Of the Greek cities on the Anatolian coast something has been said
already. The great period of the elder ones as free and independent
communities falls between the opening of the eighth century and the
close of the sixth. Thus they were in their full bloom about the year
600. By the foundation of secondary colonies (Miletus alone is said to
have founded sixty!) and the establishment of trading posts, they had
pushed Hellenic culture eastwards round the shores of the peninsula, to
Pontus on the north and to Cilicia on the south. In the eyes of
Herodotus this was the happy age when "all Hellenes were free" as
compared with his own experience of Persian overlordship. Miletus, he
tells us, was then the greatest of the cities, mistress of the sea; and
certainly some of the most famous among her citizens, Anaximander,
Anaximenes, Hecataeus and Thales, belong approximately to this epoch, as
do equally famous names from other Asiatic Greek communities, such as
Alcaeus and Sappho of Lesbos, Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon, Anacreon
of Teos, and many more. The fact is significant, because studies and
literary activities like theirs could hardly have been pursued except in
highly civilized, free and leisured societies where life and wealth were
secure.
If, however, the brilliant culture of the Asiatic Greeks about the
opening of the sixth century admits no shadow of doubt, singularly few
material things, which their arts produced, have been recovered for us
to see to-day. Miletus has been excavated by Germans to a very
considerable extent, without yielding anything really worthy of its
great period, or, indeed, much that can be referred to that period at
all, except sherds of a fine painted ware. It looks as if the city at
the mouth of the greatest and largest valley, which penetrates Asia
Minor from the west coast, was too important in subsequent ages and
suffered chastisements too drastic and reconstructions too thorough for
remains of its earlier greatness to survive except in holes and corners.
Ephesus has given us more archaic treasures, from the deposits bedded
down under the later reconstructions of its great shrine of Artemis; but
here again the site of the city itself, though long explored by
Austrians, has not added to the store. The ruins of the great Roman
buildings which overlie its earlier strata have proved, perhaps, too
serious an impediment to the excavators and too seductive a prize.
Branchidae, with its temple of Apollo and Sacred Way, has preserved for
us a little archaic statuary, as have also Samos and Chios. We have
archaic gold work and painted vases from Rhodes, painted sarcophagi from
Clazomenae, and painted pottery made there and at other places in Asia
Minor, although found mostly abroad. But all this amounts to a very poor
representation of the Asiatic Greek civilization of 600 B.C. Fortunately
the soil still holds far more than has been got out of it. With those
two exceptions, Miletus and Ephesus, the sites of the elder Hellenic
cities on or near the Anatolian coast still await excavators who will go
to the bottom of all things and dig systematically over a large area;
while some sites await any excavation whatsoever, except such as is
practised by plundering peasants.
In their free youth the Asiatic Greeks carried into fullest practice the
Hellenic conception of the city-state, self-governing, self-contained,
exclusive. Their several societies had in consequence the intensely
vivid and interested communal existence which develops civilization as a
hot-house develops plants; but they were not democratic, and they had
little sense of nationality--defects for which they were to pay dearly
in the near future. In spite of their associations for the celebration
of common festivals, such as the League of the twelve Ionian cities, and
that of the Dorian Hexapolis in the south-west, which led to discussion
of common political interests, a separatist instinct, reinforced by the
strong geographical boundaries which divided most of the civic
territories, continually reasserted itself. The same instinct was ruling
the history of European Greece as well. But while the disaster, which in
the end it would entail, was long avoided there through the insular
situation of the main Greek area as a whole and the absence of any
strong alien power on its continental frontier, disaster impended over
Asiatic Greece from the moment that an imperial state should become
domiciled on the western fringe of the inland plateau. Such a state had
now appeared and established itself; and if the Greeks of Asia had had
eyes to read, the writing was on their walls in 600 B.C.
Meanwhile Asiatic traders thronged into eastern Hellas, and the Hellenes
and their influence penetrated far up into Asia. The hands which carved
some of the ivories found in the earliest Artemisium at Ephesus worked
on artistic traditions derived ultimately from the Tigris. So, too,
worked the smiths who made the Rhodian jewellery, and so, the artists
who painted the Milesian ware and the Clazomenae sarcophagi. On the
other side of the ledger (though three parts of its page is still hidden
from us) we must put to Greek credit the script of Lydia, the rock
pediments of Phrygia, and the forms and decorative schemes of many
vessels and small articles in clay and bronze found in the Gordian
tumuli and at other points on the western plateau from Mysia to
Pamphylia. The men of "Javan," who had held the Syrian sea for a century
past, were known to Ezekiel as great workers in metal; and in Cyprus
they had long met and mingled their culture with that of men from the
East.
It was implied in the opening of this chapter that in 600 B.C. social
changes in the East would be found disproportionate to political
changes; and on the whole they seem so to have been. The Assyrian Empire
was too lately fallen for any great modification of life to have taken
place in its area, and, in fact, the larger part of that area was being
administered still by a Chaldaean monarchy on the established lines of
Semitic imperialism. Whether the centre of such a government lay at
Nineveh or at Babylon can have affected the subject populations very
little. No new religious force had come into the ancient East, unless
the Mede is to be reckoned one in virtue of his Zoroastrianism. Probably
he did not affect religion much in his early phase of raiding and
conquest. The great experience, which was to convert the Jews from
insignificant and barbarous highlanders into a cultured, commercial and
cosmopolitan people of tremendous possibilities had indeed begun, but
only for a part of the race, and so far without obvious result. The
first incursion of Iranians in force, and that slow soakage of
Indo-European tribes from Russia, which was to develop the Armenian
people of history, are the most momentous signs of coming change to be
noted between 800 and 600 B.C. with one exception, the full import of
which will be plain at our next survey. This was the eastward movement
of the Greeks.
CHAPTER IV
THE EAST IN 400 B.C.
