THE RISE AND GROWTH OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE.

I. THE DISGRACE AND DEATH OF THEMISTOCLES.

Six years after the battle of PlatÆa the career of Xerxes was terminated by assassination, and his son, Artaxerxes Longim'anus, succeeded to the throne. In the mean time Athens had been rebuilt and fortified by Themistocles, and the PirÆus (the port of Athens) enclosed within a wall as large in extent as that of Athens, but of greater height and thickness. But Themistocles, by his selfish and arbitrary use of power, provoked the enmity of a large body of his countrymen; and although he was acquitted of the charge of treasonable inclinations toward Persia, popular feeling soon after became so strong against him that he was condemned to exile by the same process of ostracism that he had directed against Aristides, and he retired to Argos (471 B.C.) Some time before this a Grecian force, composed of Athenians under Aristides, and Cimon the son of Miltiades, and Spartans under Pausanias the victor of PlatÆa, waged a successful war upon the Persian dependencies of the Ægean, and the coasts of Asia Minor. The Ionian cities were aided in a successful revolt, and Cyprus and Byzantium--the latter now Constantinople--fell into the hands of the Grecians. Pausanias, who was at the head of the whole armament, now began to show signs of treasonable conduct, which was more fully unfolded by a communication that he addressed to the Persian court, seeking the daughter of Xerxes in marriage, and promising to bring Sparta and the whole of Greece under Persian dominion.

When news of the treason of Pausanias reached Sparta, he was immediately recalled, and, though no definite proof was at first furnished against him, his guilt was subsequently established, and he perished from starvation in the Temple of Minerva, whither he had fled for refuge, and where he was immured by the eph'ors. The fate of Pausanias involved that of Themistocles. In searching for farther traces of the former's plot some correspondence was discovered that furnished sufficient evidence of the complicity of Themistocles in the crime, and he was immediately accused by the Spartans, who insisted upon his being punished. The Athenians sent ambassadors to arrest him and bring him to Athens; but Themistocles fled from Argos, and finally sought refuge at the court of Persia. He died at Magne'sia, in Asia Minor, which had been appointed his place of residence by Artaxerxes, and a splendid monument was raised to his memory; but in the time of the Roman empire a tomb was pointed out by the sea-side, within the port of PirÆus, which was generally believed to contain his remains, and of which the comic poet PLATO thus wrote:

Although "the genius of Themistocles did not secure him from the seductions of avarice and pride, which led him to sacrifice both his honor and his country for the tinsel of Eastern pomp," yet, as THIRLWALL says, "No Greek had then rendered services such as those of Themistocles to the common country; and no Athenian, except Solon, had conferred equal benefits on Athens. He had first delivered her from the most imminent danger, and then raised her to the pre-eminence on which she now stood. He might claim her greatness; and even her being, as his work." The following tribute to his memory is from the pen of TULLIUS GEM'INUS, a Latin poet:

II. THE RISE AND FALL OF CIMON.

Foremost among the rivals of Themistocles in ability and influence, was Cimon, the son of Miltiades. In his youth he was inordinately fond of pleasure, and revealed none of those characteristics for which he subsequently became distinguished. But his friends encouraged him to follow in his father's footsteps, and Aristides soon discovered in him a capacity and disposition that he could use to advantage in his own antagonism to Themistocles. To Aristides, therefore, Cimon was largely indebted for his influence and success, as well as for his mild temper and gentle manners.

On the banishment of Themistocles Aristides became the undisputed leader of the aristocratical party at Athens, and on his death, four years subsequently, Cimon succeeded him. The later was already distinguished for his military successes, and was undoubtedly the greatest commander of his time. He continued the successful war against Persia for many years, and among his notable victories was one obtained on both sea and land, in Pamphyl'ia, in Asia Minor, and called

THE BATTLE OF EURYM'EDON.

