449-440BC in Greece

Later copy of a Diomedes statue by Kresilas

This post will look at Greece and the wider Greek world from the years 449BC to 440BC. Firstly, a word about our sources. Archaeology can shed some light on this period, but we are primarily reliant on written sources, such as the writings of Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Pausanias. A more complete list of sources is given at the end of the blog.

In the year 449BC the Athenians and the Spartans had an uneasy peace with each other, having brokered a temporary truce in the previous years under the auspices of Cimon. Now however, Cimon was dead, and it was unclear that the truce he had made would last.

The Athenians took this opportunity to send the wealthy nobleman Callias (also known as Callias II to differentiate him from others of the same name in Athens) to Persia to negotiate a peace between the Athenians and the Great King, Artaxerxes I. In the aftermath of Xerxes' failed invasion, the Athenians and their Greek allies had inflicted numerous defeats on the Persians and they had wrested Ionia and the western coast of Asia Minor from the Persian Empire. But they had been unable to seriously damage the Persians, whose inland empire was vast and the Athenians had suffered defeats in Cyprus and Egypt. The last engagement, in Cyprus, had seen the death of Cimon, the tactical defeat of the Persians and the strategic defeat of the Athenians. There was no longer any advantage for either state to continue fighting.

Head of woman, from Melos

It is said that a peace treaty was made, generally referred to in literature as the Peace of Callias. The terms of the peace were said to be that the Athenians would cease to support the enemies of Persia, particularly in Egypt and Cyprus. In return the Persians would acknowledge the liberation of the Ionian cities and would not allow them to be interfered with. The Persian navy would also be bound not to sail into the Aegean Sea.

This would appear to be a triumph of diplomacy and is sometimes seen as the end of the Persian Wars. However, all may not be all as it seems. Most references to the Peace of Callias are from a century later, when orators compared it to a much less favourable peace that had been imposed. There was supposedly a monument to the treaty, but it had been written using the wrong script, suggesting that perhaps it was forged later? It is honestly hard to tell. Thucydides makes no mention of it and he is one of the better historians of this era. But, regardless of whether the Peace of Callias actually existed or not, or if the terms were exactly the ones mentioned, it does seem as if the Persians and Athenians stopped fighting each other for a while.

Stele from around 447BC stipulating
tribute payments for the
Delian League/Athenian Empire

Another argument for the existence of a peace treaty is that the other states of the Delian League became restless. The Delian League had been formed to fight the Persians. But with the possibility of a lasting peace with Persia, the need for the League's existence was now uncertain. The Athenians still required high payments of tribute in either ships or money. Most allies now paid in money and the treasury of the League was held at Athens, rather than on the island of Delos as had previously been the case. Here, the Athenians were beginning to contemplate using these funds for purposes other than protecting the League.

For all the genius of the Greeks, it seems bizarre that they never were able to cooperate unless in times of desperation. They spent so much blood and treasure on fighting each other that it seems strange that they never thought of combining into a more unified group. There is an inkling that something of this might have been tried this year. Athens, Sparta and Persia were all at peace and Pericles proposed a Congress that could use the treasury of the Delian League and other funds in Greece to rebuild all the temples that had been destroyed in the Persian invasions, as a symbol that the long war was truly over. This was not a call for political unity, but it was asking the Greeks to act in a unified way on something other than just the Panhellenic Games.

Bust of Pericles in the Altes Museum
Berlin

The Spartans rejected it. It seemed too like an Athenian trick. The ostensible aim was to spend a lot of money rebuilding temples that had been destroyed, and a lot of Athenian temples had been destroyed. The proposer was Pericles, who was a man who had favoured war with Sparta before. The Spartans believed this was some cheap way for the Athenians to further their influence over the rest of the Greek world, and to be fair to the Spartans, it probably was. But I would like to imagine that for a brief moment, there was a chance of something greater, some vision that offered hope, before it faded and the Greek cities continued along the path that they had always followed.

In the wake of the failure of the proposed Congress, Pericles raised more money from the Delian League to rebuild some of the temples in Greece, primarily in Athens. Sparta had a different reaction however. They wanted to reassert their own authority on Pan-Hellenic matters and marched against Phocis.

When the Athenians had defeated Thebes in the Battle of Oenophyta eight years earlier, they had also made Delphi reliant on nearby Phocis, rather than the defunct Amphictyonic League, led by Sparta. The Spartans marched northwards and made Delphi independent of the Phocians. It is hard to imagine that this act was viewed kindly in Athens. In fact, with this act the truce can be said to have been broken. This act marked the beginning of a short and unremarkable conflict known as the Second Sacred War.

This year in Athens saw Herakleides win the competition for tragedy at the Great Dionysia Festival. With the new funds allocated for temple building, work began on the Temple of Hephaestus, on the north-western corner of the Agora, as well as the Temple of Athena Nike on the Acropolis hill itself, just to the right of the entrance area. The temple of Nike was probably planned by the architect Callicrates.

Coinage of Perdiccas II of Macedonia

In the year 448, King Alcetas II of Macedon was murdered, after a short and rather undistinguished reign. The Macedonian kingdom was breaking up and the nephew of the king, named Archelaus, murdered the king. The king's brother Perdiccas succeeded to the throne as Perdiccas II and tried to re-establish the strength of the kingdom. However, other members of the royal family, such as Perdiccas' brother Philip, tried to place themselves on the throne and civil war ensued.

In central Greece, the Athenians marched to Delphi and placed the sanctuary of Delphi back under the control of Phocis. This marked the end of the short and unremarkable conflict known as the Second Sacred War. While the dispute over Phocis and Delphi was fairly trivial in itself, it marked the resumption of the First Peloponnesian War, with Athens and Sparta once again at war.

Perhaps because of this resumption of hostilities, construction began on another Long Wall in Athens, known as the Middle Wall. The first two Long Walls had covered all the ground in the triangle between Athens, Phalerum and Piraeus. The Middle Wall created a narrow, but protected, road between Piraeus and Athens, in case the naval power of Athens failed and the Phalerum was taken or the eastern Long Wall was breached by siege.

Reverse of Athenian Tetradrachm

The Olympic Games were held that year. Lacharidas won the boy's stadion. Polynikos of Thespiai won the boy's wrestling. Ariston won the boy's boxing. Krison of Himera won the prestigious stadion race, while Eucleides of Rhodes won the double pipe (diaulos race). Lyceinos won the race in full armour, the hoplitodromos, while Cheimon of Argos won the wrestling competition. Keton of Locroi won the pentathlon, while Arcesilaus of Sparta owned the team of horses that won the tethrippon chariot race.

Yet nothing surpassed the triumph of the family of Diagoras of Rhodes at this Olympic Games. Diagoras was a supposed descendent of the Messenian hero Aristomenes and if true, lived up well to the fame of his forebears. He had been victorious as a boxer in all four of the Panhellenic Games: The Olympic, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean Games. These wins included two Olympic victories, celebrated with a victory ode by no lesser poet than the poet Pindar. He had also sired mighty sons.

In this year his son Damagetos of Rhodes won the pancration for the second time at the Olympics. Meanwhile another of his sons, Acusilaus of Rhodes, won the boxing competition as his father had done. The two Olympic victors celebrated by carrying their aging father on their shoulders around the race track, while the spectators cheered and saluted their good fortune, skill and glory.

Modern statue in Rhodes, showing
Diagoras being carried on the shoulders of
his sons

The story goes that Diagoras came to Olympia in the company of his sons Acusilaus and Damagetus. The youths … proceeded to carry him through the crowd, while the Greeks pelted him with flowers and congratulated him on his sons. The family of Diagoras was originally, through the female line, Messenian, as he was descended from the daughter of Aristomenes.
Pausanias, Description of Greece, 6.7.3, written circa AD150

It is said that a spectator called out to Diagoras that he might as well die at that moment, as this was the height of human happiness. It is also said, probably as a later addendum to the legend, that Diagoras died at that moment; the happiest man in the world. This is probably a later tale, but it is certain that Diagoras' family were legendary. A third son, Dorieus, would go on to win glory in the Olympics, and it is said that his daughter was so obsessed with sports that she trained her son (Diagoras' grandson) and made her way in disguise into the arena to watch his victory. It's hard to know how much of this is true, but it is worth remembering the tales, even if they are merely legends.

Diagoras' tomb was created in Rhodes and was later mistakenly reverenced by the locals as the tomb of a saint. The local football team and their stadium, as well as the airport of Rhodes are also named after him.

Tomb of a youth in Boeotia

In 447 Pericles led an expedition to the Chersonese to expel the non-Greek inhabitants of the area and plant Athenian colonies. Pericles was correct in identifying the Straits of the Hellespont as vital to Athenian interests. Athens was growing as a city and had long been unable to feed itself. It instead paid (or required as tribute) for grain to be shipped from the lands surrounding the Black Sea to feed the population.

While Pericles was away with much of the Athenian fleet, an oligarchic revolt against Athenian rule broke out in Thebes. Thebes was the traditional leader of Boeotia and a traditional enemy of Athens. However Thebes had been defeated by Athens ten years previously and their ruling oligarchs expelled. The Athenians favoured the democratic faction in Thebes and strengthened it. However the alliance with the traditional rivals must have eroded the popularity of the democratic faction in Thebes. The exiles returned and ousted the democratic faction.

The Athenians led a small force of Athenians and allies, under the command of Tolmides, to bring Thebes back into line. Either they underestimated the threat, or they had overextended their reach in their expedition to the Hellespont. After an initial Athenian success, the Thebans counterattacked and heavily defeated the Athenians at the Battle of Coronea.

In the aftermath of this defeat, the remainder of the Athenian army was effectively trapped in hostile territory. In order the extricate themselves, the Athenians had to make a humiliating peace and Boeotia and Thebes left the Delian League. As Boeotia lay across the land routes to Locris and Phocis, it became clear that Athens would no longer be able to hold these areas and shortly thereafter these regions also left.

Decree authorising construction of the Parthenon

Not much is known exactly about tactics or the politics of this conflict, but it was a crucial one in Greek history. The Athenians had attempted to control both land and sea and had controlled the land of central Greece as far north as the borders of Macedonia. Now they had lost the vast majority of their land empire, with their northern border being the mountains to the immediate north of Attica and with Megara being the only contiguous land area they controlled.

In Athens itself, the Middle Long Walls were completed, giving a measure of security to the port of Piraeus and providing reassurance to the Athenians that even if the land was lost, the sea was still their undisputed empire.

The Athenians passed the Coinage Decree, proposed by an Athenian named Clearchus, which stipulated that the Athenian weights and measures, and most specifically, coinage, should be used throughout the Athenian Empire. This was quite sensible in certain ways, but cannot have endeared the allies to the Athenians.

In this year work began on the most famous of all Greek temples, the Parthenon. The architects in charge of its design were Callicrates and Ictinus.

Around this time, Achaeus of Eretria wrote his first play. He was a writer of tragedies and was said to have had great competence. However he only won one competition and none of his plays survive antiquity.

Modern painting of Antigone and her unburied
brother Polyneices

Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man himself.
Sophocles, Antigone, written circa 447BC

Also around this time, although the year is slightly uncertain, Sophocles wrote the play Antigone. This is the eponymous story of one of the daughters of the doomed Oedipus, King of Thebes. Her brothers have quarrelled over the throne of Thebes and one attacked Thebes to kill his brother, while the other defended Thebes (to kill his brother). Both brothers fought with each other and died from their wounds. The new king, Creon, the brother of Oedipus' mother/wife, vows that the corpse of the son of Oedipus who attacked the city should be left to rot. Antigone, his sister, refuses to leave her brother unburied, regardless of what he has done, or the demands of the state. She honours her family and the gods above the duties of the political authorities.

