III. In the mean while the new ascendency of Athens was already

endangered. The Carystians in the neighbouring isle of Euboea openly

defied her fleet, and many of the confederate states, seeing

themselves delivered from all immediate dread of another invasion of

the Medes, began to cease contributions both to the Athenian navy and

the common treasury. For a danger not imminent, service became

burdensome and taxation odious. And already some well-founded

jealousy of the ambition of Athens increased the reluctance to augment

her power. Naxos was the first island that revolted from the

conditions of the league, and thither Cimon, having reduced the

Carystians, led a fleet numerous and well equipped.

Whatever the secret views of Cimon for the aggrandizement of his

country, he could not but feel himself impelled by his own genius and

the popular expectation not lightly to forego that empire of the sea,

rendered to Athens by the profound policy of Themistocles and the

fortunate prudence of Aristides; and every motive of Grecian, as well

as Athenian, policy justified the subjugation of the revolters--an

evident truth in the science of state policy, but one somewhat hastily

lost sight of by those historians who, in the subsequent and

unlooked-for results, forgot the necessity of the earlier enterprise.

Greece had voluntarily intrusted to Athens the maritime command of the

confederate states. To her, Greece must consequently look for no

diminution of the national resources committed to her charge; to her,

that the conditions of the league were fulfilled, and the common

safety of Greece ensured. Commander of the forces, she was answerable

for the deserters. Nor, although Persia at present remained tranquil

and inert, could the confederates be considered safe from her revenge.

No compact of peace had been procured. The more than suspected

intrigues of Xerxes with Pausanias were sufficient proofs that the

great king did not yet despair of the conquest of Greece. And the

peril previously incurred in the want of union among the several

states was a solemn warning not to lose the advantages of that league,

so tardily and so laboriously cemented. Without great dishonour and

without great imprudence, Athens could not forego the control with

which she had been invested; if it were hers to provide the means, it

was hers to punish the defaulters; and her duty to Greece thus

decorously and justly sustained her ambition for herself.

IV. And now it is necessary to return to the fortunes of Pausanias,

involving in their fall the ruin of one of far loftier virtues and

more unequivocal renown. The recall of Pausanias, the fine inflicted

upon him, his narrow escape from a heavier sentence, did not suffice

to draw him, intoxicated as he was with his hopes and passions, from

his bold and perilous intrigues. It is not improbable that his mind

was already tainted with a certain insanity [154]. And it is a

curious physiological fact, that the unnatural constraints of Sparta,

when acting on strong passions and fervent imaginations, seem, not

unoften, to have produced a species of madness. An anecdote is

recorded [155], which, though romantic, is not perhaps wholly

fabulous, and which invests with an interest yet more dramatic the

fate of the conqueror of Plataea.

At Byzantium, runs the story, he became passionately enamoured of a

young virgin named Cleonice. Awed by his power and his sternness, the

parents yielded her to his will. The modesty of the maiden made her

stipulate that the room might be in total darkness when she stole to

his embraces. But unhappily, on entering, she stumbled against the

light, and the Spartan, asleep at the time, imagined, in the confusion

of his sudden waking, that the noise was occasioned by one of his

numerous enemies seeking his chamber with the intent to assassinate

him. Seizing the Persian cimeter [156] that lay beside him, he

plunged it in the breast of the intruder, and the object of his

passion fell dead at his feet. “From that hour,” says the biographer,

“he could rest no more!” A spectre haunted his nights--the voice of

the murdered girl proclaimed doom to his ear. It is added, and, if we

extend our belief further, we must attribute the apparition to the

skill of the priests, that, still tortured by the ghost of Cleonice,

he applied to those celebrated necromancers who, at Heraclea [157],

summoned by gloomy spells the manes of the dead, and by their aid

invoked the spirit he sought to appease. The shade of Cleonice

appeared and told him, “that soon after his return to Sparta he would

be delivered from all his troubles.” [158]

Such was the legend repeated, as Plutarch tells us, by many

historians; the deed itself was probable, and conscience, even without

necromancy, might supply the spectre.

V. Whether or not this story have any foundation in fact, the conduct

of Pausanias seems at least to have partaken of that inconsiderate

recklessness which, in the ancient superstition, preceded the

vengeance of the gods. After his trial he had returned to Byzantium,

without the consent of the Spartan government. Driven thence by the

resentment of the Athenians [159], he repaired, not to Sparta, but to

Colonae, in Asia Minor, and in the vicinity of the ancient Troy; and

there he renewed his negotiations with the Persian king. Acquainted

with his designs, the vigilant ephors despatched to him a herald with

the famous scytale. This was an instrument peculiar to the Spartans.

To every general or admiral, a long black staff was entrusted; the

magistrates kept another exactly similar. When they had any

communication to make, they wrote it on a roll of parchment, applied

it to their own staff, fold upon fold--then cutting it off, dismissed

it to the chief. The characters were so written that they were

confused and unintelligible until fastened to the stick, and thus

could only be construed by the person for whose eye they were

intended, and to whose care the staff was confided.

The communication Pausanias now received was indeed stern and laconic.

“Stay,” it said, “behind the herald, and war is proclaimed against you

by the Spartans.”

On receiving this solemn order, even the imperious spirit of Pausanias

did not venture to disobey. Like Venice, whose harsh, tortuous, but

energetic policy her oligarchy in so many respects resembled, Sparta

possessed a moral and mysterious power over the fiercest of her sons.

His fate held him in her grasp, and, confident of acquittal, instead

of flying to Persia, the regent hurried to his doom, assured that by

the help of gold he could baffle any accusation. His expectations

were so far well-founded, that, although, despite his rank as regent

of the kingdom and guardian of the king, he was thrown into prison by

the ephors, he succeeded, by his intrigues and influence, in procuring

his enlargement: and boldly challenging his accusers, he offered to

submit to trial.

The government, however, was slow to act. The proud caution of the

Spartans was ever loath to bring scandal on their home by public

proceedings against any freeborn citizen--how much more against the

uncle of their monarch and the hero of their armies! His power, his

talents, his imperious character awed alike private enmity and public

distrust. But his haughty disdain of their rigid laws, and his

continued affectation of the barbarian pomp, kept the government

vigilant; and though released from prison, the stern ephors were his

sentinels. The restless and discontented mind of the expectant

son-in-law of Xerxes could not relinquish its daring schemes. And the

regent of Sparta entered into a conspiracy, on which it were much to

be desired that our information were more diffuse.

VI. Perhaps no class of men in ancient times excite a more painful

and profound interest than the helots of Sparta. Though, as we have

before seen, we must reject all rhetorical exaggerations of the savage

cruelty to which they were subjected, we know, at least, that their

servitude was the hardest imposed by any of the Grecian states upon

their slaves [160], and that the iron soldiery of Sparta were exposed

to constant and imminent peril from their revolts--a proof that the

curse of their bondage had passed beyond the degree which subdues the

spirit to that which arouses, and that neither the habit of years, nor

the swords of the fiercest warriors, nor the spies of the keenest

government of Greece had been able utterly to extirpate from human

hearts that law of nature which, when injury passes an allotted, yet

rarely visible, extreme, converts suffering to resistance.

Scattered in large numbers throughout the rugged territories of

Laconia--separated from the presence, but not the watch, of their

master, these singular serfs never abandoned the hope of liberty.

Often pressed into battle to aid their masters, they acquired the

courage to oppose them. Fierce, sullen, and vindictive, they were as

droves of wild cattle, left to range at will, till wanted for the

burden or the knife--not difficult to butcher, but impossible to tame.

We have seen that a considerable number of these helots had fought as

light-armed troops at Plataea; and the common danger and the common

glory had united the slaves of the army with the chief. Entering into

somewhat of the desperate and revengeful ambition that, under a

similar constitution, animated Marino Faliero, Pausanias sought, by

means of the enslaved multitude, to deliver himself from the thraldom

of the oligarchy which held prince and slave alike in subjection. He

tampered with the helots, and secretly promised them the rights and

liberties of citizens of Sparta, if they would co-operate with his

projects and revolt at his command.

Slaves are never without traitors; and the ephors learned the

premeditated revolution from helots themselves. Still, slow and wary,

those subtle and haughty magistrates suspended the blow--it was not

without the fullest proof that a royal Spartan was to be condemned on

the word of helots: they continued their vigilance--they obtained the

proof they required.

VII. Argilius, a Spartan, with whom Pausanias had once formed the

vicious connexion common to the Doric tribes, and who was deep in his

confidence, was intrusted by the regent with letters to Artabazus.

Argilius called to mind that none intrusted with a similar mission had

ever returned. He broke open the seals and read what his fears

foreboded, that, on his arrival at the satrap’s court, the silence of

the messenger was to be purchased by his death. He carried the packet

to the ephors. That dark and plotting council were resolved yet more

entirely to entangle their guilty victim, and out of his own mouth to

extract his secret; they therefore ordered Argilius to take refuge as

a suppliant in the sanctuary of the temple of Neptune on Mount

Taenarus. Within the sacred confines was contrived a cell, which, by

a double partition, admitted some of the ephors, who, there concealed,

might witness all that passed.

Intelligence was soon brought to Pausanias that, instead of proceeding

to Artabazus, his confidant had taken refuge as a suppliant in the

temple of Neptune. Alarmed and anxious, the regent hastened to the

sanctuary. Argilius informed him that he had read the letters, and

reproached him bitterly with his treason to himself. Pausanias,

confounded and overcome by the perils which surrounded him, confessed

his guilt, spoke unreservedly of the contents of the letter, implored

the pardon of Argilius, and promised him safety and wealth if he would

leave the sanctuary and proceed on the mission.

The ephors, from their hiding-place, heard all.

On the departure of Pausanias from the sanctuary, his doom was fixed.

But, among the more public causes of the previous delay of justice, we

must include the friendship of some of the ephors, which Pausanias had

won or purchased. It was the moment fixed for his arrest. Pausanias,

in the streets, was alone and on foot. He beheld the ephors

approaching him. A signal from one warned him of his danger. He

turned--he fled. The temple of Minerva Chalcioecus at hand proffered

a sanctuary--he gained the sacred confines, and entered a small house

hard by the temple. The ephors--the officers--the crowd pursued; they

surrounded the refuge, from which it was impious to drag the criminal.

Resolved on his death, they removed the roof--blocked up the entrances

(and if we may credit the anecdote, that violating human was

characteristic of Spartan nature, his mother, a crone of great age

[161], suggested the means of punishment, by placing, with her own

hand, a stone at the threshold)--and, setting a guard around, left the

conqueror of Mardonius to die of famine. When he was at his last

gasp, unwilling to profane the sanctuary by his actual death, they

bore him out into the open air, which he only breathed to expire

[162]. His corpse, which some of the fiercer Spartans at first

intended to cast in the place of burial for malefactors, was afterward

buried in the neighbourhood of the temple. And thus ended the glory

and the crimes--the grasping ambition and the luxurious ostentation--

of the bold Spartan who first scorned and then imitated the

effeminacies of the Persian he subdued.

