 Chapter 12 Part 2 of A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 2. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great, Volume 2, by John Bagnell Bury. Chapter 12 Part 2. The Rebellion of Cyrus and the March of the Ten Thousand. We now come to an episode which takes us into the domestic history of Persia out of the limits of Greek geography into the heart of the Persian Empire. On the death of Darius, his eldest son Artaxerxes had succeeded to the throne, notwithstanding the plots of his mother Parisatis, who attempted to secure it for her younger and favourite son Cyrus. In these transactions Tysophanes had supported Artaxerxes, and when Cyrus returned to his satrapia in Asia Minor, Tysophanes was set to watch him. False suspicions and callonies frequently lead to the actual perpetration of the crimes which they attribute, and perhaps if he had not been suspected, Cyrus would not have formed the plan of subverting his brother and seizing the kingship. But it is far more likely that from the first Cyrus had hoped and resolved to succeed to his father's throne. For his success he relied largely on an army of Greek mercenaries which he began to enlist. The revolutions which had passed over Greek cities in recent years, both in Asia and Europe, threw into the military market large numbers of strong men eager for employment and pay. They were recruited for the prince's service by Clearchus, a Spartan, who had held the post of Hamost, but had been repudiated and expelled by the Ephors when he attempted to make himself tyrant of Byzantium like a new Porcenias. Moreover, the Lacedaemonian government, which owed much to Cyrus, was induced to support him secretly, and sent him, avowedly for another purpose, seven hundred hoplites. The army which Cyrus mustered when he set forth on his march to Sousa amounted to one hundred thousand oriental troops, and about thirteen thousand Greeks, of which ten thousand six hundred were hoplites. The purpose of the march was at first carefully concealed from the troops, nor was the secret communicated to any of the officers except Clearchus. The hill tribes of Pisidia were often troublesome to Persian satraps, and their reduction furnished a convenient pretext. Among those who were induced by the prospect of high pay under the generous Persian prince to join this Pisidian campaign was Xenophon, an Athenian knight who was one of the pupils and companions of the philosopher Socrates. His famous history of the anabasis, or up-going of the Greeks with Cyrus, and their subsequent retreat, has rendered the expedition a household word. The charm of the anabasis depends on the simple directness and fullness with which the story is told, and the great interest of the story consists in its breaking new ground. For the first time we are privileged to follow step by step a journey through the inner parts of Asia Minor into the heart of the Persian Empire beyond the Euphrates and the Tigris. There is a charm of actuality in the early chapters with their recurring phrases like brief entries in a diary. The days marches from one city to another, the number of parasangs, and the lengths of the halts all duly set out. Hence Cyrus marches two stages, ten parasangs, to Pelti, an inhabited city, and here he remained three days. Setting forth from Sardis Cyrus took the south-easterly road which led across the Upper Meander to the Phrygian Colossi, where he was joined by the troops of one of his Greek captains, the Thessalian Menon, and thence onward to Selene where he awaited the arrival of Clearchus. So far the march had been straight to the ostensible destination, the country of Pesidia, but now Cyrus turned in the opposite direction and, descending the meander, marched northward to Pelti and Ceremon Agara or Potters Mart. Then eastward to the city called Caista Plain, close to the fort of Ipsos. Here the Greeks demanded their arrears of pay, and Cyrus had no money to satisfy them. But he was relieved from the difficulty, which might well have proved fatal to his enterprise, by the Cylician queen Epiaxa, wife of Psionesis, who arrived well laden with money. Her coming must have been connected with private negotiations between Cyrus and the Cylician governor. As the root of Cyrus lay through Cylicia, a country barred on all sides by difficult passes, it was of the greatest moment for Cyrus to come to an understanding with the ruler, and on the other hand it was the policy of Psionesis so to order his ways that whether Cyrus succeeded or failed, he might in either event be safe. As the plan of Cyrus was still a secret, it was a prudent policy to entrust the delicate negotiations to no one less safe than the queen. Having pacified the demands of his Greek mercenaries, Cyrus proceeded, by Thimbryon and Tyreaeon, to Iconium, and thence by the road which describes a great southern curve through Lycaeonia to Tyreaeon. The Greeks were allowed to plunder Lycaeonia, a rough country with rough people, as they passed through it. The arrangement with Psionesis seems to have been that he should make a display of resisting Cyrus, and Cyrus make a display of circumventing him. To carry out this arrangement, Menon's division, accompanied by the queen Epiaxa, diverged from the route followed by the rest of the army, and crossed the torus into Silicia by a shorter route. Perhaps they struck off at Barata, and passed by Liranda on a road that led to Solai. Thus Psionesis, who, as a loyal servant of the great king, hastened to occupy the Silician gates, the pass for which the main army of Cyrus was making, found himself taken in the rear by Menon. It was therefore useless to remain in the pass, and he retreated to a mountain stronghold. What more could a loyal servant of the great king be expected to do? The army of Cyrus, then coming up from Tyreaeon by pedandas, found the impregnable pass open, and descended safely to Tarsus where it met Menon. The city and palace of the Prince of Silicia were pillaged. This perhaps was part of the pretence. It was at all events safe now for Psionesis to enter into a contract with Cyrus, a compulsory contract the great king would understand, to supply some money and men. It must have been dawning on the Greek troops for some time past, and at Tarsus they no longer felt any doubt that they had been deceived as to their ultimate destination. They had long ago passed Pisidia, the ostensible object of their march, and the true object was now clear to them. They flatly refused to advance further. It was a small thing to be asked to take the field against the forces of the great king, but it was no such light matter to be asked to undertake a march of three months into the centre of Asia. To be at a distance of three months from the sea-coast was a terrible idea for a Greek. Cliakas, a strict disciplinarian, a man of grim feature and harsh voice unpopular with his men, thought to repress the mutiny by severity, but the mutiny was too general to be quelled by coercion. Then he resorted to a stratagem which he carried out with admirable adroitness. Seeing his soldiers together he stood for some time weeping before he spoke. He then set forth the cruel dilemma in which their conduct had placed him. He must either break his plighted faith with Cyrus, or desert them. But he did not hesitate to choose. Whatever happened he would stand by them who were his country, his friends, and his allies. This speech created a favourable impression which was confirmed when Cyrus sent to demand an interview with Cliakas, and Cliakas publicly refused to go. But the delight of the troops was changed into perplexity when Cliakas asked them what they proposed to do. They were no longer the soldiers of Cyrus and could not look to him for pay, provisions, or help. He, Cliakas, would stand by them, but declined to command them or advise them. The soldiers, some of them in the secret confidence of their captain, discussed the difficulty, and it was decided to send a deputation to Cyrus to ask him to declare definitely his real intentions. Cyrus told the deputation that his purpose was to march against his enemy Abracomas, Persian general in Syria, who was now on the Euphrates, and offered higher pay to the Greeks, a derrick and a half instead of a derrick a month. The soldiers, finding themselves in an awkward pass, agreed to continue the march, reluctant, but hardly seeing any other way out of the difficulty, though many of them must have shrewdly suspected that they would deal with Abracomas on the Euphrates, even as they had dealt with the hillmen of Pisidia. The march was now eastward by Adena and Mopsuestia, across the rivers Serus and Pyramus, and then along the coast to Issus, where Cyrus found his fleet. It brought him seven hundred hoplites sent by the Lacedamonians. There too he was reinforced by four hundred Greek mercenaries who had deserted from the service of the Persian general Abracomas, the enemy of Cyrus, who had fled to the Euphrates instead of holding the difficult and fortified passes from Silicia into Syria, as a loyal general of the great king should have done. So Cyrus now, with his Greek troops increased to the total number of fourteen thousand, passed with as much ease through the Syrian gates owing to the cowardly flight of Abracomas, as he had before passed through the Silician gates owing to the prudent collusion of Sienesis. The Syrian gates are a narrow pass between the end of Mount Amanus and the sea, part of the coast road from Issus to Myriandras. At Myriandras the Greeks bared good-bye to the sea, little knowing how many days would pass, how many terrible things befall them before they hailed it again. They crossed Mount Amanus by the pass of Bailan, which Abracomas ought to have guarded, and in a twelve-day march passing by the park and palace of Bailesis, Satrap of Syria, they reached Thapsicus and beheld the famous Euphrates. Here a new explanation was necessary as to the object of the march, and Cyrus had at last to own that Babylon was the goal, that the foe against whom he led the army was the great king himself. The Greek troops murmured loudly and refused to cross the river, but their murmurings here were not like their murmurs at Tarsus, for they had guessed the truth long since, and their complaints were only designed to extort promises from Cyrus. The prince agreed to give each man a present of five money at the end of the expedition, more than a year's pay at the high rate of a derrick and a half. But while the rest of the Greeks were making their bargain, Menon stole a march on them, inducing his own troops to cross the river first, a good example for which Cyrus would owe him and his troops particular thanks. Abracomas had burned the ships, but the Euphrates