1 Nabonidus Chronicle, col. ii, 15. Cyrus himself entered Babylon two and a half weeks
later.
2 Jeremiah 28.14.
3 Ezekiel 32.23.
4 Cyrus Cylinder 20. The titles used by the Persian kings were not original to them
but were derived from an assortment of Near Eastern kingdoms, Babylon included.
5 Aeschylus The Persians 104–5.
6 Cyrus Cylinder 16.
7 Herodotus 1.214.
8 Isaiah 45.1–3.
9 Heracleitus, quoted by Diogenes Laertius, The Lives and Doctrines of the Eminent
Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library no. 184 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1925), 1.21.
10 For a concise introduction to the sources that enable the events of 522 to be recon-
structed, as well as the sources themselves, see the chapter “From Cambyses to Darius
I,” in Amélie Kuhrt, The Persian Empire: A Corpus of Sources from the Achaemenid Period
(London: Routledge, 2007), vol. 1.
11 Bisitun Inscription 63.
12 A date that is probable rather than certain.
13 Phocylides frag. 4. Despite the Assyrian reference, the poem is almost certainly a
reflection of the growth of Persian power.
14 Tyrtaeus 7.31–32.
15 Quoted by Tim Blanning in The Pursuit of Glory: Europe 1648–1815 (New York: Vi-
king, 2007), 626.
16 Herodotus 6.116.
17 Herodotus 8.24.
18 Herodotus 9.62.
19 Lycurgus Against Leocrates 81.
30 Holland
2. Pericles, Thucydides, and the Defense of Empire
Donald Kagan
By the middle of the fifth century, when Pericles became the
leading figure in Athens, defense of its empire was of the highest im-
portance, because the empire was the key to the defense of Athens itself.
It represented security against a renewal of the Persian threat, and it pro-
vided the means for warding off any future chal enge from Sparta. Beyond
that, its revenues were essential to Pericles’ plans for making Athens the
most prosperous, beautiful, and civilized city the Greeks had ever known.
The glory it reflected was an essential part of his vision for Athens.
Pericles and his Athenians regarded their empire as necessary, but it
also raised serious questions. Could an empire limit its growth and am-
bition and maintain itself in safety? Or did rule over others inevitably
lead the imperial power to overreach and bring about its own ruin? Was
empire, especially by Greek over Greek, morally legitimate? Or was it
evidence of hubris, the violent arrogance that was sure to bring on the
justified destruction of those who dared to rule over others as though
they were gods?
It fell to Pericles, as leader of the Athenian people, to guide their
policy into safe channels and to justify the empire in the eyes of the
other Greeks as well as their own. In both tasks Pericles broke a sharply
new path. He put an end to imperial expansion and moderated Athe-
nian ambitions. He also put forward powerful arguments, by word as
well as deed, to show that the empire was both legitimate and in the
common interest of all the Greeks.
It is important to recall that the Athenians did not set out to acquire
an empire and that the Delian League that was its forerunner came
into being only because of Sparta’s default, but the Athenians had good
reasons for accepting its leadership. First and foremost was the fear and
expectation that the Persians would come again to conquer the Greeks.
The Persians had attacked them three times in two decades, and there
was no reason to believe they would permanently accept the latest
defeat. Second, the Athenians had hardly begun to repair the dam-
age done by the latest Persian attack; they knew another would surely
make Athens a target again. In addition, the Aegean and the lands to its
east were important to Athenian trade. Their dependence on imported
grain from Ukraine, which had to travel from the Black Sea, meant that
even a very limited Persian campaign that gained control of the Bos-
porus or the Dardanelles could cut their lifeline. Finally, the Athenians
had ties of common ancestry, religion, and tradition with the Ionian
Greeks, who made up most of the endangered cities. Athenian security,
prosperity, and sentiment all pointed toward driving the Persians from
all the coasts and islands of the Aegean, the Dardanelles, the Sea of
Marmora, the Bosporus, and the Black Sea.
The new alliance was one of three interstate organizations in the
Greek world, alongside the Peloponnesian League and the Hellenic
League formed against Persia, which had by no means lapsed when the
Spartans withdrew from the Aegean. After the founding of the Delian
League, the Hellenic League had an increasingly shadowy existence
and collapsed at the first real test. The important, effective, and active
alliances were the Peloponnesian League, led by Sparta, on the main-
land and the Delian League, led by Athens, in the Aegean.
