CHAPTER 6

Back to Square One

A republic that is wise should hazard nothing which exposes it to good or to bad fortune: the only good to which it ought to aspire is the perpetuation of its condition.

CHARLES LOUIS DE SECONDAT, BARON DE LA BRÈDE ET DE MONTESQUIEU

MEGABYZUS’ victory in Egypt in 454 was as decisive as it was dramatic. It threatened to change the entire course of events, and for a time within the eastern Mediterranean it fostered new expectations and a new mood and atmosphere to which, all suspected, they might eventually have to conform. Most prominent among those who had to adjust their presumptions, reconsider their options, and rethink the geopolitical imperatives that they faced were the Persians, the Athenians, and the Lacedaemonians.

In the immediate aftermath, Megabyzus was no doubt too busy eliminating pockets of resistance and consolidating Persia’s control over Egypt to contemplate any other task. Inaros he captured, but we know that a rebel prince named Amyrtaeus managed to maintain his independence for years in the marshlands of the western Delta. Moreover, Herodotus reports that the Persians allowed Thannyras son of Inaros and Pausiris son of Amyrtaeus to succeed their fathers as dynasts in that region, and there is no reason to suppose these men the sole holdouts. Egypt was immense. It was complex; and given its importance and its propensity for rebellion, for a time at least, it must have required close attention.

For the task facing Megabyzus, however, the Achaemenid fleet was of limited use. What he needed to do was to establish firm control over the main channels of the Nile. There was no shortage of river boats in Egypt and no shortage of men skilled in their management, and by this time both were for the most part under Persian control. The marshlands as such were of little interest.¹

At sea, however, in the eastern Mediterranean, the fleet of triremes supplied chiefly by the Phoenicians was now for the first time in a quarter-century unopposed. It cannot have taken Artaxerxes and his minions long to realize that Persia was now well-situated for going on the offensive.

We have reason to believe that in and after the late 460s the Athenians had begun encroaching on cities, at least partially Greek in population, hitherto relegated to Persia’s domain—such as Aspendus, which lay in Pamphylia along the southern shore of Asia Minor to the east of Phaselis; Celenderis further east in Cilicia; and perhaps even Dorus, a harbor town situated on the Palestinian coast in the shadow of Mount Carmel—and they may have made similar progress in Cyprus prior to being lured by Inaros to the banks of the Nile.² These gains Artaxerxes will surely have set out to reverse. Whether he was also intent on recovering the Aegean we do not know, but it is hard to believe that he had abandoned the quest for world domination dictated by the species of Zoroastrianism that had animated his father and grandfather. This ambition was a central feature of the political theology that served as the raison d’être of the Achaemenid monarchy; and we know that, like his forebears, Artaxerxes drew a sharp distinction between the realm he governed on behalf of the great god Ahura Mazda and the realm still under the control of the evil spirit Ahriman.³ Nonetheless, all that we can say with any degree of confidence is that the Athenians and their allies thought such an incursion perfectly possible. In the circumstances, it made sense for them to anticipate the worst.

The Five-Year Truce

And this they appear to have done. As we have seen, when the Delian League was first established, its council met on the island of Delos; and there, on that same island, the Hellenotamíaı appointed by the Athenians looked after the phóros contributed by those within the confederacy who chose not to supply ships and their crews. As we have also had occasion to note, in the late 470s, when the Persians began once again to build a great fleet for the purpose of challenging the forces of the Delian League in the Aegean, the members of that body considered shifting its treasury to Athens; and we are told in a late, chronologically unreliable literary source that this was eventually done in 461. It is highly unlikely, however, that the move took place at either time. Diodorus, who is no doubt following Ephorus, reports that such a shift was carried out when Pericles was in charge. Plutarch implies that it preceded the early 440s by no more than a handful of years; he reports that the Athenians justified the shift with an eye to the seriousness of the barbarian threat; and it is not until 454/3 that, for the first time, we have clear-cut epigraphical evidence that the contributions as yet unspent had actually been moved to Athens for safekeeping. All that can be said is that, when the Aegean became exceedingly vulnerable to a Persian attack, such a transfer was imperative; that the Athenians defended the move on these very grounds at the time that the move was proposed; and that it was immediately after the Egyptian catastrophe that we have the first undeniable proof that such a shift had taken place.⁴

The money held in reserve in this treasury was of vital importance for the defense of Hellas. After the debacle in Egypt, the Athenians and their allies had many fewer ships than before, and they no doubt set out immediately to build a host of new triremes—which was an expensive proposition.⁵ But a shortage of galleys may not have been the greatest difficulty they faced. They had captured a great many at Eurymedon; and, although they are said to have destroyed them all, they may well have salvaged some of those that could serve their turn. In 459, when the confederacy deployed two hundred triremes in the eastern Mediterranean, the Athenians and their allies were still able to field a fleet in the Saronic Gulf capable of defeating the Corinthians and their allies at Cecryphalia and then, in short order, the Aeginetans and their allies at Aegina. Moreover, in the latter battle, they captured seventy triremes; and, when the Aeginetans surrendered on terms after Oenophyta in 458, they handed over to the Athenians what remained of their fleet. Prior to the debacle in Egypt, the Athenians and their allies had something on the order of one hundred triremes in the Corinthian Gulf and perhaps as many as one hundred more stored as a reserve at the Peiraeus with an eye to emergencies such as the one they now faced.

The real problem the Athenians confronted was a lack of manpower. In Egypt, they had lost not only the rowers—quite a few of them citizens. They had also lost trierarchs, helmsmen, flutists, exhorters, bow-masters, and the other specialists needed for maritime operations—as well as the archers and marines carried on deck (the latter apt to have been quite numerous given the aims of the expedition). To put themselves in a position once again to take on the Achaemenid fleet would take an immense effort. The Athenians would have to add to their fleet; they would have to hire able-bodied men to row from here, there, and everywhere; and they would have to train another generation of their compatriots to serve as officers.

All of this the Athenians could do—but it would be a great deal easier if somehow the war in Greece could be put on hold. To this end, Pericles acted with regard to the most important of his erstwhile political opponents just as Themistocles had done on the eve of Xerxes’ invasion of Greece with regard to Pericles’ father and the others whose ostracisms he had engineered in the years preceding. In the assembly, after working out in private a modus vivendi with Cimon’s sister Elpinike, the son of Xanthippus proposed that the son of Miltiades be recalled to Athens.⁶

We do not know with any precision when he did this. Shortly before the battle of Tanagra, Cimon had, Plutarch tells us, made a demonstration of his patriotism by showing up in Boeotia fully armed and prepared to fight alongside his tribesmen on Athens’ behalf against the Lacedaemonians and the other Peloponnesians. When sent away at the behest of the Council of Five Hundred at Athens, he is said to have urged those among his friends and supporters who were most sympathetic to Lacedaemon to remain loyal to Athens, and many of these are said to have sacrificed their lives on the city’s behalf in the extremely bloody battle that followed. According to Plutarch, it was in the aftermath of this struggle and in the expectation that the Spartans would return the following spring that Pericles secured Cimon’s recall. Cornelius Nepos dates the return of Miltiades’ son to the fifth year of his ostracism, and Theopompus of Chios asserts that it took place before five years of the war with Lacedaemon had passed. Whether Theopompus dated the beginning of this war to Athens’ alliance with Argos in 461, to her attack on Halieis in 459, or to the battle of Tanagra the following year we do not know. What we do know is that all three of these writers claim that Miltiades’ son was recalled for the purpose of reaching a rapprochement with Lacedaemon. All three report that he journeyed to Sparta and negotiated a truce, and they imply that he did so tolerably soon after his return.

There is no good reason to doubt the colorful tale told concerning Cimon’s conduct at Tanagra. It is the sort of story that would have delighted Ion of Chios, and we know that Plutarch drew extensively on his Epıdēmíaı. Nor is there any reason to suppose Cimon’s recall and his negotiation of a truce with Lacedaemon a figment of the fourth-century literary imagination. In an oration, Thucydides’ younger contemporary the orator Andocides tells a version of the story—which, though confused, is clear enough on the crucial point. Plutarch and Nepos err, however, in one particular. If Cimon was recalled with an eye to reaching an accord with Sparta, as all insist, the occasion cannot have been the immediate aftermath of the battle of Tanagra. For, as we have seen, the Athenians pursued an exceedingly aggressive policy against Lacedaemon and her allies in the period stretching from 458 to 454. Cimon’s conduct at Tanagra may well have figured in the rhetoric later deployed in favor of his recall, but, if Pericles’ aim was the negotiation of an extended truce with Lacedaemon, he can hardly have had any reason to make such a proposal before the news reached Athens of the catastrophe in Egypt.⁷

Thucydides says not one word about Athens’ activities in the aftermath of the Egyptian debacle—presumably because there was nothing that took place in this period that was germane to his theme. We have reason, however, to think that the Athenians faced ongoing troubles in Boeotia. There is evidence suggesting that the cities in this region may have been inducted into the Delian League and made to pay phóros—which, if true, is apt to have stirred resentment. We have scattered reports that democracies may have been set up in the cities of the region but that they did not last long and that Athens’ relations with the oligarchies that then took over were fraught. From Tolmides’ presence there in 454, we can infer that Boeotia required attention. There is also evidence for this period suggesting revolts on Euboea, Naxos, and perhaps even Andros; troubles elsewhere in the Delian confederacy; and Persian meddling in the affairs of the cities on Anatolia’s west coast.⁸ Like the battle at Oenoe, however, these developments were of passing importance and did not illustrate in any significant way the growth in Athenian power. The first event subsequent to the disaster in Egypt that Thucydides even deigns to mention is the five-year truce that was negotiated with Sparta in the summer of 451, three years after Myronides’ abortive campaign in Thessaly, Pericles’ visit to Acarnania, and the debacle in Egypt.⁹

If Theopompus supposed that Athens’ war with Sparta began with the shedding of blood at Tanagra—the central event in Thucydides’ account of the growth of Athenian power—his dating of Cimon’s recall makes excellent sense. For the odds are good that the son of Miltiades returned to Athens late in 454 or early in 453—not in the fifth year subsequent to his ostracism, but in the fifth year after his appearance on the battlefield in Boeotia.

