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124 contingent, with the Samian eleven and a few others, maintained a desperate struggle. The hundred Chian ships, each with forty picked marines on board, charged repeatedly through the enemy's line. When they had taken many of his galleys, and lost half their own, such as were able made their way to their own island. Their damaged ships made for Mycalè, where the crews ran them ashore and marched to Ephesus. But ill fortune followed them. It was night, and the Ephesians were celebrating a feast, whose chief ceremony was a torch-light procession of women. Thinking them a party of freebooters come to carry off their wives and daughters, the citizens sallied out and cut them all to pieces. Dionysius the Phocæan had taken three ships, thus exactly doubling his own number. When he saw that the fight was lost, he made straight for the coast of Phoenicia, left undefended by the absence of their war-galleys, sank a number of merchantmen in the harbours, and gained by this booty the means of setting up handsomely as a corsair in Sicily, where he plundered Carthaginians and Tyrrhenians, but—with "a refinement of delicacy very unusual," as Mr Rawlinson observes—let all Greek vessels go free.

The fall of Miletus soon followed the sea-fight. Most of the men were killed, and the women and children enslaved. The Athenians were deeply affected by the news, and when their poet Phrynichus brought on the stage his tragedy of the "Capture of Miletus," the audience burst into tears, and he was fined a thousand drachmas (francs), and forbidden ever to exhibit it again. The revolt, which had now been desperately maintained for six years, was terribly expiated. The towns on the coast were as far as possible depopulated