THE RISE AND GROWTH OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE.
I. THE DISGRACE AND DEATH OF THEMISTOCLES.
Six years after the battle of Platæa the career of Xerxes was
terminated by assassination, and his son, Artaxerxes Longim'anus,
succeeded to the throne. In the mean time Athens had been rebuilt
and fortified by Themistocles, and the Piræus (the port of Athens)
enclosed within a wall as large in extent as that of Athens, but
of greater height and thickness. But Themistocles, by his selfish
and arbitrary use of power, provoked the enmity of a large body
of his countrymen; and although he was acquitted of the charge
of treasonable inclinations toward Persia, popular feeling soon
after became so strong against him that he was condemned to exile
by the same process of ostracism that he had directed against
Aristides, and he retired to Argos (471 B.C.) Some time before
this a Grecian force, composed of Athenians under Aristides,
and Cimon the son of Miltiades, and Spartans under Pausanias
the victor of Platæa, waged a successful war upon the Persian
dependencies of the Ægean, and the coasts of Asia Minor. The
Ionian cities were aided in a successful revolt, and Cyprus and
Byzantium--the latter now Constantinople--fell into the hands
of the Grecians. Pausanias, who was at the head of the whole
armament, now began to show signs of treasonable conduct, which
was more fully unfolded by a communication that he addressed
to the Persian court, seeking the daughter of Xerxes in marriage,
and promising to bring Sparta and the whole of Greece under
Persian dominion.
When news of the treason of Pausanias reached Sparta, he was
immediately recalled, and, though no definite proof was at first
furnished against him, his guilt was subsequently established,
and he perished from starvation in the Temple of Minerva, whither
he had fled for refuge, and where he was immured by the eph'ors.
The fate of Pausanias involved that of Themistocles. In searching
for farther traces of the former's plot some correspondence was
discovered that furnished sufficient evidence of the complicity
of Themistocles in the crime, and he was immediately accused by
the Spartans, who insisted upon his being punished. The Athenians
sent ambassadors to arrest him and bring him to Athens; but
Themistocles fled from Argos, and finally sought refuge at the
court of Persia. He died at Magne'sia, in Asia Minor, which had
been appointed his place of residence by Artaxerxes, and a splendid
monument was raised to his memory; but in the time of the Roman
empire a tomb was pointed out by the sea-side, within the port
of Piræus, which was generally believed to contain his remains,
and of which the comic poet PLATO thus wrote:
By the sea's margin, on the watery strand,
Thy monument, Themistocles, shall stand.
By this directed to thy native shore,
The merchant shall convey his freighted store;
And when our fleets are summoned to the fight
Athens shall conquer with thy tomb in sight.
--Trans. by CUMBERLAND.
Although "the genius of Themistocles did not secure him from
the seductions of avarice and pride, which led him to sacrifice
both his honor and his country for the tinsel of Eastern pomp,"
yet, as THIRLWALL says, "No Greek had then rendered services
such as those of Themistocles to the common country; and no
Athenian, except Solon, had conferred equal benefits on Athens.
He had first delivered her from the most imminent danger, and
then raised her to the pre-eminence on which she now stood. He
might claim her greatness; and even her being, as his work."
The following tribute to his memory is from the pen of TULLIUS
GEM'INUS, a Latin poet:
Greece be thy monument; around her throw
The broken trophies of the Persian fleet;
Inscribe the gods that led the insulting foe,
And mighty Xerxes, at the tablet's feet.
There lay Themistocles; to spread his fame
A lasting column Salamis shall be;
Raise not, weak man, to that immortal name
The little records of mortality.
--Trans. by MERIVALE.
* * * * *
II. THE RISE AND FALL OF CIMON.
Foremost among the rivals of Themistocles in ability and influence,
was Cimon, the son of Miltiades. In his youth he was inordinately
fond of pleasure, and revealed none of those characteristics for
which he subsequently became distinguished. But his friends
encouraged him to follow in his father's footsteps, and Aristides
soon discovered in him a capacity and disposition that he could
use to advantage in his own antagonism to Themistocles. To Aristides,
therefore, Cimon was largely indebted for his influence and success,
as well as for his mild temper and gentle manners.
