The Athenians who were to have assisted Nikodromus arrived at Ægina one day too late. Their proceedings had been delayed by the necessity of borrowing twenty triremes from the Corinthians, in addition to fifty of their own: with these seventy sail they defeated the Æginetans, who met them with a fleet of equal number, and then landed on the island. The Æginetans solicited aid from Argos, but that city was either too much displeased with them, or too much exhausted by the defeat sustained from the Spartan Kleomenês, to grant it. Nevertheless, one thousand Argeian volunteers, under a distinguished champion of the pentathlon named Eurybatês, came to their assistance, and a vigorous war was carried on, with varying success, against the Athenian armament.
At sea, the Athenians sustained a defeat, being attacked at a moment when their fleet was in disorder, so that they lost four ships with their crews: on land they were more successful, and few of the Argeian volunteers survived to return home. The general of the latter, Eurybatês, confiding in his great personal strength and skill, challenged the best of the Athenian warriors to single combat: he slew three of them in succession, but the arm of the fourth, Sôphanês of Dekeleia, was victorious, and proved fatal to him.[81] At length the invaders were obliged to leave the island without any decisive result, and the war seems to have been prosecuted by frequent descents and privateering on both sides,—in which Nikodromus and the Æginetan exiles, planted by Athens on the coast of Attica near Sunium, took an active part;[82] the advantage on the whole being on the side of Athens.
The general course of this war, and especially the failure of the enterprise concerned with Nikodromus in consequence of delay in borrowing ships from Corinth, were well calculated to impress upon the Athenians the necessity of enlarging their naval force. And it is from the present time that we trace among them the first growth of that decided tendency towards maritime activity, which coincided so happily with the expansion of their democracy, and opened a new phase in Grecian history, as well as a new career for themselves.
The exciting effect produced upon them by the repulse of the Persians at Marathon has been dwelt upon in my preceding volume. Miltiades, the victor in that field, having been removed from the scene under circumstances already described, Aristeidês and Themistoklês became the chief men at Athens: and the former was chosen archon during the succeeding year. His exemplary uprightness in magisterial functions insured to him lofty esteem from the general public, not without a certain proportion of active enemies, some of them sufferers by his justice. These enemies naturally became partisans of his rival, Themistoklês, who had all the talents necessary for bringing them into coöperation: and the rivalry between the two chiefs became so bitter and menacing, that even Aristeidês himself is reported to have said, “If the Athenians were wise, they would cast both of us into the barathrum.” Under such circumstances, it is not too much to say that the peace of the country was preserved mainly by the institution called Ostracism, of which so much has been said in the preceding volume. After three or four years of continued political rivalry, the two chiefs appealed to a vote of ostracism, and Aristeidês was banished.
Of the particular points on which their rivalry turned, we are unfortunately little informed. But it is highly probable that one of them was, the important change of policy above alluded to,—the conversion of Athens from a land-power into a sea-power,—the development of this new and stirring element in the minds of the people. By all authorities, this change of policy is ascribed principally and specially to Themistoklês:[83] on that account, if for no other reason, Aristeidês would probably be found opposed to it,—but it was, moreover, a change not in harmony with that old-fashioned Hellenism, undisturbed uniformity of life and narrow range of active duty and experience, which Aristeidês seems to have approved in common with the subsequent philosophers. The seaman was naturally more of a wanderer and cosmopolite than the heavy-armed soldier: the modern Greek seaman even at this moment is so to a remarkable degree, distinguished for the variety of his ideas and the quickness of his intelligence:[84] the land-service was a type of steadiness and inflexible ranks, the sea-service that of mutability and adventure. Such was the idea strongly entertained by Plato and other philosophers:[85] though we may remark that they do not render justice to the Athenian seaman, whose training was far more perfect and laborious, and his habits of obedience far more complete,[86] than that of the Athenian hoplite, or horseman: a training beginning with Themistoklês, and reaching its full perfection about the commencement of the Peloponnesian war.
In recommending extraordinary efforts to create a navy as well as to acquire nautical practice, Themistoklês displayed all that sagacious appreciation of the circumstances and dangers of the time for which Thucydides gives him credit: and there can be no doubt that Aristeidês, though the honester politician of the two, was at this particular crisis the less essential to his country. Not only was there the struggle with Ægina, a maritime power equal or more than equal, and within sight of the Athenian harbor,—but there was also in the distance a still more formidable contingency to guard against. The Persian armament had been driven with disgrace from Attica back to Asia; but the Persian monarch still remained with undiminished means of aggression and increased thirst for revenge; and Themistoklês knew well that the danger from that quarter would recur greater than ever. He believed that it would recur again in the same way, by an expedition across the Ægean like that of Datis to Marathon;[87] against which the best defence would be found in a numerous and well-trained fleet. Nor could the large preparations of Darius for renewing the attack remain unknown to a vigilant observer, extending as they did over so many Greeks subject to the Persian empire. Such positive warning was more than enough to stimulate the active genius of Themistoklês, who now prevailed upon his countrymen to begin with energy the work of maritime preparation, as well against Ægina as against Persia.[88] Not only were two hundred new ships built, and citizens trained as seamen,—but the important work was commenced, during the year when Themistoklês was either archon or general, of forming and fortifying a new harbor for Athens at Peiræus, instead of the ancient open bay of Phalêrum. The latter was indeed somewhat nearer to the city, but Peiræus, with its three separate natural ports,[89] admitting of being closed and fortified, was incomparably superior in safety as well as in convenience. It is not too much to say, with Herodotus,—that the Æginetan “war was the salvation of Greece, by constraining the Athenians to make themselves a maritime power.”[90] The whole efficiency of the resistance subsequently made to Xerxes turned upon this new movement in the organization of Athens, allowed as it was to attain tolerable completeness through a fortunate concurrence of accidents; for the important delay of ten years, between the defeat of Marathon and the fresh invasion by which it was to be avenged, was in truth the result of accident. First, the revolt of Egypt; next, the death of Darius; thirdly, the indifference of Xerxes, at his first accession, towards Hellenic matters,—postponed until 480 B. C., an invasion which would naturally have been undertaken in 487 or 486 B. C., and which would have found Athens at that time without her wooden walls,—the great engine of her subsequent salvation.