VIII. Amid the documents of which the ephors possessed themselves

after the death of Pausanias was a correspondence with Themistocles,

then residing in the rival and inimical state of Argos. Yet

vindictive against that hero, the Spartan government despatched

ambassadors to Athens, accusing him of a share in the conspiracy of

Pausanias with the Medes. It seems that Themistocles did not disavow

a correspondence with Pausanias, nor affect an absolute ignorance of

his schemes; but he firmly denied by letter, his only mode of defence,

all approval and all participation of the latter. Nor is there any

proof, nor any just ground of suspicion, that he was a party to the

betrayal of Greece. It was consistent, indeed, with his astute

character, to plot, to manoeuvre, to intrigue, but for great and not

paltry ends. By possessing himself of the secret, he possessed

himself of the power of Pausanias; and that intelligence might perhaps

have enabled him to frustrate the Spartan’s treason in the hour of

actual danger to Greece. It is possible that, so far as Sparta alone

was concerned, the Athenian felt little repugnance to any revolution

or any peril confined to a state whose councils it had been the object

of his life to baffle, and whose power it was the manifest interest of

his native city to impair. He might have looked with complacency on

the intrigues which the regent was carrying on against the Spartan

government, and which threatened to shake that Doric constitution to

its centre. But nothing, either in the witness of history or in the

character or conduct of a man profoundly patriotic, even in his vices,

favours the notion that he connived at the schemes which implicated,

with the Grecian, the Athenian welfare. Pausanias, far less able, was

probably his tool. By an insight into his projects, Themistocles

might have calculated on the restoration of his own power. To weaken

the Spartan influence was to weaken his own enemies at Athens; to

break up the Spartan constitution was to leave Athens herself without

a rival. And if, from the revolt of the helots, Pausanias should

proceed to an active league with the Persians, Themistocles knew

enough of Athens and of Greece to foresee that it was to the victor of

Salamis and the founder of the Grecian navy that all eyes would be

directed. Such seem the most probable views which would have been

opened to the exile by the communications of Pausanias. If so, they

were necessarily too subtle for the crowd to penetrate or understand.

The Athenians heard only the accusations of the Spartans; they saw

only the treason of Pausanias; they learned only that Themistocles had

been the correspondent of the traitor. Already suspicious of a genius

whose deep and intricate wiles they were seldom able to fathom, and

trembling at the seeming danger they had escaped, it was natural

enough that the Athenians should accede to the demands of the

ambassadors. An Athenian, joined with a Lacedaemonian troop, was

ordered to seize Themistocles wherever he should be found. Apprized

of his danger, he hastily quitted the Peloponnesus and took refuge at

Corcyra. Fear of the vengeance at once of Athens and of Sparta

induced the Corcyreans to deny the shelter he sought, but they

honourably transported him to the opposite continent. His route was

discovered--his pursuers pressed upon him. He had entered the country

of Admetus, king of the Molossians, from whose resentment he had

everything to dread. For he had persuaded the Athenians to reject the

alliance once sought by that monarch, and Admetus had vowed vengeance.

Thus situated, the fugitive formed a resolution which a great mind

only could have conceived, and which presents to us one of the most

touching pictures in ancient history. He repaired to the palace of

Admetus himself. The prince was absent. He addressed his consort,

and, advised by her, took the young child of the royal pair in his

hand, and sat down at the hearth--“THEMISTOCLES THE SUPPLIANT!” [163]

On the return of the prince he told his name, and bade him not wreak

his vengeance on an exile. “To condemn me now,” he said, “would be to

take advantage of distress. Honour dictates revenge only among equals

upon equal terms. True that I opposed you once, but on a matter not

of life, but of business or of interest. Now surrender me to my

persecutors, and you deprive me of the last refuge of life itself.”

IX. Admetus, much affected, bade him rise, and assured him of

protection. The pursuers arrived; but, faithful to the guest who had

sought his hearth, after a form peculiarly solemn among the

Molossians, Admetus refused to give him up, and despatched him,

guarded, to the sea-town of Pydna, over an arduous and difficult

mountain-road. The sea-town gained, he took ship, disguised and

unknown to all the passengers, in a trading vessel bound to Ionia. A

storm arose--the vessel was driven from its course, and impelled right

towards the Athenian fleet, that then under Cimon, his bitterest foe,

lay before the Isle of Naxos (B. C. 466).

Prompt and bold in his expedients, Themistocles took aside the master

of the vessel--discovered himself; threatened, if betrayed, to inform

against the master as one bribed to favour his escape; promised, if

preserved, everlasting gratitude; and urged that the preservation was

possible, if no one during the voyage were permitted, on any pretext,

to quit the vessel.

The master of the vessel was won--kept out at sea a day and a night to

windward of the fleet, and landed Themistocles in safety at Ephesus.

In the mean while the friends of Themistocles had not been inactive in

Athens. On the supposed discovery of his treason, such of his

property as could fall into the hands of the government was, as usual

in such offences, confiscated to the public use; the amount was

variously estimated at eighty and a hundred talents [164]. But the

greater part of his wealth--some from Athens, some from Argos--was

secretly conveyed to him at Ephesus [165]. One faithful friend

procured the escape of his wife and children from Athens to the court

of Admetus, for which offence of affection, a single historian,

Stesimbrotus (whose statement even the credulous Plutarch questions,

and proves to be contradictory with another assertion of the same

author), has recorded that he was condemned to death by Cimon. It is

not upon such dubious chronicles that we can suffer so great a stain

on the character of a man singularly humane. [166]

X. As we have now for ever lost sight of Themistocles on the stage of

Athenian politics, the present is the most fitting opportunity to

conclude the history of his wild and adventurous career.

Persecuted by the Spartans, abandoned by his countrymen, excluded from

the whole of Greece, no refuge remained to the man who had crushed the

power of Persia, save the Persian court. The generous and

high-spirited policy that characterized the oriental despotism towards

its foes proffered him not only a safe, but a magnificent asylum. The

Persian monarchs were ever ready to welcome the exiles of Greece, and to

conciliate those whom they had failed to conquer. It was the fate of

Themistocles to be saved by the enemies of his country. He had no

alternative. The very accusation of connivance with the Medes drove him

into their arms.

Under guidance of a Persian, Themistocles traversed the Asiatic

continent; and ere he reached Susa, contrived to have a letter, that

might prepare the way for him, delivered at the Persian court. His

letter ran somewhat thus, if we may suppose that Thucydides preserved

the import, though he undoubtedly fashioned the style. [167]

“I, Themistocles, who of all the Greeks have inflicted the severest

wounds upon your race, so long as I was called by fate to resist the

invasion of the Persians, now come to you.” (He then urged, on the

other hand, the services he had rendered to Xerxes in his messages

after Salamis, relative to the breaking of the bridges, assuming a

credit to which he was by no means entitled--and insisted that his

generosity demanded a return.) “Able” (he proceeded) “to perform great

services--persecuted by the Greeks for my friendship for you--I am

near at hand. Grant me only a year’s respite, that I may then apprize

you in person of the object of my journey hither.”

The bold and confident tone of Themistocles struck the imagination of

the young king (Artaxerxes), and he returned a favourable reply.

Themistocles consumed the year in the perfect acquisition of the

language, and the customs and manners of the country. He then sought

and obtained an audience. [168]

Able to converse with fluency, and without the medium of an

interpreter, his natural abilities found their level. He rose to

instant favour. Never before had a stranger been so honoured. He was

admitted an easy access to the royal person--instructed in the

learning of the Magi--and when he quitted the court it was to take

possession of the government of three cities--Myus, celebrated for its

provisions; Lampsacus, for its vineyards; and Magnesia, for the

richness of the soil; so that, according to the spirit and phraseology

of oriental taxation, it was not unaptly said that they were awarded

to him for meat, wine, and bread.

XI. Thus affluent and thus honoured, Themistocles passed at Magnesia

the remainder of his days--the time and method of his death uncertain;

whether cut off by natural disease, or, as is otherwise related [169],

by a fate than which fiction itself could have invented none more

suited to the consummation of his romantic and great career. It is

said that when afterward Egypt revolted, and that revolt was aided by

the Athenians; when the Grecian navy sailed as far as Cilicia and

Cyprus; and Cimon upheld, without a rival, the new sovereignty of the

seas; when Artaxerxes resolved to oppose the growing power of a state

which, from the defensive, had risen to the offending, power;

Themistocles received a mandate to realize the vague promises he had

given, and to commence his operations against Greece (B. C. 449).

Then (if with Plutarch we accept this version of his fate), neither

resentment against the people he had deemed ungrateful, nor his

present pomp, nor the fear of life, could induce the lord of Magnesia

to dishonour his past achievements [170], and demolish his immortal

trophies. Anxious only to die worthily--since to live as became him

was no longer possible--he solemnly sacrificed to the gods--took leave

of his friends, and finished his days by poison.

His monument long existed in the forum of Magnesia; but his bones are

said by his own desire to have been borne back privately to Attica,

and have rested in the beloved land that exiled him from her bosom.

And this his last request seems touchingly to prove his loyalty to

Athens, and to proclaim his pardon of her persecution. Certain it is,

at least, that however honoured in Persia, he never perpetrated one

act against Greece; and that, if sullied by the suspicion of others,

his fame was untarnished by himself. He died, according to Plutarch,

in his sixty-fifth year, leaving many children, and transmitting his

name to a long posterity, who received from his memory the honours

they could not have acquired for themselves.

XII. The character of Themistocles has already in these pages

unfolded itself--profound, yet tortuous in policy--vast in conception

--subtle, patient, yet prompt in action; affable in manner, but

boastful, ostentatious, and disdaining to conceal his consciousness of

merit; not brilliant in accomplishment, yet master not more of the

Greek wiles than the Attic wit; sufficiently eloquent, but greater in

deeds than words, and penetrating, by an almost preternatural insight,

at once the characters of men and the sequences of events.

Incomparably the greatest of his own times, and certainly not

surpassed by those who came after him. Pisistratus, Cimon, Pericles,

Aristides himself, were of noble and privileged birth. Themistocles

was the first, and, except Demosthenes, the greatest of those who rose

from the ranks of the people, and he drew the people upward in his

rise. His fame was the creation of his genius only. “What other man”

(to paraphrase the unusual eloquence of Diodorus) “could in the same

time have placed Greece at the head of nations, Athens at the head of

Greece, himself at the head of Athens?--in the most illustrious age

the most illustrious man. Conducting to war the citizens of a state

in ruins, he defeated all the arms of Asia. He alone had the power to

unite the most discordant materials, and to render danger itself

salutary to his designs. Not more remarkable in war than peace--in

the one he saved the liberties of Greece, in the other he created the

eminence of Athens.”

After him, the light of the heroic age seems to glimmer and to fade,

and even Pericles himself appears dwarfed and artificial beside that

masculine and colossal intellect which broke into fragments the might

of Persia, and baffled with a vigorous ease the gloomy sagacity of

Sparta. The statue of Themistocles, existent six hundred years after

his decease, exhibited to his countrymen an aspect as heroical as his

deeds. [171]

We return to Cimon

CHAPTER III.

Reduction of Naxos.--Actions off Cyprus.--Manners of Cimon.--

Improvements in Athens.--Colony at the Nine Ways.--Siege of Thasos.--

Earthquake in Sparta.--Revolt of Helots, Occupation of Ithome, and

Third Messenian War.--Rise and Character of Pericles.--Prosecution and

Acquittal of Cimon.--The Athenians assist the Spartans at Ithome.--

Thasos Surrenders.--Breach between the Athenians and Spartans.--

Constitutional Innovations at Athens.--Ostracism of Cimon.

I. At the time in which Naxos refused the stipulated subsidies, and

was, in consequence, besieged by Cimon, that island was one of the

most wealthy and populous of the confederate states. For some time

the Naxians gallantly resisted the besiegers; but, at length reduced,

they were subjected to heavier conditions than those previously

imposed upon them. No conqueror contents himself with acquiring the

objects, sometimes frivolous and often just, with which he commences

hostilities. War inflames the passions, and success the ambition.

Cimon, at first anxious to secure the Grecian, was now led on to

desire the increase of the Athenian power. The Athenian fleet had

subdued Naxos, and Naxos was rendered subject to Athens. This was the

first of the free states which the growing republic submitted to her

yoke [172]. The precedent once set, as occasion tempted, the rest

shared a similar fate.

