have Bridges over them.

Close to the Euphrates, there was a narrow Pass, between the River and
the Trench, about twenty Feet in breadth. This Trench the Great King,
as soon as he heard Cyrus was marching against him, caus’d to be made
by way of Fortification; through this Pass Cyrus and his Army march’d,
and were now within the Trench. That day the King did not engage, but
many Tracks appear’d both of Horses and Men that retreated. Here Cyrus,
sending for Silanus, the Soothsayer of Ambracia, gave him three thousand
Darics,[6] because the eleventh Day before that, when he was offering
Sacrifice, he told Cyrus that the King would not fight within ten Days:
Upon which Cyrus said, “If he does not fight within ten Days, he will
not fight at all: And, if what you say proves true, I’ll give you ten
Talents;” which Sum, the ten Days being expir’d, he then paid him. Since
therefore the King had suffer’d the Army of Cyrus to march through this
Pass unmolested, both Cyrus and the rest concluded that he had given over
all Thoughts of fighting: so that the next Day Cyrus march’d with less
Circumspection; and the third day he rode on his Car, very few marching
before him in their Ranks; great part of the Soldiers observ’d no Order,
many of their Arms being carried in Waggons, and upon sumpter Horses.

It was now about the time of Day, when the Market is usually crowded, the
Army being near the place, where they propos’d to encamp, when Patagyas,
a Persian, one of those whom Cyrus most confided in, was seen riding
towards them full speed, his Horse all in a Sweat, and immediately called
to every one he met, both in his own Language, and in Greek, that the
King was at hand with a vast Army, marching in Order of Battle. Upon
this there was great Confusion, the Greeks and all the rest expecting he
would charge them, before they had put themselves in Order: and Cyrus
leaping from his Car, put on his Corslet, then mounting his Horse, took
his Javelins in his Hand, and order’d all the rest to arm, and every Man
to take his Post: They quickly form’d themselves, Clearchus on the right
Wing, close to the Euphrates, and next to him Proxenus, and after him the
rest: Menon and his Men were posted upon the left of the Greek Army. Of
the Barbarians a thousand Paphlagonian Horse, with the Greek Targeteers,
stood next to Clearchus on the right. Upon the left Ariæus, Cyrus’
Lieutenant-General, was plac’d with the rest of the Barbarians. Cyrus put
himself in the Center with six hundred Horse: they had large Corslets,
and Cuisses, and all of them Helmets, but Cyrus, who stood ready for
the Charge, with his Head unarm’d; they say it is also customary for
the rest of the Persians to expose themselves in a day of Action in
the same manner: All the Horses in Cyrus’ Army had both Frontlets and
Breast-plates, and the Horsemen Greek Swords.

It was now the middle of the Day, and no Enemy was yet to be seen. In
the Afternoon there appear’d a Dust like a white Cloud, which not long
after spread itself like a Darkness over the Plain; when they drew
nearer, immediately the brazen Armour flash’d, and their Spears and Ranks
appear’d: The Enemy had on their left a Body of Horse arm’d in white
Corslets (these were said to be commanded by Tissaphernes), next came
those with Persian Bucklers, and next to them heavy-arm’d Men with wooden
Shields, reaching down to their Feet (these were said to be Egyptians);
then other Horse and other Archers. All these marched according to their
respective Countries, each Nation being drawn up in a solid oblong
Square: And before them were disposed the Chariots arm’d with Scythes,
at a considerable distance from one another. These Chariots had Scythes
fix’d aslant at the Axle-Trees, with others under the Body of the
Chariot, pointing downwards, that so they might cut asunder every thing
they encounter’d. The Design of these Chariots was to break the Ranks of
the Greeks.

It now appear’d that Cyrus, when he had exhorted the Greeks to withstand
the Shouts of the Barbarians, was mistaken; for they did not come on
with Shouts, but as silently and quietly as possible, and in an equal
and slow March. Here Cyrus, riding along the Ranks with Pigres the
Interpreter, and three or four others, called to Clearchus to bring his
Men over-against the Center of the Enemy, because the King was there:
And if we break that, says he, our Work is done. But Clearchus observing
their Center, and understanding from Cyrus that the King was beyond the
left Wing of the Greek Army (for the King was so much superior in number,
that, when he stood in the Center of his own Army, he was beyond the left
Wing of that of Cyrus) Clearchus, I say, would not however be prevail’d
on to withdraw his right from the River, fearing to be surrounded on both
sides: but answer’d Cyrus, He would take care that all should go well.

Now the Barbarians came regularly on: and the Greek Army standing on the
same Ground, the Ranks were form’d, as the Men came up. In the mean time
Cyrus, riding at a small distance before the Ranks, survey’d both the
Enemy’s Army and his own: Whom Xenophon, an Athenian, observing from the
Greek Army, he rode up to him, and ask’d him, whether he had any thing
to command; Cyrus, stopping his Horse, order’d him to let them all know,
that the Sacrifices and Victims promis’d success. While he was saying
this, he heard a Noise running through the Ranks, and ask’d him what
Noise it was; Xenophon answer’d, that the Word was now giving for the
second time; Cyrus wonder’d who should give it, and ask’d him what the
Word was; the other replied, Jupiter the Preserver, and Victory: Which
Cyrus hearing, said, I accept it, let That be the Word. After he had said
this, he return’d to his Post.

The two Armies being within three or four Stadia of each other, the
Greeks sung the Pæan, and advanced: As this Motion occasion’d a small
Fluctuation in the Line of Battle, those who were left behind, hasten’d
their march, and at once they gave a general Shout, as their Custom is
when they invoke the God of War, and all ran on. Some say they struck
their Shields with their Pikes to frighten the Enemy’s Horses. But the
Barbarians, before they came within the Reach of their Darts, turn’d
their Horses and fled, and the Greeks pursued them as fast as they could,
calling out to one another not to run, but to follow in their Ranks. Here
some of the Chariots were borne through their own People without their
Charioteers, others through the Greeks, some of whom seeing them coming,
divided; while others being amaz’d, like Spectators in the Hippodrome,
were taken unawares; but even these were reported to have received no
harm, neither was there any other Greek hurt in the Action, except one
upon the left Wing, who was said to have been wounded by an Arrow.

Cyrus seeing the Greeks victorious on their side, and in pursuit of the
Enemy, rejoic’d, and was already worshipp’d as King by those about him;
however, he was not so far transported as to leave his Post, and join in
the Pursuit; but, keeping his six hundred Horse in a Body, he observ’d
the King’s Motions; well knowing that he was in the Center of the Persian
Army: for in all Barbarian Armies, the Generals ever place themselves in
the Center, looking upon that Post as the safest, on each side of which
their Strength is equally divided, and, if they have occasion to give
out any Orders, these are receiv’d in half the time by the Army. The
King therefore being at that time in the Center of his own Battle, was,
however, beyond the left Wing of Cyrus; and, when he saw none oppos’d him
in front, nor any Motion made to charge the Troops that were drawn up
before him, he wheel’d to the left, in order to surround their Army. Upon
this Cyrus, fearing he should get behind him, and cut off the Greeks,
advanc’d against the King, and charging with his six hundred Horse, broke
those who were drawn up before him, put the six thousand Men to flight,
and, as they say, killed with his own Hand Artagerses, their Commander.

These being broken, the six hundred also belonging to Cyrus dispers’d
themselves in the Pursuit, very few being left about him, and those
almost all Persons who used to eat at his Table; being accompanied with
these, he discovered the King, and those about him, and, unable to
contain himself, immediately cried out, I see the Man; then ran furiously
at him, and, striking him on the Breast, wounded him through his Corslet,
as Ctesias the Physician says, who affirms that he cur’d the Wound.
While he was giving the Blow, somebody threw a Javelin at him with great
force, and wounded him under the Eye: and now the King and Cyrus engag’d
hand to hand, and those about them, in defence of each. In this Action
Ctesias (who was with the King) informs us how many fell on his side; on
the other, Cyrus himself was killed, and eight the most considerable of
his Friends lay dead upon him. When Artapates, who was in the greatest
Trust with him of any of his scepter’d Ministers, saw Cyrus fall, they
say, he leap’d from his Horse, and threw himself about him: some say, the
King order’d Artapates to be slain upon the Body of Cyrus; others, that,
drawing his Scimitar, he slew himself: for, he wore a golden Scimitar,
a Chain, Bracelets, and other Ornaments, which are worn by the most
considerable Persians; and was held in great esteem by Cyrus, both for
his Affection and Fidelity.

When Cyrus was dead, his Head and right Hand were cut off upon the spot,
and the King, with his Men, in the Pursuit, broke into his Camp; while
those with Ariæus, no longer made a stand, but fled through their own
Camp to their former Post, which was said to be four Parasangs from the
Field of Battle. The King, with his Forces, among many other things, took
Cyrus’ Mistress, a Phocæan, who was said to be a Woman of great Sense
and Beauty. The other, a Milesian, who was the younger of the two, was
also taken by the King’s Troops, but escap’d naked to the Quarter of the
Greeks, who were left to guard the Baggage. These, forming themselves,
kill’d many of those who were plundering the Camp, and lost some of their
own Men; however, they did not fly, but sav’d the Milesian, with the Men
and Effects, and, in general, every thing else that was in their Quarter.
By this time the King and the Greeks were at the distance of about thirty
Stadia from one another, these pursuing the Enemy that were opposite to
them, as if they had gain’d a complete Victory; and the King’s Troops
plundering the Camp of the Greeks, as if they also had been every where
victorious. But, when the Greeks were inform’d, that the King, with his
Men, was among their Baggage, and the King, on his side, heard from
Tissaphernes, that the Greeks had put those before them to flight, and
were gone forward in the Pursuit, he then rallied his Forces, and put
them in order. On the other side, Clearchus consulted with Proxenus, who
was nearest to him, whether they should send a Detachment, or should all
march to relieve the Camp.

In the mean time the King was observ’d to move forward again, and seem’d
resolved to fall upon their Rear; upon which the Greeks faced about, and
put themselves in a posture to march that way, and receive him. However,
the King did not advance that way; But, as before, he pass’d beyond
their left Wing, so now he led his Men back the same Way, taking along
with him those who had deserted to the Greeks during the Action, and
also Tissaphernes with his Forces: for Tissaphernes did not fly at the
first Onset, but penetrated with his Horse, where the Greek Targeteers
were posted, quite as far as the River: However, in breaking through, he
killed none of their Men, but the Greeks, dividing, wounded his People
both with their Swords and Darts. Episthenes of Amphipolis commanded the
Targeteers, and shewed great conduct upon this occasion.

Tissaphernes, therefore, sensible of his Disadvantage, departed, then;
coming to the Camp of the Greeks, he found the King there, and reuniting
their Forces, they advanc’d. When they came opposite to the left of the
Greeks, these were afraid they should attack their Wing, and, by wheeling
to the right and left, annoy them on both sides; to avoid which, they
resolv’d to open that Wing, and cover the Rear with the River. While they
were consulting upon this, the King marched by them, and drew up his Army
opposite to theirs, in the same Order in which he first engag’d. When the
Greeks saw them draw near in Order of Battle, they again sung the Pæan,
and went on with much more Alacrity than before. However, the Barbarians
did not stay to receive them, but fled sooner than the first time: and
the Greeks pursued them to a Village. There they halted; for there was
an Eminence above the Village, upon which the King’s Forces fac’d about.
He had no Foot with him, but the Hill was cover’d with Horse in such a
manner, that it was not possible for the Greeks to see what was doing:
However, they said they saw the royal Ensign there, which was a golden
Eagle with its Wings extended, resting upon a Spear.

When the Greeks advanc’d towards them, the Horse quitted the Hill, some
running one way, and some another: However, the Hill was clear’d of them
by degrees, and at last they all left it. Clearchus did not march up
the Hill with his Men, but, halting at the Foot of it, sent Lycius the
Syracusan, and another, with Orders to reconnoitre the place, and make
their Report; Lycius rode up the Hill, and, having view’d it, brought
Word that the Enemy fled in all haste. While these things were doing, it
grew near Sunset. Here the Greeks halted, and lying under their Arms,
rested themselves. In the mean time they wonder’d that neither Cyrus
appear’d any where, nor any one from him; for they did not know he was
dead; but imagin’d, that he was either led away by the Pursuit, or had
rode forward to possess himself of some Post. Hereupon they consulted
among themselves, whether they should stay where they were, and send for
their Baggage, or return to their Camp. At last they resolv’d to return:
And arriv’d at their Tents about Supper-time; And this was the end of
that Day. There they found the greatest part of their Baggage plunder’d,
with all the Provisions, and also the Carriages full of Flour and Wine,
which Cyrus had prepar’d, in order to distribute them among the Greeks,
if at any time his Army should labour under the want of Necessaries. It
was said these Carriages amounted to four hundred: which were then all
rifled by the King’s Troops, so that the greatest part of the Greeks had
no Supper, neither had they eaten any Dinner; for, before the Army could
halt in order to dine, the King appear’d. And in this Manner they passed
the Night.[c]

[Illustration: GREEK SEALS]

THE RETREAT

When the battle of Cunaxa was over, the Greeks, whose camp meanwhile
had been pillaged, rejected the Persian king’s demand for unconditional
surrender, and, although their numbers by this time were reduced to ten
thousand, determined to fight their way through to Asia Minor, a task
which involved marching through a hostile country for a distance which
measured 1850 miles by the route they had taken from Ephesus to Cunaxa.

