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THE GREAT PERSIAN WAR.

To
MY WINTER-FRIEND
HENRY FRANCIS PELHAM.

THE
GREAT PERSIAN WAR
AND ITS PRELIMINARIES;

A STUDY OF THE EVIDENCE, LITERARY
AND TOPOGRAPHICAL.

By G. B. GRUNDY, M.A.,
LECTURER AT BRASENOSE COLLEGE, AND UNIVERSITY LECTURER
IN CLASSICAL GEOGRAPHY, OXFORD.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.

NEW YORK:
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS.
LONDON:
JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET.
1901.

PRINTED BY
WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS LIMITED,
LONDON AND BECCLES.

PREFACE.

The publication of a version of an old old story which has been retold in modern times by famous writers, demands an apology even at this day of the making of many books. It can only be justified in case the writer has become possessed of new evidence on the history of the period with which the story is concerned, or has cause to think that the treatment of pre-existing evidence is not altogether satisfactory from a historical point of view.

I think I can justify my work on the first of these grounds; and I hope I shall be able to do so on the second.

Within the last half-century modern criticism of great ability has been brought to bear on the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides. Much of it has been of a destructive nature, and has tended to raise serious doubts as to the credibility of large and important parts of the narratives of those authors. I venture to think that, while some of this criticism must be accepted as sound by every careful student, much of it demands reconsideration.

A large part of it has been based upon topographical evidence. Of the nature of that evidence I should like to say a few words.

Until ten years ago the only military site of first-rate importance in Greek history which had been surveyed was the Strait of Salamis, which the Hydrographic Department of the English Admiralty had included in the field of its world-wide activity. A chart of Pylos made by the same department was also available, but was quite inadequate for the historical purpose.

Since that time Marathon has been included in the survey of Attica made by the German Staff Officers for the German Archæological Institute.

The surveys of Thermopylæ, Platæa, and Pylos, I have myself made at different times between 1892 and 1899. Pylos does not come within the scope of the present volume.

In the absence of these surveys, this side of Herodotean criticism was founded upon such sketches as Leake and other travellers had made of important historical sites, and upon the verbal description of them contained in their works.

It is superfluous to praise the labours of such inquirers. No amount of later investigation in Greek topography can ever supplant much that they have done. But I am quite certain that Leake would have been the last to claim any scientific accuracy for the sketch-maps which he made; and I think it will be agreed that maps without accuracy cannot be used for the historical criticism of highly elaborate narratives.

The present volume, deals exclusively with the Græco-Persian wars up to the end of 479 B.C. I propose to deal with the Hellenic warfare of the remainder of the fifth century in a separate volume.

Some of my conclusions are not in accord with the commonly accepted versions of the history of this period. But, when the circumstances of the work are considered, it will, I think, be conceded that such a result was almost inevitable.

I have supported my conclusions, especially in such cases as I believe them to be in disagreement with accepted views, by arguments taken from the evidence. Where those arguments are in my opinion likely to be of interest to the general reader, I have inserted them in the actual text; where they are of a very specialist character, I have put them in the form of notes.

I have but little more to say with regard to my own work in general. In the form in which I have presented it in this volume I have tried to make it constructive rather than destructive. I have, I believe, confined my destructive criticism to passages in which I found myself in conflict with accepted authorities on the subject who had presumably enjoyed equal opportunities with myself of becoming acquainted with the facts. I have purposely avoided criticism of those who, not having had the opportunity of visiting the scenes of action, but yet having made the best use of the evidence available at the time at which they wrote, have, in my opinion, been led into error by the defectiveness of the evidence they were obliged to use.

Early in the course of my inquiries, the results of investigation suggested to me that Herodotus’ evidence as an historian differs greatly in value, according as he is relating facts, or seeking to give the motives or causes lying behind them. Further investigation has tended to confirm this view. My conclusions on these two points will be made sufficiently clear in the course of this work.

In his purely military history Herodotus is dealing with a subject about which he seems to have possessed little, if any, special knowledge, and hardly any official information. The plan or design which lay behind the events which he relates can, therefore, only be arrived at, in the majority of instances, by means of an induction from the facts he mentions. This will, I think, adequately define and account for the method I have adopted in treating his evidence.

The necessity of employing various words indicating probability rather than certainty does not add adornment to style, but is inevitable under circumstances where the evidence is of the nature of that which is presented to any one who attempts to write the history of any part of the fifth century before Christ.

The spelling of Greek names is a difficulty at the present day. Many of the conventional forms are absolutely wrong. I do not, however, think that the time has yet come when it is convenient to write Sikelia, Athenai, Kerkura, etc. I have therefore used the conventional forms for well-known names, but have adopted the more correct forms for names less known, with one or two literal changes, such as “y” for upsilon, where the change is calculated to make the English pronunciation of the name approximate more closely to that of the original Greek.

As one who is from force of present circumstances laying aside, not without regret, a department of work which has been of infinite interest to him, and whose necessary discontinuance causes him the greatest regret, I may perhaps be allowed to speak briefly of my own experience to those Englishmen who contemplate work in Greece.

Firstly, as to motive: If you wish to take up such work because you have an enthusiasm for it, and because you feel that you possess certain knowledge and qualifications, take it up by all means; you will never regret having done so. It will give you that invaluable blessing,—a keen intellectual interest, lasting all your life.

But if your motive be to acquire thereby a commercial asset which may forward your future prospects, leave the work alone. You will, in the present state of feeling in England, forward those prospects much more effectively by other means.

In all work in Greece malaria is a factor which has to be very seriously reckoned with. There has been much both of exaggeration and of understatement current upon the subject. It so happens that many of the most interesting sites in Greece are in localities notoriously unhealthy —Pylos and Thermopylæ are examples in point. Of the rare visitors to Pylos, two have died there since I was at the place in August, 1895; and of the population of about two hundred fisher-folk living near the lagoon in that year, not one was over the age of forty. The malaria fiend claims them in the end, and the end comes soon. At Thermopylæ, in this last summer, I escaped the fever, but caught ophthalmia in the marshes. An Englishman who was with me, and also our Greek servant, had bad attacks of fever.

On the whole, I prefer the spring as the season for work. The summer may be very hot. During the four weeks I was at Navarino the thermometer never fell below 93° Fahrenheit, night or day, and rose to 110° or 112° in the absolute darkness of a closed house at midday. What it was in the sun at this time, I do not know. I tried it with my thermometer, forgetting that it only registered to 140°, with disastrous results to the thermometer.

At Thermopylæ in 1899 the nights were, in July and August, invariably cool, though the heat at midday was very great; so much so that you could not, without using a glove, handle metal which had been exposed to it.

The winter is, I think, a bad time for exploration,—in Northern Greece at any rate. Rain and snow may make work impossible, and the mud on the tracks in the plain must be experienced in order to be appreciated. Snow, moreover, may render the passes untraversable.

To one who undertakes survey work in circumstances similar to those in which I have been placed, the expense of travelling in Greece is considerable. Survey instruments are cumbrous, if not heavy paraphernalia. Moreover, as I have been obliged to do the work within the limits of Oxford vacations, and as the journey to Greece absorbs much time, it has been necessary for me to labour at somewhat high pressure while in the country. Twelve hours’ work a day under a Greek sun, with four hours’ work besides, demands that the doer should be in the best of condition. One is therefore obliged to engage a servant to act as cook and purveyor, since the native food and cooking are not of a kind to support a Western European in a healthy bodily state for any length of time. In case of survey, moreover, it is just as well to choose a servant who knows personally some of the people of the district in which the work is carried on, as suspicions are much more easy to arouse than to allay, and original research may connect itself in the native mind with an increase of the land-tax.

There are very few parts of Greece where it is dangerous to travel without an escort. Since the recent war with Turkey, the North has been a little disturbed, and brigandage has never been quite stamped out in the Œta and Othrys region. But it is not the organized brigandage of old times; nor, I believe, in the vast majority of cases, are the crimes committed by the resident population. The Vlach shepherds, who come over from Turkish Epirus in the summer with their flocks, are usually the offenders. Throughout nine-tenths of the area of the country an Englishman may travel with just as much personal security as in his own land.

The Greeks are a kindly, hospitable race. The Greek peasant is a gentleman; and, if you treat him as such, he will go far out of his way to help you. If you do not, there may be disagreeables.

I cannot acknowledge all the written sources of assistance to which I have had recourse in compiling this volume, because I cannot recall the whole of a course of reading which has extended over a period of ten years.

Of Greek histories I have used especially those of Curtius, Busolt, Grote and Holm; of editions of Herodotus those of Stein and Macan. Of special books, I have largely used the French edition of Maspero’s “Passing of the Empires,” and Rawlinson’s “Herodotus.” I have read Hauvette’s exhaustive work on “Hérodote, Historien des Guerres Médiques.” I have not, however, been able to use it largely, as I find that my method of dealing with the evidence differs very considerably from his.

Where I have consciously used special papers taken from learned serials, I have acknowledged them in the text.

Many of my conclusions on minor as well as major questions are founded on a fairly intimate knowledge of the theatre of war.[1]

I have dealt with the war as a whole, as well as with the major incidents of it, because it is a subject of great interest to one who, like myself, has, in the course of professional teaching, had to deal with the campaigns of modern times.

I cannot close this Preface without expressing my gratitude for the help which has been given me at various stages of my work.

Mr. Douglas Freshfield, himself a worker in historical research, and Mr. Scott Keltie gave me invaluable assistance at the time of my first visit to Greece, when I was holding the Oxford Travelling Studentship of the Royal Geographical Society.

My own college of Brasenose generously aided me with a grant in 1895, which was renewed last year.

In reckoning up the debt of gratitude, large items in it are due to my friends Mr. Pelham and Mr. Macan. As Professor of Ancient History, Mr. Pelham is ever ready to aid and encourage those who are willing to work in his department, and I am only one of many whom he has thus assisted. Such grants as I have obtained from the Craven Fund have been obtained by his advocacy, and he has often by his kindly encouragement cheered the despondency of a worker whose work can only be rewarded by the satisfaction of having done it,—a reward of which he is at times, when malarial fever is upon him, inclined to under-estimate the value.

I owe much to that personal help which Mr. Macan so kindly gives to younger workers in the same field as his own. He has also been kind enough to read through the first three chapters of this book. Though he has suggested certain amendments which I have adopted, he is in no way responsible for the conclusions at which I have arrived.

To Canon Church, of Wells, I am deeply indebted for those illustrations which have been made from the beautiful collection of Edward Lear’s water-colour sketches of Greece which he possesses.

My father, George Frederick Grundy, Vicar of Aspull, Lancashire, has read through all my proofs, and has done his best to make the rough places smooth. I have every reason to be grateful for this labour undertaken with fatherly love, and, I may add, with parental candour.

The chapters in this volume which deal with the warfare of 480–479 were awarded the Conington Prize at Oxford, given in the year 1900.

G. B. GRUNDY.

Brasenose College, Oxford,
October, 1901.

NOTE.

Note.—After nearly a year spent in learning the principles and practice of surveying, I went to Greece in the winter of 1892–93, and made

1. A survey of the field of Platæa;
2. A survey of the town of Platæa;
3. A survey of the field of Leuctra.

I also examined

1. The western passes of the Kithæron range;
2. The roads leading to them from Attica by way of Eleusis and Phyle respectively;
3. The great route from Thebes northward, west of Kopais, as far as Lebadeia and Orchomenos.

In the summer of 1895 I revisited Greece.

During that visit I did the following work:⁠—

1. A survey of Pylos and Sphakteria;
2. An examination of the great military route from Corinth to Argos, and from Argos, by way of Hysiæ, to Tegea;
3. An examination of the military ways from the Arcadian plain into the Eurotas valley;
4. I also followed and examined the great route from the Arcadian plain to Megalopolis, and thence to the Messenian plain;
5. An examination of the site of Ithome.

In the recent summer of 1899 I did further work abroad in reference to Greek as well as Roman history. The Greek portion consisted of:⁠—

1. A visit to the site of and museums of Carthage, with a view to ascertaining the traceable effects of Greek trade and Greek influence in the Phœnician city;
2. A detailed examination, lasting ten days, of the region and site of Syracuse;
3. An examination of the field of Marathon, which I had previously visited, though under adverse circumstances of weather, in January, 1893;
4. A very careful examination of Salamis strait;
5. A voyage up the Euripus, and such examination of the strait at Artemisium as was necessary;
6. A survey of the pass of Thermopylæ;
7. A detailed examination of the path of the Anopæa;
8. An examination of the Asopos ravine and the site and neighbourhood of Heraklea Trachinia;
9. An examination of the route southward from Thermopylæ, through the Dorian plain, past Kytinion and Amphissa to Delphi;
10. A second examination of Platæa and the passes of Kithæron.

Other parts of Greece known to me, though not visited with the intention of, or, it may be, under circumstances permitting, historical inquiry are:⁠—

1. Thessaly, going
   1. (a) From Volo to Thaumaki, viâ Pharsalos;
   2. (b) From Volo to Kalabaka (Æginion) and the pass of Lakmon;
   3. (c) From Volo to Tempe, viâ Larissa;
2. The great route from Delphi to Lebadeia by the Schiste;
3. The route up the west coast of Peloponnese from Pylos, through Triphylia and Elis to Patras;
4. The neighbourhood of Missolonghi;
5. Corfu and Thera (Santorin).

CONTENTS.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

MAPS.

CHAPTER I.
GREEK AND PERSIAN.

