Mustafa H. Sayar (Ed.

), Eleventh International Congress of Thracology, Istanbul, 8th -12th November, 2010 (2016) 159-164

Perikles vs Thrace, 447 BC

Peter LONDEY*

Abstract
Taking as its starting point the Athenian casualty list IG I3 1162.45–48 , this paper ex-
amines Perikles’ campaign in the Thrakian Chersonesos, generally dated to 447 BC. In
particular, the paper considers ways in which Perikles’ “fondly remembered” campaign
may have helped the Greek cities of the area, who were beset by hostile Thrakians both
inside and outside the peninsula. Various possible avenues of assistance are canvassed:
the building of a wall across the neck of the peninsula; the settlement of Athenian kler-
ouchs; a reduction in tribute; and, hypothetically, the expulsion of Thrakian inhabitants
from the interior of the peninsula. The paper argues that the last two possibilities are
probably the most important.

For many years, among the myriad relics of modern wars, the Australian War Memorial in
Canberra also had on display a plaster cast of part of a 5th century BC Athenian inscription.
It sat near an assortment of ancient sculptures and a large mosaic brought back by Australian
troops who had fought in the Middle East in both world wars. But the inscription had been
acquired quite separately, and carried a much deeper meaning for Australians shocked by the
devastation of the Great War, but also intent on placing their own military achievements in a
historical context.

The Australian War Memorial, Australia’s national war memorial and museum, was conceived
in the midst of World War I – at Pozières to be precise – and was the brainchild of official war
correspondent Charles Bean. Bean, who had grown up partly in Australia and partly in Britain,
had studied Classics at Oxford. Although as a journalist and later as Australia’s Official His-
torian of the war he became an important chronicler of contemporary events, the Greeks and
Romans always remained important to him. In order to find a language of commemoration for
what had occurred Bean turned, not surprisingly, to the ancient world and, specifically, to the
Greeks of 5th century BC Athens.1

* Dr, School of Cultural Inquiry Australian National University Canberra ACT 0200 Australia.
E.mail: peter.londey@anu.edu.au
1 Full discussion at Londey 2007.
164 Peter Londey

So it was with some excitement that Bean and the Director of the Memorial, John
Treloar, learnt in 1932 of the epigram at IG I3 1162.45–48, commemorating among others
soldiers who had died “beside the Hellespont”. In the translation of the Australian poet,
Christopher Bren-nan, the epigram ran:
These by the Hellespont laid down their shining youth
In battle, and won fair renown for their land,
So that their enemy groaned carrying war’s harvest from the field –
But for themselves they founded a deathless monument of valour.

Bean adopted Brennan’s translation, but substituted “Dardanelles” for “Hellespont”, to make
more obvious the allusion to the young Australian soldiers who had died in the 1915 Gallipoli
campaign. Gallipoli had a peculiar resonance for Australians, since it had been the first major
campaign they had fought since Federation in 1901 created a nation out of six British colonies.
Bean and Treloar went to some trouble to obtain a plaster cast of the inscription, which was
for many years exhibited alongside the Memorial’s relics of World War I.
But the inscription is interesting for far more than its epigram. It is an Athenian casualty in-
scription, usually dated to 447 BC (for reasons discussed below). The list includes 59 names,
divided into three groups according to campaign: 28 (including the strategos Epiteles, the only
man given more than a bare name and tribal affiliation) who died “in Cherronesos”, 12 who
died “at Byzantion”, and 19 dead “in other wars”.
On epigraphical and historical grounds, the inscription is assumed to belong to the mid-5th
century (rather than, say, the Peloponnesian War). It is generally linked with a campaign by
Perikles, best known from Plutarch and conventionally dated to 447 BC.2 Because Plutarch’s
account is central to my argument, I quote it in full:
Τῶν δὲ στρατηγιῶν ἠγαπήθη μὲν ἡ περὶ Χερρόνησον αὐτοῦ μάλιστα,
σωτήριος γενομένη τοῖς αὐτόθι κατοικοῦσι τῶν Ἑλλήνων· οὐ γὰρ μόνον
ἐποίκους Ἀθηναίων χιλίους κομίσας ἔρρωσεν εὐανδρίᾳ τὰς πόλεις, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὸν
αὐχένα διαζώσας ἐρύμασι καὶ προβλήμασιν ἐκ θαλάττης εἰς θάλατταν, ἀπετείχισε
τὰς καταδρομὰς τῶν Θρᾳκῶν περικεχυμένων τῇ Χερρονήσῳ, καὶ πόλεμον
ἐνδελεχῆ καὶ βαρὺν ἐξέκλεισεν, ᾧ συνείχετο πάντα τὸν χρόνον ἡ
χώρα, βαρβαρικαῖς ἀναμεμειγμένη γειτνιάσεσι καὶ γέμουσα λῃστηρίων
ὁμόρων καὶ συνοίκων. (Plutarch, Perikles 19.1–2)