Xenophon, one of their leaders, has made this march of the Greeks,
which is commonly known as the Retreat of the Ten Thousand, the subject
of a separate work. It is one of the most famous military exploits of
antiquity and sets the superiority of Greece in the most brilliant light,
for the bold and successful enterprise of these ten thousand Greeks does
not redound to their glory alone. It is the common possession of their
age, their nation, and the culture which it had attained; and marks in
the most striking fashion the contrast of the relative values of Persian
and Greek civilisation and political institutions. A handful of Greeks
bid splendid defiance to the sovereign of the enormous Persian empire, to
the sheer bulk of his army, and to all the intrigues of his satraps. It
was the victory of Greek subtlety and skill over the rigid and mechanical
organisation of Persia, of Greek science over the intellectual poverty of
the East, of Greek tactics over Persian confusion; finally, of a genuine
sense of honour and patriotic pride over craft, cowardice, and servility.

The route which the Ten Thousand took was not the same by which they had
marched to Cunaxa; it lay through Mesopotamia, Media, Armenia, and along
the southern shore of the Black Sea to Thrace. The valiant Greeks did not
know their way through these countries; they had neither maps nor any
trustworthy guide; they had to march through desert and wilderness, to
cross mountains and ravines, to pass through barbarous tribes and whole
provinces in arms; nevertheless they succeeded in reaching the frontier
of their own land with comparatively slight loss.

Soon after they had begun their march, Artaxerxes concluded a treaty with
them through the mediation of the satrap Tissaphernes, who had succeeded
to the satrapy of Cyrus, in virtue of which they were to be allowed
to proceed home undisturbed, escorted by the latter at the head of a
Persian army, and supplied with the requisite provisions by the way. But
Tissaphernes kept the Greeks waiting for more than twenty days before
he returned from the king’s camp, and when at length he did return and
set forth with them on their way through Media, he showed himself of so
suspicious a temper and fostered such constant and increasing friction
between the Greek troops and his own, that at last Clearchus, the Greek
commander, begged for an interview with the satrap. This was granted, and
Clearchus, confiding in the honour of the hostile leader, went to the
Persian camp accompanied by all the twenty-four officers who composed
his military council. As soon as they reached it they were treacherously
taken prisoners and their guard cut down. They were presently carried off
to the royal capital and there put to death together.

The Persians hoped to throw the Greeks into confusion by this treacherous
blow, and so vanquish them without much trouble; but they were not a
little amazed when (in striking contrast to the spirit and organisation
of their own army) a new body of generals and new subordinate officers
sprang immediately and, as it were, spontaneously into being from the
ranks of the Greek privates and subalterns. For in the Greek army fresh
appointments to all posts were made every year; there was no regular
promotion and no officer held permanent rank; on the contrary, the man
who one year occupied the position of an officer frequently served as a
private soldier the next. By this means almost every private soldier was
qualified to step into the place of an officer, and it was an easy matter
to appoint fresh leaders to the large and small divisions of the army.
Xenophon, who had hitherto accompanied the march, neither in the capacity
of private nor officer, but merely as a friend and comrade of one of the
generals, was the first after the treacherous act of Tissaphernes to
urge his countrymen not to yield to the Persian demand for submission,
but to fight their way sword in hand through the enemy’s country. Only
one of the colonels and captains who gathered about him demurred to his
proposal. This aroused the suspicions of the rest, and, marking him
more narrowly, they perceived by his pierced ears that he was by birth
no Greek but a Persian. He was promptly expelled, and Xenophon and four
others were appointed to succeed the generals captured by the Persians.

From that day forward Xenophon was the soul of the Greek army, which owed
its ultimate deliverance to him and in whom it rightly reposed absolute
confidence. He was prudent enough not to command in his own name, but
in that of Chirisophus of Sparta, though the latter was wholly devoid
of the capacity and knowledge requisite for leading his countrymen home
through the heart of the Persian empire. Xenophon’s motive in this was,
on the one hand, to avoid making himself obnoxious to the Spartans, who
had become masters of Greece by the Peloponnesian War, and on the other,
to keep his own people under stricter discipline through the terror of a
Spartan leader. Directed by an admirable tactical skill, which was equal
to every fresh demand of place or circumstance, the Greeks continued
their march, perpetually pursued and harassed by the Persians, to the
rugged and inhospitable mountain country about the Upper Tigris. Here
they came in contact with the fierce and warlike tribe of the Carduchi,
who, like the Kurds of to-day who may be their descendants, had never
been conquered, and who rejected all overtures for permission to pass
through their territory in peace. The Persians, not daring to venture
farther, now gave up the pursuit of the Ten Thousand, and the latter
marched into the rugged and precipitous country of the Carduchi, and
in spite of the constant attacks of the inhabitants succeeded by the
superiority of their military discipline and experience in reaching the
other side of the mountain range and the frontiers of Armenia in seven
days. This march through the country of the Carduchi was the most arduous
part of their journey and cost them more loss and suffering than all the
attacks of the Persian army.[e] We turn again to the vivid description in
Xenophon’s own words as Englished by Spelman.

XENOPHON’S PICTURE OF THE HARDSHIPS

In the country of the Taochians, their Provisions began to fail them:
For the Taochians inhabited Fastnesses, into which they had convey’d
all their Provisions. At last the army arriv’d at a strong Place, which
had neither City nor Houses upon it, but where great Numbers of Men
and Women with their Cattle were assembled. This Place Chirisophus
order’d to be attack’d the Moment he came before it, and, when the first
Company suffer’d another went up, and then another; for the Place being
surrounded with Precipices, they could not attack it on all Sides at
once. When Xenophon came up with the Rear-Guard, the Targeteers and
heavy-arm’d Men, Chirisophus said to him, “You come very seasonably, for
this Place must be taken, otherwise the Army will be starved.”

Upon this they call’d a Council of War, and Xenophon demanding, what
could hinder them from carrying the Place; Chirisophus answer’d, “there
is no other Access to it but This, and, when any of our Men attempt to
gain it, they roll down Stones from the impending Rock, and those they
light upon are treated as you see”; pointing at the same time to some of
the Men, whose Legs and Ribs were broken. “But,” says Xenophon, “when
they have consum’d all the Stones they have, what can hinder us then from
going up? For I can see nothing to oppose us, but a few Men, and of these
not above two or three that are arm’d. The Space, you see, through which
we must pass expos’d to these Stones, is about one hundred and fifty
Feet in Length, of which that of one hundred Feet is cover’d with large
Pines, growing in Groups, against which, if our Men place themselves,
what can they suffer, either from the Stones that are thrown, or rolled
down by the Enemy? The remaining Part of this Space is not above fifty
Feet, which, when the Stones cease, we must dispatch with all possible
Expedition.” “But,” says Chirisophus, “the Moment we offer to go to the
Place that is cover’d with the Trees, they will shower down Stones upon
us.” “That,” replies Xenophon, “is the very Thing we want, for by this
Means they will be consum’d the sooner. However,” continues he, “let us,
if we can, advance to that Place, from whence we may have but a little
Way to run, and from whence we may also, if we see convenient, retreat
with Ease.”

Upon this, Chirisophus and Xenophon, with Callimachus of Parrhasia, one
of the Captains, advanced (for the last had the command that Day of the
Captains in the Rear), all the rest of the Officers standing out of
Danger. Then about seventy of the Men advanc’d under the Trees, not in
a Body, but one by one, each sheltering himself as well as he could:
While Agasias the Stymphalian and Aristonymus of Methydria, who were also
Captains belonging to the Rear, with some others, stood behind, without
the Trees, for it was not safe for more than one Company to be there.
Upon this Occasion Callimachus made Use of the following Stratagem. He
advanc’d two or three Paces from the Tree under which he stood; but, as
soon as the Stones began to fly, he quickly retir’d, and, upon every
Excursion, more than ten Cart-Loads of Stones were consum’d. When
Agasias saw what Callimachus was doing, and that the Eyes of the whole
Army were upon him, fearing lest he should be the first Man who enter’d
the Place, he, without giving any Notice to Aristonymus, who stood next
to him, or to Eurylochus, of Lusia, both of whom were his friends, or to
any other Person, advanc’d alone, with a Design to get before the rest.
When Callimachus saw him passing by, he laid hold of the Border of his
Shield. In the mean Time Aristonymus, and, after him, Eurylochus ran by
them both: For all these were Rivals in Glory, and in constant Emulation
of each other. And, by contending thus, they took the Place: For, the
Moment one of them had gain’d the Ascent, there were no more Stones
thrown from above.

And here followed a dreadful Spectacle indeed; for the Women first
threw their Children down the Precipice, and then themselves. Then Men
did the same. And here Æneas the Stymphalian, a Captain, seeing one of
the Barbarians, who was richly dress’d, running with a Design to throw
himself down, caught hold of him, and the other drawing him after, they
both fell down the Precipice together, and were dashed to Pieces. Thus we
made very few Prisoners, but took a considerable Quantity of Oxen, Asses,
and Sheep.

From thence the Greeks advanc’d, through the Country of the Chalybians,
and, in seven Marches, made fifty Parasangs. These being the most
valiant People they met with in all their March, they came to a close
engagement with the Greeks. They had linen Corslets that reach’d below
their Navel, and, instead of Tassels, thick Cords twisted. They had also
Greaves and Helmets, and at their Girdle a short Faulchion, like those
of the Lacedæmonians, with which they cut the Throats of those they
over-power’d, and afterwards, cutting off their Heads, carried them away
in Triumph. It was their Custom to sing and dance, whenever they thought
the Enemy saw them. They had Pikes fifteen Cubits in length, with only
one Point. They staid in their Cities till the Greeks march’d past them,
and then followed harassing them perpetually. After that they retir’d
to their strong Holds, into which they had conveyed their Provisions:
So that the Greeks could supply themselves with nothing out of their
Country, but liv’d upon the Cattle they had taken from the Taochians.

They now came to the River Harpasus, which was four hundred Feet broad.
And from thence advanc’d through the Country of the Scythinians, and, in
four Days’ March, made twenty Parasangs, passing through a Plain into
some Villages; in which they staid three Days, and made their Provisions.
From this Place they made, in four Days’ March, twenty Parasangs, to a
large and rich City well inhabited: It was called Gymnias. The Governour
of this Country sent a Person to the Greeks, to conduct them through
the Territories of his Enemies. This Guide, coming to the Army, said he
would undertake, in five Days, to carry them to a Place, from whence they
should see the Sea. If not, he consented to be put to death. And, when
he had conducted them into the Territories belonging to his Enemies,
he desired them to lay waste the Country with Fire and Sword. By which
it was evident that he came with this View, and not from any Good-will
he bore to the Greeks. The fifth Day they arriv’d at the holy Mountain
called Theches. As soon as the Men, who were in the Vanguard, ascended
the Mountain, and saw the Sea, they gave a great Shout, which, when
Xenophon and those in the Rear, heard, they concluded that some other
Enemies attack’d them in Front, for the People belonging to the Country
they had burn’d, follow’d their Rear, some of whom those who had Charge
of it, had killed, and taken others Prisoners in an Ambuscade. They had
also taken twenty Bucklers made of raw Ox-hides with the hair on.

The Noise still increasing as they came nearer, and the Men, as fast as
they came up, running to those who still continued Shouting, their Cries
swelled with their Numbers, so that Xenophon, thinking something more
than ordinary had happen’d, mounted on Horse-back, and, taking with him
Lycius and his Horse, rode up to their Assistance: And presently they
heard the Soldiers calling out “The Sea! The Sea!” and cheering one
another. At this they all set a running, the Rear-guard as well as the
rest, and the Beasts of Burden, and Horses were driven forward. When they
were all come up to the Top of the Mountain, they embraced one another,
and also their Generals and Captains with Tears in their Eyes. And
Immediately the Men, by whose Order it is not known, bringing together
a great many Stones, made a large Mount, upon which they plac’d a great
Quantity of Shields made of raw Ox-hides, Staves, and Bucklers taken from
the Enemy. The Guide himself cut the Bucklers in Pieces, and exhorted the
rest to do the same. After this the Greeks sent back their Guide, giving
him Presents out of the publick Stock, these were a Horse, a silver Cup,
a Persian Dress, and ten Darics. But, above all Things the Guide desir’d
the Soldiers to give him some of their Rings, many of which they gave
him. Having therefore shewn them a Village, where they were to Quarter,
and the Road that led to the Macronians, when the Evening came on, he
departed, setting out on his Return that Night.[c]

END OF THE MARCH

[Sidenote: [401-399 B.C.]]

At length, four months after the battle of Cunaxa, they entered Trapezus,
the first Greek city they came to, and celebrated their safe arrival
among their kindred with sacrifices and games. From this point they
continued their retreat, some by sea and some by land. But when the air
of Greece breathed upon them once more and the fear of the barbarians was
overpast, discord and greed crept in amongst them, and they proved such
troublesome guests that even the inhabitants of the Greek colonies along
the southern shore of the Black Sea tried to get rid of them as speedily
as possible. Making many raids in search of booty and suffering no small
loss on the way, they came through Bithynia to Byzantium, and thence
proceeded to the interior of Thrace, where Seuthes, who then ruled the
country, engaged the rude and bellicose adventurers into whom the remnant
of the Ten Thousand had degenerated. For some months they assisted him to
extend his sovereignty over various Thracian tribes. Finally they were
enlisted by the Spartans, who were then at war with the Persian empire,
and so went back to Asia.

