CHAPTER 3

Shifting Sands

If you can look into the seeds of time,

And say which grain will grow and which will not,

Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear

Your favors nor your hate.

BANQUO, IN MACBETH

EURYMEDON was not as great and glorious a battle as Salamis or Plataea. Nor was it as important. There was, to begin with, a marked difference in scale. There were a great many more Persian and Greek triremes deployed in the engagement off the Attic coast, and there were a great many more soldiers on both sides involved in the conflict in Boeotia. Scale mattered. It always does—but, in this case, it did not matter nearly as much as the fact that the battles at Salamis and Plataea turned the world upside down, defying all expectations, while the sea battle and that on land at Eurymedon served merely to reaffirm and confirm the result achieved a decade before.

This confirmation and reaffirmation was, in and of itself, highly significant, however—for the victory achieved by the Athenians and the other members of the Delian League at Eurymedon was decisive in a fashion in which Salamis and Plataea were not.¹ In the aftermath, it seemed not at all likely that the Persians would try again. In consequence, Eurymedon was a battle more than sufficient to alter the course of subsequent events. If Plataea and Mycale created new standards of values, new moods, and new atmospheres in the eastern Mediterranean, Eurymedon made it abundantly clear that it was to these that everyone would have to conform.

Among the first to recognize and accommodate himself to the new situation was Xerxes himself. Now, for the first time, he saw that the game was up—that, its great wealth and vast resources notwithstanding, there was little, if any, chance that Persia could in the foreseeable future recover its supremacy at sea and once again project power in the Aegean. Salamis may have seemed a fluke, but Eurymedon demonstrated that it was anything but. The Hellenes now possessed a superiority in naval warfare that the Persians were not likely to be able to overcome; and—thanks to Eurymedon—Marathon, Plataea, and Mycale were now seen as similarly decisive. In infantry battles of the sort apt to take place on plains in the rough mountainous or semimountainous country in the Balkans and along the coasts of Thrace and Anatolia, Greek hoplites formed up eight men deep in a phalanx behind a wall of broad shields were a great deal more effective than were the dedicated infantrymen bearing small shields and the archers doubling as spearmen who operated in close cooperation with the cavalry of Persia’s Great King.

Achieving a Modus Vivendi with Persia

We do not know when the negotiations began. But it is striking that we hear nothing about an effort on the part of the Athenians and their allies to recover Cyprus at this time. The Greek cities on that island had lent their support to the Ionian revolt in the early 490s. They had rallied to the banner of the Hellenes in the spring of 478 when Pausanias had visited the island; and, after Eurymedon, there was nothing that the Great King or anyone else could have done to prevent Cimon from landing hoplites on the island and once again taking control.

On the two occasions in the past when the Greek cities on the island had rebelled, the Mede had vigorously asserted himself, and in time he had regained dominion. This he had reason to strive for. As everyone understood, Cyprus was strategically vital to the Achaemenid monarchy. If it fell to the Greeks and they fully consolidated control, Cilicia, the Levant, and the Nile basin would be vulnerable to assault, and it would only be a matter of time before the Egyptians—who were, even in the best of circumstances, restive under the Great King’s yoke—would revolt and seek the aid of the Hellenes.²

Cyprus was far less important to the Greeks. It was not strategically vital, and it lay on the margins of the Hellenic world. There were, moreover, Phoenician as well as Greek settlements on the island. Of course, its acquisition did promise to bring with it one quite considerable advantage. The Mede would never risk his fleet in the Aegean if the Hellenes in his rear could launch a strike from the great island sitting athwart the coasts of the Levant and southern Anatolia. If, then, Cimon failed to seize Cyprus in the wake of Eurymedon, it was perhaps because he suspected that it would be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, for the Hellenes to sustain control over regions to any considerable degree populated by non-Greeks. It certainly could be argued that, with the acquisition of Phaselis, the Delian League had more or less reached its natural limits. Cyprus was a prize, to be sure. But it may, in Cimon’s opinion, have been more valuable as a bargaining chip than as an actual possession; and it is this fact that explains why he exercised restraint and enlisted the services of a man who had done him a good turn two decades before.

Hereby hangs a tale. As a young man, prior to the beginning of his military career, Cimon had found himself in dire financial straits. His father Miltiades, after the victory at Marathon, had persuaded the Athenians to back him in an ill-fated attempt to liberate the Cycladic póleıs from Persian control and extract from them the silver needed to bolster Athens’ defense. In the aftermath, his enemies—led by Xanthippus son of Ariphron—had brought Miltiades to trial on a charge of treason, arguing that he had misled the Athenians and contending that he must have been bribed by agents of the King of Kings to withdraw from Paros, as he had quite precipitously done; and Miltiades, who had been wounded on the island and was too ill at the time to be able even to speak in his own defense, lost the case. He was fined fifty talents of silver, a whopping 1.425 tons—which may have been the estimated cost of the expedition, and which was an enormous sum for an individual to have to cough up. When he was unable to come up with the money on short notice, Miltiades was jailed; and there, after gangrene set in, he died, leaving it to Cimon, who was still in his early twenties, to pay off what remained of the fine. Had it not been, we are told, for his negotiation of the marriage of his younger sister Elpinike to the richest man in Athens, Miltiades’ son might never have been able to pay the debt.³

The figure said to have rescued Elpinike’s older brother from this predicament was Callias son of Hipponicus, the scion of an aristocratic family no less ancient and distinguished than the Philaid clan to which Cimon himself belonged. After Eurymedon, when the son of Miltiades was at the height of his power and influence, there is reason to believe that he generously returned the favor this man had once done for him by singling him out for a signal honor and sending him to Susa to negotiate a cessation of hostilities with Persia’s Great King.

We do not know who initiated the bargaining. But the fact that Cimon assiduously kept his hands off Cyprus suggests that he had negotiations in mind from the outset; and from this we can infer that he is likely to have made the first move. The Athenian was, after all, the victor. It was only appropriate that he make the initial friendly gesture. It was the polite—it was the diplomatic—thing to do. It would have cost him nothing. But for a man charged by the great god Ahura Mazda with responsibility for world conquest who styled himself the King of Kings to abase himself by making such an overture—this would have been exceedingly unpleasant and politically awkward, especially in the wake of a devastating military defeat. Put simply, it would have been a great humiliation, and it would have been perceived as such. The art of diplomacy has as its focus making it as easy and as painless as possible for the other side to give ground. This much Cimon surely understood.

The terms of what modern scholars call the Peace of Callias were dictated by geopolitical circumstance. The Hellenes left Cyprus to the Mede and agreed not to attack his lands; and the Great King agreed in turn to leave to the Greeks Thrace, the Hellespont, the Bosporus, the Aegean, and the Hellenic, Carian, and Lycian cities on the Aegean and Anatolian coasts of Anatolia west of the Eurymedon River and the Chelidonian isles. He promised to launch no attacks on these communities, and he pledged, moreover, to send neither his navy nor his armies anywhere near these cities and to limit the size of any fleets he might have his minions construct.

