Herodotus (Swayne)/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII.
IONIA.
Whose treason, like a deadly blight,
Comes o'er the counsels of the brave,
And blasts them in their hour of might!"
—Moore, "Fire-Worshippers."
Darius had not forgotten the good service done him by Histiæus of Miletus, in preserving the Danube bridge for him on his hurried retreat from the Scythian expedition. He had given him a grant of land in Thrace, in a most desirable position for a new settlement. But he was afterwards persuaded that he had done wrong. A shrewd Greek would be tempted to form there the nucleus of an independent power. He therefore sent for Histiæus, and detained him in an honourable captivity in his own court at Susa. And this detention led to the great Persian war.
There was a revolution in the little island of Naxos. "The men of substance," as they were literally called, were expelled, and came to Miletus begging Aristagoras, now deputy-governor in the absence of his father-in-law Histiæus, to restore them. Thinking to get Naxos for himself, Aristagoras procured the aid of a Persian flotilla. On the way, a quarrel arose about a Greek captain whom Megabates, the Persian admiral, had punished, because he found no watch set on board his ship. The punishment consisted in binding him down so that his head protruded from one of the ports or rowlocks, and Aristagoras had taken upon himself to release him. Megabates, in dudgeon, sent to warn the Naxians, who were to have been surprised, and the expedition failed. Then Aristagoras, finding himself unable to pay the expenses of the armament, as had been stipulated, thought of securing his position by the desperate expedient of stirring up a revolt at Miletus against Persia. He was confirmed in this resolution by the arrival of a singular courier from Histiæus, who was determined at any cost to escape from the forced hospitalities of Susa. Histiæus had taken a slave, shaved his head, punctured certain letters on the bare crown, then kept him till the hair was grown, and sent him to Aristagoras with merely the verbal message that he was to shave his head. When Aristagoras had played the barber, he found that the living despatch bore the word "revolt."
His first step was to proclaim democracy throughout the Greek confederacy. The different despots were given up to their fellow-citizens, to be dealt with according to their deserts. It speaks strongly in favour of the character of their "tyranny," that nearly all were dismissed uninjured. One only—Coes of Mytilene—was stoned to death. Aristagoras then set sail for Sparta to seek for aid. That state at this time enjoyed the singular constitution of a double monarchy. This may have had some mythological connection with the legend of the twin sons of Leda, Castor and Pollux, who became sea-gods, from whom the constellation of the Gemini was named; but Herodotus assigns to it a different origin.
His tradition is that when the sons of Hercules reconquered their heritage of the Peloponnese, one of their three chiefs, Aristodemus, had the kingdom of Sparta for his share. His wife gave birth to twins just before his death. The boys were much alike; and the mother, hoping that they might both be kings, protested that she did not know them apart. The Spartans were puzzled; and the Delphic oracle gave an answer which hardly mended the matter, except so far that it satisfied the mother.
"Let both be kings, but let the elder have more honour."
But which was the elder? that was the question. At last it was suggested that a watch should be set to see which the mother washed and fed first. If she acted on system, the case was clear. The espionage succeeded; the elder was discovered, and named Eurysthenes, and the other Procles. The two brothers, when they grew up, were said to have been always at variance, and their separate lines continued so ever after. The two kings had peculiar duties, rights, and privileges, but lived in the same plain way as other citizens.
When Aristagoras arrived at Sparta, he was admitted to an audience with the senior king, Cleomenes. He showed him a bronze tablet engraved with a chart—the earliest known map of the world—pointed out where all the different nations lay, and conjured him to assist his kinsmen the Ionians; observing, that it was foolish for the Spartans to fritter away their force in local feuds, when they might be lords of Asia. As for the Persians, they were an easy prey—men who actually "went into battle with trousers on." Cleomenes promised to give him an answer in three days. At the second interview he asked "how far it was to Susa?"
Aristagoras was unguarded enough to say, "a three months' journey;" on which Cleomenes ordered him to quit Sparta before sunset. Then he returned and sat before the king in the sacred guise of a suppliant, with an olive-bough in his hand. A little daughter of Cleomenes, named Gorgo, aged eight or nine, was standing at her father's side. The Milesian wished her to be sent away, but Cleomenes told him to say on, and not to heed the child. Then Aristagoras began by offering ten talents, and as the king shook his head, increased them by degrees to fifty. When this sum was mentioned, the child cried out, "Go away, father, or the strange man will be sure to bribe thee."[1] The "conscience of the king" was moved. He withdrew to escape the temptation, and the mission of Aristagoras failed at Sparta.