The sharp, fierce struggle between Greek and Persian which was fought out on land and sea in the years 480–479, was regarded by those who were contemporary with it, and has ever since been looked upon as the great crisis in the history of the two races. It was a struggle whose results were decisive in the history of the world. From a purely military point of view, it is true, the fighting in those two years was not final. The loser did not issue from it in a condition so crippled that he could not continue the contest. So far from this being the case, Persia, for more than a century after Salamis was fought, continued not merely to show a bold front to Greece, but to maintain the preponderance of her power in the lands east of the Ægean, and to be a cause of dread to the Hellene of Europe. Athens did, in the period succeeding these great years of the war, wrest from Persia most of the Hellenic or semi-Hellenic Islands and coast towns in the Eastern Ægean; but her tenure of many of them was brief, and of all, precarious. The city States on the mainland slip rapidly from her grasp, and the measure of the independence from Persia in the case of some of those who remain on the tribute lists is at least open to discussion. It was long before the Greek world discovered that decay of the great Empire which is so apparent to the student of history who has the story of the fifth and fourth centuries before him. It set in soon after 479; but how far it was caused by the festering of the wounds inflicted in that year cannot now be said. The mischief was internal: it was situate far away in the depths of Asia, beyond the ken of the Greek of the fifth century, and it is not strange that he never appreciated the full extent of the malady.

And yet there is even a military point of view, from which the warfare of these years was, in a sense, decisive. From that time forward Persia was the assailed and not the assailant. The Great King either was not, or did not feel himself in a position to assume the offensive beyond the waters which separated Asia from Europe.

In reckoning up the results of a great war it is instructive to appreciate what was: it is impossible to ignore what might have been. Of the issues, military, political, and social, of this Græco-Persian war, the military issue is perhaps the least important from the point of view of world-history. It did, indeed, teach a great lesson, in that it brought into prominence for the first time the strength and weakness of the East and West when brought into contact with one another; but the most extraordinary feature about this special aspect of the matter is that those who had tried the tremendous experiment were all but utterly unconscious of the true bearing of its results; and it was left to the fourth generation from them to appreciate a truth which their forefathers had proved but never realized.

The possible results from a political and social point of view which might have ensued, had the war ended otherwise than it did, have formed the subject of many a surmise for those who have written the history of these years. If Herodotus can be taken as representative of the views and sentiments of men of his time,—the men, that is to say, of the half century which succeeded the critical phase of the long warfare with Persia,—it is evident that those who regarded the great series of events from a near perspective were supremely conscious of the political, and but little, if at all, conscious of the social issue. THE ISSUES AT STAKE IN THE WAR. It was perhaps the very intensity of the love of freedom with the Greek that blinded him to all save the fact of the preservation of that freedom. Doubtless that feeling was largely bound up with the social question of the preservation of Hellenic civilization, and with the consciousness of the peril to which any social system must be exposed under a political system alien to it. It is nevertheless strange that, if the peril had been regarded in this instance as a very real one, a historian like Herodotus, whose wide experience of other social systems seems to have had the effect of making him a peculiarly ardent Hellenist, should have failed to notice it. It is perhaps possible to suggest a reason for an omission so remarkable. Herodotus himself had been brought up in one of the Dorian cities of Asia, at a time when it was in a state of vassalage to Persia. He had personal experience of the position of the Greeks under Persian rule. He must furthermore have been intimately acquainted with the life in the great Ionian cities which were subject to the Empire. From the Greek point of view, their political position was the reverse of ideal; but even a Greek could hardly have denied that their position might have been much worse than it actually was. The most objectionable feature,—the Greek tyrant governing in the Persian interest,—had been to a great extent removed before his time; and after the deposition of tyranny the cities seem to have enjoyed a large measure of local independence under Persian suzerainty. Whatever the extent or nature of the tie which bound them to the sovereign government, it certainly does not seem to have been such as to crush social and intellectual development on Hellenic lines; in fact, with regard to intellectual development, these very cities seem to have been first in the field, and to have been infinitely more prominent under Persian than under Athenian rule. Whatever the cause, whether fear or policy, or both, it is plain, on the evidence of the Greeks themselves, that the Persian Government was extraordinarily lenient and liberal in its treatment of subject Greeks. The Hellenism of the fifth century, social and intellectual, was, moreover, no tender plant requiring careful political nurture. It had struck its roots deep into the very being of the race; and it may be doubted whether Persia could, even if she would, have eradicated so strong a growth.

It is therefore possible to exaggerate the consequences which might have resulted to Greek civilization had the issue of the great war been favourable to the Persian. The inherent probabilities of the case do not warrant the assertion that such a victory would have brought about the substitution of an Eastern for a Western civilization in South European lands. It is, moreover, extremely doubtful whether the Great King could have maintained his hold upon European Greece for any prolonged period after the initial conquest; and any attempt to crush the Hellenism of the land would certainly have led to insurrection in a country designed by nature to be the home of communal and individual freedom.

Speculation upon what “might have been” is ever open to the charge of idleness. It is, indeed, futile to attempt it in detail, by reason of the infinity of the factors which modify human action. But, inasmuch as what has been already said with regard to the possible results of the war might leave a wrong impression as to the legitimate deductions to be drawn from the main factors of a possible though imaginary situation, it is necessary to carry the speculation one step farther.

That a Persian victory, even if only temporary, would have immensely modified the political development of Greece in the last three quarters of the fifth century, goes without saying; and such a modification could not but have seriously affected the genius of Hellenism. The splendour of the life and literature of the last half of the century was largely due to the elaboration at Athens of a political and social system, the counterpart of which the world has never seen. Never before, and never since, has existed a community so large in which so great a proportion of its members has had time to think out their own salvation, and to work it out upon their own lines of thought. EASTERN AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION. Salvation may seem a strange word to use of a system which produced the pitiful record of the fourth century; and yet, from amid all the evil, failure, and folly of the time there emerged a social order which was infinitely better than anything of the kind which had preceded it, and which was destined to form the foundation of the edifice of civilization in the western world at the present day. A Persian victory at Salamis, or even at Platæa, must have postponed the realization of those ideals which are the glory of the Greek people, and on which rests the claim of their race to the highest place in the history of the nations; and postponement might have made the full realization impossible.

The catastrophe of 480 had been long in maturing. The march of events in South-eastern Europe and Western Asia had been slow. Still, the two paths of development tended in opposite directions; and it was inevitable that those who followed them should meet in a collision, the shock of which would be proportionate to the forces of propulsion. The moral strength of those forces was enormous. The ancient civilization of the East, ages old, strong in development, the one ideal of the millions of Western Asia, came into contact through its most western off-shoot with a civilization which, whatever its origin, and whatever the influences to which it had been exposed, was in striking contrast to it. On the eastern shores of the Ægean the two first met.

It is impossible to say on the one hand what was the level of the civilization attained by the Greeks at the time they first settled on these coasts, more than 1000 years before Christ; and it is still less possible to say what was the state of the peoples they found there at the time of their settlement. Whether Lydia at this early age of its development had as yet come into contact with, and been influenced by, the civilization of the lands east and south of Taurus must also be matter of doubt. It is, on the whole, probable that it had; for the number and rapid development of the Greek trading towns on the East Ægean coast point to a considerable and valuable overland trade, whose roots would, in all probability, be in the lands of Mesopotamia, if not still farther east. The caravans from that rich plain would be sure to carry the infection of its civilization to the lands they traversed.

But, in any case, neither the Greek nor this most westerly off-shoot of the Asiatic civilization can have passed beyond an early stage of development, nor, in so far as is known, did the representatives of either seek to inflict their own form of life upon the representatives of the other. Neither side seems to have been strong enough to conquer the other, even if either had been disposed to try. The Greek was content to trade; the various native races were without union, and cannot have been equal to the conquest of a people whose original settlements they had apparently been unable to prevent.

The great Phrygian kingdom which flourished in Asia Minor for several centuries had probably passed the zenith of its greatness when the Greeks first established themselves on the coast; and the Lydian monarchy, still in its infancy, had not developed into the greatness it attained in after-time. In the obscure and uncertain traditions of the Asian Greeks which Herodotus has preserved, this monarchy is represented as having had an existence extending far into the past, under various dynasties; but of its earliest history nothing is really known, and the little that can be conjectured rests on the uncertain foundation of mythical story. The Atyadæ or Herakleidæ of the earlier dynasties are mere shadow-kings in history. A recurrent theme in Phrygian and Lydian story alike is the fabulous wealth of certain of those rulers. They seem to have afforded the Greek his first glimpse of the splendour of the East.

Though, doubtless, the Greek trader traversed the Western Asian peninsula through and through in his trading journeys, the populations with whom he came in contact remained uninfluenced by a civilization they did not appreciate, and probably could not understand. The Lydians alone afforded an exception to this rule, because their position was exceptional. They were brought into close contact with the Greek, and seem to have implanted on a civilization of an Oriental type certain characteristics derived from Greek social life. RISE OF THE LYDIAN KINGDOM. It is doubtful whether such features of this civilization as are known to the modern world were characteristic of the Lydian race as a whole in early days; it is more probable that the mass of the people remained in a comparatively low state of social development, and that the quasi-feudal ruling families of the land evolved for themselves a civilization copied from foreign lands, and were influenced especially by the reports which reached them of the life and glories of the great cities of the Euphrates plain.

The rise of Lydia to greatness seems to date from the early years of the eighth century before Christ. A feudal family established a precarious supremacy over the other feudal families of the land. Nevertheless, the kingdom seems to have acquired a stable unity which it hitherto had lacked; and the westernmost region of the West Asian peninsula gradually developed into a dominion more splendid, if not more powerful, than any which had hitherto existed among the strangely diverse populations of that part of the world.

Geographical convention has assigned this peninsula to Asia; and, under the influence of name-association, it has come to be regarded as being in every sense an integral portion of that great continent. In point of fact, however, it was at this time a borderland between Orient and Occident, approximating ethnographically rather to West than to East; though, in so far as it was influenced by the outside world, affected rather by the preponderant power and splendour of the East than by the comparative weakness and insignificance of the West. The true historical western frontier of Asia has varied at different periods of history between the Hellespont and the Taurus, according as this debateable land has been in possession of an eastern or a western power. But in the earlier days of the Lydian kingdom the region was politically centred within itself, or, rather, was an aggregation of political circles, and not, as in later times, a mere segment of a great circle, whose centre lay far beyond its borders. Those who know by experience the character of the barrier which, in the shape of Mount Taurus, separates this region from the adjacent East, are most emphatic in insisting upon the formidable nature of that wall of separation. It is not difficult to demonstrate that Taurus has been in the past one of the most decisive physical features in the history of the world.

The great systems of civilization have had one of two origins. Either they have sprung up in those great plains of the world whose climate is favourable to ease of existence; or they have been developed by nations whose circumstances have been favourable to wide intercourse with, and experience of, the peoples around them. Egypt, the Euphrates plain, India, and China, are examples of the first; Greece and Great Britain are the most prominent examples of the latter class. As, however, the “civilizations of intercourse” must be largely dependent on navigation, which can itself be alone developed by long experience, it is plain that they must be of later development than the “civilizations of ease of existence.” Thus it is that, many centuries before any system of civilization of high development existed in Europe, the plains of the Euphrates basin had given birth to one which, had nature allowed it unimpeded expansion, must have spread to a great distance from its centre. The all but blank, impassable wall of Taurus prevented the West Asian peninsula from being thoroughly orientalized. Thus that civilization which was springing up beyond the Ægean was allowed to develop on its own lines, hardly affected by those pale rays of the glowing life of the East which the narrow passes of Taurus allowed to penetrate to the lands of the West. It was the Taurus, too, which protected the earlier stages of the growth of the Lydian kingdom.

East of the chain the Assyrian empire was living out a life of stormy magnificence. The records of its kings,—a wearisome tale of murder, conquest, tribute, and torture,—give, it may be, only one side of its history, and that not the best. Their exploits have as little perspective as their presentment of them. The immediate object is all that is sought; the past is dead; the present alone is living; the future is of no account. A land is conquered; its population is either decimated, wiped out, or removed elsewhere. Its wealth is plundered; and, if there is anything left on which tribute can be laid, tribute is laid upon it. Such is the record of one year. ASSYRIA. A few years later, even in the case of lands previously reported as left desolate, the same process is repeated. There is no rest for the ruling race. For some inscrutable reason, its kings seem not to have had foresight enough to establish a strong system of administration for the conquered provinces. These are merely treated as sources of revenue, doomed to tribute,—a heavy burden indeed, but, at least in the case of regions not bordering immediately on Assyria proper, the only burden laid upon them.

Of the great empires which arose at different periods in this part of the world, Assyria seems to have been the least enlightened. Its real field of operation was bounded by the great mountain-systems on the north and east, by the Great Sea on the west and the desert on the south. Any operations undertaken outside these well-defined limits seem to have been of the nature of punitive expeditions directed against mountain tribes who had raided within these boundaries. Their lands were too poor to excite the cupidity of this brigand empire. If they remained quiet, Assyria left them alone, and devoted its energies to the exaction of tribute from the richer lands of the plain or of the Syrian coast. There are few records of expeditions west of the Taurus; and, though some lands are asserted to have paid tribute, there is no evidence whatever of anything like permanent conquest. The great mountain chain acted as a groyne which diverted the flood of invasion from the Euphrates region southward along the Syrian coast Thus it was that the growing kingdom of Lydia never came into hostile contact with the great empire. Yet the commercial intercourse between them must have been carried on upon a large scale; and, indeed, the prosperity of Lydia and of the Greek colonies on the Asian coast was due to their acting as middlemen in the commerce between East and West which passed along that route which formed in later Persian times the line of the royal road to Susa. It was an interruption of this intercourse, and a threatened diversion of this route, which brought about the opening of diplomatic relations between the two realms.