If this was, in fact, the moment when this great statesman reappeared, it will have taken him some time to get the Lacedaemonians to agree to a truce. That they should be reluctant is what we ought to expect. Their allies—especially, the Aeginetans and the Corinthians—had suffered grievously at the hands of the Athenians, and they themselves had been subject to attack. At Oenoe, the Athenians had helped the Argives fend off the raid the Spartans had mounted. At Tanagra, the Lacedaemonian losses must have been considerable; and two years later Tolmides, while circumnavigating the Peloponnesus, had not only overrun Boiai and Cythera; he had also destroyed the Spartan fleet, burned the dockyards at Gytheion, and ravaged the countryside in its vicinity. On the day that the news arrived concerning Athens’ great defeat in Egypt, there must have been rejoicing in Lacedaemon.

Soon, however, the Spartans or, at least, the more astute members of Lacedaemon’s ruling order must have begun entertaining second thoughts. It was one thing to see Athens brought low. It was another to witness a Persian resurgence. The resentment that the Lacedaemonians harbored for the Athenians must have been tempered by a renewed realization that the fleet deployed by Athens and her allies was the only obstacle standing in the way of a second Persian invasion of Greece. It was on this point that the son of Miltiades must have harped; and if word reached Lacedaemon at this time, suggesting that a major ship-building campaign was under way in the Levant, as it may well have done, it will have considerably eased his task. Cimon was in his person the embodiment of a policy, favorable to the interests of Sparta, that the Athenians were about to revive; and, in time, he was able to overcome the misgivings of the Lacedaemonians and to persuade a majority of the Spartiates that the threat posed by Athens was nothing in comparison with that posed by the Great King.¹⁰

For the truce, the Lacedaemonians exacted a price. If Athens was to be allowed a free hand in the eastern Mediterranean, the Athenians were going to have to abandon, at least for the nonce, their Argive allies. It was, we must suspect, the prospect that in the interim—while Athens was preoccupied with Persia—Sparta and her Peloponnesian allies would march against them that persuaded the Argives to agree at this time, in 451, to a truce of thirty years’ duration with the Lacedaemonians.¹¹

It was quite likely in the wake of their forging of this agreement that the Spartans managed to bring Tegea back into their alliance. Our sole source for their achievement of this goal is a passage in the Stratagems composed by a figure named Polyaenus, who grew up in Macedonia six centuries after the reported event. Under the command, he tells us, of a Spartiate of some prominence named Cleandridas—who was, we know, a senior figure of great weight and quite likely an ephor at Lacedaemon in 446—the Spartans managed by a ruse to sow dissension within Tegea between the rich and the poor and to secure the city’s betrayal.

This event—for there clearly was some such event—marked a real turning point in the relations between Sparta and this Arcadian community. For a number of decades thereafter, when trouble for Sparta once again erupted within the Peloponnesus, the Tegeans remained firmly loyal to Lacedaemon. It is a reasonable guess that, at this time, Cleandridas installed an oligarchy in Tegea fully to the liking of his compatriots and that he did so ruthlessly and without compunction in a manner not easy to reverse.¹²

The Spartans knew what they were doing. The alliance that the Athenians had formed with Megara was an encroachment, to be sure. Their support for Argos at Oenoe, modest though it may have been, was most unwelcome. The attacks that they had launched on the Corinthians, the Epidaurians, and the Sicyonians were an outrage. It was an affront that they had disarmed Aegina and regrettable that they had conquered Boeotia and Locris and restored control of Delphi to the Phocians; and the arrangements that Athens had made with Troezen, Hermione, and the cities of Achaea were also an offense. But none of this—not even the blood shed at Tanagra, the seizure of Cythera, and the attack on Gytheion—mattered nearly as much as the hostility of the Tegeans, the influence they threatened to exercise throughout Arcadia as a whole, and the support lent them locally by the Lacedaemonians’ age-old foe the Argives. As the Spartans had forcefully been reminded in 465, the helots (especially those in Messenia) were the city’s Achilles’ heel, and her alliance with the Arcadians—the Tegeans, first and foremost—was their aegis.

The events of the 460s had very nearly done the Spartans in. Patiently, step by careful step, in the years following, however, they had regained their footing. Initially, they had defeated the Argives, the Tegeans, and the Athenian volunteers at Tegea. Not long thereafter, they had managed to contain the helot revolt. They had also given the Mantineians the support requisite to keep them loyal; they had defeated Tegea and her Arcadian allies at Dipaea; and they had settled things to their liking in south-central and southwestern Arcadia. Thereafter, they had defeated the rebellious helots and períoıkoı at Ithome in Messenia. In later years, they had seen to the withdrawal of the remnants of this rebel force; and, finally, they had induced the Argives to sign on to a peace of long duration, and they had reconfigured the polity at Tegea in such a fashion as to render it a Spartan satellite. In the face of a great host of vicissitudes, the Lacedaemonians had not only endured. They had won a reprieve.

A Reckoning with Artaxerxes

After negotiating an accord with Lacedaemon, Cimon turned his attention to the Achaemenid empire. As in the past, Miltiades’ son adopted an aggressive posture. He might have done otherwise. He might have bided his time. He might have chosen to wait for the Mede in the Aegean. But, as we have seen, this was not his modus operandi. Nor did it accord with the temperament of his compatriots. The Athenians were not known for their patience. Audacity was for them the norm, and for the most part it had served them well.

Athens and those of her allies who supplied ships had had an interval of three years in which to build triremes, recruit rowers, and train helmsmen, flutists, exhorters, bow-masters, marines, and the like while drilling a new crop of oarsmen in the art of rowing in unison, of reversing positions and backing water, and of performing the períplous, the kúklos, the dıékplous, the anastróphē, and the other intricate maneuvers developed for combat at sea. By the spring of 451, in the opinion of the son of Miltiades and of his fellow citizens, the Athenians and their allies were ready.

We have three sources of information for the campaign that followed—Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, and Plutarch. None of them is entirely satisfactory. Thucydides’ account is extremely terse, and those of Diodorus and Plutarch are, at least in some particulars, confused. Where they are at odds, there can be no doubt that Thucydides’ narrative should be preferred. He was, at the time, a child, but he may have been old enough to be aware of what was at stake and to be attentive to developments. Even more to the point, in the aftermath for decades, he was in a position to consult those who had served in the expedition; and we must never forget that its leader was his kinsman. He is not apt to have been uninterested in Cimon’s fate or unaware of the course of events.

What Thucydides tells us is simple. Shortly after negotiating the truce with Sparta (presumably that very spring), in his capacity as the principal commander, Cimon led an armada of two hundred triremes, supplied by Athens and her allies, to Cyprus—which once again was to be the fulcrum of war. There he divided his fleet, dispatching sixty triremes to Egypt in response to a request from Amyrtaeus, who ruled, in defiance of Persia, the marshlands in the western Delta. With the remainder, the son of Miltiades besieged Citium, a Phoenician settlement on the southeastern coast of the island, where the city of Larnaca is now located—and there he died.

Map 18. Cyprus and Its Environs

In the aftermath, the unnamed individual or individuals who succeeded Cimon in the command opted to lift the siege. The surviving manuscripts of Thucydides specify that the allied force was short of food. Some scholars believe that, where the scribes attributed the withdrawal to lımós or famine, Thucydides had actually written loımós—plague. This is perfectly possible. Errors of this sort can easily creep in over the generations as manuscripts are copied, recopied, and recopied again and again; and expeditionary forces are notoriously vulnerable both to shortages of food and to the ravages of disease.

What matters, however, is that, shortly after withdrawing, the Athenians and their allies encountered an Achaemenid fleet—supplied by the Phoenicians and Cilicians and perhaps, as some of the manuscripts say, by the Cypriots as well. The encounter took place just off Cypriot Salamis, which was situated on a bay on the eastern coast of the island where Famagusta lies today. There the Hellenes reportedly fought the barbarians on both land and sea, and there they were victorious on both elements, as they had been at Eurymedon. When it was over, Thucydides tells us, the victors headed home, taking with them the ships that had returned from Egypt.

Diodorus tells a more elaborate tale. He confirms the size of the allied fleet and makes a point of the fact that the crews were well-trained and that the supplies provided were ample. He makes no mention of the squadron sent to Egypt. He reports, instead, that Cimon besieged and seized Marium, a Greek city on Cyprus’ northwestern coast. He claims also that the son of Miltiades then conquered Citium. Soon thereafter, according to his account, the Athenian commander led the fleet to victory against a force of three hundred Phoenician and Cilician triremes mustered by the satraps Artabazus and Megabyzus; captured one hundred of these; and pursued the remainder all the way to Phoenicia and also, apparently, to Cilicia—where the Greeks landed their marines and defeated an army of three hundred thousand marshaled in the latter district by Megabyzus. There, he tells us, the deputy commander Anaxicrates lost his life. Diodorus also asserts that, in the following year, Cimon initiated a siege of Cypriot Salamis, where the Persians maintained a large garrison, and died there shortly after the end of the war.

Plutarch’s account is even more elaborate—for he reports a great variety of omens and portents. He also claims that the allied fleet numbered three hundred triremes. He mentions the dispatch of sixty ships to Egypt. He refers to a great battle at sea in which Cimon defeated the Phoenicians and Cilicians. He mentions his death at Citium, indicating that he is not certain whether he died from disease, as most of the reports claim, or from a wound, as some say. And he adds, citing the fourth-century Atthidographer Phanodemos, that on his deathbed the son of Miltiades urged his compatriots to keep his passing a secret and to effect an immediate withdrawal, which they did.