Of his campaigns, especially well regarded was that concerning the Chersonesos,
as bringing deliverance to the Greeks living there. For not only did he strengthen
the cities with abundant man-power by taking with him a thousand Athenian
colonists; but also, by girding the isthmus from sea to sea with defences and
obstacles, he put up a barrier against the incursions of the Thracians who were
crowded around the Chersonesos, and shut out the continual grievous war with
which the country was all the time vexed, mixed together as it was with barbarian
districts and full of bands of robbers on the borders and living among them.

2 Meiggs 1972: 160–161; Meiggs and Lewis 1989: 125–128 (no. 48); Stadter 1989: 213. For a recent contrary view,
see Green 2006: 169–170 n. 364 (arguing that we should accept Diodoros’ date of 453/2).
 Perikles vs Thrace, 447 BC 165

Plutarch also refers to the thousand Athenian settlers (epoikoi at 19.1) in a list of Perikles’ set-
tlements of Athenians overseas, at Perikles 11.5: on that occasion he calls them klerouchoi.
Diodoros does not describe the campaign, but does say that,

ἐλθὼν εἰς Χερρόνησον χιλίοις τῶν πολιτῶν κατεκληρούχησε τὴν χώραν.

(Diod. 11.88.3)
going to the Chersonesos, he portioned out the land to a thousand of the citizens (as
klerouchai).

There is much to wonder at in Plutarch’s account. Plutarch gives no indication of the date
of the campaign, but it has been conventionally ascribed to 447 BC, mainly on the basis of
changes around that time in the tribute collected from the Chersonesos (see further below).3
The date can scarcely be considered secure, but for the purposes of this paper I will accept it,
along with the conventional connection between IG I3 1162 and the campaign described at
Perikles 19.1–2, to see where it leads us. Accepting these connections, we are left with a cam-
paign which is, in many ways, puzzling. What sort of campaign are we to imagine here, and
why was it successful? How was building a wall going to help? And why, according to Plutarch,
was the campaign so well remembered in Athens?

In trying to assess the nature of the campaign, we must turn to the list of dead. Twenty-eight
dead, as listed at IG I3 1162 col. i, lines 1–40, does not suggest that Perikles (and the general
who died, Epiteles) ever fought a pitched battle with a Thrakian army. And indeed it would
be surprising if Thrakians chose to take on a Greek hoplite army in that way, unless they had
lured them into the sort of rough terrain which the Chersonesos does not offer in any abun-
dance, certainly not near its neck. Yet clearly there was some nasty fighting: 28 deaths is more
than we would expect from a force simply expected to escort new settlers into the area and
scare off the Thracian intruders by their mere presence. Rather, the number is suggestive of a
series of skirmishes and small scale fights against bands of Thrakians, reminiscent of modern
counter-insurgency operations.

It is hard to see immediately how such a campaign could be of long term benefit. Once the
Athenian forces withdrew, what would stop the Thrakians from resuming the business of raid-
ing as before? Yet Perikles did enough to have his campaign well remembered, and for the
Chersonesos to remain a loyal and reliable part of the Athenian empire throughout the Pelo-
ponnesian War. Plutarch gives us two possible answers, neither of them particularly satisfac-
tory: the wall, and the settlers.

