through our period; and it is worth noticing here what Thessaly had to offer. Thessaly was agriculturally rich and thus able to support horses
on a scale well beyond what most Greek states could afford. So cavalry was the first of Thessaly's advantages. The second was her advantage
of position, athwart the main land route to Macedon and Thrace, places to which Greeks looked for grain and ship-building timber; a
stranglehold on eastern Thrace and the Hellespontine region would have an additional economic attraction: control of the Hellespont meant
control of grain shipments from another main source of supply, namely south Russia (via the Black Sea). It was important for Athens to keep
this supply line open, as it was for her enemies to close it. The third advantage of Thessaly "was its excellent harbour at Pagasae (modern
Volos), the best in central Greece. Finally, Thessaly controlled a majority of votes in, and traditionally supplied the president of, the Delphic
amphictyony, the international panel which controlled the affairs of the shrine of Apollo at Delphi, seat of the most famous oracle in the
ancient world. It was the amphictyony that declared the 'Sacred Wars', which throughout Greek history - there were no less than four between
600 and 336 - were a device for mobilizing Greek opinion and Greek military forces against some real or alleged sinner. Control of the
amphictyony thus had enormous propaganda and political value. Spartan interest in the amphictyony is specifically attested for the 470s, when
she tried to get Persian sympathizers voted off the panel, thus strengthening her own hold; as with the attempt to prevent the rebuilding of
Athens' walls, it was Themistocles who stopped this.
Nevertheless Sparta did pass up the hegemony after 478 and for the next fifty odd years (in Greek the pentekontaetia of 479-431) was content,
or obliged, to let Athenian power grow. Only on three occasions did Sparta stir against Athens: in 465 she promised, but in the event failed, to
invade Attica as a way of relieving the pressure which Athens was applying to the wealthy island of Thasos; in 446, near the end of the First
Peloponnesian War, the Spartan king Pleistoanax did invade Attica, but then withdrew; and in 440 Sparta voted to go to war with Athens who
was disciplining another powerful subject ally, Samos. But again this did not come to anything because Sparta allowed herself to be outvoted
by her allies at a second meeting, of her whole league. These three occasions have a common feature: Sparta ultimately draws back, just as she
had drawn back after 478. If Sparta was an imperialist she was a singularly reluctant one.
The reasons for this reluctance lie in her domestic difficulties. Like all Greek states, Sparta had a population of slaves, but her slave problem
was unique both because of the sheer numbers involved and because most of them, the helots, who approximated more closely to medieval
serfs than to chattel slaves of an ordinary Greek type, were of one single nationality, Messenians. Because these Messenian helots all spoke
Greek (unlike, for instance, Athens' slaves who were a wide racial mix and had no common language in which to articulate discontent), and
had a national self-consciousness, they posed special problems of security for their Spartan masters, whose own numbers were constantly on
the decline. Apart from the helots, a second set of domestic difficulties faced Sparta after 478, difficulties which had to do with the
Peloponnesian League. There is evidence of serious unrest in one area in particular during the 470s and 460s, namely Arcadia, north of Sparta.
There were several reasons for this. First, the Peloponnesian League had been called into existence in the first place by fear of Argos; but
Argos was now in low water as a result of her defeat by Cleomenes of Sparta in 494. The Arcadians may thus have felt that the league now
lacked a justification. Second, Cleomenes' own suppression by the Spartan authorities may have caused disaffection among the Arcadians,
whom he seems to have singled out with promises of a personal relationship with himself, perhaps involving lighter control. Third, there is the
unsettling effect of Athenian democracy, which had, in the years after its establishment by Cleisthenes in 507, shown itself to be militarily
capable as well as politically attractive: it was now no longer necessary for the Greek cities of the second rank to choose between tyranny on
the one hand and Spartan-sponsored oligarchy on the other. A third possibility now existed, namely imitation of, or affiliation to, democratic
Athens. It is likely that this possibility was made concrete by the presence in the Peloponnese of Themistocles in the late 470s and early in the
460s. Though he had fallen from favour in Athens, he continued to oppose Spartan interests on Sparta's own doorstep, by encouraging
democrats in Arcadia and Argos.
So much for Sparta, and the domestic reasons which ruled her out as permanent leader. An additional worry, which may have been felt by her
or her would-be supporters, was perhaps the thought that Sparta had little experience of naval warfare, or of overseas empire.
In this she was unlike Corinth. Corinth did have a naval tradition, and she had experience of administering distant colonial possessions, places
like her colonies in north-west Greece, for instance Ambracia or in the northern Aegean, but Corinth had been too close to Sparta for too long
to be able to contemplate defying or superseding her; and from the point of view of the other Greek states she lacked the ideological
magnetism exerted by Athens or by Sparta, whose agoge (military training and discipline) was not just an effective repressive device, but was
thought of in many quarters as somehow admirable in a positive way.
That left only Athens; for the other main classical Greek states, Thebes and Argos, had disqualified themselves for the moment, as had
Thessaly, by taking the Persian side in the Wars ('Medism'). Argos was in any case, as we have seen, in poor shape in the early fifth century.
She was indeed to make a short-lived bid for power during a lull in the Great Peloponnesian War (the so-called Peace of Nicias of 421), when
she attempted to revive the old Argive greatness of the heroic age: such nostalgic, but altogether sincere, attempts to capitalize on traditional
or mythical periods of supremacy are characteristic of Greek politics and poetry. As for Thebes, her bid for hegemony was to be postponed
still later, until the 360s; even Thessaly, so often the object of the avarice of other states, had a brief fling on her own account in the 370s,
under Jason of Pherae who, like the Argives after 421, defined his aims in very ancient terms, levying the 'tribute of Scopas', and modelling
his military reorganization on the army of Aleuas the Red. Scopas and Aleuas were figures of the dim past of Thessaly.
Athens in 478 had all the advantages, and none of the disadvantages, of the other claimants we have considered. She had no helots or