Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/269

SYLOSON DESPOT OF SAMOS. 251 gelf, wei e directed to fall upon the Samian people and massaern them without discrimination, man and boy, on ground sacred as well as profane. The bloody order was too faithfully executed, and Samos was handed over to Syloson, stripped of its male inhabitants. 1 Of Charilaus and the acropolis we hear no farther . perhaps he and his guards may have escaped by sea. Lykaretus, 9 the other brother of Maeandrius, must have remained either in '.he service of Syloson or in that of the Persians ; for we find him some years afterwards intrusted by the latter with an im portant command. Syloson was thus finally installed as despot of an island peo- pled chiefly, if not wholly, with women and children : we may, however, presume, that the deed of blood has been described by the historian as more sweeping than it really was. It seems, nevertheless, to have sat heavily on the conscience of Otanes, who was induced sometime afterwards, by a dream and by a painful disease, to take measures for repeopling the island. 3 From whence the new population came, we are not told : but wholesale translations of inhabitants from one place to another were familiar to the mind of a Persian king or satrap. Masandrius, following the example of the previous Samian exiles under Polykrates, went to Sparta and sought aid for the purpose of reestablishing himself at Samos. But the Lacedaemonians had no disposition to repeat an attempt which had before turned out so unsuccessfully, nor could he seduce king Kleomenes by the display of his treasures and finely-wrought gold plate. The king, however, not without fear that such seductions might win over some of the Spartan leading men, prevailed w r ith the ephors /o send Masandrius away. 4 Syloson seems to have remained undisturbed at Samos, as a tributary of Persia, like the Ionic cities on the continent: some years afterwards we find his son -ZEakes reigning in the island/' Strabo states that it was the harsh rule of Syloson which caused the depopulation of the island. But the cause just recounted out of Herodotus is both very different and sufficiently plausible in 1 Herodot. iii, 149. ep^/iov koiiaav avdpuv. 1 Herodot. v, 27, * Herodot. iii, 149. 3 Herodot. iii, 148. * Herodot, vi, 13.