At Athens he had better chances of success. Athens was in the heyday of her first freedom. She had rid herself of her Tyrants, the Pisistratids, who were at this moment intriguing with Persia, not without success, for their restoration. The feelings of the citizens towards these powerful absentees and their Asiatic friends were much the same as those of the French of 1792 towards the Emigration and its abettors. The two great ruling families were now the rival houses of Alcmæon and Isagoras. Cleisthenes the Alcmæonid, grandson of the tyrant of Sicyon, might not have thought it worth his while to court the people, had he not been determined to put down the rival faction which was led by Isagoras, brother of his father's rival Hippocleides, of dancing notoriety. As it was, he brought about a complete democratic revolution. He broke up the four old tribes, which were bound by family ties and sacred rites, and made ten new geographical divisions. This was as radical a change as the substitution of departments for provinces in France; and the introduction of the decimal system, in nearly every department of state at Athens, anticipated by more than two thousand years the work of the French Revolution. The Isagorids for a time turned the tables on the Alcmæonids, by calling in the assistance of the Spartans, and Cleisthenes had only just defeated a dangerous confederacy against Athens. The Spartans had invaded Attica from Megara, when the Bœotians and Chalcidians broke in upon their northern frontier. But the usual jealousy between the two Spartan kings, and the defection of their Corinthian allies, dissolved the Spartan army, and left the Athenians at leisure to deal with their other enemies. They defeated the Bœotians with great slaughter, taking seven hundred prisoners; and crossing on the same day to Eubœa, there obtained a second victory over the Chalcidians, in whose lands they afterwards planted a military colony. The prisoners were ransomed, but their chains still hung in the citadel of Athens in the time of Herodotus on the walls blackened with Persian fire, and a handsome bronze quadriga stood by the gateway, which had been offered to Minerva from the tithe of the ransom. Its inscription was to this effect:—
Sons of Athenian sires quelled in the labour of war,
Slaking their ardent pride in a dismal fetter of iron—
Then to the Maid for tithe gave we the chariot-and-four."
The energy of Athens at this time struck Herodotus forcibly. It was like that of the French Jacobins when they had enemies on every frontier, and the Vendée and the Federals of the South on their hands besides. Great political changes give a nation a present sense of life and happiness, which is too often ultimately wrecked by selfishness, but which seems for a time to inspire superhuman strength. The worsted Thebans stirred up the little island of Ægina, which was always a thorn in the side of Athens till she had become mistress of the sea. There was a very old-standing feud about some sacred images or fetishes of olive-wood, representing the goddess Ceres and her daughter Persephone. No doubt their holiness was enhanced by their age and ugliness. Artistic beauty seems to have little to do with the sacredness of images, and in modern times in Italy an old black Madonna has been an object of peculiar veneration. The Zeus of Phidias and the Aphrodite of Praxiteles were not moulded by the hands of Faith.
The Athenians had just refused a demand of the Persian satrap of Sardis for the restoration of their tyrant Hippias, when Aristagoras arrived. They received him with open arms, not only on account of this, but also because Miletus was their own colony; and despatched twenty ships—probably all they could spare from the Æginetan war—to aid the Milesians in their struggle against the yoke of Persia. These were joined by five galleys from Eretria in Eubœa, that city being under an obligation to the Milesians. The crews left their ships on the shore near Ephesus, and marched on and surprised Sardis, shutting up the Persians in the citadel. But Sardis proved to them a miniature Moscow. The town, mainly built of wood and reeds, caught fire, and the buccaneers thought it best to retreat as soon as a sack became out of the question. But the Persian forces caught them up near Ephesus, and inflicted severe punishment before they could reach their ships. The Ionian Greeks were now left to themselves by the Athenians, but the insurrection assumed large proportions, involving the whole Greek seaboard of Asia, many inland tribes, and lastly spreading to the island of Cyprus.
