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"When you have gained a victory by yourself, Miltiades, then you may ask to triumph so too." One mark of Cimon's great favor with the people, was the judgment, afterwards so famous upon the tragic poets. Sophocles, still a young man, had just brought forward his first plays; opinions were much divided, and the spectators had taken sides with some heat.
Then he hurried on quickly, for observing that Cimon's brow lowered, and his lips quivered, he desired to cut off all words that might lead to altercation. "But I have a request to ask of the Athenian Nauarchus. Will you gratify myself and the fleet by putting your Athenian triremes into play?
At the first, as has been said, when he set himself against Cimon's great authority, he did caress the people.
These advantages greatly impressed the people. The poet Ion, however, says that Pericles was overbearing and insolent in conversation, and that his pride had in it a great deal of contempt for others, while he praises Cimon's civil, sensible, and polished address.
The graves of Cimon's horses, which thrice won the Olympian races, are yet to be seen close by his own monument. Old Xanthippus, too, the father of Pericles, entombed his dogs which swam after his galley to Salamis, when the people fled from Athens, on the top of a cliff, which they call the dogs' tomb to this day.
But Cimon's generosity outdid all the old Athenian hospitality and good-nature.
This was one of the chief occasions of indignation against him among the confederates, who now joining their resentments and forces with Cimon's, besieged him in Byzantium. He escaped out of their hands, and, continuing, as it is said, to be disturbed by the apparition, fled to the oracle of the dead at Heraclea, raised the ghost of Cleonice, and entreated her to be reconciled.
XVIII. The struggle between the contending parties and principles had commenced before Cimon's expedition to Ithome; the mortification connected with that event, in weakening Cimon, weakened the aristocracy itself. Still his fall was not immediate , nor did it take place as a single and isolated event, but as one of the necessary consequences of the great political change effected by Ephialtes.
For should a man except the achievement at Marathon, the sea-fight at Salamis, the engagements at Plataea and Thermopylae, Cimon's exploits at Eurymedon, and on the coasts of Cyprus, Greece fought all her battles against, and to enslave, herself; she erected all her trophies to her own shame and misery, and was brought to ruin and desolation almost wholly by the guilt and ambition of her great men.
And the aristocratical party, seeing that Pericles was already before this grown to be the greatest and foremost man of all the city, but nevertheless wishing there should be somebody set up against him, to blunt and turn the edge of his power, that it might not altogether prove a monarchy, put forward Thucydides of Alopece, a discreet person, and a near kinsman of Cimon's, to conduct the opposition against him.
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