the Spartans, but all the defenders of the Pass together. They were the
flower of one of the great conquering armies of history. The Spartans
lifted their shields again and renewed the furious fighting. They made
a dreadful slaughter of the Immortals, till at the long day’s end the
Persians fell back, beaten and baffled. The Spartans dropped on the
ground and slept like dead men.
Next day was a repetition of the day before.
Xerxes, or his generals, grew anxious. The closest co-operation with
the fleet was necessary for the victualling of so numerous a host; and
the fleet had failed to penetrate into the Malian Gulf. And the Pass
was not yet forced.
At this critical hour a man craved audience of the King. He was a
Malian Greek, a native of the region, and he knew all Oeta like one of
its foxes. (Long years after, when a price was on his head, something
drew him back to the scene of his immortal crime, to be slain there by
no public avenger.) This fellow offered, for gold, to lead the Persians
by a path he knew, which would take them by a long, steep, circuitous
climb and descent to a position in the rear of the men in the Pass.
The offer was accepted eagerly.
Hydarnes, commanding the Immortals, set out under the guidance of the
traitor. As they left the Persian encampment darkness was falling and
lamps began here and there to glimmer. The guide led the way into the
wild ravine of the Asôpos. If outside the light was failing, here it
was already night. Far above their heads the men could see a star or
two shining between the narrow slit where the sheer walls of the gorge
seemed almost to meet, so high they were. The path, by which a laden
mule could with difficulty pass, followed the course of the rushing
stream over gravel and between great boulders. It was part of the old
hill-road to Delphi and well known to pilgrims and bandits. It had an
evil reputation. “It hath ever been put to an ill use by the Malians.”
(We can imagine to what sort of use our Malian had been wont to put
it.) Moreover the Asôpos would sometimes rise suddenly and come roaring
in spate down the gulley, flooding over the road. A sinister path.
For about three miles the Persians in Indian file threaded the ravine,
which then opened out into a valley, up the slope of which they toiled,
aided by their spears, along a track getting ever rougher and steeper.
Sometimes the way would conduct them through a pitchy wood of firs. Now
and again a man would stumble in the thick scrub or over a projecting
edge of rock. Superstitious terror, begotten of the darkness upon
such hills in the minds of those worshippers of Ahriman, troubled
and silenced them. They emerged at last on a kind of rocky pavement.
Then they descended a ravine and climbed the opposing slope. As they
climbed the darkness lifted a little; a faint glimmer came from their
golden bangles and the pomegranates of gold and silver on the butt of
their spears. When they reached the summit of the path called Anopaia
which they had so long been following, the dawn was clear behind the
acute peak of Mount Saromata.
Anopaia was not unknown to the defenders of the Pass, and Leonidas
had detached his Phocian contingent to guard it. In the silence of
that windless night, in the hour before the break of day, the Phocian
outposts heard a mysterious sound—a sort of light, dry, continuous
roar, gradually growing nearer and louder. It was the Persians passing
through an oak wood and dispersing with their feet the fallen leaves
of many autumns. Suddenly the men appeared in the open. The Phocians
were taken by surprise. Under a shower of arrows they retreated upon
a little fort crowning a height about half a mile away. There they
awaited the attack of Hydarnes. But he, neglecting these Phocians,
pressed on along the path, which now began to descend, very steep and
narrow. In no long time he would be on the road behind Leonidas. The
Pass was turned.
While it was yet night, deserters had come to the Greeks with news of
the march across the mountain. Soon after scouts came running down
from the heights confirming the tale. Tradition says that Leonidas in
so desperate a case bade his allies depart and save themselves; as
for himself and his men, their orders were to defend the Pass to the
utmost. It has, however, been recently suggested that the contingents
which withdrew went to meet Hydarnes. If such was their purpose, either
they came too late, or missed the enemy, or like the Phocians shrank
from the conflict with the odds so heavy against them. At any rate
they now pass out of the story. They were all the Greek forces save
the Lacedaemonians, the thousand who must have composed nearly the
whole fighting power of Thespiai, and four hundred Thebans. Of these
the Thebans, it is said, were retained by Leonidas as hostages, their
city being tainted already with suspicion of disloyalty. Yet they may
have been true men. But the Thespians stayed willingly. Even when it
was known that Hydarnes could not be stopped, they chose to stay.