The remnant of the whole force amounted to six thousand men, the distance
they had traversed from the battle-field of Cunaxa to about the middle
of the south coast of the Black Sea to not less than two thousand miles.
This they had done in eight months. But the whole march, from Ephesus
to Cunaxa and thence to this region on the Black Sea, occupied fifteen
months (from February, 401, to the beginning of June, 400 B.C.), and the
march from the latter place to the spot where they joined the Spartan
army in Asia Minor (March, 399 B.C.) took nine months.

Xenophon, who had rendered the most conspicuous service on this memorable
march, returned to Greece after he had led the remnant of the Ten
Thousand to the Spartan army in Asia Minor. Some years later he took
part in the expedition against the Persians conducted by his friend the
Spartan king, Agesilaus, and after the return of the latter fought at the
battle of Coronea. While he was in Asia with Agesilaus he was banished
from his native city by a vote of the people, because he had taken part
in a war against the Persian king, who was at that time an ally of
Athens, and because his aristocratic opinions and his preference for the
political system of Sparta had earned him the hatred of the demagogues
and the jealousy of the populace. After the battle of Coronea he
accompanied Agesilaus to Sparta and remained there for a while, and then
settled on a country estate in the neighbourhood of Olympia, which he
had either received as a gift from the Spartans or bought with the great
wealth he had amassed in Asia. Here and in Corinth he wrote some part
of his works. The sentence of banishment from Athens was soon repealed,
but it does not seem probable that he ever returned to his native city,
though at a later time he induced his son Gryllus to take part in one of
the military expeditions of the Athenians. Gryllus fell at the battle of
Mantinea, and the story goes that the news of his death was brought to
his aged father as he was standing by an altar, sacrificing to the gods.
Xenophon was crowned with a garland, in accordance with the Greek custom
of wearing wreaths upon festal occasions. He immediately took it from his
head, but received the news of his son’s death with the utmost composure,
saying that he knew he had only begotten a mortal. When he was told
that Gryllus had fought with great valour, he put the garland on again,
finished his sacrifice, and added to it a prayer in which he gave thanks
to the gods for his son’s worthiness. Xenophon died at Corinth in (355
B.C.) the ninetieth year of his age.[e]

THE MEANING OF XENOPHON’S FEAT

[Sidenote: [399 B.C.]]

The world has never ceased to thrill with a sympathetic memory of that
glad cry of Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, “_Thalatta! Thalatta!_” (The sea!
The sea!) It has a kinship with the feelings of the foot-sore and
heart-sore children of Israel reaching the edge of the Promised Land. It
stands out from above the usual crises of history as a temple dome above
a town. It takes its place among such peaks of emotion as the view that
Attila took of Rome, and the crusaders of the minarets of Jerusalem, the
cry of “Land ho!” on the ships of Columbus. It finds a strangely modern
parallel in the first ocean-glimpse of the American soldiers in Sherman’s
march to the sea.

Like all these picturesque incidents, it meant more than a merely
dramatic moment to the history of mankind. It was a prelude in Greek
history to the triumph of Alexander. It showed to the Greeks that their
ambitions need not be confined to the small parishes they had dwelt in.
It revealed the fact that the great realm of the Persian monarch, whom
the Greeks always referred to as “The King,” was like Dead Sea fruit:
brilliant in its shell, and hollow corruption at core. The only impetus
the Greeks had felt towards a Panhellenic spirit had been inspired by the
imminence of the Persian danger. They had with small bands of patriots
dispersed the droves of oriental subjects brought against them, and yet
they could not have dreamed that their success in an offensive war would
be equal to the glory of the defensive struggle.

But here was a lessening body of ten thousand Greeks, bound together
by no common sentiment except a desire for money--which they did not
get. And this comparative handful of mercenaries had ransacked the
very innermost recesses of the Persian empire, and had never found an
army great enough or brave enough to withstand it in open assault. The
conquest of such an empire seemed to be within the grasp of any Greek
commander. The first to attempt it was a second-rate Spartan king,
Agesilaus, who failed. And the Persian empire resisted attack for five
generations more, till the new blood of Macedonia and the unlimited
ambitions of Alexander made the attempt. Until he came, the blows of the
others were only so much callisthenics. When he came he was not loath to
acknowledge, on the eve of the battle of Issus, the inspiration he owed
to the feat of the Ten Thousand.

Meanwhile, without reference to its remote bearings, the anabasis and
catabasis of Xenophon’s army stand forth glorious in themselves. He
himself sums up the achievement baldly at the conclusion of his work.

[Sidenote: [401-399 B.C.]]

“The governors of The King’s country, as much of it as we went through,
were these: of Lydia, Artemas; of Phrygia, Artacamas; of Lycaonia and
Cappadocia, Mithridates; of Cilicia, Syennesis; of Phœnicia and Arabia,
Dernes; of Syria and Assyria, Belesys; of Babylon, Rhoparas; of Media,
Arbaces; of the Phasiani and Hesperitæ, Tiribazus; the Carduchi, the
Chalybes, the Chaldeans, the Macrones, the Colchians, the Mosynœci,
the Cœtæ, and the Tibareni, were independent nations; of Paphlagonia,
Corylas; of the Bithynians, Pharnabazus; and of the Thracians in Europe,
Seuthes.

“The computation of the whole journey, the anabasis and catabasis, was
215 days’ march, 1155 parasangs, 34,650 stadia. The length of time
occupied in the anabasis and catabasis was one year and three months.”

Reckoning the parasang at three and two-fifths miles, the total distance
covered would therefore be 3927 miles in the course of fifteen months.
The manuscripts do not all agree with regard to the numbers, but the
total march may be accepted as nearly four thousand miles, through a
country bristling with hostility and treachery, a country unmapped and
unknown to the Greeks. This exploit of what might well be termed a pack
of desperadoes looms high in history, both as an absolute feat of bravado
and as a finger-post for Grecian ambition.[a]

FOOTNOTES

[5] [A parasang was equal to about 3⅖ English miles.]

[6] [A daric, named after Darius, was a gold coin of about the weight of
a sovereign, or five dollars. An Attic talent was valued at about £200 or
$1000.]

[Illustration: GREEK MEDAL]

CHAPTER XLI. THE SPARTAN SUPREMACY

There is an inevitable bias in the minds of most people towards the
brilliant and refined ideals of Athens as opposed to the obstinate
and barren creed of the Spartans. We have heard, therefore, more of
the Athenian side than of the Spartan in their wars together. As we
approach a period of Spartan glory, it is well to make a quick review and
summary of her ideals and achievements down to this period, when, as the
Spartophile Müller notes, Sparta won her advancement by discarding her
venerable creeds. What follows must be read with the knowledge that it is
from the pen of a Spartan partisan.[a]

Sparta, by the conquest of Messenia and Tegea, had obtained the first
rank in the Peloponnese, which character she confirmed by the expulsion
of the tyrants, and the overthrow of Argos. From about the year 580 B.C.
she acted as the recognised commander, not only of the Peloponnese, but
of the whole Greek name. The confederacy itself, however, was formed
by the inhabitants of that peninsula alone, on fixed and regular laws;
whereas the other Greeks only annexed themselves to it temporarily. The
order of precedence observed by the members of this league may be taken
from the inscription on the footstool of the statue of Jupiter, which was
dedicated at Olympia after the Persian War, the Ionians, who were only
allied for a time, being omitted. It is as follows: Lacedæmon, Corinth,
Sicyon, Ægina, Megara, Epidaurus, Tegea, Orchomenos, Phlius, Trœzen,
Hermione, Tiryns, Mycenæ, Lepreum, and Elis; which state was contented
with the last place, on account of the small share which it had taken in
the war.

The defenders of the isthmus are enumerated as follows: Lacedæmonians,
Arcadians, Eleans, Corinthians, Sicyonians, Epidaurians, Phliasians,
Trœzenians, and Hermionians, nearly agreeing with the other list, only
that the Arcadians, having been present with their whole force, and also
the Eleans, occupy an earlier place; and the Megarians and Æginetans are
omitted, as having had no share in the defence. This regular order of
precedence is alone a proof of a firm union. The Tegeatæ, since they had
joined the side of Lacedæmon, enjoyed several privileges, and especially
the place of honour at the left wing of the allied army. Argos remained
excluded from the nations of the Peloponnesus, as it never would submit
to the command of Sparta; the Achæans, indifferent to external affairs,
only joined themselves momentarily to the alliance: but the Mantineans,
though latterly they followed the policy of Argos, were long attached to
the Peloponnesian league; for at the end of the Persian War they sent an
army, which arrived too late for the battle of Platæa: having before,
together with the other Arcadians, helped to defend the isthmus; they had
also been engaged in the first days of the action at Thermopylæ, and
they were at this time still the faithful allies of the Lacedæmonians.
Their subsequent defection from Sparta may be attributed partly to their
endeavours to obtain the dominion of Parrhasia, which was protected by
Lacedæmon, to their hostility with Tegea, which remained true to Sparta
after the great war with Arcadia, which began about 470 B.C., and to
the strengthening of their city, and the establishment of a democratic
government, through the influence of Argos.

[Sidenote: [480-432 B.C.]]

The supremacy of Sparta was exercised in the expeditions of the whole
confederacy, and in transactions of the same nature. In the first, the
Spartan king--after it had been thought proper never to send out two
together--was commander-in-chief, in whose powers there were many remains
of the authority of the ancient Homeric princes. Occasionally, however,
Sparta was compelled to give up her privilege to other commanders,
especially at sea, as, for instance, the fleet at Salamis to Eurybiades.
When any expedition was contemplated, the Spartans sent round to the
confederate states, to desire them to have men and stores in readiness.
The highest amount which each state could be called on to supply was
fixed once for all, and it was only on each particular occasion to be
determined what part of that was required. In like manner the supplies
in money and stores were regularly appointed; so that an army, with all
its equipment, could be collected by a simple summons. But agricultural
labour, festivals, and the natural slowness of the Doric race, often very
much retarded the assembling of this army. The contributions, chiefly
perhaps voluntary, both of states and individuals, were registered on
stone: and there is still extant an inscription, found at Tegea, in which
the war-supplies of the Ephesians, Melians, etc., in money and in corn,
are recorded. But the Lacedæmonians never exacted from the Peloponnesian
confederacy a regular annual contribution, independent of circumstances;
which would have been, in fact, a tribute: a measure of this kind being
once proposed to King Archidamus, he answers, “that war did not consume
according to rule.”

Pericles, however, properly considers it as a disadvantage to the
Peloponnesians that they had no paid troops, and that they had amassed
no treasure. The object of an expedition was publicly declared:
occasionally, however, when secrecy was required, it was known neither
to the states nor to their army. The single allied states, if necessity
demanded it, could also immediately summon the army of the others; but it
is not clear to what extent this call was binding upon them. The Spartan
military constitution, which we will explain hereafter, extended to the
whole allied army; but it was doubtless variously combined with the
tactics of the several nations. To the council of war, which, moreover,
only debated, and did not decide, the Spartan king summoned the leaders
of the several states, together with other commanders, and generally the
most distinguished persons in the army.

According to the constitution of the Peloponnesian league, every common
action, such as a declaration of war, or the conclusion of a peace or
treaty, was agreed on at a congress of the confederates. But, as there
was no regular assembly of this kind, the several states sent envoys
(ἄγγελοι), like the deputies (πρόβουλοι), of the Ionians, who generally
remained together only for a short time. All the members had legally
equal votes (ἰσόψηφοι); and the majority sometimes decided against a
strong opposition; Sparta was often outvoted, Corinth being at all times
willing to raise an opposition. We have, however, little information
respecting the exact state of the confederacy; it is probable, from the
aristocratic feelings of the Peloponnesians, that, upon the whole,
authority had more weight than numbers; and for great undertakings, such
as the Peloponnesian War, the assent of the chief state was necessary, in
addition to the agreement of the other confederates. When the congress
was summoned to Sparta, the envoys often treated with a public assembly
of the Spartans.

But upon the internal affairs, laws, and institutions of the allied
states, the confederacy had legally no influence. It was a fundamental
law that every state should, according to its ancient customs, be
independent and supreme; and it is much to the credit of Sparta, that,
so long as the league was in existence, she never, not even when a
favourable opportunity offered, deprived any Peloponnesian state of this
independence. Nor were disputes between individual states brought before
the congress of the allies, which, on account of the preponderance of
Sparta, would have endangered their liberty; but they were commonly
either referred to the Delphian oracle, or to arbitrators chosen by both
states. For disputes between citizens of different states there was an
entirely free and equal intercourse of justice. The jurisdiction of the
states was also absolutely exempt from foreign interference. These are
the chief features of the constitution of the Peloponnesian confederacy;
the only one which in the flourishing times of Greece combined extensive
powers with justice, and a respect for the independence of its weaker
members.

[Sidenote: [580-479 B.C.]]

Sparta had not become the head of this league by agreement, and still
less by usurpation; but by tacit acknowledgment she was the leader,
not only of this, but of the whole of Greece; and she acted as such in
all foreign relations from about the year 580 B.C. Her alliance was
courted by Crœsus: and the Ionians, when pressed by Cyrus, had recourse
to the Spartans, who, with an amusing ignorance of the state of affairs
beyond the sea, thought to terrify the king of Persia by the threat
of hostilities. It is a remarkable fact, that there were at that time
Scythian envoys in Sparta, with whom a great plan of operations against
Persia is said to have been concerted. In the year 520 B.C. the Platæans
put themselves under the protection of Cleomenes, who referred them
to Athens; a herald from Sparta drove the Alcmæonidæ from their city:
afterwards Aristagoras sought from the protector of Greece aid against
the national enemy: and when the Æginetans gave the Persians earth and
water, the Athenians accused them of treachery before the Spartans: and
lastly, during the Persian War, Greece found in the high character of
that state the only means of effecting the union so necessary for her
safety and success.

