Despite the great catastrophe which had just taken place before their eyes, the Greek cities had no mind to make an unconditional surrender to the power which had vanquished their old master. It was unfortunate that, after coming to such a decision, they did not combine in a common resistance. The inherent weakness of their strategical position, together with the incompleteness of the sympathy between Æolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greek, made such united action difficult. There is a terrible sameness in the drama of history as played upon this coast of the Ægean. The scenery admitted of but one plot, of which the leading motive was disunion. In the present, as in other instances, the Dorian states of the Carian coast went their own way. They threw in their lot with their Carian neighbours. The Æolians and Ionians were not altogether blameless in the matter. They did not at first show a bold front to the Persian, but offered to submit to him on the terms on which they had submitted to Crœsus.

Save in the case of Miletus, the largest and most formidable of the towns, Cyrus would not hear of terms; and so the cities prepared to fight for their liberty.

It was the beginning of the winter; and, as the Persians did not possess the means for assaulting the cities from the side of the sea, the latter had a few months’ respite wherein to make preparations. They appealed to Sparta for help. That cautious government, which was probably congratulating itself on having escaped from involving its citizens in the Lydian débâcle, refused active assistance, but sent an embassy to Cyrus to warn him against interference. Cyrus, whose notions as to the geography of this part of the world may well have been vague, asked who the ambassadors were, and whence they came. H. i. 153. On being told, he warned them that, all well, he would give them cause to talk about their own woes and not those of the Ionians. This rough humour must have seemed in great contrast to the politeness with which Crœsus had addressed the foremost race in Greece.

Cyrus was obliged to entrust the completion of the conquest of the Lydian kingdom to one of his lieutenants. The news of the fall of Sardes had scared Babylon into inactivity; but the Baktrians and Sakæ on the extreme eastern borders of his dominion had seized the opportunity afforded by the western campaign to rise in revolt.

He had not proceeded far on his homeward march before news reached him of a rising in Lydia. Paktyas, a renegade Lydian who had embraced his cause, and to whom the conqueror had entrusted the care of the transport of the spoils, had intrigued with the Ionian Greeks; and, having ample funds at his disposal, had hired mercenaries from them. Tabalos, the Persian lieutenant whom Cyrus had left behind him, was besieged in the citadel of Sardes; and there was every prospect that, if the place fell, all the work of the late campaign would have to be done again. There was no time to be lost: nor was Cyrus the man to lose time. He despatched an army under Mazares the Mede to rescue the besieged, and Sardes was saved. Paktyas fled to Kyme, and thence to the islands. He neither deserved nor received sympathy, and, after various adventures, was handed over by the Chians to the Median commander.

With the flight of Paktyas the insurrection in Lydia came to an end; in fact, in so far as extant records go, the Lydians themselves played but little part in it. The passive and entire submission of this people, their acceptance, once and for all, of the yoke laid upon them, is one of the most extraordinary features of this extraordinary time. CONQUEST OF IONIA BY PERSIA. It might well have been expected that a nation with a past so recent and so glorious would have seized the first and every opportunity of attempting to regain the freedom, if not the dominion they had lost. But nothing of the kind took place; and even the great effort of the Ionian revolt failed to rouse them from the apathy of defeat.

The circumstances of Paktyas’ rebellion showed Mazares that the Greek cities of the coast could no longer be left in a position to be the instruments of trouble in the newly-won territory. To them, accordingly, he immediately turned his attention. He first attacked Priene and sacked it; but, before he had completed the reduction of Magnesia on the Mæander, he died, and Harpagos, who succeeded him as governor, took up the task of reduction. Phokæa and Teos were besieged. Ere they fell, the mass of their inhabitants went into voluntary exile—the Phokæans to Corsica in the farthest west, the Teans to the near coast of Thrace.

There can be little doubt that the departure of these peoples was a disaster of the first magnitude to the Greek towns of Asia. It is hardly possible to realize at the present day the strength of resolution which prompted the Phokæans to undertake their long and perilous journey. They are the New Englanders of the sixth century before Christ. Their presence fifty years later, at the time of the revolt, might have given the Ionian resistance that “stiffening” which it seems to have lacked; indeed, a member of the remnant they left behind them, that dare-devil old pirate Dionysius, is the one prominent person on the Greek side in that distressful time whom later historians consented to praise. One by one the other Ionian and Æolian cities fell into Persian power. There does not appear to have been any real combined resistance. Nature had made them units without unity. The islanders of Samos alone escaped subjection.