It is very hard to see how the wall could have formed an effective defence. A fortification is
useless without defenders. This one would have been about 7 km long, stretching from coast
to coast across the isthmus, in an area almost devoid of natural defensive features. The open
nature of the countryside would afford good views of an approaching enemy (during the day),
and could have been built (like the Dema Wall in Attika, a century later) with sally ports, to act
as a secure base for attacks on approaching Thracian bands. Yet to garrison such a wall perma-
nently would have required huge manpower, beyond the capacity of the local cities to provide.

3 For example, see Stadter 1989: 213.

166

Even if all the cities of the Chersonesos (some of them nearly 90 km away) provided garrison
troops, it remains hard to see how the wall would prevent small groups of Thrakians from
slipping across at night. And even if Thrakians were not natural sea-farers they could surely,
like the Japanese in Malaya in 1942, have demonstrated the weakness of a defensive line drawn
across a peninsula by going around the ends. Nevertheless, the idea of the wall retained its
power: walls had been built here before (Hdt. 6.36.2), and would be again (Xen., Hell. 3.2.10).
Nearly a millennium later, Prokopios was eager to praise the fortification Justinian built across
the neck4 by belittling earlier Greek attempts at the project:

At this isthmus the men of former times built a cross-wall of a very casual and
indifferent sort which could be captured with the help of a ladder. (Prokopios,
peri Ktismaton 10.4.5)

Prokopios had his reasons for contempt, but that is not to say that it was entirely unjustified.

The thousand Athenian settlers are probably more important, but not as a military force. It
is hard to quantify their effectiveness, but in a peninsula which Xenophon tells us had about
a dozen poleis their number does not seem great enough to have made a decisive difference
defensively. At this stage, we do not have archaeological evidence to allow us to make any
estimate of the population of the Chersonesos, but the thousand settlers can only have been
decisive if the Greek population on the peninsula was small up to this point. Presumably they
settled down to farm the land, and thus were not available as a permanent garrison force; or,
indeed, many may have become absentee landowners. As Moreno has recently argued, many
klerouchai were evidently wealthy men, or received allotments on a scale which made them
wealthy. The advantage to Athens, Moreno argues, was not so much improving the status of
the landless poor as securing Athens’ grain supplies.5

Assuming the chronology referred to above, the biggest change for the people of the
Chersonesos was something Plutarch does not mention, and which is known only from
inscriptions: a huge drop in the level of tribute paid to Athens. At this time, the total tribute
paid by cities of the Chersonesos dropped from 18 talents to about 2 talents. 6 We are left
guessing a little at the meaning of this but it does seem most likely that the Chersonesitans
took on responsibility for their own defence, and were aided by Athens in doing so by the
almost complete lifting of their obligations to the rest of the empire. The ATL authors speak
of a Chersonesitan “Home Guard”, but the relief of 16 talents of tribute suggests something
rather more than that. Presumably it allowed the Greeks of the peninsula to devote more of
their own manpower to defence (rather than, say, going off to row in the Athenian fleet to bring
back money for the tribute). The Chersonesitans also now seem to be absent from Athenian
campaigns, until they support Alkibiades en masse in his campaign against Byzantion in 407
(Xen., Hell. 1.3.8–10).