In this war a new confederacy was formed, which was extended beyond the
Peloponnese; the community of danger and of victory having, besides a
momentary combination, also produced a union destined for some duration.
It was the assembly of this league--a fixed congress at Corinth during,
and at Sparta after, the war--that settled the internal differences of
Greece, that invited Argos, Corcyra, and Gelo to join the league, and
afterwards called upon Themistocles to answer for his proceedings. So
much it did for the present emergency. But at the same time Pausanias,
the regent of Sparta, after the great victory of Platæa, prevailed upon
the allies to conclude a further treaty. Under the auspices of the
gods of the confederacy, particularly of the Eleutherian (or Grecian)
Jupiter, they pledged themselves mutually to maintain the independence of
all states, and to many other conditions, of which the memory has been
lost. To the Platæans in particular security from danger was promised.
The Ionians also, after the battle of Mycale, were received into this
confederacy.

The splendid victories over the Persians had for some time taken Sparta,
which was fitted for a quiet and passive existence, out of her natural
sphere; and her king, Pausanias, had wished to betray his country for
the glitter of an Asiatic prince. But this state soon perceived her true
interest, and sent no more commanders to Asia, “that her generals might
not be made worse”: she likewise wished to avoid any further war with
the Persians, thinking that Athens was better fitted to carry it on than
herself. If the speech were now extant in which Hetoëmaridas the Heraclid
proved to the councillors that it was not expedient for Sparta to aim at
the mastery of the sea, we should doubtless possess a profound view, on
the Spartan side, of those things which we are now accustomed to look on
with Athenian eyes. Nor is it true that the supremacy over the Greeks
was in fact transferred at all from Sparta to Athens, if we consider
the matter as Sparta considered it, however great the influence of this
change may have been on the power of Athens. But Sparta continued to
hold its pre-eminence in the Peloponnese, and most of the nations of the
mother-country joined themselves to her: while none but the Greeks of
Asia Minor and the islands, who had previously been subjects of Persia,
and were then only partially liberated, perhaps too much despised by
Sparta, put themselves under the command of Athens. But the complete
liberation of Asia Minor from the Persian yoke, which has been considered
one of the chief exploits of Athens, was in fact never effected. The
Athenian empire did not prevent the vassals and subjects of the king of
Persia from ruling over the Greeks of Asia Minor, even down to the very
coast. We need not go any further to prove the entire falsehood of the
account commonly given by the panegyrical rhetoricians of Athens.

[Illustration: GREEK SHOVELS

(In the British Museum)]

[Sidenote: [479-465 B.C.]]

The Peloponnese took the less concern in these proceedings, as internal
differences had arisen from some unknown cause, which led to an open
war between Sparta and Arcadia. We only know that, between the battle
of Platæa (in which Tegea, as also later still, showed great fidelity
towards Sparta) and the war with the Helots (_i.e._ between 479 and
465 B.C.), the Lacedæmonians fought two great battles, the one against
the Tegeatæ and Argives at Tegea, the other against all the Arcadians,
with the exception of the Mantineans, at Dipæa (ἐν Διπαιεῦοιν), in the
Mænalian territory. Tisamenus, an Elean, of the family of the Iamidæ, was
in both battles in the Spartan army; and in both Sparta was victorious.

[Sidenote: [465-451 B.C.]]

This war had not been brought to a termination, when, in the year 465
B.C., a tremendous earthquake destroyed Sparta, and a sudden ruin
threatened to overwhelm the chief state of Greece. For, in the hope of
utterly annihilating their rulers, many helots revolted, and the war was
called the Third Messenian War. Upon this the Lacedæmonians, foreseeing
a tedious siege, called in the aid of their allies; and this call was
answered among others by the Athenians; the Spartans, however, dismissed
them, as we have seen, before the fortress was taken.

Immediately after the dismission of the Athenians from Ithome, the
injured people of Athens annulled the alliance with Sparta, which had
subsisted since the Persian War. Then followed the war with the maritime
towns of Argolis, in which Athens, after many reverses, at length
succeeded in destroying the fleet of Ægina, and subjugating that island
(457 B.C.). The inactivity of Sparta during these astonishing successes
of her enemy (for when she concluded the armistice with Athens she must
have partly foreseen its consequences) seems to prove that she was
entirely occupied with the final capture of Ithome, and the settlement of
her interests in Arcadia.

The five years’ truce in 451 B.C. was only an armistice between Athens
and the Peloponnesian confederacy, which left Bœotia to shake off the
Athenian yoke by her own exertions. At the end of these five years Megara
revolted from the Athenians, and in consequence an invasion of Attica
by the Peloponnesians took place, which, though it did not produce any
immediate result, was soon followed by the Thirty Years’ Truce, in which
Athens ceded her conquests in Megaris and the Peloponnese, and on the
mainland returned within her ancient boundaries.

If now we consider the events which have been briefly traced it will be
perceived, that the principle on which the Lacedæmonians constantly acted
was one of self-defence, of restoring what had been lost, or preserving
what was threatened with danger; whereas the Athenians were always aiming
at attack or conquest, or the change of existing institutions. While the
Spartans during this period, even after the greatest victories, did not
conquer a foot of land, subjugate one independent state, or destroy one
existing institution; the Athenians, for a longer or for a shorter time,
reduced large tracts of country under their dominion, extended their
alliance (as it was called) on all sides, and respected no connection
when it came in conflict with their plans of empire.

But the astonishing energy of the Athenians, which from one point kept
the whole of Greece in constant vibration, almost paralysed Sparta; the
natural slowness of that state became more and more apparent: which
having been, as it were, violently transplanted into a strange region,
only began by degrees to comprehend the policy of Athens. It is manifest
that the maxims of the Athenian policy were directly at variance with the
general feeling of justice entertained by the Greeks, and especially to
the respect for affinity of blood; and this fundamental difference was
the true cause of the Peloponnesian War. In the first place then, Dorians
were opposed to Ionians; and hence in the well-known oracle it was
called the Doric War. It was a union of the free Greeks against the evil
ambition of one state: of land forces against sea forces: the fleet of
the Peloponnesians was at the beginning of the war very inconsiderable.
Hence it was some time before the belligerent parties even so much as
encountered one another; the land was the means of communication for one
party, the sea for the other: hence the states friendly to Athens were
immediately compelled to build Long Walls for the purpose of connecting
the chief city with the sea, and isolating it from the land. Large bodies
of men practised in war fought against wealth: the Peloponnesians
carried on the war with natives; whereas Athens manned her fleet--the
basis of her power--chiefly with foreign seamen; so that the Corinthians
said justly that the power of Athens was rather purchased than native.
It was the main principle of Pericles’ policy, and it is also adopted by
Thucydides in the famous introduction to his _History_, that it is not
the country and people, but moveable and personal property in the proper
sense of the word, which make states great and powerful. The war meant
the maintenance of ancient custom as opposed to the desire for novelty:
the former was the chief feature of the Doric, the latter of the Ionic
race. The Dorians wished to preserve their ancient dignity and power, as
well as their customs and religious feelings: the Ionians were commonly
in pursuit of something new. It was a union of nations and tribes against
one arbitrarily formed: aristocracy was pitted against democracy:
this difference was manifested in the first half of the war by Athens
changing, while Sparta only restored governments; for in this instance
also the power of Sparta was in strictness only employed in upholding
ancient establishments, as an aristocracy may indeed be overthrown, but
cannot be formed in a moment.

[Illustration: GRECIAN TERRA-COTTA STATUETTE

(In the British Museum)]

These obvious points of difference are sufficient to substantiate the
result which we wish to arrive at. The “honesty and openness” of the
Doric character, the noble simplicity of the ancient times of Greece,
soon disappeared in this tumultuous age. Sparta therefore and the
Peloponnesians emerge from the contest, altered, and as it were reversed;
and even before its termination appear in a character of which they had
before probably contained only the first seeds.

[Sidenote: [460-405 B.C.]]

But in the second half of the war, when the Spartans gave up their great
armaments by land, and began to equip fleets with hired seamen; when
they had learnt to consider money as the chief instrument of warfare,
and begged it at the court of Persia; when they sought less to protect
the states joined to them by affinity and alliance, than to dissolve
the Athenian confederacy; when they began to secure conquered states
by harmosts of their own, and by oligarchs forced upon the people, and
found that the secret management of the political clubs was more to their
interest than open negotiation with the government; we see developed on
the one hand an energy and address, which was first manifested in the
enterprises of the great Brasidas, and on the other a worldly policy, as
was shown in Gylippus, and afterwards more strongly in Lysander; when the
descendants of Hercules found it advisable to exchange the lion’s for the
fox’s skin. And since the enterprises conducted in the spirit of earlier
times either wholly failed or else remained fruitless, this new system,
though the state had inwardly declined, brought with it, by the mockery
of fate, external fame and victory.[b]

Whatever nobility of creed the Sparta-loving Müller has, as above,
claimed for Sparta up to this time, it is certain that the sudden
accession of vast and unforeseen power changed her to a mood in which,
as Bury says, “she cynically set aside her high moral professions and
yielded to a lust for oppression.” Grote was no lover of Sparta and yet
he substantiates well his accusations against her.[a]

GROTE’S COMPARISON OF SPARTAN AND ATHENIAN RULE

[Sidenote: [405-404 B.C.]]

The Spartan empire began with the decisive victory of Ægospotami in the
Hellespont (September or October 405 B.C.). The whole power of Athens was
thus annihilated, and nothing remained for the Lacedæmonians to master
except the city itself and Piræus; a consummation certain to happen, and
actually brought to pass in April 404 B.C., when Lysander entered Athens
in triumph, dismantled Piræus, and demolished a large portion of the Long
Walls. With the exception of Athens herself--whose citizens deferred the
moment of subjection by an heroic, though unavailing, struggle against
the horrors of famine--and of Samos, no other Grecian city offered any
resistance to Lysander after the battle of Ægospotami; which in fact not
only took away from Athens her whole naval force, but transferred it all
over to him, and rendered him admiral of a larger Grecian fleet than had
ever been seen together since the battle of Salamis.

The allies, especially Thebes and Corinth, not only relented in their
hatred and fear of Athens, now that she had lost her power--but even
sympathised with her suffering exiles, and became disgusted with the
self-willed encroachments of Sparta; while the Spartan king Pausanias,
together with some of the ephors, were also jealous of the arbitrary and
oppressive conduct of Lysander.

We have learned from dark, but well-attested details, to appreciate the
auspices under which that period of history called the Lacedæmonian
empire was inaugurated. Such phenomena were by no means confined within
the walls of Athens. On the contrary, the Year of Anarchy (using that
term in the sense in which it was employed by the Athenians) arising out
of the same combination of causes and agents, was common to a very large
proportion of the cities throughout Greece. The Lacedæmonian admiral
Lysander, during his first year of naval command, had organised in most
of the allied cities factious combinations of some of the principal
citizens, corresponding with himself personally. By their efforts in
their respective cities he was enabled to prosecute the war vigorously,
and he repaid them, partly by seconding as much as he could their
injustices in their respective cities, partly by promising to strengthen
their hands still further as soon as victory should be made sure.

In the greater number of cities, he established an oligarchy of ten
citizens, or a decarchy, composed of his own partisans; while he at the
same time planted in each a Lacedæmonian harmost or governor, with a
garrison, to uphold the new oligarchy. The decarchy of ten Lysandrian
partisans, with the Lacedæmonian harmost to sustain them, became the
general scheme of Hellenic government throughout the Ægean, from Eubœa
to the Thracian coast towns, and from Miletus to Byzantium. Lysander
sailed round in person with his victorious fleet to Byzantium and
Chalcedon, to the cities of Lesbos, to Thasos, and other places--while
he sent Eteonicus to Thrace for the purpose of thus recasting the
governments everywhere. Not merely those cities which had hitherto
been on the Athenian side, but also those which had acted as allies of
Sparta, were subjected to the same intestine revolution and the same
foreign constraint. Everywhere the new Lysandrian decarchy superseded the
previous governments, whether oligarchical or democratical.

In what spirit these new decarchies would govern, consisting as they
did of picked oligarchical partisans distinguished for audacity and
ambition--who, to all the unscrupulous lust of power which characterised
Lysander himself, added a thirst for personal gain, from which he
was exempt, and were now about to reimburse themselves for services
already rendered to him--the general analogy of Grecian history would
sufficiently teach us, though we are without special details. But in
reference to this point, we have not merely general analogy to guide
us; we have further the parallel case of the Thirty at Athens, the
particulars of whose rule are well known and have already been alluded to.

Isocrates, who speaks with indignant horror of these decarchies, while he
denounces those features which they had in common with the triacontarchy
at Athens--extrajudicial murders, spoliations, and banishments--notices
one enormity besides, which we do not find in the latter: violent
outrages upon boys and women. Nothing of this kind is ascribed to Critias
and his companions; and it is a considerable proof of the restraining
force of Athenian manners, that men who inflicted so much evil in
gratification of other violent impulses, should have stopped short here.
The decemvirs named by Lysander, like the decemvir Appius Claudius at
Rome, would find themselves armed with power to satiate their lusts as
well as their antipathies, and would not be more likely to set bounds to
the former than to the latter. Lysander, in all the overweening insolence
of victory, while rewarding his most devoted partisans with an exaltation
comprising every sort of licence and tyranny, stained the dependent
cities with countless murders, perpetrated on private as well as on
public grounds. No individual Greek had ever before wielded so prodigious
a power of enriching friends or destroying enemies, as in this universal
reorganisation of Greece; nor was there ever any power more deplorably
abused.