In the latter half of the eighth century before Christ, the plains of Asia and East Europe were disturbed by one of those movements of thrust which are ever recurrent in their history; and a tide of migration was set up which was destined to have many more remarkable counterparts in later story. Under pressure of a race which may with a certain amount of probability be identified with the Massagetæ of after times, those mysterious peoples, the Cimmerians and Scythians, were driven from their homes in the northern plains and invaded in whole or in part the West Asian peninsula. Of the two, the Cimmerians settled in the region of the North bordering on the Euxine, and by continual raids made life a burden to the Phrygians and White Syrians of those parts. Some thirty unhappy years seem to have passed thus. The Phrygian kingdom was gradually broken up, and by 670 B.C. the Cimmerians found themselves on the north borders of Lydia, which had just taken a new lease of life under Gyges, one of the ablest and most energetic of its successive rulers. The possibility of invasion was only part of the danger which threatened Lydia. That Gyges could and did ward off in a fierce struggle with the northern hordes; but his resources were, unaided, not equal to the task of reopening the great trade route to the East which passed through the lands of which these hordes were in possession. He began negotiations with the mighty Empire of the East which, under the energetic rule of Assur-bani-pal, was at the height of its power. He sought to get aid in the heavy task which lay before him. There were difficulties about the interpretation of the message which his envoys carried to Nineveh; but these were overcome, and he received fair words in answer to his request. More than this he did not get. Assur-bani-pal had his hands full nearer home. He and his line seem to have been past-masters of the art of creating difficulties to be overcome; but the king seems to have had no desire to interfere in the affairs of a land whose geographical position was vaguely known to him as being near the “crossing of the sea.” He had enough self-created troubles at his very gates without going abroad to find them.

LYDIA AND THE GREEKS.

So Gyges got no help from Nineveh, and was obliged to content himself with having successfully warded off the invasion of his own territories. For some years at any rate the great route eastward must have been difficult, if not actually impassable. This interruption of commercial relations by land with the East may well have led to that development of Lydian intercourse with Egypt of which the Assyrian records afford evidence.

The history of the Lydian kingdom, except in so far as it affects the fortunes of the Greeks in Asia and Europe, forms no part of the design of the present volume.

In the reign of Gyges, however, the relations between Lydian and Greek entered upon a new stage. The Lydian rulers had hitherto lived on friendly terms with most of the Hellenic towns on the adjacent coasts. Gyges went still further, and by assiduous cultivation of the Delphic oracle attracted the attention and regard of the Greeks of Europe, who thus for the first time became intimate with one of the great monarchies of the East.

For the new relations with Egypt, the Greek trader formed the connecting link. It was almost inevitable that an energetic ruler like Gyges should seek to get direct control of the main, if not the only, means of communication with an ally whose alliance flattered his vanity, and with a country whose wealth could not fail to benefit Lydian trade. It is evident, however, that he did not feel himself strong enough to attempt an overt attack on the Greek cities. That could only have resulted in a formidable resistance on the part of those centres of liberty and wealth. He devised a better plan, slow working but terribly effective, and destined in later days to lead to the undoing of the liberties of Greece.

Gyges has the distinction of being the first barbarian in history who saw his way to profit by the fierce political dissensions common to all Greek communities. By allying himself with factions in the various cities he acquired in many of them a preponderating influence, while he reduced others to subjection. Kolophon shared this latter fate; so did the smaller Magnesia near Sardes. With others he entered into close relations of friendship favourable to himself, since the continuance of the pressure from the side of the Cimmerians made persistence in the policy of absorption impossible. The pressure increased instead of diminishing; and it was from this quarter that the final catastrophe came. A combination between the Cimmerians and other tribes of Asia Minor proved too strong for Gyges. He perished in a great battle. Lydia was overrun and devastated; and during the stormy days of the commencement of the reign of his successor, Ardys, the Asian Greeks found it necessary to join the Lydians in their death struggle. The Greek towns, though none save Magnesia appear to have been actually captured, suffered severe losses, which were but partially compensated for by successes won by Greek hoplites. Ardys, like his father, appealed to Assyria; and this time the Lydian appeal did not remain without effect, for the Cimmerians had turned east and were threatening the Assyrian border. Assailed by the Assyrians in the passes of Taurus, they were so terribly defeated that they ceased thereafter to be the formidable power they had been in West Asia during the previous half century. In the years which followed Lydia gradually acquired all that northern part of the peninsula which had been in Cimmerian hands.

Lydia was now a considerable power, extending to the Halys on the east; and as such it presented itself to the European Greek of the later years of the seventh century. To Lydia accordingly turned the thoughts of Aristomenes, the hero of the Messenian wars of independence against Sparta, when as a refugee he sought safety across the Ægean. Paus. iv. 24. 2, 3. Death overtook him before he had time to carry out his intention of appealing to Ardys for help.

Having attained a frontier on the east beyond which further attempts at expansion were dangerous, Ardys’ attention was naturally directed westward, where the thickly dotted line of Greek colonies practically cut Lydia off from communication with the Ægean littoral. They held the natural exits of that overland trade to which the prosperity of Ardys’ kingdom must have been largely due, and must have absorbed a large proportion of those trade profits which the Lydian might not unreasonably regard as his own. STRATEGIC POSITIONS OF ASIATIC GREEKS. Moreover, the relations of Lydia with the great trading towns of Smyrna, Kolophon, Klazomenæ, Miletus, and Priene, were no longer of the friendly character of former days. The policy of Ardys consequently aimed specially at the reduction or absorption of these towns.

The inevitable was about to happen. The very nature of the peninsula made it all but certain that whenever a great State acquired command of the upper part of the great valleys of the Hermus, Mæander, and other streams, the towns which stood on their western exits must succumb to that State.

A glance at the map of Western Asia will show this.

The main physical characteristics of the country from the Halys to the Ægean are, (1) a great interior plateau; (2) a series of parallel mountain chains running from east to west, between which rivers, following the same direction, run down towards the Ægean, so that their valleys form a series of natural lines of communication between the plateau and the coast. There is no cross-chain running north and south, at the head of these valleys, to form a natural barrier towards the east. Access to them is unimpeded from that direction.

This physical conformation of the land was alike a curse and a blessing to the Greek trading towns of the coast. The valleys formed, on the one hand, natural routes for commerce of immense value to those who held their exits; but they also afforded natural highways for attack to any power coming from the interior which assailed the holders of those exits.

The disadvantage had not been so apparent while Lydia was still a comparatively weak State; but it was sure to come into prominence so soon as she attained to any degree of power. The weakness of the strategic position of those Greek cities is not less striking than the advantages of their positions from a commercial point of view. Their territories, besides being this void of any line of defence towards the east, were separated from one another by the ranges which divided the river valleys; and intercommunication by sea was rendered difficult by the long projecting promontories which separate the deep gulfs at the head of which most of the cities were situated. From the point of view of joint action this was a very serious drawback. Nature had been doubly unkind to them in this respect. Not content with having made a base of combination on land impossible, she had made combination on sea difficult. Prosperity without liberty was the natural birthright of these Asian towns. Even when backed up by all the naval strength of the Athenian empire, their independence of the power on the mainland seems to have been in most cases partial, and in all precarious; and even independence gave them little more or better than a change of masters.

H. i. 15.

Priene was taken by Ardys somewhere about the year 620. Miletus was next attacked; but this greatest of the cities proved no easy prey. The war dragged on after Ardys’ death, through the short reign of his successor, Sadyattes; H. i. 17. and under Alyattes took the form of annual raids, designed to wear out the patience of the citizens. At last, mainly on the advice of the oracle at Delphi, a compromise was effected about B.C. 604, by which each side granted commercial concessions to the other, though matters remained politically in statu quo.

The comparative failure at Miletus did not discourage Alyattes in his enterprises against the towns. Kolophon, which had regained or reassumed its independence at the time of the Cimmerian trouble, was brought into subjection once more; H. i. 16. Smyrna, as a town, was destroyed, and its inhabitants forced to take up their abode in unwalled settlements. Klazomenæ well-nigh experienced the same fate. Alliances were made with other cities, such as Ephesus and Kyme. Alyattes would doubtless have prosecuted further his designs against the Greek cities, had not his attention been at this moment called away to the eastern frontier of his kingdom.

It was not from Assyria that the trouble threatened. That great empire had come to an end some years before, under circumstances of which the details do not directly affect the Greeks. A Scythian incursion, so prolonged that it seemed likely to terminate in permanent settlement, had broken it. MEDO-LYDIAN WAR. The final death-blow had been inflicted by two peoples—the Medes, who inhabited the mountainous uplands beyond the Zagros chain which bounds the plain of the Tigris on the east and north-east, and the Babylonians, who had ever chafed under Assyrian rule.

Within a short period the Medes had pushed their frontier westward beyond the Taurus, and had reduced to subjection the country between that range and the Halys, a region which at times came within the sphere of Assyrian influence, but cannot be said to have formed part of that empire.

With all the vigour inspired by recent success, the Mede sought to push his way westward; and a fierce frontier war seems to have been waged for several years upon the Halys between Alyattes and Cyaxares, the Median king.

Pteria, a town whose position renders it the chief strategic point in the Halys region, commanding, as it does, the middle portion of the cleft-like valley through which the river flows, formed the point d’appui of the Lydian defence, and was the immediate object of the Median attack.

Of the war itself but little is known, except the important fact that it came to an end in a remarkable way. The opposing armies were drawn up for a battle, when an eclipse of the sun took place, which caused both sides to shrink from the engagement. It is calculated that such eclipses took place in Asia Minor in the years 610 and 585, of which the latter seems to be the more probable date of this unfought fight. H. i. 74. A peace was concluded through the mediation of a Babylonian whose name Herodotus gives as Labynetos; but in what capacity he acted as mediator is not known. The celebrated Nebuchadrezzar was ruling in Babylon at the time. Lydia apparently sacrificed Pteria and the region east of Halys, and that river became the definite frontier between the two States.

The story of this Median kingdom has come down to posterity in a form so imperfect that it is difficult to extract the small historical from the large mythical element contained in it. Its chief importance in history is that its kings are the first of that series of Iranian dynasties which, whether Median, Persian, or Parthian, were paramount in the eastern world for many centuries. From this time forward the Iranian took the place of the Semite as the suzerain of the East; for the Babylonian realm of Nebuchadrezzar was but of comparatively brief splendour, and was soon absorbed by the less civilized but more virile power which became heir to its partner in the destruction of Assyria.

The Median king Cyaxares, who had warred with the Lydians on the Halys, lived but one year after the close of the campaign, and was succeeded by his son Astyages, whose chief claim to fame is that he was the last of the brief line of Median kings. Little is known of him. For the Greek the truth concerning him and his was lost in that mirage of legends which accumulated round the personality of the man who overthrew him, Cyrus the Great.

The myths, fables, and legends which the ever lively imagination of the East invented with regard to the founder of the Persian dynasty, have crowded the greater part of the real story of his life out of the pages of history. Their adoption by Greek historians was all but complete; though some, like Herodotus, sought to rationalize a few of the incidents reported. Did there exist no other records of his life than those which have survived in the Greek historians, it would be difficult to assert with confidence which of the reported details are true. Comparatively recent discoveries in the East have brought to light, however, certain annals of a Babylonian king, Nabonidus, a successor of Nebuchadrezzar, and a contemporary of Cyrus. From these records it is possible to reconstruct the story of some of the main events of what must have been a very stirring time in that part of the world.

Astyages the Mede had reigned a quarter of a century, when Cambyses, the prince of one of the vassal principalities of the Median empire, died, and was succeeded by his son Kurush, the Cyrus of the Greeks. This was about the year 559. The name of the principality appears in the records as Anshan. Its inhabitants were the Persians of history.

MEDE AND PERSIAN.

This people, which was destined to play so great a part in the two following centuries, were of the same race as the Medes. The only possible deduction to be drawn from subsequent events is that the connection between the two nations was very close. Its exact nature can only be guessed at. Any difference between the two must have been rather nominal than real; for the supremacy of the one race does not appear to imply the subjection of the other; and when, somewhere about 552, Cyrus revolted, and defeated Astyages, the Median army came over immediately to his side. It is hardly credible that such a thing should have taken place, had not the Medes regarded Cyrus and his family as being in some very real sense a part of themselves, and as possessed of some title to be their rulers. Both races were certainly Iranian. They were alike in religion and very near akin in language. It may even have been that the Persian was a tribesman of the nation to which the name Mede was given. Their nearest neighbours, the Babylonians, recorded the change of ruler, but not in language which could lead to the supposition that they regarded it as an event of great magnitude. They seem to have looked upon it as more or less of a domestic matter, an internal revolution.

The Persian empire was indeed the empire of the Mede under a new name; stronger and more vigorous than its forerunner, because the helm of government passed into abler hands. The Greeks themselves hardly recognized the distinction between the two, and used the names Mede and Persian in a general sense as synonymous terms. Nor has the perspective of centuries sensibly altered the nature of the picture as it presented itself to those who regarded it from a nearer point of view. The two nations, one in religion, one in civilization, one in social system, appear as one in the making of the history of the three centuries during which they played the foremost part in Western Asia.

During the thirty years of Astyages’ rule in Media, the Lydian kingdom enjoyed a continuous career of expansion. Whether owing to troubles at home, or to the severity of the check administered in the campaign on the Halys before 585, Astyages made no attempt to extend the Median frontier towards the West. It is probable that he had his hands full with the work of consolidating the wide dominion which his race had so recently won, and the revolt of Cyrus may have been but the last of a series of insurrections on the part of his subordinate rulers. Be that as it may, Lydia was given a breathing space from attack, which, under the energetic rule of Alyattes, she used to the full.

