The whole Persian fleet, manned by Phœnician sailors, and a huge army, under the two satraps Datis and Artaphernes, were on the opposite side of the Ægean Sea, ready to overwhelm little Attica first, and then all Greece. Nobody had yet stood firm against those all-conquering Persians, and as they came from island to island the inhabitants fled or submitted. Attica was so small as to have only 9000 fighting men to meet this host. They sent to ask the aid of the Spartans, but though these would have fought bravely, an old rule forbade them to march during the week before the full moon, and in this week Athens might be utterly ruined. Nobody did come to their help but 600 men from the very small state of Platæa, and this little army, not numbering 10,000, were encamped around the temple of Hercules, looking down upon the bay of Marathon, where lay the ships which had just landed at least 200,000 men of all the Eastern nations, and among them many of the Greeks of Asia Minor. The hills slant back so as to make a sort of horse-shoe round the bay, with about five miles of clear flat ground between them and the sea, and on this open space lay the Persians.
It was the rule among the Athenians that the heads of their ten tribes should command by turns each for a day, but Aristides, the best and most high-minded of all of them, persuaded the rest to give up their turns to Miltiades, who was known to be the most skilful captain. He drew up his men in a line as broad as the whole front of the Persian army, though far less deep, and made them all come rushing down at them with even step, but at a run, shouting the war-cry, “Io pæan! Io pæan!” In the middle, where the best men of the Persians were, they stood too firm to be thus broken, but at the sides they gave way, and ran back towards the sea, or over the hills, and then Miltiades gave a signal to the two side divisions—wings, as they were called—to close up together, and crush the Persian centre. The enemy now thought of nothing but reaching their ships and putting out to sea, while the Athenians tried to seize their ships; Cynegyrus, one brave Greek, caught hold of the prow of one ship, and when the crew cut off his hand with an axe, he still clung with the other, till that too was cut off, and he sank and was drowned. The fleet still held many men, and the Athenians saw that, instead of crossing back to Asia Minor, it was sailing round the promontory of Sunium, as if to attack Athens. It was even said that a friend of Hippias had raised a shield, glittering in the sun, as a signal that all the men were away. However, Miltiades left Aristides, with his tribe of 1000 men, to guard the plain and bury the dead, and marched back over the hills with the rest to guard their homes, that same night; but the Persians must have been warned, or have changed their mind, for they sailed away for Asia; and Hippias, who seems to have been wounded in the battle, died at Lemnos. The Spartans came up just as all was over, and greatly praised the Athenians, for indeed it was the first time Greeks had beaten Persians, and it was the battle above all others that saved Europe from falling under the slavery of the East. The fleet was caught by a storm as it crossed the Ægean Sea again.
All the Athenians who had been slain were buried under one great mound, adorned with ten pillars bearing their names; the Platæans had another honourable mound, and the Persians a third. All the treasure that was taken in the camp and ships was honourably brought to the city and divided. There was only one exception, namely, one Kallias, who wore long hair bound with a fillet, and was taken for a king by a poor Persian, who fell on his knees before him, and showed him a well where was a great deal of gold hidden. Kallias not only took the gold, but killed the poor stranger, and his family were ever after held as disgraced, and called by a nickname meaning, “Enriched by the Well.”
The Platæans were rewarded by being made freemen of Athens, as well as of their own city; and Miltiades, while all his countrymen were full of joy and exultation, asked of them a fleet of seventy ships, promising to bring them fame and riches. With it he sailed for the island of Faros, that which was specially famed for its white marble. He said he meant to punish the Parians for having joined the Persians, but it really was because of a quarrel of his own. He landed, and required the Parians to pay him a hundred talents, and when they refused he besieged the city, until a woman named Timo, who was priestess at a temple of Ceres near the gates, promised to tell him a way of taking the city if he would meet her at night in the temple, where no man was allowed to enter. He came, and leaped over the outer fence of the temple, but, brave as he was in battle, terror at treading on forbidden and sacred ground overpowered him, and, without seeing the priestess, he leaped back again, fell on the other side, and severely injured his thigh. The siege was given up, and he was carried back helpless to Athens, where there was no mercy to failures, and he was arraigned before the Areopagus assembly, by a man named Xanthippus, for having wasted the money of the State and deceived the people, and therefore being guilty of death.
It must have been a sad thing to see the great captain, who had saved his country in that great battle only a year or two before, lying on his couch, too ill to defend himself, while his brother spoke for him, and appealed to his former services. In consideration of these it was decided not to condemn him to die, but he was, instead, to pay fifty talents of silver, and before the sum could be raised, he died of his hurts. It was said that his son Kimôn put himself into prison till the fine could be raised, so as to release his father’s corpse, which was buried with all honour on the plain of Marathon, with a tomb recording his glory, and not his fall.
The two chief citizens who were left were Aristides and Themistocles, both very able men; but Aristides was perfectly high-minded, unselfish, and upright, while Themistocles cared for his own greatness more than anything else. Themistocles was so clever that his tutor had said to him when he was a child, “Boy, thou wilt never be an ordinary person; thou wilt either be a mighty blessing or a mighty curse to thy country.” When he grew up he used his powers of leading the multitude for his own advantage, and that of his party. “The gods forbid,” he said, “that I should sit on any tribunal where my friends should not have more advantage than strangers.” While, on the other hand, Aristides was so impartial and single-hearted that he got the name of Aristides the Just. He cared most for the higher class, the aristoi, and thought they could govern best, while Themistocles sought after the favour of the people; and they both led the minds of the Athenians so completely while they were speaking, that, after a meeting where they had both made a speech, Aristides said, “Athens will never be safe till Themistocles and I are both in prison,” meaning that either of them could easily make himself tyrant.
However, Aristides, though of high family, was very poor, and men said it was by the fault of his cousin Kallias, the “Enriched by the Well;” and Themistocles contrived to turn people’s minds against him, so as to have him ostracised. One day he met a man in the street, with a shell in his hand, who asked him to write the name of Aristides on it, as he could not write himself. “Pray,” said Aristides, “what harm has this person done you, that you wish to banish him?”
“No harm at all,” said the man; “only I am sick of always hearing him called the Just.”
Aristides had no more to say, but wrote his own name; and six thousand shells having been counted up against him, he was obliged to go into exile for ten years.
