Page:Greece from the Coming of the Hellenes to AD. 14.djvu/127

Rh tion against Greece. He performed the first part of his commission, but in attempting to carry out the second he met with a terrible shipwreck whilst rounding the promontory of Nymphaeum (at the foot of Mount Athos) in which the greater part of his fleet and more than twenty thousand men were lost.

The expedition, however, was not entirely fruitless, for the king's authority in Thrace was strengthened, and the island of Thasos was deprived of its fleet and fortifications. Thus secured in the North, the king in the following year (B.C. 491) sent envoys into Greece to demand earth and water—the symbols of submission—from all the principal states. Many of the continental cities complied, especially those in Thessaly and Boeotia (except Plataea), as well as Argos in Peloponnese. Athens and Sparta almost alone of the greater cities refused, and even put the envoys to death. The islands of the Ægean, however, reluctantly complied, for the fleets which the possession of Phoenicia now put into the king's hand gave him supremacy at sea.

The Athenians were specially indignant that Ægina, almost in sight of the Piraeus, should have yielded to the king's command. It was too good an opportunity of humiliating an old rival to be lost, and a formal complaint was promptly lodged at Sparta, as the acknowledged head of Greece. The kings of Sparta at that time were Demaratus and Cleomenes. The latter was half crazed, but always ready to assert Spartan supremacy over neighbours. Demaratus was inclined to support the Æginetans,