As the fifth century draws to its close the East lies revealed at last
in the light of history written by Greeks. Among the peoples whose
literary works are known to us, these were the first who showed
curiosity about the world in which they lived and sufficient
consciousness of the curiosity of others to record the results of
inquiry. Before our present date the Greeks had inquired a good deal
about the East, and not of Orientals alone. Their own public men,
military and civil, their men of science, their men of letters, their
merchants in unknown number, even soldiers of theirs in thousands, had
gone up into Inner Asia and returned. Leading Athenians, Solon, Hippias
and Themistocles, had been received at Eastern courts or had accompanied
Eastern sovereigns to war, and one more famous even than these,
Alcibiades, had lately lived with a Persian satrap. Greek physicians,
Democedes of Croton, Apollonides of Cos, Ctesias of Cnidus, had
ministered to kings and queens of Persia in their palaces. Herodotus of
Halicarnassus had seen Babylon, perhaps, and certainly good part of
Syria; Ctesias had dwelt at Susa and collected notes for a history of
the Persian Empire; Xenophon of Attica had tramped from the
Mediterranean to the Tigris and from the Tigris to the Black Sea, and
with him had marched more than ten thousand Greeks. Not only have works
by these three men of letters survived, wholly or in part, to our time,
but also many notes on the East as it was before 400 B.C. have been
preserved in excerpts, paraphrases and epitomes by later authors. And we
still have some archaeological documents to fall back upon. If the
cuneiform records of the Persian Empire are less abundant than those of
the later Assyrian Kingdom, they nevertheless include such priceless
historical inscriptions as that graven by Darius, son of Hystaspes, on
the rock of Behistun. There are also hieroglyphic, hieratic and demotic
texts of Persian Egypt; inscriptions of Semitic Syria and a few of
archaic Greece; and much other miscellaneous archaeological material
from various parts of the East, which, even if uninscribed, can inform
us of local society and life.
SECTION 1. EASTWARD MOVEMENT OF THE GREEKS
The Greek had been pushing eastward for a long time. More than three
hundred years ago, as has been shown in the last chapter, he had become
a terror in the farthest Levant. Before another century had passed he
found his way into Egypt also. Originally hired as mercenaries to
support a native revolt against Assyria, the Greeks remained in the Nile
valley not only to fight but to trade. The first introduction of them to
the Saite Pharaoh, Psammetichus, was promoted by Gyges the Lydian to
further his own ends, but the first development of their social
influence in Egypt was due to the enterprise of Miletus in establishing
a factory on the lowest course of the Canopic Nile. This post and two
standing camps of Greek mercenaries, one at Tahpanhes watching the
approach from Asia, the other at Memphis overawing the capital and
keeping the road to Upper Egypt, served to introduce Ionian civilization
to the Delta in the seventh century. Indeed, to this day our knowledge
of the earliest fine painted pottery of Ionia and Caria depends largely
on the fragments of their vases imported into Egypt which have been
found at Tahpanhes, Memphis and another Greek colony, Naukratis, founded
a little later (as will be told presently) to supersede the original
Milesian factory. Though those foreign vases themselves, with their
decoration of nude figure subjects which revolted vulgar Egyptian
sentiment, did not go much beyond the Greek settlements (like the Greek
courtesans of Naukratis, who perhaps appealed only to the more
cosmopolitan Saites), their art certainly influenced all the finer art
of the Saitic age, initiating a renascence whose characteristics of
excessive refinement and meticulous delicacy survived to be reinforced
in the Ptolemaic period by a new infusion of Hellenic culture.
So useful or so dangerous--at any rate so numerous--did the Greeks
become in Lower Egypt by the opening of the sixth century that a
reservation was assigned to them beside the Egyptian town of Piemro, and
to this alone, according to Herodotus, newcomers from the sea were
allowed to make their way. This foreign suburb of Piemro was named
Naukratis, and nine cities of the Asiatic Greeks founded a common
sanctuary there. Other maritime communities of the same race (probably
the more powerful, since Miletus is named among them) had their
particular sanctuaries also and their proper places. The Greeks had come
to Egypt to stay. We have learned from the remains of Naukratis that
throughout the Persian domination, which superseded the Saitic before
the close of the sixth century, a constant importation of products of
Ionia, Attica, Sparta, Cyprus and other Hellenic centres was maintained.
The place was in full life when Herodotus visited Egypt, and it
continued to prosper until the Greek race, becoming rulers of all the
land, enthroned Hellenism at Alexandria on the sea itself.
SECTION 2. PHOENICIAN CARRIERS
Nor was it only through Greek sea-rovers and settlers in Cilicia, and
through Greek mercenaries, merchants and courtesans in the Nile-Delta,
that the East and the West had been making mutual acquaintance. Other
agencies of communication had been active in bringing Mesopotamian
models to the artists of the Ionian and Dorian cities in Asia Minor, and
Ionian models to Mesopotamia and Syria. The results are plain to see, on
the one hand in the fabric and design of early ivories, jewellery and
other objects found in the archaic Artemisium at Ephesus, and in the
decoration of painted pottery produced at Miletus; on the other hand, in
the carved ivories of the ninth century found at Calah on the Tigris.
But the processes which produced these results are not so clear. If the
agents or carriers of those mutual influences were certainly the
Phoenicians and the Lydians, we cannot yet apportion with confidence to
each of these peoples the responsibility for the results, or be sure
that they were the only agents, or independent of other middlemen more
directly in contact with one party or the other.
The Phoenicians have pushed far afield since we looked at them last. By
founding Carthage more than half-way towards the Pillars of Hercules the
city of Tyre completed her occupation of sufficient African harbours,
beyond the reach of Egypt, and out of the Greek sphere, to appropriate
to herself by the end of the ninth century the trade of the western
Mediterranean basin. By means of secondary settlements in west Sicily,
Sardinia and Spain, she proceeded to convert this sea for a while into
something like a Phoenician lake. No serious rival had forestalled her
there or was to arise to dispute her monopoly till she herself, long
after our date, would provoke Rome. The Greek colonies in Sicily and
Italy, which looked westward, failed to make head against her at the
first, and soon dropped out of the running; nor did the one or two
isolated centres of Hellenism on other shores do better. On the other
hand, in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean, although it was her own
home-sea, Tyre never succeeded in establishing commercial supremacy, and
indeed, so far as we know, she never seriously tried to establish it. It
was the sphere of the Aegean mariners and had been so as far back as
Phoenician memory ran. The Late Minoan Cretans and men of Argolis, the
Achaean rovers, the Ionian pirates, the Milesian armed merchantmen had
successively turned away from it all but isolated and peaceful ships of
Sidon and Tyre, and even so near a coast as Cyprus remained foreign to
the Phoenicians for centuries after Tyre had grown to full estate. In
the Homeric stories ships of the Sidonians, though not unknown, make
rare appearances, and other early legends of the Greeks, which make
mention of Phoenician visits to Hellenic coasts, imply that they were
unusual phenomena, which aroused much local curiosity and were long
remembered. The strangeness of the Phoenician mariners, the unfamiliar
charm of their cargoes--such were the impressions left on Greek story by
the early visits of Phoenician ships.
