With the Lacedaemonians out of the way, the Athenians, at the head of the Delian League, prosecuted the war against Persia. To show how the League developed under Athenian leadership, Thucydides selected four events from the first twelve years or so of its history. First, the League expelled the Persians from Eion (Thuc. I 98; Ephorus, BNJ 70, Fr. 191, fr. 4; Diod. XI 60). The League’s sworn purpose was to wage war against the Persians (Thuc. III 10) and at Eion it did so. Eion lay in the northern Aegean near the mouth of the River Strymon far to the west of the Hellespont. While Eion may have been an isolated base, it is nonetheless possible that the Persians still held much territory in Europe and that the League had a fair amount to do before it had confined them to Asia.
Second, the League captured the island of Scyros in the northern Sporades (ll. cc.), probably in 470. There were no Persians on Scyros, but the island was a notorious pirates’ nest (Plut. Cim. 8). When the League cleaned that nest out, it may not have been adhering to its sworn goal of fighting the Persians, but it was certainly doing everyone in the Aegean a favor. Third, the League attacked the Euboean town of Carystus. This was a Greek town which had not joined the League and which had fallen afoul of the other Euboeans (Thuc. I 98). Carystians had fought for the Persians at Salamis, and perhaps they had cooperated with the Persians more than strictly necessary. Soon after the Greek victory at Salamis, Themistocles had actually led forces against Carystus and had extorted money from it (Hdt. VIII 112), so just possibly a case was advanced that the Carystians were collaborators who deserved what they got. All the same, the League was this time fighting neither against the Persians nor against a common pest, but against a Greek community, albeit one outside of the League.
Fourth, Thucydides mentions the League’s campaign against Naxos (Thuc. I 98), a campaign which was ongoing in 465 (Thuc. I 137). Naxos had been a member of the League; its sin was that it had tried to leave the League. For the first time, the League took action against a member state, and the suppression of the Naxian Revolt showed that this was no longer an alliance of free states, but one under the dominion of Athens (cf. Thuc. III 10) which clearly would not countenance a departure from the League. Thucydides then explains that the allies were themselves responsible for their fate: they had the option of contributing ships to the common campaigns or, in lieu of ships, money. Most preferred to send cash and to let the Athenians do the lion’s share of the actual fighting. The Athenians, fairly enough, expected such allies to meet their fiscal obligations and when they failed so to do, took action to see that they did. Since the allies had been shirking their duty in the fighting, they were woefully underprepared to fight against the battle-hardened Athenians who, after all, were merely insisting that the allies pay what they had undertaken to pay into the common treasury so as to finance a war which the Athenians were waging on behalf of them all (Thuc. I 98).
Thucydides’ analysis contains, however, an historiographical sleight of hand which calls it into question. Just before Naxos revolted (on this, see Box 11.1), the Athenians under the command of Cimon, the son of Miltiades the Younger, had defeated the Persians in a “double battle,” first by sea and then by land near the mouth of the River Eurymedon in Pamphylia (Thuc. I 100; Ephorus, BNJ 70, Fr. 191, frr. 9-13; Callisthenes, BNJ 124, Fr. 15). The battle probably took place circa 466 and effectively brought hostilities between Persia and the Athenian-led alliance to an end. The Persians for now accepted that they had lost control of most of the Greek-settled regions in Asia Minor. In other words, the war was over and the Delian League had achieved its goal. What reason was there for the member states to continue making payments into a common treasury to finance a war which was no longer being waged?
So, shortly after the Battle of the Eurymedon, Naxos ceased making the payments. Yet the Athenians were loath to forgo the 460 talents annually deposited into a treasury that Athenian-appointed treasurers controlled. In effect the Athenians were now demanding that the members of the League pay the Athenians money to protect them from an enemy which was not threatening them anymore. The Delian League had become, in essence, a protection racket; and the Athenians were willing and able to exact severe vengeance on anyone who possessed the effrontery not to pay the demanded protection money. The Delian League, originally an alliance of independent states united to fight the Persians, had been transmogrified into the Athenian Empire - a collection of subject states united for the greater glory of Athens.
Next, around this time the Athenians probably concluded a formal peace with the Persians, the so-called Peace of Callias, named after the chief Athenian negotiator (see Plut. Cim. 13). Callias was Cimon’s brother-in-law (Plut. Cim. 4), and presumably Cimon supported the making of a peace treaty. While Callias’ travel to Persia is clearly attested by a fifth-century source (Hdt. VII 151), the Peace itself is not (see Fornara, Nr. 95). Like Herodotus, Thucydides too fails to mention it, probably because it did not serve his purposes to point out that the war against Persia ended about this time. The paucity of clear early attestations of the Peace of Callias has caused an endless debate on the matter in modern scholarship (see Badian 1993 in the Further Reading).
Finally, Thucydides’ is not the sole surviving account of the early years of the Delian League. A parallel account exists in Diodorus and the surviving fragments of Ephorus, Diodorus’ source (see BNJ 70, Biographical Essay, section II F). Comparison of Thucydides’ and Diodorus’/Ephorus’ accounts shows that both are actually based on the same source, Hellanicus (BNJ 4), a late-fifth-century BC writer on Athenian history (see Rainey 2004 in Further Reading and commentary to Ephorus, BNJ 70, Fr. 191).
World History
