Cimon

Cimon was born into towering expectations. His father, Miltiades, struck the blow at Marathon; his family held ties to the Philaid clan and the aristocratic culture of elite patronage. As a young man he possessed easy charisma and physical courage, the kind that won him allies in the assembly and loyalty in the ranks. He married Isodice and cultivated an image of munificence: ancient writers relish the detail of Cimon’s open estates, where citizens could share in his orchards, and his habit of dining poor Athenians. He was aristocratic but not aloof, a man who made status feel like stewardship.

His strategic horizon was wide. In the 470s he drove Persian garrisons from Eion on the Strymon and smashed a Persian fleet and army at the Eurymedon River in Pamphylia (c. 466 BCE), a double victory so complete that it became proverbial. He brought the bones of Theseus home from Skyros, gilding imperial policy with mythic piety, and he adorned public spaces—planting plane trees in the Agora—as if to root civic pride in his own benefaction. In domestic politics, he led the aristocratic, pro‑Spartan faction, convinced that Sparta and Athens, together, could stabilize Greece. That conviction became his trap. When an earthquake in 464 BCE touched off a Helot revolt, Cimon urged sending an Athenian force to aid Sparta. The Spartans, suspicious of democratic agitators, sent the force home in humiliation. The city boiled. In 461 BCE, the demos used ostracism to rebalance policy: “Cimon son of Miltiades” was voted a ten-year exile. The measured brutality of the procedure—no trial, no confiscation, just enforced absence—removed the one man who could block the radical reforms of Ephialtes and the rise of Pericles.

Cimon was not a schemer; he was a believer. His generosity was genuine, but it could shade into complacency about privilege and deference. He misread the depth of Athenian anger after Sparta’s insult and underestimated how quickly the crowd could turn a gratitude economy into a reckoning. Yet even his enemies acknowledged his courage. He accepted exile with resignation rather than fury and, when recalled around 451, negotiated a five-year peace with Sparta and died campaigning on Cyprus.

His legacy is the paradox of a victorious general removed by a grateful city that needed to change course. Cimon’s ostracism is the hinge between an aristocratic, Sparta-friendly Athens and the Periclean democracy that would centralize power at home and project it abroad. The event exemplifies how ostracism worked as a safety valve: rather than purge a faction, Athenians shelved its leader, lowering the temperature without bloodshed. Cimon’s victories helped build an empire; his exile helped determine what kind of empire it would be.