CHAPTER 4

A Parting of the Ways

Great quarrels, it has been said, often arise from small occasions but never from small causes.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

THE first and most severe of the seismic jolts that shook Lacedaemon in 465/4 took place during the day. We are told that it wiped out an entire class of young men on the threshold of adulthood, who were caught at their exercise beneath the colonnade of a gymnasium. Moreover, given the greater likelihood that at that time of day the women and small children were inside their homes, there is reason to suspect that their proportion among the casualties greatly exceeded that of the boys and men, which was itself by all accounts enormous. We must imagine rents opening up in the earth, landslides hurtling down from Mount Taygetus, and nearly all of the houses and public buildings in the villages constituting Sparta collapsing suddenly in a cloud of dust as the ground beneath everyone’s feet gave way, turned liquid, and shifted dramatically. The screams of those caught inside and trapped in the debris were no doubt everywhere heard.¹

In the midst of the chaos, there was one man of consequence who kept his head. His name was Archidamus son of Zeuxidamos. He was the grandson and heir of the disgraced, exiled Eurypontid king Leotychidas, whom his father had predeceased. In 469/8, four years before the earthquake, Leotychidas had reportedly died, and Archidamus, who was barely then old enough to assume office, had been installed as king. When the catastrophe struck, while others were intent on rescuing from the rubble their valuables (and no doubt also their kin), he had the presence of mind to lay hold of his weapons and sound the alarm by having the sálpınx blown; and those of his compatriots who were dazed but otherwise unharmed did what they had been, as Spartans, trained to do: they quickly retrieved their arms, rallied, and formed up in a phalanx—just in time to fend off the attacks which the helots of Laconia soon thereafter mounted. “At the moment of crisis,” Plutarch reports, “this saved Sparta—this alone.”²

Such appears also to have been the judgment of Archidamus’ contemporary Ion of Chios, who is in all likelihood the source on whom Ephorus, Cicero, Pliny, Aelian, Polyaenus, and Plutarch later drew for the details they report concerning the earthquake, the damage it did, the loss of life it inflicted, the helot revolt that followed, and Archidamus’ alacrity in summoning his compatriots. It was probably soon after these events that Ion penned a drinking song for the Spartans in which, on the most likely interpretation, he had them hail the Eurypontid king as their “savior and father.” Looking back some years thereafter, Ion would pointedly celebrate, in his guise as a tragedian, the fact that, in fortifying herself against “mutinous Ares,” Lacedaemon relied on deeds guided by sound counsel and not on the mere making of speeches.³

The fact that the helots of Laconia were so quick to recognize this seismic catastrophe as an opportunity to wreak havoc is a sign that Aristotle was right when he later described that servile class as a force hostile to their masters, “continuously lying in wait for misfortune” to strike. Of course, their readiness on this particular occasion may as well have had something to do with the unsettling impact on their generation of their discovery, while on campaign with their masters abroad in Boeotia at the time of the battle of Plataea in 479, that elsewhere within Hellas virtually all of the Greeks were free; and it may also be an indication of the effectiveness of Pausanias’ efforts shortly before this time to forge them into an instrument for revolution. Had the Agiad regent been alive to witness these events, to rally his supporters among the Spartiates, and provide the helots with leadership, the outcome might well have been fatal to the inherited order at Lacedaemon. As things stood, the Spartans came to think the earthquake and the subsequent revolt a punishment inflicted on them by Poseidon for the sacrilege they had committed when they dragged the helot suppliants from his sanctuary at Taenarum and put them to the sword.⁴

An Appeal for Aid

As one would expect, the revolt quickly spread to Messenia—where the helots were more numerous than in Laconia and far less docile—and there, no doubt to the great consternation of the Spartans, the períoıkoı of Thouria and Aethaea joined in.⁵ It must have been as this was happening that Archidamus and the ephors dispatched the próxenoı of Sparta’s allies—those, at least, who had survived the quake and the initial skirmish—to seek support. For, as he was no doubt acutely aware, it was by no means clear that Lacedaemon’s remaining manpower was adequate to the challenge the city then faced. The Spartiates had been vastly outnumbered by the helots prior to these events. If, as we are told, half of the former had lost their lives in the earthquake and if two communities of períoıkoı reinforced the rebellious helots, the disproportion in numbers and the danger attendant thereon will have increased dramatically.

We do not know which city responded first, but it is a reasonable guess that it was Mantineia. Although—or, rather, because—she shared a fertile plain with Tegea, this city was nearly always at odds with her neighbor to the south.⁶ She cannot have been pleased by the alliance of that city with Argos to her east. Nor will she have relished the prospect that Arcadia would find unity under the leadership of her rival. She had a stake in Lacedaemon’s survival as a great power. For, in these circumstances, she could hardly remain independent in the absence of Spartan support.

If Mantineia had a motive, she also had the means. In a pinch, perhaps with the help of her dependencies in Maenalia, she could field a hoplite army of three thousand.⁷ She was closer to Laconia than any of the other cities known to have sent aid, and the help that she did send apparently made a considerable difference. More than three-quarters of a century later, when Sparta and Mantineia were at odds, Archidamus’ younger son Agesilaus asked not to be saddled with the punitive expedition against the latter then in the offing, and he gave as his reason the fact that “the pólıs of the Mantineians” had been “serviceable” to his father “in many regards in the wars” he conducted “against Messene.”⁸

The Aeginetans were probably the next to arrive—for we know that they, too, earned the gratitude of the Lacedaemonians.⁹ They were a wealthy, mercantile people resident on a small island in the Saronic Gulf which could be seen from Athens on a clear day. They had a distinguished maritime tradition and are said to have manned more ships in 480 and 479 than any city in Hellas apart from Athens. In the first of these two years, despite the fact that they had to hold back a squadron of triremes to defend their own island against a surprise attack which might have been mounted at any time by the Persian fleet then harbored at Phalerum, they managed to supply to the Hellenic force that gathered at Salamis thirty triremes—manned by something like six thousand men—and it was to this flotilla that the participants in this fleet action later awarded the prize for valor. The following year, while sending a similar or even larger continent with the Hellenic fleet to the island of Delos and on to Samos and to Mycale on the coast of Asia Minor, the Aeginetans were nonetheless able to dispatch five hundred hoplites to Plataea.¹⁰

In 465/4, when they had no need to deploy a fleet for battle, the Aeginetans could have come up with a comparable force of infantrymen or even with twice or thrice that number, and they could easily have employed some of their triremes as transports (as they had in the past) to ferry these hoplites down the eastern coast of the Peloponnesus to the plain of Thyrea south of the Argeia, to Prasiae or Epidauros Limera on Laconia’s Aegean coast, to Gytheion, Sparta’s port on the Laconian gulf, or even to Coryphasium in Navarino bay in Messenia.¹¹ Something of the sort they probably did with dispatch. For, like the Mantineians, the citizens of Aegina had need of the Lacedaemonians. Prior to Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, as we have seen, they had been involved in what must have seemed like an endless, episodic war with Athens—and the emergence of the Athenians at the battles of Artemisium, Salamis, and Mycale as the leading naval power in Greece had not only made them nervous. It had taught them that they needed a counterweight if they were to retain their independence.

