Chapter XXIV: The Rise of Pericles (2)

Athens was now at peace both abroad and at home, under the administration of Pericles, with a great empire, a great fleet, and a great accumulated treasure. The common fund collected from the contributions of the confederates, and originally deposited at Delos, had before this time been transferred to the Acropolis at Athens. At what precise time such transfer took place, we cannot state: nor are we enabled to assign the successive stages whereby the confederacy, chiefly with the free will of its own members, became transformed from a body of armed and active warriors under the guidance of Athens, into disarmed and passive tribute-payers defended by the military force of Athens: from allies free, meeting at Delos, and self-determining into subjects isolated, sending their annual tribute, and awaiting Athenian orders. But it would appear that the change had been made before this time. Some of the more resolute of the allies had tried to secede, but Athens had coerced them by force, and reduced them to the condition of tribute-payers without ships or defence; and Chios, Lesbos, and Samos were now the only allies free and armed on the original footing. Every successive change of an armed ally into a tributary, every subjugation of a seceder, tended of course to cut down the numbers, and enfeeble the authority of the Delian synod; and, what was still worse, it materially altered the reciprocal relation and feelings both of Athens and her allies--exalting the former into something like a despot, and degrading the latter into mere passive subjects.

Of course the palpable manifestation of the change must have been the transfer of the confederate fund from Delos to Athens. The only circumstance which we know respecting this transfer is, that it was proposed by the Samians--the second power in the confederacy, inferior only to Athens, and least of all likely to favour any job or sinister purpose of the Athenians.

Such transition, arising spontaneously out of the character and circumstances of the confederates themselves, was thus materially forwarded by the acquisitions of Athens extraneous to the confederacy. She was now not merely the first maritime state in Greece, but perhaps equal to Sparta even in land-power, possessing in her alliance Megara, Bœotia, Phocis, Locris, together with Achaia and Trœzen in the Peloponnesus. Large as this aggregate already was, both at sea and on land, yet the magnitude of the annual tribute, and still more the character of the Athenians themselves, superior to all Greeks in that combination of energy and discipline which is the grand cause of progress, threatened still further increase. Occupying the Megarian harbour of Pegæ, the Athenians had full means of naval action on both sides of the Corinthian isthmus: but what was of still greater importance to them, by their possession of the Megarid and of the high lands of Geranea, they could restrain any land-force from marching out of the Peloponnesus, and were thus (considering besides their mastery at sea) completely unassailable in Attica. Ever since the repulse of Xerxes, Athens had been advancing in an uninterrupted course of power and prosperity at home, as well as of victory and ascendency abroad--to which there was no exception except the ruinous enterprise in Egypt.

[Sidenote: [448-446 B.C.]]

Looking at the position of Greece therefore about 448 B.C.--after the conclusion of five years’ truce between the Peloponnesians and Athens, and of the so-called Cimonian Peace between Persia and Athens--a discerning Greek might well calculate upon further aggrandisement of this imperial state as the tendency of the age; and accustomed as every Greek was to the conception of separate town-autonomy as essential to a freeman and a citizen, such prospect could not but inspire terror and aversion. The sympathy of the Peloponnesians for the islanders and ultra-maritime states, who constituted the original confederacy of Athens, was not considerable. But when the Dorian island of Ægina was subjugated also, and passed into the condition of a defenceless tributary, they felt the blow sorely on every ground. The ancient celebrity, and eminent service rendered at the battle of Salamis, of this memorable island, had not been able to protect it; while those great Æginetan families, whose victories at the sacred festival-games Pindar celebrates in a large proportion of his odes, would spread the language of complaint and indignation throughout their numerous “guests” in every Hellenic city. Of course, the same anti-Athenian feeling would pervade those Peloponnesian states which had been engaged in actual hostility with Athens--Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, etc., as well as Sparta, the once-recognised head of Hellas, but now tacitly degraded from her pre-eminence, baffled in her projects respecting Bœotia, and exposed to the burning of her port at Gythium without being able even to retaliate upon Attica. Putting all those circumstances together, we may comprehend the powerful feeling of dislike and apprehension now diffused so widely over Greece against the upstart despot-city; whose ascendency, newly acquired, maintained by superior force, and not recognised as legitimate, threatened nevertheless still further increase. Sixteen years hence, this same sentiment will be found exploding into the Peloponnesian War. But it became rooted in the Greek mind during the period which we have now reached, when Athens was much more formidable than she had come to be at the commencement of that war: nor shall we thoroughly appreciate the ideas of that later period, unless we take them as handed down from the earlier date of the five years’ truce (about 451-446 B.C.).