From the first, the Delian League was very effective because it was
entirely and enthusiastically voluntary, its purposes were essential to
its members, and its organization was clear and simple. Athens was
the leader: all the members, about 140 in the beginning, swore a per-
petual oath to have the same friends and enemies as Athens, in this
way forming a permanent offensive and defensive alliance under Athe-
nian leadership. Hegemony, however, was not domination. In the early
years of the league, the Athenians were “leaders of autonomous allies
who took part in common synods.”1 In those years, those synods deter-
mined policy and made decisions at meetings at Delos, where Athens
had only one vote. In theory, Athens was only an equal partner in the
32 Kagan
synod, with the same single vote as Samos, Lesbos, Chios, or even tiny
Seriphos. In fact, the system worked in Athens’s favor. Athenian mili-
tary and naval power, the enormous relative size of Athens’s contribu-
tion, and the city’s immense prestige as hegemon guaranteed that the
many small and powerless states would be under its influence, while
the larger states that might have challenged the Athenians were easily
outvoted. Many years later, the embittered and rebellious Mytilene-
ans would say, “The allies were unable to unite and defend themselves
because of the great number of voters.”2 In the early years, however,
there appears to have been harmony and agreement among the mem-
bers, large and small, and the degree of Athens’s influence was propor-
tionate to its contribution. From the beginning, then, Athens was in the
happy position of controlling the Delian League without the appear-
ance of illegality or tyranny.
The early actions of the league must have won unanimous and en-
thusiastic support: the allies drove the Persians from their remaining
strongholds in Europe and made the sea lanes of the Aegean safe by
expelling a nest of pirates from the island of Scyros. As victory fol-
lowed victory and the Persian threat seemed more remote, some al-
lies thoug
ht the league and its burdensome obligations were no longer
needed. The Athenians, however, rightly saw that the Persian threat
was not gone and that it would increase to the degree that Greek vigi-
lance waned. Thucydides makes it clear that the chief causes for the
later rebellions were the allies’ refusal to provide the agreed-upon ships
or money and to perform the required military service. The Athenians
held them strictly to account and
were no longer equally pleasant as leaders. They no longer be-
haved as equals on campaigns, and they found it easy to reduce
states that rebelled. The blame for this belonged to the allies
themselves: for most of them had themselves assessed in quotas
of money instead of ships because they shrank from military ser-
vice so that they need not be away from home. As a result, the
Athenian fleet was increased by means of the money they paid in,
while when the allies tried to revolt, they went to war without the
means or the experience.3
Pericles and the Defense of Empire 33
Less than a decade after its formation, perhaps in 469, the forces
of the Delian League won smashing victories over the Persian fleet
and army at the mouth of the Eurymedon River in Asia Minor. This
decisive Persian defeat intensified the restlessness of the allies and the
harshness and unpopularity of the Athenians. The rebellion and siege
of Thasos from 465 to 463, which arose from a quarrel between the
Athenians and the Thasians and had no clear connection with the pur-
poses of the league, must have had a similar effect.
The first Peloponnesian War (ca. 460–445) strained Athenian re-
sources to the limit and encouraged defection. The destruction of the
Athenian expedition to Egypt in the mid-450s provided the shock that
hastened the transformation from league to empire. To many, it must
have seemed the beginning of the collapse of Athenian power, so it
provoked new rebellions. The Athenians responded swiftly and effec-
tively to put them down, and then took measures to ensure they would
not be repeated. In some places they installed democratic governments
friendly to and dependent on themselves. Sometimes they posted mili-
tary garrisons, sometimes they assigned Athenian officials to oversee
the conduct of the formerly rebellious state, and sometimes they used
a combination of tactics. All were violations of the autonomy of the
subject state.
The Athenians tightened their control of the empire even more in
the 440s. They imposed the use of Athenian weights, measures, and
coins, closing the local mints and so depriving the allies of a visible
symbol of their sovereignty and autonomy. They tightened the rules
for collection and delivery of tribute payments, requiring that the trials
for those accused of violations be held in Athens. They used military
force against states that rebelled or refused to pay tribute. Sometimes
the Athenians confiscated territory from the offending state and gave
it as a colony to loyal allies or Athenian citizens. When such a colony
was composed of Athenians it was called a cleruchy. Its settlers did not
form a new, independent city but remained Athenian citizens. When
the Athenians suppressed a rebellion, they usually installed a demo-
cratic regime and made the natives swear an oath of loyalty. The fol-
lowing is the oath imposed on the people of Colophon:
34 Kagan
I will do and say and plan whatever good I can with regard to the
people of the Athenians and their allies, and I will not revolt from
the people of the Athenians either in word or deed, either myself
or in obedience to another. And I will love the people of the Athe-
nians and I will not desert. And I will not destroy the democracy
at Colophon, either myself or in obedience to another, either by
going off to another city or by intriguing there. I will carry out
these things according to the oath truly, without deceit and with-
out harm, by Zeus, Apollo, and Demeter. And if I transgress may
I and my descendants be destroyed for all time, but if I keep my
oath may great prosperity come to me.4
A bit later they imposed a similar oath on the Chalcidians, but in
this one allegiance was sworn not to the alliance but to the Athenian
people alone.
