The Peace of Callias (c. 449 BC): how the Persian Wars ended, and did the treaty exist?

In the summer of 465 BC a Persian king was murdered in his own palace. In the fifteen years that followed, Athens lost a fleet on the Nile, moved the League’s treasury from Delos to its own Acropolis, and sent Cimon on one last campaign to Cyprus, where he died. Then, according to later Greek writers, an Athenian named Callias made a peace with the Persian king that kept the royal fleet out of the Aegean for good. Whether that treaty was ever signed is one of the oldest arguments in Greek history.

Where this chapter fits

The battle of the Eurymedon had broken Persian sea power in the eastern Mediterranean. The next fifteen years are known mainly from Thucydides, who wrote within living memory, but who covered the time between the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars in a short summary. The Victorian historian George Grote warned that for these years Thucydides only glances briefly at the main events.1 The details come from Ctesias, Diodorus and Plutarch, who wrote later and often disagree with him and with each other.

Untangled History · the last years of the war, 465–449 BC

465 BCXerxes murderedArtaxerxes I becomes king of Persia.

c. 465–463 BCThasosThe island revolts and is forced back into the League.

c. 461 BCCimon ostracisedAthens sends its leading general into exile for ten years.

c. 460–454 BCEgyptAn Athenian fleet joins the revolt of Inaros; six years later it is destroyed.

454 BCThe treasury movesThe League’s money goes from Delos to Athens.

c. 451 BCTruce with SpartaA five-year truce in Greece; Cimon is back.

c. 450 BCCyprusCimon dies at Kition; victory off Salamis in Cyprus.

c. 449 BCPeace of Callias?A treaty reported by later writers, and disputed.

After Thucydides 1.100–112, Diodorus 11.69–77 and 12.3–4, and Plutarch, Life of Cimon. Thucydides gives no years; apart from Xerxes’ death and the move of the treasury, the dates are approximate modern reconstructions.

Thasos: the ally that wanted out

The first crisis came from inside the League. Thasos, a rich island off the coast of Thrace, quarrelled with Athens over the trading posts and the gold mine it owned on the mainland opposite.2 Cimon beat the Thasian fleet and laid siege to the city, as the previous chapter told.

In the third year of the siege the Thasians gave in. The terms show what the League had become. They had to pull down their walls, hand over their ships, pay what was demanded at once “and tribute in future”, and give up their mainland possessions and the mine.3 An ally that had joined to fight Persia now paid Athens instead of sailing with it. Diodorus, too, puts the blame on a quarrel over the mines.

A new king in Persia

At the same time the Persian empire changed rulers. In 465 BC Xerxes, the king who had invaded Greece, was killed in his palace. Diodorus names the murderer as Artabanus, a Hyrcanian, the captain of the royal bodyguard, who then tried to seize the throne for himself.4 The young prince Artaxerxes survived the plot and became king. A Babylonian tablet dates Xerxes’ death to the summer of 465 BC.5 Artaxerxes I ruled for some forty years; Thucydides records his death in the winter of 425/424 BC.

One of his first visitors was a Greek. Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, had been ostracised and then hunted as a traitor, and he fled across the Aegean, as chapter 9 told. On landing in Asia he wrote to Artaxerxes, who had just come to the throne, offering his services. The king made him governor of Magnesia, a city in Asia Minor. Thucydides says he died of disease, though some said he poisoned himself because he could not keep his promises to the king. Plutarch, five centuries later, preferred the dramatic version: Themistocles took his own life rather than lead a Persian army against Cimon.

A worn stone relief of a bearded Persian king in a tall crown, raising one hand and holding a bow — Relief of the king above the tomb attributed to Artaxerxes I at Naqsh-e Rostam, near Persepolis. The tomb has no inscription naming its owner; the attribution is modern. Photo: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Egypt: a fleet on the Nile

The change of king was a signal for rebellion. When the Egyptians heard of Xerxes’ death and the disorder at court, Diodorus says, they drove out the Persian tax collectors and made a man named Inaros their king.6 Thucydides calls Inaros a Libyan king from the Egyptian border, who brought almost the whole of Egypt over to his side and asked Athens for help.

The Athenians said yes. Their fleet was then campaigning off Cyprus, and Thucydides says they abandoned that campaign and sailed up the Nile with two hundred ships of their own and their allies. They made themselves masters of the river and of two-thirds of Memphis, the old capital, and besieged the Persians and Medes who held out in the last third, the “White Castle”.

