The Growth of Athens’ Power

Thucydides’ twin themes of 1.23 must, for convenience’s sake, be sorted into two parallel plots: the growth of Athens’ power, her arche or empire, on the one hand; Sparta’s developing fear on the other.

Athens’ empire grew out of the wartime alliance against the Persians (Brunt 1953-4). As Thucydides paraphrases baldly in the course of his 'Archaeology, 'the Hellenes - both those who had fought in the war together and those who had revolted from the King of Persia - split into two divisions, one group following Athens and the other Sparta’ (1.18). This split occurred through a change, apparently piecemeal, in the leadership of the naval campaign which sought to take the war into the King’s own territory. The campaign in Cyprus and Byzantion was under the leadership of the Spartan Pausanias (1.94). His perceived arrogance, however, especially to those lonians until recently under Persian rule, led to the lonians’ seeking Athenian protection. Complaints to Sparta, meanwhile, led to Pausanias’ recall; by the time that a successor, the unfortunate Dorkis, was sent out to take over the command, the allies were no longer willing to accept Spartan command (1.95). The new dispensation was quickly sealed: with the establishment of a league treasury (at Delos) and treasurers (the hellenotamiai), and the fixing of the contributions to be made - which states should contribute ships and which money (1.96) - and, as we learn from the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, by a solemn oath 'to have the same friends and enemies’, sealed by the sinking of weights to the bottom of the sea ([Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 23).

The Spartans, crucially in Thucydides’ account, were not unhappy with this outcome. As Thucydides’ Athenian representatives at Sparta declare, '[this empire] came to us at a time when you were unwilling to fight on to the end against the Persians’ (1.75); Thucydides ascribes to the Spartans, in his own words, the fear that their leaders would, like Pausanias, be corrupted by far-flung commands, the sense that the command was a burden, and the conviction that the Athenians were both capable and well-disposed to Spartan interests (1.95). (This complex picture of Spartan motivation should be read, however, alongside their secret sense of grievance over the Athenians’ rebuilding of their walls, 1.92: see further below.) The Athenians’ leadership is also, in Thucydides’ account, initially with the consent of her allies: 'our allies came to us of their own accord and begged us to lead them’ (as the Athenians at Sparta say again: 1.75). There is an almost immediate slippage, however. The allies were 'at first autonomous and deliberated in common councils’, but implicitly this was short-lived (1.97). The report of the Athenians’ crushing response to the attempted secession of Naxos - 'the first allied state to be enslaved contrary to what had been established’ (1.98), the first of many - prompts a grim anatomy of the changing dynamics of the relationship between Athens and her allies in which allied laziness and Athenian harshness combine to entrench an inequality in strength (1.99):

The chief reasons for these revolts were failures to produce the right amount of tribute or the right number of ships, and sometimes a refusal to produce any ships at all. For the Athenians insisted on obligations being exactly met, and made themselves unpopular by bringing the severest pressure to bear on allies who were not used to making sacrifices and did not want to make them. In other ways, too, the Athenians as rulers were no longer popular as they used to be: they bore more than their fair share of the actual fighting, but this made it all the easier for them to force back into the alliance any state that wanted to leave it. For this position it was the allies themselves who were to blame. Because of this reluctance of theirs to face military service, most of them, to avoid serving abroad, had assessments made by which, instead of producing ships, they were to pay a corresponding sum of money. The result was that the Athenian navy grew strong at their expense, and when they revolted they always found themselves inadequately armed and inexperienced in war.