Cynegyrus, the man whose hands had been cut off in the bay of Marathon, had a very famous brother named Æschylus—quite as brave a soldier, and a poet besides. The Athenians had come to worshipping Bacchus, but not in the horrid, mad, drunken manner of the first orgies. They had songs and dances by persons with their heads wreathed in vine and ivy leaves, and a goat was sacrificed in the midst. The Greek word for a goat is tragos, and the dances came to be called tragedies. Then came in the custom of having poetical speeches in the midst of the dances, made in the person of some old hero or god, and these always took place in a curve in the side of a hill, so worked out by art that the rock was cut into galleries, for half-circles of spectators to sit one above the other, while the dancers and speakers were on the flat space at the bottom. Thespis, whom Solon reproved for falsehoods, was the first person who made the dancers and singers, who were called the chorus, so answer one another and the speakers that the tragedy became a play, representing some great action of old. The actors had to wear brazen masks and tall buskins, or no one could have well seen or heard them. Æschylus, when a little boy, was set to watch the grapes in his father’s vineyard. He fell asleep, and dreamt that Bacchus appeared to him, and bade him make his festivals noble with tragedies; and this he certainly did, for the poetry he wrote for them is some of the grandest that man ever sung, and shows us how these great Greeks were longing and feeling after the truth, like blind men groping in the dark. The custom was to have three grave plays or tragedies on the same subject on three successive days, and then to finish with a droll one, or comedy, as it was called, in honour of the god Comus. There is one trilogy of Æschylus still preserved to us, where we have the death of Agamemnon, the vengeance of Orestes, and his expiation when pursued by the Furies, but the comedy belonging to them is lost.
Almost all the greatest and best Greeks of this time believed in part in the philosophy of Pythagoras, who had lived in the former century, and taught that the whole universe was one great divine musical instrument, as it were, in which stars, sun, winds, and earth did their part, and that man ought to join himself into the same sweet harmony. He thought that if a man did ill his spirit went into some animal, and had a fresh trial to purify it, but it does not seem as if many others believed this notion.
View in the vicinity of Athens
The Athenians had not a long breathing-time. Darius, indeed, died five years after the battle of Marathon; but his son Xerxes was far more fiery and ambitious, and was no sooner on the throne than he began to call together all the vast powers of the East, not to crush Athens alone, but all the Greeks. He was five years gathering them together, but in the spring of 480 he set out from Sardis to march to the Hellespont, where he had a bridge of ships chained together, made to enable his army to cross the strait on foot. Xerxes was a hot-tempered man, not used to resistance, and it was said that when a storm broke part of his bridge he caused the waves to be scourged and fetters to be thrown in, to show that he was going to bind it to his will. He sat on a throne to watch his armies pass by. It is said that there were two million six hundred thousand men, of every speech and dress in Asia and Egypt, with all sorts of weapons; and as the “Great King” watched the endless number pass by, he burst into tears to think how soon all this mighty host would be dead men!
Xerxes had a huge fleet besides, manned by Phœnicians and Greeks of Asia Minor, and this did not venture straight across the Ægean, because of his father’s disaster, but went creeping round the northern coast. Mount Athos, standing out far and steep into the sea, stood in the way, and it was dangerous to go round it; so Xerxes thought it would be an undertaking worthy of him to have a canal dug across the neck that joins the mountain to the land, and the Greeks declared that he wrote a letter to the mountain god, bidding him not to put rocks in the way of the workmen of the “Great King.” Traces of this canal can still be found in the ravine behind Mount Athos.
All the Greeks knew their danger now, and a council from every city met at the Isthmus of Corinth to consider what was to be done. All their ships, 271 in number, were gathered in a bay on the north of the great island of Eubœa. There the Spartan captain of the whole watched and waited, till beacons from height to height announced that the Persians were coming, and then he thought it safer to retreat within the Euripus, the channel between the island and the mainland, which is so narrow that a very few ships could stop the way of a whole fleet. However, just as they were within shelter, a terrible storm arose, which broke up and wrecked a great number of Persian ships, though the number that were left still was far beyond that of the Greeks. On two days the Greeks ventured out, and always gained the victory over such ships as they encountered, but were so much damaged themselves, without destroying anything like the whole fleet, that such fighting was hopeless work.
In the meantime Xerxes, with his monstrous land army, was marching on, and the only place where it seemed to the council at the Isthmus that he could be met and stopped was at a place in Thessaly, where the mountains of Œta rose up like a steep wall, leaving no opening but towards the sea, where a narrow road wound round the foot of the cliff, and between it and the sea was a marsh that men and horses could never cross. The springs that made this bog were hot, so that it was called Thermopylæ, or the Hot Gates.
The council at the Isthmus determined to send an army to stop the enemy there, if possible. There were 300 Spartans, and various troops from other cities, all under the command of one of the Spartan kings, Leonidas, who had married Gorgo, the girl whose word had kept her father faithful. They built up a stone wall in front of them, and waited for the enemy, and by-and-by the Persians came, spreading over an immense space in the rear, but in this narrow road only a few could fight at once, so that numbers were of little use. Xerxes sent to desire the Spartans to give up their arms. Leonidas only answered, “Come and take them.” The Persian messenger reported that the Greeks were sitting on the wall combing their hair, while others were playing at warlike games. Xerxes thought they were mad, but a traitor Spartan whom he had in his camp said it was always the fashion of his countrymen before any very perilous battle. Xerxes made so sure of victory over such a handful of men, that he bade his captains bring them all alive to him; but day after day his best troops fell beaten back from the wall, and hardly a Greek was slain.
But, alas! there was a mountain path through the chestnut woods above. Leonidas had put a guard of Phocian soldiers to watch it, and the Persians did not know of it till a wretch, for the sake of reward, came and offered to show them the way, so that they might fall on the defenders of the pass from behind. In the stillness of the early dawn, the Phocians heard the trampling of a multitude on the dry chestnut leaves. They stood to arms, but as soon as the Persians shot their arrows at them they fled away and left the path open. Soon it was known in the camp that the foe were on the hills above. There was still time to retreat, and Leonidas sent off all the allies to save their lives; but he himself and his 300 Spartans, with 700 Thespians, would not leave their post, meaning to sell their lives as dearly as possible. The Delphic oracle had said that either Sparta or a king of Sparta must perish, and he was ready to give himself for his country. Two young cousins of the line of Hercules he tried to save, by telling them to bear his messages home; but one answered that he had come to fight, not carry letters, and the other that they would fight first, and then take home the news. Two more Spartans, whose eyes were diseased, were at the hot baths near. One went back with the allies, the other caused his Helot to lead him to the camp, where, in the evening, all made ready to die, and Leonidas sat down to his last meal, telling his friends that on the morrow they should sup with Pluto. One of these Thespians had answered, when he was told that the Persian arrows came so thickly as to hide the sky, “So much the better; we shall fight in the shade.”
The Persians were by this time so much afraid of these brave men that they could only be driven against them by whips. Leonidas and his thousand burst out on them beyond the wall, and there fought the whole day, till everyone of them was slain, but with heaps upon heaps of dead Persians round them, so that, when Xerxes looked at the spot, he asked in horror whether all the Greeks were like these, and how many more Spartans there were. Like a barbarian, he had Leonidas’ body hung on a cross; but in after times the brave king’s bones were buried on the spot, and a mound raised over the other warriors, with the words engraven—
“Go, passer-by, at Sparta tell,
Obedient to her law, we fell.”