The king first tried money. Thucydides says Artaxerxes sent a Persian, Megabazus, to Sparta with money to bribe the Spartans into invading Attica and so drawing the Athenians home. When nothing came of it, he sent an army instead, under Megabyzus son of Zopyrus. Megabyzus beat the Egyptians and their allies, drove the Greeks out of Memphis, and besieged them on the island of Prosopitis for eighteen months.

FACT An island made dry land. Prosopitis was an island between branches of the Nile in the delta. Thucydides says Megabyzus ended the long siege by draining the canal around it, so that the Athenian ships were left high and dry and his men could march across (1.109). Diodorus tells the same trick (11.77).

Six years, and three different endings

Thucydides’ ending is a catastrophe. When the canal was drained, the Persians marched across and took the island. “Thus the enterprise of the Hellenes came to ruin after six years of war.” Of the whole force only a few reached Cyrene through Libya; most died.7 Inaros was betrayed and crucified.8 Worse followed. A relief squadron of fifty ships had sailed from Athens, knowing nothing of the defeat; it put in at the Mendesian mouth of the Nile and was attacked by the Persian army from the land and the Phoenician fleet from the sea, and most of its ships were lost.

Diodorus tells it differently. In his version the Athenians, trapped on the island, burned their own ships and prepared to fight to the end. The Persian generals, unwilling to lose many thousands of men against such opponents, agreed a truce that let them leave Egypt unharmed, and the Athenians marched home through Libya, “as by a miracle”.9 His translator notes that Thucydides says the opposite: most of them perished.10

Ctesias, a Greek doctor at the Persian court around 400 BC, tells a third story from Persian informants. In his account Athens sent only forty ships, and their commander Charitimides won a sea battle in which twenty Persian ships were captured and thirty sunk.11 At the end Megabyzus could not take the last stronghold and came to terms with Inaros and more than 6,000 Greeks, promising that they would come to no harm.

Untangled History · the Egyptian expedition, three versions

Thucydidesc. 400 BC · within living memory200 ships, then 50 more as reliefDestroyed after a siege of 18 months. A few men reach Cyrene; most die. The relief squadron is caught and mostly sunk.

Ctesiasc. 400 BC · from Persian informants40 shipsOver 6,000 Greeks surrender on terms with Inaros. Years later the queen mother has 50 of them beheaded.

Diodorusc. 30 BC · after Ephorus200 shipsThe Athenians burn their ships, make a truce and march home safely through Libya.

Thucydides 1.104 and 1.109–110; Ctesias in Photius’ summary (codex 72); Diodorus 11.71–77. Bars show the Athenian ships sent, to scale (250 ships = full width). No source gives a credible number for the Persian armies or for the men Athens lost.

Modern historians generally follow Thucydides, the earliest and most careful of the three, and treat the Egyptian expedition as a heavy defeat for Athens.12 But how heavy is uncertain. Two hundred ships would have carried tens of thousands of men; Ctesias’ figure is far smaller, and Thucydides does not count the dead. What is not in doubt is that Egypt went back to the king, except for Amyrtaeus, a rebel king in the marshes of the delta, whom the Persians could not catch.

The treasury moves to Athens

When the League was founded in 478/477 BC, its money was kept on the sacred island of Delos, and its meetings were held in the temple there. Thucydides says the common treasury was kept at Delos and the League’s meetings were held in the temple. In 454 BC the treasury was moved to Athens. The date comes not from a historian but from stone: from that year on, the Athenians inscribed on large slabs on the Acropolis the share of each ally’s tribute that was given to Athena, and the fragments of these “tribute lists” survive.13

WORD Hellenotamiai. Greek for “Treasurers of the Greeks”. Thucydides says the office was created by the Athenians when the League was founded, to receive the tribute of the allies (1.96). The treasurers were always Athenians, and after 454 BC they kept the money in Athens.

Ancient writers saw the move as a turning point. Plutarch says Pericles’ enemies attacked him for “removing the common treasure of the Greeks from the isle of Delos into their own custody”, and then spending it on temples and statues for Athens.14 Another story makes Aristides himself comment, when the Samians proposed the move, “that the thing indeed was not just, but was expedient”.15 Aristides had probably died before 454 BC, so the story is doubtful, but it shows how later Greeks judged the decision. The official reason, according to Pericles’ critics in Plutarch, was safety: the money was moved so that the barbarians could not seize it.16 Modern historians often link the timing to the disaster in Egypt: with a fleet lost, an island in the middle of the Aegean may have seemed exposed to a Persian raid.17

WORD Aparchē. The “first-fruits”: one sixtieth of each ally’s tribute, given to Athena. The tribute lists record these offerings, not the full payments, so modern scholars multiply by sixty to work out what each city paid.

