for the Spartans to fritter away their force in local feuds, when they might be lords of Asia. As for the Persians, they were an easy prey—men who actually "went into battle with trousers on." Cleomenes promised to give him an answer in three days. At the second interview he asked "how far it was to Susa?"
Aristagoras was unguarded enough to say, "a three months' journey;" on which Cleomenes ordered him to quit Sparta before sunset. Then he returned and sat before the king in the sacred guise of a suppliant, with an olive-bough in his hand. A little daughter of Cleomenes, named Gorgo, aged eight or nine, was standing at her father's side. The Milesian wished her to be sent away, but Cleomenes told him to say on, and not to heed the child. Then Aristagoras began by offering ten talents, and as the king shook his head, increased them by degrees to fifty. When this sum was mentioned, the child cried out, "Go away, father, or the strange man will be sure to bribe thee."[1] The "conscience of the king" was moved. He withdrew to escape the temptation, and the mission of Aristagoras failed at Sparta.
At Athens he had better chances of success. Athens was in the heyday of her first freedom. She had rid herself of her Tyrants, the Pisistratids, who were at
- ↑ Gorgo was well worthy to become, as she afterwards did, the wife of Leonidas. An incident in her married life, subsequently related by Herodotus, seems to militate against the dictum of Aristotle that the Spartan women were inferior to the men. All the authorities of Sparta were puzzled by the arrival of a waxen tablet (the usual form of a despatch) with nothing written on it. When Gorgo heard of it, she at once suggested that the wax should be scraped off, and the despatch was found engraven on the wood.