was, a very unusual circumstance at that season, shallow enough to be forded, a fact of which Abracomas was conceivably aware. The army accordingly crossed on foot and continued the march along the left bank, an agreeable march until they reached the river Cabaras, beyond which the desert of Arabia began. A plain, Xenophon describes it, smooth as a sea, treeless, only wormwood and scented shrubs for vegetation, but alive with all kinds of beasts strange to Greek eyes, wild asses and ostriches, antelopes and bustards. The tramp through the desert lasted thirteen days, and then they reached Pyley at the edge of the land of Babylonia, fertile then with its artificial irrigation, now mostly a barren wilderness. Soon after they passed Pyley, they became aware that a large host had been moving in front, ravaging the country before them. Mr. Xerxes, on his part, had made somewhat tardy preparations to receive the invaders. It seems, indeed, to have been hardly conceived at the Persian court that the army of Cyrus would ever succeed in reaching Babylonia. The city of Babylon was protected by a double defense against an enemy approaching from the north, by a line of wall and a line of water, both connecting the Euphrates with the Tigris. The enemy would first have to pass the wall of Medea, a hundred feet high and twenty feet broad, built of bricks with bitumen cement, and they would then have to cross the royal canal before they could reach the gates of Babylon. To these two lines of defense a third was now added in the form of a trench about forty miles long, joining at one end the wall of Medea and at the other the Euphrates, where a space of not more than seven yards was left between the trench and the river. To defend a country so abundantly guarded by artificial fortifications, the king was able to muster immediately an army of about four hundred thousand. But this did not seem enough when the danger became imminent and orders were sent to Medea that the troops of that province should come to the aid of Babylonia. There was some delay in the arrival of these forces, and Artaxerxes probably did not wish to risk an action until their arrival had made his immense superiority in numbers overwhelming. This may explain the extraordinary circumstance that when the army of Cyrus came to the fos which had been dug expressly to keep them out, they found it undefended, and walked at their ease over the narrow passage between the trench and the river. But now it was hardly possible for Artaxerxes to let his foes advance further, though there was still no sign of the troops from the east. Two days after passing the trench the army of Cyrus reached the village of Cunaxa, and suddenly learned that the king's host was approaching. The oriental troops under Ariaeus formed the left wing of Cyrus, who himself occupied the center with a squadron of cavalry. The Greeks were on the right, resting on the river Euphrates. The Persian left wing commanded by Tysophanes consisted of cavalry, Roman and Egyptian footmen, with a row of scythe-armed chariots in front. The king was in the center with a strong bodyguard of horse. Cyrus knew the oriental character, and he knew that if the king fell or fled the battle would be decided, and his own cause won. He accordingly formed a plan of battle which would almost certainly have been successful if it had been adopted. He proposed that the Greeks should shift their position further to the left to a considerable distance from the river, so that they might immediately attack the enemy's center where the king was stationed. But Cliarchus, to whom Cyrus signified his wishes, made decided objections to this bold and wise plan. Before to rise like Cyrus to the full bearings of the situation, he ruined the cause of his master, bipedantically or timorously adhering to the precepts of Greek drill sergeants, that it is fatal for the right wing to allow itself to be outflanked. And besides the consideration which Cyrus had in view, the advantage of bringing about with all speed the flight of Artaxerxes, there was another consideration which would not have occurred to Cyrus, but which ought to have occurred to Cliarchus. The safety of Cyrus himself was a matter of the first importance to the Greeks. How important, we shall see in the sequel. It was useless for the Greeks to cut down every single man in the Persian left, if while they were sweeping all before them, the prince for whom they fought was slain. Cyrus did not press the matter and left it to Cliarchus to make his own dispositions. The onset of the Greeks struck their enemies with panic before a blow was struck. On the other side, the Persian right, which far outflanked the left wing of Cyrus, was wheeled round so as to take the troops of Arius in the rear. Then Cyrus, who was already receiving congratulations as if he were king on account of the success of the Greeks, dashed forward with his six hundred horse against the six thousand who surrounded Artaxerxes. The impetuous charge broke up the guard, and if the prince had kept command over his passions he would have been the great king within an hour. But unluckily he caught sight of his brother whom he hated with his whole soul amid the flying bodyguard. The bitter passion of hatred overmastered him, and he galloped forward with a few followers to slay Artaxerxes with his own hand. He had the satisfaction of wounding him slightly with a javelin, but in the melee which ensued he was himself wounded in the eye by a carrion soldier, and falling from his horse was presently slain. The news of his death was the signal for the flight of his Asiatic troops. The vivid narrative of Xenophon who took part in the battle preserves the memory of these remarkable events. At the time he saw little of the battle, and he could have known little of the arrangements and movements of the Persians. But before he wrote his own book he had the advantage of reading a book written by another Greek, who had also witnessed those remarkable events, but from the other side. This was Ctesias, the court physician, who was present at the battle and cured Artaxerxes of the breast wound which Cyrus had dealt him. The book of Ctesias is lost, but some bits of his story have drifted down to us in the works of later writers who had read it, and afford us a glimpse or two into the great king's camp and court about this eventful time. For the Greek band, which now found itself in the heart of Persia, girt about by enemies on every side, the death of Cyrus was an immediate and crushing calamity. But for Greece it was probably a stroke of good fortune, though Sparta herself had blessed the enterprise. This was a prince whose ability was well nigh equal to his ambition. He had proved his capacity by his early successes as satrap, by the organization of his expedition which demanded an exceptional union of policy and vigor, in meeting difficulties and surmounting dangers, by his recognition of the value of the Greek soldier. Under such a sovereign the Persian realm would have thriven and waxed great, and become once more a menace to the freedom of the European Greeks. Who can tell what dreams that ambitious brain might have cherished, dreams of universal conquest to be achieved at the head of an invincible army of Grecian footlancers? And in days when mercenary service was coming into fashion, the service of Cyrus would have been popular. Over oriental craft and cruelty lurked beneath, he had not only a frank and attractive manner, but a generous nature, which completely won such an honest Greek as Xenophon, the soldier, and historian. He knew how to appreciate the Greeks as none of his country ever knew before. He recognized their superiority to the Asiatics in the military qualities of steadfastness and discipline, and this undisguised appreciation was a flattery which they were unable to resist. If Cyrus had come to the throne, his energy and policy would certainly have been felt in the Aegean world. The Greeks would not have been left for the next two generations to shape their own destinies, as they did, little affected by the languid interventions of Artaxerxes. Perhaps the stubborn stupidity of Clearchus on the field of Cunexa, with his hard and fast precepts of Greek drill sergeants, saved Helas from becoming a Persian satrapy. But such speculations would have brought little comfort, could they have occurred, to the ten thousand Greeks who flushed with the excitement of pursuit, returned to hear that the rest of their army had been defeated to find their camp pillaged, and then to learn on the following morning that Cyrus was dead. The habit of self-imposed discipline, which Cyrus knew so well how to value, stood the Greeks in good stead at this grave crisis, and their easy victory had given them confidence. They refused to surrender at the summons of Artaxerxes. For him their presence was extremely awkward, like a hostile city in the midst of his land, and his first object was at all hazards to get them out of Babylonia. He therefore parlied with them, and supplied them with provisions. The only desire of the Greeks was to make all the haste they could homeward. By the road they had come it was nearly fifteen hundred miles to Sardis. But that road was impracticable, for they could not traverse the desert again, unprovisioned. Without guides, without any geographical knowledge, not knowing so much as the course of the Tigris, they had no alternative but to embrace the proposal of Tissiphernes, who undertook to guide them home by another road, on which they would be able to obtain provisions. Following him, but well in the rear of his troops, the Greeks passed the wall of Medea, and crossed two navigable canals before they reached the Tigris, which they passed by its only bridge close to Citesi. Their course then lay northward up the left bank of the Tigris. They passed from Babylonia into Medea, and, crossing the lesser Zarb, reached the banks of the greater Zarb without any incident of consequence. But here the distrust and suspicion which smoldered between the Greek and the Persian camps almost broke into a flame of hostility, and Cliochus was driven into seeking an explanation with Tissiphernes. The frankness of the sat trap disarmed the suspicions of Cliochus. Tissiphernes admitted that some persons had attempted to poison his mind against the Greeks, but promised to reveal the names of the Columniators if the Greek generals and captains came to his tent the next day. Cliochus readily consented, and induced his four fellow generals, Aegeus, Menon, Proximus, and Socrates, to go to Tissiphernes, though such blind confidence was ill- justified by the character of the crafty satrap. It was a fatal blunder, the second great blunder Cliochus