The play follows the struggle between the two strong-willed tragic figures, both driven by what they believe is the right way to act. It has been seen as the great work of civil disobedience, of the conflict between religion and the state, between public and private morality and a host of different interpretations.

We have only a little time to please the living. But all eternity to love the dead.
Sophocles, Antigone, written circa 447BC

Coin of Sybaris before their expulsion in 446BC

In the year 446, in Italy, the exiles of Sybaris were expelled once again from their city. They had returned to their city under the leadership of a Thessalian and possibly with an alliance with the Greek city of Poseidonia. However the nearby city of Croton was too powerful once again and the Sybarites were once more expelled and banished from the region.

In Sicily Ducetius, the Sicel rebel leader, returned from Corinth and founded a new city at Caleacte on the northern coast of Sicily. It is probable that he did so with some level of permission from Syracuse, as the Syracusans did not venture to attack him, as they would doubtless otherwise have done.

The return of Ducetius was opposed by the Greek city of Acragas, and they sent a force towards the Himera River to attack the Syracusans, who were believed to have been behind Ducetius' return. The Syracusans won a victory there and Acragas was forced to make peace shortly thereafter.

On mainland Greece the Achaeans, in the northern Peloponnese, revolted against the Athenians. The Theban victory of the previous year had proved that far from being invincible, that the Athenian Empire was extremely vulnerable to attack by land. To add insult to injury, the island of Euboea revolted against the Athenians. Euboea was a large island and very close to Attica. If it was to revolt successfully, Athenian control of the Aegean would be threatened. Pericles took an army to bring Euboea back into the empire by force.

Athenian Tetradrachm

While the Athenians were engaged in Euboea, the people of Megara decided to revolt against the Athenians. The Corinthians, Epidaurians and Sicyonians joined in the attack on the Athenian garrison and the garrison were all killed.

The Athenians perhaps did not realise the seriousness of their danger and did not immediately recall their army from Euboea. Meanwhile the Spartans displayed their strength and marched in force from the Peloponnese under the leadership of King Pleistonax.

The Athenians had sent military forces to retake Megara. These were unable to retake the city though and had to retreat to avoid the oncoming Spartans. A later tombstone in Athens is dedicated to a man named Pythion of Megara, who is said to have saved the lives of three tribes of Athens. It may be that Pythion was a Megarian who was friendly to Athens and who guided the Athenian troops homewards once the Spartan army approached. As the Spartans were advancing in force, Pythion probably led them through a circuitous and unexpected route into Boeotia.

Pleistonax passed Megara, which had previously been a bastion keeping the Spartans in the Peloponnese, and advanced as far as Eleusis. There was nothing to stop the Spartans from advancing as far as the walls of Athens, but Pericles hurriedly abandoned the sieges in Euboea to return to Athens with the full Athenian army.

Bust of Pericles

The Spartans had made their presence felt and Pericles seems to have sent emissaries to Pleistonax and his close advisor Cleandridas. It is not clear exactly what was said, or what terms were offered. But Pleistonax led the Spartan army away. In a purely coincidental fact, the Athenian treasury for that year had 10 talents unaccounted for, which Pericles had simply marked as "Important state business".

It seems likely that Pericles had bribed Pleistonax to retreat. But this was perhaps an oversimplification. The Athenians knew that they were in trouble certainly. But Pericles and Pleistonax both knew that the Spartans could not have taken the city of Athens. The walls of Athens were far too strong for the Spartans to besiege. So, a withdrawal actually was the best outcome for both sides, even though Pleistonax (or his advisor Cleandridas) probably did take the small bribe.

Freed from the immediate threat of Spartan invasion of Attica, Pericles took the Athenian army back to Euboea and conquered it, forcing it back into the Athenian Empire. The town of Histaiea was the only one that was not settled with a negotiated surrender; possibly because these townspeople had massacred the crew of an Athenian trireme. They were expelled from their lands and an Athenian colony planted there.

Also in this year, the Athenians disarmed the city of Miletus, perhaps suspecting it of disloyalty to the Delian League/Athenian Empire. As they were now disarmed, they would have to contribute money instead of ships to the fleet.

Female statue from Theseion

This year the comic poet Callias won the prize for Comedy in the Great Dionysia festival in Athens. It is not known, by me at least, for which play he won. The works of Callias are not well known, but some fragments of one of his plays survive, as well as the titles of some of his other works. The work of his that is known is called the Letter Tragedy, where there were 24 chorus members, each representing one of the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet.

In the year 445, after around fifteen years of intermittent warfare, Athens and Sparta made peace. Callias II, the wealthy nobleman who had perhaps negotiated the peace with the Persians (or perhaps had not) was sent to Sparta to deal with the Spartans and create a peace. More accurately, what had been agreed upon was a thirty year truce, but this was a much stronger agreement than the previous five year truce negotiated by Cimon.

Athens was to give up all the bases that she had occupied around the Peloponnese. Aegina was to remain tributary but was to have autonomy. Megara was to re-join the Peloponnesian League of Sparta and her allies. Both cities would recognise the alliances that were in place already and would not try and tempt cities to join them. So, Athens, for example, would not try and tempt Corinth or other cities to forsake the Spartans and join the Athenians while Sparta would likewise refrain with Athenian allied cities.

The Athenian attempt to become dominant in mainland Greece was ended, but the two cities of Athens and Sparta were unquestionably the two strongest states in Greece and roughly comparable in military might. However, their methods of military force differed. Athens was very strong at sea, while Sparta was very strong on the land. But for now, they were at peace.

White-ground lekythos painted
by the Phiale Painter

There were probably some in Sparta who were unhappy with the treaty, as Spartan fortunes in war had been improving after the quelling of the helot revolt in the previous decade. The Agiad king of Sparta, Pleistonax, was banished, along with his advisor Cleandridas. Cleandridas was later sentenced to death in absentia for his taking of bribes from Pericles and the Athenians. Cleandridas never returned, but his son would later serve with distinction in the Spartan army. Pleistonax went into exile.

Meanwhile, in Italy, the expelled Sybarites took advantage of the newfound peace between Sparta and Athens to request their aid. They begged for colonists to be sent to Sybaris, to re-found Sybaris with representatives of the two strongest states in Greece. Surely the people of Croton would not dare to anger both Athens and Sparta simultaneously? The Athenians and Spartans were pleased with the proposal and sent out settlers to re found the city.

Preparations began for the new colonists, but probably not many were sent out originally. The colonists arrived in Sybaris and began to rebuild the city, but then moved slightly away from the city, to found a new city nearby. This new city was named Thurii (or Thurium) and was probably made in response to an oracle. The city was a combination of the numerous settlers and the few remnants of the original Sybarites.

In the arts, the Phiale Painter flourished around this time. He was an Attic red-figure vase painter. He was probably a student of the Achilles Painter.

In the year 444 the leadership of Pericles was challenged in Athens. Pericles held the elected position of strategos, meaning general, which allowed him certain privileges, but his real leadership of Athens lay in his ability to speak and persuade the Assembly. Pericles was an aristocrat, but had continued the reforms of the murdered Ephialtes, who had favoured a more radical democracy than had existed under Cimon or Themistocles.

He was opposed by Thucydides, son of Melesias, who led an aristocratic party against Pericles. He was probably related to the more famous Thucydides son of Olorus, who later wrote a history of the Peloponnesian War, but it is not clear exactly how the two were related. Both had Thracian connections and Thucydides, son of Melesias, was a relative of Cimon. After Cimon's death he had taken up the mantle as leader of the conservative opposition. His followers were less than those of Pericles, but he magnified their effect in the Assembly by having them sit and stand together, thus making their voices seem perhaps greater than they would have been otherwise.

Temple of Hephaestus in Athens

Thucydides began to take Pericles to account for his expenditure of money. Firstly there was the matter of the ten missing talents that had clearly been used for a bribe to get the Spartans to leave when Pleistonax had invaded Attica. However this was so obviously done for the benefit of the state that the auditors seemed quite content to accept this irregularity.

There was however the more serious matter of the huge sums being spent on the building of new temples. Pericles had used the treasury of the Delian League to finance this. Not only was this money that had been taken from their allies and subjects, but it was such an outlay that the state would struggle to pay such expenses.

Thucydides took Pericles to task for this extravagance. He was a good speaker and the building works, so obviously visible from Pnyx Hill, were visible to everyone. The public feeling rose high against Pericles. However, Pericles was a bold and accomplished orator and when the rage of the people had reached its zenith, he took to the speaking platform.

Earthquake shaken column of the
Temple of Hephaestus in Athens

He made no apology for the scale and expense of his building program and told his listeners how these adornments would make Athens the finest city in the world. He then told the people that if they were concerned about cost, that he, Pericles, would personally pay for each and every monument that he was building, but that to shame the populace, he would inscribe his own name upon the buildings, as the people were clearly unworthy of such splendour. The people of Athens were amused and amazed by this and they voted to continue with the building work. Pericles was once more back in the favour of the people and Thucydides son of Melesias was held in poor regard.

When the orators, who sided with Thucydides and his party, were at one time crying out, as their custom was, against Pericles, as one who squandered away the public money, and made havoc of the state revenues, he rose in the open assembly and put the question to the people, whether they thought that he had laid out much; and they saying, "Too much, a great deal." "Then," said he, "since it is so, let the cost not go to your account, but to mine; and let the inscription upon the buildings stand in my name." When they heard him say thus, whether it were out of a surprise to see the greatness of his spirit, or out of emulation of the glory of the works, they cried aloud, bidding him to spend on, and lay out what he thought fit from the public purse, and to spare no cost, till all were finished.
Plutarch, Life of Pericles, written circa AD100

Around this time, the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens was mostly completed. However, only the basic structure had been put in place. The friezes and ornamentation were not yet finished, as the primary building effort was now put into the work on the Parthenon and other temples on the Acropolis. The temple of Hephaestus was built of Pentelic marble and even in an unfinished state, would have looked quite wonderful from the nearby Agora.

Interior of the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens

The Olympic Games were held this year. Krison of Himera won the stadion race. Tausosthenes of Aegina won the wrestling competition. Alkainetos of Lepreon won the boxing competition. Iccus of Taras (or Taranto) won the pentathlon. Charmides of Elis won the boy's boxing, while Arcesilaus of Sparta owned the team of horses that won the tethrippon chariot race once again.

Iccus of Taranto was famed in antiquity as being one of the greatest gymnasts of his age. He followed Pythagorean precepts in preparing for his athletic contests. He would eat abstemiously and abstain from sex while in training. He is sometimes held to be the first proponent of special athletic diets. This is probably overstating the case, but it shows that the Greeks were beginning to treat sport in an almost scientific fashion, in a way that modern Olympians would find familiar. The methods of training, diet and overall preparation were different, but the attention to detail and care given would have had similarities.

Around the year 443 the new city of Thurii was beginning to flourish. This was very near to the vanquished city of Sybaris and its people were composed of the defeated Sybarites and new colonists from Athens, Sparta and many other parts of Greece. It looked as if the fortunes of the people of Sybaris were finally about to change for the better; after decades of defeats inflicted by their neighbouring city, Croton, Sybaris would rise once more.

However, it was not to be. The Sybarites had seen themselves as the core of the new city and are said to have given themselves certain privileges, such as restricting certain voting rights to themselves alone, giving the tracts of land closest to the city to themselves and allowing their wives to sacrifice first to the gods. The new colonists resented this and a few years after the new city of Thurii was founded, the colonists rose up in revolution.

Later bust of Pindar

The exact year is uncertain, but it was probably between 443 and 440, that the colonists, who were intended to protect the Sybarites, took over the city for themselves. Those few Sybarites who were not killed in this new disaster were exiled.