That they did pay such visits, however, from time to time is certain.
The little Egyptian trinkets, which occur frequently in Hellenic strata
of the eighth to the sixth centuries, are sufficient witness of the
fact. They are most numerous in Rhodes, in Caria and Ionia, and in the
Peloponnese. But the main stream of Tyrian commerce hugged the south
rather than the north coasts of the Eastern Mediterranean. Phoenician
sailors were essentially southerners--men who, if they would brave now
and again the cold winds of the Aegean and Adriatic, refused to do so
oftener than was necessary--men to whom African shores and a climate
softened by the breath of the Ocean were more congenial.
If, however, the Phoenicians were undoubtedly agents who introduced the
Egyptian culture to the early Hellenes of both Asia and Europe, did they
also introduce the Mesopotamian? Not to anything like the same extent,
if we may judge by the products of excavations. Indeed, wherever
Mesopotamian influence has left unmistakable traces upon Greek soil, as
in Cyprus and Ionia or at Corinth and Sparta, it is often either certain
or probable that the carrying agency was not Phoenician. We find the
nearest affinities to archaic Cypriote art (where this was indebted to
Asiatic art at all) in Cilician and in Hittite Syrian art. Early Ionian
and Carian strata contain very little that is of Egyptian character, but
much whose inspiration can be traced ultimately to Mesopotamia; and
research in inner Asia Minor, imperfect though its results are yet, has
brought to light on the plateau so much parallelism to Ionian
Orientalizing art, and so many examples of prior stages in its
development, that we must assume Mesopotamian influence to have reached
westernmost Asia chiefly by overland ways. As for the European sites,
since their Orientalism appears to have been drawn from Ionia, it also
had come through Asia overland.
Therefore on the whole, though Herodotus asserts that the Phoenician
mariners carried Assyrian cargoes, there is remarkably little evidence
that those cargoes reached the West, and equally little that Phoenicians
had any considerable direct trade with Mesopotamia. They may have been
responsible for the small Egyptian and Egyptianizing objects which have
been found by the excavators of Carchemish and Sakjegeuzi in strata of
the ninth and eighth centuries; but the carrying of similar objects
eastward across the Euphrates was more probably in Hittite hands than
theirs. The strongest Nilotic influence which affected Mesopotamian art
is to be noticed during the latter half of the New Assyrian Kingdom,
when there was no need for alien intermediaries to keep Nineveh in
communication with its own province of Egypt.
Apparently, therefore, it was not through the Phoenicians that the
Greeks had learned most of what they knew about the East in 400 B.C.
Other agents had played a greater part and almost all the
intercommunication had been effected by way, not of the Levant Sea, but
of the land bridge through Asia Minor. In the earlier part of our story,
during the latter rule of Assyria in the farther East and the subsequent
rule of the Medes and the Babylonians in her room, intercourse had been
carried on almost entirely by intermediaries, among whom (if something
must be allowed to the Cilicians) the Lydians were undoubtedly the most
active. In the later part of the story it will be seen that the
intermediaries have vanished; the barriers are down; the East has itself
come to the West and intercourse is immediate and direct. How this
happened--what agency brought Greeks and Orientals into an intimate
contact which was to have the most momentous consequences to
both--remains to be told.
SECTION 3. THE COMING OF THE PERSIANS
We have seen already how a power, which had grown behind the frontier
mountains of the Tigris basin, forced its way at last through the
defiles and issued in the riverine plains with fatal results to the
north Semitic kings. By the opening of the sixth century Assyria had
passed into Median hands, and these were reaching out through Armenia to
central Asia Minor. Even the south Semites of Babylonia had had to
acknowledge the superior power of the newcomers and, probably, to accept
a kind of vassalage. Thus, since all lower Mesopotamia with most part of
Syria obeyed the Babylonian, a power, partly Iranian, was already
overshadowing two-thirds of the East before Cyrus and his Persians
issued upon the scene. It is important to bear this fact in mind when
one comes to note the ease with which a hitherto obscure king of Anshan
in Elam would prove able to possess himself of the whole Semitic Empire,
and the rapidity with which his arms would appear in the farthest west
of Asia Minor on the confines of the Greeks themselves. Nebuchadnezzar
allied with and obedient to the Median king, helping him on the Halys in
585 B.C. to arrange with Lydia a division of the peninsula of Asia Minor
on the terms _uti possidetis_--that is the significant situation which
will prepare us to find Cyrus not quite half a century later lord of
Babylon, Jerusalem and Sardes.
What events, passing in the far East among the divers groups of the
Iranians themselves and their Scythian allies, led to this king of a
district in Elam, whose own claim to have belonged by blood to any of
those groups is doubtful, consolidating all the Iranians whether of the
south or north under his single rule into a mighty power of offence, we
do not know. Stories current among the Greeks and reported by Herodotus
and Ctesias represented Cyrus as in any case a Persian, but as either
grandson of a Median king (though not his natural heir) or merely one of
his court officials. What the Greeks had to account for (and so have we)
is the subsequent disappearance of the north Iranian kings of the Medes
and the fusion of their subjects with the Persian Iranians under a
southern dynasty. And what the Greeks did not know, but we do, from
cuneiform inscriptions either contemporary with, or very little
subsequent to, Cyrus' time, only complicates the problem; since these
bear witness that Cyrus was known at first (as has been indicated
already) for a king of Elam, and not till later for a king of Persia.
Ctesias, who lived at Susa itself while at was the Persian capital,
agrees with Herodotus that Cyrus wrested the lordship of the Medes from
the native dynasty by force; but Herodotus adds that many Medes were
consenting parties.
These problems cannot be discussed here. The probability is, summarily,
this. Some part of the southern or Persian group of Iranians which,
unlike the northern, was not contaminated with Scyths, had advanced into
Elam while the Medes were overrunning and weakening the Semitic Empire;
and in Anshan it consolidated itself into a territorial power with Susa
for capital. Presently some disaffection arose among the northern
Iranians owing, perhaps, to favour shown by the Median kings to their
warlike Scythian subjects, and the malcontents called in the king of
Anshan. The issue was fought out in central West Persia, which had been
dominated by the Medes since the time of Kyaxares' father, Phraortes,
and when it was decided by the secession of good part of the army of
King Astyages, Cyrus of Anshan took possession of the Median Empire with
the goodwill of much of the Median population. This empire included
then, beside the original Median land, not only territories conquered
from Assyria but also all that part of Persia which lay east of Elam.
