This pride of the city was also sustained by the emergence of Athens as a fully-fledged empire. Without the restraining influence of Cimon, the city now became even more ruthless in its overseas affairs. After 461, protection of the city against Sparta was the priority. Following the breakdown of relations with her former ally the Athenians had moved quickly, in 460 Bc, to make an alliance with Sparta’s old enemy, Argos. The next step was to control the Isthmus (through which any invading force of Spartans would have to pass to reach Athens). When the neighbouring city of Megara approached Athens for protection from Corinth, she found herself taken over and garrisoned by Athens. Athens then dealt with her oldest rival, the island of Aegina, only a few kilometres from her coast and a competitor for trade for generations. Troops from the League were used to besiege her and finally to incorporate her into the League (458). Pericles was once again the driving force here. (He was always careful to use troops from other members of the league when he could to avoid having to announce Athenian casualties to the Assembly.)
This active policy in the west took place at the same time as a major expedition by troops of the League to the east. One target was Cyprus, strategically placed close to the Asian coast and not yet a member of the League. An expedition arrived there in the late 460s, but when news came through in 459 that the Egyptians had risen against Persian rule the expedition was diverted. It was too good an opportunity to miss. Persian control over Egypt was likely to be weak and the chance of access to the immense fertility of the Nile valley, especially its grain supplies, irresistible. Athens’s army was stationed in the Delta and occupied Memphis. About 454, however, in what appears to have been a major disaster, it was driven out by a Persian army. The details are poorly recorded but as many as 250 ships may have been lost with most of their crews. There is no doubt that Athens was placed on the defensive and that soon afterwards the treasury of the League at Delos was moved from its exposed position in the centre of the Aegean to Athens.
In the 450s Athens also conducted a number of campaigns into central Greece. (They were known collectively as the First Peloponnesian War.) Her objectives were varied: to dominate the Isthmus and so keep the Peloponnese closed off, to bully Corinth into the Athenian rather than Spartan camp, and to exploit the fertile plains of Thessaly, the pastures of the best horses in Greece. (Control of the plains would also offer access to the timber - and mineral-rich lands of northern Greece.) The campaigns brought Athens face to face with Sparta for the first time. In 457 Sparta had sent an army north to support her mother city, Doris, against an attack by her neighbour Phocis. As the successful Spartan army returned south, rumours reached Athens that it was in contact with anti-democratic factions in the city. The Athenians, with League support, sent an army over the Attic border to confront it. At the Battle of Tanagra, in which Pericles fought, both sides had heavy losses but the Spartans were able to withdraw and make for home. Their survival was enough for the Dorians to claim victory over Argives, Athenians and Ionians’. Yet just two months after their withdrawal, Athens gained control of the whole of the Boeotian plain with the exception of Thebes, its largest city.
The later campaigns in central Greece must have been affected by the losses in Egypt. In the event it proved impossible for Athens to sustain any long-term control over such a large region. By the early 440s the western cities of the plain had broken free of Athenian control and an army sent to restore it was decisively defeated at
Coronea (447). There were revolts in Euboea and Megara, and Megara was now lost to Athens. It was a major blow and left Athens vulnerable to direct attack by Sparta. (The Spartans did, in fact, invade Attica but soon withdrew for reasons that have never been made clear.) Over the winter of 446/445 Athens and Sparta made a formal peace (the so-called Thirty Years Peace) by which each recognized each other’s alliances. The potential stalemate in any conflict, the inability of Athens to defend an extended border and the impossibility of the Spartans actually taking Athens, now defended behind the Long Walls, was clear.
Although the Peace put an end to Athenian intrusions in central Greece, it did allow the city to develop an empire in the Aegean without interference from Sparta. Up to 449 Athens had been able to use the threat of Persia as a means of forcing the smaller League members into dependence on her. In 451 Cimon’s ten years of exile were up and he was still energetic enough to lead an Athenian force against Persia in Cyprus. However, he died while on campaign and in 449 it is possible that a peace treaty (the so-called Peace of Callias) was made with Persia. There is some dispute over this treaty as Thucydides makes no mention of it and the earliest reference is a fourth-century source. However, there is no further recorded hostility between Athens and Persia in the fifth century.
Furthermore, there is a gap in the records of tribute paid to the League’s treasury, now in Athens, for 448. This is understandable if the main raison d’etre of the League’s existence had disappeared and members refused to continue their contributions. There is evidence that Athens may have attempted to refound the League as a much larger alliance of Greek states and suspended all tribute payments while the details were being settled. However, the refusal of Sparta to acquiesce in a blatant extension of Athenian power across the wider Greek world led to the plan’s failure. In 447 Athens resumed her demands for tribute but the total collected was much smaller than that raised in 449. Clearly some states baulked at restarting payments. By 446 Athens had reasserted control and the tribute was back to normal levels (600 talents a year). From now on Athens acted as if she was an imperial power rightfully exacting tribute from her subjects. One source from the 440s talks of ‘the cities that the Athenians control’. When the city of Chalcis was subdued after the revolt in Euboea of 446, she had to promise loyalty to Athens alone. No mention was made of the League. The Council of the League stopped meeting, probably during the 440s. All the evidence suggests, therefore, that Athens was now set on domination of the Aegean in her own right.