When Darius heard of the great revolt, and especially of the burning of Sardis, his wrath was greatly kindled against the Athenians. He took a bow and shot towards heaven, saying, "O Zeus! grant that I may be avenged on the Athenians!" He also appointed a slave to say to him thrice every day during dinner, "king! remember the Athenians."[2] Then he sent for Histiæus, telling him that he suspected he knew something about the business. But the Greek's innocent look and plausible words deceived the king, who was induced to send him to the coast the very thing he had desired to help to quell the insurrection. At Sardis Histiæus found an astuter head to deal with. The satrap there was Artaphernes the king's brother. He said, "I see how it is, Histiæus—thou hast stitched the shoe, and Aristagoras has put it on." But the adroit Ionian managed for the time to escape out of all his difficulties. He even outwitted Artaphernes so far, that, as Mr Grote supposes, he got him to execute a number of innocent Persians at Sardis, by opening a treasonable correspondence with them. The Milesians, however, would not receive him back as governor: he therefore persuaded the Lesbians to give him eight triremes, with which he took to piracy on his own account in the parts about the Hellespont. While marauding on the coast near Lesbos, he was defeated by a Persian force which happened to be there, and his captors, fearing lest the good-natured Darius might pardon him, put him to death at Sardis. Their fears were well founded; for when they sent his head to the king, Darius expressed much regret, and ordered it to be buried with all honour. This is quite consistent with the character of the Persian king as drawn by the prophet Daniel. It seems as if no one who had once done him a service could ever afterwards forfeit his good graces.
After reducing Cyprus, the Persians fell with their combined force on the Ionians and their allies. A victory won by the Greek fleet over the Phœnician sailors of Darius had no result of importance. The Carians fought most valiantly, and cut off a whole Persian division by an ambuscade. Though they lost in one battle ten thousand men, yet their spirit was unbroken. Miletus, too, still held out gallantly. If any man under these circumstances ought to have shown an example of self-devotion, that man was Aristagoras. But nerve is inconsistent with levity of character. It often happens that the coward runs into the jaws of his fate, and so it happened to him. He abandoned the Ionian cause, and with some of his partisans sailed away for his father-in-law's new settlement in Thrace, where he was killed while besieging some petty town. He had been just in time to make .his fruitless escape, for the Persians now proceeded to invest Miletus by land and sea. The allied Greeks decided on leaving it to defend itself by land, and concentrating their fleet at a small island off the coast. The allies counted in all three hundred and fifty triremes, which were confronted by six hundred in the service of Persia. The Persian commanders first tried to dissolve the hostile confederation by sending the deposed despots each to their own countrymen with promises of pardon on submission, and threats of extermination in case of prolonged resistance. The plan so far failed that it did not supersede the necessity of an action, for each separate state imagined itself the only one to which overtures were made. The Ionian captains, in their council of war, now agreed to put themselves all under the command of Dionysius of Phocæa. He set to work to put the ships in constant training, especially practising a manoeuvre something like that of Nelson,—attacking the enemy's line in columns, and cutting through it. The invention of steam-rams seems likely to make the sea-fights of the future more like those of the remote past than ever. The incidents of the Merrimac's battle and of Lissa recall the collisions of ancient navies, only that the oars of the galleys are superseded by steam-engines. Their sails were not used in action, as they would have only embarrassed the rowers. To sweep away a whole broadside of oars by cleverly shaving the enemy, and then turn sharply and ram him home on the quarter, was doubtless a favourite evolution of the best sailors. Dionysius was too much of a martinet for the self-indulgent Ionians. He kept them at sea all night an unheard-of innovation and at drill all day, and the days were terribly hot. They had not bargained for this when they chose him admiral. They began to murmur. "What god have we offended that we should be thus victimised? What fools we were to give ourselves up body and soul to this Phocæan bully, who commands but three ships of his own! We shall fall sick with the work and heat. The Persians can but make us slaves, and no slavery can well be worse than this. Let us mutiny." So they landed and encamped on the island, lolled in the shade all day, and refused to go on board any more. Then the Persian poison began to work. Æaces, the son of Syloson, lately tyrant of Samos, succeeded in persuading his country-men to promise to desert, and they alone had sixty ships. Little could be hoped now from a general battle, but the battle took place. The Samians went off, all but eleven ships, whose stanch captains, like Nelson at Copenhagen with his blind eye to the telescope, would not see the signal of retreat. Most of the other allied squadrons, when they saw what the Samians were doing, imitated their bad example. The Chian contingent, with the Samian eleven and a few others, maintained a desperate struggle. The hundred Chian ships, each with forty picked marines on board, charged repeatedly through the enemy's line. When they had taken many of his galleys, and lost half their own, such as were able made their way to their own island. Their damaged ships made for Mycalè, where the crews ran them ashore and marched to Ephesus. But ill fortune followed them. It was night, and the Ephesians were celebrating a feast, whose chief ceremony was a torch-light procession of women. Thinking them a party of freebooters come to carry off their wives and daughters, the citizens sallied out and cut them all to pieces. Dionysius the Phocæan had taken three ships, thus exactly doubling his own number. When he saw that the fight was lost, he made straight for the coast of Phoenicia, left undefended by the absence of their war-galleys, sank a number of merchantmen in the harbours, and gained by this booty the means of setting up handsomely as a corsair in Sicily, where he plundered Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians, but—with "a refinement of delicacy very unusual," as Mr Rawlinson observes—let all Greek vessels go free.