II. The reduction of Naxos was but the commencement of the victories

of Cimon. In Asia Minor there were many Grecian cities in which the

Persian ascendency had never yet been shaken. Along the Carian coast

Cimon conducted his armament, and the terror it inspired sufficed to

engage all the cities, originally Greek, to revolt from Persia; those

garrisoned by Persians he besieged and reduced. Victorious in Caria,

he passed with equal success into Lycia [173], augmenting his fleet

and forces as he swept along. But the Persians, not inactive, had now

assembled a considerable force in Pamphylia, and lay encamped on the

banks of the Eurymedon (B. C. 466), whose waters, sufficiently wide,

received their fleet. The expected re-enforcement of eighty

Phoenician vessels from Cyprus induced the Persians to delay [174]

actual hostilities. But Cimon, resolved to forestall the anticipated

junction, sailed up the river, and soon forced the barbarian fleet,

already much more numerous than his own, into active engagement. The

Persians but feebly supported the attack; driven up the river, the

crews deserted the ships, and hastened to join the army arrayed along

the coast. Of the ships thus deserted, some were destroyed; and two

hundred triremes, taken by Cimon, yet more augmented his armament.

But the Persians, now advanced to the verge of the shore, presented a

long and formidable array, and Cimon, with some anxiety, saw the

danger he incurred in landing troops already much harassed by the late

action, while a considerable proportion of the hostile forces, far

more numerous, were fresh and unfatigued. The spirit of the men, and

their elation at the late victory, bore down the fears of the general;

yet warm from the late action, he debarked his heavy-armed infantry,

and with loud shouts the Athenians rushed upon the foe. The contest

was fierce--the slaughter great. Many of the noblest Athenians fell

in the action. Victory at length declared in favour of Cimon; the

Persians were put to flight, and the Greeks remained masters of the

battle and the booty--the last considerable. Thus, on the same day,

the Athenians were victorious on both elements--an unprecedented

glory, which led the rhetorical Plutarch to declare--that Plataea and

Salamis were outshone. Posterity, more discerning, estimates glory

not by the greatness of the victory alone, but the justice of the

cause. And even a skirmish won by men struggling for liberty on their

own shores is more honoured than the proudest battle in which the

conquerors are actuated by the desire of vengeance or the lust of

enterprise.

III. To the trophies of this double victory were soon added those of

a third, obtained over the eighty vessels of the Phoenicians off the

coast of Cyprus. These signal achievements spread the terror of the

Athenian arms on remote as on Grecian shores. Without adopting the

exaggerated accounts of injudicious authors as to the number of ships

and prisoners [175], it seems certain, at least, that the amount of

the booty was sufficient, in some degree, to create in Athens a moral

revolution--swelling to a vast extent the fortunes of individuals, and

augmenting the general taste for pomp, for luxury, and for splendour,

which soon afterward rendered Athens the most magnificent of the

Grecian states.

The navy of Persia thus broken, her armies routed, the scene of action

transferred to her own dominions, all designs against Greece were laid

aside. Retreating, as it were, more to the centre of her vast

domains, she left the Asiatic outskirts to the solitude, rather of

exhaustion than of peace. “No troops,” boasted the later

rhetoricians, “came within a day’s journey, on horseback, of the

Grecian seas.” From the Chelidonian isles on the Pamphylian coast, to

those [176] twin rocks at the entrance of the Euxine, between which

the sea, chafed by their rugged base, roars unappeasably through its

mists of foam, no Persian galley was descried. Whether this was the

cause of defeat or of acknowledged articles of peace, has been

disputed. But, as will be seen hereafter, of the latter all

historical evidence is wanting.

In a subsequent expedition, Cimon, sailing from Athens with a small

force, wrested the Thracian Chersonese from the Persians--an exploit

which restored to him his own patrimony.

IV. Cimon was now at the height of his fame and popularity. His

share of the booty, and the recovery of the Chersonese, rendered him

by far the wealthiest citizen of Athens; and he continued to use his

wealth to cement his power. His intercourse with other nations, his

familiarity with the oriental polish and magnificence, served to

elevate his manners from their early rudeness, and to give splendour

to his tastes. If he had spent his youth among the wild soldiers of

Miltiades, the leisure of his maturer years was cultivated by an

intercourse with sages and poets. His passion for the sex, which even

in its excesses tends to refine and to soften, made his only vice. He

was the friend of every genius and every art; and, the link between

the lavish ostentation of Themistocles and the intellectual grace of

Pericles, he conducted, as it were, the insensible transition from the

age of warlike glory to that of civil pre-eminence. He may be said to

have contributed greatly to diffuse that atmosphere of poetry and of

pleasure which even the meanest of the free Athenians afterward

delighted to respire. He led the citizens more and more from the

recesses of private life; and carried out that social policy commenced

by Pisistratus, according to which all individual habits became merged

into one animated, complex, and excited public. Thus, himself gay and

convivial, addicted to company, wine, and women, he encouraged shows

and spectacles, and invested them with new magnificence; he

embellished the city with public buildings, and was the first to erect

at Athens those long colonnades--beneath the shade of which, sheltered

from the western suns, that graceful people were accustomed to

assemble and converse. The Agora, that universal home of the

citizens, was planted by him with the oriental planes; and the groves

of Academe, the immortal haunt of Plato, were his work. That

celebrated garden, associated with the grateful and bright

remembrances of all which poetry can lend to wisdom, was, before the

time of Cimon, a waste and uncultivated spot. It was his hand that

intersected it with walks and alleys, and that poured through its

green retreats the ornamental waters so refreshing in those climes,

and not common in the dry Attic soil, which now meandered in living

streams, and now sparkled into fountains. Besides these works to

embellish, he formed others to fortify the city. He completed the

citadel, hitherto unguarded on the south side; and it was from the

barbarian spoils deposited in the treasury that the expenses of

founding the Long Walls, afterward completed, were defrayed.

V. In his conduct towards the allies, the natural urbanity of Cimon

served to conceal a policy deep-laid and grasping. The other Athenian

generals were stern and punctilious in their demands on the

confederates; they required the allotted number of men, and, in

default of the supply, increased the rigour of their exactions. Not

so Cimon--from those whom the ordinary avocations of a peaceful life

rendered averse to active service, he willingly accepted a pecuniary

substitute, equivalent to the value of those ships or soldiers they

should have furnished. These sums, devoted indeed to the general

service, were yet appropriated to the uses of the Athenian navy; thus

the states, hitherto warlike, were artfully suffered to lapse into

peaceful and luxurious pursuits; and the confederates became at once,

under the most lenient pretexts, enfeebled and impoverished by the

very means which strengthened the martial spirit and increased the

fiscal resources of the Athenians. The tributaries found too late,

when they ventured at revolt, that they had parted with the facilities

of resistance. [177]

In the mean while it was the object of Cimon to sustain the naval

ardour and discipline of the Athenians; while the oar and the sword

fell into disuse with the confederates, he kept the greater part of

the citizens in constant rotation at maritime exercise or enterprise--

until experience and increasing power with one, indolence and gradual

subjection with the other, destroying the ancient equality in arms,

made the Athenians masters and their confederates subjects. [178]

VI. According to the wise policy of the ancients, the Athenians never

neglected a suitable opportunity to colonize; thus extending their

dominion while they draughted off the excess of their population, as

well as the more enterprising spirits whom adventure tempted or

poverty aroused. The conquest of Eion had opened to the Athenians a

new prospect of aggrandizement, of which they were now prepared to

seize the advantages. Not far from Eion, and on the banks of the

Strymon, was a place called the Nine Ways, afterward Amphipolis, and

which, from its locality and maritime conveniences, seemed especially

calculated for the site of a new city. Thither ten thousand persons,

some confederates, some Athenians, had been sent to establish a

colony. The views of the Athenians were not, however, in this

enterprise, bounded to its mere legitimate advantages. About the same

time they carried on a dispute with the Thasians relative to certain

mines and places of trade on the opposite coasts of Thrace. The

dispute was one of considerable nicety. The Athenians, having

conquered Eion and the adjacent territory, claimed the possession by

right of conquest. The Thasians, on the other hand, had anciently

possessed some of the mines and the monopoly of the commerce; they had

joined in the confederacy; and, asserting that the conquest had been

made, if by Athenian arms, for the federal good, they demanded that

the ancient privileges should revert to them. The Athenian government

was not disposed to surrender a claim which proffered to avarice the

temptation of mines of gold. The Thasians renounced the confederacy,

and thus gave to the Athenians the very pretext for hostilities which

the weaker state should never permit to the more strong. While the

colony proceeded to its destination, part of the Athenian fleet, under

Cimon, sailed to Thasos--gained a victory by sea--landed on the

island--and besieged the city.

Meanwhile the new colonizers had become masters of the Nine Ways,

having dislodged the Edonian Thracians, its previous habitants. But

hostility following hostility, the colonists were eventually utterly

routed and cut off in a pitched battle at Drabescus (B. C. 465), in

Edonia, by the united forces of all the neighbouring Thracians.

VII. The siege of Thasos still continued, and the besieged took the

precaution to send to Sparta for assistance. That sullen state had

long viewed with indignation the power of Athens; her younger warriors

clamoured against the inert indifference with which a city, for ages

so inferior to Sparta, had been suffered to gain the ascendency over

Greece. In vain had Themistocles been removed; the inexhaustible

genius of the people had created a second Themistocles in Cimon. The

Lacedaemonians, glad of a pretext for quarrel, courteously received

the Thasian ambassadors, and promised to distract the Athenian forces

by an irruption into Attica. They were actively prepared in

concerting measures for this invasion, when sudden and complicated

afflictions, now to be related, forced them to abandon their designs,

and confine their attention to themselves.

VIII. An earthquake, unprecedented in its violence, occurred in

Sparta. In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent

asunder. From Mount Taygetus, which overhung the city, and on which

the women of Lacedaemon 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 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, empoverished, 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 we have seen before that the helots were already ripe for

revolt. The death of that fierce 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 (B. C. 464)--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 levelled Sparta rent her

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 succour, 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.

IX. Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not altogether unforeseen.

After the confusion and horror of the earthquake, and while the

people, dispersed, were seeking to save their effects, Archidamus,

who, four years before, had succeeded to the throne of Lacedaemon,

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

valour. This they fortified; and, occupying also the neighbouring

lands, declared open war upon their lords. As the Messenians were the

more worthy enemy, so the general insurrection is known by the name of

the Third Messenian War.

X. While these events occurred in Sparta, Cimon, intrusting to others

the continued siege of Thasos, had returned to Athens [179]. He found

his popularity already shaken, and his power endangered. The

democratic party had of late regained the influence it had lost on the

exile of Themistocles. Pericles, son of Xanthippus (the accuser of

Miltiades), had, during the last six years, insensibly risen into

reputation: the house of Miltiades was fated to bow before the race of

Xanthippus, and hereditary opposition ended in the old hereditary

results. Born of one of the loftiest families of Athens,

distinguished by the fame as the fortunes of his father, who had been

linked with Aristides in command of the Athenian fleet, and in whose

name had been achieved the victory of Mycale, the young Pericles found

betimes an easy opening to his brilliant genius and his high ambition.

