The Ally Who Kept His Ships

Chios joined the Delian League at its foundation in 478/7 BC, and for the next sixty-five years it occupied a position no other member managed to hold.

The League's members contributed either ships or money. Over time almost all of them converted to cash, which Athens collected and, from 454, kept on its own Acropolis, and by degrees the alliance against Persia turned into the Athenian Empire. By the 430s, only three allies still contributed ships and therefore still possessed navies of their own: Chios, Lesbos, and Samos. Samos was crushed after its revolt of 440–439. Lesbos was crushed after Mytilene revolted in 428–427. From then on there was one.

The position Chios held was remarkable in every particular. It paid no tribute. It maintained a substantial fleet — the sources suggest around sixty ships in the Peloponnesian War period — under its own command and its own flag. It kept an oligarchic or at least moderately oligarchic constitution at a time when Athens was installing democracies everywhere it could reach. Its squadrons fought alongside Athens in every major operation of two generations: in Egypt, at Samos, at Potidaea, in the great and doomed expedition to Sicily. And in return Athens treated Chios with a deference it showed to nobody else at all.

Thucydides delivers a verdict on the Chians which, from him, is nearly unprecedented:

Thucydides' entire subject is the corruption of judgement by power — how prosperity makes states stupid, how strength makes them reckless, how the Athenians talked themselves into Sicily. For him to name a single exception, and for that exception to be a small rich island, is a considerable compliment. What it implies is a governing class of real political skill: men who managed, for decade after decade, the extraordinarily delicate business of being wealthy, armed, and formally free inside an empire that had systematically eliminated every comparable case.

The delicacy shows through occasionally. Around 425 BC, Athens grew suspicious and ordered Chios to pull down a new city wall it had built. Thucydides records that the Chians complied — and adds, with the driest possible economy, that they did so only after obtaining pledges from Athens that no further action would be taken against them. That single clause is the whole relationship in miniature: a subordinate ally with just enough leverage to negotiate the terms of its own humiliation, and just enough sense to take the deal.

Chian wealth in this period was proverbial. The island's wine, mastic, figs, marble, and manufactured goods moved through a merchant fleet that worked the whole eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea; Chian coinage circulated far beyond the island; and the Chians were rich enough to make the kind of dedication at Delphi that everyone would notice. They built the great altar of Apollo that stood in front of the temple — the altar on which the sacrifices of the whole Greek world were made — and in gratitude the Delphians granted them promanteia, the right to consult the oracle ahead of everyone else. The grant is carved on the stone, and the stone is still there.