Nau This pactus. Athenian merchants with Corinth in the west was active, and it was about this time that an Athenian general took Naupactus from the Capture of Ozolian Locrians, and secured a naval station which gave Athens a considerable control over the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf. was a blow which struck home; Athens had now the means of intercepting and harassing the Corinthian argosies which sailed forth with merchandise for the far west. War was a question of months, and the occasion soon came. 459 B.C. The Megarians, on account of a frontier dispute with Corinth, Athens deserted the Peloponnesian league and placed themselves under wins Athenian protection. Nothing could be more welcome to Athens Megara, than the adhesion of Megara. Holding Megara, she had a strong frontier against the Peloponnesus, commanding the isthmus from Pagae on the Corinthian, to Nisaea on the Saronic, bay. Without any delays she set about the building of a double line of wall from the hill of Megara down to the haven of Nisaea, which faces Salamis, and she garrisoned these "Long Walls" with her own troops. the eastern coast-road was under her control, and Attica had a strong Walls of bulwark against invasion by land. Thus Long Megara. phalea. The occupation of Megara was a new offence to Corinth; and it was an offence to the mistress of the Peloponnesian league. War soon broke out, but at first Sparta took no active part. On the events of the war we are ill-instructed. We find an Athenian Battle of squadron making a descent on Halieis, and gaining an advantage Halieis, over some Corinthian and Epidaurian troops. Then the little 459-8 B.C. island of Cecryphalea, which lies between Aegina and the Argive Battle of shore, becomes the scene of a naval combat with a Peloponnesian Cecryfleet, and the Athenians prevail. At this point the Aeginetans enter the struggle. They saw that if Corinth sustained a severe defeat, their own fate was sealed; Athens would become absolute mistress in the Saronic sea. A great naval battle was fought near Aegina; the Battle of allies of both Aegina and Athens were engaged; and the Athenians, Aegina, having taken seventy ships, landed on the island and blockaded the 458 B. C. Thereupon the Peloponnesians sent a force of hoplites to help the Aeginetans; while the Corinthians, advancing over the heights of Geranea, descended into the Megarid, expecting that the Athenians would find it impossible to protect Megara and blockade Aegina at the same time. But they reckoned without a true knowledge of the Athenian spirit. The citizens who were below and above the regular military age were formed into an extraordinary army and marched to the Megarid under the strategos Myronides. A battle was fought; Battle both sides claimed the victory; but, when the Corinthians withdrew, in the the Athenians raised a trophy. Urged by the taunts of their fellow- Megarid, citizens, the Corinthian soldiers returned in twelve days and began town. 458 B. C. to set up a counter-trophy, but as they were at work the Athenians rushed forth from Megara and inflicted a severe defeat. This warfare, round the shores and in the waters of the Saronic bay, is the prelude to more warfare in other parts of Greece; but it is a prelude which has a unity of its own. Athens is opposed indeed to the Peloponnesian alliance; but the war is, so far, mainly conducted by a concert of three states, whose interests lie in the neighbourhood of the Saronic Bay-Corinth, Epidaurus, and Aegina. These states have indeed the Peloponnesian league behind them, and are helped by "Peloponnesian ships" and "Peloponnesian hoplites"; but at the same time, the war has not yet assumed a fully Peloponnesian character. The year of these successes was a year of intense excitement and strain for Athens; it might fairly be described as an annus mirabilis in her history. The victories of Cecryphalea and Aegina were won with only a portion of her fleet. For, in the very hour when she was about to be brought face to face with the armed opposition of rival Greek powers against the growth of her empire and the expansion of her trade, she had embarked in an enterprise beyond the limits of the Greek world. It was an expedition to Egypt, one of the most daring ventures she ever undertook. Egyptian A fleet of 200 Athenian and Confederate galleys was operating expedition. against Persia in Cyprian seas, when it was invited to cross over to Egypt. The call came from Inaros, a Libyan potentate, who had stirred up the lands of the lower Nile to revolt against their Persian masters. The murder of Xerxes had been followed by troubles at the Persian court, and it was some time before Artaxerxes was safely seated on his throne; the