Page:The City-State of the Greeks and Romans.djvu/272

248 take two or three notable cases by way of illustration; cases of which we have some definite information, and which will fix themselves on the memory as we become sensible of the disastrous results which each of them brought incidentally upon the whole of Hellas.

At the end of the sixth century Naxos was one of the most flourishing States in the Ægean Sea; it lay in a most favourable position, not too near the coast to be in danger of concquest by the Persian, and was the largest of the islands which the Greeks knew as the Cyclades. It was reported to be able to muster 8000 armed men, and to equip a large fleet of warships. It was also said to be rich both in money and slaves. But Naxos was divided against itself In the year 501 B.C. a number of its oligarchical party (of the "fat," or comfortable, as Herodotus calls them) were sent into exile by the Demos, or fled of their own accord before violence. They chose to go to Miletus, then the most powerful Greek city in Ionia. Miletus had also suffered from internal discord, but had called in the Parians to cure the disease, and was now prospering greatly under the strong rule of a leading citizen, Aristagoras. To this man the Naxian oligarchs applied for help. Aristagoras did not refuse it, but for reasons of his own he made it a bargain that he should himself ask aid for the undertaking from his friend Artaphernes, the Persian satrap in Sardis. This is a story which is constantly repeated in various forms during the two following centuries; Greeks, quarrelling among