Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/381

 SUBSEQUENT CONDUCT OF MILTIADES. 365 and to have had the satisfaction of talking to them in Greek, which we may well conceive to have made some impression upon him, at a spot distant by nearly three months' journey from tbo coast of Ionia. 1 Happy would it have been for Miltiades if he had shared the honorable death of the polemarch Kallimachus, " animam exhalasset opimam," in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy contrast with the Marathonian heroism. His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. Pie proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion ; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assur- ing them that, if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise, from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon, was sufficient, and the armament was granted, no man except Milti- ades knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a 1 Herodot. vi, 119. Darius atbsac rfc Kicra^c wp;?f naTo'imae kv kuvrov T(j> oiv%daaovre TT/V up^airjv y/lw<7<7av. The meaning of the word ara^fj.bg is explained by Herodot. Y, 52. oraify/df EUVTOV is the same as arai?//df /JacuA^iof : the particulars which Herodotus recounts about Arderikka, and its remarkable well, or pit of bitumen, salt, and oil, give every reason to believe that he had himself stopped there. Strabo places the captive Erctrians in Gordyene, which would be con siderably higher up the Tigris ; upon whose authority, we do not know (Strabo, xv, p. 747). The many particulars which are given respecting the descendants of these Eretrians in Ivissia, by Philostratus, in his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, as they are alleged to have stood even in the first century of the Christian era, cannot be safely quoted. With all the fiction there con- tained, some truth may perhaps be mingled ; but we cannot discriminate il 'Philostratus. Vit, Apollon. i, c. 24-30).