The Murder of Ephialtes

An assassination at the crossroads of the Peloponnesian war, the fall of oligarchs, and the birth of Athenian democracy. This is the story of Ephialtes.

Jan 14, 2025

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The long con of antiquity, telling it as straight as I can.

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I picked up on the Ephialtes case from the same source as the Hellenotamiae caper in Antiphon’s oration On the Murder of Herodes. It’s a story invoked by Euxitheus, the Mytilenean, to bolster his defense on charges that he murdered Herodes of Athens. We’ll get to that story in the next transmission.

There’s one more important thing before we start. Here’s a map of reference for this transmission, so you can visualize where these events took place.

Back to Ephialtes. First note, this doesn’t concern Ephialtes of Trachis, the traitor who betrayed the Greeks to the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae. Herodotus (7.213) tells us of this wretch, made infamous in the film 300:

Ephialtes son of Eurydemus, a Malian, thinking he would get a great reward from the king (of Persia), came to speak with him and told him of the path leading over the mountain to Thermopylae. In so doing he caused the destruction of the Hellenes remaining there.

This is the story of a different Ephialtes, a noble one, a στρατηγός (strategos, military commander, one of 10 elected annually at Athens), who brought a naval fleet beyond Phaselis — beyond Lycia, the further reaches of Anatolia — in 465BCE. I want you to keep Ephialtes in mind as we poke around a little backstory for this case.

At the same time as Ephialtes is off to the east, his soon-to-be rival, another strategos called Cimon — a war hero who had just routed a Phoenician fleet, destroying 200 of their ships — was leading an Athenian charge against the revolting Thasians.

It’s right here where things get interesting.

You see, the people of Thasos wanted out of the Delian League — they had some bone to pick about silver deposits on Thrace, and Athenian access to that ore. Cimon countered the threat. He overwhelmed the Thasians, seizing 33 of their ships, taking their city and their mines in Thrace.

Where things get tricky is the Spartans saw this revolt, and the diversion of Athenian military resources, as the perfect chance to invade Athens.

Thucydides tells us of this intrigue, in The Peloponnesian War (1.101):

Meanwhile the Thasians being defeated in the field and suffering siege, appealed to Lacedaemon (Sparta), and desired her to assist them by an invasion of Attica. Without informing Athens she promised and intended to do so, but was prevented by the occurrence of the earthquake, accompanied by the secession of the Helots and the Thuriats and Aethaeans of the Perioeci to Ithome.

The earthquake referenced here happened in 464BCE. It was tragic, just about leveling Sparta, causing 20,000 casualties there alone. An act of nature, or of the gods — Poseidon rules earthquakes, remember — or even pure chance, it doesn’t matter. The end was the same, Sparta couldn’t pull off the secretive invsasion on Athens, and lost their element of surprise.

This calamity opened the door for another revolt, this one against Sparta herself, by the slave class Helots called the Messenians. In a bind, Sparta called for help from the Greek alliance — and Athens heard the call. Or rather, it was Cimon, a laconist, a lover of Sparta, who convinced Athens to raise a force. Who argued against him? Ephialtes.

The start of a rivalry.

It was Cimon again who arrived with 4,000 Athenian hoplites in 462BCE, ready to defend Sparta against the slave rebellion.

When the forces arrived to Sparta’s doorstep, a puzzling thing happened — the Spartans turned away Cimon and the Athenian help.

This was, Thucydides tells us, the first open quarrel between these two legendary rivals, and history looks at this moment as setting the stage for the Peloponnesian War:

But the Athenians, aware that their dismissal did not proceed from the more honorable reason of the two, but from suspicions which had been conceived, went away deeply offended, and conscious of having done nothing to merit such treatment from the Lacedaemonians; and the instant that they returned home they broke off the alliance which had been made against the Mede, and allied themselves with Sparta's enemy Argos; each of the contracting parties taking the same oaths and making the same alliance with the Thessalians.

I hope I’m painting a picture for you, and it’s coming in clear.

Because it’s about to get a little darker — especially for Ephialtes, who I told you to keep at the back of your mind.

Remember, it was Cimon who marched with 4,000 hoplites to Sparta and was turned away. When they got back to Athens, they were dealt a double-sting. Instead of pats on the back and “nice try!”, the chorus at Athens was clear: you have failed.

A crime, no doubt — as Cimon lost support in Athens. Then a vote was held, on broken pottery, with names of those to be ostracized.

undefined — *Kimon is there in the center.*

Cimon lost and found himself in exile for the next decade.

But this man was no failure. His exile was a sign of the times. I want to take another step back, and bring you to what Plutarch wrote of this man in his Parallel Lives, Life of Cimon:

Cimon lavished the revenues from his campaign, which he was thought to have won with honour from the enemy, to his still greater honour, on his fellow-citizens. He took away the fences from his fields, that strangers and needy citizens might have it in their power to take fearlessly of the fruits of the land; and every day he gave a dinner at his house, — simple, it is true, but sufficient for many, to which any poor man who wished came in, and so received a maintenance which cost him no effort and left him free to devote himself solely to public affairs.

