise. As long, however, as the Greeks maintained their dominion over the briny deep, they would be safe—for, in the absence of a fleet dominant on that element, the logistical difficulties that an army would face in invading Hellas were insuperable. In consequence, since there was no reason to expect the Persian peril to disappear in the foreseeable future, the new alliance was intended as a permanent arrangement. When those joining took the requisite oath, they threw iron ingots into the sea and swore to remain faithful until these returned to the surface.

Before leaving Delos for home, the delegates from the new league’s constituent cities voted to impose an annual assessment on its members. The cities that wished would provide triremes and crews in numbers soon to be specified. Those communities which preferred to outsource their defense were allowed to supply, in compensation, the equivalent in silver. Part of this phóros—the name given their “contribution” to distinguish it from the dasmós hitherto exacted as tribute by the Mede—the Hellenotamíaı were expected to retain and store at Delos as an emergency reserve. Part of it was to be used to defray the cost of constructing triremes additional to those on offer from the alliance’s members. Part of it would be used to hire Athenians to officer these additional ships; part, to pay the rowers hired as crew at Athens and elsewhere; and part, to cover the costs of administration. The annual budget constituting the contributions made in specie was to be four hundred sixty talents or a bit more than thirteen tons of silver. This stream of income, in addition to the triremes on offer, is what the members of this new alliance thought that it would take to secure Greece against the Mede. These contributions were also regarded as an investment of sorts—for there was every expectation that ravaging and plundering the Great King’s territory would yield booty in ample amounts.

The devil was, as always, in the details—which were left for determination by Aristeides, who had already earned for himself well before this time a reputation for decency and strict honesty. In the aftermath of the foundation of the Delian League, he traveled far and wide, visiting its constituent communities and allocating to each what he estimated to be its just portion of the overall assessment. This task was, to say the least, unenviable. But it may well have been made easier by one peculiar circumstance. After the Ionian revolt, for the purpose of making the assessment of tribute equitable and easier to accept, Darius had commissioned his brother Artaphernes, the satrap at Sardis, to do a land survey in many of the communities concerned. In the cities once under Persian control, Aristeides could without fear of stirring anger frame his allocation of each community’s share of the phóros largely with an eye to Artaphernes’ earlier assessment of that particular city’s ability to pay. Elsewhere, however, he had to estimate the carrying capacity of each community’s territory himself. That he managed to do all of this without infuriating anyone, that his assessment was in later times universally admired, and that he retained for himself forever after the moniker Aristeides the Just that had been awarded him long before by his compatriots suggests that, as a statesman, Aristeides was a man of exquisite judgment and tact. It is also an indication that everyone involved then regarded the Persian threat as grave and the demand on their resources as reasonable and fair.³⁸

Aristeides was also singularly shrewd. He hailed from the Athenian village or deme Alopeke—literally, that of the fox—and a wag named Callaeschrus is said to have remarked at the time that the wily son of Lysimachus was “more of a fox in his modus operandi than as a consequence of the deme in which he was born.”³⁹ This canny statesman knew that Athens’ turn to the sea and her appropriation of the maritime hegemony would profoundly alter the character of the city. According to Aristotle, he urged the Athenians to leave their fields behind and live in town, where, thanks to Athens’ appropriation of the hegemony, there would be “a livelihood for all—for some in the forces sent on expedition, for some in garrison duty, for some in the management of communal affairs.” In the end, the peripatetic adds, this enabled “the many”—including a host of officials charged with managing the league—to prosper, just as Aristeides had predicted. From the contributions made by the allies and the taxes they collected, Athens would in time be able to provide remunerative employment for more than twenty thousand men.⁴⁰

While Aristeides was devoting his attention to pressing matters fiscal and administrative, his colleague Cimon collected the Delian League forces that had wintered at Byzantium and led them against the Mede.⁴¹ In Thrace, along the Aegean coast, the Achaemenids had established two great strongholds—the one, a fort at Doriscus near the river Hebrus, sufficient in size for a garrison of ten thousand; the other, a fort to the west at Eion atop a hill on the eastern bank of the river Strymon quite near where it then emptied into the Mediterranean Sea. Both were on the route that Xerxes’ army had taken in its invasion of Hellas. Both had served at that time as logistical depots for the storage of food;⁴² and at this time, given the circumstances, both were almost certainly well-supplied. With them, if he regained control of the sea, Xerxes could mount another invasion by land. Without them, such an endeavor would have been difficult, if not impossible. It was a strategic imperative for the Hellenes that these Achaemenid outposts be eliminated.

