Whether the Persian interpreters, who read this letter to Artaxerxes Longimanus, exactly rendered its brief and direct expression, we cannot say. But it made a strong impression upon him, combined with the previous reputation of the writer, and he willingly granted the prayer for delay: though we shall not readily believe that he was so transported as to show his joy by immediate sacrifice to the gods, by an unusual measure of convivial indulgence, and by crying out thrice in his sleep, “I have got Themistoklês the Athenian,”—as some of Plutarch’s authors informed him.[567] In the course of the year granted, Themistoklês had learned so much of the Persian language and customs as to be able to communicate personally with the king, and acquire his confidence: no Greek, says Thucydidês, had ever before attained such a commanding influence and position at the Persian court. His ingenuity was now displayed in laying out schemes for the subjugation of Greece to Persia, which were eminently captivating to the monarch, who rewarded him with a Persian wife and large presents, sending him down to Magnesia, on the Mæander, not far from the coast of Ionia. The revenues of the district round that town, amounting to the large sum of fifty talents yearly, were assigned to him for bread: those of the neighboring seaport of Myus, for articles of condiment to his bread, which was always accounted the main nourishment: those of Lampsakus on the Hellespont, for wine.[568] Not knowing the amount of these two latter items, we cannot determine how much revenue Themistoklês received altogether: but there can be no doubt; judging from the revenues of Magnesia alone, that he was a great pecuniary gainer by his change of country. After having visited various parts of Asia,[569] he lived for a certain time at Magnesia, in which place his family joined him from Athens. How long his residence at Magnesia lasted we do not know, but seemingly long enough to acquire local estimation and leave mementos behind him. He at length died of sickness, when sixty-five years old, without having taken any step towards the accomplishment of those victorious campaigns which he had promised to Artaxerxes. That sickness was the real cause of his death, we may believe on the distinct statement of Thucydidês;[570] who at the same time notices a rumor partially current in his own time, of poison voluntarily taken, from painful consciousness on the part of Themistoklês himself that the promises made could never be performed,—a farther proof of the general tendency to surround the last years of this distinguished man with impressive adventures, and to dignify his last moments with a revived feeling, not unworthy of his earlier patriotism. The report may possibly have been designedly circulated by his friends and relatives, in order to conciliate some tenderness towards his memory (his sons still continued citizens at Athens, and his daughters were married there). These friends farther stated that they had brought back his bones to Attica, at his own express command, and buried them privately without the knowledge of the Athenians; no condemned traitor being permitted to be buried in Attic soil. If, however, we even suppose that this statement was true, no one could point out with certainty the spot wherein such interment had taken place: nor does it seem, when we mark the cautious expressions of Thucydidês,[571] that he himself was satisfied of the fact: moreover, we may affirm with confidence that the inhabitants of Magnesia, when they showed the splendid sepulchral monument erected in honor of Themistoklês in their own market-place, were persuaded that his bones were really inclosed within it.
Aristeidês died about three or four years after the ostracism of Themistoklês;[572] but respecting the place and manner of his death, there were several contradictions among the authors whom Plutarch had before him. Some affirmed that he perished on foreign service in the Euxine sea; others, that he died at home, amidst the universal esteem and grief of his fellow-citizens. A third story, confined to the single statement of Kraterus, and strenuously rejected by Plutarch, represents Aristeidês as having been falsely accused before the Athenian judicature and condemned to a fine of fifty minæ, on the allegation of having taken bribes during the assessment of the tribute upon the allies,—which fine he was unable to pay, and was therefore obliged to retire to Ionia, where he died. Dismissing this last story, we find nothing certain about his death except one fact,—but that fact at the same time the most honorable of all,—that he died very poor. It is even asserted that he did not leave enough to pay funeral expenses,—that a sepulchre was provided for him at Phalêrum at the public cost, besides a handsome donation to his son Lysimachus, and a dowry to each of his two daughters. In the two or three ensuing generations, however, his descendants still continued poor, and even at that remote day, some of them received aid out of the public purse, from the recollection of their incorruptible ancestor. Near a century and a half afterwards, a poor man, named Lysimachus, descendant of the just Aristeidês, was to be seen at Athens, near the chapel of Iacchus, carrying a mysterious tablet, and obtaining his scanty fee of two oboli for interpreting the dreams of the passers by: Demetrius the Phalerean procured from the people, for the mother and aunt of this poor man, a small daily allowance.[573] On all these points the contrast is marked when we compare Aristeidês with Themistoklês. The latter, having distinguished himself by ostentatious cost at Olympia, and by a choregic victory at Athens, with little scruple as to the means of acquisition,—ended his life at Magnesia in dishonorable affluence, greater than ever, and left an enriched posterity both at that place and at Athens. More than five centuries afterwards, his descendant, the Athenian Themistoklês, attended the lectures of the philosopher Ammonius at Athens, as the comrade and friend of Plutarch himself.[574]
CHAPTER XLV.
