Looking at the position of Greece therefore about 448 B.C.—after the conclusion of five years’ truce between the Peloponnesians and Athens, and of the so-called Cimonian Peace between Persia and Athens—a discerning Greek might well calculate upon further aggrandisement of this imperial state as the tendency of the age; and accustomed as every Greek was to the conception of separate town-autonomy as essential to a freeman and a citizen, such prospect could not but inspire terror and aversion. The sympathy of the Peloponnesians for the islanders and ultra-maritime states, who constituted the original confederacy of Athens, was not considerable. But when the Dorian island of Ægina was subjugated also, and passed into the condition of a defenceless tributary, they felt the blow sorely on every ground. The ancient celebrity, and eminent service rendered at the battle of Salamis, of this memorable island, had not been able to protect it; while those great Æginetan families, whose victories at the sacred festival-games Pindar celebrates in a large proportion of his odes, would spread the language of complaint and indignation throughout their numerous “guests” in every Hellenic city. Of course, the same anti-Athenian feeling would pervade those Peloponnesian states which had been engaged in actual hostility with Athens—Corinth, Sicyon, Epidaurus, etc., as well as Sparta, the once-recognised head of Hellas, but now tacitly degraded from her pre-eminence, baffled in her projects respecting Bœotia, and exposed to the burning of her port at Gythium without being able even to retaliate upon Attica. Putting all those circumstances together, we may comprehend the powerful feeling of dislike and apprehension now diffused so widely over Greece against the upstart despot-city; whose ascendency, newly acquired, maintained by superior force, and not recognised as legitimate, threatened nevertheless still further increase. Sixteen years hence, this same sentiment will be found exploding into the Peloponnesian War. But it became rooted in the Greek mind during the period which we have now reached, when Athens was much more formidable than she had come to be at the commencement of that war: nor shall we thoroughly appreciate the ideas of that later period, unless we take them as handed down from the earlier date of the five years’ truce (about 451-446 B.C.).
COMMENCEMENT OF DECLINE
Formidable as the Athenian empire both really was and appeared to be, however, this widespread feeling of antipathy proved still stronger, so that instead of the threatened increase, the empire underwent a most material diminution. This did not arise from the attack of open enemies; for during the five years’ truce, Sparta undertook only one movement, and that not against Attica: she sent troops to Delphi, in an expedition dignified with the name of the Sacred War—expelled the Phocians, who had assumed to themselves the management of the temple—and restored it to the native Delphians. To this the Athenians made no direct opposition, but as soon as the Lacedæmonians were gone, they themselves marched thither and placed the temple again in the hands of the Phocians, who were then their allies. The Delphians were members of the Phocian league, and there was a dispute of old standing as to the administration of the temple—whether it belonged to them separately or to the Phocians collectively. The favour of those who administered it counted as an element of considerable moment in Grecian politics; the sympathies of the leading Delphians led them to embrace the side of Sparta, but the Athenians now hoped to counteract this tendency by means of their preponderance in Phocis. We are not told that the Lacedæmonians took any ulterior step in consequence of their views being frustrated by Athens—a significant evidence of the politics of that day.
[447 B.C.]