Cimon’s last campaign

Cimon had not been in Athens for the Egyptian adventure. After the Spartans sent home an Athenian army that he had led to help them against their rebel helots, the angry Athenians turned on him and ostracised him for ten years. Plutarch says he was recalled early, by a decree proposed by Pericles himself, and made peace with Sparta. Thucydides records a five-year truce between Athens and the Peloponnesians, and goes straight on: freed from war in Greece, the Athenians sent two hundred ships of their own and their allies to Cyprus under Cimon.

Sixty of the ships went on to Egypt, at the request of Amyrtaeus, the rebel king still holding out in the marshes. The rest besieged Kition, on the south coast of Cyprus. There Cimon died. Thucydides gives only the bare fact: Cimon’s death and a shortage of food forced the Athenians to give up the siege. Plutarch knew two versions: “He died, some say, of sickness, while besieging Citium, in Cyprus; according to others, of a wound he received in a skirmish with the barbarians.”18

FACT A dead man in command. Plutarch says the dying Cimon ordered his officers to sail home and keep his death secret. They did, and the fleet came home safe, so that, as Phanodemus put it, the Greek army was led by Cimon “thirty days after he was dead”.

The retreat ended in a victory. Sailing off Salamis, on the east coast of Cyprus, the Athenians “fought with the Phoenicians, Cyprians, and Cilicians by land and sea, and, being victorious on both elements departed home”, joined by the squadron returning from Egypt.19 It was a double victory, like the Eurymedon. Grote thought the two fights were probably not on the same day, unlike the Eurymedon.20

Diodorus puts the events in a different order. In his version Cimon took Kition and Marion, beat a Phoenician and Cilician fleet and captured a hundred ships with their crews, won a battle on land in Cilicia, and then besieged Salamis itself. He makes Cimon die of illness only after the peace was signed, while Thucydides says his death came before the battle. Grote noticed the problem and trusted Thucydides.

Rows of broken stone columns and walls of the ancient city of Salamis in Cyprus under a blue sky — Ruins of Salamis in Cyprus. Most of what stands today is Roman, built centuries after the battle fought off the city around 450 BC. Photo: Mike McBey, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

What the sources say about a peace

After Cyprus the fighting between Athens and Persia stopped. Diodorus, writing about 30 BC and probably following the fourth-century historian Ephorus, explains why.21 Artaxerxes, “when he learned of the reverses his forces had suffered at Cyprus, took counsel on the war with his friends and decided that it was to his advantage to conclude a peace with the Greeks.”22 His generals sent envoys to Athens, and the Athenians sent ambassadors of their own, led by Callias son of Hipponicus.23

Callias came from one of the great families of Athens.24 Herodotus, writing in Callias’ own lifetime, mentions him in passing: at a time when Argive envoys came to ask Artaxerxes whether their friendship with his father still held, “Athenian envoys, Callias son of Hipponicus, and the rest who had come up with him, were at Susa, called the Memnonian, about some other business”.25 Herodotus does not say what that business was, or when it happened.

Plutarch, about AD 100, tells the story differently again. He connects the peace not with Cyprus but with the Eurymedon, twenty years earlier: “This success of Cimon so daunted the king of Persia, that he presently made that celebrated peace”.26 He knew that the matter was disputed, and gives his evidence: the fourth-century historian Callisthenes denied that the king agreed to any terms, “but in the collection which Craterus made of the public acts of the people, there is a draft of this treaty given.”27 Craterus had collected the decrees of the Athenian assembly, so a copy of the treaty was apparently on record in Athens. His collection is lost.

FACT An altar of Peace. Plutarch adds that the Athenians “erected the altar of Peace upon this occasion, and decreed particular honors to Callias” (Life of Cimon 13). If he is right, Athens celebrated the peace like a victory.