They did not go far, but instead founded a new city, known as Sybaris on the Traeis. The exact location of this city is unknown, but it was quite a small city, probably more akin to a town. It was located somewhere along the Trionto River in present day Calabria in Italy.

It is around this time that Pindar, perhaps the greatest of the Greek lyric poets, died. He was originally from Thebes, but had travelled in his lifetime throughout much of the Greek world, including Thessaly, Aegina and Syracuse, attending the Panhellenic Games and writing odes in the honour of the victors. In certain cases the athletes would commission these themselves, while in other cases the home city of the athlete would pay for an ode to be composed in the honour of their victor. Some of the victors were rulers of cities in their own right, such as the tyrant Hiero I of Syracuse, and thus could afford to have their glories remembered. It is through the works of Pindar that we can begin to see the importance of sport to the ancient Greeks, who commissioned poetry to explicitly compare their sporting heroes to the demigods and heroes of old.

For words live longer down the years than deeds.
Pindar, Nemean Ode 4, written circa 465BC

Ostraca cast against Pericles. Thucydides son of Melesias
was ostracised instead, but some votes were clearly cast
against Pericles

It is perhaps in this year that Thucydides, son of Melesias, was ostracised by the Athenians after his failure to discredit Pericles in the previous year. Thucydides left the city for a ten year banishment and Pericles was once more unchallenged in the political favour of the Athenians.

In the year 442 the playwright Sophocles was elected as a treasurer of the Athenians. He had probably been given this position because he was beloved playwright. There was more scope than ever for playwrights, as the lesser known annual festival of the Lenaia was moved to the Theatre of Dionysus around this time and plays were performed at it. It seems that in this year comedy was added to the Lenaia.

In the year 441 a dispute seems to have arisen between the cities of Miletus and Samos about which would control the nearby region of Priene. All of the cities were in close proximity to each other and both Samos and Miletus were famed in the Greek world. However, Miletus had been disarmed by the Athenians five years previously. The Samians by contrast had not only kept their navy, but were one of the very few cities in the Athenian Empire to still maintain their own navy, which they did with pride. Thus when the two cities eventually came to blows, the Samians had much more success than the Milesians.

Later bust of Euripides

In this year Euripides is said to have won the tragedy competition at the Great Dionysia, but the play with which he won has not survived. He was the youngest of the three great tragedians of antiquity. Aeschylus had been revered by the Athenians and had served his country in war. Sophocles was a well-known public figure in addition to being a great dramatist. Euripides however had a reputation for being a bit weird and was satirised by comic writers as being a brooding misanthrope. More of his works survive than any of the other playwrights of antiquity however.

It is possibly around this time that Sophocles wrote his tragedy, Ajax. This was a character study into a hero whose pride leads him to madness and then tragic suicide. The fate of the body of the hero is then debated by his family and by those that Ajax had planned to murder, eventually culminating in respect being allowed even to foes in death.

In the year 440BC in Cyrene in North Africa, the people had finally had enough of the tyrannical rule of their king Arcesilaus IV. He had exiled many of the nobles and had kept himself in power by hiring mercenaries. He and his son fled the city to go to what is now the Benghazi region in Libya. Here he was caught and killed and his corpse desecrated. His son was beheaded and his head cast into the sea. The land of Cyrene was subsequently made into a republic, while remaining under Persian rule.

Coin of Acragas from this period

In Sicily, the Sicel leader Ducetius, who had been defeated by Syracuse, exiled to Corinth and later returned to found a new colony at Caleacte, died. While he may not have directly controlled the Sicels any longer, it seems that his death was the signal for the city of Acragas to attack the Sicels. The city of Palice, founded by Ducetius, had been a place for slaves to flee to, and it seems that perhaps this was once more seen as a threat by the people of Acragas. Palice was attacked and destroyed and the Sicel communities were scattered, leaderless and decentralised once more. The colony of Caleacte also seems to have failed and only became prosperous in later centuries. Thus passed Ducetius, the failed freedom fighter of a forgotten people.

In the Aegean, the dispute between Miletus and Samos had come to blows and the Samians were victorious. The Milesians appealed to Athens. The Milesians had previously been disarmed by the Athenians, but they were still, like the Samians, part of the Athenian Empire. The Athenians were perhaps motivated by a number of factors, perhaps fearing Samian overreach, or perhaps fearing that if they did not defend those they disarmed that they would seem weak. Perhaps they disliked the oligarchic Samian government and preferred the democratic Milesian government.

Whatever the reason, the Athenians told the Samians to give up the disputed territories and to accept Athenian judgement on the matter. Some Athenians suspected that this favourable judgement was given because Pericles was in love with the hetaira (courtesan) Aspasia, who was originally from Miletus.

Later bust supposedly of Aspasia

The Samians refused to accept these terms and so the Athenians, acting swiftly and before the Samians were aware, sent a force of forty ships to Samos. This fleet changed the government of Samos to a democracy, took 100 hostages and placed them on the island of Lemnos, and left an Athenian garrison on Samos.

This had been an easy win for Athens, but this was only because the Samians had been caught off guard. Some of the exiled oligarchs went inland into Asia Minor, where they appealed to Pissuthnes, who was a Persian satrap in Sardis. Pissuthnes gave them 700 mercenaries and the exiles made the short crossing to Samos in the night, where they began a revolution. The Athenian garrison was captured and handed over to the Persians. The Samian hostages were then rescued from Lemnos and word sent out to other states in the Aegean to rise up against the Athenians.

The Samian War had now begun. The strategic city of Byzantium had also risen up against the Athenians, which threatened the grain supply of Athens from the Black Sea regions. Pericles immediately set out against Samos with a large fleet. The Samians, who had a significant fleet of their own, sent out their ships, but the Athenians defeated them near the island of Tragia. The Athenians then received reinforcements, landed on the island of Samos and then began to make siege works to try and take the city. While no Greek army at this period showed any great skill in siege-craft, the Athenians were probably the most skilled in this art.

Temple of Hephaestus in Athens seen from the Agora

At this time, Pericles, who was leading the attack on Samos, heard that there was a Persian fleet approaching from Caria to assist the Samians. He hurriedly took 60 ships and moved south to fend off this threat. The Persian fleet never materialised, however the Samians took advantage of the reduced Athenian forces to sally forth and inflict a defeat on the besiegers. It is recorded that the leader of this attack was Melissus of Samos, the Eleatic philosopher who did not believe in vacuums. The attack was so successful that for a little time, the Samians were once again master of the seas around their island.

Once it was clear that the Persian fleet was not coming to defend Samos, Pericles returned to Samos with the 60 Athenian ships. The blockade around Samos was re-established and the city was placed under siege in earnest once more.

But in the meantime the Samians made a sudden sally, and fell on the camp, which they found unfortified. Destroying the look-out vessels, and engaging and defeating such as were being launched to meet them, they remained masters of their own seas for fourteen days, and carried in and carried out what they pleased. But on the arrival of Pericles, they were once more shut up.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, written circa 400BC

Later bust of Sophocles

Around this time, the city of Mytilene, an important city on the island of Lesbos, was considering joining the revolt. The Samians had appealed to Sparta and her allies for aid against the Athenians and the Peloponnesian League was gathered in Sparta to decide whether or not to go to war against Athens once more. The League was nearly evenly split, but in an interesting turn of events, the Corinthians argued against intervention, thus saving Athens from the danger of fighting the Spartans and quelling a major revolt simultaneously.

Around this time the Temple of Poseidon at Sunium was completed by the Athenians. This temple reared dramatically above the cape. The designer may have been the same architect who designed the Temple of Hephaestus near the Agora in Athens. It is only partly preserved, with some of the outer columns standing yet. The cape had an entire captured Persian trireme dedicated to Poseidon, great god of the sea, as a memorial to Athenian naval might.

It was around this time that Phidias created his statue Athena Lemnia, which was hailed by later Greeks as the greatest of his works. Like nearly all works of Greek statuary from this period, it has not survived, but some glimpse of it can be seen from the Roman copies.

Around this time, the physician Euryphon of Cnidus flourished. He wrote some books on medicine, of which nothing now survives. There were two competing schools of Greek medicine, at Cnidus and Cos. It seems that Euryphon may have been aware of the difference between arteries and veins. Another doctor who flourished around this time was Pausanias of Sicily. Little is known about Pausanias of Sicily save that he was the eromenos of Empedocles.

Eromenos was a term denoting a "male beloved" in Greek. However, this had some differences between homosexuality as it is currently understood. This had some fairly crucial differences from our culture's experience of homosexuality. The eromenos was generally younger, in certain cases much younger, than the other man. We would probably be quite uncomfortable with the arrangement, as the Athenians and at least some other Greek states, seem to have viewed consent as the important thing rather than age. At least some of these relationships would be viewed as child abuse now. Probably all of these relationships would be viewed as problematic, as the older man would have comparatively more power and status within society and this asymmetry of power would lend itself to manipulation and abuse (much like a teacher seducing a student).

Theatre of Dionysus in Athes

There certainly were some homosexual relationships that we would be more familiar with, where two men of roughly comparable ages were lovers, but these seem to have been regarded as somewhat unusual in Athens.

The point is not to morally castigate the ancient Greeks. They certainly engaged in many practices that we would consider immoral. The ubiquity of slavery as a means of production and torture as a means of interrogation are but two examples of how ancient morality differed from our own. It is fair to point out that they engaged in this behaviour, but condemning them doesn't revert the harm that was done. The only reason to morally criticise the past is to learn from it ourselves.

But I do think it is worth remembering that the cultural expressions of sexuality in the ancient world were quite different from the cultural expressions of sexuality in our own times. The subject is quite a complex one and many of the terms of discussion do not easily translate from one period to another. This is the barest introduction to the study of ancient sexuality, but it is worth studying.

Fragment of the writing of Empedocles
found in Egypt

Empedocles was from Acragas, in southern Sicily and, like many ancient philosophers, was quite an influential man in his own city. He was known as an orator and later legends credit him with seemingly miraculous powers, which he seems to have partly fostered himself. He wrote at least one, perhaps two, poems on philosophical matters, parts of which survive in fragments and quotations of other works. Like many ancient philosophers he was said to have travelled, but these accounts are much later and hard to verify. His thought was a mixture of many other schools and philosophies, but there is much that is original. Like many other Greek thinkers at the time, he would have been troubled by the opinions of Parmenides and the Eleatics, who held that change was impossible.

Rather than prioritising any one of the four classical elements (for example Thales had believed that all things came from water), Empedocles believed that the four elements exist in the same proportions from eternity. Empedocles may have been the first to propose that each of these "elements" were fundamental. The apparent change in the world was caused by two powers in the world, known as Love and Strife. These were used with different meanings than in normal Greek and might perhaps be better known as Combination and Dissolution. The changes in the world were caused by the forces of Love and Strife in flux.

Empedocles, like all the Greek intellectuals, had interests that spanned the full horizon of thought. He believed that light emanates from our eyes to allow us to see (the opposite of what is in fact the case). Like the Pythagoreans, he was a vegetarian and believed in the transmigration of souls. He believed that the world had at one point been spontaneously populated by all possible forms of creatures, but that only certain ones were able to survive and which eventually gave us the creatures we see today. Like Parmenides and the Eleatics, he believed that the cosmos was a sphere but that within the sphere, the elements were operated on by the forces of Love and Strife. The sphere as a whole seems to have been considered by Empedocles as in some way divine.

Decorative element from Parthenon

And I shall tell thee another thing. There is no substance of any of all the things that perish, nor any cessation for them (the four elements) of baneful death. They are only a mingling and interchange of what has been mingled. Substance is but a name given to these things by men.
Empedocles, On Nature, written circa 440BC

Parmenides and the Eleatics, Melissus and Zeno, who had believed that motion was impossible had to a certain extent laid down a challenge to the thinkers of the Greek world. To prove that motion was impossible, Melissus of Samos, who around this time was battling the Athenians in the Samian War, had argued against the existence of the vacuum. It is around this time that a thinker named Leucippus, possibly from Abdera but more likely Miletus, became convinced in the positive existence of the vacuum.

