CHAPTER 2

Persia Redivivus

It is almost impossible that a war can be decided by naval action alone. Unaided, naval pressure can only work by a process of exhaustion. Its effects must always be slow. . . . The tendency is always to accept terms of peace that are far from conclusive. For a firm decision a quicker and more drastic form of pressure is required. Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided—except in the rarest cases—either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life, or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.

JULIAN STAFFORD CORBETT

IN 480, after the debacle at Salamis, Xerxes son of Darius, the Achaemenid king of Persia, withdrew to Sardis in western Anatolia. The following year, as events unfolded in mainland Greece and Ionia, he waited patiently in the ancient Lydian capital,¹ providing guidance insofar as communications allowed and anxiously awaiting news—at least until, one must suspect, the arrival from Plataea of Artabazus son of Pharnaces with a report concerning Mardonius’ defeat.

In the spring of 478, after weighing the consequences of Plataea and Mycale for his realm, Xerxes made dispositions, we are told, for the defense of Anatolia. Then he departed from Lydia. We do not know where he intended to go—whether toward Susa in Elam, as Herodotus reports, or Ecbatana in Media, as Diodorus claims. But before setting off, he installed as the new ruler of Cilicia a henchman from Halicarnassus who had demonstrated a fierce loyalty to the royal house, and he appears to have taken revenge on the Milesians for the support they had lent the Hellenes at Mycale by sacking the temple of Apollo at Didyma and carrying off the bronze statue of the god. Along the way, Xenophon tells us, Persia’s king paused for a considerable period of time to fortify the citadel at the strategic city of Celaenae, which lay about a week’s march inland from Sardis near the headwaters of the river Maeander in southern Phrygia on the border with Lydia. There, at the foot of the acropolis, the Great King is also said to have constructed a royal palace.² If Xerxes was dismayed at the outcome of his war with the Hellenes, he certainly did not let on.

Map 4. The Persian Empire, ca. 475

There is, in fact, reason to suspect that the Great King and his minions may have represented the Greek campaign to the larger public within the empire as an unmitigated success. Half a millennium after these events—after purportedly hearing a Mede dismiss Marathon as a minor skirmish and sum up the results of Xerxes’ invasion with the observation that the Great King had vanquished the Lacedaemonians at Thermopylae and killed Leonidas; then sacked Athens and sold into slavery those of her citizens who had not fled; and, finally, returned to Asia after imposing tribute on the Greeks—the Bithynian orator and philosopher Dio Chrysostom expressed suspicions regarding Xerxes’ self-representation of just such a sort.³

It would not have been especially hard for Xerxes and his courtiers to spin events in this fashion. After all, he bore with him—on his initial journey to Sardis and on his later travels between Babylon, Pasargadae, Susa, and no doubt Ecbatana and Persepolis as well—proof positive of his glorious victory in the form of statues, images, and votive offerings (including the famous bronze of the tyrant-slayers Harmodius and Aristogeiton) that he had looted from Athens and the other cities he had sacked. Indeed, were we to judge the outcome of the war solely on the basis of the inscriptions that Xerxes himself put up—almost certainly thereafter—at Persepolis, Pasargadae, and presumably elsewhere as well, we would know nothing of his failures at Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. We would suppose, in fact, that, after the war, he ruled over and collected tribute from not only the “Ionians who dwell by the Sea” but also the Ionians “who dwell beyond the Sea” as well as the peoples of “Thrace,” as he claimed.⁴

A King Imperiled

Of course, none of this will have fooled the courtiers who accompanied the Great King on his seasonal peregrinations between Persepolis, Ecbatana, Babylon, and Susa. Nor will it have fooled the great families of Persia. They will have recognized his failure; they will have known that very little tribute was coming in from Ionia, that none was coming in from the islanders and the Greeks who lived in the Balkans, and that Thrace with its gold and silver mines was lost as well. Moreover, in Xerxes’ attempts to mislead the public, they will have discerned nothing other than weakness. No one from the high aristocracy who remembered Darius can at this time have harbored much respect for his feckless son. Of course, had Xerxes quickly seized control of the seas once more, had he mounted a second and successful invasion of Hellas, his initial failures would have been forgotten.

But this he did not do; and over time, as Cimon and the forces deployed by the Delian League systematically ousted Persian garrisons and conducted raids into the interior, the Persian defense posture along the coast of Anatolia gradually deteriorated. As Plutarch puts it,

No one humiliated the Great King and reduced his pride more than did Cimon. For the latter did not allow the former a free and easy departure from Hellas but pursued him, as if at his heels. Moreover, before the barbarians could catch their breath and take a stand, he laid waste, overthrew, and harried them in one quarter, then stirred revolt in another quarter and attached [the rebellious communities] to the Hellenes—so that Asia from Ionia to Pamphylia was entirely emptied of Persian arms.

Cimon’s chief aim was the liberation of the Great King’s Greek subjects. But he was more than willing to absorb into the Delian League barbarian communities situated in territories of strategic interest. In Caria, we are told, he persuaded the cities long before colonized by the Greeks to revolt against their Persian overlord; and the towns of mixed population, where two languages were spoken and there were Persian garrisons firmly entrenched, he besieged and took by force. In Lycia, to the east along the southern coast of Anatolia, he is said to have done the like. It must have seemed, as Plutarch suggests, as if his object was “the subjection of Asia entire.”⁵

In a realm such as that of the Achaemenid kings, in a polity which has expansion as its raison d’être, such a development is apt to have profound consequences—not only abroad, but also at home, where gross personal misconduct on Xerxes’ part reportedly compounded his woes by giving rise both to divisions within the royal household and to unflattering talk in other quarters so widespread that it eventually came to the attention of Herodotus.

Contemporary students of Achaemenid history are quick to denounce Plato’s contention that the moral formation [paıdeía] afforded Cambyses, Xerxes, and their successors was defective and his suggestion that the spectacular achievements of Cyrus and Darius were made possible by the fact that neither was reared in luxury by women and eunuchs at the court and that both knew little but the hardships of the campaign.⁶ There is this to be said for the argument advanced by these scholars. The Persian empire did not collapse after Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. It survived for another century and a half. It was resilient, and Achaemenid administration appears to have been competent, efficient, and effective throughout.

There is, however, more to be said for Plato’s analysis than these scholars are currently willing to admit. The survival of the Achaemenid empire may be a reflection of Darius’ genius and of his success in thoroughly cowing its subjects and in setting up institutions more than adequate to insure continued submissiveness on their part. It takes moxie to establish an empire and to defend it in its infancy; it takes very little to sustain it once it is firmly in place. A well-oiled machine can compensate for weakness and self-indulgence on the part of those at the very top. The Roman empire not only survived Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Domitian, Commodus, and the sons of Septimius Severus. For the most part, it flourished under their rule.

