Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/318

 294 HISTORY OF GREECE. of subjequent results is fatal to any correct understanding, either of the real agents or of the real period ; both of which are to be explained from the circumstances preceding and actually present, with some help, though cautious and sparing, from our acquaint- ance with that which was then an unknown future. When Aris- teides and Kimon dismissed the Lacedaemonian admiral Dorkis, and di'ove Pausanias away from Byzantium on his second coming out, they had to deal with the problem immediately before th%m ; they had to complete the defeat of the Persian power, still for- midable, — and to create and organize a confederacy as yet only inchoate. This was quite enough to occupy their attention, with- out ascribing to them distant views of Athenian maritime empire. In that brief sketch of incidents preceding the Peloponnesian war, which Thucydides introduces as " the throwing off* of his narrative,"' he neither gives, nor professes to give, a complete enumeration of all which actually occurred. During the interval between the first desertion of the Asiatic allies from Pausanias to Athens, in 477 B.C., — and the revolt of Naxos in 466 B.C., — he recites three incidents only : first, the siege and capture of £ion, on the Strymon, with its Persian garrison, — next, the capture of Skyros, and appropriation of the island to Athenian kleruchs, or out-citizens, — thirdly, the war with Karystus in Euboea, and reduction of the place by capitulation. It has been too much the practice to reason as if these three events were the full history of ten or eleven years. Considering what Thucydides states respecting the darkness of this period, we might perhaps suspect that they were all which he could learn about it on good authority : and they are all, in truth, events having a near and special bearing on the subsequent history of Athens herself, — for Eion was the first stepping-stone to the important settlement of Amphipolis, and Skyros in the time of Thucydides was the property of outlying Athenian citizens, or kleruchs. Still, Ave are left in almost entire ignorance of the proceedings of Athens, as conducting the newly-established con- federate force : for it is certain that the first ten years of the Athenian hegemony must have been years of most active ' Thucyd. i, 97. eypafa is avru Kal ttjv c«/3o/l^v tov Xoyov trcoLTiaujxrjv 6iu Toih, etc.