[457 B.C.]
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 Ithome 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 Nicomedes. 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 purpose, under instigation of the Corinthians, was, to arrest the aggrandisement 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 disorganised, 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 neighbour at once powerful and hostile to the Athenians, so as to prevent their further aggrandisement by land: it was the same policy as Epaminondas pursued eighty years afterwards, in organising Arcadia and Messene 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, and perhaps banishing suspected opponents. To this scheme the Thebans lent themselves with earnestness; promising to keep down for the future their border neighbours, so as to spare the necessity of armies coming from Sparta.
But there was also a further design, yet more important, in contemplation by the Spartans and Corinthians. The oligarchical opposition at Athens was so bitterly hostile to the Long Walls, to Pericles, 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. 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 co-operation with them. The juncture was undoubtedly one of much hazard for Athens, especially as the ostracised Cimon 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 Myronides at Megara; for the blockade of Ægina was still going on.
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. But though the advantage was on their side, it was not sufficiently decisive to favour the contemplated rising in Attica. Nor did the Peloponnesians gain anything by it except an undisturbed retreat over the high lands of Geranea, after having partially ravaged the Megarid.
CIMON RECALLED
Though the battle of Tanagra was a defeat, yet there were circumstances connected with it which rendered its effects highly beneficial to Athens. The ostracised Cimon 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 a hoplite and fight in the ranks of his tribe—the Œneis. 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. Pericles, on his part, who was present among the hoplites of his own tribe the Acamantii, aware of this application and repulse of Cimon, 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 Cimon 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 ostracised leader himself. Such was the happy working of this new sentiment that a decree was shortly proposed and carried—proposed too by Pericles himself—to abridge the ten years of Cimon’s ostracism, and permit his immediate return.
We may recollect that under circumstances partly analogous, Themistocles had himself proposed the restoration of his rival Aristides from ostracism, a little before the battle of Salamis: 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 Thucydides 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.
So powerful was this burst of fresh patriotism and unanimity after the battle of Tanagra, which produced the recall of Cimon and appears to have overlaid the pre-existing 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 Myronides into Bœotia: the extreme precision of this date (being the single case throughout the summary of events between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars wherein Thucydides 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, Myronides 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, favourable to Theban ascendency and Lacedæmonian connection, to become exiles. Nor was it only Bœotia which the Athenians thus acquired; Phocis and Locris 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 Pegæ, to the strait of Thermopylæ.
[457-456 B.C.]
These important acquisitions were soon crowned by the completion of the Long Walls and the conquest of Ægina. That island, doubtless starved out by its protracted blockade, was forced to capitulate on condition of destroying its fortifications, surrendering all its ships of war, and submitting to annual tribute as a dependent ally of Athens. The reduction of this once powerful maritime city marked Athens as mistress of the sea on the Peloponnesian coast not less than on the Ægean. Her admiral Tolmides displayed her strength by sailing round Peloponnesus, and even by the insult of burning the Lacedæmonian ports of Methone and of Gythium. He took Chalcis, a possession of the Corinthians, and Naupactus belonging to the Ozolian Locrians, near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, disembarked troops near Sicyon, with some advantage in a battle against opponents from that town, and either gained or forced into the Athenian alliance not only Zacynthus and Cephallenia, but also some of the towns of Achaia; for we afterwards find these latter attached to Athens without knowing when the connection began. During the ensuing year the Athenians renewed their attack upon Sicyon, with a force of one thousand hoplites under Pericles himself, sailing from the Megarian harbour of Pegæ in the Crissæan Gulf. This eminent man, however, gained no greater advantage than Tolmides, defeating the Sicyonian forces in the field and driving them within their walls. He afterwards made an expedition into Acarnania, taking the Achæan allies in addition to his own forces, but miscarried in his attack on Œniadæ and accomplished nothing. Nor were the Athenians more successful in a march undertaken this same year against Thessaly, for the purpose of restoring Orestes, one of the exiled princes or nobles of Pharsalus. Though they took with them an imposing force, including their Bœotian and Phocian allies, the powerful Thessalian cavalry forced them to keep in a compact body and confined them to the ground actually occupied by their hoplites; while all their attempts against the city failed, and their hopes of internal rising were disappointed.