had made, to place all the Greek commanders helplessly in the power of the Persian. Cliochus had been throughout an enemy of the Thessalian Menon, and it may be that he suspected Menon of treason, and that his desire to convict his rival in the tent of Tissiphernes blinded his better judgment. The five generals went with twenty captains and some soldiers. The captains and soldiers were cut down, and the generals were fettered and sent to the Persian court, where they were all put to death. Tissiphernes had no intention of attacking the Greek army. He had led them to a place from which it would be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to return to Greece, and he imagined that when they found themselves without any responsible commanders they would immediately surrender. But if in the first moments of dismay the prospect seemed hopeless, the Greeks speedily rallied their courage, chose new generals, and resumed their northward march. It was the Athenian Xenophon, a man of ready speech and great presence of mind, who did most to infuse new spirit into the army and guide it amidst the perils and difficulties which now beset it. Though he had no rank, being merely a volunteer, he was elected a general, and his power of persuasion, united with practical sense, won for him a remarkable ascendancy over the men. He tells us how, on the first dreary night after the betrayal of the generals, he dreamed that he saw a thunderbolt striking his father's house, and flames wrapping the walls about. This dream gave him his inspiration. He interpreted it of the plight in which he and his fellows were. The house was in extreme danger, but the light was a sign of hope. And then the thought was borne in on him that it was foolish to wait for others to take the lead, that it would be well to make a start himself. It was bold indeed to undertake a march of uncertain length terribly long, without guides, and with inexperienced officers, over unknown rivers and uncouth mountains, through the lands of barbarous folks. The alternative would have been to found a Greek city in the centre of media, but this had no attraction. The hearts of all were set upon returning to the Greek world. It would belong to tell the full diary of the adventures of their retreat. It is a chronicle of courage, discipline, and reasonableness in the face of perils, which nothing but the exercise of those qualities in an unusual measure would have been able to surmount. Their march to the Carduchian mountains, which form the northern boundary of media, was harassed by the army of Tysophenes, who, however, never ventured on a pitched battle. When they entered Carduchia, the Greeks passed out of the Persian Empire, for the men of these mountains were independent, wedged in between the satrapies of media and Armenia. The passage through this wild country was the most dangerous and destructive part of the whole retreat. The savage Hillsmen were implacably hostile, and it was easy for them to defend the narrow precipitous passes against an army laden with baggage and fearing at every turn of the winding roads to be crushed by rocky masses which the enemy rolled down from the heights above. After much suffering and loss of life, they reached the stream of the Centretes, a tributary of the Tigris, which divides Carduchia from Armenia. The news of their coming had gone before, and they found the opposite bank lined with the forces of Tiribatzis, the Armenian satrap. The Carduchian Hillsmen were hanging on their rear, and it needed a clever stratagem to cross the river safely. It was now the month of December, and the march lay through the snows of wintry Armenia. They had saw struggles with cold and hunger, but they went unmolested, for they had made a compact with Tiribatzis, undertaking to abstain from pillage. The direction of the march lay north-westward. They crossed the two branches of the Euphrates, and their route perhaps partly corresponded to that which a traveller follows at the present day from Tavris to Erzurum. When they had made their way through the territories of the Marshall Calibis and other hostile peoples, they reached a city, a sign that at last they were once more on the fringe of civilisation. It was the city of Jimnias, a thriving place which perhaps owed its existence to neighbouring silver mines. Here they had a friendly welcome, and learned with delight that they were not many days' journeys south of Trapedsis. A guide undertook that they should have sight of the sea after a five days' march. And on the fifth day they came to Mount Thickees, and when the van reached the summit a great cry arose. When Xenophon and the Rear heard it, they thought that an enemy was attacking in front, but when the cry increased as fresh men continually came up to the summit Xenophon thought it must be something more serious, and galloped forward to the front with his cavalry. When he drew near he heard what the cry was, the sea, the sea. The sight of the sea to which they had said farewell at Mary-Andrus, and which they had so often despaired of ever again beholding, was an assurance of safety at last attained. The night watches in the plains of Babylonia, or by the rivers of media, the wild faces in the Cardukian mountains, the bleak highlands of Armenia, might now fade into the semblances of an evil dream. A few more days brought the army to Trapedsis, to Greek soil, and to the very shore of the sea. Here they rested for a month, supporting themselves by plundering the Colchian natives, who dwelled in the hills round about, while the Greeks of Trapedsis supplied a market. Here they celebrated games, and offered their sacrifices of thanksgiving to Zeus Sotir, in fulfilment of a vow they had made on that terrible night on the Zarb after the loss of their generals. Ten thousand Greek soldiers dropped down from the mountains like a sudden thunderbolt from heaven, were a surprise which must have caused strange perplexity to the Greeks of the coast, to Trapedsis and her sister Seresis, and to their common mother Sinope. It was a somewhat alarming problem, more than a myriad soldiers, mostly hoplites, steeled by an ordeal of experience such as few men had ever passed, but not quite certain as to what their next step should be, suddenly knocking at one's gates. And they were not an ordinary army, but rather a democracy of ten thousand citizens equipped as soldiers, serving no king, responsible to no state, allure unto themselves, electing their officers and deciding all matters of importance, in a sovereign popular assembly. As it were, a great moving city, moving along the shores of the Yuxain. What might it, what might it not do? For one thing, it might easily plant itself on some likely site within the range of Sinope's influence, and conceivably out-top Sinope herself. The ten thousand themselves thought only of home, the Aegean, and the Greek world. Could they have procured ships at once, they would not have tarried to perplex Sinope and her daughter cities. To Xenophon, who foresaw more or less dimly the difficulties which would beset the army on its return to Greece, the idea of seizing some native town, like faces, and founding a colony, in which he might amass riches and enjoy power, was not unwelcome. But when it was known that he contemplated such a plan, though he never proposed it, he well nigh forfeited his influence with the army. In truth a colony at faces, in the land of the Golden Fleece, founded by the practical Xenophon, might have been the best solution of the fate of the ten thousand. The difficulties which they had now to face were of a different kind from those which they had so successfully surmounted, demanding not so much endurance and bravery as tact and discretion. Now that they were no longer in daily danger of sheer destruction, the motive for cohesion had lost much of its strength. If we remember that the army was composed of men of different Greek nationalities brought together by chance, and that it was now united by no bond of common allegiance, but was purely a voluntary association, the wonder is that it was not completely disorganized and scattered long before it reached Byzantium. It is true that the discipline sensibly and inevitably declined, and it is true that the host dissolved itself at Heraclea into three separate bands, though only to be presently reunited. But it is a remarkable spectacle, this large society of soldiers managing their own affairs, deciding what they would do, determining where they would go, seldom failing to listen to the voice of reason in their assemblies, whether it was the voice of Xenophon or of another. The last stages of the retreat from Trapezas to Calcedon were accomplished partly by sea, partly by land, and were marked by delays, disappointments, and disorders. It might be expected that on reaching Calcedon the army would have dispersed each man hastening to return to his own city, but they were satisfied to be well within the Greek world once more, and they wanted to replenish their empty purses before they went home. So they still held together, ready to place their arms at the disposal of any power who would pay them. To Farnabadsas, the satrap of the helispontine province of Persia, the arrival of men who had defied the power of the great king, was a source of alarm. He bribed the Lacedemonian admiral Anaxibius, who was stationed at the Bosphorus, to induce the Ten Thousand to cross over into Europe. Anaxibius compassed this by promises of high pay, but the troops who were admitted into Byzantium would have pillaged the city when they discovered that they had been deluded if Xenophon's presence of mind and persuasive speech had not once more saved them from their first impulse. After this they took service under a Thracian prince, Suthis was his name, who employed them to reduce some rebellious tribes. Suthis was more perfidious than Anaxibius, for he cheated them of the pay which they had actually earned. But better times were coming. War broke out, as we shall presently see, between Lacedemon and Persia, and the Lacedemonians wanted fighting men. The impoverished army of Cyrus, now reduced to the number of Six Thousand, crossed back into Asia, and received an advance of pay. Here our interest in them ends, if it did not already end when they reached Trapezus, our interest in all of them at least except Xenophon. Once and again Xenophon had intended to leave the army since its return to civilization, and he had steadfastly refused all proposals to elect him commander. But his strong ascendancy among the soldiers, and his consequent power to help them, had rendered it impossible for him on each occasion to abandon them in their difficulties. Now he was at last released, and returned