The fall of Miletus soon followed the sea-fight. Most of the men were killed, and the women and children enslaved. The Athenians were deeply affected by the news, and when their poet Phrynichus brought on the stage his tragedy of the "Capture of Miletus," the audience burst into tears, and he was fined a thousand drachmas (francs), and forbidden ever to exhibit it again. The revolt, which had now been desperately maintained for six years, was terribly expiated. The towns on the coast were as far as possible depopulated (the people being sent to the interior); and the islands were traversed by lines of soldiers, who "netted" the inhabitants from one side to the other. Cities and temples were burnt to the ground. The Chians had been warned of coming evil by terrible portents. Of a hundred youths sent to Delphi, all but two had died of a pestilence; and just before the great sea-fight off Miletus, the roof of a public school had fallen on the heads of the children of the principal citizens, and only one had escaped out of a hundred and twenty. In 1821 Europe was roused to sympathy for Greece by the horrors which this very island (Scio) suffered from the troops of the Capudan Pasha.
After a time the policy of the Persians changed towards Ionia, probably because Darius disapproved of the excessive severity which had been exercised; and Mardonius, his son-in-law, a young noble of great promise, was sent to depose once more the "tyrants," and establish democracies. These rulers had proved that they were not to be trusted. Having settled this business to the king's satisfaction, he was appointed to the command of a fleet and army whose destination was Athens and Eretria—for Darius had never forgotten their offence in the burning of Sardis. But the ulterior object of the expedition was the subjugation of all Greece.
As the Persian fleet was doubling Mount Athos, a north wind sprang up which terribly shattered it. Little short of three hundred wrecks and twenty thousand corpses were cast away on the rocky promontory. Many fell victims, says Herodotus, to sea-monsters—one of the additional perils of the deep in the imagination of ancient mariners; those who could not swim were drowned—and those who could, died of cold. Mardonius himself received a wound in an action on the mainland of Thrace, and the expedition returned home with its commander invalided. Darius immediately made fresh preparations, and sent heralds to all the Greek states to demand earth and water, in order that he might know what support to expect. It is to be hoped that the Athenians and Spartans did not disgrace themselves by throwing one of the heralds into a well and the other into a pit, and telling them to fetch earth and water thence; but such is the story. Darius himself would under no provocation have so forgotten his knighthood. Some years afterwards, the Spartans were said to have sent two of their citizens, who voluntarily offered themselves, to Susa, as an atonement for this outrage, for which they believed that the wrath of the hero Talthybius, the patron of heralds, lay heavy on them; but Xerxes, who was then king, would not accept the sacrifice, and dismissed them unhurt.
The Æginetans gave the earth and water to Darius, probably to spite the Athenians, who at once denounced them to the Spartans (who were as yet considered the leaders of Greece) as traitors to the national cause. The Spartan king Cleomenes went to Ægina to arrest the most guilty parties; but his mission there was foiled by his brother-king Demaratus, who was accusing him at home. In retaliation, Cleomenes attempted to prove that Demaratus was illegitimate. His mother was the loveliest woman in Sparta. She had been ugly in her childhood, but was changed into a beauty by her nurse taking her daily to the temple of Helen. There a mysterious lady—"tall as the gods, and most divinely fair"—one day laid her hand on the child, whose looks from that time forth began to amend. In due time she had been married to a noble Spartan; but Ariston the king fell in love with her, and got her from her husband, who was his greatest friend, by a ruse. He proposed to exchange their most precious possessions, and they ratified the compact by an oath. Ariston straightway demanded his friend's wife. Thus taken off his guard, and bound by his oath, the husband unwillingly resigned her. But from circumstances connected with the birth of the child Demaratus, he was supposed by some to be not the son of Ariston, but of her former husband. Cleomenes found a powerful ally in Leotychides, the next heir, who was a deadly enemy of Demaratus, and the suit was carried on in his name. The inevitable oracle of Delphi was the last court of appeal; and the priestess, being bribed by Cleomenes, pronounced against Demaratus, who was then deposed, and ultimately driven from Sparta by the taunts of Leotychides. He made his way to that paradise of refugees, the hospitable court of Darius, who gave him lands and cities. He had stood very high in the estimation of his countrymen, as having been the only Spartan who had won the four-horse chariot-race at Olympia.
