Both in the internal constitution, indeed,—of which more presently,—and in the external policy of Athens, the dismissal of these soldiers was pregnant with results. The Athenians immediately passed a formal resolution to renounce the alliance between themselves and Lacedæmon against the Persians. They did more: they looked out for land enemies of Lacedæmon, with whom to ally themselves. Of these by far the first, both in Hellenic rank and in real power, was Argos. That city, neutral during the Persian invasion, had now recovered from the effects of the destructive defeat suffered about thirty years before from the Spartan king Kleomenês: the sons of the ancient citizens had grown to manhood, and the temporary predominance of the Periœki, acquired in consequence of the ruinous loss of citizens in that defeat, had been again put down. In the neighborhood of Argos, and dependent upon it, were situated Mykenæ, Tiryns, and Midea,—small in power and importance, but rich in mythical renown. Disdaining the inglorious example of Argos, at the period of danger, these towns had furnished contingents both to Thermopylæ and Platæa, which their powerful neighbor had been unable either to prevent at the time, or to avenge afterwards, from fear of the intervention of Lacedæmon. But so soon as the latter was seen to be endangered and occupied at home, with a formidable Messenian revolt, the Argeians availed themselves of the opportunity to attack not only Mykenæ and Tiryns, but also Orneæ, Midea, and other semi-dependent towns around them. Several of these were reduced; and the inhabitants robbed of their autonomy, were incorporated with the domain of Argos: but the Mykenians, partly from the superior gallantry of their resistance, partly from jealousy of their mythical renown, were either sold as slaves or driven into banishment.[618] Through these victories Argos was now more powerful than ever, and the propositions of alliance made to her by Athens, while strengthening both the two against Lacedæmon, opened to her a new chance of recovering her lost headship in Peloponnesus. The Thessalians became members of this new alliance, which was a defensive alliance against Lacedæmon: and hopes were doubtless entertained of drawing in some of the habitual allies of the latter.
The new character which Athens had thus assumed, as a competitor for landed alliances, not less than for maritime ascendency, came opportunely for the protection of the neighboring town of Megara. It appears that Corinth, perhaps instigated, like Argos, by the helplessness of the Lacedæmonians, had been making border encroachments on the one side upon Kleônæ, on the other side upon Megara:[619] on which ground the latter, probably despairing of protection from Lacedæmon, renounced the Lacedæmonian connection, and obtained permission to enrol herself as an ally of Athens.[620] This was an acquisition of signal value to the Athenians, since it both opened to them the whole range of territory across the outer isthmus of Corinth to the interior of the Krissæan gulf, on which the Megarian port of Pegæ was situated, and placed them in possession of the passes of Mount Geraneia, so that they could arrest the march of a Peloponnesian army over the isthmus, and protect Attica from invasion. It was, moreover, of great importance in its effects on Grecian politics: for it was counted as a wrong by Lacedæmon, gave deadly offence to the Corinthians, and lighted up the flames of war between them and Athens; their allies, the Epidaurians and Æginetans, taking their part. Though Athens had not yet been guilty of unjust encroachment against any Peloponnesian state, her ambition and energy had inspired universal awe; while the maritime states in the neighborhood, such as Corinth, Epidaurus, and Ægina, saw these terror-striking qualities threatening them at their own doors, through her alliance with Argos and Megara. Moreover, it is probable that the ancient feud between the Athenians and Æginetans, though dormant since a little before the Persian invasion, had never been appeased or forgotten: so that the Æginetans, dwelling within sight of Peiræus, were at once best able to appreciate, and most likely to dread, the enormous maritime power now possessed by Athens. Periklês was wont to call Ægina the eyesore of Peiræus:[621] but we may be very sure that Peiræus, grown into a vast fortified port, within the existing generation, was in a much stronger degree the eyesore of Ægina.
The Athenians were at this time actively engaged in prosecuting the war against Persia, having a fleet of no less than two hundred sail, equipped by or from the confederacy collectively, now serving in Cyprus and on the Phenician coast. Moreover, the revolt of the Egyptians under Inaros, about 460 B. C., opened to them new means of action against the Great King; and their fleet, by invitation of the revolters, sailed up the Nile to Memphis, where there seemed at first a good prospect of throwing off the Persian dominion. Yet in spite of so great an abstraction from their disposable force, their military operations near home were conducted with unabated vigor: and the inscription which remains,—a commemoration of their citizens of the Erechtheid tribe, who were slain in one and the same year, in Cyprus, Egypt, Phenicia, the Halieis, Ægina, and Megara,—brings forcibly before us that energy which astonished and even alarmed their contemporaries. Their first proceedings at Megara were of a nature altogether novel, in the existing condition of Greece. It was necessary for the Athenians to protect their new ally against the superiority of Peloponnesian land-force, and to insure a constant communication with it by sea; but the city, like most of the ancient Hellenic towns, was situated on a hill at some distance from the sea, separated from its port Nisæa by a space of nearly one mile. One of the earliest proceedings of the Athenians was to build two lines of wall, near and parallel to each other, connecting the city with Nisæa, so that the two thus formed one continuous fortress, wherein a standing Athenian garrison was maintained, with the constant means of succor from Athens in case of need. These “long walls,” though afterwards copied in other places, and on a larger scale, were at that juncture an ingenious invention, for the purpose of extending the maritime arm of Athens to an inland city.
