After the conclusion of the war with Ægina, and the consequences of the battle of Œnophyta, the position of Athens became altered more and more. She acquired a large catalogue of new allies, partly tributary, like Ægina,—partly in the same relation as Chios, Lesbos, and Samos; that is, obliged only to a conformity of foreign policy and to military service. In this last category were Megara, the Bœotian cities, the Phocians, Lokrians, etc. All these, though allies of Athens, were strangers to Delos and the confederacy against Persia; and accordingly, that confederacy passed insensibly into a matter of history, giving place to the new conception of imperial Athens, with her extensive list of allies, partly free, partly subject. 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 of Greece, but perhaps equal to Sparta even in land-power,—possessing in her alliance Megara, Bœotia, Phocis, Lokris, together with Achæa and Trœzen, in 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 farther increase. Occupying the Megarian harbor of Pêgæ, 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 highlands of Geraneia, they could restrain any land-force from marching out of 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. Looking at the position of Greece, therefore, about 448 B. C.,—after the conclusion of the five years’ truce between the Peloponnesians and Athens, and of the so-called Kimonian peace between Persia and Athens,—a discerning Greek might well calculate upon farther aggrandizement 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 who had been engaged in actual hostility with Athens,—Corinth, Sikyon, Epidaurus, etc., as well as Sparta, the once-recognized head of Hellas, but now tacitly degraded from her preëminence, 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 recognized as legitimate,—threatened, nevertheless, still farther 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.
Formidable as the Athenian empire both really was and appeared to be, however, this wide-spread 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.[650] 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 favor 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.
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, Lokris, and Eubœa, was maintained, not by means of garrisons, but through domestic parties favorable to Athens, and a suitable form of government; just in the same way as Sparta maintained her influence over her Peloponnesian allies.[651] 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 Lokris, there was at this time a considerable aggregate body of exiles, Bœotian, Phocian, Lokrian, Eubœan, Æginetan, etc., all bitterly hostile to Athens, and ready to join in any attack upon her power. We learn farther that the democracy,[652] established at Thebes after the battle of Œnophyta, was ill-conducted and disorderly: which circumstances laid open Bœotia still farther 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 Orchomenus, Chæroneia, and some other less important places in Bœotia. The Athenian general, Tolmidês, 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 Tolmidês, 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 Periklês, 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.[653] Fatally, indeed, were his predictions justified. Though Tolmidês was successful in his first enterprise,—the recapture of Chæroneia, 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 Korôneia, by the united body of exiles and their partisans. No defeat in Grecian history was ever more complete or ruinous. Tolmidês 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.[654] Long, indeed, did the fatal issue of this action dwell in the memory of the Athenians,[655] and inspire them with an apprehension of Bœotian superiority in heavy armor on land: but if the hoplites under Tolmidês 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 Sphakteria.
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 Lokris, and to carry the flame of revolt into Eubœa. To this important island Periklês 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, Sikyon, 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 Geraneia,—Pleistoanax, 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 neighborhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain. He was a very young man, so that a Spartan of mature years, Kleandridês, had been attached to him by the ephors as adjutant and counsellor. Periklês, it is said, persuaded both the one and the other, by means of large bribes, to evacuate Attica without advancing to Athens. We may well 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: Kleandridês never came back, and Pleistoanax himself lived for a long time in sanctuary near the temple of Athênê, 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.[656]
So soon as the Lacedæmonians had retired from Attica, Periklês 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 Tolmidês, 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 Chalkis 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 kleruchs, or out-settled citizens.[657]
But the reconquest of Eubœa was far from restoring Athens to the position which she had occupied before the fatal engagement of Korôneia. 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. For though she still continued to hold Nisæa and Pegæ, yet her communication with the latter harbor was now out off by the loss of Megara and its appertaining territory, so that she thus lost her means of acting in the Corinthian gulf, and of protecting as well as of constraining her allies in Achaia. Nor was the port of Nisæa of much value to her, disconnected from the city to which it belonged, except as a post for annoying that city. 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 Periklês, 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 Periklês 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 Peloponnesus altogether,[658] 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.
Having traced what we may call the foreign relations of Athens down to this thirty years’ truce, we must notice the important internal and constitutional changes which she had experienced during the same interval.