The fact that Mantineia and Aegina are the only two póleıs in or near the Peloponnesus known to have supported the Lacedaemonians in their time of need should not be taken as an indication that Sparta’s other allies left her in the lurch. If we know that Mantineia and Aegina were among Lacedaemon’s benefactors at this time, it is solely because decades later dramatic occasions meriting mention presented themselves in which reciprocity on some level seemed necessary and appropriate. We are told that the Lacedaemonians sought help from all of their allies,¹² and there was at least one other city belonging to the Spartan alliance that was beleaguered and in need of Sparta’s protection. It, too, deserves special notice.

Geographically, the northeastern Peloponnesus formed a unit. There was a thoroughfare, ideal for carts, linking the main districts suited to growing grain; and naturally enough, in the late Bronze Age, the entire region was ruled from a single center, the great palace at Mycenae. In the archaic period, however, and in much of the succeeding classical period, the region was divided between two powers of genuine consequence and comparable weight—Argos and Corinth—and, although both póleıs were Dorian, they were also in a variety of ways—religiously, culturally, and economically—distinct and even opposed.¹³

Map 9. The Argolid, the Argolic Acte, the Corinthiad, and the Cities Nearby

Prior to 494, the Argives, an agrarian people with a long, distinguished hoplite tradition, were locally predominant—which helps explain why, in the early archaic period and in the sixth century, Corinth, a mercantile power much stronger at sea than on land, sought shelter through an alliance with Lacedaemon.¹⁴ After Cleomenes’ massacre of the Argives at Sepeia that year, however, Argos went into temporary eclipse, as we have seen; and the Corinthians, who would soon come to be overshadowed at sea by Athens, had a much freer hand on land in the region than ever before.¹⁵ Sometime not long thereafter, they appear to have overrun Cleonae, which lay well to the north of Argos—athwart both the main thoroughfare, which led from Corinth to Argos and on past Hysiae to Tegea, and the more difficult wagon road leading from Tenea in the east past Cleonae to Nemea and Phlius further west. For a time, the Corinthians even usurped from the Cleonaeans the presidency of the Nemean Games.¹⁶ It was presumably at this time as well that, with full support from Lacedaemon, they drew, into a regional alliance hostile to Argos, Cleonae and the other cities in the region once in the Argive orbit—which helps explain why Sicyon and Phlius a few miles inland from the Corinthian Gulf; Epidaurus, Troezen, and Hermione on or near the coast of the Argolic Acte; and Aegina just offshore in the Saronic Gulf joined the Hellenic League in 481 or 480. It is telling that later, when Tiryns fell to Argos, the surviving citizens found refuge within the Argolic Acte—initially in Epidaurus and Hermione and ultimately at Halieis on the coast.¹⁷

Eventually, however, Argos recovered; and, by the time of the helot revolt and the Argive attack on Mycenae, Cleonae was once again an Argive satellite,¹⁸ as we have seen. By this time, however, the Corinthians had turned northeast. Centuries before, they had seized Perachora from the Megarians; and, in the late archaic period, they appear to have made an abortive attempt to encroach further on the territory of the Megarians—for we have good reason to believe that in the late sixth century, with the help of the Argives, the Megarians had inflicted on their aggressive neighbor a severe defeat. In the mid-460s, if not before, the Corinthians renewed the struggle, contesting the southwestern border of the Megarid.¹⁹ In the circumstances, it was only natural that the Megarians look to Lacedaemon, their mutual hegemon, for protection. We are not told that the Megarians responded quickly to the Lacedaemonian appeal for help in 465/4, but. in the circumstances, they certainly had reason to do so.

The odds are also good that cities less obviously in need of Spartan support—such as Corinth herself; her regional allies Sicyon, Phlius, Epidaurus, Troezen, and Hermione; and perhaps even Elis—also responded by sending troops. Mantineia and Aegina may have been enthusiastic and especially quick off the mark. Megara had a powerful motive for being similarly forthcoming. But these three póleıs can hardly have been alone. In the sphere of foreign affairs, the price for neglecting one’s obligations can be quite high. Betting on Lacedaemon’s demise was apt to be unwise.

Even outside the Peloponnesus, the próxenoı dispatched by Lacedaemon managed to secure support. The Plataeans had not forgotten what the Spartans had done to their advantage in the struggle with Persia a decade and a half before; and, given the proximity of Thebes and the hostility the Thebans continued to display, they had reason to treasure the promises formally made to them after the battle of Plataea in the presence of the Hellenes by Pausanias the Regent. On this occasion, as we have seen, the allied commander had not only conceded to the Plataeans their city and land and formally affirmed their right to live there and conduct their affairs in accord with their ancestral customs and laws. He had also promised that no one would be allowed to attack them unjustly with an eye to their subjection, and he had pledged that, if this occurred, those who had formed the great alliance against the Mede would rally in their defense.²⁰

The Plataean contingent at the battles of Marathon and Plataea had been led by a man, sometimes identified in the ancient sources as Arimnestus, whose real name was almost certainly Aeimnestus. Before the latter battle, in the company of the Athenian commander Aristeides, he had scouted out the Pantassa ridge outside Hysiae, identifying it as a place where a hoplite force could deploy for combat and not have to worry about a cavalry assault. When, on the actual day of the conflict, the Spartans retreated from their perch on the ridge running along the south bank of the Asopus River and marched up the slopes of Mount Cithaeron to the outskirts of Boeotian Hysiae, this Plataean was with them, almost certainly functioning as a guide. And at the battle that followed, a combatant bearing his name—who is described by Herodotus as “a man to be reckoned with [lógımos] at Lacedaemon”—managed to kill the Persian general Mardonius.²¹