Taking all these causes of evil together--the decarchies, the harmosts,
and the overwhelming dictatorship of Lysander--and construing other
parts of the Grecian world by the analogy of Athens under the Thirty,
we shall be warranted in affirming that the first years of the Spartan
empire, which followed upon the victory of Ægospotami, were years
of all-pervading tyranny, and multifarious intestine calamity, such
as Greece had never before endured. The hardships of war, severe in
many ways, were now at an end, but they were replaced by a state of
suffering not the less difficult to bear because it was called peace.
And what made the suffering yet more intolerable was, that it was a
bitter disappointment and a flagrant violation of promises proclaimed,
repeatedly and explicitly, by the Lacedæmonians themselves.

For more than thirty years preceding--from times earlier than the
commencement of the Peloponnesian War--the Spartans had professed to
interfere only for the purpose of liberating Greece, and of putting down
the usurped ascendency of Athens. Like the allied sovereigns of Europe in
1813, who, requiring the most strenuous efforts on the part of the people
to contend against the Emperor Napoleon, promised free constitutions, and
granted nothing after the victory had been assured--the Lacedæmonians
held out the most emphatic and repeated assurances of general autonomy in
order to enlist allies against Athens; disavowing, even ostentatiously,
any aim at empire for themselves.

The victory of Ægospotami, with its consequences, cruelly undeceived
every one. The language of Brasidas, sanctioned by the solemn oaths
of the Lacedæmonian ephors, in 424 B.C., and the proceedings of the
Lacedæmonian Lysander in 405-404 B.C., the commencing hour of Spartan
omnipotence, stand in such literal and flagrant contradiction, that we
might almost imagine the former to have foreseen the possibility of such
a successor, and to have tried to disgrace and disarm him beforehand.
There was no present necessity for conciliating allies--still less for
acting up to former engagements; so that nothing remained to oppose the
naturally ambitious inspirations of the Spartan ephors, who allowed the
admiral to carry out the details in his own way. But former assurances,
though Sparta was in a condition to disregard them, were not forgotten
by others; and the recollection of them imparted additional bitterness
to the oppressions of the decemvirs and harmosts. In perfect consistency
with her misrule throughout eastern Greece, too, Sparta identified
herself with the energetic tyranny of Dionysius at Syracuse, assisting
both to erect and to uphold it; a contradiction to her former maxims of
action which would have astounded the historian Herodotus.

[Sidenote: [405-371 B.C.]]

The empire of Sparta, thus constituted at the end of 405 B.C., maintained
itself in full grandeur for somewhat above ten years, until the naval
battle of Cnidus in 394 B.C. That defeat destroyed her fleet and
maritime ascendency, yet left her in undiminished power on land, which
she still maintained until her defeat by the Thebans, at Leuctra in 371
B.C. Throughout all this time, it was her established system to keep up
Spartan harmosts and garrisons in the dependent cities on the continent
as well as in the islands. Even the Chians, who had been her most active
allies during the last eight years of the war, were compelled to submit
to this hardship; besides having all their fleet taken away from them.
But the native decarchies, though at first established by Lysander
universally throughout the maritime dependencies, did not last as a
system so long as the harmosts. Composed as they were to a great degree
of the personal nominees and confederates of Lysander, they suffered in
part by the reactionary jealousy which in time made itself felt against
his overweening ascendency. After continuing for some time, they lost
the countenance of the Spartan ephors, who proclaimed permission to the
cities (we do not precisely know when) to resume their pre-existing
governments. Some of the decarchies thus became dissolved, or modified in
various ways, but several probably still continued to subsist, if they
had force enough to maintain themselves; for it does not appear that the
ephors ever systematically put them down as Lysander had systematically
set them up.

Such then was the result throughout Greece when that long war, which had
been undertaken in the name of universal autonomy, was terminated by the
battle of Ægospotami. In place of imperial Athens was substituted, not
the promised autonomy, but yet more imperial Sparta. An awful picture
is given by the philo-Laconian Xenophon, in 399 B.C., of the ascendency
exercised throughout all the Grecian cities, not merely by the ephors and
the public officers, but even by the private citizens, of Sparta.

We have more than one picture of the Athenian empire in speeches made by
hostile orators who had every motive to work up the strongest antipathies
in the bosoms of their audience against it. We have the addresses of
the Corinthian envoys at Sparta when stimulating the Spartan allies to
the Peloponnesian War; that of the envoys from Mytilene delivered at
Olympia to the Spartan confederates, when the city had revolted from
Athens and stood in pressing need of support; the discourse of Brasidas
in the public assembly at Acanthus; and more than one speech also from
Hermocrates, impressing upon his Sicilian countrymen hatred as well as
fear of Athens. Whoever reads these discourses, will see that they dwell
almost exclusively on the great political wrong inherent in the very fact
of her empire, robbing so many Grecian communities of their legitimate
autonomy, over and above the tribute imposed. That Athens had thus
already enslaved many cities, and was only watching for opportunities
to enslave many more, is the theme upon which they expatiate. But of
practical grievances--of cruelty, oppression, spoliation, multiplied
exiles, etc., of high-handed wrong committed by individual Athenians--not
one word is spoken. Had there been the smallest pretext for introducing
such inflammatory topics, how much more impressive would have been the
appeal of Brasidas to the sympathies of the Acanthians! How vehement
would have been the denunciations of the Mytilenean envoys, in place of
the tame and almost apologetic language which we now read in Thucydides!
Athens extinguished the autonomy of her subject-allies, and punished
revolters with severity, sometimes even with cruelty. But as to other
points of wrong, the silence of accusers, such as those just noticed,
counts as a powerful exculpation.

[Sidenote: [405-403 B.C.]]

The case is altered when we come to the period succeeding the battle of
Ægospotami. Here indeed also, we find the Spartan empire complained of
(as the Athenian empire had been before), in contrast with that state
of autonomy to which each city laid claim, and which Sparta not merely
promised to ensure, but set forth as her only ground of war. Yet this
is not the prominent grievance--other topics stand more emphatically
forward. The decemvirs and the harmosts (some of the latter being
helots), the standing instruments of Spartan empire, are felt as more
sorely painful than the empire itself; as the language held by Brasidas
at Acanthus admits them to be beforehand. At the time when Athens was
a subject city under Sparta, governed by the Lysandrian Thirty and
by the Lacedæmonian harmost in the Acropolis--the sense of indignity
arising from the fact of subjection was absorbed in the still more
terrible suffering arising from the enormities of those individual
rulers whom the imperial state had set up. Now Athens set up no local
rulers--no native Ten or native Thirty--no resident Athenian harmosts or
garrisons. This was of itself an unspeakable exemption, when compared
with the condition of cities subject, not only to the Spartan empire,
but also under that empire to native decemvirs like Critias, and Spartan
harmosts like Aristarchus or Aristodemus. A city subject to Athens had
to bear definite burdens enforced by its own government, which was
liable in case of default or delinquency to be tried before the popular
Athenian dicastery. But this same dicastery (as is distinctly stated by
Thucydides) was the harbour of refuge to each subject city; not less
against individual Athenian wrong-doers than against misconduct from
other cities. In no one point can it be shown that the substitution of
Spartan empire in place of Athenian was a gain, either for the subject
cities or for Greece generally; while in many points it was a great and
serious aggravation of suffering. And this abuse of power is the more
deeply to be regretted, as Sparta enjoyed after the battle of Ægospotami
a precious opportunity--such as Athens had never had, and such as never
again recurred--of reorganising the Grecian world on wise principles, and
with a view to Panhellenic stability and harmony.

She now stood without competitor as leader of the Grecian world, and
might at that moment have reasonably hoped to carry the members of it
along with her to any liberal and Panhellenic organisation, had she
attempted it with proper earnestness. Unfortunately she took the opposite
course, under the influence of Lysander; founding a new empire far more
oppressive and odious than that of Athens, with few of the advantages,
and none of the excuses, attached to the latter. As she soon became even
more unpopular than Athens, _her_ moment of high tide, for beneficent
Panhellenic combination, passed away also--never to return.[c]

HARSHNESS OF THE SPARTAN HEGEMONY

[Sidenote: [405-353 B.C.]]

The Peloponnesian War had been disastrous in its consequences to public
morals. Its long duration and peculiarly bloody character, arousing
everywhere mistrust, exciting passions, deifying brute force, had wrought
a deterioration in the Greek nature from which it never fully recovered.
There was ferocity on the battle-field, a ferocity in the party contests.
“This,” says Aristotle, “is the oath administered to-day in several
cities by the oligarchy: ‘I will be the enemy of the people and will do
them all the evil I can.’” We may indeed place against this homicidal
oath that taken by the heliasts of Athens after the tyranny: “I will
forget all past ills and will permit no one else to remember and give
them mention.” But Athens even in its decadence was always Athens liberal
and generous, even as its mutilated statues remain beautiful in all their
degradation.

[Illustration: GREEK URN

(In the British Museum)]

The system of warfare had also changed. We have shown how one military
revolution had already occurred; the replacing of the aristocratic army
of former times by the democratic army of the fifth and sixth centuries.
And now the age of mercenaries was being ushered in by the employment,
in all Greek cities, of hired soldiers to fight beside their citizen
troops. But to pay these hirelings money was required, and Greece applied
to Persia, who alone had money; hence her mendicant attitude towards
the Great King, and the continual intervention of Xerxes’ successors in
Hellenic affairs. This dependence on a foreign power and harshness of
the public temper were first observed during the last years of the war;
they are found again in the year after peace was concluded, the Year of
Anarchy, as the Greeks called the commencement of the Spartan dominion.

Blood flowed everywhere because everywhere were established oligarchical
governments. A massacre occurred at Thasos. At Miletus eight hundred
citizens belonging to the popularist party were lured from their retreats
by Lysander and put to death. At Byzantium, Œtœa, and the greater part
of the towns of Asia Minor similar outrages were committed. At Samos the
inhabitants were all banished, with the privilege of taking away but a
single garment. The defection of Chios and its navy had assured Sparta’s
triumph; as a reward its most prominent citizens were sent into exile
and all its triremes were seized. Lycophron, a Pheræan, made himself
master of the province of Thessaly after desperate battles. “Thereafter,”
relates Xenophon, “a Lacedæmonian’s lightest word was obeyed; even a
citizen in private life could arrange everything to his will.” Xenophon
himself appears to have shared this terror, since after the retreat
of the Ten Thousand he refused the title of general-in-chief that his
companions wished to bestow upon him, fearing that Sparta might view
with disfavour the placing of command in the hands of an Athenian. The
islanders, especially those who had betrayed the cause of Athens, hoped
that with the accession to power of Lacedæmonia who was an ally of the
Great King the duties established by Aristides and Pericles to protect
their commerce would be removed. But they found they had simply changed
masters, Sparta continuing to levy the former tribute, which amounted
annually to 1000 talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000].

Athens, more adroit in establishing her empire, had proceeded without
cruelty, violence, or spoliation, hence had not known, even in her time
of greatest misfortune, the falling-off of her supports. Sparta was not
so wise in the formation of kingdoms; force was the only instrument of
which she knew the use, and with her the use of it was the abuse of it.
Athens had also made use of force, but had always associated with it
justice. Athens had made itself the political, military, and judiciary
centre of the empire, and further, it was the metropolis of arts and
letters for all Hellas. Nothing great or glorious, nothing useful or full
of promise, could proceed from the Lacedæmonian dominion; it threatened
to topple over in the hour of its erection. A thousand causes were at
work to bring about a rapid dissolution; many of these were in Sparta or
Greece, the rest in other lands.

DEGENERACY OF SPARTA

[Sidenote: [353-240 B.C.]]

The results of Lycurgus’ institutions continued to be made manifest. The
Spartan city diminished in population from day to day, as though worn
away by the friction of its iron institutions. The narrow circle, which
it had drawn round itself, never widening but always growing smaller,
finally came to enclose but an insignificant number of Spartans. Great
numbers had perished in the wars, others cast by poverty into the lower
classes could no longer take their seats at the public tables. Aristotle
says, “Whoever is without means to contribute to the expense of these
tables must forfeit his political rights.” The Spartans knew that they
were menaced with destruction through lack of citizens; the cry that
arose when the four hundred and twenty Spartan soldiers were imprisoned
on the island of Sphacteria, still rang in every ear. Aristotle further
states: “The territory of Sparta that is capable of providing sustenance
for fifteen hundred cavalry and thirty thousand hoplites, to-day barely
supports a thousand warriors.” In the assemblies of four thousand,
there were scarcely to be seen forty Spartans; moreover, inequality of
conditions grew as the people decreased in number.

