The artistic career of Sophocles, the second…

Mycenae had sent four hundred men to fight against the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 BCE, and its men were at Plataea in 479 BCE.

In 470 BCE, however, while Sparta is preoccupied elsewhere, Argos, which had been neutral in the Persian war, takes an ignoble revenge in 468 BCE by besieging its neighbor Mycenae and destroying it, executing a tenth of its male citizens as a tribute to the war god and enslaving the rest of its population.

Aristides has remained a major figure in Athenian politics until he dies in 468.

Aeschylus, having returned to Athens, writes Seven against Thebes, the final installment of a trilogy about the destruction of the House of Oedipus.

The play focuses on the decision of Eteocles, the son of Oedipus and the ruler of Thebes, to meet his brother in battle, where each kills the other.

It also marks the first known appearance in Aeschylus' work of a theme that will continue through his plays, that of the polis (the city) being a vital development of human civilization.

The Volsci, an Italic people belonging to the Osco-Sabellian group of tribes, had lived in the valley of the upper Liris River around 600 BCE.

Later events, however, drove them first westward and then south to the fertile, partly hilly, partly marshy district of the south of Latium, bounded by the Aurunci and Samnites on the south, the Hernici on the east, and stretching roughly from Norba and Cora in the north to Antium in the south.

The Volsci speak Volscian, a Sabellic Italic language, which is closely related to Oscan and Umbrian, but also to Latin, more distantly.

They are among the most dangerous enemies of Rome.

Knowledge of the Volsci depends largely upon Roman accounts of their mutual wars.

To increase their pressure against Rome and the Latins, the Volsci have frequently allied themselves with the Aequi.

Rome and the Latins in turn have in 486 BCE joined in alliance with the Hernici, who live between the Aequi and the Volsci.

In this year, the Romans briefly take Antium, the capital of the Volsci.

The lyric poet Simonides of Ceos, an Athenian Greek,  is celebrated for his solemn style and rich imagery and for his victory odes (“epinicia”), dirges, elegies, and epigrams (especially those honoring the Greeks who died at the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae).

Simonides had returned to Athens after the Battle of Marathon, but soon left for Sicily at the invitation of Hiero of Syracuse, at whose court he will spend the rest of his life.

So unbounded is his popularity that he is a power even in the political world; we are told that he reconciled Hiero and Theron on the eve of a battle between their opposing armies.

He is the intimate friend of Themistocles and Pausanias the Spartan, and his poems on the war of liberation against Persia no doubt give a powerful impulse to the national patriotism.

He has passed much of his time with aristocrats, for whom he has written various kinds of commemorative poetry, little of which survives.

According to Plutarch, Simonides once said "Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks."

For his poems he can command almost any price: later writers, from Aristophanes onward, will accuse him of avarice, probably not without some reason.

To Hiero's queen, who had asked him whether it was better to be born rich or a genius, he replied "Rich, for genius is ever found at the gates of the rich."

Again, when someone asked him to write a laudatory poem for which he offered profuse thanks, but no money, Simonides replied that he kept two coffers, one for thanks, the other for money; that, when he opened them, he found the former empty and useless, and the latter full.

He dies in 468.

Pamphylia (a narrow strip of land in southern Anatolia that curves along the Mediterranean between Cilicia and Lycia) belongs to the satrapy of the Sea Peoples (and its successors) during the fifth century, but its cities are allowed to issue their own coinage.

The Pamphylians, a mixture of aboriginal inhabitants, immigrant Cilicians, and Greeks, have never acquired great political significance and have run the gauntlet of Anatolian conquerors: Phrygians, Lydians, Persians.

Although Aeolian Greeks had founded the city of Side (modern Selimiye), Pamphylia's principal city and port, its citizens speak a peculiar non-Greek language.

Cimon, as leader of an allied fleet of two hundred ships, routs the much larger Phoenician fleet near the mouth of the River Eurymedon in Pamphylia in about 467, destroying or capturing the entire Persian fleet of two hundred triremes, manned by Phoenicians.

He subsequently defeats the King's forces on land, sacking their army camp, and routing their Cyprian reinforcements, thus gravely weakening Persian control over the eastern Mediterranean.

Many new allies are now recruited by the Delian League following Cimon’s victory, such as the trading city of Phaselis on the Lycian-Pamphylian border.

A rare early imperial inscription of the late 460s details the judicial privileges accorded to Phaselis.

Set up by the Rhodians in 700 BCE on an isthmus separating two harbors, it had become the most important harbor city of western Lycia and an important center of commerce between Greece, Asia, Egypt, and Phoenicia.

The city had been captured by Persians after they conquered Asia Minor in the sixth century.

Cimon's victory makes a great impression both in Greece (where it is celebrated by the dedication of a bronze date palm, or phoinix, at Delphi: a punning reference to the defeated Phoenician fleet) and among waverers, outside Greece proper, who have not yet joined the league.

Many new allies are now recruited, such as Aspendus (its wealth attested by a wide range of coinage from the fifth century BCE onward) and the trading city of Phaselis on the Lycian-Pamphylian border. (A rare early imperial inscription of the late 460s details the judicial privileges accorded to Phaselis.)

Hiero, though despotic in his rule, is a liberal patron of literature.

The poets Aeschylus, Pindar, and Bacchylides, a nephew of Simonides of Ceos, are among those who have repaid his hospitality with elegant flattery.

The Alexandrian scholars, who would later compile select lists of the best writers in each kind, included Bacchylides in their "canon" of the nine lyric poets, along with Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonides and Pindar.

Of these, Pindar is the one whose work is best preserved, and some critics since antiquity have regarded him as the greatest.

Pindar composed choral songs of several types.

According to a Late Antique biographer, these works were grouped into seventeen books by scholars at the Library of Alexandria.

Of his vast and varied corpus, only the epinician odes—poems written to commemorate athletic victories—survive in complete form; the rest are known to us only by quotations in other ancient authors or papyrus scraps unearthed in Egypt.

Hieron's reign is marked by the creation of the first secret police in Greek history, but he is a liberal patron of literature and culture.

The poets Simonides, Pindar, Bacchylides, Aeschylus, and Epicharmus are active at his court, as well the philosopher Xenophanes.

He is an active participant in panhellenic athletic contests, winning several victories in the single horse race and also in the chariot race.

He won the chariot race at Delphi in 470 (a victory celebrated in Pindar's first Pythian ode) and at Olympia in 468 (this, his greatest victory, was commemorated in Bacchylides' third victory ode).

Other odes dedicated to him include Pindar's first Olympian Ode, his second and third Pythian odes, and Bacchylides' fourth and fifth victory odes.

He dies at Catana/Aetna in 467 and is buried there, but his grave will later be destroyed when the former inhabitants of Catana returned to the city.

Hiero is succeeded by his surviving brother, Thrasybulus, but the tyranny at Syracuse lasts only a year or so after his death.

Quintus Fabius Vibulanus, son of Marcus Fabius Vibulanus (consul 483 BCE), and the the only male to escape the slaughter of his gens at the Battle of the Cremera, becomes consul of the Roman Republic in 467 BCE, with Tiberius Aemilius L.f. Mamercinus (Mamercus).