There was nothing now between the Persians and the temple at Delphi. The priests asked the oracle if they should bury the treasures. “No,” the answer was; “the god will protect his own.” And just as a party of Persians were climbing up the heights to the magnificent temple there was a tremendous storm; rocks, struck by lightning, rolled down, and the Persians fled in dismay; but it is said Xerxes sent one man to insult the heathen god, and that he was a Jew, and therefore had no fears, and came back safe.
Now that Thermopylæ was lost, there was no place fit to guard short of the Isthmus of Corinth, and the council decided to build a wall across that, and defend it, so as to save the Peloponnesus. This left Attica outside, and the Athenians held anxious council what was to become of them. Before the way to Delphi was stopped, they had asked the oracle what they were to do, and the answer had been, “Pallas had prayed for her city, but it was doomed; yet a wooden wall should save her people, and at Salamis should women be made childless, at seed-time or harvest.”
Themistocles said the wooden walls meant the ships, and that the Athenians were all to sail away and leave the city. Others would have it that the wooden walls were the old thorn fence of the Acropolis, and these, being mostly old people, chose to stay, while all the rest went away; and while the wives and children were kindly sheltered by their friends in the Peloponnesus, the men all joined the fleet, which lay off Salamis, and was now 366 in number. The Persians overran the whole country, overcame the few who held out the Acropolis, and set Athens on fire. All the hope of Greece was now in the fleet, which lay in the strait between Attica and the isle of Salamis. Eurybiades, the Spartan commander, still wanted not to fight, but Themistocles was resolved on the battle. Eurybiades did all he could to silence him. “Those who begin a race before the signal are scourged,” said the Spartan. “True,” said Themistocles; “but the laggards never win a crown.” Eurybiades raised his leading staff as if to give him a blow. “Strike, but hear me,” said Themistocles; and then he showed such good reason for there meeting the battle that Eurybiades gave way. Six days later the Persian fleet, in all its grandeur, came up, and Xerxes caused his throne to be set on Mount Ægaleos, above the strait, that he might see the battle. The doubts of the Peloponnesians revived. They wanted to sail away and guard their own shores, but Themistocles was so resolved that they should fight that he sent a slave with a message to Xerxes, pretending to be a traitor, and advising him to send ships to stop up the other end of the strait, to cut off their retreat. This was done, to the horror of honest Aristides, who, still exiled, was in Ægina, watching what to do for his countrymen. In a little boat he made his way at night to the ship where council was being held, and begged that Themistocles might be called out. “Let us be rivals still,” he said; “but let our strife be which can serve our country best. I come to say that your retreat is cut off. We are surrounded, and must fight.” Themistocles said it was the best thing that could happen, and led him into the council with his tidings.
They did fight. Ship was dashed against ship as fast as oars could bring them, their pointed beaks bearing one another down. The women who were made childless were Persian women. Two hundred Persian ships were sunk, and only forty Greek ones; an immense number were taken; and Xerxes, from his throne, saw such utter ruin of all his hopes and plans, that he gave up all thought of anything but getting his land army back to the Hellespont as fast as possible, for his fleet was gone!
After being thus beaten by sea, and having learnt what Greeks were by land, Xerxes himself, with a broken, sick, and distressed army, went back to Sardis; but he left a satrap named Mardonius behind him, with his best troops, in Thessaly, to see whether anything could still be done for his cause. He did try whether the Athenians could be persuaded to desert the other Greeks, and become allies of Persia, but they made a noble answer—“So long as the sun held his course, the Athenians would never be friends to Xerxes. Great as might be his power, Athens trusted to the aid of the gods and heroes, whose temple he had burnt.”
Persian soldier After this answer, Mardonius marched again into Attica, and took possession of it; but as the Athenians were now all safe in Salamis, or among their friends, he could not do them much harm; and while he was finishing the ruin he had begun ten months before, the Spartans had raised their army, under the command of their king, Pausanias, nephew to Leonidas, and all the best soldiers from the other Greek cities. They came up with the Persians near the city of Platæa. Though a Spartan, Pausanias had rather not have fought; but when at last the battle began, it was a grand victory, and was gained in a wonderfully short time. The Spartans killed Mardonius, and put the best Persian troops, called the Immortals, to flight; and the Athenians, under Aristides, fought with the Thebans, who had joined the Persian army. The whole Persian camp was sacked. The Helots were sent to collect the spoil, and put it all together. They stole a good deal of the gold, which they took for brass, and sold it as such. Waggon-loads of silver and gold vessels were to be seen; collars, bracelets, and rich armour; and the manger of Xerxes’ horses, which he had left behind, and which was of finely-worked brass. Pausanias bade the slaves of Mardonius to prepare such a feast as their master was used to, and then called his friends to see how useless were all the carpets, cushions, curtains, gold and silver, and the dainties upon them, and how absurd it was to set out on a conquering expedition thus encumbered.
A tenth part of the spoil was set apart for Apollo, and formed into a golden tripod, supported by a brazen serpent with three heads. A great statue of Jupiter was sent to Olympia, the pedestal adorned with the names of all the cities which had sent men to the battle, and such another of Neptune was set up on the Isthmus; while a temple to Athene, adorned with pictures of the battle, was built on the spot near Platæa. Pausanias received a sample of all that was best of the spoil. Among the dead was found that one Spartan who had missed Thermopylæ. He had been miserable ever since, and only longed to die in battle, as now he had done. The Platæans were to be respected by all the other states of Greece, so long as they yearly performed funeral rites in honour of the brave men whose tombs were left in their charge.
On the same day as the battle of Platæa was fought, another great battle was fought at Mykale, near Miletus, by the Ionian Greeks of Asia, assisted by Athenians and Spartans. It set Miletus free from the Persians, and was the first step backwards of their great power. The Athenian fleet also gained back the Chersonesus, and brought home the chains that had fastened together the bridge of boats, to be dedicated in the temples of their own gods.
The Athenians were all coming home rejoicing. Even the very week after Xerxes had burnt the Acropolis, the sacred olive which Pallas Athene was said to have given them had shot out a long branch from the stump, and now it was growing well, to their great joy and encouragement. Everyone began building up his own house; and Themistocles, Aristides, and the other statesmen prepared to build strong walls round the city, though the Spartans sent messengers to persuade them that it was of no use to have any fortified cities outside the Peloponnesus; but they knew this was only because the Spartans wanted to be masters of Greece, and would not attend to them. Athens stood about three miles from the coast, and in the port there had hitherto been a village called Piræus, and Themistocles persuaded the citizens to make this as strong as possible, with a wall of solid stone round it. These were grand days at Athens. They had noble architects and sculptors; and Æschylus was writing the grandest of his tragedies—especially one about the despair of the Persian women—but only fragments of most of them have come down to our time.
