CHAPTER 5

War in Two Theaters

Never in this city, pray I,

May faction, greedy for evils, rage. . . .

Instead, let the citizens return joy for joy

In a spirit of common love,

And may they hate with a single heart.

For much there is among mortals that such a hate can remedy.

AESCHYLUS

TROEZEN and Hermione were not alone in adjusting with alacrity to the new geopolitical environment. The Megarians did the like at about the same time. It is a reasonable guess that Athens threatened the two cities on or near the coast of the Argolid with the stick. To the Megarians, by way of contrast, they offered the carrot.

Athens and Megara had not been on especially friendly terms in the past. The island of Salamis had been a bone of contention in the early years of the sixth century, and the border between the two cities was contested.¹ In Hellas, next-door neighbors tended to be at odds.

In the aftermath of the Persian Wars, however, the Corinthians, who were also neighbors of the Megarians, had begun bullying their ally to the west, as we have seen. Eventually, we must suppose, the Megarians appealed to Lacedaemon, asking that the hegemon of the Peloponnesian League intervene to rein in her most important ally. This, if the Megarians really did ask, the Spartans were unwilling—and, in the circumstances, quite likely unable—to do, as the Corinthians no doubt knew. The Lacedaemonians were, as we have also seen, preoccupied with wars nearer to home.

The pressure on Megara must have been great and her situation, grim. For, when the Athenians broke off their alliance with Lacedaemon and lined up with Argos and Thessaly, the Megarians, in desperation, did the unthinkable. They withdrew from the Spartan alliance, and they grasped at the opportunity this realignment afforded them. Then, without hesitation, the Athenians did the like, seizing the golden opportunity that the Megarians’ appeal afforded them and forging an alliance with that political community.²

Map 12. The Saronic Gulf

For Athens, Megara was a strategic prize. Like Corinth, she occupied part of the narrow isthmus that connected the Peloponnesus to the Balkan peninsula and separated the Corinthian from the Saronic Gulf. Between the two communities situated on this isthmus lay Mount Geraneia, which was traversed by passes that, with light-armed troops, one might be able to close. If Athens controlled the Megarid and guarded with an adequate force either these passes themselves or the approaches to them from the northwest, it would be exceedingly difficult for a Peloponnesian force to invade Attica.³ Moreover, if Athens controlled the Megarid, she could also make use of Pegae, the capacious Megarian port on the Corinthian Gulf.

The Athenians were not behindhand. The news of Lacedaemon’s pledge to the Thasians had shaken them. They knew that the helot rebellion would someday come to an end, that the Spartans would then find an occasion in which to march into Attica with their allies, and that they could neither defeat the Peloponnesians in the field nor withstand a lengthy siege. With this prospect in mind, they garrisoned Megara and Pegae and set about building walls on either side of a corridor designed to serve as an umbilical cord, linking the town of Megara, which was just under a mile inland from the Saronic Gulf, with Nisaea, its port on that body of water.⁴ In this fashion, by making it easy to resupply the Megarians from the sea, they rendered it impossible for Lacedaemon and her Peloponnesian allies to mount a successful siege of their town. In this fashion, they also arranged that, if the Peloponnesians managed to force their way through Geraneia and the Megarid and enter Attica, they would have a sizable Athenian garrison in their rear.

The Year 459

It is to Athens’ alignment with Megara chiefly that Thucydides traces “the violent hatred [sphodròn mîsos]” that characterized the disposition of the Corinthians with regard to the Athenians from this time on.⁵ Prior to the Persian Wars, as we have seen, the Corinthians had sided with the Athenians against the Thebans and the Aeginetans, and they had stood in the way of Spartan attempts to make Athens a satellite. In 480, the two communities had clashed over the advisability of staging a battle in the narrows at Salamis; and there is, as we have also seen, evidence strongly suggesting that the sudden and dramatic shift in the balance of power at sea in Athens’ favor effected by Themistocles on the eve of the war elicited from the Corinthians in its aftermath a measure of wariness and even fear. Like the Spartans, however, the Corinthians may well have been ambivalent—appreciative of the service that Athens and her Aegean alliance performed in fending off the Persians, and both miffed and nervous at unexpectedly being overshadowed.

Athens’ intervention on Megara’s behalf in her border dispute with Corinth transformed the Corinthians’ wariness, fear, and resentment into fury; and a year later, in 459, when an Athenian fleet descended on Halieis, it was the Corinthians who rallied their Epidaurian and Sicyonian allies and drove off Athens’ marines.⁶ In, however, the naval battle that followed quite soon thereafter off the little island of Cecryphalia (which lay between Epidaurus and Aegina), the Athenians defeated the Corinthians and their Peloponnesian allies. And not long thereafter, in the same campaigning season, the Athenians and their own allies fought a great fleet action off Aegina against Athens’ ancient Aeginetan enemy and her allies in which—under the command of Leocrates son of Stroibos, who had been one of Athens’ generals at Plataea—they achieved a decisive victory and captured seventy ships before landing marines on the island and initiating a siege.⁷

These were not the only battles that the Athenians and their allies fought in the campaigning season of 459. They were also engaged in that year with the Mede. In 464, when Artaxerxes repudiated the agreement that his father Xerxes had made with Cimon’s brother-in-law Callias in the aftermath of Eurymedon, he was in no position to launch an attack on any of the members of the Delian League. He first needed to consolidate his control of his father’s empire, subdue a rebellion that broke out in Egypt that year, and rebuild the Achaemenid navy.⁸

This left the initiative in the hands of the Athenians and their allies. After Eurymedon, Cyprus had been Cimon’s bargaining chip. He could have seized it. Instead, as we have seen, he offered to back off—on condition that Xerxes agreed to a cessation of hostilities and to ground rules governing the future disposition of the Greek and the Persian forces. After Callias’ return from Susa late in 464 or in 463, the Athenians and their allies began making plans to take the island. At first, they may have been preoccupied—initially, with the siege at Thasos and with evacuating the surviving colonists from Ennea Hodoi; then, with forging alliances with Argos and Thessaly, with asserting control along the Argolid coast, and with building fortifications in the Megarid. But when these operations were all completed—if not, in fact, before—they turned once again to the eastern Mediterranean to demonstrate to Artaxerxes just how much damage they could do. Precisely when they first initiated a campaign we do not know. But, in 459, we find them present along the coasts of Cyprus with a fleet of two hundred triremes, which they also used to raid the Phoenician coast.⁹

War in Two Theaters: A Timetable, 464–449

Winter 464	Inaros stages a rebellion in Egypt
Winter–Spring 464	Artaxerxes refuses to renew the Peace of Callias
462/1	Athens repudiates her alliance with Sparta
	Athenian alliance with Argos and Thessaly
461	Athens cows Hermione and Troezen and garrisons Halieis
	Battle of Oenoe
	Athens allies with Megara, garrisons Megara and Pegae
461/0	Athens builds Long Walls from Megara to Nisaea
ca. 461/0	Athens begins constructing Long Walls from Athens to Phalerum and the Peiraeus
460	Fall of Tiryns, refugees flee to Epidaurus and Hermione
	Aneristus’ commandos capture Halieis
	Tirynthian refugees resettle at Halieis
459	Athenian fleet dispatched to Cyprus, raids Phoenician coast
	Corinthians, Epidaurians, and Sicyonians defend Halieis against Athens
	Athenians victorious at sea in battles off Cecryphalia and Aegina
	Siege of Aegina initiated
	Persians defeated at Papremis in Egypt
	Athenian fleet shifts from Cyprus to Egypt
	Corinthians cross Geraneia, Athenians defeat them in the Megarid
458	Siege of the White Castle at Memphis in Egypt initiated
	Spartans lead Peloponnesian force to Doris, Delphi, Phocis, and Boeotia
	Athenian Triremes, based at Pegae, institute blockade
	Battle of Tanagra
	Battle of Oenophyta; Athens subdues Boeotia, Phocis, and Locris
	Athens’ Long Walls completed, Aegina surrenders on terms
456	Megabyzus mounts Persian invasion of Egypt
455	Tolmides circumnavigates the Peloponnesus, captures Cythera, burns Gytheion
	Withdrawal of Messenian helots from Mt. Ithome negotiated
	Tolmides settles Messenian refugees at Naupactus
	Athenians tighten their blockade in the Corinthian Gulf
	Athenian fleet besieged at Prosopitis in Egypt
454	Athenian force at Pharsalus in Thessaly
	Tolmides quells uprisings in Boeotia and on Euboea, Naxos, and Andros
	Pericles with fleet in the Corinthian Gulf, attacks Sicyon and Oeniadae
	Achaean alliance with Athens
	Athenians captured at Prosopitis, loss of relief squadron
454/3	Cimon recalled from exile
451	Five-year truce
	Battle of Cypriot Salamis
449	Peace of Callias renewed, Congress Decree