Another accidental help, without which the new fleet could not have been built,—a considerable amount of public money,—was also by good fortune now available to the Athenians. It is first in an emphatic passage of the poet Æschylus, and next from Herodotus on the present occasion, that we hear of the silver mines of Laurium[91] in Attica, and the valuable produce which they rendered to the state. They were situated in the southern portion of the territory, not very far from the promontory of Sunium,[92] amidst a district of low hills which extended across much of the space between the eastern sea at Thorikus, and the western at Anaphlystus. At what time they first began to be worked, we have no information; but it seems hardly possible that they could have been worked with any spirit or profitable result until after the expulsion of Hippias and the establishment of the democratical constitution of Kleisthenês. Neither the strong local factions, by which different portions of Attica were set against each other before the time of Peisistratus, nor the rule of that despot succeeded by his two sons, were likely to afford confidence and encouragement. But when the democracy of Kleisthenês first brought Attica into one systematic and comprehensive whole, with equal rights to all the parts, and a common centre at Athens,—the power of that central government over the mineral wealth of the country, and its means of binding the whole people to respect agreements concluded with individual undertakers, would give a new stimulus to private speculation in the district of Laurium. It was the practice of the Athenian government either to sell, or to let for a long term of years, particular districts of this productive region to individuals or companies,—on consideration partly of a sum or fine paid down, partly of a reserved rent equal to one-twenty-fourth part of the gross produce.
We are told by Herodotus that there was in the Athenian treasury, at the time when Themistoklês made his proposition to enlarge the naval force, a great sum[93] arising from the Laurian mines, out of which a distribution was on the point of being made among the citizens,—ten drachms to each man. This great amount in hand must probably have been the produce of the purchase-money or fines received from recent sales, since the small annual reserved rent can hardly have been accumulated during many successive years: new and enlarged enterprises in mines must be supposed to have been recently begun by individuals under contract with the government, in order to produce at the moment so overflowing an exchequer and to furnish means for the special distribution contemplated. Themistoklês availed himself of this precious opportunity,—set forth the necessities of the war with Ægina and the still more formidable menace from the great enemy in Asia,—and prevailed upon the people to forego the promised distribution for the purpose of obtaining an efficient navy.[94] One cannot doubt that there must have been many speakers who would try to make themselves popular by opposing this proposition and supporting the distribution, insomuch that the power of the people generally to feel the force of a distant motive as predominant over a present gain deserves notice as an earnest of their approaching greatness.
Immense, indeed, was the recompense reaped for this self-denial, not merely by Athens but by Greece generally, when the preparations of Xerxes came to be matured, and his armament was understood to be approaching. The orders for equipment of ships and laying in of provisions, issued by the Great King to his subject Greeks in Asia, the Ægean, and Thrace, would of course become known throughout Greece Proper,—especially the vast labor bestowed on the canal of Mount Athos, which would be the theme of wondering talk with every Thasian or Akanthian citizen who visited the festival games in Peloponnesus. All these premonitory evidences were public enough, without any need of that elaborate stratagem whereby the exiled Demaratus is alleged to have secretly transmitted, from Susa to Sparta, intelligence of the approaching expedition.[95] The formal announcements of Xerxes all designated Athens as the special object of his wrath and vengeance;[96] and other Grecian cities might thus hope to escape without mischief: so that the prospect of the great invasion did not at first provoke among them any unanimous dispositions to resist. Accordingly, when the first heralds despatched by Xerxes from Sardis in the autumn of 481 B. C., a little before his march to the Hellespont, addressed themselves to the different cities with demand of earth and water, many were disposed to comply. Neither to Athens, nor to Sparta, were any heralds sent; and these two cities were thus from the beginning identified in interest and in the necessity of defence. Both of them sent, in this trying moment, to consult the Delphian oracle: while both at the same time joined to convene a Pan-Hellenic congress at the Isthmus of Corinth, for the purpose of organizing resistance against the expected invader.
I have in the preceding volume pointed out the various steps whereby the separate states of Greece were gradually brought, even against their own natural instincts, into something approaching more nearly to political union. The present congress, assembled under the influence of common fear from Persia, has more of a Pan-Hellenic character than any political event which has yet occurred in Grecian history. It extends far beyond the range of those Peloponnesian states who constitute the immediate allies of Sparta: it comprehends Athens, and is even summoned in part by her strenuous instigation: it seeks to combine, moreover, every city of Hellenic race and language, however distant, which can be induced to take part in it,—even the Kretans, Korkyræans, and Sicilians. It is true that all these states do not actually come, but earnest efforts are made to induce them to come: the dispersed brethren of the Hellenic family are intreated to marshal themselves in the same ranks for a joint political purpose,[97]—the defence of the common hearth and metropolis of the race. This is a new fact in Grecian history, opening scenes and ideas unlike to anything which has gone before,—enlarging, prodigiously, the functions and duties connected with that headship of Greece which had hitherto been in the hands of Sparta, but which is about to become too comprehensive for her to manage,—and thus introducing increased habits of coöperation among the subordinate states, as well as rival hopes of aggrandizement among the leaders. The congress at the isthmus of Corinth marks such further advance in the centralizing tendencies of Greece, and seems at first to promise an onward march in the same direction: but the promise will not be found realized.