In 375 Aristides died, greatly honoured, though he was so poor that he did not leave enough to pay his funeral expenses; but a monument was raised to him by the State, and there is only one Athenian name as pure and noble as his.
The two other men who shared with him the honours of the defeat of the Persians met with very different fates, and by their own fault. When Pausanias went back to Sparta, he found his life there too stern and full of restraint, after what he had been used to in his campaign. He tried to break down the power of the Ephors, and obtain something more like royalty for the kings, and this he hoped to do by the help of Persia. He used to meet the messenger of this traitorous correspondence in the temple of Neptune, in the promontory of Tænarus. Some of the Ephors were warned, hid themselves there, and heard his treason from his own lips. They sent to arrest him as soon as he came back to Sparta; but he took refuge in the temple of Pallas, whence he could not be dragged. However, the Spartans were determined to have justice on him. They walled up the temple, so that he could neither escape nor have food brought to him; indeed it is said that, in horror at his treason, his mother brought the first stone. When he was at the point of death he was taken out, that the sanctuary might not be polluted, and he died just as he was carried out. The Spartans buried him close to the temple, and gave Pallas two statues of him, to make up for the suppliant she had lost, but they were always reproached for the sacrilege.
Themistocles was a friend of Pausanias, and was suspected of being mixed up in his plots. He was obliged to flee the country, and went to Epirus, where he came to the house of King Admetus, where the queen, Phthia, received him, and told him how to win her husband’s protection, namely, by sitting down on the hearth by the altar to the household gods, and holding her little son in his arms.
When Admetus came in, Themistocles entreated him to have pity on his defenceless state. The king raised him up and promised his protection, and kept his word. Themistocles was taken by two guides safely across the mountains to Pydna, where he found a merchant ship about to sail for Asia. A storm drove it to the island of Naxos, which was besieged by an Athenian fleet; and Themistocles must have fallen into the hands of his fellow-citizens if he had landed, but he told the master of the ship that it would be the ruin of all alike if he were found in the vessel, and promised a large reward if he escaped. So the crew consented to beat about a whole day and night, and in the morning landed safely near Ephesus. He kept his word to the captain; for indeed he was very rich, having taken bribes, while Aristides remained in honourable poverty. He went to Susa, where Xerxes was dead; but the Persians had fancied his message before the battle of Salamis was really meant to serve them, and that he was suffering for his attachment to them, so the new king, Artaxerxes, the “Long-armed,” who had a great esteem for his cleverness, was greatly delighted, offered up a sacrifice in his joy, and three times cried out in his sleep, “I have got Themistocles the Athenian.”
Themistocles had asked to wait a year before seeing the king, that he might have time to learn the language. When he came, he put forward such schemes for conquering Greece that Artaxerxes was delighted, and gave him a Persian wife, and large estates on the banks of the Mæander, where he spent the rest of his life, very rich, but despised by all honest Greeks.
All the history of the war with Xerxes was written by Herodotus, a Greek of Caria, who travelled about to study the manners, customs, and histories of different nations, and recorded them in the most lively and spirited manner, so that he is often called the father of history.
Æschylus went on gaining prizes for his tragedies, till 468, when, after being thirteen times first, he was excelled by another Athenian named Sophocles, and was so much vexed that he withdrew to the Greek colonies in Sicily. It is not clear whether he ever came back to Athens for a time, but he certainly died in Sicily, and in an extraordinary way. He was asleep on the sea-shore, when an eagle flew above him with a tortoise in its claws. It is the custom of eagles to break the shells of these creatures by letting them fall on rocks from a great height. The bird took Æschylus’ bald head for a stone, threw down the tortoise, broke his skull, and killed him!
Sophocles did not write such grand lines, yearning for the truth, as Æschylus, but his plays, of Ajax’ madness, and especially of Antigone’s self-devotion, were more touching, and full of human feeling; and Euripides, who was a little younger, wrote plays more like those of later times, with more of story in them, and more characters, especially of women. He even wrote one in which he represented Helen as never having been unfaithful at all; Venus only made up a cloud-image to be run away with by Paris, and Helen was carried away and hidden in Egypt, where Menelaus found her, and took her home. The works of these three great men have always been models. The Greeks knew their plays by heart almost as perfectly as the Iliad and Odyssey, and used to quote lines wherever they applied.
Athens and Sparta were now quite the greatest powers in Greece. No other state had dared to make head against the Persians, and all the lesser cities, and the isles and colonies, were anxious to obtain the help and friendship of one or other as their allies. The two states were always rivals, and never made common cause, except when the Persian enemy was before them. In the year 464 there was a terrible earthquake in Laconia, which left only five houses standing in Sparta, and buried great numbers in the ruins. The youths, who were all together in one building exercising themselves, were almost all killed by its fall; and the disaster would have been worse if the king, Archidamas, had not caused the trumpet to be blown, as if to call the people to arms, just outside the city. This brought all the men in order together just in time, for the Helots were rising against them, and, if they had found them groping each in the ruins of his house, might have killed them one by one; whereas, finding them up and armed, the slaves saw it was in vain, and dispersed.
The Messenians, who had never forgotten Aristodemus, hoped to free themselves again. A great many of the Helots joined them, and they made their fortified hill of Ithome very strong. The Spartans called on the Athenians to help them to put down the insurrection. The three greatest men in Athens were Pericles, the son of that Xanthippus who had impeached Miltiades; Kimôn, the son of Miltiades himself; and Ephialtes, a great orator, who was thought to be as upright as Aristides the Just. When the request from Sparta came, Ephialtes was against helping the rival of Athens; but Kimôn, who had friends in Laconia, declared that it would be unbecoming in Athens to let Greece be crippled in one of her two legs, or to lose her own yoke-fellow. He prevailed, and was sent with an army to help in the siege of Ithome; but it was such a tardy siege that the Spartans fancied that the Athenians had an understanding with the Messenians, and desired them to go home again, thus, of course, affronting them exceedingly.
