Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/600

572 PERSIA [MEDO-PERSIAN 485-479. nances of Darius. He seems, too, to have shown a correct insight in his choice of the persons to whom he entrusted important positions. Xerxes I. He was succeeded, apparently without any disturbance, by his son Xerxes (Khshayarshd) L, who, as son of Atossa, elder daughter of Cyrus, had probably always been regarded as heir-apparent. 1 The time was not yet come when claim ants to the throne and suspects were assassinated. On the contrary, the king s blood-relations played under Xerxes as under Darius a great role as leaders and counsellors. But the whole generation was probably deeply degenerate, though the difference could hardly anywhere have been so great as that between Darius and Xerxes, who begins the series of weak and unworthy kings. The subjugation of Egypt was effected in 484 (Herod., vii. 7). The measures taken by Khabbash to protect the mouths of the Nile against the " fleet of the Asiatics " had thus been unsuccessful. According to Herodotus a much harder yoke was laid on Egypt than before. The king s own brother Acluemenes w r as made satrap of the country. Babylon Babylon too seems to have again risen in revolt. Ctesias revolts, assigns to this date the revolt with which the well-known story of Zopyrus 2 is connected, naming instead of Zopyrus his son Megabyzus. The long siege of which Herodotus speaks does not, as we saw, fit in with the revolt under Darius ; it belongs, perhaps, to the time of Xerxes. Ctesias gives us to understand that Xerxes wounded the religious feelings of the Babylonians, and Herodotus speaks ex pressly of the desecration of their sanctuaries by the same king (i. 183). To the victorious Macedonians, who em phatically asserted that they were come to avenge the destruction of Greek temples by Xerxes, the Babylonian priests afterwards told many tales of the outrages he perpetrated on their sanctuaries. 3 Doubtless they grossly exaggerated, but they did not invent everything. Of course such sacrileges may equally well have taken place when. the city w r as reconquered, or have been the occasion of a revolt. Invasion Darius was firmly resolved to wipe out the disgrace of of Greece. Marathon, and to bring the whole of Greece under the yoke. His mighty preparations for the march thither had been interrupted by the revolt of Egypt, and, if our con jecture is right, of Babylon. They were now vigorously recommenced ; and provision was made for the mainte nance of the army, at least within the limits of the Persian domain. Xerxes himself went to Sardis, the. first great rendezvous. From there he set forward in the spring of 480. We will not further describe the great expedition, which, after the dearly-bought successes at Thermopylae and Artemisium, ended with the defeats of Salamis (Sep tember 480) and Plataea (479) all this belongs rather to the history of Greece but we will briefly discuss the causes which procured for the disunited and far from numerous Greeks a victory over the mighty power of the great empire. It may very well be said that it would have been possible to subdue even Hellas, and to put an incalculable check upon the Greek spirit, if the great enter prise had been conducted with more sagacity. There was no lack of Greek traitors, nor even of traitor states, from which the king might have learned how to set about the business. But the blind arrogance of the Asiatic king was bent on bearing down everything by the sheer weight of his masses, and when he failed in this his arrogance passed at once into childish cowardice. The fleet certainly mus tered over 1 200 sail at the beginning of the war, and even 1 In spite of the anecdote in Herod., vii. 2-4 ; Justin, ii. 10 ; Plut., De frat. amore, p. 488, and Reg. apophth., p. 173. 2 This story, with all sorts of variations, is very widely spread in the East, but it can hardly rest on an historical fact. 3 Arrian, vii. 17, 2; Strabo, 738. after the heavy losses by storms at Eubcea, losses, however, which the Greeks no doubt exaggerated, it must with rein forcements have numbered fully 1000 ships of war, a force too large to operate, at least in a single mass, in the narrow Greek seas. Moreover, it was without an able head. If the ships furnished by the Phoenicians and the subject Greeks were fairly a match for those of the free Greeks, on the other hand the Persians, Medes, and Sacaj who manned the fleet as soldiers probably cut but a sorry figure, and the Persian officers associated with the native ship captains cannot have contributed to the more efficient working of these powerful engines of war. Again, the army, which in any case numbered over a million men, was far too numerous to find sufficient sustenance for any length of time, in spite of the frugal habits which mostly characterize Asiatics. To this must be added the circum stance that the levies were drawn from peoples many of whom were totally unused to the Greek climate. Famine and pestilence must have wrought dreadful havoc among the soldiers. By far the most of them were a useless rabble. Of the Asiatics proper probably only some Persian and Median regiments of guards were well armed, but even they were not to be compared, man for man, with the heavy-armed soldier-citizens of Greece. Moreover, in the use of their weapons on land the Greeks, and above all the Spartans, were far superior to all the Persians. Even the Greeks on the Persian side were no match for the Greeks of Europe ; some of them fought half-heartedly, and an anxious watch was kept on them, so that they were more a hindrance than a help. If the Persians were kept well informed of the enemy s affairs by means of traitorous Greeks, much more so were the Greeks through deserters and friends in the enemy s camp. Even when the Persians were driven by necessity to take the resolution of sending back all worthless troops, and when the king had fled. Greece was still in great danger, for an able man, Mar donius, now stood with the best part of the army in the heart of the country. But even with a defeat at Plata?a all would not have been over, for the enemy was without his fleet. Add to all this the excellent bearing of those Greeks who remained faithful to their fatherland. Exem plary above all was the conduct of Athens ; she durst not allow the laurels won at Marathon to wither. The Spartans, too, with their morbidly exaggerated sense of military honour, earned immortal renown. Even petty Greek communities like Thespise, Tegea, and JEgina came glori ously to the front. At the head of the Greeks stood many distinguished men, above all Themistocles. On the whole, we may say that here Greek intellect, Greek valour, and Greek virtue triumphed over the spiritless and helpless hordes of Asiatic slaves. Here and there a modern 4 has expressed the opinion that the conquest of the Greeks by the Persians would have been no such great misfortune after all, inasmuch as the intellectual superiority of the former would have asserted itself even under a foreign dominion, especially as the Persians were not regular barbarians ; but this opinion is entirely false. Only in a free country could the Greek spirit fully unfold itself, only in democratic Athens could it accomplish its highest work and achieve imperishable results for all time. In the externals of civilization the Asiatics might, in some respects, be actu ally the superiors of the Greeks ; but genuine free human culture first arose among the latter, and if there was one pride that was justified it was that of the cultivated Greeks as against all barbarians. The Greeks themselves had no inkling of the high sense in w r hich the watchword at Salamis, " All is at stake " (yEschyl., Pers., 405), was ap plicable to the whole of human culture. 4 E.g., Maspero, Hist, ancienne des peuples de I Orient, chap. xiv.