They had no traditional code of military honour like the Spartans;
their proportionate stake was twenty times greater. “Their leader was
Demophilos the son of Diadromês, their bravest man was Dithyrambos the
son of Harmatidas.”
It was full daylight when Xerxes according to arrangement attacked. The
Greeks, who hitherto had lined up behind the old wall which the Persian
scout had seen drawn along the ridge of a mound within the narrowest
part of the Pass, now, knowing the end was come, issued forth into the
broader space beyond. Then followed a fight which men who only read of
it never forget. The Barbarians came on in wave upon wave; the Greeks
slew and slew. They could see the Persian officers lashing on their men
with whips to the assault. Now and again one of themselves would fall
with a rattle of bronze. But the enemy fell in heaps. Many were thrust
into the sea and drowned; still more were trampled to death beneath
the feet of their fellows. Two brothers of Xerxes were slain.
Then Leonidas fell.
The Spartans gathered about their king and fought to rescue the body.
By this time their spears were broken, and they were fighting with
their swords. One of the two men who had been left behind at the base
in the last stages of ophthalmia appeared, led by his servant. The
helot turned the face of his master towards the enemy and fled. The
blind man stumbled forward, striking wildly, until he was killed. Four
times the Barbarians were driven back, and the body of Leonidas was
saved.
Word came that the Immortals were on the road behind them. Therefore
the Greeks changed their plan of battle and retreated to the narrower
portion of the Pass; all but the Thebans, who surrendered to the foe.
The men of Sparta and Thespiai fought their way back to the mound and
behind the stone wall across the mound, and there made their final
stand. With cries the Barbarians swarmed about them on front and flank
and rear. In a moment the wall was down. Such of the Greeks as still
had swords kept using them. When their swords were gone, they fought
with their bare hands; and died at last rending their enemies’ flesh
like wolves with their teeth.
Thus, and not more easily, did Xerxes win through the Pass.
III
THE ADVENTURERS
The Greek world, like the English, was largely the creation of
adventurous men. To follow in their track would be in itself a literary
adventure of the most fascinating and entirely relevant to our subject,
the conflict of the Greek and the Barbarian. Unfortunately for our
delight the adventurers did not often write down their experiences; or
if they did, their accounts have for the most part disappeared. There
was a certain Pytheas of Massalia, that is Marseille, who about the
time of Alexander the Great sailed up the eastern coast of England and
discovered Scotland, and wrote a book about it afterwards. We should
like to read that book; if only to see what he said about Scotland.
But his account is lost, and we should hardly know about him at
all, if it were not for a brief reference in the geographer Strabo.
Pytheas seems to have got as far as the Orkney or even the Shetland
Islands—one German sends him on a Polar expedition—and had something
to say about a mysterious “Thule.” He remarked on the extraordinary
length of the summer days in these northern latitudes, thereby
provoking his fellow-countrymen to regard him as “extremely mendacious”
(Ψευδίστατος).
Long before the time of Pytheas one Skylax of Karyanda in Asia Minor—a
Greek or half-Greek—was sent by King Darius to explore the mouths of
the Indus, that “second of all the rivers which produced crocodiles.”
He sailed down a river “towards the dawn and the risings of the sun
into the sea and through the sea westward,” circumnavigating India.
What river was that? Whatever river it was, he accomplished a wonderful
thing. Skylax also wrote a book, apparently, on this voyage. There
exist fragments of his _Voyage Round the Parts Without the Pillars of
Heracles_. His Indian narrative might be the worst written volume in
the world, but it could not fail to excite the imagination in every
sentence. Sailing along a river of crocodiles in a Greek galley in the
reign of Darius the King!