Caria was next attacked. It yielded practically without a blow, and the Dorian colonies fell with it into Persian hands—a fate in their case not wholly undeserved. Lycia fought for its liberty, but in vain; and with its subjection the establishment of Persian rule on the continent of West Asia was complete.

The rest of the career of Cyrus, important though it is, has little influence on Greek history. His campaign in the East was a prolonged one. He seems to have extended the borders of his empire to the Thian-Shan and Suleiman ranges, if not into the plains of India itself. His aim can hardly have been the mere acquisition of these enormous areas of comparatively unproductive territory. The reason lying behind his policy was, in all probability, the fact that the races of this region were near akin to his own, and that he wished to advance against the Semitic peoples at the head of a forced coalition of the Iranian races.

The turn of Babylon for attack was soon to come. Nabonidus’ antiquarian researches absorbed more and more of his time, and the real conduct of the government seems to have passed into the hands of his son Bel-sharuzar, the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel. In the final struggle, indeed, Nabonidus seems to have come to the front again.

By 538 Cyrus was ready. He made great preparations for the invasion, probably in anticipation of a much harder task than it actually proved. The collapse seems to have been rapid, so that within a short time Babylon was taken, Nabonidus a prisoner, and the brief revival of the Chaldæan empire at an end. The whole of the Babylonian dominions submitted to the conqueror, and the empire of Cyrus now stretched unbroken from the Ægean and Mediterranean on the west to the borders of India on the east.

Of the three rival kingdoms, Egypt alone survived. Doubtless Cyrus had designs upon it; but after the fall of Babylon in 538, he seems to have wisely devoted himself to the task of consolidating the empire he had won so rapidly in the previous fourteen years. Before his plans were ripe for an expedition beyond the Isthmus of Suez, disturbances in the far east called him thither. There he died, probably in a great battle about the year 529. The halo of legend which rapidly formed about his great personality concealed not merely the real man, but even his real history. THE PERSIAN CIVILIZATION. Four versions of the story of his death, each differing wholly from the other, were known to the Greeks. But whatever fate he met, his body was brought to his home-land, where the remains of his tomb may be seen at the present day. “I am Cyrus, the king, the Achæmenian,” is the only part of his epitaph which survives. It would be too little for a lesser man. It is sufficient for him even now that he has been twenty-five centuries dead.

The new Orientalism with which the Asian Greek was brought into contact by the conquest of Lydia was, in many respects, of a different character to that which had preceded it in Western Asia. As years rolled on, and the specially Persian characteristics of it became more and more merged in the general Oriental type, the difference tended to disappear; but even until quite late times the hardy races from the mountains of Iran had many national customs which were in strong contrast to the typical civilization of the Euphrates plain. Though far from ideal, there were certain grand elements in it which struck the imagination of some of the finer minds of Greece, and which, through them, must have influenced Greek life, though in ways which it is not possible now to trace. Had the Greek come much under its influence, that influence, though it would have been disastrous in many respects, would not have tended wholly for evil.

The civilization was indeed essentially of an Eastern type. It is unnecessary to point out the significance of such a general characteristic. The Mede and Persian had been for centuries next-door neighbours of the population of the great plains, and it was inevitable that they should have borrowed from their brilliant life. Yet, despite their nearness, there was a triple gulf between the two, which the intercourse even of centuries could not bridge. Difference of race, difference of habitat, and, above all, difference of religion sundered them. The Iranian and Semite regarded the world and life in it from different points of view. The struggle for existence presented itself in wholly different aspects to the mountaineer and the man of the plain. The monotheist could have but little sympathy with a polytheistic creed.

The Medo-Persian was a strange product for an Asiatic soil. He was an Asian apart. His religious belief was alone calculated to make him remarkable among his contemporaries. The Asiatic of this time had a natural tendency towards polytheism. The monotheism of even the Israelites was spasmodic. But with the Persian monotheism was the set religion of the race. It had a legendary origin in the teachings of Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, as he appears in Western history. Ahura-mazda was the one god. There were, indeed, other objects of worship,—the stars, the sun, the moon, and fire, beautiful and incomprehensible works of Ahura-mazda; but he was god alone. Other spiritual beings there were too, represented as deified virtues and blessings—Good Thought, Perfect Holiness, Good Government, Meek Piety, Health, and Immortality; and these stood nearest to Ahura-mazda’s throne.

