The fortune of Athens in these regions was still unpropitious. All her late commanders, Ergophilus, Autokles, Menon, Timomachus, had been successively deficient in means, in skill, or in fidelity, and had undergone accusation at home.[813] Timomachus was now superseded by Kephisodotus, a man of known enmity towards both Iphikrates and Kotys.[814] But Kephisodotus achieved no more than his predecessors, and had even to contend against a new enemy, who crossed over from Abydos to Sestos to reinforce Kotys—Charidemus with the mercenary division under his command. That officer, since his service three years before under Timotheus against Amphipolis, had been for some time in Asia, especially in the Troad. He hired himself to the satrap Artabazus; of whose embarrassments he took advantage to seize by fraud the towns of Skepsis, Kebren, and Ilium; intending to hold them as a little principality.[815] Finding his position, however, ultimately untenable against the probable force of the satrap, he sent a letter across to the Chersonese, to the Athenian commander Kephisodotus, asking for Athenian triremes to transport his division across to Europe; in return for which, if granted, he engaged to crush Kotys and reconquer the Chersonese for Athens. This proposition, whether accepted or not, was never realized; for Charidemus was enabled, through a truce unexpectedly granted to him by the satrap, to cross over from Abydos to Sestos without any Athenian ships. But as soon as he found himself in the Chersonese, far from aiding Athens to recover that peninsula, he actually took service with Kotys against her; so that Elæeus and Krithôtê, her chief remaining posts, were in greater peril than ever.[816]
The victorious prospects of Kotys, however, were now unexpectedly arrested. After a reign of twenty-four years he was assassinated by two brothers, Python and Herakleides, Greeks from the city of Ænus in Thrace, and formerly students under Plato at Athens. They committed the act to avenge their father; upon whom, as it would appear, Kotys had inflicted some brutal insult, under the influence of that violent and licentious temper which was in him combined with an energetic military character.[817] Having made their escape, Python and his brother retired to Athens, where they were received with every demonstration of honor, and presented with the citizenship as well as with golden wreaths; partly as tyrannicides, partly as having relieved the Athenians from an odious and formidable enemy.[818] Disclaiming the warm eulogies heaped upon him by various speakers in the assembly, Python is said to have replied—“It was a god who did the deed; we only lent our hands:”[819] an anecdote, which, whether it be truth or fiction, illustrates powerfully the Greek admiration of tyrannicide.
The death of Kotys gave some relief to Athenian affairs in the Chersonese. Of his children, even the eldest, Kersobleptes, was only a youth:[820] moreover two other Thracian chiefs, Berisades and Amadokus, now started up as pretenders to shares in the kingdom of Thrace. Kersobleptes employed as his main support and minister the mercenary general Charidemus, who either had already married, or did now marry, his sister; a nuptial connection had been formed in like manner by Amadokus with two Greeks named Simon and Bianor—and by Berisades with an Athenian citizen named Athenodorus, who (like Iphikrates and others) had founded a city, and possessed a certain independent dominion, in or near the Chersonese.[821] These Grecian mercenary chiefs thus united themselves by nuptial ties to the princes whom they served, as Seuthes had proposed to Xenophon, and as the Italian Condottieri of the fifteenth century ennobled themselves by similar alliance with princely families—for example, Sforza with the Visconti of Milan. All these three Thracian competitors were now represented by Grecian agents. But at first, it seems, Charidemus on behalf of Kersobleptes was the strongest. He and his army were near Perinthus on the north coast of the Propontis, where the Athenian commander, Kephisodotus, visited him, with a small squadron of ten triremes, in order to ask for the fulfilment of those fair promises which Charidemus had made in his letter from Asia. But Charidemus treated the Athenians as enemies, attacked by surprise the seamen on shore, and inflicted upon them great damage. He then pressed the Chersonese severely for several months, and marched even into the midst of it, to protect a nest of pirates whom the Athenians were besieging at the neighboring islet on its western coast—Alopekonnesus. At length, after seven months of unprofitable warfare (dating from the death of Kotys), he forced Kephisodotus to conclude with him a convention so disastrous and dishonorable, that as soon as known at Athens, it was indignantly repudiated.[822] Kephisodotus, being recalled in disgrace, was put upon his trial, and fined; the orator Demosthenes (we are told), who had served as one of the trierarchs in the fleet, being among his accusers.[823]
Among the articles of this unfavorable convention, one was that the Greek city of Kardia should be specially reserved to Charidemus himself. That city—eminently convenient from its situation on the isthmus connecting the Chersonese with Thrace—claimed by the Athenians as within the Chersonese, yet at the same time intensely hostile to Athens—became his principal station.[824] He was fortunate enough to seize, through treachery, the person of the Thracian Miltokythes, who had been the pronounced enemy of Kotys, and had coöperated with Athens. But he did not choose to hand over this important prisoner to Kersobleptes, because the life of Miltokythes would thus have been saved: it not being the custom of Thracians, in their intestine disputes, to put each other to death.[825] We remark with surprise a practice milder than that of Greece, amidst a people decidedly more barbarous and blood-thirsty than the Greeks. Charidemus accordingly surrendered Miltokythes to the Kardians, who put the prisoner with his son into a boat, took them a little way out to sea, slew the son before the eyes of the father, and then drowned the father himself.[826] It is not improbable that there may have been some special antecedent causes, occasioning intense antipathy on the part of the Kardians towards Miltokythes, and inducing Charidemus to hand him over to them as an acceptable subject for revenge. However this may be, their savage deed kindled violent indignation among all the Thracians, and did much injury to the cause of Kersobleptes and Charidemus. Though Kephisodotus had been recalled, and though a considerable interval elapsed before any successor came from Athens, yet Berisades and Amadokus joined their forces in one common accord, and sent to the Athenians propositions of alliance, with request for pecuniary aid. Athenodorus, the general of Berisades, putting himself at the head of Thracians and Athenians together, found himself superior in the field to Kersobleptes and Charidemus; whom he constrained to accept a fresh convention dictated by himself. Herein it was provided, that the kingdom of Thrace should be divided in equal portions between the three competitors; that all three should concur in surrendering the Chersonese to Athens; and that the son of a leading man named Iphiades at Sestos, held by Charidemus as hostage for the adherence of that city, should be surrendered to Athens also.[827]