In an irony of history, if Leucippus was from Miletus and an influential member of society, he may have been a leader of Miletus at the outbreak of the Samian War. Melissus of Samos was almost certainly a leader of the Samians and thus the initial squabbles between Miletus and Samos may have been driven by beliefs about the existence of the vacuum, as well as territorial struggles over Priene. This is just humorous speculation of course.

A modern painting of Leucippus

Leucippus is a poorly understood figure. It is entirely possible that Leucippus did not in fact exist, but enough has been written about him that we can at least talk about the legend of Leucippus. It is said that Leucippus posited that vacuum itself existed. If vacuum existed within the world, then substances could not be infinitely divisible. There would have to be a minimum size of the smallest part of the smallest objects that could not be further divided. This was referred to as an atom, from the Greek word for "indivisible".

We of course use the word atom today to describe a certain class of particles. These particles are different from what Leucippus would have envisioned, as (famously) these particles can indeed be divided. We must be careful not to confuse our modern physics with the philosophical ideas of Leucippus and his followers. But the conception of tiny indivisible particles being the fundamental building blocks of all matter, bouncing off each other in the vacuum of the void has proved a very fruitful philosophical conception of matter and continues to inform our perceptions on reality.

It is probable that Leucippus (or if not Leucippus, then his pupil Democritus) invented atomic theory in the west, however there were similar ideas among some of the thinkers in India. It is quite difficult to date these theories however, so it is difficult to gauge who has the priority in invention. Neither Greek nor Indian proponents of atomism had any way of testing their ideas experimentally, so these ideas remained pure philosophical ideas until quite recently.

Leucippus is said to have founded a school at Abdera, on the coast of Thrace, around this time. It is also said that the city of Metapontum, in southern Italy, was founded by Leucippus, but this was probably (almost certainly) a different Leucippus altogether. This is all that we can say about the (possible) father of Atomism.

Dying Niobid Statue

Another Greek thinker who flourished at this time, and who was very likely a contemporary of Leucippus, was Protagoras of Abdera. He is believed to have been the first sophist. Sophist is now almost a term of insult today, with the related word "sophistry" being a synonym for obscure, technical and misleading argumentation. But in the latter half of the 5th century BC it generally just meant wise person.

Protagoras would travel from city to city offering to teach wisdom to any who would learn. He charged a fee for this of course, but other philosophers had done similarly. What set Protagoras apart from mystics like Pherecydes, proto-physicists like Leucippus, or mystic mathematicians such as Pythagoras, was that he did not seem to have set doctrines, but would rather teach his student how to think and how to debate skilfully. In a world where many states were democracies or oligarchies, the ability to speak well in the assembly or council was greatly prized and people flocked to learn from Protagoras. In a time before the rules of logic had been formulated, a lot of debating skills were little better than verbal tricks and many people began to intensely dislike the sophists.

Protagoras spent a lot of time teaching in Athens, where he seems to have had a friendship with Pericles. The sophist and the statesman are said to have had a debate on a case where an athlete had accidentally killed a spectator with a javelin, as to where the responsibility lay. Did the fault lie with the thrower of the javelin, those responsible for the games, or even with the javelin itself? What conclusion they came to is unknown. However, any skilful debater must be able to argue both sides of a question. When this skill was taught, many believed that the sophists were enabling injustice to prevail over justice, as long as the unjust cause hired a speaker trained by sophists.

Funerary stele in Athens

Protagoras is said to have proclaimed that "Man is the measure of all things", which is perhaps the first example of philosophical relativism (at least in western culture). It is unclear if Protagoras actually believed this, if it was attributed to him by his enemies, or if it was merely a clever statement that he argued for in a sample debate. Relativism holds that most or all states of being are relative to the perceiver. Thus what one perceives as hot, will be perceived by another observer as cold. Neither are wrong, but neither are right without qualification.

Protagoras is also said to have been unsure of the existence of the gods, certainly as they were described in Greek myths. Again, it is unclear if Protagoras actually believed this, or if later writers believed that he had believed it.

It is said that Protagoras taught Euathlus to speak on the basis he would repay him from the winnings of this first lawsuit. Euathlus refused to take on any cases. Protagoras did what every good teacher should do and took him to court. He reasoned that he couldn't lose his fee because "… if I win the case, I should get the fee because I have won it; If you win the case, I should get the fee because you have won it!" This is the same tale that is told of the Syracusan orators Corax and Tisias, so we shouldn't take this story too seriously. This is most of what we can say about Protagoras of Abdera with any certainty.

Of all things the measure is Man, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not.
Sayings attributed to Protagoras, circa 440BC

Another philosopher or thinker who lived around this time may have been Diotima of Mantineia. She is only mentioned in one later work of Plato's. This work of Plato's did however have other historical personages in it, leading some to believe that Diotima was perhaps also a real person. According to Plato, she was a seer-like figure who had once had some conversations with Socrates about love. Also according to Plato, around this time Diotima had been consulted by the Athenians about the correct sacrifices to make, which were said to be able to ward off plague for some years. It is not clear if she existed, but it is possible and so mention is made of her here.

The Lune of Hippocrates (the shaded area is equal to the
triangle ABC

It was clearly an intellectually fruitful time, with Hippocrates of Chios being the first to write a textbook of geometry, known as the Elements. He attempted without success to square the circle, which is now known to be impossible using the geometric methods available. However, as part of a partial solution Hippocrates was able to discover what is known as the Lune of Hippocrates. Sadly the transcendental value of pi will forever frustrate some attempts to the end of time.

Hippocrates of Chios clearly had a taste for doomed endeavours and also spent some time working on the problem of Doubling the Cube, which again is now known to be impossible (using only the geometers tools of compass and straightedge: it can of course be done to a given value of precision using inductive methods). Finally he spent time puzzling over the nature of celestial phenomena such as the Milky Way, which he understood to be an optical illusion. Like Empedocles he seems to have considered vison to be a type of ray extending from the eye, rather than the eye receiving light, which seems to have led him astray.

Around this time Theodorus of Byzantium flourished. He was a teacher of public speaking and was sometimes accounted as a sophist and sometimes spoken of as one of the pioneers of rhetoric. Of course the distinction is a little bit of an academic one, as certain other sophists were certainly teachers of rhetoric. Nothing survives of his work save generally approving references in later classical writings.

Around this time the comic poet Pigres of Halicarnassus flourished. He was the son, or possibly the brother, of Artemisia of Halicarnassus, who had fought against the Greeks at the Battle of Salamis during the invasion of Xerxes. He was famed for his skill at adapting the works of Homer. It is said that to display his skill he added a pentameter line underneath every line of the Iliad (which is written in hexameters), maintaining the sense of the poem while nearly doubling its length.

He was also famed in antiquity for writing a poem called Margites, about an eponymous character who was famously stupid. Margites became a byword for stupidity among the Greeks, however this work was also attributed (incorrectly) to Homer. It is not clear if Pigres actually wrote it, but it is clear that Homer didn't. Another work that was sometimes attributed to Pigres and sometimes attributed to Homer was Batrachomyomachia, which was a type of Homeric satire. Very little of any of his works have survived and only in quotation by later authors.

Phiale Painter

Also active at this time was Hippodamus of Miletus. He was a city planner who had assisted in rationalising the plan of his own city, before planning the rebuilt city of Rhodes and then creating the city plan for the Athenian port of Piraeus. There had been instances of city planning before in other civilisations, but Greek cities had previously been quite haphazardly laid out. Hippodamus envisioned neat grids of houses laid out with squares and plazas so that the streets should meet at right angles. The grid plan of the Piraeus was so admired that the central square was named the Hippodameia in his honour.

Hippodamus also wrote books on the composition of the ideal state, which he envisioned as comprising about 10,000 citizens, who would compete for rewards as to who could benefit the city the most. He wrote a number of books on mathematics, city planning and political theory.

It is said that Hippodamus was sent by the Athenians to Thurii to assist in planning the city there. However I am unsure of this. Most of the other individuals that we have mentioned are associated with the foundation of Thurii; Herodotus, Empedocles, Protagoras, etc. Some of these may have gone to Thurii, others may not.

The Olympic Games were held this year. Gnathon of Dipaia won the boy's boxing. Krison of Himera won the stadion race. Theompompos of Heraia won the wrestling competition while Polycles of Sparta owned the horses that won the tethrippon chariot race.

Modern statue of Herodotus at the Parliament
building in Vienna

It was around this time that Herodotus' Histories came to be written in something resembling the form in which we have it today. It is likely that some parts of the Histories had been written perhaps ten years earlier and some sections show signs of revision up to perhaps a decade later. But the majority of it must have been written around this time. Herodotus had spent some time travelling in the eastern Mediterranean, although it is not clear if he actually visited Egypt and Babylonia. I believe that he did indeed visit Egypt, but I am sceptical if he ever made it to Babylonia.

This was the first work of history to come down to us in a nearly intact form. It is the basis of the vast majority of history in the 6th and early 5th centuries BC. Without the Histories of Herodotus our knowledge of the world would be greatly diminished. He created a trend of historical writing that was lasted in a nearly unbroken chain to this day. While there is a separate birth of history in China, with the Grand Historian Sima Qian, Herodotus is unquestionably earlier. While in many cases Herodotus may have misunderstood his sources, it seems likely that he was a truthful narrator insofar as he could be. He was however influenced by his sources, and the time that he spent in Athens gives his work a decidedly pro-Athenian bias. However, it is almost impossible to not be influenced by sources.

Temple of Poseidon at Sounion

It is said that Herodotus, when his work was nearing completion, went to the Olympic Games to read his Histories aloud to the gathered Greeks at the festival. Some accounts say that the reading was a great success and that he read the entire work from start to finish (almost impossible unless it was much shorter then than it is now). Another account recounts that Herodotus refused to begin reading his work until some clouds covered the sun, allowing him to read in the shade. By the time some clouds did eventually oblige Herodotus, the gathered Greeks had dispersed, leaving Herodotus to read his life's work aloud to an empty plaza. Thus "Herodotus and his shade" became a proverb describing those who miss their greatest opportunity by waiting.

This is the display of the inquiry of Herodotus of Halicarnassus, so that things done by man not be forgotten in time, and that great and marvellous deeds, some displayed by the Greeks, some by the non-Greeks, not lose their glory, including among others what was the cause of their waging war on each other.
Opening Prologue of Herodotus's Histories, written circa 440BC

And thus the period draws to a close, with the weakening of Athens, the end of the Athenian Land Empire, the end of the First Peloponnesian War and the beginning of the First Peloponnesian War. There were revolutions in Cyrene and new kings in Macedonia and Odrysian Thrace. There was athletic triumph with the achievements of Diagoras of Rhodes and his sons. Pericles had been challenged for the leadership of Athens and had retained his influence. A new spate of temple building had begun in Athens. The tragic playwrights were reaching new heights of achievement with the works of Sophocles and Euripides. Doctors, city planners, mathematicians, poets and dieticians all left their mark on history. The period saw the rise of the sophists and orators, as well as the birth of relativism, the postulation of the four classical elements and the birth of atomic theory as well, with the works of Protagoras, Empedocles and Leucippus (and possibly Leucippus' pupil Democritus). While this is one of the lesser studied period in Greek history, it is not uneventful.