The national religion had not, indeed, wholly escaped the contamination of the less spiritual cults of the neighbouring peoples. The animalism of the worship of the Babylonian goddess Mylitta had been introduced into the land under the guise of the adoration of the nymph Anahita.

Nevertheless, with the Persian the deification of the various forms of nature took a special form. The deities themselves were treated as demi-gods, rather than gods; creations of the great spirit of Ahura-mazda. One power alone, the power of evil, seemed to contest his supremacy. In opposition, therefore, to the god of that light which he looked upon as the visible embodiment of the Good, the Persian conceived the existence of a god of darkness, a god of evil, a god of the under-world, a god of death. This god, Angro-mainyus, possessed, indeed, the attributes both of Satan and of Pluto. There was no hope for the complete triumph of good over evil in this life. “Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,”—in that lay the whole alternative, the ultimate possibility for good or evil, in so far as the world of the present was concerned. Only in an after-life could the final triumph of the good be looked for,—in a life after that resurrection of the dead which the prophets, the sons of Zoroaster, awaking from their long sleep, should bring to pass.

It seems at first strange that the Persian creed never captured the imagination of the Greek. It may, indeed, be doubted whether it was ever presented to him in its highest and purest form. The ideal was, perhaps, too elevated for the ordinary devotee, and its full appreciation confined to the initiated few. The Greek learnt indeed in after times to admire certain of the virtues which the Persian displayed; but never grasped, apparently, the spiritual and intellectual basis which underlay them. It was long, too, ere the bitter hostility to the barbarian allowed the Greek to view him and his ways with unprejudiced eyes; and in that lapse of time the barbarian had deteriorated, and his life had become more and more tainted with the baser side of Oriental civilization, which could only excite contempt in the Hellenic mind.

Of the history of the Asiatic Greeks during the later years of Cyrus and the brief reign of his successor, Cambyses, but little is known. Samos alone, as has been said, retained its independence. During the last years of Cyrus, somewhere about 533, a certain Polykrates made himself tyrant of the island, and under his rule the Samians enjoyed a short period of prosperity, so great that it remained proverbial in after-history. Polykrates used to the full the opportunity afforded him by Cyrus’ detention in the East. Separated as he was by only a few miles of sea from the great empire, he could not but recognize the danger of his position, a danger which was rendered far greater by the fact that the acquisition of Phœnicia had given the Persians that arm they had up to that time lacked, a fleet. The great prosperity of the island, due, no doubt, in a great measure to its being the only Greek trading community on the Asiatic side which was not under the Persian dominion, enabled him to raise and maintain a large body of mercenaries as well as a fleet of a hundred fifty-oared war-ships. He furthermore entered into negotiations with Egypt, with a view to mutual defence.

At home in the Ægean, he played a many-sided part. Piracy, trade, engineering, and territorial acquisition were all included in the field of his manifold activity. The piracy was probably carried on at the expense of those traders who did not use Samos as an entrepôt between East and West. It involved him in many a quarrel with the Asiatic Greek towns, whose anomalous position at the time is shown by the recorded fact that Polykrates actually took possession of parts of their territory on the mainland, although they were under the Persian dominion. This somewhat wild career was interrupted, if not positively checked, by events which were preparing on the far side of the Levant.

Cambyses had made up his mind to complete by the conquest of Egypt the work which his father had done. With a view to so doing, he was collecting a great armament, in which a powerful fleet was to play a part. This method of invasion, thus adopted for the first time, served as a precedent for all the great Persian expeditions of after years. The fact that it was Cambyses who conceived the design is sufficient to stamp the picture which Herodotus draws of him as a copy of a somewhat clumsy Egyptian caricature, even if other evidence did not tend the same way.

Ships were levied from Phœnicia, and the Greeks of Cyprus had also to contribute to the fleet. H. iii. 19. The latter, after the fall of Assyria, to which they had been in a position of nominal subordination, had enjoyed a short period of absolute liberty. Amasis of Egypt had reduced them to subjection; but, on the establishment of the Persian power in the Syrian region, they had thrown off their allegiance to Egypt and tendered their submission to the new empire.

