In occupied her thoughts far more than the prospect of aggrandis- SECT. 2. THE CONFEDERACY OF DELOS Delos; its The lukewarmness of Sparta, exhibited in her failure to follow up the battle of Mycale, had induced the Ionian and other Asiatic Greeks to place themselves under the leadership of Athens. Thus was formed the voluntary confederation on which an Athenian empire was to rise. The object was not Cononly to protect the rescued cities from reconquest by the federacy of barbarian, but also to devastate the country of the Great King, purpose. in order to obtain by rapine a set-off against the expenses and Winter losses of the war. The treasury of the league was established in the sacred island of Delos, the ancient centre of Ionian worship, and it was hence called the Confederacy of Delos. (Above, The recapture of Sestus was its first achievement. The league included the Ionian and Aeolian cities of Asia ; the islands adjacent to the coast from Lesbos to Rhodes; a large number of towns on the Propontis, and some in Thrace ; most of the Cyclades; and Euboea except its southern city Carystus. It was a league of sea-states, and therefore the basis of the contract was that each state should furnish ships to the common fleet. But most of the members were small and poor; many could not equip more than one or two ships; many could do no more than contribute a part of the expense to the furnishing of a single galley. To gather together a number of small and scattered contingents at a fixed time and place was always a matter of difficulty; nor was such a miscellaneous armament easily managed. It was therefore arranged that the smaller states, instead of furnishing ships, should pay a yearly sum of money to a common treasury. It is uncertain how the amount of these payments was fixed. It seems probable that a calculation was made that all the states, which undertook to pay in money, ought to have been able to contribute VOL. I 2 A 478-7 в.с.) p. 350.) £124,200. between them 100 ships; and that the annual sum of 460 talents was taken as the equivalent of this contribution. Then a careful estimate was made of the resources and capacities of each city; and that sum was proportionally distributed among (φόρος.) them. The valuation of the wealth of the confederate cities and the determination of the "contribution" of each was a The Phoros work of great difficulty and responsibility; and it was devolved assigned by upon Aristides, whose discretion, and the respect in which he Aristides. was held, fitted him eminently for the task. His valuation fixed and The remained in force for more than fifty years. Thus from the very beginning the Confederacy consisted of two kinds of members, those who furnished ships and those who paid an equivalent in money-a phoros, as it was called; and the second class was far the larger. For besides those who could only furnish a ship or two, or even part of a ship, many of the larger cities preferred the system of money payments, which did not oblige their burghers to leave home. The tribute was collected by ten Athenian officers, who bore the title of Hellenotamiae, “treasurers of the Greeks." The Council of the Confederates met at Delos, where the treasury was, and each member had an equal voice. The large number of votes enabled Athens easily to control the proceedings of the Council; she could influence the smaller states, and the number of these votes overcame the weight of any opposition which the larger states could offer. As leader of the Confederacy, Athens had the executive entirely in her hands, and it was of the highest significance that the treasurers were not selected from the whole body of Confederates but were Athenian citizens. Thus from the first Athens held in her hands the means of gradually, and without any violent revolution, transforming the naval union into a naval empire. While the name of Aristides is connected most closely with the foundation of the Confederacy, there is no doubt that it was due to his rival Themistocles that Athens took the tide of fortune at the flood. Themistocles had made his city a seapower; and this feat approved him the greatest of all her statesmen. He was a man of genius. The most reserved of all historians, Thucydides, turns aside to praise his unusual natural gifts: his power of divining what was likely to happen, and his capacity for dealing with difficult situations. We Themis support should have expected that the guidance of the policy of Athens, Position of the organisation of the new Confederacy, would have been tocles; he entirely entrusted to Themistocles. Half a century later, has no when the democratic development of Athens had advanced party to farther, this would probably have been the case. But at this him. time a man without powerful connexions could not long maintain his influence over the people. Themistocles had no party behind him, and the exceptional ability of the man is shown by nothing so much as by the fact that in spite of this disadvantage he played such a great part. His rivals, Aristides and Xanthippus, were representative of the old and considerable party of the Coast, which was associated with the family of Megacles and Cleisthenes, to which the wife of Xanthippus belonged. They are the leaders at Plataea and Mycale; the name of Themistocles does not appear in the second year of the Persian war. The circumstance that Themistocles was not a party leader, that there was no protracted period during which Athens submitted to his influence, might easily lead us to underrate his importance. Though he was not formally