To deny that Xerxes was weak, self-indulgent, and more than a bit of a fool, we would have to reject the only real evidence that we have about the man as a man. It would be unwise to do so if we really want to understand his situation. Thanks to the yeoman’s work done over the last twenty-five years by the scholars from a great variety of disciplines who regularly attended the annual meetings of the Achaemenid History Workshop, no one now doubts that Herodotus, Xenophon, and even Ctesias, not to mention the others in Hellas who wrote about Achaemenid Persia, knew a great deal. What they have to say about Persian institutions and practices dovetails exceedingly well with the evidence we have from the Jewish Bible; from Achaemenid Egypt and Babylon; from the surviving Old Persian, Akkadian, Elamite, and Aramaic tablets and royal inscriptions; and from the pictorial representations found at Persepolis, Susa, and elsewhere.

The lurid tale that Herodotus tells us concerning Xerxes, his son Darius, his wife Amestris, his brother Masistes, and Masistes’ wife and daughter is bizarre, to be sure. But this does not mean that it is wholly or even largely false. Similar tales are known to be true regarding dynasty after dynasty under the Roman principate, and Plato’s analysis of the reasons why Cyrus and Darius were so much more impressive than Cambyses, Xerxes, and most of the latter’s successors can be applied to the Roman principes with no less interpretive force. That a despot’s son—reared at court with the expectation that, if he pleases his father, he might well inherit the throne—should come, when king, to entertain a sordid passion for his brother’s wife; that he should contrive a marriage between that woman’s daughter and his own firstborn son; that he should subsequently seduce the daughter; that his attempts to please the young woman should in time enrage his wife and eventuate in a fatal breach with his brother: this little domestic drama is shocking in the extreme but it is in no way incredible.⁷ It does not top what Tacitus and Suetonius have to report regarding the successors of Augustus and their womenfolk at Rome. Where a monarch’s word is law, the only discipline to which he will be subject is self-discipline; and those who have not become inured to self-control and self-denial while young are not apt to acquire these qualities later in life.

The fact that there was nothing secret about these events, that they came to Herodotus’ attention, and that they must have been discreetly discussed in a disapproving manner behind closed doors in many a noble Persian household can hardly have added to Xerxes’ prestige. This he surely knew, and he must also have come to suspect that, if he did not do something to prevent it from happening, his inadequacy as Great King was likely to become a subject of conversation as well. Had the Hellenes, after Mycale, limited their purview to the islands off the Anatolian coast, he might have been able to ignore their dominion over the Aegean. After all, his father had weathered the Scythian disaster, and Darius had not felt the need to return to the northern shores of the Black Sea after suffering defeat on the steppes.⁸ But the attacks on Xerxes’ Anatolian holdings, especially those situated along the southern coast of Asia Minor, were another matter. He could not afford to ignore the steady assault on his realm mounted by the Delian League and its chief general Cimon son of Miltiades.

As we shall soon have occasion to observe, Xerxes jumped at the opportunity that Pausanias the regent afforded him and did what he could to sow division in Hellas among the victorious Hellenes. But such a venture was, as he no doubt realized, a gamble—which might or might not yield much fruit. And so, after the passage of a handful of years, he once again ordered that a great fleet of triremes be built in Cilicia, Tyre, Sidon, Egypt, and elsewhere. Precisely when he did so we do not with any certitude know. We are not even sure when the great battle that followed was fought—though there is, as we shall in due course see, one datable event, which took place at Athens in the spring of 468, that might reasonably be taken as an indicator that a military encounter of great consequence had been fought in the previous summer.⁹

If so, in 473 or the year following, the Athenians are apt to have begun hearing from merchants who plied the seas in the Levant persistent rumors that the construction of a formidable navy was once again under way. In the 480s, when Xerxes made preparations for his great invasion of Greece, they had had ample warning of this sort. In later times, when the Persians made similar preparations, the Greeks learned what was in store three or four years before the onslaught began. On this occasion, if Plato is to believed (as he should be), they got advance word as well; and they evidently regarded the Mede’s return to the Aegean in force as a serious possibility. At this time, while Aristeides was still active in a diplomatic capacity, there was, we are told, a discussion in the synod of the Delian League focused on the question whether the common treasury should be moved from Delos to Athens for safekeeping, and the Samians actually proposed such a move.¹⁰

If there were Spartans at this time who still harbored resentment at the Athenians’ usurpation of the hegemony that they had themselves once exercised at sea, as there surely were, this intelligence may well have been sobering; and it no doubt served to buck up those in Lacedaemon who had favored leaving the war at sea and the considerable risks involved to the city that, in 480 and 479, had provided something like half of the Hellenic fleet and whose leader had maneuvered the Greeks into fighting at Salamis. At Athens itself, this news can only have served to reinforce the conviction, already widespread, that Achaemenid Persia was still by far the greatest threat the city faced. If, from the outset, the Athenians were—as Thucydides tells us they were—“precise and exacting” in collecting the phóros on offer from their allies and if they demanded that those who had promised ships actually provide them, it was because they were convinced that the Mede would someday attempt to return. If, moreover, “contrary to” what Thucydides calls “established custom,” they ruthlessly attacked Naxos when she sought to withdraw from the Delian League and even subjugated the city for the purpose of making of her a deterrent example, it was arguably because, by the time of that city’s rebellion, they knew that the Persians were already in the process of mounting an attempt to restore to Xerxes son of Darius the mastery over the sea that he had inherited from his father.¹¹

A Challenge to Cimon’s Policy

There was one prominent Athenian who appears to have regarded Lacedaemon as a far greater threat to Athens in the aftermath of the battles of Plataea and Mycale than Persia, and he was a man to be reckoned with. During the war, Themistocles had been the greatest champion of Athenian-Spartan cooperation; and, in his dealings with the Lacedaemonians, he had been a paragon of good judgment, diplomacy, and tact.¹² Afterward, however, when the Mede had retreated from Hellas and the islanders had been liberated from the Persian yoke, he had turned on a dime, as we have seen—shamelessly exploiting the prestige and goodwill he had earned at Salamis in an effort to fool the Spartans while the Athenians rebuilt the walls that had hitherto protected their town, then brazenly asserting Athens’ capacity in the postwar world to manage her own affairs and look after the welfare of Hellas as a whole.

The walls about the Peiraeus, which Themistocles had the Athenians finish with great care immediately after their completion of the city walls, were in part designed for the same purpose. Themistocles understood that the Persians could not return until and unless they regained the maritime hegemony, which is why he insisted at this time that his compatriots build twenty additional triremes a year; and he recognized that the Athenians needed a proper fortified harbor for quartering and repairing their triremes. This is the argument advanced by the ambassadors he dispatched at this time to Lacedaemon.¹³ The Athenian statesman also recognized that, if the Mede ever did regain full control over the sea, the Peiraeus would be useless to the Athenians. What those walls could do, however, was afford the Athenians a place of refuge should the Lacedaemonians and their Peloponnesian allies stage an invasion of Attica by land. As long as Athens controlled the sea, food could be imported, and his fellow citizens could hold out. “The Peiraeus,” Thucydides reports, Themistocles “thought more useful to the Athenians than the city up-country. Time and again, he urged the Athenians to go down there if they were overpowered on land and withstand all of mankind with their ships.”¹⁴

