This stunning double victory in or about 466 removed any lingering threat to Hellas and its liberties. As usual, Simonides was invited to praise the fallen with a moving verse:
These men lost the splendour of their youth at the Eurymedon.
Spearmen, they fought the vanguard of Persian archers,
Not only on foot but on their swift ships.
Dying, they left the most beautiful memory of their valour.
Nevertheless, more as symbol than from any real need, the Athenians decided to fortify the Acropolis, and the spoils from the Eurymedon paid for the work. The torched temples, though, were left as they were, still untouched.
—
During these triumphant postwar decades, Theseus, the national hero of Athens, put in a reappearance. He had long been honored as a demigod and hoplites fighting at Marathon believed that they saw him in full armor, leading the charge against the barbarians.
Then came a new development. In 476, the authorities consulted the oracle at Delphi. The Pythia demanded that the bones of Theseus be found and reinterred in Athens. Their approximate location was known—the island of Scyros off Euboea in the Aegean. In the misty days of myth, the aging Theseus decided to settle there and its ruler, seeing him as a rival, had pushed him off a high cliff to his death. But where precisely the body had been buried was a mystery.
Cimon understood the importance of Theseus to the Athenian brand and, after a successful campaign in Thrace in the same year as the Pythia’s ruling, restored his shrine at Athens. At this juncture, the league decided to invade Scyros and expel its inhabitants.
The reason was this. The island was largely barren and its inhabitants were inefficient farmers; so instead they made their living from piracy and disrupted peaceful trade. The high seas were not a safe place and maritime banditry was commonplace and almost respectable. To be a pirate was to be somebody in the world; whenever a ship arrived at port, the first question anyone would ask the captain was: “Are you pirates?” If he was, he would be confidently expected to acknowledge the fact. As Thucydides observed, there was “no sense of shame in the profession, rather a glorying in it.”
The last straw came when pirates confiscated the goods of some merchants from Thessaly, who had dropped anchor at the port of Scyros, and threw them into prison. The merchants managed to escape and, furious at their treatment, complained to the Amphictyony of Delphi, an association of states in middle and northern Greece—in effect, a federation of neighbors.
Judgment was given in their favor and the authorities at Scyros, anxious to avoid retaliation, named the actual culprits and instructed them to return their plunder. Panic-stricken, the robbers wrote to Cimon and promised to betray the island and hand it over to him, presumably in return for a pardon.
This was too good an offer to resist. Cimon arrived with the allied fleet, captured Scyros without trouble, and removed the population (exchanging it with Athenians and so, in effect, annexing the place). Now that he was there, and mindful of Apollo’s commandment, the admiral set about looking for the lost king. It was hard to know where to start until (or so the story goes) he saw an eagle pecking about on the top of a mound. He immediately dug there and unearthed a coffin containing the bones of an unusually tall warrior, a bronze spear and sword at his side.
Evidently Cimon had found his man and, with his sacred cargo on board his personal trireme, he set sail for Athens. His fellow-citizens were thrilled. There were massive celebrations, splendid processions, and sacrifices as if the once and future king were coming back into his own. A monument was built where his remains received the worship due to a hero or a demigod. Plutarch writes:
And now he lies buried in the heart of the city…and his tomb is a sanctuary and place of refuge for runaway slaves and all poor men who stand in fear of men in power, since Theseus was their champion and helper throughout his life, and listened kindly to the pleas of the needy and downtrodden.
—
How much of this tale should we take at face value? We may suspect Cimon to have had Theseus in mind when planning his raid on the pirates. No doubt what he found was an ancient barrow of some kind or the fossilized remains of a prehistoric creature, easily interpreted as the outsize skeleton of a hero. He knew the value of public relations.
Theseus was a talisman for the demos and the new philosophy of government. His legend showed him to have been indomitable, imaginative, popular, ruthless, and quick-witted. These were the values of the contemporary Athenian. He was a metaphor in human form of the democracy. Through him the glorious and mythic past blessed the imperial present.
14
The Falling-Out
One might think that nothing could be done to unwalled Sparta, that haphazard collection of dusty villages, to make it even more unimpressive to look at than it already was. But then, probably in 465, that all changed.
The place was flattened by a series of tremendous earthquakes. The peaks of neighboring Mount Taygetus broke away. The entire city was demolished, except for five houses. Where there had been little to look at there was now nothing to look at. Some young men and boys were exercising together at the time under the colonnade of a gymnasium; just before the earthquake struck, the boys’ attention was distracted by a hare and, still naked and covered in oil, they ran after it into the open. But the men were all killed when the gymnasium collapsed on them.
There was huge loss of life—twenty thousand deaths according to one source and, wrote Plutarch, “all the ephebes or military cadets.” Full adult male Spartan citizens, the invincible Equals, were in short supply.
For the helots—the enslaved population of the southern Peloponnese—the catastrophe was a god-sent opportunity. They immediately rose in revolt. Some in the countryside nearby headed at once for the city, where the survivors were trying to rescue those caught under rubble and masonry or to retrieve their possessions. The twenty-four-year-old king Archidamus astutely anticipated trouble and had the trumpet blown to herald an imminent enemy attack. When the helots arrived they faced an armed force and withdrew.
—
However, rebellion spread and many perioeci, free men but without civic rights and under Spartan rule, joined it. The Spartans were unable to put out the flames themselves and asked their allies to assist. The appeal was extended to the Athenians in spite of the fact that it was only a short while since they had themselves been planning an invasion of Attica. It was lucky that the men of Thasos kept their mouths shut.
The comic playwright Aristophanes has one of his characters amusedly recall the day “when Pericleidas the Spartan came here once and sat at the altars petitioning the Athenians, with a white face and a scarlet cloak, begging for an army.” There was lively debate in the ecclesia, some arguing that it would be good for Sparta to be taken down a peg or two. But Cimon, Plutarch writes, “put Sparta’s interests before his own country’s aggrandizement” and persuaded the assembly to send out an expeditionary force, under his command.
At this point things went mysteriously and very wrong.
The insurgents were gradually pushed back to their heartland and their final defensive position, Mount Ithome deep inside Messenia, where they built stockades and prepared to make a last stand. The Athenians had the reputation of being good at siege operations and this was the main reason for asking for their help. They arrived in force with four thousand hoplites, but before they could achieve anything the Spartans had a startling change of heart.