If this Aeimnestus was not already the próxenos of the Spartans at Plataea, he was soon thereafter awarded that office, and he clearly delighted in the fact. In celebration of the status conferred on him, he named his son Lakon; and it was almost certainly he who persuaded his compatriots to send one-third of their levy to fight at this time on Sparta’s behalf. We are told, moreover, that on the Stenyklaros plain in Messenia the man who had brought down Mardonius in 479 led a band of three hundred against the Messenians and that, on the latter occasion, he and every one of his comrades lost their lives.²²

The Athenians were not at this time beleaguered; and, thanks to the withdrawal of the remaining Persians from Hellas after the battle of Plataea and to their own valiant efforts at sea thereafter, they no longer had any pressing need for Lacedaemonian support. But they answered Archidamus’ summons anyway.²³

Regarding the details, Plutarch is our chief informant. As we have already had occasion to note, he had access to the memoirs of Cimon’s much younger friend Ion of Chios, who resided in Athens in these years. He drew also on the ruminations of Socrates’ renegade student Critias and on the testimony of the comic poets, and he was intent on fleshing out in full the remarkable life story of Miltiades’ son. In consequence, his account of the interaction of Sparta and Athens in Cimon’s heyday is considerably less terse than is the pertinent material found in Thucydides’ highly abbreviated and narrowly focused description of the growth of Athenian power during the Pentekontaetia, and there is every reason to suppose Plutarch knew what he was talking about. On this occasion, according to his report, a Spartiate named Pericleidas—whom we have reason to identify as the Athenians’ próxenos at Lacedaemon and who is known to have named his son Athenaios—suddenly and unexpectedly presented himself at Athens’ civic altars, as the comic poet Aristophanes later recalled in his Lysistrata, “white-faced, clad in the distinctive purple cloak of the Lacedaemonians, seeking an army.”²⁴

It goes without saying that there were Athenians vehemently opposed to sending aid. Themistocles had had a following at Athens. Some of his admirers had fought alongside the Argives and the Tegeans at the battle of Tegea just a few years before. Sparta’s demise would be, they were convinced, Athens’ gain. In the assembly called to consider Pericleidas’ request, this was, Plutarch tells us, the position articulated by Ephialtes son of Sophonides—a man of unimpeachable honesty who had been, we have reason to suppose, a close ally of Themistocles in the past. Lacedaemon he identified as Athens’ “adversary [antípalos].” To aid her, to raise her up made no sense, said he. “Let Sparta in her arrogance lie prostrate and be trampled under foot.”²⁵

Cimon took the opposite side—as did, we must presume, the other próxenoı of the Lacedaemonians at Athens: among them, Alcibiades son of Cleinias, Cimon’s brother-in-law Callias son of Hipponicus, and, in all likelihood, Alcmaeon and his son Leobotes. Cimon in particular had his reasons for taking a strong stand. For a decade and a half, he had relied on Sparta’s forbearance. In the absence of Lacedaemon’s willingness to let Athens take the lead on the sea, it would not have been at all easy for the latter to have founded the Delian League and to have continued the war against Persia in the way she had. Mindful of this, the son of Miltiades had done everything he could to sustain and reinforce the friendship between the two powers, which had made possible the Hellenic victory in the Persian Wars and opened the way for the emergence of Athens’ maritime hegemony in the aftermath. Although circumstances had changed dramatically as a consequence of the earthquake and the helot revolt, and, at least for the time being, Athens no longer needed Sparta’s forbearance, Cimon was not about to change his stance. He was not as cold-blooded as his erstwhile rival Themistocles. He was restrained by a sense of honor and perhaps by a conviction that Lacedaemon’s moment of weakness would soon pass. He could not turn on a dime. And so, according to his friend and admirer Ion of Chios (who in all likelihood witnessed the debate), the Athenian statesman passionately urged his compatriots “not to look on, standing idly by, while Hellas went lame and their own city became ill-matched with her yokefellow.” In this fashion, by appealing to Panhellenic sentiment, Cimon secured the support of his fellow Athenians, and to Lacedaemon he soon thereafter led by land a force of four thousand hoplites.²⁶

The End of an Alliance

We do not know in detail how events thereafter unfolded. It is conceivable that the Spartans managed to pacify Laconia without outside aid. But the odds are that the Mantineians, the Aeginetans, and the loyal among the Lacedaemonians’ other allies within the Peloponnesus arrived in time to help them with this formidable task. Messenia was an even harder nut to crack. To begin with, it was on the other side of the Taygetus massif—an obstacle to the projection of power almost insuperable—and in Messenia there were no Spartan settlements. There may have been—there surely were—garrisons, though we know nothing about them. But the members of these may have been—indeed, they are likely to have been—massacred at the beginning of the revolt.

We do not know how long the various foreign contingents remained. It is a reasonable guess that, once Laconia was thoroughly pacified, some of them returned home. The Mantineians and the Plataeans were present for at least some of the fighting in Messenia, however. This we know. And the same may well have been true for the Aeginetans. But we do not hear of the Athenians doing battle in Messenia at this time. They may have marched back as soon as Lacedaemon’s survival was guaranteed. At this time, they had pressing business of their own to attend to.

The siege at Thasos was still under way, and the Athenians and their other allies were also then absorbed in an enormously ambitious and difficult endeavor to establish a colony in a position to exploit the timberlands and the silver and gold mines of Thrace. Just under three miles up the Strymon River from Eion—where Xerxes, while en route to Thermopylae and beyond, had had bridges built to span the stream at its narrowest point—lay a strategic location called Ennea Hodoi (“Nine Roads”), where travelers tended to converge. At Myrcinus a short distance to the north, Histiaeus of Miletus had once attempted to build a fort; and it was at another, similar spot, nearer the surviving bridge, that these colonists sought to settle at this time.²⁷

Unfortunately for the Athenians and their allies, however, their venture on the Strymon quickly came a-cropper. Before the colony was firmly established and fully fortified, the Edonians in alliance with the other Thracian tribesmen of the region ambushed an expedition mounted by the settlers and massacred “ten thousand” of them—which is to say, an immense number—at a place further inland called Drabeskos, which lay near the gold mines in the Daton valley north of Mount Pangaeum. And soon thereafter the survivors camped at Ennea Hodoi were evacuated.