4 Indeed, any fortifications seen by later travellers were probably those of Justinian.
5 Moreno 2007: 89–143
6 Meritt et al., Athenian tribute lists, vol. 3, pp. 59, 289–290.
 Perikles vs Thrace, 447 BC 167

It must be admitted that there is a danger of circularity here. The reason for dating Perikles’
campaign to 447 is because it then coincides with the drop in tribute payments from the
Chersonesos. But combining these events does produce a reasonably logical outcome. There
remains the question of the popularity of Perikles’ campaign. It probably made good sense to
give the Chersonesitans the resources to manage their own defence, and there may also be an
element here of Perikles continuing and building the relationship his father Xanthippos had
formed with the Greeks of the area, responding to the demands of the people of Elaious that
he punish the Persian governor, Artayktes, for desecrating the sanctuary of Protesilaos (Hdt.
9.116–120). Whether either factor made good politics in the Athenian assembly is another
question, however, and we can imagine Perikles selling the conflict to the Athenian audience
as one between Greeks and barbarians. This surely is where the wall comes in. Whether or
not a wall was in fact defensively useful, it had great symbolic value as a clear demarcation
between the Greek world, which Perikles was protecting, and the barbarian “other”. We can
easily imagine Perikles soothing the assembly with news of the wall: job done. A thousand
years later Prokopios could sneer:

But they thought they had set up a kind of invincible bulwark against the enemy
and so decided to regard everything inside this circuit-wall as requiring no
further protection. (Prokopios, peri Ktismaton 10.4.8)

A sneer, but perhaps not entirely missing the mark.

One problem remains. Of all the Athenian behaviours of the 5th century, one of the most un-
popular was the planting of klerouchies. Plutarch’s claim that Perikles’ campaign in the Cher-
sonesos was especially well regarded sits very strangely with the planting of Athenian settlers,
whether technically epoikoi or klerouchoi (the latter would retain Athenian citizenship). Either
way, we would expect them to be given grants of land – but whose? Even if the Greeks of the
Chersonesos were grateful for Athenian help against the Thrakians, it seems unlikely that they
were grateful enough cheerfully to give up large tracts of their own land to the newcomers. In
the absence of almost any archaeological work on the peninsula in the last century, it is very
hard to say just how far inland settlement extended from the Greek colonies on the coast. It
is possible that there was good agricultural land lying unused on the borders of the exploited
coastal zone. But it is just as likely that some of the indigenous Thrakian population remained
in these areas, even a century or more after Greek colonisation.7

Plutarch, in the passage quoted above, speaks of bands of robbers “living among” the Greeks
of the peninsula (Perikles 19.2), implying that not all the troublemakers were on the other side
of Perikles’ wall. Generally speaking, bandits and insurgents (who may be the same people,
viewed from opposite angles) need bases of support in the local population. The centrepiece
of modern counter-insurgency warfare is to cut off those local sources of support. If there
were still Thrakian settlements in the hinterland of the peninsula (and at this stage we cannot
know whether there were or not8), then those settlements may have provided crucial support

7 Greek colonisation of the Chersonesos seems to have begun in the 7th century, but was evidently still expanding
in the 6th century when Athens became interested in the area (Isaac 1986: 160–175).
8 Archaeological evidence is lacking, but the argument from silence is not strong, given the limited archaeological
exploration of the whole area.
168

to whatever bands of leisterioi were roaming the peninsula and harrassing the Greeks on the
coast. So Perikles’ contribution may have been to expel or subjugate Thrakians in the interior,
and give their lands to rich Athenians who would ensure that Athens could fully exploit the
grain-growing potential of the area.

That at least makes sense of the number of casualties. We can imagine ugly skirmishes with
members of the ejected population, and especially with the brigands for whom they very likely
provided both a base and a source of recruitment. For their part, the brigands could not sim-
ply melt away into the hills when they saw what as happening, probably to their own kinsmen.
Without a sympathetic local population, they themselves had no future. So there will have
been fighting, enough to kill 28 Athenians: not a glorious campaign, but rather what we would
call “ethnic cleansing”. But they were advancing Athenian interests, not on this occasion at the
expense of fellow Greeks, but at the expense of troublesome barbarians. And so Perikles could
have his well-remembered campaign, and the soldiers who died could win the renown claimed
for them in the epigram which so excited Charles Bean.

Abbreviations
ATL Athenian tribute lists [see bibliography under Meritt et al.]
Diod. Diodorus Siculus
Hdt. Herodotos
IG Inscriptiones graecae
Xen., Hell. Xenophon, Hellenika

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