Page:History of Greece Vol V.djvu/215

BATTLES OF PLAT^A AND MYKALE. 191 On the same day that Pausanias and the Grecian land army conquered at Plataea, the naval armament under Leotychides and Xanthippus was engaged in operations hardly less important, at Mykale on the Asiatic coast. The Grecian commanders of the fleet, which numbered One hundred and ten triremes, having advanced as far as Delos, were afraid to proceed farther east- ward, or to undertake any offensive operations against the Per- sians at Saraos, for the rescue of Ionia, — although Ionian envoys, especially from Chios and Samos, had urgently solicited aid both at Sparta and at Delos. Three Samians, one of them named Hegesistratus, came to assure Leotychides, that their countrymen were ready to revolt from the despot Theomestor, whom the Persians had installed there, so soon as thef Greek fleet should appear off the island. In spite of emphatic appeals to the com- munity of religion and race, Leotychides was long deaf to the eptreaty; but his reluctance gradually gave way before the persevering earnestness of the orator. "While yet not thoroughly determined, he happened to ask the Samian speaker what was his name. To which the latter replied, " Hegesistratus, i. e. army-leader." " I accept Hegesistratus as an omen (replied and orators of the subsequent century, if that vow were not of suspicious authenticity. The Greeks, while promising faithful attachment, and con- tinned peaceful dealing among themselves, and engaging at the same time to amerce in a tithe of their property all who had medized, — are said to have vowed that they would not repair or I'ebuild the temples which the Persian invader had burnt ; but would leave them in their half-ruined con- dition as a monument of his sacrilege. Some of the injured temples near Athens were seen in their half-burnt state even by the traveller Pausanias (x, 35, 2), in his time. Perikles, forty years after the battle, tried to con- voke a Pan-Hellenic assembly at Athens, for the purpose of deliberating what should be done with these temples (Plutarch, Perikles, c. 17). Yet Theopompus pronounced this alleged oath to be a fiibrication, though both the orator Lykurgus and Diodorus profess to report it verbatim. "We may safely assert that the oath, as they give it, is not genuine ; but perhaps the vow of tithing those who had voluntarily joined Xerxes, which Herodotus refers to an earlier period, when success was doubtful, may now have been renewed in the moment of victory : see Diodor. ix, 29 : Lykurgus cont. Leokrat. c. 19, p. 193; Polybius, ix. 33; Isokrates, Or. iv; Pancgvr. c. 41, p. 74 ; Theopompus, Fragm. 167, ed. Didot ; Suidas, v. AsKareveiv, Cicero de Repnblica, iii, 9, and the beginning of the chapter last but one preceding, of this historj'.