discontented Arcadians to stab her in the back. She had (unlike Corinth) positive incentives to offer, in her democracy and her paideia
(culture): thanks to the artistic and literary patronage of the sixth-century Pisistratid tyrants she was already a strong cultural magnet, to which
many dispossessed Ionian intellectuals were drawn after 480. As for the claims of history, memory, and myth, Argos may have had her
ancient kings, and Thessaly her Aleuas and Scopas; but Athens produced some of the ablest propagandists ever to advertise on behalf of an
imperial power. Cimon was to justify coercion of the island of Scyros, in the early days of the Athenian empire, by discovering there the
bones of Theseus, mythical king of Athens.
The image of Athens as universal benefactor of mankind (and hence morally justified in her suzerainty) was propagated by means of the myth
of Demeter and her gift of corn to man. This cult was centred on Eleusis, a great religious focus - but also a constituent village of Attica and so
in the territory of Athens. The great Athenian leader Pericles, and his successors, took a leaf out of Pisistratus' book when they placed this
emphasis on Eleusis; and there is a further explicitly Pisistratid reminiscence in the 'purification' of Apollo's sanctuary of Delos carried out in
- The central-Aegean island of Delos was the spiritual heart of the Athenian Empire (and incidentally acted as the imperial bank where
monetary tribute from the allies was stored until 454). That empire was, in racial terms, largely 'Ionian', and it was another brilliant coup of
fifth-century Athenian propaganda to exploit and magnify, for imperial purposes, an undoubted historical fact: the part played by Athens in
the colonization of Ionia in the Dark Ages. By posing as the 'mother-city' of all her subject allies, irrespective of the often hazy reality in
particular instances, Athens could demand the religious homage which, according to Greek notions, a daughter city owed to the place which
had founded her. Finally, the Athenians had - unlike the medizers of Argos, Thebes, and Thessaly - performed noble service to Greece in the
most recent historical past, sacrificing their physical city to Xerxes.
Athenian orators were still reminding each other of this well into the fourth century. And the theme was stressed in fifth-century architecture:
the 192 figures in the cavalcade on the Parthenon frieze have been ingeniously interpreted as an attempt to represent the dead heroes of
Marathon. The victory at Marathon was certainly in the mind of the architect of the mid-fifth-century temple of Nemesis (i.e. divine
punishment of the Persians) at Rhamnous near Marathon. In fairness, not all this religious glorification of Athens was of her own
manufacture: the oracle of Apollo at Delphi, which was to side with Sparta in the Great Peloponnesian War, nevertheless called fifth-century
Athens an 'eagle in the clouds for all time'.
Above all, Athens had, like Corinth, a formidable fleet (above, p. 42). And Athens, like Corinth, had already had the beginnings of an
overseas empire by the late archaic period; apart from her emotional and religious links with Ionia, there were her settlements at Sigeum near
Troy, at the mouth of Hellespont, at the Chersonese and (nearer home) on the islands of Salamis and Euboea. One chief reason for this early
transmarine activity is food: archaic and classical Athens needed the south-Russian grain which, as we have seen, came through the
Hellespont. This gave Athens a special motive for responding to the appeal of the east-Greek islanders in the early 470s: economic necessity.
To say, with one modern Marxist (de Ste. Croix), that fifth-century Athens 'pursued a policy of naval imperialism, but for this there were very
special reasons', namely economic reasons, is therefore correct, but we need not follow this writer when he goes on to minimize the element of
what he calls 'naked aggressiveness and greediness'. We shall see that individual Athenians, and not just hungry members of the poorer
classes, stood to make economic gains from the empire which went well beyond the filling of their stomachs. As for aggression, many
Athenian manifestations of it are remote from any immediate anxieties about the corn supply. We should at least expand the economic
argument so as to include desire for precious metal for coinage (a supplement to the Laurium output), which goes far to explain the attack on
Thasos in 465; and desire for ship-timber, which is relevant to Amphipolis in 437 and perhaps to the colony sent to Thurii in 443. Thurii is
near the Sila forests in Bruttium (South Italy), and Thurian timbers are listed in Attic accounts in 407.
All that was in the future in 478; and even the wish for Black Sea grain is not formulated as a motive by Thucydides when he describes
Athens' assumption of the leadership. Rather, the talk is of revenge and booty to be extracted from Persia, though in speeches we do hear of
more high-minded motives of liberation. 'Revenge' is, however, stated to be a 'pretext' (rather than the whole story), and scholars have
legitimately wondered what Thucydides took the whole story to be. Perhaps he meant that continued mobilization against Persia was a front
for enmity directed against Sparta; or more likely he was thinking of the developed empire, whose activities were directed against the Greek
world at large.