Herodotus tells us that Darius and Xerxes appointed hyparchs—subordinate commanders—to rule the various communities under their control in the Hellespont and Thrace, and he indicates that, in the aftermath of the Persian Wars, the Greeks ousted all of these save one. His name was Maskames son of Megadostes. He had been substituted for Darius’ nominee at Doriscus by Xerxes when he passed that way in 480; and, by a grit and determination that earned him the admiration of the Great King and annual rewards, he managed to fend off repeated attacks.⁴³ Whether one of these was launched by the son of Miltiades at this time we do not know. It would not, however, be surprising—for, late in the campaigning season of 477, he initiated a successful attack on Eion to the west.

From the perspective of the Hellenes, Eion may have been the more important of these two great strongholds. It lay quite near the dense concentration of Greek settlements in what we now call the Chalcidice; and upstream from Eion along the Strymon in the vicinity of Mount Pangaeum, there was not only an abundance of fir trees ideally suited for the building of ships. There were also rich mines, whose yield in silver and gold was also of recognized strategic value.⁴⁴

All of these concerns had no doubt been discussed at the congress on Delos, and Cimon had been sent to deal with them. At Eion this he did—and with admirable dispatch. He landed his marines on the shore; and, with the help of a cavalry force brought from Thessaly by Menon of Pharsalus, he defeated the Persian garrison in battle, initiated a siege of the settlement, and expelled from their homeland the Thracians upriver who were providing the garrison with supplies. Given the costs of conducting such a siege and the fact that the Delian League treasury was not yet a factor, the twelve talents of silver (one-third of a ton) also contributed by this Menon will have been most welcome, and the service rendered by the highly disciplined cavalry he conveyed from his homeland is not apt to have been negligible. The horsemen for which that fertile and well-watered region was renowned were prized at home and celebrated throughout Greece for their exceptional skill and prowess in battle.

Over time, as the winter and spring months passed, the ample stores in the Persian stronghold gradually dwindled. At some point after midsummer 476, it became evident to Boges, the Great King’s garrison commander, that Eion could no longer be held. He might have surrendered on terms and returned to Persia, but he chose not to do so. Instead, when the provisions were about to run out, he built a funeral pyre; lit the wood; slit the throats of his children, wife, concubines, and servants; and then hurled their bodies into the fire. The gold and silver he had amassed on his master’s behalf he threw into the Strymon, where recovery would be well-nigh impossible. Then, without further ado, he cast himself into the flames.⁴⁵

Map 3. The Northern Aegean

After enslaving the survivors, building a fortified emporium and naval base at Eion, and settling a colony of his compatriots on fertile land in the immediate neighborhood,⁴⁶ Cimon returned home. The following year he directed his attention to the isle of Skyros—which lay between Euboea and Lemnos, an island which his father had briefly added to the possessions of Athens in the 490s and which, in the aftermath of Mycale, the Athenians had no doubt reacquired. The land occupied by the barbarian population on Lemnos they had confiscated, and on it they had established a cleruchy—a settlement of impecunious Athenians, who, depending on circumstances, either farmed their new allotments themselves with the help of hirelings and functioned as a garrison of sorts or leased them out and returned home to live as rentiers.