Some time, doubtless, elapsed before the sovereignty of Cyrus was
acknowledged by all Persia; but, once his lordship over this land was an
accomplished fact, he naturally became known as king primarily of the
Persians, and only secondarily of the Medes, while his seat remained at
Susa in his own original Elamite realm. The Scythian element in and
about his Median province remained unreconciled, and one day he would
meet his death in a campaign against it; but the Iranian element
remained faithful to him and his son, and only after the death of the
latter gave expression by a general revolt to its discontent with the
bargain it had made.
SECTION 4. FALL OF LYDIA
Cyrus must have met with little or no opposition in the western Median
provinces, for we find him, within a year or two of his recognition by
both Persians and Medes, not only on his extreme frontier, the Halys
river, but able to raid across it and affront the power of Lydia. To
this action he was provoked by Lydia itself. The fall of the Median
dynasty, with which the royal house of Lydia had been in close alliance
since the Halys pact, was a disaster which Croesus, now king of Sardes
in the room of Alyattes, was rash enough to attempt to repair. He had
continued with success his father's policy of extending Lydian dominion
to the Aegean at the expense of the Ionian Greeks; and, master of
Ephesus, Colophon and Smyrna, as well as predominant partner in the
Milesian sphere, he secured to Lydia the control and fruition of
Anatolian trade, perhaps the most various and profitable in the world at
that time. A byword for wealth and luxury, the Lydians and their king
had nowadays become soft, slow-moving folk, as unfit to cope with the
mountaineers of the wild border highlands of Persia as, if Herodotus'
story is well founded, they were ignorant of their quality. Croesus took
his time, sending envoys to consult oracles near and far. Herodotus
tells us that he applied to Delphi not less than thrice and even to the
oracle of Ammon in the Eastern Sahara. At least a year must have been
spent in these inquiries alone, not to speak of an embassy to Sparta and
perhaps others to Egypt and Babylon. These preliminaries at length
completed, the Lydian gathered the levies of western Asia Minor and set
out for the East. He found the Halys in flood--it must have been in late
spring--and having made much ado of crossing it, spent the summer in
ravaging with his cavalry the old homeland of the Hatti. Thus he gave
Cyrus time to send envoys to the Ionian cities to beg them attack Lydia
in the rear, and time to come down himself in force to his far western
province. Croesus was brought to battle in the first days of the autumn.
The engagement was indecisive, but the Lydians, having no mind to stay
out the winter on the bleak Cappadocian highlands and little suspicion
that the enemy would think of further warfare before spring, went back
at their leisure to the Hermus valley, only to hear at Sardes itself
that the Persian was hot in pursuit. A final battle was fought under the
very walls of the Lydian capital and lost by Croesus; the lower town was
taken and sacked; and the king, who had shut himself with his guards
into the citadel and summoned his allies to his rescue come five months,
was a prisoner of Cyrus within two weeks. It was the end of Lydia and of
all buffers between the Orient and Greece. East and West were in direct
contact and the omens boded ill to the West. Cyrus refused terms to the
Greeks, except the powerful Milesians, and departing for the East again,
left Lydia to be pacified and all the cities of the western coasts,
Ionian, Carian, Lycian and what not, excepting only Miletus, to be
reduced by his viceroys.
SECTION 5. PERSIAN EMPIRE
Cyrus himself had still to deal with a part of the East which, not
having been occupied by the Medes, though in a measure allied and
subservient to them, saw no reason now to acknowledge the new dynasty.
This is the part which had been included in the New Babylonian Empire.
The Persian armies invaded Babylonia. Nabonidus was defeated finally at
Opis in June 538; Sippara fell, and Cyrus' general appearing before
Babylon itself received it without a struggle at the hands of the
disaffected priests of Bel-Marduk. The famous Herodotean tale of Cyrus'
secret penetration down the dried bed of Euphrates seems to be a
mistaken memory of a later recapture of the city after a revolt from
Darius, of which more hereafter. Thus once more it was given to Cyrus to
close a long chapter of Eastern history--the history of imperial
Babylon. Neither did he make it his capital, nor would any other lord of
the East so favour it. If Alexander perhaps intended to revive its
imperial position, his successor, Seleucus, so soon as he was assured of
his inheritance, abandoned the Euphratean city for the banks of the
Tigris and Orontes, leaving it to crumble to the heap which it is
to-day.
The Syrian fiefs of the Babylonian kings passed _de jure_ to the
conqueror; but probably Cyrus himself never had leisure or opportunity
to secure them _de facto_. The last decade of his life seems to have
been spent in Persia and the north-east, largely in attempts to reduce
the Scythian element, which threatened the peace of Media; and at the
last, having brought the enemy to bay beyond the Araxes, he met there
defeat and death. But Cambyses not only completed his father's work in
Syria, but fulfilled what is said to have been his further project by
capturing Egypt and establishing there a foreign domination which was to
last, with some intervals, nearly two hundred years. By the end of the
sixth century one territorial empire was spread over the whole East for
the first time in history; and it was with a colossus, bestriding the
lands from the Araxes to the Upper Nile and from the Oxus to the Aegean
Sea, that the Greeks stood face to face in the gate of the West.
Before, however, we become absorbed in contemplation of a struggle which
will take us into a wider history, let us pause a moment to consider the
nature of the new power come out of the East, and the condition of such
of its subject peoples as have mattered most in the later story of
mankind. It should be remarked that the new universal power is not only
non-Semitic for the first time in well-certified history, but controlled
by a very pure Aryan stock, much nearer kin to the peoples of the West
than any Oriental folk with which they have had intimate relations
hitherto. The Persians appeared from the Back of Beyond, uncontaminated
by Alarodian savagery and unhampered by the theocratic prepossessions
and nomadic traditions of Semites. They were highlanders of unimpaired
vigour, frugal habit, settled agricultural life, long-established social
cohesion and spiritual religious conceptions. Possibly, too, before they
issued from the vast Iranian plateau, they were not wholly unversed in
the administration of wide territories. In any case, their quick
intelligence enabled them to profit by models of imperial organization
which persisted in the lands they now acquired; for relics of the
Assyrian system had survived under the New Babylonian rule, and perhaps
also under the Median. Thereafter the experience gained by Cambyses in
Egypt must have gone for something in the imperial education of his
successor Darius, to whom historians ascribe the final organization of
Persian territorial rule. From the latter's reign onward we find a
regular provincial system linked to the centre as well as might be by a
postal service passing over state roads. The royal power is delegated to
several officials, not always of the ruling race, but independent of
each other and directly responsible to Susa: these live upon their
provinces but must see to it first and foremost that the centre receives
a fixed quota of money and a fixed quota of fighting men when required.