The renewal of the assault on the liberties of the Greek towns of the Ægean coast followed immediately upon the close of the fighting with the Medes. Before five years had elapsed, the Troad and Mysia, with the Æolian Greek cities of the Hellespontine region, had been reduced. Even Bithynia seems to have been invaded about this time, and part of it secured by strongholds built at important strategical points. In the south-west Caria proved a harder conquest. Its population, from which the earliest professional soldiery in the Levant had been drawn, did not give up the struggle until about the year 566, well-nigh at the close of Alyattes’ reign. The Dorian cities on the coast seem to have shared its fate. On this occasion, at any rate, they were partners in its adversity.

It was in this campaign that Crœsus, that figure of pathetic magnificence, destined later to cast both light and shadow on the historical records of the Greek, first came into prominence. The mingled admiration and commiseration of after-time exaggerated his personality into the very type of human fortune and misfortune; and the picture of his life as drawn by Herodotus is probably no more than a truthful reproduction of the impression of him which prevailed a century after his death. Nevertheless the thread of fact runs unbroken through the maze of fiction, and it is possible to reconstruct his history with more reliability than can be claimed for the records of his predecessors.

CRŒUS. LYDIAN CIVILIZATION.

As a youth he had incurred the displeasure of his father Alyattes by his extravagance, and had imperilled his chances of succession by the distrust which his conduct excited among an influential section of the population, composed probably of staid merchants, who would be unlikely to sympathize with irresponsible and expensive frivolity. The danger brought him to his senses; and he apparently made up his mind that the Carian war afforded him an opportunity of winning a good opinion he had never tried to earn. How he succeeded is not known. He did succeed; for the fortunate issue of the war was largely attributed to his exertions and ability. He was just in time to save the situation for himself, since the years of his father’s life were numbered. About B.C. 561,[2] Alyattes died, not before he had raised the Lydian kingdom to a greatness beyond what it hitherto had known.

It stood, indeed, on the same level as the great contemporary monarchies of the East, while as yet the Mede had not succeeded to the full heritage of that Assyria which he had helped to destroy. It absorbed for the time the attention of the Greek, when he gave his attention to anything beyond his home affairs. Its very splendour became a barrier of light which the Greek eye could not pierce so far as to see clearly what was going on in the region beyond, so that even the great Cyrus came not within the field of Hellenic vision until he had emerged from the comparative darkness of the lands beyond the Halys.

Archæological discovery within Lydia itself has done far more than the meagre records of contemporary history towards disclosing the characteristics of the civilization which was thus brought into strong contrast with that of the Hellenic lands and cities. It would be out of place in a work of this kind to enter into details with regard to it; yet the possibilities of the future were at the moment of Crœsus’ accession so significant, and of such world-wide importance, that it is impossible to pass over in silence the main features of a social system whose influence upon the Hellenic world must have been very great, and might have been much greater.

The Lydians, a people of undeniable genius, seem to have built upon an indigenous foundation a composite civilization, made up largely of elements drawn from foreign lands. Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt all contributed to its formation; and the influence of the Greek of the Asian coast and of Europe is unmistakable, especially in the last years of its independent existence. It was, indeed, in the main a “civilization of intercourse,” due to the important trading relations of the kingdom with the various nations which lay within its reach. Its main characteristics in the sixth century are Oriental, though the tendency towards its hellenization, fostered greatly by its rulers, is strikingly apparent. It must, indeed, on the other hand, have influenced the social life of the Greek cities within the borders of the kingdom; and it is difficult to say how far this influence might have affected the civilization of the West, had not the process of infiltration been brought to a sudden standstill.

It was, as might be expected from the variety of its origin, a strange compound of good and evil. From his very vocation the Lydian trader evolved a system of cosmopolitan humanity, rare in those ages, rare, indeed, in any age in eastern lands. Living at ease himself, he was naturally inclined to live and let live. The width of his trade connections, and the necessity of securing safe passage through foreign countries, would tend to make him cultivate friendly relations with the people around him. One thing that he evolved from the necessities of his mode of life has had as much influence upon the history of the world as any single invention of man before or since. The awkwardness of exchange and barter to a merchant whose trade had distant roots, and who had to make long overland journeys in the course of his business, led him to invent and gradually adopt one medium of exchange, which all peoples, however various their home products, would appreciate. LYDIAN INFLUENCE ON THE GREEKS. It required but little education in taste to make even the rudest of races set value on the most beautiful of all the metals; and the gold and silver which Lydia produced so freely was stamped into the first currency of which there is record in history. Greek and Persian alike lost but little time in adopting so magnificent an invention.

The Lydian works of art which have survived show that the nation had attained to considerable skill in that respect.

But if the virtues of this civilization were great, its vices were equally so. The grossest form of immorality, that pest which the East seems to inherit like a moral leprosy, was prevalent. Certain tales in Herodotus show this to have been the case. The Greek did not escape the disease, and it may be that it was from the Lydian that he first caught it. Wholesale immorality of another kind was not merely prevalent, but received a religious sanction in the guise of that Aphrodite worship which in various forms sapped the vigour of the East. The town populations of Greece, especially those which, like the Corinthians, had closest intercourse with the Asian coast, caught this infection also.

It would have been contrary to the very nature of things had the Greeks,—a race peculiarly apt to learn both evil and good,—escaped altogether the influence of this Oriental social system at their doors. It is fortunate for posterity that its influence was short-lived. The very excellence of the general relations between the Lydia of Crœsus and the Greeks as a body made the Lydian influence the more dangerous. It was the bitter hostility which sprang up in after times between the Greeks and the representatives of that new Orientalism which was superimposed upon the Lydian form, which saved the Greek civilization from becoming itself orientalized. The danger which Greece ran in the great war of 480–479 was as nothing compared with the danger Hellenism would have run had the war never taken place. The bitter, lasting hostility which it roused was far less dangerous than friendly intercourse with a great empire, the heir of all the ages of a world-old civilization, which might have made a moral conquest of the Hellene, had it refrained from attempting a physical one. It was the war itself, rather than its issue, which proved the salvation of Greece.

Crœsus’ succession to the great dominion which Alyattes had left was not undisputed. But the son had inherited the vigour of his father. He anticipated the plans of his rival. The pretender disappeared,—how or whither is not known; and his supporters, who were largely drawn from the feudal nobility of the land, met death in many grievous forms. Some of the Greek cities had more than sympathized with his antagonist, so to these he now turned his attention. All of them, Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian alike, were reduced to the position of Lydian dependencies, though in matters purely local they remained autonomous, if the name of autonomy can be given to a form of government in which a local tyrant played the part of administrator and political agent. Yet unpromising as was their position from the point of view of theoretical politics, they were in actual fact treated with marked consideration by Crœsus.

It is impossible at the present day to sound the motives which underlay the attitude which this extraordinary man adopted to the Greeks alike of Asia and of Europe. It may have been from pure self-interest; it may have been because Hellenism had cast over him the glamour which it cast over other barbarian monarchs. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that, when once he had reduced the Greek cities to that position of dependence which was necessary for the political homogeneity of his empire, he seems to have lost no opportunity of ingratiating himself in the eyes of his Greek subjects and of their kinsmen beyond the seas. At Branchidæ and at Ephesus he enriched the Greek temples with splendid offerings; and the wealth of the gifts he gave to Delphi excited the admiration of centuries. If contemporary report be not exaggerated, the value of his dedications to the great Hellenic shrine amounted to considerably more than a million pounds sterling of the money of the present day. Gifts of great value were also sent to the lesser Greek oracles.

DESIGNS OF CRŒUS.

The authorities at Delphi would have been exceptional among similar societies in all ages of the world, had they not shown appreciation of a devotee so wealthy and so willing. He was made a citizen; to his embassies were given a precedence over all others.

It is difficult to imagine that Crœsus should have expended such enormous sums on the cultivation of friendly relations with the Greeks of Europe for purely sentimental reasons. The oracles were not the only recipients of his gifts. The friendship of prominent and powerful families in various States, such as the Alkmæonidæ of Athens, was bought with a price.

Perhaps the explanation maybe sought and found in the previous and later policy of the king. He had subjugated the Greek cities of the coast, and by so doing had advanced his kingdom to its extreme limits on the west. Unless he converted Lydia into a naval power, further expansion on this side was impossible. So he turned his eyes towards the East, where nature and the circumstances of the time offered what must have seemed a favourable opportunity for the extension of his empire.

It must, however, have been quite evident to him that any policy of expansion eastward could only be carried out with safety in case his rear was secured from attack, where danger lay, not merely in the recently subdued Greek cities, but also in the possibility of any movement on their part being supported by help from their kinsmen in Europe.

Considerations such as these must have had a large influence upon his policy.

The story of his operations in the East has survived in history in what is manifestly a very mutilated form. It is fortunate that Strabo has preserved some reliable details which Herodotus does not mention in his somewhat legendary account of the last days of the rule of Crœsus. The Lydian frontier had been extended to the Halys; but the motley collection of races and states included within the dominion was in some cases bound to the ruler of Sardes by comparatively loose ties. These ties Crœsus strengthened.

Affairs in Asia beyond the Halys were at the moment, when Crœsus brought his plans to maturity, about the year 548, in a condition which made all certain calculation as to their issue impossible. The Median dynasty had come to an end some four years before, and with it the treaty concluded by Lydia with the Mede in 585 had come to an end also. Cyrus must have been an unknown factor to the Lydian, though doubtless the merchant travellers had brought back from the East many a tale of his energy and success. He was certainly a danger: and the question probably suggested itself to Crœsus whether he were not a danger which it would be wise to forestall, by pushing forward the Lydian frontier to that mass of mountains formed by the meeting of Taurus with the Armenian chains. Such a precautionary measure would be rendered the more attractive to the Lydian trader by the fact that it would lead to the inclusion within the empire of that rich mineral district on the south shore of the Euxine wherein the famed Chalybes dwelt.

Crœsus was wise enough not to enter upon this venture single-handed.

It is evident that the comparative indifference with which Nabonidus and the Babylonians had originally regarded the change of rulers in Median empire, had by this time given place to a feeling of uneasiness, if not of actual alarm. The easy-going, peace-loving antiquarian of Babylon might well be apprehensive as to what might be the next object of the uncomfortable enterprise of his energetic neighbour. Even then the faint outlines of the writing on the wall were well-nigh decipherable.

Amasis of Egypt had far less grounds for alarm; but even he seems to have caught the infection of fear.

H. i. 77.

With these two states Crœsus entered into negotiations, which resulted in the formation of a grand alliance, having for its object the suppression of the power which was so rapidly developing in the East.

The negotiations of Crœsus were not confined to the great powers. He sought and obtained allies in European Greece. The Lydian kings had had a long experience of the value of the Greek heavy-armed infantryman. Greek hoplites had fought many a time both with and against them. LYDIA AND SPARTA. The addition of a contingent of them to the grand army which the king was now gathering together would be of inestimable value. There was evidently a difficulty about his obtaining such a force from the Greek cities of Asia; nor can there be any reasonable doubt as to where that difficulty lay. These cities had within the last few years been robbed of much of that measure of autonomy which they had up to that time enjoyed, and upon which they had set a value out of proportion, doubtless, to its real worth. The vivid discontent which such a loss must have aroused in Greek minds, a discontent the depth of which the experience of ages would enable the Lydian to gauge, would inevitably render them dangerous elements in a Lydian army. The cities did, indeed, with one exception, remain proof against Cyrus’ attempts to tamper with their loyalty; but their attitude at the time was probably as much due to caution as to fidelity. Their geographical position would not allow them to accept risks against Lydia.

It was, therefore, to Greece itself that Crœsus turned. The relations which he had so assiduously cultivated with Delphi enabled him to obtain its assistance in the negotiations. H. i. 69. The outcome was, so Herodotus says, that Sparta, partly persuaded by the oracle, partly flattered by the Lydian embassy, consented to give aid in the war. Moreover, the way to this alliance had been previously paved with Lydian gold.

It is true that this contingent never reached Lydia. Ere it had actually started, Sardes had fallen and Crœsus was either dead or a prisoner. Whether the delay in despatching it was intentional or not, the satisfactorily attested fact of such an alliance having been made is evidence that the Lydia of that day exercised a very real influence in Greece. Of the danger to which Hellenic civilization was exposed by Lydian friendship, enough has been already said.

That friendship was genuine and unaffected on the side, at any rate, of the Greeks. The relations of Crœsus with Delphi must have been largely instrumental in forming it; but what happened in relation to this very war showed clearly that the feeling of Greece towards Crœsus was built upon wider foundations. The Greeks had come to regard him as a distinguished convert to that Hellenism they so much loved. The impression may have been false, but it was powerful. “He loveth our nation” is an article in a national creed whose possibilities can be hardly exaggerated. That the feeling had become independent of the relations with Delphi is conspicuously shown in the present instance by the fact that it was Delphi which administered to it a shock which the Greek world took long to forget. The remembrance of it was evidently vivid a hundred years later in the time of Herodotus.

It came about as follows. Anxious as to the issue of the great venture upon which he was entering, Crœsus sought to fortify or defeat his own resolution by inquiring of the oracles as to what the future had in store for him.

