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Updated: June 3, 2025
Very, very many years ago there dwelt in Athens a fruit-dealer of the name of Kimon, who was possessed of two daughters, the one named Helen and the other Xanthippe. At the age of twenty, Helen was wed to Aristagoras the tinker, and went with him to abide in his humble dwelling in the suburbs of Athens, about one parasang's distance from the Acropolis.
Kimon, on the other hand, postponing the interests of his own country to those of the Lacedæmonians, persuaded the people of Athens to march a numerous body of men to assist them. The historian Ion has preserved the argument which had most effect upon the Athenians, and says that Kimon besought them not to endure to see Greece lame of one foot and Athens pulling without her yoke-fellow.
Indeed with the exception of Marathon and Salamis, Platæa and Thermopylæ, and the campaigns of Kimon on the Eurymedon and in Cyprus, all the other battles of Greece have been fought against herself, to bring about her slavery, and every trophy has been a misfortune, and a monument of shame rather than glory, arising chiefly from the rivalry between the leading cities.
These children were borne to him by his wife Kleitoria, according to the historian Stesimbrotus; and consequently Perikles frequently reproached them with the low birth of their mother. But Diodorus the geographer says that these two and the third, Thessalus, were all the children of Kimon by Isodike, the daughter of Euryptolemus the son of Megakles.
It seldom happens that men born to command can please the people, or have anything in common with them; because they cause pain by their attempts to rule and reform them, just as the bandages of a surgeon cause pain to the patient, when by their means he is endeavouring to force back dislocated limbs into their proper position. For this reason, methinks, neither Kimon nor Lucullus deserve blame.
However, Kimon took the island, as is written in my history of his Life, and making it a point of honour to discover his tomb, he chanced to behold an eagle pecking with its beak and scratching with its talons at a small rising ground. Here he dug, imagining that the spot had been pointed out by a miracle.
Thus Kimon was enabled to make himself master of Skyros, where he expelled the Dolopes and put an end to their piracies; after which, as he learned that in ancient times the hero Theseus, the son of Ægeus, after he had been driven out of Athens, took refuge at Skyros, and was murdered there by Lykomedes, who feared him, he endeavoured to discover where he was buried.
That hour was but the essential agony of a soul-conflict which, affecting a generation, marks the transformation of the Athens of Kimon and Ephialtes, of Kleon and Kritias, into the Athens of Plato and Isocrates, of Demosthenes and Phocion.
After this, Epikrates, of the township of Acharnai, managed to convey his wife and children out of Athens to join him, for which, we are told by Stesimbrotus, Kimon subsequently had him condemned and executed.
At length the Persians were defeated with great slaughter, and the Athenians gained an immense booty from the plunder of the tents and the bodies of the slain. Kimon, having thus, like a well-trained athlete at the games, carried off two victories in one day, surpassing that of Salamis by sea, and that of Platæa by land, proceeded to improve his success by attacking the Phœnician ships also.
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