No doubt there was also a propaganda aspect. Themistocles had inscribed on the rocks of Euboea messages imploring the Ionians on the Persian side not to help in enslaving their Ionian kin. This looks forward to Athens’ political exploitation, in the very near future, of its original role as Ionian mother city. For the moment it surely helped sap morale in the Persian fleet. Sound strategy might have dictated a Persian withdrawal, or an attempt to bypass Salamis and press on to the Isthmus of Corinth, before the battle had even begun, but the prestige of the Persian king was visibly at stake. Plataea
Xerxes returned home, but the Persian general Mardonius remained for a final encounter with the Greeks at Plataea. The Spartans under Pausanias, regent for the underage Spartan king, advanced from the Peloponnese via the Isthmus and Eleusis; there had once been a question of making a stand at the Isthmus for the defense of the Peloponnese, but Salamis had made that unnecessary. Again the Persians were defeated, but this time the battle was primarily won, as Aeschylus was to put it in his play Persians, “under the Dorian spear”—that is, under the leadership of hoplite Sparta. (The army, however, was a truly Pan-Greek one and included a large infantry force of Athenians.)
Substantial fragments of an elegiac poem on papyrus by the great poet Simonides were published as recently as 1992; the poem describes the run-up to the battle of Plataea and more or less explicitly compares Pausanias to Achilles, the Greek leader of the mythical Trojan War. It thus equates the magnitude and importance of the Trojan and Persian wars. This remarkable find provides the missing link between epic, which had not hitherto normally treated recent historical events, and historiography proper. It is thus one of the most exciting literary discoveries in many decades.
As much glory was to attach to Plataea itself as to Sparta. A Hellenistic geographer said with some impatience of the Plataeans that they had nothing to say for themselves except that they were colonists of the Athenians (strictly false, but an illuminating exaggeration) and that the Persians were defeated on Plataean soil. A great commemorative festival was still celebrated at Plataea in Hellenistic and Roman times; a 3rd-century inscription discovered in 1971 mentions “the sacrifice in honour of Zeus the Liberator and the contest which the Greeks celebrate on the tombs of the heroes who fought against the barbarians for the liberty of the Greeks.”
After the residue of the Persian fleet had been defeated at Mycale, on the eastern side of the Aegean, the Greeks were saved—for the moment. The Persians had, after all, returned to Greece after the small-scale humiliation of Marathon in 490; thus there could be no immediate certainty that they would abandon their plans to conquer Greece after the far greater humiliations of 480 and 479. A leader was required in case the Persians returned. The Athenian empire
The eastern Greeks of the islands and mainland felt themselves particularly vulnerable and appealed to the natural leader, Sparta. The Spartans’ proposed solution was an unacceptable plan to evacuate Ionia and resettle its Greek inhabitants elsewhere; this would have been a remarkable usurpation of Athens’s colonial or pseudocolonial role as well as a traumatic upheaval for the victims. Samos, Chios, Lesbos, and other islanders were received into the Greek alliance. The status of the mainlanders was temporarily left in suspense, though not for long: in early 478 Athens on its own account captured Sestus, still under precarious Persian control hitherto. In doing so it was assisted by “allies from Ionia and the Hellespont”—that is to say, including mainlanders. The authority for this statement, which should not be doubted, is Thucydides, the main guide for most of the next 70 years.
The Athenian empire at its greatest extent.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Emerging Athenian independence
The fortification of Athens
The capture of Sestus was one manifestation of Athenian independence from Spartan leadership, which had gone unquestioned by Athens in the Persian Wars of 480–479, except for one or two uneasy moments when it had seemed that Sparta was reluctant to go north of the Isthmus. Another manifestation was the energetic building in the early 470s of a proper set of walls for the city of Athens, an episode elaborately described by Thucydides to demonstrate the guile of Themistocles, who deceived the Spartans over the affair. Whether the walls were entirely new or a replacement for an Archaic circuit is disputed; Thucydides implies that there was a pre-existing circuit, but no trace of this has been established archaeologically. The Themistoclean circuit, on the other hand, does survive, although the solidity of the socle does not quite bear out Thucydides’ dramatic picture of an impromptu “all hands to the pump” operation carried out with unprofessional materials.
Sparta’s reluctance to see Athens fortified and its anger—concealed but real—after the irreversible event show that even then, despite its cautious attitude to the mainland Ionians, Sparta was not happy to see Athens take over completely its own dominant military role. Or rather, some Spartans were unhappy, for it is a feature of this period that Sparta wobbled between isolationism and imperialism, if that is the right word for a goal pursued with such intermittent energy. This wobbling is best explained in factional terms, the details of which elude the 21st century as they did Thucydides. Thucydides disconcertingly juxtaposes the wall-building episode, with its clear implication of Spartan aggressiveness, with the bland statement that the Spartans were glad to be rid of the Persian war and considered the Athenians up to the job of leadership and well-disposed toward themselves. In fact, there is evidence in other literary sources for the first and more outward-looking policy, such as a report of an internal debate at Sparta about the general question of hegemony, as well as particular acts such as a Spartan attempt to expel Medizers from the Delphic Amphictyony—i.e., pack it with its own supporters. The ambition of Pausanias
One easily identifiable factor in the formation of Spartan policy is a personal one: the ambitions of Pausanias, a young man flushed from his success at Plataea. Pausanias was one of those Spartans who wanted to see the impetus of the Persian Wars maintained; he conquered much of Cyprus (a temporary conquest) and laid siege to Byzantium. But his arrogance and typically Spartan violence angered the other Greeks, “not least,” Thucydides says, “the Ionians and the newly liberated populations.” Those now approached Athens in virtue of kinship, asking it to lead them.
That was a crucial moment in 5th-century history; the immediate effect was to force the Spartans to recall Pausanias and put him on trial. He was charged with “Medism,” and, though acquitted for the moment, he was replaced by Dorcis. Yet Dorcis and others like him lacked Pausanias’s charisma, and Sparta sent out two more commanders. Pausanias went out again to Byzantium “in a private capacity,” setting himself up as a tyrant to intrigue with Persia, but he was again recalled and starved to death after having taken sanctuary in the temple of Athena of the Brazen House in Sparta. (The end may not have come until late in the 470s.) The charge was again Medism, and there was some truth to it because the rewards given by Persia to Gongylus of Eretria, one of his collaborators, can be shown to have been historical. There was also a suspicion that Pausanias was organizing a rising of the helots, “and it was true,” Thucydides says.
Despite its successes in 479, Sparta, then, was as much a prisoner of the helot problem as ever, and it could not rely on the loyalty of Arcadia or the Peloponnese generally: Mantinea and Elis had sent their contingents to the Battle of Plataea suspiciously late. The Delian League
The most important consequence of the successful Greek appeal to Athens was the beginning of the Athenian empire, or Delian League (the latter is a modern expression). The appeal to Ionian kinship set the tone for the organization and for much of its subsequent history, though one can fairly complain that this does not emerge strongly enough from Thucydides, who always tends to underreport the religious or sentimental factor in Greek politics. Paying tribute to Athens