Читать книгу The History of Greece from Its Earliest Beginnings to the Hellenistic Age - John Bagnell Bury - Страница 49

The Athenian republic had now become a democracy in the fullest sense, and the new government was hardly established before it was called upon to prove its capacity. King Cleomenes, who was the greatest man in Greece at the time, could not rest without attempting to avenge the humiliation which he had recently endured at the hands of the Athenian people. The man who had pulled down one tyrant now proposed to set up another. Isagoras, who had hitherto aimed at establishing an oligarchy, now, it would seem, came forward as an aspirant to the tyrannis. Cleomenes arranged with the Boeotians and the Chalcidians a joint attack upon Attica. While the Lacedaemonians and their allies invaded from the south, the Boeotians were to come down from Mount Cithaeron, and the men of Chalcis were to cross the Euripus; the land was to be assailed on three sides at the same moment.

The Peloponnesian host under the two kings, Cleomenes and Demaratus, passed the isthmus and occupied Eleusis; and the Athenians marched to the Eleusinian plain. But the peril on this side passed away without a blow. The Corinthians, on second thoughts, disapproved of the expedition, as unjust, and returned to Corinth. At this time Aegina was the most formidable commercial rival of Corinth, and it therefore suited Corinthian interests to encourage the rising power of Aegina’s enemy. This action of the Corinthians disconcerted the whole army, and the situation was aggravated by the discord between the Spartan leaders, Cleomenes and Demaratus. In the end the army broke up, and there was nothing left for Cleomenes but to return home. His attempt to thrust a tyranny had been as unsuccessful as his previous attempt to thrust an oligarchy upon Athens. For the second time the Athenian democracy had been saved from Spartan coercion. A hundred years hence, indeed, that coercion was to befall her; Cleomenes is the forerunner of Lysander, who will amply avenge him.

The Theban leaders of Boeotia had readily concurred in the Spartan plan, for they had a recent cause of offence against Athens. The town of Plataea, on the Boeotian slope of Mount Cithaeron, was determined to retain her independence and hold aloof from the Boeotian league, which was under the supremacy of Thebes. The Plataeans applied in the first instance to Sparta; but as Sparta was unwilling to interfere, they sought and obtained the help of Athens. This was the beginning of a long friendship between Athens and Plataea, based on mutual interest. Plataea depended on the support of Athens to maintain her independence in Boeotia; while it suited Athens to have a small friendly power on the other side of Cithaeron—a sort of watch-tower against Thebes. The Athenians went to the protection of Plataea, but the threatened conflict was averted by the intervention of Corinth. The Corinthian arbitration ruled that Boeotian cities which did not wish to join the league must not be coerced. But, as they were departing, the Athenians were treacherously attacked by the Thebans, and, winning a victory, they fixed the river Asopus as the southern boundary of the territory of Thebes. The Athenians acquired, by this expedition, a post in Boeotia itself—the town of Hysiae, on the northern slope of Cithaeron.

On the approach of the Peloponnesian army, the Boeotians had seized Hysiae, and crossing the pass of Cithaeron above it had taken Oenoe on the upper Attic slopes. When Cleomenes and the Peloponnesians retreated, the Athenian army marched northward to check the knights of Chalcis who were ravaging the northern demes of Attica. The Boeotian forces then withdrew into their own land and moved northwards too, in order to join the Chalcidians. But the Athenians, who must have been generalled by an able polemarch, succeeded in encountering their two foes singly. They intercepted the Boeotians near the straits and won a complete victory. Then they crossed the straits, for the Chalcidians had retired to their island, and fought another battle, no less decisive, with the horsemen of Chalcis. The defeat of the Chalcidians was so crushing that and the they were forced to cede to Athens a large part of that rich Lelantine plain whose possession in old days they had disputed so hotly with Eretria. But this was not all. A multitude of Chalcidians and Boeotians had been made prisoners; they were kept fettered in bitter bondage until their countrymen ransomed them at two minas a man. We cannot withhold our sympathy from the Athenian people if they dealt out hard measure to those whom the Spartan king had so unjustly stirred up against them. The “gloomy iron chains” in which “they quenched the insolence” of their foes were proudly preserved on the Acropolis, and with a tithe of the ransom they dedicated to Athena a bronze chariot.

A portico commemorative of this victory was set up within the sanctuary of Delphi. “The Athenians dedicated the portico, with the arms and figureheads which they took from their foes—so runs the dedicatory inscription found in recent years on a step of the ruined building. It would appear from this that the Athenians captured and destroyed the ships of Chalcis. If the victory had been some twenty years later, Athens would have added them to her own fleet; but she had not yet come to discern that her true element was the sea.

The democracy had not only brilliantly defended itself, but had won a new territory. The richest part of the Chalcidian plain was divided into lots among two thousand Athenian citizens, who transported their homes to the fertile region beyond the straits—probably under the same conditions as the cleruchs of Salamis.

These outsettlers retained all their rights as citizens; they remained members of their demes and tribes. The Salaminians were so near Athens that it was easier for them than for most of the inhabitants of Attica to attend a meeting of the Ecclesia; and the plain of Chalcis was not farther than Sunium from Athens.

And not only beyond the sea was new territory acquired, but on the borders of Attica itself. This at least is the only occasion to which we can well assign the annexation of the march district of Oropus, the land of the people who gave to the Hellenic race its European name. It had come under the sway of Eretria, had adopted the Eretrian dialect which it was to retain throughout all future vicissitudes, and was the last part of Boeotia to be annexed by the Boeotian power of Thebes. This fertile little plain was destined to be a constant subject of discord between Boeotia and Athens, as it had before been a source of strife between Eretria and Boeoti; but it was now to remain subject to Athens for nearly a hundred years. Subject to Athens, not Athenian; the men of Oropus, like the men of Eleutherae, never became Athenian citizens.