Themistocles did not stop at this. He attempted to thwart Spartan ambition at every turn. A year or two after persuading his compatriots to fortify the Peiraeus, for example, he was Athens’ delegate at a meeting of the council of the Amphictyonic League, which convened twice a year, once in the fall and again in the spring. As we have seen, it was forbidden that a member of this league destroy another member or cut her off from fresh water, even in time of war—which is why Themistocles objected when the Lacedaemonians proposed the expulsion of those cities which had not joined the alliance against the Mede. Plutarch tells us that he feared that—if the Spartans succeeded in excluding the Argives, who had dodged joining the Hellenic League while maintaining friendly relations with the Persians, as well as the Thebans and Thessalians, who had openly medized—they would secure for themselves control of the league and make of it an instrument for their domination of Greece. In consequence, he drew attention to an exceedingly awkward fact—that only three of that ancient league’s members were among the thirty-one cities listed on the tripod at Delphi as having resisted Xerxes’ invasion. It would be “a terrible thing,” he reportedly argued, “if the rest of Hellas was excluded from the treaty and the league council was left to the two or three greatest póleıs” in Hellas. It was this challenge to their hegemony on the Greek mainland, we are told, that “most gave offense” to the Lacedaemonians and caused them to turn with a vengeance on the Athenian they had once so revered.¹⁵

After abruptly reversing course and presenting himself as a defender of the Hellenic polities that had medized, Themistocles may have taken an additional step of a similar character. At some point, almost certainly after the Persian withdrawal, Alexander I, king of Macedon, presented himself at the Olympic Games, applied for inclusion, and was acknowledged as a Hellene. It is exceedingly hard to see how the medizing monarch of what was regarded as a barbarian kingdom could have secured recognition in this fashion had he lacked firm support from Athens, which had in the past honored him as a benefactor and named him her próxenos; and there is no Athenian who could have been a more effective advocate on his behalf at this time than the architect of the Hellenic victory at Salamis—who was, we know, lionized in 476 at the first Olympic Games subsequent to the great war.¹⁶

The Spartans may have had additional reasons for fearing Themistocles and even for loathing the man. The son of Neocles appears to have had more in mind than a mere restriction of the Spartan sphere of influence to the Peloponnesus; and, if Plutarch is to be trusted, he was prepared to be ruthless in the extreme. In the year in which Leotychidas led an army into Thessaly in his capacity as the Hellenic League commander, the Athenian statesman tipped his hand. The circumstances deserve attention.

There is reason to suspect that Leotychidas’ troops traveled initially by sea. This was the mode of conveyance employed in 480 when a Spartiate named Euainetos son of Karenos journeyed with just such a force to the Gulf of Magnesia and then marched on through Thessaly to the vale of Tempe in a futile attempt to prevent the Achaemenid army from entering Greece from Macedonia. Moreover, we are told, there was a winter, not long after Xerxes’ departure from Hellas, in which the Hellenes lodged a fleet at Pagasae on the northern shore of that same gulf. The only occasion known to us when it would have made sense for such a fleet to sojourn in so remote a place was that of Leotychidas’ Thessalian campaign; and, given the burden that the Athenians were shouldering in the ongoing struggle against the Mede in the Aegean, the odds are excellent that most of the triremes involved in this particular venture were supplied by Aegina along with Corinth, Megara, and the other members of the Peloponnesian League. If the Athenians were there at all, it was to keep up appearances. Their aim—that of Cimon, certainly, but surely that of Aristeides as well—was to maintain the alliance with Lacedaemon while continuing the battle with Persia themselves. We do not know who was the Athenian commander on this occasion, but Themistocles was present at Pagasae, as was his former opponent Aristeides. Both may have been generals, and the latter may have been the commander in charge.

In 479 or 478, on an occasion in which Themistocles contemplated a venture that required secrecy and dispatch, he had informed the Athenians that he had a scheme in mind, requiring both, which would be of advantage to them; and they in turn had appointed his erstwhile rivals Aristeides and Xanthippus to vet his proposal. Something of the sort reportedly took place on this occasion at Pagasae as well. Themistocles is said to have concocted another such plan. The Athenians had him divulge it to Aristeides; and, when Themistocles suggested to his counterpart that the allied fleet be burned, Aristeides purportedly responded to his compatriots that “nothing could be more advantageous” to Athens than his comrade’s proposal. Then, he added that “nothing could also be more unjust.” Thereupon, Themistocles was instructed to desist, and desist he did.¹⁷

We do not know whether the Spartans ever got wind of Themistocles’ scheme, but this does not matter. They were acquainted with the man. They had worked closely with him. They knew him all too well. Most important, they recognized his capacities. They stood in awe of Athens’ Odysseus, and they sensed his hostility—even if, at this time, they may not have quite fully plumbed its depths. His response to their proposal that Medizers be expelled from the Amphictyonic League had told the tale. To counter him, those who favored maintaining cordial relations with Athens looked to Cimon son of Miltiades. In those days, there were no permanent ambassadors living abroad to look after the interests of their cities. Instead, the various communities in Greece chose from among the citizens of the communities with which they intended to maintain relations one or more próxenoı to function in something like the manner of a modern vice-consul. This was the post of honor that the Lacedaemonians conferred on Cimon at this time, and he signaled his gratitude and delight soon thereafter by naming one of his twin sons Lacedaemonius.¹⁸

The Spartans chose wisely and well. In the mid- and late 470s, Cimon was ascendant. We do not know the details but there is reason to suppose that, in this and in much of the succeeding decade, he went out as general every year to lead the Delian League fleet against the Mede and that—in his systematic attempt to rid the Thracian coast, the Hellespont, and the Anatolian coast of Persian garrisons—he enjoyed considerable success. If revenge against the Mede was what the Athenians craved, as they surely did, Miltiades’ son gave them that revenge and enabled them to taste and savor it.

Themistocles—who had, as we have seen, incurred his compatriots’ distrust and resentment in the aftermath of the battle of Salamis—was by way of contrast yesterday’s man. He had little in the way of accomplishment that was new to offer and could only hearken back to his achievements in the increasingly distant past. It was, moreover, one thing to try to persuade the Athenians that they needed to fortify their city and the Peiraeus. It was one thing to tell them that they could not entirely trust the Lacedaemonians, the Aeginetans, the Megarians, the Corinthians, and the other Peloponnesians. They were not saps. This much they instinctively understood, and Aristeides, Xanthippus, and no doubt Cimon as well were fully on board. It was another thing, however, for Themistocles to try to persuade his compatriots that their main ally in the recent war against the Mede was really their enemy.

