Thasos was a member of the confederacy of Delos; but her quarrel with Athens seems to have arisen out of causes quite distinct from confederate relations. It has been already stated that the Athenians had within the last few years expelled the Persians from the important post of Eion, on the Strymon, the most convenient post for the neighboring region of Thrace, which was not less distinguished for its fertility than for its mining wealth. In the occupation of this post, the Athenians had had time to become acquainted with the productive character of the adjoining region, chiefly occupied by the Edonian Thracians; and it is extremely probable that many private settlers arrived from Athens, with the view of procuring grants or making their fortunes by partnership with powerful Thracians in working the gold-mines round Mount Pangæus. In so doing, they speedily found themselves in collision with the Greeks of the opposite island of Mount Thasos, who possessed a considerable strip of land, with various dependent towns on the continent of Thrace, and derived a large revenue from the mines of Skaptê Hylê, as well as from others in the neighborhood.[597] The condition of Thasos at this time, about 465 B. C., indicates to us the progress which the Grecian states in the Ægean had made since their liberation from Persia. It had been deprived both of its fortifications and of its maritime force, by order of Darius, about 491 B. C., and must have remained in this condition until after the repulse of Xerxes; but we now find it well-fortified and possessing a powerful maritime force.
In what precise manner the quarrel between the Thasians and the Athenians of Eion manifested itself, respecting the trade and the mines in Thrace, we are not informed; but it reached such a height that the Athenians were induced to send a powerful armament against the island, under the command of Kimon.[598] Having vanquished the Thasian force at sea, they disembarked, gained various battles, and blocked up the city by land as well as by sea. And at the same time they undertook—what seems to have been part and parcel of the same scheme—the establishment of a larger and more powerful colony on Thracian ground not far from Eion. On the Strymon, about three miles higher up than Eion, near the spot where the river narrows itself again out of a broad expanse of the nature of a lake, was situated the Edonian town or settlement called Ennea Hodoi, (Nine Ways), a little above the bridge, which here served as an important communication for all the people of the interior. Both Histiæus and Aristagoras, the two Milesian despots, had been tempted by the advantages of this place to commence a settlement there: both of them had failed, and a third failure on a still grander scale was now about to be added. The Athenians sent thither a large body of colonists, ten thousand in number, partly from their own citizens, partly collected from their allies: and the temptations of the site probably rendered volunteers numerous. As far as Ennea Hodoi was concerned, they were successful in conquering it and driving away the Edonian possessors: but on trying to extend themselves farther to the eastward, to a spot called Drabêskus, convenient for the mining region, they encountered a more formidable resistance from a powerful alliance of Thracian tribes, who had come to the aid of the Edonians in decisive hostility to the new colony,—probably not without instigation from the inhabitants of Thasos. All or most of the ten thousand colonists were slain in this warfare, and the new colony was for the time completely abandoned: we shall find it resumed hereafter.[599]
Disappointed as the Athenians were in this enterprise, they did not abandon the blockade of Thasos, which held out more than two years, and only surrendered in the third year. Its fortifications were razed; its ships of war, thirty-three in number, taken away:[600] its possessions and mining establishments on the opposite continent relinquished: moreover, an immediate contribution in money was demanded from the inhabitants, over and above the annual payment assessed upon them for the future. The subjugation of this powerful island was another step in the growing dominion of Athens over her confederates.
The year before the Thasians surrendered, however, they had taken a step which deserves particular notice, as indicating the newly-gathering clouds in the Grecian political horizon. They had made secret application to the Lacedæmonians for aid, entreating them to draw off the attention of Athens by invading Attica; and the Lacedæmonians, without the knowledge of Athens, having actually engaged to comply with this request, were only prevented from performing their promise by a grave and terrible misfortune at home.[601] Though accidentally unperformed, however, this hostile promise is a most significant event: it marks the growing fear and hatred on the part of Sparta and the Peloponnesians towards Athens, merely on general grounds of the magnitude of her power, and without any special provocation. Nay, not only had Athens given no provocation, but she was still actually included as a member of the Lacedæmonian alliance, and we shall find her presently both appealed to and acting as such. We shall hear so much of Athens, and that too with truth, as pushing and aggressive,—and of Sparta as homekeeping and defensive,—that the incident just mentioned becomes important to remark. The first intent of unprovoked and even treacherous hostility—the germ of the future Peloponnesian war—is conceived and reduced to an engagement by Sparta.
We are told by Plutarch, that the Athenians, after the surrender of Thasos and the liberation of the armament, had expected from Kimon some farther conquests in Macedonia,—and even that he had actually entered upon that project with such promise of success, that its farther consummation was certain as well as easy. Having under these circumstances relinquished it and returned to Athens, he was accused by Periklês and others of having been bought off by bribes from the Macedonian king Alexander; but was acquitted after a public trial.[602]
During the period which had elapsed between the first formation of the confederacy of Delos and the capture of Thasos (about thirteen or fourteen years, B. C. 477-463), the Athenians seem to have been occupied almost entirely in their maritime operations, chiefly against the Persians,—having been free from embarrassments immediately around Attica. But this freedom was not destined to last much longer; and during the ensuing ten years, their foreign relations near home become both active and complicated; while their strength expands so wonderfully, that they are found competent at once to obligations on both sides of the Ægean sea, the distant as well as the near.