Polykrates began to reconsider his position. A Greek legend, which Herodotus has preserved, represents him as having been thrown over by Amasis out of superstitious apprehension. His hitherto unvarying success, so thought the Egyptian king, must end in some terrible disaster proportionate in greatness. Herodotus could not resist a tale which so entirely harmonized with his views of life.

In actual fact, the reverse seems to have been the case. SAMOS ANNEXED BY PERSIA. Polykrates broke off the alliance with Amasis; and not merely did so, but actually despatched forty ships to aid the Persian expedition. He tried, indeed, to kill two birds with one stone, and missed both; for he manned these vessels with Samian suspects, who had no mind to lend their bodies for this experiment in diplomacy, and forthwith turned Polykrates’ own weapons against himself by sailing back with the fleet and making an attack on Samos. Failing in that, they sailed away to Laconia, with a view to getting help of Sparta. Polykrates’ great bid for Persian favour had miscarried.

What followed is peculiarly interesting as being the first example of the way in which Corinth could, and did, force the hand of the Lacedæmonians in matters of policy.

The Lacedæmonians had indeed grievances against the Samians; but it is unlikely that they would have undertaken the expedition, had they not been urged thereto by Corinth. The grievance on the side of Corinth was of a kind that was fated to reappear on many momentous occasions in the course of the next century. Corinthian trade had been interfered with by the Samians. The piratical enterprise of Polykrates was sure to be directed against the trade of a state which had broken off its old commercial relations with Samos and transferred its connection to Miletus.

The expedition took place about 524. It failed. After a fruitless siege of forty days the Lacedæmonians returned to Peloponnese.

Soon afterwards Polykrates met his end. He was enticed to Magnesia on the Mæander by Orœtes, Satrap of Sardes, and there put to death.

His secretary, Mæandrios, carried on the tyranny for some years; but about the year 516 a Persian force invaded the island, H. iii. 139–149. and established Syloson, a brother of Polykrates who had won the favour of Darius, as tyrant in the Persian interest. A brother of Mæandrios made one vigorous but vain attempt to win the island back. The acquisition of Samos completed the Persian conquest of the Asian coast.

It is significant that Sparta, when appealed to by Mæandrios for help, not merely refused it, but dismissed him from the Peloponnese, lest he should bring about political complications. Sparta’s policy on this occasion, and her attitude at the time of the Ionian revolt, show that the fear of experience had taken the place with her of that courage of ignorance which she had shown in her alliance with Lydia.

Cambyses’ short reign came to an end in 522. He had added to his dominions Egypt and the Libyan coast as far as the Greater Syrtis, and had even made an expedition up the Nile into Ethiopia. The Greeks in Egypt had been involved in the disaster which fell upon their adopted home.

On the other hand, Persian enterprise in the West was for the time being at a standstill; and the Asiatic Greeks, with the exception of the Samians, seem to have passed seven uneventful years of submission to their new ruler.

The last few months of Cambyses’ life had been troubled by the plots of a Magian named Gaumata, who is said to have borne a remarkable resemblance to Smerdis, a brother whom Cambyses had caused to be murdered. The rising was no doubt encouraged by the state of Cambyses’ health. He had certainly suffered from serious illness in Egypt; there is, indeed, reason to suspect that he was an epileptic.

The story of this false Smerdis is one of the unsolved mysteries of the period. But few reliable details of it survive, and these are for the most part contained in the great inscription of Darius on the rocks at Behistun.

The usurpation was certainly popular in the home provinces of the empire, if the rapid spread of the insurrection be any criterion. On his way home from Egypt to suppress it, Cambyses died,—a violent death, it seems certain, though historians are not in agreement as to its exact form.

For some years the pseudo-Smerdis concealed his identity, and maintained his power; but at last the suspected deception was discovered by some of the great Persian nobles, among whom was Darius, who claimed descent from the Achæmenid family. DARIUS. Of the events that followed, nothing is known for certain, save that these nobles assassinated the pretender, and Darius succeeded to the supreme power.

He seems to have been at first a king without a kingdom; for the great satraps of the provinces, whose position placed at their disposal large resources of men and money, revolted with well-nigh one consent. The province in Asia Minor was one of the few which did not join in the rising. H. iii. 126, 128. If a tale preserved in Herodotus be true, its governor Orœtes meditated insurrection; but before he could carry his plans into action, he was assassinated by his own bodyguard, in obedience to written orders sent by Darius.

