The tale of the fate of the spies is one upon which tradition was likely to improve; but there is no reason to doubt the main incidents of it; how they went to Sardes and were apprehended; how they were only saved from execution by the interposition of Xerxes, who thought it would be instructive to them to see what they wanted to see, and that it might be very advantageous to him if they reported what they had seen to those who sent them. Xerxes’ policy in the matter was admittedly wise. Resistance is frequently due to misapprehension.

The States to whom appeals for aid were sent were all of them in peculiar positions with reference not merely to their home affairs, but also to their relations towards the mass of the Greek States.

The very nature of things as they existed in the fifth century before Christ made it improbable, almost impossible, that Corcyra should take a very active interest in the affairs of Greece generally. The Hellenism of her continental neighbours in North-west Greece, in Epirus, in Ætolia, in Acarnania, was as yet undeveloped. The range of Pindus, by its oblique course from the very shores of the Adriatic to those of the Corinthian Gulf, cut off that corner of the Greek world from those outside influences and that wide experience which contributed so largely towards making the Hellenism of the fifth century what it was. Corcyra had no immediate neighbours from whom she could catch the infection of the Hellenic spirit. It is hardly strange if she did not interpret the unwritten law of Greek patriotism in the sense in which it was interpreted by those who were much more interested in upholding it. Selfish she appeared to the Greeks of this time; and it can be seen by reading between the lines in Thucydides that this was the impression she gave to her contemporaries half a century later. She was severely—it may be, hardly judged. The circumstances were peculiarly unfavourable to the development within her of a pan-Hellenic spirit. Nature had placed her in an almost ideal position in relation to one of the greatest trade routes of the ancient world,—that from Greece to Italy and the West. Wealth came easily to her. Her position allowed her to regard with equanimity the competition of Corinth and the growing rivalry of Athenian trade. However much there might be for her competitors, the very nature of her position assured her of an ample sufficiency. So she lived on a policy of sufferance, neither interfering nor interfered with. If the Corcyrean was a spoilt child, he had been spoilt by mother nature. His circumstances were such as were peculiarly calculated to encourage a selfish patriotism. Had he voyaged the whole Mediterranean over, he could not have found a fairer picture than that presented by his own enchanted island. To himself, no doubt, he appeared the honest man; but to his contemporaries of larger view he seemed, as it were, the “man with the muck-rake” of Greek politics, over whose head the crown of patriotism was held in vain.

It is conceivable that in the present instance Corcyra did not understand to the full the nature of the danger which threatened Greece. It had taken long to convince the states who sent her the invitation that the attack was not directed against Athens alone. She promised assistance, but evidently with a mental reservation to hold back until the intention of the Persian was declared unmistakably.

Unfortunately for her reputation, she held back too long. When she ought to have joined in, she did not—possibly she was too late to do so; and it is not surprising if her contemporaries, who had borne the burden of the struggle unaided by her, judged her hardly.

Not so severe, perhaps, should be the judgment of those who are in a position to review the whole extent of the feeling which prevailed at this critical time. Patriotism, when aroused, does not argue according to the rules of logic; and so, remembering this, the severity of the judgment passed by the Greek patriot on the Greek neutral may be excused, or even in a sense justified. But it must also be borne in mind that those who, with Delphi, regarded any joint action of the Greek States in a quarrel which might be looked upon as concerning Athens alone, to be calculated to bring suffering upon the whole of Greece, or at any rate on those who took part in it, and therefore impolitic, were also justified from their point of view. To them it might seem as if Athens should lie on the bed she herself had made, when she had alone among the great powers of Greece interfered in the Ionian revolt.

Of the Crete of the earlier part of the fifth century but little is known from the historians; and the modern exploration of the historic remains on the island has, so far, thrown but little light on its political relations at this time, whether internal or external. It seems to have been divided up between a number of comparatively small city States, which it would have been difficult to rouse to joint action on any question which did not concern their special interests. Herodotus does not pass any judgment on the conduct of the Cretans in refusing aid, possibly because the refusal was in accordance with the answer given by the Delphic oracle when consulted on the subject.

