Hitherto Leutychides and the Spartans with him had shown in this expedition an enterprise peculiarly foreign to them; but now once more a fatal national characteristic began to reassert itself. THE FLEET SAILS TO THE HELLESPONT. Whether because of that homesick conservatism of the race which made it averse to ventures far beyond its borders, and anxious when engaged in them to get quit of the matter in hand at the earliest possible opportunity, or from a lack of intelligence which failed to grasp the proper issue of a situation, Sparta was ever wont to leave her tasks unfinished, especially if they demanded absence far from home. And so it was now. On the plea that the only object of the expedition to the Hellespont had been to ensure the destruction of the bridge, they renounced all idea of further operations for the time being, and set sail for home. It may be doubted whether they genuinely believed that the disappearance of the bridge had removed all necessity for further action in this region. The Athenians, at any rate, under their leader Xanthippos, saw that the peril from Persia must ever be recurrent, if that power continued to hold the Thracian Chersonese, that tongue of land which in both ancient and modern times, though for different reasons, has ever been of the greatest strategical importance to Mediterranean powers. They determined therefore to clear the enemy out of this, their tête-du-pont in Europe.
The chief strategic position in the peninsula at that time was Sestos. It lay on the European side of the great ferry of the Hellespont at Abydos, and so commanded the main route from Asia to Europe.
As a place of great military importance, it was the strongest fortress in those parts; and on the news of the arrival of the Greeks at the Hellespont, the Persian population from all the neighbouring towns collected thither under the command of Artauktes, the governor of the region. He was a man who had got an evil reputation among the Greeks owing to sacrilegious behaviour of the grossest character, peculiarly calculated to arouse their most fierce resentment. The arrival of the Greeks in the Hellespont had been so unexpected that he was taken unawares, having made no preparations for a siege. But the inexperience and incapacity of the Athenian assailants in the attack on walled towns, despite the reputation they enjoyed among their fellow-countrymen, who were themselves hopelessly impotent in this department of the art of war, caused the siege to drag out a weary length, until the wane of autumn brought with it that severity of wintry weather from which all the lands within reach of the inhospitable Euxine suffer at that time of year.
The Athenian soldiers and sailors began to weary of the apparently endless blockade, and demanded of their leaders that they should be taken home once more. This request Xanthippos and his captains refused, saying that they must bide where they were until either the town were taken or the Athenian Government sent for them. So they continued to bear their hardships as best they could. Meanwhile the besieged, reduced to the last extremity of want, ate even the leathern straps of their beds. At last, in desperation, the Persian portion of the inmates of the town escaped by night through the besiegers’ lines at a point where there were but few men on guard; but here their success ended. The natives of the Chersonese who were in the town informed the Athenians by signal of their flight, and the latter started in hot pursuit. One body of the fugitives made its escape to Thrace, to meet with a miserable fate at the hands of the wild tribes of that region; but the main body, under Artauktes, was overtaken by the Athenians near Ægospotami, and after an obstinate defence, such as survived, including Artauktes, were brought back as prisoners to Sestos. A tale which Herodotus tells shows that the Persian commander had some apprehension with regard to the retribution which his sacrilegious conduct might bring upon him; for he made an offer to Xanthippos to pay one hundred talents’ compensation for the outrage, and two hundred talents’ ransom for himself and his son. To this offer Xanthippos turned a deaf ear.
The punishment inflicted on the Persian was a blot on Greek civilization. He was nailed to a board, and his son was stoned to death before his eyes. The Greek nature was capable in moments of revenge of inflicting the death penalty in wholesale fashion on enemies who had excited its bitter resentment; but the torture of a captured foe was wholly alien to the spirit of the people. END OF THE CAMPAIGN. Doubtless the Persians, with the ineradicable cruelty of the Oriental, had given many precedents for such a form of revenge; but whether that be so or not, this particular act was inexcusable in a people who claimed for themselves a standard of civilization infinitely higher than that of the world around them.
With the capture of Sestos the campaign of this famous year ended, and with it the great war for the liberation of European Greece. Many years were indeed fated to pass before the present struggle ceased. But from this time forward the war entered upon a new phase, in which the Greek was the assailant. Hitherto he had been acting purely on the defensive; even the expedition across the Ægean had been but an act of the great drama which was being played in Greece. The West had triumphed over the East in one great effort, wherein the success had been rapid and striking. But henceforward the tide of success was destined to flow more slowly,—so slowly, indeed, that ere the end came, victor and vanquished alike had sunk into decay, and alike had fallen into subjection to that newer, broader, and more vigorous but less genuine Hellenism which Macedonia evolved from her heritage in the older type.
CHAPTER XIII.
THE WAR AS A WHOLE.
It is often an invidious task to examine the causes which lie behind any great series of events in military history, because the most efficient of them are in the majority of cases due to human error rather than to human power. The historian of peaceful development is not exempt from the necessity of compiling such records of frailty, but by the very nature of things such tasks fall more frequently to one who narrates the story of periods at which the sanity of the sanest is troubled by the nervous tension involved in participation in events whose issues and their results lie in the immediate, not in the distant future. The errors of war may not be greater, but they are less remediable than those of peace. There may be time to arrest the latter’s slow decay; but the swift and often fatal stab of a lost battle is the work of a moment. Men have in all ages been conscious of the gravity of this truth; and the consciousness of it, apart altogether from the inevitable physical fear, has rendered them less capable at such times of the calculations of reason, or even, in some instances, of common sense.
The great Persian War was of a special type. In the majority of cases in which races and empires have come into collision, each side has had some practical acquaintance with the resources, devices, and fighting qualities of the other; and in many cases such experience has been intimate and prolonged. UNDETERMINED FACTORS. But when the Persian and the Greek of Europe came into collision in 480, such experience can hardly be said to have existed on either side; or, in so far as it did exist, it had been misleading. In only two instances had the European Greek come into contact with the Persian on the field of battle, and in both of them the same Greek state, the Athenian, had alone been represented in the conflict. But, furthermore, the instances had, from a military point of view, been indecisive, if not actually fallacious. At Ephesus, in the first year of the Ionian revolt, a small contingent of Athenians had been present on the defeated side, when the Persians fell on the expedition which had burnt Sardes. Of the battle practically nothing is recorded save the result; but this much may be assumed with certainty,—that a fight in which a small body of European Greeks had been defeated in partnership with hastily raised levies of Ionians could not possibly afford any experience worth calling such to either of the sides who were destined to take part in the war of twenty years later. The Ionians of Asia, long under Persian rule, must have been very deficient in military training when compared with the Greek of Europe. Darius had, indeed, made use of them in the Scythian expedition, but in that instance had employed them to guard the lines of communication. It is manifestly improbable that the Persian Government would encourage any advanced system of military exercises in a people whose position at the very borders of the empire would have rendered them, if accustomed to the use of arms, very dangerous subjects.
Marathon was the other instance. It is a battle of problems, a problem among battles, whose data are woefully imperfect. The only thing about it which seems clear is that, for some reason which can only be conjectured, it formed but an imperfect test of the fighting capacity and methods of Greek and Persian respectively.