The whole of the work of Cyrus seemed undone. The conquest of the great Empire had to be carried out again, as it were, from the beginning. How Darius carried it out is no real part of the present story. Suffice it to say that he did the work, and that he seems to have done it thoroughly.

This formidable upheaval showed Darius the necessity of giving the empire a new organization, under which its recurrence would be difficult or impossible. The time of Cyrus had been fully taken up with the military acquisition and maintenance of the great realm. Cambyses had been similarly occupied during his short reign; though it may also be doubted whether he possessed the capacity required for carrying out so huge a scheme. Under these two rulers the old Assyrian method, or want of method, of administration had largely prevailed, a system which seems to have been admirably designed for goading the subject populations into rebellion, but which provided no machinery by which insurrection could be rendered difficult or be nipped in the bud. The central power was ever kept on the strain by repeated revolts in the provinces, if the term “province” can be applied to regions which were not in any real sense “areas of administration,” but were merely regarded as lands to be exploited for the benefit of the conquerors.

There are two important reasons why, in dealing with the history of the relations between Greek and Persian, prominence should be given to this organization of the empire under Darius. It was, in the first place, destined to be the permanent political system of the Persian dominion for all the ages during which that empire continued to be the neighbour of the Greek of Europe and of Asia. In the second place, it is impossible to realize the ability of the Persian race at its highest point of development, and the enlightened character of some, at least, of its rulers, without fully appreciating the main details of the great scheme of imperial and provincial government which Darius promulgated. In certain respects, indeed, its methods may seem rude when compared with those of later ages; but in judging of them it must be borne in mind that it was designed for the government of peoples most of whom recognized no law save that of the strong hand, and furthermore, that its creators were creators in a very literal sense of the term, in that their work was so far in advance of anything on the same scale which had preceded it, that its originality is beyond question. The decay of the empire for whose government it was formed was not due to faults in the scheme itself, but to the rapid deterioration of those who administered it. It erred perhaps on the side of centralization; but then the East does not understand, and never has understood, anything but centralization in government. Still, this feature was, owing to special circumstances, destined to prove fatal to it; for it was at the centre of the empire, in the reigning family itself, that the decay set in which corrupted the whole.

The first danger to be provided against by the new scheme was caused by the isolation and comparative independence of the provincial governors, especially in the remoter provinces of the empire. It is a form of danger common to all great empires at all ages of the world, one against which the central government must ever make provision. Darius’ solution of the difficulty was conceived on much the same lines as were followed in later days by the Cæsars in dealing with the Cæsarean provinces of the Roman empire. ORGANIZATION OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE. Not merely was the area of administration of the governor limited within the province, but also his actions were placed under immediate observation by the appointment of high officials, with special departments of their own, who were not under his control, but were directly responsible to the head of the empire. The plan had its disadvantages from the point of view of the governed; and there were doubtless many instances in which the subjects of the Great King, like the Roman provincial of later days, complained that Tac Agric. 15. “discord and harmony between those set over them were alike disastrous to those they ruled.” For the end for which it was devised, however, the method seems to have been effective.

The empire was divided into satrapies, whose number varied from twenty to twenty-eight at different periods of Darius’ reign.3 Persia proper was alone excluded, receiving special treatment as the home of the ruling race.

The civil and military powers in these satrapies or provinces were divided. Three independent officials, with separate departments of administration, were appointed to each. In the case of important provinces the satraps were generally drawn from great families connected with the Achæmenids; but in the case of the others the field of choice seems to have been practically unlimited, and governors were selected from among the comparatively poor as well as from the wealthy, from the subject races as well as from the Persians. The instances in which persons not of Persian or Medic extraction were appointed to these important posts seem, however, to have been rare and exceptional. There was no set period for the tenure of the office. The duration of the governor’s administration depended on the pleasure of the Great King.

In all civil matters the governor had absolute authority. He controlled the administration of the taxes and the dispensation of justice; he possessed the power of life and death. As viceroy, representing the king, he was allowed to maintain a court and bodyguard, with other minor attributes of regal power. Under ordinary circumstances he neither commanded nor even controlled the military forces in his province; in fact, a common policy of the central government seems to have been to place a personal enemy of the governor in command of the troops, whose relations with the king were, of course, direct. It may be that under exceptional circumstances,—as, for instance, when Artaphernes was satrap of Sardes at the time of the Ionian revolt,—the supreme direction of military operations was entrusted to a governor of peculiarly high distinction.