The colony had been a joint venture, and the Athenians may have been only a minority among the settlers. But Athens’ losses that year in the Chersonnesus, at Thasos, and, above all, in Thrace must have been deeply felt—for the names of the dead were recorded tribe by tribe in a set of inscriptions carved on stone slabs set up along the road leading from Athens to the Academy, and many scholars suspect that the casualties in this set of campaigns inspired the practice, well attested later, of providing a formal civic burial in the Ceramicus each year for citizens who had died in war. It was presumably with Drabeskos in mind (but clearly not Drabeskos alone) that Aristotle dryly remarks, “The generals given commands in those days were chosen on the basis of the reputation of their ancestors and,” apart from Cimon, “tended to be inexperienced in war so that up to two or three thousand of those going out on an expedition always lost their lives, which cost the Athenians the decent sorts—those drawn both from the common people and from the well-to-do.”²⁸

Map 10. The Strymon Valley and Its Environs

Cimon’s popularity may well have suffered. Up through the Eurymedon campaign, he had gone from strength to strength. But, in some measure, he must have been held responsible for the rebellion of Thasos and the disaster at Drabeskos. His prestige was such, especially after Themistocles’ ostracism, that Athens was not apt to have done anything of moment that he did not favor, and we have a confused report attributing to him the foundation of a colony of ten thousand at Ennea Hodoi.²⁹ But even if we had no information expressly assigning responsibility to him, we would have to suppose something of the sort—for Cimon was certainly active in the region at this time.

After Eurymedon, the Athenian commander is said to have cleared the Persians once again from the Thracian Chersonnesus, to have crushed the Thracians whom they had called in for support, and to have once again opened up that fertile district, which had been a Philaid family fiefdom, for settlement by his compatriots. It may have been at this time and at his instigation that the Persians finally evacuated their stronghold nearby at Doriscus on the Hebron to the west. Cimon also led the Athenian fleet that defeated the Thasians at sea in 465, soon after their rebellion, and he it was who then initiated the siege and seized their settlements along the Thracian coast and their gold mine inland from there.³⁰ The establishment of a colony at Ennea Hodoi was clearly a central part of his overall scheme.

Envy no doubt also played a role in undercutting Cimon’s popularity, as it often had with regard to others similarly situated in the recent past—after Marathon, for example, when Cimon’s father Miltiades led the Athenians on an ill-fated campaign against Paros and was fined; and again after Salamis when the Spartans fêted Themistocles, the Athenians learned that he had erred in encouraging them to presume that their victory at sea would induce the Persians to withdraw their army from Hellas, and he was cashiered as general. Envy always plays a role in politics—especially, the politics of democracies, where every form of superiority is an invitation to resentment; and, in Greece, envy’s influence was greatly enhanced by the agonistic ethos propagated in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey—the two books that served as a Bible of sorts for the Hellenes.³¹

In democratic societies, resentment of this sort is apt to find expression in scurrilous taunts with sexual overtones, and we know from the surviving graffiti that Cimon, who was thought to be sexually voracious, and his sister, who sometimes acted as his political agent, were an object of these. Forty years later, the comic poet Eupolis would parody in the following fashion the scuttlebutt retailed at this time regarding the Athenian leader:

A total disgrace he was not, but he did love his drink and he was careless.

Moreover, he would often sleep away from home in Lacedaemon,

Leaving that Elpinike alone with herself.³²

When a man as successful and as overbearing as Cimon finally stumbled, as stumble he would, he was bound to come under attack.

In the wake of the revolt of Thasos and the massacre at Drabeskos, the son of Miltiades was prosecuted for treason. After defeating the Thasians, investing the city, and seizing their holdings in Thrace, he could easily have invaded Macedonia and hived off much of its territory—or so it was said—but, purportedly in return for a bribe from the Macedonian king Alexander, he had chosen not to proceed. This was the charge he faced. To make sense of this claim, one must attend to the evidence strongly suggesting that Alexander, who had been on good terms with the Athenians before the Persian Wars and who had been singled out at that time as their “benefactor” and made their próxenos, had taken Artabazus’ headlong retreat from Plataea with the remnants of Xerxes’ great army in 479 as an opportunity to assert Macedonian control over the mines in the upper Strymon basin. Thereafter, one must suppose, he had come into conflict with Athens over these mines.³³

Among those selected at the time of Cimon’s annual audit [euthúna] as general to argue the case against him was Pericles, son of the Xanthippus who had prosecuted his father Miltiades in 489. As a child, this Pericles had witnessed his own father’s ostracism at the hands of Themistocles, the evacuation of Attica in anticipation of Xerxes’ invasion, Themistocles’ recall of his father from exile, his father’s re-emergence as a political force, and his victorious return from the battles at Mycale and Sestos—and all of this no doubt made a strong impression on the young lion. As a young man, Xanthippus’ younger son appears to have been a supporter of Themistocles. It is otherwise hard to explain why, in March 472—a couple of weeks, just over a year, or two years before that statesman’s ostracism—as chorēgós he had defrayed the cost of producing a tragedy by Aeschylus designed to remind their compatriots of Themistocles’ achievement at Salamis. In 463, he was aligned with Ephialtes; and, though he reportedly soft-pedaled his rhetoric at the trial and no one can have expected a conviction, the prosecution of Cimon on a charge of treason—like that of Themistocles shortly before his ostracism—was an instrument useful for besmirching the man’s reputation and reducing his political support.³⁴

According to Plutarch—who is presumably once again drawing on the memoirs of Ion of Chios—Cimon responded by dismissing the indictment as absurd. Money was, he implied, nothing to a man like him. He was not, he proudly noted, the pampered próxenos of a rich Ionian pólıs. Nor did he represent at Athens the fabulously wealthy dynasts of Thessaly. He was neither looked after like others whom he seems to have identified but left unnamed. Nor was he on the take. He was the próxenos of the Lacedaemonians. He was a passionate admirer of their frugality and of their moderation, and in his conduct he assiduously imitated both. These qualities he honored far more than wealth, and he prided himself on enriching his own pólıs at the expense of her enemies.

The prosecution was obviously frivolous, and Cimon’s response was an effective riposte. He was not the sort to take a bribe, and everyone knew it.³⁵ But flaunting his love of all things Spartan, as he did on this and apparently on other occasions as well, was costly to him in the end.

