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 Locris, and to carry the flame of revolt into Eubœa. To this important island Pericles 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, Sicyon, 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 Geranea, Plistoanax, 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 neighbourhood of Eleusis and the Thriasian plain. He was a very young man, so that a Spartan of mature years, Cleandridas, had been attached to him by the ephors as adjutant and counsellor. Pericles, it is said, persuaded both the one and the other, by means of large bribes, to evacuate Attica without advancing to Athens. We may fairly 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: Cleandridas never came back, and Plistoanax himself lived for a long time in sanctuary near the temple of Athene 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.
So soon as the Lacedæmonians had retired from Attica, Pericles 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 Tolmides, 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 Chalcis 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 cleruchs or out-settled citizens.
[445-440 B.C.]
Yet the reconquest of Eubœa was far from restoring Athens to the position which she had occupied before the fatal engagement of Coronea. 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. 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 Pericles, 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 Pericles 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 the Peloponnesus altogether, 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.[d]
THE GREATNESS OF PERICLES
Athens now rested six years, unengaged in any hostilities; a longer interval of perfect peace than she had before known in above forty years elapsed since she rose from her ashes after the Persian invasion. It is a wonderful and singular phenomenon in the history of mankind, little accounted for by anything recorded by ancient, or imagined by modern writers, that, during this period of turbulence, in a commonwealth whose whole population in free subjects amounted scarcely to thirty thousand families, art, science, fine taste, and politeness should have risen to that perfection which has made Athens the mistress of the world through all succeeding ages. Some sciences indeed have been carried higher in modern times, and art has put forth new branches, of which some have given new helps to science: but Athens, in that age, reached a perfection of taste that no country has since surpassed; but on the contrary all have looked up to, as a polar star, by which, after sinking in the deepest barbarism, taste has been guided in its restoration to splendour, and the observation of which will probably ever be the surest preservative against its future corruption and decay.
One great point of the policy of Pericles was to keep the people always either amused or employed. During peace an exercising squadron of sixty trireme galleys was sent out for eight months in every year. Nor was this without a further use than merely engaging the attention of the people, and maintaining the navy in vigour. He sometimes took the command in person: and, sailing among the distant dependencies of the empire, settled disputes between them, and confirmed the power and extended the influence of Athens. The Ægean and the Propontis did not bound his voyages: he penetrated into the Euxine; and finding the distant Grecian settlement of Sinope divided between Timesileus, who affected the tyranny, and an opposing party, he left there Lamachus with thirteen ships, and a land-force with whose assistance to the popular side the tyrant and those of his faction were expelled. The justice of what followed may indeed appear questionable. Their houses and property, apportioned into six hundred lots, were offered to so many Athenian citizens; and volunteers were not wanting to accept the offer, and settle at Sinope. To disburden the government at home, by providing advantageous establishments, in distant parts, for the poor and discontented among the sovereign citizens of Athens, was a policy more than once resorted to by Pericles. It was during his administration, in the year, according to Diodorus, in which the Thirty Years’ Truce was concluded, that the deputation came from the Thessalian adventurers who had been expelled by the Crotoniats from their attempted establishment in the deserted territory of Sybaris, in consequence of which, under his patronage, the colony was settled with which the historian Herodotus then, and afterward the orator Lysias, passing to Thurii, both established themselves there.