Just before the Athenians had made their retreat to Salamis during the war with Persia, a young nobleman on a personal mission led a procession of his friends up to the Acropolis, where he dedicated his horse’s bridle to Athena in her temple. On the walls were shields dedicated to the goddess. He took one down for his own use and carried this to the ships.
The nobleman was a tall, stately man with a head of curly hair. His name was Cimon.[26] His beau geste was a piece of political theater calculated to show the radical democrat Themistocles that the conservative aristocracy — some of them at least — were loyal to the state. The aristocrats were willing to sacrifice their lands, horses, and privileges in the desperate effort to save their homeland in a naval battle. By leaving his bridle as an offering, Cimon sacrificed his cavalry command on the land together with his class privileges as a knight. Now armed as a lowly infantryman, he headed down to the shore to embark on Themistocles’ evacuation to Salamis, the Athenian Dunkirk. He recognized the leadership of Themistocles, a novus homo with a Thracian mother and no pedigree.[27] With Cimon’s example before them, the aristocrats embraced Themistocles’ desperate gamble, which would put the decisive battle into the hands of the poorest class of Athens, for it was they who rowed the ships.
The heir apparent to the leadership of Greece after the repulse of the Persian invasion was Pausanias, the Spartan regent and general who was the victor of Plataea. He sailed with a fleet to Cyprus to free the Greek cities on the island from the Persians. He then sailed north to the Bosporus to wrest the strategic city of Byzantium from them. He eventually freed Byzantium, after taking bribes from wealthy Persian leaders to let them escape. He then went on to take the city of Sestos in the Hellespont, recently freed by the allies, as his own fiefdom. But when he tried to set himself up as a tyrant and independent warlord, he was recalled to Sparta and eventually arrested and put to death.[28]
Disappointed by the Spartan general’s betrayal, the Greek coalition turned away from Sparta and toward Athens for leadership. Into the power vacuum stepped Cimon. He proved his military abilities to the allies with a series of daring attacks. He first drove the Spartan renegade Pausanias out of Sestos and Byzantium. Then he sailed south to take the coastal city of Eion in Thrace from the Persians. The nearby island of Scyros was infested with pirates. Cimon captured it and drove out the pirates, making the Aegean safe for Greek commerce. Sailing to the southern coast of Asia Minor, he enrolled Greek city states and barbarian states alike as allies against the Persians. Hearing of a Persian expedition against him, he sailed south to Eurymedon, where he defeated both a large naval fleet and an army. He then intercepted a squadron sent to reinforce the first fleet and destroyed it. By his aggressive actions, Cimon had driven the Persians out of the whole Aegean rim and turned it into a Greek lake.[29]
With the leadership of Cimon the allies set up an organization for their common defense, the Delian League, with headquarters and a treasury on the island of Delos. All allied cities had a vote, but Athens, by reason of her military prowess and initiative, was from the outset the dominant partner.
Cimon was more than a military man. As the son of Miltiades, the hero of the Greek victory of Marathon, when the Persians had invaded Attica ten years before Xerxes’ invasion, Cimon was heir to a great name and legacy. Miltiades, however, had later been assessed a great fine in a law case and died in prison, leaving Cimon a poor orphan. The boy did not get the liberal education aristocrats typically gained by being attached to wealthy relatives, so he could not recite poetry or play the lyre at a drinking party.[30] But he had natural gifts with people, which he used effectively. When he had restored his family fortune by good management, he opened his home so any neighbor could drop in and dine with him. He removed the fences around his fields, inviting neighbors to help themselves to his crops. He and his companions dressed in fine clothing, but they would readily exchange their robes for the threadbare cloaks of a poor citizen, or give out money to the needy. Cimon became known as an open-handed benefactor to all.[31]
In politics Cimon was a conservative. He admired the Spartan way of life with its frugality and simplicity, and he supported a strong partnership between Athens and Sparta. He believed that the two leading states of Greece should work together in their common cause against the Persians. Yet cooperation between the two powers was never easy. Where the Athenians were ambitious, pleasure-loving, open-minded, and innovative, the Spartans were cautious, austere, closed-minded and tradition-bound. While the Athenians were pushing forward with ever more democratic institutions, the Spartans held rigidly to their age-old constitution with two kings, a council of thirty elders, an assembly of (the relatively few) citizens, and five magistrates called ephors. Having reduced their poor of Laconia and neighboring Messenia to the status of landless serfs or “helots,” the Spartans turned the outlying peoples into subjects (perioikoi). Their small cadre of citizens lived like a professional military class, residing in barracks and eating in a common mess hall from the time they were twelve-year-old boys until they were men of thirty. Organized into patrols, they were drilled, beaten, given only the rudiments of literacy, and shaped into ruthless soldiers. Girls too were given a strict education with generous amounts of physical training to prepare them to be soldiers’ wives. Forbidden to till the land, the Spartans were fed by the helots so they could devote all their energies to the work of war. In modern times, Nazi Germany would find inspiration in the Spartan system.
Athenians who admired discipline and order found the Spartan way of life attractive. Cimon was one of these, as was Socrates later. When an earthquake hit the Peloponnesus in 464 BC, when Socrates was five years old, Sparta’s oppressed subjects in Messenia rose in revolt, slaughtering three hundred Spartan troops and threatening the Spartan way of life. Desperate, the Spartans sent an emissary to Athens, who came in a purple robe to the altars of the city as a suppliant, begging for military assistance. When the democratic leader Ephialtes opposed the request, Cimon stepped forward, pleading with the assembly not to let Athens lose her “yokemate.” Cimon carried the day and led an army down to Ithome in Messenia, where the rebels had gathered. There the Spartans, with their customary xenophobia, became suspicious of the Athenians’ motives and churlishly sent Cimon’s army home. Outraged at this insult, the Athenians responded by ostracizing Cimon (461 BC, when Socrates was eight years old).[32]
The honeymoon between Athens and Sparta was over. From now on the two most powerful cities of Greece would be enemies, in either a cold or a hot war.
Under their new leader, Pericles, Athens continued for a time to attack the Persian Empire. When Egypt revolted from Persian rule, the Athenians sent a fleet of two hundred ships to the Nile and helped the rebels capture Memphis (459 BC). They also fought Persian forces in Cyprus. But wars in Greece also required armies and fleets, and expeditions to the far south were draining Athens’ resources. Persia gradually drove back the rebels and reasserted authority in Egypt, destroying most of the Athenian fleet.[33] Finally, Athens made peace with Persia, the Peace of Callias, around 449 BC: Athens would stay out of the southeastern Mediterranean, and Persia would stay out of the Aegean.[34]
Socrates was twenty years old by then, old enough to serve in the army. The enemy he would face would be Sparta, not Persia.
[26].Plutarch Cimon 5.2-3.
[27]. Plutarch Themistocles 1-2; Podlecki 1975: 1-3.
[28].Thucydides 1.128-134.
[29].Thucydides 1.97-98, 100.
[30].Plutarch Cimon 4.1-4.
[31].Plutarch Cimon 10.
[32].Thucydides 1.101-102; Plutarch Cimon 16.1-17.2.
[33].Diodorus Siculus 11.77.1-5; Thucydides 1.109-110.1. Perhaps only a portion of the Athenian fleet was present at the defeat. See Gomme 1945:1.320-322.
[34].Diodorus Siculus 12.4.5. Details of the peace, its chronology, and even whether there was a formal treaty are controversial. I follow Lewis 1992:121-127.