No writer of the fifth century mentions a treaty at all. The first surviving reference comes from the Athenian orator Isocrates, in a speech of 380 BC, some seventy years after the event.28 By then the peace had become a boast. The German scholar Dahlmann, quoted by Grote, thought the treaty itself was invented in the schools of Athenian rhetoric as a rhetorical answer to the humiliating peace Sparta made with Persia in the 380s BC.

The reported terms

Diodorus gives the fullest version of the terms: “All the Greek cities are to live under laws of their own making; the satraps of the Persians are not to come nearer to the sea than a three days’ journey”, and no Persian warship was to sail inside Phaselis or the Cyanean Rocks. In return, the Athenians would not send troops into the king’s territory. Phaselis lies on the coast of Lycia, in the south-west of Asia Minor; the Cyanean Rocks are at the entrance to the Black Sea, at the northern end of the Bosporus.29

Plutarch’s version uses different landmarks. The king’s armies were to “come no nearer the Grecian sea than the length of a horse’s course”, and his warships were not to appear “between the Cyanean and Chelidonian isles”.30 Elsewhere in the same Life he puts the limit at four hundred furlongs, about 75 kilometres: after Cimon, he says, not even a royal messenger on horseback came that close to the sea.31 Grote added that the Athenians, for their part, left the king Cyprus and Egypt.32

Untangled History · the reported limits of the peace

Map of the Aegean, Asia Minor and Cyprus showing the limits reported for the Peace of Callias: no Persian warships west of Phaselis and the Chelidonian islands or south of the Cyanean Rocks at the Bosporus, and Persian troops kept back from the coast

AthensDelosThasosByzantiumCyanean RocksEphesusSardisPhaselisChelidonian islandsKitionSalamis in CyprusSusa →↓ Egypt

No Persian warships beyond this linePersian troops kept back from the coast (schematic)Persian cityGreek city

After Diodorus 12.4 (Phaselis, the Cyanean Rocks, three days’ journey) and Plutarch, Life of Cimon 13 and 19 (Chelidonian islands, a horse’s course, 400 furlongs). The land limit is drawn about 75 km inland and is only schematic. Coastline: Natural Earth (public domain).

The terms do not agree with each other, and none of them can be checked against the treaty itself. C. H. Oldfather, who translated Diodorus for the Loeb edition, put it bluntly: “There was a cessation of hostilities at this time between Athens and Persia; but the specific terms of the treaty, as they are stated here and in fourth-century orators, are clearly false.”33

Did the peace exist?

The doubts are as old as the treaty’s fame. In the fourth century BC the historian Callisthenes said that the king “did not agree to any such articles”, only that fear kept his forces away from the coast.34 His contemporary Theopompus went further and called the treaty a forgery. He had seen the text on a stone in Athens and noticed that it was written in the Ionic alphabet, which Athens adopted officially only after the archonship of Eucleides (403/402 BC). Grote summarised the argument: the peace “was engraved, not in ancient Attic, but in Ionic letters”.35

WORD Stele. An upright stone slab carrying an inscription. Athens published its laws, decrees and treaties on stelai set up in public places, so a treaty with Persia would be expected on one. Theopompus’ objection was not that the stone was missing, but that its letters were too modern.

The strongest argument against the peace is a silence. Thucydides, who describes the Egyptian expedition and the battle off Salamis in Cyprus, never mentions a treaty with Persia. Grote, who believed in the peace, answered that the treaty only recognised the existing state of things, which gave Thucydides “a reasonable ground for the silence”.36 He also pointed out that the orators of the next century had so exaggerated the treaty that it was easy to doubt it.

Other evidence points the other way. Grote answered Theopompus: a treaty that mattered most to the Ionian cities might have been cut in Ionic letters, or the stone could have been re-cut later, since nearly a century had passed when Theopompus saw it.37 Thucydides himself shows that something restrained the king’s fleet. In 411 BC, when the Athenians were desperate for Persian help, they broke off talks when they were asked to “allow the King to build ships and sail along his own coast wherever and with as many as he pleased”.38 That demand only makes sense if the king had not been free to do so before. Grote weighed it all and concluded “in favor of this treaty as an historical fact”.39

Untangled History · did the peace of Callias exist?

For a treatyHerodotus puts Callias at Susa on “other business” (7.151).Craterus’ collection of Athenian decrees contained a text (Plutarch).Theopompus saw a stone with the treaty in Athens.In 411 BC the Athenians refuse to let the king sail freely along his own coast (Thucydides 8.56).After c. 449 BC the fighting stops, and the fleet leaves Cyprus.

