When the tiny, ever-quarreling Greek city-states beat back the invasion of the greatest power of their time, it looked like a miracle. The Persian king Xerxes led a countless host to punish the insolent cities; but in 480 BC at Salamis the Greek fleet under Themistocles routed the Persian armada in a narrow strait, and in 479 BC at Plataea the land militia of the Hellenes destroyed the Persian army. Freedom held its ground. Yet within this very improbable victory lurked an idol: the temptation to read the triumph as proof of one's own chosenness. For the Persians the conquered peoples were faceless "subjects of the king of kings" — and now the victorious Greeks risked falling into a mirror-image pride, taking their good fortune for a right to command.
The triumph became the seed of future disaster. To continue the war with Persia, the Delian League was created in 478 BC — a voluntary alliance of cities led by Athens, with a common treasury on the sacred island of Delos. The design was defensive, the league a brotherhood of equals before a common threat. But Athens, which had borne the main weight of the victory, little by little turned the common cause into a foundation for its own hegemony.
And captivity ripened from within liberation itself. The alliance of equals became an instrument of Athenian power: the treasury was moved from Delos to Athens, the voluntary contributions of the allies became a compulsory tribute, and attempts to leave the league were put down by force. Athens interfered in the internal affairs of its "allies" and spent the common money on the adornment of its own city. The liberator of Hellas gradually became its master — not by the Persian sword, but by the very hand of its recent saviors.
There is as yet no return here — it is postponed to the next war, and for now only the bare mechanism is visible: how liberation turns into enslavement, how the right of the strong grows out of the gratitude of the weak. But the voice of warning was already sounding. Aeschylus, himself a veteran who had fought at Salamis, in his tragedy "The Persians" brought onto the stage not the triumph of the victor but the lament of the vanquished and the fearsome thought of the reckoning for pride (hubris). The tragedy of the victor was named aloud in the very hour of triumph — at the station of the Judges, where every victory is brought before a trial over what it will make of the victor.