The Historians' History of the World 03

These important acquisitions were soon crowned by the completion of the Long Walls and the conquest of Ægina. That island, doubtless starved out by its protracted blockade, was forced to capitulate on condition of destroying its fortifications, surrendering all its ships of war, and submitting to annual tribute as a dependent ally of Athens. The reduction of this once powerful maritime city marked Athens as mistress of the sea on the Peloponnesian coast not less than on the Ægean. Her admiral Tolmides displayed her strength by sailing round Peloponnesus, and even by the insult of burning the Lacedæmonian ports of Methone and of Gythium. He took Chalcis, a possession of the Corinthians, and Naupactus belonging to the Ozolian Locrians, near the mouth of the Corinthian Gulf, disembarked troops near Sicyon, with some advantage in a battle against opponents from that town, and either gained or forced into the Athenian alliance not only Zacynthus and Cephallenia, but also some of the towns of Achaia; for we afterwards find these latter attached to Athens without knowing when the connection began. During the ensuing year the Athenians renewed their attack upon Sicyon, with a force of one thousand hoplites under Pericles himself, sailing from the Megarian harbour of Pegæ in the Crissæan Gulf. This eminent man, however, gained no greater advantage than Tolmides, defeating the Sicyonian forces in the field and driving them within their walls. He afterwards made an expedition into Acarnania, taking the Achæan allies in addition to his own forces, but miscarried in his attack on Œniadæ and accomplished nothing. Nor were the Athenians more successful in a march undertaken this same year against Thessaly, for the purpose of restoring Orestes, one of the exiled princes or nobles of Pharsalus. Though they took with them an imposing force, including their Bœotian and Phocian allies, the powerful Thessalian cavalry forced them to keep in a compact body and confined them to the ground actually occupied by their hoplites; while all their attempts against the city failed, and their hopes of internal rising were disappointed.

Had the Athenians succeeded in Thessaly, they would have acquired to their alliance nearly the whole of extra-Peloponnesian Greece. But even without Thessaly their power was prodigious, and had now attained a maximum height from which it never varied except to decline. As a counter-balancing loss against so many successes, we have to reckon their ruinous defeat in Egypt, after a war of six years against the Persians (460-455 B.C.). At first they had gained brilliant advantages, in conjunction with the insurgent prince Inarus; expelling the Persians from all Memphis except that strongest part called the White Fortress. And such was the alarm of the Persian king Artaxerxes at the presence of the Athenians in Egypt, that he sent Megabazus with a large sum of money to Sparta, in order to induce the Lacedæmonians to invade Attica. This envoy however failed, and an augmented Persian force, being sent to Egypt under Megabyzus, son of Zopyrus, drove the Athenians and their allies, after an obstinate struggle, out of Memphis into the island of the Nile called Prosopitis. Here they were blocked up for eighteen months, until at length Megabyzus turned the arm of the river, laid the channel dry, and stormed the island by land. A very few Athenians escaped by land to Cyrene: the rest were either slain or made captive, and Inarus himself was crucified. And the calamity of Athens was farther aggravated by the arrival of fifty fresh Athenian ships, which, coming after the defeat, but without being aware of it, sailed into the Mendesian branch of the Nile, and thus fell unawares into the power of the Persians and Phœnicians, very few either of the ships or men escaping. The whole of Egypt became again subject to the Persians, except Amyrtæus, who contrived by retiring into the inaccessible fens still to maintain his independence. One of the largest armaments ever sent forth by Athens and her confederacy was thus utterly ruined.

It was about the time of the destruction of the Athenian army in Egypt, and of the circumnavigation of Peloponnesus by Tolmides, that the internal war, carried on by the Lacedæmonians against the helots or Messenians at Ithome, ended. These besieged men, no longer able to stand out against a protracted blockade, were forced to abandon this last fortress of ancient Messenian independence, stipulating for a safe retreat from the Peloponnesus with their wives and families; with the proviso that if any one of them ever returned to Peloponnesus, he should become the slave of the first person who seized him. They were established by Tolmides at Naupactus (recently taken by the Athenians from the Ozolian Locrians), where they will be found rendering good service to Athens in the following wars.

THE FIVE-YEARS’ TRUCE

[455-448 B.C.]