In the meantime, a Libyan prince named Inaros—who appears to have passed himself off as a descendant of the younger Psammetichus, the last Saite ruler of Egypt—had seized upon the news of Xerxes’ death as an opportunity to stage a revolt in lower Egypt. At some point not long after January 464, he managed to lay hold of much of upper Egypt as well, and the man then hailed in Egypt as “the prince of the rebels” is said to have expelled from the valley of the Nile the hated functionaries charged with collecting tribute for the Mede.¹⁰

In the aftermath, Inaros may have sent an embassy to Athens to forge an alliance. In 459—when he got word that Artaxerxes’ uncle Achaemenes, who had been the Persian satrap in Egypt for more than twenty years, was advancing on Egypt with a sizable armada—he appealed for assistance, and the Athenians broke off operations on Cyprus and sailed with their entire force to the Nile. Whether, as Diodorus Siculus reports, they lent a hand when Inaros, his Egyptian subjects, and the mercenaries in his hire defeated the Persians at Papremis and killed Achaemenes is open to question. But with their triremes they did defeat the naval forces of Achaemenes and they seized control of the great river; and with the marines on board, they captured two-thirds of Memphis and initiated a siege of the fortress called the White Castle—where the surviving Persians and Medes and their Egyptian supporters were holed up.¹¹

Map 13. The Southeastern Mediterranean

Inaros was a Libyan, not an Egyptian, and his assertion of his right to rule the Nile basin may in some quarters have stirred resentment. It is possible that his hold on upper Egypt, where he was a complete stranger, was tenuous from the outset; and it seems likely that the presence of a large Persian garrison at Memphis and the expectation that an army would be sent for its relief was sufficient to encourage the Iranians still lodged in the region, the mercenaries at Elephantine and elsewhere, and native Egyptians who had benefited from the Achaemenid regime to rebel against his rule. The papyrological evidence indicates that at Elephantine, in and after December 459, Artaxerxes was recognized as king, and the same was evidently true at Aswan in and after 458. North of Memphis, however, in the marshlands of the Delta where little, if any, written evidence from this period has survived, Inaros appears to have retained control. Such is what we would conclude from weighing the testimony of our Greek sources.¹²

At this time, the Athenians were stretched thin; and, with an eye to capitalizing on the fact, the Corinthians and their allies attempted to dislodge them from Megara. First, they dispatched three hundred Peloponnesian hoplites to Aegina to stiffen the resistance to Athens’ siege. Then, to the surprise and dismay of their adversaries, they seized the heights of Geraneia and marched into the Megarid, figuring that, with so many heavy infantrymen absent on Aegina and in the southeastern Mediterranean, the Athenians would be incapable of defending the Megarians without lifting the siege on Aegina. The Corinthians were, however, in for a shock—for, at Athens, Myronides son of Callias, who had also shared in the command at Plataea twenty years before, rallied the reserves left behind to defend the town—both those deemed too young to take the field and those regarded as too old—and he led them into the Megarid, where they engaged the Peloponnesians, fought them to a standstill, and sent them packing.

Twelve days later, when the hoplites of Corinth—stung by the taunts they encountered at the hands of their elders—returned to the battlefield to set up a trophy belatedly asserting their claim to victory, Myronides’ men sallied out from Megara and inflicted on them a clear-cut defeat. Then, to add injury to insult, when one division of the retreating army lost its way and stumbled into a cul-de-sac, the Athenians blocked the exit and had their light-armed troops stone to death the men they had trapped. The defeat, compounded by this massacre, was for Corinth, Thucydides tells us, “a grave blow,” and it greatly buoyed Athenian morale.¹³

All in all, it had been an astonishing year for the Athenians. After the campaigning season had come to an end, they commemorated their achievement by acknowledging the cost. Near the Ceramicus, they erected ten marble slabs—one for each civic tribe—and on these they recorded the names of the men who had given their lives in war for Athens that year. The memorial for the Erechtheid tribe, which survives almost in full, specified that the fallen had died on Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phoenicia, at Halieis, on Aegina, and in the Megarid. In 480, there had been thirty thousand adult male Athenians. Twenty-one years later, thanks to financial contributions from the members of the Delian League and the employment on offer for those willing to assist with the maintenance and deployment of the fleet, Athens could support a much larger population, and the citizen body appears to have grown dramatically to meet the demand. The losses must nonetheless have been deeply felt. The dead belonging to the Erechtheid tribe exceeded 185 in number. It is conceivable that ten times as many citizens—perhaps 3 percent of a total adult male citizen population numbering sixty thousand—died in service to Athens that one year.¹⁴

Lacedaemon Awakes

The Athenians must have found the invasion of the Megarid by the Corinthians and their allies unsettling. Hitherto they may have entertained the notion that the guards whom they had installed on or near the passes through the Geraneia would be able to prevent such an invasion, but this pleasing presumption had turned out to be an egregious error. Had the invading force been considerably larger, had the Lacedaemonians joined in, had they brought with them the Arcadians and Eleans as well as the members of Corinth’s regional alliance, Attica would have been in grave peril—for the underage and superannuated men under Myronides’ command would not have been adequate for homeland defense.

In the past, the Athenians had contemplated joining Athens to the Peiraeus and Phalerum Bay with Long Walls like those which they had constructed at the very end of the 460s between Megara and Nisaea. After Eurymedon, as we have seen, Cimon had even gone to the trouble of laying foundations for the two “legs” (as they would be called) in the marshland lying inland from Phalerum and the Peiraeus.¹⁵ But, if anyone followed up on his preparatory effort, it was in a desultory fashion. The distance and the cost were no doubt daunting. Less than a mile separated Megara from Nisaea. Athens was nearly five miles inland from the Peiraeus. Moreover, the Thebans, who had posed a threat in the past, were no longer dominant in Boeotia to the north. The Boeotian League, if it even existed at the time, was not militarily formidable.¹⁶ And the Athenians had for some time been on friendly terms with the Spartans and their allies. They were not in peril—or so they thought.

When the Athenians learned of the commitments that the Spartans had made to the Thasians in 465, it must have shattered the illusions that they had hitherto entertained. Had the Lacedaemonians with their Peloponnesian allies actually invaded Attica, as they had promised, the Athenians would have been virtually defenseless. They could not hope to defeat an army of that size as well trained as were the Peloponnesians. Nor could they cower for long behind Athens’ city walls and outlast a siege. For what was threatened they were woefully unprepared.

Map 14. Attica, Southern Boeotia, and the Eastern Megarid, ca. 457

It is conceivable, then, and, in fact, quite likely that the Athenians began in earnest building their own Long Walls in the winter of 461/0, shortly after their breach with the Lacedaemonians. Thucydides’ choice of language is imprecise. Immediately after describing the events of 461 through 459, he tells us that katà toutoùs chrónous—“in these times”—they initiated construction. Given the number of miles involved and the height and breadth of the walls required, it is a reasonable guess that the project, which reached completion in 458, took two or even three years to finish.¹⁷

All that we can say, however, with any degree of certainty is this: that the Corinthian invasion of the Megarid in 459 must have removed any lingering doubts the Athenians had entertained. The Messenian threat had been contained. Although the rebels holed up on Mount Ithome had not been dislodged, they could not hold out forever. Someday—in all likelihood, someday tolerably soon—the Lacedaemonians would be back in force. It was imperative that the Long Walls connecting the city with the sea be finished before that day came, and everyone at Athens knew it.