If there were negotiations in the wake of Eurymedon—as, I believe, there were—it probably took a year or more to work out the details. It was, as we have seen, a six to thirteen-week journey from Ephesus on the Aegean coast to Susa, and it took no less time to return. In the interim, there was no doubt a great deal of pomp and circumstance to be endured, and negotiations require patience. It is a reasonable guess that, sometime late in 468 or early in 467, everything was settled in a manner more or less to the satisfaction of both parties and that Cimon squared it with the Spartans, who had every reason to welcome Persia’s withdrawal from the scene. As was the Persian practice, Xerxes presumably provided direction to his satraps as to how they were to conduct themselves—and that may be all that he did. But it is also possible that, from on high, he later issued a formal edict spelling out the terms, which he pretended, justice required that he, as Ahura Mazda’s viceroy on earth, dictate to all concerned. Such were the protocols by which the Achaemenid Great Kings sought to save face and uphold the pretense that everyone was marching to the beat of the great god’s drum.⁴

It is highly unlikely that the accord negotiated by Callias was publicly promulgated as a treaty, formally bringing to a close the Persian Wars.⁵ Had there been solemnities of this sort, a decade or so after Mycale, Herodotus might well have treated them as the denouement marking the end of his tale; and, in the fourth century, Theopompus of Chios would not have been so quick to denounce as a fabrication the story told by Callias’ descendants.⁶ Thucydides has rightly been accused of neglecting to tell readers interested in understanding the geopolitical situation of Athens and Sparta in this period much of what they need to know concerning Persian affairs.⁷ But, this propensity notwithstanding, had there actually been a formal peace, he would surely have mentioned it in his highly abbreviated account of the inexorable growth of Athenian power during the Pentekontaetia. Moreover, had there been a proper peace, at Athens a fifth-century inscription recording the terms would in all likelihood survive in whole or in part. Callias’ handiwork is apt to have been what we would today call an executive agreement; and it was, I suspect, analogous to what came, in the age of firearms, to be called a cease-fire. It signaled the end of open conflict. It embodied a modus vivendi. It was not a genuine treaty of peace.

It could hardly have been otherwise.⁸ The Achaemenid kings were Zoroastrians of a sort. In keeping with their political theology, Xerxes’ invasion of Hellas was a holy war—akin to those launched by the early Muslim caliphs. As the royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid monarchs make clear, the Great King of Persia was under an obligation to subdue the earth in its entirety, to put an end to commotion, and to restore to the sway of the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda the lands which lay within the realm of the evil spirit Ahriman. He could not make a formal peace with the foe. Behind the scenes he could make any species of temporary accord he wished, but he could not publicly acknowledge and treat with another power as his equal. He was, after all, the King of Kings.⁹

The Athenians were in a similar bind. The Delian League had been formed to liberate the Greeks, to take revenge on the Mede, and continue the war. If they made a formal peace and renounced this quest, the alliance would lose its raison d’être, and it would be apt to come apart at the seams—which was not what the Athenians had in mind. They profited from the alliance. They had come to depend upon it for income and employment, and they knew perfectly well that its collapse would invite a resumption of war on the part of the Great King. It was in everyone’s interest that there be a cessation of hostilities and that it not eventuate in a treaty proclaiming peace and amity between the former foes.

There were some at Athens who were less than fully satisfied with the results—some who had their eyes on larger prey, on Cyprus, for example, and on Egypt beyond; and some who were merely hostile to and jealous of Cimon. But, at this time, they were in no position to stand in the way of an implementation of the peace by the general who had gone from strength to strength and who had quite recently won at Eurymedon a magnificent double victory, on two elements in one day. It was elsewhere, we must suspect, that there was genuine bitterness and discontent. The Persians were not used to losing. Theirs was, in principle, a universal empire. Expansion was its sole rationale, and it was only natural that they blame their losses and the contraction of their empire on their leader—Darius’ pathetic, feckless son.

Given his penchant for egregious and imprudent personal misconduct, it is hardly a surprise that, in due course, Xerxes fell prey to assassination. Many a self-indulgent Roman princeps suffered the like in similar circumstances. But this Great King’s domestic travails probably counted for little in this regard when compared with his perceived failures as an empire-builder. The Gallo-Roman historian Pompeius Trogus was surely correct, when, writing in the time of Augustus, he claimed that, after repeated defeats at the hands of the Hellenes, Xerxes came to be held in contempt by his own people. Indeed, it makes perfect sense that, after this Great King had tacitly acknowledged Persia’s defeat by ordering a cessation of hostilities and abjectly accepting the humiliating terms proposed by the Athenian Callias, the Chiliarch in charge of court protocol—who controlled access to the monarch, commanded the royal bodyguard, and functioned as the Persian equivalent of the Roman principate’s praetorian prefect—should play a prominent role in the conspiracy that brought him down. No one could be better placed to witness and reflect on what Justin, following Pompeius Trogus, rightly calls “the decline day-by-day-by-day in the majesty of the kingship.”¹⁰

Within the Persian empire, the battles of Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale, when viewed in retrospect half a century thereafter, may well have seemed like a mere bump in the road. At the time, however, these defeats are likely to have been seen as a catastrophe by those in the know. For the self-indulgent, out-of-control son and heir of Darius the Great, these battles, his failure to mount a successful expedition soon thereafter, the gradual erosion in subsequent years of Persia’s defensive position along the Anatolian coast, the annihilation of his navy and massacre of his army at Eurymedon in 469, and the man’s disgraceful acceptance of a humiliating peace thereafter were arguably fatal.

Thasos

In Hellas, the decision at Eurymedon and the negotiation of a settlement with Persia in its aftermath were also sufficient to create new standards of values, new moods, and new atmospheres to which everyone really did have to conform. The Athenians were themselves among the first to adjust to the new situation.

Prior to this time, they had exercised a modicum of self-restraint in their dealings with their allies. They had, indeed, forced Carystus (and, no doubt, induced other free riders) to join the Delian League. They had been rigorous in requiring that the league’s members provide each year the ships and the phóros that they had pledged, and they were ruthless in crushing Naxos when that island polity failed to deliver on that promise and sought to withdraw from the alliance. They had also looked after their own interests, installing cleruchies—made up of Athenian citizens selected by lot from among those with modest resources—on territory they had seized from barbarians at Eion, on Lemnos and Skyros, and no doubt elsewhere as well. But, hitherto, they had not, as far as we know, trespassed on the possessions of fellow members of the league.

This they now did—and with a vengeance. Thasos, which had been colonized by Paros in the early seventh century, may have been the wealthiest member of the Delian League. There were gold, silver, lead, and copper mines scattered all over this exceedingly mountainous island, and there were rich marble quarries as well. Thasos was, moreover, famous for her wine, which was marketed far and wide. In addition, the pólıs drew revenues in gold from the Scaptesyle mine on the mainland of Thrace nearby. Early on, almost certainly in cooperation with her mother city, she established trading posts, such as Galepsos, Oisyme, Neapolis (modern Kavala), and Pistyros, in the peraía—the extraterritorial domain—that the two póleıs had seized along the Thracian coast between the Strymon and the Nestos estuaries; and there is good reason to suspect that, prior to the coming of the Mede, Eion on the Strymon and even Berge, some ten miles upstream, had been theirs as well. By means of these emporia, the citizens of Paros and Thasos and the cities to which they belonged profited handsomely from the gold and silver extraction taking place at a variety of locations in the interior. Herodotus estimated that, at the time of the Ionian revolt, Thasos’ annual revenues varied between two and three hundred talents in gold—which is to say, between 5.7 and 8.55 tons.

During the Ionian revolt, the Thasians had leveraged this wealth to build a sizable fleet of triremes for the city’s defense. To house them, they had constructed a military harbor equipped with shipsheds, where the galleys could be drawn out of the water for recaulking and repair. This harbor they had then fortified against both tempests and armed assault by building breakwaters and moles and forging a great chain with which to block the narrow entrance left open to the sea. At this time, they had also strengthened the town’s walls, which then stretched to a circuit more than two and a half miles in length. The enceinte they built was of such a quality that, on the landward side, much of it is still intact to a considerable height today, more than two and a half millennia after its construction.¹¹

This great effort notwithstanding, when Mardonius passed through with a fleet and army in 492, the Thasians calculated the likelihood that they would be able successfully to resist, then despaired, and knuckled under. Moreover, the following year, when their neighbors accused them of plotting a revolt and they were called upon by the Great King himself to tear down a section of their city walls and dispatch their fleet to the base that the Persians were establishing at Abdera, they did so without protest. To Xerxes’ subsequent invasion of Hellas proper, they then lent their support.¹²

We know little about the history of Thasos after the battles of Salamis, Plataea, and Mycale. There is every reason, however, to suppose that the city quickly regained from the Mede much of the territory on the continent that she had once controlled as well as the revenues attendant on their possession. Within the Delian League, the Thasians must have been among the major providers of ships. When Cimon besieged and captured Eion on the Thracian coast to their west, the citizens of this island polity must have been overjoyed, and they must have welcomed the Athenian generals’ gradual elimination of the other Persian garrisons nearby in Thrace and in the Hellespont—though they cannot have been pleased that Athens kept Eion for herself.