It is possible that the allied fleet consisted of three hundred ships and that Cimon’s death at Citium was kept a secret, as Plutarch claims. It is no less possible that the Athenian commander seized Marium shortly after reaching Cyprus in the manner suggested by Diodorus. This prosperous town, which was Greek in population, was the first landfall that a fleet sailing in from the Aegean would encounter, and its possession would have been a real asset. It is also conceivable that there was at some point a battle on land near the Persian base in Cilicia outside Tarsus in which a general named Anaxicrates lost his life. The Achaemenid fleet may, moreover, have been as large as Diodorus claims, and Cypriot Salamis may have been subject to siege in the year following the Hellenic victory on land and sea. But the battle in the bay of Famagusta and onshore nearby was not fought prior to the siege of Citium, as Plutarch asserts. Nor was that city taken in the course of this expedition, as Diodorus contends. Moreover, neither of the victories won on land and sea was the handiwork of Cimon himself, and Megabyzus did not have an army of three hundred thousand. Apart from the insuperable obstacle posed for the Persians by the logistical imperatives, there is no way that six to nine thousand hoplites—the maximum number of marines apt to have been on board the two to three hundred triremes of the Delian League fleet—could have defeated so immense a force. In short, nothing that Plutarch has to add to Thucydides’ story can be regarded as certain, and everything that Diodorus and Plutarch say contrary to his testimony is false. Were it not for the survival of a commemorative epigram confirming Diodorus’ claim that the allies captured one hundred triremes, it would be tempting to dismiss his entire account as a fanciful tale concocted by a eulogist intent on praising Miltiades’ son.¹³

Cimon’s larger purpose remains a mystery. On this subject, where Thucydides and Diodorus are silent, Plutarch is voluble. In his estimation, Cimon was intent on redirecting the irrepressible aggressive energy of his compatriots away from their fellow Hellenes against the barbarian, on providing the Athenians and their allies with an opportunity to enrich themselves at the expense of their natural enemy, and on effecting the wholesale destruction of the Great King’s empire. One scholar suggests a more modest aim—the acquisition of Cyprus both as a source of triremes and as a forward base for ongoing Athenian operations in the eastern Mediterranean and its denial to the Persians. Another is inclined to emphasize the Athenians’ growing need for imported grain and the fact that Cyprus and Egypt were capable of exporting a surplus of that commodity. There may be something to this speculation. Cyprus and Egypt certainly served as temptations. Missing, however, is a proper appreciation of the severity of the damage done Athens by the debacle in Egypt three years before, of the danger that she and her allies faced as a consequence, and of her exhaustion and need for peace.¹⁴

Cimon had defeated the Persians once before in a decisive fashion in the eastern Mediterranean. In the aftermath on that occasion, as we have seen, he had ostentatiously exercised restraint—holding back when he could have wrested Cyprus from Achaemenid control; and, if Plutarch is to be trusted, supporting negotiations that eventuated in a cessation of hostilities and in an agreement aimed at preventing their renewal. The odds are good that Cimon’s purpose in initiating the siege of Citium and in sending a substantial fleet to Amyrtaeus in Egypt had little, if anything, to do with a desire on his part to reorient his compatriots’ imperial impulse, gather booty, acquire Cyprus as a base and source of triremes, extend Athenian power to the Levant and the valley of the Nile, and secure grain for the city. He knew better than to suppose that Athens, with her meager population (much reduced as a consequence of the Egyptian catastrophe), could establish her dominion over the barbarian peoples residing in western Asia and along the Nile. What he wanted was to repeat what he had achieved at Eurymedon. He wanted to reassert Athens’ supremacy at sea, to provide thereby for her security and that of her allies, to humiliate the Persians, and to draw the Great King into negotiations. If he carried the war into the eastern Mediterranean, attacked a Phoenician city on Cyprus, intervened again in Egypt, and threatened to wrest both Cyprus and Egypt one more time from the grasp of the King of Kings, it was for the purpose of forcing the Achaemenid monarch and his minions to launch the Persian fleet and mount a counterattack. Only by inflicting on Artaxerxes a defeat like the one he had inflicted on Xerxes at Eurymedon could Cimon induce the son to do what his father had done and reach a modus vivendi with the Athenians and their allies.

The Cimon who journeyed to Cyprus in the spring of 451, after negotiating a truce with Lacedaemon, was no longer a young man. He was approaching, if he had not recently passed, his sixtieth birthday; and, Diodorus to the contrary notwithstanding, he did not live to see this scenario take place. Others did, however. For, soon after the Athenian statesman’s death, the Persians did launch their fleet, and they did suffer a decisive defeat, as we have seen. And, like the double victory at Eurymedon, that at Cypriot Salamis dispelled illusions entertained by the Achaemenid court and once again within the eastern Mediterranean radically altered expectations.

In the immediate aftermath, if Diodorus—who is once again summarizing Ephorus—is to be trusted, Artaxerxes pondered the matter, consulted his councillors, and then without further ado seized the initiative by authorizing terms. At his urging, Artabazus and Megabyzus sent ambassadors to Athens to open negotiations, presumably in the spring of 450. The Athenians responded with alacrity by once again dispatching, probably to Susa, an embassy led by Callias son of Hipponicus; and the arrangement originally negotiated with Xerxes was perhaps tweaked, and it was certainly renewed.

By the end of 450, hostilities had come to an end. The Athenians withdrew from the eastern Mediterranean and agreed that henceforth they would not attack any of the territories ruled by the Great King. Artaxerxes, for his part, pledged that he would leave Caria, Lycia, and the Greek cities in Anatolia to their own devices; bar his satraps and their armies from approaching within a day’s ride of the territory of these communities; limit the size of his fleet; and refrain from dispatching warships south from the Black Sea into the Bosporus and west from the Levant past Phaselis and the Chelidonian isles, which were situated just off the south coast of Asia Minor. This time, the two former antagonists may even have promised mutual friendship. But it is hard to believe that the Persian chosen by Ahura Mazda to bring order to a disordered world, the man who styled himself the King of Kings, deigned to take any sort of oath, and it is quite unlikely that the arrangement was formally promulgated as a treaty between equal powers on the same footing. As in the past, the pretensions of the Achaemenid regime and the rules of decorum are apt to have ruled this out.¹⁵

Genuinely cordial relations were, in any case, impossible. The regime differences and the manner in which the ruling order in the monarchy and that in the democracy each justified its right to rule precluded the requisite mutual respect and posed insuperable obstacles. Naked self-interest was the only available glue. In the event, however, it proved sufficient. Now and again, as one would expect, one side or the other breached the agreement’s terms, and covert or semicovert warfare on a modest scale erupted with some frequency in Anatolia. In no case, however, during the thirty-seven or thirty-eight years that followed did a general war ensue. If, for more than three and a half decades, there was a cold peace between Athens and Persia, it was because the agreement originally forged by Callias with Xerxes in the early 460s and, after a lengthy hiatus, revised and renewed in 449 accurately reflected the balance of power in the region. Painful experience had taught both sides that neither was capable of establishing and sustaining its dominion over the territory claimed and effectively controlled by the other. Persia lacked the wherewithal to recover its hegemony on the high seas and never again made the attempt. Although, with the help of their allies, the Athenians could project power almost anywhere along the coasts of Asia Minor, they lacked the manpower needed for seizing and retaining Cyprus, let alone Egypt, Syria, and the interior of Anatolia.¹⁶

Most scholars acknowledge that there was such a peace. Some are, nonetheless, skeptical. No surviving fifth-century author mentions the agreement. Herodotus’ failure to do so means little, however. He ends his narrative shortly after the battle of Mycale with the siege of Sestos, and given that narrative’s focus he could not have touched on the peace in a digression without altering the architecture of his Hıstoríaı and providing a lengthy explanation of how it came about. Thucydides’ silence is, in contrast, passing strange. He describes Cimon’s expedition, his death, and the battle by land and sea at Cypriot Salamis, then shifts abruptly back to events in Hellas. He could easily have cited Persia’s abandonment of the war as a sign of Athens’ growing power and even as a development that greatly enhanced her power.

The first known to have mentioned the peace was Isocrates in 380, who speaks of it in such a manner as to suggest that he is alluding to an event known to his readers from an inscription in the Agora at Athens, which they could peruse for themselves. He and the other Athenian orators who followed his lead tended to cite the agreement polemically as an example worthy of imitation, contrasting the commitments that the Athenian Callias had extracted from the Persians in Athens’ heyday with what the Spartiate Antalcidas in the time of Lacedaemon’s hegemony had recently conceded to them.

Although the polemical character of these references has given rise to suspicion, it would be a mistake to suppose the peace a fraud. Apart from Thucydides, there is no surviving fifth-century writer whose failure to mention the agreement is in any way odd, and orators who deploy examples from the past for the purpose of belittling the accomplishments of those in the present are far more likely to exaggerate the achievements of men in the days of yore than to invent them out of whole cloth. If, moreover, we are to judge the charge of fraud advanced by the fourth-century writer Theopompus of Chios in light of the argument he made by way of justifying his claim, we would have to reject that charge on its merits. For the fact that the stele in Athens recording the agreement was inscribed in Ionic lettering can hardly be taken as proof that the document was a forgery. In that city, the occasional use of Ionic lettering in inscriptions pertinent to the Ionians predates by decades the decision made in 403/2 to employ henceforth only that script. Moreover, inscriptions of historical importance were often recopied in the fourth century, and there is reason to suspect that the particular inscription read by Isocrates and Theopompus recorded a renewal of the peace in 423—on the occasion of Artaxerxes’ death and Darius II’s succession to the Achaemenid throne.¹⁷

In any case, as we have seen, Thucydides’ history as it pertains to the Persians is notoriously deficient, and the peace negotiated by Callias in 449 is but one of many important developments in the period between Xerxes’ invasion of Greece and the coming of the great Peloponnesian War that the Athenian historian fails to mention. Even more to the point, Thucydides’ narrative presupposes that there was a cessation of hostilities after the double victory achieved by Athens and her allies at Cypriot Salamis. Thereafter, he makes no further reference to any campaign directed at Persia until after the Sicilian Expedition thirty-seven or thirty-eight years later; and, under the year 428, he reports a speech delivered by the Mytilenians in which they allude to Athens’ suspension of the war with Persia.