Panhellenic sentiment and a seething hatred of the barbarians who had for a time deprived them of their lands and who had in the process torn down their temples and destroyed their city, their villages, and their homes—these stood in Themistocles’ way. Fear played a role as well. The son of Neocles evidently thought the Mede a spent force. On land, the Persians were inferior to the Greeks. Their archers could not penetrate the armor that the Greek hoplites wore and the capacious shields they bore, and their infantrymen could not stand up to the Greek phalanx with its wall of interlocking shields and its ranks eight men deep. This Themistocles had seen with his own eyes at Marathon, and he was probably present as well at either Plataea or Mycale when the hoplites of the Hellenes shoved their way through a wall of wicker shields set up by the Persian troops and made mincemeat of the dedicated spearmen bearing small shields and the shieldless archers doubling as spearmen on the other side. On the sea, where he had masterminded the Greek victory at Salamis, Themistocles had apparently come to think the Persians inferior as well. At Mycale, as he knew, they had not even dared to contest the supremacy of the Hellenes on that element. It was Themistocles’ conviction that, if the Athenians and their allies in the Delian League kept the allied fleet in good repair, they had little to fear.¹⁹ His compatriots, who had suffered grievously at the hands of the Persians, lacked Themistocles’ confidence.

In consequence, when the struggle over policy finally came to a head, the son of Neocles was at a grave disadvantage. With an eye to reminding the Athenians of that statesman’s achievement at Salamis, Phrynichus could write and stage The Phoenician Women among the tragedies put on at the City Dionysia, and this he did—almost certainly in March 476 when Themistocles, as his chorēgós, is known to have defrayed the cost of producing his plays. Aeschylus could do the same four years thereafter when, at the same festival, he staged The Persians with financial support from the younger of Xanthippus’ two attested sons—a newcomer to public life named Pericles. But neither tragedian could save their friend.²⁰

There was considerable irony in the outcome—for Themistocles was hoist on his own petard. In the 480s, when he had been intent on preparing the Athenians for a war with the Mede that only he foresaw, he had appropriated a legal instrument, designed for fending off tyranny, which had been forged twenty years before but never actually used. The law in question provided for a procedure by which the Athenians could, if circumstances merited it, vote in assembly to hold on a specified day two and a half months later what came to be called an ostracism—which is to say, a referendum in which, if a quorum of six thousand voters showed up to cast a ballot in the form of a potsherd or óstrakon with a name scratched on it, the public figure who garnered the most votes would be banished temporarily from Attica for a ten-year period. In this fashion, without doing violence or lasting injustice to the man or his family, one could end, at least for a time, the political career of someone of great stature thought to be a danger to the city who had not yet, as far as anyone knew, committed any crime.²¹ This instrument Themistocles recast by using it to settle a great policy debate; and, in the wake of the battle of Marathon, he effected one by one the ostracism of those most prominent at Athens who had hitherto favored appeasing the Mede.

First and foremost among those forced to go abroad was Hipparchus son of Charmos, who was a kinsman of Hippias, the erstwhile Peisistratid tyrant who had led the Persian forces to Marathon. After him came Megacles son of Hippocrates, the leader of the Alcmeonid clan, and then an as yet unidentified kinsman of his. In subsequent years, the ostracized included a number of other prominent figures associated in one way or another with that clan—such as Xanthippus son of Ariphron, who had married one of Megacles’ sisters; and Aristeides son of Lysimachus, who was a fellow demesman of Megacles and had in days gone by been an ally of his uncle Cleisthenes.²²

That which began as an expedient seems quickly to have become an ordinary feature of Athenian political life. In the 470s—to judge by the surviving óstraka, which number well over ten thousand—ostracisms took place with some frequency. We know, for example, that the Alcmeonid Megacles son of Hippocrates was sent abroad a second time and that, in the year of his second ostracism, óstraka were cast against Cimon, Themistocles, and a certain Callias son of Cratios who hailed from Alopeke, the deme where Megacles and Aristeides resided. We are told that the treatment meted out to Megacles was visited as well upon Alcibiades son of Cleinias—a prominent figure who bore a Spartan name and inherited a position as one of Sparta’s próxenoı at Athens, whose grandfather had been a close ally of the Alcmeonid Cleisthenes, and whose son Cleinias would later marry Megacles’ daughter Deinomache. Xanthippus’ elder son Ariphron at one point received a handful of votes, and there were a great many others who at one time or another received honorable mention—among them Leagros son of Glaucon; Menon son of Menandrios; the general Myronides son of Callias; Themistocles’ friend Habronichus son of Lysikles; Hippocrates son of Anaxileos; Aristeides son of Lysimachus; and Callias son of Hipponicus, a hereditary próxenos of the Lacedaemonians, known for his great wealth, who is said to have been among Aristeides’ kinsmen. We are not, however, well enough informed to be able to sort out whether the contests in which these individuals came under fire arose from policy disagreements or were rooted in nothing more serious than the personal rivalries that were an enduring feature of Greek life. It may be telling that among the surviving óstraka cast against Megacles in this period are a number which accuse him of luxury, greed, and sexual misconduct but not one that casts aspersions suggestive of differences of opinion.²³

In the 480s, as we have seen, policy differences had trumped personality. Moreover, in the course of mounting a series of campaigns in the 480s for the ouster of Hipparchus, Megacles, Xanthippus, Aristeides, and the like, Themistocles and his associates had branded at least some of them “friends of the tyrant.” Some they had also charged with Medism.²⁴

At the end of the 470s, as a consequence of his own sudden about-face regarding the Persian peril, Themistocles himself became vulnerable to a similar smear; and, turnabout being fair play, there is likely to be something to the report that, at this time, his motives were impugned and someone emerged to charge in court that the man responsible for Xerxes’ defeat at Salamis had himself in the interim become a Medizer. If so, however, nothing came of the criminal charges.²⁵

Politics is, nonetheless, a rough and ugly business; and lodging charges of this sort and arguing the case would certainly have served the political purpose of softening up Themistocles as a target. Soon thereafter—in the spring of 472, 471, or 470, when it had already become abundantly clear that the Mede really did intend to challenge Athens once again for dominion over the sea—the debate over policy was thought to be settled; and, naturally enough, it was Themistocles, not Cimon, who was on this occasion ostracized and sent abroad for a ten-year term.²⁶

A Prince on the Bosporus

There remained one rather large fly in the ointment. In 477, Pausanias the regent had been tried at Sparta for Medism and for abusing the allies, as we have seen. At some point—probably some months after he was acquitted on the first count, found guilty on the second, and had paid his fine—he left Lacedaemon. He purportedly did so on his own and without permission from the ephors. But we know that there was a faction backing him at Sparta, and he almost certainly acted with the connivance of the ephors who took office in the year after his trial. Otherwise, it is hard to explain why the son of Cleombrotus was issued a primitive code machine called a skutálē, a transpositional cryptograph devised by the Lacedaemonians for encoding and decoding confidential dispatches, which they reserved for the use of commanders and diplomats sent abroad on official business.²⁷ Their aim in conducting what amounted to a semi-clandestine venture must have been to hedge Sparta’s bets while maintaining what those experienced in covert operations now call “plausible deniability.” In this fashion, the authorities could secure for Lacedaemon a strategic foothold abroad without provoking an open breach with Athens. They could also open up communications with the Mede, and on the home front they could appease those among Pausanias’ partisans who favored making peace with the Persians and turning on Athens.²⁸

In keeping with this surmise concerning his mission, Pausanias first journeyed to Hermione on the Saronic Gulf. Then, from there, in a trireme not owned by Lacedaemon, he made his way back to Byzantium, where—at some point not long after Cimon had collected the allied fleet, then set off for Eion—he was received into the city as her liberator, honored as her refounder, and treated as a hero of sorts. It was from here that he is said to have renewed his dalliance with the Mede.²⁹ His immediate aims in doing so overlapped with the divers aims that can be attributed to the authorities back home and to his Lacedaemonian partisans, but there is reason to suspect that the son of Cleombrotus had ambitions and a personal agenda all his own.

