Though we know no particulars respecting operations against Persia, since the attack on Eion, such operations must have been going on; but the expedition under Cimon, undertaken not long after the Naxian revolt, was attended with memorable results. That commander, having under him two hundred triremes from Athens, and one hundred from the various confederates, was despatched to attack the Persians on the southwestern and southern coast of Asia Minor. He attacked and drove out several of their garrisons from various Grecian settlements, both in Caria and Lycia: among others, the important trading city of Phaselis, though at first resisting, and even standing a siege, was prevailed upon by the friendly suggestions of the Chians in Cimon’s armament to pay a contribution of ten talents and join in the expedition. From the length of time occupied in these various undertakings, the Persian satraps had been enabled to assemble a powerful force, both fleet and army, near the mouth of the river Eurymedon, in Pamphylia, under the command of Tithraustes and Pherendates, both of the regal blood. The fleet, chiefly Phœnician, seems to have consisted of two hundred ships, but a further reinforcement of eighty Phœnician ships was expected, and was actually near at hand, and the commanders were unwilling to hazard a battle before its arrival. Cimon, anxious for the same reason to hasten on the combat, attacked them vigorously: partly from their inferiority of numbers, partly from discouragement at the absence of the reinforcement, they seem to have made no strenuous resistance. They were put to flight and driven ashore, so speedily, and with so little loss to the Greeks, that Cimon was enabled to disembark his men forthwith, and attack the land-force which was drawn up on shore to protect them.
The battle on land was long and gallantly contested, but Cimon at length gained a complete victory, dispersed the army with the capture of many prisoners, and either took or destroyed the entire fleet. As soon as his victory and his prisoners were secured, he sailed to Cyprus for the purpose of intercepting the reinforcement of eighty Phœnician ships in their way, and was fortunate enough to attack them while yet they were ignorant of the victories of the Eurymedon. These ships too were all destroyed, though most of the crews appear to have escaped ashore on the island. Two great victories, one at sea and the other on land, gained on the same day by the same armament, counted with reason among the most glorious of all Grecian exploits, and were extolled as such in the inscription on the commemorative offering to Apollo, set up out of the tithe of the spoils. The number of prisoners, as well as the booty taken by the victors, was immense.
A victory thus remarkable, which thrust back the Persians to the region eastward of Phaselis, doubtless fortified materially the position of the Athenian confederacy against them; but it tended not less to exalt the reputation of Athens, and even to popularise her with the confederates generally, from the large amount of plunder divisible among them. Probably this increased power and popularity stood her in stead throughout her approaching contest with Thasos, and at the same time it explains the increasing fear and dislike of the Peloponnesians.[c]
Athens, become, within a very few years, from the capital of a small province, in fact though not yet in avowed pretension, the head of an empire, exhibited a new and singular phenomenon in politics, a sovereign people; a people, not, as in many other Grecian democracies, sovereign merely of that state which themselves, maintained by slaves, composed, but supreme over other people in subordinate republics, acknowledging a degree of subjection, yet claiming to be free. Under this extraordinary political constitution philosophy and the arts were beginning to make Athens their principal resort. Migrating from Egypt and the east, they had long been fostered on the western coast of Asia. In Greece itself they had owed some temporary encouragement principally to those called tyrants; the Pisistratidæ at Athens, and Periander at Corinth. But their efforts were desultory and comparatively feeble till the communication with the Asian Greeks, checked and interrupted by their subjection to Persia, was restored, and Athens, chief of the glorious confederacy by whose arms the deliverance had been effected, began to draw everything toward itself as a common centre, the capital of an empire. Already science and fine taste were so far perfected that Æschylus had exhibited tragedy in its utmost dignity, and Sophocles and Euripides were giving it the highest polish, when Cimon returned in triumph to his country.
