The outstanding life-size “Charioteer of Delphi,” also known as Heniokhos (the rein-holder), is one of the largest Greek bronze works of the age.

The life-size statue of a chariot driver, found in 1896 at the Sanctuary of Apollo in Delphi, and now in the Delphi Archaeological Museum, is erected at Delphi soon after 474 BCE, to commemorate the victory of a chariot team in the Pythian Games, which are held at Delphi every four years in honor of Pythean Apollo.

(It was originally part of a larger group of statuary, including the chariot, four (possibly six) horses and two grooms.

Some fragments of the horses were found with the statue.

When intact, it must have been one of the most imposing works of statuary in the world.)

An inscription on the limestone base of the statue shows that it was commissioned by Polyzalus, the tyrant of Gela, a Greek colony in Sicily, as a tribute to Apollo for helping him win the chariot race.

The name of the Pan Painter, a Greek vase painter of the Attic red-figure style, is derived from his name vase, a bell krater in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, which depicts Pan pursuing a shepherd on the front, and on the back the death of Aktaion at the hands of Artemis.

A pupil of Myson, active around 480 to 450 BCE, he paints kraters, pelikes, hydriai and amphorae.

More than a hundred vases are attributed to him.

His figural scenes are characterized by freshness, skill, humor, and irony.

His figures can range from coarse to fine, revealing his connections with both Doric and Ionic art.

This places him within early Doric-Ionic Classical art.

His Pelike showing Heracles fighting Busiris, found at Thespiai (now in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens), is painted around 470.

Hiero, allied with Aristodemus, the tyrant of Cumae, leads the Greeks of Campania (now in southern Italy) to defeat their rivals, the Etruscans, in battle near Cumae in 474 in the Bay of Naples.

This victory marks the end of the Etruscan aggression against the Greeks in southern Italy and saves the Greeks of Campania from Etruscan domination.

The Syracusans dedicate a captured Etruscan bronze helmet (now in the British Museum, London), with an inscription commemorating the event, the great panhellenic sanctuary at Olympia.

After their defeat, the Etruscans lose much of their political influence in Italy.

They will soon lose control of the sea and their territories will eventually be taken over by the Romans, Samnites, and Gauls.

The Etruscans will later join the failed Athenian expedition against Syracuse in 415 BCE, which will contribute even further to their decline.

Hiero, Syracuse having defeated the Etruscans on the sea, occupies Ischia and the surrounding Parthenopean islands and leaves behind a garrison to build a fortress before the city of Ischia itself, together with two towers built to control enemy fleet movements.

The fortress will still be extant in the Middle Ages and known as Castello Aragonese, but the original garrison will flee before the eruptions of 470 BCE.

The island will be taken over by Neapolitans.

Veii, having nearly succeeded in its attack on Rome during a ten-year war between the two cities, concludes a truce with that city in 474.

More Athenian aggression follows, directed unequivocally against other Greeks: Carystus, at the southeastern end of Euboea, is forced to join the league.

Athenian involvement in Euboea goes back to the sixth century, when Athens had installed a cleruchy on Chalcis soon after the Cleisthenic reforms.

Thus, the Delian League, an association of Greek city-states, comes under the military leadership of the Athenians.

The justification for this is that Carystus had been enjoying the advantages of the League (protection from pirates and the Persians) without taking on any of the responsibilities.

Furthermore, Carystus, having been subjugated by Darius in 490, has been a traditional base for Persian occupations.

The Athenians, professing outrage at this recalcitrance, attack Carystus and torch the entire city.

This tactic is a strong deterrent to any Greek city-state inclined to side with Persia and offer their city as a base or simply to enjoy the advantages of a Persian-free Greece without paying their share.

Athenian politicians have to justify these acts to Athenian voters in order to get votes.

Polygnotus, a native of Thasos who had been adopted by the Athenians and admitted to their citizenship, is probably the first classical painter to depict spatial depth in a realistic style.

He paints for the Athenians in the time of Cimon a picture of the taking of Ilium on the walls of the Stoa Poecile, and another of the marriage of the daughters of Leucippus in the Anaceum.

Plutarch mentioned that historians and the poet Melanthius attested Polygnotus as not having painted for money but out of charitable feeling to the Athenian people.

In the hall at the entrance to the Acropolis other works of his were preserved.

The most important, however, of his paintings were his frescoes in a building erected at Delphi by the people of Cnidus.