Of the incidents which had taken place in Central Greece during the twelve or fifteen years immediately succeeding the battle of Platæa, we have scarcely any information. The feelings of the time, between those Greeks who had supported and those who had resisted the Persian invader, must have remained unfriendly even after the war was at an end, and the mere occupation of the Persian numerous host must have inflicted severe damage both upon Thessaly and Bœotia. At the meeting of the Amphiktyonic synod which succeeded the expulsion of the invaders, a reward was proclaimed for the life of the Melian Ephialtês, who had betrayed to Xerxes the mountain-path over Œta, and thus caused the ruin of Leonidas at Thermopylæ: moreover, if we may trust Plutarch, it was even proposed by Lacedæmon that all the medizing Greeks should be expelled from the synod,[603]—a proposition which the more long-sighted views of Themistoklês successfully resisted. Even the stronger measure, of razing the fortifications of all the extra-Peloponnesian cities, from fear that they might be used to aid some future invasion, had suggested itself to the Lacedæmonians,—as we see from their language on the occasion of rebuilding the walls of Athens; and in regard to Bœotia, it appears that the headship of Thebes as well as the coherence of the federation was for the time almost suspended. The destroyed towns of Platæa and Thespiæ were restored, and the latter in part repeopled,[604] under Athenian influence; and the general sentiment of Peloponnesus as well as of Athens would have sustained these towns against Thebes, if the latter had tried at that time to enforce her supremacy over them in the name of “ancient Bœotian right and usage.”[605] The Theban government was then in discredit for its previous medism,—even in the eyes of Thebans themselves;[606] while the party opposed to Thebes in the other towns was so powerful, that many of them would probably have been severed from the federation to become allies of Athens like Platæa, if the interference of Lacedæmon had not arrested such a tendency. The latter was in every other part of Greece an enemy to organized aggregation of cities, either equal or unequal, and was constantly bent on keeping the little autonomous communities separate;[607] whence she sometimes became by accident the protector of the weaker cities against compulsory alliance imposed upon them by the stronger: the interest of her own ascendency was in this respect analogous to that of the Persians when they dictated the peace of Antalkidas,—of the Romans in administering their extensive conquests,—and of the kings of medieval Europe in breaking the authority of the barons over their vassals. But though such was the policy of Sparta elsewhere, her fear of Athens, which grew up during the ensuing twenty years, made her act differently in regard to Bœotia: she had no other means of maintaining that country as her own ally and as the enemy of Athens, except by organizing the federation effectively, and strengthening the authority of Thebes. It is to this revolution in Spartan politics that Thebes owed the recovery of her ascendency,[608]—a revolution so conspicuously marked, that the Spartans even aided in enlarging her circuit and improving her fortifications: nor was it without difficulty that she maintained this position, even when recovered, against the dangerous neighborhood of Athens, a circumstance which made her not only a vehement partisan of Sparta, but even more furiously anti-Athenian than Sparta, down to the close of the Peloponnesian war.
The revolution, just noticed, in Spartan politics towards Bœotia, did not manifest itself until about twenty years after the commencement of the Athenian maritime confederacy. During the course of those twenty years, we know that Sparta had had more than one battle to sustain in Arcadia, against the towns and villages of that country, in which she came forth victorious: but we have no particulars respecting these incidents. We also know that a few years after the Persian invasion, the inhabitants of Elis concentrated themselves from many dispersed townships into the one main city of Elis:[609] and it seems probable that Lepreum in Triphylia, and one or two of the towns of Achaia, were either formed or enlarged by a similar process near about the same time.[610] Such aggregation of towns out of preëxisting separate villages was not conformable to the views, nor favorable to the ascendency, of Lacedæmon: but there can be little doubt that her foreign policy, after the Persian invasion, was both embarrassed and discredited by the misconduct of her two contemporary kings, Pausanias, who, though only regent, was practically equivalent to a king, and Leotychidês,—not to mention the rapid development of Athens and Peiræus. But in the year B. C. 464, the year preceding the surrender of Thasos to the Athenian armament, a misfortune of yet more terrific moment befell Sparta. A violent earthquake took place in the immediate neighborhood of Sparta itself, destroying a large portion of the town, and a vast number of lives, many of them Spartan citizens. It was the judgment of the earth-shaking god Poseidon, according to the view of the Lacedæmonians themselves, for a recent violation of his sanctuary at Tænarus, from whence certain suppliant Helots had been dragged away not long before for punishment,[611]—not improbably some of those Helots whom Pausanias had instigated to revolt. The sentiment of the Helots, at all times one of enmity towards their masters, appears at this moment to have been unusually inflammable: so that an earthquake at Sparta, especially an earthquake construed as divine vengeance for Helot blood recently spilt, was sufficient to rouse many of them at once into revolt, together with some even of the Periœki. The insurgents took arms and marched directly upon Sparta, which they were on the point of mastering during the first moments of consternation, had not the bravery and presence of mind of the young king Archidamus reanimated the surviving citizens and repelled the attack. But though repelled, the insurgents were not subdued: for some time they maintained the field against the Spartan force, and sometimes with considerable advantage, since Aeimnêstus, the warrior by whose hand Mardonius had fallen at Platæa, was defeated and slain with three hundred followers in the plain of Stenyklêrus, overpowered by superior numbers.