Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/312

 294 HISTORY OF GREECE. Meanwhile the principal force of Darius having been assem- bled at Sardis, Daurises, Hymeas, and other generals who had married daughters of the Great King, distributed their efforts against different parts of the western coast. Daurises attacked the towns near the Hellespont, 1 Abydus, Perkote, Lampsakus, and Paesus, which made little resistance. He was then ordered southward into Karia, w r hile Hymeas, who, with another division, had taken Kios on the Propontis, marched down to the Helles pont and completed the conquest of the Troad as well as of the JEolic Greeks in the region of Ida. Artaphernes and Otanes attacked the Ionic and JEolic towns on the coast, the former taking Klazomena?, 2 the latter Kyme. There remained Karia, v.'hich, with Miletus in its neighborhood, offered a determined re- sistance to Daurises. Forewarned of his approach, the Karians assembled at a spot called the White Pillars, near the confluence of the rivers Majander and Marsyas. Pixodarus, one of their chiefs, recommended the desperate expedient of fighting with the river at their back, so that all chance of flight might be cut off; cutting off his nose and ears, exposing him to all sorts of insults, and ulti- mately causing him to be flayed alive. The skin of this unfortunate general was conveyed to Constantinople as a trophy, but in after-times found its way to Venice. We read of nothing like this treatment of Bragadino in the Persian recon quest of Cyprus, though it was a subjugation after revolt ; indeed, nothing like it in all Persian warfare. Von Hammer gives a short sketch (not always very accurate as to ancient times) of the condition of Cyprus under its successive masters, Persians, Graeco-Egyptians, Romans, Arabians, the dynasty of Lusignan, Venetians, and Turks. the last seems decidedly the worst of all. In reference to the above-mentioned piece of cruelty, I may mention that the Persian king Kambyses caused one of the royal judges (according to Herodotus v, 25), who had taken a bribe to render an iniquitous judgment, to be flayed alive, and his skin to be stretched upon the seat on which his son was placed to succeed him ; as a lesson of justice to the latter. A sim- ilar story is told respecting the Persian king Artaxcrxes Mnemon ; and what is still more remarkable, the same story is also recounted in the Turk- ish history, as an act of Mohammed the Second (Von Hammer, Geschichto des Osmannisch. Reichs, book xvii, vol. ii, p. 209 ; Diodoras, xv, 10). Ammianns Marcellinus (xxiii, 6) had good reason to treat the reality of the fact as problematical. 1 Herodot. v. 117. * Herodot. 122-124.