Two years after, Kimôn was ostracised; but soon after the Spartans affronted the Athenians, by placing a troop of men at Tanagra, on the borders of Attica. The Athenians went out to attack them, and Kimôn sent to entreat permission to fight among his tribe, but he was not trusted, and was forbidden. He sent his armour to his friends—a hundred in number—and bade them maintain his honour. They were all killed, fighting bravely, and the victory was with the Spartans. Soon after, the virtuous Ephialtes was stabbed by some unknown person, and Pericles, feeling that good men could not be spared, moved that Kimôn should be called home again. Kimôn was much loved; he was tall and handsome, with curly hair and beard; and he was open-handed, leaving his orchards and gardens free to all, and keeping a table for every chance guest. Yet he much admired the Spartans and their discipline, and he contrived to bring about a five-years’ truce between the two great powers. The greatest benefit he gave his people was the building of the Long Walls, which joined Athens and the Piræus together, so that the city could never be cut off from the harbour. Kimôn began them at his own expense, and Pericles persuaded the Athenians to go on with them, when their founder had been sent on an expedition to the isle of Cyprus, which was rising against the Persians. There Kimôn fell sick and died, but his fleet, immediately after, won a grand victory over the Phœnician and Cilician fleets, in the Persian service.
However, some hot-headed young Athenians were beaten at Coronea by the Bœotians, who were Spartan allies, and a good many small losses befel them by land, till they made another peace for thirty years in 445. There was nobody then in Athens, or Greece either, equal to Pericles, who was managing all affairs in his own city with great wisdom, and making it most beautiful with public buildings. On the rock of the Acropolis stood the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess Pallas Athene, which was adorned with a portico, the remains of which still stand up gloriously against the blue Grecian sky. The bas-relief carvings on the pediments, representing the fight between the Centaurs and Lapithæ, are now in the British Museum; and though the statue itself is gone, still seals and gems remain, made to imitate it, and showing the perfect beauty of the ivory and gold statue of Athene herself, which was carved by the great sculptor Phidias, and placed within the temple. When there was a question whether this figure should be made of marble or of ivory, and Phidias recommended marble as the cheapest, the whole assembly of Athenians voted for ivory.
A beautiful fortification called the Propylæa guarded the west side of the Acropolis, where only there was no precipice; and there were other splendid buildings—a new open theatre, for the acting of those unrivalled tragedies of the three Athenian poets, and of others which have been lost; a Museum, which did not then mean a collection of curiosities, but a place where the youth might study all the arts sacred to the Muses; a Lyceum for their exercises, and schools for the philosophers. These schools were generally colonnades of pillars supporting roofs to give shelter from the sun, and under one of these taught the greatest, wisest, and best of all truth-seekers, namely, Socrates.
Though the houses at Athens stood irregularly on their steep hill, there was no place in the world equal to it for beauty in its buildings, its sculptures, and its carvings, and, it is also said, in its paintings; but none of these have come down to our times. Everything belonging to the Athenians was at this time full of simple, manly grace and beauty, and in both body and mind they were trying to work up to the greatest perfection they could devise, without any aid outside themselves to help them.
But they had come to the very crown of their glory. When a war arose between the Corinthians and the Corcyrans, who inhabited the isle now called Corfu, the Corcyrans asked to be made allies of Athens, and a fleet was sent to help them; and as the Corinthians held with Sparta, this brought on a great war between Athens and Sparta, which was called the Peloponnesian war, and lasted thirty years. It was really to decide which of the two great cities should be chief, and both were equally determined.
As Attica had borders open to the enemy, Pericles advised all the people in the country to move into the town. They sent their flocks into the isle of Eubœa, brought their other goods with them, and left their beautiful farms and gardens to be ravaged by the enemy; while the crowd found dwellings in a place under the west side of the Acropolis rock, which had hitherto been left empty, because an oracle declared it “better untrodden.” Such numbers coming within the walls could not be healthy, and a deadly plague began to prevail, which did Athens as much harm as the war. In the meantime, Pericles, who was always cautious, persuaded the people to be patient, and not to risk battles by land, where the Spartans fought as well as they did, whereas nobody was their equal by sea; and as their fleet and all their many isles could save them from hunger, they could wear out their enemies, and be fresh themselves; but it was hard to have plague within and Spartans wasting their homes and fields without. Brave little Platæa, too, was closely besieged. All the useless persons had been sent to Athens, and there were only 400 Platæan and 80 Athenian men in it, and 110 women to wait on them; and the Spartans blockaded these, and tried to starve them out, until, after more than a year of famine, 220 of them scrambled over the walls on a dark, wet night, cut their way through the Spartan camp, and safely reached Athens. The other 200 had thought the attempt so desperate, that they sent in the morning to beg leave to bury the corpses of their comrades; but they then heard that only one man had fallen. They held out a few months longer, and then were all put to death, while the women were all made slaves. The children and the 220 were all made one with the Athenians.
Athens was in a piteous state from the sickness, which had cut off hosts of people of all ranks. It lasted seven or nine days in each, and seems to have been a malignant fever. Pericles lost his eldest son, his sister, and almost all his dearest friends in it; but still he went about calm, grave, and resolute, keeping up the hopes and patience of the Athenians. Then his youngest and last son died of the same sickness, and when the time came for placing the funeral garland on his head, Pericles broke down, and wept and sobbed aloud. Shortly after, he fell sick himself, and lingered much longer than was usual with sufferers from the plague. Once, when his friends came in, he showed them a charm which the women had hung round his neck, and, smiling, asked them whether his enduring such folly did not show that he must be very ill indeed. Soon after, when he was sinking away, and they thought him insensible, they began to talk of the noble deeds he had done, his speeches, his wisdom and learning, and his buildings: “he had found Athens of brick,” they said, “and had left her of marble.” Suddenly the sick man raised himself in his bed, and said, “I wonder you praise these things in me. They were as much owing to fortune as to anything else; and yet you leave out what is my special honour, namely, that I never caused any fellow-citizen to put on mourning.” So died this great man, in 429, the third year of the Peloponnesian war.
The Peloponnesian war went on much in the same way for some years after the death of Pericles. There was no such great man left in Athens. Socrates, the wise and deep-thinking philosopher, did not attend to state affairs more than was his duty as a citizen; and the leading man for some years was Nikias. He was an honest, upright man, but not clever, and afraid of everything new, so that he was not the person to help in time of strange dangers.
There was a youth growing up, however, of great ability. His name was Alkibiades. He was of high and noble family, but he had lost his parents very young, and Pericles had been his guardian, taking great care of his property, so that he was exceedingly rich. He was very beautiful in person, and that was thought of greatly at Athens, though he was laughed at for the pains he took to show off his beauty, and for carrying out to battle a shield inlaid with gold and ivory, representing Cupid hurling Jupiter’s thunderbolts. His will was so determined, that, when he was a little boy at play in the street, and saw a waggon coming which would have spoiled his arrangements, he laid himself down before the wheels to stop it. He learnt easily, and, when he was with Socrates, would talk as well and wisely as any philosopher of them all; and Socrates really seems to have loved the bright, beautiful youth even more than his two graver and worthier pupils, Plato and Xenophon, perhaps because in one of Alkibiades’ first battles, at Delium, he had been very badly wounded, and Socrates had carried him safely out of the battle on his broad shoulders. Socrates was very strong, but one of the ugliest of men, and the Athenians were amused at the contrast between master and pupil.