H. i. 53.

Two of the oracles consulted, of which Delphi was one, answered that “if he warred with the Persians he would overthrow a mighty empire.” The response was capable of two interpretations, of which Crœsus seized upon the most obvious; and was thus, so the Greeks thought, led to his undoing. Despite the pious faith with which Herodotus regards the utterances of the Delphic oracle, he is unable to conceal the tremendous shock which this apparent deception caused to Hellenic sentiment all the world over. To the Greek it appeared as though the oracle had betrayed its best friend and his also. Even in the cities of Asia, chafing though they were under recent subjugation, this feeling must have found some echo, whose resonance lasted till Herodotus’ own time. It is unlikely that he would ever have disclosed its existence had not the feeling been very widespread in the Hellenic world he loved. H. i. 90. The legendary story which he relates of the conversation between Crœsus and Cyrus, expresses evidently a feeling entertained by many besides Crœsus himself; and in the chapter which follows upon this tale, he shows that the Delphic oracle was forced by public opinion to attempt to explain away the apparent deception it had practised. FALL OF THE LYDIAN KINGDOM. The true explanation, which would have relieved it of a large part of the burden of the moral guilt, was one it dare not give in view of the prophetic character which it had to maintain before the eyes of the world. Prophecy founded upon intimate knowledge of Greek affairs was very far from being the mere guesswork, wrapped in enigma, of its utterances relative to matters deep in Asia, of which it can have had no real ken.

The account of the campaign given by Herodotus is full of inconsistencies; but by comparison of his story with other incidental references to it in various sources, it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the main outlines of what took place.

The great coalition might have taken Cyrus by surprise, had not the plans of Crœsus been divulged to him by an Ephesian traitor, if a tale preserved by Diodorus is to be believed. The mere fact that he was able to anticipate the designs of Crœsus renders it probable that some disclosure of the kind did take place.

Forewarned and forearmed, Cyrus executed a rapid and adventurous march through the northern territories of the Babylonian kingdom, and must have been already near the Taurus before Crœsus received from his ally Nabonidus news of the coming attack. He was but half-prepared; but the danger was so imminent that he had to take the field with the force he had with him, while he sent urgent messages to his allies to come with all speed to help him. H. i. 75. He crossed the Halys into the district of Pteria, which he laid waste as a defensive measure. The historians, Herodotus and Polyænus, are hopelessly at variance as to what happened in the actual fighting that ensued. A great battle did take place: that is certain. It is also certain that after the battle Crœsus retired through Phrygia to Sardes; but whether he did so because he had been defeated, or because he had inflicted a severe check on Cyrus, and expected that a diversion on the part of the Babylonians would make it impossible for him to advance towards Sardes in the winter, is unknown. In any case, Nabonidus did not move, and Cyrus surprised Crœsus in Lydia. Crœsus, caught unprepared, made a desperate defence with such forces as he could collect; but he was shut up in Sardes. Of the real history of the siege the Greeks seem to have known little or nothing; their chroniclers give the most contradictory accounts of it. But the town fell within a short time—taken, it would seem, by escalade. What became of Crœsus is not known. Bakchylides III. 23 ff. It is probable that he immolated himself upon a burning pyre. The tale was too shocking for Greek ears, and was softened down by a legendary addition to the effect that he was saved from the flames by divine intervention.

The sudden collapse of Lydia is one of the most remarkable incidents in history.

It fell in a moment, as it were, never to rise again; and it fell, not in the decadence of age, but at the very height of its young and vigorous life. To the Greek the spectacle was bewildering: nor is it strange that a catastrophe so sudden and complete, unparalleled, indeed, in the history of the world, should have so dazed the senses of those who were spectators of it, that they were never able to give a rational account of how it came to pass.

CHAPTER II.
PERSIAN AND GREEK IN ASIA. THE SCYTHIAN EXPEDITION.

Despite the great catastrophe which had just taken place before their eyes, the Greek cities had no mind to make an unconditional surrender to the power which had vanquished their old master. It was unfortunate that, after coming to such a decision, they did not combine in a common resistance. The inherent weakness of their strategical position, together with the incompleteness of the sympathy between Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greek, made such united action difficult. There is a terrible sameness in the drama of history as played upon this coast of the Ægean. The scenery admitted of but one plot, of which the leading motive was disunion. In the present, as in other instances, the Dorian states of the Carian coast went their own way. They threw in their lot with their Carian neighbours. The Æolians and Ionians were not altogether blameless in the matter. They did not at first show a bold front to the Persian, but offered to submit to him on the terms on which they had submitted to Crœsus.

Save in the case of Miletus, the largest and most formidable of the towns, Cyrus would not hear of terms; and so the cities prepared to fight for their liberty.

It was the beginning of the winter; and, as the Persians did not possess the means for assaulting the cities from the side of the sea, the latter had a few months’ respite wherein to make preparations. They appealed to Sparta for help. That cautious government, which was probably congratulating itself on having escaped from involving its citizens in the Lydian débâcle, refused active assistance, but sent an embassy to Cyrus to warn him against interference. Cyrus, whose notions as to the geography of this part of the world may well have been vague, asked who the ambassadors were, and whence they came. H. i. 153. On being told, he warned them that, all well, he would give them cause to talk about their own woes and not those of the Ionians. This rough humour must have seemed in great contrast to the politeness with which Crœsus had addressed the foremost race in Greece.

Cyrus was obliged to entrust the completion of the conquest of the Lydian kingdom to one of his lieutenants. The news of the fall of Sardes had scared Babylon into inactivity; but the Baktrians and Sakæ on the extreme eastern borders of his dominion had seized the opportunity afforded by the western campaign to rise in revolt.

He had not proceeded far on his homeward march before news reached him of a rising in Lydia. Paktyas, a renegade Lydian who had embraced his cause, and to whom the conqueror had entrusted the care of the transport of the spoils, had intrigued with the Ionian Greeks; and, having ample funds at his disposal, had hired mercenaries from them. Tabalos, the Persian lieutenant whom Cyrus had left behind him, was besieged in the citadel of Sardes; and there was every prospect that, if the place fell, all the work of the late campaign would have to be done again. There was no time to be lost: nor was Cyrus the man to lose time. He despatched an army under Mazares the Mede to rescue the besieged, and Sardes was saved. Paktyas fled to Kyme, and thence to the islands. He neither deserved nor received sympathy, and, after various adventures, was handed over by the Chians to the Median commander.

With the flight of Paktyas the insurrection in Lydia came to an end; in fact, in so far as extant records go, the Lydians themselves played but little part in it. The passive and entire submission of this people, their acceptance, once and for all, of the yoke laid upon them, is one of the most extraordinary features of this extraordinary time. CONQUEST OF IONIA BY PERSIA. It might well have been expected that a nation with a past so recent and so glorious would have seized the first and every opportunity of attempting to regain the freedom, if not the dominion they had lost. But nothing of the kind took place; and even the great effort of the Ionian revolt failed to rouse them from the apathy of defeat.

The circumstances of Paktyas’ rebellion showed Mazares that the Greek cities of the coast could no longer be left in a position to be the instruments of trouble in the newly-won territory. To them, accordingly, he immediately turned his attention. He first attacked Priene and sacked it; but, before he had completed the reduction of Magnesia on the Mæander, he died, and Harpagos, who succeeded him as governor, took up the task of reduction. Phokæa and Teos were besieged. Ere they fell, the mass of their inhabitants went into voluntary exile—the Phokæans to Corsica in the farthest west, the Teans to the near coast of Thrace.

There can be little doubt that the departure of these peoples was a disaster of the first magnitude to the Greek towns of Asia. It is hardly possible to realize at the present day the strength of resolution which prompted the Phokæans to undertake their long and perilous journey. They are the New Englanders of the sixth century before Christ. Their presence fifty years later, at the time of the revolt, might have given the Ionian resistance that “stiffening” which it seems to have lacked; indeed, a member of the remnant they left behind them, that dare-devil old pirate Dionysius, is the one prominent person on the Greek side in that distressful time whom later historians consented to praise. One by one the other Ionian and Æolian cities fell into Persian power. There does not appear to have been any real combined resistance. Nature had made them units without unity. The islanders of Samos alone escaped subjection.

Caria was next attacked. It yielded practically without a blow, and the Dorian colonies fell with it into Persian hands—a fate in their case not wholly undeserved. Lycia fought for its liberty, but in vain; and with its subjection the establishment of Persian rule on the continent of West Asia was complete.

The rest of the career of Cyrus, important though it is, has little influence on Greek history. His campaign in the East was a prolonged one. He seems to have extended the borders of his empire to the Thian-Shan and Suleiman ranges, if not into the plains of India itself. His aim can hardly have been the mere acquisition of these enormous areas of comparatively unproductive territory. The reason lying behind his policy was, in all probability, the fact that the races of this region were near akin to his own, and that he wished to advance against the Semitic peoples at the head of a forced coalition of the Iranian races.

The turn of Babylon for attack was soon to come. Nabonidus’ antiquarian researches absorbed more and more of his time, and the real conduct of the government seems to have passed into the hands of his son Bel-sharuzar, the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel. In the final struggle, indeed, Nabonidus seems to have come to the front again.

By 538 Cyrus was ready. He made great preparations for the invasion, probably in anticipation of a much harder task than it actually proved. The collapse seems to have been rapid, so that within a short time Babylon was taken, Nabonidus a prisoner, and the brief revival of the Chaldæan empire at an end. The whole of the Babylonian dominions submitted to the conqueror, and the empire of Cyrus now stretched unbroken from the Ægean and Mediterranean on the west to the borders of India on the east.

Of the three rival kingdoms, Egypt alone survived. Doubtless Cyrus had designs upon it; but after the fall of Babylon in 538, he seems to have wisely devoted himself to the task of consolidating the empire he had won so rapidly in the previous fourteen years. Before his plans were ripe for an expedition beyond the Isthmus of Suez, disturbances in the far east called him thither. There he died, probably in a great battle about the year 529. The halo of legend which rapidly formed about his great personality concealed not merely the real man, but even his real history. THE PERSIAN CIVILIZATION. Four versions of the story of his death, each differing wholly from the other, were known to the Greeks. But whatever fate he met, his body was brought to his home-land, where the remains of his tomb may be seen at the present day. “I am Cyrus, the king, the Achæmenian,” is the only part of his epitaph which survives. It would be too little for a lesser man. It is sufficient for him even now that he has been twenty-five centuries dead.

The new Orientalism with which the Asian Greek was brought into contact by the conquest of Lydia was, in many respects, of a different character to that which had preceded it in Western Asia. As years rolled on, and the specially Persian characteristics of it became more and more merged in the general Oriental type, the difference tended to disappear; but even until quite late times the hardy races from the mountains of Iran had many national customs which were in strong contrast to the typical civilization of the Euphrates plain. Though far from ideal, there were certain grand elements in it which struck the imagination of some of the finer minds of Greece, and which, through them, must have influenced Greek life, though in ways which it is not possible now to trace. Had the Greek come much under its influence, that influence, though it would have been disastrous in many respects, would not have tended wholly for evil.

The civilization was indeed essentially of an Eastern type. It is unnecessary to point out the significance of such a general characteristic. The Mede and Persian had been for centuries next-door neighbours of the population of the great plains, and it was inevitable that they should have borrowed from their brilliant life. Yet, despite their nearness, there was a triple gulf between the two, which the intercourse even of centuries could not bridge. Difference of race, difference of habitat, and, above all, difference of religion sundered them. The Iranian and Semite regarded the world and life in it from different points of view. The struggle for existence presented itself in wholly different aspects to the mountaineer and the man of the plain. The monotheist could have but little sympathy with a polytheistic creed.

The Medo-Persian was a strange product for an Asiatic soil. He was an Asian apart. His religious belief was alone calculated to make him remarkable among his contemporaries. The Asiatic of this time had a natural tendency towards polytheism. The monotheism of even the Israelites was spasmodic. But with the Persian monotheism was the set religion of the race. It had a legendary origin in the teachings of Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, as he appears in Western history. Ahura-mazda was the one god. There were, indeed, other objects of worship,—the stars, the sun, the moon, and fire, beautiful and incomprehensible works of Ahura-mazda; but he was god alone. Other spiritual beings there were too, represented as deified virtues and blessings—Good Thought, Perfect Holiness, Good Government, Meek Piety, Health, and Immortality; and these stood nearest to Ahura-mazda’s throne.

The national religion had not, indeed, wholly escaped the contamination of the less spiritual cults of the neighbouring peoples. The animalism of the worship of the Babylonian goddess Mylitta had been introduced into the land under the guise of the adoration of the nymph Anahita.

Nevertheless, with the Persian the deification of the various forms of nature took a special form. The deities themselves were treated as demi-gods, rather than gods; creations of the great spirit of Ahura-mazda. One power alone, the power of evil, seemed to contest his supremacy. In opposition, therefore, to the god of that light which he looked upon as the visible embodiment of the Good, the Persian conceived the existence of a god of darkness, a god of evil, a god of the under-world, a god of death. This god, Angro-mainyus, possessed, indeed, the attributes both of Satan and of Pluto. There was no hope for the complete triumph of good over evil in this life. “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,”—in that lay the whole alternative, the ultimate possibility for good or evil, in so far as the world of the present was concerned. Only in an after-life could the final triumph of the good be looked for,—in a life after that resurrection of the dead which the prophets, the sons of Zoroaster, awaking from their long sleep, should bring to pass.

POLYKRATES OF SAMOS.

It seems at first strange that the Persian creed never captured the imagination of the Greek. It may, indeed, be doubted whether it was ever presented to him in its highest and purest form. The ideal was, perhaps, too elevated for the ordinary devotee, and its full appreciation confined to the initiated few. The Greek learnt indeed in after times to admire certain of the virtues which the Persian displayed; but never grasped, apparently, the spiritual and intellectual basis which underlay them. It was long, too, ere the bitter hostility to the barbarian allowed the Greek to view him and his ways with unprejudiced eyes; and in that lapse of time the barbarian had deteriorated, and his life had become more and more tainted with the baser side of Oriental civilization, which could only excite contempt in the Hellenic mind.