The attitude of Argos is not so easy to account for. She had, indeed, suffered terribly by the loss of six thousand of her citizens in the battle with the Lacedæmonians under Kleomenes. Delphi, in consistency with its policy at the time, counselled against interference; but the Argive tale was that, even so, they were ready to take part in the defence, provided Sparta granted them a thirty years’ truce, and provided she shared the supreme command of the allied forces with them. H. vii. 149. The proposal of a truce was entertained, if not actually accepted; but Sparta refused to let Argos have more than one-third of the command. The old question of the hegemony of Sparta and Argos in the Peloponnese lay at the bottom of the refusal; but there is manifestly a certain amount of improbability in the Argive account of the affair as given by Herodotus. H. vii. 151, ad init. He tells another tale, which seems to have been of Athenian origin. It is to the effect that Xerxes had been in direct communication with Argos, and had practically ensured its neutrality, and that the terms demanded by Argos from the other Greeks were proposed with a full knowledge that they would be refused.

This tale was supported, so the historian says, by information obtained at Susa by that mysterious embassy of Kallias; nevertheless, Herodotus believes the Argive account, and rejects the tale current in the rest of Greece.

If an author in the fifth century B.C. could not satisfactorily discover the truth with regard to the matter, it is not likely that it should be possible to do so at the present day. It may be that Argos, from genuine conviction, followed the lead of Delphi, but provided for a possible error in that policy by entering into some kind of arrangement with the Persian.

The answer which the Greek Council sent to the Argives, as reported by Diodorus, may be an invention of later times, but is so peculiarly apt as to be worthy of quotation:⁠—

But the greatest military power in the Greek world at this time was not situated in the mother country. Gelo, the tyrant of Syracuse in Sicily, had at his command an armed force superior to that of any other Greek State. His land army may not, indeed, have been greater than the force which Sparta could put in the field; but he possessed, besides, a navy as powerful as that of Athens. He seems to have been a man of unusual capacity who, had death spared him for a while, might have made Syracuse the centre of a considerable dominion in the West. He was manifestly a desirable acquisition for the league of defence; and it was very natural that a joint embassy should be sent to him to ask his help in the coming peril. Herodotus describes the embassy with considerable detail, but his account raises some difficulties which cast a doubt, not perhaps on his truthfulness, but on the correctness of his version of what took place.

It may be assumed that the speeches made by Gelo and the Greek ambassadors are in their form the creation of the historian. The real historical question is not as to the form, but as to the matter. H. vii. 157. In the speech of the Greeks two points are peculiarly prominent; it shows that there was an idea in certain quarters in Greece that the expedition was directed against Athens alone; it is further asserted that if Greece is subdued, Sicily’s turn for attack will not fail to come quickly. The first of these is important as throwing further light on the attitude of the Delphic oracle; the second is an argument in accord with Herodotus’ own impression of the situation at the time.

It is quite easy to see that there prevailed in antiquity two views as to the exact significance of the coincidence of the Carthaginian attack on Sicily with the invasion of Greece by Xerxes. Herodotus never saw any connection between them. It is possible that no hint of such a connection was apparent in the sources from which he drew his story of the relations between Gelo and the embassy. H. vii 158. He represents the former as being willing to send a very considerable contingent to aid the Greeks at home, provided that the latter will give him the command of the united force. The condition, if the offer was ever made, was in no wise a surprising one. Considering the magnitude of the help which Gelo is reported to have offered, it was reasonable. H. vii 159. And yet it was refused, and that, too, in language which cannot be regarded as otherwise than insulting. So Gelo reduced his terms to the command of either the sea or land force. And now the Athenian section of the embassy had a word to say. Their refusal of the command by sea was, perhaps, somewhat more polite, but hardly less explicit than had been that of the Spartans to the original condition. Gelo’s answer, as reported, is brief, but marked by a wit not unworthy of the distinguished literary society of his court: “My Athenian friend, you seem to have commanders, without the likelihood of any troops to command.”

After this, it may well be imagined, there was nothing more to be said or done, and the embassy went home.

Gelo, however, is reported to have sent a treasure-ship to Delphi, to watch the course of the war, with orders, in case the Persian won the day, to surrender the treasure to him and offer the earth and water of submission. The general origin of the tale so far is plainly indicated by Herodotus. It is a story which existed—perhaps indeed was current—in European Greece, for the historian, before proceeding to add further details, expressly mentions that they were derived from Sicily.