Themistocles had foreseen the danger the city now faced, as he had foreseen many another. As we have already had occasion to note, when this great statesman had pressed his compatriots to complete the fortifications around the Peiraeus, he had repeatedly urged that, if they ever found themselves beleaguered on land, they should fall back on the Peiraeus, import food, and rely on their fleet.¹⁸ In the interim, however, the dramatic growth in Athens’ population had rendered this expedient untenable. As Cimon may have been the first to recognize, his compatriots were going to need a much larger refuge—one that encompassed the town of Athens as well as the Peiraeus and turned the two into something like an island. To accomplish this and radically alter and improve the strategic situation of the pólıs thereby, all that they would have to do would be to fortify the thoroughfare linking the town with its port—which is what the Athenians set out to accomplish—in 461, 460, or, at the latest, 459—when they began building formidable fortifications along this route on foundations made up of immense quadrangular blocks of stone roughly twelve feet across.¹⁹

While the Athenians busied themselves with this ambitious project, the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies mounted an expedition into central Greece north of the Corinthian Gulf. To the best of our knowledge, the Lacedaemonians had done nothing when Megara withdrew from the Spartan alliance. They had apparently done nothing when Athens attacked Halieis and initiated the siege of Aegina. Moreover, when the Corinthians and their allies had responded to this crisis by sending three hundred Peloponnesian hoplites to Aegina and by invading the Megarid, the Spartans do not appear to have lent a hand.

Now, however, that the Athenians’ Phocian allies had attacked Doris—which lay outside the Peloponnesus tucked away in the Cephisus river valley to the south of Thermopylae—the Lacedaemonians and their allies suddenly came to life. Why they did so at this time and not before is a puzzle. The northeastern Peloponnesus was of far greater strategic importance to Sparta than the Dorian tetrapolis could ever be.

It is, of course, true that the Lacedaemonians—and presumably the other Dorians residing within the Peloponnesus—considered Doris their ancestral homeland. It is also true that it was solely by dint of her connection with Doris that Sparta had a vote in the Amphictyonic League, and this surely counted for something. As Herodotus insists, the Lacedaemonians took their religious responsibilities very seriously.²⁰

It is nonetheless exceedingly odd that the Phocians’ seizure of one of the four póleıs in the Dorian tetrapolis was accorded greater weight than Athens’ acquisition of Megara, her annihilation of the Aeginetan fleet, and her investment of the town of Aegina itself. Lacedaemon’s troubles at home may well have eased somewhat by 458, but they were by no means over. The fact that the Eurypontid king Archidamus did not accompany the expedition to Doris strongly suggests that he was still preoccupied with the ongoing efforts aimed at containing the helot revolt and at dislodging the rebels from Mount Ithome—which is what we would expect from reading Thucydides’ report that the helot revolt, which began in 465/4, did not end until its tenth year.²¹

By 458, Pleistarchus was dead. Pleistoanax son of Pausanias the regent had inherited the Agiad kingship, but he was still a minor. So, commanding in the latter’s stead was his guardian, the regent Nicomedes—who is described in one source as a son of Cleombrotus (and, therefore, a brother of Pausanias) and in another as a son of Cleomenes, and who was no doubt one or the other. The expeditionary force Nicomedes led on this occasion consisted of fifteen hundred Lacedaemonian hoplites and of a great host—“ten thousand” more—drawn from among Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies. The number of Lacedaemonians dispatched reveals (and it may to some degree conceal) the severity of the manpower crisis that Sparta faced at this time. At Plataea in 479, Pleistoanax’ father had had under his command ten thousand Lacedaemonians—half of them Spartiates. Of the fifteen hundred men that the authorities at Lacedaemon thought that they could spare in 458, the vast majority are apt to have been períoıkoı.²²

Map 15. Central Greece

There were only two possible routes from the Peloponnesus to Doris. One could journey initially by sea or one could journey entirely by land. To be precise, one could slip across the Corinthian Gulf by ship and, then, either march up from Itea on the Gulf of Crisa some twenty-five miles—past the Phocian city of Amphissa and west of Mount Parnassus—into the upper reaches of the Cephisus valley, or land at Crisa itself and make one’s way on foot up through Delphi and along the western flanks of Parnassus to Lilaia, which was perched above the middle of that valley. Alternatively, one could trudge the much longer route through Geraneia and the Megarid, then on through Boeotia, into eastern Phocis, and up the Cephisus river valley from there. The passes through Geraneia were, we are told, difficult to traverse and now carefully guarded by the Athenians—which suggests what we are not expressly told: that Nicomedes and his men must have journeyed surreptitiously by sea from Sicyon or the Corinthian port at Lechaeum, perhaps under cover of night.²³ Once in Doris, they reportedly set things to rights, thrashing the Phocians, restoring to its rightful owners the town that the Phocians had seized, and settling future relations between the two peoples.²⁴

When, however, the authorities at Lacedaemon dispatched this expedition, they may have had more than one aim in mind. In this regard, Thucydides speaks only of Doris—which is no doubt the story he heard more than thirty years after the event from his Spartan informants. Plutarch, however, mentions Delphi where Thucydides had mentioned Doris. On this point, the manuscript tradition of Plutarch is unanimous. There is no reason why one should suppose this a scribal error, and it is unlikely to be an authorial slip. Plutarch was himself one of the two priests at the temple of Apollo at Delphi. He was steeped in local lore, and he was far more attentive to religious motives than was Thucydides.²⁵ It is, moreover, perfectly possible that the Phocians, who lived nearby, had taken control there (as, we know, they would a few years thereafter) and that they had done so on behalf of the Amphictyonic League, in which they figured prominently. It is even conceivable that, at the instigation of their Athenian allies, they had seen to something apt to anger the Lacedaemonians: that the god should demand of the Spartans that they “release the suppliant of Ithomaean Zeus,” as, we know, he did.²⁶ Delphi was, as we have seen, on one of the two roads leading from the Gulf of Crisa to Doris, and it was only a few miles east of the other path.

Diodorus Siculus and Justin in the material he excerpted from Pompeius Trogus—both in all likelihood echoing Ephorus—also claim that, after settling affairs in Doris, the Peloponnesians attempted to restore the hegemony of Thebes within Boeotia as a counterweight to the Athenians, and Plato reports that they were acting in defense of the liberty of the Boeotians.²⁷ Not one of the ancient authors asserts that either aim was an object of the expedition from the outset, but their silence in this particular can hardly be judged dispositive. The Spartans were notoriously secretive; and although they customarily said very little, on those rare occasions when they actually did speak up, the authorities at Lacedaemon were famous for saying one thing and doing another.²⁸ That the liberation of Doris was the stated object of the expedition is virtually certain, but it is not apt to have exhausted the aims contemplated by the closed-mouth older men in charge. Nicomedes is unlikely to have been freelancing, and it is easy to imagine that the Corinthians, who were thoroughly familiar with the geopolitical dynamics of Attica and Boeotia, had recommended something of the sort.

Thucydides also reports that Nicomedes received word after reaching Doris that the Athenians meant to dispute his army’s passage home. In the interim, an Athenian fleet made up of fifty triremes had apparently circumnavigated the Peloponnesus and was now stationed in the Corinthian Gulf, almost certainly in the sizable harbor at Pegae;²⁹ and, thanks to the Athenians’ awareness of the presence of the Peloponnesians to the north, this fleet was no doubt on alert. The journey back by sea from the Gulf of Crisa to Sicyon or Lechaeum was now much more perilous than before. There were also Athenians guarding the passes through the Geraneia massif. That road was, in the best of times, difficult, and it would be dangerous for the Peloponnesians to try to force their way back through the Megarid.³⁰

There was also dissension at Athens. The political reforms championed by Ephialtes had left some Athenians embittered and apoplectic. The diplomatic revolution that had followed had intensified their dissatisfaction, and they considered the ostracism of Cimon an outrage. Shortly after the passage of his reforms, Ephialtes was discovered one morning dead in his bed. It is conceivable that he died of natural causes, as one scholar has recently suggested. But there is apt to have been clear evidence of foul play—for it was widely assumed at the time that he was assassinated in his sleep, and rumors were rife. Moreover, Aeschylus clearly believed that Ephialtes had been murdered—for he made sleeplessness, the dangers of sleeping, and nocturnal killing thematic in his Oresteia.