Of the history of the Asiatic Greeks during the later years of Cyrus and the brief reign of his successor, Cambyses, but little is known. Samos alone, as has been said, retained its independence. During the last years of Cyrus, somewhere about 533, a certain Polykrates made himself tyrant of the island, and under his rule the Samians enjoyed a short period of prosperity, so great that it remained proverbial in after-history. Polykrates used to the full the opportunity afforded him by Cyrus’ detention in the East. Separated as he was by only a few miles of sea from the great empire, he could not but recognize the danger of his position, a danger which was rendered far greater by the fact that the acquisition of Phœnicia had given the Persians that arm they had up to that time lacked, a fleet. The great prosperity of the island, due, no doubt, in a great measure to its being the only Greek trading community on the Asiatic side which was not under the Persian dominion, enabled him to raise and maintain a large body of mercenaries as well as a fleet of a hundred fifty-oared war-ships. He furthermore entered into negotiations with Egypt, with a view to mutual defence.

At home in the Ægean, he played a many-sided part. Piracy, trade, engineering, and territorial acquisition were all included in the field of his manifold activity. The piracy was probably carried on at the expense of those traders who did not use Samos as an entrepôt between East and West. It involved him in many a quarrel with the Asiatic Greek towns, whose anomalous position at the time is shown by the recorded fact that Polykrates actually took possession of parts of their territory on the mainland, although they were under the Persian dominion. This somewhat wild career was interrupted, if not positively checked, by events which were preparing on the far side of the Levant.

Cambyses had made up his mind to complete by the conquest of Egypt the work which his father had done. With a view to so doing, he was collecting a great armament, in which a powerful fleet was to play a part. This method of invasion, thus adopted for the first time, served as a precedent for all the great Persian expeditions of after years. The fact that it was Cambyses who conceived the design is sufficient to stamp the picture which Herodotus draws of him as a copy of a somewhat clumsy Egyptian caricature, even if other evidence did not tend the same way.

Ships were levied from Phœnicia, and the Greeks of Cyprus had also to contribute to the fleet. H. iii. 19. The latter, after the fall of Assyria, to which they had been in a position of nominal subordination, had enjoyed a short period of absolute liberty. Amasis of Egypt had reduced them to subjection; but, on the establishment of the Persian power in the Syrian region, they had thrown off their allegiance to Egypt and tendered their submission to the new empire.

Polykrates began to reconsider his position. A Greek legend, which Herodotus has preserved, represents him as having been thrown over by Amasis out of superstitious apprehension. His hitherto unvarying success, so thought the Egyptian king, must end in some terrible disaster proportionate in greatness. Herodotus could not resist a tale which so entirely harmonized with his views of life.

In actual fact, the reverse seems to have been the case. SAMOS ANNEXED BY PERSIA. Polykrates broke off the alliance with Amasis; and not merely did so, but actually despatched forty ships to aid the Persian expedition. He tried, indeed, to kill two birds with one stone, and missed both; for he manned these vessels with Samian suspects, who had no mind to lend their bodies for this experiment in diplomacy, and forthwith turned Polykrates’ own weapons against himself by sailing back with the fleet and making an attack on Samos. Failing in that, they sailed away to Laconia, with a view to getting help of Sparta. Polykrates’ great bid for Persian favour had miscarried.

What followed is peculiarly interesting as being the first example of the way in which Corinth could, and did, force the hand of the Lacedæmonians in matters of policy.

The Lacedæmonians had indeed grievances against the Samians; but it is unlikely that they would have undertaken the expedition, had they not been urged thereto by Corinth. The grievance on the side of Corinth was of a kind that was fated to reappear on many momentous occasions in the course of the next century. Corinthian trade had been interfered with by the Samians. The piratical enterprise of Polykrates was sure to be directed against the trade of a state which had broken off its old commercial relations with Samos and transferred its connection to Miletus.

The expedition took place about 524. It failed. After a fruitless siege of forty days the Lacedæmonians returned to Peloponnese.

Soon afterwards Polykrates met his end. He was enticed to Magnesia on the Mæander by Orœtes, Satrap of Sardes, and there put to death.

His secretary, Mæandrios, carried on the tyranny for some years; but about the year 516 a Persian force invaded the island, H. iii. 139–149. and established Syloson, a brother of Polykrates who had won the favour of Darius, as tyrant in the Persian interest. A brother of Mæandrios made one vigorous but vain attempt to win the island back. The acquisition of Samos completed the Persian conquest of the Asian coast.

It is significant that Sparta, when appealed to by Mæandrios for help, not merely refused it, but dismissed him from the Peloponnese, lest he should bring about political complications. Sparta’s policy on this occasion, and her attitude at the time of the Ionian revolt, show that the fear of experience had taken the place with her of that courage of ignorance which she had shown in her alliance with Lydia.

Cambyses’ short reign came to an end in 522. He had added to his dominions Egypt and the Libyan coast as far as the Greater Syrtis, and had even made an expedition up the Nile into Ethiopia. The Greeks in Egypt had been involved in the disaster which fell upon their adopted home.

On the other hand, Persian enterprise in the West was for the time being at a standstill; and the Asiatic Greeks, with the exception of the Samians, seem to have passed seven uneventful years of submission to their new ruler.

The last few months of Cambyses’ life had been troubled by the plots of a Magian named Gaumata, who is said to have borne a remarkable resemblance to Smerdis, a brother whom Cambyses had caused to be murdered. The rising was no doubt encouraged by the state of Cambyses’ health. He had certainly suffered from serious illness in Egypt; there is, indeed, reason to suspect that he was an epileptic.

The story of this false Smerdis is one of the unsolved mysteries of the period. But few reliable details of it survive, and these are for the most part contained in the great inscription of Darius on the rocks at Behistun.

The usurpation was certainly popular in the home provinces of the empire, if the rapid spread of the insurrection be any criterion. On his way home from Egypt to suppress it, Cambyses died,—a violent death, it seems certain, though historians are not in agreement as to its exact form.

For some years the pseudo-Smerdis concealed his identity, and maintained his power; but at last the suspected deception was discovered by some of the great Persian nobles, among whom was Darius, who claimed descent from the Achæmenid family. DARIUS. Of the events that followed, nothing is known for certain, save that these nobles assassinated the pretender, and Darius succeeded to the supreme power.

He seems to have been at first a king without a kingdom; for the great satraps of the provinces, whose position placed at their disposal large resources of men and money, revolted with well-nigh one consent. The province in Asia Minor was one of the few which did not join in the rising. H. iii. 126, 128. If a tale preserved in Herodotus be true, its governor Orœtes meditated insurrection; but before he could carry his plans into action, he was assassinated by his own bodyguard, in obedience to written orders sent by Darius.

The whole of the work of Cyrus seemed undone. The conquest of the great Empire had to be carried out again, as it were, from the beginning. How Darius carried it out is no real part of the present story. Suffice it to say that he did the work, and that he seems to have done it thoroughly.

This formidable upheaval showed Darius the necessity of giving the empire a new organization, under which its recurrence would be difficult or impossible. The time of Cyrus had been fully taken up with the military acquisition and maintenance of the great realm. Cambyses had been similarly occupied during his short reign; though it may also be doubted whether he possessed the capacity required for carrying out so huge a scheme. Under these two rulers the old Assyrian method, or want of method, of administration had largely prevailed, a system which seems to have been admirably designed for goading the subject populations into rebellion, but which provided no machinery by which insurrection could be rendered difficult or be nipped in the bud. The central power was ever kept on the strain by repeated revolts in the provinces, if the term “province” can be applied to regions which were not in any real sense “areas of administration,” but were merely regarded as lands to be exploited for the benefit of the conquerors.

There are two important reasons why, in dealing with the history of the relations between Greek and Persian, prominence should be given to this organization of the empire under Darius. It was, in the first place, destined to be the permanent political system of the Persian dominion for all the ages during which that empire continued to be the neighbour of the Greek of Europe and of Asia. In the second place, it is impossible to realize the ability of the Persian race at its highest point of development, and the enlightened character of some, at least, of its rulers, without fully appreciating the main details of the great scheme of imperial and provincial government which Darius promulgated. In certain respects, indeed, its methods may seem rude when compared with those of later ages; but in judging of them it must be borne in mind that it was designed for the government of peoples most of whom recognized no law save that of the strong hand, and furthermore, that its creators were creators in a very literal sense of the term, in that their work was so far in advance of anything on the same scale which had preceded it, that its originality is beyond question. The decay of the empire for whose government it was formed was not due to faults in the scheme itself, but to the rapid deterioration of those who administered it. It erred perhaps on the side of centralization; but then the East does not understand, and never has understood, anything but centralization in government. Still, this feature was, owing to special circumstances, destined to prove fatal to it; for it was at the centre of the empire, in the reigning family itself, that the decay set in which corrupted the whole.

The first danger to be provided against by the new scheme was caused by the isolation and comparative independence of the provincial governors, especially in the remoter provinces of the empire. It is a form of danger common to all great empires at all ages of the world, one against which the central government must ever make provision. Darius’ solution of the difficulty was conceived on much the same lines as were followed in later days by the Cæsars in dealing with the Cæsarean provinces of the Roman empire. ORGANIZATION OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Not merely was the area of administration of the governor limited within the province, but also his actions were placed under immediate observation by the appointment of high officials, with special departments of their own, who were not under his control, but were directly responsible to the head of the empire. The plan had its disadvantages from the point of view of the governed; and there were doubtless many instances in which the subjects of the Great King, like the Roman provincial of later days, complained that Tac Agric. 15. “discord and harmony between those set over them were alike disastrous to those they ruled.” For the end for which it was devised, however, the method seems to have been effective.

The empire was divided into satrapies, whose number varied from twenty to twenty-eight at different periods of Darius’ reign.[3] Persia proper was alone excluded, receiving special treatment as the home of the ruling race.

The civil and military powers in these satrapies or provinces were divided. Three independent officials, with separate departments of administration, were appointed to each. In the case of important provinces the satraps were generally drawn from great families connected with the Achæmenids; but in the case of the others the field of choice seems to have been practically unlimited, and governors were selected from among the comparatively poor as well as from the wealthy, from the subject races as well as from the Persians. The instances in which persons not of Persian or Medic extraction were appointed to these important posts seem, however, to have been rare and exceptional. There was no set period for the tenure of the office. The duration of the governor’s administration depended on the pleasure of the Great King.

In all civil matters the governor had absolute authority. He controlled the administration of the taxes and the dispensation of justice; he possessed the power of life and death. As viceroy, representing the king, he was allowed to maintain a court and bodyguard, with other minor attributes of regal power. Under ordinary circumstances he neither commanded nor even controlled the military forces in his province; in fact, a common policy of the central government seems to have been to place a personal enemy of the governor in command of the troops, whose relations with the king were, of course, direct. It may be that under exceptional circumstances,—as, for instance, when Artaphernes was satrap of Sardes at the time of the Ionian revolt,—the supreme direction of military operations was entrusted to a governor of peculiarly high distinction.

The secretary of state within the province was a third official who had immediate relations to the king. Though nominally the chief assistant of the governor, he was in reality appointed to watch his conduct, and to report irregularities or suspicious circumstances to the central government at Susa.

In his general relations with the subject populations and vassal kingdoms, the Persian seems to have followed a policy of forbearance and liberality which is extraordinary at that period. The language, customs, religion, and local laws of the various peoples were respected; even their rulers were in many cases allowed to remain in power, provided always that their rule was in conformity with Persian interests. The Greek cities of Asia are an instance in point. They were allowed to retain such local self-government as they had possessed under their Lydian suzerain, with the exception that, for any democracies which had existed in them, either an aristocracy, or a Greek tyrant ruling in the Persian interest, was substituted. Such was the case, at any rate, before the Ionian revolt Motives of self-interest obviously contributed to this policy. The maintenance of local institutions in the empire, and the avoidance of complete unification, were eminently calculated to keep the various populations separate, and to prevent the spread of any rebellion over a wide area. To use a modern simile, the provinces were converted, in so far as possible, into compartments fireproof against the flame of insurrection.

There can be no question that, throughout the vast area of the empire as a whole, the condition of the population generally was greatly ameliorated in comparison with its life in the past. Precautions were taken to safeguard the subject from oppression by high officials. Apart from the check which the triple division of direct responsibility placed on the arbitrary exercise of power, a special body of officers, known to the Greeks as the king’s “eyes” or “ears,” went on annual circuits through the empire, and reported any case of abuse in the administration. The intention, at any rate, was good; though it may be doubted whether the system could guarantee the provincial from acts of oppression on the part of officials who had a mind to act in arbitrary fashion.

But there was another most important side to the policy of the government. The ordinary conditions of daily life within the empire were certainly made much better than they had been before its establishment. It was to the interest of the government to preserve peace, an inestimable blessing to a continent which only knew the peace of exhaustion. Petty states were no longer allowed to wage war on one another. Life became more secure. The highways of the land and sea were rendered safe by the suppression of brigandage and piracy. The great roads were improved in character, to the benefit of internal trade. Moreover, to facilitate trade, and for the convenience of the revenue, Darius instituted a system of currency, whose coins were notorious for the purity of their metal. The gold Daric became, indeed, the sovereign of the ancient trading world; for the Greeks had not command of a sufficient supply of the precious metal to introduce a gold standard into their coinage system. The encouragement of agriculture, and the bringing of waste lands into cultivation, was not merely a part of the policy of the government; it was actually inculcated by the Persian religion.

