Athens had a ravaged look now that the sixth century temples and statues on the Acropolis had been burned or destroyed by the Persians. The ruins were left untouched for over thirty years in memory of the desecration. Much of the Archaic sculpture was incorporated into new defensive walls, although the most ancient site of all, the temple of Athena Polias (Athena as ‘goddess of the city’), was cleared so that sacrifices could resume. Yet, despite the devastation, the Greeks were triumphant, and Athens, with her forces intact and brimming with confidence of victory and desire for revenge, was ready to continue the war with Persia. (For the background to this chapter see the essays in Loren J. Samons III (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles, Cambridge and New York, 2007, and Christian Meier, Athens: A Portrait of the City in the Golden Age, London, 1998. James Davidson’s Courtesans and Fishcakes, London, 1997, is a lively survey of Athenian society.)
Yet in 479 the triumph still remained incomplete. The expansion of the Persian empire had been thwarted for a second time but the empire was intact and resilient and the Greeks, sheltering in their city-states, were still vulnerable. Those smaller communities in the Aegean and along the west coast of Asia Minor looked for a protector. Sparta’s crucial role in the final Battle of Plataea gave her the chance but her traditional clumsiness in handling others soon alienated the other Greeks. It was, therefore, by mutual agreement that Athens set up a system of alliances, a league, in which the member states would have ‘the same friends and enemies’. Athens played on the common Ionian ancestry of most of her dependants. The league treasury was on the central Aegean island of Delos, sacred to Apollo, and a spiritual focus for lonians, and the Delian League, as it was later known, was planned to be an alliance of equal members, each contributing ships or money according to their size.
Athens’s predominance in the League was inevitable. She had 180 triremes in 480 and 300 by 431, each manned by 200 fit oarsmen. In contrast Sparta (never a member of the League) had no navy at all, and few maritime members of the League could provide the 400 men needed to man even two triremes. Athens proved opportunistic, even ruthless, in expanding her influence. The historian Thucydides, whose account of the League’s early activities is the only one to have survived, suggests her motives were ones of self-interest. The desire for revenge and reparations from Persia was no more than a pretext (proskhema), he tells us, for gaining control of the alliance. (The work of Thucydides is dealt with in detail in Chapter 18.) Certainly Athens had powerful economic reasons for maintaining a presence in the Aegean. While she may not have been as dependent on grain imports from the Black Sea as was once thought (the dependency only became acute towards the end of this century), recent research suggests that she favoured this grain for its quality. The north-western coast of the Aegean with its silver mines in Thrace and its rich timber was also attractive to a city which relied so heavily on building and maintaining ships. There was a major challenge in 476 when Naxos, the largest island in the Cyclades, tried to break free of the alliance. Athens crushed her, ‘enslaved her contrary to what was established, according to Thucydides, and insisted that she would now have to pay her tribute in gold rather than in providing ships. A few years later the island of Thasos in the northern Aegean was besieged by Athenians after a trading dispute over a gold mine, its walls pulled down, its navy surrendered, and an annual tribute demanded in its place.
The commander of the League’s forces was Cimon, the aristocratic son of the Miltiades who had launched the Athenian attack at Marathon. His policy appears to have been to use the threat of Persia to mould and maintain the unity of the League, while at the same time keeping good relations with Sparta so that Athens could maintain her forward policy in the Aegean without any threats from the Pelo-ponnese. His first campaign was to Eion at the mouth of the river Strymon in Thrace, where a Persian garrison still held out. Then the Athenians attacked Carys-tus on the tip of Euboea, a city that had gone over to the Persians in the war. Cimon’s most resounding success was against a Persian (in fact, largely Phoenician) fleet at the river Eurymedon, some time between 469 and 466. The enemy fleet was completely destroyed and Persia left without any offensive forces in the Aegean. A further campaign by Cimon is recorded against Persians and Thracians in the Chersonese, possibly about 468. Athens appears to have used these campaigns to her own advantage. There were rich timber resources to be exploited around Eion, and there is one account of an Athenian force trying to fight its way inland after the city had been captured. When the island of Scyros was cleared of pirates Athenians remained to settle around its fine harbour.
World History