He had nothing to contend against but his own advantages. The beauty

of his countenance, the sweetness of his voice, and the blandness of

his address, reminded the oldest citizens of Pisistratus; and this

resemblance is said to have excited against him a popular jealousy

which he found it difficult to surmount. His youth was passed

alternately in the camp and in the schools. He is the first of the

great statesmen of his country who appears to have prepared himself

for action by study; Anaxagoras, Pythoclides, and Damon were his

tutors, and he was early eminent in all the lettered accomplishments

of his time. By degrees, accustoming the people to his appearance in

public life, he became remarkable for an elaborate and impassioned

eloquence, hitherto unknown. With his intellectual and meditative

temperament all was science; his ardour in action regulated by long

forethought, his very words by deliberate preparation. Till his time,

oratory, in its proper sense, as a study and an art, was uncultivated

in Athens. Pisistratus is said to have been naturally eloquent, and

the vigorous mind of Themistocles imparted at once persuasion and

force to his counsels. But Pericles, aware of all the advantages to

be gained by words, embellished words with every artifice that his

imagination could suggest. His speeches were often written

compositions, and the novel dazzle of their diction, and that

consecutive logic which preparation alone can impart to language,

became irresistible to a people that had itself become a Pericles.

Universal civilization, universal poetry, had rendered the audience

susceptible and fastidious; they could appreciate the ornate and

philosophical harangues of Pericles; and, the first to mirror to

themselves the intellectual improvements they had made, the first to

represent the grace and enlightenment, as Themistocles had been the

first to represent the daring and enterprise, of his time, the son of

Xanthippus began already to eclipse that very Cimon whose qualities

prepared the way for him.

XI. We must not suppose, that in the contests between the

aristocratic and popular parties, the aristocracy were always on one

side. Such a division is never to be seen in free constitutions.

There is always a sufficient party of the nobles whom conviction,

ambition, or hereditary predilections will place at the head of the

popular movement; and it is by members of the privileged order that

the order itself is weakened. Athens in this respect, therefore,

resembled England, and as now in the latter state, so then at Athens,

it was often the proudest, the wealthiest, the most high-born of the

aristocrats that gave dignity and success to the progress of

democratic opinion. There, too, the vehemence of party frequently

rendered politics an hereditary heirloom; intermarriages kept together

men of similar factions; and the memory of those who had been the

martyrs or the heroes of a cause mingled with the creed of their

descendants. Thus, it was as natural that one of the race of that

Clisthenes who had expelled the Pisistratides, and popularized the

constitution, should embrace the more liberal side, as that a Russell

should follow out in one age the principles for which his ancestor

perished in another. So do our forefathers become sponsors for

ourselves. The mother of Pericles was the descendant of Clisthenes;

and though Xanthippus himself was of the same party as Aristides, we

may doubt, by his prosecution of Miltiades as well as by his connexion

with the Alcmaeonids, whether he ever cordially co-operated with the

views and the ambition of Cimon. However this be, his brilliant son

cast himself at once into the arms of the more popular faction, and

opposed with all his energy the aristocratic predilections of Cimon.

Not yet, however, able to assume the lead to which he aspired (for it

had now become a matter of time as well as intellect to rise), he

ranged himself under Ephialtes, a personage of whom history gives us

too scanty details, although he enjoyed considerable influence,

increased by his avowed jealousy of the Spartans and his own

unimpeachable integrity.

XII. It is noticeable, that men who become the leaders of the public,

less by the spur of passion than by previous study and conscious

talent--men whom thought and letters prepare for enterprise--are

rarely eager to advance themselves too soon. Making politics a

science, they are even fastidiously alive to the qualities and the

experience demanded for great success; their very self-esteem renders

them seemingly modest; they rely upon time and upon occasion; and,

pushed forward rather by circumstance than their own exertions, it is

long before their ambition and their resources are fully developed.

Despite all his advantages, the rise of Pericles was gradual.

On the return of Cimon the popular party deemed itself sufficiently

strong to manifest its opposition. The expedition to Thasos had not

been attended with results so glorious as to satisfy a people pampered

by a series of triumphs. Cimon was deemed culpable for not having

taken advantage of the access into Macedonia, and added that country

to the Athenian empire. He was even suspected and accused of

receiving bribes from Alexander, the king of Macedon. Pericles [180]

is said to have taken at first an active part in this prosecution; but

when the cause came on, whether moved by the instances of Cimon’s

sister, or made aware of the injustice of the accusation, he conducted

himself favourably towards the accused. Cimon himself treated the

charges with a calm disdain; the result was worthy of Athens and

himself. He was honourably acquitted.

XIII. Scarce was this impeachment over, when a Spartan ambassador

arrived at Athens to implore her assistance against the helots; the

request produced a vehement discussion.

Ephialtes strongly opposed the proposition to assist a city, sometimes

openly, always heartily, inimical to Athens. “Much better,” he

contended, “to suffer her pride to be humbled, and her powers of

mischief to be impaired.” Ever supporting and supported by the

Lacedaemonian party, whether at home or abroad, Cimon, on the other

hand, maintained the necessity of marching to the relief of Sparta.

“Do not,” he said, almost sublimely--and his words are reported to

have produced a considerable impression on that susceptible assembly--

“do not suffer Greece to be mutilated, nor deprive Athens of her

companion!”

The more generous and magnanimous counsel prevailed with a generous

and magnanimous people; and Cimon was sent to the aid of Sparta at the

head of a sufficient force. It may be observed, as a sign of the

political morality of the time, that the wrongs of the helots appear

to have been forgotten. But such is the curse of slavery, that it

unfits its victims to be free, except by preparations and degrees.

And civilization, humanity, and social order are often enlisted on the

wrong side, in behalf of the oppressors, from the license and

barbarity natural to the victories of the oppressed. A conflict

between the negroes and the planters in modern times may not be

unanalogous to that of the helots and Spartans; and it is often a

fatal necessity to extirpate the very men we have maddened, by our own

cruelties, to the savageness of beasts.

It would appear that, during the revolt of the helots and Messenians,

which lasted ten years, the Athenians, under Cimon, marched twice

[181] to the aid of the Spartans. In the first (B. C. 464) they

probably drove the scattered insurgents into the city of Ithome; in

the second (B. C. 461) they besieged the city. In the interval Thasos

surrendered (B. C. 463); the inhabitants were compelled to level their

walls, to give up their shipping, to pay the arrear of tribute, to

defray the impost punctually in future, and to resign all claims on

the continent and the mines.

XIV. Thus did the Athenians establish their footing on the Thracian

continent, and obtain the possession of the golden mines, which they

mistook for wealth. In the second expedition of the Athenians, the

long-cherished jealousy between themselves and the Spartans could no

longer be smothered. The former were applied to especially from their

skill in sieges, and their very science galled perhaps the pride of

the martial Spartans. While, as the true art of war was still so

little understood, that even the Athenians were unable to carry the

town by assault, and compelled to submit to the tedious operations of

a blockade, there was ample leisure for those feuds which the

uncongenial habits and long rivalry of the nations necessarily

produced. Proud of their Dorian name, the Spartans looked on the

Ionic race of Athens as aliens. Severe in their oligarchic

discipline, they regarded the Athenian Demus as innovators; and, in

the valour itself of their allies, they detected a daring and restless

energy which, if serviceable now, might easily be rendered dangerous

hereafter. They even suspected the Athenians of tampering with the

helots--led, it may be, to that distrust by the contrast, which they

were likely to misinterpret, between their own severity and the

Athenian mildness towards the servile part of their several

populations, and also by the existence of a powerful party at Athens,

which had opposed the assistance Cimon afforded. With their usual

tranquil and wary policy, the Spartan government attempted to conceal

their real fears, and simply alleging they had no further need of

their assistance, dismissed the Athenians. But that people,

constitutionally irritable, perceiving that, despite this hollow

pretext, the other allies, including the obnoxious Aeginetans, were

retained, received their dismissal as an insult. Thinking justly that

they had merited a nobler confidence from the Spartans, they gave way

to their first resentment, and disregarding the league existing yet

between themselves and Sparta against the Mede--the form of which had

survived the spirit--they entered into an alliance with the Argives,

hereditary enemies of Sparta, and in that alliance the Aleuads of

Thessaly were included.

XV. The obtaining of these decrees by the popular party was the

prelude to the fall of Cimon. The talents of that great man were far

more eminent in war than peace; and despite his real or affected

liberality of demeanour, he wanted either the faculty to suit the

time, or the art to conceal his deficiencies. Raised to eminence by

Spartan favour, he had ever too boldly and too imprudently espoused

the Spartan cause. At first, when the Athenians obtained their naval

ascendency--and it was necessary to conciliate Sparta--the partiality

with which Cimon was regarded by that state was his recommendation;

now when, no longer to be conciliated, Sparta was to be dreaded and

opposed, it became his ruin. It had long been his custom to laud the

Spartans at the expense of the Athenians, and to hold out their

manners as an example to the admiration of his countrymen. It was a

favourite mode of reproof with him--“The Spartans would not have done

this.” It was even remembered against him that he had called his son

Lacedaemonius. These predilections had of late rankled in the popular

mind; and now, when the Athenian force had been contumeliously

dismissed, it was impossible to forget that Cimon had obtained the

decree of the relief, and that the mortification which resulted from

it was the effect of his counsels.

Public spirit ran high against the Spartans, and at the head of the

Spartan faction in Athens stood Cimon.

XVI. But at this time, other events, still more intimately connected

with the Athenian politics, conspired to weaken the authority of this

able general. Those constitutional reforms, which are in reality

revolutions under a milder name, were now sweeping away the last

wrecks of whatever of the old aristocratic system was still left to

the Athenian commonwealth.

We have seen that the democratic party had increased in power by the

decree of Aristides, which opened all offices to all ranks. This, as

yet, was productive less of actual than of moral effects. The liberal

opinions possessed by a part of the aristocracy, and the legitimate

influence which in all countries belongs to property and high descent

(greatest, indeed, where the countries are most free)--secured, as a

general rule, the principal situations in the state to rank and

wealth. But the moral effect of the decree was to elevate the lower

classes with a sense of their own power and dignity, and every victory

achieved over a foreign foe gave new authority to the people whose

voices elected the leader--whose right arms won the battle.

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; as we have already seen, it was, in all

probability, Clisthenes also who weakened the more illicit and

oppressive influences of wealth, by establishing the ballot or secret

suffrage instead of the open voting, which was common in the time of

Solon. It is the necessary constitution of society, that when one

class obtains power, the ancient checks to that power require

remodelling. The Areopagus was designed by Solon as the aristocratic

balance to the popular assembly. But in all states in which the

people and the aristocracy are represented, the great blow to the

aristocratic senate is given, less by altering its own constitution

than by infusing new elements of democracy into the popular assembly.

The old boundaries are swept away, not by the levelling of the bank,

but by the swelling of the torrent. The checks upon democracy ought

to be so far concealed as to be placed in the representation of the

democracy itself; for checks upon its progress from without are but as

fortresses to be stormed; and what, when latent, was the influence of

a friend, when apparent, is the resistance of a foe.

The Areopagus, the constitutional bulwark of the aristocratic party of

Athens, became more and more invidious to the people. And now, when

Cimon resisted every innovation on that assembly, he only ensured his

own destruction, while he expedited the policy he denounced.

Ephialtes directed all the force of the popular opinion against this

venerable senate; and at length, though not openly assisted by

Pericles [182], who took no prominent part in the contention, that

influential statesman succeeded in crippling its functions and

limiting its authority.

XVII. I do not propose to plunge the reader into the voluminous and

unprofitable controversy on the exact nature of the innovations of

Ephialtes which has agitated the students of Germany. It appears to

me most probable that the Areopagus retained the right of adjudging

cases of homicide [183], 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 [184], that its irresponsible

character was abolished, and it was henceforth rendered accountable to

the people. Such alterations were not made without exciting the deep

indignation of the aristocratic faction.

In all state reforms a great and comprehensive mind does not so much

consider whether each reform is just, as what will be the ultimate

ascendency given to particular principles. Cimon preferred to all

constitutions a limited aristocracy, and his practical experience

regarded every measure in its general tendency towards or against the

system which he honestly advocated.

