At the “Renaissance” court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, son of a merchant, enemy of aristocrats, patron of the arts, there were also poets like Anacreon and Ibikos. History has also passed down the names of many famous Samian painters: Calliphon, Teodoros, Timotes, Agatarkhos. The latter was also active in Athens and according to tradition introduced painting to the theater (he was also the author of a lost treatise on theater design).
Philosophers were born on Samos: Pythagoras and Melissus, as well as the historians Pageos and Duris.
The list of Samian worthies can be extended significantly. It should really begin with the name of Hera, who was said to have been born on the bank of the Imbrasos river.
WE WILL NOW BREAK with the custom of describing ancient stones. The reason for this is straightforward—I do not know the island by autopsy, unless you count pre-World War I postcards. They show a Doric column without a capital, lonely as a factory chimney, amid an arid landscape backed by a burnt sky.
We will concern ourselves here with a certain historical episode called the rebellion or insurrection of Samos. It occupies a brief segment of time from 440 to 439 B.C. and many historians have squeezed it into the margins of Greek history. However, to us the event seems more crucial and more fraught with consequences than specialists would have it.
We will try to reconstruct this history from contradictory sources and accounts, without concealing our sympathy for the defeated.
And so two great Ionian cities—Samos and Miletus—found themselves in constant conflict. The apple of contention was Priene, hometown of Bias, one of the Seven Sages, situated on the coast of Asia Minor near the estuary of the Meander. Conflicts between Greek towns were reminiscent of family quarrels, in which it is hard to track what the real causes are and “who started it.” Both sides of the quarrel belonged to the Delian League, later called the Athenian Maritime League. Formally all the League’s members, and there were more than 200 of them, had equal rights and each held one vote at the League Council Assemblies. In fact, Athens had the deciding vote as a result of its actual power advantage.
In the conflict between Samos and Miletus, common sense dictated that Athens limit itself to the role of arbiter and not take up a position on either side. It is hard to explain why Pericles, a seasoned politician after all, let himself be pulled into this perilous game—unless we accept the gossip of Plutarch, who says it was at the instigation of his wife Aspasia, who came from Miletus. Either way, Athens declared itself against Samos, awarding the city Priene, subject of the quarrel, to Miletus. The Samians felt wronged and did not accept the decision. The arbitrary Athenian policy brought into question their position as a free state. There were rumors that the Samian government would not submit but would fight for its rights, even that it would secede from the Athenian League, which would be a dangerous precedent, as such a step might be followed by a chain of insurrections by other Greek cities against the Athenians. Therefore Pericles decided to act quickly and decisively, which is to say, conduct a policy of intervention.
In the summer of 440 B.C. an expeditionary corps of forty triremes sailed from Piraeus to chasten the rebels.
The first act of the Samian drama was played out at the speed of lightning. The surprised island fell into the hands of the Athenians, who dismissed the existing government, created a new one that gave a guarantee of loyalty, left a garrison on the island and took the fifty most prominent citizens and an equal number of children as hostages and sent them off to the island Lemnos.
The question seemed to be settled definitively. Pericles’s apologist says that the Athenians set up a democratic government on Samos and sailed back to Athens. It sounds as slick as a report on a school field trip.
However, some Samians fled from the invasion and sought aid in Asia Minor at the court of Pissouthnes, then the military commander of Sardis. Having gathered reinforcements to the tune of 700 men, they then made a night landing on the island, overthrew the government imposed on them, brought back the hostages from Lemnos and handed over the Athenian crew to the Persians.
From a minor little episode of the kind in which Greek history abounds it turned into a serious matter, particularly after Byzantium—a colony situated on the northern edges of the Greek world, but at a point of strategic and economic importance—had allied itself with the rebels. Pericles decided to act decisively, before an anti-Athenian coalition could be formed.
The year 440 B.C.: the second expedition and intervention against Samos. The operation was fashioned on a large scale not only because its fleet had the participation of more units than in the first expedition, but also—and this is the moment of political significance—because other members of the League took part in the military action on the side of Athens. Thucydides remarks characteristically that Pericles sent his war ships to Chios and Lesbos to summon those states to take part in the war. That summons must have been quite categorical.
With his native deftness, Pericles carried out a diplomatic action parallel to his military operations, aiming to isolate Samos in what one might call the international arena, so that the whole affair might be contained within Greek borders. To secure the neutrality of the Persian satraps with certain sums derived from the League’s treasury (the Athenian commander accounted for this kind of expenditure before the Athenian Assembly with the simple formula “unavoidable expenses”) still falls within the bounds of acceptability. On the other hand, giving the Persians Greek lands on the Karian coast oversteps those bounds considerably.
The second Samian war was waged with varying success. Pericles set out for the island at the head of sixty ships and engaged in a victorious battle with the enemy fleet near the island of Tragia. However, the opponent was not conquered militarily nor did he lose the spirit of resistance, although Athenian troops landed on Samos and began a long siege of the city from the sea side. Forty ships from Athens and twenty-five from Chios and Lesbos came to the aid of the interventionary fleet.
