The First Peloponnesian War can in fact be seen not as a straightforward political or military struggle but as a struggle for religious influence at certain of the great Panhellenic sanctuaries, above all Delphi and Nemea. The Athenians were vying for influence at Delphi with the Spartans, who significantly exerted themselves only twice during the whole war. The first time was the Tanagra campaign in defense of Doris, which was their mythical “metropolis” and the possessor of vital direct leverage in the amphictyony that controlled the affairs of the Delphic sanctuary. The Spartans themselves had no direct vote in the amphictyony, a detail that explains why Doris mattered so much to them—it was a source of indirect Delphic influence. The second occasion was the so-called Second Sacred War, fought a few years later over control of the Delphic sanctuary. Corresponding to this struggle was a simultaneous struggle between the Corinthians and the Argives for influence over the Nemean Games, which were administered by the people of a small local city, Cleonae. Characteristically, Thucydides does not bring out these religious aspects at all clearly; they have to be reconstructed from other wisps of literary and inscriptional evidence. Sparta’s resistance
The central Greek line of Athenian expansion was bound to bring a collision with Sparta. It entered the war in 458 in response to an appeal by its “mother city” Doris, the city from which the primeval Dorians were believed to have set out to undertake the invasion of the Peloponnese. This tiny state in central Greece was currently experiencing difficulties with its neighbour Phocis. The religious and sentimental factor in Sparta’s response was not negligible, but Sparta may have had other aims as well. Not only is there the amphictyonic aspect already noted, but there is evidence in Diodorus Siculus, a Greek historian of the 1st century bce, though not in Thucydides, that Boeotia was a target.
It was on their return from Doris that the Spartans finally came to blows with Athens at Tanagra in Boeotia (458). The battle was of large scale—one hears of Argive involvement on the Athenian side—but indecisive. The Athenians, however, followed it up with a victory at Oenophyta, which gave them control of Boeotia for a decade, an extremely important development passed over by Thucydides in half a dozen words. There was further aggressive Athenian action, first under the general Tolmides, who circumnavigated the Peloponnese (456) and perhaps settled the large number of Messenians at Naupactus alongside the original Naupactans, and second, under Pericles, who launched military expeditions in the Gulf of Corinth (454?). But the disastrous end to the adventure in Egypt (454) made Athens ready for a truce, and in 451 Athens came to terms with Sparta, while Argos concluded a 30-years’ peace with Sparta on its own account. Peace with Persia
Athens resumed the war against Persia with hostilities on Cyprus, but Cimon’s death there made diplomacy imperative in this sphere also. This is where one should place the Peace of Callias (449), mentioned by Diodorus but one of Thucydides’ most famous omissions. Thucydides’ subsequent narrative of the Peloponnesian War, however, presupposes it at a number of points, especially in the context of Greek dealings with Persia in 411. More generally, a peace is made likely by the history of the 440s and 430s, which records no more overt Athenian warfare against Persia and a certain restlessness inside the Athenian empire. (This absence of warfare may be due to other factors as well; it is possible that the Treasury of the League, to which various states in the Delian League paid tribute, was moved from Delos to Athens in 454, a centralizing gesture that may have caused alarm. But the move may have happened earlier.)
Nonliterary evidence also points in the direction of a peace: the evidence of inscriptions makes it probable that no tribute was levied in 448. Perhaps it was recognized that the struggle with Persia was over and with it the justification for tribute; if so, the recognition was only momentary, because there was tribute again in 447. Furthermore, an inscription of the 420s appears to refer to a renewal of the peace on the death of Artaxerxes I. Finally, the commissioning of a new Temple of Athena Nike (“Victory”), and perhaps even of the Parthenon, may have been an aspect of the same mood. (The peace could be represented as a victory of a sort because it restricted the Persian king’s naval movements.) Yet the close correlation of architectural with political history is to be avoided; antibarbarian artistic themes on Greek public buildings need no special explanation at any time in the 5th century. Against all this there are a few ancient allegations that the peace was a later forgery, an implausible idea because such diplomacy was a matter of public knowledge.
Despite the truce with Athens in 451, Sparta had not withdrawn into its Peloponnesian shell completely. In addition to its campaign in support of Doris, Sparta successfully intervened in central Greece in a “Second Sacred War” against Phocis, which, with the assistance of Athens, had gained control of Delphi. Sparta handed over Delphi to the Delphians, but this action was promptly neutralized by the Athenians, who restored the sanctuary to Phocis. Catastrophic revolts in Boeotia and Euboea (446), however, soon eroded that Athenian authority in central Greece of which the Delphic intervention was a manifestation. Revolts of Athens’s tributary states Economic sources of resentment
The tributary states had much cause to rebel. There was something ominous about the sheer physical scale of the first (in chronological order) of the stone blocks on which were carved, as a permanent record, the tribute payments due to Athena. The block, preserved in the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, is a towering 142 inches (3.61 metres) high and had plenty of room for many years of tribute. Evidently the Athenians of 454 expected the empire to go on indefinitely, despite the failure in Egypt, which must have made many observers reflect that peace with Persia could not be far away. Yet tribute, exactingly collected, as Thucydides says, was not the only grievance. It was not even the only economic grievance. In the period of the early Peloponnesian War there were, as inscriptions show, strict Athenian controls on the traffic of grain from the Black Sea, including “Guardians of the Hellespont.” According to one view, those controls were a purely wartime expedient, but, given the state of the evidence, that charitable view is an abuse of the argument from silence; in any case, a prewar inscription does in fact attest a 10 percent tax on shipping from the Black Sea. Grain bound for Athens itself was probably exempt from this.
Still in the economic sphere, resentment against Athenian ownership of land—whether collectively (the so-called cleruchy system, stepped up at the end of the 450s) or privately, by wealthy individuals—can legitimately be inferred from the self-denying promises made by Athens in the days of its 4th-century confederacy. In that category should be included sacred precincts (temenē) in allied states, marked out by horoi, or boundary stones, which indicated land that might be leased out to other wealthy Athenians. The view that those precincts attest benevolently exported or adopted Athenian cults has been challenged. Political and legal sources of resentment
Another interference in the internal affairs of tribute-paying allies in the 4th century was the placement of garrisons and garrison commanders, attested as early as the Erythrae decree of 453. The same decree imposed a “democratic” constitution, according to a principle that the literary sources say was general Athenian policy. Yet it would be simplistic to think that such Athenian-influenced constitutions were necessarily a significant upholding of human rights. One must always ask what “democracy” can have meant in a small community.