Reared by his care, of softer ray appears
Cimon, sweet-souled; whose genius, rising strong,
Shook off the load of young debauch; abroad
The scourge of Persian pride, at home the friend
Of every worth and every splendid art;
Modest and simple in the pomp of wealth.
--THOMSON.
On the banishment of Themistocles Aristides became the undisputed
leader of the aristocratical party at Athens, and on his death,
four years subsequently, Cimon succeeded him. The later was already
distinguished for his military successes, and was undoubtedly
the greatest commander of his time. He continued the successful
war against Persia for many years, and among his notable victories
was one obtained on both sea and land, in Pamphyl'ia, in Asia
Minor, and called
THE BATTLE OF EURYM'EDON.
After dispersing a fleet of two hundred ships Cimon landed his
troops, flushed with victory, and completely routed a large Persian
army. The poet SIMONIDES praises this double victory in the
following verse:
Ne'er since that olden time, when Asia stood
First torn from Europe by the ocean flood,
Since horrid Mars first poured on either shore
The storm of battle and its wild uproar,
Hath man by land and sea such glory won
As by the mighty deed this day was done.
By land, the Medes in myriads press the ground;
By sea, a hundred Tyrian ships are drowned,
With all their martial host; while Asia stands
Deep groaning by, and wrings her helpless hands.
--Trans. by MERIVALE.
The same poet pays the following tribute to the Greeks who fell
in this conflict:
These, by the streams of famed Eurymedon,
There, envied youth's short brilliant race have run:
In swift-winged ships, and on the embattled field,
Alike they forced the Median bows to yield,
Breaking their foremost ranks. Now here they lie,
Their names inscribed on rolls of victory.
--Trans. by MERIVALE.
On the recall of Pausanias from Asia Minor Sparta lost, and Athens
acquired, the command in the war against Persia. Athens was now
rapidly approaching the summit of her military renown. The war
with Persia did not prevent her from extending her possessions
in Greece by force of arms; and island after island of the Ægean
yielded to her sway, while her colonies peopled the winding shores
of Thrace and Macedon. The other states and cities of Greece could
not behold her rapid, and apparently permanent, growth in power
without great dissatisfaction and anxiety. When the Persian war
was at its height, a sense of common danger had caused many of
them to seek an alliance with Athens, the result of what is known
as the Confederacy of Delos; but, now that the danger was virtually
passed, long existing jealousies broke out, which led to political
dissensions, and, finally, to the civil wars that caused the ruin
of the Grecian republics. Sparta, especially, had long viewed
with indignation the growing resources of Athens and was preparing
to check them by an invasion of Attica, when sudden and complicated
disasters forced her to abandon her designs, and turn her attention
to her own dominions. In 464 B.C. the city was visited by an
earthquake that laid it in ruins and buried not less than twenty
thousand of its chosen citizens; and this calamity was immediately
followed by a general revolt of the Helots. BULWER'S description
of this terrible earthquake, and of the memorable conduct of the
Laconian government in opposing, under such trying circumstances,
the dreadful revolt that occurred, has been greatly admired for
its eloquence and its strict adherence to facts.
The Earthquake at Sparta and the Revolt of the Helots.
"An earthquake, unprecedented in its violence, occurred in Sparta.
In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent asunder.