Gold and silver currency had for a long time ceased to be proscribed
and the disinterestedness of the Lacedæmonians to be extolled. Numerous
examples of their venality were known; Eurybiades had been bought by
Themistocles, Plistoanax and Cleandridas by Pericles, Leotychides by
the Aleuadæ, the admiral and captains of the fleet by Tissaphernes. The
kings, the senators, the ephors, all had repeatedly received bribes,
and Gylippus, the liberator of Syracuse, who had been charged to carry
to Sparta the plunder of Athens, kept back for his own use thirty
talents [£6000 or $30,000]. Hence the remark of an interlocutor in the
_Alcibiades_: “There is more gold and silver in Lacedæmonia than in all
the rest of Greece; money flows to it from all parts and once there
remains; the country is like a lion’s cave, one sees the footprints
of those who enter, but of footsteps leaving there is no trace.” The
commanders who returned from ports in Asia brought with them great
wealth, and more than that a taste for luxury and ease, in a word,
corruption; every one plunged into wild extravagance and the vices
engendered by the possession of riches.

[Sidenote: [405-240 B.C.]]

After the Peloponnesian War, the ephor Epitadeus had passed a law
authorising citizens to dispose of their property and land. The effects
of this rhetra were so prompt to appear that Aristotle was given cause
to write: “The land has passed into the hands of a few.” In the time
of Agis IV the entire territory was owned by a hundred Spartans. Thus
the government had become more and more oligarchical. All the national
affairs were carried on by the ephors and the senate, even the general
assembly was rarely consulted, and in consequence the rulers, being few
in number, were all the more jealous of the privileges of their station
and less disposed to suffer them to be curtailed. To open their ranks,
moreover, for the readmission of families that poverty had driven forth
would have been to expose themselves, by relinquishing the majority, to
some territorial reform tending toward a fresh division of the immense
domains now concentrated in the possession of a few. Public interest
might point this way but private interest decidedly opposed it, and
private interest won.

There resulted from this a violent hatred between the privileged and
the lower classes; the latter being formed of Spartans degraded from
their ranks, enfranchised helots, Laconians to whom had been accorded
certain rights, and the children of Spartan fathers of the higher order
and alien mothers. These classes were given denominations that kept them
separate and distinct; there was doubtless also a wide difference in
conditions. Below the Equals, who formed a restricted oligarchy, were the
Inferiors, or Spartans, who were excluded from the public tables, and the
_neodamodes_ or helots enfranchised for services rendered the state, and
lastly the _periœci_. Though they had no share in the actual government
of their country these men estimated highly the value of their services
to the state; and at different times many prominent figures, sons of
Spartan fathers and helot mothers, such as Lysander, Gylippus, and
Callicratidas had issued from this class. In a vindictive address against
Lacedæmon the Thebans at Athens declared that the Spartans recruited
their military governors from among men who had helot blood in their
veins; and indeed many of these people had amassed competencies that gave
them the ambition to leave the inferior station in which custom held
them. When Cleomenes III promised liberty to those among the helots who
could pay into the public treasury the sum of five minæ [£21 or $108],
six thousand presented themselves.

Lacedæmon’s two royal houses, however, had been retained, and it should
have been the function of these to maintain discipline in the state. But
the newly-acquired wealth of Sparta, coupled with the growing authority
of the ephors, appreciably diminished the power of the kings. Reduced to
the rôle of hereditary generals these monarchs could never depart on an
expedition without being accompanied by ten supervisors, who, under the
name of councillors, in reality directed all the military operations.
During the last years of the Peloponnesian War the decisive battles had
been fought on sea, and the fleets were commanded, captives sold, cities
ransomed and subsidies received from the Great King by men who were not
of pure Spartan blood. Aristotle in his _Politics_ calls the office of
admiral among them “a second royalty.”

Lysander was not obeying the dictates of ambition when, as Sparta’s
leading citizen, he undertook to reform for his own advantage the
political system of the city. “He could not,” says Plutarch, “see without
regret a city whose glory he had done so much to increase governed by
kings who had no more ability to rule than he, so he formed the plan of
depriving the reigning houses of their dignity to make it the common
appanage of all the Heraclids.” The discovery of the plot of Cinadon
[described later] revealed an abyss of hatred yawning beneath the social
system of Sparta, and at the same time an alarming unanimity of feeling
between the inferior classes, both free and slaves. A civil war could
easily have resulted from the situation; but Sparta, with that vigilance
which continued distrust arouses in all oligarchies, discovered and
baffled all the plots that were formed against her.

Yet in spite of this hostility between the classes, in spite of many
other difficulties, such as strife between the kings on the one hand
and the senators and the ephors on the other, in which the kings were
reduced almost to the condition of subjects, and rivalry between the
kings themselves, the Spartan government, by reason of concentration of
authority in a few hands, was powerful enough for action against other
states. At home and abroad the ephors and the harmosts, those so-called
conciliators, exercised a permanent dictatorship, maintaining garrisons
at Megara, Ægina, Tanagra, Pharsalus, Heraclea in Trachinia, at the
entrance of Thermopylæ; also Dionysius of Syracuse was Sparta’s ally. But
this power, widespread as it was, was scarcely more than an influence,
and an influence that was already on the wane, since the nation that
lacks citizens has no resources within itself.

Sparta’s exactions offended those who still loved liberty and had not,
to console them for its loss, the advantages offered by Athens to her
subjects--extensive commerce, and the splendour of public festivals, of
arts and of poetry. Sparta, equally grasping and more oppressive, robbed
her subjects of everything. She levied on them an annual tribute of one
thousand talents [£200,000 or $1,000,000] which vanished in Lacedæmon
never to be seen again, and those who had furnished her with troops, like
the Achæans and Arcadians, or with vessels, like the Corinthians, or
auxiliaries, like the Thebans, received nothing in return.

The weight of this heavy Dorian rule began shortly to be felt, and many
regretted the Athenian supremacy that was kindly even in its excesses.
That the Greeks from the coasts of Thrace or Asia, those people who
had never known how to say “No,” should tremble at sight of a Spartan
mantle or wand of office, was in no way remarkable, since they had been
accustomed to obey. Not that a double servitude, that of the oligarchs,
friends of Lysander, and that of the Lacedæmonian harmosts was not
a great burden to bear, even for them. But Sparta must not count on
such docility in the mother-country. She had not hesitated to speak as
sovereign in the matter of the Athenian exiles, nor to make decrees, as
sole authority, for all Greece. We have seen how Thebes responded.

Thebes, a continental power, had long aspired to play in central Greece
the part played by Sparta in the Peloponnesus. Between this state
and Athens there might be jealousy, but not necessarily a clash of
interests as in her relations with Lacedæmonia. In the intoxication of
victory Sparta had believed prudence no longer necessary, and, incensed
that the Thebans should have taken at Decelea the tithe belonging to
Apollo, had scornfully rejected their claims to a share in the spoils
and treasures brought back by Lysander, fourteen hundred and seventy
talents, the remainder of the advances made by Cyrus. Corinth, no better
received, made common cause with Thebes, and this formed another ground
of complaint to Sparta against that state. The Argives, in a discussion
relative to the fixing of boundaries, maintained their reasons to be
superior to those of their adversaries. “He who is strongest with this
argument,” said Lysander, drawing his sword, “reasons best about boundary
limits.” A Megarian, in conference, spoke in a very loud voice. “My
friend,” said Lysander, addressing him, “your words need a city to make
them good.” Still more unceremoniously Sparta dealt with the Eleans, as
we shall see later.

To the imperious demands of the Spartan government were added individual
acts of violence, which are often more odious because a single victim,
even though obscure, excites more pity than a whole people bowed under
defeat; and there is less peril in attacking public liberty which is the
property of all, than in endangering, by contempt of truth and right, the
honour or the life of an individual.

A kind and hospitable man of Leuctra, Scedadus, received in his house one
day two young Lacedæmonians, who were greatly struck with the beauty of
their host’s two daughters. Returning from a voyage to Delphi, whither
they had gone to consult the oracle, these two Lacedæmonians found the
daughters alone in the house and violated them, after which they murdered
them and threw their bodies into the well. When Scedadus returned next
day his daughters did not, to his surprise, come forth to meet him, and
his dog, howling plaintively, ran back and forth from his master to the
well. Alarmed, Scedadus looked into the well, discovered the crime, and
learned from his neighbours who were its perpetrators. He departed at
once for Lacedæmon. In Argolis he fell in with a man as unfortunate as
himself, whose son had fallen a victim to the brutality of a Spartan.
This father had believed in Lacedæmonian justice, but had had none
accorded him. Nevertheless Scedadus continued on his journey, and when
he arrived in Sparta, told his story to the ephors, to the kings, to all
the citizens he met, but no one would give it heed. Then wishing to call
the divine anger down upon Sparta he invoked all the gods of heaven and
earth, especially the furies of revenge, and put an end to his life. A
tomb was later erected at Leuctra to his unfortunate daughters.

As against the few facts of this nature that have come to our knowledge
how many have escaped us? We realise this more fully when we reflect on
the hatred Sparta everywhere inspired even in the Peloponnesus.

The Arcadians and the Achæans served her from motives of fear alone; she
was, they declared, a citadel placed upon their flank to keep guard over
the whole peninsula. At Lacedæmon their sentiments were well known. On
his return from an expedition in which a whole Spartan corps had been
lost, in the Corinthian War which we shall treat of shortly, Agesilaus
entered the towns only at night, leaving them at break of day, that
his men might not witness the joy exhibited by the inhabitants at this
disaster.[f]

[Illustration: GREEK PHILOSOPHER

(After Hope)]

CHAPTER XLII. SPARTA IN ASIA

When the Lacedæmonians put an end to the Athenian empire, they neither
claimed any dominion on the continent of Asia, nor asserted the freedom
of the Grecian republics there: the allegiance of the Asian Greeks was
transferred from the Athenian people to the Persian king; and, under
him, to the satraps, Pharnabazus and Tissaphernes. We have seen that,
among the Greeks of Asia, Cyrus was popular, and Tissaphernes unpopular;
insomuch that by a kind of rebellion against the satrap, the Ionians
had attached themselves to the prince. The event therefore of the
expedition against the king, and the appointment of Tissaphernes to the
great command which Cyrus had held, could not but be highly alarming to
them. But, on the other hand, the glorious retreat of the Greeks who had
accompanied the prince, and the clear evidence which their return in
safety bore to the superiority of the Grecian arms, afforded ground of
encouragement. If the patronage of Lacedæmon could be obtained, whose
councils commanded the united arms of Greece, little, it was hoped,
need be apprehended from the satrap’s vengeance. Refusing therefore to
acknowledge his authority, the Ionians sent ministers to Lacedæmon to
solicit protection.

The Lacedæmonian government, less expecting friendship from the king and
from Tissaphernes on account of their connection with Cyrus, and valuing
it less as the fame of the actions of the Cyrean army taught to despise
their enmity, resolved that the Ionians should be protected. Possibly
circumstances at home might contribute to this determination. It might
be desirable to employ a part of their people on foreign service; and
for service against an enemy so famed for wealth, and so little for
bravery and military skill, volunteers would be numerous among the poor
commonwealths of Peloponnesus. Four thousand men were required from the
allies. Only one thousand were added from Lacedæmon: and they were all of
those called neodamodes, who, owing their elevation from the condition
of slaves into the rank of citizens to the necessities of war, were, on
the return of peace, looked upon with so invidious an eye, that occasion
for sending them on foreign service would be acceptable, both to the
government and to themselves. Cavalry was very desirable for war in Asia:
but the utmost force that Peloponnesus could raise was very small; and
the principal citizens of the wealthiest republics, who alone composed
it, would not be the most willing partakers in distant adventure.
Application was therefore made to Athens; where recent disorders, extreme
political jealousy, and a total want of protection against any momentary
caprice of the people, made the situation of men of rank and fortune
so precarious that the offer of pay for three hundred horse found ready
acceptance there. Thimbron was appointed commander in chief in Asia, with
the title of harmost.

[Sidenote: [400-399 B.C.]]

From their attachment to the cause of Cyrus, and consequent dread of
the king’s vengeance, apparently arose the revolt of those Grecian
subjects of the Persian empire, which otherwise would mark gross
ingratitude to a beneficent government. For the testimony here given by
Xenophon, remarkably corresponding with all remaining from Herodotus
and Thucydides, strongly confirms what has been heretofore observed,
that there was uncommon liberality in the despotism of the Persian
empire. Public faith was kept; property was not without security; it
was not then, as under the present wonderfully barbarian government of
the same fine country, a crime to be rich. Large estates, given even
to foreigners, passed to their late posterity; and, instead of the
tyranny which now depopulates towns and provinces, and against which the
remaining subjects recur to the patronage of some foreign ambassador,
the Persian government so extended liberal protection to all, that
Grecian cities could prefer the dominion of the Persian king to that of
the Athenian or Lacedæmonian commonwealths, and flourish under it. But
the Persian government, though generally mild and liberal, had been,
since the reign of Xerxes, always weak, and verging to dissolution. The
Lacedæmonian general Thimbron, who, with comparatively a small force, had
been making conquests against it, showed no considerable abilities in the
field, and in camp and in quarters his discipline was very deficient. The
allies suffered from the licentiousness of his army; and complaints were
in consequence so urged at Lacedæmon that, on the expiration of his year,
he was sentenced to banishment.