rebellion of Egypt was one of the consequences of this situation. The invitation of Inaros was most alluring. It meant that, if Athens delivered Egypt from Persian rule, she would secure the chief control of the foreign trade with the Nile valley and be able to establish a naval station on the coast; by one stroke she would far outstrip all the rival merchant cities of Hellas. The nameless generals of the Aegean fleet accepted the call of the Libyan prince. As in the days of remote antiquity, the "peoples of the north" were now to help the Libyans in an attempt to overthrow the lords of Egypt. Of those remote episodes the Greeks knew nothing, but they might remember how Carian and Ionian adventurers had once placed an Egyptian king upon the throne. In another way, an attack on Egypt was a step in a new path. Hitherto the Confederate ships had sailed in waters which were wholly or partly Greek, and had confined their purpose to the deliverance of Greek cities or cities which, like the Carian and Lycian, were in close touch with Greek civilisation. The shores of Cyprus, where Greek and Phoenician were side by side, invited above other shores a squadron of Greek deliverers. But when the squadron crossed over to Egypt, it entered a new sphere and undertook a new kind of work. The Egyptian expedition was an attempt to carry the struggle with Persia into another stage- -a stage in which Greece is the aggressor and the invader. This attempt was not destined to prosper; more than a century was still to elapse before the invasion of Xerxes would be avenged. But it is well to remember that the Athenians, in moving on Egypt, anticipated Alexander the Great, and that success was not impossible if Cimon had been their general. The Athenians sailed up the Nile to find Inaros triumphant, Capture of having gained a great victory in the Delta over a Persian army Memphis, which had been sent to quell him. Sailing up they won possession 459 B.C. (autumn). of the city of Memphis, except the citadel, the "White Castle," in which the Persian garrison held out. After this achievement, we lose sight of the war in Egypt for more than two years, and beyond the protracted blockade of the White Castle we have no record how the Athenian forces were employed. But it was a fatal coincidence that the power of Athens should have been divided at this moment. With her full forces she might have inflicted a crushing blow on the Peloponnesians; with her full forces she might have prospered in Egypt. It was a triumph for the political party which had driven Cimon into banishment that, when half the Athenian fleet was on the banks of the Nile, the hostilities of Corinth and Aegina and their friends should have been so bravely repelled. Nothing impresses Erechtheid one more with the energy of Athens at this crisis than the stone inscription, which records the names of the citizens belonging to one of the 459-8 B.C. tribes, who fell in this memorable year: Of the Erechtheid tribe, These are they who died in the war, in Cyprus, in Egypt, in and the names follow. Enrolled The siege of Aegina was continued, and, within two years after Fall of the battle, the Aeginetans capitulated, and agreed to surrender their Aegina, fleet and pay tribute to Athens. Few successes can have been more 457-6 B. C. welcome or profitable to the Athenians than this. The island which in the Conoffended their eyes and attracted their desires when they looked forth federacy of from their hill across the waters of their bay was at length powerless Delos. in their hands. They had lamed one of their most formidable commercial rivals; they had overthrown one of the most influential cities of Dorian Greece. In the Confederacy, Aegina took her rank with Thasos as the richest of the subject states. For these two island Lacedaemonian to northern Greece, 457 B. C. cities the burden of yearly tribute was thirty talents, incomparably larger than the sum paid by any of the other cities whose tribute we know. In the meantime events in another part of Greece had led the Lacedaemonians themselves to take part in the war, and had transexpedition ported the main interest of the struggle from the Saronic Gulf to Boeotia. The errand of the Lacedaemonians was an errand of piety, to succour their mother people, the Dorians of the north, one of whose three little towns had been taken by the Phocians. To force the aggressors to restore the place was an easy task for a force which consisted of 1500 Lacedaemonian hoplites and 10,000 troops of the Restoration allies. of the hegemony of Thebes in Boeotia. FIG. 108.