Map 5. The Thraceward District

If—as a consequence of the peace negotiated after Eurymedon by Callias—Maskames or a successor was forced to relinquish the Persian stronghold at Doriscus to their east, as seems likely, this, too, the Thasians will have cheered. But when, at about the same time, the Athenians and their allies began preparations for the establishment of a colony up the Strymon River, they became disturbed. Mount Pangaeum with its rich mines lay nearby. And when these same Athenians challenged their right to the Scaptesyle mine on the mainland near Neapolis and interfered with the trading posts they maintained on the Thracian coast, the Thasians quite naturally took it ill.

Had this been done in the mid- or late 470s—when a Persian resurgence was in the offing, when the Mede was still perceived as a clear and present danger, and Maskames remained in control of Doriscus—the Thasians might have grumbled bitterly among themselves and acquiesced. After Eurymedon, however, and Callias’ negotiation of a cessation of hostilities, their perceptions underwent a change; and, as was predictable, they began to have second thoughts. They, too, recognized that they had to adjust their policy in light of the new circumstances in which they found themselves. The Delian League seemed no longer as much of a necessity as it once had seemed. Athens’ hegemony was no longer as welcome as it once had been, and her abuse of the prerogatives attendant on leadership was regarded not as an unfortunate imposition, but as an intolerable affront. In consequence, in 465, the Thasians chose to withdraw from the league and fight for what had long been their property.¹³

We know very little about the Thasians’ revolt. They may have taken up the question of Athenian conduct in one of the regular meetings of the league assembly on Delos. If so, they got nowhere. As later rebels would complain, that assembly was rigged. The votes were not weighted. Every member, no matter how tiny, had an equal say. Most of the cities in the Delian League were exceedingly small and desperately in need of protection against their more powerful neighbors. They would support Athens through thick and thin.¹⁴

Even if they did not take up the matter with the Delian League as such, the Thasians are likely to have approached the Mytilenians, the Chians, the Samians, the Byzantines, the various communities on Rhodes, and the other póleıs of size and wealth which contributed ships. At one time or another, every one of these cities would stage a revolt. Had they ever coordinated efforts, joined forces, and acted in concert, they might have succeeded. But this they never did. Early on, they were with reason not fully persuaded that the Persian peril had evaporated; and, on this particular occasion as well, no member of Athens’ alliance is mentioned as having offered Thasos aid and comfort. In fact, the only pólıs known to have responded to a plea on her part for help was . . . Lacedaemon.

The magnitude of the Athenian victory must have impressed the Spartans as well. It impressed everyone—as did Xerxes’ willingness to ratify the outcome. The strategic situation had altered. It was now possible to imagine that the Persians were more or less off the geopolitical map, at least as far as the Hellenes were concerned; and, as one would expect, the Lacedaemonians were among those who paused to reconsider. The astonishing strength on the high seas displayed by Athens, which had seemed to many Spartans more a consolation and comfort than an offense in 480 and the 470s, they were now more apt to regard as an affront. This was one of the reasons why, as Thucydides informs us, in 465, some time after Athens had defeated Thasos at sea, “the Lacedaemonians”—almost certainly, on this occasion, the “little assembly” consisting of the ephors, the gérontes, and the two kings or their regents—secretly promised to come to the support of the islanders and mount an invasion of Attica.¹⁵ There were, as we shall soon see, other reasons as well—powerful reasons—why Sparta came to think Athens a threat. Eurymedon was not the only battle of significance to take place in the early 460s. These years marked the beginning of a period, in which, as Thucydides laconically remarks, the Spartans were “constrained by wars at home.”¹⁶

Although the Athenian historian is exceedingly reticent and casts next to no light on these particular conflicts, piecing together the evidence for what happened in the Peloponnesus in the years to which he refers is, in fact, essential for understanding the divers calculations that governed Sparta’s subsequent conduct and that of Athens as well. In both cities, in later years, there were statesmen who were haunted not only by a remembrance of what had actually happened at this time but also, and even more emphatically, by ruminations concerning what had very nearly taken place. Here again Themistocles looms large.

A Lion in Winter

If, when Cimon arranged for the ostracism of Themistocles in the spring of 472, 471, or 470, he calculated that this would settle matters once and for all, he erred grievously. The son of Neocles was a man bigger than life. At Athens, he may have become an object of distrust—a prophet without honor in his own land. Elsewhere, however, the victory over the Mede that he had achieved at Salamis had made him a celebrity. In 480, the Spartans honored him as they never had honored anyone and never would honor anyone again. Four years later, when Themistocles entered the stadium at the Olympic Games, we are told, the audience stood up to applaud. Thereafter, they reportedly neglected the contestants and focused their gaze steadily on him, pointing him out to strangers with expressions of admiration and approval.¹⁷

It is easy to see why they did so. Pausanias’ success at Plataea was a signal achievement, but it did not beggar the imagination. Everyone knew that, if the Mede could be lured onto ground unsuitable for cavalry, he could be defeated. At Marathon, after the Persians had loaded most of their steeds on horse transports, the Athenians had massacred their infantry. The Greek victory at Salamis had, however, seemed impossible. The Phoenicians were the sea dogs of the archaic world, and the Hellenes were greatly outnumbered. Moreover, most of the Greeks rowing and even those officering the triremes at Salamis were rank amateurs. Five years before, apart from the Corinthians, the Aeginetans, and the Athenians, the Hellenic communities that would fight in the straits between Salamis and Attica had possessed hardly any ships of this sort.

Themistocles was not just admired for his tactical brilliance, however. Men also stood in awe of his strategic foresight. He had anticipated Xerxes’ invasion, and he had seen to it that the Athenians built the requisite ships. The historian Thucydides was a kinsman of Cimon.¹⁸ By all rights, he should have been the man’s partisan. But when he had occasion to record Themistocles’ death, the historian intimated that, as a statesman, the son of Neocles was far superior to the son of Miltiades. “Themistocles was a man,” he wrote,

who in a fashion quite reliable displayed strength of nature, and in this regard he was outstanding and worthy of greater admiration than anyone else. By his own native intelligence, without the help of study before or after, he was at once the best judge in matters, admitting of little deliberation, which require settlement on the spot, and the best predictor of things to come across the broadest expanse. What he had in hand he could also explain; what lay beyond his experience he did not lack the capacity adequately to judge. In a future as yet obscure he could in a preeminent fashion foresee both better and worse. In short, by the power of his nature, when there was little time to take thought, this man surpassed all others in the faculty of improvising what the situation required.¹⁹

Of no one else did Thucydides (or anyone else of remotely comparable stature in antiquity) ever speak with commensurate awe and respect. Themistocles was, in the Athenian historian’s estimation, the greatest of statesmen.

