Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/260

 238 mSTGRY OF GREECE. and sea, the Samians obstinately defended themselves for some months longer, until the close of the summer. Nor was it until the last extremity that they capitulated ; obtaining permission for every freeman to depart in safety, but with no other property except a single garment. Lysander handed over the city and the properties to the ancient citizens, that is, to the oligarchy and their partisans, who had been partly expelled, partly disfranchised, in the revolution eight years before. But he placed the govern- ment of Samos, as he had dealt with the other cities, in the hands of one of his dekadarchies, or oligarchy of Ten Samians, chosen by himself; leaving Thorax as Lacedaemonian harmost, and doubtless a force under him. 1 Having thus finished the war, and trodden out the last spark of resistance, Lysander returned in triumph to Sparta. So im- posing a triumph never fell to the lot of any Greek, either before or afterwards. He brought with him every trireme out of the harbor of Peiraeus, except twelve, left to the Athenians as a concession ; he brought the prow-ornaments of all the ships cap- tured at .ZEgospotami and elsewhere ; he was loaded with golden crowns, voted to him by the various cities ; and he farther ex- hibited a sum of money not less than four hundred and seventy talents, the remnant of those treasures which Cyrus had handed over to him for the prosecution of the war. 2 That sum had been greater, but is said to have been diminished by the treachery of Gylippus, to whose custody it had been committed, and who sul- lied by such mean peculation the laurels which he had so glori- ously earned at Syracuse. 3 Nor was it merely the triumphant evidences of past exploits which now decorated this returning admiral. He wielded besides an extent of real power greater than any individual Greek either before or after. Imperial Sparta, as she had now become, was as it were personified in Ly- sander, who was master of almost all the insular, Asiatic, and Thracian cities, by means of the harmost and the native dekadar- chies named by himself and selected from his creatures. To this state of things we shall presently return, when we have folio wed the eventful history of the Thirty at Athens. 1 Xenoph. Hellen. ii, 3, 6-8. * Xenoph. Helltn. i', ? 8
 * Plutarch, Lysand. c. 16; Diodor. xiii, 106