or officially the founder of the Confederacy, yet, when Athens undertook the leadership and entered upon the new paths which then opened out before her, she was under the spell of a spirit of which he had been the clearest and earliest interpreter. But his influence had not yet passed away; and, while the fleet was building an empire in the east, there was work for him to do amid the ruins of Athens. SECT. 3. THE FORTIFICATION OF ATHENS AND THE PIRAEUS Themistocles, as we saw, made Athens a sea-power. Under The Acropolis too his guidance she threw her chief energy into the development far from of a navy; but, if she had followed that guidance more fully, the coast. she would have now cut herself more boldly adrift from the ties which attached her to the continent. It often occurred to the Athenians to regret that Athens was not an island; "if we were islanders," they thought, "we could defy the world." There would always be the Boeotian and the Megarian frontiers. But, if a series of strong fortresses had been regularly maintained on these frontiers, and if Athenian politicians had resolutely eschewed a continental policy, it might have been The walls of Athens possible to spend practically all their strength on their ships. In any case, when Athens decided to enter upon a new career, her true policy would have been to come down to the Piraeus. She should have left her old city round the Acropolis and migrated to the shore of the sea which was henceforward to shape her history. The position of the Acropolis was a fatality for Athens; it was too far from the sea and at the same time too near. If it had been as far from the coast as Acharnae, the citizens would almost certainly at this period have transferred their hearths and temples to the hill of Munychia and the shores of the Piraeus. But it was near enough to admit of tolerably quick communication with the harbour; and this geographical circumstance at once saved the old town and weakened the new city. Expediency will induce a monarch, but nothing except necessity will persuade a free people, to take the momentous resolution of leaving the spot where the homes and temples of the community have stood for centuries -the place associated with their dearest memories, their hopes and their fears. Had Themistocles been a tyrant, we may venture to suppose that he would have left Athens unfortified, built his palace on Munychia, and made Piraeus the centre of government-the city; so that in a few years the old town would have sunk into decay. But since Athens was to remain as before, notwithstanding the new development, and since this new development made the Piraeus of greater strategic importance, it became necessary to fortify and defend two towns within five miles' distance of each other. After Plataea, the Athenians brought back their families and goods to their desolate habitation. Little of the old town wall was still standing, and they proceeded to build a new wall. The work was done in haste; the material of older buildings and even gravestones were used. The traces of haste can be detected in some of the remains of this wall of Themistocles, near the Dipylon Gate in the north-west of the city. For it was by the advice and under the inspiration of Themistocles that the work was wrought. It embraced a larger circuit than the old enclosure; on the south side it followed the heights of the Pnyx group of hills, and approached the Ilisus. The Peloponnesians looked with jealousy at the rise of the Athenian walls. The activity of Athens in the Persian war and her strong navy made them suspect her ambitions. But they could not prevent her from strengthening her town. The Lacedaemonians sent an embassy, to deprecate fortifications, and to invite the Athenians instead of fortifying their own town to join Sparta in demolishing all fortifications in Greece. But they were not in a position to do more than remonstrate. As the name of Themistocles was associated with the wall, it was inevitable that an anecdote should be circulated, to illustrate the resources and wiles of the Attic Odysseus. At his sugges- The trick tion, the Spartan envoys were sent back with the answer that of themisthe Athenians would send an embassy. When they were gone, he started himself, as one of the ambassadors, but his colleagues were to remain behind till the wall had reached the lowest defensible height. In the meantime, the whole population, men, women, and children, were to press on the work. Having arrived at Sparta, he delayed presenting himself before the assembly, and when he was asked why, he said that his colleagues had been detained and that he expected them every day. Meanwhile persons arriving from Athens assured the Spartans that the wall was being built. Themistocles asked them not to be deceived by such rumours, but to send men of their own to discover whether it was true. At the same time he sent a message to Athens, with instructions that the envoys from Sparta should be detained till he and his colleagues had returned. The wall had now reached a sufficient height; and, the other ambassadors having arrived, Themistocles appeared before the assembly, and declared that Athens had walls and could defend her people. In future, he said, if the Lacedaemonians or their allies have any communication to make, they must deal with us as with men who are capable of deciding their own and Greece's interests. The Lacedaemonians had to put as good a face on the matter as they could. The story has significance in representing Athens as now formally declaring herself the peer of Sparta. |