COMMENCEMENT OF DECLINE

Formidable as the Athenian empire both really was and appeared to be, however, this widespread feeling of antipathy proved still stronger, so that instead of the threatened increase, the empire underwent a most material diminution. This did not arise from the attack of open enemies; for during the five years’ truce, Sparta undertook only one movement, and that not against Attica: she sent troops to Delphi, in an expedition dignified with the name of the Sacred War--expelled the Phocians, who had assumed to themselves the management of the temple--and restored it to the native Delphians. To this the Athenians made no direct opposition, but as soon as the Lacedæmonians were gone, they themselves marched thither and placed the temple again in the hands of the Phocians, who were then their allies. The Delphians were members of the Phocian league, and there was a dispute of old standing as to the administration of the temple--whether it belonged to them separately or to the Phocians collectively. The favour of those who administered it counted as an element of considerable moment in Grecian politics; the sympathies of the leading Delphians led them to embrace the side of Sparta, but the Athenians now hoped to counteract this tendency by means of their preponderance in Phocis. We are not told that the Lacedæmonians took any ulterior step in consequence of their views being frustrated by Athens--a significant evidence of the politics of that day.

[Sidenote: [447 B.C.]]

The blow which brought down the Athenian empire from this its greatest exaltation was struck by the subjects themselves. The Athenian ascendency over Bœotia, Phocis, Locris, and Eubœa, was maintained, not by means of garrisons, but through domestic parties favourable to Athens, and a suitable form of government--just in the same way as Sparta maintained her influence over her Peloponnesian allies. After the victory of Œnophyta, the Athenians had broken up the governments in the Bœotian cities established by Sparta before the battle of Tanagra, and converted them into democracies at Thebes and elsewhere. Many of the previous leading men had thus been sent into exile; and as the same process had taken place in Phocis and Locris, there was at this time a considerable aggregate body of exiles, Bœotian, Phocian, Locrian, Eubœan, Æginetan, etc., all bitterly hostile to Athens, and ready to join in any attack upon her power. We learn further that the democracy established at Thebes after the battle of Œnophyta was ill conducted and disorderly, which circumstance laid open Bœotia still further to the schemes of assailants on the watch for every weak point. These various exiles, all joining their forces and concerting measures with their partisans in the interior, succeeded in mastering Orchomenos, Chæronea, and some other less important places in Bœotia.

The Athenian general Tolmides marched to expel them, with one thousand Athenian hoplites and an auxiliary body of allies. It appears that this march was undertaken in haste and rashness. The hoplites of Tolmides principally youthful volunteers and belonging to the best families of Athens, disdained the enemy too much to await a larger and more commanding force: nor would the people listen even to Pericles, when he admonished them that the march would be full of hazard, and adjured them not to attempt it without greater numbers as well as greater caution. Fatally indeed were his predictions justified. Though Tolmides was successful in his first enterprise--the recapture of Chæronea, wherein he placed a garrison--yet in his march, probably incautious and disorderly, when departing from that place, he was surprised and attacked unawares, near Coronea, by the united body of exiles and their partisans.

No defeat in Grecian history was ever more complete or ruinous. Tolmides himself was slain, together with many of the Athenian hoplites, while a large number of them were taken prisoners. In order to recover these prisoners, who belonged to the best families in the city, the Athenians submitted to a convention whereby they agreed to evacuate Bœotia altogether: in all the cities of that country the exiles were restored, the democratical government overthrown, and Bœotia was transformed from an ally of Athens into her bitter enemy. Long indeed did the fatal issue of this action dwell in the memory of the Athenians, and inspire them with an apprehension of Bœotian superiority in heavy armour on land. But if the hoplites under Tolmides had been all slain on the field, their death would probably have been avenged and Bœotia would not have been lost--whereas in the case of living citizens, the Athenians deemed no sacrifice too great to redeem them. We shall discover hereafter in the Lacedæmonians a feeling very similar, respecting their brethren captured at Sphacteria.

[Sidenote: [447-445 B.C.]]