But nobody could help loving Alkibiades in these early years, and he was a sort of spoiled child of the people. He won three crowns in the chariot races at the Olympic games, and feasted and made presents to his fellow-citizens afterwards, and he was always doing some strange thing in order to make a sensation. The first day that he was old enough to be admitted to the public assembly, while he was being greeted there, he let loose a tame quail, which he carried about under his cloak, and no business could be done till it had been caught. Another time he came very late, with a garland on his head, and desired to have the sitting put off because he had a feast at his house; and the grave archons actually granted his request. But the strangest thing he did was to cut off the tail of his beautiful dog, that, as he said, the Athenians might have something to talk about. In truth he made everything give way to his freaks and self-will; and he was a harsh and unkind husband, and insolent to his father-in-law; and, as time went on, he offended a great many persons by his pride and rudeness and selfishness, so that his brilliancy did little good.
There were Greek colonies in Sicily, but these were mostly in the interest of Sparta. There had been some fighting there in the earlier years of the war, and Alkibiades was very anxious to lead another expedition thither. Nikias thought this imprudent, and argued much against it; but the effect of his arguments was that the Athenians chose to join him in the command of it with Alkibiades, much against his will, for he was elderly, and out of health, and, of all men in Athens, he most disliked and distrusted Alkibiades.
Just as the fleet for Sicily was nearly ready, all the busts of Mercury which stood as mile-stones on the roads in Attica were found broken and defaced; and the enemies of Alkibiades declared that it was done in one of his drunken frolics. Such a thing, done to the figure of a god was not mere mischief, but sacrilege, and there was to be a great inquiry into it. Alkibiades wanted much to have the trial over before he sailed, that he might clear himself of the suspicion; and, indeed, it seems certain that whatever follies he might commit when he had nothing to do, he had then far too much to think of to be likely to bring himself into trouble by such a wanton outrage. But the Athenians chose to put off the inquiry till he was gone, and the fleet set sail—the largest that had ever gone from the Piræus—with sound of trumpet, libations poured into the sea from gold and silver bowls, songs and solemn prayers, as the 100 war galleys rowed out of the harbour in one long column. At Corcyra the fleet halted to meet their allies, who raised the number of ships to 154, containing 5000 heavily-armed men, with whom they made sail for Rhegium, the Italian foreland nearest to Sicily, whence they sent to make inquiries. They found more of the Greek cities were against them than they had expected, and their friends were weaker. Nikias wanted merely to sail round the island, and show the power of Athens, and then go home again. Lamachus, another general, wanted to make a bold attack on Syracuse at once; and Alkibiades had a middle plan, namely, to try to gain the lesser towns by force or friendship, and to stir up the native Sicels to revolt. This plan was accepted, and was going on well—for Alkibiades could always talk anyone over, especially strangers, to whom his gracefulness and brilliancy were new—when orders came from Athens that he and his friends were to be at once sent home from the army, to answer for the mischief done to the busts, and for many other crimes of sacrilege, which were supposed to be part of a deep plot for upsetting the laws of Solon, and making himself the tyrant of Athens.
This was, of course, the work of his enemies, and the very thing he had feared. His friends wrote to him that the people were so furious against him that he had no chance of a fair trial, and he therefore escaped on the way home, when, on his failing to arrive, he was solemnly cursed, and condemned to death. He took refuge in Sparta, where, fine gentleman as he was, he followed the rough, hardy Spartan manners to perfection, appeared to relish the black broth, and spoke the Doric Greek of Laconia, as it was said, more perfectly than the Spartans themselves. Unlike Aristides, and like the worse sort of exiles, he tried to get his revenge by persuading the allies of Athens in Asia Minor to revolt; and when the Spartans showed distrust of him, he took refuge with the Persian satrap Tissaphernes.
In the meantime, after he had left Sicily, Nikias was so cautious that the Syracusans thought him cowardly, and provoked a battle with him close to their own walls. He defeated them, besieged their city, and had almost taken it, when a Spartan and Corinthian fleet, headed by Gylippus, came out, forced their way through the Athenians, and brought relief to the city. More reinforcements came out to Athens, and there was a great sea-fight in front of the harbour at Syracuse, which ended in the total and miserable defeat of the Athenians, so that the army was obliged to retreat from Syracuse, and give up the siege. They had no food, nor any means of getting home, and all they could do was to make their way back into the part of the island that was friendly to them. Gylippus and the Syracusans tried to block their way, but old Nikias showed himself firm and undaunted in the face of misfortune, and they forced their way on for three or four days, in great suffering from hunger and thirst, till at last they were all hemmed into a small hollow valley, shut in by rocks, where the Syracusans shot them down as they came to drink at the stream, so thirsty that they seemed not to care to die so long as they could drink. Upon this, Nikias thought it best to offer to lay down his arms and surrender. All the remnant of the army were enclosed in a great quarry at Epipolæ, the sides of which were 100 feet high, and fed on a scanty allowance of bread and water, while the victors considered what was to be done with them, for in these heathen times there was no law of mercy for a captive, however bravely he might have fought. Gylippus wanted to save Nikias, for the pleasure of showing off so noble a prisoner at Sparta; but some of the Syracusans, who had been on the point of betraying their city to him, were afraid that their treason would be known, and urged that he should be put to death with his fellow-general; and the brave, honest, upright old man was therefore slain with his companion Demosthenes.
For seventy days the rest remained in the dismal quarry, scorched by the sun, half-starved, and rapidly dying off, until they were publicly sold as slaves, when many of the Athenians gained the favour of their masters by entertaining them by repeating the poetry of their tragedians, especially of Euripides, whose works had not yet been acted in Sicily. Some actually thus gained their freedom from their masters, and could return to Athens to thank the poet whose verses, stored in their memory, had been their ransom.
All the history of the Peloponnesian war is written by Thukydides, himself a brave Athenian soldier and statesman, who had a great share in all the affairs of the time, and well knew all the men whom he describes.
Still the war went on, the Athenians holding out steadily, but the Spartans beginning to care more for leadership than for Greece, and so making league with the Persians. Alkibiades was forgiven and called back again after a time, and he gained numerous towns and islands back again for the Athenians, so that he sailed into the Piræus with a fleet, made up by his own ships and prizes to full two hundred sail, all decked with purple, gold, and silver, and doubling what had been lost in the unhappy Sicilian enterprise; but his friends were sorry that it was what they called an unlucky day—namely, that on which every year the statue of Pallas Athene was stripped of its ornaments to be dusted, washed, and repaired, and on which her worshippers always avoided beginning anything or doing any business.