There seem to have been well over 200 subject states of the empire. Virtually every island of the Aegean was a member. Athenian control stretched along the Asian coastline from Rhodes up to the Hellespont, through into the Black Sea and round southern Thrace as far as the Chalcidice peninsula. Nearer home the cities of Euboea and the island of Aegina were subjects. The tribute expected was not burdensome and was reduced after 445 presumably because Athens was at peace with both Persia and Sparta. The average sum was two talents a member, less than it took to keep an Athenian trireme in service for a year.
Map 5
Athens used a variety of methods to keep control of her empire. One indirect method was to use proxenoi, citizens of a subject city who were expected to represent Athens’s interests there. Some key cities had cleruchies (the term originates from one who is allotted land overseas while retaining citizenship at home) imposed on them. Poorer Athenians were often given preference in the allocation of places in these settlements. (Pericles’ motives, claimed Plutarch, included the desire to rid the city of riff-raff.) When Lesbos revolted in the 420s, for instance, land was confiscated and then distributed to Athenian citizens, with the incentive for prospective settlers that the native population could be used as labour. The demand was such that the plots of land had to be allocated by lot.
Cleruchies are recorded in at least twenty-four cities in Thrace, the Chersonese (the northern coastline of the Hellespont), and on the islands of Naxos and Andros. There is no doubt that the main motive was to strengthen Athens’s control of these cities, which either had a history of revolt or were strategically important. There is also evidence of richer Athenians gaining land overseas. It may have been handed out by the state as a means of buying off aristocratic dissent but served as well to maintain her dominance.
The sources suggest other symbols of Athenian predominance. There were attempts to enforce a cultural unity centred on the worship of Athena. All members of the League were now expected to attend the Greater Panathenaea bringing a cow and a shield and helmet with them and marching in the procession. (This helped reinforce the old belief that Athens was the mother city of the Ionian states.) A Coinage Decree, possibly passed in 445, required the allies to use only Athenian weights, measures, and silver coinage. This ensured the prosperity of the Athenian silver mines as well as exploiting the propaganda value of her distinctive coins. Important judicial cases were to be referred to Athens, while Athens also took an interest in supporting democracy against oligarchy. The city of Erythrae in Ionia had a ‘democratic’ constitution imposed on her as early as the 450s and Samos possibly went through the same experience after a revolt in 440/439. There is some evidence that local democrats in subject cities were able to use Athenian support to bolster their own position, and the feeling among the masses that Athens would support them against the wealthy oligarchs may have been one reason for the empire’s long-term stability.
The evidence from the 440s and 430s is of a city gradually consolidating its position wherever its trading interests required. In 443 Athens set up a colony at Thurii in the instep of Italy (on the site of the city of Sybaris, which had been destroyed by its neighbours in 510). An alliance followed with Rhegium on the Italian side of the Straits of Messina. This suggests an increasing interest in the riches of the west. Meanwhile a new city was founded at Amphipolis, upriver from Eion, in the northern Aegean, where control could be held over the river crossing. The city offered access not just to timber but to the gold mines of Mount Pangaeon. Amphipolis was to acquire a mystique rather similar to that of the commercial centre of Singapore for the British empire, and its loss to Sparta in 424 was to be as deeply felt.
The Athenian empire was in many senses a conservative and even defensive one. It had no internal dynamic. Despite the seizure of land in some areas, there was never the deliberate and ruthless exploitation of resources on the scale followed by later trading states such as Venice. Insofar as a transfer of resources took place, it seems to have been from the wealthier members of the subject cities to the Athenian oarsmen and Athens’s own richer citizens. Its main purpose could be seen as maintenance of control over trade routes. Yet Athenian hegemony over the Aegean lasted for seventy-five years, all the more remarkable an achievement in view of its extent.
The empire allowed Athens to build up financial reserves. Thucydides describes the treasury holding 9,300 talents at its height, but, since a single siege could soak up three years’ worth of tribute, the empire was particularly vulnerable to revolts. If a revolt was allowed to succeed, the myth of Athenian superiority would be exploded. When Samos rebelled in 440, Pericles and his nine fellow generals were sent to deal with the island. Samos was recaptured at some cost and no other city joined the rebellion. There is no doubt, however, of the resentment felt by many ordinary subjects of the empire. When some decades later, in 377, Athens tried to rebuild a naval confederacy, she could only get the Aegean cities to join by promising them that none of the impositions of empire, including the seizure of land and the payment of tribute, would be renewed.
World History