This pattern is further exemplified by Thucydides’ sketch of subsequent relations between Athens and her allies: the revolt of Thasos, in part over a dispute over the control of the rich mines on the mainland of Thrace (1.100-1); the expansion (and subsequent contraction) of the alliance on the Greek mainland in the period of the so-called ‘First Peloponnesian War’ (461-446; see further below); or Athens’ involvement in the war between two allies, Samos and Miletos, and her subsequent suppression of a Samian revolt (1.115-17), a conflict that, Thucydides comments, came close to depriving the Athenians of their control of the sea (8.76). The same development of alliance to empire is also, though, sketched in the overlapping accounts of the protagonists (all of which, we must remember, are put into their mouths by Thucydides himself: e. g., Stadter 1973, Rood 1998: 46-8, now Laird 1999: 143-52). For the Athenians, fear of Persia gives way to a sense of their own honour and to selfinterest (1.75); others’ hostility then prevents them from letting go of their empire. The Mytileneans, in the context of their revolt against Athens, justify their earlier failure to revolt (to the Spartans whose help they are soliciting) in terms again of a development of Athenian imperialism from innocent beginnings (3, 9-14). By the time that they realized the change they were powerless (3.10; cf. Hermokrates, Thuc. 6.76): ‘when we saw that they were becoming less and less antagonistic to Persia and more and more interested in enslaving their own allies, then we became frightened.’ This developmental model is not beyond criticism (most radically: Robertson 1980). Other sources suggest, in particular, an earlier date for Athenian imperial intent. Herodotos is explicit that Pausanias’ hybris was held up as a pretext (prophasis) for the Athenians to take the leadership (8.3). His account of the Persian wars, most probably written in its final form in the early years of the Peloponnesian War (Fornara 1971b, Hornblower 1991: 2-26), shows the Greek allies not only fighting against their Persian enemies but jostling amongst themselves for pole position come the peace. The Athenian general Miltiades, to take one example from many, in encouraging his fellow Athenian Kallimachos to cast his vote for battle against Persia, the battle of Marathon, makes the claim that Athens’ survival would lead to her becoming the first of the cities of Greece (Hdt. 6.109; cf. 9.102). Athens’ contribution to the Ionian Revolt is represented as motivated, at least in substantial part, by a desire for the wealth of Asia (5.97; cf. 5.49). And the Athenians’ angry rejection of the suggestion that their colonists might be transplanted from Ionia to mainland Greece (the lonians, with the Samians, Chians and Lesbians in the vanguard, are instead incorporated into the alliance against Persia; cf. [Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 24) already has a certain proprietorial air. (His account of Leotychidas and the Spartans’ taking their leave from the war against Persia, while Xanthippos, the father of Perikles, and the

Athenians head for the Peloponnese, might, on the other hand, be taken to support Thucydides’ portrait of Spartan acquiescence, to mark the crucial parting of the ways in the wartime alliance, 9.114.)

The presence of a pattern, if not of a critique, of incipient Athenian imperialism in Herodotos’ Histories is now virtually an orthodoxy among Herodotean scholars (e. g., Fornara 1971b, Stadter 1992, Moles 1996, 2002; cf. Meiggs 1972: 5), but is yet to be established in historical narratives of the empire (cf. Fornara & Samons 1991: 76-113). That the Athenian empire or arche formed part of ‘a larger sequence in which Athenian behaviour had already become pronouncedly aggressive’ (Fornara & Samons 1991: 102) is also suggested by a number of what we might term ‘protoimperial’ ventures in the sixth and early-fifth centuries: the Peisistratid tyrants’ interest in Sigeion, for example, that of the Philaids in the Chersonese, or the curious and ultimately unsuccessful enterprises of Miltiades after Marathon (Hdt. 6.132; cf. 8.112.3; Hornblower 1984; Fornara & Samons, 1991: 76-113, Mills 1997: 69; cf. Calame 1996: 223-7); these ventures, undertaken by individuals, with varying degrees of polis sanction, to establish family fiefdoms, may precede the formal foundations of the fifth-century League but they are surely connected to it.

Further evidence of an early imperial intent can be gleaned from a dramatic source, Aischylos’ Persians (a dramatization of the Persians’ hearing of the news of their defeat at Salamis), first performed in 472, only a few years into the alliance’s life (Gow 1928, Harrison 2000). A number of relevant themes emerge from the play: the idea that Athens’ role is pivotal to the survival of Greece (lines 233-4), an idea which was unsurprisingly controversial (cf. Hdt 7.139) and which, as we know from Thucydides, served as a regular justification of Athenian rule over her allies (Thuc. 1.73-4, 5.89, 6.83; cf. Lysias 2.2); or the use of the ethnic term ‘lonians’ to embrace both the Athenians and their allies (so, ‘the Ionian people do not run away from battle’, line 1025; cf. lines 178, 563, 950-1, 1011, Thuc. 1.94, Solon F 4a West), resonant of the Athenians’ proprietorial embrace of the lonians in Herodotos’ account (9.105-6). Perhaps most significant, however, is the play’s implicit analogy between Persian and Athenian empires, reflecting as it does the Athenians’ consciousness of their status as an imperial power at this early date. In one scene of the play, the chorus of Persian elders heaps praise on their former King Dareios (in contrast to his son Xerxes) for his many conquests in the Greek world, listed with relish. At the end of the passage, however, we learn that Dareios’ conquests are the Athenians’ gains at the time of the play’s production. ‘Now there is no doubt’, they conclude, ‘that through wars we are enduring the gods’ reversal of our fortunes’ (lines 904-7). The dramatic motive of the list, it emerges then, has been to arouse the Athenian audience’s pride in their own achievements: the Persians’ losses are their gains, but the Athenians are protected from the fall that the Persians have suffered by their democracy and piety.