XVIII. The struggle between the contending parties and principles had

commenced before Cimon’s expedition to Ithome; the mortification

connected with that event, in weakening Cimon, weakened the

aristocracy itself. Still his fall was not immediate [185], nor did

it take place as a single and isolated event, but as one of the

necessary consequences of the great political change effected by

Ephialtes. All circumstances, however, conspired to place the son of

Miltiades in a situation which justified the suspicion and jealousy of

the Athenians. Of all the enemies, how powerful soever, that Athens

could provoke, none were so dangerous as Lacedaemon.

Dark, wily, and implacable, the rugged queen of the Peloponnesus

reared her youth in no other accomplishments than those of stratagem

and slaughter. Her enmity against Athens was no longer smothered.

Athens had everything to fear, not less from her influence than her

armies. It was not, indeed, so much from the unsheathed sword as from

the secret councils of Sparta that danger was to be apprehended. It

cannot be too often remembered, that among a great portion of the

Athenian aristocracy, the Spartan government maintained a considerable

and sympathetic intelligence. That government ever sought to adapt

and mould all popular constitutions to her own oligarchic model; and

where she could not openly invade, she secretly sought to undermine,

the liberties of her neighbours. Thus, in addition to all fear from

an enemy in the field, the Athenian democracy were constantly excited

to suspicion against a spy within the city: always struggling with an

aristocratic party, which aimed at regaining the power it had lost,

there was just reason to apprehend that that party would seize any

occasion to encroach upon the popular institutions; every feud with

Sparta consequently seemed to the Athenian people, nor without cause,

to subject to intrigue and conspiracy their civil freedom; and (as

always happens with foreign interference, whether latent or avowed)

exasperated whatever jealousies already existed against those for

whose political interests the interference was exerted. Bearing this

in mind, we shall see no cause to wonder at the vehement opposition to

which Cimon was now subjected. We are driven ourselves to search

deeply into the causes which led to his prosecution, as to that of

other eminent men in Athens, from want of clear and precise historical

details. Plutarch, to whom, in this instance, we are compelled

chiefly to resort, is a most equivocal authority. Like most

biographers, his care is to exalt his hero, though at the expense of

that hero’s countrymen; and though an amiable writer, nor without some

semi-philosophical views in morals, his mind was singularly deficient

in grasp and in comprehension. He never penetrates the subtle causes

of effects. He surveys the past, sometimes as a scholar, sometimes as

a taleteller, sometimes even as a poet, but never as a statesman.

Thus, we learn from him little of the true reasons for the ostracism,

either of Aristides, of Themistocles, or of Cimon--points now

intricate, but which might then, alas! have been easily cleared up by

a profound inquirer, to the acquittal alike of themselves and of their

judges. To the natural deficiencies of Plutarch we must add his party

predilections. He was opposed to democratic opinions--and that

objection, slight in itself, or it might be urged against many of the

best historians and the wisest thinkers, is rendered weighty in that

he was unable to see, that in all human constitutions perfection is

impossible, that we must take the evil with the good, and that what he

imputes to one form of government is equally attributable to another.

For in what monarchy, what oligarchy, have not great men been

misunderstood, and great merits exposed to envy!

Thus, in the life of Cimon, Plutarch says that it was “on a slight

pretext” [186] that that leader of the Spartan party in Athens was

subjected to the ostracism. We have seen enough to convince us that,

whatever the pretext, the reasons, at least, were grave and solid--

that they were nothing short of Cimon’s unvarying ardour for, and

constant association with, the principles and the government of that

state most inimical to Athens, and the suspicious policy of which was,

in all times--at that time especially--fraught with danger to her

power, her peace, and her institutions. Could we penetrate farther

into the politics of the period, we might justify the Athenians yet

more. Without calling into question the integrity and the patriotism

of Cimon, without supposing that he would have entered into any

intrigue against the Athenian independence of foreign powers--a

supposition his subsequent conduct effectually refutes--he might, as a

sincere and warm partisan of the nobles, and a resolute opposer of the

popular party, have sought to restore at home the aristocratic balance

of power, by whatever means his great rank, and influence, and

connexion with the Lacedaemonian party could afford him. We are told,

at least, that he not only opposed all the advances of the more

liberal party--that he not only stood resolutely by the interests and

dignities of the Areopagus, which had ceased to harmonize with the

more modern institutions, but that he expressly sought to restore

certain prerogatives which that assembly had formally lost during his

foreign expeditions, and that he earnestly endeavoured to bring back

the whole constitution to the more aristocratic government established

by Clisthenes. It is one thing to preserve, it is another to restore.

A people may be deluded under popular pretexts out of the rights they

have newly acquired, but they never submit to be openly despoiled of

them. Nor can we call that ingratitude which is but the refusal to

surrender to the merits of an individual the acquisitions of a nation.

All things considered, then, I believe, that if ever ostracism was

justifiable, it was so in the case of Cimon--nay, it was perhaps

absolutely essential to the preservation of the constitution. His

very honesty made him resolute in his attempts against that

constitution. His talents, his rank, his fame, his services, only

rendered those attempts more dangerous.

XIX. Could the reader be induced to view, with an examination equally

dispassionate, the several ostracisms of Aristides and Themistocles,

he might see equal causes of justification, both in the motives and in

the results. The first was absolutely necessary for the defeat of the

aristocratic party, and the removal of restrictions on those energies

which instantly found the most glorious vents for action; the second

was justified by a similar necessity that produced similar effects.

To impartial eyes a people may be vindicated without traducing those

whom a people are driven to oppose. In such august and complicated

trials the accuser and defendant may be both innocent.

CHAPTER IV.

War between Megara and Corinth.--Megara and Pegae garrisoned by

Athenians.--Review of Affairs at the Persian Court.--Accession of

Artaxerxes.--Revolt of Egypt under Inarus.--Athenian Expedition to

assist Inarus.--Aegina besieged.--The Corinthians defeated.--Spartan

Conspiracy with the Athenian Oligarchy.--Battle of Tanagra.--Campaign

and Successes of Myronides.--Plot of the Oligarchy against the

Republic.--Recall of Cimon.--Long Walls completed.--Aegina reduced.--

Expedition under Tolmides.--Ithome surrenders.--The Insurgents are

settled at Naupactus.--Disastrous Termination of the Egyptian

Expedition.--The Athenians march into Thessaly to restore Orestes the

Tagus.--Campaign under Pericles.--Truce of five Years with the

Peloponnesians.--Cimon sets sail for Cyprus.--Pretended Treaty of

Peace with Persia.--Death of Cimon.

I. Cimon, summoned to the ostracism, was sentenced to its appointed

term of banishment--ten years. By his removal, the situation of

Pericles became suddenly more prominent and marked, and he mingled

with greater confidence and boldness in public affairs. The vigour of

the new administration was soon manifest. Megara had hitherto been

faithful to the Lacedaemonian alliance--a dispute relative to the

settlement of frontiers broke out between that state and Corinth.

Although the Corinthian government, liberal and enlightened, was often

opposed to the Spartan oligarchy, it was still essential to the

interest of both those Peloponnesian states to maintain a firm general

alliance, and to keep the Peloponnesian confederacy as a

counterbalance to the restless ambition of the new head of the Ionian

league. Sparta could not, therefore, have been slow in preferring the

alliance of Corinth to that of Megara. On the other hand, Megara, now

possessed of a democratic constitution, had long since abandoned the

Dorian character and habits. The situation of its territories, the

nature of its institutions, alike pointed to Athens as its legitimate

ally. Thus, when the war broke out between Megara and Corinth, on the

side of the latter appeared Sparta, while Megara naturally sought the

assistance of Athens. The Athenian government eagerly availed itself

of the occasion to increase the power which Athens was now rapidly

extending over Greece. If we cast our eyes along the map of Greece,

we shall perceive that the occupation of Megara proffered peculiar

advantages. It became at once a strong and formidable fortress

against any incursions from the Peloponnesus, while its seaports of

Nisaea and Pegae opened new fields, both of ambition and of commerce,

alike on the Saronic and the Gulf of Corinth. The Athenians seized

willingly on the alliance thus offered to them, and the Megarians had

the weakness to yield both Megara and Pegae to Athenian garrisons,

while the Athenians fortified their position by long walls that united

Megara with its harbour at Nisaea.

II. A new and more vast enterprise contributed towards the stability

of the government by draining off its bolder spirits, and diverting

the popular attention from domestic to foreign affairs.

It is necessary to pass before us, in brief review, the vicissitudes

of the Persian court. In republican Greece, the history of the people

marches side by side with the biography of great men. In despotic

Persia, all history dies away in the dark recesses and sanguinary

murthers of a palace governed by eunuchs and defended but by slaves.

In the year 465 B. C. the reign of the unfortunate Xerxes drew to its

close. On his return to Susa, after the disastrous results of the

Persian invasion, he had surrendered himself to the indolent luxury of

a palace. An able and daring traitor, named Artabanus [187], but who

seems to have been a different personage from that Artabanus whose

sagacity had vainly sought to save the armies of Xerxes from the

expedition to Greece, entered into a conspiracy against the feeble

monarch. By the connivance of a eunuch, he penetrated at night the

chamber of the king--and the gloomy destinies of Xerxes were

consummated by assassination. Artabanus sought to throw the guilt

upon Darius, the eldest son of the murdered king; and Artaxerxes, the

younger brother, seems to have connived at a charge which might render

himself the lawful heir to the throne. Darius accordingly perished by

the same fate as his father. The extreme youth of Artaxerxes had

induced Artabanus to believe that but a slender and insecure life now

stood between himself and the throne; but the young prince was already

master of the royal art of dissimulation: he watched his opportunity--

and by a counter-revolution Artabanus was sacrificed to the manes of

his victims. [188]

Thus Artaxerxes obtained the undisturbed possession of the Persian

throne (B. C. 464). The new monarch appears to have derived from

nature a stronger intellect than his father. But the abuses, so rapid

and rank of growth in Eastern despotisms, which now ate away the

strength of the Persian monarchy, were already, perhaps, past the

possibility of reform. The enormous extent of the ill-regulated

empire tempted the ambition of chiefs who might have plausibly hoped,

that as the Persian masters had now degenerated to the effeminacy of

the Assyrians they had supplanted, so the enterprise of a second Cyrus

might be crowned by a similar success.

Egypt had been rather overrun by Xerxes than subdued--and the spirit

of its ancient people waited only the occasion of revolt. A Libyan

prince, of the name of Inarus, whose territories bordered Egypt,

entered that country (B. C. 460), and was hailed by the greater part

of the population as a deliverer. The recent murder of Xerxes--the

weakness of a new reign, commenced in so sanguinary a manner, appeared

to favour their desire of independence; and the African adventurer

beheld himself at the head of a considerable force. Having already

secured foreign subsidiaries, Inarus was anxious yet more to

strengthen himself abroad; and more than one ambassador was despatched

to Athens, soliciting her assistance, and proffering, in return, a

share in the government for whose establishment her arms were

solicited: a singular fatality, that the petty colony which, if we

believe tradition, had so many centuries ago settled in the then

obscure corners of Attica, should now be chosen the main auxiliary of

the parent state in her vital struggles for national independence.

III. In acceding to the propositions of Inarus, Pericles yielded to

considerations wholly contrary to his after policy, which made it a

principal object to confine the energies of Athens within the limits

of Greece. It is probable that that penetrating and scientific

statesman (if indeed he had yet attained to a position which enabled

him to follow out his own conceptions) saw that every new government

must dazzle either by great enterprises abroad or great changes at

home--and that he preferred the former. There are few sacrifices that

a wary minister, newly-established, from whom high hopes are

entertained, and who can justify the destruction of a rival party only

by the splendour of its successor--will not hazard rather than incur

the contempt which follows disappointment. He will do something that

is dangerous rather than do nothing that is brilliant.