The secretary of state within the province was a third official who had immediate relations to the king. Though nominally the chief assistant of the governor, he was in reality appointed to watch his conduct, and to report irregularities or suspicious circumstances to the central government at Susa.

In his general relations with the subject populations and vassal kingdoms, the Persian seems to have followed a policy of forbearance and liberality which is extraordinary at that period. The language, customs, religion, and local laws of the various peoples were respected; even their rulers were in many cases allowed to remain in power, provided always that their rule was in conformity with Persian interests. The Greek cities of Asia are an instance in point. They were allowed to retain such local self-government as they had possessed under their Lydian suzerain, with the exception that, for any democracies which had existed in them, either an aristocracy, or a Greek tyrant ruling in the Persian interest, was substituted. Such was the case, at any rate, before the Ionian revolt Motives of self-interest obviously contributed to this policy. The maintenance of local institutions in the empire, and the avoidance of complete unification, were eminently calculated to keep the various populations separate, and to prevent the spread of any rebellion over a wide area. To use a modern simile, the provinces were converted, in so far as possible, into compartments fireproof against the flame of insurrection.

There can be no question that, throughout the vast area of the empire as a whole, the condition of the population generally was greatly ameliorated in comparison with its life in the past. Precautions were taken to safeguard the subject from oppression by high officials. Apart from the check which the triple division of direct responsibility placed on the arbitrary exercise of power, a special body of officers, known to the Greeks as the king’s “eyes” or “ears,” went on annual circuits through the empire, and reported any case of abuse in the administration. The intention, at any rate, was good; though it may be doubted whether the system could guarantee the provincial from acts of oppression on the part of officials who had a mind to act in arbitrary fashion.

But there was another most important side to the policy of the government. The ordinary conditions of daily life within the empire were certainly made much better than they had been before its establishment. It was to the interest of the government to preserve peace, an inestimable blessing to a continent which only knew the peace of exhaustion. Petty states were no longer allowed to wage war on one another. Life became more secure. The highways of the land and sea were rendered safe by the suppression of brigandage and piracy. The great roads were improved in character, to the benefit of internal trade. Moreover, to facilitate trade, and for the convenience of the revenue, Darius instituted a system of currency, whose coins were notorious for the purity of their metal. The gold Daric became, indeed, the sovereign of the ancient trading world; for the Greeks had not command of a sufficient supply of the precious metal to introduce a gold standard into their coinage system. The encouragement of agriculture, and the bringing of waste lands into cultivation, was not merely a part of the policy of the government; it was actually inculcated by the Persian religion.

The revenue and taxation of the empire was conducted on business-like principles during the days of Darius; and though the burdens imposed on the subject populations were not light, yet, on the whole, they received a fair return for their contributions in the shape of that prosperity which followed upon the greater security they enjoyed. The financial levy was either in money or in kind, or in both, according to the nature and products of a province. The great defect of the system was, however, that the satraps, after handing over the provincial quota to the imperial treasury, had thereafter to raise from the province the expenses of themselves and their following. Given a strong central government and a good satrap, the system was probably as free from abuse as such a system could be; but if, as must too often have been the case, either of these circumstances were unfavourable, much evil must have resulted to the subject populations, and many of the outbreaks which took place must be assigned to such a cause.

In all probability, however, the heaviest burden laid upon the provincial population was the obligation to furnish contingents for the army of the empire. Considering the nature of the monarchy, the actual standing army seems to have been curiously small, little more, in fact, than what was necessary for the maintenance of peace within the frontiers. In case, therefore, of external war, unsparing levies of the subject population were inevitable. The burden seems also to have been unevenly distributed: it would naturally fall most heavily on those peoples who made the most effective soldiers. From a military point of view, this feature of the imperial system was a mistake. An army formed of heterogeneous elements deficient in military training cannot under such a system have been welded into one harmonious whole. Only its multitude could be strikingly formidable.

But in every other respect the new empire with which the Greeks had been brought into contact was not a mere aggregation of barbarism, but a highly organized piece of machinery, controlled by a people who, in certain sides of their civilization, compared not unfavourably with the Greeks themselves.

This great scheme of organization was in all probability not carried out in one piece, though the greater part of it must be attributed to the years which followed the completion of the re-conquest.

After securing the empire from disturbance from within, the next step was to secure it against disturbance from without; and it was in carrying out this policy that Darius came into conflict with the Greek in Europe.