How can this picture be reconciled with that of Thucydides? Thucydides’ portrayal of the origins of the empire is still notably cynical. The allied request for protection from the hybristic Pausanias was, he notes for example, welcome to the Athenians, ‘who made up their minds to put a check on Pausanias and to arrange matters generally in a way that would best suit their own interests’ (1.95; cf. Hdt. 8.3, Plutarch Aristeides 23). The alliance’s initial purpose of ravaging the King’s land was a pretext, or professed motive (proschema), disguising an Athenian desire either to subjugate the allies or to compete with Sparta (1.96). Thucydides’ account of the early actions of the League under the leadership of Kimon (1.98) - the mopping up of a Persian position at Eion on the river Strymon, clearing the island of Skyros of Dolopian ‘pirates’ and replacing them with Athenian settlers, the defeat of Karystos on Euboia, and (climactically) the enslavement of Naxos - suggests only the briefest period of innocence. The Mytileneans’ later claim that they were useful to Athens as an example of a willing ally shows also a distinctly critical approach to allied ‘consent’ (3.11). (The Mytileneans’ characterization of the shift in the nature of the alliance is also of a relative change: the Athenians became more interested in enslaving their allies, 3.10.) Thucydides’ conviction in his developmental model of imperialism, coupled with his start date (in part perhaps a homage to his predecessor, Herodotos; for the complexityofhis attitude to Herodotos see Hornblower 1996:19-38,122-45), have possibly had the effect of downplaying the Athenians’ original imperial intentions.

This is not, however, to deny any evolution in the relationship between Athens and her allies. The transfer of the league treasury from Delos to Athens (454), reflected in the beginning of records of the sixtieth share (or ‘quota’) dedicated to Athena (the so-called Tribute Lists), or the removal of the pretext of a war against Persia by the Peace of Kallias (or the de facto conclusion of hostilities with Persia) would surely have confirmed the suspicion of those who, like Thucydides’ Mytileneans, perceived a shift towards Athens’ enslaving of her own allies. Every successive revolt - especially the flurry in the period of the ‘First Peloponnesian War’ - would, in the light of its suppression, have ratcheted up both allied resentment and Athenian cynicism and attempts at self-vindication. A shift in the character of the empire has also traditionally been dated by the onset of a new harshness in the language of Athens’ imperial decrees, a shift from speaking of Athenian allies to the ‘cities which Athens rules’ (Meiggs 1972: 152-74; cf. Finley 1978: 103). There may, however, have been a substantial time lag before the harsh realities of empire were reflected in harsh language; such language may to a large extent be dependent on context (see now Low 2005); and we anyway lack earlier inscriptions to serve as a control. (On the single-most hotly debated issue, the ‘three bar-sigma’, above, Chapter 3, Excursus.)

A further issue is the popularity of the empire among the allies. Thucydides gives us, at least in the period of the Peloponnesian War, an unreservedly negative picture: ‘our empire is a tyranny’, Perikles tells the assembled Athenians (2.63), a tyranny that it would be unsafe for the Athenians to give up even should they want to. This is an impression confirmed by the Old Oligarch ([Xenophon] Ath. Pol.) and reflected in Aristophanes (cf. Forrest 1975). The concern of much modern scholarship has been to break down the question of popularity into thematic parts: to weigh any advantages to the allies against disadvantages, to construct in the words of a famous essay by Moses Finley a ‘balance sheet’ of Athenian imperialism (Finley 1978).