After dispersing a fleet of two hundred ships Cimon landed his troops, flushed with victory, and completely routed a large Persian army. The poet SIMONIDES praises this double victory in the following verse:

The same poet pays the following tribute to the Greeks who fell in this conflict:

On the recall of Pausanias from Asia Minor Sparta lost, and Athens acquired, the command in the war against Persia. Athens was now rapidly approaching the summit of her military renown. The war with Persia did not prevent her from extending her possessions in Greece by force of arms; and island after island of the Ægean yielded to her sway, while her colonies peopled the winding shores of Thrace and Macedon. The other states and cities of Greece could not behold her rapid, and apparently permanent, growth in power without great dissatisfaction and anxiety. When the Persian war was at its height, a sense of common danger had caused many of them to seek an alliance with Athens, the result of what is known as the Confederacy of Delos; but, now that the danger was virtually passed, long existing jealousies broke out, which led to political dissensions, and, finally, to the civil wars that caused the ruin of the Grecian republics. Sparta, especially, had long viewed with indignation the growing resources of Athens and was preparing to check them by an invasion of Attica, when sudden and complicated disasters forced her to abandon her designs, and turn her attention to her own dominions. In 464 B.C. the city was visited by an earthquake that laid it in ruins and buried not less than twenty thousand of its chosen citizens; and this calamity was immediately followed by a general revolt of the Helots. BULWER'S description of this terrible earthquake, and of the memorable conduct of the Laconian government in opposing, under such trying circumstances, the dreadful revolt that occurred, has been greatly admired for its eloquence and its strict adherence to facts.

The Earthquake at Sparta and the Revolt of the Helots.

"An earthquake, unprecedented in its violence, occurred in Sparta. In many places throughout Laconia the rocky soil was rent asunder. From Mount Ta-yg'e-tus, which overhung the city, and on which the women of LacedÆmon were wont to hold their bacchanalian orgies, huge fragments rolled into the suburbs. The greater portion of the city was absolutely overthrown; and it is said, probably with exaggeration, that only five houses wholly escaped disaster from the shock. This terrible calamity did not cease suddenly as it came; its concussions were repeated; it buried alike men and treasure: could we credit Diodorus, no less than twenty thousand persons perished in the shock. Thus depopulated, impoverished, and distressed, the enemies whom the cruelty of Sparta nursed within her bosom resolved to seize the moment to execute their vengeance and consummate her destruction. Under Pausanias the Helots were ready for revolt; and the death of that conspirator checked, but did not crush, their designs of freedom. Now was the moment, when Sparta lay in ruins--now was the moment to realize their dreams. From field to field, from village to village, the news of the earthquake became the watchword of revolt. Up rose the Helots--they armed themselves, they poured on--a wild and gathering and relentless multitude resolved to slay, by the wrath of man, all whom that of nature had yet spared. The earthquake that leveled Sparta rent their chains; nor did the shock create one chasm so dark and wide as that between the master and the slave.

"It is one of the sublimest and most awful spectacles in history--that city in ruins--the earth still trembling, the grim and dauntless soldiery collected amid piles of death and ruin; and in such a time, and such a scene, the multitude sensible not of danger, but of wrong, and rising not to succor, but to revenge--all that should have disarmed a feebler enmity giving fire to theirs; the dreadest calamity their blessing--dismay their hope. It was as if the Great Mother herself had summoned her children to vindicate the long-abused, the all-inalienable heritage derived from her; and the stir of the angry elements was but the announcement of an armed and solemn union between nature and the oppressed.

"Fortunately for Sparta, the danger was not altogether unforeseen. After the confusion and the horror of the earthquake, and while the people, dispersed, were seeking to save their effects, Archida'mus, who, four years before, had succeeded to the throne of LacedÆmon, ordered the trumpets to sound as to arms. That wonderful superiority of man over matter which habit and discipline can effect, and which was ever so visible among the Spartans, constituted their safety at that hour. Forsaking the care of their property, the Spartans seized their arms, flocked around their king, and drew up in disciplined array. In her most imminent crisis Sparta was thus saved. The Helots approached, wild, disorderly, and tumultuous; they came intent only to plunder and to slay; they expected to find scattered and affrighted foes --they found a formidable army; their tyrants were still their lords. They saw, paused, and fled, scattering themselves over the country, exciting all they met to rebellion, and soon joined with the Messenians, kindred to them by blood and ancient reminiscences of heroic struggles; they seized that same Ithome which their hereditary Aristodemus had before occupied with unforgotten valor. This they fortified, and, occupying also the neighboring lands, declared open war upon their lords." [Footnote: "Athens: Its Rise and Fall," pp. 176, 177.]

