Cimon

Athenian general and statesman

• Born: c. 510 b.c.e.
• Birthplace: Unknown
• Died: c. 451 b.c.e.
• Place of death: Near Citium (now Larnaca), Cyprus

Through skillful military leadership and diplomacy, Cimon became an important force behind the establishment of the Delian League—a Greek alliance against the Persians—and its later transformation into the Athenian Empire. Domestically, he struggled unsuccessfully against the extension of democracy in ancient Athens.

Early Life

As the oldest child of Miltiades the Younger, the victor of the Battle of Marathon, and Hegesipyle, the daughter of King Olorus of Thrace, Cimon (SI-muhn) inherited the political leadership and influence of one of the most ancient and respected aristocratic families in Athens, the Philaidae clan. He received a traditional Athenian education, emphasizing simple literacy skills and athletic prowess, as opposed to the stress on rhetoric and speculative philosophy that would prevail in later generations. As a youth, however, Cimon disappointed his fellow clan members and other Philaidae supporters by his dissolute behavior. His riotous living and heavy drinking recalled to Athenian minds the infamous conduct of his grandfather and namesake, Cimon, nicknamed koalemos (the “nincompoop”). The younger Cimon’s irresponsible attitudes threatened to cast the Philaidae clan into obscurity in an Athenian political arena in which familial relationships and alliances counted for much in the competition for power.

Although Cimon possessed the personal assets essential to successful political leadership—high intelligence and an impressive physical appearance—he also entered manhood in the 480’s with crippling liabilities. His father’s conviction in 489 for “deceiving the people” had cast disrepute on the Philaidae, while responsibility for the enormous fine imposed at the trial impoverished Cimon for several years after Miltiades’ death. Inability to provide a dowry for his beautiful sister, Elpinice, forced him to support her in his own household under circumstances that incited rumors of incestuous relations. (Ancient and modern historians have debated the nature of Cimon’s relationship with Elpinice. Many believe that she was his half sister, and thereby, appropriately married to Cimon under Athenian law and custom, which allowed such unions.) Cimon’s hopes for a successful political career appeared dim.

Persia’s invasion of Greece in 480 thrust Cimon into the limelight and decidedly reversed his political fortunes. When the Persian king Xerxes I invaded Attica and threatened Athens, the city’s leaders had difficulty persuading the populace to adhere to the previously agreed-on strategy: evacuation of noncombatants and concentration of military resources and personnel with the fleet in the Bay of Salamis. Cimon resolved to set an example for the young aristocrats who traditionally formed the small, Athenian cavalry contingent. He led his comrades up to the Acropolis, where he was the first to dedicate his horse’s bridle on the altar of Athena. Seizing a shield from the wall of the sanctuary, he then joined the fleet at Salamis as a simple hoplite. His actions inspired his fellow Athenians. After fighting courageously at the subsequent Battle of Salamis, Cimon emerged a hero from the Great Persian War. He was not slow to utilize his refurbished reputation.

Life’s Work

About 480, Cimon was married to Isodice, an Athenian woman from the Alcmaeonidae clan. Together, they had at least three sons: twins, Lakedaimonios and Oulios, and Thettalos. According to some ancient sources, Cimon also had three other sons—Cimon, Miltiades, and Peisianax—although most modern historians are skeptical of the existence of these children. Marriage to Isodice promised important political advantages, yet Cimon also loved her passionately, and the depth of his devotion to her was unusual enough to induce comment from contemporary observers and ancient historians.

Shortly after his own marriage, Cimon was able to find a husband for Elpinice. She was betrothed to Callias of Alopeke, a member of the Hipponikos clan and the richest man in Athens. This new brother-in-law assisted Cimon in paying his father’s fine and recouping the Philaidae clan’s finances. More important, the marriages of Cimon and Elpinice forged an alliance among three of the most politically important clan-factions in Athens: the Philaidae, Alcmaeonidae, and Hipponikos. This coalition may have been directed against Themistocles, who had emerged from the Great Persian War as the leading Athenian politician; his skilled courting of the populace engendered defensive reactions from fellow aristocrats.

Although Cleisthenes of Athens had instituted democratic reforms to the Athenian constitution, aristocratic clan-factions, especially those based in Athens itself, still exerted considerable influence over the city’s political life. Because payment for public officials was as yet unknown in Athens, only men of independent financial means could spare the time and energy necessary to state service. Ordinary Athenian voters tended to coalesce around aristocratic leaders, who could assist them with financial and judicial problems. In the 470’s and 460’s, Cimon was especially renowned for his skillful use of this “politics of largesse,” that is, the disbursement of monetary and commodity gratuities in the hope of securing votes.