Skyros was of interest for three reasons. First, like Lemnos and, for that matter, Imbros and Tenedos, which were even nearer the entrance to the Hellespont, it sat squarely athwart the most direct route leading from Athens to the Black Sea. Second, it was occupied by Dolopians, not Greeks; and this barbarian people was not only given to piracy. They sometimes even plundered merchants who put into their port, and this had made them an object of complaint at a recent meeting of the Amphictyonic League. Third, it was on this island that Theseus, the legendary figure thought to have been the founder of Athens as a unified political community, had purportedly been murdered and buried; and this misdeed was, the Athenians believed, as yet unavenged.

Presumably at the instigation of Cimon, who was a canny political operator, the Athenians had—at some point in the term of the eponymous archon who presided at Athens in 476/5—been instructed by the oracle at Delphi to recover Theseus’ bones and bury them honorably in Attica. If they performed this service, they had been told, the island would be theirs. Not long after his compatriots had received this oracle, the son of Miltiades set out to fulfill the terms specified therein; and, in the process, he seized the island, enslaved its population, and established an Athenian cleruchy on the land the Dolopians had long tilled. Skyros and Lemnos—along with Imbros, which appears to have been acquired at about this time—were to become prized possessions of the Athenians.⁴⁷

Our evidence for what followed is sparse. No surviving author, apart from Thucydides, describes the four-decade-long period between 475 and the last few years before the great war between the Peloponnesians and the Athenians in any detail; and he does so sparingly, only by way of brief anecdotes touching on dramatic events in these four decades that illustrate the theme of his narrative: the inexorable growth of Athenian power during the so-called Pentekontaetia after the Persian Wars and the fear to which it eventually gave rise in Lacedaemon.⁴⁸ Moreover, Thucydides was far from infallible; many of the events he describes in this section of his history took place before he reached maturity and some, before his birth; and he may on occasion have erred. But his aim was accuracy, as he makes clear; and he was nobody’s fool. It is, moreover, a mistake to think him a blind partisan or to suppose his narrative tendentious or dishonest. Athens’ power did wax in these years. The Lacedaemonians had good reason to be afraid, as we shall soon see; and Thucydides did what he could to accurately depict this process.

Nevertheless, the story that Thucydides tells concerning these four decades has, from our perspective, more than one grave defect. It is highly selective and has a narrow focus; and, although everything that he has to relate concerning the increase in Athens’ power is of the utmost interest, there is much that is not germane to this focus which a student of Sparta’s changing security environment and of the grand strategy she adapted to deal with these changes would very much like to know. Concerning, for example, internal developments at Athens in this period that may have had a bearing on the framing of her foreign policy, Thucydides has next to nothing to say. Even more to the point, he mentions Lacedaemon and Persia rarely and, then, only when what they do or suffer has a significant impact on Athens’ rise; and he does not supply us with a precise chronology.⁴⁹

To fill out Thucydides’ narrative in a such a manner as to take into account Athens’ internal politics and to cast light on the changing situation of Sparta and Persia and on their shifting intentions and policy, we will have to attend closely to fragments of information found elsewhere—in Herodotus; in the universal historian Diodorus Siculus, the biographer Plutarch, and the travel writer Pausanias; in a variety of other authors; and in the surviving inscriptions. In some cases, to elicit in full the larger implications of anecdotes that Thucydides actually relates, we will have to consider what can be gleaned from these other sources and from a consideration of the imperatives to which geography gives rise.

At some point, for example, in the years immediately following Cimon’s seizure of Skyros, the Athenians turned their attention to Carystus, as Thucydides notes in passing. Although the historian makes no mention of the fact, the latter pólıs was, like Skyros, of obvious strategic importance. Carystus was situated near the southern tip of the island of Euboea, and it possessed in Geraistos a port, quite close to Attica, which provided a haven at a crucial point on the maritime byway that ran from the Peiraeus and Phalerum Bay in Attica around Cape Sunium; then, between the islands of Euboea and Andros; and on past Skyros, Lemnos, and Imbros to Tenedos.⁵⁰

