Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 18.djvu/601

EMPIRE.] PERSIA 573 King Xerxes had shown himself in the war a thoroughly commonplace Eastern despot, as boastful as he was effemi nate. The dreadful sacrifice described by Herodotus (vii. 114) may be excused on the ground of religious supersti tion, but the mutilation of the corpse of Leonidas and the decapitation of the Phoenicians who commanded the fleet show the spirit of the man. His disgraceful flight must have been welcome to Mardonius. The latter fell like a man at Platsea ; indeed the battle of Platsea did honour to a large part of the vanquished. Of course great masses I euns of the vast army returned to Asia, several doubtless still in irin good order, but many, very many, must have perished in } Greece, and in Thrace, where the savage Thracians cut off large numbers of the fugitives. The Greek fleet did not at first venture to pursue the Persians to Asia, but afterwards it crossed at the request of the Greek islanders. At the headland of Mycale, not far from Miletus, the remainder of the Persian fleet was annihilated just about the time of the battle of Plateea. The liberation of the islands and of the greater part of the Greek cities on the coast of Thrace followed. Thrace and Macedonia regained their independence without any effort of their own. The whole of the islands were per manently wrested from the Persians, and the liberation of the Asiatic coast was already begun. We stand here at the decisive turning-point of Persian history. Henceforward Greece might be coveted and designs against it cherished, but no enterprises were under taken. The Persians were thrown back upon the defensive. Though they often afterwards exercised an influence on the history of Hellas by means of money or diplomacy, still the respect for their fighting power was gone, and so far it is possible to regard Alexander s expedition as a result and continuation of the old struggles, and the saying of ^Eschylus, " In Salamis the power of the Persians lies buried," may be called prophetic. 1 Xerxes was still in Sardis when his full brother Masistes came thither with the beaten forces from Mycale. Dis quieted probably by the neighbourhood of the victors, the king retired into the depths of Asia. About the same time he deeply offended Masistes on a point of family honour ; in revenge Masistes intended to go to his province of Bactria and there raise a revolt, but was cut down by horsemen despatched after him (Herod., vii. 108 sq.). This story (like that told by Herodotus in iv. 13) exhibits all those horrors of a later age which Ctesias loves to paint. The idea of a revolt, moreover, was not far to seek after the profound humiliation inflicted by the Greek war and the dreadful losses of men, how many Sogdianians, Indians, and Nubians can have returned to their homes 1 The in habitants of distant frontier lands may even then have severed their connexion with Persia, and even then mountain and desert tribes in the very heart of the empire may have regained their full independence. Unfortunately the work of Herodotus breaks off abruptly with the battle of Mycale, and with it our only continuous ancient history of the empire comes to an end. The frag ments of Ctesias and the occasional statements of other writers can only, to a small extent, supply the deficiency. Henceforward we possess tolerable information on the f.hifting relations between the Persian empire and the Greek states, but on little else. au- Under the conduct of Pausanias, the victor of Plattea, lnias - the Greeks sailed (477) first to Cyprus and then to By zantium. At the capture of the latter many distinguished Persians fell into their hands, and Pausanias, who must have appeared to Xerxes as a sort of king of Greece, took advan tage of this opportunity to open a correspondence with 1 JEschyl., Pers., 596 sq. The brevity and simplicity of the expres sion ^x e T b nepcrCy cannot be rendered in any modern language. the Persian monarch. Artabazus, son of the Pharnaces 479-464. who had held a command under Mardonius, received the satrapy of Hellespontine Phrygia (where his family retained the power thenceforward down to the fall of the empire), for the purpose of conducting the negotiations. The definite statements of Thucydides leave no doubt as to Pausanias s guilt. In particular the king s letter (i. 129) bears every mark of genuineness. Happily he proved himself a clumsy intriguer, and when long afterwards in Sparta retribution at last overtook him he had ceased to be dangerous, at least for the freedom of Greece as a whole. The conduct of Pausanias, together with a want of inclination and capacity for distant naval expeditions, caused the Spartans to resign the conduct of the maritime war against Persia. They withdrew, and the command passed into the hands of the Athenians (476). The naval power of Sparta was quite insignificant, and was certainly surpassed by that of some of her allies, such as yEgina and Corinth ; and the advantage to Persia of the absence of the Peloponnesian fleet was far more than counter balanced by the circumstance that the Greek naval forces were now under a single energetic leadership, which aimed at nothing less than the exclusion of the enemy from all Greek seas and coasts. The war lasted for a long time, but few of its details are known to us, though the scanty statements of the Greek writers are partly illustrated by Attic inscriptions. The European coast was soon completely cleared. Eion fell after an arduous siege (about 470). Doriscus alone continued for long to be a Persian possession. The most brilliant episode of this period of the war is the Cimon s great naval expedition of Cimon. 2 He liberated the Greek liaval cities of the Carian and Lycian coast, and took the bilingual exp OI s< towns, which were occupied by a Persian force ; all were incorporated in an Attic maritime league. The important Phaselis on the borders of Lycia and Pamphylia also fell into his hands. At the mouth of the Eurymedon the Persian fleet, under a son and a nephew of Xerxes, was defeated and destroyed, and a land-victory for the Greeks followed im mediately. Upon this Cimon sailed hastily for Cyprus, where he captured eighty ships. Here for once the Greeks were numerically superior, but nevertheless it was a great exploit to have advanced victoriously so far beyond their own waters. About this time Xerxes was assassinated. From various Xerxes writers we can piece together an account of this event by assassin- Ctesias, and another by Dinon, 3 which differ from each other in numerous particulars; a third version is given by Aristotle (Pol., p. 1311 b). For such scenes, occurring in the interior of the seraglio, an outsider is not a trust worthy authority, but this much is clear : Xerxes was killed by Artabanus, captain of the body-guard ; his youngest son Artaxerxes, in league with the murderer, put to death his elder brother Darius, who had a better title to the throne. It does not, however, follow with certainty that Artaxerxes was a parricide. We have here a change of sovereign of the sort which abounds in Oriental history. Artabanus was soon afterwards put out of the way by Artaxerxes. Later chronologists represent him as actually reigning for seven months, but this is probably a mistaken interpretation of expressions used by Dinon. Artaxerxes (Artakhshathra*} I. came to the throne in Arta- 464. His surname "Longhand" (MaK-po^ei/)), which xerxes I. seems to have been first mentioned by Dinon, has no doubt a symbolical meaning, " of far-reaching power," but later Greek writers took it literally. Ctesias tells of a 2 About 465. Perhaps it falls within the reign of Artaxerxes. 3 He wrote in the time of Alexander. 4 A second form, Arlakhshasht, is represented by Hebrew and Egyptian forms, and by Aprae cFff-rjt on a Greek inscription (Le Bas and Waddington, No. 1651). ated.