The first operations of Corinth, however, were not directed against Megara. The Athenians having undertaken a landing in the territory of the Halieis, the population of the southern Argolic peninsula, bordering on Trœzen and Hermionê, were defeated on land by the Corinthian and Epidaurian forces: possibly it may have been in this expedition that they acquired possession of Trœzen, which we find afterwards in their dependence, without knowing when it became so. But in a sea-fight which took place off the island of Kekryphaleia, between Ægina and the Argolic peninsula, the Athenians gained the victory. After this victory and defeat,—neither of them apparently very decisive,—the Æginetans began to take a more energetic part in the war, and brought out their full naval force, together with that of their allies,—Corinthians, Epidaurians, and other Peloponnesians: while Athens equipped a fleet of corresponding magnitude, summoning her allies also; though we do not know the actual numbers on either side. In the great naval battle which ensued off the island of Ægina, the superiority of the new nautical tactics, acquired by twenty years’ practice of the Athenians since the Persian war,—over the old Hellenic ships and seamen, as shown in those states where, at the time of the battle of Marathon, the maritime strength of Greece had resided,—was demonstrated by a victory most complete and decisive. The Peloponnesian and Dorian seamen had as yet had no experience of the improved seacraft of Athens, and when we find how much they were disconcerted with it, even twenty-eight years afterwards, at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war, we shall not wonder at its destructive effect upon them in this early battle. The maritime power of Ægina was irrecoverably ruined: the Athenians captured seventy ships of war, landed a large force upon the island, and commenced the siege of the city by land as well as by sea.[622]
If the Lacedæmonians had not been occupied at home by the blockade of Ithômê, they would have been probably induced to invade Attica as a diversion to the Æginetans; especially as the Persian Megabazus came to Sparta at this time on the part of Artaxerxes to prevail upon them to do so, in order that the Athenians might be constrained to retire from Egypt: this Persian brought with him a large sum of money, but was nevertheless obliged to return without effecting his mission.[623] The Corinthians and Epidaurians, however, while they carried to Ægina a reinforcement of three hundred hoplites, did their best to aid her farther by an attack upon Megara; which place, it was supposed, the Athenians could not possibly relieve without withdrawing their forces from Ægina, inasmuch as so many of their men were at the same time serving in Egypt. But the Athenians showed themselves equal to all these three exigencies at one and the same time,—to the great disappointment of their enemies. Myrônidês marched from Athens to Megara at the head of the citizens in the two extremes of military age, old and young; these being the only troops at home. He fought the Corinthians near the town, gaining a slight, but debatable advantage, which he commemorated by a trophy, as soon as the Corinthians had returned home. But the latter when they arrived at home, were so much reproached by their own old citizens, for not having vanquished the refuse of the Athenian military force,[624] that they returned back at the end of twelve days and erected a trophy on their side, laying claim to a victory in the past battle. The Athenians, marching out of Megara, attacked them a second time, and gained on this occasion a decisive victory. The defeated Corinthians were still more unfortunate in their retreat; for a body of them, missing their road, became entangled in a space of private ground, inclosed on every side by a deep ditch, and having only one narrow entrance. Myrônidês, detecting this fatal mistake, planted his hoplites at the entrance to prevent their escape, and then surrounded the enclosure with his light-armed troops, who, with their missile weapons, slew all the Corinthian hoplites, without possibility either of flight or resistance. The bulk of the Corinthian army effected their retreat, but the destruction of this detachment was a sad blow to the city.[625]
Splendid as the success of the Athenians had been during this year, both on land and at sea, it was easy for them to foresee that the power of their enemies would presently be augmented by the Lacedæmonians taking the field. Partly on this account,—partly also from the more energetic phase of democracy, and the long-sighted views of Periklês, which were now becoming ascendent in the city,—the Athenians began the stupendous undertaking of connecting Athens with the sea by means of long walls. The idea of this measure had doubtless been first suggested by the recent erection of long walls, though for so much smaller a distance, between Megara and Nisæa: for without such an intermediate stepping-stone, the idea of a wall forty stadia long (equal to four and a half miles) to join Athens with Peiræus, and another wall of thirty-five stadia (equal to about four miles) to join it with Phalêrum, would have appeared extravagant even to the sanguine temper of Athenians,—as it certainly would have seemed a few years earlier to Themistoklês himself. Coming as an immediate sequel of great recent victories, and while Ægina, the great Dorian naval power, was prostrate and under blockade, it excited the utmost alarm among the Peloponnesians,—being regarded as the second great stride,[626] at once conspicuous and of lasting effect, in Athenian ambition, next to the fortification of Peiræus. But besides this feeling in the bosom of enemies, the measure was also interwoven with the formidable contention of political parties then going on at Athens. Kimon had been recently ostracized; and the democratical movement pressed by Periklês and Ephialtês—of which more presently—was in its full tide of success, yet not without a violent and unprincipled opposition on the part of those who supported the existing constitution. Now, the long walls formed a part of the foreign policy of Periklês, continuing on a gigantic scale the plans of Themistoklês when he first schemed the Peiræus. They were framed to render Athens capable