to Athens with a considerable sum of money. It is probable that his native city, where his Master Socrates had recently suffered death, proved uncongenial to him, for he soon went back to Asia to fight with his old comrades against the Persians. When Athens presently became an ally of Persia against Sparta, Xenophon was banished, and more than twenty years of his life was spent at Silas, a Trifilion village where the Spartans gave him a home. Afterwards the sentence of exile was revoked, and his last years were passed at Athens. On a country estate near that Trifilion village, not far from Olympia, Xenophon settled down into a quiet life, with abundant leisure for literature, and composed among other things of less account the narrative of that memorable adventure in which Xenophon the Athenian had played such a leading part. Of the environment of his country life in quiet Trifilion, he has given a glimpse, showing us how he imprinted his own personality on the place. He had deposited in the great temple of Artemis at Ephesus a portion of a ransom of some captives taken during the retreat to be reserved for the service of the goddess. This deposit was restored to him at Silas, and with the money Xenophon bought a suitable place for a sanctuary of Ephesian Artemis. A river Salinas flows through the place, just as at Ephesus a river Salinas flows past the temple, and in both streams there are fishes and shellfishes, but in the place at Silas there is also all manner of game. And Xenophon made an altar and a temple with the sacred money, and henceforward he used every year to offer to the goddess a tithe of the fruits of his estate, and all the citizens and neighbours, men and women, took part in the feast. They camped in tents, and the goddess furnished them with meal, bread, wine, and sweet meats, and with a share of the hallowed dole at the sacrifice, and with a share of the game, for Xenophon's lads, and the lads of the neighbours used to hunt quarry for the feast, and men who liked would join in the chase. There was game both in the consecrated estate, and in Mount Folowee, wild swine, and gazelles, and stags. That estate has meadowland and wooded hills, good pasture for swine and goats, for cattle, and horses, and the beasts of those who fare from Sparta to the Olympian festival, for the road wends through the place, have their fill of feasting. The temple, which is girt by a plantation of fruit trees, is a small model of the great temple of Ephesus, and the cypress wood image is made in the fashion of the Ephesian image of gold. Here Xenophon could lead a happy, uneventful life, devoted to sport and literature, and the service of the gods. At a casual glance the expedition of Cyrus may appear to belong not to Greek, but to Persian history, and the retreat of the Ten Thousand may be deemed matter for a book of adventures, and a digression which needs some excuse in a history of Greece. But the story of the up-going and the homecoming of Xenophon and his fellows is, in truth, no digression. It has been already pointed out how vitally the interests of Hellas, according to human calculation, were involved in the issue of Cunexa, and how, if the arbitrement of fortune on that battlefield had been other, the future of Greece might have been other, too. But the whole episode, the up-going, the battle, and the homecoming has an importance, by no means problematical, which secures it a certain and conspicuous place in the procession of Grecian history. It is an epilogue to the invasion of Xerxes, and a prologue to the conquest of Alexander. The great king had carried his arms into Greece, and Greece had driven him back. That was a leading epoch in the combat between Asia and Europe. The next epoch will be the retribution. The Greeks will carry their arms into Persia, and Persia will fail to repel them. The success of Alexander will be the answer to the defeat of Xerxes. For this answer the world has to wait for five generations. But in the meanwhile the expedition of the soldiers of Cyrus is a prediction, vouchsafed, as it were, by history, what the answer is to be. Xenophon's anabasis is the continuation of Herodotus. Xenophon and his band are the reconnoitras who forrun Alexander. Because this significance of the adventure as a victory of Greece over Persia was immediately understood. A small company of soldiers had marched unopposed to the centre of the Persian Empire when no Greek army had ever won its way before. They had defeated almost without a blow the overwhelming forces of the king within a few miles of his capital, and they had returned safely having escaped from the hostile multitudes which did not once dare to withstand their spears in open warfare. Such a display of Persian impotence surprised the world, and Greece might well despise the power whose resources a band of strangers had so successfully defied. No Hellenic city indeed had won a triumph over the barbarian, but all Hellenic cities alike had reasoned to be stirred by pride at a brilliant demonstration of the superior excellence of the Greek to the Asiatic in courage, discipline and capacity. The lesson had, as we shall see, its immediate consequences. Only a year or two passed, and it inspired a Spartan king, a man indeed of poor ability and slight performance, to attempt to achieve the task which fate reserved for Alexander. But the moral effect of the anabasis was lasting and of greater import than the futile warfare of Agisileus. Considering these bearings, we shall have not said too much if we say that the episode of the Ten Thousand, though a private enterprise so far as Hellas was concerned, and though enacted beyond the limits of the Hellenic world, yet occupies a more eminent place on the highway of Grecian history than the contemporary transactions of Athens and Sparta and the other states of Greece. CHAPTER XII PARTS III AND IV OF A HISTORY OF GREECE TO THE DEATH OF ALEKSANDR THE GREAT VOLUME II This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A HISTORY OF GREECE TO THE DEATH OF ALEKSANDR THE GREAT VOLUME II BY JOHN BADNELL BUERY CHAPTER XII PARTS III AND IV WALL OF SPARTA WITH PERSIA The enterprise of Cyprus had immediately affected the position and prospect of the Greek cities of Ionia. In accordance with their contract, the Spartans handed over the Asiatic cities to Persia, retaining only Abidas on account of its strategic importance. Cyprus, however, bidding for Greek support, had instigated the Ionian cities to revolt from their satrap, Tisophenes, and to place themselves under his protection. Tisophenes was in time to save Miletus, but all the other cities received Greek garrisons, and thus, when Cyprus disappeared into the interior of Asia, they had practically passed out of Persian control. After the defeat of Cyrus at Kunaksa, Tisophenes returned to the Aegean coast as governor of all the districts which had been under Cyprus, and with the general title of Commander of Further Asia, implying supremacy over the adjacent Satrapes. His first concern was to recover the Greek cities of the coast, and he attacked Symi. The Asiatic Greeks were greatly alarmed, and they sent to Sparta an appeal for her protection. The relations of Sparta to Persia were no longer the same, since the help given to Cyrus was an act of war against the King. The successful march of the Ten Thousand inspired Greece with a feeling of contempt for the strength of the Persian Empire. The opportunity of plundering the wealthy satrapes of Phonabasus and Tisophenes was a bait for Spartan cupidity. The prospect of gaining signal successes against Persia appealed to Spartan ambition. These considerations induced Sparta to send an army to Asia, and this army was increased by the remains of the famous Ten Thousand, who, as already stated, crossed over from Thrace and entered the service of Sparta. Much might have been accomplished with a competent commander, but the general Sibron was unable to maintain discipline among his men, and the few successes achieved fell far short of Sparta's reasonable hopes. Sibron was superseded by Dercolidus, a man who had the repute of being unusually wily. Taking advantage of a misunderstanding between the two Satrapes, Dercolidus made a truce with Tisophenes and marched with all his forces into the province of Phonabasus, against whom he had a personal grudge. A recent occurrence rendered it possible for him to get into his hands the Troad, Aureolus, as it was called, with speed and ease. The government of this region had been granted by Phonabasus to Xenus, a native of Dardanus. When he died leaving a widow, a son, and a daughter, Phonabasus was about to choose another Sub-Satrap, but the widows whose name was Mania, presented a position that she should be permitted to fill the post which her husband had held. My husband, she argued, paid his tribute punctually, and you thanked him for it. If I do as well, why should you appoint another? If I am found unsatisfactory, you can remove me at any moment." She fortified her arguments by large presence of money to the Satrap, his offices and concubines, and won her request. She gave Phonabasus full satisfaction by her regular payments of tribute, and under her vigorous administration the Aeolid became a rich and well-defended land. A body of Greek mercenaries was maintained in her service, and immense treasures were stored in the strong mountain fortresses of Skepsis, Gurgis, and Khebron. She even reduced some coast towns in the south of the Troad, and took part herself, like the Carian Artemisia, in military expeditions. But she had for a son-in-law an ungrateful traitor, Medius of Skepsis, whom she treated with trust and affection. In order to possess himself of her power, he strangled her, then killed her son, and laid hold of the three fortresses which controlled the district, along with the treasure. But Phonabasus refused to recognize the murder of Menia, and sent back the gifts of Medius with the message. Keep them, until I come to seize both them and you. Life would not be worth living if I avenged not the death of Menia. As Medius was expecting, with alarm, the vengeance of Phonabasus, the Spartan army appeared on the scene. Durkilledus became master of the Aeolid without any opposition, since the garrisons of the cities did not acknowledge Medius, excepting only the forts of Skepsis, Gurgis, and Khebron. The garrison of Khebron soon surrendered. At Skepsis, Medius came forth to a conference, and Durkilledus, without waiting to confer, marched up to the gates of the town so that Medius, with the power of the enemy, could do nothing but order them to be opened, and his unwilling orders likewise to open the gains of Gurgis. His own private property was restored to Medius, but