In 462, if Plutarch’s report is to be trusted (as it should be), the Spartans once again asked for Athenian help. The year before, if the chronological framework that I have adopted here is correct, the Lacedaemonians had sent a force north—first, to reassert their hegemony over southwestern Arcadia, the Parrhasia, and what would eventually be called the Megalopolitan plain; and, then, as we have seen, to buck up their allies at Mantineia. After weathering the attack the Arcadians mounted against them at Dipaea, the Lacedaemonians had returned; and soon thereafter, with the help of the Mantineians, the Plataeans, and the remainder of their most loyal allies, they had defeated the Messenians in a great battle which took place, we have reason to suspect, near the midpoint of the Pamisos valley—where a ridge, which may then have been called “the isthmus,” runs from Mount Ithome eastward toward Mount Taygetus, separating the Stenyklaros plain in the north from the Makaria flats to the south.³⁶

This impressive victory did not, however, bring the great revolt to an end. Instead of surrendering, the surviving rebels—helots from Messenia, períoıkoı from Thouria and Aeathea, and refugees from Laconia—fell back on Mount Ithome and waged a guerrilla war from its heights.³⁷ It was their continued resistance that induced the Lacedaemonians to turn to Athens once again.

Figure 5. Greek hoplites bearing aspídes on the Nereid monument from Xanthos in Lycia, ca. 390–380 B.C. (British Museum, London, Photograph by Jan van der Crabben / Ancient History Encyclopedia [www.ancient.eu], courtesy of the photographer).

The Lacedaemonians excelled at hoplite warfare. In archaic and early classical Greece, there were no heavily armed soldiers worthy of comparison. But—on rough ground where one could not deploy one’s heavy infantry in a phalanx, and on hillsides where agility and quickness were required and strength and endurance were not the principal key to success—they were at a distinct disadvantage. The aspís borne by the hoplite was designed for use in the phalanx. It had a bronze armband in the center, called a pórpax, through which the warrior slipped his left arm, and a leather cord attached to the right rim of the shield, called an antılabḗ, for him to lay hold of with his left hand. Such a shield was not suitable for a solo performer. It left the right side of its bearer’s body dangerously exposed. Within the phalanx, however, it provided protection to the right side of the hoplite arrayed to its bearer’s left. But on ground unsuited to their joint deployment in a phalanx, where the shields of the infantrymen could not in this fashion interlock, the aspís was worse than useless. It was heavy and burdensome—an obstacle to agility—and it rendered its bearer vulnerable to attack on his exposed right side.³⁸

Of course, at Plataea and in other battles, the Spartans had sometimes deployed light-armed troops. But these were drawn from among the helot population. To the best of our knowledge, there were no experienced psíloı among the Spartiates themselves. The ablest of the residents of Laconia and Messenia possessed of these specialized skills were ranged against them on Ithome. At siege warfare, moreover, the Lacedaemonians were notoriously ineffectual; and, on the slopes of the mountain, the Spartans were seriously outclassed.

Cimon’s Athenians were differently situated. They had ample experience in siege warfare. For a decade and a half, they had been busy along the Thracian and Anatolian coasts scaling fortresses, bursting through palisades, and ousting garrisons; and they had among their forces a corps of specialists—light-armed troops picked and trained for this particular task—who had become adept at fighting in the hill country, at skirmishing on rough ground, and at capturing strongholds. It made sense for the Spartans to summon Athenian help a second time and to ask this time that they send these specialists, and they could rely on Cimon, who was a genuine Laconophile, to persuade his compatriots to respond—which is what he did.³⁹

This time, however, the Athenians may have been a bit more reluctant. The emergency had passed. Lacedaemon’s survival was no longer at stake. Moreover, they had had time to reflect at leisure on their situation and on that of the Spartans. They could now more easily consider what it was that they were being asked to do, and they could question whether Athens had anything to gain from such an effort. Panhellenic sentiment still had a hold on them, of course. But the rebels on Ithome were not barbarians, much less Persians. They were Hellenes, as the Athenians well knew. It was one thing to assist fellow Greeks in subjugating barbarians. This was a matter of ethnic solidarity. The barbarians were, after all, the common foe. Under the leadership of Darius and Xerxes, they had attempted to deprive the Athenians and the other Hellenes of the liberty that had long distinguished the Greeks as Greeks. The veterans of the battles fought at Marathon, Artemisium, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, Sestos, Cyprus, Byzantium, Eion, Eurymedon, and elsewhere needed no instruction in such matters. But to assist the Spartans in denying other Hellenes the liberty they bravely sought—there was something distasteful about that.

Had abstract justice been their only ground for objection, the Athenians might have been prepared to dismiss the arguments against aiding Sparta that the likes of Ephialtes and Pericles no doubt advanced once again in the assembly. Athens was, after all, deeply indebted to Lacedaemon. Her citizens had not forgotten the battle of Plataea. They were, moreover, deeply indebted as well to the son of Miltiades. He had repeatedly defeated the Persians, and he really had enriched the city at the expense of her foes. Furthermore, he had recently defeated the Thasians at sea and had initiated a siege that was bound to succeed. At Drabeskos, they could remind themselves, he had not been in command; and what had happened there was, in any case, nothing more than a temporary setback. This they understood.

But there was another sphere in which things had also gone wrong. Late in 468 or early in 467, as we have seen, Cimon’s brother-in-law Callias had negotiated a peace of sorts with Xerxes, and nearly everyone at Athens had breathed a great sigh of relief. Two or three years later, however—in early August 465, as we have also seen—Xerxes was assassinated. Darius the crown prince was murdered soon thereafter; and Artaxerxes, the youngest of Xerxes’ three sons, was installed on the throne. In the fall of 465 or not long thereafter—as soon as the identity of the new Great King was clear—Callias was once again dispatched as an envoy to Susa, presumably for the purpose of renewing the peace with Persia’s new monarch. We have reason to suspect that he returned laden with gifts of the sort that Achaemenid monarchs customarily showered on emissaries from abroad—but otherwise empty-handed.⁴⁰

Xerxes had paid dearly for his willingness to treat with the Athenians; Artaxerxes had good reason not to fall into the same trap, and in this and other ways he distanced himself from his father’s policies. Within a very short time the Athenians found themselves once again at war with the Mede. It was probably upon the occasion of Callias’ return from Susa in or soon after the summer of 464 that the Athenians reacted in anger, as was their wont when they did not get what they desired, and charged that their emissary had been bribed, demanding that he cough up a fifty-talent fine.⁴¹ By 462, Cimon’s achievements may have seemed to his compatriots if not tarnished, at least considerably less impressive than hitherto.

