40Chapter 2Heavy tributes swelled the Athenian treasury. Some of
the conquered land was distributed to poor citizens,
and wealthier Athenians acquired property in allied
cities without regard for local law. The true nature of
the league was revealed when the island of Thasos tried
to withdraw from it in 465 B.C. Athens treated the mat-
ter as a rebellion and laid siege to the place for two
years. Corinth, Athen’s chief commercial rival and an
ally of Sparta, had long argued against what it saw as
Athenian imperialism. Now both Delians and Pelopon-
nesians began to fear that Athens sought nothing less
than political hegemony over the Greek world. As long
as Cimon, an admirer of Sparta, controlled Athenian
policy, every effort was made to avoid open conflict
with the Peloponnesian League. But he, too, was ostra-
cized in 461 B.C.
The removal of Cimon coincided with a further de-
mocratization of Athenian government under the lead-
ership of Ephialtes and his younger colleague Pericles
(c. 495–429 B.C.). The Persian War and its aftermath
had for the first time involved large numbers of poor
citizens in combat, especially in the navy. Their claims
to full participation in civic life could no longer be ig-
nored, and Pericles, who would play a dominant role in
Athenian politics for more than thirty years, built his
career on changes that further liberalized the constitu-
tion of Cleisthenes.
Realizing that most people could not afford to
serve the polis, the reformers adopted the novel policy
of paying men for public service, including jury duty, a
measure paid for by the wealth accumulated in Cimon’s
day. Citizenship, which now became more valuable
than ever, was restricted for the first time to men with
two citizen parents, but by 450 B.C. Athens had be-
come a participatory democracy in which every male
citizen could play a role. Some have held that this de-
mocratization contributed to the tremendous flowering
of high culture in the classical or Periclean age (see
chapter 3); others that it fueled the increasingly aggres-
sive and reckless character of Athenian policy. The two
arguments are not incompatible, but war followed al-
most immediately upon the downfall of Cimon.
In the First Peloponnesian War (460–445 B.C.) the
Delian league defeated both the Peloponnesians and
the Persians, but when several allies rebelled against the
arrogance of Athenian leadership Pericles agreed to a
thirty years’ peace. His skills as an orator and popular
leader were balanced with prudence. The peace, which
enabled Athens to recover its strength and reorganize its
empire, lasted only fourteen years. In 435 B.C. war broke
out between Corinth and Corcyra. Corcyra was a formersome miles to the east near the island of Salamis. The
Athenians and their allies hoped that by forcing a sea
battle in the narrow waters between the island and the
mainland they could compensate for the greater speed
and maneuverability of the Persian fleet.
Xerxes’s army entered the deserted city and burned
it. Shortly thereafter half of his fleet was destroyed by
the Greek triremes in the battle of Salamis, one of the
greatest naval engagements in history. As Themistocles
had foreseen, the Persians crowded into the narrow
strait and could not maneuver properly. The Greek
ships, though slower, carried more fighting men and
found it easy to ram and overwhelm their opponents as
they came in. Salamis was the turning point of the war.
Without the support of his fleet, Xerxes returned to
Persia, leaving a portion of his army to winter in
Greece. The garrison was defeated at Plataea in the
summer of 479 B.C. and fled, never to return. At the
same time, a fleet under Spartan command dislodged
the enemy from the Ionian coast in the battle of
Mycale.
The Peloponnesian Wars
The Persian threat had been repelled but not extin-
guished. Under the direction of Themistocles, the Athe-
nians began to rebuild their city, fortifying its port at
Piraeus, and constructing the Long Walls that protected
the road connecting the two. After Themistocles was
ostracized in 472 B.C. (the great enemy of the Persians
ended his life as a Persian governor in Asia Minor), the
work was continued by his successor, Cimon. Then, in
the winter of 478–477 B.C. Athens, as the leading Greek
naval power, joined with a number of its allies to form
the Delian League, an association dedicated to protect-
ing the cities of the Aegean from Persians and pirates.
Sparta, though it had led the war on land, did not join,
preferring instead to concentrate on the helot problem
and on strengthening its own Peloponnesian League. By
467 B.C. the Athenian navy and its Delian allies had se-
cured the coasts of Asia Minor and achieved unques-
tioned dominance at sea. Greece was now divided into
two increasingly competitive alliance systems.
The size of its fleet made Athens the dominant
partner in the Delian League, and though at first the
Athenians maintained the rhetoric of friendship, they
used the alliance to further their own purposes. Under
Cimon’s leadership, Athens sought to control grain sup-
plies in the Aegean and to improve its access to ship’s
timber and precious metals by seizing new territory.