5 - Mainland Greece, 479–451 b. c.

Summary

FROM 479 TO 461

There is no reason to doubt that the Hellenic alliance had taken some form of oath to punish medizing states, though the versions least affected by later propaganda contain an escape clause which would allow interpretation (Hdt. VII.132‘those who had not been forced’, paraphrased as ‘voluntarily’ by Diod. XI.3.3). But while Leotychidas and the Peloponnesians on the other side of the Aegean were still contemplating a wholesale expulsion of the medizers of northern Greece (Hdt. IX.106.3), Pausanias, in the aftermath of Plataea, was already faced with interpreting the programme in the light of realism and military necessity. A few miles from the battlefield, Thebes still held out. After ten days he turned his force on the city, but its walls provided a substantial obstacle and he may not have wished to proceed by a prolonged siege (it will have been at least well into September). The medizing party is said to have lost 300 men of its ‘first and best’ in the battle, a substantial number for a narrow oligarchy. A settlement was reached by which the city, no doubt already throwing the blame on a small group (Thuc. III.62.3–4; contrast Hdt. IX.87.2), and with earlier services to the Greek cause to claim (Hdt. VII.202, 222; Plut. De mal. Hdt. 864–7), simply handed over the principal medizers, who were later executed (Hdt. IX.86–8). It seems likely that it was at this point that Thebes and other Boeotian cities became or reverted to being the hoplite democracies which seem to have been the norm later in the century.