The Sicilians say, so he relates, that in spite of what had occurred, Gelo would have aided the Greeks and submitted to the Lacedæmonian command, had not circumstances arisen at home, in the shape of a Carthaginian invasion, which prevented him from so doing. Herodotus ascribes the invasion to the intervention of the Carthaginians in favour of Terillos, tyrant of Himera, who had been driven out of his government by Thero of Akragas. An immense army, 300,000 in number, composed, after the manner of the Carthaginian armies, of nearly all the peoples in the Western Mediterranean, invaded Sicily by way of Himera.

Such is Herodotus’ account of the events in Sicily at this critical time, an account which closes with words of great significance, which put a somewhat different complexion on the tale of the sending of the treasure-ship to Delphi “Thus, not being able to help the Greeks (owing to this invasion), Gelo sent the treasure to Delphi.”

Even if there existed no other evidence with regard to the events of this period than that which Herodotus supplies, his narrative as it stands would raise several serious difficulties.

It is, in the first place, quite impossible that an expedition of the magnitude of that despatched by Carthage could have been got ready without prolonged preparations such as could not have remained a secret from the surrounding peoples, and especially from the Sicilian Greeks. It would be calculated to excite the liveliest alarm among all who could conceive themselves to be the objects of attack. Of the magnitude of the expedition there can be no doubt. The numbers given in Herodotus may not be correct, probably are not so; but, be that as it may, Sicily itself bore testimony of an exceedingly practical kind to the magnitude of the victory which was subsequently won at Himera. Head. Hist. Numm. The victory itself, and the prosperity to which it gave rise, caused something like a revolution in the coinage of Syracuse and of the Siciliot states generally.

It is impossible to suppose that Gelo was unaware that the expedition was being prepared, and, indeed, that Sicily was the object of it, long before the expedition itself started. LIBERTY AND TYRANNY. It is therefore, to say the least of it, doubtful whether he can ever have entertained, or even have professed to entertain, any idea of sending a force to help the Greeks at home. H. vii. 165, ad fin. Even in Herodotus’ narrative it is stated that Gelo was aware of the coming of the great Carthaginian expedition before the treasure was despatched to Delphi. Why should Gelo have sought to buy off a Persian attack from a distance when the great invasion was close upon him? If he succumbed to the latter, the money would be thrown away. If he were successful in warding it off, he might reasonably expect to be able to resist any force which Persia could bring against him. The Ionian Sea was not a Hellespont which might be bridged.

The tale of this despatch of treasure to Delphi is a strange one. It may not be true. In any case the motive for it in Herodotus is manifestly impossible. But the tale is not one which can be ignored. The Greek of the fifth century was just as capable of suppressing as of making history. His patriotism had a tendency to run on party lines. The very intensity of the sympathy which he felt for all that was Hellenic made him intensely hostile to any political system in the Hellenic world, or to any representative of a system, which was opposed to his own ideas; optimi corruptio pessima. The tyranny of the great king over his subjects, even if they were Greeks, aroused but a lukewarm resentment in the breast of the Greek democrat. He hated with a much fiercer passion the tyranny of Greek over Greek. The barbarian knew no better, because he was a barbarian; the Greek ought to know, because he was a Greek. Nowhere and at no time in Greek history can this feeling have been stronger than in the Athens of the middle of the fifth century, under whose influence Herodotus so manifestly wrote. The Great War had in his day become a story; he just saved it from becoming a myth. The creative genius of the Greek did not discriminate in subject-matter. History, both Ancient and Modern, went alike info the melting-pot of his imagination, to be cast into a fable, often beautiful, with a moral in its train. To such an influence as this Herodotus was peculiarly susceptible. His genuinely conscientious desire to write history in all truth was tinged with a piety which induced an unconscious reservation of fact. He preferred the improbable combined with a distinct moral lesson to the probable when no moral lesson was conveyed. He wished to teach as well as to inform.