Temple of Poseidon at Sounion

Primary Sources:
Pindar, Odes, written circa 475BC
Sophocles, Antigone, written circa 447BC
Herodotus, Histories, written circa 440BC
Sayings attributed to Protagoras, circa 440BC
Empedocles, On Nature, written circa 440BC
Fragments attributed to Pigres, written circa 440BC
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, written circa 400BC
The Parian Chronicle, written circa 216BC
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, written circa 40BC
Plutarch, Life of Pericles, written circa AD100
Pausanias, Description of Greece, written circa AD150

Secondary Sources:
Historical eruptions on Mount Etna

Related Blogs
Protagoras of Abdera
Greece 459-450BC
459-440BC in the Near East
459-440BC in Rome
439-430BC in Greece

459-450BC in Greece

Statue A from the Riace Bronze
Sculptures, found undersea
near Calabria

This post will look at Greece and the wider Greek world from the years 459BC to 450BC. Firstly, a word about our sources. Archaeology can shed some light on this period, but we are primarily reliant on written sources, such as the writings of Aeschylus, Thucydides, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, and Pausanias.

In the year 459 the Athenians and Spartans were at war in what would become known as the First Peloponnesian War. The Spartans were probably still fighting a helot uprising and the Athenians were fighting a major campaign against the Persians in Egypt, having committed perhaps 200 ships and their crews to that war. Thus, even though the war had begun the previous year, it is not clear that either side had really engaged each other. However the dates are somewhat unclear from this time, so some of what I mention in this year may in fact have occurred the year previously.

Some scholars place the alliance between Athens and Megara in this year, but I think it more likely that this occurred the year previously, as it was likely a cause for the war. However, I would certainly not be dogmatic about it.

The Athenians fought the Corinthians and the Corinthian allies from Epidaurus at a place called Halieis. Both Athens and Corinth were naval powers, but this battle was fought on land. The Athenians suffered a defeat, but probably not a very serious one. The Athenian navy was more successful than their land army, and won a victory over the Corinthians in a naval battle fought near the tiny island of Cecryphaleia, which was near to Aegina. Aegina was a traditional foe of Athens and the presence of their enemies in force must have frightened the Aeginetans.

Roman copy of a bust of Pericles

The Aeginetans joined the war on the Spartan side (this may possibly have happened early in the following year), adding their navy to the navy of the Corinthians and other Peloponnesian allies. Even with the huge naval force already engaged in Egypt, the Athenian navy was still the terror of the seas. The remainder of the Athenian fleet engaged the full fleet of the Aeginetans and whatever allies were available to help them. The Athenians were victorious, winning a huge victory, capturing 70 ships and entirely crippling the navy of Aegina.

A large Athenian force then landed on the island of Aegina and began to besiege the city. The Spartans had sent a force of three hundred soldiers to aid the Aeginetans, but it was nowhere near enough to sally forth and rout the Athenians. The siege dragged on, as siege warfare was not advanced in this time period among the Greeks. The Spartans meanwhile were decidedly inactive, which leads me to suspect that they were still fighting the helot uprising at this time.

Around this time, in Asia Minor, Archeptolis, son of the Themistocles, became governor of Magnesia. He governed the region as a vassal of the Persian kings and followed his father's example in minting coins in his own name, which may also include a portrait of his face upon the obverse of the coins.

In Sicily, the leader of the native people (the Sicels) took over the settlement of Morgantina. This town was probably taken from one of the Greek cities, Catana or Camerina.

Coin of Archeptolis, son of Themistocles, ruler of Magnesia

In the year 458 the Spartans remained inactive, perhaps still engaged in quelling the helot uprising. The Corinthians were not inactive however, and they decided, as the foremost of Sparta's allies, to take the initiative. They had previously defeated the Athenians in a land engagement and the Athenian land forces were acting as marines in Egypt or Aegina, fighting two simultaneous major wars. The Corinthians recognised that this would leave them vulnerable to a land invasion. The Corinthians sent their land forces to attack the city of Megara, a recent Athenian ally and one that lay on the route from Corinth to Athens.

The Corinthians had reasoned correctly and the Athenians had no proper land forces ready to counter the Corinthian attack. The cemetery of Kerameikos in Athens has a number of funerary monuments that give casualty lists for various years. The casualty lists for these years are, by any standards, high. There was a statue, excavated from the Acropolis Hill and created around this time that shows Athena exhausted and mourning, presumably for the Athenians who were paying such a heavy cost for their many battles and many wars.

Contemplative Athena

But the Athenians did not lack initiative themselves. They responded to the Corinthian attack. They armed the young and the old, calling every man who could hold a spear and sent this motley bunch of misfits to hold Megara at all costs, under the command of a general called Myronides.

The Megarians had their own troops of course, although they were outnumbered by the Corinthians. The Athenians joined forces with the Megarians and an inconclusive battle was fought between the two sides, quite near to the city of Megara itself. Neither side had much advantage, but the Corinthians, not wanting to stay so close to the hostile city of their foes, simply went home after the battle, thinking they had won, or at least, not lost.

Now it was tradition in ancient Greek warfare for the victor to erect a trophy to show all the world that they had been victorious. The Athenians believed that they had won the battle and thus put up a trophy after the Corinthians had gone home. The Corinthians were galled by the insult and went back to Megara to put up their own trophy. The Athenians and Megarians saw a small Corinthian detachment putting up their own trophy and they sallied out to punish this impudence.

The Corinthian detachment was put to flight and the Athenians pursued this group until it re-joined the main Corinthian army. Being disoriented by their own fleeing troops and the rapidity of the Athenian attack, the main Corinthian army was routed. Many Corinthians simply ran all the way back to Corinth, which was not very far away. A detachment of Corinthians got caught in a fenced enclosure on a farm and the Athenians surrounded them and killed them, which was a major blow to the Corinthian land army.

Bust of Pericles in
Vatican Museum

Around this time, the Athenians began constructing their own Long Walls, to connect the city of Athens (which is some kilometres inland), with their ports of Piraeus and Phalerum. These were rather longer than the Long Walls of Megara, which the Athenians were also constructing for their allies. The Athenians knew that, even if their land armies were not inferior to their enemies, their troops would often be away on distant engagements. The walls were to enable the city to withstand sieges and still continue to be supplied from the sea. Even if they lost control of their farmland outside their walls, the Athenians never envisaged themselves losing control of the sea. These walls were not close to each other and encompassed all the land between Piraeus and Phalerum.

In Sparta, Pleistarchus, the son of the famed Leonidas and Gorgo, died. He was succeeded by Pleistonax, who was the son of the disgraced regent Pausanias, as the Agiad King of Sparta. Nicomedes, son of Cleombrotus, acted as a regent however, as the king was still a young man.

The playwright Aeschylus won the tragedy prize at the Great Dionysia Festival that year. The trilogy of plays that he presented that year was the Oresteia. This is the first full trilogy of plays that survives to us from the classical era. It is also arguably one of the finest works of tragedy ever written.

Theatre of Dionyus in Athens. The seating and stage
date from the later Roman era

The first play is "Agamemnon", where the Mycenaean king and his prisoner Cassandra return after ten years of war at Troy, only to be murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and treacherous relative Aegisthus, in vengeance for murders and human sacrifices committed earlier.

The next play is "The Libation Bearers", where Orestes, son of Agamemnon and his wife Clytemnestra, returns unknown from exile to avenge his father, eventually trapping and killing Aegisthus and then his own mother. On the one hand he has fulfilled the will of the gods and of justice by slaying his father's murderer. On the other hand Orestes has committed the heinous crime of matricide and thus he is pursued by the Erinyes, or as their name translates, the Furies.

In the third play, "Eumenides", the haunted Orestes wanders the earth only to arrive in Athens. Here he pleads to Athena, goddess of wisdom. She answers his prayer by allowing Orestes to stand trial, where he is eventually found innocent. The nature of vengeance then changes. The primordial cycle of revenge gives way to the laws of the state and of reason. The Furies become the embodiment of the fury of the law and the place of the trial, the Areopagus, became a permanent law court for Athens. It is a majestic trilogy spanning heights and lows and is one of the greatest works of Greek literature.

Aeschylus also wrote a satyr play, called Proteus, to accompany the dark and gloomy majesty of the Oresteia, but the play is lost to us. Sophocles received the second prize for his plays that year, but these are (to my knowledge) unknown. Euphonius received the prize in the Comedy competition.

A kylix showing the murder of Cassandra by Clytemnestra

Chorus: What is it, Cassandra? What terror turns your head? 
Cassandra: Terror! Terror, terror indeed! 
Chorus: What terror, Cassandra? Is there some terror in your heart? 
Cassandra: Do you smell that? In there. Do you smell that? The palace is clogged thick with the stench of slaughter! 
Chorus: What are you saying? It is the smell of animals sacrificed on the altar! 
Cassandra: It is like the stench that emanates from a tomb. 
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, 1305-1312, written circa 458BC

Around this time a painter named Agatharchus flourished in Athens. He was reputed to have been a great painter and is said by a later Roman writer to have painted the backdrops to one of Aeschylus' plays and to have used a form of perspective and vanishing points.

In the first place Agatharchus, in Athens, when Aeschylus was bringing out a tragedy, painted a scene, and left a commentary about it. This led Democritus and Anaxagoras to write on the same subject, showing how, given a centre in a definite place, the lines should naturally correspond with due regard to the point of sight and the divergence of the visual rays, so that by this deception a faithful representation of the appearance of buildings might be given in painted scenery, and so that, though all is drawn on a vertical flat facade, some parts may seem to be withdrawing into the background, and others to be standing out in front.
Vitruvius, De Architectura, Preface to Book 7, written circa 20BC

Vase by the Persephone Painter

In this year Pericles made the archonship a paid position and allowed the poorer citizens to attain to this office. This was part of Pericles' policy of expanding the democracy. Even though Pericles came from a very aristocratic background himself, his policies generally strengthened the overall body politic at the expense of the aristocratic faction in Athens.

In the year 457 the Phocians attacked the region of Doris near Boeotia. This region was the reputed homeland of the Spartans and it was felt that this insult to Spartan power could not be ignored. The Spartans must have felt that they were no longer threatened by the helot uprising, or possibly the rising had been finished at this time. In any case, they were able to raise a large army and slip across the Gulf of Corinth, eluding the Athenian navy. The Spartans, under the command of Nicomedes, fought with the Phocians and compelled them to cease attacking Doris.

The Spartans had won a victory, but were now in a tricky situation. The Athenians were aware that a large Spartan force had left the Peloponnese and their navies now watched the seas. The land route led them by the city of Megara along the narrow isthmus and the Athenian land armies were mustering now to stop the Spartans from passing this way.

Pediment detail from the Temple of Zeus at
Olympia

The Spartans waited in Boeotia for the Athenians to come to them. The Athenians slightly outnumbered the Spartans. Presumably some marines had been brought from the siege at Aegina to strengthen the Athenian numbers. The two sides met at Tanagra and a protracted struggle ensued. The fighting was intense and there were heavy losses for both armies. Eventually the Athenians were forced off the field, but this was no great Spartan victory. The Spartans were unable to do anything with this victory except retreat back to Sparta using the land route past Megara, where they cut down some fruit trees of the Megarians, but accomplished little else.

The reason for the Spartan retreat may have been more than just their heavy losses. Athens had previously concluded an alliance with Argos, and the Spartans may have feared leaving their lands exposed for too long to attack from an enemy so near to them. The Athenian navy meanwhile could still roam unchecked and attack anywhere on the coasts of the Peloponnese at will.