An examination of the map will show that the weakest part of the whole frontier, with the exception, perhaps, of that portion immediately east of the Caspian, lay along the shores of the Ægean and the Propontis. But whereas on the eastern frontier the races on either side of the boundary were probably alien and hostile to one another, on the western border the peoples on either side of the narrow seas were akin, and in close sympathy. The Thracian races of North-west Asia Minor were within sight of the lands of their free brethren in Europe; the Greek of the Ionian coast was within an easy and safe voyage of twenty-four hours of his mother country. Blood was thicker than water even towards the close of the sixth century before Christ; and the sympathy of kindred races so near at hand must have seemed to Darius and the Persians a standing menace to this extremity of the empire. The possibility of its taking an active form in case of a revolt was also an obvious danger.

Had the Greeks of Asia been different from what they were, had, indeed, they not been Greeks, it is possible that Darius would not have considered it necessary to take action.

The character of this branch of the Hellenic race at this period of its history is difficult to realize. The extant evidence on the question, with the exception of a few fragments of the writings of historians most of whose works have perished, is demonstrably hostile to the Ionian Greek, and not merely that, but demonstrably unfair. Herodotus, as will be shown in dealing with his account of the Ionian revolt, is largely responsible for the mistaken impression of the nature of this people which has been handed down to after-time. His whole view of the Ionian Greek was coloured by the belief that he was originally responsible for all the trouble which fell upon European Hellas in the years succeeding the revolt; that he imperilled the very existence of that Hellenic liberty which was destined to produce the greatness of that after-time under whose influence he wrote. He looked upon the revolt as having been from beginning to end a colossal mistake. Begun in culpable ignorance, it was carried out with contemptible pusillanimity,—so he thought. Its authors were a people of whom the Hellenic race was ashamed. Even their nearest relations among the Greeks were loth to claim relationship with them.

Apart from the facts which Herodotus himself gives tending to an opposite conclusion, the previous history of this branch of the Greek race, and especially of the Ionian section of it, tends in every way to deductions which are irreconcilable with the views of the historian. These Ionians were the descendants of men who had been conspicuous for ages as the boldest navigators of their time; who had planted colonies in almost every part of the Mediterranean, making voyages to lands previously unknown to the Greek, undeterred by the partly fabulous, partly real, perils of such enterprises. The Ionian Greek had been accustomed for centuries to take his life in his hands, facing all the manifold dangers incident to early navigation, to intercourse with barbarous tribes and life among them. And though by the end of the sixth century custom and experience must have diminished the perils attached to such adventurous existence, yet even then the Ionian had only one rival, the Phœnician, in the boldness of his seamanship. The dangerous trade route with Egypt across the expanse of the Levant was in his hands; the corn trade with the stormy Euxine was still for the most part under his control.

Such a mode of life, in which a large portion of the population of the Asiatic Greek towns must have shared, was not calculated to produce a people lacking in courage or, indeed, in perseverance. It is true that by the time that Darius’ organization of the empire had been brought to something like completion, the race had been for more than half a century under a foreign yoke. Judged by the standard of those days, the yoke had been a light one; it could hardly have been accounted heavy at any period of history. It might easily have been much heavier. It would have been to the advantage of the conqueror to have made it so, had the subject cities displayed the temper of passive submission.

Little is known of the history of these cities during the half century which intervened between the fall of Crœsus and the outbreak of the revolt. If they tamely submitted to their fate during this period, the revolt itself becomes incomprehensible. There is absolutely no adequate immediate cause for it; and Herodotus’ own account of its beginning shows by certain significant phrases which he uses that, though the actual outbreak was premature, the design had existed before ever Aristagoras made his failure at Naxos. There is no record of an actual change of attitude on the part of Persia towards the towns during the years which immediately preceded it, which could lead to the supposition that the relations between them had become suddenly embittered.

