Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/247

 ORCETES, SATRAP OF LYDIA. 229 Darius. Oroetes, satrap of Phrygia, Lydia, and Ionia, ruling seemingly the entire western coast of Asia Minor, possessing a large military force and revenue, and surrounded by a body- guard of one thousand native Persians, maintained a haughty independence. lie secretly made away with couriers sent to summon him to Susa, and even wreaked his vengeance upon eome of the principal Persians who had privately offended him. carried on war against the Persians more than fifty years hcfore ; it appears to me, indeed, that this is the more reasonable hypothesis of the two. I have permitted myself to prolong this note to an unusual length, he- cause the supposed mention of such recent events in the history of Herod- otus, as those in the reign of Darius Nothus, has introduced very gratuitous assumptions as to the time and manner in which that history was com posed. It cannot be shown that there is a t-ingle event of precise and as- certained date, alluded to in his history, later than the capture of the Lac- edaemonian heralds in the year 430 B.C. (Herodot. vii, 137 : see Larcher, Vie d'Herodote, p. Ixxxix ): and this renders the composition of his history as an entire work much more smooth and intelligible. It may be worth while to add, that whoever reads attentively Herod- otus, vi, 98, and reflects at the same time that the destruction of the Athenian armament at Syracuse (the greatest of all Hellenic disasters, hardly inferior, for its time, to the Russian campaign of Napoleon, and especially impressive to one living at Thurii, as may be seen by the life of Lysias, Plutarch. Vit. x, Oratt. p. 835) happened during the reign of Da- rius Nothus in 413 B.C., will not readily admit the hypothesis of additions made to the history during the reign of the latter, or so late as 408 B.C. Herodotus would hardly have dwelt so expressly and emphatically upon mischief done by Greeks to each other in the reigns of Darius son of Hys- taspes, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes, if he had lived to witness the greater mis- chiefs so inflicted during the reign of Darius Nothus, and had kept his his- tory before him for the purpose of inserting new events. The destruction of the Athenians hcfore Syracuse would have been a thousand times more striking to his imagination than the revolt of the Medes against Darius Nothus, and would have impelled him with much greater force to alter or enlarge the chapter vi, 98. The sentiment too which Herodotus places in the mouth of Demaratus respecting the Spartans (vii, 104) appears to have heen written before the capture of the Spartans in Sphakteria, in 425 B.C., rather than after it compare Thucyd. iv. 40. Dahlmann (Forschungen auf dem Gehiete der Geschichtc, vol. ii, pp. 41- 47) and Heyse (Quaestiones Ilerodoteas, pp. 74-77, Berlin, io27) both pro- fess to point out six passages in Herodotus which mark events of Viter data than 430 B.C. But none of the chronological indications which <hey ad- duce appear to me trustworthy.