At some point, a name was assigned the putative assassin. But this only adds to the mystery, for the man mentioned in our sources—Aristodikos—bears a name instanced neither in Tanagra, where he supposedly originated, nor anywhere else in Boeotia. Moreover, no murderers or accomplices were ever apprehended, indicted, or tried; and one fourth-century commentator actually suggested that Ephialtes’ friend and political associate Pericles was the culprit.³¹ There is one thing, however, that cannot be doubted and that is that there were some at Athens who genuinely hated Ephialtes and his legacy.

Aeschylus was clearly not in their number. He had backed Themistocles; and, as we have just seen, he lent oblique support in his Oresteia to the suspicion that Ephialtes had been assassinated. In keeping with this, he warmly welcomed the alliance forged with Argos in 461, and he may also have embraced the reform program carried out by Ephialtes the previous year. In his Oresteia, which won the prize at the City Dionysia in March 458, the tragedian staged the epic tale—repeatedly referenced in Homer’s Odyssey—of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, and Orestes, shifting the location for most of the action from Mycenae to Argos, and recasting the story in such a manner as to foreshadow in legend and extol in elegant verse the new ties linking the latter city with Athens. In the Eumenides, the final play of that trilogy, he also articulated a new foundation legend for Athens’ Areopagus, celebrating that body for the one function left to it by Ephialtes and his allies—its role as a sentinel, watchful over those who sleep, and its responsibilities as a court in which a trial for murder could put a destructive vendetta to rest, as it purportedly had in the case of Orestes.³²

In the spring of 458, Aeschylus was clearly worried that the discontent to which the diplomatic revolution and the political reform effected by Ephialtes and his allies had given rise would eventuate in civil war. Toward the end of his Eumenides, he twice in an unmistakable fashion sounded the alarm. First, he had Athena warn the Furies not to inflict stásıs on the political community whose patron god she was:

Do not cast into places that belong to me

A whetstone to sharpen the taste for blood, damaging to the spleen

Of young men, driven mad by a spirited anger not due to wine.

Do not pluck out the hearts of fighting cocks

And plant with them in my townsmen an Ares

Operating within the tribe, rendering them brazen in their dealings with one another.

Instead, let there be war abroad, beyond the door, let it come without toil or pain.

In it there will be a wondrous lust for renown;

But battle with the bird in one’s own abode—this I do not sanction.

Then, judging this brief, oblique warning insufficient, the tragedian had the chorus take up the same theme once more:

Never in this city, pray I,

May faction, greedy for evils, rage.

Never may dust drink the black blood of citizens

And a furious impulse for vengeance,

Driven by murder to the bane of murder in return,

Devour the city.

Instead, let the citizens return joy for joy

In a spirit of common love,

And may they hate with a single heart.

For much there is among mortals that such hatred can cure.

Though heartfelt, Athena’s exhortation and this choral prayer appear to have fallen on deaf ears. According to Thucydides, some at Athens from among the disaffected sent an emissary to Nicomedes, inviting him to cooperate with them in effecting a revolution in the city and in putting an end to the Athenians’ construction of Long Walls.³³

This last possibility is apt to have been in contemplation at Lacedaemon well before Nicomedes’ departure from the Peloponnesus. The strategic significance of Athens’ Long Walls project could not have escaped the notice of the Corinthians, who had responded to Athens’ seizure of control in the Saronic Gulf with a project of construction along the same lines—aimed at building Long Walls along the thoroughfare, some two miles in length, linking Corinth with Lechaeum on the Corinthian Gulf. The fact that, a quarter of a century later, we find them bitterly reproaching the Lacedaemonians for having failed to nip the Athenian project in the bud strongly suggests that at the time they had pressed hard for a decisive intervention on Sparta’s part.³⁴ At the time, the Lacedaemonians may have been obsessed with conserving their now meager manpower, with ousting the Messenian rebels from Ithome, and with shoring up their position in Arcadia. But they were neither stupid nor strategically obtuse. If, at acceptable cost, they could prevent the Athenians from making of Athens an island, it would be worth the very considerable risks attendant on sending a hoplite army outside the Peloponnesus.³⁵

Nicomedes is said to have tarried for a time near Thebes, expanding the circuit of the town’s walls and pressing the other Boeotian cities to unite under her leadership. Then, if I have the order of events right, he shifted his army ten miles to the southeast—away from the Corinthian Gulf, away from the Megarid, away from every conceivable route home—to the environs of Tanagra in southeastern Boeotia, which lay just north of the Asopus River, less than a mile from the border of Attica and quite close to Oropus—Athens’ strategically important port of embarkation for Euboea.

There, Nicomedes’ immediate aim may have been to overturn or co-opt a regime, hitherto friendly to the Athenians, that had for some time been asserting Tanagra’s hegemony over Boeotia. If it had been his intention all along to draw the Athenians into battle, with this act, Nicomedes succeeded gloriously. For they regarded the isolation of his army and its inability to find an unimpeded way home as a welcome opportunity.

The Athenians were still engaged in Egypt, and the siege on Aegina had not yet been brought to a successful conclusion. But it is virtually certain that by this time the Athenians had completed their circumvallation of the town and had, in keeping with standard operating procedures, reduced considerably their hoplite commitment on the island. In countering the Peloponnesians, they were better situated than they had been vis-à-vis Corinth in 459, and they were even more audacious. The twenty-five miles to Tanagra via Deceleia or Cephisia in northeastern Attica they marched with their entire levy.

Figure 6. Hoplite on Vix Krater, late archaic Laconian ware (Vix Treasure, Musée du Pays Châtillonnais. Châtillon-sur-Seine, France. Photographer: Michael Greenhalgh, Wikimedia Commons. Published 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic).

This maneuver or something like it they had planned well in advance. For, in addition, the Athenians brought with them one thousand Argive hoplites and an unknown number from Cleonae, a considerable body of infantrymen from their Aegean allies, and a cavalry force from Thessaly. They should have been a match for Nicomedes’ Peloponnesians. Their army is said to have amounted to fourteen thousand hoplites, and his, to eleven thousand five hundred. If, as Plato and Pausanias contend, he had some Boeotian support as well, it must have come largely from Thebes; and, given what we are told by Thucydides concerning the makeup of Nicomedes’ infantry force, the Theban contribution must have been for the most part composed of cavalry familiar with the Boeotian plain and well-suited to deployment on it—for that is what Nicomedes is almost certain to have lacked, though it could not have been clear that the Boeotians could withstand the celebrated horsemen of Thessaly.

The battle itself was hard fought, and, if Diodorus and Pausanias are not confused, it lasted two days. It was, we must suppose, a classic clash of two long phalanxes made up of heavy infantrymen armed with interlocking shields, thrusting spears, and short swords and variously equipped with metal helmets or caps made of felt and with corslets or cuirasses and greaves made of brass. We must imagine serried ranks of exhausted hoplites stubbornly pushing, shoving, spearing, and stabbing for hours on end in the hot summer sun while the cavalry forces covered their flanks. In such a battle, everything turned on strength and endurance, and that will have been especially true if the conflict actually continued for two days.

On this particular occasion, we are told, there were a great many lives lost on both sides—including three or perhaps even four hundred of the thousand Argives—and, at a crucial juncture, at least a part of the highly disciplined Thessalian cavalry force shamelessly switched sides. When it was all over, the Lacedaemonians and their Peloponnesian allies, though badly battered, still held the field.

Diodorus reports that, in the aftermath, the two sides negotiated a truce lasting four months and that the Peloponnesians then made their way home via Geraneia and the isthmus. Thucydides confirms the route they took but mentions no truce and asserts that—presumably as a gesture of triumph—the Peloponnesians tarried in the Megarid for some time to cut down the trees bearing fruit.³⁶ However ambiguous the situation may have seemed in the three years preceding, the Athenians and the Spartans were undoubtedly now at war.

After Tanagra

For the Lacedaemonians, the Athenians, and the Argives, there was a great deal riding on the outcome at Tanagra. Had either side inflicted on the other a genuinely decisive defeat—had the Peloponnesian force overwhelmed and slaughtered its opponents, or had the Athenian-Argive coalition managed to massacre or force a surrender of the Peloponnesians—the battle might well have marked a turning point in Greek history. Churchill was surely right: “Great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.” But great battles fought to a draw change very little.

