Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/148

 126 HISTORY OF GREECE. plied maintenance and clothing to the distressed seamen of th vanquished fleet, but also encouraged the construction of fresh ships in the room of those captured. While he armed the sea- men, gave them pay for two months, and distributed them as guards along the coast of the satrapy, he at the same time grant- ed an unlimited supply of ship-timber from the abundant forests of Mount Ida, and assisted the officers in putting new triremes on the stocks at Antandrus ; near to which, at a place called Aspa- neus, the Idaean wood was chiefly exported. 1 Having made these arrangements, he proceeded to lend aid at Chalkedon, which the Athenians had already begun to attack. Their first operation after the victory, had been to sail to Perin- thus and Selymbria, both of which had before revolted from Athens : the former, intimidated by the recent events, admitted them and rejoined itself to Athens; the latter resisted such a requisition, but ransomed itself from attack for the present, by the payment of a pecuniary fine. Alkibiades then conducted them to Chalkedon, opposite to Byzantium on the southernmost Asiatic border of the Bosphorus. To be masters of these two straits, the Bosphorus and the Hellespont, was a point of first-rate moment to Athens ; first, because it enabled her to secure the arrival of the corn ships from the Euxine, for her own consumption ; next, because she had it in her power to impose a tithe or due upon all the trading ships passing through, not unlike the dues imposed by the Danes at the Sound, even down to the present time. For the opposite reasons, of course, the importance of the position was equally great to the enemies of Athens. Until the spring of the preceding year, Athens had been undisputed mistress of both the straits. But the revolt of Abydos in the Hellespont (about April, 411 B.C.) and that of Byzantium with Chalkedon in the Bosphorus (about June, 411 B.C.), had deprived her of this pre- eminence ; and her supplies chained during the last few months could only have come through during those intervals when her fleets there stationed had the preponderance, so as to give them convoy. Accordingly, it is highly probable that her supplies of corn from the Euxine during the autumn of 411 B.C., had been comparatively restricted. 1 Xenoph. Hcllen. i, 1, 24-26; Strabo, xiii, p. 606