Plutarch's Lives, Volume 2 (of 4)

by Plutarch

"Mnestheus from Athens led our hosts of yore,
With Agamemnon, to the Trojan shore;
Than whom no chief knew better to array,
The mail-clad Greeks, when mustering for the fray:
Thus Homer sung; and Athens now, as then,
Doth bear away the palm for ruling men."

VIII. These verses, although Kimon's name is nowhere mentioned in them, appeared to the men of that time excessively adulatory. Neither Themistokles nor Miltiades had ever been so honoured. When Miltiades demanded the honour of an olive crown, Sophanes of Dekeleia rose up in the public assembly and said,—"Miltiades, when you have fought and conquered the barbarians alone, you may ask to be honoured alone, but not before"—a harsh speech, but one which perfectly expressed the feeling of the people.

Why, then, were the Athenians so charmed with Kimon's exploit? The reason probably was because their other commanders had merely defended them from attack, while under him they had been able themselves to attack the enemy, and had moreover won territory near Eion, and founded the colony of Amphipolis. Kimon also led a colony to Skyros, which island was taken by Kimon on the following pretext.

The original inhabitants were Dolopes,[308] who were bad farmers, and lived chiefly by piracy. Emboldened by success they even began to plunder the strangers who came into their ports, and at last robbed and imprisoned some Thessalian merchants whose ships were anchored at Ktesium. The merchants escaped from prison, and laid a complaint against the people of Skyros before the Amphiktyonic council. The people refused to pay the fine imposed by the council, and said that it ought to be paid by those alone who had shared the plunder. These men, in terror for their ill-gotten gains, at once opened a correspondence with Kimon, and offered to betray the island into his hands if he would appear before it with an Athenian fleet. Thus Kimon was enabled to make himself master of Skyros, where he expelled the Dolopes and put an end to their piracies; after which, as he learned that in ancient times the hero Theseus, the son of Ægeus, after he had been driven out of Athens, took refuge at Skyros, and was murdered there by Lykomedes, who feared him, he endeavoured to discover where he was buried. Indeed there was an oracle which commanded the Athenians to bring back the bones of Theseus to their city and pay them fitting honours, but they knew not where they lay, as the people of Skyros did not admit that they possessed them, and refused to allow the Athenians to search for them. Great interest was now manifested in the search, and after his sepulchre[309] had with great difficulty been discovered, Kimon placed the remains of the hero on board of his own ship and brought them back to Athens, from which they had been absent four hundred years. This act made him very popular with the people of Athens, one mark of which is to be found in his decision in the case of the rival tragic poets. When Sophokles produced his first play, being then very young, Aphepsion,[310] the archon, seeing that party feeling ran high among the spectators, would not cast lots to decide who were to be the judges, but when Kimon with the other nine generals, his colleagues, entered to make the usual libation to the god, he refused to allow them to depart, but put them on their oath, and forced them to sit as judges, they being ten in number, one from each of the ten tribes. The excitement of the contest was much increased by the high position of the judges. The prize was adjudged to Sophokles, and it is said that Æschylus was so grieved and enraged at his failure that he shortly afterwards left Athens and retired to Sicily, where he died, and was buried near the city of Gela.

IX. Ion tells us that when quite a boy he came from Chios to Athens, and met Kimon at supper in the house of Laomedon. After supper he was asked to sing, and he sang well. The guests all praised him, and said that he was a cleverer man than Themistokles; for Themistokles was wont to say that he did not know how to sing or to play the harp, but that he knew how to make a state rich and great. Afterwards the conversation turned upon Kimon's exploits, and each mentioned what he thought the most important. Hereupon Kimon himself described what he considered to be the cleverest thing he had ever done. After the capture of Sestos and Byzantium by the Athenians and their allies, there were a great number of Persians taken prisoners, whom the allies desired Kimon to divide amongst them. He placed the prisoners on one side, and all their clothes and jewellery on the other, and offered the allies their choice between the two. They complained that he had made an unequal division, but he bade them take whichever they pleased, assuring them that the Athenians would willingly take whichever part they rejected. By the advice of Herophytus of Samos, who urged them to take the property of the Persians, rather than the Persians themselves, the allies took the clothes and jewels. At this Kimon was thought to have made a most ridiculous division of the spoil, as the allies went swaggering about with gold bracelets, armlets, and necklaces, dressed in Median robes of rich purple, while the Athenians possessed only the naked bodies of men who were very unfit for labour. Shortly afterwards, however, the friends and relations of the captives came down to the Athenian camp from Phrygia and Lydia, and ransomed each of them for great sums of money, so that Kimon was able to give his fleet four months' pay, and also to remit a large sum to Athens, out of the money paid for their ransom.

X. The money which Kimon had honourably gained in the war he spent yet more honourably upon his countrymen. He took down the fences round his fields, that both strangers and needy Athenians might help themselves to his crops and fruit. He provided daily a plain but plentiful table, at which any poor Athenian was welcome to dine, so that he might live at his ease, and be able to devote all his attention to public matters. Aristotle tells us that it was not for all the Athenians, but only for the Lakiadæ, or members of his own township, that he kept this public table. He used to be attended by young men dressed in rich cloaks, who, if he met any elderly citizen poorly clothed, would exchange cloaks with the old man; and this was thought to be a very noble act. The same young men carried pockets full of small change and would silently put money into the hands of the better class of poor in the market-place. All this is alluded to by Kratinus, the comic poet, in the following passage from his play of the Archilochi:

"I too, Metrobius, hoped to end
My days with him, my noblest friend,
Kimon, of all the Greeks the best,
And, richly feasting, sink to rest.
But now he's gone, and I remain unblest."

Moreover, Gorgias of Leontini says that Kimon acquired wealth in order to use it, and used it so as to gain honour: while Kritias, who was one of the Thirty, in his poems wishes to be

"Rich as the Skopads, and as Kimon great,
And like Agesilaus fortunate."

Indeed, Lichas the Spartan became renowned throughout Greece for nothing except having entertained all the strangers who were present at the festival of the Gymnopædia: while the profuse hospitality of Kimon, both to strangers and his own countrymen, far surpassed even the old Athenian traditions of the heroes of olden days; for though the city justly boasts that they taught the rest of the Greeks to sow corn, to discover springs of water, and to kindle fire, yet Kimon, by keeping open house for all his countrymen, and allowing them to share his crops in the country, and permitting his friends to partake of all the fruits of the earth with him in their season, seemed really to have brought back the golden age. If any scurrilous tongues hinted that it was merely to gain popularity and to curry favour with the people that he did these things, their slanders were silenced at once by Kimon's personal tastes and habits, which were entirely aristocratic and Spartan. He joined Aristeides in opposing Themistokles when the latter courted the mob to an unseemly extent, opposed Ephialtes when, to please the populace, he dissolved the senate of the Areopagus, and, at a time when all other men except Aristeides and Ephialtes were gorged with the plunder of the public treasury, kept his own hands clean, and always maintained the reputation of an incorruptible and impartial statesman. It is related that one Rhœsakes, a Persian, who had revolted from the king, came to Athens with a large sum of money, and being much pestered by the mercenary politicians there, took refuge in the house of Kimon, where he placed two bowls beside the door-posts, one of which he filled with gold, and the other with silver darics.[311] Kimon smiled at this, and inquired whether he wished him to be his friend, or his hired agent; and when the Persian answered that he wished him to be a friend, he said, "Then take this money away; for if I am your friend I shall be able to ask you for it when I want it."