The Great King maintains royal residences in various cities of the
empire, and not infrequently visits them; but in general his viceroys
are left singularly free to keep the peace of their own governorates and
even to deal with foreign neighbours at their proper discretion.
If we compare the Persian theory of Empire with the Assyrian, we note
still a capital fault. The Great King of Susa recognized no more
obligation than his predecessors of Nineveh to consider the interests of
those he ruled and to make return to them for what he took. But while,
on the one hand, no better imperial theory was conceivable in the sixth
century B.C., and certainly none was held or acted upon in the East down
to the nineteenth century A.D., on the other, the Persian imperial
practice mitigated its bad effects far more than the Assyrian had done.
Free from the Semitic tradition of annual raiding, the Persians reduced
the obligation of military service to a bearable burden and avoided
continual provocation of frontier neighbours. Free likewise from Semitic
supermonotheistic ideas, they did not seek to impose their creed. Seeing
that the Persian Empire was extensive, decentralized and provided with
imperfect means of communication, it could subsist only by practising
provincial tolerance. Its provincial tolerance seems to have been
systematic. We know a good deal of the Greeks and the Jews under its
sway, and in the history of both we miss such signs of religious and
social oppression as marked Assyrian rule. In western Asia Minor the
satraps showed themselves on the whole singularly conciliatory towards
local religious feeling and even personally comformable to it; and in
Judaea the hope of the Hebrews that the Persian would prove a deliverer
and a restorer of their estate was not falsified. Hardly an echo of
outrage on the subjects of Persia in time of peace has reached our ears.
If the sovereign of the Asiatic Greek cities ran counter to Hellenic
feeling by insisting on "tyrant" rule, he did no more than continue a
system under which most of those cities had grown rich. It is clear that
they had little else to complain of than absence of a democratic freedom
which, as a matter of fact, some of them had not enjoyed in the day of
their independence. The satraps seem to have been supplied with few, or
even no, Persian troops, and with few Persian aides on their
administrative staff. The Persian element in the provinces must, in
fact, have been extraordinarily small--so small that an Empire, which
for more than two centuries comprehended nearly all western Asia, has
left hardly a single provincial monument of itself, graven on rock or
carved on stone.
SECTION 6. JEWS
If we look particularly at the Jews--those subjects of Persia who
necessarily share most of our interest with the Greeks--we find that
Persian imperial rule was no sooner established securely over the former
Babylonian fief in Palestine than it began to undo the destructive work
of its predecessors. Vainly expecting help from the restored Egyptian
power, Jerusalem had held out against Nebuchadnezzar till 587. On its
capture the dispersion of the southern Jews, which had already begun
with local emigrations to Egypt, was largely increased by the
deportation of a numerous body to Babylonia. As early, however, as 538,
the year of Cyrus' entry into Babylon (doubtless as one result of that
event), began a return of exiles to Judaea and perhaps also to Samaria.
By 520 the Jewish population in South Palestine was sufficiently strong
again to make itself troublesome to Darius, and in 516 the Temple was in
process of restoration. Before the middle of the next century Jerusalem
was once more a fortified city and its population had been further
reinforced by many returned exiles who had imbibed the economic
civilization, and also the religiosity of Babylonia. Thenceforward the
development of the Jews into a commercial people proceeds without
apparent interruption from Persian governors, who (as, for example,
Nehemiah) could themselves be of the subject race. Even if large
accretions of other Semites, notably Aramaeans, be allowed
for--accretions easily accepted by a people which had become rather a
church than a nation--it remains a striking testimony to Persian
toleration that after only some six or seven generations the once
insignificant Jews should have grown numerous enough to contribute an
important element to the populations of several foreign cities. It is
worth remark also that even when, presumably, free to return to the home
of their race, many Jews preferred to remain in distant parts of the
Persian realm. Names mentioned on contract tablets of Nippur show that
Jews found it profitable to still sit by the waters of Babylon till late
in the fifth century; while in another distant province of the Persian
Empire (as the papyri of Syene have disclosed) a flourishing
particularist settlement of the same race persisted right down to and
after 500 B.C.
SECTION 7. ASIA UNDER PERSIA
On the whole evidence the Persians might justifiably claim that their
imperial organization in its best days, destitute though it was of
either the centralized strength or the theoretic justification of modern
civilized rule, achieved a very considerable advance, and that it is not
unworthy to be compared even to the Roman in respect of the freedom and
peace which in effect it secured to its subjects.
[Plate 5: PERSIAN EMPIRE (WEST) AT ITS GREATEST EXTENT. TEMP. DARIUS
HYSTASPIS]
Not much more need--or can--be said about the other conquered peoples
before we revert to the Greeks. Though Cyrus did not live to receive in
person the submission of all the west Asian peoples, his son Cambyses
had received it before his short reign of eight years came to an end.
Included in the empire now were not only all the mainland territories
once dominated by the Medes and the Babylonians, but also much wider
lands east, west and south, and even Mediterranean islands which lay
near the Asiatic shores. Among these last was Cyprus, now more closely
linked to Phoenicia than of old, and combining with the latter to
provide navies for the Great King's needs. On the East, the Iranian
plateau, watched from two royal residences, Pasargadae in the south and
Ecbatana in the north, swelled this realm to greater dimensions than any
previous eastern empire had boasted. On the south, Cambyses added Cyrene
and, less surely, Nabia to Egypt proper, which Assyria had possessed for
a short time, as we have seen. On the west, Cyrus and his generals had
already secured all Asia which lay outside the Median limit, including
Cilicia, where (as also in other realms, e.g. Phoenicia, Cyprus, Caria)
the native dynasty accepted a client position.
This, however, is not to be taken to mean that all the East settled down
at once into contented subservience. Cambyses, by putting his brother to
death, had cut off the direct line of succession. A pretender appeared
in the far East; Cambyses died on the march to meet him, and at once all
the oriental provinces, except the homeland of Persia, were up in
revolt. But a young cognate of the royal house, Darius, son of
Hystaspes, a strong man, slew the pretender, and once secure on the
throne, brought Media, Armenia, Elam and at last Babylonia, back to
obedience. The old imperial city on the Euphrates would make one more
bid for freedom six years later and then relapse into the estate of a
provincial town. Darius spent some twenty years in organizing his empire
on the satrap system, well known to us from Greek sources, and in
strengthening his frontiers. To promote the latter end he passed over
into Europe, even crossing the Danube in 511 to check Scythian raids;
and he secured the command of the two straits and the safety of his
northwest Asiatic possessions by annexing the south-east of the Balkan
peninsula with the flourishing Greek cities on its coasts.
