Cimon

Now there were certain Persians who would not abandon the Chersonese, but called in Thracians from the North to help them, despising Cimon, who had sailed out from Athens with only a few triremes all told.[*]( 466 B.C.) But he sallied out against them with his four ships and captured their thirteen, drove out the Persians, overwhelmed the Thracians, and turned the whole Chersonese over to his city for settlement.

And after this, when the Thasians were in revolt from Athens,[*]( 465 B.C.) he defeated them in a sea-fight, captured thirty-three of their ships, besieged and took their city, acquired their gold mines on the opposite mainland for Athens, and took possession of the territory which the Thasians controlled there. From this base he had a good opportunity, as it was thought, to invade Macedonia and cut off a great part of it, and because he would not consent to do it, he was accused of having been bribed to this position by King Alexander, and was actually prosecuted, his enemies forming a coalition against him.[*]( 463 B.C.)

In making his defence before his judges he said he was no proxenus of rich Ionians and Thessalians, as others were, to be courted and paid for their services, but rather of Lacedaemonians, whose temperate simplicity he lovingly imitated, counting no wealth above it, but embellishing the city with the wealth which he got from the enemy.

In mentioning this famous trial Stesimbrotus says that Elpinice came with a plea for Cimon to the house of Pericles, since he was the most ardent accuser, and that he smiled and said, Too old, too old, Elpinice, to meddle with such business. But at the trial he was very gentle with Cimon, and took the floor only once in accusation of him, as though it were a mere formality.

Well then, Cimon was acquitted at this trial. And during the remainder of his political career, when he was at home, he mastered and constrained the people in its onsets upon the nobles, and in its efforts to wrest all office and power to itself; but when he sailed away again on military service,[*]( 462 B.C. See Plut. Cim. 17.) the populace got completely beyond control. They confounded the established political order of things and the ancestral practices which they had formerly observed,

and under the lead of Ephialtes they robbed the Council of the Areiopagus of all but a few of the cases in its jurisdiction. They made themselves masters of the courts of justice, and plunged the city into unmitigated democracy, Pericles being now a man of power and espousing the cause of the populace. And so when Cimon came back home, and in his indignation at the insults heaped upon the reverend council, tried to recall again its jurisdiction and to revive the aristocracy of the times of Cleisthenes, they banded together to denounce him, and tried to inflame the people against him,

renewing the old slanders about his sister and accusing him of being a Spartan sympathizer. It was to these calumnies that the famous and popular verses of Eupolis about Cimon had reference:—

1. He was not base, but fond of wine and full of sloth,
2. and oft he’ld sleep in Lacedaemon, far from home,
3. And leave his Elpinicé sleeping all alone.

It is true indeed that he was from the first a philo-Laconian. He actually named one of his twin sons Lacedaemonius, and the other Eleius,— the sons whom a woman of Cleitor bare him, as Stesimbrotus relates, wherefore Pericles often reproached them with their maternal lineage. But Diodorus the Topographer says that these, as well as the third of Cimon’s sons, Thessalus, were born of Isodice, the daughter of Euryptolemus, the son of Megacles.