When he left Athens after his ostracism, Thucydides tells us, Themistocles moved to Argos. In two of the pseudepigraphical letters composed half a millennium thereafter, the exiled statesman is depicted as having reported that he has come under pressure from the Argives to assume public office as a general or even as the presiding officer of the whole city. On the face of it, this might seem absurd. Ancient Greek póleıs were exceedingly jealous of the prerogatives of citizenship. But, in the case of Themistocles, there might be something to it—for the man was a force of nature. Thucydides, who was in a position to know, also tells us that, while residing in Argos, Themistocles was in the habit of traveling throughout the Peloponnesus,²⁰ and we know that the years that followed close on his arrival at Argos were a time of trouble and peril in that great peninsula for the Lacedaemonians. Moreover, it is clear that, in these same years, the Spartans came to hate and fear the man as never before. Had he merely operated as a tourist during these years of enforced absence from his fatherland, it is hard to see why the Lacedaemonians would have even cared.²¹

Sparta’s strength derived in part from the discipline her hoplites displayed on the field of battle. That strength was multiplied many times over by her ability to leverage the manpower of her neighbors—above all, the Corinthians and the Eleans as well as the Tegeans, Mantineians, and Orchomenians of Arcadia, and their adherents within that upland region, not to mention the Phliasians, Sicyonians, Epidaurians, Troezeneans, and Hermioneans. The alliance system that Lacedaemon had constructed within the Peloponnesus with painstaking care in the sixth century was the bastion of her security. It was also, however, quite fragile. For the cities that Sparta commanded were genuine allies, not subjects. Moreover, like all Hellenic póleıs, they possessed an agonistic culture likely to give rise to factional strife and bitter disputes concerning public policy; and within the Peloponnesus lay another powerful pólıs—named Argos—profoundly hostile to Lacedaemon, watching and waiting, hoping to lure away her allies, wrest from her the hegemony, and liberate the Messenians.

Map 6. The Peloponnesus

In later years, one Corinthian leader would sum up Sparta’s strategic position elegantly by comparing her to a stream. “At their sources,” he noted, “rivers are not great and they are easily forded, but the farther on they go, the greater they get—for other rivers empty into them and make the current stronger.” So it is with the Spartans, he continued. “There, in the place where they emerge, they are alone; but as they continue and gather cities under their control, they become more numerous and harder to fight.” The prudent general, he concluded, will seek battle with the Spartans in or near Lacedaemon where they are few in number and relatively weak.²² The structure of Sparta’s defenses was fragile in the extreme, and the Lacedaemonians understood from the beginning what history was eventually to reveal: that it took but a single major defeat in warfare on land to endanger the city’s very survival.

As Thucydides intimates in his eulogy for the man, Themistocles was also aware of the location of Sparta’s Achilles’ heel, and this was why, after being ostracized, he accepted an invitation from three of his Argive guest-friends that he situate himself in Argos.²³ Given his predilections, he could hardly have come at a more auspicious time.

The Peloponnesus in Flux

In the decades preceding Themistocles’ extended sojourn at Argos, the situation within the Peloponnesus was exceptionally fluid.²⁴ For example, shortly before the battle of Marathon, when it came to light that the Agiad king Cleomenes had bribed the oracle at Delphi with an eye to ousting his recalcitrant Eurypontid colleague and installing as king someone else who was more pliable, he had fled to Arcadia—where, by sheer force of personality and his charisma as a sacral king, he managed to unite the Arcadians against Lacedaemon on a scale sufficient to persuade his compatriots to recall him from exile forthwith. We are also told that, at some point not all that many years prior to Xerxes’ invasion, the Tegeans were not on friendly terms with the Spartans. And yet, in 480, when Leonidas marched to Thermopylae, five hundred Tegeans accompanied him; and in 479, when the battle of Plataea took place, three times as many Tegeans presented themselves. In the latter battle, these men actually distinguished themselves as stalwart, courageous, and enthusiastic allies of the Lacedaemonians.²⁵

Mantineia deserves special attention as well. She was said to be the oldest and greatest pólıs in Arcadia. Her citizens were famous for their prowess in battle—so much so, in fact, that they were sometimes said to have invented the hoplite panoply—and they may well have been the first to treat hoplite warfare as a formal course of study, as was claimed. We are not told that, in the 490s, the Mantineians refused to rally in support of Cleomenes—which suggests that they, too, must have lent him their support. Like the Tegeans, however, they sent five hundred men to Thermopylae. But when the Lacedaemonians later summoned them to Plataea, they balked. They had ample warning, and the battle itself was fought weeks after they were supposed to show up. But they did not arrive until it was over.²⁶

A similar tale could be told about the Eleans, who did not present themselves until after the arrival of the Mantineians. That the citizens of these two important cities confessed that they deserved punishment and subsequently banished those responsible for their late arrival strongly suggests that—from the Spartan and, for that matter, the Hellenic perspective—something far more sinister than fecklessness was involved. Between them, these two communities were capable of fielding something on the order of six thousand hoplites.²⁷

The situation at Argos was also fluid. There had been an epoch, a century and more before Themistocles arrived in that city, when the Arcadians had been aligned with the Argives against Lacedaemon, and Argos had been the leading power within the Peloponnesus. In those days, the Argives had dominated the Argeia, the Argolic Acte, and much of the world beyond. After seizing Asine in the late eighth century, they had apparently asserted their presidency over the amphictyony of Apollo Pythaeus long based in that city; and, with this as a justification, they had extended their dominion over the Argolic Gulf in its entirety. From this position of preeminence, they had imposed obligations on cities as distant as Sicyon, Epidaurus, Troezen, and Aegina. At this time, the fertile plain of Thyrea and Cynouria to the south along the Aegean coast of the Peloponnesus had been in their grasp along with the island of Cythera opposite Cape Malea—and Sparta’s hold on Messenia had been tenuous.²⁸

From time to time, in and after the mid-sixth century, the Argives had mounted an attempt to regain their hegemony within the Peloponnesus, but to no avail. In about 494, at Sepeia, they had suffered a particularly severe setback, losing in battle something on the order of six thousand men—a larger number than are known to have been lost by a single city in any other battle in the classical period—and in the aftermath, we have reason to believe, the Spartans had refused to sign with them the customary thirty years’ peace.²⁹

In the wake of the massacre that took place at Sepeia, a woman named Telesilla is said to have organized the defense of the city walls, rallying the old men, the young, her fellow women, and the underlings attached to their households [oıkétaı] to wield whatever weapons they could find and fend off an assault. Herodotus, our most reliable source, makes no mention of this event. But he appears to be aware of this tradition, for an oracle he cites associates Argos’ defeat with a victory and an achievement of glory on the part of that city’s women.³⁰

It is a reasonable guess that the oıkétaı mentioned by Plutarch in his discussion of Telesilla’s achievement were drawn from the city’s substantial and downtrodden pre-Dorian population. In the aftermath of the battle, Herodotus tells us, there was a revolution at Argos, and the slaves [doȗloı] seized power. Aristotle has a different tale to relate. According to his report, the Argives were forced, after their defeat, to accept some of their períoıkoı into the ruling order. Plutarch confirms what we would in any case surmise: that those whom Herodotus’ aristocratic Argive informants disdainfully called doȗloı outsiders would be inclined to identify as períoıkoı; and he mentions that, because of a shortage of adult male citizens, the widows and young girls of Argos married these men.

A generation after this development, in the wake of the conflicts to which it gave rise, the citizen body of Argos appears to have been reorganized: a “tribal reform” was carried out on the model of those known (or thought) to have been instituted earlier at Lacedaemon, Corinth, Athens, Samos, Eretria, and Cyrene. In consequence, membership in the political community at Argos came to be redefined, in a manner guaranteeing the inclusion of the pre-Dorian population of the Argeia, either in terms of a citizen’s residence in a particular ward or village (as opposed to his membership in one of the three ancient Dorian kinship corporations and the fourth consisting of the pre-Dorian element in the population), or in terms of his assignment to a phratry of the enfranchised included within one of these four tribes.³¹

The catastrophe at Sepeia and Sparta’s persistent refusal to agree to a peace of extended duration help explain why Argos dodged joining the Hellenic coalition at the time of Xerxes’ invasion; why, without incurring the risks associated with sending soldiers to support Xerxes, it maintained exceedingly cordial relations with the Mede; why Sicyon and Phlius to the north of the Argeia and cities on its periphery near the Saronic Gulf or the Aegean, such as Epidaurus, Troezen, and Hermione, as well as the island of Aegina just off that coast, felt free to ignore the predilections of the Argives and join the Hellenic League; and why small póleıs deep within the Argeia near Argos itself, such as Mycenae and Tiryns, which had previously been answerable to that great city, were able to participate in the Hellenic League as independent communities.³² The absorption of the pre-Dorian population into the citizen body at Argos, which may have been a matter of military necessity in 494, also set the stage for a struggle that broke out years later when those whom Herodotus terms “the sons of the slain” reached maturity [epḗbēsan] and carried out a coup d’état that eventuated in an expulsion of at least some of the underlings promoted to citizenship.³³

By the time that Themistocles reached his intended refuge, Argos must to some extent have recovered from the blow dealt it at Sepeia. Almost a quarter of a century had passed, and a new generation had come of age. At Argos, there had never been a shortage of women able to bear sons. The demographic implosion that had eliminated the better part of a generation of Argive men and that had for a time crippled the city must have been largely past. The only obstacle to an Argive resurgence was the independence of cities within the Argeia which had once been her subjects.

