Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/110

Rh king, Demaratus, was opposed to his designs. The Corin thians refused to follow him, and his army broke up when it had advanced no further than Eleusis. Meanwhile the Thebans and the Chalcidians of Euboea had been induced to take up arms against Athens. Freed from the danger of the Peloponnesian invasion, the Athenians marched against the Thebans. They found them on the shore of ths Euripus, and routed them. Crossing the strait into Euboea, they defeated the Chalcidians on the same day. The lands of the Chalcidian knights (Hippobotae) were divided in equal lots among four thousand Athenians, who occupied them, not as colonists forming a new city, but as non-resident citizens of Athens. This was the first kleru- chia. The Spartans, incited by Cleomenes, now made a final effort to repress the democratic strength of Athens. Hippias was invited from his retreat on the Hellespont to Lacedaemon, and a Peloponnesian congress was convened at Sparta to discuss a project for restoring him to Athens as tyrant. The representative of Corinth urged that it would be shameful if Sparta, the enemy of tyrannies, should help to set up a new one. The congress was of his mind. The scheme failed, and Hippias went back to Sigeum.

Jn these five years (510-505) which followed the fall of the Pisistratidte the future of Athens was decided. Athens had become a free commonwealth, in which class grievances no longer hindered the citizens from acting together with vigorous spirit. The results were soon to appear in work done by the "Athenians, not for Athens only, but for all Greece.

The time was now drawing near when Greece was to sustain its first historical conflict with the barbarian world. There was not, in the modern sense, an Hellenic nation. But there were common elements of religion, manners, and culture, which together constituted an Hellenic civilization, and were the basis of a common Hellenic character. The Graikoi of Epirus, united in the worship of the Pelasgian Zeus, had become the Hellenes of Thessaly, united in the worship of Apollo. The shrine of Delphi, at first the centre of the most important amphictyony, had now become the religious centre of all Hellas. It was acknowledged as such by foreigners, by the kings of Phrygia and Lydia in the east, by the Etruscan Tarquinii in the west, as after wards by the Roman republic. In political matters also Delphi was a common centre for the Greek states, mediat ing or advising in feuds between factions or cities, and giving the final sanction to constitutional changes. A sense of Hellenic unity was further promoted by the great festivals. It has already been seen how Sparta lent new brilliancy to the gatherings at Olympia. The Pythian fes tival was revived with a fresh lustre after the first Sacred War (595-585), in which Clisthenes, tyrant of Sicyon, and his allies destroyed Crisa, the foe of Delphi. A little later two other festivals were established, the Isthmian and the Nemean, at about the time when the tyranny of the Cypselid;e was overthrown at Corinth, and that of the Orthagoridae at Sicyon. The games of Nemea and of the Isthmus were new assertions of the Dorian sentiment which was so strongly opposed to tyrannies, and they exemplify the manner in which such festivals were fitted to express and strengthen national sympathy. In the gradual growth, too, of Hellenic art, with a stamp of its own distinct from that of Assyria, Babylon, Phoenicia, or Egypt, the Greeks found a bond of union, and the temples were centres at which the growth of such an art was encouraged and recorded. Above all, the Homeric poetry, in which the legends of the heroic age took a form that appealed to every branch of the Greek race, was a witness to the contrast between Greek and barbarian. It was the interpretation of this contrast which made Homer so peculiarly the national poet. Still the unity of Greece had hitherto been little more than an ideal. The only great enterprise in which Greeks had made common cause against barbarians belonged to legend. The first historical event in which the unity of Greece found active expression was the struggle with Persia.

III. The Ionic Revolt and the Persian Wars, 502-479 B.C.

The twelve Ionian cities on the western coast of Asia Minor formed a community which kept itself thoroughly distinct from the vEolian colonists to the north and the Dorians to the south. The Pan-Ionic festivals preserved the memory of the common descent. The Ionian life and culture had a character of its own. But the Ionian cities The had no political cohesion, nor had they any recognized Ionian leader. One after another they became tributary to the Clties kings of Lydia. The process of subjugation commenced at the time when the Lydian dynasty of the Mermnadae (about 716 B.C.) began to make themselves independent of Assyria. It was completed by Crcesus, to whom, about 550 B.C., all the Ionian cities had became subject. Crcesus under was friendly to the Greeks : he respected their religion, Lydia and enriched its shrines ; he welcomed distinguished Greeks to Sardis. All that was exacted from the lonians by Crcesus was that they should acknowledge him as their suzerain, and pay a fixed tribute. The Persians, under Cyrus, defeated Croesus and conquered Lydia about 547 B.C. The whole coast-line of Asia Minor was afterwards reduced by Harpagus, the general of Cyrus. The Persians, muler zealous monotheists, destroyed the Greek temples. But it Persia was not till the reign of Darius, who succeeded Cambyses in 521 B.C :, that the lonians felt the whole weight of the Persian yoke. Darius, the able organizer of the Persian empire, preferred that each Ionian city should be ruled by one man whom he could trust. He therefore gave system atic support to tyrannies.

It is characteristic of the political condition of Ionia that ^he i, the revolt was not a popular movement, but was the work revolt. of two men, each of whom had private ends to serve. Ilistiaeus, tyrant of Miletus, had rendered a vital service to Darius during his Scythian expedition (510 B.C.) by dissuading the other Greek leaders from breaking down the bridge over the Danube, which secured the retreat of the Persian army. Having been rewarded with a principality in Thrace, he presently became suspected of ambitious designs. Darius sent for him to Susa, and detained him there on the pretext that he could not live without his friend. Meanwhile Aristagoras, the son-in-law of Histianis, ruled at Miletus. In 502 Aristagoras undertook to restore the exiled oligarchs of Naxos, and for this purpose obtained 200 Persian ships from Artaphernes, the satrap of western Asia Minor. The enterprise miscarried. Aristagoras, dreading the anger of Artaphernes, now began to meditate revolt. He was encouraged by secret messages from Histiseus, who hoped to escape from Susa by being sent to suppress the rising. Aristagoras laid down his tyranny, and called on the people of Miletus to throw off the Persian yoke. The other Ionian cities followed the example. They deposed their tyrants and declared themselves free. The ^Eolian and Dorian settlements made common cause with them. Cyprus also joined in the revolt (500 B.C.). Aristagoras next sought aid beyond the ^Egean. Sparta held aloof, but five ships were sent by the Eretrians, and twenty by the Athenians. The united Greek force surprised Sardis, and set fire to it, but was presently driven back to the coast. The Athenians then went home. Darius was deeply incensed by this outrage. The whole Persian force was brought to bear on Ionia, and Miletus was invested by land and sea. In a sea fight off Lade, an island near Miletus, the lonians were decisively defeated by a Persian fleet of nearly twice their number, 