Another concern of some moment is apt to have presented itself at this time. Thasos surrendered in 462, and soon thereafter the Athenians are quite likely to have learned that in 465, shortly before the helot revolt, the Spartans had promised the rebels aid. Had the Athenians known of this when Cimon proposed sending a second expedition in support of Lacedaemon, they would surely have refused. We are not told that word came to Athens soon after the expeditionary force left for Messenia. We are not told precisely when the Athenians learned the truth. But that they did so eventually we do know, and the most likely time for the divulging of this information was the immediate aftermath of Thasos’ surrender.⁴²

It is, I would suggest, in light of this hypothesis that we can most easily make sense of three events—the sudden and total collapse of Cimon’s position at Athens, open grumbling on the part of “the picked men” under his command in Messenia, and an overreaction on the part of the Lacedaemonians to this expression of discontent. At Athens, in the absence of Cimon and of the soldiers in this expeditionary force, Ephialtes, with the help of Pericles, managed to push through the assembly a democratic political reform, stripping the Areopagus of the political responsibilities implicit in its charge as “the guardian of the regime [polıteía].” Precisely what this involved is by no means certain. After the reform, the Areopagus continued to adjudicate murder trials and at least some cases involving religious infractions. That much is clear. If it had previously conducted the scrutiny [dokımasía], determining whether candidates for office met the necessary legal qualifications, it lost this prerogative. If it handled treason trials or played a preliminary role in their regard (as, for example, it may have done in the cases lodged against Themistocles and Cimon), it no longer did so. If it ordinarily played a role in punishing magistrates for a breach of the law and if (perhaps only as the court of first resort) it audited retiring magistrates, holding a hearing [euthúna] at the end of their term to consider whether the conduct of each in office had been lawful and proper or not, it was deprived of these functions. There can be no doubt that the prerogatives which the Areopagus had previously exercised gave this council of former magistrates considerable political leverage and that its exercise of these prerogatives elicited in some quarters fierce resentment and in others an admiration no less vehement. For when these tasks in their entirety were reassigned to the council, the assembly, and the courts (which acted on behalf of the dmos as a whole), there was an uproar on both sides of the dispute.⁴³

An attack on the Areopagus and its superintending role within the city was an attack on the proud son of Miltiades. This body had been a bastion of his power. This much everyone knew—and it is most unlikely that the Athenians would have turned so savagely on their champion and his associates had there not been a revelation suggesting on his part an improvident stewardship of Athens’ affairs.

In the end, however, it was the Spartans who finished Cimon off. A majority of the ephors who had appealed to Athens for help were, we can presume, friendly to the Spartan-Athenian condominium in Greece. Those who succeeded them in September may have been among those hostile to and instinctively distrustful of the Athenians. For understandable reasons, many of their compatriots were unnerved by the pronounced grumbling that erupted at this time within Athenian ranks. These Athenians were not Lacedaemonians, they apparently told themselves. They were not even Dorians. From the Spartan perspective; they were, as Thucydides pointedly puts it, an alien people drawn “from another tribe.” In these elite light-armed troops—proud, as they were, of their expertise in unconventional warfare—the Lacedaemonians discerned “a spirit of audacity and a taste for innovation.” The word—neōteropoıía—that I have translated here as “innovation” can also mean “revolution,” and that is surely what the Spartans feared. The resentment expressed by these interlopers and their propensity as Athenians to speak their minds were evidently serious enough to cause the ephors to worry that Cimon might soon face a mutiny and to fear that his soldiers might abandon their allegiance and side with the rebels holed up on Mount Ithome. Here again it is unlikely that the authorities at Lacedaemon would have been so nervous had they not become aware that the promises made to the Thasians in 465 had been quite recently divulged.

When the Spartan leaders requested that the man they had made their próxenos at Athens lead his soldiers back home, saying that they now had sufficient support from their other allies and no longer needed Athenian help, it was perfectly evident that they were lying—for the Athenians’ first attempt to dislodge the rebels from Ithome had failed, and the insurgent helots and their supporters from among the períoıkoı of Messenia were still firmly ensconced on the mountain. What the Spartans did on this occasion was an expression of distrust, not outright hostility. They were in no position even to think about launching a war, and they did what they could to disguise their distrust. In context, however, their dismissal of the Athenians was tantamount to a confession that the stories these soldiers had recently heard from home were true—that the Lacedaemonians really had promised the Thasian rebels an invasion of Attica. Suddenly, it looked as if Themistocles’ assessment of Athens’ interests had been right all along, and the indictment that Critias would hand down half a century later now seemed apt. Cimon had “subordinated the augmentation in power of his fatherland to the interests of the Lacedaemonians.” This is what an overwhelming majority of his compatriots now believed, and it was on the basis of this conviction that they decided what to do next.⁴⁴

When Cimon reached Athens, he mounted an effort to have Ephialtes’ reform reversed—but to no avail. The Areopagus would never again have any considerable political weight. Henceforth everything was to be decided in as democratic a fashion as possible—in the probouleutic Council of 500, in the assembly, and the popular courts.⁴⁵

This was one blow delivered to the son of Miltiades. There would soon be more. First, almost immediately after Cimon’s return from Sparta, the assembly voted to effect a diplomatic revolution. It renounced the alliance against the Mede that Athens had forged with Lacedaemon, and it opted to embrace as Athens’ new allies the erstwhile Medizers of Thessaly and of Argos. This was a turning point—for, as Thucydides takes care to remind his readers, the Argives were then at war with the Lacedaemonians: the Argives were, he says, the Spartans’ polemíoı. Then, to confirm the revolution that they had effected, the Athenians voted early in 461 to hold an ostracism, and ten weeks later more than six thousand of the great man’s compatriots gathered in the agora, scratched the names of the various rival candidates on potsherds called óstraka, tossed them in a pile, and sent Cimon packing.⁴⁶

Whether, in this period, Cimon’s associates Alcmaeon and Leobotes and his brother-in-law Callias son of Hipponicus suffered a similar comeuppance we do not know. Callias’ close relationship with the illustrious son of Miltiades and his status as hereditary próxenos of the Lacedaemonians at Athens must have made him exceedingly vulnerable to attack, and Alcmaeon and Leobotes are apt to have been in a similar plight.