all the treasures of Menia were appropriated by the Spartan general, for the property of Menia belonged to her master Phonabasus, and was therefore the legitimate booty of the Satrap's enemy. This booty supplied Durkilledus with papers eight thousand soldiers for nearly a year, and it was noticed that the conduct of the heroes of the Anabasus showed a signal improvement from this time forward. The Aeolid now served the Spartans against the satrapy of Phonabasus, somewhat as Decalea had served them in Attica. It was a fortified district in the enemy's country. Sparta, hoping that these successors would induce Persia to make terms and acquiesce in the freedom of the Greek cities, concluded truces with Tisophanes and Phonabasus, and sent up ambassadors to Cesar to treat with the great king. Durkilledus, meanwhile, crossed into Europe and defended himself with restoring the cross-wall which defended Cestos and the other cities of the Chersones against the incursions of the Thracians, the inhabitants gladly furnishing pay and food to the army. On returning to Asia the Spartan commander captured after a long siege the strong town of Ataneus. Then by special orders from home he proceeded to Caria. The Spartan overtures were heard unfavourably at Cesar, for the king had been persuaded by his able satrap Phonabasus to prosecute the war by sea. The Spartans could not cope in mere numbers with the fleet which Phoenicia and Cyprus could furnish him, but everything would depend on the commander. Here fortune played into his hands. There was an enemy of Sparta, an experienced naval officer, who was ready to compass heaven and earth to work the downfall of her supremacy. The Athenian admiral Conan, who we last saw escaping from the surprise of Aegosopotomy, was burning to avenge the disgrace of that fatal day. He had found hospitality and protection at the court of Evagoras, king of the Cyprian Salamis, and through him had entered into communication with Ctesius, the Greek physician, whom we already met at Cunasa. Ctesius had the ear of the Queen Mother Parisatis, and through her influence and the advice of Phonabasus, Conan was appointed to command a fleet of three hundred ships which was prepared in Phoenicia and Cilicia. Under his command such a numerous navy was extremely formidable, but the Lacodemonian government does not seem to have realized the danger, owing perhaps to their experience of the ineffectiveness of previous Persian armaments, and they committed the mistake of throwing all their vigor into the land warfare and neglecting their sea power, which was absolutely vital for the maintenance of their supremacy. But when Conan, not waiting for the complete equipment of the fleet, sailed to Cornus in Carrier with forty ships, the Spartans were obliged to move. They sent a fleet of a hundred and twenty ships under Pharax to blockade Cornus and Conan's galleys in the harbor, and ordered decilidus to Carrier. The joint forces of Ctesiphonius and Phonabasus first raced the siege of Cornus and then confronted decilidus in the valley of the Mianda. A panic which seized some of the troops of the Spartan general might have been fatal, but the reputation of the Ten Thousand, whose valour Ctesiphonius had experienced, rented that satrap unwilling to risk a battle, and a conference issued in an armistice. But Sparta had now decided to conduct the war against Persia with greater vigor and on a larger scale, and decilidus had to make way for no less a successor than one of the Spartan kings. A guest of Leus, who now comes upon the scene, had been recently raised to the regal dignity in unusual circumstances. When Lysandon retired from public affairs to visit the temple of Zeus Ammon, he had neither discarded ambition nor lost his influence. He conceived the plan of making a change in the Spartan constitution which can hardly be described as less than revolutionary. The idea was that the kingship should be no longer confined to the Eurysthenid and Proclid families in which it was hereditary by law, but that the king should be elected from all Heraclids. The Spartan king was not a king in our sense of the word. He was not a sovereign. He was rather a grand officer of the state, but the scheme to make the office elective instead of hereditary was nevertheless momentous. It meant immediately that Lysander should hold the military functions which belonged to the kings, the command of the army abroad for life. He could no longer be disposed or recalled at the end of a term of office. And in the hands of a man like Lysander, this permanent office might become something very different from what it was in the hands of the ordinary Proclid or Eurysthenid. The proportion between the power of king and Ephor might be considerably shifted. Lysander's project might well have proved the first step to a sort of principate, which might have partially adapted Spartan institutions to the requirements of an imperial state. Lysander did not conceive the possibility of carrying this bold innovation by a coup d'etat. His plan was to bring religious influence to bear on the authorities, and he secretly employed his absence from Sparta in attempting to enlist the most important oracles in favour of his design. But the oracles received his proposals coldly. It sounded far too audacious. He succeeded, however, in winning over some of the Delphic priests who aided him to invent oracles for his purpose. A rumour was spread that certain sacred and ancient records were preserved at Delphi, never to be revealed until a son of Apollo appeared to claim them, and at the same time people began to hear of the existence of a youth named Silinus, whose mother vouched that Apollo was his sire. But the ingenious plot broke down at the last moment. One of the confederates did not play his part, and the oracles bearing on the Spartan kingship were never revealed. Lysander then abandoned his revolutionary idea and took advantage of the death of King Aegis to secure the scepter for a man whom he calculated he could direct and control. The kingship descended in the natural course, on Leo Tichidus, the son of Aegis, but it was commonly believed that this youth was illegitimate, being really the son of Elcibiades. There were doubts on the matter, but the suspicion was strong enough to enable the half-brother of Aegis, Agessa Leus, supported by the influence of Lysander, to ask his nephew and assume the scepter. Lysander was deceived in his man. The new king was not of the metal to be the kingmaker's tool. Agessa Leus had the hitherto shown only one side of his character. He had observed all the ordinances of Lycurgus from his youth up, had performed all duties with cheerful obedience, had shown himself singularly docile and gentle, had never asserted or put himself forward among his fellow-citizens. But the mask of Spartan discipline covered a latent spirit of pride and ambition which no one suspected. Agessa Leus, though strong and courageous, was of insignificant stature and lame. When he claimed the throne an objection was raised on the ground of his deformity, for an oracle had once solemnly warned like a demon to beware of a halt reign. But like all sacred weapons this oracle could be blunted or actually turned against the adversaries. The god did not mean, said Lysander, physical lameness, but the reign of one who was not truly descended from Heracles, yet those Spartans who believed in little interpretation of divine words were ill-content with the preference of Agessa Leus. The new king displayed remarkable discretion and policy by his general demeanour of deferential respect to the other authorities. This had the greater effect, as the kings were generally want to make up by their haughty manners for their want of real power. Agessa Leus made himself popular with everybody, and he maintained as king the simplicity which had marked his life as a private citizen. He was unswervingly true to his friends, but this virtue declined to vice when he upheld his partisans in acts of injustice. Not long after his accession, a serious incident occurred which gives us a glimpse of the social condition of the Lachodemonian state at this period, and shows that while the government was struggling to maintain its empire abroad, it was menaced at home by dangers which the existence of that empire rendered graver every year. Commerce with the outside world and acquisition of money had promoted considerable inequalities in wealth, and in consequence the number of peers or fully enfranchised Spartan citizens was constantly diminishing, while the class of those who had become too poor to pay their scot to the Sissitia were proportionally growing. These disqualified citizens were not degraded to the rank of periorechi, they formed a separate class and were named inferiors. A stroke of luck might at any moment enable one of them to pay his subscription and restore him to full citizenship. But the inferiors naturally formed a class of malcontents, and the narrow, ever narrowing oligarchy of peers had to fear that they might make common cause with the periorechi and helots and conspire against the state. Such a conspiracy was hatched, but was detected in its first stage through the efficient system of secret police which was established at Sparta. The prime mover seems to have been a young man of the inferior class named Synodon of great strength and bravery. The Ethels learned from an informer that Synodon had called his attention in the marketplace to the small number of Spartans compared with the multitude of their enemies, one perhaps in a hundred. All alike, inferiors, neo-demodies, periorechi, helots, were according to Synodon his accomplices. For here any of them talk about the Spartans, he talks as if he could eat them raw. And when Synodon was asked where the conspirators would find arms, he pointed to the shops of the ironsmiths in the marketplace and added that every workman and husband-man possessed tools. On the grounds of information which was perhaps more precise than this, the Ethels sent for Synodon, whom they had often employed on police service, and sent him on a mission of this kind, but with an escort which arrested him on the road, put him to the torture, and wrung from him the names of his accomplices. It would have been dangerous to arrest him in Sparta and so spread the alarm before the names of the others were known. Asked why he conspired, Synodon said, I wished to be inferior to none in Sparta. He was scorched round the city and put to death with his fellows. Recollecting the histories of other states we cannot help wondering that an ambitious general like Lysander did not attempt to use for his own purposes this mass of discontent into which Synodon's abortive conspiracy