Neither the hatred nor the fear of Persia was at an end in Athens; and

to carry war into the heart of her empire was a proposition eagerly

hailed. The more democratic and turbulent portion of the populace,

viz., the seamen, had already been disposed of in an expedition of two

hundred triremes against Cyprus. But the distant and magnificent

enterprise of Egypt--the hope of new empire--the lust of undiscovered

treasures--were more alluring than the reduction of Cyprus. That

island was abandoned, and the fleet, composed both of Athenian and

confederate ships, sailed up the Nile. Masters of that river, the

Athenians advanced to Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt. They

stormed and took two of the divisions of that city; the third, called

the White Castle (occupied by the Medes, the Persians, and such of the

Egyptians as had not joined the revolt), resisted their assault.

IV. While thus occupied in Egypt, the Athenian arms were equally

employed in Greece. The whole forces of the commonwealth were in

demand--war on every side. The alliance with Megara not only created

an enemy in Corinth, but the Peloponnesian confederacy became involved

with the Attic: Lacedaemon herself, yet inert, but menacing; while the

neighbouring Aegina, intent and jealous, prepared for hostilities soon

manifest.

The Athenians forestalled the attack--made a descent on Haliae, in

Argolis--were met by the Corinthians and Epidaurians, and the result

of battle was the victory of the latter. This defeat the Athenians

speedily retrieved at sea. Off Cecryphalea, in the Saronic gulf, they

attacked and utterly routed the Peloponnesian fleet. And now Aegina

openly declared war and joined the hostile league. An important

battle was fought by these two maritime powers with the confederates

of either side. The Athenians were victorious--took seventy ships--

and, pushing the advantage they had obtained, landed in Aegina and

besieged her city. Three hundred heavy-armed Peloponnesians were

despatched to the relief of Aegina; while the Corinthians invaded the

Megarian territory, seized the passes of Geranea, and advanced to

Megara with their allies. Never was occasion more propitious. So

large a force in Egypt, so large a force at Aegina--how was it

possible for the Athenians to march to the aid of Megara? They

appeared limited to the choice either to abandon Megara or to raise

the siege of Aegina: so reasoned the Peloponnesians. But the

advantage of a constitution widely popular is, that the whole

community become soldiers in time of need. Myronides, an Athenian of

great military genius, not unassisted by Pericles, whose splendid

qualities now daily developed themselves, was well adapted to give

direction to the enthusiasm of the people. Not a man was called from

Aegina. The whole regular force disposed of, there yet remained at

Athens those too aged and those too young for the ordinary service.

Under Myronides, boys and old men marched at once to the assistance of

their Megarian ally. A battle ensued; both sides retiring, neither

considered itself defeated. But the Corinthians retreating to

Corinth, the Athenians erected a trophy on the field. The Corinthian

government received its troops with reproaches, and, after an interval

of twelve days, the latter returned to the scene of contest, and

asserting their claim to the victory, erected a trophy of their own.

During the work the Athenians sallied from Megara, where they had

ensconced themselves, attacked and put to flight the Corinthians; and

a considerable portion of the enemy turning into ground belonging to a

private individual, became entangled in a large pit or ditch, from

which was but one outlet, viz., that by which they had entered. At

this passage the Athenians stationed their heavy-armed troops, while

the light-armed soldiers surrounded the ditch, and with the missiles

of darts and stones put the enemy to death. The rest (being the

greater part) of the Corinthian forces effected a safe but

dishonourable retreat.

V. This victory effected and Megara secured--although Aegina still

held out, and although the fate of the Egyptian expedition was still

unknown--the wonderful activity of the government commenced what even

in times of tranquillity would have been a great and arduous

achievement. To unite their city with its seaports, they set to work

at the erection of the long walls, which extended from Athens both to

Phalerus and Piraeus. Under Cimon, preparations already had been made

for the undertaking, and the spoils of Persia now provided the means

for the defence of Athens.

Meanwhile, the Spartans still continued at the siege of Ithome. We

must not imagine that all the helots had joined in the revolt. This,

indeed, would be almost to suppose the utter disorganization of the

Spartan state. The most luxurious subjects of a despotism were never

more utterly impotent in procuring for themselves the necessaries of

life, than were the hardy and abstemious freemen of the Dorian Sparta.

It was dishonour for a Spartan to till the land--to exercise a trade.

He had all the prejudices against any calling but that of arms which

characterized a noble of the middle ages.

As is ever the case in the rebellion of slaves, the rise was not

universal; a sufficient number of these wretched dependants remained

passive and inert to satisfy the ordinary wants of their masters, and

to assist in the rebuilding of the town. Still the Spartans were

greatly enfeebled, crippled, and embarrassed by the loss of the rest:

and the siege of Ithome sufficed to absorb their attention, and to

make them regard without open hostilities, if with secret enmity, the

operations of the Athenians. The Spartan alliance formally dissolved

--Megara, with its command of the Peloponnesus seized--the Doric city

of Corinth humbled and defeated--Aegina blockaded; all these--the

Athenian proceedings--the Spartans bore without any formal declaration

of war.

VI. And now, in the eighth year of the Messenian war, piety succeeded

where pride and revenge had failed, and the Spartans permitted other

objects to divide their attention with the siege of Ithome. It was

one of the finest characteristics of that singular people, their

veneration for antiquity. For the little, rocky, and obscure

territory of Doris, whence tradition derived their origin, they felt

the affection and reverence of sons. A quarrel arising between the

people of this state and the neighbouring Phocians, the latter invaded

Doris, and captured one of its three towns [189]. The Lacedaemonians

marched at once to the assistance of their reputed father-land, with

an army of no less than fifteen hundred heavy-armed Spartans and ten

thousand of their Peloponnesian allies [190], under the command of

Nicomedes, son of Cleombrotus, and guardian of their king Pleistoanax,

still a minor. They forced the Phocians to abandon the town they had

taken; and having effectually protected Doris by a treaty of peace

between the two nations, prepared to return home. But in this they

were much perplexed; the pass of Geranea was now occupied by the

Athenians: Megara, too, and Pegae were in their hands. Should they

pass by sea through the Gulf of Crissa, an Athenian squadron already

occupied that passage. Either way they were intercepted [191]. Under

all circumstances, they resolved to halt a while in Boeotia, and watch

an opportunity to effect their return. But with these ostensible

motives for that sojourn assigned by Thucydides, there was another

more deep and latent. We have had constant occasion to remark how

singularly it was the Spartan policy to plot against the constitution

of free states, and how well-founded was the Athenian jealousy of the

secret interference of the Grecian Venice.

Halting now in Boeotia, Nicomedes entered into a clandestine

communication with certain of the oligarchic party in Athens, the

object of the latter being the overthrow of the existent popular

constitution. With this object was certainly linked the recall of

Cimon, though there is no reason to believe that great general a party

in the treason. This conspiracy was one main reason of the halt in

Boeotia. Another was, probably, the conception of a great and politic

design, glanced at only by historians, but which, if successful, would

have ranked among the masterpieces of Spartan statesmanship. This

design was--while Athens was to be weakened by internal divisions, and

her national spirit effectually curbed by the creation of an

oligarchy, the tool of Sparta--to erect a new rival to Athens in the

Boeotian Thebes. It is true that this project was not, according to

Diodorus, openly apparent until after the battle of Tanagra. But such

a scheme required preparation; and the sojourn of Nicomedes in Boeotia

afforded him the occasion to foresee its possibility and prepare his

plans. Since the Persian invasion, Thebes had lost her importance,

not only throughout Greece, but throughout Boeotia, her dependant

territory. Many of the states refused to regard her as their capital,

and the Theban government desired to regain its power. Promises to

make war upon Athens rendered the Theban power auxiliary to Sparta:

the more Thebes was strengthened, the more Athens was endangered: and

Sparta, ever averse to quitting the Peloponnesus, would thus erect a

barrier to the Athenian arms on the very frontiers of Attica.

VII. While such were the designs and schemes of Nicomedes, the

conspiracy of the aristocratic party could not be so secret in Athens

but what some rumour, some suspicion, broke abroad. The people became

alarmed and incensed. They resolved to anticipate the war; and,

judging Nicomedes cut off from retreat, and embarrassed and confined

in his position, they marched against him with a thousand Argives,

with a band of Thessalian horse, and some other allied troops drawn

principally from Ionia, which, united to the whole force of the armed

population within their walls, amounted, in all, to fourteen thousand

men.

VIII. It is recorded by Plutarch, that during their march Cimon

appeared, and sought permission to join the army. This was refused by

the senate of Five Hundred, to whom the petition was referred, not

from any injurious suspicion of Cimon, but from a natural fear that

his presence, instead of inspiring confidence, would create confusion;

and that it might be plausibly represented that he sought less to

resist the Spartans than to introduce them into Athens--a proof how

strong was the impression against him, and how extensive had been the

Spartan intrigues. Cimon retired, beseeching his friends to vindicate

themselves from the aspersions cast upon them. Placing the armour of

Cimon--a species of holy standard--in their ranks, a hundred of the

warmest supporters among his tribe advanced to battle conscious of the

trust committed to their charge.

IX. In the territory of Tanagra a severe engagement took place. On

that day Pericles himself fought in the thickest part of the battle

(B. C. 457); exposing himself to every danger, as if anxious that the

loss of Cimon should not be missed. The battle was long, obstinate,

and even: when in the midst of it, the Thessalian cavalry suddenly

deserted to the Spartans. Despite this treachery, the Athenians, well

supported by the Argives, long maintained their ground with advantage.

But when night separated the armies [192], victory remained with the

Spartans and their allies. [193]

The Athenians were not, however, much disheartened by defeat, nor did

the Spartans profit by their advantage. Anxious only for escape,

Nicomedes conducted his forces homeward, passed through Megara,

destroying the fruit-trees on his march; and, gaining the pass of

Geranea, which the Athenians had deserted to join the camp at Tanagra,

arrived at Lacedaemon.

Meanwhile the Thebans took advantage of the victory to extend their

authority, agreeably to the project conceived with Sparta. Thebes now

attempted the reduction of all the cities of Boeotia. Some submitted,

others opposed.

X. Aware of the necessity of immediate measures against a neighbour,

brave, persevering, and ambitious, the Athenian government lost no

time in recruiting its broken forces. Under Myronides, an army,

collected from the allies and dependant states, was convened to

assemble upon a certain day. Many failed the appointment, and the

general was urged to delay his march till their arrival. “It is not

the part of a general,” said Myronides, sternly, “to await the

pleasure of his soldiers! By delay I read an omen of the desire of

the loiterers to avoid the enemy. Better rely upon a few faithful

than on many disaffected.”

With a force comparatively small, Myronides commenced his march,

entered Boeotia sixty-two days only after the battle of Tanagra, and,

engaging the Boeotians at Oenophyta, obtained a complete and splendid

victory (B. C. 456). This battle, though Diodorus could find no

details of the action, was reckoned by Athens among the most glorious

she had ever achieved; preferred by the vain Greeks even to those of

Marathon and Plataea, inasmuch as Greek was opposed to Greek, and not

to the barbarians. Those who fell on the Athenian side were first

honoured by public burial in the Ceramichus--“As men,” says Plato,

“who fought against Grecians for the liberties of Greece.” Myronides

followed up his victory by levelling the walls of Tanagra. All

Boeotia, except Thebes herself, was brought into the Athenian

alliance--as democracies in the different towns, replacing the

oligarchical governments, gave the moral blow to the Spartan

ascendency. Thus, in effect, the consequences of the battle almost

deserved the eulogies bestowed upon the victory. Those consequences

were to revolutionize nearly all the states in Boeotia; and, by

calling up a democracy in each state, Athens at once changed enemies

into allies.