To be precise, had the Lacedaemonian allies achieved such a victory, their accomplishment would have prevented Athens’ completion of the Long Walls linking the urban center with its port at the Peiraeus. It would have fanned into flames the civil dissension then threatening Athens, and it would almost certainly have forced her to raise the siege at Aegina and agree to a humiliating settlement on Spartan terms. The Athenians had marched out with their full levy. Had they been deprived of a substantial proportion of this force, they would not have been able to defend the territory in which they resided.

By the same token, had the Athenians and Argives triumphed in a similar fashion, their victory would almost certainly have undermined the morale of the Spartan alliance. It would have shaken Corinth and Mantineia. It would have heartened the rebels on Ithome, and it would have encouraged the Argives and Tegeans to attempt a revival in the fortunes of the latter’s stillborn pan-Arcadian alliance.

At Tanagra, however, neither side struck anything like a decisive blow. At the end of the struggle, the Peloponnesians held the field. They had won the day, and in triumph they marched home, pausing contemptuously in the Megarid, as we have seen, to ostentatiously display their command of the situation by cutting down the fruit trees of their erstwhile Megarian allies.

Satisfying though their victory must have seemed, it was nonetheless for Sparta a strategic defeat—for her losses and those of her Peloponnesian allies were no less heavy than those of their opponents, and this the Lacedaemonian element at the core of the Peloponnesian army could ill afford. If Sparta was ever in a position to win a war of attrition, it was not at this time. In consequence, once they crossed the Geraneia, the Peloponnesians dispersed to their homes and did not return. In effect, as Plato would later point out, the Lacedaemonians and their allies left central Greece to the mercy of those whom they had just overcome.³⁷

The shrewdest of the Athenians were aware of what they had gained. Although they had been defeated in battle and their loss of life had been considerable, they were anything but defeated in spirit. Sixty-two days after Tanagra, Myronides son of Callias led an Athenian army back into Boeotia. So Thucydides tells us, and he adds that the Athenian general defeated the Boeotians at Oenophyta, secured control of Boeotia and Phocis, tore down the walls of Tanagra, and carried off as hostages the one hundred wealthiest Opuntian Locrians.³⁸

Diodorus’ account deserves attention as well. For, although his treatment of these events is marred by the rhetorical hyperbole and Athenian triumphalism to which Ephorus was prone, and he is clearly confused concerning the order of events preceding the battle of Tanagra and following immediately thereafter,³⁹ he fleshes out the details regarding Myronides’ expedition in a manner suggesting that in the fourth century the historian from Cumae knew more than Thucydides in his highly abbreviated epitome bothers to tell us.

To begin with, Diodorus observes, a good many Athenians were late in arriving at the place where they were instructed to gather before setting off on the expedition, and he tells us that Myronides chose not to tarry and left with a considerably smaller force than expected—confident that enthusiastic hoplites were worth far more than those who were reluctant. If the story that he tells us is true, as I am inclined to suppose, it is indicative of the impact that their grueling defeat at Tanagra had had on Athenian morale. It nonetheless also says even more about Athenian resilience. For Diodorus reports that Myronides and his men, though outnumbered, won a victory at Tanagra, then captured the town, and razed its walls. Myronides’ harsh treatment of the citizens of Tanagra suggests the possibility that Athens had earlier sponsored that pólıs’ claim to hegemony within Boeotia and that, when Nicomedes appeared, the ruling order in the city had earned Athenian ire by abandoning their allegiance to Athens and embracing the Lacedaemonian cause.⁴⁰

After dealing with Tanagra, according to this report, Myronides marched throughout Boeotia, ravaging the countryside and collecting booty in such a manner as to force the Boeotians to rally and fight—which is what they eventually did at Oenophyta, where they suffered a decisive defeat. In the aftermath, Diodorus tells us, Myronides firmly took possession of every pólıs in Boeotia apart from Thebes. Then, the Sicilian historian adds, after marching against the Locrians of Opuntia, defeating them, and taking hostages to guarantee good conduct on the part of those not seized, he did the same in Phocis. Thereafter, Myronides is said to have marched into Thessaly to punish those who had turned coat at Tanagra and to have attempted, in vain by way of a siege, to force the Pharsalians in particular to take back their pro-Athenian exiles.

Diodorus contends that Myronides accomplished all of this in a short span of time. But, given the Sicilian annalist’s propensity for summarizing a chronologically extended narrative in a single entry under a particular year, it seems more reasonable to suppose that the pacification process took more than one campaigning season. Moreover, Aristotle’s claim that Thebes was governed by a democracy in the immediate aftermath of the battle of Oenophyta suggests that, while she may not have come into the possession of the Athenians, she was among the cities forced to submit. And Thucydides’ testimony strongly suggests that Myronides did not reach Thessaly until a few years after Oenophyta.⁴¹

There is one matter of great importance that Diodorus with his celebratory bombast neglects. We have it on good authority that, in this period, the Boeotians in the various cities were at odds with one another, and it is virtually certain that Myronides and the Athenians more generally exploited their mutual hostility. It was in this period that Pericles son of Xanthippus famously compared the Boeotians with holm oaks, remarking that these trees knocked one another down in the course of falling and that the Boeotians did the like when they warred against one another.⁴²

The Spartans appear to have employed an expedition ostensibly sent for the defense of Doris to rearrange affairs in central Greece to the disadvantage of the Athenians. After their withdrawal, Myronides undid nearly everything that they had done. The fact that he found it necessary to intervene in Phocis is especially telling—for it suggests that, after he defeated the Phocians, Nicomedes had left a pro-Spartan faction in command. It was probably also at this time that Athens made an alliance with the Amphictyonic League and that the Phocians recovered control of Delphi.⁴³

Late in 458, not long after Myronides’ victory at Oenophyta, the Athenians finished their Long Walls; and the Aeginetans surrendered on terms, gave up their surviving triremes, pulled down their walls, and agreed to join the Delian League and pay the phóros required of its members. In return, the Athenians may have pledged that they would honor the Aeginetans’ right to govern themselves in accord with their ancestral laws. According to Diodorus, the siege had lasted nine months.⁴⁴

The Saronic Gulf was now, for all intents and purposes, an Athenian lake. Thanks to the Long Walls, Athens herself was an island of sorts impervious to assault by land, and the Athenians were now free to turn their attention further afield. It is no wonder that, in his account of the Pentekontaetia, Thucydides reserves the central place for the battle of Tanagra. The tactical victory that was for Sparta a great strategic defeat marked a genuine turning point in the growth of Athenian power.⁴⁵

In 459 or 458, Themistocles died at Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, and there, in the marketplace, a monument was constructed in his honor. After his flight from Argos, there had been a treason trial at Athens, he had been condemned in absentia, his property had been confiscated, and his sons, driven into exile. In other circumstances, Cimon’s ostracism might have paved the way for Themistocles’ recall. But his flight to Persia, which seemed to confirm the charge of Medism, ruled this out. After Themistocles’ death, however—perhaps in the wake of Athens’ victory at Oenophyta and the surrender of Aegina, when his admirers were riding high—the assembly at Athens voted to recall his sons and restore to them his property. In time, perhaps at the instigation of his offspring, the great man’s remains were reburied in a tomb overlooking that great monument to his foresight: the largest of the three harbors in the Peiraeus.⁴⁶

The Corinthian Gulf

Two years after the fall of Aegina, Tolmides son of Tolmaeus sailed around the Peloponnesus with a force of fifty triremes—half of which must have served as troop transports. For, with him, he brought no fewer than four thousand hoplites—three thousand of whom appear to have been volunteers. Many of these presumably doubled as rowers.