Late in 478 or early in 477, when Gongylus the Eretrian fled to Xerxes with the Persian notables captured by Pausanias when he took Byzantium, he is said to have carried with him a letter from the Spartan regent to the Great King, indicating that their release was a gift to the Achaemenid monarch from its author and a token of his eagerness to marry into the royal family of Persia and to subject Lacedaemon and Hellas to the Great King. Pausanias asked only that Xerxes dispatch to western Anatolia a man of trust with whom he could closely work.

It was at this time that Xerxes sent his father’s much younger cousin Artabazus son of Pharnaces to Dascyleium to take over from Megabates the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia. This Artabazus was, by all accounts, the perfect man for such a job. He was intimately familiar with Hellas and the Hellenes. He had accompanied Xerxes on his long march into and out of Greece. After conducting his master to the Hellespont in 480, he had turned back and besieged Potidaea—a Corinthian colony situated astride the narrow isthmus connecting the Pallene peninsula in what we now call the Chalcidice with western Thrace on the mainland, which had rebelled in the wake of Salamis. Then, in 479, he had commanded a Persian army that had fled intact from the debacle at Plataea. Even more to the point, while in Boeotia, he had tried to persuade Mardonius that the proper way to defeat the Hellenes was not to stage a military confrontation. He had urged him, instead, to employ gold as a means for corrupting their leaders and sowing division within their ranks.

With Artabazus, the Achaemenid monarch is said to have sent to the Spartan regent a letter in reply, thanking him for his benefaction, politely ignoring the proposal for a marital alliance, and indicating that he had instructed Artabazus to do everything in his power to help him achieve his stated aim. This, we are told, is what the new satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia did by providing Pausanias with subventions on a considerable scale.³⁰

Among scholars, these reports have for understandable reasons aroused a modicum of skepticism bordering on outright incredulity. Among other things, they say that Thucydides, our most authoritative source, is almost certainly in error in supposing that an exchange took place between Artabazus and Pausanias prior to the latter’s initial return to Lacedaemon. For this, there was, they insist, insufficient time. It would have taken Gongylus six to thirteen weeks to make the journey with his charges to Xerxes’ court at Ecbatana or Susa. It would have taken Artabazus a similar span of time to make his way back from that court to Dascyleium near the Propontis in Asia Minor—and, in the interim between these two journeys, a week or more would have been needed for deliberation. By that time, Pausanias would have been long gone. Even, they add, if the initial message was conveyed with dispatch via Persia’s remarkably efficient pony express, the timetable would have been implausibly tight.³¹ If there is anything at all to the stories told concerning the Spartan regent’s dealings with the minions of the Mede, some argue, those that involve Artabazus must be located, after Pausanias’ trial and partial acquittal, in the six- or seven-year period in which the Spartan regent held court at Byzantium.³²

These arguments would be dispositive or very nearly so were it established that, in late 478 and early 477, Xerxes was ensconced at Susa, where Persian monarchs tended to spend the winter months, or in a royal palace at Ecbatana, Babylon, or Persepolis. There is evidence, however, strongly suggesting that, at this time, the Great King of Persia was still in Asia Minor, and it is tolerably likely that Artabazus was either with him or still in command of a Persian army stationed elsewhere in Anatolia. In his Anabasis, Xenophon mentions in passing that after Plataea, when he headed home from Sardis, Xerxes paused nearby at Celaenae on the Lydian border with southern Phrygia to fortify the citadel and construct a palace. Such a venture was bound to take some months, if not, in fact, a year or more. Major construction projects cannot be accomplished overnight. If, then, Xerxes was tarrying at Celaenae in the fall of 478 and the winter of 477, as seems likely, the letter that Pausanias is said to have dispatched with Gongylus of Eretria at some point after the end of the campaigning season in 478 could easily have been in the Great King’s hands within a few days, and Artabazus could have presented himself at Dascyleium with Xerxes’ reply in hand in well under a month.³³

Among the lurid tales told by Thucydides, moreover, there is one set of claims advanced that almost certainly does deserve credence—for these particular charges were based on public conduct visible to all. As we have noted, late in 478 or early in 477, after Gongylus had fled but while the Agiad regent was still in charge of the Hellenic League fleet, Pausanias began to put on Persians airs. This modus operandi reappeared with a vengeance after Pausanias’ return to Byzantium,³⁴ when Artabazus was certainly in charge at Dascyleium, and the two men were in a position to have extensive dealings with one another.

The reports concerning Pausanias’ mode of conduct—if, as I think, they are accurate—should give us pause. For they suggest that there really was something amiss with the man. The harshness with which he handled Lacedaemon’s allies in 478 and 477 may well have been a common enough Spartiate trait—a natural concomitant of the rigors associated with the Lacedaemonian agṓgē and of the overweening pride instilled in those who survived it. There was, as Aristotle argues, something beast-like about the upbringing or paıdeía that young Spartans were made to endure, and the son of Cleombrotus was by no means the last adult Spartiate to display such qualities.³⁵ But Pausanias’ adoption of Persian dress and of the practices of the Achaemenid court—this was, indeed, peculiar; and it was, to say the least, inconsistent with Lacedaemonian mores and manners. Moreover, the same thing can be said with even greater emphasis regarding the Spartan regent’s decision, probably in 478/7, to commit an act of gross impiety—by appropriating, for his own use, a great bronze bowl already dedicated by someone else at the sanctuary of Poseidon located on the cliffs overlooking the entrance from the Bosporus to the Black Sea; and by having inscribed on it an epigram (which a visitor in the late fourth or early third century could still read), in which the general victorious in the battles that had taken place at Plataea, on Cyprus, and at Byzantium boasted of his own prowess [aretḗ] and described himself in ominous terms as “the ruler [árchōn] of Hellas extensive in territory.”³⁶

So inconsistent was Pausanias’ public conduct with Spartan customs and ways that it lends credence to what might otherwise be regarded as an outlandish supposition: that, like his father’s half-brother Cleomenes, the young man had, in fact, become unhinged and that, as a consequence of his megalomania, he had come to harbor ambitions which could not be realized within the framework of the existing Spartan regime. We should, in sum, be open to the possibility that the bizarre tales told concerning Pausanias and his dalliance with the Mede were by and large true.³⁷ The Spartans certainly came in time to think them so.

