The Milesians had the worst of the fighting and went to Athens to lay a complaint against the Samians. All the parties were members of the league and, as is usual in family quarrels, feelings ran high. The Milesian cause was supported by some private individuals from Samos who wanted to overthrow the oligarchic form of government. The affair called for a quick response to head off a possible insurrection, which could well spread, if unchecked, throughout the empire: Byzantium, a polis on the European side of the Bosphorus, seized the hour and rebelled from the league.
The Athenians immediately dispatched Pericles with forty ships to Samos, threw out the ruling aristocrats, and established a democracy, which they ordered to abandon hostilities with Miletus. To ensure good behavior they took fifty boys and fifty men as hostages and sent them to the island of Lemnos. Before sailing home, Pericles left behind a garrison of Athenians to deter troublemakers.
Some Samians managed to escape to the mainland and made their way to the Persian governor of Sardis, who promised his assistance. Presumably this came in the form of ready money, for they immediately raised a force of seven hundred mercenaries and crossed the narrow strait to Samos under cover of night. They rescued their hostages and handed over the Athenian garrison to the Persians. They then resumed their war with Miletus.
On hearing the news Pericles wearily returned to Samos. He found that the islanders had raised their sights and were now determined to wrest command of the seas from Athens. But they were beaten in a naval engagement and Pericles laid siege to their capital, the port of Samos. The islanders were undaunted. They sallied out and fought under the city walls. But when reinforcements from Athens arrived the city was completely encircled.
The Persians seem to have been still supporting the rebels. Hearing that a Phoenician fleet was on its way to relieve the island, Pericles took sixty ships and sailed away to meet it. This was an incautious move, for the Samians, commanded (in the true Greek manner) by a philosopher, took advantage of his absence and the fewer Athenian ships, and put out to sea in a highly successful surprise attack. They captured the Athenian camp, which was unfortified, and took numerous prisoners, whose foreheads they branded with the symbol of Athena, the owl, and destroyed many enemy ships.
Pericles hurried back to the rescue and once more defeated the Samian fleet. To avoid continuing casualties, he built a wall around the city and settled down with his men to a long siege. Eventually after nine months the Samians surrendered. They were given a heavy fine, their fleet was confiscated, and the city walls were demolished; Byzantium then capitulated too. Plutarch mentions a report, only to dismiss it, that the Athenians acted with great brutality and crucified Samos’s captains and marines in the main square of Miletus. But they had been given a bad fright, which tends to make men behave badly.
Thucydides believed that Samos came within an inch of depriving Athens of its command of the sea, but apparently his victory gave Pericles a prodigiously high opinion of himself. It had taken Agamemnon ten years to capture Troy, but (he reflected) he had reduced the greatest city of Ionia in less than one. It is hard to agree with him, for the campaign had been marked by one miscalculation after another.
Back home, Pericles presided over funeral honors for all those who had lost their lives in the war. He won high praise for the speech he delivered. For once he found a memorable phrase, which even today touches the heart. With the deaths of these young men, he said, it was “as if the spring had been taken out of the year.”
As he stepped down from the speaker’s rostrum, women mobbed him. They clasped his hand and crowned him with garlands and hair ribbons as if he were an athlete and had won a prize at the Games.
—
A sentry runs to the ruler of Thebes with bad news. Someone unknown has covered the corpse with dry dust where it lies in front of the city walls. It was the duty of a good Greek to bury the dead and a sprinkling of earth was the least he was obliged to do. Without this rite the unhappy spirit would be forever caught between the upper air and the underworld.
But, in the legendary story, King Creon had forbidden any such ceremony, he was so furious with the dead man. This was his nephew Polynices, who had led an invasion against his native city. His brother Eteocles had patriotically commanded the defense. The invasion was repelled, but the two princes met in single combat and, as luck would have it, killed one another. Eteocles was awarded a full burial, but his sibling was left to the birds and the dogs.
It turned out that the illegal burier was the men’s sister Antigone. She was hauled before the king and asked to explain herself. Their exchange sets the theme of a memorable tragedy by Sophocles, successor of Aeschylus and the leading Athenian playwright of the mid-fifth century.
Only seven of his plays have survived and this one, the Antigone, first performed about the time of the revolt of Samos, is a masterpiece. Sophocles was a public figure as well as an artist. He served as a national treasurer and fought as a general during the Samian campaign. His work displays an optimism, an intellectual curiosity, and honesty typical of the age of Pericles. It could only have been written under a democracy.
The chorus sings a justly famous hymn to the vitality of humankind.
Wonders are many on the earth, and the greatest of these
Is man, who rides the ocean and takes his way
Through the deeps…
The use of language, the wind-swift motion of brain
He learned; found out the laws of living together
In cities…
There is nothing beyond his power.
Sophocles makes it clear that humanity is capable of evil as well as good. Overall, the portrait he paints bears a striking resemblance to his fellow-Athenians in their pomp.
The debate between Creon and his niece explores the proper limits of political power and the rights of the individual. It raised imagined issues for the demos that it had to answer for real.
The king asks if Antigone knew of his order not to bury Polynices. She replies that she did.
Creon.
And yet you dared to contravene it?
Antigone.
Yes.
That order did not come from God. Justice,
That dwells with the gods below, knows no such law.
I did not think your edicts strong enough
To overrule the unwritten, unalterable laws
Of god and heaven.
Creon insists that the needs of the state take priority over the laws of conscience and condemns his niece to be buried alive in a cave. Eventually he is persuaded to relent, but too late. Antigone hangs herself. Creon’s son, who is her fiancé, and his wife both commit suicide. The broken monarch staggers back into his empty palace.
Creon has been guilty of hubris, an offense that was regarded as a serious crime in Athens. It signified gratuitous harm inflicted by someone who is, or thinks he is, superior to and more powerful than his victim.
Sophocles draws no direct comparison with the life around him, but Creon’s behavior echoes the pride and violence of some Athenian imperialists. His fate, the playwright means us to understand, was a lesson the victors of Samos would be wise to learn.
—
One woman in particular was pleased that the Samian crisis was over. This was the beautiful Aspasia. She was, allege the ancient sources, a high-class prostitute or hetaira (literally, a “female companion”). Hetairai were usually educated women who were expected to offer intellectual and emotional support to their patrons as well as sexual services. The appellation was unfair or at least overstated, for Aspasia appears to have been born to a “good” family in the powerful polis of Miletus on the coast of Asia Minor. However, there is no doubt that she lived with Pericles as his mistress.