Before departing, Tolmides secured permission to raid Laconia. En route he may have captured Methana in the plain of Thyrea, and he is said to have taken Boiai on the Gulf of Laconia and the island of Cythera a short distance to the south. Thereafter, presumably using Cythera as a base, he descended on the dockyards at the Spartan port of Gytheion, burned them, and ravaged the land nearby. Then, after sailing along the coast of Messenia, he brought over two islands—Zacynthus, which lay off the coast of Elis in the northernmost corner of the western Peloponnesus; and Cephallenia with its four distinct póleıs, which faced both the Gulf of Patras and, deep within that body of water, the entrance to the Corinthian Gulf. In turn, using the latter of the two islands as a base, he captured both the Corinthian colony of Chalcis—which was situated a short distance north of the Gulf of Patras a few miles west of the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf—and Naupactus, which was located along the latter gulf’s northern shore a few miles east of its entrance and narrowest point (where northern Greece and the Peloponnesus are separated by a mile and, in 2004, a suspension bridge bearing a roadway was completed between the two).⁴⁷ It was in the strategically vital waters off Chalcis and Naupactus (by then renamed Lepanto) that a naval battle of world-historical importance would take place some two millennia subsequent to Tolmides’ arrival.

In the meantime, the Lacedaemonians, who were presumably once again under pressure from the oracle at Delphi “to release the suppliant of Ithomaean Zeus,” came to terms with the rebels on Mount Ithome—who surrendered their stronghold on condition that the Spartans allow them to depart from Messenia under truce with their children and wives. These refugees the son of Tolmaeus then settled in Naupactus alongside the Ozolian Locrians, who were themselves recent arrivals; and, thereafter, he descended on Sicyon and defeated the citizens of that maritime city in battle.⁴⁸

Map 16. The Corinthian Gulf, the Gulf of Patras, Zacynthus, Cephallenia, and Leucas

When Tolmides and his hoplites marched back to Athens, as they presumably did at the end of the campaigning season, he almost certainly left most of his triremes at Pegae in the Megarid. We are not told that, after this, the fifty Athenian triremes present in the Corinthian Gulf since 458 and those left by Tolmides two years thereafter vigorously asserted Athens’ control over that body of water. But it stands to reason that they must have done so, and we later learn that the Achaeans, who lived along the northern coast of the Peloponnesus west of Sicyon and opposite Naupactus, had aligned themselves with the Athenians.⁴⁹

Naupactus near the narrows was clearly chosen with an eye to its strategic significance. Twenty-seven years after settling the Messenians on that site, when the Athenians were once again at war against the Spartans and their allies, one of their commanders circumnavigated the Peloponnesus with twenty triremes, based himself at Naupactus, and set out to prevent anyone from sailing in and out of Corinth and the Corinthian Gulf as a whole. It is not at all likely that he blocked only the movement of triremes and troop transports. Merchant galleys and gaúloı were easy marks; and, in this later war, we are expressly told, the Athenians were interested in preventing the shipment of grain to the Peloponnesus from Italy and Sicily. Moreover, during this later war, they tried to maintain from Salamis and, in time, the tiny island of Minoa a strict blockade of Nisaea, Megara’s port on the Saronic Gulf—which suggests that they must have treated Corinth in much the same fashion, cutting her off, insofar as this was possible, from all commerce with the emporia in the Aegean, on the Ionian Sea, on the Adriatic, in Sicily, Italy, and the western Mediterranean more generally.⁵⁰

If, as seems clear, this is what the Athenians did in the 420s, it seems plausible to suppose that they did the same in their earlier war with the Peloponnesians. It is highly likely that they initiated this project in 458 when fifty Athenian triremes are known to have been present in the Corinthian Gulf; that in 455 they stationed a squadron at Naupactus, and perhaps another at Chalcis, in addition to the one known to have been lodged at Pegae; and that central to the mission they were assigned was to put an end to the lucrative trade with the west that enriched Corinth, supplemented incomes at Sicyon and elsewhere, and supplied foodstuffs to much of the Peloponnesus. To the same end, the Athenians may also have lodged a squadron of galleys in the harbor of Patras on the Achaean shore. It is striking that in 419—when an Athenian general once again intervened in Achaea, built long walls from the city of Patras to the gulf bearing her name, and attempted to construct a fort at Achaean Rhium where, at the narrowest point between the northern and southern shores, the Gulf of Patras gives way to the Gulf of Corinth—the Corinthians and Sicyonians became agitated and intervened to put a stop to construction. If, as I suppose, the Athenians in the 450s actually mounted a blockade, using these ports, the suffering they inflicted in this manner on the Corinthians in the latter part of that decade would go a long way toward explaining the depth and persistence of “the violent hatred” that the latter contracted for the Athenians in these years.⁵¹

Even more to the point, had the Athenians not imposed a blockade on Corinthian trade in the late 450s, it would be hard to explain what the Corinthians had in mind when, two decades thereafter, in speaking to the members of the Spartan alliance, they adopted a didactic tone, alluded cryptically to their own bitter experience with the Athenians, and then went on to issue a warning to the cities that lay in the interior of the Peloponnesus—in which they stressed the great damage that the Athenians could do them in battle far less than the economic hardship they could inflict if ceded command of the sea. “It is necessary,” the Corinthian delegates insisted on this occasion, “that those who occupy the interior [mesógeıa] and reside off the beaten path recognize that, if they do not rally to the defense of those down-country on the shore, they will have greater difficulty both in exporting by sea the produce which in season they gather [hḕ komıdḕ tōˆn hōraíōn], and in receiving again as a return [antílēpsıs] those things that the sea has to offer to the lubbers on land.” Theirs was, as these Corinthians clearly imply, the voice of experience—and that experience appears to have been exceedingly unpleasant.

One could exercise considerable leverage if one controlled the sea. As an acute Athenian observer would note at some point in the decades that followed, among the Hellenes and the barbarians none but his compatriots were really “capable of amassing the wealth” attendant on overseas commerce. “If a city is rich in timber for ships,” he asked,

where will she dispose of it, if she does not persuade the rulers of the sea? If a city is rich in iron, copper, or flax, where will she find a market, if she does not persuade the rulers of the sea? . . . Moreover, we will not allow men, on pain of losing the use of the sea, to conduct trade elsewhere with those at odds with us. . . . And near every mainland district there is a headland sticking out, an island lying offshore, or a choke point so that it is possible for those ruling the sea to lie in wait and wreak harm on those who make their homes on land.

In short, in the 450s, when the Athenians were riding high, a blockade that would have been a hardship for those who resided in the mesógeıa would have been a disaster for a city famous for the wealth she elicited from trade.⁵²

The Athenians were also active on land. In the spring of 454, the Athenians—probably under the command of Myronides—made an attempt with the help of their Boeotian and Phocian allies to install Orestes son of Echecratides as the ruler of Pharsalus, but to no avail. The Thessalians—who were superior in cavalry, as the Athenians should have foreseen—confined them to their camp, and they were unable to storm the town. A short time thereafter, we are given to understand, there was trouble in Boeotia, which Tolmides was sent to quell.

While the son of Tolmaeus was thus preoccupied, Pericles son of Xanthippus took to the sea. First, he marched to Pegae with a thousand Athenian hoplites. Then, he embarked on the triremes lodged there, sailed along the coast to Sicyon, marched inland either to Nemea or along the Nemean River, and inflicted a defeat on the Sicyonians. And finally, he reembarked, took with him a host of Achaeans, induced most of the Acarnanians to align with Athens, and unsuccessfully laid siege to the stronghold of Oeniadae, a short distance upstream from the coast.⁵³

In these years, the Athenians may not have been in a position to put real pressure on Lacedaemon’s allies in the interior of the Peloponnesus. But they did everything they could to force the cities on the coast to abandon the Spartan alliance, and it is a reasonable guess that they made life miserable for the Epidaurians, the Sicyonians, and the Corinthians in a multitude of minor ways that Thucydides, Diodorus, and Plutarch have no occasion to mention.