It is not necessary to suppose—there are, indeed, many reasons for thinking it improbable,—that he ever departed from what he believed to be true; but, at the same time, he was not possessed of the keen critical faculty which would have been necessary to unravel the truth from the falsehood of the tales which must have formed so largely the basis of the history of the earlier part of the fifth century. His account of Gelo is doubtless coloured by, if not reproduced from, the tradition of the Greece of his time with regard to this incident in the history of the great war. That war was regarded as far the greatest of the triumphs of Hellenic freedom, a triumph of free institutions over the monarchical system. The nature of the triumph would have been largely discounted had it been necessary to record the name of a hated tyrant upon the roll of fame. And so, may be, the connection between Gelo’s victory and the war of liberation in Greece itself was a thing almost forgotten in Hellas by the time of Herodotus. It may have been hardly known to his generation, or only sufficiently known to be resented and buried in silence. The tale as it was told was a grand moral lesson to the democratic Greek. Even in the stress of the severest need the free Greek had refused to sell his birthright of command to a hated tyranny, though the price offered had been great. And yet the issue had been triumphant. Could it be bearable that the tyrant should be accorded a share in the triumph? The tradition which Herodotus followed had some such motive behind it.

It may not be possible at the present time to arrive at aught resembling a detailed knowledge of this side plot of the great drama of 480, and even the circumstances of the information are not of such a kind as to allow us to speak with ultimate assurance on the main outlines of it; but the evidence, actual and presumptive, when the several items are added and subtracted, leaves a large balance of probability in favour of a view very different from that which Herodotus has given to the world.

It is not, perhaps, unnatural that knowledge after the event should tend to obscure the true appreciation of all that preceded it. There is, however, one phase of the Persian expedition of 480 which stands out above all others; and that is the splendid character of the organization which placed the enormous host of Xerxes in middle Greece. It was not merely the outcome of the experience of years of campaigning half the world over; it must have been the outcome of some years of preparation with an express end in view. Can it be supposed that in these years the advantages of a diversion in the western world of Greece escaped the notice of a people who gave such practical proof of capacity? It cannot be too often said that it is a great historical mistake to read the incapacity of the Persia of the fourth century into its history at the beginning of the fifth.

The means of creating the diversion were both obvious and easy. Persia, through the intermediary of her subjects the Phœnicians, had excellent means of communicating with and influencing the great Carthaginian power. This influence must have been largely increased by the favour which Persia showed to the Phœnician as against the Greek trader.

It is unnecessary to point to the fact that Carthage would presumably require but little persuasion to attack the rival Greek in Sicily at a time when no help could possibly be given from Greece itself.

The Sicilian Greek seems to have had no sort of doubt as to the connection between the invasion of his own island and that of the mother country. H. vii. 165. ad init. Herodotus, even in spite of his bias towards the Greek version of the story, H vii. 166. gives some hint of a different version in Sicily. Frag. Hist. Græc. He does not apparently know much about it, as he does not mention Himera as the locality of the decisive battle.

It is in a fragment of Ephoros that occurs the first extant historical reference to the connection between the two expeditions. Pyth. i. 146. He says that Persian and Phœnician ambassadors were sent to the Carthaginians, “ordering” them to invade Sicily with as large an expedition as possible, and after subduing it, to come on to the Peloponnese. Discredit has been cast on the passage in consequence of the use of the word “order,” because, so it is said, the Persians were not in a position to give orders to Carthage. But, supposing the use of the word is not merely an instance of verbal inaccuracy, it is quite conceivable that a Greek historian might use such an expression to describe the supposed relations between the mother state of Phœnicia and her colony. Diod. xi. 1. The historian Diodorus recognizes the same connection between the two expeditions. He does not, however, make any reference to Phœnician agency in the matter, nor does he speak of an “order,” but of a diplomatic agreement.106

One question remains: Did Gelo ever seriously entertain the idea of sending help to the mother country? It is hardly conceivable that he did. The Carthaginian preparations were on such a scale that he must have been long forewarned of the coming storm. Whether he made any sort of offer to the Greek embassy is quite another question.