A very able man named Lysander, of the royal line, though not a king, had come into command at Sparta, and he had a sea-fight at Notium, just opposite to Ephesus, with the Athenians, and gained no very great advantage, but enough to make the discontent and distrust always felt for Alkibiades break out again, so that he was removed from the command and sailed away to the Chersonese, where in the time of his exile he had built himself a sort of little castle looking out on the strait.
Konon was the name of the next commander of the fleet, which consisted of 110 ships, with which he met the Spartan Kallikratidas with only fifty, near the three little islets called Arginusæ, near Malea. The numbers were so unequal that the Spartan was advised not to fight, but he answered that “his death would not hurt Sparta, but dishonour would hurt him.” The Athenians gained a complete victory, Kallikratidas was killed, and the whole Spartan fleet broken up; but the Athenian fleet lost a great many men by a violent storm, which hindered the vessels from coming to the aid of those which had been disabled, and which therefore sunk in the tempest.
The relations of the men who had been drowned called for a trial of the commanders for neglecting to save the lives of their fellow-citizens, and there was such a bad spirit of party feeling in Athens at the time that they were actually condemned to death, all except Konon, though happily they were out of reach, and their sentence could not be executed. Lysander was, in the meantime, hard at work to collect a fresh fleet from the Spartan allies and to build new ships, for which he obtained money from the Persians at Sardis, where the satrap at that time was Cyrus, the son of Darius, the Great King, a clever prince, who understood something of Greek courage, and saw that the best thing for Persia was to keep the Greeks fighting with one another, so that no one state should be mightiest, or able to meddle with the Persian domains in Asia Minor. He gave Lysander the means of adding to his forces, and with his new fleet he plundered the shores of the islands of Salamis and Eubœa, and even of Attica itself, to insult the Athenians. Their fleet came out to drive him off. It had just been agreed by the Athenians that every prisoner they might take in the fight they expected should have his right thumb cut off, to punish the Greeks who had taken Persian gold. Lysander sailed away, with the Athenian fleet pursuing him up to the Hellespont, where he took the city of Lampsacus and plundered it before they came up, and anchored at a place called Ægos Potami, or the Goat’s River, about two miles from Sestos. In the morning Lysander made all his men eat their first meal and then go on board, but gave orders that no ship should stir from its place. The Athenians too embarked, rowed up to Lampsacus and defied them; but as no Spartan vessel moved, they went back again to their anchorage, a mere open shore where there were no houses, so that all the crews went off to Sestos, or in search of villages inland, to buy provisions. The very same thing happened the next day. The challenge was not accepted by the Spartans, and the Athenians thought them afraid, grew more careless, and went further away from their ships. But on the hills above stood the little castle of Alkibiades, who could look down on the strait, see both fleets, and perceive that the Spartans sent swift galleys out each day to steal after the Athenians, so that they would be quite sure to take advantage of their foolish security. He could not bear to see his fellow-citizens ruining themselves, and came down to warn them and beg them to move into Sestos, where they would have the harbour to shelter them and the city behind them; but the generals scoffed at him, and bade him remember that they were commanders now, not he, and he went back to his castle, knowing only too well what would happen.
Till the fifth day all went on as before, but then Lysander ordered his watching galley to hoist a shield as a signal as soon as the Athenians had all gone off to roam the country in search of food, and then he spread out his fleet to its utmost width, and came rowing out with his 180 ships to fall upon the deserted Athenians. Not one general was at his post, except Konon, and he, with the eight galleys he could man in haste, sailed out in all haste—not to fight, for that was of no use, but to escape. Almost every vessel was found empty by the Spartans, taken or burnt, and then all the men were sought one by one as they were scattered over the country, except the few who were near enough to take refuge in the fort of Alkibiades. Out of the eight ships that got away, one went straight to Athens to carry the dreadful news; but Konon took the other seven with him to the island of Cyprus, thinking that thus he could do better for his country than share the ruin that now must come upon her.
It was night when the solitary ship reached the Piræus with the dreadful tidings; but they seemed to rush through the city, for everywhere there broke out a sound of weeping and wailing for husbands, fathers, brothers, and kinsmen lost, and men met together in the market-places to mourn and consult what could be done next. None went to rest that night; but the fleet was gone, and all their best men with it, and Lysander was coming down on Athens, putting down all her friends in the islands by the way, and driving the Athenian garrisons on before him into Athens. Before long he was at the mouth of the Piræus himself with his 150 galleys, and while he shut the Athenians in by sea, the Spartan army and its allies blockaded them by land.
If they held out, there was no hope of help; delay would only make the conquerors more bitter; so they offered to make terms, and very hard these were. The Athenians were to pull down a mile on each side of the Long Walls, give up all their ships except twelve, recall all their banished men, and follow the fortunes of the Spartans. They were very unwilling to accept these conditions, but their distress compelled them; and Lysander had the Long Walls pulled down to the sound of music on the anniversary of the day of the battle of Salamis. Then he overthrew the old constitution of Solon, and set up a government of thirty men, who were to keep the Athenians under the Spartan yoke, and who were so cruel and oppressive that they were known afterwards as the thirty tyrants. So in 404 ended the Peloponnesian war, after lasting twenty-seven years.
The Athenians were most miserable, and began to think whether Alkibiades would deliver them, and the Spartans seem to have feared the same. He did not think himself safe in Europe after the ruin at Ægos Potami, and had gone to the Persian governor on the Phrygian coast, who received him kindly, but was believed to have taken the pay of either the Spartans or the thirty tyrants, to murder him, for one night the house where he was sleeping was set on fire, and on waking he found it surrounded with enemies. He wrapped his garment round his left arm, took his sword in his hand, and broke through the flame. None of the murderers durst come near him, but they threw darts and stones at him so thickly that at last he fell, and they despatched him. Timandra, the last of his wives, took up his body, wrapped it in her own mantle, and buried it in a city called Melissa. Such was the sad end of the spoilt child of Athens. He had left a son at Athens, whom the Thirty tried to destroy, but who escaped their fury, although during these evil times the Thirty actually put to death no less than fourteen hundred citizens of Athens, many of them without any proper trial, and drove five thousand more into banishment during the eight months that their power lasted. Then Thrasybulus and other exiles, coming home, helped to shake off their yoke and establish the old democracy; but even then Athens was in a weak, wretched state, and Sparta had all the power.
