The Historians' History of the World 03

Though the battle of Tanagra was a defeat, yet there were circumstances connected with it which rendered its effects highly beneficial to Athens. The ostracised Cimon presented himself on the field, as soon as the army had passed over the boundaries of Attica, requesting to be allowed to occupy his station as a hoplite and fight in the ranks of his tribe—the Œneis. But such was the belief, entertained by the members of the senate and by his political enemies present, that he was an accomplice in the conspiracy known to be on foot, that permission was refused and he was forced to retire. In departing he conjured his personal friends, Euthippus (of the deme Anaphlystus) and others, to behave in such a manner as might wipe away the stain resting upon his fidelity, and in part also upon theirs. His friends retained his panoply and assigned to it the station in the ranks which he would himself have occupied: they then entered the engagement with desperate resolution and one hundred of them fell side by side in their ranks. Pericles, on his part, who was present among the hoplites of his own tribe the Acamantii, aware of this application and repulse of Cimon, thought it incumbent upon him to display not merely his ordinary personal courage, but an unusual recklessness of life and safety, though it happened that he escaped unwounded. All these incidents brought about a generous sympathy and spirit of compromise among the contending parties at Athens; while the unshaken patriotism of Cimon and his friends discountenanced and disarmed those conspirators who had entered into correspondence with the enemy, at the same time that it roused a repentant admiration towards the ostracised leader himself. Such was the happy working of this new sentiment that a decree was shortly proposed and carried—proposed too by Pericles himself—to abridge the ten years of Cimon’s ostracism, and permit his immediate return.

We may recollect that under circumstances partly analogous, Themistocles had himself proposed the restoration of his rival Aristides from ostracism, a little before the battle of Salamis: and in both cases, the suspension of enmity between the two leaders was partly the sign, partly also the auxiliary cause, of reconciliation and renewed fraternity among the general body of citizens. It was a moment analogous to that salutary impulse of compromise, and harmony of parties, which followed the extinction of the oligarchy of Four Hundred, forty-six years afterwards, and on which Thucydides dwells emphatically as the salvation of Athens in her distress—a moment rare in free communities generally, not less than among the jealous competitors for political ascendency at Athens.

So powerful was this burst of fresh patriotism and unanimity after the battle of Tanagra, which produced the recall of Cimon and appears to have overlaid the pre-existing conspiracy, that the Athenians were quickly in a condition to wipe off the stain of their defeat. It was on the sixty-second day after the battle that they undertook an aggressive march under Myronides into Bœotia: the extreme precision of this date (being the single case throughout the summary of events between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars wherein Thucydides is thus precise) marks how strong an impression it made upon the memory of the Athenians. At the battle of Œnophyta, engaged against the aggregate Theban and Bœotian forces, or, if Diodorus is to be trusted, in two battles, of which that of Œnophyta was the last, Myronides was completely victorious. The Athenians became masters of Thebes as well as of the remaining Bœotian towns; reversing all the arrangements recently made by Sparta, establishing democratical governments, and forcing the aristocratical leaders, favourable to Theban ascendency and Lacedæmonian connection, to become exiles. Nor was it only Bœotia which the Athenians thus acquired; Phocis and Locris were both successively added to the list of their dependent allies, the former being in the main friendly to Athens and not disinclined to the change, while the latter were so decidedly hostile that one hundred of their chiefs were detained and sent to Athens as hostages. The Athenians thus extended their influence, maintained through internal party-management, backed by the dread of interference from without in case of need, from the borders of the Corinthian territory, including both Megara and Pegæ, to the strait of Thermopylæ.

[457-456 B.C.]