Cimon, who had no desire to cross the Lacedaemonians, appears initially to have kept his distance and to have left Pausanias to his own devices. He no doubt heard complaints concerning the Spartan’s brutal mistreatment of the Byzantines, and he cannot have been ignorant of the man’s entanglement with the Mede. But he also must have sensed, even if his xénoı—his guest-friends—in Lacedaemon gave him no warning, that the Spartan regent was on a semi-official mission and had protectors and partisans at home—as, Thucydides and Aristotle make clear, he did. In about 470, however—as a consequence of the Persian naval buildup unfolding in the Levant—the Athenian commander decided that he could no longer afford to avert his gaze, and he intervened and ousted the Medizing Spartan from the strategic city that he controlled.³⁸

Apart from the stories told about his misconduct and his assumption of Persian airs, we hear very little about Pausanias’ long sojourn in Byzantium. There is, however, a snippet in a pseudepigraphical letter—composed half a millennium or so thereafter as part of an epistolary novel focused on Themistocles’ last years—which may cast some light on the question. We cannot identify the author or authors of these letters. But about them we can say two things: that whoever was responsible for their composition was exceedingly well-informed and aimed at verisimilitude, and that the letters themselves betray a close familiarity with accurate contemporary reportage now lost. The particular letter in question purports to have been written to Pausanias by Themistocles while the latter was in exile at Argos. “I hear,” the pertinent snippet reads, “that you rule the Hellespont almost in its entirety up to the Bosporus and that you are making an attempt on Ionia as well.”³⁹

Were this letter our only source of pertinent information, it would probably be appropriate to give it little, if any, weight. But there is another snippet—this one in Plutarch’s Life of Cimon—which derives from the memoirs, the Epıdēmíaı or Sojourns, penned by Cimon’s much younger contemporary and admirer the pro-Athenian Chian tragedian, lyric poet, philosopher, and well-born man-about-town Ion son of Orthomenes.⁴⁰ It reveals that, when Miltiades’ son recovered Byzantium, he drove the Mede not only from that city but from Sestos in the Thracian Chersonnesus as well. There, in the years in which Pausanias held sway, Xerxes’ minions appear to have made dramatic inroads from their stronghold at Doriscus and also from Dascyleium and even Lydia. We are told, in fact, that, on this occasion, the forces of the Delian League captured a host of Persian notables, who fetched a pretty penny when Cimon offered them for ransom by those of their kinsmen and friends who were residing in Phrygia nearby and, at a greater distance, in Lydia as well.⁴¹ The presence of these Persians in both cities suggests not only that Byzantium on the Bosporus and Sestos on the Hellespont were governed in common at this time but also that Pausanias really did rule the little empire described in the Themistoclean epistle—and that he did so in close cooperation with the Mede.

It is no less revealing that, when the son of Cleombrotus was finally expelled from Byzantium, he did not return to Lacedaemon. Instead, he made his way to Colonae in the Troad, a settlement of Aeolic origin which lay slightly inland in a region of Anatolia not at this time likely to have been included in the Delian League. There, moreover, where, we must presume, the satrap of Hellespontine Phrygia held sway, Pausanias lingered for some months, apparently under Artabazus’ protection. Then, when a new board of ephors came into office at Sparta, those in charge summoned him home by sending him a brief message on a strip of leather—which he could read if he wrapped it about the skutálē issued to him when he left for Hermione six or seven years before. In this message, the son of Cleombrotus was bluntly told that, if he did not return home forthwith, he would be declared a public enemy of Lacedaemon.⁴²

There had been, we must suspect, a shift of sentiment at Sparta—occasioned by the naval buildup then known to have been taking place in the Levant, and reflected in the composition of the new board of ephors. It would not do to have a Spartan regent colluding with the Mede at a time when the only thing that stood between Lacedaemon and a second Persian invasion was the fleet fielded by Athens and her allies in the Delian League.

Trireme Warfare

The year of reckoning, if my interpretation of the indicators is correct, was 469; and Miltiades’ son was intent on fighting fire with fire. If there was to be all-out war, he did not want it taking place in the Aegean. Audacity could be, he knew, an advantage. The Phoenicians and the others who manned the Achaemenid monarch’s fleet had been whipped at Salamis, and they were apt to be afraid of what was in store for them if they battled the Hellenes at sea a second time. It was far better, Cimon supposed, that the Greeks confront the Great King’s fleet in waters he regarded as his own. Boldness would buck up their morale. A display of confidence might subvert the morale of their foe.

The fleet of the Delian League was made up of triremes. By this time, ships of this sort had been in operation in the Mediterranean for well over a half century—if not, in fact, for a considerably longer interval. Their deployment in large numbers in the 520s by Cambyses, Great King of Persia, had constituted a military revolution. For, when supported by merchant galleys able to carry provisions and by the even more capacious sailing vessels that the Greeks called “round ships” or “bathtubs [gaúloı],” they could sweep the seas of the lesser ships—the thirty-man triaconters and the fifty-man penteconters—that had ruled the deep in days gone by; and they could do something else as well that had never been done before. They could convey overseas an expeditionary force—made up not only of footsoldiers but also of horses and of cavalrymen to ride them—and this they could do on a scale sufficient for this force to constitute an army capable of projecting power from the sea ashore as never before.

In the mid-490s, Darius’ triremes had ferried infantrymen, horsemen, and their steeds from the base he maintained on the Aleion plain near Tarsus in Cilicia across to Cyprus to good effect. Even more to the point, however, in 490, his generals Datis and Artaphernes had conveyed from Aleion all the way across the Aegean to Marathon in Attica an army and a unit of cavalry of a size sufficient, at least in principle, for the conquest of Athens. Moreover, in 480, Xerxes had mounted his invasion of Greece as a combined operation. On land, his army marched from Sardis to the Hellespont, which it crossed via two bridges of boats built from Abydos in Anatolia to a point near Sestos on the European shore. Thereafter, it marched up the Thracian Chersonnesus, then west through Thrace to Macedon, and south through Thessaly to Thermopylae and on to Boeotia and Attica—while his fleet, bearing thousands of marines and horsemen, made its way along the Thracian and Hellenic shores in tandem with a host of horse transports and of merchant ships carrying supplies.

Figure 3. The Olympias, Naval Tradition Park, Palaio Paliro, Greece (Photograph: Χρήστης Templar52, Wikimedia Commons. Published 2019 under the following license: “The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.”).

The Spartans knew that this could happen again—as did the Athenians and their principal general Cimon. The battle in prospect was to be no minor affair. Fortunately—thanks to the wisdom that Themistocles had displayed in and after the 480s and to that evidenced by Aristeides when, in the course of founding the Delian League, he had made its constituent cities responsible for providing triremes or for paying for their provision—the Athenians and those of their allies who had chosen to provide ships had triremes of their own in considerable numbers, and by this time they had had ample experience in their handling. Landlubbers in 480 many of them may have been. Landlubbers they were no more.