From Boeotia, Myronides marched to Phocis, and, pursuing the same

policy, rooted out the oligarchies, and established popular

governments. The Locrians of Opus gave a hundred of their wealthiest

citizens as hostages. Returned to Athens, Myronides was received with

public rejoicings [194], and thus closed a short but brilliant

campaign, which had not only conquered enemies, but had established

everywhere garrisons of friends.

XI. Although the banishment of Cimon had appeared to complete the

triumph of the popular party in Athens, his opinions were not banished

also. Athens, like all free states, was ever agitated by the feud of

parties, at once its danger and its strength. Parties in Athens were,

however, utterly unlike many of those that rent the peace of the

Italian republics; nor are they rightly understood in the vague

declamations of Barthelemi or Mitford; they were not only parties of

names and men--they were also parties of principles--the parties of

restriction and of advance. And thus the triumph of either was

invariably followed by the triumph of the principle it espoused.

Nobler than the bloody contests of mere faction, we do not see in

Athens the long and sweeping proscriptions, the atrocious massacres

that attended the party-strifes of ancient Rome or of modern Italy.

The ostracism, or the fine, of some obnoxious and eminent partisans,

usually contented the wrath of the victorious politicians. And in the

advance of a cause the people found the main vent for their passions.

I trust, however, that I shall not be accused of prejudice when I

state as a fact, that the popular party in Athens seems to have been

much more moderate and less unprincipled even in its excesses than its

antagonists. We never see it, like the Pisistratidae, leagued with

the Persian, nor with Isagoras, betraying Athens to the Spartan. What

the oligarchic faction did when triumphant, we see hereafter in the

establishment of the Thirty Tyrants. And compared with their

offences, the ostracism of Aristides, or the fine and banishment of

Cimon, lose all their colours of wrong.

XII. The discontented advocates for an oligarchy, who had intrigued

with Nicomedes, had been foiled in their object, partly by the conduct

of Cimon in disavowing all connexion with them, partly by the retreat

of Nicomedes himself. Still their spirit was too fierce to suffer

them to forego their schemes without a struggle, and after the battle

of Tanagra they broke out into open conspiracy against the republic.

The details of this treason are lost to us; it is one of the darkest

passages of Athenian history. From scattered and solitary references

we can learn, however, that for a time it threatened the democracy

with ruin. [195]

The victory of the Spartans at Tanagra gave strength to the Spartan

party in Athens; it also inspired with fear many of the people; it was

evidently desirable rather to effect a peace with Sparta than to

hazard a war. Who so likely to effect that peace as the banished

Cimon? Now was the time to press for his recall. Either at this

period, or shortly afterward, Ephialtes, his most vehement enemy, was

barbarously murdered--according to Aristotle, a victim to the hatred

of the nobles.

XIII. Pericles had always conducted his opposition to Cimon with

great dexterity and art; and indeed the aristocratic leaders of

contending parties are rarely so hostile to each other as their

subordinate followers suppose. In the present strife for the recall

of his rival, amid all the intrigues and conspiracies, the open

violence and the secret machination, which threatened not only the

duration of the government, but the very existence of the republic,

Pericles met the danger by proposing himself the repeal of Cimon’s

sentence.

Plutarch, with a childish sentimentality common to him when he means

to be singularly effective, bursts into an exclamation upon the

generosity of this step, and the candour and moderation of those

times, when resentments could be so easily laid aside. But the

profound and passionless mind of Pericles was above all the weakness

of a melodramatic generosity. And it cannot be doubted that this

measure was a compromise between the government and the more moderate

and virtuous of the aristocratic party. Perhaps it was the most

advantageous compromise Pericles was enabled to effect; for by

concession with respect to individuals, we can often prevent

concession as to things. The recall [196] of the great leader of the

anti-popular faction may have been deemed equivalent to the surrender

of many popular rights. And had we a deeper insight into the

intrigues of that day and the details of the oligarchic conspiracy, I

suspect we should find that, by recalling Cimon, Pericles saved the

constitution. [197]

XIV. The first and most popular benefit anticipated from the recall

of the son of Miltiades in a reconciliation between Sparta and Athens,

was not immediately realized further than by an armistice of four

months. [198]

About this time the long walls of the Piraeus were completed (B. C.

455), and shortly afterward Aegina yielded to the arms of the

Athenians (B. C. 455), upon terms which subjected the citizens of that

gallant and adventurous isle (whose achievements and commerce seem no

less a miracle than the greatness of Athens when we survey the limits

of their narrow and rocky domain) to the rival they had long so

fearlessly, nor fruitlessly braved. The Aeginetans surrendered their

shipping, demolished their walls, and consented to the payment of an

annual tribute. And so was fulfilled the proverbial command of

Pericles, that Aegina ought not to remain the eyesore of Athens.

XV. Aegina reduced, the Athenian fleet of fifty galleys, manned by

four thousand men [199], under the command of Tolmides,

circumnavigated the Peloponnesus--the armistice of four months had

expired--and, landing in Laconia, Tolmides burnt Gythium, a dock of

the Lacedaemonians; took Chalcis, a town belonging to Corinth, and,

debarking at Sicyon, engaged and defeated the Sicyonians. Thence

proceeding to Cephallenia, he mastered the cities of that isle; and

descending at Naupactus, on the Corinthian gulf, wrested it from the

Ozolian Locrians.

In the same year with this expedition, and in the tenth year of the

siege (B. C. 455), Ithome surrendered to Lacedaemon. The long and

gallant resistance of that town, the precipitous site of which nature

herself had fortified, is one of the most memorable and glorious

events in the Grecian history; and we cannot but regret that the

imperfect morality of those days, which saw glory in the valour of

freemen, rebellion only in that of slaves, should have left us but

frigid and scanty accounts of so obstinate a siege. To posterity

neither the cause nor the achievements of Marathon or Plataea, seem

the one more holy, the other more heroic, than this long defiance of

Messenians and helots against the prowess of Sparta and the aid of her

allies. The reader will rejoice to learn that it was on no

dishonourable terms that the city at last surrendered. Life and free

permission to depart was granted to the besieged, and recorded by a

pillar erected on the banks of the Alpheus [200]. But such of the

helots as had been taken in battle or in the neighbouring territory

were again reduced to slavery--the ringleaders so apprehended alone

executed. [201]

The gallant defenders of Ithome having conditioned to quit for ever

the Peloponnesus, Tolmides invested them with the possession of his

new conquest of Naupactus. There, under a democratic government,

protected by the power of Athens, they regained their ancient freedom,

and preserved their hereditary name of Messenians--long distinguished

from their neighbours by their peculiar dialect.

XVI. While thus, near at home, the Athenians had extended their

conquests and cemented their power, the adventurers they had

despatched to the Nile were maintaining their strange settlement with

more obstinacy than success. At first, the Athenians and their ally,

the Libyan Inarus, had indeed, as we have seen, obtained no

inconsiderable advantage.

Anxious to detach the Athenians from the Egyptian revolt, Artaxerxes

had despatched an ambassador to Sparta, in order to prevail upon that

state to make an excursion into Attica, and so compel the Athenians to

withdraw their troops from Egypt. The liability of the Spartan

government to corrupt temptation was not unknown to a court which had

received the Spartan fugitives; and the ambassador was charged with

large treasures to bribe those whom he could not otherwise convince.

Nevertheless, the negotiation failed; the government could not be

induced to the alliance with the Persian king. There was indeed a

certain spirit of honour inherent in that haughty nation which, if not

incompatible with cunning and intrigue, held at least in profound

disdain an alliance with the barbarian, for whatsoever ends. But, in

fact, the Spartans were then entirely absorbed in the reduction of

Ithome, and the war in Arcady; and it would, further, have been the

height of impolicy in that state, if meditating any designs against

Athens, to assist in the recall of an army which it was its very

interest to maintain employed in distant and perilous expeditions.

The ambassador had the satisfaction indeed of wasting some of his

money, but to no purpose; and he returned without success to Asia.

Artaxerxes then saw the necessity of arousing himself to those active

exertions which the feebleness of an exhausted despotism rendered the

final, not the first resort. Under Megabyzus an immense army was

collected; traversing Syria and Phoenicia, it arrived in Egypt,

engaged the Egyptian forces in a pitched battle, and obtained a

complete victory. Thence marching to Memphis, it drove the Greeks

from their siege of the White Castle, till then continued, and shut

them up in Prosopitis, an island in the Nile, around which their ships

lay anchored. Megabyzus ordered the channel to be drained by dikes,

and the vessels, the main force of the Athenians, were left stranded.

Terrified by this dexterous manoeuvre, as well as by the success of

the Persians, the Egyptians renounced all further resistance; and the

Athenians were deprived at once of their vessels and their allies.

[202]

XVII. Nothing daunted, and inspired by their disdain no less than by

their valour, the Athenians were yet to the barbarian what the Norman

knights were afterward to the Greeks. They burnt their vessels that

they might be as useless to the enemy as to themselves, and, exhorting

each other not to dim the glory of their past exploits, shut up still

in the small town of Byblus situated in the isle of Prosopitis,

resolved to defend themselves to the last.

The blockade endured a year and a half, such was the singular

ignorance of the art of sieges in that time. At length, when the

channel was drained, as I have related, the Persians marched across

the dry bed, and carried the place by a land assault. So ended this

wild and romantic expedition. The greater part of the Athenians

perished; a few, however, either forced their way by arms, or, as

Diodorus more probably relates, were permitted by treaty to retire,

out of the Egyptian territory. Taking the route of Libya, they

arrived at Cyrene, and finally reached Athens.

Inarus, the author of the revolt, was betrayed, and perished on the

cross, and the whole of Egypt once more succumbed to the Persian yoke,

save only that portion called the marshy or fenny parts (under the

dominion of a prince named Amyrtaeus), protected by the nature of the

soil and the proverbial valour of the inhabitants. Meanwhile a

squadron of fifty vessels, despatched by Athens to the aid of their

countrymen, entered the Mendesian mouth of the Nile too late to

prevent the taking of Byblus. Here they were surprised and defeated

by the Persian troops and a Phoenician fleet (B. C. 455), and few

survived a slaughter which put the last seal on the disastrous results

of the Egyptian expedition.

At home the Athenians continued, however, their military operations.

Thessaly, like the rest of Greece, had long shaken off the forms of

kingly government, but the spirit of monarchy still survived in a

country where the few were opulent and the multitude enslaved. The

Thessalian republics, united by an assembly of deputies from the

various towns, elected for their head a species of protector--who

appears to have possessed many of the characteristics of the podesta

of the Italian states. His nominal station was that of military

command--a station which, in all save the most perfect constitutions,

comprehends also civil authority. The name of Tagus was given to this

dangerous chief, and his power and attributes so nearly resembled

those of a monarch, that even Thucydides confers on a Tagus the title

of king. Orestes, one of these princes, had been driven from his

country by a civil revolution. He fled to Athens, and besought her

assistance to effect his restoration. That the Athenians should exert

themselves in favour of a man whose rank so nearly resembled the

odious dignity of a monarch, appears a little extraordinary. But as

the Tagus was often the favourite of the commonalty and the foe of the

aristocratic party, it is possible that, in restoring Orestes, the

Athenians might have seen a new occasion to further the policy so

triumphantly adopted in Boeotia and Phocis--to expel a hostile

oligarchy and establish a friendly democracy [203]. Whatever their

views, they decided to yield to the exile the assistance he demanded,

and under Myronides an army in the following year accompanied Orestes

into Thessaly. They were aided by the Boeotians and Phocians.

Myronides marched to Pharsalus, a Thessalian city, and mastered the

surrounding country; but the obstinate resistance of the city

promising a more protracted blockade than it was deemed advisable to

await, the Athenians raised the siege without effecting the object of

the expedition.

