The anti-Persian aspect of the league had not, however, been forgotten, in spite of all this activity against Greeks. In 467 Cimon won the great Battle of the Eurymedon River in Pamphylia (southern Anatolia), a naval victory that made a great impression both in Greece (where it was celebrated by the dedication of a bronze date palm, or phoinix, at Delphi: a punning reference to the defeated Phoenician fleet) and among waverers, outside Greece proper, who had not yet joined the league. Many new allies were now recruited, such as the trading city of Phaselis on the Lycian-Pamphylian border. A rare early imperial inscription of the late 460s details the judicial privileges accorded to Phaselis. Athens’s moves northward
Greek success in the east was followed by some mixed achievement under Cimon in the north. A quarrel arose in 465 with the wealthy and fertile northern Aegean island of Thasos about the island’s trading stations and mines along the mainland area just opposite it, and Thasos revolted. The word quarrel is obviously a euphemism for a piece of naked economic aggression by Athens; all ancient states wished to get their hands on as much precious metal for coinage as possible. Thasos was reduced and forced to give up all of its mines and mainland possessions. A further attempt at this time to extend Athenian northern interest, the colonizing expedition sent to the Nine Ways, the site of the later Amphipolis, was less successful. If silver was one coveted commodity, ship-building timber was another, and the desire for the latter was a large part of Athens’s motive for getting a foothold in the Amphipolis region. The Nine Ways operation is a reminder that colonizing activity did not cease with the end of the Archaic period: 10,000 settlers were sent. But the entire force was destroyed at Drabescus. That was probably the occasion for instituting state burial for war dead, a democratic measure that anticipated the reforms at the end of the 460s.
Thasos signaled changes in foreign policy alignments all over Greece. The Thasians had appealed to Sparta for help, asking it to invade Attica, and the Spartans secretly agreed to do so. According to Thucydides, they would have done it had they not been detained by a massive revolt of the helots, who had taken advantage of an earthquake to occupy the strong position of Ithome in Messenia. Ithome, together with the Acrocorinth, the citadel of Corinth, was described by a Hellenistic ruler as one of the “horns of the Peloponnesian ox” that a would-be conqueror had to seize. It is indeed possible that the occupiers of Ithome planned not only an act of secession but, in fact, an attack on the famously unravaged city of Sparta itself. The earthquake not only shook Spartan nerve but must also have had serious demographic effects, though how long-term those were is disputed. Sparta’s responses
The Spartan response to Thasos looked forward in its anti-Athenian aspect to the great Peloponnesian War of 431–404. It was one of three major episodes in the period up to that war when Sparta moved against Athens. The second was an aborted invasion of Athens under King Pleistoanax in 446. The third episode, in 440, revolved again around the issue of whether to intervene to prevent Athens disciplining a recalcitrant ally, this time Samos. The actual confrontation between Sparta and Athens did not happen in any of these cases. Among the reasons for this—apart from the helot revolt that took a decade for Sparta to put down—was the growing anti-Spartan restlessness in Arcadia.
The Athenian Themistocles, who had fallen from favour at Athens and spent time in the Peloponnese after his ostracism (perhaps 471), might have been behind that movement, though attempts to associate him with particular “synoecizing” developments in the Arcadian cities (i.e., developments whereby small communities coalesced into a single city) are speculative. Nor need such synoecizing (if it happened at that time) necessarily have been democratic and thus evidence that the communities in question were following the Athenian model rather than the Spartan oligarchic one. The evidence of Athenian tragedy (the Suppliants of Aeschylus) cannot be pressed to yield secure allusions to Themistocles.
Another reason was the continued revival of Argos; its population had now recovered from the defeat at Sepeia (494), and the temporarily exiled descendants of the casualties of Sepeia, the “sons of the slain” as Herodotus calls them, a naturally anti-Spartan group, were now back in control (after ousting the slaves). Argos is on record as fighting a battle in perhaps the 470s, together with Arcadian Tegea, against Sparta, which also had to cope with “all the Arcadians except the Mantineans” at a strictly undatable battle of Dipaieis (which, however, should be put earlier than the Ithome revolt).
The “secret” promise to Thasos was followed by a more open rebuff to Athens. Sparta had invited the Athenians to help with the siege of the helots on Ithome, but with its usual catastrophic indecision Sparta then dismissed the Athenian contingent on suspicion of “revolutionary tendencies.” Athens reacted by allying itself with Argos and Thessaly, which was a blow to Spartan ambitions both in its obvious stronghold, the Peloponnese, and in central Greece, an area into which one group of Spartans always seems to have wanted to expand. The reforms of Ephialtes Legal reforms
That phase of foreign policy has to be somehow associated with internal change at Athens, the so-called Ephialtic reforms. In 462, together with the young Pericles, the Athenian statesman Ephialtes pushed through the decisive phase of the reforms, namely an assault on the powers of the Areopagus. These powers, except for a residual jurisdiction over homicide and some religious offenses, and perhaps a formal “guardianship of the laws,” were redistributed among the Council of Five Hundred and the popular law courts. This is, in essence, the very bald and unhelpful account of the main source, the Constitution of Athens; there must have been more to it, but the problem is to know how much more. Probably the Areopagus ceased to hear crimes against the state, and such cases were transferred to the popular courts.
Alternative interpretations of the inadequate evidence, however, are possible: there are a handful of recorded treason trials earlier than 462 in which a popular element does admittedly play a prominent part, and, although these can be explained away in various ways, it can be held that the transfer of jurisdictional power to the people occurred earlier than 462. Alternatively, it is possible that Ephialtes’ reforms in that area involved a mere transfer of “first-instance” jurisdiction (i.e., jurisdiction over cases other than those on appeal) from the Areopagus to the Council of Five Hundred. That interpretation requires the assumption of an unattested early 5th-century reform transferring capital appeals to the people.
More radically, and generally, the jurisdiction of magistrates (archons) was much curtailed; they now conducted a mere preliminary hearing, and the main case went to a large popular jury. The authority to conduct inquiries into the qualifications for office of the archons themselves (the dokimasia procedure) and into their behaviour after their terms of office had expired (euthyna procedure) was also taken away from the Areopagus and given to the Council of Five Hundred. The principle of popular accountability seems new, though the statement in Aristotle’s Politics, that the right of popular euthyna goes back in some sense to Solon, has its defenders. Political reforms