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Updated: June 20, 2025
Cimon was left an orphan very young, with his sister Elpinice, who was also young and unmarried. And at first he had but an indifferent reputation, being looked upon as disorderly in his habits, fond of drinking, and resembling his grandfather, also called Cimon, in character, whose simplicity got him the surname of Coalemus the simpleton.
As he came down from the stage on which he spoke, all the women except Elpinice, the aged sister of Cimon, came out and complimented him, taking him by the hand, and crowning him with garlands and ribbons, like a victorious athlete in the games.
They accused him, in his younger years, of cohabiting with his own sister Elpinice, who, indeed, otherwise had no very clear reputation, but was reported to have been over intimate with Polygnotus, the painter; and hence, when he painted the Trojan women in the porch, then called the Plesianactium, and now the Poecile, he made Laodice a portrait of her.
But Thucydides was of the township of Halimus, and Miltiades and his family were Laciadae. Miltiades, being condemned in a fine of fifty talents to the State, and unable to pay it, was cast into prison, and there died. Thus Cimon was left an orphan very young, with his sister Elpinice, who was also young and unmarried.
By this means the historian Thucydides was his kinsman by the mother's side; for his father's name also, in remembrance of this common ancestor, was Olorus, and he was the owner of the gold mines in Thrace, and met his death, it is said, by violence, in Scapte Hyle, a district of Thrace; and his remains having afterwards been brought into Attica, a monument is shown as his among those of the family of Cimon, near the tomb of Elpinice, Cimon's sister.
Some affirm that Elpinice lived with her brother, not secretly, but as his married wife, her poverty excluding her from any suitable match. But afterward, when Callias, one of the richest men of Athens, fell in love with her, and proffered to pay the fine the father was condemned in, if he could obtain the daughter in marriage, with Elpinice's own consent, Cimon betrothed her to Callias.
“And now to the great marvel—did Glaucon truly seek her not for dowry, nor rank, but for sheer love?” “Marriages for love are in fashion to-day,” said Democrates, with a side glance at Cimon, whose sister Elpinice had just made a love match with Callias the Rich, to the scandal of all the prudes in Athens. “Then I meet marvels even in my old age. Another Odysseus and his Penelope!
Some say that, before Cimon's recall by Pericles, a secret compact was made with him by Elpinice, Cimon's sister, that Cimon was to proceed on foreign service against the Persians with a fleet of two hundred ships, while Pericles was to retain his power in the city.
Mahaffy, it is true, tells us that Pericles used to present peacocks to the great ladies of Athenian society in order to induce them to sit to his friend Phidias, and we know that Polygnotus introduced into his picture of the Trojan women the face of Elpinice, the celebrated sister of the great Conservative leader of the day, but these GRANDES DAMES clearly do not come under our category.
V. On his return, Pericles was received with an enthusiasm which attested the sense entertained of the value of his conquest. He pronounced upon those who had fallen in the war a funeral oration. When he descended from the rostrum, the women crowded round and showered fillets and chaplets on the eloquent victor. Elpinice, the sister of Cimon, alone shared not the general enthusiasm.
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