On the negative side, then, we might list: the burden of tribute paying, and its association with political subjection (e. g., Hdt. 1.27 on Alyattes; R&O 22 for the Second Athenian Confederacy’s eschewal of the term phoros, perhaps euphemistic but reflective also of a different balance of power); the presence of garrisons (Isokrates 7.65), or Athenian magistrates in allied cities (M&L 45 paragraph 4, [Aristotle] Ath. Pol. 24); the establishment of settlers or ‘cleruchs’ (literally, allotment-holders) on allied land (Brunt 1966), designed not only for security but also to ‘make citizens without land into hoplites’ (Antiphon F 61); the possible imposition of Athenian coinage on her allies (M&L 45; cf. Figueira 1998: esp. 319-423); or interference in the judicial independence of an allied city, the demand for example that cases for which the punishment was death should be heard in Athens (Antiphon 5.47, M&L 52; cf. M&L 31 for legal privileges granted to Phaselites, Thuc. 1.77 for an Athenian defence). The frequency of revolts from Athenian rule - which we may trace not only from Thucydides’ narrative but also from tracking changes and omissions in a given city’s record of tribute payment (Osborne 2000: 86-7) - might suggest that such burdens were felt keenly; the frequency of revolts cannot be taken, however, as a reliable measure of the level of discontent as revolt clearly depends on other factors, Athenian military reversals, or the presence of a Spartan army at the gates (so Brasidas in Thrace in 424: Thuc. 4-5.24).

On the positive side, we might include defence against the real and continuing threat of Persia or from pirates. The imposition of Athenian coinage on all allied cities might have had a positive aspect, a kind of ‘common market’ for goods and services across the Aegean world (see esp. [Xenophon] Ath. Pol. 2.8, Thuc. 2.38, Hermippos F 63 Kassel & Austin, though the cosmopolitan flavour of Athens in [Xenophon] is probably pejorative; cf. Hdt 1.135). It is crucial also to distinguish between different elements in allied poleis. Thucydides’ and the Old Oligarch’s impression of the empire as a tyranny was, in a now classic article of Geoffrey de Ste. Croix (de Ste. Croix 1954-5; cf. Bradeen 1960; Quinn 1964; Fornara 1977), argued to be the result of these authors’ aristocratic leanings, and those of their contacts in the allied cities. This is a theory supported by a range of suggestive evidence. Allied revolts were often followed by the imposition of democratic regimes (e. g., Erythrai: M&L 40), just as Sparta saw to it that her allies were oligarchic in government (Thuc. 1.18, Aristotle Politics 1307b22; Isokrates later makes explicit that tribute was the price for the guarantee of democracy, 12.68). When the Athenians crushed the revolt of the Mytileneans, they chose (reversing their original decision, and overruling the advice of Kleon, Thuc. 3.39: ‘Do not put the blame on the aristocracy and say that the people were innocent’) to kill only the (anyway large number of) supposed ringleaders of the revolt. A number of sources highlight the contacts maintained between aristocrats in the allied cities and in Athens (so, the Old Oligarch, in a confusing passage, [Xenophon] Ath Pol. 1.14-15), and between prominent pro-Athenians amongst the allies and leading Athenians: these connections are seen both as crucial for the maintenance of allied rule (Plato Seventh Letter 332B-C) and, by the Myti-leneans, as a way of ensuring continued independence (Thuc. 3.12). (To be a leading pro-Athenian or proxenoswas sometimes a vulnerable position: Thuc. 3.70, M&L 52, IG13 19, 27.)

Our balance sheet can also (more tendentiously perhaps) include less material advantages and disadvantages to the allies: on the negative side, evidence of opportunistic or selfish motives; on the positive side, evidence of benign intentions on the Athenians’ part, or (from the allies’ point of view) any sense of kinship or religious identity that might have mitigated political subjection.

Evidence for benign intentions - a civilizing mission even - might be detected in the oath sworn by the Athenian generals of 439 (in the wake of the destructive war against Samos) ‘to do and advise and say only what is good for the people of Samos’ (M&L 56.15-23). ‘Did the men who swore that oath’, one modern historian has asked (Forrest 1975; cf. Meiggs 1972: 193), ‘have their tongues in their cheeks, all of them? Or did one or two of them have a tear in their eye?’ Such idealism, first - even if we presume it to be in good faith - need not exclude opportunism (Harrison 2005; cf. Hornblower 1991: 144); the motives of an imperial power, as Thucydides appreciated in speaking of the pretext of revenge against Persia (1.96), are not black and white. Clearly also we should be wary of believing claims that are so clearly a part of an Athenian justification for empire (esp. Mills 1997: ch. 2; contrast de Ste. Croix 1972: 44 on Lysias 2.55-6). We should be similarly wary of the claims of protection from Persia or piracy, both probably contemporary Athenian claims (Thuc. 5.89; Lysias 2.56-8; Isokrates 12.69; Xenophon Poroi 5.5; Plutarch Kimon 8.3-7; Thuc. 1.4.2, though see Hornblower 1991: 21-2) and both often embedded unquestioned in modern narratives (Meiggs 1972: 69, Nixon & Price 1990: 138, Hornblower 2002: 17-18; cf. Hornblower 1991: 150; for piracy, see esp. M&L 30 (= Fornara 63) with de Souza 1999: 26-30). (By contrast, a reasonable modern rationalization of the clearing of‘pirates’ from Skyros is that it had an economic motive, to safeguard the route to the Black Sea and thereby the grain supply from the Crimea: Davies 1993: 46, 77.)