The association took a critical step in the transition from league to
empire in the year 454–453, when the treasury was moved from Delos to
the Acropolis in Athens. The formal explanation was the threat that the
Persians might send a fleet into the Aegean, following a catastrophic
Athenian defeat in Egypt and confronted with a war with Sparta. We
do not know whether that fear was real or merely a pretext, but the
Athenians did not waste time in turning the transfer to their advan-
tage. From that year until late in the Peloponnesian War, the Athenians
took one-sixtieth of the tribute paid by the allies as first fruits for the
goddess Athena Polias, patroness of the city and now of the reconsti-
tuted league. The Athenians were free to use the goddess’s share as
they liked, not necessarily for league purposes.
Changes so important and so radical that they transformed a volun-
tary league of al ies into a largely involuntary empire ruled by Athens de-
manded justification in the ancient world of the Greeks. In most respects
the Greeks resembled other ancient peoples in their attitudes toward
power, conquest, empire, and the benefits that came with them. They
viewed the world as a place of intense competition in which victory and
domination, which brought fame and glory, were the highest goals, while
defeat and subordination brought ignominy and shame. They always
Pericles and the Defense of Empire 35
honored the creed espoused by Achil es, the greatest hero of Greek leg-
end: “Always to be the best and foremost over al others.” When the leg-
endary world of aristocratic heroes gave way to the world of city-states,
the sphere of competition moved up from contests between individuals,
households, and clans to contests and wars between cities. In 416, more
than a decade after the death of Pericles, Athenian spokesmen explained
to some Melian officials their view of international relations: “Of the
gods we believe, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature
they always rule wherever they have the power.”5
Yet the Melian Dialogue, as this famous passage in Thucydides
on international Realpolitik in the classical world came to be known,
was a dramatic presentation of the morally problematic status of the
Athenian Empire. The Athenians’ harsh statement is provoked by the
Melians’ claim that the gods will be on their side, because the Athe-
nians are behaving unjustly toward a neutral state. The Melian com-
plaint may refer to the specific actions taken or contemplated by the
Athenians, but it would have struck a deep vein of sympathy among
the Greeks. The Greeks were free from the modern prejudice against
power and the security and glory it could bring, but their own historical
experience was different from that of other ancient nations. Their cul-
ture had been shaped not by great empires but by small, autonomous,
independent poleis, and they came to think that freedom was the natu-
ral condition for men raised in such an environment. Citizens should
be free in their persons and free to maintain their own constitutions,
laws, and customs, and their cities should be free to conduct their own
foreign relations and to compete with others for power and glory. The
Greeks also believed that the freedom made possible by the life of the
polis created a superior kind of citizen and a special kind of power. The
free, autonomous polis, they thought, was greater than the mightiest
powers in the world. The sixth-century poet Phocylides was prepared
to compare it to the great Assyrian Empire: “A little polis living orderly
in a high place is greater than block-headed Nineveh.”6
When poleis fought one another, the victor typical y took control of
a piece of borderland that was usual y the source of the dispute. The
defeated enemy was not normal y enslaved, nor was his land annexed
or occupied. In such matters, as in many, the Greeks employed a double
36 Kagan
standard by which they distinguished themselves from alien peoples
who did not speak Greek and were not shaped by the Greek cultural
tradition. Since they had not been raised as free men in free communities
but lived as subjects to a ruler, they were manifestly slaves by nature, so
it was perfectly al right to dominate and enslave them in reality. Greeks,
on the other hand, were natural y free, as they demonstrated by creating
and living in the liberal institutions of the polis. To rule over such people,
to deny them their freedom and autonomy, would clearly be wrong.
That was what the Greeks thought, but they did not always act ac-
cordingly. At a very early time the Spartans had conquered the Greeks
residing in their own region of Laconia and neighboring Messenia and
made them slaves of the state. In the sixth century they formed the
Peloponnesian League, an alliance that gave the Spartans considerable
control over the foreign policy of their allies. But the Spartans gener-
ally did not interfere with the internal arrangements of the allied cit-
ies, which continued to have the appearance of autonomy. In the two
decades after the Persian War, the Argives appear to have obliterated
Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome Page 6