[612] When at length defeated, they occupied and fortified the memorable hill of Ithômê, the ancient citadel of their Messenian forefathers. Here they made a long and obstinate defence, supporting themselves doubtless by incursions throughout Laconia: nor was defence difficult, seeing that the Lacedæmonians were at that time confessedly incapable of assailing even the most imperfect species of fortification. After the siege had lasted some two or three years, without any prospect of success, the Lacedæmonians, beginning to despair of their own sufficiency for the undertaking, invoked the aid of their various allies, among whom we find specified the Æginetans, the Athenians, and the Platæans.[613] The Athenian troops are said to have consisted of four thousand men, under the command of Kimon; Athens being still included in the list of Lacedæmonian allies.
So imperfect were the means of attacking walls at that day, even for the most intelligent Greeks, that this increased force made no immediate impression on the fortified hill of Ithômê. And when the Lacedæmonians saw that their Athenian allies were not more successful than they had been themselves, they soon passed from surprise into doubt, mistrust, and apprehension. The troops had given no ground for such a feeling, and Kimon, their general, was notorious for his attachment to Sparta; yet the Lacedæmonians could not help calling to mind the ever-wakeful energy and ambition of these Ionic strangers, whom they had introduced into the interior of Laconia, together with their own promise—though doubtless a secret promise—to invade Attica, not long before, for the benefit of the Thasians. They even began to fear that the Athenians might turn against them, and listen to solicitations for espousing the cause of the besieged. Under the influence of such apprehensions, they dismissed the Athenian contingent forthwith, on pretence of having no farther occasion for them; while all the other allies were retained, and the siege or blockade went on as before.[614]
This dismissal, ungracious in the extreme, and probably rendered even more offensive by the habitual roughness of Spartan dealing, excited the strongest exasperation both among the Athenian soldiers and the Athenian people,—an exasperation heightened by circumstances immediately preceding. For the resolution to send auxiliaries into Laconia, when the Lacedæmonians first applied for them, had not been taken without considerable debate at Athens: the party of Periklês and Ephialtês, habitually in opposition to Kimon, and partisans of the forward democratical movement, had strongly discountenanced it, and conjured their countrymen not to assist in renovating and strengthening their most formidable rival. Perhaps the previous engagement of the Lacedæmonians to invade Attica on behalf of the Thasians may have become known to them, though not so formally as to exclude denial; and even supposing this engagement to have remained unknown at that time to every one, there were not wanting other grounds to render the policy of refusal plausible. But Kimon, with an earnestness which even the philo-Laconian Kritias afterwards characterized as a sacrifice of the grandeur of Athens to the advantage of Lacedæmon,[615] employed all his credit and influence in seconding the application. The maintenance of alliance with Sparta on equal footing,—peace among the great powers of Greece, and common war against Persia,—together with the prevention of all farther democratical changes in Athens,—were the leading points of his political creed. As yet, both his personal and political ascendency was predominant over his opponents: as yet, there was no manifest conflict, which had only just begun to show itself in the case of Thasos, between the maritime power of Athens, and the union of land-force under Sparta: and Kimon could still treat both of these phenomena as coexisting necessities of Hellenic well-being. Though no way distinguished as a speaker, he carried with him the Athenian assembly by appealing to a large and generous patriotism, which forbade them to permit the humiliation of Sparta. “Consent not to see Hellas lamed of one leg, and Athens drawing without her yoke-fellow;”[616] such was his language, as we learn from his friend and companion, the Chian poet Ion: and in the lips of Kimon it proved effective. It is a speech of almost melancholy interest, since ninety years passed over before such an appeal was ever again addressed to an Athenian assembly.[617] The despatch of the auxiliaries was thus dictated by a generous sentiment, to the disregard of what might seem political prudence: and we may imagine the violent reaction which took place in Athenian feeling, when the Lacedæmonians repaid them by singling out their troops from all the other allies as objects of insulting suspicion,—we may imagine the triumph of Periklês and Ephialtês, who had opposed the mission,—and the vast loss of influence to Kimon, who had brought it about,—when Athens received again into her public assemblies the hoplites sent back from Ithômê.