Moreover, when Thucydides reports on the negotiations that took place in the winter of 411 between the Athenian leaders then operating in Ionia and the Persian satrap Tissaphernes, we learn that, under previously existing agreements, the Persians were excluded from Ionia and their fleet was restricted in size and barred from entering the Aegean; and a later agreement between the Spartans and Tissaphernes presupposes that there had hitherto been restrictions on what the Great King could and could not do in Anatolia within his own domain. Had there been no such restrictions and had they not been for the most part honored, it is hard to believe that, even if they did fear rebellion, the Athenians would have dared to have the cities in Ionia along the Anatolian coast tear down a stretch of their walls—as they evidently did.¹⁸ In short, even if the orators Isocrates, Demosthenes, and Lycurgus; the historian Ephorus, and the fourth-century Atthidographer Aristodemos had made no reference to an agreement reached between Athens and Persia in the wake of the double victory at Cypriot Salamis, we would be unable to make sense of what Thucydides does tell us about subsequent events without assuming that, soon after 451, the two powers had negotiated a cessation of hostilities and agreed on a set of ground rules defining distinct spheres of influence and specifying a prohibition on trespass, which would, in fact, be honored in the breach.

Postwar Challenges

The victory that the Athenians and their allies won at Cypriot Salamis and their subsequent success in forcing a settlement on Artaxerxes confirmed within Hellas the impression suggested by their earlier victory over the Persians at Eurymedon and their fleeting achievement of a modus vivendi with Xerxes; and they had an even greater impact than those earlier developments. This time—precisely because, after a second round of conflict, the intercommunal system in the eastern Mediterranean had returned to the same equilibrium—it looked as if the arrangement with Persia might be tolerably stable; and for this reason Athens’ achievement once again altered expectations and encouraged on the part of every community concerned a resort to rumination and a reconsideration of the dictates of self-interest. In this sense, it really did foster within Hellas a new standard of value, a new mood, and a new atmosphere to which, everyone now knew, they would have to conform.

The Athenians were, for understandable reasons, ecstatic. The fear generated by the debacle in Egypt dissipated; and, in celebration, they dedicated at Delphi a bronze column in the shape of a palm tree or phoînıx (which punned on the name in Greek given the Aramaic-speaking peoples of the Levant). Adorning its top was a statue of Athena in gold, and inscribed on the dedication was the following epigram:

Since first the sea did Europe from Asia in twain divide

And furious Ares laid hold of cities belonging to those destined to die,

No deed such as this was accomplished among the men dwelling on the earth

None such at the same time upon the land and at sea.

For in Cyprus these men destroyed many a Mede

And at sea they captured one hundred Phoenician ships

Stuffed with men, whom Asia greatly mourned,

Struck down with both hands in the violence of war.¹⁹

The Athenians had reason to be proud of their accomplishment.

For Athens, however, this victory, though welcome, merely meant the replacement of one set of difficulties with another. On the one hand, when Athens ushered Persia offstage, it relieved anxiety on the part of nearly everyone in Greece. On the other, it heightened the fear and the resentment inspired by the Athenians themselves, and it posed a question of vital importance to the members of the Delian League.

In principle, this alliance was meant to be permanent. Its members had hurled iron ingots into the sea, and they had sworn that they would act as one until those ingots returned to the surface. In practice, however, the alliance must have seemed to many of its members obsolete. Its stated purpose was unending war against the Achaemenid monarchy, aimed at vengeance and at liberating the Greeks under the Persian yoke. Its chief, if unstated, function was to prevent a return of the Mede, and everyone knew it. The war of liberation and revenge they had pledged was now no more, and Hellas no longer seemed in any obvious way to need a defense. The day after victory is achieved by a coalition in a great war, that coalition almost always begins to unravel.

In this case, however, the victory was far from complete; and, in fact, there was no prospect that it would ever be complete. Achaemenid Persia had not been conquered. It had not been deprived of its manpower. Nor was it ever going to be short of the silver and gold that served as the sinews of maritime war. It had not even been reduced to a state of relative impotence. It had merely been fended off—once, twice, and finally thrice. The Achaemenid realm was still the greatest empire in the world, and it still commanded a greater proportion of the world’s wealth and population than any empire before or since. If the Delian League collapsed or if its members dramatically reduced the number of ships and fully trained crews they deployed, the Persians would certainly make mischief; and if and when an ambitious and spirited monarch came to the throne, they might well return in full force. The Athenians could not afford to allow their league to dissolve. Somehow or other, they had to hold it together.

There was no one at Athens who had the auctoritas that Themistocles and Cimon had once exercised. Ephialtes had been preeminent in 462/1, but he had been dead now for twelve years; and, though Pericles had been closely associated with Ephialtes in the latter’s heyday, he had been a junior partner in the enterprise, for he had been just over thirty at the time. In the 450s, he was but one among a handful of figures who were influential. Men like Tolmides, Leocrates, and Myronides were not to be trifled with, and there were others also—Cimon, after his return, and Cimon’s much younger kinsman by marriage Thucydides son of Melesias, who was a rough contemporary of Pericles.²⁰

The odds are good that there was now near unanimity in Athens in favor of detente with Persia. The losses in Egypt were sobering and no doubt concentrated the mind wonderfully. What to do next, however, is apt to have been a matter of dispute.

A City of Salarymen

In the event, it was Pericles who took the lead. He was in his forties now. In the early years of the previous decade, when others were more visible at the head of the army and the fleet than he was, he seems to have concentrated his attention on completing the program of democratic reform initiated by his former colleague Ephialtes. To this end, in 458/7, he sponsored legislation opening to the zeugítaı—the prosperous smallholders of Athens who formed the backbone of her hoplite armies—the archonship, a magistracy hitherto filled solely from the handful of wealthy Athenians classed via the census as pentakosıomédımnoı or hıppeîs. To this end—either before Cimon’s ostracism or shortly after his return—he secured the passage of laws providing pay for those who served on Athens’ juries, and it may have been at this time and at his urging that Athens began providing a salary for the multitude of men needed, in the midst of a war with Athens’ Peloponnesian neighbors, to guard the dockyards and the walls against surprise attack and to do active service abroad as cavalrymen, archers, and hoplites. Given the size of Athenian juries, which provided six thousand Athenians with occasional employment and given the number of citizens who already drew pay for service in the fleet and in the administration of the Delian League; the number who served in wartime as infantrymen, archers, cavalrymen, and guards; and the number who labored in the city’s dockyards, it is fair to say that Athens was well on her way to becoming, as Pericles reportedly put it, a “salaried city.”²¹

It was surely with this last fact in mind and with an eye to the opportunities afforded Athenians by the installation of cleruchies that, in 451, Pericles ushered through the assembly a law tightening the requirements for citizenship, which stipulated that henceforth one could not be registered as an Athenian citizen unless both of one’s parents were Athenian. In the years following Xerxes’ invasion and the establishment of the Delian League, the material benefits attendant on Athenian citizenship had become more and more attractive, and there is reason to suspect that, in the last few years prior to the passage of the new citizenship law, there had been an upsurge in the number of Athenian women forming liaisons with men from abroad. After the Egyptian debacle, the former no doubt outnumbered their male compatriots by a considerable margin; and, given Athens’ desperate need for manpower at this juncture, there must have been a dramatic increase in the number of foreigners who took up residence in Attica for the purpose of securing employment as rowers in Athens’ fleet.²²

Figure 7. Bust of Pericles (Museo Pio-Clementino, Muses Hall, Vatican City. Photographer: Jastrow. Published 2019 under the following licensed issued by Jastrow [Marie-Lan Nguyen]: “I, the copyright holder of this work, release this work into the public domain. This applies worldwide. In some countries this may not be legally possible; if so I grant anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without conditions, unless such conditions are required by law”).

The reforms carried out by Pericles at this time brought to completion a complex transformation initiated almost three decades before. Prior to Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, Themistocles and Aristeides had been rivals at odds with regard to public policy. In the aftermath of the battles of Plataea and Mycale, however, the two discovered that they were for the most part of one mind in their assessment of Athens’ new strategic environment and of the unprecedented challenges she faced. To cope with this new environment and meet these challenges, they not only cooperated in rebuilding the city’s walls and fortifying the Peiraeus. They also worked in tandem to reorient Athens to the sea, seize from Sparta the maritime hegemony, and turn a population of landlubbers into one of mariners. Thereby, with full awareness, the two initiated a revolution in the skein of relations linking Athenian citizens with one another. Subsequently, when he led out each year the fleet Athens contributed to the forces of the Delian League, Cimon unwittingly accelerated the gradual sociopolitical metamorphosis initiated by these two erstwhile rivals. Then, in finishing off the reform program begun by Ephialtes, Pericles deliberately fashioned political institutions to fit the character of this altered civic association, which would make it easier for the poor to participate fully in its governance. Under his guidance, the pólıs underwent an almost noiseless change of regime, and a new ruling order emerged and took charge.

In the late sixth century, thanks to the efforts of Cleisthenes, Athens’ ancient aristocracy had given way to the smallholders who dominated the city’s hoplite phalanx. Now the hoplites had to make way for the landless men called thetes—who had migrated in large numbers from the countryside into the Peiraeus and Athens to row in and officer the city’s fleet; to serve as marines, archers, light-armed troops, and specialists of various kinds in the expeditionary forces of the Delian League; to labor in the city’s dockyards and serve on her juries; and to engage in manufacturing and trade. As one nameless Athenian, who heartily disliked the new order, was forced to acknowledge in the aftermath of Pericles’ completion of Ephialtes’ reform program,

There [in Athens], it is just that the poor and the dmos have the advantage over the well-born and the rich, and the reason is this: the members of the dmos man and row the ships and confer strength on the pólıs. The helmsmen and the exhorters and the commanders of fifty and the bow-masters and the shipwrights—these are the ones who confer strength on the city, and they do so far more effectively than do the hoplites, the well-born, and the worthy. Since this is so, it seems just that any one of the citizens wishing to speak up be allowed to do so and that everyone share in the magistracies—in those filled by lot and also in those filled by election.

Although the thetes did not and could not supply Athens with her generals, cavalry commanders, and statesmen, they would henceforth sit in judgment on these men, and it was to their tune, with their material interests in mind, that the city’s leaders would have to dance.