SECTION 8. PERSIA AND THE GREEKS
The sixth century closed and the fifth century ran three years of its
course in apparently unbroken peace between East and West. But trouble
was near at hand. Persia had imposed herself on cities which possessed a
civilization superior, not only potentially but actually, to her own; on
cities where individual and communal passion for freedom constituted the
one religion incompatible with her tolerant sway; on cities conscious of
national identity with a powerful group outside the Persian Empire, and
certain sooner or later to engage that group in warfare on their behalf.
Large causes, therefore, lay behind the friction and intrigue which,
after a generation of subjection, caused the Ionian cities, led, as of
old, by Miletus, to ring up the first act of a dramatic struggle
destined to make history for a very long time to come. We cannot examine
here in detail the particular events which induced the Ionian Revolt.
Sufficient to say they all had their spring in the great city of
Miletus, whose merchant princes and merchant people were determined to
regain the power and primacy which they had enjoyed till lately. A
preliminary failure to aggrandize themselves with the goodwill of Persia
actually brought on their revolt, but it only precipitated a struggle
inevitable ultimately on one side of the Aegean or the other.
After setting the whole Anatolian coast from the Bosporus to Pamphylia
and even Cyprus in a blaze for two years, the Ionian Revolt failed,
owing as much to the particularist jealousies of the Greek cities
themselves as to vigorous measures taken against them by Darius on land
and his obedient Phoenicians at sea. A naval defeat sealed the fate of
Miletus, whose citizens found, to the horror of all Greece, that, on
occasion, the Persian would treat rebels like a loyal successor of
Shalmaneser and Nebuchadnezzar. But even though it failed, the Revolt
brought on a second act in the drama. For, on the one hand, it had
involved in Persian politics certain cities of the Greek motherlands,
notably Athens, whose contingent, greatly daring, affronted the Great
King by helping to burn the lower town of Sardes; and on the other, it
had prompted a despot on the European shore of the Dardanelles, one
Miltiades, an Athenian destined to immortal fame, to incense Darius yet
more by seizing his islands of Lemnos and Imbros.
Evidently neither could Asiatic Greeks be trusted, even though their
claws were cut by disarmament and their motives for rebellion had been
lessened by the removal of their despots, nor could the Balkan province
be held securely, while the western Greeks remained defiant and Athens,
in particular, aiming at the control of Aegean trade, supported the
Ionian colonies. Therefore Darius determined to strike at this city
whose exiled despot, Hippias, promised a treacherous co-operation; and
he summoned other Greek states to make formal submission and keep the
peace. A first armada sent to coast round the northern shore in 492
added Macedonia to the Persian Empire; but it was crippled and stayed by
storms. A second, sent two years later direct across the Aegean, reduced
the Cyclad isles, revenged itself on Eretria, one of the minor culprits
in the Sardian affair, and finally brought up by the Attic shore at
Marathon. The world-famous defeat which its landing parties suffered
there should be related by a historian rather of Greece than of the
East; and so too should the issue of a third and last invasion which,
ten years later, after old Darius' death, Xerxes led in person to defeat
at Salamis, and left to meet final rout under his generalissimo at
Plataea. For our purpose it will be enough to note the effects which
this momentous series of events had on the East itself.
SECTION 9. RESULTS OF THE PERSIAN ATTACKS ON GREECE
Obviously the European failure of Persia affected the defeated less than
the victorious party. Except upon the westernmost fringe of the Persian
Empire we have no warrant for saying that it had any serious political
result at all. A revolt of Egypt which broke out in the last year of
Darius, and was easily suppressed by his successor, seems not to have
been connected with the Persian disaster at Marathon; and even when two
more signal defeats had been suffered in Greece, and a fourth off the
shore of Asia itself--the battle of Mycale--upon which followed closely
the loss of Sestus, the European key of the Hellespont, and more
remotely the loss not only of all Persian holdings in the Balkans and
the islands, but also of the Ionian Greek cities and most of the
Aeolian, and at last (after the final naval defeat off the Eurymedon) of
the whole littoral of Anatolia from Pamphylia right round to the
Propontis--not even after all these defeats and losses did the Persian
power suffer diminution in inner Asia or loss of prestige in inland Asia
Minor. Some years, indeed, had still to elapse before the ever-restless
Egyptian province used the opportunity of Xerxes' death to league itself
with the new power and make a fresh attempt to shake off the Persian
yoke; but once more it tried in vain.
When Persia abandoned direct sovereignty over the Anatolian littoral she
suffered little commercial loss and became more secure. It is clear that
her satraps continued to manage the western trade and equally clear that
the wealth of her empire increased in greater ratio than that of the
Greek cities. There is little evidence for Hellenic commercial expansion
consequent on the Persian wars, but much for continued and even
increasing Hellenic poverty. In the event Persia found herself in a
position almost to regain by gold what she had lost by battle, and to
exercise a financial influence on Greece greater and longer lasting than
she ever established by arms. Moreover, her empire was less likely to be
attacked when it was limited by the western edge of the Anatolian
plateau, and no longer tried to hold any European territory. There is a
geographical diversity between the Anatolian littoral and the plateau.
In all ages the latter alone has been an integral part of inner Asia,
and the society and politics of the one have remained distinct from
those of the other. The strong frontier of Asia at its western
peninsular extremity lies not on, but behind the coast.
At the same time, although their immediate results to the Persian Empire
were not very hurtful, those abortive expeditions to Europe had sown the
seeds of ultimate catastrophe. As a direct consequence of them the
Greeks acquired consciousness of their own fighting value on both land
and sea as compared with the peoples of inner Asia and the Phoenicians.
Their former fear of numerical superiorities was allayed, and much of
the mystery, which had hitherto magnified and shielded Oriental power,
was dissipated. No less obviously those expeditions served to suggest to
the Greeks for the first time that there existed both a common enemy of
all their race and an external field for their own common encroachment
and plundering. So far as an idea of nationality was destined ever to be
operative on Greek minds it would draw its inspiration thenceforward
from a sense of common superiority and common hostility to the Oriental.
Persia, in a word, had laid the foundations and promoted the development
of a Greek nationality in a common ambition directed against herself. It
was her fate also, by forcing Athens into the front of the Greek states,
to give the nascent nation the most inspiriting and enterprising of
leaders--the one most fertile in imperial ideas and most apt to proceed
to their realization: and in her retreat before that nation she drew her
pursuer into a world which, had she herself never advanced into Europe,
would probably not have seen him for centuries to come.