The subjects of these were the visit to Hades by Odysseus, and the taking of Ilium.

His pupil Micon’s celebrated paintings, produced in collaboration with Polygnotus for the “Stoa Poikile” (“Painted Stoa,” an art gallery, since destroyed) in the Athenian Agora, portray the battle of Marathon and a battle with the Amazons.

Themistocles, the son of Neocles, an Athenian of no distinction and moderate means, his mother being a Carian or a Thracian, had been the most influential politician in Athens, if not in Greece, in the year prior to the invasion of Xerxes.

Though the Greek fleet had been nominally under the control of the Spartan Eurybiades, Themistocles had caused the Greeks to fight the indecisive Battle of Artemisium, and more, it was he who brought about the Battle of Salamis, by his threat that he would lead the Athenian army to found a new home in the West, and by his seemingly treacherous message to Xerxes, whose fleet was lured into the channel between Salamis and the mainland and crushed.

This has left the Athenians free to restore their ruined city.

Sparta, on the ground that it is dangerous to Greece that there should be any citadel north of the Isthmus of Corinth which an invader might hold, has urged against this, but Themistocles has forestalled Spartan action by means of a visit to Sparta that had allowed diplomatic delays and subterfuges and enabled the work to be carried sufficiently near to completion to make the walls defensible.

He has also carried out his original plan of making Piraeus a real harbor and fortress for Athens.

Athens has thus become the finest trade center in Greece, and this, along with Themistocles' remission of the alien's tax, induces many foreign traders to settle in Athens.

After the crisis of the Persian invasion Themistocles and Aristides "the Just", with whom he had previously competed over the love of a boy, appear to have made up their differences.

One of the ten Athenian strategoi during the Greco-Persian war, Aristides has been instrumental in having Athens, rather than Sparta, become the ruling state of the Delian League.

But Themistocles had soon begun to lose the confidence of the people, partly due to his arrogance (it is said that he built near his own house a sanctuary to Artemis Aristoboulë ["of good counsel"]) and partly due to his alleged readiness to take bribes.

Diodorus and Plutarch both refer to some accusation leveled against him, and at some point between 476 and 471 he is ostracized (or banished).

The Greek art of the drama has its roots in religious festivals for the gods, chiefly Dionysus, the god of wine.

Dramatic competitions have become part of the City Dionysia in the spring.

The festival begins with an opening procession, continues with a competition of boys singing dithyrambs, and culminates in a pair of dramatic competitions.

The first competition is for the tragedians, and consists of three playwrights each presenting three tragic plays followed by a shorter comedic satyr play.

A second competition of five comedic playwrights follows, and the winners of both competitions are chosen by a panel of judges.

Aeschylus, after the death of Phrynichus, one of his chief rivals, was by 473 BCE the yearly favorite in the Dionysia, winning first prize in nearly every competition.

Often recognized as the father or the founder of tragedy, and the earliest of the three Greek tragedians whose plays survive, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, Aeschylus expands the number of characters in plays to allow for conflict among them; previously, characters had interacted only with the chorus.

No more than seven of the estimated seventy plays written by Aeschylus have survived into modern times.

Many of his works are influenced by the Persian invasion of Greece, a contemporary event, he having participated in the Greek victory at Marathon.

He dramatizes Athens's naval victory over Persia at Salamis in The Persians, his earliest preserved play, which wins first prize at the Dionysia.

Written in 472, The Persians, the oldest surviving Classical Greek play, remains a quintessential primary source of information about this period in Greek history.

Displaying surprising sympathy for the defeated invaders, Aeschylus shows Atossa, the Persian queen, suffering the blow of her son's defeat; the ambitious Xerxes, who begins as a proud conqueror, degenerates into a vengeful destroyer of his subjects' lives and property.

Sparta has taken no steps to prevent Athens rise to dominance over the Delian League.

Her interests and those of Athens do not directly clash, for Athens includes in her empire only the islands of the Aegean and the towns on its north and east coasts, which lie outside the Spartan political horizon: with the Peloponnese Athens does not meddle.

Moreover, Sparta's attention is at this time fully occupied by troubles nearer home—such as the plots of Pausanias not only with the Persian king but with the Laconian helots.

Tegea between 473 and 471, by which time Sparta’s authority in the Peloponnesus has eroded, forsakes Sparta for an alliance with Argos.

Following a Spartan attack on Tegea in an inconclusive battle, all the Arcadian cities, except Mantinea, ally against Sparta.