The calamitous consequences of this defeat came upon Athens in thick and rapid succession. The united exiles, having carried their point in Bœotia, proceeded to expel the philo-Athenian government both from Phocis and Locris, and to carry the flame of revolt into Eubœa. To this important island Pericles himself proceeded forthwith, at the head of a powerful force; but before he had time to complete the reconquest, he was summoned home by news of a still more formidable character. The Megarians had revolted from Athens. By a conspiracy previously planned, a division of hoplites from Corinth, Sicyon, and Epidaurus, was already admitted as garrison into their city: the Athenian soldiers who kept watch over the Long Walls had been overpowered and slain, except a few who escaped into the fortified port of Nisæa. As if to make the Athenians at once sensible how seriously this disaster affected them, by throwing open the road over Geranea, Plistoanax, king of Sparta, was announced as already on his march for an invasion of Attica. He did in truth conduct an army, of mixed Lacedæmonians and Peloponnesian allies, into Attica, as far as the neighbourhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain. He was a very young man, so that a Spartan of mature years, Cleandridas, had been attached to him by the ephors as adjutant and counsellor. Pericles, it is said, persuaded both the one and the other, by means of large bribes, to evacuate Attica without advancing to Athens. We may fairly doubt whether they had force enough to adventure so far into the interior, and we shall hereafter observe the great precautions with which Archidamus thought it necessary to conduct his invasion, during the first year of the Peloponnesian War, though at the head of a more commanding force. Nevertheless, on their return, the Lacedæmonians, believing that they might have achieved it, found both of them guilty of corruption. Both were banished: Cleandridas never came back, and Plistoanax himself lived for a long time in sanctuary near the temple of Athene at Tegea, until at length he procured his restoration by tampering with the Pythian priestess, and by bringing her bought admonitions to act upon the authorities at Sparta.

So soon as the Lacedæmonians had retired from Attica, Pericles returned with his forces to Eubœa, and reconquered the island completely. With that caution which always distinguished him as a military man, so opposite to the fatal rashness of Tolmides, he took with him an overwhelming force of fifty triremes and five thousand hoplites. He admitted most of the Eubœan towns to surrender, altering the government of Chalcis by the expulsion of the wealthy oligarchy called the _hippobotæ_. But the inhabitants of Histiæa at the north of the island, who had taken an Athenian merchantman and massacred all the crew, were more severely dealt with, the free population being all or in great part expelled, and the land distributed among Athenian cleruchs or out-settled citizens.

[Sidenote: [445-440 B.C.]]

Yet the reconquest of Eubœa was far from restoring Athens to the position which she had occupied before the fatal engagement of Coronea. Her land-empire was irretrievably gone, together with her recently acquired influence over the Delphian oracle; and she reverted to her former condition of an exclusively maritime potentate. Moreover, the precarious hold which she possessed over unwilling allies had been demonstrated in a manner likely to encourage similar attempts among her maritime subjects; attempts which would now be seconded by Peloponnesian armies invading Attica. The fear of such a combination of embarrassments, and especially of an irresistible enemy carrying ruin over the flourishing territory round Eleusis and Athens, was at this moment predominant in the Athenian mind. We shall find Pericles, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War fourteen years afterwards, exhausting all his persuasive force, and not succeeding without great difficulty, in prevailing upon his countrymen to endure the hardship of invasion--even in defence of their maritime empire, and when events had been gradually so ripening as to render the prospect of war familiar, if not inevitable. But the late series of misfortunes had burst upon them so rapidly and unexpectedly, as to discourage even Athenian confidence, and to render the prospect of continued war full of gloom and danger. The prudence of Pericles would doubtless counsel the surrender of their remaining landed possessions or alliances, which had now become unprofitable, in order to purchase peace; but we may be sure that nothing short of extreme temporary despondency could have induced the Athenian assembly to listen to such advice, and to accept the inglorious peace which followed. A truce for thirty years was concluded with Sparta and her allies, in the beginning of 445 B.C., whereby Athens surrendered Nisæa, Pegæ, Achaia, and Trœzen--thus abandoning the Peloponnesus altogether, and leaving the Megarians (with their full territory and their two ports) to be included among the Peloponnesian allies of Sparta.

It was to the Megarians, especially, that the altered position of Athens after this truce was owing: it was their secession from Attica and junction with the Peloponnesians, which laid open Attica to invasion. Hence arose the deadly hatred on the part of the Athenians towards Megara, manifested during the ensuing years--a sentiment the more natural, as Megara had spontaneously sought the alliance of Athens a few years before as a protection against the Corinthians, and had then afterwards, without any known ill-usage on the part of Athens, broken off from the alliance and become her enemy, with the fatal consequence of rendering her vulnerable on the land-side. Under such circumstances we shall not be surprised to find the antipathy of the Athenians against Megara strongly pronounced, insomuch that the system of exclusion which they adopted against her was among the most prominent causes of the Peloponnesian War.[d]

THE GREATNESS OF PERICLES

Athens now rested six years, unengaged in any hostilities; a longer interval of perfect peace than she had before known in above forty years elapsed since she rose from her ashes after the Persian invasion. It is a wonderful and singular phenomenon in the history of mankind, little accounted for by anything recorded by ancient, or imagined by modern writers, that, during this period of turbulence, in a commonwealth whose whole population in free subjects amounted scarcely to thirty thousand families, art, science, fine taste, and politeness should have risen to that perfection which has made Athens the mistress of the world through all succeeding ages. Some sciences indeed have been carried higher in modern times, and art has put forth new branches, of which some have given new helps to science: but Athens, in that age, reached a perfection of taste that no country has since surpassed; but on the contrary all have looked up to, as a polar star, by which, after sinking in the deepest barbarism, taste has been guided in its restoration to splendour, and the observation of which will probably ever be the surest preservative against its future corruption and decay.