Moreover, by a subsequent change of attitude towards her victorious
foe--though that change was not wholly to her discredit--Persia bred in
the Greeks a still better conceit of themselves and a better
understanding of her weakness. The Persians, with the intelligence and
versatility for which their race has always been remarkable, passed very
rapidly from overweening contempt to excessive admiration of the Greeks.
They set to work almost at once to attract Hellenic statesmen and men of
science to their own society, and to make use of Hellenic soldiers and
sailors. We soon find western satraps cultivating cordial relations with
the Ionian cities, hospitably entertaining Greeks of distinction and
conciliating Greek political and religious prepossessions. They must
have attained considerable success, while thus unwittingly preparing
disaster. When, a little more than a century later, western Europe would
come eastward in force, to make an end of Persian dominion, some of the
greater Ionian and Carian cities would offer a prolonged resistance to
it which is not to be accounted for only by the influence of Persian
gold or of a Persian element in their administration. Miletus and
Halicarnassus shut their gates and defended their walls desperately
against Alexander because they conceived their own best interests to be
involved in the continuance of the Persian Empire. Nor were the Persians
less successful with Greeks actually taken into their service. The Greek
mercenaries remained to a man loyal to the Great King when the Greek
attack came, and gave Alexander his hardest fighting in the three great
battles which decided the fate of the East. None the less, such an
attitude towards Greeks was suicidal. It exalted the spirit of Europe
while it depraved the courage and sapped the self-reliance of Asia.
SECTION 10. THE FIRST COUNTER-ATTACKS
This, however, is to anticipate the sequel. Let us finally fix our eyes
on the Eastern world in 400 B.C. and review it as it must then have
appeared to eyes from which the future was all concealed. The coasts of
Asia Minor, generally speaking, were in Greek hands, the cities being
autonomous trading communities, as Greeks understood autonomy; but most
of them until four years previously had acknowledged the suzerainty or
rather federal leadership of Athens and now were acknowledging less
willingly a Spartan supremacy established at first with Persian
co-operation. Many of these cities, which had long maintained very close
relations with the Persian governors of the nearer _hinterland_, not
only shaped their policy to please the latter, but even acknowledged
Persian suzerainty; and since, as it happens, at this particular moment
Sparta had fallen out with Persia, and a Spartan army, under
Dercyllidas, was occupying the Aeolian district of the north, the
"medizing" cities of Ionia and Caria were in some doubt of their future.
On the whole they inclined still to the satraps. Persian influence and
even control had, in fact, greatly increased on the western coast since
the supersession of Athens by a power unaccustomed to imperial politics
and notoriously inapt in naval matters; and the fleets of Phoenicia and
Cyprus, whose Greek princes had fallen under Phoenician domination, had
regained supremacy at sea.
Yet, only a year before, "Ten Thousand" heavy-armed Greeks (and near
half as many again of all arms), mostly Spartan, had marched right
through western Asia. They went as mercenary allies of a larger native
force led by Cyrus, Persian prince-governor of west central Anatolia,
who coveted the diadem of his newly enthroned brother. Having traversed
the old Lydian and Phrygian kingdoms they moved down into Cilicia and up
again over north Syria to the Euphrates, bound (though they only learned
it at last by the waters of the Great River itself) for Babylon. But
they never reached that city. Cyrus met death and his oriental soldiers
accepted defeat at Cunaxa, some four days' march short of the goal. But
the undefeated Greeks, refusing to surrender, and, few though they were,
so greatly dreaded by the Persians that they were not directly molested,
had to get back to their own land as best they might. How, robbed of
their original leaders they yet reached the Black Sea and safety by way
of the Tigris valley and the wild passes of Kurdish Armenia all readers
of Xenophon, the Athenian who succeeded to the command, know well. Now
in 400 B.C. they were reappearing in the cities of west Asia and Europe
to tell how open was the inner continent to bold plunderers and how
little ten Orientals availed in attack or defence against one Greek.
Such stories then and there incited Sparta to a forward policy, and one
day would encourage a stronger Western power than hers to march to the
conquest of the East.
We are fortunate in having Xenophon's detailed narrative of the
adventures of these Greeks, if only because it throws light by the way
on inner Asia almost at the very moment of our survey. We see Sardes
under Persia what it had been under Lydia, the capital city of Anatolia;
we see the great valley plains of Lydia and Phrygia, north and south,
well peopled, well supplied, and well in hand, while the rough foothills
and rougher heights of Taurus are held by contumacious mountaineers who
are kept out of the plains only by such periodic chastisement as Cyrus
allowed his army to inflict in Pisidia and Lycaonia. Cilicia is being
administered and defended by its own prince, who bears the same name or
title as his predecessor in the days of Sennacherib, but is feudally
accountable to the Great King. His land is so far his private property
that Cyrus, though would-be lord of all the empire, encourages the
pillage of the rich provincial capital. The fleet of Cyrus lands men and
stores unmolested in north Syria, while the inner country up to the
Euphrates and down its valley as far as Babylonia is at peace. The Great
King is able to assemble above half a million men from the east and
south to meet his foe, besides the levy of Media, a province which now
seems to include most of the ancient Assyria. These hundreds of
thousands constitute a host untrained, undisciplined, unstable, unused
to service, little like the ordered battalions of an essentially
military power such as the Assyrian had been.
From the story of the Retreat certain further inferences may be drawn.
First, Babylonia was a part of the empire not very well affected to the
Great King; or else the Greeks would have been neither allowed by the
local militia to enter it so easily nor encouraged by the Persians to
leave it. Second, the ancient Assyria was a peaceful province not
coerced by a standing Persian force or garrisons of any strength. Third,
southern Kurdistan was not held by or for the Great King and it paid
tribute only to occasional pressure. Fourth, the rest of Kurdistan and
Armenia as far north as the upper arm of the Euphrates was held,
precariously, by the Persians; and lastly, north of the Euphrates valley
up to the Black Sea all was practical independence. We do not know
anything precise about the far eastern provinces or the south Syrian in
this year, 400. Artaxerxes, the Great King, came from Susa to meet his
rebellious brother, but to Babylon he returned to put to death the
betrayed leaders of the Greeks. At this moment Ctesias, the Cnidian
Greek, was his court physician and no friend either to Cyrus or to
Spartans; he was even then in correspondence with the Athenian Conon who
would presently be made a Persian admiral and smash the Spartan fleet.