Changes in Athenian constitutional practices during the 480’s strengthened aristocratic influences on government. The prestige of the Areopagus—a judicial-administrative body composed of former archons drawn from the upper classes—increased during the Persian War because of its skilled handling of the crisis. Moreover, the decision in 488/487 to select archons by lot actually enhanced the ability of the aristocracy to direct Athenian politics, because consequently the strategoi (board of generals) increasingly assumed leadership of the Assembly and the Council of Five Hundred. Unlike the archons, the strategoi could be elected to office consecutively and as many times as possible. During the 470’s and 460’s, aristocratic defenders of the status quo, such as Cimon and Aristides, served as strategoi for years, dominating Athenian foreign policy and influencing domestic developments.

These years also witnessed the establishment of the Delian League, an alliance between Athens and numerous Ionian and Aegean city-states, by which continuous war was vigorously pursued against the Persian Empire. In the 470’s, Cimon’s fair treatment of Athens’s allies in the league spread his fame over the Greek world and ensured for him perennial command of major military expeditions. Between 476 and 469, he expelled from Byzantium the renegade Spartan commander Pausanias, seized Eion on the Strymon River from the Persians, and conquered Scyros from Dolopian pirates and colonized it with Athenians. During the latter expedition, Cimon discovered and transported to Athens the supposed bones of Theseus, the mythical founder of the Athenian state, an act that fulfilled an ancient oracle and won for him great applause.

Cimon’s finest military achievement, however, took place at the mouth of the Eurymedon River in 466. There, utilizing a self-designed trireme that accommodated a greater number of hoplites, Cimon destroyed a large Persian fleet and defeated an accompanying army on land. A Phoenician fleet sailing to reinforce the Persians was similarly devastated by the new triremes. Cimon had brought Athens and the league to the pinnacle of success. Persian presence in the Aegean, in Ionia, and on the shores of southern Asia Minor had been obliterated. Cimon’s foreign policy—peace with Sparta and other Greeks and concentration on the traditional Persian enemy—had proved its value.

The leader of the Philaidae, nevertheless, teetered dangerously on the brink of political disaster, as his tremendous success had aroused the jealousies of aristocratic rivals. Following Cimon’s successful siege of Thasos—a city-state that had attempted to secede from the Delian League—and his conquest of the Persian-occupied Chersonese, he was brought to trial for allegedly accepting a bribe from Alexander I of Macedon not to attack his territory. Although Cimon was acquitted, the charge was an ominous portent of difficulties to come: The accusation had been brought by a young Pericles and other aristocrats intent on further democratizing the Athenian state to their own political advantage.

During the trial, Cimon had convincingly pleaded his incorruptibility by citing his long tenure as proxenos (a Greek who officially represented the interests of another city-state to his fellow citizens) for Sparta, whose citizens were known for their self-imposed poverty and inability to provide large monetary rewards for services rendered. Cimon’s admiration for Spartan culture and military institutions was well known to his fellow Athenians, but previously his loyalty to his own city-state had gone unquestioned. Worsening relations between Athens and Sparta would soon cast suspicion on Cimon and his pro-Spartan foreign policy and thereby wreck his political career.

By the late 460’s, an earlier spirit of cooperation and friendship between Athens and Sparta, proceeding from the Persian War, had been replaced by fear and hostility. The tremendous growth of Athens’s power—realized through the gradual conversion of the Delian League into an Athenian Empire —was largely responsible for this change. The Spartans so greatly resented Athenian usurpation of their traditional leadership role in Greece that they promised Thasos an invasion of Attica to support the Thasian secession attempt. Before the Spartans were able to execute their plan, however, Laconia was struck by a severe earthquake and a widespread helot (serf) rebellion. Sparta was forced to call on other Greek cities, including Athens, for aid.

Among the Athenians, the debate over aid to Sparta grew acrimonious. The so-called democratic party, led by Ephialtes, strongly opposed assisting the Spartans, regarding them as dangerous rivals. Cimon, on the other hand, argued that abandoning the Spartans would weaken all Greece, while he referred to Sparta as Athens’s “yoke-fellow.” In the end, his position prevailed, because the Athenians had not yet learned of Spartan complicity in the Thasian revolt. In 462, Cimon led a large Athenian army into Laconia to assist in the suppression of the helots.

With Cimon away on this expedition, Ephialtes and Pericles moved to weaken the foundations of conservative rule in Athens. They began by bringing forth accusations of malfeasance against prominent members of the Areopagus. Meanwhile, in Laconia, Cimon and his army suffered the ignominy of a curt dismissal by the Spartans, who probably feared that progressive Athenian political ideas would exacerbate Sparta’s current problems with subject peoples. When Cimon returned to Athens, he faced the wrath of prideful Athenians, distrustful of Sparta and humiliated by the recent events in Laconia. With emotions running high against the Spartans, Cimon’s admiration for them appeared treasonous to many Athenians. In 461, he was ostracized, a formal, political procedure by which leaders considered dangerous to Athens were exiled for ten years. In Cimon’s absence, Ephialtes and Pericles stripped the Areopagus of nearly all of its judicial and administrative powers and strengthened those of the Assembly, the Council of Five Hundred, and the law courts. Athens had entered the final, radical phase of democratization.