Skylax was an Ionian or an Ionized Carian; and this reminds us that
Ionia produced the first adventurers. There went to the making of that
colony a great commingling of races. The first settlers may actually
have come from Crete bringing with them what they could of the dazzling
Cretan civilization. Many certainly came from Greece, which had enjoyed
a civilization derived from Crete. No doubt the colonists had to accept
help from any quarter and adopt dubious fugitives from Dorianized
Hellas and “natives”—Carians, Lydians, Leleges and the like, who had
learned to speak a kind of Greek—and marry native wives, who had not
even learned to do that, and who would not eat with their husbands, and
persisted in a number of other irrational and unsympathetic customs.
But it is possible to believe that some memory of the ancient lore
was long preserved, and in particular a knowledge of the sea-routes
the Cretan ships had followed. I have argued elsewhere in this sense,
venturing the suggestion that the Greek colonial empire (which started
from Ionia) began in an effort to re-establish the great trading system
which had its centre in early Crete. Excavators keep on discovering
signs of Cretan—“Minoan” or “Mycenaean”—influences in the very places
to which the Greek colonists came; and it looks as if they came because
they knew the way.
The Ionian cities were nearly all maritime, and this in the fullest
sense that the word suggests. The relation of Miletus, for example,
to the Aegean did not less effectually mould the character of that
state than the Adriatic moulded Venice. Therefore to understand
Ionia we must approach her from the sea. She early discovered that
this was her element. From Miletus harbour, from the shell-reddened
beach of Erythrae, from Samos, from Chios, from Phokaia her ships
ventured yearly farther, seeking (if we are right) to recover the old
trade-connexions so long severed by the Invasions; to recover the old
and, if possible, to pick up new. Ionian seamen became famous for their
skill and hardihood. Not merely in the Aegean, but also in remoter
waters, it soon became a common thing to see a little wooden many-oared
vessel, a great eye painted on either bow (to let her see her way, of
course), a touch of rouge on her cheeks; her sail set or her rowers
rowing to the music of one that played on a flute. Her burden would
be (for a guess) wine and olive oil and black-figured pottery, with
a quantity of the glittering rubbish with which traders have always
cheated natives—for the chief an embroidered belt or a woollen garment
dyed as red as possible, for his wife a bronze mirror or a necklace of
glorious beads. Having reached her destination and done good business,
the ship would leave behind one or two of the crew with instructions
to collect and store the products of the country against her return
next spring. If all went well and the natives did not suddenly attack
and exterminate the foreign devils in their midst, the storehouses
would increase and the settlers with them, until at last the factory
seemed important enough to undergo the solemn ceremony of “foundation”
(_Oikismos_) and to be called a “colony” (_Apoikia_). Normally the
“foundation” meant a great influx of new settlers, and from it the
colony dated its official existence. But it might have had a struggling
unofficial existence quite a long time before. More likely than not it
had. These settlements at the sea-ends of trade-routes are immemorially
old.
Let me quote an anecdote from Herodotus. He is engaged in relating the
saga of the founding of Cyrene by certain men of the Aegean island
Thera, and at a point in his narrative he says of these Theraeans:
_In their wanderings they came to Crete and namely to the city of
Itanos. There they meet a man that was a seller of purple, whose name
was Korôbios; who said that he had been caught in a tempest and carried
to Libya, even to the island of Platea, which is part of Libya. This
man they persuaded to go with them to Thera, giving him money; and
from Thera men sailed to view the land, being few in number as for the
first time. But when Korôbios had guided them to this Isle Platea, they
leave him there with provision for certain months, and themselves set
sail with all speed to report concerning the island to the Theraeans.
Now when they did not return in the time agreed upon, Korôbios was
left with nothing. But then a ship of Samos that was voyaging to
Egypt put in at this Platea; and when the master of the ship, whose
name was Kolaios, and the other Samians had heard the whole tale from
Korôbios, they left him a year’s food, and themselves put off from the
isle, being eager to make Egypt. However, they were driven from their
course by a wind out of the east. And passing out through the Pillars
of Heracles they arrived at Tartessos, the wind never ceasing to blow.