Against a treatyThucydides never mentions it.Callisthenes (4th century BC) said the king agreed to no terms.Theopompus called the stone a forgery: its letters were Ionic.No source earlier than Isocrates (380 BC) names it.The terms differ from writer to writer, and Plutarch dates it twenty years too early.

Herodotus 7.151; Plutarch, Life of Cimon 13; Thucydides 8.56; Grote, History of Greece vol. 5 ch. 45 (on Theopompus); Fine (1983) on Isocrates.

Modern historians are still divided. Some accept a formal treaty about 449 BC; J. V. A. Fine thought the Athenian withdrawal from Cyprus itself suggests an agreement.40 Ernst Badian argued for a first peace after the Eurymedon, renewed by Callias about 449 BC, which would explain why Plutarch connects it with Cimon.41 Others, like Raphael Sealey, doubted that a formal peace was ever made, noting that Callisthenes and Theopompus had already rejected it in antiquity.42 Between them lies a middle view, found in popular histories such as Tom Holland’s Persian Fire: some kind of accommodation was reached, whatever its form.43 The debate is still going on in the journals.44

The end of the Persian Wars

Treaty or not, the war was over. For a generation Athens sent no more fleets against Persia, and, as Grote noted, Persian warships no longer appeared in the Aegean.45 Plutarch saw Cimon’s death as the end of an age: after him “there was not one commander among the Greeks that did anything considerable against the barbarians”, and the Greeks turned on one another instead.46 Thucydides moves straight on from Cyprus to wars between Greeks: a Spartan “sacred war” over Delphi, then revolts in Boeotia and Euboea, and in the end the great war between Athens and Sparta that began in 431 BC.47

The peace, real or not, confirmed what the fighting had already decided. Grote judged that it “did little more than recognize the existing state of things, without introducing any new advantage or disadvantage on either side”.48 The Greek cities of the Asian coast belonged to the Athenian alliance, not to the king, and paid their tribute to Athens. The League, though, did not dissolve when the war ended. Its ships and money now served Athens, and Pericles’ critics complained that the allies’ money was being spent to gild Athens, on temples such as the Parthenon, begun in 447 BC.

The Persian perspective

Egypt won back, a coastline let go

For Artaxerxes the great event of these years was not Cyprus but Egypt, and there he won. Ctesias, who heard the court’s version of events, says the king’s brother Achaemenides was killed in the first battle against Inaros and his body sent to the king, and that the king then sent Megabyzus with a huge army and fleet.49 Thucydides agrees that the revolt ended with Egypt back under the king. The richest province of the west was safe; the small Greek cities of the coast were a much smaller loss.

Ctesias also shows what the war cost inside the palace. Megabyzus had promised Inaros and the Greeks their lives, and the king agreed. But the queen mother Amestris wanted revenge for her son Achaemenides, and after five years she got it: “Inarus was impaled on three stakes; fifty of the Greeks, all that she could lay hands on, were decapitated.” Megabyzus, his oath broken, went to his province of Syria and rebelled.50 No Persian text tells this story, and Ctesias liked scandal, but it is the only account we have from inside the court.

Two royal tombs cut into a cliff face, each with a cross-shaped facade and a carved relief above the door — The rock-cut royal tombs at Naqsh-e Rostam near Persepolis: left, the tomb attributed to Artaxerxes I; right, the tomb of Darius I, identified by its inscription. The relief below them is Sasanian, some seven centuries later. Photo: A.Davey, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons.

Did the king give anything up? Not in his own eyes. The Persian kings never stopped regarding the Greek cities of Asia as their subjects. In 412 BC, when Athens was weakened by its disaster in Sicily, the king pressed his satrap Tissaphernes for the tribute of his province, which, Thucydides says, Tissaphernes had been unable to raise “from the Hellenic towns by reason of the Athenians”.51 The claim had been put aside, not abandoned. Even Herodotus’ story of Callias at Susa shows the king keeping his options open, assuring the Argives at the same time that no city was a better friend to him than Argos.

How close is our evidence?

Untangled History · how close is our evidence?