"The incident here related of the King of Sparta," says ALISON, "amid the yawning of the earthquake and the ruin of his capital, sounding the trumpets to arms, and the LacedÆmonians assembling in disciplined array around him, is one of the sublimest recorded in history. We need not wonder that a people capable of such conduct in such a moment, and trained by discipline and habit to such docility in danger, should subsequently acquire and maintain supreme dominion in Greece." The general insurrection of the Helots is known in history as the THIRD MESSENIAN WAR. After two or three years had passed in vain attempts to capture Ithome, the Spartans were obliged to call for aid on the Athenians, with whom they were still in avowed alliance. The friends of Pericles, the rival of Cimon and the leader of the democratic party at Athens, opposed granting the desired relief; but Cimon, after some difficulty, persuaded his countrymen to assist the LacedÆmonians, and he himself marched with four thousand men to Ithome. The aid of the Athenians was solicited on account of their acknowledged skill in capturing fortified places; but as Cimon did not succeed in taking Ithome, the Spartans became suspicious of his designs, and summarily sent him back to Athens.

III. THE ACCESSION OF PERICLES TO POWER.

The ill success of the expedition of Cimon gave Pericles the opportunity to place himself and the popular party in power at Athens; for the constitutional reforms that had been gradually weakening the power of the aristocracy were now made available to sweep it almost entirely away. The following extract from BULWER'S Athens briefly yet fully tells what was accomplished in this direction:

"The Constitution previous to Solon was an oligarchy of birth. Solon rendered it an aristocracy of property. Clisthenes widened its basis from property to population; and it was also Clisthenes, in all probability, who weakened the more illicit and oppressive influences of wealth by establishing the ballot of secret suffrage, instead of the open voting which was common in the time of Solon. The Areop'agus was designed by Solon as the aristocratic balance to the popular assembly. This constitutional bulwark of the aristocratic party of Athens became more and more invidious to the people, and when Cimon resisted every innovation on that assembly he only insured his own destruction, while he expedited the policy he denounced. Ephial'tes, the friend and spokesman of Pericles, directed all the force of the popular opinion against this venerable senate; and at length, though not openly assisted by Pericles, who took no prominent part in the contention, that influential statesman succeeded in crippling its functions and limiting its authority."

With regard to the nature of the constitutional changes effected, the same writer adds: "It appears to me most probable that the Areopagus retained the right of adjudging cases of homicide, and little besides of its ancient constitutional authority; that it lost altogether its most dangerous power in the indefinite police it had formerly exercised over the habits and morals of the people; that any control of the finances was wisely transferred to the popular senate; that its irresponsible character was abolished, and that it was henceforth rendered accountable to the people." The struggle between the contending parties was long and bitter, and the fall of Cimon was one of the necessary consequences of the political change. Charged, among other things, with too great friendship for Sparta, he was driven into exile. Pericles now persuaded the Athenians to renounce the alliance with Sparta, and he increased the power of Athens by alliances with Argos and other cities. He also continued the construction of the long walls from Athens to the PirÆus and Phalerum--a project that Themistocles had advised and that Cimon had commenced.

The long existing jealousy of Sparta at last broke out in open hostilities. While the siege of Ithome was in progress, Sparta, still powerful in her alliances, sent her allied forces into Boeotia to counteract the growing influence of the Athenians in that quarter. The indignant Athenians, led by Pericles, marched out to meet them, but were worsted in the battle of Tan'agra. Before this conflict began, Cimon, the banished commander, appeared in the Athenian camp and begged permission to enter the ranks against the enemy. His request being refused, he left his armor with his friends, of whom there were one hundred among the Athenians, with the charge to refute, by their valor, the accusation that he and they were the friends of Sparta. Everyone of the one hundred fell in the conflict. About two months after, in the early part of the year 456 B.C., the Athenians wiped off the stain of their defeat at Tanagra by a victory over the combined Theban and Boeotian forces, then in alliance with Sparta; whereby the authority and influence of Sparta were again confined to the Peloponnesus.