When Cleomenes had thus worked his will on Demaratus, he took Leotychides, his new associate on the throne, with him to Ægina, where he arrested two of the principal citizens, as guilty of treason against the liberty of Greece, and deposited them as hostages with their bitter enemies the Athenians. But his own end was near. Rumour accused him of underhand practices against Demaratus, and he fled into Arcadia, where he began to hatch a conspiracy against Sparta. The Spartans in alarm called him home to his former honours. He had always been eccentric; he now became a maniac. He would dash his staff in the face of every citizen he met. At last his friends put him in the stocks a wholesome instrument of restraint, as common there as in our own country within the last century. Finding himself alone one day with his keeper, he asked for a knife. The Helot did not dare to refuse the king, though a prisoner. Then he committed suicide in a manner which, though effected more clumsily, resembled the "Happy Despatch" of the Japanese.
The madness of Cleomenes, like that of Cambyses, was generally supposed to have been a judgment on his impiety. Herodotus thought his treatment of Demaratus enough to account for it; but other charges equally grave were brought against him. He had bribed the Pythian priestess. He had roasted alive some fifty Argives who had taken refuge in a sacred grove, during his invasion of Argolis, by burning the grove itself. He had scourged Argive priests for not allowing him, a foreigner, to sacrifice in the temple of Juno. He had been in the habit of entering forbidden temples, and generally of making a parade of reckless irreligion. The Spartans themselves, however, gave a more naturalistic account of the cause of his madness. Certain Scythian ambassadors, who were staying at Sparta to negotiate a league against Darius, had induced the king to adopt the habit of taking his wine without water like themselves. "To drink like a Scythian" was a proverb. The case of Cambyses, as we have seen, admitted of the like explanation.
When Cleomenes was dead, the Æginetans sent to Sparta to complain of Leotychides about their hostages, who were still in custody with the Athenians. Leotychides, who was not popular, narrowly escaped "being given up as a hostage in their stead; but, in the end, he was duly sent to Athens to demand their release. The Athenians refused to give them up, saying that as two kings had placed them there, they could not give them up to one. They certainly would have had the English law of trusteeship on their side. Leotychides, however, read them a striking lesson on the sacredness of trusts. He told them how one Glaucus, a Spartan, had once consulted the oracle at Delphi as to restoring a deposit of money to its rightful owner. He had the audacity to ask whether he might venture to purge himself by an oath, according to the Greek law, and so keep the money. The Pythoness gave answer in these warning words:—
And a false oath is easy sin;
Swear—an thou wilt: death follows both
The righteous and unrighteous oath:
But Perjury breeds an awful Birth,
That hath no name in heaven or earth;
Strong without hands, swift without feet,
It tracks the pathway of deceit—
Sweeps its whole household from the land;
Only the just man's house shall stand."
When Glaucus heard these words, he at once restored the money, and sent to beg of the god that the thought of his heart might be forgiven him. The oracle replied that to tempt heaven with such a question was as bad as to commit the sin. "And now," said the Spartan king, "mark my words, men of Athens; at this day there is none of Glaucus' race left in Sparta: they have perished, root and branch."
The Athenians, however, turned a deaf ear to the solemn monition. In return for their stubbornness, the Æginetans laid wait for and captured the Sacred Galley which carried the Athenian embassy to Delos periodically, and threw the envoys (men of the highest rank) into prison. A fierce war of reprisals was entered upon, of which perhaps the most remarkable characteristic is the poverty of the Athenians of the period in ships. They were obliged to beg twenty galleys of their friends the Corinthians, who, as it was against the law to give them, generously sold the whole for a hundred drachmæ—about five francs apiece.
Leotychides might have served to point the moral of his own remarkable anecdote. He reaped little happiness from the successful plot by which he had supplanted Demaratus. After seeing his only son die before him, he ended his own days in exile, having been banished from Sparta for the disgraceful crime of taking bribes from the enemy during a war with the Thessalians. The evident satisfaction with which Herodotus, here as elsewhere, traces the course of retributive justice, is highly characteristic of the historian.
- ↑ Gorgo was well worthy to become, as she afterwards did, the wife of Leonidas. An incident in her married life, subsequently related by Herodotus, seems to militate against the dictum of Aristotle that the Spartan women were inferior to the men. All the authorities of Sparta were puzzled by the arrival of a waxen tablet (the usual form of a despatch) with nothing written on it. When Gorgo heard of it, she at once suggested that the wax should be scraped off, and the despatch was found engraven on the wood.
- ↑ There is a parallel symbolism in the case of Elisha and Joash (2 Kings xiii. 17): "Then Elisha said, Shoot; and he shot. And he said, The arrow of the Lord's deliverance, and the arrow of deliverance from Syria."