The Athenians first settled which allies should pay tribute in the form of money and which should provide ships; the details of this assessment were entrusted to the Athenian statesman and general Aristides. Tribute, the need for which was assumed rather than explained, was to be stored at Delos, which would also be the site of league meetings, or synods. Thucydides does not add that the choice of Delos, with its associations with Ionian Apollo, was essentially religious in motivation. Nor does he bring out more than the mercenary or revenge motive of the league (to get redress by devastating the king of Persia’s territory).
The “booty” factor was indeed a major motive for much ancient warfare, and this war was no exception. But there is also evidence that the mood at the league’s founding was positive and solemn, with oaths and ceremonies cementing the act of liberation (478–477). It is unlikely that there was much “small print” to which allies had to subscribe. League meetings were to be held, almost certainly, in a single-chamber organization, in which Athens had only a single vote, though a weighty one; there were perhaps undertakings, subsumed in the general oath taking, about not deserting or refusing military contributions.
Unfortunately there are no inscribed stelae, or pillars, as there are for the Second Athenian Confederacy a century later, recording precise pledges by Athens or (equally valuable) listing the members in the order of their enrollment. Apart from the big Ionian islands and some mainlanders, there were in fact Dorian members like Rhodes and Aeolians like Lesbos; there were even some non-Greeks on Cyprus, always a place with a large Semitic component. (Some Cypriot communities probably joined at the outset.) Some Thracian cities were surely enrolled very early. There was no doctrinaire insistence that the league should be exclusively maritime, though the facts of geography gave it this general character automatically. For instance, epigraphy (i.e., the study of inscriptions) suggests that by mid-century (in the period of Athens’s decade of control of Boeotia, 457–446) the land-locked cities of Orchomenus and Akraiphia were in some sense members. Nor was the league necessarily confined to the Aegean: in 413, financial contributions from Rhegium in the south of Italy, among other places, were handled by the imperial “Treasurers of the Greeks.” No inscribed records of tribute exist before 454 bce; after that point, one has the intermittent assistance of the “Athenian Tribute Lists,” actually the record of the one-sixtieth fraction paid to the goddess Athena. It should be stressed that until roughly the late 450s there are virtually no imperial inscriptions at all. Strains on Greek unity
Such lack of evidence makes it difficult to show in detail the increasing oppressiveness of the Athenian empire in the second half of its existence (450–404), particularly in the 420s when policy was affected by demagogues like the notorious Cleon. There is simply too little comparative material from the first three decades, and, in the absence of documentary material and of detailed information like that provided by Thucydides for the Peloponnesian War of 431–404, one must infer what happened from the very sparse literary account Thucydides gives for the years 479–439 and from supplementary details provided by later writers. Although it is right to protest, against facile talk of the harsh imperialism of Cleon, that imperialism is never soft, an important but sometimes overlooked chapter of Thucydides is nonetheless explicit that Athens suffered a loss of goodwill through its excessive rigour.
By the middle of the 470s, Greek unity had not come too obviously apart, though the reluctant withdrawal of Sparta was ominous. Even so, at the Olympic Games of 476, an unusually political celebration (the first after the last of the Persian Wars and held in the honoured presence of the Athenian Themistocles), there were still victorious competitors from Sparta, as well as from other Dorian states such as Argos and Aegina and from Italy and Sicily. Mounting Athenian aggression Cimon’s actions
Athens’s capture of Eion on the Strymon, also in 476, was perfectly in keeping with the ostensibly Panhellenic or anti-Persian program of the Delian League: Eion, an economically and strategically important site in northern Greece, was still held by a Persian commander. That capture, the first act of the league recorded by Thucydides, was undertaken by Cimon, the son of Miltiades the Younger, who had won the Battle of Marathon.
The next act of Cimon and the Athenians, the attack on the island of Scyros, was considerably more dubious. Cimon expelled the “Dolopians” (i.e., the indigenous inhabitants) allegedly because they were pirates. Protection against piracy was surely as real a justification for the Delian League as protection against Persia and more general in its application (vulnerability to Persia was very much a matter of geographic position). That Athens was effective in this respect is suggested by the evidence for recrudescent piracy in the early 4th century, when the Athenians no longer had the power to police the seas. Nonetheless, the treatment of these Dolopians, who were hardly a serious threat to peaceful commerce, certainly appears to have been an act of mere muscle flexing.
The enterprise had a propagandist point as welclass="underline" Cimon brought back the bones of Theseus from the island to Athens, where they were housed in a shrine built for them, somewhere in or near the Agora—perhaps to the east of it. (The site has not been discovered; the so-called “Theseum” is generally agreed to be a temple to Hephaestus.) That magnificent piece of theatre must have been in imitation of the Spartan treatment of the bones of Orestes; the act is not surprising, because Cimon was perhaps the first identifiable “Laconizer,” or admirer of Spartan values, in Athenian history. Theseus had a special significance not only for Cimon but for the Athenian empire in general. It was Theseus who, according to the myth, had founded the great Ionian festival at Delos called the Delia, which Athens was to revive with much pomp in 426. Such exploitation of the cult of relics was a kind of manifestation of kinship diplomacy, a phenomenon already noted above; the Athenians practiced it again in the early 430s when they founded Amphipolis and made political use of the relics of Rhesus, a local Thracian hero. Athens’s moves against other Greeks
More Athenian aggression followed, unequivocally directed against other Greeks: Carystus, at the southeastern end of Euboea, was forced to join the league. This was a stepping-up of an Athenian involvement in Euboea that goes back to the 6th century, when Athens installed a cleruchy on Chalcis soon after the Cleisthenic reforms. In the middle of the century inscriptions show that wealthy Athenians possessed land on the Lelantine Plain. Such ownership by individual wealthy Athenians of land in the subject cities of the empire is a telling phenomenon, because the land was usually acquired in defiance of local rules: landowning was normally restricted to nationals of the state in which the land was situated. For Athenians to acquire such land, otherwise than by inheritance as a result of marriage to a non-Athenian, was an abuse, and inheritance of this kind was much less likely after a law of 451 restricting Athenian citizenship to persons of citizen descent on both sides. After 451 “mixed marriages” must have been far less common.
A still more sinister move was the reduction of Naxos, probably in the early 460s. Thucydides equates the inhabitants’ loss of freedom with “enslavement”—a strong metaphor. (The precise chronology of the whole period 479–439, and particularly the first 30 years, is uncertain, because Thucydides gives no absolute dates and there are none from other sources before the events in the northern Aegean of 465. The chronology followed here is the orthodox one, but some scholars seek to down-date the attacks on Eion and Scyros to 469—leaving the 470s implausibly empty of known imperial action—and Naxos later still.)