The Athenians were now masters of Greece, from the Gulf of Corinth to the Pass of ThermopylÆ, and in the following year they sent an expedition round the Peloponnesus, which captured, among other cities, Naupactus, on the Corinthian Gulf. The third and last Messenian war had just been concluded by the surrender of Ithome, on terms which permitted the Messenians and their families to retire from the Peloponnesus, and they joined the colony which Athens planted at Naupactus. But the successes of Athens in Greece were counterbalanced, in the same year, by reverses in Egypt, where the Athenians were fighting Persia in aid of In'arus, a Libyan prince. These, with some other minor disasters, and the state of bitter feeling that existed between the two parties at Athens, induced Pericles to recall Cimon from exile and put him in command of an expedition against Cyprus and Egypt. In 449, however, Cimon was taken ill, and he died in the harbor of Ci'tium, to which place he was laying siege.

Before the death of Cimon, and through his intervention, a five years' truce had been concluded with Sparta, and soon after his death peace was made with Persia. From this time the empire of Athens began to decline. In the year 447 B.C. a revolt in Boeotia resulted in the overthrow of Athenian supremacy there, while the expulsion of the Athenians from Pho'cis and Lo'cris, and the revolt of Euboea and Megara, followed soon after. The revolt of Euboea was soon quelled, but this was the only success that Athens achieved. Meanwhile a Spartan army invaded Attica and marched to the neighborhood of Eleusis. Having lost much of her empire, with a fair prospect of losing all of it if hostilities continued, Athens concluded a thirty years' truce with Sparta and her allies, by the terms of which she abandoned her conquests in the Peloponnesus, and Megara became an ally of Sparta (445 B.C.)

THE "AGE OF PERICLES."

With the close of the Persian contest, and the beginning of the Thirty Years' truce, properly begins what has been termed the "Age of Pericles"--the inauguration of a new and important era of Athenian greatness and renown. Having won the highest military honors and political ascendancy, Athens now took the lead in intellectual progress. Themistocles and Cimon had restored to Athens all that of which Xerxes had despoiled it--the former having rebuilt its ruins, and the latter having given to its public buildings a degree of magnificence previously unknown. But Pericles surpassed them both:

Orator and philosopher, as well as statesman and general, Pericles had the most lofty views. "Athens," says a modern writer, "was to become not only the capital of Greece, but the center of art and refinement, and, at the same time, of those democratical theories which formed the beau ideal of the Athenian notions of government." Athens became the center and capital of the most polished communities of Greece; she drew into a focus all the Grecian intellect, and she obtained from her dependents the wealth to administer the arts, which universal traffic and intercourse taught her to appreciate. The treasury of the state being placed in the hands of Pericles, he knew no limit to expenditure but the popular will, which, fortunately for the glories of Grecian art, kept pace with the vast conceptions of the master designer. Most of those famous structures that crowned the Athenian Acropolis, or surrounded its base, were either built or adorned by his direction, under the superintendence of the great sculptor, Phidias. The Parthenon, the Ode'um, the gold and ivory statue of the goddess Minerva, and the Olympian Jupiter--the latter two the work of the great sculptor himself--were alone sufficient to immortalize the "Age of Pericles." Of these miracles of sculpture and of architecture, as well as of the literature of this period, we shall speak farther in a subsequent place.

Of the general condition and appearance of Athens during the fourteen years that the Thirty Years' Truce was observed, HAYGARTH gives us the following poetical description:

But, as the poet adds,

and then began that dismal period between the "Age of Pericles" and the interference of the Romans--embracing the three Peloponnesian wars, the rising power of Macedonia under Philip of Macedon, the wars of Alexander and the contentions that followed--known as the period of the civil convulsions of Greece.