With Cimon in exile and his pro-Spartan policies thoroughly discredited, relations between Athens and Sparta deteriorated. In 459, war broke out between the two cities and their allies. This conflict, known as the Great Peloponnesian War, lasted until 445. Initially, the Athenians enjoyed success, despite the fact that the war with Persia continued in Cyprus and Egypt, and necessitated the dispersal of Athens’s resources over several theaters of action. In 457, however, the Spartans and their allies counterattacked by invading central Greece and directly threatening to invade Attica.

The Athenians, Spartans, and their respective allies met at Tanagra, a small city in southern Boeotia. Athenian morale was low because of pervasive rumors of a pro-Spartan conspiracy by Cimon’s supporters and other clan-factions against the new democratic state. Nevertheless, before the battle began, Cimon appeared fully armed and offered his services to the Athenian generals. Although suspicion of Cimon’s motives caused his offer to be spurned, the leader of the Philaidae exhorted his friends and relatives along the Athenian battle line to give their greatest efforts to demonstrate their loyalty to Athens. In the subsequent battle, the Philaidae faction fought courageously, making up a disproportionate number of the Athenian dead. Sympathy for Cimon revived in Athens.

While Cimon’s gift for political theatrics rejuvenated his public image, events elsewhere set the stage for his return to Athens. In 454, the large Athenian expeditionary force in Egypt was annihilated by the Persians. This reversal of fortunes incited several revolts against Athenian rule in Ionia and the Aegean region. Cimon was recalled from exile as the statesman who could best attenuate Athens’s overextended military commitments by making peace with Sparta. In 451, he returned to Athens and negotiated a five-year truce with the Spartans. In the next year, serving again as strategos, Cimon led an expedition to Cyprus, where he died while besieging Citium, fighting once again the Persians.

Significance

Although as fiercely competitive as any Greek aristocrat, Cimon was extraordinary in his dedication to principle and loyalty to his city-state. By adhering to three policies—aristocratic predominance in Athenian democracy, peace and fair-dealing with fellow Greeks, and war against the Persians—he remained unusually consistent over a long career. His political style transcended the personal and clan rivalries that had structured Athenian politics for centuries and presaged a reshaping of political competition along ideological lines in the latter fifth and fourth centuries.

Bibliography

Burn, A. R. Pericles and Athens. London: English Universities Press, 1948. Contains useful material on the relationship between Cimon and Pericles. Burn’s depiction of Cimon as a myopic, obtuse conservative is overdrawn. It was Cimon, after all, not Pericles, who stressed Greek unity against the Persians, in anticipation of similar fourth century visions.

Kagan, Donald. The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969. Serves well as an introduction to interstate relations in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean worlds during the period of Cimon’s career. Important chapters on Spartan and Athenian internal politics show the relationships between domestic developments in these city-states and the growth of hostility between them. May also be used as a guide to the ancient sources on Cimon and his times.

Laistner, M. L. W. A History of the Greek World from 479 to 323 B.C. London: Methuen, 1962. This introductory book should be consulted first by those unfamiliar with Cimon’s era. It is also useful as a broad outline of ideological interpretations of Athenian politics after the Great Persian War.

McGregor, Malcolm F. The Athenians and Their Empire. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1987. Written especially for students and nonprofessional historians, this is a very useful introduction to its subject. Although lacking footnotes, the information is highly reliable. Numerous maps, appendices, charts, and a glossary of Greek political terminology make this volume required reading for beginners.

Meiggs, Russell. The Athenian Empire. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1972. This is the standard, scholarly work on its subject, replete with footnotes that can be used to guide the reader to ancient sources. Also contains detailed discussions of the controversial issues surrounding the Athenian Empire.

Plutarch. The Rise and Fall of Athens: Nine Greek Lives. Translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1960. An adaptation of Plutarch’s famous Bioi parallēloi (c. 105-115 c.e.; Parallel Lives), this volume contains the biographies of nine important Athenians. Plutarch’s “Life of Cimon,” contained herein, is the most significant source of information on him and the place to start serious research. Use Plutarch only in conjunction with modern histories, however, because his love of a good story often led him to errors, which later historians have corrected.

Schreiner, Johan Henrik. Hellanikos, Thukydides and the Era of Kimon. Oakville, Conn.: Aarhus University Press, 1997. History includes bibliography and index.

Sealey, Raphael. A History of the Greek City-States, c. 700-338 B.C. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Written by a prominent proponent of the prosopographical approach to Greek politics, that is, the concept that personal and familial relations overrode ideological issues in shaping events. Includes discussion of major aspects of Cimon’s life and times, with ancient sources referenced. Most historians have not found Sealey’s interpretation of Athenian politics in the era 480 to 450 to be persuasive, because ideology does seem to have structured political behavior much more clearly after the Great Persian War than before.

Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Robert B. Strassler. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998. Contains Thucydides’ famous account of the period between the Great Persian War and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War. While recounting the development of hostility between Athens and Sparta, Thucydides reveals much about the Athenian Empire and Cimon’s role in its establishment and expansion.