administration of the state. Associated with Aristides, first in the
embassy to Sparta, and subsequently in the expeditions to Cyprus and
Byzantium, he had profited by the friendship and the lessons of that
great man, to whose party he belonged, and who saw in Cimon a less
invidious opponent than himself to the policy or the ambition of
Themistocles.

By the advice of Aristides, Cimon early sought every means to
conciliate the allies, and to pave the way to the undivided command he
afterward obtained. And it is not improbable that Themistocles might
willingly have ceded to him the lead in a foreign expedition, which
removed from the city so rising and active an opponent. The
appointment of Cimon promised to propitiate the Spartans, who ever
possessed a certain party in the aristocracy of Athens--who peculiarly
affected Cimon, and whose hardy character and oligarchical policy the
blunt genius and hereditary prejudices of that young noble were well
fitted to admire and to imitate. Cimon was, in a word, precisely the
man desired by three parties as the antagonist of Themistocles; viz.,
the Spartans, the nobles, and Aristides, himself a host. All things
conspired to raise the son of Miltiades to an eminence beyond his
years, but not his capacities.

XIX. Under Cimon the Athenians commenced their command [144], by
marching against a Thracian town called Eion, situated on the banks of
the river Strymon, and now garrisoned by a Persian noble. The town
was besieged (B. C. 476), and the inhabitants pressed by famine, when
the Persian commandant, collecting his treasure upon a pile of wood,
on which were placed his slaves, women, and children--set fire to the
pile [145]. After this suicide, seemingly not an uncommon mode of
self-slaughter in the East, the garrison surrendered, and its