opens a glimpse. There was something in the Spartan air which made a peer rarely capable of disloyalty to the privileges of his own class. Section 4 Asiatic Campaigns of Agesilaeus, Battle of Cnidus. It was arranged that Agesilaeus should take the place of Desidilus, that he should take with him a force of two thousand neodymodes and a military council of thirty Spartans, including Lysander. In the Spartan projects at this juncture we can observe very clearly the effect of the episode of the expedition of Cyrus and the Ten Thousand in revolutioning the attitude of Greece towards Persia and spreading the idea that Persia was really weak. The Spartan leaders seem to have regarded the lands of the Great King as a field of easy conquest for a bold Greek. King Agesilaeus especially, who now began to disclose the consuming quality of ambition, dreamt of dethroning the Great King himself, and felt no doubt that he would at least speedily deliver the Asiatic coast from Persian control. But he lived sixty years too soon, and in any case this respectable Spartan was not the man to settle the eternal question. He regarded himself as a new Agamemnon going forth to capture a new Troy, and to make the illusion of resemblance complete he sailed with part of his army to Aulis to offer sacrifices there in the Temple of Artemis as the King of Men had done before the sailing of the Greeks to Illium. If Agesilaeus had subverted the Persian Empire, the sacrifice at Aulis would have seemed an interesting instance of a great man's confidence in his own star. But the performance of Agesilaeus can only provoke the mirth of history, especially as the solemnity was not successfully carried out. The Spartan king had not asked the permission of the Theavans to sacrifice in the Temple, and the body of armed men interrupted the proceedings and compelled him to desist. It was an insult which Agesilaeus never forgave to Thebes. Lysander expected that the real command in the war would devolve upon himself, and on arriving in Asia he acted on that assumption. He was soon undeceived. Agesilaeus had no intention of being merely a nominal chief, and he checked his council's self-sufficiency by invariably refusing the petitions which were presented to him through Lysander. The policy was effectual. Lysander, smarting under the humiliation, assented his own request on a separate mission to the Hellspaunt, where he did useful work for Sparta. The satraps in the meantime had renewed with Agesilaeus that the truce they had made was docilidus, but it was soon broken by Tysophanes. Agesilaeus made a faint of marching into Carrier, and then suddenly, when Tysophanes had completed his dispositions for defence, turned northwards to Frigia and invaded the satropy of Farnabasas. Here he accomplished nothing of abiding importance, but secured a vast quantity of booty with which he enriched his friends and favourites. It was no temptation to himself. The historian Xenophon, who has left us a special work on the life and character of Agesilaeus, tells many anecdotes of this campaign to illustrate the merits of his hero. These incidents, which bring out his humanity, have more than a personal interest for us. They must be taken in connection with the general fact that the Greeks of the fourth century were more humane than the Greeks of the fifth. We are told that Agesilaeus protected his captives against ill-usage. They were to be treated as men, not as criminals. Sometimes slave merchants, bleeding out of the way of his army, abandoned on the roadside little children whom they had bought. Instead of leaving these to perish by wolves or hunger, Agesilaeus had them removed and and given in charge to natives who were too old to be carried into captivity. But Agesilaeus did not scruple to use the captives without regard to their feelings, as object lessons for his own soldiers. At Ephesus, where the winter was passed, in drill, he conceived the idea of showing his troops the difference between good and bad training. He caused the prisoners to be brought up for auction naked, that the Greek soldiers might see the inferior muscles, the white skin, and the soft limbs of the Asiatics whose body were never exposed to the weather nor hardened by regular gymnastic discipline. The spectacle impressed the Greeks with their own superiority, but it was an outrage, though not intended as such, on the captives. For while all Greeks habitually stripped for exercise, Asiatics think it a shame to be seen naked. Having organised a force of cavalry during the winter, Agesilaeus took the field in spring, and gained a victory over Tysophanes on the Pactolus, near Sardis. The general ill success of Tysophanes was made a matter of complaint at Sousa. The Queen Mother, Parisatis, who had never forgiven him for the part he played in the disaster of her beloved Cyrus, made all the efforts to procure his downfall, and Tysophanes was sent to the coast to succeed him and put him to death. An offer was now made by Tysophanes to Agesilaeus, which it would have been wise to accept. He was required to leave Asia on condition that the Greek cities should enjoy complete autonomy, paying only their original tribute to Persia. Agesilaeus could not agree without consulting his government at home, and an armistice of six months was concluded. An armistice with Tysophanes, not with Persia, for Agesilaeus was left free to turn his arms against Farnabasas. In his second campaign in Fridja, the Spartan king was supported by a Paphlogonian prince named Otis, as well as by Spithridates, a Persian noble, whom Lysander had induced to revolt. The province was ravaged up to the walls of Duskillion, where Farnabasas resided, and the Spartan troops wintered in the rich parks of the neighbourhood, well supplied with birds and fish. The train of Farnabasas, who moved about the country with all his furniture, was captured, but a dispute over the spoil alienated the Oriental allies of Agesilaeus, who was the more deeply chagrined at their departure, as he was warmly attached to a beautiful youth, the son of Spithridates. The Greek occupation of Fridja was brought to an end by an interesting scene, an interview between the Persian satrap and the Lachodemonian general. Agesilaeus arrived first at the appointed place and sat down on the grass to wait. Then the servants of Farnabasas appeared and began to spread luxurious carpets for their master. But Farnabasas, seeing the simple seat of Agesilaeus, went and sat down beside him. They shook hands, and Farnabasas made a speech of dignified remonstrance. I was the faithful ally of Sparta when she was at war with Athens. I helped her to victory. I never played her false like Tisophanes, and now, for all this, you have brought me to such a plight that I cannot get a dinner in my own province saved by picking up what you leave. All my parks and hunting grounds and houses you have ravaged or burnt. Is this justice or gratitude? After a long silence, Agesilaeus explained that being at war with the great king, he had to treat all Persian territories hostile, but invited the satrap to throw off his allegiance and become an ally of Sparta. If the king sends another governor and puts me under him, said Farnabasas, then I shall be glad to become your friend and ally, but now, while I hold this poster of command for him, I shall make war upon you with all my strength. Agesilaeus was delighted with this becoming reply. I will quit your territory at once, he said, and will respect it in future, so long as I have others to make war upon. Farewells were said, and Farnabasas rode away, but his handsome son, dropping behind, said to Agesilaeus, I make you my guest, and gave him a javelin. Agesilaeus accepted the proper friendship and gave an exchange to the ornaments of his secretary's horse. The incident had a sequel. In later years, this young Persian, ill-treated by his brothers, fled for refuge to Greece, and did not seek in vain the protection of his guest-friend Agesilaeus. His success in Phrygia rendered Agesilaeus more than ever disposed to attempt conquest in the interior of Asia Minor, but in the meantime he had mismanaged manners of greater emoments. Before he marched against Farnabasas, he had received a message from Sparta, committing to him the supreme command by sea. The preparation of an adequate fleet was urgent. Conon, with eighty sail, the rest of the armament was not yet completed, and induced roads to revolt and had captured a corn-fleet which an Egyptian prince had dispatched to the Lachodemonians. Agesilaeus took measures for the equipment of a fleet of a hundred and twenty triremes at the expense of the cities of the islands and coastland, but he committed the blunder of entrusting the command to Pisanda, his brother-in-law, a man of no experience. After his Phrygian expedition, Agesilaeus had been himself recalled to Europe for reasons which will presently be related. While Farnabasas went to discharge the functions of joint admiral with Conon, who had visited Sousa in person to stimulate the Persian zeal and obtain the necessary funds. In the middle of the summer the fleet of Conon and Farnabasas, having left Cilician waters, appeared off the coast of the Canidian Peninsula. The numbers are uncertain, but the Persian fleet was overwhelmingly larger than that of Pisanda, who sailed out from Cnidus to oppose it with desperate courage. The result could not be doubtful. Pisanda's Asiatic contingents deserted him without fighting, and of the rest the greater part were taken or sunk. Pisanda fell in the action. The Greek cities of Asia expelled the Spartan garrisons and acknowledged the overlordship of Persia, thus Conon, in the guide of a Persian admiral, avenged Athens and undid the victory of the Aegos Potomai in a battle which was almost as easily won. The maritime power of Sparta was destroyed and the unstable foundations of her empire undermined. CHAPTER XII. PART V. OF A HISTORY OF GREECE TO THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. THIS IS A LIBERVOX RECORDING. