Page:History of Greece Vol VIII.djvu/159

PHARNABAZUS DETAINS T1IE ATHENIAN ENVOYS. 13? down t^ the coast overthrew all such calculations. The young prince brought with him a fresh, hearty, and youthful antipathy against Athens, a power inferior only to that of the Great King himself, and an energetic determination to use it without reserve in insuring victory to the Peloponnesians. From the moment that Pharnabazus and the Athenian envoy? met Cyrus, their farther progress towards Susa became impossible. Bocotius, and the other Lacedoemonian envoys travelling along with the young prince, made extravagant boasts of having obtained all that they asked for at Susa ; and Cyrus himself announced his powers as unlimited in extent over the whole coast, all for the purpose of prosecuting vigorous war in conjunction with the Lacedaemonians. Pharnabazus, on hearing this intelligence, and seeing the Great King's seal to the words, " I send down Cyrus, as lord of all those who muster at Kastolus," not only refused to let the Athenian envoys proceed onward, but was even obliged to obey the orders of the young prince, vho insisted that they should either be surrendered to him, or at lenst detained for some time in the interior, in order that no information might be conveyed to Athens. The satrap resisted the fir?t of these requisitions, having pledged his word for their safety ; but he obeyed the second, detain- ing them in Kappadokia for no less than three years, until Athens was prostrate and on the point of surrender, after which he ob- tained permission from Cyrus to send them back to the sea-coast. 1 This arrival of Cyrus, overruling the treachery of Tissaphernes as well as the weariness of Pharnabazus, and supplying the ene- mies of Athens with a double flow of Persian gold at a moment when the stream would otherwise have dried up, was a paramount item in that sum of causes which concurred to determine the re- sult of the war. 2 But inrrortant as the event was in itself, it was 1 Xcnoph. Hcllen. i, 4, 3 -'J. The words here employed respecting the en- voys, when returning a*V;r their three years' detention, udev itpbs rb u/lAo ai paroxedov uni^evaav , appear to me an inadvertence. The return of the envoys must have been in the spring of 404 B. c., at a time when Athens had no camp : the surrender of the city took place in April 404 H.C. Xenophon incautiously speaks as if that state of things which existed when the envoys departed, still continued at their return. 1 TJx-i w;r<'-s of Thutydides (ii, 65) imply this as his opinion, Kvp.y rt lfrYvfii:i-'.i)r Tratdi rrpoayevofitvy, etc.