If the Greek version of the story of the time provokes the suspicion that it arose under influences inimical to the strict truth, the Sicilian also, of which there is a hint in Herodotus, and some detail in Diodorus, suggests in certain of its passages that it is not an unadorned tale. That sentiment of the free Greek which, when the history of the great war came to be written, led him to deny the Sicilian tyrant all share in its glory, met a counter-sentiment in Sicily, which claimed for the Sicilian Greek a share in the famous triumph. Under such influences both exaggeration and suppression of the truth were sure to take place. The Sicilian version was not content with confining itself to the just claim that Gelo and Sicily in the victory at Himera had contributed to the triumphant result of the great war. It sought evidently to ascribe to the Sicilian Greek a sympathetic, if not actual, share in the liberation of Greece itself. Diod. xi 26. Gelo is represented as having, after the victory of Himera, prepared a fleet with a view to sending help to Greece, but to have desisted from the design on receiving news of the victory at Salamis. This is neither capable of proof nor disproof. The exact date of Himera is not known, though there was a tradition that it was fought on the same day as Salamis. If that be accepted, this addition to the Sicilian version must be rejected; but if the tradition was merely of that class which is found represented in the history of the time, and which supplied the eternal demand for curious coincidences, then it is possible that Himera was fought sufficiently long before Salamis to make it possible for Gelo to entertain such a design; nor would it have been strange had he sought to avenge himself on Persia for an attack which she had provoked against him. It is possible, too, that the epigram reported to have been engraved on an offering of Gelo at Delphi107 refers not merely to the true significance of Himera, but also to the preparation of this expedition which was never sent.

This war in Sicily, and the questions which arise concerning it, are of much greater importance to the study of this period of Greek history than the comparative brevity of their treatment by Greek historians might suggest to the mind of a reader who did not realize to himself their full significance. The Greek tyrant in Sicily played no small part in spreading and developing certain sides of that Greek civilization which has contributed so largely towards the civilization of the present day. The view, therefore, which was taken by one of the greatest and most able of those tyrants as to the part which he should play at a time when that civilization was threatened with extinction, is not a minor matter in the history of Greece, or, indeed, of the world. Nor, again, can the part played by Persia in the invasion of Sicily be of small account. Persia at this time represented, in certain respects,—and especially with respect to sheer capacity and breadth of view, —the highest development which the great empires of the East were able to attain; and its connection or lack of connection with the attack on Sicily cannot but affect the judgment which the modern world must pass on that capacity.108

To the Greeks gathered in council at the Isthmus the outlook, after their retreat from Tempe, and after the return of the embassies, must have been a gloomy one. Nothing had been gained, and much had been lost. Thessaly with its cavalry, that arm in which the Greeks were peculiarly weak, and their enemy peculiarly strong, had been perforce left to its fate; and no one could doubt what that would be. The states between Kithæron and Œta were wavering, ready to desert. They could hardly be blamed. The backbone of the future resistance seemed to be with Sparta and the states of the Peloponnesian league who followed her lead. QUESTION OF THE LINE OF DEFENCE. It might well be suspected, perhaps even then it was known, that, if they could have their way, the defence of the Isthmus would be the beginning and the end of their design. Northern Greece seemed but too likely to be left to its fate, just as Thessaly had been. Was it strange that it should seek to make terms of submission? In one of its states, moreover, and that the most powerful from a military point of view, Bœotia, more sinister influences were at work. The oligarchical party, at all times strong in that country whose comparatively open nature left the many at the mercy of the powerful few, seemed only too ready to play a part similar to that which the Aleuadæ had played in Thessaly.

The attitude of Argos was also calculated to cause alarm. It must be pointed out at the same time, that though it aggravated the situation to a certain extent, it did not affect it so decisively as has been imagined by modern commentators. The possibility of the landing of Persian troops behind the defences of the Isthmus was not a question so much dependent on the action of Argos as on the success or failure of the Greek fleet in checking the advance of the enemy’s ships before they succeeded in crossing the Saronic Gulf. Had the Persian fleet once succeeded in establishing itself in some harbour of the coast of Argolis, the defence of the Isthmus must have collapsed, whatever the attitude of Argos might have been. This State, owing to the losses it had suffered in the great defeat which Kleomenes and the Spartans inflicted upon it, can hardly have been in a position to offer serious resistance to a landing on its coasts.