The Second Capture of Sestos

Abstract

In the ninth chapter of his Life of Cimon, Plutarch tells how Cimon, appointed to allot the spoils from Sestos and Byzantium, set the prisoners on one side, and the material booty on the other. The allies, invited to choose between the two, chose the latter as being much the more attractive in value, and Cimon's division was laughed at as ridiculous. But later, when the ransom money for the prisoners came in, the tables were turned, and the Athenians, thanks to Cimon's device, were seen to have had the best of the bargain after all.This story, which is repeated by Polyaenus, originally came from Ion of Chios, who said that Cimon himself told it to him at a dinner-party, and that he (Cimon) thought it one of the cleverest things he had ever done. The prisoners and booty, which he was allotting, came from Sestos and Byzantium. Now the information from Herodotus and Thucydides is that Sestos was besieged at the end of 479; when it fell is another problem to which I shall return. Byzantium was certainly captured in the summer of 478. But the commander at Sestos, when the Athenians were the backbone of the Hellenic forces (the Spartans having sailed home), was Xanthippus, the father of Pericles: while the commander at the siege of Byzantium was the Spartan Pausanias, the victor of Plataea. Subsequently Pausanias himself, as a refugee from Sparta, seized Byzantium and had to be driven out of it again by the Athenians in 477. On this occasion the Athenian forces, made up of the contingents of the new Delian Confederation, were commanded by Cimon. Are we to understand from this passage of Plutarch that, on this same campaign, Cimon also captured Sestos, and that Sestos had, like Byzantium, fallen into the hands of Pausanias since its original liberation?