Page:History of Greece Vol VI.djvu/90

 68 mSTORY OF GREECE. taken part, fifty years before, in the expedition of Xerxes. Thes two princes appear gradually to have extended their dominions, after the ruin of Persian power in Thrace by the exertions of Athens, until at length they acquired all the territory between the rivers Axius and Strymon. Now Perdikkas had been for some time the friend and ally of Athens ; but there were other Macedonian princes, his brother Philip and Derdas, holding in dependent principalities in the upper country, 1 apparently on the higher course of the Axius near the Paeonian tribes, with whom he was in a state of dispute. These princes having been ac- cepted as the allies of Athens, Perdikkas from that time became her active enemy, and it was from his intrigues that all the diffi- culties of Athens on that coast took their first origin. The Athenian empire was much less complete and secure over the seaports on the mainland than over the islands : 2 for the former were always more or less dependent on any powerful kind- neighbor, sometimes more dependent on him than upon the mis- tress of the sea ; and we shall find Athens herself cultivating assiduously the favor of Sitalkes and other strong Thracian potentates, as an aid to her dominion over the seaports. 3 Per- dikkas immediately began to incite and aid the Chalkidians and Bottia3ans to revolt from Athens, and the violent enmity against the latter, kindled in the bosoms of the Corinthians by the recent events at Korkyra, enabled him to extend the same projects to Potidsea. Not only did he send envoys to Corinth in order to 1 Thucyd. i, 57; ii, 100. 120-122. 3 Thucyd. ii, 29-98. Isokrates has a remarkable passage on this subject in the beginning of Or. v, ad Philippum, sects. 5-7. After pointing out the imprudence of founding a colony on the skirts of the territory of a powerful potentate, and the excellent site which had been chosen for Kv- rene, as being near only to feeble tribes, he goes so far as to say tnat the possession of Amphipolis would be injurious rather than beneficial to Athens, because it would render her dependent upon Philip, from his power of annoying her colonists, just as she had been dependent before upon Mcdokus, the Thracian king, in consequence of her colonists in the Cher- tonese, uvaynaa'dTjaonr&a TTJV O.TJTIJV evvotav %etv rotf aoif Trpuyftact 6it) rot)f Lvrav-da (at Amphipolis) KaroiKovvraf, olav Trep el^o/tev M^doKW rift i<> 6ia roiif iv Xtppovfjou
 * See two remarkable passages illustrating this difference, Thucyd. iv,