This was no mean accomplishment. The trireme was a triple-banked shell, shaped like a wine glass. In the manner of the double-banked penteconters that had preceded it, it sported a prow equipped with a bronze-sheathed ram. Its ram, however, had not one, but three horizontal cutting blades capable of slicing through the hull of virtually any vessel equal or smaller in mass that it struck amidships or in the stern. Triremes varied in size—from about one hundred to one hundred thirty feet long and from about fifteen to eighteen feet wide. When fully manned, those known to have been deployed by the Hellenes were powered by one hundred seventy oarsmen facing the stern, each plying a single oar fourteen feet in length, using as a fulcrum a tholepin to which the oar was tied by a well-greased leather oarloop. These rowers, who slid back and forth on cushions of fleece so that they could leverage the muscles in their legs as they pulled the oars, were organized on three levels—with at least two-thirds of them enclosed within the hull and unable to see their own oars.

Some of the triremes in the Persian fleet may have been considerably shorter than those deployed by the Hellenes, and these will have employed fewer oarsmen. In the Phoenician galleys, which sported majestically high bulwarks lined with shields, the third of the rowers on the top level were also situated inside the trireme—some think, at the topwale. In the ships deployed by the Athenians in the late fifth century, however, these oarsmen were perched on outriggers mounted above and outboard from their colleagues on the topwale. Whether those employed by the Athenians and their Hellenic allies at the battles of Artemisium and Salamis in 480, at Mycale in 479, and in the struggle with the Mede in 469 were of a similar character, we do not know.

Within a trireme, there were officers on deck to decide on and direct the ship’s course, to dictate and sustain the tempo of the oarsmen’s strokes, and to convey to them the orders of the trierarch awarded command. There was also a shipwright on board and a purser, and there were specialists trained in handling the sails as well as archers and marines fully equipped for combat—enough to bring a Greek boat’s full complement to two hundred men at a minimum and its weight, when loaded with all of the pertinent equipment and personnel, to something on the order of fifty tons. When fully manned—as it had to be if it was not to be underpowered, slow, hard to maneuver, and unlikely to survive a contest—this newfangled ship was a formidable fighting machine.

Figure 4. Section of Athenian trireme carved in stone; fragment of Lenormant relief, ca. 410–400 B.C. (Acropolis Museum, Athens; Photograph: Marsyas, Wikimedia Commons, Published 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 Generic).

Rowing such a vessel required, as a Phocaean commander told the Ionians on the eve of the battle of Lade in 494, that one embrace “hardship” and “toil.” This was the price, he rightly insisted, that one had to pay for liberty. It, in fact, took extraordinary grit, determination, discernment, and discipline on the part of a great many men for a trireme to be operated in battle to advantage. The trierarch in command had to be a man of fine judgment—quick to sense danger, and no less quick in recognizing opportunity—and he had to have an intimate knowledge of the capacity of his ship and crew and of their limits. The helmsman [kubernḗtēs] stationed immediately below the trierarch’s perch at the stern was in charge in the trierarch’s absence and had to possess the same capacities. He also had to be skilled and precise in his use of the vessel’s two steering oars. Everything depended on his ability to maneuver the galley into a position from which it could strike and not be struck in return, and an error or even a measure of imprecision on his part could quite easily be fatal to all concerned. When the trireme was in motion the archers and marines on deck had to remain seated lest they destabilize the vessel. In consequence they had to be able to shoot or hurl projectiles with great accuracy from an uncomfortable, sedentary position. With the help of a flutist [aulḗtēs] located amidships keeping time with his instrument, the exhorter [keleustḗs] situated on the gangway near the stern and his colleague, the bow-master [prōrátēs] stationed near the prow, had to drill the oarsmen in synchronizing their strokes and in rowing forward now at this pace, now at that. These two also had to teach them how to reverse themselves on the benches and back water without missing a beat, and they had to instruct them in the procedure of partially shipping their oars on command at a time when a few seconds’ delay on their part could result in the oars on one side being sheared off, in some of the men wielding them being killed by whiplash, and in the galley itself being left entirely disabled. In time of battle, moreover, these two officers had to convey the helmsman’s orders quickly and accurately, and throughout they somehow had to sustain the morale of men whom they were driving quite hard.

The oarsmen themselves had to learn endurance and close coordination. This was no small thing, as scholars first came fully to appreciate in the late 1980s and early 1990s—when, under the guidance of an intrepid group of British classicists and naval experts, a Greek shipyard built a replica of a trireme; and, every other summer, volunteers gathered from far and near to take the Olympias, as she was called, to sea and put her through a series of trials. There was, these scholars discovered, a great deal to endure, and everything depended on a precise synchronization of the rowers’ strokes.

On journeys, for example—when the sea was becalmed, when the wind blew from the wrong quarter or was insufficient—the oarsmen of ancient times had to row steadily for hours and hours. When the fleet was arranged for battle in line abreast, they had to row gently forward and then back water and do this again and again to maintain their galley’s position in the formation. In the battle itself, when maneuvering for advantage, they had to be able to turn the vessel on a dime; and, when closing in for a kill or fleeing attack, they had to drive the vessel forward at maximum speed. If, at the end of such a sprint, their ship succeeded in ramming at high speed an enemy trireme, they had to back water at a moment’s notice to prevent the two vessels from being locked together in such a manner that the infantrymen seated on board the damaged ship could attempt to board and seize their own. Alternatively, if the trierarch’s aim was to approach an enemy vessel head-on at full tilt, then narrowly dodge a collision and coast along the enemy boat’s starboard or port side with an eye to shearing off half of its oars and rendering it defenseless and incapable of maneuver, the oarsmen on the vulnerable side of his own trireme had to be able to partially ship their oars at a moment’s notice while their colleagues on the other side of the vessel simultaneously lifted theirs out of the water. For the rowers in a trireme to be able to do all of this with maximum effectiveness, they had to drill and drill and drill once more. Following orders and close coordination had to become second nature for each and every one of them.

Prior to the battles of Lade and Artemisium, the rival fleets had practiced a complex maneuver called the dıékplous. This maneuver consisted, as the etymology of the Greek term suggests, in the galleys belonging to one fleet “rowing through and out” between the ships of the rival fleet. This each galley may have done, as one scholar supposes, with an eye to shearing off the oars on one side of one of the two enemy ships as it passed between. Alternatively, the crews may have “rowed through and out,” as most others presume, with the aim of repositioning their ships behind the enemy fleet where each could then swing around [anastróphē] and at high speed ram a hostile trireme in the stern, as the Phoenicians had apparently become wont to do. Or they could have carried out this maneuver, as yet another scholar argues, in order to swing around and position themselves at the stern of an enemy trireme, poised for boarding and seizing the vessel. There is also a fourth and, I have argued, more likely possibility: that the dıékplous was a preliminary maneuver designed to open up all three options, leaving it up to the trierarch to select which of the three modes of attack best suited the occasion and the capacity of his crew.⁴³

At Artemisium, the Persian commanders had initially attempted to take advantage of their fleet’s superiority in numbers and in skill. To this end, their triremes swarmed around the Greek ships and carried out a maneuver which appears to have been called the períplous—in which they surrounded the Greek fleet and rowed one behind another around it in a circle, gradually reducing the circumference so that the enemy triremes would be forced back upon one another and eventually run afoul of one another in such a manner that their helmsmen would lose control over their craft. The Greeks responded by forming, when a prearranged signal was given, what was called a kúklos—engaging in an exceedingly difficult maneuver that they must have frequently practiced in advance. Each trireme backed water so that their sterns formed a circle. Then, as the Persian fleet tightened the períplous and drew nearer, the Greek ships, when a second prearranged signal was given, suddenly shot forward en masse and attempted to hull the ships of their opponents.