From Mount Ta-yg'e-tus, which overhung the city, and on which
the women of Lacedæmon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies,
huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of
the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably
with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped disaster
from the shock. This terrible calamity did not cease suddenly as
it came; its concussions were repeated; it buried alike men and
treasure: could we credit Diodorus, no less than twenty thousand
persons perished in the shock. Thus depopulated, impoverished, and
distressed, the enemies whom the cruelty of Sparta nursed within
her bosom resolved to seize the moment to execute their vengeance
and consummate her destruction. Under Pausanias the Helots were
ready for revolt; and the death of that conspirator checked, but
did not crush, their designs of freedom. Now was the moment,
when Sparta lay in ruins--now was the moment to realize their
dreams. From field to field, from village to village, the news
of the earthquake became the watchword of revolt. Up rose the
Helots--they armed themselves, they poured on--a wild and gathering
and relentless multitude resolved to slay, by the wrath of man,
all whom that of nature had yet spared. The earthquake that leveled
Sparta rent their chains; nor did the shock create one chasm so
dark and wide as that between the master and the slave.
"It is one of the sublimest and most awful spectacles in history
--that city in ruins--the earth still trembling, the grim and
dauntless soldiery collected amid piles of death and ruin; and in
such a time, and such a scene, the multitude sensible not of danger,
but of wrong, and rising not to succor, but to revenge--all that
should have disarmed a feebler enmity giving fire to theirs; the
dreadest calamity their blessing--dismay their hope. It was as if
the Great Mother herself had summoned her children to vindicate
the long-abused, the all-inalienable heritage derived from her;
and the stir of the angry elements was but the announcement of an
armed and solemn union between nature and the oppressed.
"Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not altogether unforeseen.
After the confusion and the horror of the earthquake, and while
the people, dispersed, were seeking to save their effects,
Archida'mus, who, four years before, had succeeded to the throne
of Lacedæmon, ordered the trumpets to sound as to arms. That
wonderful superiority of man over matter which habit and discipline
can effect, and which was ever so visible among the Spartans,
constituted their safety at that hour. Forsaking the care of
their property, the Spartans seized their arms, flocked around
their king, and drew up in disciplined array. In her most imminent
crisis Sparta was thus saved. The Helots approached, wild,
disorderly, and tumultuous; they came intent only to plunder and
to slay; they expected to find scattered and affrighted foes
--they found a formidable army; their tyrants were still their
lords. They saw, paused, and fled, scattering themselves over
the country, exciting all they met to rebellion, and soon joined
with the Messenians, kindred to them by blood and ancient
reminiscences of heroic struggles; they seized that same Ithome
which their hereditary Aristodemus had before occupied with
unforgotten valor. This they fortified, and, occupying also the
neighboring lands, declared open war upon their lords." [Footnote:
"Athens: Its Rise and Fall," pp. 176, 177.]
"The incident here related of the King of Sparta," says ALISON,
"amid the yawning of the earthquake and the ruin of his capital,
sounding the trumpets to arms, and the Lacedæmonians assembling
in disciplined array around him, is one of the sublimest recorded
in history. We need not wonder that a people capable of such
conduct in such a moment, and trained by discipline and habit to
such docility in danger, should subsequently acquire and maintain
supreme dominion in Greece." The general insurrection of the Helots
is known in history as the THIRD MESSENIAN WAR. After two or three
years had passed in vain attempts to capture Ithome, the Spartans
were obliged to call for aid on the Athenians, with whom they were
still in avowed alliance. The friends of Pericles, the rival of
Cimon and the leader of the democratic party at Athens, opposed
granting the desired relief; but Cimon, after some difficulty,
persuaded his countrymen to assist the Lacedæmonians, and he
himself marched with four thousand men to Ithome. The aid of the
Athenians was solicited on account of their acknowledged skill
in capturing fortified places; but as Cimon did not succeed in
taking Ithome, the Spartans became suspicious of his designs,
and summarily sent him back to Athens.
* * * * *
III. THE ACCESSION OF PERICLES TO POWER.
The ill success of the expedition of Cimon gave Pericles the
opportunity to place himself and the popular party in power at
Athens; for the constitutional reforms that had been gradually
weakening the power of the aristocracy were now made available
to sweep it almost entirely away. The following extract from
BULWER'S Athens briefly yet fully tells what was accomplished
in this direction:
"The Constitution previous to Solon was an oligarchy of birth.