Thus were they marvellously led to this market, which at that time was
untouched, so that these men won the greatest profit in merchandise of
all Greeks of whom we surely know._
It would be easy to write a long commentary on that story. I might
invite the reader to share my admiration of an art which makes you see
so much in so little. You see the lonely man on his desert island of
sand and scrub, with no companions but the wild goats (if goats there
were) and the sea-birds fishing among the breakers. You picture his
despair as he watches his store of victuals coming to an end, with no
sign of his returning shipmates; his extravagant joy when he descries
a Greek vessel; the astonishment of the strangers at the sight of
this Crusoe; his bursting eagerness to tell them “the whole tale”;
the departure of the Samians and the belated reappearance of the
Theraeans; the face of Korôbios as he goes down to meet them, thinking
of the things he will say. But the point I wish more particularly to
make is the significance for history of the story. Desiring to learn
what they can of the commercial possibilities of the Cyrenaica, the
Theraeans come to Crete, and not only to Crete, but to that part of
it where there still dwelt in the eastern corner of the long island a
remnant of Eteocretans, that is “Cretans of Pure Blood,” descendants of
the “Minoan” Cretans, who had been such famous traders and mariners.
Itanos, where Korôbios lived, was an Eteocretan town. It has been
excavated and has revealed material evidence of “Minoan” culture.
That the ships of Minos visited Cyrenaica any one would conjecture
who looked at a map. Ethnographers and archæologists adduce arguments
of their own pointing to the same conclusion. Where the Greek town of
Cyrene later grew up was the end of a caravan-route of unknown age
from the Oasis of Siwah to the Mediterranean. Was not trade done there
by the Minoans long before it was reconstituted as a “colony” of the
Theraeans? Might not some knowledge of this African market and the
sea-road thither linger on among the ruined and hunted Eteocretans?
In Herodotus’ account Korôbios appears to know only Platea, and it
only by accident. That Eteocretan then must have felt no end of a
surprise when the Samians came so opportunely to his help in the
island he had “discovered.” Platea is supposed to be the little island
of Bomba, which gives its name to the Gulf of Bomba. The Theraeans
stayed in Platea a matter of two years. Then, urged by want and the
Delphian Oracle, they landed in a body on the mainland opposite the
island. It was a beautiful spot called Aziris, shut in by wooded
hills and nourished by a river. Here they lived six years. Then at
last, guided by friendly Libyans—are not those “friendlies” somewhat
significant?—they pushed on to the site of what came to be known as
the city of Cyrene. Korôbios has dropped out of the story, and the
whole business looks like a bit of “peaceful penetration” into unknown
country. That is the impression Herodotus wishes to convey. But it is a
wrong impression, for somebody did know a remarkable amount about the
Cyrenaica. The god of Delphi knew. It is he who is always urging the
reluctant Theraeans from stage to stage of their advance. Herodotus,
less perhaps from pious than artistic motives, emphasizes the contrast
of the divine foreknowledge with the timid ignorance of men; it makes
everything more dramatic. But we need not suffer ourselves to be
imposed upon. For the god we substitute his ministers. The priests at
Delphi had in their possession some previous information about the
Libyan coast. They made a point of collecting such information. Where
they got this particular piece of knowledge we do not know; but the
old Homeric hymn tells how in ancient days a ship sailed from Crete to
establish the oracle at Delphi.
But we have not yet exhausted the interest of that brief excerpt from
Herodotus. Our thoughts travel with those Samians who, making for
Egypt, were driven by contrary winds farther and farther west, until
at last they passed the Straits of Gibraltar and found a superb new
market at Tartessos just outside. It has been generally believed by
scholars that Tartessos is the Tarshish with which, as we read in the
Old Testament, King Hiram of Tyre exchanged merchandise; but of this
there is now some doubt. Tartessos stood on an island at the mouth of
the Guadalquivir, and was doubtless known to the Phoenicians before
the Samians got there. It is surely of it that Arnold is thinking at
the end of that long simile which concludes _The Scholar Gipsy_, when
he tells how the Phoenician trader after passing the Atlantic straits
reaches a place where _through sheets of foam, shy traffickers, the
dark Iberians come_. The discovery of the Atlantic made a profound
impression on the Greek mind. Pious and conservative spirits, like
Pindar, thought it wicked to venture beyond the Straits; and indeed, it
was long before any one did venture far, because, for one thing, the
sort of craft which was suited to the tideless Mediterranean could not
face so well the different conditions of the ocean. For another thing,
the Phoenicians had got a monopoly of the British trade.
