The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

It is very difficult to estimate the loss which civilization has suffered by the destruction of this great city, which had been, up to the very time of its destruction, the foremost in the Hellenic world. It was not merely in the front rank in Greek commerce; it was also an intellectual centre unrivalled among the cities of the age. Whether it could ever have developed a period of literary brilliance equal to that of the Athens of the later part of this century, must remain a matter of speculation. It had a long start in the intellectual race. The wide interest of its material relations called forth a corresponding breadth of interest in literary speculation of various kinds; and the world would certainly have been enriched, had it possessed an Asiatic Greek literature parallel to that of European Greece. Difference of environment and difference of political circumstances would have produced a literary development on different lines; and the literature itself could not have failed to display one side of the many-sidedness of the Greeks, which is lost to the present world, save for a few fragments, which point to a promise of future greatness.

H. vi. 21.

At Athens the fall of the great city created more than a momentary impression. Phrynichos composed a drama on the subject which aroused so bitter a sense of loss in the mind of the Athenians that they punished the dramatist by a fine of a thousand drachmas. It is possible that self-reproach was mingled with regret. The desertion of 498 was so sudden, and is, in certain respects, so unaccountable, that it may well have provoked considerable feeling even in Athens itself.

Herodotus draws a contrast between the emotion of Athens and the apathy of the Sybarites. When Sybaris was destroyed by Kroton about the year 510, the whole Milesian population had mourned the loss of their old commercial friend.

The last twenty years had been fateful in the history of Greek trade. Sybaris, Chalkis, and Miletus—three of the greatest names in the history of Greek commerce—had successively fallen; and their disappearance from the stage of the commercial world must have greatly modified that obscure but powerful factor in Greek history. It will be a matter for later consideration whether the disappearance of these competitors, especially from the western trade route, had not a powerful influence in shaping the events of the later half of the century.

Of the individual fortunes of the rest of the Asiatic Greek cities, Herodotus says but little. Among the Samians, the divided counsels in their contingent at Ladé seem to have given birth to such bitter dissensions that a section of the population which had remained loyal to the revolt left the island and set sail for Sicily, whence an invitation had come from the people of Zanklé, calling such Ionians as would to settle at Kale Akte on the north coast of the island. Their adventures are related by Herodotus.[45] It is not necessary to follow them thither. Suffice it to say that the gross treachery of their conduct to their would-be hosts upon their arrival there affords one of those painful and striking examples of the co-existence in the Greek race of great virtues and great defects.

H. vi. 25.

Æakes, the tyrant who had negotiated the treachery at Ladé, as a reward for his services on that occasion, was reinstated in Samos by the Phœnician fleet. The city and its temples were left untouched.

“Immediately after the capture of Miletus,” says Herodotus, “the Persians got possession of Caria, some of the cities submitting voluntarily, and others being reduced by force.”

The part played by Caria, as described in the narrative of the revolt, is quite incomprehensible. What had she been doing during the time that had intervened since the great defeat of the Persians on the Pedasos road? SUBJUGATION OF CARIA. The interval cannot, upon any calculation from the facts mentioned by Herodotus, have amounted to less than two years. Were the Carians during all this time inactive, sullenly awaiting their fate? Their story during these years is a lost chapter in history.