The Ongoing War with Persia: A Timetable, 490–465

490	Helot revolt, battle of Marathon
480	Battles of Artemisium and Salamis
479	Battles of Plataea and Mycale
	Mantineia and Elis late for Plataea
	Islanders admitted to the Hellenic League
479/8	Siege of Sestos
	Walls at Athens rebuilt
478	Pausanias at Cyprus, then Byzantium
ca. 478	Athenians begin in earnest fortifying the Peiraeus
Winter/Early Spring 477	Pausanias recalled, tried, fined for misconduct, acquitted of Medism
Early Spring 477	Dorcis’ abortive Navarchy
477	The Delian League founded
477/6	Cimon at Eion
	Pausanias returns to Byzantium
ca. 476/5	Leotychidas in Thessaly
475	Cimon seizes Skyros
ca. 475/4	Hetoemaridas dissuades the Spartans from initiating war with Athens
ca. 475–473	Cimon forces Carystos to join the Delian League
ca. 472/1	News of Achaemenid fleet construction
472, 471, or 470	Ostracism of Themistocles
471/0	Pausanias driven from Byzantium, recalled from Colonae
ca. 470	Rebellion of Naxos
469	Battle of Eurymedon
ca. 468/7	First Peace of Callias
465	Settlement dispatched to Ennea Hodoi
	Rebellion of Thasos
Late Summer 465	Siege initiated at Thasos

It was nearly always from the last of these isles, which lay just twelve miles southwest of the entrance to the Hellespont, that ships set out to work their way up that narrow body of water and on through the Propontis and the Bosporus to the Black Sea. In all seasons, the current running down from the Euxine to the Mediterranean is swift and powerful; and, especially in winter, the prevailing winds blow in the same direction. In antiquity, even on those comparatively rare days when the wind blew from the southwest, sails were insufficient, and it took oarsmen a considerable, sustained effort to overcome the force of the current. Merchant ships wholly reliant on sail—round ships or bathtubs [gaúloı], as they were called—tended to drop off their cargoes to be warehoused on Tenedos—whence galleys, rowed by the famed ferrymen of that strategically situated port, would convey them up the Hellespont and through the Propontis to Byzantium on the Bosporus and beyond.⁵¹

In 490, when Darius sent an expedition by sea to bring the Cyclades under Persian control and to punish the Eretrians and the Athenians for their support of the Ionian revolt, the Carystians resisted and were subdued by force. In 480, mindful of what resistance had cost them in 490, they assisted Xerxes at Salamis; and, in the aftermath, Themistocles had extracted from them as an indemnity of sorts a considerable sum. Apparently, however, the Carystians were not among those who joined Aristeides in founding the Delian League, though, like everyone in the Aegean, they profited from the protection it afforded. No doubt for the purpose of encouraging contributions from other cities which had also held aloof, the Athenians intervened to force the Carystians into line.⁵²

Thucydides prided himself on his precision; and, in his account of the early years of the Delian League, he made it a point to discuss events in sequence. The next anecdote he relates concerns the revolt of Naxos, an island pólıs of some size, blessed with considerable wealth, which was a member of the Delian League. Thucydides does not tell us why Naxos sought to leave the alliance. He singles her out solely because she was the first to try. He does indicate, however, that defections of this sort tended to be the consequence of a desertion from the ranks or of a shortfall in the payment of contributions or provision of ships. In these matters, he tells us, the Athenians were “precise and exacting and made themselves obnoxious by bringing necessity to bear on men unaccustomed to hard labor and unwilling to suffer hardship.” He also remarks that the Athenians were no longer as affable and accommodating as they once had been. This change in tone he blames less on the arrogance and ambition of Athens, which he treats as a given, than on the fecklessness of her allies, most of whom preferred to pay their share of the cost of their defense in money—or in empty ships, as Cimon cannily allowed them to do—rather than by supplying naval contingents of their own. “Thus,” Thucydides concludes, “while Athens was augmenting her fleet with the money which they contributed, when they did rebel, they lacked the requisite equipment and proved to be inexperienced in war.”⁵³

