The latter marked an ideological watershed. Not only did the Persian onslaught inspire a collective response in defence of Greece, however incomplete, fragile and short-lived Greek unity may have been, but the Greek victory encouraged a self-definition in cultural terms as Greeks in antithesis to a hostile barbarian ‘other’, a development which is particularly marked in Athenian tragedy (E. Hall 1989). Consequently for a generation any kind of compromise with Persia was unthinkable, as the Delian League pursued its retaliatory mission. Whether that was concluded by a formal peace (the ‘Peace of Kallias’) is one of the great controversies in ancient history, but there is an attractive alternative which styles it a ‘detente’ (Holladay 1986): while overt hostilities ceased, the Athenians continued to maintain a naval deterrent and to patrol the Aegean (Plutarch Perikles 11.4), and indeed show the flag further afield, as when Perikles led an expedition into the Black Sea (Plutarch Perikles 20). In many ways this was a ‘Cold War’, with defectors in both directions (Themistokles to Persia, Zopyros son of Megabyzos to Athens, for example), low-level hostilities pursued or fomented by satraps and attempts to stir up trouble by funding dissidents (the revolt of Samos in 440 is a good example of both, and the rumours and uncertainties about the possible involvement of the Phoenician fleet point to continuing fear of an outright attack from the east). Nevertheless, in Greece itself attitudes were changing, as growing tension between Athens and Sparta and the increasing prospect of major hostilities encouraged some in both states to think the unthinkable; by 431, when war broke out, Thucydides tells us (2.7.1) that both sides were seeking support from the Great King.
Thucydides also tells us that the principal reason for the increase in tension was the steady expansion of Athenian power. One aspect was territorial, which in part was driven by economic interest, and is exemplified by the establishment of cleruchies, overseas settlements of citizens (Figueira 1991). These were not a new phenomenon-cleruchs (klerouchoi) had been settled on the territory of Chalkis in Euboia after her defeat in 506 - but the fifth century saw their use on a much larger scale, particularly a clutch around 450, and not only as a reprisal, but on the territory of compliant allies who were compensated by a reduction in tribute. Cleruchs will have been largely poor citizens, but rich Athenians too evidently took advantage of Athenian power, since the inscriptions known as the Attic Stelai (e. g., Fornara 147) which list the confiscated property of those guilty of mutilating the herms in 415 mention estates overseas in Thasos, Euboia and Abydos; this contravened the normal link between citizenship and landholding, and the fact that the decree which established the Second Athenian Confederacy in 378/7 (R&O 22) explicitly abjures both private and public landholding in allied territory makes it clear how unpopular they had been.
Other settlements served strategic ends, notably the protracted attempt to establish a colony which would command the crossing of the river Strymon in Thrace and so secure land communications to the Hellespont. A Persian garrison was dislodged from Eion at the river mouth by the Delian League, probably in 476, and the Athenian settlers who replaced it established a foothold. One attempt at colonization about 465 by ten thousand Athenian and allied settlers was annihilated by the Thracians at Drabeskos, but an all-Athenian colony probably gained a foothold at Brea (Fornara 100), perhaps in 446, though date and location alike are uncertain, before the foundation of Amphipolis in 437/6. The majority of settlers here seem to have been non-Athenians (Thuc. 4.106.1), hence the initiative after the town fell to the Spartans in 424/3 to honour as founder the recently deceased Brasidas in place of the original Athenian founder Hagnon (Thuc. 5.11) and the failure of the Athenians ever to recover the place, which seems to have obsessed them for the rest of the classical period. The inclusion of so many non-Athenians was evidently an attempt to present the foundation of Amphipolis as an act on the part of and of benefit to all Greeks, though on Athenian initiative, a line of propaganda which had been deployed at the slightly earlier settlement at Thourioi. However, it clearly served Athenian strategic interests, since Athens was becoming increasingly reliant on imported corn, particularly from the northern Black Sea; the re-establishment of settlements on the Thracian Chersonese, Lemnos and Imbros (see Figueira 1991: 253-6 for the complexities of their status) fits the same pattern of securing communications, as do attempts to suppress piracy, particularly on Skyros, which lay on the natural route to the Piraeus, and the place of the grain supply in Perikles’ strategic calculations is likely to have been a factor in his diplomatic initiative in the Black Sea, especially if it is to be dated to the 430s.