It is this fact, which everyone understood at the time, that explains both why Athens was so bitterly divided in the late 460s and the early 450s and why the construction of the Long Walls proved so controversial. Henceforth, the well-to-do pentakosıomédımnoı, the hıppeîs, and the zeugítaı who served as cavalrymen and hoplites in Athens’ armies were not only to be overshadowed by the penurious thetes who labored for the city, built her ships, worked on her construction projects, and engaged in manufacturing and commerce within the great emporium that grew up within the Peiraeus and in Athens as a consequence of the city’s imperial venture. The interests of these prosperous farmers were also to be given short shrift, and those who recognized the consequences of their marginalization did not relish the fact. The Long Walls were, as they knew, the visible, material embodiment of a new policy. Thanks to the revolution initiated by Themistocles and Aristeides and completed by Ephialtes and Pericles, if the Lacedaemonians and their Peloponnesian allies were ever to invade Attica, the well-stocked farms of those who tilled the soil would go undefended. There was no longer to be any pretense. Athens had ceased to be a resolutely agrarian republic, and there was a symbiotic relationship between the new order that emerged in Attica in these years and the city’s dominion abroad. For the well-being of her new ruling order, Athens looked chiefly to imperial expansion and her rule over the sea.²³ As Pericles understood, she could not let the new arrangement with Persia become an occasion for the dissolution of her empire.

Reaping the Advantages of Empire

By 454, if not well before, Pericles had turned his attention from domestic reform to the management of foreign affairs. In that year, as we have seen, he conducted a military campaign in the Corinthian Gulf; and, that year or the next, he sponsored the recall of Cimon. By 449, however, Cimon was dead, as was Leocrates. After 454, we hear nothing of Myronides, who may have died that year during the expedition against Pharsalus. The only figures of import, known to us, who were at this time in a position to rival Pericles were Tolmides and Melesias’ ambitious son Thucydides.²⁴

From the time of the foundation of the Delian League, Athens had presented herself—with some justice—as the defender of Hellas as a whole. As we have seen, this is why the treasurers of the Delian League were called the Hellenotamíaı; and it also explains why, in the wake of the settlement with Artaxerxes, Pericles persuaded his compatriots to convoke a Panhellenic congress at Athens so that representatives from all of the Greek cities, both great and small, could discuss what in the new circumstances should be the policy of the Hellenes.

This was done with great fanfare and formality. According to Plutarch, who is clearly restating the formulae of a decree, the Athenians sent out twenty men, each over fifty years in age. Five journeyed to the Ionians and Dorians in Asia and to those on the islands lying between Lesbos and Rhodes; five, to Thrace and the Hellespont all the way up to Byzantium; five, to Boeotia, Phocis, the Peloponnesus, Ozolian Locris, Acarnania, and Ambracia; and five, to Euboea, Oetaea, the Gulf of Malia, Phthiotic Achaea, and Thessaly. The Hellenes living in these parts they invited to deliberate in common concerning three matters: “the Greek sanctuaries burned down by the barbarians, the sacrifices owed the gods in fulfillment of the vows made on Hellas’ behalf when they were battling the barbarians, and the manner in which all might without fear sail the seas and maintain the peace.”

The first of these three concerns is clear. The oaths that the Hellenes had taken shortly before the battle of Plataea called upon them to leave in ruins the temples destroyed by the Mede as a reminder of Persian impiety—which is what the Athenians and quite possibly the Phocians, Thespians, and Plataeans had done. Now that the war was finally over and a satisfactory settlement had been reached with the Great King, Pericles and his compatriots wanted sanction for a celebratory reconstruction of these sanctuaries.

The same can be said for the third concern. The Delian League had eliminated piracy from the waters in which its members were to be found, and this had proved to be a great boon. Thanks to the Athenian peace, intercommunal trade flourished in and beyond the Aegean as never before. This was true to such an extent that it produced a noiseless revolution in the circulation of currency. Gradually, without any fanfare, the smaller cities ceased to mint coins in the larger denominations. Given the scale of intercommunal commerce and the transaction costs this entailed, it was more convenient for them to make use of the owls produced in Athens and of the silver and electrum specie minted by the wealthiest of their local trading partners.²⁵

Mindful of the damage that a renewal of piracy would pose and sensitive to the need to enforce the terms of the peace made with Artaxerxes, Pericles wanted sanction and no doubt funding for the maintenance of a Hellenic fleet capable of policing the seas and deterring Persian encroachment. He was also no doubt interested in the welfare of his fellow citizens. In keeping with Aristeides’ prediction, the war with Persia had become a jobs program for Athens’ poor. At its high point, twenty thousand Athenians are said to have earned their livelihood from service in the fleet, in the administrative apparatus required for running the Delian League, and in managing the city of Athens.

The second concern set for discussion at the proposed congress may have had to do with the responsibilities taken on by the Plataeans when, after the battle of Plataea, they agreed to tend the graves of those who died there. They may also have agreed—though there are grounds for wondering whether this was really so—to hold a recurring festival called the Eleuthería (Liberty or, perhaps, Liberation) in commemoration of the Hellenic victory, at which, on Hellas’ behalf, there would be solemn sacrifice to Zeus Eleutherios—Zeus the Liberator. There may have been much more involved—for a great many vows were no doubt made in the course of the various campaigns constituting Hellas’ thirty years’ war against the Mede, and the time had come for their fulfillment.

Pericles cannot have been oblivious to the fact that it was highly unlikely that the Spartans and their allies would be willing to attend such a gathering. To do so would be to accept Athens’ claim to hegemony and to confer legitimacy on her continued collection of phóros from those who had joined or been forced into the Delian League, and this would be tantamount to surrender. The prospect was rendered doubly odious by the fact that the Persian threat had receded and that Athens was once again perceived—by the Lacedaemonians, by their allies, and by many of the communities within the Delian League—more as a menace than as a defender (and with some reason). After all, the Athenians still controlled not only their league, but also Megara, Boeotia, Locris, and Naupactus as well as Molycreium further west on or inland a bit from the north shore of the Corinthian Gulf, and Chalcis in the Gulf of Patras; and they had drawn into alliance by force and by other means of persuasion Aegina, Hermione, Troezen, Achaea, Phocis, and Acarnania.

The maneuver devised by Pericles was an ingenious ploy. The issuance of the invitation—coming as it did in the immediate aftermath of the Great King’s defeat and his acceptance of a humiliating settlement—enabled the Athenians to stage an elaborate celebration of their achievement and to make a display of their magnanimity, reasonableness, and willingness to consult everyone with a stake in the outcome of the proposed deliberations. This they were able to do while at the same time putting the Lacedaemonians (and those in Athens who desperately longed for a rapprochement with Sparta) in an impossible position. The Athenian gesture forced the former to choose between an acknowledgment of their status as a secondary power and a rejection of what looked—at least to the unsuspecting glance—like a generous offer, and it isolated Lacedaemon’s admirers at Athens. The Spartans’ selection of the second option made them seem petulant and ungrateful. It put on them the onus for the collapse of the Panhellenic project, and it provided excuse for what Athens did in the aftermath—which was to take unilateral action with regard to the array of issues they had shown to be in need of resolution.²⁶

How this resolution was effected lies for the most part beyond our ken. But we do know this. From 454/3 on, each and every year the Athenians set aside for the goddess Athena one sixtieth of the phóros collected from the members of their alliance; and, in the agora on stone, they meticulously recorded under the name of each pólıs the sum subtracted for this purpose from her contribution. There was, however, one year for which no record was kept—either the year 449/8, 448/7, or 447/6 (most likely the first of these years).²⁷ Some scholars suppose that, shortly after peace was made with Persia, the collection of phóros was suspended pending the results of the congress that the Athenians then called. Others cannot believe that the Athenians would take such a risk—given their financial needs and the awkwardness that resuming collection would involve. Some suggest, instead, that all of the phóros for that year must have been set aside for the construction of the temple of Athena Nike—Athena the Victor. But this hypothesis is also open to objection—for the Athenians did not begin to build the temple until 435. The truth is that we do not know what occurred. All that we can safely infer is that the gap in the record was somehow connected with the end of the war and the adjustments attendant on that.

After the gap, the records resume. But it is noteworthy that throughout this period—after the Egyptian debacle and again after the making of peace—there are numerous irregularities. Cities appear on the list of contributors, then disappear. Cities contribute different amounts in different years. In any given year, a city may contribute twice or may contribute well after what appears to have been the deadline. It is a reasonable inference that in many quarters there was a certain, resentful dragging of the feet.

We also know that the Athenians began rebuilding their temples in 447/6. We have reason to believe that to cover the cost they drew freely on the reserves that had built up over the years in the treasury of the Delian League, and it is clear that, when it came to expenditures on the project, the Athenians did not stint. It was in the decades following that the Parthenon, the Propylaea, the Hephaesteum, the Odeum, the Eleusinion, the temple of Athena Nike, and other monuments of note were constructed on the Acropolis and elsewhere in Attica.²⁸

This use of the money contributed by Athens’ allies must have been a source of bitterness throughout the alliance. Even among the Athenians, it was controversial. According to Plutarch—whose arresting account is likely to derive from one of the lively anecdotes told in Ion of Chios’ Epıdēmíaı—Pericles’ opponents made a concerted attempt in assembly after assembly to use the embarrassment the expenditure of this money occasioned to undercut his influence. But this they did to no avail. First, they drew attention to the decision to shift the Delian League treasury from Delos to Athens and to the reason given at the time—the barbarian threat. Then, they charged that the people of Athens had incurred a bad reputation because Pericles had laid hold of “the money belonging in common to the Hellenes.” Greece, they said, will suppose herself “subject to terrible insolence [húbrıs] and to brazen tyranny” as she “looks on while we expropriate resources, which she has been forced by necessity to contribute for the war effort, and then use these resources to coat our pólıs with gold and doll her up like a vain, pretentious bitch who pretties herself up with precious stones, expensive statues, and temples costing a thousand talents.”

