Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/223

 BATTLES OF PLATJEA AND MYKALE. J^ of Kilikia. Xerxes was still at Sardis, where he had remained ever since his return, and where he conceived a passion for the wife of his brother Masistes ; the consequences of his passion entailed upon that unfortunate woman sufferings too tragical to be described, by the orders of his own queen, the jealous and savage Amestris.' But he had no frcsh army ready to send down to the coast, so that the Greek cities, even on the continent, were for the time practically liberated from Persian supremacy, while the insular Greeks were in a position of still greater safety. The commanders of the victorious Grecian fleet had full con- fidence in their power of defending the islands, and willingly admitted the Chians, Samians, Lesbians, and the other islanders hitherto subjects of Persia, to the protection and reciprocal en- gagements of their alliance. "We may presume that the despots Stratis-and Theomestor were expelled from Chios and Samos.^ But the Peloponnesian commanders hesitated in guaranteeing the same secure autonomy to the continental cities, which could not be upheld against the great inland power without efforts incessant as well as exhausting. Nevertheless, not enduring to abandon these continental lonians to the mercy of Xerxes, they made the offer to transplant them into European Greece, and to make room for them by expelling the medizing Greeks from their seaport towns. But this proposition was at once repudiated by the Athenians, who would not permit that colonies originally planted by themselves should be abandoned, thus impairino- the metropolitan dignity of Athens."^ The Lacedaemonians readily acquiesced in this objection, and were glad, in all probability, to find honorable grounds for renouncing a scheme of wholesale dispossession eminently difficult to execute,"! — yet, at the same ' Herodot. ix. 108-113. He gives the story at considerable length: it illustrates forcibly and painfully the interior of the Persian regal palace. ^ Herodot. viii, 132. ' Herodot. ix, 106 ; Diodor. xi, 37. The latter represents the lonians and -(Eolians as having actually consented to remove into European Greece, and indeed the Athenians themselves as having at first consented to it, though the latter afterwards repented and opposed the scheme. another have always been more or less in the habits of Oriental despots, the Persians in ancient times and the Turks in more modem times : to a
 * Such wholesale transportations of population from one continent to