Dercyllidas, who succeeded him, was more equal to a great and difficult
command. Having already served in Asia, under Lysander, he knew the
characters of the two satraps, who divided between them, in almost
independent sovereignty, the dominion of the western provinces. The
instructions of the ephors directed him to lead the army into Caria, the
hereditary government of Tissaphernes. But the desire of revenging a
disgrace he had formerly incurred, when harmost of Abydos, in consequence
of an accusation from Pharnabazus, assisted at least, according to the
contemporary historian, his friend, in determining him to act otherwise.
He negotiated with Tissaphernes; and that dastardly satrap, ill-disposed
towards Pharnabazus, and always readier for negotiation than battle,
instead of exerting the great power with which he was vested for the
general defence of the empire, bargained for a particular peace for
his own provinces, and consented that the Grecian arms should, without
opposition from him, be carried into the Bithynian satrapy. Dercyllidas,
having thus provided for the safety of the rich fields of Ionia, which
would otherwise have been liable, in his absence, to suffer from the
Persian cavalry, hastened his march northward; and, in the length of
way from Caria to the borders of Æolis, he maintained an exactness of
discipline that gained him the greater credit with the allies as it was
contrasted with the licentiousness from which the country had suffered
while Thimbron commanded.

The circumstances of Æolis might reasonably have invited the attention
of the general, though revenge had not instigated him. According to
that liberal policy, more than once already noticed as ordinary among
the Persians, Pharnabazus had appointed Zenis, a Greek of Dardanus,
to be governor, or, according to Xenophon’s phrase, satrap of that
fine country, so interesting, in earliest history, as the kingdom of
Priam, and the seat of the Trojan War. Zenis died young, leaving a
widow, Mania, also a Dardanian. This extraordinary woman solicited the
succession to her late husband’s command; and supported her solicitations
with presents so agreeable to the satrap’s fancy, and proofs so pregnant
of her own talents and spirit, that she obtained her suit. Being
accordingly vested with the government, she did not disappoint, but, on
the contrary, far exceeded, the satrap’s expectation. She not only held
all in due obedience, but, raising a body of Grecian mercenaries, she
reduced the maritime towns of Larissa, Hamaxitus, and Colonæ, which had
hitherto resisted the Persian dominion. Herself attended the sieges,
viewing the operations from her chariot, and by praises and presents
judiciously bestowed she excited such emulation that her army acquired
repute superior to any other body of mercenaries in Asia. Pharnabazus
requiring troops for suppressing the incursions of the rebellious Mysians
and Pisidians, she attended in person. In consequence of her able conduct
and high reputation, he always treated her with great respect, and
sometimes even desired her assistance in his council.

[Sidenote: [399 B.C.]]

Mania was another Artemisia; and the weighty authority of Xenophon for
the history of the Dardanian satrapess not a little supports the account
given by Herodotus of the Halicarnassian queen. But, though Mania could
govern provinces and conduct armies, yet, amid the encouragement which
the gross defects, both of Grecian and Persian government, offered for
daring villainy, she could not secure herself against domestic treachery.
Scarcely had she passed her fortieth year when she was murdered in her
palace by Midias, who had married her daughter. But a single murder would
not answer the execrable villain’s purpose. Her son, a most promising
youth of seventeen, was cut off. The assassin had then the impudence to
ask of the satrap the succession to the government held by the deceased
Mania, supporting his solicitation by large presents. But he seems to
have founded his hopes on a knowledge rather of the general temper
and practice of the Persian great than of the particular character of
Pharnabazus. He, with a generous indignation, refused the presents, and
declared he would not live unless he could revenge Mania. Midias prepared
to support himself by force or intrigue, as circumstances might direct.
He had secured Gergis and Scepsis, fortified towns in which Mania’s
treasures were deposited; but the other towns of the province, with one
consent, refusing to acknowledge his authority, adhered to Pharnabazus.

Dercyllidas arrived upon the borders in this critical conjuncture. The
satrap was unprepared; the Lacedæmonian name was popular; and the towns
of Larissa, Hamaxitus, and Colonæ, in one day opened their gates. A
declaration was then circulated, that the purpose of Dercyllidas and the
Lacedæmonian government was to give perfect independency to the Æolian
cities; desiring only alliance defensive and offensive, with quarters
for the army within their walls whenever it might become requisite in
that service whose object was the common liberty of all Grecian people.
The garrisons were composed mostly of Greeks, attached to Mania, but
indifferent to the interest of Pharnabazus. The towns of Neandria, Ilium,
and Cocylium acceded to the Spartan general’s invitation. Hope of large
reward for his fidelity induced the governor of Cebrene to adhere to the
satrap; but, upon the approach of the army, the people soon compelled him
to surrender.

Dercyllidas then marched towards Scepsis. The assassin Midias, fearful,
at the same time, of the Spartan general, the Persian satrap, and the
Scepsian citizens, conceived his best hope to lie in accommodation with
the former. He proposed a conference, to which Dercyllidas consented.
Acquitting himself then of that miscreant by restoring all his private
property, with liberal allowance for all his claims, he seized the
wealth of Mania, as now belonging to the satrap, the common enemy; and
it was his boast, a grateful boast to the army, that he had enriched the
military chest with a twelvemonth’s pay for eight thousand men.

[Sidenote: [399-398 B.C.]]

Having thus, according to Xenophon’s expression, in eight days, taken
nine cities, he sent proposals of truce to Pharnabazus. That generous
satrap, unassisted from the capital of the empire, and deserted and
betrayed by the great neighbouring officer whose more peculiar duty it
was to afford him assistance, readily accepted them. Xenophon indeed
says, that he was little disturbed with the loss of Æolis; esteeming
that province, under Lacedæmonian protection, while he had himself peace
with Lacedæmon, rather a useful barrier against other enemies. The
meaning of this apparently is to be collected only from what follows. The
Bithynians, though as tributary subjects of the empire he had assisted
them against the Cyrean army, were always licentious, sometimes perhaps
rebellious, and they frequently carried hostile depredation among the
more peaceful and settled inhabitants of his satrapy. Among these people
Dercyllidas resolved to take his winter quarters, as in a hostile
territory, and Pharnabazus expressed no dissatisfaction.

Since he had been in Asia, Dercyllidas had fought no great battle, nor
taken any town by assault; but, in an army which, under his predecessor,
had been so lawless as to be a terror more to friends than enemies, he
had restored exact discipline, and yet was the favourite of that army.
With that army then he had awed the two great satraps, each commanding a
province equal to a powerful kingdom, and both together acting under the
mightiest empire in the world; so that, after having given independency
and security to the long line of Ionian and Æolian colonies, he could
direct his views another way for the benefit of the Grecian name.

The Thracian Chersonese, once the principality of the renowned Miltiades,
lately, in large proportion, the property of another great and singular
character, Alcibiades, and by its fertility, its many harbours, and its
advantageous situation for trade, always a great object for industrious
adventurers from Greece, was however always subject to dreadful
incursions from the wild hordes of Thracians, who made it their glory
to live by rapine. The Chersonesites, in a petition to Lacedæmon for
protection, declared that, unless it were granted, they must abandon
the country. Dercyllidas, informed of this, before orders could come to
himself from Lacedæmon, or another could be sent with the commission,
resolved to execute the service. He sent to Pharnabazus a proposal
for prolonging the existing truce, which was immediately accepted;
and, having so far provided tranquillity for Asia, he transported his
army to the European shore. Immediately he visited the Thracian prince
Seuthes, by whom he was very hospitably entertained; and having arranged,
apparently to his satisfaction, those matters in which his commonwealth
and that prince had a common concern, he marched to the Chersonese. There
he employed his army, not in plunder and destruction, but in raising
a rampart across the isthmus, to secure the peace of the rich country
and industrious people within. Begun in spring, it was completed before
autumn, and the army was reconveyed into Asia. Dercyllidas then made a
progress through the Asiatic cities, to inspect the state of things, and
had the satisfaction to find everywhere peace, prosperity, and general
content.

Now the ephors sent orders for war to be carried into Caria; for the army
under Dercyllidas to march thither; and for the fleet, then commanded by
Pharax, to co-operate with it. The first effect of these ill-concerted
measures appears to have been to produce, or at least to hasten, a
union between the two satraps, Tissaphernes and Pharnabazus; whose long
variance had in no small degree contributed to those great successes
which the Greeks, with a force otherwise inadequate to contention with
the Persian empire, had been enabled to obtain. Pharnabazus, unsupported
by the court of Susa, and basely deserted, or worse than deserted, by
Tissaphernes, his immediate superior in command, had acquiesced under the
loss of Æolis. But, as soon as the threatened attack of Caria afforded a
probability that Tissaphernes would be disposed to change his conduct,
Pharnabazus went to him, and declared his readiness to co-operate
zealously in measures for driving the Greeks out of Asia. This proposal,
to which the jealousy and pusillanimity of Tissaphernes otherwise would
scarcely have listened, was made acceptable by the indiscreet violence of
the Spartan government. The two satraps went together into Caria, and,
having arranged matters for the defence of that country, returned to take
the command of an army which threatened Ionia with destruction.

[Sidenote: [398-397 B.C.]]

Dercyllidas was already marching for Caria, when information reached him
that all his hitherto successful labours for the welfare of the colonies
were upon the point of being rendered utterly vain. In these alarming
circumstances the interested pusillanimity of Tissaphernes relieved
him. Pharnabazus was desirous of engaging; but Tissaphernes already
more than half satisfied, since his property in Caria was no longer in
immediate danger, would first try the effect of a conference. A herald
was therefore sent to the Grecian general. The conference being held
accordingly, Dercyllidas insisted on the simple proposition, “that all
Grecian cities should be independent.” To this the satraps consented,
with the conditions, “that the Grecian army should quit the king’s
territory” (by which seems to have been meant Asia, including the Grecian
colonies), “and that the Lacedæmonian governors should quit the Grecian
towns.” Upon these terms a truce was concluded, to hold till the pleasure
of the king and of the Lacedæmonian government could be known.

This was the first treaty, reported on any authentic or even probable
testimony, by which, since the early times of the Lydian monarchy, it
was provided that the Asian Greeks should be completely emancipated from
foreign dominion. All the Ionian and Æolian cities, it appears, thus
gained immediate enjoyment of independency in peace: the Carian seem to
have waited the confirmation of the treaty by the king of Persia and
the Lacedæmonian government. But it was a quiet revolution: no great
battle gave it splendour; none of those striking events attended which
invite the attention of the writer in proportion as they are fitted to
impress the fancy of the reader. It forms, nevertheless, a memorable
and interesting era in Grecian history; and the fame of Dercyllidas,
less brilliant, but far purer, than that of most of the great men of
Greece, though, being recorded by the pen of Xenophon, it is indeed
secured against perishing, yet deserves to have been more generally and
more pointedly noticed, than we find it, by writers whose theme has been
Grecian history, or panegyric of the Grecian character.

WAR OF LACEDÆMON AND ELIS

[Sidenote: [420-399 B.C.]]

In that system, if it may be so called, by which the various members of
the Greek nation were in some degree held together, we find a strange
mixture of undefined, and sometimes repugnant claims, more or less
generally admitted. While the Lacedæmonians presided, with authority
far too little defined, over the political and military affairs of
Greece, the Eleans asserted a prescriptive right to a kind of religious
supremacy; also too little defined; universally allowed nevertheless,
in a certain degree, but, like the Lacedæmonian supremacy, not always
to the extent to which the claimants pretended. In the schism of
Peloponnesus, which occurred during the Peloponnesian War, we have seen
the imperial state of Lacedæmon summoned to the Elean tribunal, as a
British corporation might be summoned to the courts at Westminster; a
fine imposed, its citizens interdicted the common games and sacrifices of
the nation, an opprobrious punishment publicly inflicted upon an aged and
respectable Spartan, who, but by implication, offended against the Elean
decrees; and, finally, these measures supported by avowed hostilities,
and alliance with the enemies of Sparta. The necessity of the times
induced the Lacedæmonians to make peace with these affronts unrevenged;
but their smothered resentment had been revived and increased by what
they esteemed a new indignity. Before the conclusion of the Peloponnesian
War, Agis, king of Lacedæmon, had been sent, in pursuance of a supposed
prophetical direction, to perform a sacrifice to Jupiter at Olympia. The
Eleans forbade the ceremony, alleging that, according to ancient law, no
oracle should be consulted for success in wars between Greeks and Greeks,
and they would allow no prayer for victory in such a war. There is a
beneficence, a liberal and extended patriotism in this idea, so consonant
to the spirit with which Iphitus is said to have founded the Olympian
festival, and so opposite to the tenets afterwards generally prevailing
in Greece, that they seem to mark the law for ancient and genuine. The
Lacedæmonians however were not the less offended with the Eleans for
bringing forward, upon such an occasion, what, if those maxims only were
considered which had prevailed through succeeding ages, would carry much
the appearance of a complete novelty.

[Illustration: GREEK VASE]

The judgment passed against the Lacedæmonians and the fine imposed, the
interdiction of the games, the punishment of Lichas, the confederacy
with Athens and Argos, the hostilities ensuing, and finally the refusal
of permission for sacrifice at Olympia, are stated by the contemporary
historian as the motives which disposed the Lacedæmonians to war. We
gather from him however that others existed; the democratical party at
this time governed Elis, and Elis held many towns of Elea in subjection.
The Lacedæmonians did not absolutely require oligarchy in every state
of Greece; for they had lately permitted the restoration of democracy
in Athens; and even their own government had a mixture of democracy:
but they always beheld, with peculiar jealousy, dominion exercised by a
democratical commonwealth.

[Sidenote: [399 B.C.]]