-Coin of Heracles stran- cept them. The real work of the expedition lay in Boeotia. It was clearly the policy of Sparta to raise up here a powerful state to hold Athens in check; and this could only be effected by strengthening Thebes and making her mistress of the Boeotian federation. Accordingly Sparta now set up the power of Thebes again, revising the league, and forcing the Boeotian cities to join it. When the army had done its work in Boeotia, its return to the Peloponnesus was beset by difficulties. To march through the Megarid was dangerous, for the Athenians held the passes, and had redoubled their precautions. And it was not safe to cross the Corinthian Gulfthe way by which they probably had come-for Athenian vessels were now on the watch to interIn this embarrassment they seem to have resolved to march straight upon Athens, where the people were now engaged on the building of Long Walls from the city to the harbour. This course was probably suggested by an Athenian party of oligarchs, who were always abiding an opportunity to overthrow the democracy. Battle of The Peloponnesian army advanced to Tanagra, near the Attic Tanagra, frontier; but before they crossed the borders the Athenians went forth to meet them, 14,000 strong, including 1000 Argives and some Thessalian cavalry. The banished statesman, Cimon, now came to the Athenian camp, pitched on Boeotian soil, and sought leave to fight for his country-against Sparta. The request was hastily referred to the Council of Five Hundred at Athens; it was not granted; and all that Cimon could do was to exhort his partisans to fight valiantly. This act of Cimon prepared the way for his recall; in the battle which followed, his friends fought so stubbornly that none of them survived. There was great slaughter on both sides; but the Thessalian horsemen deserted during the combat, and the Lacedaemonians gained the victory. But the battle saved Athens, 457 B.C. (summer). and the victory only enabled the victors to return by the Isthmus and cut down the fruit trees of the Megarid. Cimon recalled. Athens now desired to make a truce with Sparta in order to gain Truce wit time. No man was more fitted to compass this than the exile Cimon, Sparta; whose recent conduct had shown that he was the foe of the foes of Athens, even if those foes were Spartans. The people, at the instance of Pericles, passed a decree recalling him; but when Cimon had negotiated the truce, he withdrew to a distance from Athens, with a tact which we might hardly have expected. The Lacedaemonians celebrated their victory by a golden shield Conquest of which they set above the gable of the new temple of Zeus in the altis Boeotia. of Olympia, as a gift from the spoils of Tanagra. But the victory did not even secure Boeotia. Two months after the battle, the Athenians made an expedition into Boeotia under the command of Myronides. A decisive battle was fought at Oenophyta, and the Athenians became Battle of masters of the whole land except Thebes. The Boeotian cities were Oenophyta not enrolled in the maritime Confederacy of Delos, but their depend- 457 B.C. (autumn). ence on Athens was expressed in the obligation of furnishing contingents to her armies. At the same time the Phocians entered into the alliance of Athens, and the Opuntian Locrians were constrained to acknowledge her supremacy. Such were the consequences of Oenophyta and Tanagra. Athens could now quietly complete the building of her Long Walls. These brilliant successes were crowned, as we have seen, by the capture of Aegina; and probably about the same time the acquisition of Troezen gave the Athenians an important post on the Argolic shore. But in the far south their arms were not so prosperous. Failure Since the capture of Memphis, no success seems to have been gained, of the and the White Castle still held out. After an ineffectual attempt Egyptian expedition. to induce Sparta to cause a diversion by invading Attica, king Artaxerxes sent a large army to Egypt under Megabyzus, who was 456 B.C. supported by a Phoenician fleet. Having won a battle, he drove the Greeks out of Memphis and shut them up in Prosopitis, an island formed by a canal which intersected the Canopic and Sebennytic channels of the Nile. Here he blockaded them for eighteen months. At last he drained the canal and turned aside the water, so that the 454 B.C. Greek ships were left high and dry, and almost the whole island was reconnected with the banks. Thus the Persians were able to march across to the island. The Greeks having burned their ships retreated to Byblos, where they capitulated to Megabyzus and were allowed to depart. A tedious march brought them to friendly Cyrene, where they found means of returning to their homes. Inaros who kindled the revolt was crucified, though his life had been spared by the terms of the capitulation. Soon afterwards a relief squadron of fifty triremes |