The Athenians were in no way dismayed however and immediately gathered more troops from their allies and subjects. Two months later they marched northwards again, commanded by their general Myronides who had led them to victory over the Corinthians, knowing that the Spartans had abandoned the region. The Thebans and other Boeotians were defeated by the Athenians at the Battle of Oenophyta. The Athenians then converted this into a tangible and lasting success for their empire and forced all of Boeotia (except Thebes) and Phocis to join the Delian League. This is sometimes referred to as the Athenian Land Empire. The walls of Tanagra were destroyed, to make sure it couldn't stand against Athens again and the regions of Locri and Phocis were also ravaged by the Athenian troops before peace was made. The Athenians then gave the administration of Delphi, a very important role, to their Phocian allies.

Pediment detail from the Temple of Zeus at
Olympia

During this year, the city of Aegina fell to the Athenian forces besieging it. The Athenians had finally defeated their old enemy and the terms of peace were not lenient. Aegina was forced to join the Delian League, tear down her walls, abandon her navy, and pay heavy tribute to Athens.

Athens was going from strength to strength. The Long Walls of Athens, that enclosed the ports of Piraeus and Phalerum, were also finished around this time, making Athens practically invulnerable to land invasion by Corinth, Thebes or even Sparta.

The battle was fought at Tanagra in Boeotia. After heavy loss on both sides, victory declared for the Lacedaemonians and their allies. After entering the Megarid and cutting down the fruit trees, the Lacedaemonians returned home across Geraneia and the isthmus. Sixty-two days after the battle the Athenians marched into Boeotia under the command of Myronides, defeated the Boeotians in battle at Oenophyta, and became masters of Boeotia and Phocis. They dismantled the walls of the Tanagraeans, took a hundred of the richest men of the Opuntian Locrians as hostages, and finished their own long walls. This was followed by the surrender of the Aeginetans to Athens on conditions; they pulled down their walls, gave up their ships, and agreed to pay tribute in future.
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, written circa 400BC

Athens had had success in nearly every venture that they had attempted. They had been defeated by Sparta to be sure, but only barely defeated, and they had recovered from that defeat to take over much of central Greece. Their sea power was unassailable by any Greek state and with their alliance with Megara, they nearly had the entire Peloponnese in a stranglehold. The only cloud on the horizon was that their armies in Egypt had still not managed to win the war against the Persians and Egyptians besieged in a fortress in Memphis.

Ruins of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia

In this year it seems that the Temple of Zeus at Olympia was completed. This was a large temple, built at the site of earlier temples, at the site of the oldest of the Panhellenic Games. It was a temple built in the Doric style. The sculptor Phidias was brought to create the statue that would be placed inside the temple, but this was done at a later date. The actual pediments of the temple itself were decorated by an unknown sculptor known as the Olympia Master. Many of the pediment decorations survive and some are in the Louvre, where they serve as an example of the early Classical style of statuary. Some refer to this style as Severe style, in that it shows a high technical ability, but like the earlier archaic statues, shows no variety of emotion. However their expressions are unlike the enigmatic smiles of the Archaic statues. The Severe statues show a firm unsmiling dignity and are serious above all else.

Around the year 456 the Athenians, revelling in their successes of the previous years, seem to have decided to launch a punitive expedition against the Spartans. They had control of the seas with their many triremes and the Peloponnese was nearly an island. They would attack all around the shores and coastlines of the Peloponnese, harassing Sparta from every side and weakening her allies. The expedition was probably mustered in this year, but may not have set sail until the following year.

Later Roman bust of Aeschylus
copied from a Greek original

As a sign of the military strength of the Athenians, the statue of Athena Promachos, meaning Athena Front-Fighter, was finished on the Acropolis hill. This statue was created by Phidias, probably the greatest of the Greek sculptors at the time and stood over 9 metres tall. It is said that the flashing of the metal could be seen by ships rounding Cape Sunium far to the south of Athens.

Around this time the Athenian playwright Aeschylus died while abroad in Sicily. He was the first of the three tragic playwrights who would be become famed in antiquity. His works comprise the oldest surviving plays from anywhere in the world. There are later legends that he was killed by an eagle mistaking his bald head for a rock and dropping a tortoise on it to shatter the tortoise. This is rather obviously a later legend, but too wonderful not to relate. His plays were so beloved by the people that they were sometimes re-staged at festivals. This is commonplace now, but at this time, plays were generally staged once in a competition and then not staged again.

But of all the praises that were given to Aeschylus before and after his death, the one that he was most proud of was that he had fought in the Battle of Marathon, and not been found wanting. This was engraved upon his tombstone in Athens.

Beneath this stone lies Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian,
who perished in the wheat-bearing land of Gela;
of his noble prowess the grove of Marathon can speak,
and the long-haired Persian knows it well.
Funerary Inscription of Aeschylus

Vase by the Altamura Painter

In this year the Olympic Games were held, where all of the Greek cities held a truce and competed against each other for glory. Phrynichus of Athens won the boys wrestling competition. Ikadion of Crete won the boys stadion. Alkainetos of Lepreon won the boys boxing. Psaumios of Camarina won the mule-cart race. Polymnastos of Cyrene won the stadion race. Diactorides won the tethrippon chariot race, or, more accurately, owned the horses that won the race. Leontiskos of Sicilian Messene won the wrestling competition. Timanthes of Kleonai won the pancration. Mnaseas of Cyrene won the hoplitodromos race.

In the year 455 the Athenian fleet sailed around the coast of the Peloponnese. They attacked and burned the port of Gythion in the southern Peloponnese. This was where the Spartans and their allies in that region had been storing supplies and building a navy in a meagre bid to challenge the naval dominance of the Athenians. It was probably the best port in the region and would later become important for the Spartans of later generations. The Athenian burning of the port by the admiral Tolmides and his navy would have set back any hopes of the Spartans to even contest the seas or give any naval aid at all to their allies.

Vase by the Achilles Painter

The fleet continued to sail its course around the Peloponnese. They had attacked the island of Cythera, which could have been strategic as a future base, and attacked the region of Messenia, perhaps in the hope of sparking fresh hope into the helot revolt. But the Spartans had quashed all remnants of hope among the bondmen there.
Sailing around the Peloponnese, Tolmides attacked and took Chalcis and Naupactus on the northern coast of the Gulf of Corinth. He then sailed further into the Gulf of Corinth and attacked the city of Sicyon, near Corinth itself. Tolmides won a battle here but was unable to take the city of Sicyon itself. Some Achaean cities along the northern coast of the Peloponnese seem to have switched to Athenian allegiances however.

All was not going to plan for the Athenians however. The long siege in Egypt had been broken. The Athenians and rebel Egyptians under Inaros and Amyrtaeus, had been besieging the Persians and loyalist Egyptians in a fortified area of Memphis known as White Castle. The siege had apparently dragged on for years, and the Athenians had probably been unable to fully capture the Nile waterway and stop the resupply of the Persian garrison. While the siege had dragged on, the Persians had been mustering a counterattack.

Obverse of Athenian Tetradrachm showing head of
Athena with test cut

The Persian general Megabyzus had been put in charge of the campaign by Artaxerxes I. He had spent time retraining his army and preparing it for the campaign. He attacked the Egyptians and Greeks and raised the siege of Memphis. The Egyptians were defeated and possibly their armies were broken at this point. The Athenians retreated in good order to the island of Prosopitis in the Nile where their ships were moored. However they were unable or unwilling to abandon the campaign and reach the sea. Megabyzus then began to besiege the island and began drainage works to drain that section of the Nile itself.

The Athenians must have known that something had gone terribly wrong in Egypt and prepared a counter-stroke. An additional 50 ships were prepared to sail to the relief and rescue of the Egyptian expedition.

The Athenians may also have finally realised that they had overstretched themselves. There seems to be a general cessation of hostilities around this point and what I suspect happened is as follows. The Athenians approached the Spartans with an offer of a temporary truce. The Spartans, who now saw Athenian garrisons within the Peloponnese itself, must have been glad to accept. They in turn gave terms to the helots who were still holding out against the Spartans on Mt Ithome. The rebel helots were allowed to leave on the condition that they would never return. The rebels left the Peloponnese under a promise of safe conduct and went to Athens. The Athenians then settled these refugee rebels in the captured city of Naupactus, which was very close to the Peloponnese and a threat to naval traffic in the Gulf of Corinth. Thus the Third Messenian War drew to a close.

Statue A from the Riace Bronze
Sculptures, found undersea
near Calabria

Now, the dates here are rather confused and some people believe that the Third Messenian War actually ended before the First Peloponnesian War, five years earlier. This is, I believe, wrong, because the Athenians would not have been able to give the helots the city of Naupactus until after Tolmides had captured it,  which certainly happened in the midst of the Peloponnesian War. The safe-conduct to the Athenians is most likely to have happened under a temporary truce and the setbacks in Egypt would likely have had to have happened before Athens would grant a truce, as up until that point they had had nearly constant successes.

The settlement of the helots at Naupactus led to tension between Athens and Sparta, but I would argue that this tension occurred during a temporary truce, rather than being a cause of the war. If the Spartans were not facing an internal threat of some sort it is difficult to explain their almost complete inaction in the early parts of the war.

In this year Euripides produced his first known tragedy, called Peliades. It did not win a prize and the play itself has not survived from antiquity.

Around this time a bronze statue was made known as Statue A of the Riace bronzes. Unlike most Greek bronze sculptures from this period, the statue has survived, perhaps being thrown overboard in a storm near the coast of Calabria in Italy, along with a slightly later statue. When statues were discovered by a diver, it was thought that it might actually be a recent drowning victim, so lifelike was the statue at first glance. Both this statue and the later statue have been recovered and restored. Their creators and the purposes for which they were made remain unknown, although some have suspected that they may have represented two of the figures known as "Seven Against Thebes", from a play by Aeschylus.

Coin of Alexander I of Macedon

In the year 454 Alexander I of Macedon died and was succeeded by Alcetas II. He had been a vassal of the king of Persia during the earlier part of his long reign, but after the defeat of Xerxes' invasion he had once again become an independent king. The Macedonians were viewed as perhaps not fully Greek by the more southerly Greek speakers. Their names and customs were seen as strange and they were a much larger, though still small, political unit compared to the average Greek city state. However Alexander I had petitioned to take part in the Olympic Games and had drawn up a genealogy that suggested his ancestors were Greeks from the time of the Trojan War. This was seen as sufficient and the Macedonians were afterwards treated as Greeks, but perhaps with certain reservations. Alexander had also been a patron of Bacchylides and Pindar and now minted coins like other Greek states. Alcetas II was less successful as a king and seems to have drank heavily.

It seems that there was a war of sorts between the two cities of Segesta and Selinunte in the region of eastern Sicily. But this is merely based on an anachronistic statement of Diodorus Siculus and we do not know if it was merely written in error or if there was indeed a war.

Roman bust of Panyassis from
the buried city of Herculaneum

In Halicarnassus, the poet Panyassis was executed for treason against the ruling tyrant Lygdamis II, who ruled the Carian city in the name of Persia. Panyassis was a famed poet in antiquity, but none of his works survive. It is guessed that his more famous nephew, Herodotus, was exiled around this time. Herodotus took this opportunity to travel around the world of the eastern Mediterranean, gathering stories and tales and eventually weaving these into what would become known to us as the "Histories". Lygdamis II probably died not long after this however, perhaps as the result of Athenian intervention, and shortly thereafter Halicarnassus became part of the Delian League (or the Athenian Empire depending on what term you want to use). Perhaps the dates here are wrong however and the death of Panyassis occurred earlier. This is probably the latest possible date for the execution of Panyassis and the beginnings of the travels of Herodotus.

Around this time unrest grew in southern Italy against the still considerable influence of the Pythagoreans. This quasi-mathematical, quasi-religious cult is generally seen today as a harmless yet slightly strange society of philosophers. In antiquity however they do seem to have had connections to political power, generally allying themselves with aristocrats against the common people and justifying this by saying that only the wise should rule. This led to a lot of unrest against them, and as democracies became more popular in the western Greek cities, in Sicily and Italy, the Pythagoreans became ever more hated.