It would be tempting to suppose that, at the time of Themistocles’ arrival, “the sons of the slain” had not yet driven out the períoıkoı and that his activities and those of the Argives within the Peloponnesus had a democratic cast.³⁴ The Spartans were, as we have seen, kaloì k’agathoí. As was only natural, they preferred the company of men like themselves; and, within their alliance, when they had an entirely free hand, they tended to promote oligarchy.³⁵ Athens was, by way of contrast, a democracy; and, all else being equal, the Athenians tended to promote that form of government.³⁶ During the great war between Sparta and Athens that sputtered on through most of the last third of the fifth century, the opposed predilections of these two rival hegemonic powers would occasion, within the cities that were up for grabs, bitter quarrels as well as bloody revolutions rooted in class differences and regime preferences.³⁷

Themistocles’ opponent Cimon was the scion of one of Athens’ leading aristocratic clans, as was his sister’s husband Callias. When the time came for him to marry, the former chose a wife from the no less distinguished Alcmeonid clan. In the process—by marrying Isodike, daughter of Euryptolemos son of Megacles—he not only put an end to a quarrel between the two families that had given rise in 489 to his father Miltiades’ trial and conviction. He also effected a political consolidation of Athens’ ancient aristocracy.³⁸ The Theban poet Pindar—who in this period wrote odes celebrating the accomplishments and family histories of great aristocrats victorious in the athletic contests at Olympia, Delphi, Isthmia, Nemea, and elsewhere—had occasion to sing the praises of Cimon and his family, of the Alcmeonids, the Spartans, and a distinguished Argive of Tirynthian ancestry named Theaios, who cannot have been one of Herodotus’ doûloı. But he did not in a similar fashion honor Themistocles, and there is no evidence to suggest that any of the poets who directly or indirectly singled out the son of Neocles for praise—such as Simonides, Phyrnichus, and Aeschylus—had a good word to say about the son of Miltiades.³⁹

A decade or so after Themistocles’ ostracism, those at Athens who are thought with some reason to have been his allies and who were similarly opposed to Cimon carried out a political reform in the teeth of the latter’s opposition that rendered Athens considerably more democratic than it had been in the latter’s heyday; and there is evidence, too often dismissed, suggesting that Themistocles and Aristeides had initiated the campaign that those junior to them later carried to a successful conclusion. The Areopagus—a council made up of Athens’ former chief magistrates, the archons, who were drawn from among the “fifty-measure men [pentakosıomédımnoı]” and the “cavalrymen [hıppeîs]” who made up the two wealthiest census classes in the city—appears to have been a great source of strength for Cimon and the other great families allied with him. The struggle to clip that body’s wings and the attempt to reorient Athens’ foreign policy may not in principle have been connected, but in the circumstances they came to be so in practice.⁴⁰

Within the Peloponnesus, only a handful of the cities possessed walls. Argos had them, as did Corinth. But the Spartans had none,⁴¹ and the same held true early on for Elis and for the póleıs within Arcadia—including Tegea and Mantineia—which consisted of dispersed villages and lacked fully developed urban centers. We know very little about the political and social development of these communities, but there is evidence suggesting that they tended in and after the late archaic period to drift in the direction of urban consolidation, democratic government, and local imperialism.

There are, for example, inscriptions showing that, three decades or more before the time of Themistocles’ ostracism, Elis had already become a democracy of sorts and that she was already then a power of some significance—ruling over a regional empire, modeled on that maintained by Lacedaemon in Laconia and Messenia, replete with dependent póleıs peopled by períoıkoı. Diodorus tells us that a synoecism—a consolidation of villages and the establishment of an urban center—took place there in 471/0, when Themistocles may already have begun to be active at Argos; and Herodotus reports that in his day the Eleans seized and sacked most of the cities in the region nearby to the south that came to be called Triphylia.⁴²

In a passage in which he confirms Diodorus’ testimony regarding Elis’ synoecism and specifies that it took place in the wake of the Persian Wars, Strabo adds that the Argives effected a synoecism of the five villages of Mantineia, and his phrasing suggests that this, too, may have taken place in the aftermath of the Persian Wars and that the Argives may also have had something to do with the synoecism of the nine villages of Tegea that he mentions next in the same passage. There is, moreover, evidence that Mantineia became a democracy at some point prior to 421; and—at Mantineia and presumably also elsewhere as well—there seems to have been a connection between urban consolidation and democracy and between dispersal into villages and the rule of the few.⁴³

This evidence is suggestive, but it is in no way dispositive. We know that Mantineia became a democracy. We do not know when. We have reason to believe that a synoecism took place at Elis in 471/0. We do not know whether Themistocles or the Argives had anything to do with it. We know that the Argives had carried out the synoecism at Mantineia, and there is reason to suspect that they may also have done the like at Tegea. But, apart from the fact that Mantineia was said to have been the oldest pólıs in Arcadia and to have been governed at some point under a moderate democracy, we have no firm evidence bearing on the question when either synoecism took place. All that we can say is that it is as easy to imagine as it is impossible to prove that Themistocles’ travels within the Peloponnesus had something to do with these developments.⁴⁴

It would, in any case, be a grave error to read the ideological polarization of late modernity back into classical antiquity. Democracy cannot have been the principal focus of Themistocles’ concerns in these years. This Athenian and those at Athens who supported him were surely favorable to democracy as such. But no one connected with Athens was intent on making of the city’s foreign policy an ideological crusade. Nor could the Athenians have afforded one. At this time, most, if not all, of their chief allies within the Delian League—including Chios, Samos, and Mytilene on the island of Lesbos—were oligarchies.⁴⁵

Themistocles and his allies had Sparta as their focus, and they were more than willing to cooperate with any Peloponnesian polity intent on resisting her hegemony. At Argos in particular, it cannot have much mattered to them whether the períoıkoı still possessed full political rights, and the odds are good that at least some of them were no longer so situated. In the twenty-three or more years that had passed since the disaster at Sepeia, the sons of the men killed there by Cleomenes had without a doubt come of age after having undergone the training and rites of passage associated with late adolescence [ephēbeía], and Herodotus’ choice of language suggests that by this time they must have seized control and that they must in some measure have purged the citizen body—though the epigraphical record shows that they did not reverse the tribal reform. It is hard to see why this would have mattered to Themistocles. The “sons of the slain” were far more likely to have been itching for revenge than to have sympathized with those responsible for the massacre of their fathers. If, after carrying out a tribal reform and embracing democracy at home, the Argives, with Themistocles’ help, staged synoecisms and promoted regime change elsewhere within the Peloponnesus, it was chiefly or even solely because the existing oligarchies were in league with Lacedaemon.⁴⁶