Cimon was Athens’ principal general throughout this period, and his achievements contributed to his popularity. When, for example, in 476, he made his way back to Athens from the siege at Eion, he was invited to set up in the agora three stone figures of the god Hermes, each adorned with an inscription in verse. In tandem, these celebrated, with a clear reference to Homer and the role thought to have been played by Athens in the Trojan War, the great victory achieved by the Athenians at Eion; and they singled out as worthy of particular honor the benefactors of the city, endowed with great virtue, who had then led their compatriots in war. Though, in deference to Athens’ character as a democracy, the latter were deliberately left unnamed, their chief was a man known to one and all.⁵⁴

In similar fashion, after seizing Skyros the following spring, Cimon, in triumph, bore to Athens a large coffin and, within it, a bronze spear, a sword, and the remains of a man of extraordinary size, whom he represented as the hero Theseus. Soon thereafter, with pomp, circumstance, processions, and sacrifices, these remains—the bones of Theseus, as they were called—were solemnly reinterred in the center of the city near the site where a gymnasium would later be built.⁵⁵

While the Athenians and those who had joined the Delian League busied themselves with evicting Persian garrisons and eliminating piracy, with forcing free riders to join the Delian League and share in the costs of collective defense, with suppressing revolts, and with acquiring for Athens territory of strategic value, the Spartans, almost certainly with the help of their Peloponnesian allies, turned their attention to the Medizers on the Greek mainland. Pausanias had dealt with the Thebans in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Plataea. But nothing had been done with regard to Thessaly—where the Aleuads, who had been among the chief instigators of Xerxes’ invasion, remained ensconced in their stronghold at Larissa. Leotychidas led the Hellenic forces in this venture; and, on the battlefield, he succeeded gloriously. The Aleuads Agelaos and Aristomenes he deposed. But, although Thessaly was at his mercy, he stopped short of a more general purge when the remaining Aleuads offered him a substantial bribe. Herodotus reports that he was found in his tent sitting on a glove filled with money; that he was carted back to Sparta, tried, and convicted; that his house was torn down and the man himself sentenced to exile; and that he then fled to Tegea seeking refuge.⁵⁶

In the aftermath of this expedition, which almost certainly took place in 476,⁵⁷ there appears to have been at Lacedaemon a great gnashing of teeth. At some point, there had to be something of the sort. First, in 479, Pausanias had let the Thebans off the hook. Then, in 478 or quite soon thereafter, he had squandered Sparta’s position of leadership on the sea; and, having appropriated her rightful place, Athens was advancing from strength to strength. Now, to make matters worse, Leotychidas had made a hash of the Lacedaemonians’ attempt to assert their hegemony on the mainland by dint of a punitive expedition against Thessaly. To describe all of this as a humiliation would be an understatement, and the Spartans are said to have reacted, as spirited men are wont to do, with an irrational burst of anger.

Diodorus Siculus reports that early on, soon after these developments, in 475/4, the Lacedaemonians came quite close to going to war with Athens, the greatest beneficiary of the ineptness, arrogance, and dishonesty that their Heraclid leaders had displayed in their postwar dealings with their fellow Greeks. They thought the loss of “their leadership at sea contrary to reason,” and this indignity, he tells us, “they bore ill.” They were hostile to “those who had defected from them,” and they threatened them “with a punishment befitting what they had done.” Moreover,

when a meeting of the gerousia was called together, its members deliberated whether to go to war with the Athenians in a struggle for maritime hegemony. In similar fashion, when the common assembly was convened, the younger men and many of the others displayed an eagerness to recover that hegemony rooted in a love of honor. If they obtained it, they thought, they would become rich, Sparta as a whole would become greater and more powerful, and the households of private individuals would experience an increase in prosperity. They also recalled to mind the ancient oracle in which the god instructed them to take care lest their leadership be “lame.” This oracle was uttered, they said, with regard to nothing other than the present circumstances. For their rule would, indeed, be lame if, having hegemony on two elements, they cast it off in one.

