Cimon

Cimon was born around 510 BCE into the glare of Athenian fame and expectation. His father, Miltiades, had commanded at Marathon; his sister Elpinice moved in the city’s political salons. By temperament generous and aristocratic, Cimon opened his estates to feed citizens and decorated Athens with spoils. He grew into leadership amid the early Delian League, when triremes flashed blue across the Aegean and Persian garrisons were still to be uprooted. His victories at Eion on the Strymon (c. 476 BCE), Scyros (c. 474 BCE), and the Eurymedon in Pamphylia (c. 466 BCE) made him the league’s sword arm and a man whose word carried weight at home and among allies.

That prestige set him at the center of a crisis he could not solve. In 464 BCE, an earthquake ripped through Laconia, toppling Spartan houses and opening a fissure in political order. Helots and Messenians seized Mount Ithome, reviving the old mountain citadel as a rebel fortress. Sparta summoned allies, and Cimon persuaded a skeptical Athenian assembly to send aid, arguing for Hellenic concord and the old alliance. He led a force—ancient sources speak of 4,000 hoplites—across the Gulf to the siege lines. But inside the Spartan camp, gratitude turned to suspicion. The Athenians’ knack for “innovation,” their democratic audacity, made Spartan leaders fear contagion. In 462 BCE they dismissed Cimon’s contingent, keeping other allies. The affront detonated in Athens: Cimon’s policy of friendship was discredited, radical democrats surged, and within a year he was ostracized.

Cimon faced challenges with a soldier’s calm and an aristocrat’s pride. He could be imperious in debate, yet his philanthropy and personal bravery won loyalty in the ranks. He believed Sparta’s discipline and Athens’ energy should complement each other; reality pulled them apart. The Ithome dismissal stung his honor and cost him influence, but he did not renounce the ideal of concord. Even in semi‑retirement he sought ways back into public service and, after recall, returned to command—dying in 450 BCE at Citium during a campaign against Persia.

Cimon’s importance to the Messenian story lies in what he could not achieve. His mission to Ithome translated Spartan fear of helots into a diplomatic rupture with Athens. The truce that allowed the rebels to depart and Athens’ settlement of the Messenians at Naupactus in 460 BCE hardened lines into the decade’s polarization. Cimon’s life thus brackets the transformation of helot revolt from a Spartan domestic problem into a fault line of Greek geopolitics. He remains the last great advocate of a Sparta–Athens partnership that might have contained that fear; his failure suggests why it could not hold.