The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

Athens! thou birthplace of the great, the free!

Though bowed thy power, and dimmed thy name may be,

Though old Renown’s once dazzling sun hath set,

Fair beams the star of Memory o’er thee yet.

City! where sang the bard, and taught the sage,

Thy shrines may fall, thou ne’er wilt know old age;

Fresh shall thy image glow in every heart,

And but with Time’s last hour thy fame depart.

—Nicholas Michell.

The history of this time with its rush of events and its startling changes exhibits on the Athenian side a picture of astonishing and almost preternatural energy.b The transition from the Athenian hegemony to the Athenian empire was doubtless gradual, so that no one could determine precisely where the former ends and the latter begins: but it had been consummated before the thirty years’ truce, which was concluded fourteen years before the Peloponnesian War, and it was in fact the substantial cause of that war. Empire then came to be held by Athens,—partly as a fact established, resting on acquiescence rather than attachment or consent in the minds of the subjects,—partly as a corollary from necessity of union combined with her superior force: while this latter point, superiority of force as a legitimate title, stood more and more forward, both in the language of her speakers and in the conceptions of her citizens. Nay, the Athenian orators of the middle of the Peloponnesian War venture to affirm that their empire had been of this same character ever since the repulse of the Persians: an inaccuracy so manifest, that if we could suppose the speech made by the Athenian Euphemus at Camarina in 415 B.C., to have been heard by Themistocles or Aristides fifty years before, it would have been alike offensive to the prudence of the one and to the justice of the other.

The imperial state of Athens, that which she held at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, when her allies, except Chios and Lesbos, were tributary subjects, and when the Ægean Sea was an Athenian lake, was of course the period of her greatest splendour and greatest action upon the Grecian world. It was also the period most impressive to historians, orators, and philosophers, suggesting the idea of some one state exercising dominion over the Ægean, as the natural condition of Greece, so that if Athens lost such dominion, it would be transferred to Sparta, holding out the dispersed maritime Greeks as a tempting prize for the aggressive schemes of some new conqueror, and even bringing up by association into men’s fancies the mythical Minos of Crete, and others, as having been rulers of the Ægean in times anterior to Athens.

[479-466 B.C.]

Even those who lived under the full-grown Athenian empire had before them no good accounts of the incidents between 479-450 B.C.; for we may gather from the intimation of Thucydides, as well as from his barrenness of facts, that while there were chroniclers both for the Persian invasion and for the times before, no one cared for the times immediately succeeding. Hence, the little light which has fallen upon this blank has all been borrowed—if we except the careful Thucydides—from a subsequent age; and the Athenian hegemony has been treated as a mere commencement of the Athenian empire: credit has been given to Athens for a long-sighted ambition, aiming from the Persian War downwards at results which perhaps Themistocles may have partially divined, but which only time and successive accidents opened even to distant view. But such systematic anticipation of subsequent results is fatal to any correct understanding, either of the real agents or of the real period; both of which are to be explained from the circumstances preceding and actually present, with some help, though cautious and sparing, from our acquaintance with that which was then an unknown future. When Aristides and Cimon dismissed the Lacedæmonian admiral Dorcis, and drove Pausanias away from Byzantium on his second coming out, they had to deal with the problem immediately before them; they had to complete the defeat of the Persian power, still formidable, and to create and organise a confederacy as yet only inchoate. This was quite enough to occupy their attention, without ascribing to them distant views of Athenian maritime empire.

In that brief sketch of incidents preceding the Peloponnesian War, which Thucydides introduces as “the throwing off of his narrative,” he neither gives, nor professes to give, a complete enumeration of all which actually occurred. During the interval between the first desertion of the Asiatic allies from Pausanias to Athens, in 477 B.C., and the revolt of Naxos in 466 B.C., he recites three incidents only: first, the siege and capture of Eion, on the Strymon, with its Persian garrison; next, the capture of Scyros, and appropriation of the island to Athenian cleruchs, or out-citizens; thirdly, the war with Carystus in Eubœa and reduction of the place by capitulation. It has been too much the practice to reason as if these three events were the full history of ten or eleven years. Considering what Thucydides states respecting the darkness of this period, we might perhaps suspect that they were all which he could learn about it on good authority: and they are all, in truth, events having a near and special bearing on the subsequent history of Athens herself; for Eion was the first stepping-stone to the important settlement of Amphipolis, and Scyros in the time of Thucydides was the property of outlying Athenian citizens, or cleruchs.