One great point of the policy of Pericles was to keep the people always either amused or employed. During peace an exercising squadron of sixty trireme galleys was sent out for eight months in every year. Nor was this without a further use than merely engaging the attention of the people, and maintaining the navy in vigour. He sometimes took the command in person: and, sailing among the distant dependencies of the empire, settled disputes between them, and confirmed the power and extended the influence of Athens. The Ægean and the Propontis did not bound his voyages: he penetrated into the Euxine; and finding the distant Grecian settlement of Sinope divided between Timesileus, who affected the tyranny, and an opposing party, he left there Lamachus with thirteen ships, and a land-force with whose assistance to the popular side the tyrant and those of his faction were expelled. The justice of what followed may indeed appear questionable. Their houses and property, apportioned into six hundred lots, were offered to so many Athenian citizens; and volunteers were not wanting to accept the offer, and settle at Sinope. To disburden the government at home, by providing advantageous establishments, in distant parts, for the poor and discontented among the sovereign citizens of Athens, was a policy more than once resorted to by Pericles. It was during his administration, in the year, according to Diodorus, in which the Thirty Years’ Truce was concluded, that the deputation came from the Thessalian adventurers who had been expelled by the Crotoniats from their attempted establishment in the deserted territory of Sybaris, in consequence of which, under his patronage, the colony was settled with which the historian Herodotus then, and afterward the orator Lysias, passing to Thurii, both established themselves there.

A GREEK FEDERATION PLANNED

Plutarch has attributed to Pericles a noble project, unnoticed by any earlier extant author, but worthy of his capacious mind, and otherwise also bearing some characters of authenticity and truth. It was no less than to unite all Greece under one great federal government, of which Athens should be the capital. But the immediate and direct avowal of such a purpose would be likely to raise jealousies so numerous and extensive as to form insuperable obstacles to the execution. The religion of the nation was that alone in which the Grecian people universally claimed a clear common interest; and even in this every town and almost every family claimed something peculiar to itself. In the vehemence of public alarm, during the Persian invasion, vows had been, in some places, made to the gods for sacrifices, to an extent beyond what the votaries, when blessed with deliverance beyond hope, were able to perform; and some temples, destroyed by the invaders, were not yet restored; probably because the means of those in whose territories they had stood were deficient. Taking these circumstances then for his ground, Pericles proposed that a congress of deputies from every republic of the nation should be assembled at Athens, for the purpose first of inquiring concerning vows for the safety of Greece yet unperformed, and temples, injured by the barbarians, not yet restored; and then of proceeding to concert measures for the lasting security of navigation in the Grecian seas, and for the preservation of peace by land also between all the states composing the Greek nation. The naval question, but still more the ruin which, in the Persian invasion, had befallen northern Greece, and especially Attica, while Peloponnesus had felt nothing of its evils, gave pretensions for Athens to take the lead in the business. On the motion of Pericles, a decree of the Athenian people directed the appointment of ministers to invite every Grecian state to send its deputies. Plutarch, rarely attentive to political information, has not at all indicated what attention was shown, or what participation proposed, for Lacedæmon. His prejudices indeed we find very generally adverse to the Lacedæmonian government, and favouring the Athenian democracy. But, judging from the friendship which, according to the authentic information of Thucydides, subsisted between Pericles and Archidamus, king of Lacedæmon, through life, it is little likely that, in putting forward the project for the peace of Greece, Pericles would have proposed anything derogatory to the just weight and dignity of Sparta; which indeed would have been, with peace the pretence, only putting forward a project of contest.

Pericles, when he formed his coalition with Cimon, seems to have entered heartily into the enlarged views of that great man; and, with the hope that, through their coalition, both the oligarchical and the democratical powers in Athens might be held justly balanced, had early in view to establish the peace of Greece on a union between Athens and Lacedæmon. It is however evident, from the narrative of Thucydides, that Archidamus rarely could direct the measures of the Lacedæmonian government. On a view of all information, then, it may seem probable that the project of Pericles was concerted with Archidamus; and that the opposition of those in Lacedæmon, of an adverse faction concurred with opposition from those in Athens, who apprehended injury to their interests from a new coalition with the aristocratical party, to compel the great projector to abandon his magnificent and beneficent purpose.[f]

FOOTNOTES

[45] Plutarch tells a story--characteristic if not true--of a rude fellow who, after railing at Pericles all day, as he was transacting business in public, followed him after dusk with abusive language to his door, when Pericles ordered one of his servants to take a light, and conduct the man home.