In pursuance of this resolution, ministers were sent to Elis with a
declaration that “the Lacedæmonians deemed it just and proper that the
towns held in subjection by the Eleans be restored to independency.”
The Eleans, alleging the right of conquest, refused to resign their
sovereignty; and upon this the ephors ordered the king, Agis, to march
into their country. The usual ravage of Grecian armies presently
followed, but an earthquake, imagined a divine admonition, alarming the
aged prince and his superstitious people, they retired out of Elea,[7]
and the troops were dismissed to their several homes. Whether as marking
the favour of the gods or the weakness of their enemies, this conduct
greatly encouraged the Eleans. In either view it improved the hope of
gaining to their cause many Grecian states, known to be disaffected
towards Lacedæmon. But if the Lacedæmonian sovereignty was tyrannical,
theirs apparently was not less so; and while they were cherishing the
hope of foreign assistance, they did not take wiser precautions than
other Grecian states for securing the attachment of their subjects. In
the next spring Agis again entered Elea with an army to which all the
allies had contributed, excepting Corinth and Bœotia. Immediately Lepreum
revolted to him; Macistus and Epitalium quickly followed the example;
and these were imitated, as he advanced into the country, by Leprine,
Amphidolia, and Marganeæ. In this defection of their towns, the Eleans
were utterly unable to face the Lacedæmonian army in the field. Agis
proceeded unopposed to Olympia and sacrificed, now unforbidden, on the
altar of Jupiter. The territories of the revolting towns of course had
been spared; but rapine and devastation marked the way from Olympia to
Elis, whither the king next directed his march. Nor did the country
suffer only from the conquering army. The opportunity of freebooting
invited the neighbouring Arcadians and Achæans; and slaves and cattle
and corn were carried off to such an amount that all the markets of
Peloponnesus were glutted with Elean plunder. It was supposed that Agis
would not, rather than that he could not, take Elis itself, which was
unfortified. After destroying many fair buildings of the outskirts he
proceeded to Cyllene, the principal seaport of the Eleans, and ravage was
extended from the mountains to the sea.

Occasion has already frequently occurred to remark, that scarcely any
misfortune could befall a Grecian state which would not bring advantage,
or at least the hope of advantage, to some considerable portion of its
subjects. The aristocratical party in Elis, oppressed by the demagogue
Thrasydæus, looked to the present sufferings of their country as the
means of relief; but with no better consideration of any political or
moral principle than might have guided the wildest savages, or the most
profligate among the lowest populace in civilised nations. They proposed
to assassinate Thrasydæus, with a few of his confidential friends;
and then, in the name of the commonwealth, to open a negotiation with
Lacedæmon. The people, they trusted, deprived of their leader, and
dreading the arms of the Lacedæmonians, would acquiesce; and thus the
principal power in the state would of course come into their hands.
The plot failed through a mistake, by which another was murdered for
Thrasydæus. The people, however, supposing their favourite killed,
rested in silent dejection: but, while the conspirators were arming,
and stationing their party, the demagogue awoke, where drunkenness and
supervening sleep had overnight checked his way. The people immediately
flocked about him; a battle followed, and the conspirators, overpowered,
fled to the Lacedæmonian camp.

[Sidenote: [398 B.C.]]

The conduct of the war was such as we have so often seen in Greece. When
plunder no longer remained to employ the Lacedæmonian army profitably,
Agis marched home, leaving only a garrison in Epitalium on the Alpheus,
where he established the Elean fugitives. Hence rapine was occasionally
prosecuted through the autumn and winter. Elis could not, like Athens,
support itself under the continual ravage of its territory. In spring
therefore Thrasydæus opened a negotiation with Lacedæmon, and at once
offered the independency of all the towns over which the Eleans claimed
sovereignty by right of conquest; proposing only to keep Epium, whose
territory they had purchased from the inhabitants for thirty talents
fairly paid. The Lacedæmonians however, considering, or affecting to
consider, the purchase as forced, required that Epium should be free
like the rest. The disposition thus apparent in the Lacedæmonians to
depress Elis encouraged the villagers of the Pisan territory to assert
their claim to the superintendency of the Olympian temple, violently
taken from their ancestors, as they contended, by the Eleans, when their
city was destroyed. But, whatever might have been the ancient right, the
Lacedæmonian administration, thinking those uneducated pretenders unfit
for an office of much solemnity and dignity in the eyes of all Greece,
would not interfere. Upon the condition therefore that every town of Elea
should be, as a free republic, a separate member of the Lacedæmonian
confederacy, which was, in effect, to be subjects of Lacedæmon, peace
was made; and Elis, according to the Lacedæmonian decree preceding the
war, humbled and chastened, was itself also restored to its place in that
confederacy.

[Illustration: THE SHORES OF ELIS]

The imputation of impiety, under which the Lacedæmonians began the war,
perhaps urged them to a more ostentatious display of respect for the gods
at the end of it. Agis himself was deputed to offer, at Delphi, the tenth
of the spoil. On his return, he was taken ill at Heræa, and he died soon
after his arrival at Lacedæmon. In the magnificence of his funeral the
Lacedæmonians probably meant also to exhibit their own piety, as well
as to testify their opinion of the deceased prince’s merit. They failed
however in their estimate of the prevailing prejudices of the Grecian
people. Honour to the gods indeed was supposed to be best shown, and
religion principally to consist, in pompous processions and expensive
spectacles; but general opinion condemned the splendour of the funeral of
Agis, as greater than could become the most illustrious mortal.[b]

When the days for the funeral solemnities were past and it was necessary
for another king to be appointed, Leotychides, who said that he was the
son of Agis, and Agesilaus his brother, stood forward as competitors for
the throne. Leotychides saying, “The law, Agesilaus, directs, not that
the brother, but that the son of the king is to reign; though if there
happen to be no son, the brother may in that case become king.” Agesilaus
rejoined, “Then I must be king.” “How,” said Leotychides, “when I am
alive?” “Because,” returned Agesilaus, “he whom you call your father,
said that you were not his son.”[8] “But my mother, who knows much better
than he, still declares that I am.” “Neptune, however,” said Agesilaus,
“showed that what you assert is false, as he drove your father abroad by
an earthquake from her chamber; and time, which is said to be the truest
of witnesses, gives testimony with him to the same effect; for you were
born in the tenth month after he fled from her, and was never after seen
in her chamber.” In this manner they disputed. But Diopithes, a man who
paid great attention to oracles, supported Leotychides, and said that
there was an oracle of Apollo enjoining them “to beware of a halting
reign.” Lysander however said in reply to him, on behalf of Agesilaus,
that “he did not think the god desired them to beware lest their king
should stumble and halt, but rather lest one who was not of the royal
family should reign; for that the royal power would assuredly be lame
whenever men not descended from Hercules should rule the state.” The
people, after hearing such arguments from both sides, chose Agesilaus for
their king.

CINADON’S PLOT

[Sidenote: [398-397 B.C.]]

Agesilaus had not yet been a year on the throne, when, as he was offering
one of the sacrifices appointed for the city, the augur told him that the
gods indicated some conspiracy of the most dangerous kind. Within five
days after the conclusion of this sacrifice, somebody gave information
to the ephors of a conspiracy, and said that “Cinadon was leader in the
affair.” Cinadon was a man of vigorous frame, and of powerful mind, but
not one of the Equals. When the ephors asked the informer what account
he could give of the way in which the plot would be carried into effect,
he said that “Cinadon, having conducted him to the outside of the forum,
desired him to count how many Spartans there were in the forum; and I,”
continued he, “having counted the king, the ephors, the senators, and
about forty others, asked him, ‘And why, Cinadon, have you told me to
count them?’ ‘Consider these,’ he replied, ‘as enemies, and all the rest
now in the forum, who are more than four thousand, as allies.’” He said
also that Cinadon pointed out to him in the streets sometimes one, and
sometimes two, that were enemies, and said that all the other people
were auxiliaries, and that whatever Spartans were on their estates in
the country, one, namely the master, was an enemy, while on every estate
there were numbers of allies. The ephors then inquiring how many Cinadon
said were privy to the plot, he replied that he told him, as to that
point, that “there were not very many in concert with the principal
agents, but that they were trustworthy, and declared that they were in
communication with all the helots, the newly-enfranchised, the inferior
citizens, and the people in the parts about the city; for whenever any
mention of the Spartans was made among them, no one could forbear from
showing that he would willingly eat them up alive.” When the ephors
further asked “whence they said they would get arms,” he answered,
that Cinadon had stated to him, “Those of us who are already united,
say we have arms enough;” and for the multitude, he said that Cinadon,
conducting him into the iron-market, had pointed out numbers of daggers,
swords, spits, axes, hatchets, and scythes, and added that “all the
instruments with which men cultivate the ground, or hew wood or stone,
would serve as weapons, while the greater part of the artificers had
sufficient tools to fight with, especially against unarmed enemies.” The
informer being finally interrogated “at what time the scheme was to be
carried into execution,” replied that “directions had been given him to
be in readiness at home.”

The ephors, after listening to his statement, were of opinion that he had
given information of a well-concerted plot, and were greatly alarmed;
nor did they summon even what was called the lesser assembly, but some
of the senators, conferring together here and there, resolved to send
Cinadon to Aulon, accompanied by some others of the younger men, with
directions to bring back with him certain inhabitants of that place, and
some helots, whose names were written on his scytale. They desired him
also to bring with him a certain woman, who was said to be the handsomest
in the place, and was thought to corrupt all the Lacedæmonians, old
as well as young, that went thither. Cinadon had executed similar
commissions for the ephors before; and they now delivered to him the
scytale on which were written the names of the persons that were to be
apprehended. As he asked “which of the young men he should take with
him,” they said to him, “Go, and desire the eldest of the _hippagretæ_
to send with you six or seven of such of his men as may be at hand.”
They had previously taken care that the _hippagretæ_ should know whom he
was to send, and that those who were sent should be apprized that they
were to secure Cinadon. They moreover acquainted Cinadon that they would
send three carriages, that they might not bring away their prisoners on
foot, concealing from him as carefully as possible that they sent them
with a view to his security alone. They did not apprehend him in the
city, because they were uncertain how far the plot might have spread, and
wished first to hear from Cinadon himself who were his accomplices in it,
before they themselves should be aware that information was given against
them, lest they should make their escape. The party who took him were to
keep him prisoner, and when they had learned from him the names of his
accomplices, were to send them in writing to the ephors as speedily as
possible. So intent indeed were the ephors on effecting their object,
that they even despatched a troop of horse to support the party that was
gone to Aulon.

As soon as Cinadon was secured, and a horseman arrived with the names of
those whom he had put on his list, they instantly apprehended Tisamenus
the soothsayer, and the other principal conspirators; and when Cinadon
was brought back and examined, and had made a full confession and
specified his accomplices, they at last asked him “with what object he
had engaged in such a scheme.” He replied, “in order that he might be
inferior to no man in Lacedæmon.” Soon after he was fastened, arms and
neck, in a wooden collar, and scourged and pricked with lances; and in
this condition he and his accomplices were led round the city. Thus they
suffered the penalty of the law.[c]

AGESILAUS IN ASIA

[Sidenote: [396 B.C.]]

Not long after this event news was brought to Sparta by a Syracusan named
Herodes, who had just returned from Phœnicia, of preparations which he
had witnessed in the Phœnician ports for a great armament, which he had
learned was to consist of three hundred galleys. He had not been able to
ascertain its object, but it had induced him to quicken his departure,
that he might bear the tidings to Greece. The Spartan government was
alarmed, and called a congress of the allies to deliberate on preventive
measures. But to Lysander the intelligence afforded a highly welcome
opportunity of resuming his ambitious plans, and recovering his influence
among the Asiatic Greeks. He seems however to have been aware that he
was himself viewed with jealousy at home, and that a proposal coming
directly from himself, and immediately tending to his own aggrandisement,
would probably be ill received. He resolved therefore to make use of his
friend Agesilaus, to accomplish his purpose, and easily prevailed on him
to undertake, with a small force, to give such employment to the Persian
arms in Asia, as would secure Greece from the threatened invasion.

Agesilaus, who was in the prime of life, was no less eager to display his
military talents in such a brilliant field, than Lysander to renew his
intrigues, and to replace his creatures in the posts from which they had
been dislodged. He therefore offered to take the command of an expedition
to Asia, for which he required no more than two thousand neodamode
troops, and six thousand of the allies, and desired to be accompanied by
a council of thirty Spartans--which he probably knew would, according
to usage, be forced upon him--and by Lysander among them. His offer was
accepted, and all his requests granted, with the addition of six months’
pay for the army. Corinth, Thebes, and Athens, were called upon to
contribute their forces, but they all refused.

It was the first time since the expedition of Menelaus that a king of
Sparta had undertaken to invade Asia; and Agesilaus, partly perhaps for
the sake of the omen, and partly for the sake of his own renown, was
willing to associate his enterprise with the recollection of that heroic
adventure. He therefore stopped at Aulis, to sacrifice there after the
example of Agamemnon. But before he had completed the rite, the Bœotarchs
sent a party of horse to enjoin him to desist, and the men did not merely
deliver the message, but scattered the parts of the victim which they
found on the altar. He however stifled his resentment, and embarked again
for Geræstus, where he found the bulk of his armament assembled, and
sailed with it to Ephesus.

Soon after his arrival he received a message from Tissaphernes, calling
on him to explain the design of his coming. Agesilaus replied, that his
object was to restore the Asiatic Greeks to the independence which their
brethren enjoyed on the other side of the Ægean. The satrap on this
proposed a truce until the king’s pleasure could be taken on this demand;
he engaged himself to support it with all the credit he possessed, and
professed to believe that the court would comply with it. Agesilaus
consented to the proposal, only requiring security for the observance
of the engagement, and even this security was no more than the oath of
Tissaphernes, which he pledged with due solemnity to Dercyllidas, and