To this, Pericles is said to have responded contemptuously, in the manner of a schoolteacher addressing students very much in need of instruction, that the Athenians did not owe an accounting to allies who had chosen to supply money to the Delian League rather than ships and crews—not at least as long as they carried on the war for them and warded off the barbarian. “Not a horse,” he reportedly said,

not a ship, not a hoplite do they provide, but solely money—which belongs not to those giving it but to those receiving it if the latter deliver that in exchange for which they took the cash. It is fitting, once the pólıs has secured a sufficient supply of the equipment necessary for war, that she employ the superfluity belonging to her for projects from which, when they are completed, she will gain eternal fame and from which, while they are being completed, an assured prosperity will arise—with all sorts of commerce and productive labor making an appearance as well as a diversity of needs which will excite and awaken every craft and every art and set in motion every hand, making Athens, almost in her entirety, a salaried city so that from this superfluity the pólıs will at the same time secure nourishment and attain the splendor that arises when things are put in proper order.

Figure 8. (Top to bottom) Óstrakon naming Themistocles son of Neocles, 480s B.C. (Ancient Agora Museum at the Stoa of Attalus, Athens: Photographer: Marsyas, Wikimedia Commons; Published 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported); óstrakon naming Cimon son of Miltiades (Kerameikos Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photographer: Giovanni Dall’Orto, Published September 2019 under the following license issued by Giovanni Dall’Orto: “I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license: The copyright holder of this file allows anyone to use it for any purpose, provided that the copyright holder is properly attributed. Redistribution, derivative work, commercial use, and all other use is permitted.”); óstrakon naming Pericles son of Xanthippus (Ancient Agora Museum at Athens. Photographer: Wally Gobetz, Wikimedia Commons. Published September 2019 under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic).

This struggle apparently went on for a number of years. Again and again, Pericles’ opponents charged him with profligacy in the expenditure of the public funds, and in the end he responded by offering (presumably in a particular case) to shoulder the burden himself and to make the dedication in his own name if that is what the people of Athens preferred. The struggle did not fully come to an end, we are told, until 444 or 443 when Thucydides son of Melesias was ostracized.

If Plutarch’s account is an accurate report, as I think it is, Pericles was a visionary with an understanding of the dynamics of trade and industry unsurpassed not only in his time but for a very long time thereafter. The biographer certainly supposed as much—for he went on to argue that what Pericles forecast at the time of these debates is what actually happened and then to describe in accurate detail the energies unleashed, the materials gathered, the enormous diversity of craftsmen and artisans put to work, and the general prosperity throughout Attica to which all of this feverish activity gave rise.²⁹

There was, of course, more to Pericles’ initiative than a jobs program. As Plutarch maintains, he wanted to make of the city an object of unforgettable beauty; and, as the funeral oration he delivered at the end of the first year of Sparta’s second Attic war makes clear, he also wanted to make it a focus of the longing for grandeur and the aspiration to immortality that, he hoped, would animate his compatriots. When he encouraged them to look upon the pólıs and give way to erṓs, he meant precisely what he said.

Fix your gaze daily on the power that actually belongs to the city, and become her lovers—her erastaí! And, when you have realized her greatness, keep in mind that those who acquired this were men of daring, men who knew what was demanded, men who were ashamed to be found wanting in action. . . . They gave their lives in common; and each on his own received in return both a praise that never grows old and the most remarkable of tombs—not that in which they lie buried, but rather that in which their reputation [dóxa] is laid up forever, always to be remembered on every occasion which calls for speech or for deed. For men graced with fame have the entire earth for a tomb: not only does the inscription on the columns in their own land mark them out, but, in foreign climes, an unwritten remembrance lives on in men’s hearts though not graven on stone. Let these men be your model; and, supposing happiness to be freedom and freedom to be stoutness of heart, take no notice of the dangers of war.³⁰

The Parthenon, the most conspicuous temple built on the acropolis as part of Pericles’ program, may also have been designed, at least in part, with an eye to instilling in that statesman’s compatriots the public-spiritedness subsequently celebrated in this funeral oration. Inside the temple’s colonnade, a continuous Ionic frieze ran around the entire building. If the latest interpretive study of this frieze is correct, as I suspect it may well be, its subject was self-sacrifice in the city’s interest.

The story now, in some quarters, thought to be illustrated on this particular frieze deserves attention. Fortunately for us, Euripides related it at length and in detail in his tragedy Erechtheus, good parts of which we now possess. According to what we can piece together from this and other sources concerning the tale, some years after the Athenians chose Athena as the city’s divine patron in preference to Poseidon, the latter’s son Eumolpus was thought to have set out with a band of Thracians and with support from the people of Eleusis in Attica to reclaim Athens for his father. When he learned what was to come, Erechtheus, who was Athens’ king, reportedly consulted the oracle at Delphi and was told that he could save the city if and only if he sacrificed one of his daughters. Upon his return, he informed his wife Praxithea, who gave a patriotic speech, urging that this be done. The youngest daughter, the one chosen, then enthusiastically embraced the mission she had been assigned, and her two older sisters chose to die alongside her.

Whether, according to the story, Erechtheus killed with his own hand his youngest daughter or she and her sisters committed suicide by casting themselves off the acropolis we cannot now ascertain. But this much is clear: the king’s daughters were said to have died of their own volition; the king himself, to have fallen in the battle; and Athens, to have been saved by the sacrifice of the daughter whom he had singled out. The Athenians also believed that the Erechtheum on the acropolis was built over the grave of Erechtheus and the Parthenon over that of his daughters, and they supposed that the first priestess of Athena Polias, who managed both cults, was Erechtheus’ wife Praxithea. It makes sense, then, that the Ionic frieze within the latter of the two temples should relate in detail the story of the young girl’s sacrifice, of Erechtheus’ death in battle, of Athens’ victory on the same occasion, and of the triumphal procession that followed. And everything that we know about the actual frieze is consistent with the supposition that these were, in fact, its themes—which is what we would expect given what we know about Pericles’ eagerness to impress upon his compatriots the necessity that they be ready to risk and even give up their lives on the community’s behalf.³¹

Although promoting public-spiritedness appears to have been one dimension of the Parthenon’s purpose, it did not by any means exhaust its didactic aim. With the help of his friend Pheidias, Pericles also sought to teach the Athenians that theirs was a mission civilisatrice. On the east pediment of the Parthenon, one could observe the birth of Athena. On the west pediment, the first element that would catch one’s eye as one passed through the acropolis gateway, one could trace the contest between Athena with her olive tree and Poseidon, the god of horses and the sea, for the divine patronage of the political community. Below the pediments, there was a Doric frieze made up of ninety-two metopes, alternating with triglyphs, replete with sculptures. The metopes on the south side of the Parthenon depicted the Theseus, king of Athens, aiding the Lapiths in a fight against the Centaurs; those on the east side, the Olympian gods battling the Giants; and those on the west side, Theseus and his fellow Athenians confronting the Amazons. Each set of metopes celebrated the victory of civilization over barbarism, and those on the north side told the story of the Trojan War—a confrontation between Europe and Asia thought to have prefigured Athens’ defeat of the Persians.³²

Thucydides son of Olorus witnessed the building of the Parthenon and the Propylaea, the acropolis’ monumental entrance. He was an adolescent when the work commenced; and, when the two were completed, he was old enough (or almost old enough) to hold the strategía and command a fleet or an army—which, in time, he would do. Years later, when he composed his account of the great Peloponnesian War, he penned a poignant passage in which he asked his readers to pause for a moment and imagine a future age in which Athens was abandoned and nothing remained to interest a visitor other than the temples and the foundations of her public buildings. These visitors would, he warned, be inclined to conclude from what met the eye that in Thucydides’ day the city’s power had been twice as great as it really was.³³

It was this conviction that Pericles, with his building program, wanted to impress on his fellow citizens, on their allies and their prospective enemies throughout Hellas, and on anyone who passed through Athens. In the last oration that he delivered—when disease afflicted the city, when his compatriots were most apt to despair, and he wanted to restore their spirits, he is said to have returned to the theme that he had announced earlier in his funeral oration:

Remember that this city has the greatest name among all mankind because she has never yielded to adversity, but has spent more lives in war and has endured severer hardships than any other city. She has held the greatest power known to men up to our time, and the memory of her power will be laid up forever for those who come after. Even if we now have to yield (since all things that grow also decay), the memory shall remain that, of all the Greeks, we held sway over the greatest number of Hellenes; that we stood against our foes, both when they were united and when each was alone, in the greatest wars; and that we inhabited a city wealthier and greater than all. . . . The splendor [lamprótēs] of the present is the glory of the future laid up as a memory for all time. Take possession of both, zealously choosing honor for the future and avoiding disgrace in the present.

The vision of the good life articulated in this speech and that conveyed by the stories retold via the sculpture on the Parthenon were one and the same, and they help explain the inflated sense of their own importance within the larger scheme of things that generally had the Athenians in its grip.³⁴

Things Come Apart

In the haunting passage in which he discussed the likelihood that, in later times, Athens’ power would be overestimated, Thucydides issued a second warning. Travelers who visited Lacedaemon at a time when that city was desolate would be apt to infer from the absence of a city center, from the fact that her population had been dispersed in villages, and from the lack of magnificent temples and grand public edifices that the Spartans had been considerably less powerful than was suggested by ancient report. This mistake was apt to be made, he added, in spite of the fact that the Lacedaemonians had occupied two-fifths of the Peloponnesus, had exercised hegemony over that great peninsula in its entirety, and had secured numerous allies in the larger world beyond.³⁵ To this, we—who live in the age imagined by the Athenian historian—can add that the disproportion between the literary monuments produced in Athens and those produced in Lacedaemon, the relative dearth of reportage in the ancient sources concerning the latter, and the decided bias against her that colors some (but, thankfully, by no means all) of the ancient sources and that mars much of the modern commentary reinforces our propensity to underestimate the Spartans.