Having heard that Phoenician ships were sailing to the island’s rescue (which was not true—Samos was completely isolated throughout the whole conflict), Pericles selected sixty ships from those blockading the city and sailed along the Karian coast to cut off the Phoenicians.
At that moment the besieged city immediately launched a counterattack. In an unexpected sally that completely surprised the Athenians, they managed to destroy the guard vessels and fight a victorious land battle with their opponents, many of whom were taken as prisoners of war. The sea was open again and it was again possible to provide themselves with food and materials they needed to carry on a war. The sky over Samos was then the color of hope. It lasted all of fourteen days.
Pericles returned with his fleet and the ruthless blockade began once again. From Athens, Chios, and Lesbos new and powerful reinforcements arrived, numbering ninety ships.
In the ninth month of the siege, the island, exhausted by the war, surrendered. This took place in the spring of 439 B.C.
The terms of capitulation were excessively severe. The Samians had to knock down their city walls, surrender their fleet, give up hostages, and pay the costs of war, which were set at the dizzying sum of about eight and a half million drachmas. A Greek garrison was placed on the island and Samos lost its status as a city allied to the League.
One of the Athenian strategists who took part in the expedition was a man who owed his fame not to military superiority but to achievements quite contrary to the spirit of war. In Greece there was no such thing as a professional general. This explains why Sophocles was granted the dubious honor of being a strategist in this fratricidal war, all on account of the success his Antigone had enjoyed in the theater. We don’t know exactly what kind of commander the poet was. Ancient gossips have passed on a joke according to which what most excited him in the whole war was the presence of a large number of young men.
The philosopher Melissus, son of Itagenes, was on the other side of the front. Melissus was a fine commander. His tactical ab
ilities, his surprise moves and lightning-quick sallies won him respectful recognition, even in the enemy camp. Melissus was, as it was said, a professional philosopher, and—even more oddly—a follower of the doctrine of Parmenides, which holds that being is one, eternal, unlimited, infinite, and unmoving. In accordance with the master’s doctrine, Melissus thought that every change, every becoming, every movement is nothing more than an illusion. In spite of that he was a leader in heart and soul, and at least his leadership in battle was not a play of appearances.
No, this war was not a dialogue between poet and philosopher. It was full of real death, real wounds, real courage and cowardice. We imagine ancient battles along operatic lines as not completely serious, and historical films have contributed not a little to this image. There the men go running across a field dressed in comical outfits, holding anachronistic killing tools in their hands. For us, all that blood has the hue of a faded fresco.
We don’t know the number of fallen, even approximately, and even if we did know, our imaginations fed on great numbers, our sensibilities blunted by so many murderous battles between white men, would remain unaffected.
At the time of the Samian war they did not do without barbarian cruelties, with which both sides, both conquerors and conquered, reproach each other. The Samians, according to Plutarch, burned the sign of the owl on the foreheads of Athenian prisoners of war, and in revenge, the Athenians branded the defenders of the island they captured with the sign of the samaena, the famous war ship with an upturned prow in the shape of a boar’s snout and a paunchlike hull.
The historian Duris (not a contemporary of the events, it is true) reports that the commanders of the Samian ships were taken to Miletus after their defeat in the war. There they were executed. They were bound to crosses in the marketplace for ten days. When they were completely exhausted, they were beaten over the head with clubs and their remains cast unburied on the ground. Duris was from Samos. Pericles’s apologist said he exaggerated the misfortunes of his homeland in order to give the Athenians a bad name.
Pericles returned to Athens wearing the victor’s wreath. The expression is metaphorical, of course, and taken from Roman custom. In any case, the enthusiasm of the multitudes was uncommonly loud, as always when a victory is ambiguous. History has preserved a revealing episode whose heroine is Elpinice, then a woman more than seventy years old, the sister of Cimon and the widow of Callias. She must have been an extraordinary woman; there are unlikely and slanderous stories about her life, probably because she was of more than average courage and intelligence. Contrary to the customs of Athenian women, her interests extended far beyond the boundaries of the domestic. She dared—and this no doubt caused holy terror—to speak out on public affairs, which were reserved for men. Among other things it is said of her that she played an intermediary role in the short “truce” between Cimon and Pericles in 461 B.C.
And so amid the general enthusiasm, when women were crowning Pericles and decorating him with ribbons, “as if he were some sort of champion wrestler,” Elpinice went to him and said:
“Verily, you well deserve admiration and these wreaths, Pericles, for having lost us so many brave citizens, and not in a war with Phoenicia or Persia, like my brother Cimon, but while restoring order in a city tied to us with bonds of alliance and blood.”
Plutarch reports that Pericles got out of it with a quotation from Archilochus, a quotation which was neither to the point nor particularly elegant: “Don’t rub yourself with perfumes, since you are so old.”