PROCEEDINGS OF THE CONFEDERACY UNDER ATHENS AS HEAD. — FIRST FORMATION AND RAPID EXPANSION OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE.
I have already recounted, in the preceding chapter, how the Asiatic Greeks, breaking loose from the Spartan Pausanias, entreated Athens to organize a new confederacy, and to act as presiding city (Vorort),—and how this confederacy, framed not only for common and pressing objects, but also on principles of equal rights and constant control on the part of the members, attracted soon the spontaneous adhesion of a large proportion of Greeks, insular or maritime, near the Ægean sea. I also noticed this event as giving commencement to a new era in Grecian politics. For whereas there had been before a tendency, not very powerful, yet on the whole steady and increasing, towards something like one Pan-Hellenic league under Sparta as president,—from henceforward that tendency disappears and a bifurcation begins: Athens and Sparta divide the Grecian world between them, and bring a much larger number of its members into coöperation, either with one or the other, than had ever been so arranged before.
Thucydidês marks precisely, as far as general words can go, the character of the new confederacy during the first years after its commencement: but unhappily he gives us scarcely any particular facts,—and in the absence of such controlling evidence, a habit has grown up of describing loosely the entire period between 477 B. C., and 405 B. C. (the latter date is that of the battle of Ægos Potamos), as constituting “the Athenian empire.” This word denotes correctly enough the last part, perhaps the last forty years, of the seventy-two years indicated; but it is misleading when applied to the first part: nor, indeed, can any single word be found which faithfully characterizes as well the one part as the other. A great and serious change had taken place, and we disguise the fact of that change, if we talk of the Athenian hegemony, or headship, as a portion of the Athenian empire. Thucydidês carefully distinguishes the two, speaking of the Spartans as having lost, and of the Athenians as having acquired, not empire, but headship, or hegemony.[575] The transition from the Athenian hegemony to the Athenian empire was doubtless gradual, so that no one could determine precisely where the former ends and the latter begins: but it had been consummated before the thirty years’ truce, which was concluded fourteen years before the Peloponnesian war,—and it was in fact the substantial cause of that war. Empire then came to be held by Athens,—partly as a fact established, resting on acquiescence rather than attachment or consent on the minds of the subjects,—partly as a corollary from necessity of union combined with her superior force: while this latter point, superiority of force as a legitimate title, stood more and more forward, both in the language of her speakers and in the conceptions of her citizens. Nay, the Athenian orators of the middle of the Peloponnesian war venture to affirm that their empire had been of this same character ever since the repulse of the Persians: an inaccuracy so manifest, that if we could suppose the speech made by the Athenian Euphêmus at Kamarina in 415 B. C. to have been heard by Themistoklês or Aristeidês fifty years before, it would have been alike offensive to the prudence of the one and to the justice of the other. The imperial state of Athens, that which she held at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, when her allies, except Chios and Lesbos, were tributary subjects, and when the Ægean sea was an Athenian lake,—was of course the period of her greatest splendor and greatest action upon the Grecian world. It was also the period most impressive to historians, orators, and philosophers,—suggesting the idea of some one state exercising dominion over the Ægean, as the natural condition of Greece, so that if Athens lost such dominion, it would be transferred to Sparta,—holding out the dispersed maritime Greeks as a tempting prize for the aggressive schemes of some new conqueror,—and even bringing up by association into men’s fancies the mythical Minos of Krete, and others, as having been rulers of the Ægean in times anterior to Athens.
