Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/277

 GRECIAN AFFAIRS AFTER THE PERSIAN INVASION. 253 vent Athens from lending active aid towards the expedition which, in the year after the battle of Plataea (b.c. 478) set sail for Asia under the Spartan Pausanias. Twenty ships from the various ^ties of Peloponnesus ' were under his command : the Athenians alone furnished thirty, under the orders of Aristeides and Kimon : other triremes also came from the Ionian and insular allies. They first sailed to Cyprus, in which island they liberated most of the Grecian cities from the Persian government : next, they turned to the Bosphorus of Thrace, and undertook the siege of Byzantium, which, like Sestus in the Chersonese, was a post of great moment, as well as of great strength, — occupied by a con siderable Persian force, with several leading Persians and even kinsmen of the monarch. The place was captured,^ seemingly after a prolonged siege : it miglit probably hold out even longer than Sestus, as being taken less unprepared. The line of com- munication between the Euxine sea and Greece was thus cleared of obstruction. The capture of Byzantium proved the signal for a capital and unexpected change in the relations of the various Grecian cities ; a change, of which the proximate cause lay in the misconduct of Pausanias, but towards which other causes, deep-seated as well as various, also tended. In recounting the history of Miltiades,3 I noticed the deplorable liability of the Grecian leading men to be spoiled by success : this distemper worked with singular rapidity on Pausanias. As conqueror of Plateea, he had acquired a renown unparalleled in Grecian experience, together w-ith a prodigious share of the plunder : the concubines, horses,"^ camels, and gold plate, which had thus passed into his possession, were well calculated to make the sobriety and discipline of Spartan life irksome, while his power also, though great on foreign com- mand, became subordinate to that of the ephors when he return- ed home. His newly-acquired insolence was manifested immedi- ately after the battle, in the commemorative tripod dedicated by ' Thucvd. i, 94 ; Plutarch, Aristeides, c. 23. Diodorus (xi, 44) says that the Peloponnesian ships were fifty in number : his statement is not to be accepted, in opposition to Thucydides. '^ Thucvd, i, 94. ' See the volume of this history immediately preceding, eh. xxxvi, p. 372.
 * Herodot. ix, 81.