Nemesis, as ever, had proved herself both merciless and witty; and just to emphasize that hubris might prove a failing of Greeks as well as of barbarian kings, she had dragged down, in the weeks that followed Pausanias’ wretched end, a hero greater even than the Regent. Themistocles, hated ever since Salamis for having been so persistently and spectacularly right, had already, by 470 BC, been ostracized by his resentful fellow citizens. Now, implicated in Pausanias’ treachery, he had fled Greece altogether. After wanderings and adventures worthy of Odysseus, he had finally ended up in Susa, where Xerxes’ son, the new Great King, had exulted in the capture of his father’s most formidable enemy. “The subtle serpent of Greece,”74 now that he was defanged, had proved a great favorite of his new master; and all the brilliant qualities of his intellect, once so fatal to Persian ambitions, had been put to the Great King’s service. Dispatched to the western front, Themistocles had settled just inland from Miletus, where he had issued coins and run an army, just like any satrap. He passed his final days advising the court in Sardis on how best to resist the encroachments of his own countrymen. And so it was, as a royal servitor and as a traitor, that Themistocles, in 459 BC, finally breathed his last.
An unsettling precedent: that the savior of Greece should have ended up the enemy of liberty. Even in exile, it seemed to many, Themistocles continued to serve as a model to his city. For increasingly, throughout the 450s BC, cities freed from barbarian rule found their sense of gratitude toward Athens darkening into envy, suspicion and dread. They could see little difference between the tribute that they had once paid to Susa and the subscription that they were now obliged to send to the Acropolis. Already, in the 460s BC, cities that had attempted to secede from the league had found themselves being visited by the Athenian fleet. So too, in the following decade, had cities not even in the alliance. In 457, for instance, the Athenians put paid to half a century of rivalry by investing their old rival Aegina, dismantling her walls, confiscating her fleet—and then inviting her to join the league. An offer which the wretched Aeginetans could hardly refuse—and of which even the most imperious Oriental despot might have been proud. Men began to recall the first arrival of Athens to her empire as a moment both ominous and fatefuclass="underline" for Xanthippus, it was said, having sailed north from the Battle of Mycale, had moored off the Hellespont, seized the cables from Xerxes’ bridge as plunder, and then nailed a captured Persian alive to a plank. This crucifixion, looming ever larger in people’s memories, began to seem sufficient to cast all Greece into its shadow.
And yet the Athenians themselves knew better. Great though their city had become, and powerful, and rich, they never forgot for a moment what she had passed through, what braved, to win such pre-eminence. “Bulwark of Greece, famous Athens, city of godlike men”: the world that she put in her shadow she also illuminated with her glory. Literally so: for a sailor rounding Cape Sunium might look toward “the shining city, violet-crowned, famous in song,”75 and see, at a distance of thirty miles, a brilliant flash of light. This was the reflection of the sun upon a burnished spear, held in the grip of a colossal Athena, some thirty-five feet tall, who stood, heroic and beautiful, on the summit of the Acropolis, guarding the entrance to the rock, her gaze serenely fixed in the direction of Salamis. Fashioned out of plunder seized from the barbarians, funded by members of the league and crafted by Phidias, the greatest Athenian sculptor of his day, the bronze rendered physical the whole triumphant course of the democracy’s history. A statue of liberty indeed.
And why not, the Athenians began to wonder, of Greek brotherhood as well? In 449 BC, a direct accommodation was reached at last with the barbarians, bringing to a conclusive end, after half a century of warfare, all hostilities between the Great King and his greatest enemy.76 In the same year, an invitation was issued by the Athenians to the cities of Greece and Ionia, requesting them to send delegates to a congress on the Acropolis.77 The ostensible purpose of this proposed conference was to discuss whether the temples burned by the barbarians might now acceptably be rebuilt. But there was also, hovering over it, an altogether more elevated goal. “Let everyone come and join in the debate on the best way to secure peace and prosperity for Greece,”78 the invitation declared. An idealistic appeal—and one that invoked, in the first months of the peace with Persia, the spirit of the Athenians’ finest hour. “We are all Greeks,” Aristeides had proudly asserted to the Spartan ambassadors, back in 479 BC, when countering the accusation that his city might side with Mardonius. “We all share the same blood, the same language, the same temples, the same holy rituals. We all share the one common way of life. It would be a terrible thing for Athens ever to betray this heritage.”79 And the Athenians, rather than do so, had lived up to Aristeides’ stirring words, and seen their city burn. The evidence of their sacrifice could still be seen cracked and blackened across the Acropolis. Why, the Athenians demanded now, did it require the barbarian to remind the Greeks that they were all Greek? Why could not their own example serve to inspire an era of universal amity and peace?
The Peloponnesians, led by Sparta, responded with scorn. Who exactly, they sneered, was to lead the cities of Greece into this promised golden age? The answer envisaged by the Athenians had been implicit in their invitation: cities that sent delegates to the Acropolis would effectively be ceding the primacy to Athens. Sparta, inevitably, refused point-blank to do so. Her allies in the Peloponnese dutifully did the same. The conference was aborted. Shrugging off this setback, Athens responded by tightening the screws on those that she could force to do her will. The war with Persia might have been brought to a close, but the Athenians were in no mood to see the league dissolved just because peace had come to the Aegean. Any hint of recalcitrance from a member state, still more open rebellion, and their crackdown would be merciless. The subscriptions sent to the Acropolis, now nakedly revealed as tribute, continued to be extorted every year. The very word “allies,” having become hopelessly outdated, was replaced by the phrase “cities subject to the Athenian people”—a description that at least had the merit of accuracy. Far from being united, the Greek world found itself divided instead into rival power blocs, each one led by a city that put her dependants humiliatingly in the shade, and justified her hegemony by boasting loudly of her record in the defense of liberty.
For Athens was not the only city which laid claim to the title of savior of Greece. In the balance, Sparta, her former ally, and now increasingly bitter rival, could set Plataea and—above all—Thermopylae. To the rest of Greece, the Spartans remained peerless as models of heroism and virtue; and nothing, not even their most splendid victories, had done more to cement this reputation than the memory of the three hundred and their exemplary defeat. “Go tell them in Sparta, O passer-by / That here, in obedience to their orders, we lie.”80 These lines, carved on a simple stone memorial, could be read on the site of the famous last stand: an epitaph as laconic and stern as Leonidas himself. As immortal as well—for Thermopylae, of all the battles fought against the armies of the Great King, was the one most gloriously transfigured into legend. Yet the Athenians—as brilliant, as eloquent, as quick-witted as their Spartan opposites were sober—would nevertheless trump its memory. Late in 449 BC, a portentous motion was brought before the Assembly. Only a few months previously Sparta had refused to send her delegates to Athens and agree that the burned temples could be reconstructed; now the Athenians voted on the issue without reference to the opinion of the rest of Greece. The proposal to rebuild the monuments on the Acropolis was thunderously passed. Plans for a spectacular makeover of the sacred rock were put into immediate effect.