To begin with, fortune favored the Greeks. The fleet sailed up the Nile, gained control of the river and of the onetime capital city of Memphis, just south of the Delta, except for its Persian garrison in a fortification called the White Tower.
The Great King tried to bribe the Peloponnesians to invade Attica, but to their credit they declined, while pocketing an advance payment. The Delian League helped repel a Persian expeditionary force, but Artaxerxes sent another one in due course. The Egyptians and their allies were driven from Memphis and besieged on a river island in the Nile Delta for a year and a half. Eventually the Persians drained the marsh waters and captured the island by infantry assault. Most of the league fleet was lost and after six years the Greek expedition ended in complete failure.
Despite the evidence of Thucydides, it would seem that many Athenians escaped albeit not with their boats, for otherwise fifty thousand lives would have been sacrificed (as we have seen, a trireme needed a two-hundred-strong crew). Although some of the oarsmen must have come from allied states, losses on such a scale would have prevented the polis from pursuing the active military policy it actually did in the coming years. But the disaster was indeed a blow to league morale.
Ever resilient, Athens resolved to become a land power in Greece as well as a sea power in the Aegean. The strategic aim was to control the bottleneck of the Isthmus and so prevent invasions of Attica led by Sparta. For a time it based a hoplite force in Megara and built Long Walls to connect it with its port, Nisaea. With harbors on both Megara’s northern and southern coasts, Athens now controlled the Corinthian gulf. It defeated its longtime rival, the island of Aegina, confiscated its navy, and compelled it to join the league as a paying member. This was the last chorus of an old song.
Finally, Athens conquered all of Boeotia except for its powerful polis, Thebes. Sparta watched these developments with growing fury. Between about 460 and 445 it and its Peloponnesian allies engaged in on-off fighting with the new boastful imperial power (named too generously as the First Peloponnesian War). The Athenians did not hold on to their mainland acquisitions for much longer than a decade. In 447 an important battle was lost at Coronea in Boeotia, with heavy upper-class casualties including Cleinias, an Alcmaeonid. Athenian hegemony in mainland Greece came to an abrupt end. Luckily a revolt in the important and nearby island dependency of Euboea was speedily put down.
With astute anticipation of failure, the Athenians made sure they could protect themselves. The Long Walls connecting Athens to Piraeus and Phaleron were completed in 457. From now onwards, so long as its fleet ruled the waves Athens was invulnerable. Themistocles’ vision of his city transformed into a maritime power was at last fully realized. In the 440s the so-called Middle Wall was built, which created a narrow and probably more defensible corridor to the port.
Meanwhile on the far side of the Aegean, Cimon, back home after his ten years of ostracism, proved once again that, although never the convinced democrat, he was ever the democracy’s proud servant. He was given command of an amphibious expedition against the Persians on Cyprus; but in 450 he fell sick or was wounded and died. At his suggestion on his deathbed, the news was kept secret to give the Greeks time to extricate themselves and abandon the campaign unimpeded.
An epitaph for the fallen, in the manner of the late Simonides, makes much of Cimon’s last hurrah.
From the time when the sea divided Europe from Asia
And wild Ares dominated the cities of mortals,
No such act by men of this earth ever took place
On land and sea at one and the same time.
The lines refer to the Cyprus campaign, but they would be a fitting if overstated envoi to this whole era of Athenian overreach. For all the gallantry and all the glory in these middle years of the fifth century, how much was really achieved? The answer is mixed.
In fact, Athens had reached the limits of its capacity. At one point the polis was so short of manpower that men as young as eighteen and as old as sixty had to be called up as reinforcements. In 456 it contemptuously sent a fleet to sail around the Peloponnese and set fire to Sparta’s naval yards at its port of Gytheion. However, in 451 it agreed to a five-year truce with Sparta. A couple of years later an advantageous accord was struck with the Great King, the Peace of Callias (so named after the politician who negotiated it, Cimon’s multimillionaire brother-in-law). The Greek cities of Asia Minor were to be free and subject to their own laws, except for Cyprus, permanently lost to Persia—a bitter pill. In effect, Athens had abandoned its ambitions in the Eastern Mediterranean.
On the credit side, Persian military forces were not allowed to come nearer the Mediterranean coast than one day’s journey by horse, were not to sail past the Blue Rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea (so protecting the grain trade) nor past the islands that lay between Lycia and Pamphilia (thus excluding the Persian navy from the Aegean). In a word, Artaxerxes agreed to keep out of the Hellenic world.
Neither belligerent could claim a total victory, but fortune overall favored the Greeks. Fifty years had passed since Athenians raided Sardis and aroused the ire of King Darius, but at long last the Persian Wars were over. Joy was not altogether unconfined, though, for peace brought Athens a new threat. In island after island across the Aegean Sea people were asking themselves what was the point of their expensive maritime alliance now that the Great King was no longer a serious threat. Why should they go on paying Athens large sums of money for a fleet that was not needed?
—
In 446 the truce between Athens and Sparta was converted into a Thirty Years’ Peace, based on recognition of the status quo. The two great powers in Greece were following very different paths. Once upon a time partners, even friends, Athens and Sparta had not trusted one another for years. Now they were on tolerable terms again, but it did not take a clairvoyant to see trouble ahead.
Sparta was greatly admired throughout the Hellenic world for its self-discipline and austerity. But it was introverted and obsessively resistant to change. Its system was the expression of barely concealed fear. The subject peoples of the Peloponnese were always seething; at any moment they might boil over and Lacedaemon would be overwhelmed. It was this ever-wakeful nightmare that underwrote its virtues.
The Peloponnesian earthquake exposed the flaws of their system, but the Spartans survived. With a convulsive effort, they vanquished the helots and re-enslaved them. But then they found themselves facing another sudden violent shaking, as the revolutionary energy of the Athenian democracy upset the balance of the Hellenic world. It not only controlled the seas, but for a time had established a land empire in central Greece that locked Sparta into its southern peninsula. And the hungry giant of the Persian Empire had been tamed. Athens was well on its way to unifying Greece.
No wonder that at some point during the 440s Pericles proposed a Panhellenic congress. All Greeks, whether from Europe or Asia, were invited. The agenda was to include the future of the Greek sanctuaries burned down by the Persians, the fulfillment of vows made to the gods during the Persian Wars, and, most important of all, the security of the seas. The underlying purpose of the congress was obvious—to win consent to the Athenian hegemony. Unsurprisingly, Sparta sabotaged the plan and the congress never took place.