Solon rendered it an aristocracy of property. Clisthenes widened
its basis from property to population; and it was also Clisthenes,
in all probability, who weakened the more illicit and oppressive
influences of wealth by establishing the ballot of secret suffrage,
instead of the open voting which was common in the time of Solon.
The Areop'agus was designed by Solon as the aristocratic balance
to the popular assembly. This constitutional bulwark of the
aristocratic party of Athens became more and more invidious to
the people, and when Cimon resisted every innovation on that
assembly he only insured his own destruction, while he expedited
the policy he denounced. Ephial'tes, the friend and spokesman of
Pericles, directed all the force of the popular opinion against
this venerable senate; and at length, though not openly assisted
by Pericles, who took no prominent part in the contention, that
influential statesman succeeded in crippling its functions and
limiting its authority."
With regard to the nature of the constitutional changes effected,
the same writer adds: "It appears to me most probable that the
Areopagus retained the right of adjudging cases of homicide, and
little besides of its ancient constitutional authority; that it
lost altogether its most dangerous power in the indefinite police
it had formerly exercised over the habits and morals of the people;
that any control of the finances was wisely transferred to the
popular senate; that its irresponsible character was abolished,
and that it was henceforth rendered accountable to the people."
The struggle between the contending parties was long and bitter,
and the fall of Cimon was one of the necessary consequences of
the political change. Charged, among other things, with too great
friendship for Sparta, he was driven into exile. Pericles now
persuaded the Athenians to renounce the alliance with Sparta, and
he increased the power of Athens by alliances with Argos and other
cities. He also continued the construction of the long walls from
Athens to the Piræus and Phalerum--a project that Themistocles
had advised and that Cimon had commenced.
The long existing jealousy of Sparta at last broke out in open
hostilities. While the siege of Ithome was in progress, Sparta,
still powerful in her alliances, sent her allied forces into
Bœotia to counteract the growing influence of the Athenians in
that quarter. The indignant Athenians, led by Pericles, marched
out to meet them, but were worsted in the battle of Tan'agra.
Before this conflict began, Cimon, the banished commander,
appeared in the Athenian camp and begged permission to enter
the ranks against the enemy. His request being refused, he left
his armor with his friends, of whom there were one hundred among
the Athenians, with the charge to refute, by their valor, the
accusation that he and they were the friends of Sparta. Everyone
of the one hundred fell in the conflict. About two months after,
in the early part of the year 456 B.C., the Athenians wiped off
the stain of their defeat at Tanagra by a victory over the combined
Theban and Bœotian forces, then in alliance with Sparta; whereby
the authority and influence of Sparta were again confined to
the Peloponnesus.
The Athenians were now masters of Greece, from the Gulf of Corinth
to the Pass of Thermopylæ, and in the following year they sent an
expedition round the Peloponnesus, which captured, among other
cities, Naupactus, on the Corinthian Gulf. The third and last
Messenian war had just been concluded by the surrender of Ithome,
on terms which permitted the Messenians and their families to
retire from the Peloponnesus, and they joined the colony which
Athens planted at Naupactus. But the successes of Athens in Greece
were counterbalanced, in the same year, by reverses in Egypt, where
the Athenians were fighting Persia in aid of In'arus, a Libyan
prince. These, with some other minor disasters, and the state of
bitter feeling that existed between the two parties at Athens,
induced Pericles to recall Cimon from exile and put him in
command of an expedition against Cyprus and Egypt. In 449, however,
Cimon was taken ill, and he died in the harbor of Ci'tium, to which
place he was laying siege.