XVIII. The possession of Pegae and the new colony of Naupactus [204]

induced the desire of extending the Athenian conquests on the

neighbouring coasts, and the government were naturally anxious to

repair the military honours of Athens--lessened in Egypt, and

certainly not increased in Thessaly. With a thousand Athenian

soldiers, Pericles himself set out for Pegae. Thence the fleet, there

anchored, made a descent on Sicyon; Pericles defeated the Sicyonians

in a pitched battle, and besieged the city; but, after some fruitless

assaults, learning that the Spartans were coming to the relief of the

besieged, he quitted the city, and, re-enforced by some Achaeans,

sailed to the opposite side of the continent, crossed over the

Corinthian Bay, besieged the town of Oeniadae in Acarnania (B. C. 454)

(the inhabitants of which Pausanias [205] styles the hereditary

enemies of the Athenians), ravaged the neighbouring country, and bore

away no inconsiderable spoils. Although he reduced no city, the

successes of Pericles were signal enough to render the campaign

triumphant [206]; and it gratified the national pride and resentment

to have insulted the cities and wasted the lands of the Peloponnesus.

These successes were sufficient to render a peace with Sparta and her

allies advisable for the latter, while they were not sufficiently

decided to tempt the Athenians to prolong irregular and fruitless

hostilities. Three years were consumed without further aggressions on

either side, and probably in negotiations for peace. At the end of

that time, the influence and intervention of Cimon obtained a truce of

five years between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians.

XIX. The truce with the Peloponnesians (B. C. 450) removed the main

obstacle to those more bright and extensive prospects of enterprise

and ambition which the defeat of the Persians had opened to the

Athenians. In that restless and unpausing energy, which is the

characteristic of an intellectual republic, there seems, as it were, a

kind of destiny: a power impossible to resist urges the state from

action to action, from progress to progress, with a rapidity dangerous

while it dazzles; resembling in this the career of individuals

impelled onward, first to obtain, and thence to preserve, power, and

who cannot struggle against the fate which necessitates them to soar,

until, by the moral gravitation of human things, the point which has

no beyond is attained; and the next effort to rise is but the prelude

of their fall. In such states Time indeed moves with gigantic

strides; years concentrate what would be the epochs of centuries in

the march of less popular institutions. The planet of their fortunes

rolls with an equal speed through the cycle of internal civilization

as of foreign glory. The condition of their brilliant life is the

absence of repose. The accelerated circulation of the blood

beautifies but consumes, and action itself, exhausting the stores of

youth by its very vigour, becomes a mortal but divine disease.

XX. When Athens rose to the ascendency of Greece, it was necessary to

the preservation of that sudden and splendid dignity that she should

sustain the naval renown by which it had been mainly acquired. There

is but one way to sustain reputation, viz., to increase it and the

memory of past glories becomes dim unless it be constantly refreshed

by new. It must also be borne in mind that the maritime habits of the

people had called a new class into existence in the councils of the

state. The seamen, the most democratic part of the population, were

now to be conciliated and consulted: it was requisite to keep them in

action, for they were turbulent--in employment, for they were poor:

and thus the domestic policy and the foreign interests of Athens alike

conspired to necessitate the prosecution of maritime enterprise.

XXI. No longer harassed and impeded by fears of an enemy in the

Peloponnesus, the lively imagination of the people readily turned to

more dazzling and profitable warfare. The Island of Cyprus had (we

have seen) before attracted the ambition of the mistress of the

Aegaean. Its possession was highly advantageous, whether for military

or commercial designs, and once subjected, the fleet of the Athenians

might readily retain the dominion. Divided into nine petty states,

governed, not by republican, but by monarchical institutions, the

forces of the island were distracted, and the whole proffered an easy

as well as glorious conquest; while the attempt took the plausible

shape of deliverance, inasmuch as Persia, despite the former successes

of Cimon, still arrogated the supremacy over the island, and the war

was, in fact, less against Cyprus than against Persia. Cimon, who

ever affected great and brilliant enterprises, and whose main policy

it was to keep the Athenians from the dangerous borders of the

Peloponnesus, hastened to cement the truce he had formed with the

states of that district, by directing the spirit of enterprise to the

conquest of Cyprus.

Invested with the command of two hundred galleys, he set sail for that

island (B. C. 450) [207]. But designs more vast were associated with

this enterprise. The objects of the late Egyptian expedition still

tempted, and sixty vessels of the fleet were despatched to Egypt to

the assistance of Amyrtaeus, who, yet unconquered, in the marshy

regions, sustained the revolt against the Persian king.

Artabazus commanded the Persian forces, and with a fleet of three

hundred vessels he ranged himself in sight of Cyprus. Cimon, however,

landing on the island, succeeded in capturing many of its principal

towns. Humbled and defeated, it was not the policy of Persia to

continue hostilities with an enemy from whom it had so much to fear

and so little to gain. It is not, therefore, altogether an improbable

account of the later authorities, that ambassadors with proposals of

peace were formally despatched to Athens. But we must reject as a

pure fable the assertions that a treaty was finally agreed upon, by

which it was decreed, on the one hand, that the independence of the

Asiatic Greek towns should be acknowledged, and that the Persian

generals should not advance within three days’ march of the Grecian

seas; nor should a Persian vessel sail within the limit of Phaselis

and the Cyanean rocks; while, on the other hand, the Athenians were

bound not to enter the territories of Artaxerxes [208]. No such

arrangement was known to Thucydides; no reference is ever made to such

a treaty in subsequent transactions with Persia. A document,

professing to be a copy of this treaty, was long extant; but it was

undoubtedly the offspring of a weak credulity or an ingenious

invention. But while negotiations, if ever actually commenced, were

yet pending, Cimon was occupied in the siege of Citium, where famine

conspired with the obstinacy of the besieged to protract the success

of his arms. It is recorded among the popular legends of the day that

Cimon [209] sent a secret mission to the oracle of Jupiter Ammon.

“Return,” was the response to the messengers; “Cimon is with me!” The

messengers did return to find the son of Miltiades was no more. He

expired during the blockade of Citium (B. C. 449). By his orders his

death was concealed, the siege raised, and, still under the magic of

Cimon’s name, the Athenians engaging the Phoenicians and Cilicians off

the Cyprian Salamis, obtained signal victories both by land and sea.

Thence, joined by the squadron despatched to Egypt, which, if it did

not share, did not retrieve, the misfortunes of the previous

expedition, they returned home.

The remains of Cimon were interred in Athens, and the splendid

monument consecrated to his name was visible in the time of Plutarch.

CHAPTER V.

Change of Manners in Athens.--Begun under the Pisistratidae.--Effects

of the Persian War, and the intimate Connexion with Ionia.--The

Hetaerae.--The Political Eminence lately acquired by Athens.--The

Transfer of the Treasury from Delos to Athens.--Latent Dangers and

Evils.--First, the Artificial Greatness of Athens not supported by

Natural Strength.--Secondly, her pernicious Reliance on Tribute.--

Thirdly, Deterioration of National Spirit commenced by Cimon in the

Use of Bribes and Public Tables.--Fourthly, Defects in Popular Courts

of Law.--Progress of General Education.--History.--Its Ionian Origin.

--Early Historians.--Acusilaus.--Cadmus.--Eugeon.--Hellanicus.--

Pherecides.--Xanthus.--View of the Life and Writings of Herodotus.--

Progress of Philosophy since Thales.--Philosophers of the Ionian and

Eleatic Schools.--Pythagoras.--His Philosophical Tenets and Political

Influence.--Effect of these Philosophers on Athens.--School of

Political Philosophy continued in Athens from the Time of Solon.--

Anaxagoras.--Archelaus.--Philosophy not a thing apart from the

ordinary Life of the Athenians.

I. Before we pass to the administration of Pericles--a period so

brilliant in the history not more of Athens than of art--it may not be

unseasonable to take a brief survey of the progress which the

Athenians had already made in civilization and power (B. C. 449).

The comedians and the rhetoricians, when at a later period they boldly

represented to the democracy, in a mixture of satire and of truth, the

more displeasing features of the popular character, delighted to draw

a contrast between the new times and the old. The generation of men

whom Marathon and Salamis had immortalized were, according to these

praisers of the past, of nobler manners and more majestic virtues than

their degenerate descendants. “Then,” exclaimed Isocrates, “our young

men did not waste their days in the gambling-house, nor with

music-girls, nor in the assemblies, in which whole days are now consumed

then did they shun the Agora, or, if they passed through its haunts,

it was with modest and timorous forbearance--then, to contradict an

elder was a greater offence than nowadays to offend a parent--then,

not even a servant of honest repute would have been seen to eat or

drink within a tavern!” “In the good old times,” says the citizen of

Aristophanes [210], “our youths breasted the snow without a mantle--

their music was masculine and martial--their gymnastic exercises

decorous and chaste. Thus were trained the heroes of Marathon!”

In such happy days we are informed that mendicancy and even want were

unknown. [211]

It is scarcely necessary to observe, that we must accept these

comparisons between one age and another with considerable caution and

qualification. We are too much accustomed to such declamations in our

own time not to recognise an ordinary trick of satirists and

declaimers. As long as a people can bear patiently to hear their own

errors and follies scornfully proclaimed, they have not become

altogether degenerate or corrupt. Yet still, making every allowance

for rhetorical or poetic exaggeration, it is not more evident than

natural that the luxury of civilization--the fervour of unbridled

competition, in pleasure as in toil--were attended with many changes

of manners and life favourable to art and intellect, but hostile to

the stern hardihood of a former age.

II. But the change was commenced, not under a democracy, but under a

tyranny--it was consummated, not by the vices, but the virtues of the

nation. It began with the Pisistratidae [212], who first introduced

into Athens the desire of pleasure and the habits of ostentation, that

refine before they enervate; and that luxury which, as in Athenaeus it

is well and profoundly said, is often the concomitant of freedom, “as

soft couches took their name from Hercules”--made its rapid progress

with the result of the Persian war. The plunder of Plataea, the

luxuries of Byzantium, were not limited in their effect to the wild

Pausanias. The decay of old and the rise of new families tended to

give a stimulus to the emulation of wealth--since it is by wealth that

new families seek to eclipse the old. And even the destruction of

private houses, in the ravages of Mardonius, served to quicken the

career of art. In rebuilding their mansions, the nobles naturally

availed themselves of the treasures and the appliances of the gorgeous

enemy they had vanquished and despoiled. Few ever rebuild their

houses on as plain a scale as the old ones. In the city itself the

residences of the great remained plain and simple; they were mostly

built of plaster and unburnt brick, and we are told that the houses of

Cimon and Pericles were scarcely distinguishable from those of the

other citizens. But in their villas in Attica, in which the Athenians

took a passionate delight, they exhibited their taste and displayed

their wealth [213]. And the lucrative victories of Cimon, backed by

his own example of ostentation, gave to a vast number of families,

hitherto obscure, at once the power to gratify luxury and the desire

to parade refinement. Nor was the Eastern example more productive of

emulation than the Ionian. The Persian war, and the league which

followed it, brought Athens into the closest intercourse with her

graceful but voluptuous colonies. Miletus fell, but the manners of

Miletus survived her liberties. That city was renowned for the

peculiar grace and intellectual influence of its women; and it is

evident that there must have been a gradual change of domestic habits

and the formation of a new class of female society in Athens before

Aspasia could have summoned around her the power, and the wisdom, and

the wit of Athens--before an accomplished mistress could have been

even suspected of urging the politic Pericles into war--and, above

all, before an Athenian audience could have assented in delight to

that mighty innovation on their masculine drama--which is visible in

the passionate heroines and the sentimental pathos of Euripides.