MITFORD’S VIEW OF THE PERIOD
It was the peculiar felicity of Athens in this period that, of the constellation of great men which arose there, each was singularly fitted for the situation in which the circumstances of the time required him to act; and none filled his place more advantageously than Cimon. But the fate of all those great men, and the resources employed, mostly in vain, to avert it, sufficiently mark, in this splendid era, a defective constitution, and law and justice ill assured. Aristides, we are told, though it is not undisputed, had founded his security upon extreme poverty: Cimon endeavoured to establish himself by a splendid, and almost unbounded, yet politic liberality. To ward against envy, and to secure his party with that tremendous tyrant, as the comic poet not inaptly calls the sovereign people, he made a parade of throwing down the fences of his gardens and orchards in the neighbourhood of Athens, and permitted all to partake of their produce; a table was daily spread at his house for the poorer citizens, but more particularly for those of his own ward, whom he invited from the agora, the courts of justice, or the general assembly; a bounty which both enabled and disposed them to give their time at his call whenever his interest required their support. In going about the city he was commonly attended by a large retinue, handsomely clothed; and if he met an elderly citizen ill clad, he directed one of his attendants to change cloaks with him. To the indigent of higher rank he was equally attentive, lending or giving money, as he found their circumstances required, and always managing his bounty with the utmost care that the object of it should not be put to shame.[42]
His conduct, in short, was a continual preparation for an election; not, as in England, to decide whether the candidate should or should not be a member of the legislature; but whether he should be head of the commonwealth or an exile.[43] In his youth he had affected a roughness of manners, and a contempt for the elegances generally reckoned becoming his rank, and which his fortune enabled him to command. In his riper years he discovered that virtue and grossness have no natural connection: he became himself a model of politeness, patronised every liberal art, and studied to procure elegant as well as useful indulgences for the people. By him were raised the first of those edifices which, for want of a more proper name, we call porticos, under whose magnificent shelter, in their torrid climate, it became the delight of the Athenians to assemble, and pass their leisure in promiscuous conversation. The widely celebrated groves of Academia acknowledged him as the founder of their fame. In the wood, before rude and without water, he formed commodious and elegant walks, and adorned them with running fountains. Nor was the planting of the agora, or great market-place of Athens, with that beautiful tree, the oriental plane, forgotten as a benefit from Cimon; while, ages after him, his trees flourished, affording an agreeable and salutary shade to those who exposed their wares there, and to those who came to purchase them. Much, if not the whole of these things, we are given to understand, was done at his private expense; but our information upon the subject is inaccurate. Those stores, with which his victories had enriched the treasury, probably furnished the sums employed upon some of the public works executed under his direction, as, more especially, the completion of the fortification of the citadel, whose principal defence hitherto, on the southern side, had been the precipitous form of the rock.
While with this splendid and princely liberality Cimon endeavoured to confirm his own interest, he was attentive to promote the general welfare, and to render permanent the superiority of Athens among the Grecian republics. The citizens of the allied states grew daily more impatient of the requisitions regularly made to take their turn of service on shipboard, and longed for uninterrupted enjoyment of their homes, in that security against foreign enemies which their past labours had, they thought, now sufficiently established. But that the common interest still required the maintenance of a fleet was a proposition that could not be denied, while the Persian empire existed, or while the Grecian seas offered temptation for piracy. Cimon therefore proposed that any commonwealth of the confederacy might compound for the personal service of its citizens, by furnishing ships, and paying a sum of money to the common treasury: the Athenians would then undertake the manning of the fleet. The proposal was at the moment popular; most of the allies acceded to it, unaware or heedless of the consequences; for, while they were thus depriving themselves of all maritime force, making that of Athens irresistible, they gave that ambitious republic claims upon them, uncertain in their nature, and which, as they might be made, could now also be enforced, at its pleasure.
[465-463 B.C.]
Having thus at the same time strengthened itself and reduced to impotence many of the allied states, the Athenian government became less scrupulous of using force against any of the rest which might dispute its sovereign authority. The reduction of Eion, by the confederate arms under Cimon, had led to new information of the value of the adjacent country; where some mines of gold and silver, and a lucrative commerce with the surrounding Thracian hordes, excited avidity. But the people of the neighbouring island of Thasos, very anciently possessed of that commerce, and of the more accessible mines, insisted that these, when recovered from the common enemy by the arms of that confederacy of which they were members, should revert entire to them. The Athenians, asserting the right of conquest, on the contrary, claimed the principal share as their own. The Thasians, irritated, renounced the confederacy. Cimon then was commanded to lead the confederate armament against them. They venturing an action at sea, were defeated; and Cimon, debarking his forces on the island, became quickly master of everything but the principal town, to which he laid siege. The Athenians then hastened to appropriate that inviting territory on the continent, which was their principal object, by sending thither a colony of no less than ten thousand men, partly Athenian citizens, partly from the allied commonwealths.