of carrying on war against any superiority of landed attack, and of bidding defiance to the united force of Peloponnesus. But though thus calculated for contingencies which a long-sighted man might see gathering in the distance, the new walls were, almost on the same grounds, obnoxious to a considerable number of Athenians: to the party recently headed by Kimon, who were attached to the Lacedæmonian connection, and desired above all things to maintain peace at home, reserving the energies of the state for anti-Persian enterprise: to many landed proprietors in Attica, whom they seemed to threaten with approaching invasion and destruction of their territorial possessions: to the rich men and aristocrats of Athens, averse to a still closer contact and amalgamation with the maritime multitude in Peiræus: lastly, perhaps, to a certain vein of old Attic feeling, which might look upon the junction of Athens with the separate demes of Peiræus and Phalêrum as effacing the special associations connected with the holy rock of Athênê. When, to all these grounds of opposition, we add, the expense and trouble of the undertaking itself, the interference with private property, the peculiar violence of party which happened then to be raging, and the absence of a large proportion of military citizens in Egypt,—we shall hardly be surprised to find that the projected long walls brought on a risk of the most serious character both for Athens and her democracy. If any farther proof were wanting of the vast importance of these long walls, in the eyes both of friends and of enemies, we might find it in the fact, that their destruction was the prominent mark of Athenian humiliation after the battle of Ægos Potamos, and their restoration the immediate boon of Pharnabazus and Konon after the victory of Knidus.
Under the influence of the alarm now spread by the proceedings of Athens, the Lacedæmonians were prevailed upon to undertake an expedition out of Peloponnesus, although the Helots in Ithômê were not yet reduced to surrender. Their force consisted of fifteen hundred troops of their own, and ten thousand of their various allies, under the regent Nikomêdês. The ostensible motive, or the pretence, for this march, was the protection of the little territory of Doris against the Phocians, who had recently invaded it and taken one of its three towns. The mere approach of so large a force immediately compelled the Phocians to relinquish their conquest, but it was soon seen that this was only a small part of the objects of Sparta, and that her main purposes, under instigation of the Corinthians, were directed against the aggrandizement of Athens. It could not escape the penetration of Corinth, that the Athenians might presently either enlist or constrain the towns of Bœotia into their alliance, as they had recently acquired Megara, in addition to their previous ally, Platæa: for the Bœotian federation was at this time much disorganized, and Thebes, its chief, had never recovered her ascendency since the discredit of her support lent to the Persian invasion. To strengthen Thebes, and to render her ascendency effective over the Bœotian cities, was the best way of providing a neighbor at once powerful and hostile to the Athenians, so as to prevent their farther aggrandizement by land: it was the same policy as Epaminondas pursued eighty years afterwards in organizing Arcadia and Messênê against Sparta. Accordingly, the Peloponnesian force was now employed partly in enlarging and strengthening the fortifications of Thebes herself, partly in constraining the other Bœotian cities into effective obedience to her supremacy: probably by placing their governments in the hands of citizens of known oligarchical politics,[627] and perhaps banishing suspected opponents. To this scheme the Thebans lent themselves with earnestness; promising to keep down for the future their border neighbors, so as to spare the necessity of armies coming from Sparta.[628]
But there was also a farther design, yet more important, in contemplation by the Spartans and Corinthians. The oligarchical opposition at Athens were so bitterly hostile to the Long Walls, to Periklês, and to the democratical movement, that several of them opened a secret negotiation with the Peloponnesian leaders, inviting them into Attica, and entreating their aid in an internal rising for the purpose not only of putting a stop to the Long Walls, but also of subverting the democracy. And the Peloponnesian army, while prosecuting its operations in Bœotia, waited in hopes of seeing the Athenian malcontents in arms, encamping at Tanagra, on the very borders of Attica, for the purpose of immediate coöperation with them. The juncture was undoubtedly one of much hazard for Athens, especially as the ostracized Kimon and his remaining friends in the city were suspected of being implicated in the conspiracy. But the Athenian leaders, aware of the Lacedæmonian operations in Bœotia, knew also what was meant by the presence of the army on their immediate borders, and took decisive measures to avert the danger. Having obtained a reinforcement of one thousand Argeians and some Thessalian horse, they marched out to Tanagra, with the full Athenian force then at home; which must, of course, have consisted chiefly of the old and the young, the same who had fought under Myrônidês at Megara; for the blockade of Ægina was still going on. Nor was it possible for the Lacedæmonian army to return into Peloponnesus without fighting; for the Athenians, masters of the Megarid, were in possession of the difficult highlands of Geraneia, the road of march along the isthmus; while the Athenian fleet, by means of the harbor of Pegæ, was prepared to intercept them, if they tried to come by sea across the Krissæan gulf, by which way it would appear that they had come out. Near Tanagra, a bloody battle took place between the two armies, wherein the Lacedæmonians were victorious, chiefly from the desertion of the Thessalian horse, who passed over to them in the very heat of the engagement.[629] But though the advantage was on their side, it was not sufficiently decisive to favor the contemplated rising in Attica: nor did the Peloponnesians gain anything by it, except an undisturbed retreat over the highlands of Geraneia, after having partially ravaged the Megarid.