This new convention, sworn on both sides, promised to Athens the full acquisition which she desired. Considering the thing as done, the Athenians sent Chabrias as commander in one trireme to receive the surrender, but omitted to send the money requested by Athenodorus; who was accordingly constrained to disband his army for want of pay. Upon this Kersobleptes and Charidemus at once threw up their engagement, refused to execute the convention just sworn, and constrained Chabrias, who had come without any force, to revert to the former convention concluded with Kephisodotus. Disappointed and indignant, the Athenians disavowed the act of Chabrias, in spite of his high reputation. They sent ten envoys to the Chersonese, insisting that the convention of Athenodorus should be resworn by all the three Thracian competitors—Berisades, Amadokus, Kersobleptes; if the third declined, the envoys were instructed to take measures for making war upon him, while they received the engagements of the other two. But such a mission, without arms, obtained nothing from Charidemus and Kersobleptes, except delay or refusal; while Berisades and Amadokus sent to Athens bitter complaints respecting the breach of faith. At length, after some months—just after the triumphant conclusion of the expedition of Athens against Eubœa (358 B.C.)—the Athenian Chares arrived in the Chersonese, at the head of a considerable mercenary force. Then at length the two recusants were compelled to swear anew to the convention of Athenodorus, in the presence of the latter as well as of Berisades and Amadokus.[828] And it would appear that before long, its conditions were realized. Charidemus surrendered the Chersonese, of course including its principal town Sestos, to Athens;[829] yet he retained for himself Kardia,[830] which was affirmed (though the Athenians denied it) not to be included in the boundaries of that peninsula. The kingdom of Thrace was also divided between Kersobleptes, Berisades, and Amadokus; which triple division, diminishing the strength of each, was regarded by Athens as a great additional guarantee for her secure possession of the Chersonese.[831]
It was thus that Athens at length made good her possession of the Chersonese against the neighboring Thracian potentates. And it would seem that her transmarine power, with its dependencies and confederates, now stood at a greater height than it had ever reached since the terrible reverses of 405 B.C. Among them were numbered not only a great number of the Ægean islands (even the largest, Eubœa, Chios, Samos, and Rhodes), but also the continental possessions of Byzantium—the Chersonese—Maroneia[832] with other places on the southern coast of Thrace—and Pydna, Methônê, and Potidæa, with most of the region surrounding the Thermaic Gulf.[833] This last portion of empire had been acquired at the cost of the Olynthian fraternal alliance of neighboring cities, against which Athens too, as well as Sparta, by an impulse most disastrous for the future independence of Greece, had made war with inauspicious success. The Macedonian king Perdikkas, with a just instinct towards the future aggrandizement of his dynasty, had assisted her in thus weakening Olynthus; feeling that the towns on the Thermaic Gulf, if they formed parts of a strong Olynthian confederacy of brothers and neighbors, reciprocally attached and self-sustaining, would resist Macedonia more effectively, than if they were half-reluctant dependencies of Athens, even with the chances of Athenian aid by sea. The aggressive hand of Athens against Olynthus, indeed, between 368-363 B.C., was hardly less mischievous, to Greece generally, than that of Sparta had been between 382-380 B.C. Sparta had crushed the Olynthian confederacy in its first brilliant promise—Athens prevented it from rearing its head anew. Both conspired to break down the most effective barrier against Macedonian aggrandizement; neither were found competent to provide any adequate protection to Greece in its room.
The maximum of her second empire, which I have remarked that Athens attained by the recovery of the Chersonese,[834] lasted but for a moment. During the very same year, there occurred that revolt among her principal allies, known by the name of the Social War, which gave to her power a fatal shock, and left the field comparatively clear for the early aggressions of her yet more formidable enemy—Philip of Macedon. That prince had already emerged from his obscurity as a hostage in Thebes, and had succeeded his brother Perdikkas, slain in a battle with the Illyrians, as king (360-359 B.C.). At first, his situation appeared not merely difficult, but almost hopeless. Not the most prescient eye in Greece could have recognized, in the inexperienced youth struggling at his first accession against rivals at home, enemies abroad, and embarrassments of every kind—the future conqueror of Chæroneia, and destroyer of Grecian independence. How, by his own genius, energy, and perseverance, assisted by the faults and dissensions of his Grecian enemies, he attained his inauspicious eminence—will be recounted in my subsequent volume.
At the opening of my ninth volume, after the surrender of Athens, Greece was under the Spartan empire. Its numerous independent city-communities were more completely regimented under one chief than they had ever been before, Athens and Thebes being both numbered among the followers of Sparta.
But the conflicts recounted in these two volumes (during an interval of forty-four years—404-403 B.C. to 360-359 B.C.) have wrought the melancholy change of leaving Greece more disunited, and more destitute of presiding Hellenic authority, than she had been at any time since the Persian invasion. Thebes, Sparta, and Athens, had all been engaged in weakening each other; in which, unhappily, each has been far more successful than in strengthening herself. The maritime power of Athens is now indeed considerable, and may be called very great, if compared with the state of degradation to which she had been brought in 403 B.C. But it will presently be seen how unsubstantial is the foundation of her authority, and how fearfully she has fallen off from that imperial feeling and energy which ennobled her ancestors under the advice of Perikles.