We do not know how the Samians lost the market of Tartessos, but
in later times we find their fellow-countrymen the Phokaians in
possession. This privilege was the result of the friendliness of
Arganthonios, King of the Tartessians, who reigned eighty years and
lived to be “quite a hundred and twenty.” The Phokaians perhaps
deserved their luck, for they were the most daring of all the Ionian
navigators. Some of their adventures would doubtless make good reading.
The Phokaians also attract us because of all the Ionians they loved
their freedom most. When Harpagos, the general of Cyrus, besieged them,
rather than live even in a nominal subjection to the Persian, they
launched their famous fifty-oared ships, and embarking their wives and
children and furniture sailed to Chios. However, the Chians could not
help them, so they decided to go and settle in distant Corsica. But
first they made a sudden descent on their city and slew the Persian
garrison which had occupied it. _Then, when this had been done by them,
they made strong curses against any who should remain behind of their
company. And beside the curses they sank also a lump of iron and sware
an oath that they would not return to Phokaia until this lump came up
to light again. But as they were setting out for Corsica, more than
half the people of the town were seized with longing and pity for their
city and the familiar places of the land, and broke their oath and
sailed back to Phokaia_. The remnant reached Corsica, where they dwelt
five years. Then they fought a disastrous drawn battle with a fleet of
Etruscans and Carthaginians. Once more they took on board their wives
and children and property and sailed away, this time to Reggio, from
which they set out again and “founded that city in the Oenotrian land
which is now called Hyele,” better known as Elea, a little south of
Paestum.
Half a century later, when the Ionians revolted against the Persian
rule, they chose for their admiral a Phokaian called Dionysios. Later
they regretted their choice, considering Dionysios to be altogether too
much of a disciplinarian, and would no longer take his orders. Disunion
broke out among them, and they were entirely defeated at the Battle of
Ladê. What did Dionysios do? He captured three of the enemy’s vessels,
and then, to elude pursuit, sailed into the Levant, where he sank a
number of trading-barks and collected a great treasure. Then he made
for Sicily, where he “set up as a buccaneer,” sparing Greek ships of
course, but attacking Etruscans and Carthaginians. I suppose it _was_
piracy, but at least it was Drake’s sort, not Captain Kidd’s. We may
hope he came to a good end.
There was a contemporary of Dionysios who is an even more significant
figure for our understanding of Hellenism. This is Demokêdês of Kroton.
The political background of the story of Demokêdês, as it is told by
Herodotus, does not quite harmonize with the rest of his history, for
it implies a policy towards Greece which Persia did not adopt till
later. But otherwise there is no reason to doubt that things happened
much as Herodotus says. Demokêdês was born at Kroton in the extreme
south of Italy. It is a town famous in the history of medicine. We do
not know how the medical school there originated. The earliest seems to
have been in the Aegean island of Kos in connexion with the worship of
Asklepios (Aesculapius), the God of Healing. Whether the physicians of
Kroton had an independent tradition or not, they soon became famous.
The first great name is Demokêdês. That he had a teacher we know from
his words to Darius, but he has not mentioned his teacher’s name. The
fact is that Demokêdês was the first doctor whose personality refused
to be merged in the guild to which he doubtless belonged. At Kos the
guild was so powerful (it had a semi-religious character there) that it
was not until the Peloponnesian War that the world heard the personal
name of one of its members—Hippokratês. Thus Demokêdês corresponds to
Archilochus. I am about to tell again the story of a man of genius.
_At Kroton he was always quarrelling with his father, who had a
violent temper. When he could not stand him any longer, he left him
and went to Aegina. Settling down there, he in his first year proved
his superiority to all the other doctors, although he lacked an outfit
and had none of the instruments of his art. And in his second year the
Aeginetans hired him for a talent paid by the State, in the third year
the Athenian people hired him for a hundred silver pounds, and in the
fourth year Polykratês_—tyrant of Samos—_for two talents_.