Though the battle of Tanagra was a defeat, yet there were circumstances connected with it which rendered its effects highly beneficial to Athens. The ostracized Kimon presented himself on the field as soon as the army had passed over the boundaries of Attica, requesting to be allowed to occupy his station as an hoplite and to fight in the ranks of his tribe,—the Œnêis. But such was the belief, entertained by the members of the senate and by his political enemies present, that he was an accomplice in the conspiracy known to be on foot, that permission was refused and he was forced to retire. In departing, he conjured his personal friends, Euthippus, of the deme Anaphlystus, and others, to behave in such a manner as might wipe away the stain resting upon his fidelity, and in part also upon theirs. His friends retained his panoply, and assigned to it the station in the ranks which he would himself have occupied: they then entered the engagement with desperate resolution, and one hundred of them fell side by side in their ranks. Periklês, on his part, who was present among the hoplites of his own tribe, the Akamantis, aware of this application and repulse of Kimon, thought it incumbent upon him to display not merely his ordinary personal courage, but an unusual recklessness of life and safety, though it happened that he escaped unwounded. All these incidents brought about a generous sympathy and spirit of compromise among the contending parties at Athens, while the unshaken patriotism of Kimon and his friends discountenanced and disarmed those conspirators who had entered into correspondence with the enemy, at the same time that it roused a repentant admiration towards the ostracized leader himself. Such was the happy working of this new sentiment that a decree was shortly proposed and carried,—proposed too, by Periklês himself,—to abridge the ten years of Kimon’s ostracism, and permit his immediate return.[630] We may recollect that, under circumstances partly analogous, Themistoklês had himself proposed the restoration of his rival Aristeidês from ostracism, a little before the battle of Salamis:[631] and in both cases, the suspension of enmity between the two leaders was partly the sign, partly also the auxiliary cause, of reconciliation and renewed fraternity among the general body of citizens. It was a moment analogous to that salutary impulse of compromise, and harmony of parties, which followed the extinction of the oligarchy of Four Hundred, forty-six years afterwards, and on which Thucydidês dwells emphatically as the salvation of Athens in her distress,—a moment rare in free communities generally, not less than among the jealous competitors for political ascendency at Athens.[632]
So powerful was this burst of fresh patriotism and unanimity after the battle of Tanagra, which produced the recall of Kimon, and appears to have overlaid the preëxisting conspiracy, that the Athenians were quickly in a condition to wipe off the stain of their defeat. It was on the sixty-second day after the battle that they undertook an aggressive march under Myrônidês into Bœotia: the extreme precision of this date,—being the single case throughout the summary of events between the Persian and Peloponnesian wars, wherein Thucydidês is thus precise, marks how strong an impression it made upon the memory of the Athenians. At the battle of Œnophyta, engaged against the aggregate Theban and Bœotian forces,—or, if Diodorus is to be trusted, in two battles, of which that of Œnophyta was the last, Myrônidês was completely victorious. The Athenians became masters of Thebes as well as of the remaining Bœotian towns; reversing all the arrangements recently made by Sparta,— establishing democratical governments,—and forcing the aristocratical leaders, favorable to Theban ascendency and Lacedæmonian connection, to become exiles. Nor was it only Bœotia which the Athenians thus acquired: Phocis and Lokris were both successively added to the list of their dependent allies,—the former being in the main friendly to Athens and not disinclined to the change, while the latter were so decidedly hostile that one hundred of their chiefs were detained and sent to Athens as hostages. The Athenians thus extended their influence,—maintained through internal party-management, backed by the dread of interference from without in case of need,—from the borders of the Corinthian territory, including both Megara and Pêgæ, to the strait of Thermopylæ.[633]