A Reversal of Fortune

A quarter of a century after these events, the Corinthians, looking back, tried for the benefit of the Lacedaemonians to describe what they were like themselves and what with Athens they were up against. “The Athenians,” they reportedly remarked, “are innovators.” They are

keen in forming plans, and quick to accomplish in deed what they have contrived in thought. You Spartans are intent on saving what you now possess; you are always indecisive, and you leave even what is needed undone. They are daring beyond their strength, they are risk-takers against all judgment, and in the midst of terrors they remain of good hope—while you accomplish less than is in your power, mistrust your judgment in matters most firm, and think not how to release yourselves from the terrors you face. In addition, they are unhesitant where you are inclined to delay, and they are always out and about in the larger world while you stay at home. For they think to acquire something by being away while you think that by proceeding abroad you will harm what lies ready to hand. In victory over the enemy, they sally farthest forth; in defeat, they give the least ground. For their city’s sake, they use their bodies as if they were not their own; their intelligence they dedicate to political action on her behalf. And if they fail to accomplish what they have resolved to do, they suppose themselves deprived of that which is their own—while what they have accomplished and have now acquired they judge to be little in comparison with what they will do in the time to come. If they trip up in an endeavor, they are soon full of hope with regard to yet another goal. For they alone possess something at the moment at which they come to hope for it: so swiftly do they contrive to attempt what has been resolved. And on all these things they exert themselves in toil and danger through all the days of their lives, enjoying least of all what they already possess because they are ever intent on further acquisition. They look on a holiday as nothing but an opportunity to do what needs doing, and they regard peace and quiet free from political business as a greater misfortune than a laborious want of leisure. So that, if someone were to sum them up by saying that they are by nature capable neither of being at rest nor of allowing other human beings to be so, he would speak the truth.⁵⁴

This is an apt description of the Athens that the Corinthians encountered in the 450s, and it captures as well the character of their Lacedaemonian opponents. If Sparta was a tortoise—slow, steady, methodical, and cautious in the extreme—Athens was a hare. Her citizens were quick, nervous, brilliant, and bold almost to the point of madness.

At the same assembly, the members of the Athenian delegation present did everything they could to reinforce the impression left by the Corinthians and to overawe the Lacedaemonians. Their hegemony—which by this time they were prepared to concede was, in fact, an empire—they boldly defended, asserting that at Marathon and Salamis and in the struggles that followed Lacedaemon’s withdrawal from the fray they had earned the right to rule. Their audacity in this regard they openly celebrated. In one passage, they asserted that they had been “compelled to advance their dominion” to its present extent “above all by fear, then also by honor, and subsequently by advantage.” In another passage, they tellingly put fear in second place. “We have done nothing wondrous,” they insisted, “nothing contrary to human ways, in accepting an empire given to us and in not yielding it up, having been conquered by the three greatest things—honor, fear, and advantage. Nor were we the first such, for it has always been the case that the weaker are subject to those more powerful. In any case, we think that we are worthy. Indeed, we seemed so to you—at least until now when, after calculating [logızómenoı] your advantage, you resort to the argument from justice [díkaıos lógos].” When one has weighed the realities, the Athenians asserted, one must conclude that “those are worthy of praise who, while following human nature in ruling over others, nonetheless are more just [dıkaıóteroı] than is required by a concern for retaining power. We certainly think that others, taking our place, would show very clearly whether we are measured [metrıázomen] in our conduct of affairs.”

The delegates conceded that Athens’ allies were restless under her yoke, but this they attributed to their failure to recognize and properly assess the only viable alternative to Athenian rule. “If you were to overcome us and to take up an empire,” they remarked, “you would swiftly lose all the goodwill which you have secured because of the fear we inspire—that is, if you hold to the pattern of conduct that you evidenced in the brief span when you were the leaders against the Mede. You have institutions, customs, and laws [nómıma] that do not mix well with those of others; and, in addition, when one of you goes abroad he follows neither his own customs and laws nor those employed in the rest of Hellas.” There is a boldness, a baldness, and an insolence evident in the Athenian speech for which there is no Spartan counterpart. It is hard to imagine a Lacedaemonian statesman openly acknowledging that it is a law of nature that the strong rule the weak. If anything, in its intellectual audacity, this speech was a demonstration of the disturbing qualities that the Corinthians had singled out.⁵⁵

The weakness of Athens derived from her strengths. Her successes—from Marathon, Salamis, and Mycale to Eurymedon and the war she conducted in these years against the Peloponnesians in Hellas and the Persians in Egypt—stemmed from her energy, her audacity, her resolve. And her magnificent success in all of these ventures served only to make the Athenians more energetic, audacious, and resolute. But energy, audacity, and resolve untempered by prudence can also lead to disaster, and this is what happened in 454.

It was one thing to harry the Persians when one had the Lacedaemonians guarding one’s back. It was another to do so when one was at daggers drawn with Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies. The Athenians were far more numerous than the Lacedaemonians, but, as we have seen, the city’s manpower was nonetheless quite limited. It did not compare with what the Peloponnesians were capable of putting in the field. Achaemenid Persia had what must have seemed like an infinite supply of men, and it possessed financial resources and a capacity to build and field fleets that beggared the imagination.

Egypt was important to the Great King. It was one of the wealthiest satrapies in his vast empire. He was not going to give it up without a tremendous fight, and that is precisely what was required—for the reconquest of Egypt was a monumental task, as Artaxerxes’ uncle Achaemenes by his failure had shown. First, one had to brave the heat, the sandstorms, the quicksand, the lack of water and make one’s way through Sinai. Then, one had to force one’s way past the massive fortifications built near Pelusium by Necho at the very end of the seventh and the very beginning of the sixth centuries. Finally, one had to march a considerable distance up the Nile, seize Memphis, and extend one’s control hundreds of miles south throughout upper Egypt.⁵⁶ For this, the Great King had the requisite resources. On land, in a place like Egypt, with sufficient preparation, he was apt to be able to overwhelm whatever forces Inaros could deploy. The Libyan rebel had defeated Achaemenes at Papremis, and he had killed the man. But, despite repeated efforts and the passage of something on the order of two or three years, he and his Athenian allies had not been able to take or force the surrender of the White Castle at Memphis; and, after Papremis, Inaros appears to have lost control of upper Egypt. “The prince of the rebels” was in Egypt an interloper of sorts himself—and this made him vulnerable.

At this stage, there was perhaps no great danger involved in the Athenians’ providing Inaros with aid. The Great King could send a minion such as Megabazos with gold to the Peloponnesus for the purpose of bringing the Lacedaemonians onto the field, as he did. But although by the end of 455 the Messenian rebels had withdrawn, within that great peninsula the Argives remained hostile, as did the Tegeans; and, outside it, Athens still controlled and patrolled the Geraneia in the Megarid as well as the Corinthian Gulf. Tanagra had been costly enough, and by this time the Athenians had finished their Long Walls. For an invasion of Attica, in 456 and 455, the circumstances were anything but propitious; and, gold or no gold, the Spartans were not about to do anything without carefully calculating the likelihood of success, which was not high, and the attendant risks, which were considerable.⁵⁷

The danger for Athens lay less in her meddling in Egypt than in the level of her commitment there. According to Thucydides—with whom, for what it is worth, Diodorus in one passage concurs—the fleet near Cyprus that was summoned by Inaros in 459 consisted of two hundred ships.⁵⁸ The manpower required for such an enterprise amounted to more than two-thirds of the entire adult male population of Athens. As we have seen, it took one hundred seventy oarsmen to power a Greek trireme, and there were at least thirty more men on board each ship, serving as officers, specialists, archers, or marines. If, initially, it was intended that this fleet be able to deploy hoplites in any numbers on the island of Cyprus, as seems likely, there may have been as many as thirty extra marines on board each galley. If Thucydides’ report is accurate—as it is apt to be—the Delian League’s commitment to Inaros at this time consisted of forty to forty-six thousand men.

Map 17. Lower Egypt

Of course, some of the triremes and crews were supplied by Samos. This we know.⁵⁹ Some no doubt were provided by Mytilene, Methymna, and the smaller póleıs on the island of Lesbos. Chios was almost certainly represented as well; and, although the officers, specialists, and marines on Athens’ triremes were all Athenians, some of the rowers in those galleys were, we can be confident, volunteers from abroad—men with little or no property, drawn from every corner of the Aegean, who earned their livelihood plying an oar. A great many, however, were without a doubt Athenians in straitened circumstances. It is, in fact, hard to believe that the citizens of Athens serving with the fleet numbered fewer than twenty thousand, and they may have been considerably more numerous.⁶⁰ In Egypt, the Athenians were playing for high stakes—which is what they nearly always did.

