In the late archaic period, Athens’ foreign policy consisted more of what we might term diplomacy, in other words the cultivation of influence, than of gains in territory or power. According to Herodotos, this was only to be expected of a polis which was subject to a tyrant (5.78), for whom a citizen army was at best a risky asset. Indeed, it is arguable that we should speak in terms of the policies of Peisistratos and his sons in this period rather than of Athens. In one area they resumed earlier initiatives: Peisistratos recaptured Sigeion from the Mytileneans - it was to serve as a refuge for his exiled sons - and the elder Miltiades established an Athenian settlement in the Thracian Chersonese, doubtless with at least the assent of the tyrant. The other major development, the voluntary surrender to Athens of Boiotian Plataiai, is dated by Thucydides (3.68) to 519, though this has been disputed by some modern scholars; according to Hero-dotos, who relates it in the context of Plataian support for Athens at Marathon (6.108), it was the work of the Spartan king Kleomenes, who foresaw the friction it would provoke between Athens and Thebes. Certainly Sparta in this period was no friend of tyrants, and the growth of the network of alliances that became what we call the Peloponnesian League owed much to the fall of tyrannies and their replacement by sympathetic client oligarchies. How far Sparta actively promoted the process is disputed - her fifth-century reputation for overthrowing tyranny is entangled with her pose in the Peloponnesian War as liberator of the Greeks from the ‘tyrant city’ Athens-but she indubitably assisted in the suppression of the Peisistratids at Athens in 510. Presumably Athens briefly became an ally of Sparta (though perhaps not a member of the Peloponnesian League), and it is clear that in favouring the leadership of Isagoras Sparta was following the same model, and that his deposition by the Athenian masses in support of Kleisthenes was regarded by the Spartans as base ingratitude and disloyalty on the part of an inferior state, hence her violent if abortive response. The mistrust sown then will have persisted, and not just at Sparta: one reason why the Spartans held command against the Persians at sea as well as on land was the widespread suspicion of Athens in the Greek alliance (Hdt. 8.2-3). In any case, the build-up ofAthens’ navy was a very recent phenomenon: less than twenty years before Salamis, she had had to beg ships from Korinth by a form of lease-lend to be able to match her neighbour Aigina at sea (Hdt. 6.89). By contrast, Sparta was unquestionably the leading military power on land, and her nascent league offered the only viable basis on which to organize resistance to Persia. It was Spartan ambivalence about undertaking a long-term commitment to the Asian Greeks, caused in part by individual shortcomings in her commanders, which offered Athens the opportunity to take the first steps to becoming an imperial power and so to usurp her previously dominant position.
All this, however, came later. In 480 Athens and Sparta were allies, and the alliance clearly remained in force, since Sparta appealed to Athens as an ally for aid against the helots; it was only after the ensuing debacle that Athens repudiated it, in 462/1. It was not only her military prowess which made Sparta the natural head of the Hellenic League against Persia; despite her later tendency to introspection, Sparta in the late archaic period had a wide range of contacts in the Mediterranean world, including supposed colonial links such as those with Thera, Crete and Italian Lokroi, diplomatic contacts like those with Kyrene, whose king Arkesilas is depicted on a Spartan cup supervising the weighing of her valuable export silphium, and an interest through Taras in affairs in southern Italy and Sicily; the abortive colonial career of the Spartan prince Dorieus (Hdt. 5.42-8) notably touches on many of these areas. Sparta had also been at the forefront of contacts with the emergent powers of the Near East: she had formed an alliance with King Kroisos of Lydia against the Persians, and probably also had direct links with Kroisos’ ally, the Pharaoh Amasis (Hdt. 3.47), who himself had connections with Kyrene (though also with Polykrates of Samos, against whom the Spartans mounted an expedition, an illustration of the potential for complications in such matters). Sparta had not actually intervened in eastern affairs: she was too late to help Kroisos, and confined herself to issuing a warning to the victorious Kyros not to harm any of the Greek cities in Asia, though he was not greatly impressed by it (Hdt. 1.152-3). Herodotos gives accounts of leading Athenian families which had xenia relations with Kroisos, notably the Alkmeonidai and Philaidai, but Athens does not appear to taken action against Persia at this stage either, and despite the self-serving account of his actions preserved by Herodotos, Miltiades seems to have ruled the Chersonese as a Persian nominee from the time ofDareios’ Scythian expedition, and his seizure ofLemnos would make sense as a piece of opportunism while the Persians were distracted by the Ionian Revolt. It was at this point that the intervention of Athens and Eretria entangled the Greek mainland with Persian affairs and precipitated the retaliatory invasions of Dareios and Xerxes.
World History
