They abruptly sent the Athenians home, alone of all the foreign troops that had come to help them. They were perfectly polite and merely said that they no longer needed them. According to Thucydides they “grew afraid of the enterprise and the unorthodoxy of the Athenians and…feared that, if they stayed on in the Peloponnese, they might listen to the people in Ithome and become the sponsors of some revolutionary changes.”
There may have been some truth in this. The whole point of Athenian policy, and that of its maritime league, was to free Greeks and not to oppress them. The helots of Messenia were Greek. Why were Cimon’s hoplites helping Sparta to re-enslave them? It is quite possible that they were in touch with the rebels, if only from shame. It is hard to see what else can explain the apparent stupidity of Sparta’s action.
Predictably, the Athenians were deeply offended and, just as predictably, the consequences fell on the head of the statesman most associated with their pro-Spartan policy.
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This was Cimon. He believed in the dual leadership of Greece, a partnership between equals, in which the Spartans dominated by land and Athens by sea. As we have seen, he greatly admired the plain Lacedaemonian way of life—and even named one of his sons Lacedaemonius. A natural oligarch (remember his family background), he was uneasy with the extreme democracy of his homeland. He was unpopular among populist politicians. On his victorious return from Thasos in 462, he was vindictively hauled before the law courts for bribery. He defended himself with vigor and candor:
I am not, like other Athenians, the spokesman of wealthy Ionians or Thessalians, to be courted or paid for my services. Instead, I represent the Spartans, whose simplicity and moderation I love to imitate—and I do so for free.
Cimon was acquitted.
Now he was in more serious trouble. His dismissal at Mount Ithome discredited his Sparta-friendly policy and helped put an end to his political career. “On a slight pretext,” according to Plutarch, the demos took its public revenge on Cimon. He was ostracized, and so compelled to leave Attica for ten years. An ostracon has come to light that raises an old slander: “Let Cimon take his sister Elpinice and get out.” It was a typical irony of democratic politics that absence made the heart fonder. In exile, the lost leader was soon forgiven.
As for Sparta, it paid a price for its incivility. Athens abrogated its alliance that had been agreed during the Persian Wars and made pacts with its enemies. Although the Spartan army eventually put down the Messenian revolt, the fortress at Ithome never fell. The defenders marched out proudly under an armistice. The Athenians took them under their wing and mischievously resettled them at Naupactus, their naval base on the northern coast of the Corinthian Gulf; from this point of vantage the former serfs kept the Peloponnese under their watchful gaze.
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The swell created by the Persian Wars was still rolling. It pushed the excited democrats at Athens to further logical extremes. A new leader was emerging who was determined that every citizen be enabled to be politically active, that the democracy should be made even more democratic. He was to become the greatest of the city’s statesmen.
Typically, he was another aristocrat and, yet again, a member of the accursed clan. He was the son of Xanthippus, the Alcmaeonid by marriage who had been brought back from a period of ostracism to help fight the Persians, had displaced Themistocles as commander of the Athenian contingent of the allied Greek fleet, and fought at the crowning mercy of Mycale. The boy’s mother, Agariste, was of equally high birth. She was the niece of Cleisthenes, who had introduced the city’s (and the world’s) first democratic constitution.
Pericles, for that was his name, was born about 495. He was good-looking, except that his head was rather long and out of proportion. It resembled the bulb of the squill, a perennial herb common in Europe and the Middle East, and satirists nicknamed him Squill-head.
With this malformation, he was lucky to have survived the first few days of life, for Greek parents took disabled (or indeed for any reason unwanted) children outside the city bounds and left them to die in some unfrequented open space. On the fifth day after his birth the newborn Pericles was welcomed to the household and placed under the protection of the household gods. In a special ritual called the Amphidromia, or the Running Around, his father had to run around the domestic hearth holding the child in his arms and consecrating him to the goddess of the hearth, Hestia.
Like other little Athenians, Pericles will have been brought to the Anthesteria, a Flower and Wine Festival, in the early spring of the fourth year of his life. There he was presented with a wreath to wear on his head, a small jug from which he drank his first sip of wine, and a toy cart. This ceremony was a rite of passage, leading him from the privacy of the family to the open community of citizens.
For it to operate efficiently, the democracy depended on a population that could read, and for this reason if no other the Athenians paid great attention to the education of children. From about the age of seven Pericles was probably tutored at home, although small schools catered for ten or fifteen pupils. The curriculum concentrated on reading and writing, athletics together with music and the arts. Students used waxed tablets on which they scratched letters and texts with a stylus. Pottery sherds also served the function of scrap paper. Literature was taught by rote and Pericles will have learned substantial chunks from the classics of Greek poetry, drama, and epic verse, especially by Homer. But at least Xanthippus did not force him to memorize the whole of the Iliad and the Odyssey, some 27,000 lines, as the father of one hapless youth insisted.
From the age of seven Athenian boys went to a sports ground or palaestra (literally, “wrestling school”) where a professional trainer or paidotribes took charge of their physical health and introduced them to competitive athletics. There they ran and threw discuses and javelins, boxed and wrestled. The very best young men would enter for the Olympic Games and the other athletic festivals.
Little Pericles’ upbringing was interrupted at the age of ten, when he and his family accompanied his ostracized father. He was soon back home in 481 after Xanthippus’s truncated exile. At fourteen he was introduced into a phratry, or brotherhood, one of thirty such mutual societies or associations. Members met for religious ceremonies and gave each other assistance when in trouble.
At the age of eighteen Pericles was registered at his deme, or local council, which functioned as if it were a miniature polis, as a full citizen, son of an Athenian father and an Athenian mother. He entered the adult world with enthusiasm. As a teenager he was much influenced by his music and arts teacher, Damon, who also discreetly introduced him to the world of politics. He remained a close adviser of the adult Pericles and, Plutarch writes, “played the role of masseur and trainer for this political athlete.”
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Pericles was an intellectual and took a lively interest in philosophical questions. He studied under the Italian thinker Zeno of Elea, a Greek colony on the southern Italian coast. Zeno is credited with having invented the dialectic—that is, a method of inquiry based on question and answer. A cynical commentator remarked:
His was a tongue that could argue both sides of a question
With an irresistible fury.
He also devised a number of subtle and profound “paradoxes,” in which logic contradicts the evidence of the senses. The most famous of these tells of Achilles, the great warrior, and a tortoise.