The cause which lay behind the whole of the history of Darius’ dealings with the West is the feeling with which the Greek regarded the very idea of subjection. He must have been at the period the most restless subject that ever empire had. Darius seems to have recognized from the very first that the presence of this wayward, bold, intriguing race on the western fringe of his dominions constituted an ever-present danger. The intensity of the political feeling within the cities themselves with regard to their internal affairs, which is known to have existed within them at this time, indicates the intensity of the feeling with which they regarded the foreign yoke. Democrat, aristocrat, and tyrant did not fight their fierce battles with one another to win the prize of pre-eminence in servitude. The opponents would seek, too, for external support; and the satraps of the West must have been continually worried by appeals for assistance from whatever side assumed for the time being the philo-Persian rôle; and must have known, too, that the opposite side would seek for help elsewhere. And what was “elsewhere” likely to mean, save beyond the narrow seas, in European Greece? Nor can the intense desire for freedom in the mass of the populations of the Greek cities have remained in any way a secret from the Persian governors. There were plenty of people in every city whose interest it would be to tell tales of their neighbours, and it is perhaps the blackest blot on the character of the Greek that he was but too ready to betray his fellow-countrymen.

The problem which presented itself to Darius in the sixth century before Christ on the west coast of Asia must have been very similar to that which presented itself to Cæsar five and a half centuries later in North-west Gaul. Just as the Gaul of that period was likely to remain a restless subject of Rome so long as kinsmen beyond the Channel remained free, and so long as he might look to them for support in case of revolt, so was the Greek of Asia likely to be restive, even under the lightest yoke, so long as his kin beyond the Ægean remained unsubdued, and so long as their aid might be hoped for whenever he made up his mind to strike a blow for freedom.

The policy thus, in a way, forced upon Darius, was carried out in three steps, of which the second came near to being a retrograde one, and formed no part of the original programme, while the third was certainly not one of advance.

These are:⁠—
(1) The Scythian Expedition;
(2) The Suppression of the Ionian Revolt;
(3) The Expeditions of 492 and 490.

It may seem strange to include the so-called Scythian Expedition in any design for the settlement of affairs in Western Asia. The name commonly attributed to it, for which Herodotus is mainly responsible, is, however, misleading. Neither he nor, in all probability, those Greeks who were contemporary with it, or even took part in it, were likely to understand its object. The Persian Government had the most overwhelming interest in concealing that object from the Greeks.

Greek imagination, however, could not resist the attractions of a subject so unknown and so vast and absolutely ran riot in dealing with it. Herodotus reproduces in detail the fantastic legend. It is not necessary to reproduce it here. The first aim must be to try and discover any solid facts in the story of the expedition. THE PERSIAN ARMY. The next, in view of the mass of modern literature which has sprung up with regard to it, must be to show what the expedition was not. Lastly, it will be necessary to point out the most reasonable hypothesis as to what it was, and to show its connection with such designs as Darius had upon Greece.

The very date of the expedition is a matter of extreme uncertainty. Dates ranging from 515 to 508 before Christ have been suggested by various authorities.4 On the whole, it is most probable that it took place in 512.

A twofold tête-du-pont had already been acquired in Europe by the reduction of Byzantion and of the Thracian Chersonese, over the latter of which Miltiades, son of Kimon, who was destined to become famous at Marathon, bore rule.

The standing army of the Empire seems to have been singularly small, little more, indeed, than what was requisite for police duties at home and in the provinces. It was therefore necessary, when any great expedition was contemplated, to call for levies from the subject races. There were several reasons for this peculiar policy in military matters. It was manifestly an economy in time of peace. It made it unnecessary to entrust large bodies of troops, save under exceptional circumstances, to commanders in the remote provinces. The levy system was also an effective one when dealing with such enemies, within and without, as the Empire would have to meet in Asia, and this had been satisfactorily proved in many years of campaigning. It never really failed until brought face to face with an infinitely better armed foe, the Greek of Europe.

In the present instance, the force collected is reported by tradition to have amounted to seven hundred thousand men.5 Here let it be said, as will frequently have to be said in the course of the history of these wars, that the numbers which the Greeks attributed to the Persian armies in various campaigns are, without doubt, invariably exaggerated. There is no fixed ratio in the exaggeration. Sometimes it is manifold; sometimes it is not. The real meaning of the Greek estimate of numbers is that the forces which Persia could put into the field when occasion demanded were of infinitely greater magnitude than any of which the Greek had experience. Even the myriad stood with him for a countless number.

In the present instance the force must indeed have been a large one, for the undertaking was great; and the Persian, unless he is much misrepresented in history, preferred on all occasions to have a large numerical margin of safety. Possibly he thought Ahura-mazda was “on the side of the big battalions.”

The crossing into Europe was affected by throwing a bridge over the Bosphorus in the neighbourhood of Kalchedon.6