Before the death of Cimon, and through his intervention, a five
years' truce had been concluded with Sparta, and soon after his
death peace was made with Persia. From this time the empire of
Athens began to decline. In the year 447 B.C. a revolt in Bœotia
resulted in the overthrow of Athenian supremacy there, while the
expulsion of the Athenians from Pho'cis and Lo'cris, and the
revolt of Euboea and Megara, followed soon after. The revolt of
Euboea was soon quelled, but this was the only success that Athens
achieved. Meanwhile a Spartan army invaded Attica and marched to
the neighborhood of Eleusis. Having lost much of her empire, with
a fair prospect of losing all of it if hostilities continued,
Athens concluded a thirty years' truce with Sparta and her allies,
by the terms of which she abandoned her conquests in the
Peloponnesus, and Megara became an ally of Sparta (445 B.C.)
THE "AGE OF PERICLES."
With the close of the Persian contest, and the beginning of the
Thirty Years' truce, properly begins what has been termed the
"Age of Pericles"--the inauguration of a new and important era
of Athenian greatness and renown. Having won the highest military
honors and political ascendancy, Athens now took the lead in
intellectual progress. Themistocles and Cimon had restored to
Athens all that of which Xerxes had despoiled it--the former
having rebuilt its ruins, and the latter having given to its
public buildings a degree of magnificence previously unknown.
But Pericles surpassed them both:
He was the ruler of the land
When Athens was the land of fame;
He was the light that led the band
When each was like a living flame;
The centre of earth's noblest ring,
Of more than men the more than king.
Yet not by fetter nor by spear
His sovereignty was held or won:
Feared--but alone as freemen fear;
Loved--but as freemen love alone;
He waved the sceptre o'er his kind
By nature's first great title--mind!
--CROLY.
Orator and philosopher, as well as statesman and general, Pericles
had the most lofty views. "Athens," says a modern writer, "was
to become not only the capital of Greece, but the center of art
and refinement, and, at the same time, of those democratical
theories which formed the beau ideal of the Athenian notions
of government." Athens became the center and capital of the most
polished communities of Greece; she drew into a focus all the
Grecian intellect, and she obtained from her dependents the wealth
to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse
taught her to appreciate. The treasury of the state being placed
in the hands of Pericles, he knew no limit to expenditure but
the popular will, which, fortunately for the glories of Grecian
art, kept pace with the vast conceptions of the master designer.
Most of those famous structures that crowned the Athenian Acropolis,
or surrounded its base, were either built or adorned by his
direction, under the superintendence of the great sculptor,
Phidias. The Parthenon, the Ode'um, the gold and ivory statue of
the goddess Minerva, and the Olympian Jupiter--the latter two
the work of the great sculptor himself--were alone sufficient to
immortalize the "Age of Pericles." Of these miracles of sculpture
and of architecture, as well as of the literature of this period,
we shall speak farther in a subsequent place.
Of the general condition and appearance of Athens during the
fourteen years that the Thirty Years' Truce was observed, HAYGARTH
gives us the following poetical description:
All the din of war
Was hushed to rest. Within a city's walls,
Beneath a marble portico, were seen
Statesmen and orators, in robes of peace,
Holding discourse. The assembled multitude
Sat in the crowded theatre, and bent
To hear the voice of gorgeous Tragedy
Breathing, in solemn verse, or ode sublime,
Her noble precepts. The broad city's gates
Poured forth a mingled throng--impatient steeds
Champing their bits, and neighing for the course:
Merchants slow driving to the busy port
Their ponderous wains: Religion's holy priests
Leading her red-robed votaries to the steps
Of some vast temple: young and old, with hands
Crossed on their breasts, hastening to walks and shades
Suburban, where some moralist explained
The laws of mind and virtue. On a rock
A varied group appeared: some dragged along
The rough-hewn block; some shaped it into form;
Some reared the column, or with chisel traced
Forms more than human; while Content sat near,
And cheered with songs the toil of Industry.
But, as the poet adds,
Soon passed this peaceful pageant: War again
Brandished his bloody lance--
and then began that dismal period between the "Age of Pericles"
and the interference of the Romans--embracing the three
Peloponnesian wars, the rising power of Macedonia under Philip
of Macedon, the wars of Alexander and the contentions that
followed--known as the period of the civil convulsions of Greece.