Callias’ colleague as hereditary próxenos, Alcibiades son of Cleinias, was, in fact, soon made to suffer as Cimon had. The Athenians were clearly furious. This Alcibiades, whom they had reportedly ostracized once already, they easily could have spared. The news that the Spartans had offered aid to the Thasian rebels appears to have been more than he could stomach. For he had taken the dramatic step of breaking all ties with Lacedaemon. No longer, he intimated, could he in good faith continue to do what his ancestors had done for many generations—serve among the Spartans’ próxenoı at Athens. This gesture did not, however, allay the anger of his compatriots.⁴⁷

If Alcmaeon and Leobotes were spared, it was presumably because the Athenians held only one ostracism per annum. After venting their wrath on Cimon one year and on Alcibiades the next, they seem have turned their minds to matters more pressing. If, moreover, Callias also escaped retribution, it was perhaps because Pericles and the others now dominant in Athens had the good sense to realize that they might in time need the services of an experienced diplomat intimately familiar both with the ways of the Lacedaemonians and with the protocols of the Persian court. As a consequence of the promise that the Lacedaemonians had made to the Thasians and of the breach with Sparta that the Athenians had initiated in the aftermath of Cimon’s return from Messenia, a great strategic rivalry had begun, and, as everyone understood, active warfare would soon ensue.⁴⁸

First Blood

Had circumstances been different, the diplomatic revolution staged by Cimon’s rivals in 461 and the alliance they had forged with Sparta’s foe might well have eventuated in an invasion of Attica by the Lacedaemonians and their allies in the Peloponnesian League. The like had happened in the past, and the Corinthians, who had at the time played a crucial role in thwarting the efforts of Cleomenes to turn Athens into a Spartan satellite, were no longer apt to come to Athens’ defense. In 480, there had been an abrupt and dramatic shift in the balance of power at sea; and the Corinthians were now far more wary of the Athenians than of their Lacedaemonian allies.

In 461, however, the Spartiates of Lacedaemon were not in a position to mount such an assault. Thanks to the earthquake of 465/4 and the helot revolt to which it had given rise, their numbers were depleted. Moreover, within their fastness in the southern Peloponnesus, they were still confronted with a rebellion, and they had to be constantly on their guard lest the guerrillas operating from Mount Ithome rouse anew the helots of Laconia and Messenia who had once again submitted to the Lacedaemonian yoke and perhaps draw into revolt those of the períoıkoı who had thus far remained loyal. To this, one can add that the Argives were still poised, ready to strike, and that the Tegeans, though weakened, remained disaffected. To project power abroad with any real effectiveness, the Lacedaemonians had to be secure at home—and there they were anything but secure. For the time being, at least, the Athenians had a relatively free hand, and they intended to take full advantage of the opportunity they had been afforded.⁴⁹

They were not, however, in a position to directly confront Lacedaemon. Laconia—where, along the Eurotas River, the Spartans resided—was geographically isolated. It was, moreover, “ringed round by mountains, rough, and difficult for foes to enter,” as Euripides tells us; and it was aptly described as “an acropolis and guard-post for the entire Peloponnesus.”⁵⁰ Had the Spartans limited their sphere of control to the Eurotas valley—cut off as it was by Mount Parnon to the east, Mount Taygetus to the west, and rugged hill country to the north—their situation would have been almost impregnable.

But, as we have seen, they did not limit themselves in this fashion. To the west, on the other side of the Taygetus massif, lay the Pamisos river valley in Messenia. “Rich” it was “in lovely fruit,” as Euripides would observe,

Irrigated by a myriad of streams and springs,

And well furnished with good pasture for cattle and sheep,

Neither bitter and stormy in the windy blasts of winter

Nor, on the contrary, rendered excessively hot by the four-horsed chariot of the sun . . .

Possessed of an excellence greater than can be expressed in words.⁵¹

This region was more vulnerable to invasion than was Laconia—especially from south-central Arcadia via the Derveni Pass—and there were places along its coast where troops could easily be landed. But, at the time of the battle of Dipaea, Lacedaemon had successfully reasserted her dominance in south-central and southwestern Arcadia, and the Athenians and their Argive allies were in no position at this time to make their way through Arcadia to the Derveni Pass. Moreover, while Athens could land hoplites at will on the Messenian shore, her manpower was limited and her capacity to provide logistical support for any length of time to such a force in so isolated a region at so great a distance from Athens was limited. Cape Malea at the tip of the southeasternmost prong of the Peloponnesus, where the prevailing winds and currents clashed and the waves could rise to mountainous heights, and the long lee shore stretching south to it from the plain of Thyrea did not constitute an insuperable obstacle. But in anything other than ideal weather this was a proverbially dangerous coast. “Double Malea,” they said, “and forget your way home.”⁵² Like Laconia, Messenia was, for all intents and purposes, a world unto itself.

Map 11. Argos, the Argeia, the Argolic Acte, and Their Environs

Furthermore, as a polity, Lacedaemon was virtually an autarchy. Economically, she was inward-looking. There were local sources of iron. Her citizens were gentlemen-farmers. They relied on the land and the helots the city owned for nearly everything that they needed. In the late archaic and classical periods, they had no trading relations worth mentioning, which helps explain why Sparta never had any coinage of her own. Athens could not in any obvious way easily leverage her mastery of the sea in such a manner as to do the Lacedaemonians grave harm.

As Themistocles had recognized, there was just one way in which a sea power, such as Athens, could decisively defeat a land power, such as Lacedaemon. The only available path to victory lay through the Peloponnesus. The analysis provided by a Corinthian leader in the early fourth century applied with equal force in 461, and it bears repeating here. It really was appropriate to think of the power of Sparta as a stream and to remember that, “at their sources, 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. 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.”⁵³ If one could win over Sparta’s allies and turn them against her, one could gather a hoplite army sufficiently numerous to be able to overwhelm the Lacedaemonians quite close to home.