This hatred came to a head, possibly in this year, and the meeting places of the Pythagoreans were burned. The Pythagoreans fled, with many of them leaving the western regions and travelling to mainland Greece. Here they set up new centres of teaching, at Phlius and Thebes. They influenced later thinkers but they never again attained political prominence. They did however carry nostalgic memories of a time when philosophers ruled cities.

Coin of Segesta in Sicily

One of those who fled was the philosopher Philolaus, who seems to have been the first thinker we know of to have conceived of a universe where the earth was not the centre. This should not be confused with helio-centrism.

Philolaus believed that everything rotated around a central flame that was far off, high up and invisible. The central fire could not be seen, as it was blocked by the disk of the sky, but presumably this was what gave light to the stars. There was also a counter-earth added to the system to make the number of heavenly bodies 10, rather than 9. Bare fragments of his work survive and the witnesses to Philolaus' work are generally later philosophers who are at least partly hostile to his thinking. We know that Philolaus was also interested in music and in the types of mathematical relationships in harmonies.

But Philolaus the Pythagorean says that it revolves round the fire in an oblique circle, in like manner as the Sun and Moon.
Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 15.LVIII, written circa AD320

Remains of a temple in Memphis in Egypt

In Egypt, the Athenian forces had been under siege on an island in the Nile. They had been defeated by the Persians in the previous year and their Egyptian allies were scattered. However, secure on their island, the Athenians were able to fend off the attacking Persians. However, the Persian commander Megabyzus had ordered the Nile to be diverted away from that area. Once the river drained away, the Persians could march over and attack the Greek forces by land. Also, the two hundred ships of the Athenians were now useless. Some Athenians tried to escape and some made it out, eventually marching along the coast and making it to Cyrene. Most did not. The Persians inflicted a terrible defeat on the Athenians, capturing or destroying the entire expeditionary navy and killing or capturing nearly all of the rowers and marines.

To further compound the disaster, the relief force that the Athenians had sent approached Egypt, unaware of the disaster. This comprised 50 ships; a sizeable force, but not a huge one. The Persian navy caught the Athenian reinforcements and utterly defeated them. The Athenians and their Greek allies had grown used to easily defeating the Persians and their overconfidence made them pay a terrible price. The defeat of the Egyptian expedition was nearly complete. The Athenians and their allies lost 250 ships and perhaps 50,000 men. It was a defeat so heavy that it should have ended most empires.

Statue of the goddess Neith
from Sais, one of the centres of
the Egyptian rebellion

The Egyptians were similarly hurt. Their rebellion against Persia was nearly ended by the defeat. The Libyan chieftain, Inaros II, who had been the main leader of the revolt, was captured by the Persians, having fled to a place called Byblos (presumably a place near Memphis rather than the more famous Byblos in Phoenicia). He was afterwards crucified or impaled on the orders of Artaxerxes I. Another leader of the rebellion, Amyrtaeus of Sais, who was an Egyptian, seems to have had more success and carried out a low-level guerrilla war against the triumphant Persians. Amyrtaeus and his remaining troops escaped the Persian retaliations by hiding in the marshes of the Nile Delta.

Arriving by land he defeated the Egyptians and their allies in a battle, and drove the Hellenes out of Memphis, and at length shut them up in the island of Prosopitis, where he besieged them for a year and six months. At last, draining the canal of its waters, which he diverted into another channel, he left their ships high and dry and joined most of the island to the mainland, and then marched over on foot and captured it. Thus the enterprise of the Hellenes came to ruin after six years of war. Of all that large host a few travelling through Libya reached Cyrene in safety, but most of them perished. And thus Egypt returned to its subjection to the King, except Amyrtaeus, the king in the marshes, whom they were unable to capture from the extent of the marsh;
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, Book I, written circa 400BC

Vase by the Hasselmann Painter

The Athenians panicked when they heard of the scale of the disaster. Their naval supremacy was now threatened and there was a real fear that the Persians would attack Greece in strength once more. Once news of the losses became known, the Athenians decided to move the treasury of the Delian League from the island of Delos in the midst of the Aegean, to Athens itself. This would protect it from any threat of the revived Persian navy, but it also meant that Athens could help itself to that money with greater ease.

It might be wondered how Athens could survive such a defeat at all. After all, Athens probably only had around 200,000 inhabitants? The exact numbers of Athenians is debateable, but I think the answer is that the soldiers and sailors who died in Egypt were from all the cities of the Delian League. Thus the actual loss of Athenian citizens was perhaps closer to 10,000 with the rest spread across the other maritime cities who made up the League. The loss in Egypt was still a heavy loss, but the loss of life from their allies and subject states perhaps explains why there were no immediate rebellions against Athenian rule.

The Athenians, under the leadership of Pericles, responded with characteristic vigour. The truce between Athens and Sparta, if it existed in the first place, was surely broken by the Spartans once they heard of the defeat that the Athenians had suffered on the Nile. There seems to have been an uprising in Thessaly against Orestes, a leader of the Thessalians and an ally of Athens. The Athenians marched northwards to restore him, but Pericles was unable to force the Thessalians to take back their exiled ruler.

Athenian funerary stele
showing a woman and a slave

With Thessaly now hostile, Pericles took the initiative and led an expedition across the Corinthian Gulf to attack the city of Sicyon. The Athenians won a victory here, but once more, seem not to have actually taken the city of Sicyon. Embarking on their ships once more, the Athenians took their Achaean allies from the north of the Peloponnese and attacked Oeniadae, on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. This was a city of the Acarnanians and neighbours of the recently settled helots at Naupactus. The helots and the Acarnanians were at war, and the helots had recently taken Oeniadae, before the Acarnanians had forced them out again and retaken their city. Pericles must have hoped to aid the helots in their war, but his siege was unsuccessful.

In this year, Pericles made the position of juryman a paid position. This meant that poorer people who were too old to serve in the navy could still earn money by serving the state. It was a measure designed to strengthen the poorer classes and bolster the democracy of Athens. It was opposed by the aristocratic faction in Athens, but these had little influence. Pericles was to all intents and purposes the absolute ruler of Athens, despite it being a democracy. Pericles was an astute politician, but seems to have not been an excellent general. He was not terrible, but his campaigns led to no great victories for Athens.

Coin of Catana in Sicily

In the year 452 no great battles, sieges or campaigns took place in the First Peloponnesian War. However in Sicily, Ducetius, the leader of the Sicels, who were some of the original inhabitants of Sicily before the Greek and Phoenician colonisation, founded a city called Palice, near the sanctuary of two Sicilian gods, called the Palici. Their temple was near a lake system that emitted sulphurous fumes and held sacred significance for the Sicels. This new city was to be the capital of the Sicels and the runaway slaves from the Greek and Carthaginian cities could flee to it and be protected by Ducetius. By now the Greek cities on the coast were becoming concerned about the growth of Ducetius' power.

On the southern coast of Italy, some exiles from the defeated city of Sybaris attempted to refound the city. However, the nearby city of Croton, who had originally defeated and exiled the Sybarites, expelled them once more. It is perhaps ironic that sybarite and sybaritic, are almost synonyms for hedonist and hedonistic, yet the actual history of the city of Sybaris seems to show mostly hardship.

The Olympic Games were held this year. Lachon of Chios won the boy's stadion race. Cleodorus won the boy's wrestling. Lykos of Larissa won the stadion race, as well as winning the hoplitodromos. Euboulos won the diaulos. Hippobotus won the dolichos. Ariston of Epidaurus won the boxing. Leontiskos of Sicilian Messene won the wrestling, for the second Olympic Games in a row. Damagetos of Rhodes won the pancration. Damagetos was the son of Diagoras, a famous boxer who had won two victories at the Olympic Games, four in the Isthmian, two in the Nemean and at least one in the Pythian Games. Psaumios of Camerina owned the team of horses that won the tethrippon chariot race, while Python was the owner of the horse that won the horse race.

Ostraca showing the name of Cimon, son of Miltiades

In the year 451 Cimon of Athens returned from the ten year exile imposed by his ostracism. He seems to have made his peace with the new order within Athens and there is no record of Pericles and himself quarrelling.

The power of Pericles was undiminished and he passed a new citizenship law, restricting Athenian citizenship to those whose parents were both Athenian. This was again popular with many of the common people, who may have been concerned with wealthy foreigners arriving and becoming citizens, but there must have been some opposition to the law. There is no record of Cimon using his influence to oppose it however. Cimon must have been quite an old man at this time however.

Some believe that there was an alliance of sorts forged between Cimon and Pericles. Pericles would lead the political development of Athens, while Cimon would use his military skill to lead the Athenian armies in the field. Cimon would also use his pro-Spartan connections to foster a truce and perhaps even forge a peace with Sparta. If such an alliance truly existed it was to the benefit of the Athenians.

Coin of Acragas from around this time

Cimon brokered some sort of truce with the Spartans. The terms of this truce involved the Athenians breaking their alliance with Argos (which was of minimal use to the Athenians anyway, as Argos had not sent many soldiers to aid Athens). There was too great hostility between Argos and Sparta for there to ever be lasting peace between them. But the Argives were weak enough that they were prepared to agree to a thirty year truce between Argos and Sparta, which was close enough to a lasting peace in the tumultuous Greek world. Meanwhile Athens took advantage in the lull in hostilities to prepare their fleets to face the Persians once more, under the leadership of Cimon, their greatest general.

In Sicily, Ducetius led his army of Sicels and attacked Motyon, which was held by the Greek city of Acragas and is possibly the archaeological site currently known as Vassallaggi. This was considered to be too threatening by the Syracusans and despite having previously supported Ducetius, they now supported Acragas against the Sicels. Ducetius was undeterred however and took Motyon in despite of the Syracusans.

Athenian funerary stele of a young
girl and two doves

In the year 450 a great many things are said to have occurred. Of these many are simply placed by historians to have happened in or around this time, because it is the midpoint of the century. I shall first deal with the things that certainly happened in this year, before dealing with the things that happened around this time.

In Sicily, Ducetius, the leader of the Sicels, fought a battle with the Greek cities of Syracuse and Acragas, which were probably the two strongest Greek settlements on the island. He was defeated at a place called Nomae and his army was scattered. Fearing the wrath both of the people of Acragas and his own people, Ducetius fled to his enemies, the Syracusans, and made himself their suppliant. The Syracusans took pity on their defeated foe, who had once been their ally, and instead of killing him, sent him into exile overseas to Corinth, not to return without the permission of the Syracusans. The people of Acragas were angry that their enemy had been released unilaterally by the Syracusans, but the Syracusans refused to answer to Acragas and gave some measure of the protection to the defeated Sicels left behind.

Meanwhile in Athens, Cimon had not been idle and had raised a great fleet of 200 triremes to send against the Persians. He attacked Cyprus with his main force, but split off a fleet of 60 triremes to sail southwards to Egypt to support the faltering revolt of Amyrtaeus. The Athenians and their allies laid siege to Kition, but were unable to take the city, as siege warfare was not well developed in those days. The Persians were mustering a response to Cimon's attack and were preparing their own navy and land army.

A modern bust of Cimon in Cyprus

While the siege dragged on, Cimon died, either of a wound or sickness, or just old age, as he cannot have been a young man. A large Persian army and navy arrived on Cyprus and the Greeks abandoned the siege of Kition, retreating towards Salamis. This was not the more famous Salamis where Persia had been defeated under Xerxes, but a city named Salamis-in-Cyprus.

The Athenians were not informed of Cimon's death and were told that he was still in command and drawing up the plans of battle. The Athenian general Anaxicrates was actually in command however. The Athenians defeated the Persians on land and sea at Salamis-in-Cyprus, giving Cimon the honour of being one of the few generals to win a posthumous victory. However, the victory was a hollow one, as the Athenians had not enough men or ships to exploit their victory. Taking the body of Cimon, the expeditionary force returned to Athens, joined by the ships that had been sent to Egypt, which had also achieved very little.