The Argives had two objects in mind—one local and immediate, the other further afield. For obvious reasons, they desperately wanted to reverse the verdict of Sepeia and regain full control of the Argeia and hegemony over the Argolid as a whole,⁴⁷ and they were also eager to recover Cynouria and supplant Lacedaemon as the leading pólıs within the Peloponnesus. For geopolitical reasons, however, the Argives had to attend to Arcadia first. They could not hope to regain Cynouria and replace the Spartans until they had recovered Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argeia and cowed Epidaurus, Troezen, and Hermione further afield in the Argolic Acte. But they could not assert themselves against these póleıs as long as the Lacedaemonians could march at will through Arcadia into the Argolid to support their clients there. To prevent this from happening, therefore, the Argives forged an alliance with Tegea, which sat athwart the main thoroughfare leading from Lacedaemon to the Argolid.⁴⁸

As Themistocles, the probable architect of this alliance, undoubtedly realized, the emergence of this axis was a development that the Spartans could not afford to ignore. From a military perspective, south-central Arcadia was for Lacedaemon the center of gravity. The Pamisos valley in Messenia, which lay to the west across Mount Taygetus from the Eurotas valley in Laconia, was the principal source of Lacedaemon’s wealth. The land there was fertile. It was well watered. But the helots who farmed that land for their Spartiate masters were a nation in bondage, more than capable of revolt, and Messenia was hard to reach. There were paths and even carriage roads across the Taygetus massif that the Spartans sometimes used, and the upkeep of these and other routes of communication was assigned to the two kings in their capacity as generals. But it was much easier for men with equipment and carts loaded with provisions to work their way around the mountain by marching north-northwest along its eastern flank, then west through the highlands of south-central Arcadia, and finally southwest over the Derveni pass into the Pamisos valley via the route followed by the modern road.

The Peloponnesus in Flux: A Timetable, 494–461

494	Sparta defeats Argos in the battle of Sepeia
Ca. 491	Cleomenes stirs rebellion in Arcadia
490	Helot revolt
479	Mantineia and Elis late for Plataea
Ca. 472–466	Themistocles sojourns at Argos, tours the Peloponnesus
471/0	Synoecism at Elis
	Synoecisms at Mantineia and Tegea? Possible Argive role
469	Battle of Eurymedon
Ca. 469	Argive-Tegean alliance
	Argos and Tegea battle Sparta at Tegea
468/7	First Peace of Callias
467/6	Pausanias executed for Medizing
466	Themistocles accused of Medism, takes flight from Argos
Spring 465	Settlement at Ennea Hodoi
	Rebellion of Thasos
Summer 465	Thasos defeated at Sea, appeal for Lacedaemonian support
	Secret Spartan pledge of aid, siege initiated at Thasos
Early August 465	Assassination of Xerxes
Late Summer 465	Execution of younger Darius, succession of Artaxerxes
Winter 465/4	Great earthquake and helot revolt at Sparta
	Mantineians, Aeginetans, Plataeans, Athenians come to Sparta’s aid
Winter–Spring 464	Artabanus’ coup d’état thwarted
	Artaxerxes repudiates first Peace of Callias
Spring, 464	Argos, Tegea, and Cleonae attack and defeat Mycenae
	Massacre at Drabeskos
464/3	Argive war against Tiryns begins
463	Battle of Dipaea
	Battle of the Isthmus near Mount Ithome
462	Cimon and the Athenians summoned to Messenia
	Thasos surrenders
	Ephialtes’ reform
	Cimon and the Athenians sent home from Messenia
462/1	Athens repudiates alliance with Sparta
	Athens forms alliance with Argos and Thessaly
461	Ostracism of Cimon

In ordinary circumstances, Tegea, which lay directly to the north of Laconia, exercised considerable influence over the districts of Arcadia to her west that bordered on Messenia. In the past, when the Tegeans had been allied to Lacedaemon’s Argive enemy, it had for obvious reasons been exceedingly difficult for the Lacedaemonians to sustain their hold on Messenia. It is no wonder, then, that the ephors dispatched the Spartiates and the períoıkoı of Laconia to Tegea—where, Herodotus tells us, a great battle was fought, pitting the Lacedaemonians against the adherents of this new and threatening alliance.⁴⁹

We do not know whether Tegea’s allies elsewhere in Arcadia, who may well have been numerous, rallied at this time to her defense; and we hear nothing of the Eleans or the Mantineians. As we have had occasion to remark, these last two communities had both been at odds with Lacedaemon in 479. If Diodorus’ chronology is to be trusted, the Eleans had just undergone a synoecism; and the Argives may recently have effected a synoecism at Mantineia. But Herodotus has nothing to say about the presence of either of these two peoples or that of anyone else, apart from the Argives, at the battle of Tegea—which would be quite telling and perhaps even dispositive were it not for his failure to mention “the Hellenes responsible for keeping Tegea free” and “the Athenians of great prowess who fell at Tegea,” whose deeds were celebrated in a poem said to have been composed by Themistocles’ friend Simonides. The presence of Athenians at this battle in numbers worth mentioning suggests that there were many at Athens who agreed with Themistocles’ analysis of their city’s strategic situation and who had volunteered to fight against the Spartans. As everyone no doubt recognized at the time, had the Lacedaemonians, in fact, lost this particular battle, it might well have sealed their doom.⁵⁰

Pausanias and Themistocles

Themistocles reached Argos in the late spring or early summer of 472, 471, or 470. Simonides died in 468/7.⁵¹ The odds are good that the battle of Tegea took place in 469 or in the spring of 468. It was, moreover, later in the latter year or in 467 that the Spartans are likely to have discovered for themselves what might well have been in store for them had they incurred defeat at Tegea.⁵²

When Pausanias returned from Colonae, he was reportedly thrown into jail. When he challenged his incarceration by offering to undergo a trial, he was released. But no trial took place—for, although his evident contempt for Spartan custom and his aping of the barbarians gave rise to suspicion, the man responsible for Hellas’ victory over Persia at Plataea had admirers. There were, moreover, those who thought that Lacedaemon really should reach an accommodation with the Mede, and the authorities lacked the level of proof required for the conviction of a figure of his stature. Even, we are told, when they were informed by certain helots that the Spartan regent was up to something with their fellows, offering the helots liberty and promising them citizenship if they joined him in an uprising and helped him accomplish his ends, they held back—for they were not about to convict or even try a citizen on the word of an underling.

But then Pausanias asked a slave of his named Argilus to convey a letter to Artabazus; and with an eye to the fact that none of the prior messengers had returned, this Argilus took the precaution of breaking the seal and reading his master’s letter. In it, among other things, he found instructions asking that its bearer be killed; and he brought the letter, which made reference to Pausanias’ arrangements with the Great King, to the ephors. Even then, Thucydides tells us, they were reluctant to act. So they had Argilus flee to the sanctuary of Poseidon at Taenarum as a suppliant, and there—when Pausanias came to attempt to persuade him to go on the mission and Argilus called him to account for the instructions in the letter—they contrived to listen in on their conversation.

It was only at this point that the ephors, after returning to Sparta and conferring, ordered the renegade regent’s arrest—and even then, if Thucydides is to be trusted, one in their number tipped him off, and he sought refuge in the temple of Athena of the Brazen House. There the ephors had him bricked in; and from there, when he was on the verge of starving to death, the authorities committed a sacrilege by having him dragged out to die. We are told that they considered throwing his corpse into the pit reserved for criminals and that they decided, instead, to inter him nearby. We are also told that the oracle at Delphi subsequently instructed the Lacedaemonians to rebury him where he died and to return to the goddess of the Brazen House two bodies to replace the one they took and that there they then dedicated two bronze statues in his stead.⁵³

This story—as told by Thucydides and elaborated on by others in his wake—is, to say, the least, bizarre; and, as one would expect, it has been a fruitful source of scholarly speculation.⁵⁴ One thing is, however, crystal clear: that, at Lacedaemon, Pausanias was a political lightning rod and that his opponents thought his elimination essential to the city’s well-being. This, in turn, suggests that we should not dismiss out of hand the report that he was conspiring with certain helots. Indeed, there is reason to suspect that it was at this time, in connection with Pausanias’ flight to the sanctuary of Athena Chalkiokis, that a number of these, known to have been party to his plot, fled as suppliants to the sanctuary of Poseidon at Taenarum—whence, in an act no less sacrilegious than that performed with regard to the renegade regent, they were dragged from the altars and massacred by the Spartans.⁵⁵ Moreover, as I have already had occasion to observe, what we know about Pausanias’ public conduct while in Byzantium lends powerful support to the suspicion that he really was a Medizer. In short, the tale told (or, as some suppose, taken over from an earlier source) by Thucydides makes a great deal more sense of what was publicly known about Pausanias’ conduct and about the response of the authorities at Lacedaemon than any of the alternative modern reconstructions. The Athenian historian was not, in any case, a man easily gulled.