Before, however, the Athenians could fully focus their attention on the Spartan alliance, they had to consider the needs of their own new allies—above all, Argos, their one ally within the Peloponnesus (and, given their aims, an utterly indispensable ally). It is this that explains their descent, early in 459, on the coastal town of Halieis. Originally a Dryopian settlement, Halieis was located within the territory of Hermione near the southeastern tip of the Argolid at the entrance to the Gulf of Argos. Its strategic significance appears to have been recognized quite early on. The archaeological remains suggest that the Spartans had garrisoned the place in the early sixth century and that they had subsequently been driven out. Its fine harbor can hardly have escaped the attention of the Athenians. It was well-suited to serve as base from which a flotilla and the marines it carried could provide assistance to the Argives on short notice, mount operations along the coast of the Argolic Acte, and raid the fertile district of Thyrea as well as Prasiae, Epidauros Limera, and the other towns occupied by Lacedaemonian períoıkoı, which were nestled in coves to the south in Cynouria at irregular intervals along the rugged Laconian coast.⁵⁴

There is reason to suspect that Argos may have been in need of assistance at this time. By 462/1, when the two cities forged their alliance, the Argives had almost certainly conquered and razed Mycenae. It is not likely that the siege initiated in 465/4 lasted more than a year. Whether, however, the Argives had already also overcome Tiryns, as they eventually would, we do not know. The latter struggle is said to have been quite difficult and to have lasted for some time,⁵⁵ and it had probably not yet come to an end. This is likely to have been one difficulty that the Athenians’ new ally faced. There was almost certainly another as well.⁵⁶

The cultural geographer Pausanias twice alludes to a battle within the Argeia—commemorated at Athens in the mid-fifth century and by Argos at Delphi at about the same time. In this conflict, the Argives and the Athenians assisting them are said to have defeated the Lacedaemonians. The battle in question was reportedly fought at Oenoe, west of Argos up the valley of the Charadros (now called the Xerias) on a narrow, difficult road—one branch of which runs from Oenoe below Mount Artemision and over the Prinos Pass to the village of Nestane and on to Mantineia, while the other branch makes its way from there across the Artemision massif further south to Nestane by way of the modern village of Tourniki.⁵⁷

Pausanias’ report, registered half a millennium after the supposed event, has given rise to considerable scholarly skepticism. As one observer has pointed out, there was no path over Mount Artemision from Mantineia that one would be likely to choose if one were leading a Lacedaemonian army against Argos—for there was a far easier road, a thoroughfare better suited to carts, that ran up to Argos from Lacedaemon via Caryae, Tegea, Hysiae, and Lerna. What this scholar failed to notice, however, is that there was one period in the fifth century in which the Athenians and the Argives were allied and the hostility of the Tegeans precluded Spartan use of the main wagon road—and that this was the very period in question here.⁵⁸ The battle described by Pausanias can plausibly be situated in or quite soon after 461—shortly before the fall of Tiryns, which is likely to have taken place in 460, and the Athenian attack on the Tirynthians’ ultimate place of refuge at Halieis in the spring of the following year.

Thucydides’ failure to mention the battle of Oenoe may but should not seem puzzling. As we have had occasion to observe, his narrative of the period between the Persian Wars and the great Peloponnesian War is highly selective, and he mentions only events that are grist to his mill. If this battle did not in his opinion bear in any significant way on the growth of Athenian power, it is because it was strategically inconsequential. The Messenians were still holed up on Mount Ithome. The Spartans may have felt called upon to relieve the siege of Tiryns, but they could not spare a large host; and, given the roughness of the roads, it would have been hard to provide much in the way of logistical support to an army of any size situated precariously on the Argive side of the Artemision massif. So, with an eye to exploiting the element of surprise and perhaps also inspiring civil strife among the Argives, they launched a commando attack.

That, at the time, the Argives and the Athenians would go to some lengths, as they reportedly did, to commemorate their victory in what was little more than a skirmish is not, however, surprising. They really did have something to celebrate. For it was not every day that either city handed the Spartans a crushing defeat,⁵⁹ and the “sons of the slain” at Argos were understandably proud that they had succeeded gloriously where the previous generation had so ignominiously failed. So proud, in fact, were they of this achievement that shortly thereafter in celebration, both at Delphi and at Argos itself, they erected statues of the victorious Epigone of Argive legend, which they juxtaposed with statues of these men’s fathers—the Seven, including Oedipus’ son Polyneices, said to have fought on his behalf in a vain attempt to conquer Thebes and make him king. It was apparently at this time as well, perhaps to celebrate their success at Oenoe and their achievement in conquering and appropriating Mycenae and Tiryns, that the Argives launched an ambitious campaign of construction, expanding the Heraeum and building a host of temples throughout the Argeia, and that they founded the athletic games in honor of Hera for which Argos would henceforth be known.⁶⁰

In retrospect, however, Oenoe may not have seemed all that memorable—especially, when seen at a distance in time from the perspective of men as hard-headed as were Thucydides, Ephorus, and Plutarch. Their silence is a salutary reminder of the limits to our knowledge of this period. Had it not been for the monuments discussed in passing by Pausanias, we would be completely unaware of what happened at Oenoe.⁶¹

It is a reasonable guess that the failure of this commando operation occasioned on the part of the Lacedaemonians another surprise attack no less daring. This one is mentioned in passing by Herodotus—who reports that at an unspecified time prior to 430 a Spartiate named Aneristus, whose father Sperthios had gained great fame in the mid-480s, managed to enter the harbor of Halieis on a merchant ship concealing a small contingent of soldiers and seize the town where the refugees driven from Tiryns by the Argives would soon find a home.⁶²

If Aneristus’ audacious coup preceded the attack that the Athenians launched on Halieis in 459, as seems tolerably likely,⁶³ that strategic harbor town must have been in hostile hands at the time. This suggests two possibilities: that the Athenians had seized Halieis shortly after forging their alliance with Argos, as they may well have done; or that at this time the Hermioneans—in whose territory, as we have seen, Halieis lay—were already aligned with Athens, as they and the citizens of nearby Troezen certainly would be a few years thereafter. Absent the latter of these two possibilities, it is hard to explain why, when the Athenians launched their attempt to retake Halieis in 459, Hermione was conspicuously absent from among the cities in the Peloponnesus known to have cooperated in fending off Athens’ assault; and it is also telling that her near neighbor Troezen passes unmentioned in this regard as well. In this region, the Athenians had apparently seized the initiative almost immediately after forging their alliance with the Argives.⁶⁴ From the outset, they sought to attract Lacedaemon’s allies into their orbit, offering the carrot but more often wielding the stick.