To the west, the foundation of Thourioi in the toe of Italy in 444/3 was another Athenian project which was opened to all Greece, and the most conspicuous evidence of a move to expand Athenian influence in this direction of which there are hints as early as the year of Salamis, when Herodotos (8.62) makes Themistokles, who had named two of his daughters Sybaris and Italia (Plutarch Themistokles 32), threaten a complete withdrawal of the Athenians to Siris, which according to certain oracles was destined to be colonized by them. Athens had also begun to make alliances in the region: the inscriptions which supply the evidence are unfortunately all problematic to interpret, particularly that recording an alliance with Egesta (which was to play an important role in precipitating the Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415). This (For-nara 81) has normally been dated to 458/7, which would make it the earliest of these alliances, though this continues to be disputed (above, pp. 53-4); the alliances with Rhegion and Leontinoi (Fornara 124; 125) are dated to 433/2, just before the outbreak of war, but are probably renewals of agreements originally made in the 440s. Overall, it seems likely that Athenian diplomatic activity was on the increase in the west after 450. So too was commerce, to judge from the wealth of Athenian pottery excavated at Spina, in the southern Po delta; this includes white-ground lekythoi, a type of funerary vase which is almost exclusively confined to Athenian graves, and therefore implies that in the fifth century Athenians were living and being buried in this entrepiot on the edge of the Etruscan zone of influence. Both developments encroached on Korinth, which as a colonial metropolis and a commercial power had hitherto been dominant in the west, and this was not the only respect in which the traditionally friendly relations between Athens and Korinth (encouraged in part by a common rivalry with Aigina) had been turning sour: the defection of Megara to Athenian protection in 459 and the settlement of Messenian rebels at Naupaktos on the northern shore of the Gulf of Korinth paved the way for open hostilities in the so-called ‘First Peloponnesian War’, in which Korinth bore the brunt of the fighting, and the Spartan response was late and limited, and culminated in a peace (the ‘Thirty Years’ Peace’) which suited Sparta rather better than her allies. It appears that in these years Athens was trying to add a land empire to her maritime hegemony, seeking to control the Isthmus of Korinth and supporting anti-Theban regimes to gain control of Boiotia. All this rapidly unravelled: there were uprisings in Boiotia and Megara, and Athens was compelled to cede her remaining strongholds on the Isthmus of Korinth. Since Athenian imperial consolidation hardly missed a beat, the loss was clearly minimal in strategic terms, though the fact that a claim to the lost strongholds was floated in 425 (Thuc. 4.21.3) shows that aspirations in that direction had not been entirely abandoned; likewise the designs on Boiotia which led to the Athenian misadventure at Delion. Korinth, however, gained nothing from the peace, and matters came to a head when Athens took the side of her recalcitrant daughter-city Kerkyra; faced with veiled threats from her leading ally that her hegemony might fall apart, Sparta was forced to act. The Kerkyra episode, which on Thucydides’ account precipitated a war that was to involve the whole Greek world, is also a conspicuous instance of the fact that the network of alliances which had begun life as the Delian League was only one element in Athenian foreign policy, and often not the dominant one, since the Athenians tended to give priority to their own interests (and continued to do so even in the fourth century).
Quite apart from the commitment to Kerkyra, Athenian interest in the west continued, and the opportunity was taken to intervene militarily when Leontinoi appealed to her ally for assistance against Syracuse. Syracuse was disproportionately large (probably at this time the largest polis after Athens herself) and under her late archaic tyrants had caused great disruption through the destruction and displacement of smaller cities and the forcible movement of populations on a large scale (behaviour otherwise associated with oriental absolutism). Ethnic divisions between Greeks were also a factor (above, p. 86), but divisions between Greeks and non-Greeks mattered much less: Egesta was not Greek but Elymian, while her neighbour Selinous reveals considerable Punic influence. Since the Dorian colonies had tended to be more aggressive towards the indigenous populations (Syracuse had a class of serfs, the killyrioi, the enslaved indigenous inhabitants), there was considerable scope for Athens to pose as a defender of the oppressed, both Greek and native. In the event, the first Athenian intervention (427-424) was unproductive, and the Syracusans were able to patch together a peace by persuading their fellow-Sicilians that Athens was the greater threat. Less than a decade later, a much larger expedition was launched, officially in response to an appeal from Egesta for aid against Selinous and to reestablish Leontinoi; in both cases, however, Syracuse was ranged on the other side, and the underlying objectives were clearly broader. This time many of the Greek cities responded guardedly; Thucydides’ account of the debate at Kamarina (6.75-88) brings out the complex cross-currents between appeals to ethnicity and interest and suspicion of both great powers which led to Kamarina’s decision to remain neutral. In contrast to many similar situations on the Greek mainland, however, political ideology played little or no part, since Athens, Syracuse and probably Kamarina all had some form of democratic constitution at this point; Athens’ position as champion of democracy had much less purchase in the west. Just how ambitious Athenian aims in Sicily were is not clear; Thucydides credits them with ambitions to control the whole island as early as the first expedition, and puts in the mouth of Alkibiades (whom he associates with designs on Carthage: Thuc. 6.15) the assertion that this was only a stepping-stone on the way to subjugating the western Mediterranean and then the whole Hellenic world (Thuc. 6.90), though since this was in a speech at Sparta advocating aid to the embattled Syracusans, it would be wise to be sceptical. Although Thucydides likewise makes the Syracusan Hermokrates claim that the Carthaginians feared Athenian attack (Thuc. 6.34), in reality the Athenians sent envoys to Carthage (Thuc. 6.88), and a frustratingly fragmentary inscription (Fornara 165) reveals the presence of Carthaginian envoys at Athens as late as 406. Athens also attracted support from the Etruscans, old opponents of the Syracusans (Thuc. 6.88, 103, 7.53-4, 57), and from Campania (Diodoros 13.44.2). Another tantalising inscription (IG 13 291), the fragments of which record monetary contributions from Athens’ allies, probably in 415, makes one wonder whether what was envisaged at some stage was a kind of western league, with Syracuse and her Dorian henchmen as the enemy rather than the barbarian. Athens’ willingness to deal with all sorts of non-Greeks demonstrates how much less tidy the Greek-barbarian antithesis was in the west; although the propaganda of the Deinomenid tyrants sought to present their victories over Carthaginians and Etruscans as contributing to the cause of Greek freedom (Harrell 2002: 450-4), and the fourth-century historian Ephoros saw a fullblown conspiracy between eastern and western barbarians, Herodotos is already aware that the Carthaginian invasion of480 was sparked by a quarrel between Greeks (Hdt. 7.165), and in the fourth century Lysias in his Olympic oration (33) denounced Dionysios I and Artaxerxes II in the same breath as enemies of Greek freedom.
World History