It took Artaxerxes and his underlings some years to gather the forces requisite for succeeding where Achaemenes had failed, but this they did. In time, almost certainly in 456, yet another Achaemenid army marched on Egypt. This time, the leader was Megabyzus son of Zopyrus, the man who had thwarted Artabanus’ plot. In the interim, he had reportedly been named satrap of Syria.⁶¹

Thucydides tells us that the army brought to Egypt by Megabyzus was large, but he does not say how large it was. We know only that it was sufficient. The Athenians can hardly have been unaware of the preparations required for the dispatch of an expeditionary force on this scale. Their chief task will have been to overawe the Phoenician fleet and to deny Megabyzus access to Egypt by sea, and for this they will have needed a fleet of considerable size.

The Achaemenid army arrived, Thucydides pointedly reports, by land—presumably because at the time the two hundred triremes deployed in this theater by the Athenians still commanded the approaches to Egypt from the sea. Megabyzus’ army then defeated in battle the partisans of Inaros and their allies—presumably at Pelusium, the gateway of Egypt, near where the easternmost branch of the Nile flows alongside the Sinai desert and into the Mediterranean. Thereafter, having entered Egypt, it marched upriver to Memphis in time-honored fashion, put an end to the siege of the White Castle, and drove Inaros’ forces and those of his Greek allies from the city.

In the interim, in the midst of the chaos associated with Megabyzus’ victory at Pelusium and the fighting at Memphis, the Great King’s fleet must have defeated the Greek squadron assigned to deny it access to the Nile. For, after the fall of Memphis, Megabyzus’ forces managed to trap the surviving Greeks in the delta on the island of Prosopitis. Fifty to sixty miles in circumference, this island was located some sixty miles downstream from Memphis, and it was set off from the mainland by a canal constructed on its northern side for the purpose of linking the Canopic and Sebennytic branches of the great river.

In the 1940s of the modern era, Prosopitis was capable of supporting more than a million souls. In Megabyzus’ day, however, before the drainage projects carried out in later times, it cannot have been even remotely as populous. But, in an era in which lower Egypt seems to have been for the most part sparsely populated, this particular island must have been well-tilled—for Herodotus, who visited this part of Egypt, tells us that Prosopitis was replete with villages. In the early and mid-450s, the Athenians and their allies will have needed a base within the delta from which to operate and a reliable source of provisions; and this island, which was strategically located athwart the two main branches of the river, may have served their turn.

At Prosopitis, deep in the delta—far, far from the sea—Megabyzus subjected the surviving Hellenes to a siege lasting eighteen long months. So Thucydides tells us. We have reason to suppose that the Athenians lodged most, if not all, of their fleet along the shores of the canal linking the Canopic and Sebennytic branches of the great river. After their victory downstream, the Phoenicians must have sailed up both branches from the Mediterranean. Their way further south along the eastern and western shores of the island must have been blocked at the two points where the canal met the branches of the river; and where these two streams ran alongside the island, the land must have been too marshy for the Persians to cross on a great host of rafts. The Athenians presumably had ample stores, but to hold out for eighteen months they must have been able to requisition produce from the villagers who resided on the island, as the pharaohs of Egypt had always done.

Finally—either in the winter of 454 or, more likely, in the following fall, when the inundation produced by the annual flood was no longer in evidence—Megabyzus and his men drained the canal by diverting the water within it into another channel and left the Greek triremes lodged along its shores stranded in the mud high and dry. It was at this point, Thucydides reports, that the soldiers of the Great King made their way across the muddy channel on foot and captured the Greek crews.⁶²

This was not, Thucydides tells us, the final blow delivered to the Greeks. Not long thereafter, when a relief squadron of fifty triremes supplied by Athens and the other members of her confederacy put into shore at the Mendesian mouth of the great river—where the Athenians and their allies, with an eye to denying the Persian fleet access to Egypt, are apt to have maintained another base—it was caught unawares. By land Megabyzus’ infantrymen attacked the Greek camp and from the sea a naval squadron descended on the fleet. Most of the Greek galleys were destroyed. Only a handful managed to escape.⁶³

Thucydides leaves us with the impression that the fleet originally diverted to Egypt remained there for five full years and that, at Memphis and Prosopitis, the Athenians and their allies lost something on the order of two hundred triremes—which is the number mentioned by his younger Athenian contemporary Isocrates and by Aelian half a millennium later.⁶⁴ All in all, then, the Athenians and their allies appear to have lost something not far short of two hundred fifty triremes in this venture—which means that the number of Greeks captured and killed must have approached, if it did not in fact exceed, fifty thousand and that Athens herself must have sacrificed something on the order of one-third of her adult male citizens, if not a greater proportion.

As one would expect, there are numerous scholars who find these numbers incredible. They cannot believe that, in 459, Athens managed to deploy two great fleets—one in and near the Saronic Gulf to attack Halieis, defeat the Corinthians and their allies, annihilate the Aeginetans and their supporters; and the other in the eastern Mediterranean—and they cannot imagine that the Athenian alliance could have survived a blow as severe as the one that, Thucydides deliberately leads us to presume and Isocrates and Aelian openly assert, they suffered in 454.⁶⁵

For support some of these skeptics look to Ctesias of Cnidus, who served as a physician at the court of Artaxerxes II in the last years of the fifth and the first years of the fourth century, and to the account that Diodorus Siculus cribbed from Ephorus. From Ctesias, we have only fragments—often, salacious tidbits which caught the fancy of later authors, many of them preserved in an epitome by the Byzantine scholar Photius—and these may not fully do the man justice. There is no reason to doubt his familiarity with the Achaemenid court in the time in which he served there, and what he has to report concerning the marriage of Megabyzus with Xerxes’ daughter and the role he played in the affairs of the first Artaxerxes may well be reliable. But what he adds concerning the identity of the Persian commander who led the first expedition against Inaros and the size of the armies at Megabyzus’ disposal is demonstrably false; and, given what Thucydides and Diodorus report concerning the number of triremes diverted to Egypt in 459, it is hard to credit Ctesias’ claim that only forty triremes were dispatched on this occasion.⁶⁶ His account and that of Diodorus concerning the ultimate fate reserved for the Greeks fighting in Egypt are no less suspect. Thucydides was a child, perhaps even an infant or a toddler, in 454. As he was growing up, he was surely made aware of what had happened to his compatriots on this particular occasion, and he had ample opportunity to speak with the survivors in the first three decades following that disaster. It is hard to believe the assertion of Ctesias and Diodorus that Megabyzus negotiated an armistice with the Greeks at Prosopitis, allowing them to withdraw, when we have in hand Thucydides’ blunt testimony that only “a few from the many” on “the great expedition [megálē strateía]” dispatched by the Hellenes managed to escape to Cyrene, well to the west in Libya, and make their way home. There is, moreover, a later passage in Diodorus in which he has a Syracusan speaker attribute to the Athenians on this occasion the loss of three hundred triremes and their crews.⁶⁷

The real question, which was already raised in the extracts Justin made from Pompeius Trogus, is whether Athens and her allies had the resources with which to fight a major fleet action in the Saronic Gulf and to deploy two hundred triremes far afield at the same time—for, if they did (which Pompeius Trogus very much doubted), they clearly had the resources to weather the loss of two hundred thirty or thirty-five triremes in 454. We know that they had enough triremes in reserve to do the like forty years later, and I see no reason to suppose this impossible in and after 461 when they deliberately launched war on a grand scale in two far-distant theaters. It is, as Athens’ opponents learned repeatedly in the course of the fifth century, a grave error to underestimate the capabilities of the Athenians and to overestimate those of their adversaries. The fact that, in speaking of its conclusion, Thucydides emphasizes the magnitude of the Egyptian expedition and quite deliberately uses language in his narrative that anticipates his description of the catastrophe suffered by Athens and her allies forty years later in Sicily suggests that we would be ill-advised to downplay the severity of the losses inflicted on the Athenians and their allies in Egypt in 454.⁶⁸

All of this is a reminder that—in political affairs, in diplomacy, and war—the unforeseen is always lurking just around the corner. By overreaching in a fashion that had always in the past served them well, the Athenians inflicted on themselves damage comparable to what the great earthquake of 465 and the subsequent helot revolt had done to Lacedaemon.