Even those who lived under the full-grown Athenian empire had before them no good accounts of the incidents between 479-450 B. C.; for we may gather from the intimation of Thucydidês, as well as from his barrenness of facts, that while there were chroniclers both for the Persian invasion and for the times before, no one cared for the times immediately succeeding.[576] Hence, the little light which has fallen upon this blank has all been borrowed—if we except the careful Thucydidês—from a subsequent age; and the Athenian hegemony has been treated as a mere commencement of the Athenian empire: credit has been given to Athens for a long-sighted ambition, aiming from the Persian war downwards at results which perhaps Themistoklês[577] may have partially divined, but which only time and successive accidents opened even to distant view. But such systematic anticipation of subsequent results is fatal to any correct understanding, either of the real agents or of the real period; both of which are to be explained from the circumstances preceding and actually present, with some help, though cautious and sparing, from our acquaintance with that which was then an unknown future. When Aristeidês and Kimon dismissed the Lacedæmonian admiral Dorkis, and drove Pausanias away from Byzantium on his second coming out, they had to deal with the problem immediately before them; they had to complete the defeat of the Persian power, still formidable,—and to create and organize a confederacy as yet only inchoate. This was quite enough to occupy their attention, without ascribing to them distant views of Athenian maritime empire.
In that brief sketch of incidents preceding the Peloponnesian war, which Thucydidês introduces as “the throwing off of his narrative,”[578] he neither gives, nor professes to give, a complete enumeration of all which actually occurred. During the interval between the first desertion of the Asiatic allies from Pausanias to Athens, in 477 B. C.,—and the revolt of Naxos in 466 B. C.,—he recites three incidents only: first, the siege and capture of Eion, on the Strymon, with its Persian garrison,—next, the capture of Skyros, and appropriation of the island to Athenian kleruchs, or out-citizens,—thirdly, the war with Karystus in Eubœa, and reduction of the place by capitulation. It has been too much the practice to reason as if these three events were the full history of ten or eleven years. Considering what Thucydidês states respecting the darkness of this period, we might perhaps suspect that they were all which he could learn about it on good authority: and they are all, in truth, events having a near and special bearing on the subsequent history of Athens herself,—for Eion was the first stepping-stone to the important settlement of Amphipolis, and Skyros in the time of Thucydidês was the property of outlying Athenian citizens, or kleruchs. Still, we are left in almost entire ignorance of the proceedings of Athens, as conducting the newly-established confederate force: for it is certain that the first ten years of the Athenian hegemony must have been years of most active warfare against the Persians. One positive testimony to this effect has been accidentally preserved to us by Herodotus, who mentions, that “before the invasion of Xerxes, there were Persian commanders and garrisons everywhere in Thrace and the Hellespont,[579] all of whom were conquered by the Greeks after that invasion, with the single exception of Maskamês, governor of Doriskus, who could never be taken, though many different Grecian attempts were made upon the fortress. Of those who were captured by the Greeks, not one made any defence sufficient to attract the admiration of Xerxes, except Bogês, governor of Eion.” Bogês, after bravely defending himself, and refusing offers of capitulation, found his provisions exhausted, and farther resistance impracticable. He then kindled a vast funeral pile,—slew his wives, children, concubines, and family, and cast them into it,—threw his precious effects over the wall into the Strymon,—and lastly, precipitated himself into the flames.[580] His brave despair was the theme of warm encomium among the Persians, and his relatives in Persia were liberally rewarded by Xerxes. This capture of Eion, effected by Kimon, has been mentioned, as already stated, by Thucydidês; but Herodotus here gives us to understand that it was only one of a string of enterprises, all unnoticed by Thucydidês, against the Persians. Nay, it would seem from his language, that Maskamês maintained himself in Doriskus during the whole reign of Xerxes, and perhaps longer, repelling successive Grecian assaults.