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A HISTORY OF GREECE TO THE DEATH OF ALEXANDER THE GREAT. SPARTA AT THE GATES OF THE PELOPONESIS. AT THE SAME TIME SHE WAS SUFFERING SERIOUS CHECKS NEAR HER HOME. While Agassilals was meditating his wonderful schemes against Persia, war had broken out in Greece between Sparta and her allies, and the turn it took rendered it imperative to recall him from Asia. It is necessary to go back a little to explain. After the battle of the Goats River, Sparta had kept for herself all the fruits of victory. She had taken over the maritime empire of her prostrate foe, and enjoyed its tribute. Her allies had got nothing, and yet they had made far greater sacrifices than Sparta herself throughout the Peloponnesian War. Any demands made by Corinth and other allies who had borne the burden and heat of those years were hotly rejected. Vassidiman felt herself strong enough to treat her former friends with contempt. She further exhibited her despotic temper by her proceedings within the Peloponneses against those who had displeased her. Alice had given her repeated and recent grounds of offense, and Alice was now chastised. King Agis invaded and ravaged the country, and imposed severe conditions on the Aliens. They were deprived of their triphillion territory, of Silene their port, and of other places, and were compelled to pull down the incomplete fortifications of their city. The only grace accorded to them was that they should still have the privilege of conducting the Olympian festival. The Spartans indulged another grudge by expelling from Naupactus and Cephalania the residue of the Messenians who had settled in those places. The exercise of authority within the Peloponneses was regarded by Sparta as an ordering of her own domain, but she also began vigorously to assert her power in the north of Greece. She resuscitated into new life her colony of Heraclia, Neutermopole, and pushing into Thessaly she placed Elacidemonian garrison and Hormost in Farsalis. When war broke out between Persia and Sparta, it was the policy of Persia to excite a war in Greece against her enemy, and fan the smoldering discontent of the secondary Greek powers into a flame. The setrap, Tithraustis, sent a Rodian agent named Timocrates with 50 talents to bribe the leading statesmen of the chief cities to join Persia in the League of Hostility against Sparta. Timocrates visited Argos, Corinth and Thebes, and gained over some of the most influential people. But it really required only an assurance of Persian cooperation, and then a favorable occasion to raise a general resistance to the ascendancy of Lassidemon. The first aggression, however, came from Lassidemon herself. A trifle, a border dispute between Faustis and Epuntian Locris furnished the occasion, the Locrians appealing to Thebes, the Faustians to Lassidemon for support. The Lassidemonians, according to their friend Xenophon, rejoiced to have a pretext for attacking Thebes, and chastising her in silence. A double invasion of Beotia was arranged, King Posanias advancing from the south, and Lysander coming down from Heraclia on the north. Thus threatened, Thebes turned for aid to her old enemy for whose utter destruction she had pleaded a few years ago. Athens had been steadily recovering a measure of her prosperity. The oligarchical party seems to have already merged its own ambitions in loyalty to the democratic majority, which had shown such generosity in the day of its triumph. And in the debate of the Theban request for aid, men of all parties alike voted to seize the opportunity for attempting to break free from Spartan rule. The decision was felt to be bold, since the Piraeus was unfortified, but there was also a feeling that the tide was at the flood. Cohnon was sailing the southeastern seas. Rhodes had revolted. The moment must not be lost. So there was concluded an eternal alliance between the Beotians and Athenians. The phrase, pregnant with the irony of history, has been preserved on a fragment of the original treaty stone, and it shows at least the enthusiastic hopes of the hour. When Lysander approached Beotia, he was joined by her commoness, which was always bitterly hostile to Theban supremacy in Beotia. He and Posanias had arranged to meet near Heliartus, which is about halfway between Thebes and our commoness. It isn't certain whether Lysander was too soon or Posanias too late, but Lysander arrived in the district of Heliartus first and attacked the town. From their battlements, the men of Heliartus could describe a band of Thebans coming along the road from Thebes some time before the danger was visible to their assailants, and they suddenly sailed forth from the gates, taking by surprise and attacked on both sides, Lysander's men were driven back, and Lysander was slain. His death was a loss to Sparta, which she could not make good. He had made her empire such as it was, and she had no other man of first-rate ability. But the death of the Spartan Lysander was no lost degrees. Posanias soon came up, and his first object was to recover the corpse of his dead colleague. He was strong enough to extort this from the Thebans and Heliartians, but an Athenian army came up at the same moment to their assistance under the leadership of Thrasybulus. Posanias was in a difficult predicament, to fight men to incur defeat, but to acknowledge weakness by asking for a burial truce was galling to Spartan pride. A council of war, however, decided to beg for a truce, and, when the Thebans, contrary to usage, would grant it only in condition that the Peloponnesian army should leave Beosia, the terms were accepted. The Spartans vented their sorrow for the loss of Lysander in anger against their king. He was condemned to death for having failed to keep trust with Lysander and for having declined battle. It is not clear whether the first charge was well founded, as for the second, no prudent general could have acted otherwise. Posanias, who had discreetly refrained from returning to Sparta, spent the rest of his life as an exile at Tegea. The result of this double blow to the Spartans, their prestige tarnished and their able as general fallen, was the conclusion of a league against her by the four most important states. Thebes and Athens were now joined by Corinth and Argos. This alliance was soon creased by the addition of the Obeans, the Occarnians, the Calcedians of Thrace, and other minor states. Perhaps the most active spirit in this insurgent movement was the Theban Ismaeus. This leader succeeded in expelling the Spartans from their northern post, Heraclea, and spreading the Theban alliance among the peoples of those regions. Sparta lost her foothold in Thessaly, and the Phocians, who were under the protection of the Spartan Hormost, were defeated. Thus, the situation of Greece and the prospects of Sparta were completely changed. The allies, when shrinking, gathered together their forces at the Isthmus, and it was proposed by one Bolcarinthian to march straight on Sparta and burn out the wasps in their nest. But the Lacedemonians were already advancing through Arcadia to Sisyon, from which place they crossed over by Namia to the southern shores of the Seronic Gulf, a movement somewhat hampered by the allies who had reached Namia. The allies then took up a post near Corinth, and a battle was fought. The number of combatants on each side was unusually large for a Greek battle. The Spartans on their wing decisively routed the Athenians, and though on the other wing their subjects were routed, it was distinctly a Spartan victory. The losses of the Confederates were more than twice as great as those of their foes. Some unrecorded feat of arms was achieved in this battle by five Athenian horsemen who lost their lives. And in the burying ground outside the Diplom gate of Athens, we may still see the funeral monument of one of these five knights, Dexileos, a youth of twenty, who is portrayed, according to Greek habit, not in the moment of his death, but in the moment of victory, spearing a hoplight who has fallen under his horse's hooves. Strategically, the Confederates lost nothing, the victors gained nothing by the battle of Corinth. The Isthmus was left under the control of the Confederates, who were now free to oppose Dexileos and Beosia. For Dexileos was bearing down on Beosia, the battle of Heliartus and the events which followed had decided the efforts to recall him from Asia, his presence being more pressingly needed in Europe. And with a heavy heart, he was constrained to abandon his dazzling visions of Persian conquest. Agamemnon had to return to Missenne without having taken Troy. He marched over land by a route which no army had traversed since the expedition of Xerces, through Thrace and Macedonia. At Amphipolis, he received the news of the victory of Corinth, not excessively inspiring. But even as he marched, the fate of his country's empire was being decided. The victory of Canaan at Nidus was the knell of the ambitions of Agiselaos. When his army reached Chironia, the sun suffered an eclipse, and the meaning of the phenomenon was explained by the news which presently arrived of the battle of Nidus. To conceal from his army the full import of this news was the first duty of the general, and the second was to hasten on a battle while you could still be concealed. Agiselaos had been reinforced by some contingents from Lassid Daemon, as well as by troops from Faustis and Archomenus. But his main force consisted of the soldiers whom he had brought from Asia, among whom were some of the famous Ten Thousand, including Xenophon himself. The Confederate army which had fought at Corinth was now in Baotia, though hardly in the same strength, as a garrison must have been left to defend their important position near the Isthmus. The Confederates established their camp in the district of Coronia, a favorable spot for blocking against the foe the road which leads to Thebes from Faustis, and the valley of the Saphysis. On the field where the Baotians had thrown off Athenian rule half a century before, Athenians and Baotians now joined to throw off the domination of Lassid Daemon. Agiselaos advanced from the Saphysis. He commanded his own right wing, and the Argives who were on the Confederate left fled before him without striking a blow. On the other side, the Thebans on the Confederate right routed the Orchomenians on the Lassid Daemonian left. Then the two victorious right-wings willing round met each other, and the real business of the day began. The object of Agiselaos was to prevent the Thebans from joining and rallying their friends. The encounter of the hoplites is described as incomparably terrible by Xenophon, who was himself engaged in it. Agiselaos, whose bodily size was hardly equal to such a fray, was trodden underfoot and rescued by the bravery of his bodyguard. The pressure of the deep column of the Thebans pushed away through the Lassid Daemonian array. Agiselaos was left master of the field. He erected a trophy, and the Confederates asked for the burial truce. But though the battle of Coronia, like the battle of Corinth, was a technical victory for the Spartans, history must here again offer her congratulations to the side which was superficially defeated. In the chief action of the day, the Thebans had displayed superiority and thwarted the attempt of their enemy to cut them off. It was a great moral encouragement to Thebes for