Just as Greece was quieted by the end of the Peloponnesian war, the old King of Persia, Darius Nothus, died, and his eldest son, Artaxerxes Mnemon, came to the throne. He was the eldest, but his brother Cyrus, who had been born after his father began to reign, declared that this gave the best right, and resolved to march from Sardis into Persia to gain the kingdom for himself by the help of a hired body of Greek soldiers. Clearchus, a banished Spartan, undertook to get them together, and he made such descriptions of the wealth they would get in the East, that 11,000 of the bravest men in Greece came together for the purpose, and among them Xenophon, the pupil of Socrates, who has written the history of the expedition, as well as that of the later years of the Peloponnesian war. Xenophon was a horseman, but most of the troops were foot soldiers, and they were joined by a great body of Asiatics, raised by Cyrus himself. They were marched across Syria, crossed the present river Euphrates at the ford Thapsacus, and at Cunaxa, seven miles from Babylon, they met the enormous army which Artaxerxes had raised. The Greeks beat all who met them; but in the meantime Cyrus was killed, and his whole army broke up and fled, so that the Greeks were left to themselves in the enemy’s country, without provisions, money, or guides.
Artaxerxes sent messages pretending to wish to make terms with them and guide them safely back to their own country, provided they would do no harm on the way, and they willingly agreed to this, and let themselves be led where they were told it would be easier to find food for them; but this was across the great river Tigris, over a bridge of boats; and a few days after, Clearchus and the other chief officers were invited to the Persian camp to meet the king, and there seized and made prisoners. A message came directly after to the Greeks to bid them deliver up their arms, as they belonged to the Great King, having once belonged to his slave Cyrus.
To deliver up their arms was the last thing they intended; but their plight was dreadful—left alone eight months’ march by the shortest way from home, with two great rivers and broad tracts of desert between it and themselves, and many nations, all hating them, in the inhabited land, with no guides, no generals, and ten times their number of Persian troops waiting to fall on them. All were in dismay; hardly a fire was lighted to cook their supper; each man lay down to rest where he was, yet hardly anyone could sleep for fear and anxiety, looking for shame, death, or slavery, and never expecting to see Greece, wife, or children again.
But that night Xenophon made up his mind to do what he could to save his countrymen. The only hope was in some one taking the lead, and, as the Greeks had been true to their oaths throughout the whole march, he believed the gods would help them. So he called the chief of the officers still remaining together, and put them in mind that they might still hope. They were so much stronger and braver than the Persians, that if only they did not lose heart and separate, they could beat off almost any attack. As to provisions, they would seize them, and the rivers which they could not cross should be their guides, for they would track them up into the hills, where they would become shallow. Only every soldier must swear to assist in keeping up obedience, and then they would show Artaxerxes that, though he had seized Clearchus, they had ten thousand as good as he. The army listened, recovered hope and spirit, swore to all he asked, and one of the most wonderful marches in the world began. Cheirisophus, the eldest officer, a Spartan, took the command in the centre; Xenophon, as one of the youngest, was in the rear. They crossed the Zab, their first barrier, and then went upwards along the banks of the Tigris. The Persians hovered about them, and always attacked them every morning. Then the Greeks halted under any shelter near at hand, and fought them till towards evening. They were sure to fall back, as they were afraid to sleep near the Greeks, for fear of a night attack. Then the Greeks marched on for a good distance before halting to sup and sleep, and were able again to make a little way in the morning before the enemy attacked them again.
So they went on till they came to the mountains, where dwelt wild tribes whom the Great King called his subjects, but who did not obey him at all. However, they were robbers and very fierce, and stood on the steep heights shooting arrows and rolling down stones, so that the passage through their land cost the Greeks more men than all their march through Persia. On they went, through Armenia and over the mountains, generally having to fight their way, and, when they came very high up, suffering very much from the cold, and having to make their way through snow and ice, until at last, when they were climbing up Mount Theche, those behind heard a shout of joy, and the cry, “The sea, the sea!” rang from rank to rank. To every Greek the sea was like home, and it seemed to them as if their troubles were over. They wept and embraced one another, and built up a pile of stones with a trophy of arms on the top, offering sacrifice to the gods for having so far brought them safely.
It was, however, only the Black Sea, the Pontus Euxinus, and far to the eastward; and, though the worst was over, they had still much to undergo while they were skirting the coast of Asia Minor. When they came to the first Greek colony—namely, Trapezus, or Trebizond—they had been a full year marching through an enemy’s country; and yet out of the 11,000 who had fought at Cunaxa there were still 10,000 men safe and well, and they had saved all the women, slaves, and baggage they had taken with them. Moreover, though they came from many cities, and both Spartans and Athenians were among them, there never had been any quarrelling; and the only time when there had been the least dispute had been when Xenophon thought Cheirisophus a little too hasty in suspecting a native guide.
Tired out as the soldiers were, they wanted, as soon as they reached the Ægean Sea, to take ship and sail home; but they had no money, and the merchant ships would not give them a free passage, even if there had been ships enough, and Cheirisophus went to Byzantium to try to obtain some, while the others marched to wait for him at Cerasus, the place whence were brought the first cherries, which take their name from it. He failed, however, in getting any, and the Greeks had to make their way on; but they had much fallen away from the noble spirit they had shown at first. Any country that did not belong to Greeks they plundered, and they were growing careless as to whether the places in their way were Greek or not. Cheirisophus died of a fever, and Xenophon, though grieved at the change in the spirit of the army, continued for very pity in command. They hired themselves out to fight the battles of a Thracian prince, but, when his need of them was over, he dismissed them without any pay at all, and Xenophon was so poor that he was forced to sell the good horse that had carried him all the way from Armenia.
However, there was a spirited young king at Sparta, named Agesilaus, who was just old enough to come forward and take the command, and he was persuading his fellow-citizens, that now they had become the leading state in Greece, they ought to go and deliver the remaining Greek colonies in Asia Minor from the yoke of Persia, as Athens had done by the Ionians. They therefore decided on taking the remains of the 10,000—now only 6000—into their pay, and the messengers who came to engage them bought Xenophon’s horse and restored it to him. Xenophon would not, however, continue with the band after he had conducted it to Pergamus, where they were to meet the Spartan general who was to take charge of them. On their way they plundered the house of a rich Persian, and gave a large share of the spoil to him as a token of gratitude for the wisdom and constancy that had carried them through so many trials.
It had been his strong sense of religion and trust in the care of the gods which had borne him up; and the first thing he did was to go and dedicate his armour and an offering of silver at the temple of Diana at Ephesus. This temple had grown up round a black stone image, very ugly, but which was said to have fallen from the sky, and was perhaps a meteoric stone. A white marble quarry near the city had furnished the materials for a temple so grand and beautiful that it was esteemed one of the seven wonders of the world.
After thus paying his vows, Xenophon returned to Athens, whence he had been absent two years and a-half. He not only wrote the history of this expedition, but a life of the first great Cyrus of Persia, which was meant not so much as real history, as a pattern of how kings ought to be bred up.