And more:

He was constantly attended by young comrades in fine attire, each one of whom, whenever an elderly citizen in needy array came up, was ready to exchange raiment with him. The practice made a deep impression. These same followers also carried with them a generous sum of money, and going up to poor men of finer quality in the market-place, they would quietly thrust small change into their hands.

But then we have Aristotle’s counter, that “it was not for all Athenians”, but:

For as Cimon had an estate large enough for a tyrant, in the first place he discharged the general public services in a brilliant manner, and moreover he supplied maintenance to a number of the members of his deme; for anyone of the Laciadae who liked could come to his house every day and have a moderate supply, and also all his farms were unfenced, to enable anyone who liked to avail himself of the harvest.

Cimon’s family lived in the deme, or suburban Athenian neighborhood, on the Sacred Way to Elusis. This was his home, and these banquets? The ripest fruits? They were for his people at Lacidae — not for every Tom, Dick, or Perseus at Athens.

But this is odd, because Plutarch later writes that Cimon was so generous and hospitable, that it invoked the “fabled communism of the age of Cronus — the Golden Age (χρύσεον γένος).” For this, Cimon was slandered, accused of flattering the rabble and demagoguery. Again, Plutarch counters this, saying that Cimon’s political policy was “aristocratic and Laconian.” He opposed Themistocles, the populist general. And as to Ephialtes, Plutarch gives us this:

Later on Cimon took hostile issue with Ephialtes, who, to please the people, tried to dethrone the Council of the Areiopagus; and though he saw all the rest except Aristides and Ephialtes filling their purses with the gains from their public services, he remained unbought and unapproached by bribes, devoting all his powers to the state, without recompense and in all purity, through to the end.

It’s important to note here that Cimon held sway and major influence at the Areopagus at this time.

Now that the story’s been set, a background given, and Cimon’s life touched with detail, we find Ephialtes again — who was murdered, but not before changing Athens forever.

What did he do? Why was he murdered? How does Cimon play into this?

It starts with Cimon’s exile. As he leaves Athens, Ephialtes fills a certain power vacuum. The people of Athens went mad — a popular revolt against Athenian institutions. The highest of them? The Areopagus, that held Athens to standards of law and order. Not just a symbolic order, not just a group of men, but the Areopagus was a rock rising above the polis itself.

Ephialtes — along with Pericles, and Aristotle says Themistocles, a traitor to Athens, a betrayer to Ephialtes — led the charge against the Areopagus. Aristotle details what happened in the Constitution of Athens.

First, he prosecuted corrupted administrators. But remember, Cimon held sway over the Areopagus before being ostracized, and so it’s hard to say what sort of purge this was — ethical or retaliatory.

Second, he stripped the powers of the Areopagus as a safeguard to the constitution, and gave it to the people (δήμῳ, demoi), the Five Hundred (πεντακοσίοις, pentakosiois, or the Boule), and the courts (δικαστηρίοις, dikasteriois).

After this stripping of the Areopagus, it is left as a shell of its former self and oligarchic power. Instead of holding the virtue and law of Athens in its palm, it’s used only for trying certain cases — murder and impiety (ἀσέβεια, asebeia), which we will return to in a future dispatch on the dame Phryne, that infamous hetaira.

This was a populist revolt in a crossroads of time, when war with the Spartans looms, when Athens gives up its past for an uncertain future.

Not everybody in Athens is happy with what happened at the Areopagus. It’s clear that the winds of change hit Attica hard. And when power is handed over with the right hand, it holds a dagger in its left.

As for our Ephialtes?

His fate is clear — assassination. The question is, by whose hand?

Aristotle tells us that he was “craftily murdered by Aristodicus of Tanagra.”

Diodorus Siculus tells it different in Library (11.77.6), that it went unsolved:

While these events were taking place, in Athens Ephialtes the son of Sophonides, who, being a popular leader, had provoked the masses to anger against the Areopagites, persuaded the Assembly to vote to curtail the power of the Council of the Areopagus and to destroy the renowned customs which their fathers had followed. Nevertheless, he did not escape the punishment for attempting such lawlessness, but he was done to death by night and none ever knew how he lost his life.

Plutarch cites Aristotle, likely because he was close to these events, but Diodorus must’ve read the same — yet walks away with a different conclusion.

Maybe it’s because Euxitheus and his defense in Antiphon’s oration On the Murder of Herodes, where he tells the story a bit different than Aristotle. The defendant makes the claim that nobody knows who killed Ephialtes, just as nobody would know who killed Herodes, the crime that Euxitheus stood on trial for.

A clever defense — perhaps playing on doubts that his judges had, as to who really did off Ephialtes.

Was it Aristodicus of Tanagra, as Aristotle wrote?

Or another hand?

Perhaps one that worked in secret — or from afar. Maybe it was a hit, one called by Cimon, who sailed and fought until the end, dying at a failed siege of Citium in Cyprus in 450BCE.

We’ll never know for sure. And that’s the long con of antiquity.

It’s all but a guessing game.

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Each and every week, we put out transmissions like the one above. Sourced directly from antiquity, crimes and plots and betrayals of the Greco-Roman world and beyond.

The long con of antiquity, telling it as straight as I can.

Read for free, forever!