The valuable indication here cited from Herodotus would be of itself a sufficient proof that the first years of the Athenian hegemony were full of busy and successful hostility against the Persians. And in truth this is what we should expect: the battles of Salamis, Platæa, and Mykalê, drove the Persians out of Greece, and overpowered their main armaments, but did not remove them at once from all the various posts which they occupied throughout the Ægean and Thrace. Without doubt, the Athenians had to clear the coasts and the islands of a great number of different Persian detachments: an operation never short nor easy, with the then imperfect means of siege, as we may see by the cases of Sestus and Eion; nor, indeed, always practicable, as the case of Doriskus teaches us. The fear of these Persians, yet remaining in the neighborhood,[581] and even the chance of a renewed Persian invading armament, formed one pressing motive for Grecian cities to join the new confederacy: while the expulsion of the enemy added to it those places which he had occupied. It was by these years of active operations at sea against the common enemy, that the Athenians first established[582] that constant, systematic, and laborious training, among their own ships’ crews, which transmitted itself with continual improvements down to the Peloponnesian war: it was by these, combined with the present fear, that they were enabled to organize the largest and most efficient confederacy ever known among Greeks,—to bring together deliberative deputies,—to plant their own ascendency as enforcers of the collective resolutions,—and to raise a prodigious tax from universal contribution. Lastly, it was by these same operations, prosecuted so successfully as to remove present alarm, that they at length fatigued the more lukewarm and passive members of the confederacy, and created in them a wish either to commute personal service for pecuniary contribution, or to escape from the obligation of service in any way. The Athenian nautical training would never have been acquired,—the confederacy would never have become a working reality,—the fatigue and discontents among its members would never have arisen,—unless there had been a real fear of the Persians, and a pressing necessity for vigorous and organized operations against them, during the ten years between 477 and 466 B. C.
As to the ten years from 477-466 B. C., there has been a tendency almost unconscious to assume that the particular incidents mentioned by Thucydidês about Eion, Skyros, Karystus, and Naxos, constitute the sum total of events. To contradict this assumption, I have suggested proof sufficient, though indirect, that they are only part of the stock of a very busy period,—the remaining details of which, indicated in outline by the large general language of Thucydidês, we are condemned not to know. Nor are we admitted to be present at the synod of Delos, which during all this time continued its periodical meetings: though it would have been highly interesting to trace the steps whereby an institution which at first promised to protect not less the separate rights of the members than the security of the whole, so lamentably failed in its object. We must recollect that this confederacy, formed for objects common to all, limited to a certain extent the autonomy of each member; both conferring definite rights and imposing definite obligations. Solemnly sworn to by all, and by Aristeidês on behalf of Athens, it was intended to bind the members in perpetuity,—marked even in the form of the oath, which was performed by casting heavy lumps of iron into the sea never again to be seen.[583] As this confederacy was thus both perpetual and peremptory, binding each member to the rest, and not allowing either retirement or evasion, so it was essential that it should be sustained by some determining authority and enforcing sanction. The determining authority was provided by the synod at Delos: the enforcing sanction was exercised by Athens as president. And there is every reason to presume that Athens, for a long time, performed this duty in a legitimate and honorable manner, acting in execution of the resolves of the synod, or at least in full harmony with its general purposes. She exacted from every member the regulated quota of men or money, employing coercion against recusants, and visiting neglect of military duty with penalties. In all these requirements she only discharged her appropriate functions as chosen leader of the confederacy, and there can be no reasonable doubt that the general synod went cordially along with her[584] in strictness of dealing towards those defaulters who obtained protection without bearing their share of the burden.