Pericles may have done the same. He may have fallen prey to his own rhetoric, to his own longing for glory, and to the aspirations he wanted to instill in his fellow citizens. And, in the process, he may have forgotten just how fragile Athens’ position was. The city’s accomplishments were breathtaking. Marathon, Salamis, Mycale, Eurymedon, and Cypriot Salamis—the list of her victories over the greatest empire known to man is long. But triumphalism can all too easily become an obstacle to a sober appreciation of the realities of power. In and immediately after 449, when Athens was at the height of her power, she was unchallenged in the Aegean, along the coast of Caria and Lycia, and in the Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Bosporus. At this time, she controlled much of central Greece—and Troezen, Hermione, and Achaea within the Peloponnesus, as well as Naupactus and Molycreium north of the Corinthian Gulf, Chalcis on the Gulf of Patras, and most of Acarnania, which stretched from south to north along the Ionian Sea, were among her allies. All of this was true. But a net assessment of her situation would have to consider the sharp decline in manpower that she had suffered just five years before, the restiveness of her allies, the jealousy inspired by her ascent and the outburst of vainglory that accompanied it, the resentment to which her continued collection of the phóros gave rise, and the residual strength of her adversaries. When Cimon negotiated a truce with the Spartans, they had given that instrument a term of five years. When these five years were over, there was every reason to suppose that there would be a renewal of war.

Athens was still overextended. Myronides’ foray into Thessaly in 454, which was his last known campaign, had come to naught. The Boeotians—who appear to have been required to contribute phóros—were resentful and restive, and the Athenians had had to intervene repeatedly. Euboea, the largest and most fertile island within Athens’ dominion, lay for the most part along the Boeotian coast; and the scant evidence that we possess suggests that, in the five years leading up to 449, the cities there and on Naxos, a sizable island nearby, were also inclined to rebellion. Tolmides, who was active in Boeotia in 454, is said to have dealt with the problem. In retaliation, he reportedly confiscated land on Euboea and Naxos, and he may have done the like for the same reason on Andros at about the same time. On this land—although it had belonged to Greeks, not barbarians—he then installed cleruchies, as the Athenians were now wont to do in such circumstances.³⁶

The Spartans, who were exceptionally god-fearing, were not disposed to break the truce negotiated with Cimon. As we have seen, however, they had in the early years of that truce put their house in order within the Peloponnesus by reaching an accord with Argos and by luring Tegea back into their alliance. This left them free for the first time in nearly two decades to devote more attention to the world outside that peninsula. In 448, we are told, they sent an expedition to Delphi once again—to oust the Phocians, whom the Athenians had apparently put back in charge of the sanctuary not long after Oenophyta, and to place the sanctuary, as they had shortly before the battle of Tanagra, in control of the population of that city. That this intervention in central Greece was an oblique attack on the interests of Athens is clear, and it was perceived as such. Almost immediately after the Lacedaemonian withdrawal, the Athenians, under Pericles’ command, restored Delphi to the control of their Phocian allies and secured for themselves the right of first response from the oracle.³⁷

Lacedaemon’s brief foray into central Greece on this occasion may have been intended in part to serve as an encouragement of those in that region hostile to the Athenians, who were, in fact, numerous. If so, the expedition was a tremendous success. Quite late in 447 or very early in 446, trouble erupted for Athens in northwestern Boeotia, not far from Delphi, at Chaeronea, Orchomenos, and elsewhere in their vicinity—when Boeotian exiles, who had presumably been driven out earlier by the Athenians, seized control. According to Plutarch, Pericles urged caution, suggesting that Tolmides, who appears to have been Athens’ point man in Boeotia, listen to “the wisest of counsellors—time.” Whether he had doubts about the wisdom of Athens’ attempting to sustain a land empire in central Greece, as some suspect, we do not know. It is perfectly possible that he merely preferred that his colleague take the time to gather a larger force.³⁸

Tolmides, however, lived up to his father’s name and his own. Like Myronides, the son of Tolmaeus was a man of great daring [tólma], and his record in the field was such that the Athenians were inclined to give him free rein. The troops assigned him he gathered. He is said to have recruited one thousand more, as was his wont, from among those most eager for honor; and he drew some support from Athens’ allies—in all likelihood, from the Plataeans and the Thespians and perhaps from other communities in Boeotia controlled by Athens’ partisans.

Chaeronea Tolmides and the Athenians under his command seized, and we are told that they enslaved those whom they captured and installed a garrison in the town. Orchomenos was apparently too well defended for them to attempt, for they then turned back in the direction of Athens. Thereafter, as they worked their way along the southern shore of Lake Kopais, the Athenians and their allies were ambushed at a site near Coronea, which lay in between Lebadeia to the west and Haliartos to the east. Thucydides reports that the force that conducted this operation was largely made up of the Boeotian exiles who had taken control of Orchomenos, of Locrians who had joined them, and of exiles from the cities of Euboea. Within their ranks, he tells us, there were others “of the same mind”—who apparently came to be called “Orchomenizers.”

In this enterprise, exiles from Thebes appear to have played an especially large role. Plutarch—a native of Chaeronea who was especially well-informed concerning Boeotian affairs—tells us that the general who staged the ambush bore the name Sparton, which was a Theban name. Twenty years later, the compatriots of this Sparton would claim the victory as their own; and this assertion Xenophon treats as uncontroversial. Moreover, in the aftermath, if we are to judge by the coins they and they alone issued on behalf of the Boeotian League, the Thebans quickly and successfully reasserted their hegemony within the region as a whole.

At Coronea, the Athenian losses were considerable. Among the dead were a number of prominent citizens, including Tolmides himself and Pericles’ close friend Cleinias, who was a son of the Alcibiades who had earlier renounced the proxenía that his family had maintained at Athens for many generations on Lacedaemon’s behalf. There were survivors, too, and they were all or nearly all captured. To secure their recovery, we are told, the Athenians agreed to evacuate all of the cities of Boeotia.³⁹

Their defeat the Athenians did not take to heart. They considered it what the Hellenes termed “a theft of war.” It was not due to the superiority of their foe. It was, they told themselves, the work of a god or hero of the land. Tolmides and his seer Theainetos they did not blame. Subsequently, in fact, they erected at Athens statues of the pair.⁴⁰

Athens’ decision to withdraw from Boeotia is puzzling. To the best of our knowledge, she still controlled most of the cities. Of course, the Athenians may have been especially sensitive at this time to the loss of life. Many had been killed at Tanagra a bit more than a decade before. A great many more had died in the interim in Egypt. Others had lost their lives in the battle near Coronea, and the number of Athenians captured may have been considerable. It is also possible that the death of Tolmides had removed from Athens the last great champion of the land empire in central Greece that Myronides had secured at and after the battle of Oenophyta. Pericles, who was now without a question the leading figure at Athens, may have long regarded that venture as a dangerous distraction from more pressing exigencies—from the need, for example, to shore up Athens’ maritime alliance and to isolate and destroy Lacedaemon.

The Athenians may, however, have had another, genuinely compelling reason for staging a retreat. In 446, not long after their delivery of that year’s phóros, Histiaea, Chalcis, Eretria, and Carystus on the island of Euboea nearby revolted in tandem. This may have taken place after the evacuation of Boeotia, as Thucydides’ narrative might seem to suggest. It is also possible, however, that the Athenian’s order of presentation reflects an eagerness on his part to wrap up one story before launching into another. After all, his focus is the growth of Athenian power—not the Boeotian and Euboean rebellions and their interconnection; and, although he proceeds to present the most illustrative events of the period in chronological order, he nowhere indicates that each and every sequence of events related was complete before the next sequence began.

The revolt on Euboea was surely inspired by Athens’ loss at Coronea and fomented by the Euboean exiles who fought in that conflict. If it took place in the immediate aftermath of that battle while the Athenians were negotiating with the Boeotian rebels, as I suspect it did, Pericles and his compatriots may have been confronted with an exceedingly unpleasant choice—between devoting their limited remaining manpower to shoring up their position in Boeotia and deploying that manpower for the recovery of Euboea.

If this is the dilemma that they then faced, the choice will have been easy. Athens was first and foremost a maritime power. Her strength derived from her hegemony over the northeastern Mediterranean and the waterway linking it with the Black Sea and from the leverage she exercised over the islands in the Aegean; over the coastline of Thrace, stretching from what we now call the Chalcidice past Byzantium to the Euxine; and over that of Anatolia, stretching from Phaselis in Pamphylia past Chalcedon on the Bosporus again to the Black Sea. Euboea was Athens’ most prized possession. It was the largest island in the Delian League, and it was the closest to Attica. Retaining it was a strategic necessity. In comparison, Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis must have seemed like an extravagance.

Map 19. The Megarid, Boeotia, Euboea, and Attica

If this reconstruction is correct, when the island revolted, the Boeotians agreed to abandon their Euboean allies;⁴¹ the Athenians evacuated Boeotia, and Pericles crossed over to the island with an army of Athenians. Then, according to Thucydides, news reached him that—with the help of a force of Corinthians, Sicyonians, and Epidaurians whom they had admitted into their city—the Megarians hostile to Athens had also staged a revolt; that, in the process, they and the Peloponnesians introduced into the town had slaughtered the Athenian garrison in their city (apart from a handful who escaped to Nisaea); and that the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies were on the verge of invading Attica. In response, we are told, Pericles returned in haste.