480 BCAD 100

Athenian tribute listsfrom 454 BC · inscriptions made at the time

Herodotus 7.151c. 430 BC · Callias at Susa, in passing

Thucydides, book 1c. 400 BC · Egypt and Cyprus, no peace

Ctesiasc. 400 BC · the Persian court’s version

Isocrates380 BC · first mention of the peace

Callisthenes, Theopompus (lost)4th century BC · both doubt the peace

Diodorusc. 30 BC · the terms in full

Plutarch, Life of Cimonc. AD 100 · Craterus’ copy, the altar

Made at the timeWithin living memoryOver a generation later

The events run from 465 to c. 449 BC. Callisthenes and Theopompus are known only from quotations; Isocrates and the tribute lists are cited after Fine (1983) and Meiggs (1972).

For the events of these years the evidence is fair. Thucydides, writing within living memory, gives the Egyptian expedition and the campaign in Cyprus in outline, and the tribute lists date the move of the treasury. For the peace itself it is poor. No text of the treaty survives, no writer of the fifth century mentions it, and the first writers who do were orators with a political point to make. Everything beyond that, the terms, the altar, Craterus’ copy, comes from Diodorus and Plutarch, three and five centuries later. The fairest summary is Oldfather’s: the fighting stopped, but the exact terms are unknown.52

Fifty years of war, from Sardis to Salamis in Cyprus

The Persian Wars began in 499 BC with a revolt in Ionia and the burning of Sardis, and they ended around 449 BC off another Salamis, in Cyprus. In between, Persia twice invaded Greece and was beaten, at Marathon, at Salamis and at Plataea, and then the Greeks carried the war to the Persian coast. Herodotus, who wrote the first history of the conflict, saw its beginning in the Athenian ships sent to help the Ionians: “These ships were the beginning of troubles for both Greeks and foreigners.”53 By the end, the Greek cities of Asia were free of the king, and Athens, not Sparta, led the Greeks at sea.

Untangled History · the Persian Wars at a glance

499 BCThe Ionian Revolt and the burning of SardisPart I

490 BCMarathonPart II

481 BCSeventy out of seven hundredChapter 5

480 BCThermopylae and ArtemisiumChapter 6

480 BCSalamisChapter 7

479 BCPlataea and MycaleChapter 8

478 BCThe Delian LeagueChapter 9

c. 469–466 BCThe EurymedonChapter 10

c. 449 BCThe Peace of CalliasChapter 11, this page

Fifty years in eleven chapters. Chapters 1–4 are still being written; the links lead to their place in the story.

Both sides went on telling the story long after the fighting stopped. For the Athenians, the peace became proof that they had humbled the king. The worst of those came in the next century, when Sparta sent Antalcidas to the Persians to make peace, “basely and wickedly betraying the Asiatic Greeks”, as Plutarch put it, and the cities of Ionia went back to the king.54 The freedom won between Mycale and Cyprus had lasted about two generations. The full story, from the revolt in Ionia to the last battle off Cyprus, is on the Persian Wars page.

Sources

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.96, 1.100–1.101, 1.104, 1.109–1.112, 1.137–1.138, 4.50, 8.5 and 8.56. Translation by R. Crawley.

Herodotus, Histories 5.97 and 7.151 (Callias at Susa). Translation by A. D. Godley.

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 11.69–11.77 and 12.3–12.4 (Egypt, Cyprus and the terms of the peace). Translation and notes by C. H. Oldfather (1946).

Plutarch, Lives of Cimon, Pericles, Aristides and Agesilaus, written c. AD 100. Translation by J. Dryden and A. H. Clough.

Ctesias, Persica, in the summary by Photius (Bibliotheca, codex 72). Translation by J. H. Freese (1920).

Modern studies: R. Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (1972); J. V. A. Fine, The Ancient Greeks (1983); R. Sealey, A History of the Greek City States (1976); E. Badian, JHS 107 (1987); L. J. Samons II, Historia 47 (1998); T. Holland, Persian Fire (2005); M. Waters, Ancient Persia (2014); G. Grote, History of Greece vol. 5 (1847), dated.

Map and dates: coastline from Natural Earth (public domain); the limits of the peace are drawn schematically; dates after 478 BC other than 465 and 454 BC are approximate modern reconstructions.

Notes

General sources

Diodorus Siculus, Library of History: 11.70, 12.3, 12.4
Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War: 1.96, 1.104, 1.109, 1.110, 1.112, 1.137, 1.138, 4.50
Plutarch, Cimon
Ctesias, Persica, summarised by Photius (Bibliotheca, codex 72)
Grote, History of Greece, vol. 5: ch. 45
Plutarch, Pericles
Herodotus, Histories: 7.151