A different problem arises when we turn to the allies’ sense of belonging, our lack of evidence for allied opinions. There are ample suggestions that a sense of Ionian kinship between Athens and her allies formed a part of the city’s official version: the initial location of the league treasury at Delos; the speech of Athena in Euripides’ Ion 1569-94, prophesying the foundation of Athenian colonies and speaking of the glorious name of the Ionians - seemingly a kind of charter myth for the Delian League; Kimon’s naming of one of his sons Oulios after an Ionian cult title of Apollo; or a number of passing references in Thucydides (the allies are said to have been conscious of their kinship when they asked Athens for help against Pausanias, 1.94; cf. 1.71; 1.124; 4.61) . We can scarcely tell, however, whether - or how soon - such talk of kinship wore thin (cf. Davies 1993: 69). We are on slightly firmer ground when it comes to the religious obligations demanded by Athens of her allies: the cow and the panoply, for example, that the Athenians demanded to be brought to the Panathe-naia. These gifts were, in time, demanded ofall allies, and the demand reiterated with a little menace (M&L 40.2-8; 46.41-3; 49.11-13; 69.55-8). A later demand for the donation of first fruits for Eleusis suggests a lack of conviction that any but Athenian allies would want to contribute (M&L 73). For any such religious links to have been effective in binding together Athens and her allies depends on a pre-existing goodwill (which any compulsion would surely have eroded). It might be better then to see such religious tributes (from the Athenian’s point of view) as the rewards of empire, as a request for fitting honour with scant concern for allied feelings (Parker 1996: 151).

This is perhaps a note that is too rarely sounded in accounts of Athenian imperialism, dominated, implicitly at least, by the question of the rights and wrongs of the empire (a concern that we have inherited from Thucydides, but which is in part informed by submerged analogy to modern empires: Harrison 2005). In Perikles’ last speech (2.59-64) Thucydides shows us an Athens frozen in self-destructive introspection. Elsewhere, however, we can glimpse an almost limitless ambition and an unabashed pride (cf. Holscher 1998 on artistic material). Athens’ imperial drive leads her far further afield than the world of her Aegean allies: to respond to the request of the Libyan Inaros, for example, for help in his revolt against Persian rule in Egypt (459-454), a venture that ends in the destruction of up to 250 ships together with their crews (Thuc. 1.104-10; cf. Thuc. 1.111 for a request from the Thessalian Orestes); to undertake a great naval show of strength through the Black Sea, ‘bringing the whole sea under their own control’ (Plutarch Perikles20); to settle colonies at Amphipolis in Thrace, again initially with great losses (4.102; cf. 1.100) or, jointly, in Thourioi in southern Italy (Diodoros 11.90; 12.10-11); or to make speculative alliances as far abroad as Egesta in western Sicily (M&L 37), or with Leontinoi and Rhegion in the east of the island (M&L 63), alliances that foreshadow Thucydides’ account of their over-reaching and disastrous expedition to Sicily (415-413; Thuc. Books 6-7; cf. 1.36). Athenian pride is perhaps no more clearly evidenced, however, than in the words placed in Perikles’ mouth in the course of his funeral oration (2.41; cf. Andokides 3.37):

Athens comes to her testing time in a greatness that surpasses what was imagined of her.

In her case, and her case alone, no invading enemy is ashamed of being defeated, and no subject can complain of being governed by people unfit for their responsibilities. Mighty indeed are the marks and monuments of our empire that we have left. Future ages will wonder at us, as the present age wonders at us now. We do not need the praises of a Homer, or of anyone else whose words may delight us for the moment, but whose estimation of facts will fall short of what is really true. For our adventurous spirit has forced an entry into every sea and into every land; and everywhere we have left behind us everlasting memorials of good done to our friends or suffering inflicted on our enemies.