Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/599

 EMPIRE.] PERSIA 571 burned the king s capital,&quot; and many added, &quot;It is all over with the king s supremacy ! &quot; Not only did the Hel- lespontine cities, with Byzantium at their head, join the lonians, but also a great part of the Carians, the Greeks in the Troad, and almost the whole of the very flourishing island of Cyprus. By this time the possession of these lands was really endangered by the revolt. But now the Persians came with a great fleet to Cyprus. The lonians sailed to meet them, beat them at sea off Salamis in Cyprus, but were beaten by the Persians on land. After great struggles, which are described in an almost epic style, befitting the primitive state of the island, Cyprus came once more under the power of the Persians, after being free only one year. This was the first heavy blow to the insurrection. Much fighting took place on the mainland ; and most of the Persian enterprises were success ful, but not all. In particular the Carians, who in general displayed great gallantry in this war, annihilated a whole Persian army under a son-in-law of Darius. But the longer the war lasted, the more marked became the progress made by the Persians. Aristagoras left the seat of war, and withdrew to his possessions of Myrcinus on the Lake of Prasias in the south of Thrace, near what was afterwards Amphipolis, but was there slain by natives as early as 49 7. : Darius then despatched Histiaeus, whom he still continued to believe faithful, to Ionia, probably in order to open negotiations. He availed himself of the oppor tunity to seek to regain the lordship of Miletus and put himself at the head of the whole revolt, but the Milesians would have nothing more to do with him or with Aris tagoras. The great intriguer had connexions on all sides, but no one trusted him in the long run. He became at last a pirate on his own account ; and after many adven tures he fell into the hands of the Persians and was crucified. It is a noteworthy fact that Histigeus had actually concerted a conspiracy with the Persians in Sardis, against Artaphernes and Darius, the discovery of which cost many their head. Fidelity has never been an Iranian virtue. The decisive struggle was concentrated about Miletus. There, at the little island of Lade, as Grote points out, the odds against the Greek fleet (600 triremes against 353) were not so unfavourable as they were at Salamis, and the want of unity of leadership was not much greater than it was there ; but the lonians and Lesbians were not, or were no longer, the equals of the European Greeks in bravery and warlike skill. A complete overthrow was the result, in which treachery on the Greek side had its share. Miletus long defended itself by sea and land, but was at last taken and destroyed ; the women and children were sold as slaves. The captured Milesians were carried off into the heart of Asia and settled at Susa. Miletus, up to that time by far the most important of all Greek cities in Asia, though it afterwards recovered, still never regained its old position. The most important city of the coast was henceforward Ephesus, which took no part in the battle of Lade, and perhaps had at that time already submitted amicably to the Persians. The subjugation of the rest of the Greeks of the main land and islands, as well as of the Carians, now rapidly followed, not without dreadful massacres and devastations. The Phoenicians, who formed the main body of the Persian fleet, seem to have been especially zealous in the work of destruction. The old bitterness between the Canaanites and the Hellenes, so vividly shown during these centuries in Sicily, cannot have died out in the east. In ruined Ionia a frightful state of things must have prevailed, so that at last Artaphernes saw himself obliged to undertake a regu lar organization to ensure the peace of the country. At 1 Time., iv. 102. the same time he caused the land to be surveyed, and estab- 500-485. lished fixed imposts. 2 These were not higher than before the war, but naturally they now pressed much harder on the impoverished lonians. Thereupon the young Mardonius, son of the Gobryas who has been mentioned before, and brother-in-law and son-in-law of the king, established de mocracies in all Ionian cities. The weakened communities might well seem to the Persians at that time less dangerous than ambitious tyrants. However, this measure apparently applied only to the lonians of the mainland, not to the islanders nor to the other Greeks of the mainland. Mardonius cherished great designs. He wished to con quer Greece itself. He did actually conquer Greeks and non-Greeks in the north-west of the Archipelago, but at the promontory of Athos his fleet was shattered by a storm. The second expedition against Greece was on a greater Expedi- scale. Under the conduct of the Mede Datis and the tl01 ^ younger Artaphernes, son of Darius s brother of the same Q ga name, the Persians took Naxos, and destroyed Eretria in Euboea, the inhabitants of which had sent five ships to help the lonians at the beginning of the revolt. But at Marathon they were utterly defeated by the Athenians and Platseans (September or October 490). They quickly renounced the project of subjecting Athens to Hippias as tyrant and to Darius as suzerain, and departed home. Miltiades, who, as lord of the Thracian Chersonese, had once been the king s vassal and had afterwards been obliged to fly, had taken the measure of the Persian. By his victory Athens had rendered immortal service to Europe and the cause of civilization. It was the first great victory of the Greeks over the Persians in the open field ; the moral impression had an immense effect in the sequel, when the danger was much greater. The south-west of the empire alone had hitherto re- Relations mained free from rebellion against Darius. Darius, who with had been with Cambyses in Egypt (Herod., iii. 139), treated ^gyp*- the Egyptians rath forbearance, and in return loyal priests praised him to fellow-countrymen and Greeks. If a notice of Polysenus is to be trusted, he must have gone in person to Egypt in the year 517, 3 in order to lighten the burdens of the people. Amongst other measures which promoted the material wellbeing of the land, he made a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea, as an inscription of the king himself testifies to this day. But the hatred of the Egyp tians to the Persians was too great. In the year 486 (Herod., vii. 1, 4) the first great insurrection of the Egyp tians against the Persians took place. From an inscription we know that during it Khabbash or Khabash was king of Egypt. Darius did not live to see the revolt put down, for he died in the following year, 485. Darius is the most remarkable king of the dynasty of Darius s the Achaemenians, and perhaps the most remarkable of all character, the native kings of Iran. So far as we know, only the Sasanid Khosrau I. in the 6th and the Safavid Abbds the Great in the 17th century A.D. can be compared with him. He was as energetic as he was prudent. He was of course a despot, and could be ruthless and even cruel, but on the whole he was inclined to be mild. We lay especial weight on the testimony of ^Eschylus, who had himself fought at Marathon against the army of Darius, and who shared the exasperation of the Athenians against the Persians, but nevertheless in his Persse expresses very high respect for the king. This, then, was the judg ment of educated Greeks on the prince who had brought such untold misery upon their nation. To such a judgment great weight is to be attached. In harmony with it are the particulars which we know of the doings and ordi- - Herod., vi. 42; Diod., x. 59. 3 See Wiedemaun, op. cit.,~&amp;gt;. 237.