Of his history of Persia some few fragments and some epitomized extracts
relating to this time have survived. These have a value, which the mass
of his book seems not to have had; for they relate what a contemporary,
singularly well placed to learn court news, heard and saw. One gathers
that king and court had fallen away from the ideas and practice of the
first Cyrus. Artaxerxes was unwarlike, lax in religion (though he had
been duly consecrated at Pasargadae) and addicted to non-Zoroastrian
practices. Many Persians great and small were disaffected towards him
and numbers rallied to his brother; but he had some Western adventurers
in his army. Royal ladies wielded almost more power at the court than
the Great King, and quarrelled bitterly with one another.
Plutarch, who drew material for his life of Artaxerxes not only from
Ctesias, but also from authorities now lost to us, leaves us with much
the same impression of the lords of the East at the close of the fifth
century B.C. Corrupt and treacherous central rule, largely directed by
harem intrigue; an unenthusiastic body of subjects, abandoned to the
schemes of satraps; inefficient and casually collected armies in which
foreign mercenaries were almost the only genuine soldiers--such was
Persia now. It was something very unlike the vigorous rule of Cyrus and
the imperial system of the first Darius--something very like the Ottoman
Empire in the eighteenth century A.D.--something which would collapse
before the first Western leader of men who could command money of his
own making and a professional army of his own people.
CHAPTER V
THE VICTORY OF THE WEST
The climax was reached in about seventy years more. When these had
passed into history, so had also the Persian Empire, and the East, as
the Greeks had conceived it thus far and we have understood it, was
subject to the European race which a century and a half before it had
tried to subdue in Europe itself. To this race (and to the historian
also) "the East," as a geographical term, standing equally for a spatial
area and for a social idea, has ceased to mean what it once meant: and
the change would be lasting. It is true that the East did not cease to
be distinguished as such; for it would gradually shake itself free
again, not only from control by the West, but from the influence of the
latter's social ideas. Nevertheless, since the Western men, when they
went back to their own land, had brought the East into the world known
to them--into a circle of lands accepted as the dwelling of civilized
man--the date of Alexander's overthrow of the Persian Empire makes an
epoch which divides universal history as hardly any other divides it.
Dramatic as the final catastrophe would be, it will not surprise us when
it comes, nor did it, as a matter of fact, surprise the generation which
witnessed it. The romantic conception of Alexander, as a little David
who dared a huge Goliath, ignores the facts of previous history, and
would have occurred to no contemporary who had read the signs of the
times. The Eastern colossus had been dwindling so fast for nearly a
century that a Macedonian king, who had already subdued the Balkan
peninsula, loomed at least as large in the world's eye, when he crossed
the Hellespont, as the titular Emperor of contumacious satraps and
ever-rebelling provinces of western Asia. To accept this view we have
only to look back over seventy years since that march of Ten Thousand
Greeks, with which our last survey closed.
SECTION 1. PERSIA AND ITS PROVINCES
Before the expedition of Cyrus there may have been, and evidently were,
enough seeds of corruption in the state of Persia; but they had not
become known by their fruits. No satrap for a century past had tried to
detach himself and his province from the Empire; hardly a subject people
had attempted to re-assert its independence. There were, indeed, two
exceptions, both of them peoples which had never identified themselves
at any time with the fortunes of their alien masters. One of these was,
of course, the Asiatic Greek, the other was the Egyptian people; but the
contumacy of the first threatened a danger not yet realized by Asia; the
rebellious spirit of the last concerned, as yet, itself alone.
It was Egypt, however, which really gave the first warning of Persian
dissolution. The weakest spot in the Assyrian Empire proved weakest in
the Persian. The natural barriers of desert, swamp and sea, set between
Egypt and the neighbouring continent, are so strong that no Asiatic
Power, which has been tempted to conquer the rich Nile valley, has ever
been able to keep it long. Under its own leaders or some rebellious
officer of its new masters it has reasserted independence sooner or
later, and all history is witness that no one, whether in Asia or in
Europe, holds Egypt as a foreign province unless he holds also the sea.
During the century which had elapsed since Cambyses' conquest the
Egyptians had rebelled more than once (most persistently about 460),
calling in the sea-lords to their help on each occasion. Finally, just
before the death of Darius Nothus, and some five years before Cyrus left
Sardes, they rose again under an Egyptian, and thereafter, for about
sixty years, not the kings of Susa, but three native dynasties in
succession, were to rule Egypt. The harm done to the Persian Empire by
this defection was not measured by the mere loss of the revenues of a
province. The new kings of Egypt, who owed much to Greek support, repaid
this by helping every enemy of the Great King and every rebel against
his authority. It was they who gave asylum to the admiral and fleet of
Cyrus after Cunaxa, and sent corn to Agesilaus when he invaded Asia
Minor; they supplied money and ships to the Spartan fleet in 394, and
helped Evagoras of Cyprus in a long resistance to his suzerain. When
Tyre and the cities of the Cilician coast revolted in 380, Egypt was
privy to their designs, and she made common cause with the satraps and
governors of Western Asia, Syria and Phoenicia when, in combination,
they planned rebellion in 373 to the grave peril of the Empire. Twelve
years later we find an Egyptian king marching in person to raise
Phoenicia.
The Persian made more than one effort to recover his province. After
conspicuous failure with his own generals Artaxerxes adopted tardily the
course which Clearchus, captain of the Ten Thousand, is said to have
advised after the battle of Cunaxa, and tried his fortune once more with
Greek _condottieri_, only to find Greek generals and Greek mercenaries
arrayed against them. It had come to this, that the Persian king and his
revolted province equally depended on mercenary swords, neither daring
to meet Greek except with Greek. Well had the lesson of the march of the
Ten Thousand been read, marked and digested in the East!
SECTION 2. PERSIA AND THE WEST
It had been marked in the West as well, and its fruits were patent
within five years. The dominant Greek state of the hour, avowing an
ambition which no Greek had betrayed before, sent its king, Agesilaus,
across to Asia Minor to follow up the establishment of Spartan hegemony
on the coasts by an invasion of inland Persia. He never penetrated
farther than about half-way up the Maeander Valley, and did Persia no
harm worth speaking of; for he was not the leader, nor had he the
resources in men and in money, to carry through so distant and doubtful
an adventure. But Agesilaus' campaigning in Asia Minor between 397 and
394 has this historical significance: it demonstrates that Greeks had
come to regard a march on Susa as feasible and desirable.