Thucydides does not tell us that the ambush at Coronea, the rebellion in Euboea, and the Peloponnesian seizure of Megara were coordinated. He says nothing to suggest a connection between this set of events and the Spartan intervention at Delphi. But his silence can hardly be regarded as dispositive. He is interested in the results, which were pertinent to the larger question of the growth in Athenian power, and not, at least at this stage, in an assessment of the sources of Lacedaemon’s strength. It is, of course, conceivable that what happened was only loosely connected—that the victory of Athens’ enemies at Coronea inspired the rebellion on Euboea, which in turn encouraged the revolt at Megara. It is more likely, however, that these events were concerted, that plans and preparations were made well in advance, and that one rebellion followed quickly upon another because Athens’ enemies recognized the value of simultaneity. They can hardly have failed to recognize that their chance of success would be reduced considerably if Athens was in a position to deal with the rebellions in Boeotia, on Euboea, and at Megara seriatim. The fact that Pleistoanax, the Agiad king of Lacedaemon, marched into Attica with an army of Peloponnesians not long after the Megarian revolt suggests that the Spartans were party to the plot and had in all likelihood engineered the predicament in which the Athenians unexpectedly found themselves.⁴²

Thucydides’ account is incomplete. Diodorus claims that, in the immediate aftermath of the Megarian revolt, the Athenians sent an infantry force into Megara, which plundered her territory and carted off a great deal of booty, and that—when the Megarians (and presumably the Corinthians, Sicyonians, and Epidaurians supporting them) sallied forth to defend their property—the Athenians defeated them and chased them back to the city. And the tale he tells is evidently true. For there is epigraphical evidence that—when Pleistoanax and the Peloponnesians actually did invade Attica—an Athenian force of two thousand men, consisting of three tribal regiments commanded by the scion of a great aristocratic family named Andocides son of Leogoras, was operating within the Megarid in the vicinity of Pegae. According to the pertinent inscription, these Athenians then found themselves cut off from Attica, and they were led to safety by a Megarian named Pythion, who conducted them via Aegosthena into Boeotia—either to Kreusis in the territory of Thespiae or to Plataea in the southeast.⁴³

The outcome of all of this maneuvering is also a puzzle. Thucydides tells us that Pleistoanax and the Peloponnesians marched into Attica as far as Eleusis and the plain of Thria and that they ravaged the countryside and then returned home without going deeper into Attica. He adds that Pericles then led the Athenians back to Euboea, where they expelled the Histiaeans from their city, seized the territory for their own citizens, and subdued the rest of the island, which surrendered on terms. Then, he reports that, shortly after the Athenians had returned from Euboea, they agreed to a peace with the Spartans and their allies and, in accord with its terms, withdrew their garrisons from Nisaea and Pegae, the two ports of Megara, and from Troezen in the Argolic Acte and Achaea on the Corinthian Gulf.⁴⁴

Diodorus (whose chronology of events is, as usual, confused) adds a few details—that the Megarians, upon revolting, made an alliance with Lacedaemon, that the loss of prestige suffered by the Athenians at Coronea inspired the revolts in Euboea, that the Athenians eventually stormed Histiaea, and that the Spartan próxenos Callias son of Hipponicus and an unknown figure named Chares negotiated with Sparta what came to be called the Thirty Years’ Peace. To this, the orator Andocides adds that there were ten Athenians on the negotiating team and that one of these was his like-named grandfather Andocides son of Leogoras, the general who had been cut off at Pegae with a force of two thousand men.⁴⁵

Plutarch tells us that, when he brought back his soldiers from Euboea, Pericles did not dare to enter into battle, hand-to-hand, with the multitude of brave hoplites who had been summoned by the Megarians; that he bribed both Pleistoanax, who was, we know, in his twenties, and Cleandridas, who had been sent by the ephors to serve as his advisor and was probably that year an ephor himself; and that the Agiad king then led the Peloponnesian army out of Attica. He indicates as well that, when Pleistoanax and Cleandridas returned home, the Lacedaemonians—in fury at their failure to drive deeper into Attica, to force the Athenians to fight, and to inflict on them a humiliating defeat—imposed so heavy a fine on the Agiad king that, unable to pay, he withdrew from Laconia; and he reports that Cleandridas fled into exile and was condemned to death. Moreover, according to Plutarch’s testimony, when Pericles presented his accounts at the end of his year of office, he listed ten talents (more than a quarter of a ton) of silver spent “out of necessity”; and when he subdued Euboea, he banished from Chalcis the Hıppóbotaı, seized their land, and settled Athenian cleruchs on it as well as on the land of the Histiaeans, who had gratuitously massacred the crew of an Athenian trireme.⁴⁶

Two questions remain unanswered. The first has to do with the Athenians, who had long before completed the Long Walls linking Athens with the Peiraeus. These had been built for just such an emergency. It should have been possible for the Athenians to withdraw behind the walls, import food by sea, and defy an invading army. But, on this occasion, Pericles apparently did not call upon his compatriots to rely on this formidable system of defense. Why he made this choice we do not know.⁴⁷

It is, of course, possible that Pericles was in a perilous situation; that he had invaded the Megarid, as Diodorus seems to suggest; and that the units under his direct command, like the regiments led by Andocides, had been outmaneuvered, were cut off from the city, and, if challenged, would have had to fight. Even, however, if his men were safely ensconced behind the Long Walls, it is likely that Pericles was aware of Andocides’ plight and that he feared for the safety of his men. He may have thought that Athens could not, in the wake of the disaster in Egypt and the losses sustained at Tanagra and Coronea, afford to abandon two thousand hoplites, and it is likely that he did not relish the prospect that the Peloponnesians would strip Attica bare. The Athenians may have had time to flee their farms, but it is unlikely that they had had an opportunity to collect their valuables and safeguard their oxen, cattle, sheep, and goats. Finally, as one scholar has suggested, Pericles may have worried that Pleistoanax would dispatch a substantial Peloponnesian force to Euboea and station it there at least temporarily as a garrison to give the anti-Athenian leaders in the various cities on the island time in which to consolidate control and prepare for the island’s defense. The only thing of which we can be certain, however, is that the Athenians were caught in a terrible bind and forced to make concessions they would never have otherwise made.⁴⁸

The second unanswered question has to do with Pleistoanax. In one fashion or another, as we have seen, he and the Peloponnesians accompanying him must have had the Athenians at their mercy. If the entire levy of the Spartan alliance was present, as is likely, the Peloponnesians will have greatly outnumbered the Athenians; and, as hoplites, they were almost certainly better trained. Had there been a battle, they might well have annihilated the army under Pericles’ command; and, had they done this, the cities on Euboea would have remained free and, in virtually every other pólıs of any consequence within the Delian League, men hostile to Athens would have seized power and effected a withdrawal from Athens’ alliance. Had the Athenians chosen to remain behind the Long Walls, Andocides and his soldiers would have been easy pickings, and Euboea would have beckoned, as we have seen.

Pleistoanax had the means with which to do Athens great harm, and the Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies had the motive. They had suffered grievously in the years subsequent to the diplomatic revolution initiated by Ephialtes in 462/1, and they surely knew that the only way to guarantee that there would not be a reprise was to eliminate Athens as a great power by destroying her hegemony. Why Pleistoanax let this opportunity slip, however, we are not told. If it had something to do with the solar eclipse that took place on 2 September 446—as may well have been the case—it is odd that no ancient source even mentions the event.⁴⁹

There is a consideration, however, as yet unmentioned, and it may have been decisive—for we know that, in the past, the Spartans had accorded it great weight. If the Athenian hegemony at sea were eliminated, if each pólıs in the Delian League were allowed to go her own way, the door would be open for a return of the Mede. Of course, Lacedaemon could have resorted to the sea and mounted an attempt to take up the hegemony herself, but Pleistoanax and Cleandridas may not have been prepared to contemplate that possibility. Like Hetoemaridas two decades before, they may have been of the view that Sparta was constitutionally ill-suited to such an enterprise and that its attempt would be apt to subvert the regime and ultimately destroy the Lacedaemonian way of life.

Of course, the two men may well have been offered a sweetener, and it is perfectly possible that they accepted what was on offer. The Lacedaemonians were notoriously vulnerable to pecuniary temptation. It is, nonetheless, hard to believe that personal profit was the sole or even the chief motive of Pleistoanax and his advisor; and, although their compatriots were for understandable reasons enraged at their failure to seize for their fatherland the opportunity afforded them by the situation, they nonetheless agreed in the aftermath, after they had had sufficient time for rumination, to accept the terms on offer from Callias, Chares, Andocides, and their fellow diplomats—terms which, in rough outline, Pericles must have offered Pleistoanax and Cleandridas.⁵⁰

The citizens of Lacedaemon were not stupid. They were, in fact, exceptionally canny; and, though they may have been more apt to give way to anger than men less spirited, they nonetheless tended toward political sobriety. Long before, in the middle of the sixth century, Chilon the ephor had crafted for them a grand strategy grounded in an appreciation for what they possessed and a prudent acknowledgment of the grave dangers inherent in seeking more. Mēdèn ágan—“nothing too much”—was the principle he had taught them, and they had taken it to heart. Henceforth, moderation [sophrosúnē] was the virtue that they trumpeted as peculiarly their own; and, although they may rarely have achieved genuine sophrosúnē as individuals, collectively, as Thucydides points out, they managed the feat, almost unheard of in Greece, of combining that quality with general prosperity.⁵¹

In their time of troubles—the two decades following the earthquake of 465/4 and the helot revolt that it inspired, and the fifteen years that had passed since Ephialtes effected the diplomatic revolution that had prepared the way for their war with Athens—the citizens of Lacedaemon had exercised remarkable patience. As we have already had occasion to observe, they had defended their stronghold deep in the Peloponnesus, they had reasserted their hegemony in south-central and southwest Arcadia, they had repeatedly defeated the Tegeans, they had defended the Mantineians, and step by careful step they had recovered control in Messenia while containing and ultimately taming the Argives and then drawing Tegea back into their alliance. Finally, at a moment when the Athenians, supposing themselves triumphant, jubilantly lorded it over most of Hellas, the Spartans seized an opportunity that with their encouragement presented itself; and they pounced, turning everything suddenly upside-down and confronting their opponents unexpectedly with the likelihood that they would be dealt a crippling strategic defeat. In the process—with the help of their allies in the Peloponnesus, in Boeotia, and beyond—the Lacedaemonians forced the Athenians to abandon Megara and her ports, Achaea and Troezen in the Peloponnesus, and Boeotia, Locris, and Phocis in central Greece. Despite everything that they had suffered as a consequence of the great earthquake and the helot revolt and despite the prospect that they might be stripped of their allies, deprived of Messenia, and forced to knuckle under, the Spartans had emerged victorious. They had met the Athenian challenge—as, a few decades previously, they had also met the Persian challenge—and once again, with bravery, cunning, and grace, they had driven off the challenger.