According to Diodorus, “virtually all of the citizens” were enthusiasts in favor of this argument. When the gerousía then reconvened, presumably to frame a resolution for presentation to the assembly, “no one expected that anyone would dare to advise them to follow any other course.” But this is precisely what a member of that august body named Hetoemaridas had the effrontery to do. This Hetoemaridas was no ordinary Spartiate. Like the kings, he was recognized as a descendant of Heracles; and he was, as a consequence of his conduct, a man renowned for virtue. He had a standing among the multitude that enabled him, when he set himself against their opinion, to command their attention and respect—which is what he did when he bluntly told them “to leave the hegemony to the Athenians” and then argued in detail that “it was not in Sparta’s interest to wrangle with the Athenians over the sea.”⁵⁸

Diodorus Siculus was not a contemporary of the events he describes in this illuminating passage. He lived much later, in the first century. He wrote annals, and he drew on earlier authors—among them, Ephorus of Cumae, the principal (but not the sole) informant on whose work he based his narrative of the period we are now examining, and the likely source of this particular report. Herodotus and Thucydides, who were contemporaries or near contemporaries of the events on which they focus, were in a position to interview eyewitnesses and the children and grandchildren of eyewitnesses. With regard to the period in question, Ephorus, who flourished in the mid-fourth century, was at a disadvantage in this particular. When he took a tack different from the one taken by his two great predecessors, he ordinarily did so on the basis of local lore and of reports found in works, now lost, which were more or less contemporary with the events described. He had, we have reason to believe, a keen interest in the rise and fall of hegemonic powers, as did Diodorus himself; and, as was only natural, the Lacedaemonian regime was one of the chief objects of their research. We should not be quick to dismiss Diodorus’ testimony, especially when it pertains to this subject. But we cannot have full confidence in Diodorus’ dating of this debate or of any other particular event in this period. Ephorus was not an annalist. He composed his universal history topically, telling one story more or less in full, then another. Diodorus aimed at chronological precision, but it was not always possible for a man in his position to discover exact dates. He was with some frequency confused, and he had a propensity for taking Ephorus’ narrative on a discrete topic and reporting it in its entirety as having happened within one of the years it had covered.⁵⁹

All of this notwithstanding, there can hardly be doubt that Diodorus’ description of the debate that supposedly took place 475/4 accurately reflects a discussion that actually took place within the first few years following the establishment of the Delian League. That the Spartans were tempted at this time to undertake an imperial venture; that matters came to a head after Leotychidas’ disastrous and disgraceful mishandling of affairs in Thessaly; that there really was in the mid-470s a Heraclid in the Spartan gerousía named Hetoemaridas; and that, by dint of a sober analysis of Lacedaemon’s geopolitical and domestic political situation, he dissuaded his compatriots from flying off the handle and committing themselves to an undertaking apt to end in tears—all of this is highly plausible. If, however, we were to discover somehow that Ephorus invented this particular assembly and this particular debate out of whole cloth and that Hetoemaridas was also a figment of the historian’s imagination, unlikely as this would be, it would hardly matter. For we could still be confident that there really was at Lacedaemon someone else of like stature and judgment who made the same arguments at about this time on a similar occasion. As we have seen, powerful arguments were there to be made in defense of Hetoemaridas’ position both concerning the geopolitical imperatives Lacedaemon faced and concerning the preconditions for sustaining Sparta’s highly disciplined way of life; and both Pausanias and Leotychidas had by their conduct reinforced their compatriots’ suspicion that the civic virtue fostered by their regime could not withstand prolonged exposure to the temptations on offer abroad.⁶⁰

Plutarch got it more or less right when he wrote, “Here, indeed, was the mindset of Sparta made manifest in a wondrous way. When the Lacedaemonians perceived that their magistrates were corrupted by the sheer magnitude of the power [entrusted to them], they willingly let go of the hegemony, and they ceased dispatching generals for the war, choosing to have the citizens remain moderate and restrained [sophronoûntas] and faithful to custom rather than to rule Hellas in its entirety.”⁶¹ This is, indeed, what the Spartans did. But it would be an error to suppose that they were of one mind in settling on this policy.