The revenue and taxation of the empire was conducted on business-like principles during the days of Darius; and though the burdens imposed on the subject populations were not light, yet, on the whole, they received a fair return for their contributions in the shape of that prosperity which followed upon the greater security they enjoyed. The financial levy was either in money or in kind, or in both, according to the nature and products of a province. The great defect of the system was, however, that the satraps, after handing over the provincial quota to the imperial treasury, had thereafter to raise from the province the expenses of themselves and their following. Given a strong central government and a good satrap, the system was probably as free from abuse as such a system could be; but if, as must too often have been the case, either of these circumstances were unfavourable, much evil must have resulted to the subject populations, and many of the outbreaks which took place must be assigned to such a cause.

In all probability, however, the heaviest burden laid upon the provincial population was the obligation to furnish contingents for the army of the empire. Considering the nature of the monarchy, the actual standing army seems to have been curiously small, little more, in fact, than what was necessary for the maintenance of peace within the frontiers. In case, therefore, of external war, unsparing levies of the subject population were inevitable. The burden seems also to have been unevenly distributed: it would naturally fall most heavily on those peoples who made the most effective soldiers. From a military point of view, this feature of the imperial system was a mistake. An army formed of heterogeneous elements deficient in military training cannot under such a system have been welded into one harmonious whole. Only its multitude could be strikingly formidable.

But in every other respect the new empire with which the Greeks had been brought into contact was not a mere aggregation of barbarism, but a highly organized piece of machinery, controlled by a people who, in certain sides of their civilization, compared not unfavourably with the Greeks themselves.

This great scheme of organization was in all probability not carried out in one piece, though the greater part of it must be attributed to the years which followed the completion of the re-conquest.

After securing the empire from disturbance from within, the next step was to secure it against disturbance from without; and it was in carrying out this policy that Darius came into conflict with the Greek in Europe.

THE GREEKS OF ASIA.

An examination of the map will show that the weakest part of the whole frontier, with the exception, perhaps, of that portion immediately east of the Caspian, lay along the shores of the Ægean and the Propontis. But whereas on the eastern frontier the races on either side of the boundary were probably alien and hostile to one another, on the western border the peoples on either side of the narrow seas were akin, and in close sympathy. The Thracian races of North-west Asia Minor were within sight of the lands of their free brethren in Europe; the Greek of the Ionian coast was within an easy and safe voyage of twenty-four hours of his mother country. Blood was thicker than water even towards the close of the sixth century before Christ; and the sympathy of kindred races so near at hand must have seemed to Darius and the Persians a standing menace to this extremity of the empire. The possibility of its taking an active form in case of a revolt was also an obvious danger.

Had the Greeks of Asia been different from what they were, had, indeed, they not been Greeks, it is possible that Darius would not have considered it necessary to take action.

The character of this branch of the Hellenic race at this period of its history is difficult to realize. The extant evidence on the question, with the exception of a few fragments of the writings of historians most of whose works have perished, is demonstrably hostile to the Ionian Greek, and not merely that, but demonstrably unfair. Herodotus, as will be shown in dealing with his account of the Ionian revolt, is largely responsible for the mistaken impression of the nature of this people which has been handed down to after-time. His whole view of the Ionian Greek was coloured by the belief that he was originally responsible for all the trouble which fell upon European Hellas in the years succeeding the revolt; that he imperilled the very existence of that Hellenic liberty which was destined to produce the greatness of that after-time under whose influence he wrote. He looked upon the revolt as having been from beginning to end a colossal mistake. Begun in culpable ignorance, it was carried out with contemptible pusillanimity,—so he thought. Its authors were a people of whom the Hellenic race was ashamed. Even their nearest relations among the Greeks were loth to claim relationship with them.

Apart from the facts which Herodotus himself gives tending to an opposite conclusion, the previous history of this branch of the Greek race, and especially of the Ionian section of it, tends in every way to deductions which are irreconcilable with the views of the historian. These Ionians were the descendants of men who had been conspicuous for ages as the boldest navigators of their time; who had planted colonies in almost every part of the Mediterranean, making voyages to lands previously unknown to the Greek, undeterred by the partly fabulous, partly real, perils of such enterprises. The Ionian Greek had been accustomed for centuries to take his life in his hands, facing all the manifold dangers incident to early navigation, to intercourse with barbarous tribes and life among them. And though by the end of the sixth century custom and experience must have diminished the perils attached to such adventurous existence, yet even then the Ionian had only one rival, the Phœnician, in the boldness of his seamanship. The dangerous trade route with Egypt across the expanse of the Levant was in his hands; the corn trade with the stormy Euxine was still for the most part under his control.

Such a mode of life, in which a large portion of the population of the Asiatic Greek towns must have shared, was not calculated to produce a people lacking in courage or, indeed, in perseverance. It is true that by the time that Darius’ organization of the empire had been brought to something like completion, the race had been for more than half a century under a foreign yoke. Judged by the standard of those days, the yoke had been a light one; it could hardly have been accounted heavy at any period of history. It might easily have been much heavier. It would have been to the advantage of the conqueror to have made it so, had the subject cities displayed the temper of passive submission.

THE ASIATIC GREEKS.

Little is known of the history of these cities during the half century which intervened between the fall of Crœsus and the outbreak of the revolt. If they tamely submitted to their fate during this period, the revolt itself becomes incomprehensible. There is absolutely no adequate immediate cause for it; and Herodotus’ own account of its beginning shows by certain significant phrases which he uses that, though the actual outbreak was premature, the design had existed before ever Aristagoras made his failure at Naxos. There is no record of an actual change of attitude on the part of Persia towards the towns during the years which immediately preceded it, which could lead to the supposition that the relations between them had become suddenly embittered.

The cause which lay behind the whole of the history of Darius’ dealings with the West is the feeling with which the Greek regarded the very idea of subjection. He must have been at the period the most restless subject that ever empire had. Darius seems to have recognized from the very first that the presence of this wayward, bold, intriguing race on the western fringe of his dominions constituted an ever-present danger. The intensity of the political feeling within the cities themselves with regard to their internal affairs, which is known to have existed within them at this time, indicates the intensity of the feeling with which they regarded the foreign yoke. Democrat, aristocrat, and tyrant did not fight their fierce battles with one another to win the prize of pre-eminence in servitude. The opponents would seek, too, for external support; and the satraps of the West must have been continually worried by appeals for assistance from whatever side assumed for the time being the philo-Persian rôle; and must have known, too, that the opposite side would seek for help elsewhere. And what was “elsewhere” likely to mean, save beyond the narrow seas, in European Greece? Nor can the intense desire for freedom in the mass of the populations of the Greek cities have remained in any way a secret from the Persian governors. There were plenty of people in every city whose interest it would be to tell tales of their neighbours, and it is perhaps the blackest blot on the character of the Greek that he was but too ready to betray his fellow-countrymen.

The problem which presented itself to Darius in the sixth century before Christ on the west coast of Asia must have been very similar to that which presented itself to Cæsar five and a half centuries later in North-west Gaul. Just as the Gaul of that period was likely to remain a restless subject of Rome so long as kinsmen beyond the Channel remained free, and so long as he might look to them for support in case of revolt, so was the Greek of Asia likely to be restive, even under the lightest yoke, so long as his kin beyond the Ægean remained unsubdued, and so long as their aid might be hoped for whenever he made up his mind to strike a blow for freedom.

The policy thus, in a way, forced upon Darius, was carried out in three steps, of which the second came near to being a retrograde one, and formed no part of the original programme, while the third was certainly not one of advance.

These are:⁠—
(1) The Scythian Expedition;
(2) The Suppression of the Ionian Revolt;
(3) The Expeditions of 492 and 490.

It may seem strange to include the so-called Scythian Expedition in any design for the settlement of affairs in Western Asia. The name commonly attributed to it, for which Herodotus is mainly responsible, is, however, misleading. Neither he nor, in all probability, those Greeks who were contemporary with it, or even took part in it, were likely to understand its object. The Persian Government had the most overwhelming interest in concealing that object from the Greeks.

Greek imagination, however, could not resist the attractions of a subject so unknown and so vast and absolutely ran riot in dealing with it. Herodotus reproduces in detail the fantastic legend. It is not necessary to reproduce it here. The first aim must be to try and discover any solid facts in the story of the expedition. THE PERSIAN ARMY. The next, in view of the mass of modern literature which has sprung up with regard to it, must be to show what the expedition was not. Lastly, it will be necessary to point out the most reasonable hypothesis as to what it was, and to show its connection with such designs as Darius had upon Greece.

The very date of the expedition is a matter of extreme uncertainty. Dates ranging from 515 to 508 before Christ have been suggested by various authorities.[4] On the whole, it is most probable that it took place in 512.

A twofold tête-du-pont had already been acquired in Europe by the reduction of Byzantion and of the Thracian Chersonese, over the latter of which Miltiades, son of Kimon, who was destined to become famous at Marathon, bore rule.

The standing army of the Empire seems to have been singularly small, little more, indeed, than what was requisite for police duties at home and in the provinces. It was therefore necessary, when any great expedition was contemplated, to call for levies from the subject races. There were several reasons for this peculiar policy in military matters. It was manifestly an economy in time of peace. It made it unnecessary to entrust large bodies of troops, save under exceptional circumstances, to commanders in the remote provinces. The levy system was also an effective one when dealing with such enemies, within and without, as the Empire would have to meet in Asia, and this had been satisfactorily proved in many years of campaigning. It never really failed until brought face to face with an infinitely better armed foe, the Greek of Europe.

In the present instance, the force collected is reported by tradition to have amounted to seven hundred thousand men.[5] Here let it be said, as will frequently have to be said in the course of the history of these wars, that the numbers which the Greeks attributed to the Persian armies in various campaigns are, without doubt, invariably exaggerated. There is no fixed ratio in the exaggeration. Sometimes it is manifold; sometimes it is not. The real meaning of the Greek estimate of numbers is that the forces which Persia could put into the field when occasion demanded were of infinitely greater magnitude than any of which the Greek had experience. Even the myriad stood with him for a countless number.

In the present instance the force must indeed have been a large one, for the undertaking was great; and the Persian, unless he is much misrepresented in history, preferred on all occasions to have a large numerical margin of safety. Possibly he thought Ahura-mazda was “on the side of the big battalions.”

H. iv. 87.

The crossing into Europe was affected by throwing a bridge over the Bosphorus in the neighbourhood of Kalchedon.[6]

THE ADVANCE TO THE ISTER.

H. iv. 89.

After crossing into Europe, Darius commanded the Ionians, Æolians, and Hellospontines, who conducted the fleet, to sail to the Ister, and while waiting for him there, to build a bridge over the river. They went two days’ sail up the stream, and constructed one at or near the head of the Delta.[7] The first point indicated in the route taken by the army is the source or sources of the Tearos. This was a subtributary of the Agrianes (the modern Ergene), which was itself a tributary of the Hebrus.[8] The Arteskos river, which is the next point mentioned, is not capable of certain identification at the present day.

H. iv. 93.

The tribes of the coast of the modern East Rumelia or South Bulgaria yielded without a blow. The Getæ, between the Hæmus (Balkans) and the Ister, were the first to offer any resistance; but they were subdued. So far the tale is comprehensible. The army must have passed near to the Greek colonies, Salmydessos, Apollonia, and Mesembria, which are indeed mentioned in relation to the tribes south of the Hæmus. From these, probably, vague tales of this part of the expedition arrived in Greece.

From this point onwards the story is full of inconsistencies and improbabilities.

Arrived at the Ister, Darius, a commander of great and manifold experience, is represented as having ordered the Ionian Greeks to break down the bridge over the river after he had passed it, and to follow him into the unknown north. No reason is either given or is conceivable for such a suicidal plan. The ships, moreover, are to remain in the Ister. He was dissuaded from this by the advice of Koës, the Greek tyrant of Mytilene. He then gave orders that the Greeks should remain at the river sixty days, and if he did not return in that time, should loose the bridge and sail away.

No advantage can possibly be gained by treating this as serious history. It is inconceivable that any general of experience should either propose to deliberately cut his own line of communications when about to enter an unknown region, or even that he should have appointed a set limit of time, and that not very long, after which it might be cut.

The story is in all probability merely a peg whereon to hang an indictment of the Greek tyrants of the Asian coast, and is designed for the glorification of the part played by Miltiades in the subsequent debate on the advisability of leaving Darius to his fate.

The truth it contains may amount to no more than that the fleet did not go farther than the Ister, and that Darius did not intend to remain north of the river for any length of time.

The tale of the actual campaigning in Scythia is more extraordinary still. The Persians are represented as having penetrated beyond the river Tanais (Don) to the Oarus, (probably the Volga), on which they built a series of forts. They then returned to the Ister by a circuitous route, and, as might indeed be expected, the sixty days had elapsed before their arrival. Such is Herodotus’ story.

Strabo vii. 305.

A reference to this campaign in the works of the geographer Strabo shows that Herodotus’ version of its history was not the only one current among the Greeks. He says that the king and his army, when between the Ister and the Tyras (Dniester), were compelled to turn back under stress of thirst.

Ktesias, a Greek who spent a large part of his life at the Persian Court, and who, though unreliable, is not likely to understate Persian exploits, Ktes. Pers. 17. says that the king only penetrated fifteen days’ march beyond the Ister.

CREDIBILITY OF THE NARRATIVE.

The impossibilities of Herodotus’ story are so manifest that it is hardly necessary to point them out. How could the commissariat of a large force have been provided for on a march of that length through a hostile country where the natives, according to the historian’s own account, destroyed all local food supplies in advance of the army? How could the army and the transport required for it have been carried across such rivers as would have to be passed ere the Volga was reached,—the Sereth, the Pruth, the Dniester, Dnieper, Boug, and Don, not to mention numerous minor unfordable streams? If this long march was undertaken, why did not Darius employ the fleet for commissariat purposes, as was the custom in Persian campaigns of this age, where the fleet could possibly be employed?