future warfare with Lassid Daemon. And immediately it was a distinct success for the Confederates. When an aggressor cannot follow up his victory, the victory is strategically equivalent to a repulse. Agiselaos immediately evacuated the ocean. That was the result of Coronia. He crossed over to the Peloponneses from Delphi, as the Confederates commanded the world by Corinth. It was around Corinth that the struggle of the next years mainly centered in fitting accordance with the object of the war. Sparta was fighting for domination beyond the Peloponneses. Her enemies were fighting to keep her within the Peloponneses. The most effective way of accomplishing this design was to hold the gates of the peninsula between the Corinthian and Seronic gulfs and not let her pass out. With this view, long walls were built binding Corinth, on the one hand with its western port, Lecaion, and on the other with its eastern port at Cancraeae. Thus, none could pass from the Peloponneses into northern Greece without dealing with the defenders of these fortifications. Never had Lassidemon been more helpless, almost a prisoner in her peninsula, and her maritime empire dissolved. This momentary paralysis of Lassidemon proved the salvation of Athens. The restoration of Athens to her place, among the independent powers of Greece at this juncture, came about by curious means. The satrap Farnabasus, who had done so much to aid Lysander in destroying her, now helped to bring about her resurrection. He had not forgiven Sparta for the injury which Agassilaus had inflicted on his province, and this wrangling resentment was kept alive by the circumstance that, while the other Asiatic cities had unanimously declared against Sparta after the Battle of Nidus, a bite as alone held out against himself under the Spartan Drosillidas. He exhibited his wrath by accompanying Canaan and the fleet in the following spring to the shores of Greece to ravage the Spartan territory and to encourage and support the Confederates. A Persian satrap within Scythe of Corinth and Salamis was a strange sight for Greece. His revengefulness stood Athens in good stead. When he returned home, he allowed Canaan to retain the fleet and make use of it to rebuild the long walls of Athens and fortify the Piraeus. He even supplied money to inflict this crushing blow on Sparta, a blow which completely undid the chief result of the Peloponnesian War. The two long parallel walls connecting Athens with the Piraeus were rebuilt. The port was again made defensible, and the Athenians could feel once more that they were a free and independent people in the Grecian world. Canaan, who had wrought out their deliverance, erected a temple to the Nidian Aphrodite in the Piraeus as a monument of his great victory. Never since the day of Salamis was there such cause for rejoicing at Athens, as when the fortifications were completed at the end of the autumn. As rebuilder of the walls, Canaan might claim to be a second Themistocles, but the comparison only reminds us of the change which had come over Greece in a hundred years. It was through Persian support that Athens now under the auspices of Canaan regained in part the position which it had won by her championship of Hellas against Persia under the auspices of Themistocles. She did not regain her former ascendancy or her former empire, but she was restored to an equality with the other powerful states of Greece. She could feel herself the peer of Thebes, Corinth and Argos, and of Sparta, now that Sparta had fallen from her high estate. The Athenians could now calmly maintain that defiance which they had boldly offered to Sparta by their alliance with Thebes. About the same time, the northern islands of Lemnus, Ambrus and Cyrus seemed to have been reunited to Athens, and she recovered her control of Delos, which the Spartans had taken from her. Caius, too, became her ally. It was of vital importance to the Lacedaemonians to gain command of the gates of the Peloponneses by capturing some part of the line of defense, and thus Corinth becomes the center of interest. The Lacedaemonians established their headquarters as Cecian, and from this base made a series of efforts to break through the lines of Corinth, efforts which were ultimately successful. Unluckily, the chronology is obscure, and it cannot be decided whether these operations were partly concurrent with or altogether subsequent to the rebuilding of the long walls of Athens. In Corinth itself, there was a considerable party favorable to Sparta. This party seems to have arranged a plot for violently overthrowing the oligarchy which was in power, but the design was suspected and prevented by the government, who caused the friends of Sparta to be massacred in cold blood in the marketplace and theater on the last day of the Feast of Euclia. The Corinthian government, at the same time, drew closer the bonds which attached it to the enemies of Sparta. By a remarkable measure, Corinth and Argos united themselves into a federal state. The boundary pillars were pulled up. The citizens enjoyed common rights. It would be interesting to know how this federal constitution was framed, but such an union had no elements of endurance. It was a merely political expedient. A considerable number of the Philoloconian party had escaped. Some still remained in the city, and these now managed to open a gate in the western wall and admit Precittus, the commander at Caesaean, with a Lacedaemonian mora of 600 hoplites. Precittus secured his position between the two walls by constructing a ditch and palisade across the intramural space on the side of Corinth. The Corinthians and their allies came down from the city. The palisade was torn up, a battle was fought, and the Lacedaemonians, completely victorious, captured the town of Lycaean, though not the port. Precittus then pulled down part of the walls and made incursions into the Corinthian territory on the side of the Seronic bay. But when winter set in, he disbanded his army, without making any provision for keeping the command of the Isthmus, and the Athenians came with carpenters and masons and repaired the breach in the walls. A warfare of raids was, at the same time, constantly carried on by the hostile parties, from their posts at Corinth and Caesaean. And this warfare, a force of mercenaries, trained and commanded by the Athenian efficorities, was especially conspicuous. They were armed as peltests, with light shield and javelin, and this armor was far better suited for the conditions of camp life and the duties of the professional soldier than the armor of a hoplite. The employment of mercenaries had been growing, destined, ultimately, to supplant the institution of citizen armies. It was the wilder parts of Greece, like Crete, Aetolia, Acarnania, that shively supplied the mercenary troops. A freakarties of remnants, an officer of great energy and talent, recognized the importance of the professional peltest as a new element in Hellenic warfare. And immortalized his name in military history by reforming the peltest's equipment. His improvements consisted in lengthening the sword and the javelin, and introducing a kind of leggings known as efikret head boots. It is difficult to appreciate the full import of these changes, but they were clearly meant to unite effectiveness of attack with rapidity of motion. This enterprising officer and his peltests won the chief honors of the Corinthian War. Achesilaus had been sent out to gain some more permanent successes than those which had been achieved by Precidus. His brother, Teleucius, cooperated with him by sea. The long walls were stormed, and the port of Lycaean was captured. In the following year he went forth again. It was the time of the Isthmian festival, and the gains were about to be held in the presence of Poseidon at Isthmus. Achesilaus marched thither, interrupted the Corinthians and Argives who were beginning the celebration, and presided at the contest himself. When he retired, the Corinthians came and celebrated the festival over again. Some athletes won the same race twice. Achesilaus then captured the port of Pyrean on the premontery, which forms the northern side of the inmost recess of the Corinthian Gulf. The importance of this capture lay in the fact that Pyrean connected Corinth with her allies in Beotia. Its occupation was a threat to Beotia, and the Beotians immediately sent envoys to Achesilaus. The position was now reversed. The Spartans commended the Isthmus passage, and by possessing Achesian, Pyrean, Lycaean, as well as Sidon and Chromian on the Seronic Gulf, they entirely closed in Corinth, except on the side of Argolis. If Achesilaus felt himself the arbiter of Greece, his triumph was short. The situation was rescued by efficacies. In the garrison at Lycaean, there were some men of Amicle, whose custom and privilege it was to return to their native place to keep the local feast of Yassinthus. The time of this feast was now at hand, and they set out to return home by Cessaean and Arcadia, the only way open to them. But as it was not safe for a handful of men to march under the walls of Corinth, they were escorted most of the way to Cessaean by a mora of 600 lessedemonian hoplites. As this escort was returning to Lycaean, the efficacies and his peltasts issued from the gates of Corinth and Otechnum. The heavy spearmen were worn out by the repeated assaults of the light shrews, with which they were unable to cope, and a large number were destroyed. This event, though less striking and important, bore a resemblance to the famous calamity of Specteria. In both cases, Spartan warriors had been discomfited in the same way by the continuous attacks of inaccessible light troops, and in both cases, a blow was dealt to the military prestige of lessedemon. The success of the efficacies was a suggestive sign of the future which might be in store for the professional peltest. To Agassilaos, the news came at a moment when he was regarded with triumphant arrogance, his captives and the Theban envoys. His pride was changed into chagrin. The army was plunged into sorrow, and only the relatives of those soldiers who had fallen in the battle moved about with the jubilant air of victors. Leaving another division as a garrison in Lycaean, Agassilaos returned home, skulking through the Sion and the Arcadian cities at night, in order to avoid unkind remarks. Pyrene, Sidon and Chromion were soon recovered by efficacies, and the garrison of Lycaean seems to have done no more than keep the gates of the Peloponneses open. This was the result of the Corinthian war. Sparta had succeeded in breaking down the barrier which was to shut her out from North Greece, but she had sustained a serious loss in damage to her reputation.