On this occasion, after closely observing the conduct of both sides, Themistocles had concluded that the Hellenes were likely to lose if they fought in the open sea—where the ships of the Mede, above all, the triremes deployed by the kings of Tyre and Sidon, were apt to outmaneuver the less experienced crews manning the Greek ships. In consequence, he later sought to lure the Persians into the narrow waters separating Attica from the island of Salamis, where their superiority in numbers would give them no advantage and where crowding would result if they deployed more ships than could operate effectively in the limited space available. This turned out to be a stroke of genius—for the Great King’s admirals took the bait; the Greeks, who were familiar with these waters, managed within their confines to ram and disable or board and seize a great host of ships; and the Persian triremes frequently ran afoul of one another. This battle eventuated in a great massacre, which broke the back of the barbarian mariners’ morale.⁴⁴ Eleven years would pass before the navy of the Great King was ready once again to confront the Hellenes. By then, as we shall soon see, the Persians had already recovered Cyprus.

Eurymedon

The Greeks whom the Great King’s fleet did confront on this later occasion were, if anything, more experienced and better prepared in seamanship than the crews deployed by the Mede. For eleven years, they had had the run of the sea, and every summer they were out and about, landing marines, ousting Persian garrisons, and patrolling the Aegean and the waterways leading to the Euxine. The Ionians had never been landlubbers, and it could no longer be said of the Athenians, as the saying went, that they knew neither how to read nor how to swim.⁴⁵

The triremes they rowed were altered as well. Those crafted on Themistocles’ behalf prior to Salamis had been only partially decked, and they carried no more than four archers and ten marines [epıbátaı] up top. The Athenian statesman’s aim had been to make the ships as maneuverable and as light as possible; and he rightly calculated that adding thirty more epıbátaı on deck of Iranian stock, as the Persians had done, would make their vessels, which had a draft of no more than three and a half feet, top-heavy and unwieldy, especially if the seas were at all rough.⁴⁶

Cimon opted, nonetheless, to maximize the number of epıbátaı on deck. To this end, he had had full decks added to the Themistoclean triremes still in service. This change he is likely to have effected well before 469. Themistocles’ chief concern had been the Persian fleet. In the years following 479, however, the Athenians and their allies had devoted themselves almost entirely to combined operations—aimed at raiding the country districts and at descending on cities and strongholds, assaulting and scaling their walls, and ousting their garrisons—and, for this, they had needed hoplites, light-armed troops, and specialists of various sorts in considerable numbers as well as mariners.⁴⁷

When word came that the Persians had once again launched a great armada, Cimon began by conveying a sizable fleet, amounting to some two or three hundred triremes, to Cnidus on the Triopian peninsula of Asia Minor. From there the Athenians and their allies rowed east between the island of Rhodes and Caria on the mainland of Anatolia, then along the Lycian shore past the Chelidonian isles to Phaselis, a Greek city still loyal to the Great King. By dint of ravaging the city’s territory and assaulting her walls, Cimon managed, with the intercession of Athens’ Chian allies, to persuade her citizens to make a contribution to the Hellenic cause of ten talents (well over a quarter ton) of silver.⁴⁸

The Persians he found awaiting him in force at the mouth of the Eurymedon River near the Pamphylian city of Aspendus. The surviving reports are not entirely in accord. Ephorus tells us that they had six hundred ships; Phanodemus, that they had three hundred fifty. Ephorus indicates that the commander of the fleet was Tithraustes and that Pherendates commanded the Persian infantry. Aristotle’s nephew Callisthenes claims that the overall commander was Ariomandes, the son of Darius’ spear-bearer and brother-in-law Gobryas and the brother or half-brother of Mardonius.

Callisthenes reports as well that this Ariomandes was awaiting reinforcements, in the form of eighty additional Phoenician triremes (which were on their way from Cyprus), and that for this reason he was exceedingly eager to delay the encounter. Initially, we are told, he tried to withdraw up the Eurymedon. Cimon, however, whose fleet was outnumbered, saw his opportunity and set off in pursuit. For a time, the Persian navy in the narrows put up a fight. But, as at Salamis, it was bested.

The enemy triremes still intact then fled to the shore; and their crews sought refuge with the Persian infantry, which marched down to the strand. Cimon then had his crews back their triremes onto the shore nearby, and the marines on board poured out of these vessels at the stern, as was their wont. Upon arrival, they formed up in a phalanx, and a great infantry battle took place. As at Marathon, Plataea, and Mycale, it ended with a Greek victory and a great massacre of the Mede.

We are not provided with the details. Given the circumstances and the limited space available for maneuver, however, the naval battle is apt to have been a melée in which some ships were rammed and hulled and others were boarded and seized. The infantry conflict was almost certainly a reprise of what had happened at Plataea and Mycale (and probably Marathon as well)—where, initially, the Persians had set up a wall of wicker shields, from behind which their archers, who doubled as spearmen, had fired arrows at the approaching Hellenes; and the Greek hoplites, in turn, after shoving their way past the wall of shields, had on the other side massacred the handful of dedicated Iranian infantrymen bearing small shields as well as the much larger body of shieldless archers who had dropped their bows and taken up spears. What we do know is that Cimon captured and reportedly demolished two hundred triremes, and we are told that he destroyed thereafter the eighty Phoenician triremes rowing over from Cyprus.⁴⁹

By all accounts, Eurymedon was a great victory for the Greeks. A treasure trove of booty was captured in the Persian camp. Those who died there on Athens’ behalf were buried along the road leading from the Academy to the city, where stone slabs bearing inscriptions listing their names were set up. Dedications were made at Delphi and elsewhere, and the proceeds that remained were used by the Athenians to construct the southern wall of their acropolis—while, with his own funds, Cimon, who had garnered great wealth as a consequence of his many victories, laid out in the swamplands stretching in an arc from the bay of Phalerum to the Peiraeus foundations for the Long Walls that would later provide protection for the road linking the city of Athens with the sea.⁵⁰

We can be confident that Cimon’s victory at the battle of Eurymedon took place at some point between 470 and 465. We cannot, however, be certain that it happened, as I have suggested, during the campaigning season of 469. Our only reason for preferring that date is the fact that a signal honor was conferred on Cimon and his fellow generals the following spring and that we know of no other event in this period that would have justified so magnificent a gesture. At the City Dionysia that year, when the ten generals entered the theater and poured a libation as was the custom, Athens’ eponymous archon intervened and requested that they take the requisite oath and serve themselves as judges of the contest about to take place. This was a memorable event for more reason than one. That year, quite possibly for the very first time, Themistocles’ friend and supporter Aeschylus failed to take the prize—which was awarded to a young tragedian on his first outing. The victor, who may well have been a partisan of Cimon, was a young poet named Sophocles.⁵¹