If the fleet did remain at the Ister, which seems to be one of the few absolutely reliable statements in the story, the fact itself is strong presumptive evidence that Darius did not intend to go far beyond that river. Ktesias says he only proceeded fifteen days’ march. Strabo implies that he never reached the Dniester.

Inasmuch as the reliability of Herodotus as an historian is in question, it is important to make an attempt to surmise, in so far as possible, what was the source or sources of this extraordinary tale which he has preserved.

It must be remembered, in the first place, that at the time at which he wrote, anything of the nature of reliable information with regard to events before the war of 480 must have been very difficult to obtain. The palpable gaps in the story of the Ionian Revolt, the confusion in the account of the relations between Athens and Ægina, the meagreness of the story of Marathon, are striking proofs that such was the case; and if he experienced such manifest difficulty in arriving at a detailed knowledge of the great events of the beginning of the fifth century, in which Greeks played a foremost part, how much greater difficulty must he have experienced in gaining information as to the events of the later years of the sixth century, in which the part played by the Greeks was but secondary?

It seems probable that his sources of information in the present instance were two in number:⁠—

(1) A tale current in the Athens of his own day, which had come thither by way of the principality of Miltiades in the Thracian Chersonese.

(2) Reports collected by the historian himself, either in the course of a journey to the Greek colonies on the north coast of the Euxine, or from persons who were natives of those parts, or had visited them.

To the first of these must be attributed the account which he gives of the events on the Danube, and especially the celebrated tale of the proposal of Miltiades to break down the bridge and leave Darius to his fate.

The story is one of the most famous in Greek History. Twice, it is said, did the Scythians, while Darius with his army was still far north of the river, ride down to the Ister and call upon the Greeks to break down the bridge. H. iv. 133, 136. On the first occasion the Ionians promised to do so. The tale seems to imply that the promise was merely made with a view to getting rid of the Scythians. On the second occasion the Scythians made much the same appeal, calling on the Ionians to strike one grand, effective blow for their freedom.

It is unnecessary to dwell on the minor difficulties of the tale, how, for instance, it came about that the Scythians knew of Darius’ orders that the bridge should be loosed after the expiration of sixty days.

H. iv. 137.

After this second appeal the Ionians held a consultation.

“It was the opinion of Miltiades—the Athenian who commanded, and was tyrant of the Hellespontine Chersonesites—that they should listen to the advice of the Scythians and give liberty to Ionia. His views were opposed by Histiæus the Milesian. The argument of the latter was that the tyrants individually owed their position to Darius, and that, if Darius’ power were destroyed, neither would he himself be able to rule in Miletus, nor any of the rest to rule elsewhere, for all the states would prefer a democracy to a tyranny. After this statement of opinion by Histiæus, all of them forthwith went over to it, though they had previously assented to that of Miltiades.”

A list, intended doubtless as a black list, of these tyrants is given.

TALE OF THE ISTER BRIDGE.

To prevent the Scythians seizing the bridge, and to give them the impression that they were going to follow their advice, the northern end of the bridge was removed for the space of a bow shot. The Scythians accordingly withdrew. Some time afterwards Darius and his army returned, and were alarmed to find the bridge apparently removed. They soon discovered their mistake. H. iv. 141, 142. The bridge was restored by Histiæus. “Thus the Persians escaped.” The Scythians’ judgment of the Ionians, as reported by Herodotus, is not without its significance in the story: H. iv. 142. “Their cowardice as free men was only equalled by their fidelity as slaves.”

Herodotus himself would be naturally inclined to seize upon a tale which so strikingly confirmed his own estimate of the Ionians.

But is the story true?

The historian Thirlwall suggested that, in its existing form, it is an excerpt from the defence made by Miltiades in answering the charge of “tyranny” brought against him at Athens about the year 493. Such stories are, however, very rarely pure fabrications from beginning to end; and, in accordance with general probability, it is more likely than unlikely that it contains a considerable element of truth. There are, furthermore, certain considerations deducible from evidence outside the story itself which tend to support the view.

Herodotus regards the expedition as the one great disaster of Darius’ career. Regarded as evidence, this is not of itself very important. The story as he told it was intended to point the great moral which runs throughout his history,—that special phase of the great Hellenic idea of the “tragedy” of life in which he most firmly believed. The career of Darius, without this great disaster, would have formed too startling an exception to that divine and natural law of the incontinuity of human fortune which he had so consciously and conspicuously illustrated in his account of the lives of Cambyses, Crœsus, and Polykrates of Samos.

But there are other reasons for supposing that the expedition was not without disaster, rumours of which,—probably, too, emanating from the Greeks at the Ister,—reached the cities of the Propontis.

Ktes. Pers. 16 (Justin, ii. 5). Ktesias states Darius’ losses to have been 80,000 men. Even if the actual number stated be untrustworthy, it shows that this historian, who would be naturally inclined to minimize them, had reason to regard them as serious.

But, furthermore, it is evident that during Darius’ absence north of the Danube, Cf. H. v. 26. a large number of the Hellespontine cities had seized the opportunity for revolt. Byzantion, Kalchedon, Antandros, and Lamponion were among the number. This caused Darius to return to Asia by way of Sestos. It is inconceivable that these towns should have chosen this time of all others, when a large portion of the levy of the Empire was actually under arms, for insurrection, had they not some reason to believe that it had gone whence it could never return their way. They must have received, either from the Greek colonies on the North Euxine, or, more probably, from the Greeks on the Ister, some tidings of a great disaster.

Even if the Greeks on the Ister were not the authors of such tidings, it is unlikely that reports which came to the towns of the Propontis failed to reach them.

May it not then be that the fictitious element in the report of the discussion on the desertion of Darius, in so far as the general details of the lines which the discussion itself followed are concerned, is confined to the part which Miltiades is alleged to have played in it? It is not necessary on this assumption to further assume the veracity of the tale of the orders given by Darius to the guardians of the bridge. That tale simply served to heighten the colouring of the picture of the treason of those Asiatic Hellenes to Hellenic freedom, in that it robbed them of the excuse of fidelity to a trust imposed upon them.

It is quite possible, then, that some report of disaster did lead to the formation of a plot in which all the tyrants were more or less implicated, but which for some unknown reason never came to a head. If it had been a one-man plot, in which Miltiades had played a solo part, surely his design must have become known to Darius. ORIGIN OF THE LEGEND. And yet on return to Asia Darius passed through Miltiades’ dominions, the only part, apparently, of the Hellespontine region to which the infection of rebellion had not spread. If Miltiades had taken part in the plot, and if any judgment can be formed from the general practice of Persian kings, it can hardly be supposed that he would have lived to fight at Marathon.

It now remains to consider briefly how the extraordinary story of the march beyond the Ister can possibly have originated.

Doubtless the Greeks in the cities on the north coast had many a tale brought to them by the native traders from the interior of the commotion caused by the sudden appearance of this strange army within the Scythian borders.

These tales, probably wild exaggerations even in their original form, would not, it may be certain, lose aught in the course of their evolution. An element common to all of them would be that somewhere in the Hinterland this army had appeared; and it may well be that within a comparatively short period the most easterly of the Greek cities came to regard their own Hinterland as the scene of its operations. This would bring the imaginary march of the army to the neighbourhood of the Don and the Volga.

In actual fact, however, it is impossible to suppose that the most extreme point ever reached by Darius was far north of the Ister. It is in the highest degree improbable that he ever passed the well-defined boundaries set by the Carpathians and the Pruth.

With regard to the motives of the expedition, Herodotus declares that it was intended as a retaliation for the Scythian invasion of Western Asia, which spread desolation through part of the continent, and was about synchronous with, and largely the cause of, the fall of the Assyrian Empire. Apart from the improbability of Darius cherishing resentment for occurrences of such ancient date, or for injuries of which he was in no real sense heir, he was probably aware, though Herodotus was not, that the people who lived to the north of the Euxine were wholly distinct from the Sakæ, whom Herodotus calls Scyths, who had troubled the continent more than a century before this time.

The unreliability and vagueness of the story of the campaign have led to the formation in modern times of many conjectures as to the object with which it was undertaken.

It has been represented as an attempt to make the Euxine a Persian lake. Such a theory must assume that Darius carried his operations far beyond the Ister. On this point sufficient has been said. But apart from this the theory is met by two other difficulties. What object could be gained by success in so bald a design? And if such a design existed, why was the fleet left at the Ister?

Again, it has been ascribed to mere lust of conquest. That is, indeed, not an uncommon characteristic with Eastern rulers. But Darius was not an Eastern ruler of the ordinary type. His wars, in so far as their history is known, are not waged from mere irrational land-hunger, but in obedience to rational policy, whose main lines are even now distinguishable. That he intended in this campaign to conquer something is obvious. But did he intend to make conquests in Scythia? Had he, too, no other conceivable motive than mere land-hunger behind the intention of conquest?

A more attractive theory which has been put forward in explanation of the object of the expedition is that, in accordance with his commercial policy, he attempted to open up, possibly to acquire, the rich region north of the Euxine. In that case it would certainly have been expected that he would have made one of the Greek harbours on the north coast of that sea the base of his operations, and have transferred his fleet thither. He could have got plenty of information on the subject from his Asiatic Greek vassals.

A theory which has been recently put forward is that his real object was to get hold of that gold region in the land of the Agathyrsi, a tribe mentioned in Herodotus’ account of the campaign. THE INTENT OF THE CAMPAIGN. This gold-bearing region must be identified with that on the western border of the modern province of Transylvania, which was included in the Roman province of Dacia. It is, however, impossible to say that there is even presumptive evidence of such an intention on Darius’ part.

It must be confessed that the evidence is not of such a nature that any theory as to the object of the campaign can be put forward with confidence. There are, however, two questions which must be taken into account in any theory on the subject which is to have the merit of plausibility:⁠—

(1) What were the net results of the campaign?

(2) Did the acts of Darius in any way declare his intentions?

The net results of the campaign were the submission of the Thracian tribes on the Euxine coast south of Hæmus, and the conquest and apparent submission of the Getæ between Hæmus and the Ister.

The intention of Darius to cross the Ister existed apparently from the beginning of the campaign. He sent the fleet thither with orders to prepare a bridge; but the intention not to proceed far beyond that river is almost equally clearly shown by his leaving his fleet at the point of crossing. Whether this second intention was part of the original design is another question. The tale of the countermanding of the orders given to the Greeks at the river, absurd though it is, may rest on a remote foundation of fact; and the fact may have been that Darius did actually modify his original plans on his arrival at the Ister.

The expedition north of that point seems to have been either of the nature of a reconnaissance in force, on the results of which the king decided against further advance and attempt at conquest, or a display intended to strike awe into the tribes beyond the newly won territory. Whether any attempt at conquest in these northern regions formed part of the original programme may be doubted: one thing is certain, that the expedition in the form it was made was not anything of the kind.

It is noticeable that at this period the great river formed a very marked and striking ethnographical boundary between the tribes of Thracian stock and the Scyths of Europe. It has already been pointed out that Darius had within his dominions in Asia Minor—mainly in the region of Bithynia—people of Thracian origin. May he not have undertaken the expedition with intent to minimize the chances of disturbance on the weak imperial frontier formed by the Propontis and its two straits by subduing the free kinsmen of his Thracian subjects? It is a precaution such as the rulers of empires at every time in history and in every part of the world have frequently had to take. It may be, then, that Darius was in search of an ethnic frontier, and when he had found it on the Ister he sought not for further conquest, but confined himself to measures intended to secure what he had won.

The Ethnic Frontier.

It is perhaps unnecessary to insist on the importance of an ethnic frontier. It is, of course, frequently coincident with a physical frontier. Where such a coincidence exists, a “scientific” frontier is attained. But in cases where the two are not coincident, history has shown again and again that the ethnic is the more “scientific” of the two.

Regarding the question from another point of view,—it is infinitely more dangerous for a state to have on its borders a race who have kin immediately beyond the border in the enjoyment of a form of government which assures them their independence, or in which they are paramount, than to have on its frontier a race alien to their neighbours beyond the border.

The first of these alternatives is an almost inevitable source of trouble and danger to the state in which the circumstances exist. The danger is twofold. It may arise from the desire of those within the frontier to attain to the position enjoyed by their kinsmen outside it, or from the sympathy of the latter with those of their race who are in subjection to aliens.

Such considerations are not the mere abstractions of political philosophy, but are plain, practical questions which have called for practical solution from men to whom the very idea of political philosophy may never have been presented. They appear in actual history in a concrete form, and are therefore hard to recognize amid the numerous factors which are involved in the complicity of human action. ETHNIC FRONTIERS. The very use of such modern terms as “scientific” or “ethnic” frontier in reference to policies of ancient date has a tendency to create the idea that the person using them is mistakenly attributing to the past conceptions which are essentially of modern date. But are such conceptions of modern date? Is it not rather the form in which they are expressed which is of recent creation? The very creation of such a form of expression indicates, indeed, that the conception itself has become clearer in course of time; it rarely, if ever, indicates the actual birth of the conception. It is quite possible to grossly exaggerate the difference between the nature of the problems presented to the rulers of empire in the sixth century before Christ, and those which call for solution at the present time.

It is not difficult to illustrate from both ancient and modern history:⁠—

(1) The dangers of a frontier which is not ethnic;

(2) The appreciation of this practical fact by those who have had to face the circumstances.