Not everyone in Athens saw the matter as clearly as their Cassandra, Elpinice. The stormy waves of the Peloponnesian war were nearing the walls of the city. Athens barely had a few years left to dream of power. Only on the surface did things seem to be going well in this best of worlds. Samos, like Euboea several years earlier, had been conquered and humiliated, Athens’s superiority had been confirmed once again, but hatred toward the victors was growing, especially in the eastern part of the empire, after the shameful cession of Greek lands to the Karian Persians.
And Maria Delcourt, author of a fine monograph on Pericles, is probably right when she says that it was precisely from this seemingly modest little war that the decline of the Maritime League began, as well as the eventide of Periclean politics.
The aim of the Athenian League, formed after the battle of Salamis, was, as we know, to liberate the Ionian cities and protect them against Persian invasion. But when the danger of a barbarian attack passed, the League’s treasury was moved from Delos to Athens and became an instrument of Athenian politics. The institution turned out to be longer lasting than the aims which prompted its creation. A case familiar not only from ancient history.
One of the fundamental flaws of the League, which was after all a voluntary league, was the fact that no one could leave it without risking war. The allied city-states had to acknowledge the actual supremacy of Athens; one can best follow this in the sphere of economic pressures.
Most of the cities paid from one to three talents annually into the common treasury—which is to say a manageable sum, especially if you take inflation into account. But that amount could be raised at will, and the tribute imposed on Samos after its failed rebellion was set at eight talents annually, to which were added the costs of war the rebels had to pay Athens, a sum of a thousand talents—taken together, a ruinous burden even for the most prosperous city-state. For the same reasons (an insurrection against Athens) Aegina paid thirty talents. After a certain time the tribute was lowered to thirteen, later even to eight talents. There was something in this practice that could be called a premium for loyalty.
Arbitrariness in the determination of financial dues was not only an instrument of Athenian policy, it also occurred where no political factors came into play. It’s hard to explain why Thasos paid thirty, and the significantly wealthier Byzantium paid only fifteen talents. This fiscal lawlessness surely did not add to the Athenians’ popularity.
The comedian Telecleides says that “The Athenians gave Pericles…1
With the cities’ assessments the cities themselves,
to bind or release as he pleases,
Their ramparts of stone to build up if he likes,
and then to pull down again straightaway,
Their treaties, their forces, their might, peace,
and riches, and all the fair gifts of good fortune.
One of the things that people and peoples find most difficult to forgive, if they can forgive at all, is humiliation. A sudden military defeat on a battlefield is still acceptable, because it can always be attributed to the opponent’s superior force, to surprise or the ineptitude of one’s own commanders. But wounded pride doesn’t heal easily.
The Athenian repertoire for humiliating the conquered included—along with placing military colonies in a country of uncertain allegiance—the demolition of the conquered city’s walls. This is what happened with Samos and Aegina. A city without walls was exposed to ridicule, dependent on the care of an imposed protector and deprived of defenses against any invader. This policy was as absurd as it was shortsighted. Alcibiades, a relative of Pericles, understood these matters better when in 417 B.C. he negotiated an alliance with Argos, promising to build a long wall connecting the city to the sea, modeled after the long wall of Athens. No one was under the illusion that Alcibiades was treating Argos, or later Patras, with disinterested love.
And so Athens was victorious in the war with Samos, but it was a morally and politically dubious victory. The official enthusiasm was tremendous. Pericles—as Ion writes—was extraordinarily proud in saying “Agamemnon spent ten years conquering a barbarian city, and [I] conquered the pre-eminent and most powerful Ionian city in nine months!” In all fairness, let us add that this arrogant self-praise does not really accord with what we know of Pericles, and should be attributed to some street flatterer.
Athens was not only the cradle of democracy, but also the homeland of rhetors and sophists. If you can’t push t
hrough a policy which prompts moral reservations and may even be morally reprehensible, you have to come up with a term which will serve to veil the evil to some extent. In such hehavior we perceive elements of magic—the belief that the foundations of the world are not only things and events but that the word has a reconstitutive and creative power. In his History of Greek Culture, Jacob Burckhardt writes admiringly, but also ironically, of the Athenians’ ability to speak of the worst matters with prudent delicacy, their capacity for inventing euphemisms. And so a prison is called a residence, tribute is called surcharge, an occupation is called a defense.
The traditional voice of public opinion was Attic comedy, the artistic realization of the principle that states that the citizen of a democratic state has the right to criticize politicians and institutions. It is worth reflecting on the fact that the immediate consequence of the Samian war was the introduction of censorship—the first in Athenian history—which forbade comic poets to represent persons on stage under their real names. This is not at all an insignificant detail. It testifies to a profound internal crisis beginning to show.
The drastic controls on freedom of speech prove that the popular mood must have in fact been quite different from the official enthusiasm and optimism. It is more than probable that critical voices were raised and that Elpinice—a fine example of civic conscience—was not an exception.
Historians defend Pericles, saying he was not the author of the decree on censorship. It seems that the act was voted through the popular assembly at a time when he was absent from Athens. Finally—his defenders say—the ban itself didn’t hold up and after a certain time (two theatrical seasons) this practice unworthy of the homeland of democracy was abandoned.
The Collected Prose Page 63