The Peace of Callias

The Peace of Callias is a treaty that, according to later Greek writers, Athens and the Persian king Artaxerxes I agreed around 449 BCE, ending fifty years of war that had begun with the Ionian Revolt. It was named after the Athenian negotiator Callias, son of Hipponicus. Whether a formal treaty was ever signed has been argued about since the 4th century BCE, but fighting between Athens and Persia did stop at about that time.

How the fighting ended

After Xerxes’ defeat in 480–479 BCE the war did not stop. Athens led the Delian League in a long naval campaign to free the Greek cities of Asia Minor and the islands. Cimon won a double victory on land and sea at the Eurymedon river in Pamphylia, probably in the late 460s. Then Athens sent a fleet to help the Egyptian rebel Inaros, and lost it around 454 BCE, a disaster told on the page on Artaxerxes I. In 450 Cimon took a fleet to Cyprus, died during the siege of Citium, and his men won a last battle off Cypriot Salamis. Both sides had reasons to stop: Athens had lost heavily in Egypt and faced trouble in Greece, and Persia had Egypt back but could not control the Aegean.

What the treaty is said to have contained

The fullest account is in Diodorus of Sicily, writing in the 1st century BCE and probably following the 4th-century historian Ephorus. Plutarch adds detail in his life of Cimon, and says the text was included in a collection of Athenian decrees made by Craterus. The terms they report are these:

• The Greek cities of Asia would be autonomous.
• Persian satraps would not bring armies closer to the sea than three days’ journey (Plutarch has a day’s ride on horseback).
• No Persian warship would sail west of Phaselis on the southern coast of Asia Minor or beyond the Cyanean rocks at the entrance to the Black Sea (Plutarch names the Chelidonian islands as the southern limit).
• Athens would not send forces into the king’s territory.

In practice this would have meant that Persia gave up the Aegean and the coast to Athenian influence, while Athens gave up Cyprus and Egypt.

The case against: a 4th-century invention

Doubts began early. The historian Theopompus, in the 4th century BCE, declared the treaty a forgery because the copy displayed in Athens was written in the Ionic alphabet, which Athens only adopted officially in 403/402 BCE. Modern epigraphers have weakened this argument, since Ionic letters do appear in some earlier Athenian inscriptions, and a later recopying would also explain it.

The bigger problem is silence. Thucydides, who wrote a careful account of the years between the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, never mentions a peace with Persia. Neither do Persian sources, though they say nothing about Greek affairs at all. Sceptics also note that the treaty was most loudly praised by 4th-century Athenian orators, who wanted to contrast a glorious past with the humiliating King’s Peace of 387 BCE, in which Persia dictated terms to Greece. An invented treaty of Callias, on this view, was patriotic myth.

The case for: Callias at Susa

Those who accept the treaty point to Herodotus, who was writing within living memory. In a passing remark he says that Callias son of Hipponicus was at Susa on business for the Athenians when envoys from Argos arrived to ask Artaxerxes whether their friendship with Xerxes still held. Herodotus does not say what Callias was negotiating, but he places the right man at the right court in the right reign.

The behaviour of both powers after 449 also fits some kind of agreement. Persian fleets stayed out of the Aegean for over thirty years, and Athens made no new attacks on the king’s lands. Some historians have connected the peace with changes in the Athenian tribute records around this time, though the evidence is open to other readings. Finally, Andocides says that Athens made a treaty with the king through his uncle Epilycus, probably soon after the accession of Darius II in 424 BCE. That looks like the renewal of an earlier agreement.

Where historians stand now

Views range widely. Some, following Ernst Badian, accept a peace and even suggest an earlier version after the Eurymedon, renewed in 449. Others believe there was an informal understanding, a ceasefire that both sides observed without a sworn treaty. A minority still regard the formal peace as invented. Most agree on what mattered in practice: from around 449 BCE the open war between Athens and Persia was over, and Persia turned to a cheaper method of influence, money, which it used to great effect in the Peloponnesian War. That story continues on Darius II and among the governors described on famous satraps of the Persian Empire.

For the wars that the peace ended, see the overview of the Greco-Persian Wars.