Cimon was buried in Athens, but was remembered by shrines in Cyprus where he had died. In more recent times statues have been placed to honour his memory there. More than any other person he had ensured the military greatness of Athens, particularly in her wars with Persia in the aftermath of the invasion of Xerxes. He was probably the single greatest military commander that Athens ever had. His death left a void in Athenian politics and his role as leader of the aristocratic party was filled by Thucydides of Alopece, who, just to clarify, was not the more famous historian Thucydides, who would come to prominence later.

Vase by the Altamura Painter

Cimon's half-sister, and reputed lover, Elpinice, survived him by many years. She was the lover of the painter Polygnotus, but was a sharp-witted woman who used her status to continue to oppose Pericles in her own right.

This year Crates won the Comedy prize for his plays at the Great Dionysia Festival. Very little survives of his works, but there are a few fragments of his work that remain. No single play remains intact however.

Many events took place around the mid-fifth century BC and, as there is no convenient year that these can be confidently ascribed to, I shall mention them here. In the realm of the theatre, it is possible that Sophocles wrote his early play "Women of Trachis" around this time, but this is unclear. The work survives to us, but is not accounted as one of the best works of Sophocles. Some scholars place it here, others assign it to a later date.

Around this time, the Achilles Painter, the Altamura Painter (who was the brother of the Niobid Painter), the Hasselmann Painter and the Persephone Painter all flourished. These were Attic painters who painted their creations in workshops just outside the city of Athens, near the cemetery and whose art was highly valued in antiquity and which survives today in many museums around the world.

Vase by the Persephone Painter

It was around this time that the perhaps legendary lawyers and masters of rhetoric, named Corax and Tisias are said to have lived in Syracuse. Corax undertook to teach Tisias how to argue before the law. He took no fee for his instruction on the understanding that Tisias would pay him from the winnings of his first court case. Tisias was fully trained in the art of speaking and debating and Corax fully expected that he would soon become an active figure in the courts. But Tisias ended up doing nothing really and Corax was furious with him.

Corax then took him to court to get him to pay his fee, however Tisias pleaded his own case. He made the rather innovative argument that if Corax won his case then, Tisias would not pay the fee, as the teaching of Corax would be shown to be useless (as Tisias could not win his case). On the other hand if Tisias won the case, then Tisias wouldn't pay the fee (as the non-payment of the fee was what Tisias was wanting).

The story is a fun one and could lead to many imaginary debates. Corax and Tisias probably existed but nothing of their work survives and this particular story is probably false. Tisias may have been the teacher of the later orator Isocrates.

Around this time the doctor Herodicus of Selymbria flourished. He is said to have favoured exercise therapy, sometimes recommending that his patients walk the 30km to Megara from Athens. His prescriptions for healthy living were probably of minimal use to anyone who had a genuinely life-threatening ailment, but would have been of interest to the populace in general and athletes in particular. It was said that he was one of the teachers of Hippocrates, who would later become the most famous doctor of the ancient world.

Relief of Zeus and Hera from
Selinunte Temple E

The mathematician and astronomer Oenopides of Chios seems to have flourished around this time. He made some astronomical observations, primarily regarding the zodiac and the Great Year, where relative apparent orbits of the sun and the moon would repeat the same patterns after a given length of time. His calculations here were useful, but imprecise. His works in geometry seem to have been more theoretical and he was apparently the first geometer to explicitly rule out more brute-force methods of solving puzzles. Only a compass and a straight-edge could be used to truly solve a problem. Thus geometry became a more theoretical discipline, whereas it had previously been an extremely practical one. He also had certain beliefs about the nature of the universe, and was a philosopher, but little of his thought remains to us.

Another astronomer who flourished around this time was the astronomer Harpalus. Little is known about him, save that he improved on certain calculations of Cleostratus, an astronomer from two generations previous who may have been influenced by the Babylonian astronomical records.

Around this time the philosopher Melissus of Samos flourished. He came from the island of Samos but had been taught in the Magna Graecia region of Italy under the tutelage of Parmenides. He is usually treated as being part of the Eleatic school of philosophy. His philosophy is quite similar to that of Parmenides, arguing for a timeless, changeless state of Being. Like the other Eleatics, Melissus was concerned to show that the concept of change was an illusory one. He restated many of the points of Parmenides, but also spoke on how there could be no true vacuum. Thus, if there was no true vacuum, there was no empty space for Being to move to. It is an odd argument, like all of the arguments of the Eleatics, but worth considering, if only as a way of testing the mind.

Zeno's Paradox of Achilles and the Tortoise:
Even though Achilles is ten times faster, he will never
catch the tortoise

The best-remembered of the Eleatics also flourished around this time. Zeno of Elea was another of the pupils of Parmenides. As a way of protecting the very unusual doctrines of his teacher from ridicule, Zeno set out to show that our normal ways of considering change and being were equally worthy of ridicule. He created nine paradoxes, including the paradox of the moving arrow, which is in motion, but if examined at any given second appears to rest still and motionless in the air. Another of the most famous paradoxes was that of Achilles and the Tortoise. Achilles runs ten times faster than the tortoise, but the tortoise starts 10 paces ahead of Achilles. By the time Achilles has run 10 paces, the tortoise has moved 1 pace. By the time Achilles has run 1 pace, the tortoise has move 0.1 pace, etc. Thus Achilles will never catch the tortoise.

These puzzling paradoxes seem to have captivated the imagination of various philosophers and many spent time trying to disprove them. A later work by Plato suggests that these paradoxes may never have been intended for publication, but that once they were known, they could not be recalled. Zeno's Paradoxes seem obviously wrong, but without a knowledge of physics and logic it can be hard to say exactly why. In this unprovable error and puzzlement lay their enduring appeal.

In the realm of architecture around this time, the Corinthian order was invented. This was a type of column that had an elaborate capital, adorned with decorations and acanthus leaves and other decorations. This became known as the third Classical Order, along with Doric and Ionic. However it did not immediately become popular and the Doric and Ionic orders were primarily used in this period. It would become very popular some centuries later.

Site of the water clock in the Athenian Agora

In Athens, a new council house was built in the Agora. The new hero temple of Theseus, whose supposed bones had been brought back to Athens by Cimon, was also completed around this time. A water clock, known as a clepsydra, was also placed in the Agora of Athens. Water clocks had been invented centuries earlier in other cultures and were well known in the ancient world, but the Greeks were beginning to make significant improvements on the ones known in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Finally, the sacred area of Eleusis, where the Athenians held the Eleusinian Mysteries, was also rebuilt after its destruction in the Persian Wars.

In Sicily, the Temple of the Dioscuri was built in Acragas around this time. In Selinunte, the Temple E was built. Scholars are unclear as to whether this was a temple to Hera or to Aphrodite. The temple contains a number of surviving reliefs that are preserved in a museum in Palermo. The temple itself stands impressively today, but was reconstructed using the fallen material in the 1950's.

Temple of the Dioscuri in Acragas

Writing around this time, the poet Praxilla of Sicyon wrote lyric poetry. Little of her work survives, but we have some references to her work in other sources. Her work was well regarded in antiquity despite its eventual loss. She wrote about mythological subject matter, but also wrote drinking songs for symposia (drinking parties). Some have suspected that the reason she was allowed to these traditionally male-dominated events was that she was a hetaira, or a prostitute, but this is not proven at all.

Around this time the early logographers wrote. These were people who were interested in the stories of times past and who wrote down lists of times, people and places. They were concerned with genealogies and festivals, being almost like a cross between a Mesopotamian chronicler and a later Greek historian. By and large they showed no critical faculty in discerning between the mythical and the historical. They also were not overly concerned with cause and effect. But their compiled lists and tales were often used by later classical historians. They were not the first historians. They were not really historians at all. But they are an important symptom of the birth of historiography in Greece.

Hellanicus of Lesbos was one such of these. He wrote lists of the priestesses of Hera, lists of the winners of the Carnea festival, a genealogy of a mythical Peloponnesian king named Phoronis, as well as some of the earliest writings about Rome, and histories of Troy, Persia and Attica. Thucydides later notes that Hellanicus' work was not particularly good, but he seems to have been used as a source by later historians.

Selinunte Temple E

Pherecydes of Leros was another such systematiser. He wrote a history of the island of Leros and long genealogies, which sometimes contained historical information.

The logographers were not even all Greek. One such writer was Xanthus of Lydia, who wrote a history of his native Lydia, which was a lost work known as the Lydica. He also is said to have written a work about Persian religion, known as Magica, after the Persian Magi.

Ultimately almost none of what the logographers wrote has survived to the present day. But I thought that it was worth mentioning their work. Even the word logographer has fallen out of our vocabulary. Their entire enterprise has been subsumed by the discipline of history. In one sense of the word, logographers are prehistoric, the last remnants of a less critical age.

In the realm of sculpture, the Severe style, or Early Classical, can be said to end, and the Mature Classical, can be said to begin. Around this time the sculptor Polycleitus formulated the Kanon, or Canon of statuary. This defined perfection in sculpting the human body as a matter of perfect proportions and symmetry. Polyclitus defined the exact proportions that he believed best exemplified these principles.

Roman marble copy of the
Doryphoros of Polycleitus

The principles were shown in Polycleitus' work Doryphoros, meaning Spear Bearer. This was a statue that showed a relaxed male nude, standing emotionless and carrying a spear over his left shoulder. The statue was made originally in bronze and has been lost to us. But there are numerous Roman copies through which its likeness survives in marble, including one found in the buried city of Pompeii.

Another important sculpture made around this time is the Discobolus, created by the sculptor Myron. This showed an athlete in the moment of spinning with a disc in hand, instants before releasing the disc. There is motion and power in the statue, but the figure is still perfectly calm. Again, this statue did not survive antiquity, but it survives in numerous Roman marble copies.

And thus the period draws to a close, with advances being made in history, mathematics and astronomy. New poets, painters, sculptors and architects were creating art of the highest quality. Philosophy and physics were under consideration. The playwrights wrote tragedies, comedies and satyr plays, with the art of theatre reaching a recognisable form.

In the political world, Athens and Sparta had spent much of the decade at war with each other. The Athenians had generally been victorious in their wars, but Sparta had concluded the helot revolt, while Athens had suffered a grievous defeat against Persia with the failure of the Egyptian expedition. Athens was led by Pericles, who continued the trend of strengthening the democracy, and had seen the loss of Cimon, their greatest general. The Persian Wars themselves were drawing to a close, as both the Persians and the Athenians were becoming tired of the decades-long struggle. Elsewhere in the Greek world, the Syracusans had exiled Ducetius, who had threatened their hegemony with his failed attempt to create a Sicel state. It is not an often studied period of history, but there is enough here to make it worth the time to take a second glance.

Roman copy of the Discobolus of Myron

Primary Sources:
Pindar, Odes, written circa 475BC
Aeschylus, Agamemnon, written circa 458BC
Aeschylus, Libation Bearers, written circa 458BC
Aeschylus, Eumenides, written circa 458BC
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, written circa 400BC
The Parian Chronicle, written circa 216BC
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, written circa 40BC
Vitruvius, De Architectura, Preface to Book 7, written circa 20BC
Plutarch, Life of Themistocles, written circa AD100
Plutarch, Life of Cimon, written circa AD100
Plutarch, Life of Pericles, written circa AD100
Pausanias, Description of Greece, written circa AD150
Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, written circa AD320

Secondary Sources:
Historical eruptions on Mount Etna
Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Part I
Agamemnon by Aeschylus, Part II

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