It is also perfectly conceivable that the two letters said to have been found among Pausanias’ effects after his death, which Thucydides quotes verbatim, are genuine.⁵⁶ Pausanias may well have made a copy of the missive he sent Xerxes, and there is no reason why he should not have kept Xerxes’ reply. Their possession was no doubt dangerous—for, read in tandem, they provided proof of his dalliance with the Mede. But, by the same token, when read in tandem, they put him in a position to lure others into the plot they described. Moreover, the marriage proposal contained in Pausanias’ message to Xerxes is suitably awkward. It is just the sort of thing that a headstrong young man who has lost all sense of proportion would propose, and Xerxes’ response handles this presumptuous proposition with appropriate tact simply by ignoring it. His letter, moreover, follows with great precision the protocols of the Persian chancellery,⁵⁷ and one may wonder whether there was anyone at Lacedaemon capable of producing so convincing a forgery.

Even the claim that Themistocles was somehow privy to and supportive of the Spartan regent’s plans is apt to be true. The two men could easily have met in Lacedaemon when the Hellenic League was formed, and they can hardly have avoided becoming well acquainted when Themistocles visited Sparta in the wake of the battle of Salamis. At the time, Pausanias’ father Cleombrotus, who had become regent for the Agiad king Pleistarchus son of Leonidas after the untimely death of the boy’s father at Thermopylae, was himself dying or quite recently dead. Cleombrotus’ son and heir, who was about to become regent or had just assumed the office, would have been expected to play a prominent role in the entertainment of the city’s distinguished guest. Moreover, Themistocles and Leonidas are apt to have become xénoı on the eve of Xerxes’ invasion—which would have made of Themistocles and Pausanias hereditary guest-friends. If the latter pair did not, in fact, inherit such a tie, the xenía, the guest-friendship, that appears to have linked them must have originated—in accord with ordinary Greek practice—at the time of Themistocles’ visit. The author of the pseudepigraphical letter from Themistocles to Pausanias presumes that they were well acquainted; and the Spartans, in making their accusation, are said to have laid great emphasis on the fact that the two were close friends (and presumably guest-friends). It may not be fortuitous that Simonides wrote in praise of Leonidas and Pausanias as well as his friend Themistocles.⁵⁸

As we have already had occasion to note, at the end of 470s, when word reached Athens that the Persians were once again building a great fleet, Themistocles came under attack for his insistence that Sparta, not Persia, was the true danger to Athens. Cimon and an Athenian bearing the tell-tale name Alcmaeon—presumably, one of the former’s Alcmeonid in-laws—reportedly seized on the occasion to denounce Themistocles. Then, if the reports are true, Alcmaeon’s son Leobotes initiated the great man’s prosecution on a charge of treason. The fact that Themistocles’ prosecutor bore a Lacedaemonian name of royal provenance, otherwise unattested in Attica, suggests a close connection—perhaps a long-standing guest-friendship—linking his progenitor’s family with the Agiad house. In all likelihood, Alcmaeon and his son resembled Cimon, his brother-in-law Callias, and their contemporary the elder Alcibiades in being among the próxenoı at Athens charged with looking after Sparta’s interests—which is precisely what, we can surmise, the two did on this particular occasion.

The object of their ire was known to have corresponded with Pausanias. So we are told. Alcmaeon charged that the Spartan regent had informed Themistocles of his own collusion with the Mede, that he had more than once invited him to join the conspiracy, and that the Athenian had not only kept the man’s confidence but had become a Medizer himself. In reply, Themistocles is said to have acknowledged the truth of the first three of these claims, to have asserted that he had rebuffed Pausanias’ offer, and to have explained his failure to sound the alarm on the grounds that he had not taken seriously the Spartan’s hare-brained scheme. He had figured that Pausanias would either give up his silly quest or get caught.⁵⁹ Themistocles was a man who prided himself on being of service to his friends; and, as everyone understood at the time, the aristocratic ethos militated against guest-friends betraying one another.⁶⁰

It is perfectly possible and even likely that the two old friends remained in touch after the recall of Pausanias while Themistocles was at Argos, as the Lacedaemonians later asserted. Given the Athenian’s ostracism, one can easily imagine Pausanias supposing that his counterpart no longer had a stake in the status quo and that he might finally be ready to join in. It would, moreover, be an error to dismiss out of hand the possibility that incriminating letters, exchanged between the two, were found among Pausanias’ effects—precisely as the Spartans claimed. Indeed, given Themistocles’ conviction that Lacedaemon was at this time a far greater threat to Athens than Persia, there is no reason why he should not have welcomed Pausanias’ collusion with the Great King and even encouraged his attempt to stir up a helot revolt. From the perspective of this Athenian Odysseus, what the son of Cleombrotus was trying to do at Lacedaemon was perfectly consonant with what the Argives and Tegeans had attempted at the battle of Tegea. Had either project come off, it would in practice have meant Sparta’s elimination as a great power.⁶¹

There is one other reason for supposing that there might have been something to the charges lodged by the Spartans when, after Pausanias’ death, they sent an embassy to Athens to propose that Themistocles be tried before the council at the upcoming meeting of the Hellenic League. The Athenian statesman could have surrendered himself for trial, but this he did not do. Nor did he stay in Argos and await a summons. Instead, fearing conviction and suspecting that the Argives would, if called upon, surrender their guest, he set off for Corcyra, hoping that his service to that city in the past as an arbitrator would persuade the citizens there to harbor him, and perhaps pondering, as Stesimbrotus suggests, the possibility that he might find refuge at the court of the tyrant Hiero in Syracusa further to the west. But the Corcyraeans were no more willing than the Argives to take the risk of protecting their benefactor when faced with demands from both Sparta and Athens; and while on Corcyra, if he ever dreamed of a sojourn in Sicily, Themistocles is apt to have learned of Hiero’s quite recent death.

In desperation, therefore, Themistocles fled as a suppliant to Admetus, the king of the Molossians—a man, like Hiero, to whom he had reportedly given offense in days gone by when he was riding high. Although he had reason to spurn the Athenian’s plea, Admetus nonetheless received him, refused to turn him over to the Spartans when their embassy arrived, and sent him on from Epirus to Pydna in Macedon, where Alexander I ruled.

From there, no doubt with the connivance of that canny Macedonian monarch, Themistocles took passage, incognito, on a merchant ship headed for Anatolia. We do not know the projected itinerary, and we do not know whether Themistocles traveled in the summer or the winter. At no time was it possible to make such a journey without danger. It is possible that the ship’s captain was intent on heading directly south past Pieria and the iron coast of Magnesia and then southeast along the unforgiving eastern shore of Euboea before making his way to Ephesus through the Cyclades past Andros, Tenos, Mykonos, Ikaros, and Samos—always in sight of land. It is also conceivable that he aimed to sail around the Chalcidice. Once past that formidable obstacle, he could take one of two routes—either east along the Thracian coast past Thasos and Samothrace to the Hellespont and then south to Ionia along the Anatolian shore or, more likely, east southeast toward Lemnos and Lesbos and on to Ionia from there.

What we do know is that the man’s ship was caught in a storm; that, if the best manuscript of Plutarch is to be trusted as an indication of what that author read in Thucydides, the vessel was driven to Thasos, which Athenians were then besieging; and that, at this point, Themistocles revealed his identity to the captain, promised him a reward if he delivered him to Anatolia, and threatened that, if the man betrayed him, he would tell the Athenians that he had bribed him. In the event, the ship’s master opted not to land on Thasos, concealed his passenger, and sailed on by one of the two northern routes to Cumae in Anatolia, where Themistocles learned that Xerxes had died not long before—early in August 465.⁶²

Map 7. Themistocles’ Flight: From Argos to Corcyra, Epirus, Pydna in Macedonia, Thasos, and Cumae in Anatolia

Themistocles’ arrival in Anatolia did not by any means put an end to his travails. He was as much a marked man in the Achaemenid empire as he was in Hellas. The Great King had at some point put a price on his head of two hundred talents (which is to say, 5.7 tons) in silver, and, needless to say, there were individuals in Anatolia eager to collect that reward. This fact notwithstanding, the Athenian managed to find a hideout not far from Cumae in a little Aeolic town, where a guest-friend of his, a man of great wealth with close ties to the district’s Achaemenid administration, had his estates. This figure appears to have put him in touch with the local satrap Artabazus son of Pharnaces—who had more than a decade before been assigned by Xerxes the management of the Medizer Pausanias, as the Athenian may well have known. It was, we have reason to believe, this Artabazus who arranged for the long journey Themistocles then made to Susa, on which he was shepherded, Thucydides reports, by a Persian—presumably one of the satrap’s underlings. It must also have been through the good offices of Artabazus that the Athenian sent on ahead a letter offering his services to Artaxerxes, the deceased Persian monarch’s successor as the King of Kings. Without authorization from on high, as we have seen, no one could make such a journey within the Achaemenid realm or dispatch such a missive. It was in this fashion that Athens’ Odysseus made his way to Susa, trading on the dubious claim that at the time of Salamis he had shown himself to be a benefactor of the royal house.

In Susa, Themistocles managed by guile or dumb luck to sidestep an exceedingly delicate situation. Xerxes was dead. His firstborn son and prospective heir Darius had been falsely accused of patricide and had himself been killed in turn. His second son Hystaspes, the satrap of Bactria, was in the process of asserting his right to the throne; and Artaxerxes, who was a stripling, was by no means firmly established as king. Thucydides tells us that, before formally presenting himself at the court, Themistocles tarried for a year with the permission of the Great King, studying Old Persian. According to another report, penned by a follower of Aristotle named Phanias of Lesbos, the Athenian was initially received in Susa by Artabanus, the Chiliarch responsible for Xerxes’ assassination, the murder of young Darius, and the succession of Artaxerxes—and it was there that he settled down to learn what he could of the language spoken by his new master. Scholars have tended to regard the latter report as improbable in the extreme, but we are told by a generally reliable source that Artabanus ruled for seven months after Xerxes’ death, and it is plausible to suppose that for a time he managed the realm in the name of the boy king whom he had installed on the throne.

Eventually, we are told, this Artabanus, who bore an Achaemenid name and may have been a descendant of Xerxes’ like-named uncle, hatched a plot to eliminate Artaxerxes and take office in his place. In one particular, however, he blundered, and that was by taking into his confidence Megabyzus son of Zopyrus—who had been a figure of great importance at Xerxes’ court. This man’s like-named grandfather had been one of the seven conspirators who had made Darius son of Hystaspes Great King in 522. His father had for Darius put down a great rebellion in Babylon. As a young man, this Megabyzus had accompanied Xerxes on the march into Greece, and he had served as one of his marshals. At some point, he had even married one of that Great King’s daughters; and, in the aftermath of Xerxes’ assassination, he stood by his brother-in-law Artaxerxes, divulged the nature of the plot, and saw to it that Artabanus’ machinations were thwarted. It is apt also to have been during Themistocles’ extended period of study that the authorities in Susa saw off the challenge mounted by Artaxerxes’ older brother Hystaspes.

By the time that Themistocles’ year of study had come to an end and he had emerged from seclusion, things had to a considerable degree settled down. This much is clear: Artabanus and his sons were dead; Hystaspes was no longer in evidence; Artaxerxes was fully in charge; and a man named Roxanes now served as his Chiliarch. When this Roxanes conducted Themistocles into the royal presence, Plutarch reports, he furiously denounced him as a “wily Greek serpent.” And there, this hostile introduction notwithstanding, the man most responsible for Persia’s defeat at Salamis secured for himself from Xerxes’ son and heir a position of honor and rich reward.⁶³

A New Atmosphere and a New Mood

If the chronology of events suggested here is correct or even close to correct, one dramatic development followed another in the early 460s. First, probably in 469, came Athens’ stunning victory at Eurymedon and the news that she was in the process of negotiating an accord with the Great King. At about the same time, there came a grave crisis within the Spartan alliance, which eventuated in a great battle at Tegea; and this event was soon followed by a series of unsettling revelations made in quick succession—by reports that the Agiad regent was conspiring to raise a helot revolt, by the presentation of proof that he had offered his services to Xerxes and had long been operating as the Great King’s agent, and finally, after the man’s death, by the discovery among his effects of correspondence indicating that Themistocles, the wiliest of the Athenians, had for some time been privy to the man’s intrigues, confirming that he had failed to divulge what he knew, and suggesting that he may even have encouraged the enterprise.

In circumstances such as these, those who take the lead in determining public policy within a polity are bound to pause and reflect. They see the earth moving rapidly beneath their feet. They have brought home to them in a most unpleasant way the vulnerability of the position their city occupies, and they revisit the calculations on which they had hitherto grounded the foreign policy of the community they govern.

Those at Lacedaemon who were convinced that the pursuit of empire would destroy the Spartan regime and that an alliance with Athens still best served the polity’s interests were no doubt exceedingly eager that Themistocles be removed from the scene. On this matter, there was no doubt unanimity among the Spartiates. Those, however, who longed for grandeur and wealth and who resented the rise of Athens can hardly have regarded this as sufficient—and they now had new arguments to make. At the time these must have had considerable purchase.

With Persia more or less off stage, as we have seen, the Delian League now seemed more like a threat than a bulwark of defense. Even more to the point, during his sojourn at Argos, Themistocles had made manifest the fragility of the Spartan alliance. Argos was resurgent. Tegea had been defeated but she was still hostile and defiant. Even if Elis and Mantineia were still loyal, as they may well have been, they could not be fully relied on. Of this their conduct in 479, when they failed to show up in time for the battle of Plataea, was more than sufficient proof.

As long as Athens was a great power, these Spartans could argue, it would be a serious threat. Within every city in the Spartan alliance, there was a faction that resented Lacedaemon. To the extent that Athens represented an alternative, she was a temptation. Cimon might favor peaceful coexistence and cooperation with Sparta. But there were others at Athens who shared the strategic vision of Themistocles. A host of them had come to Tegea as volunteers to fight against Lacedaemon, and the odds were good that at Athens they would someday be ascendant. It made no sense for the Spartans to make their security dependent on the political success of the son of Miltiades and those who shared his views.

When the Athenians encroached on the interests of the Thasians and the latter revolted, were defeated at sea, and appealed to Sparta for aid, we can be confident that in “the little assembly”—consisting of the ephors, the gérontes, and the two kings or the regents who stood in for them—these concerns were fully aired.⁶⁴ If the authorities secretly opted to promise Lacedaemon’s support—as, I suspect, was the case—or if “the common assembly” actually did so, it was because what had happened at Eurymedon and Tegea and in the aftermath of these two great battles had within Hellas created a new atmosphere and had given rise to a new mood—to which the Spartans thought that they, too, would have to conform.