Among these unfortunate towns, thus changing their master and passing out into a harsher subjection, two deserve especial notice,—Teôs and Phôkæa. The citizens of the former, so soon as the mound around their walls had rendered farther resistance impossible, embarked and emigrated, some to Thrace, where they founded Abdêra,—others to the Cimmerian Bosphorus, where they planted Phanagoria; a portion of them, however, must have remained to take the chances of subjection, since the town appears in after-times still peopled and still Hellenic.[356]
The fate of Phôkæa, similar in the main, is given to us with more striking circumstances of detail, and becomes the more interesting, since the enterprising mariners who inhabited it had been the torch-bearers of Grecian geographical discovery in the west. I have already described their adventurous exploring voyages of former days into the interior of the Adriatic, and along the whole northern and western coasts of the Mediterranean as far as Tartêssus (the region around and adjoining to Cadiz),—together with the favorable reception given to them by old Arganthônius, king of the country, who invited them to emigrate in a body to his kingdom, offering them the choice of any site which they might desire. His invitation was declined, though probably the Phôkæans may have subsequently regretted the refusal; and he then manifested his good-will towards them by a large present to defray the expense of constructing fortifications round their town.[357] The walls, erected in part, by this aid, were both extensive and well built; yet they could not hinder Harpagus from raising his mounds of earth up against them, while he was politic enough at the same time to tempt them with offers of a moderate capitulation; requiring only that they should breach their walls in one place by pulling down one of the towers, and consecrate one building in the interior of the town as a token of subjection. To accept these terms, was to submit themselves to the discretion of the besieger, for there could be no security that they would be observed; and the Phôkæans, while they asked for one day to deliberate upon their reply, entreated that, during that day, Harpagus should withdraw his troops altogether from the walls. With this demand the latter complied, intimating, at the same time, that he saw clearly through the meaning of it. The Phôkæans had determined that the inevitable servitude impending over their town should not be shared by its inhabitants, and they employed their day of grace in preparation for collective exile, putting on ship-board their wives and children as well as their furniture and the movable decorations of their temples. They then set sail for Chios, leaving to the conqueror a deserted town for the occupation of a Persian garrison.[358]
It appears that the fugitives were not very kindly received at Chios; at least, when they made a proposition for purchasing from the Chians the neighboring islands of Œnussæ as a permanent abode, the latter were induced to refuse by apprehensions of commercial rivalry. It was necessary to look farther for a settlement: and Arganthônius their protector, being now dead, Tartêssus was no longer inviting. Twenty years before, however, the colony of Alalia in the island of Corsica had been founded from Phôkæa by the direction of the oracle, and thither the general body of Phôkæans now resolved to repair. Having prepared their ships for this distant voyage, they first sailed back to Phôkæa, surprised the Persian garrison whom Harpagus had left in the town, and slew them: they then sunk in the harbor a great lump of iron, and bound themselves by a solemn and unanimous oath never again to see Phôkæa until that iron should come up to the surface. Nevertheless, in spite of the oath, the voyage of exile had been scarcely begun when more than half of them repented of having so bound themselves,—and became homesick.[359] They broke their vow and returned to Phôkæa. But as Herodotus does not mention any divine judgment as having been consequent on the perjury, we may, perhaps, suspect that some gray-headed citizen, to whom transportation to Corsica might be little less than a sentence of death, both persuaded himself, and certified to his companions, that he had seen the sunken lump of iron raised up and floating for a while buoyant upon the waves. Harpagus must have been induced to pardon the previous slaughter of his Persian garrison, or at least to believe that it had been done by those Phôkæans who still persisted in exile. He wanted tribute-paying subjects, not an empty military post, and the repentant home-seekers were allowed to number themselves among the slaves of the Great King.
Meanwhile the smaller but more resolute half of the Phôkæans executed their voyage to Alalia in Corsica, with their wives and children, in sixty pentekontêrs, or armed ships, and established themselves along with the previous settlers. They remained there for five years,[360] during which time their indiscriminate piracies had become so intolerable (even at that time, piracy committed against a foreign vessel seems to have been both frequent and practised without much disrepute), that both the Tyrrhenian seaports along the Mediterranean coast of Italy, and the Carthaginians, united to put them down. There subsisted particular treaties between these two, for the regulation of the commercial intercourse between Africa and Italy, of which the ancient treaty preserved by Polybius between Rome and Carthage (made in 509 B. C.) may be considered as a specimen.[361] Sixty Carthaginian and as many Tuscan ships attacked the sixty Phôkæan ships near Alalia, and destroyed forty of them, yet not without such severe loss to themselves that the victory was said to be on the side of the latter; who, however, in spite of this Kadmeian victory (so a battle was denominated in which the victors lost more than the vanquished), were compelled to carry back their remaining twenty vessels to Alalia, and to retire with their wives and families, in so far as room could be found for them, to Rhegium. At last, these unhappy exiles found a permanent home by establishing the new settlement of Elea, or Velia, in the gulf of Policastro, on the Italian coast (then called Œnôtrian) southward from Poseidônia, or Pæstum. It is probable that they were here joined by other exiles from Ionia, in particular by the Kolophonian philosopher and poet Xenophanês, from whom what was afterwards called the Eleatic school of philosophy, distinguished both for bold consistency and dialectic acuteness, took its rise. The Phôkæan captives, taken prisoners in the naval combat by Tyrrhenians and Carthaginians, were stoned to death; but a divine judgment overtook the Tyrrhenian town of Agylla, in consequence of this cruelty; and even in the time of Herodotus, a century afterwards, the Agyllæans were still expiating the sin by a periodical solemnity and agon, pursuant to the penalty which the Delphian oracle had imposed upon them.[362]
Such was the fate of the Phôkæan exiles, while their brethren at home remained as subjects of Harpagus, in common with all the other Ionic and Æolic Greeks except Milêtus. For even the insular inhabitants of Lesbos and Chios, though not assailable by sea, since the Persians had no fleet, thought it better to renounce their independence and enrol themselves as Persian subjects,—both of them possessing strips of the mainland which they were unable to protect otherwise. Samos, on the other hand, maintained its independence, and even reached, shortly after this period, under the despotism of Polykratês, a higher degree of power than ever. Perhaps the humiliation of the other maritime Greeks around may have rather favored the ambition of this unscrupulous prince, to whom I shall revert presently. But we may readily conceive that the public solemnities in which the Ionic Greeks intermingled, in place of those gay and richly-decked crowds which the Homeric hymn describes in the preceding century as assembled at Delos, presented scenes of marked despondency: one of their wisest men, indeed, Bias of Priênê, went so far as to propose, at the Pan-Ionic festival, a collective emigration of the entire population of the Ionic towns to the island of Sardinia. Nothing like freedom, he urged, was now open to them in Asia; but in Sardinia, one great Pan-Ionic city might be formed, which would not only be free herself, but mistress of her neighbors. The proposition found no favor; the reason of which is sufficiently evident from the narrative just given respecting the unconquerable local attachment on the part of the Phôkæan majority. But Herodotus bestows upon it the most unqualified commendation, and regrets that it was not acted upon.[363] Had such been the case, the subsequent history of Carthage, Sicily, and even Rome, might have been sensibly altered.
Thus subdued by Harpagus, the Ionic and Æolic Greeks were employed as auxiliaries to him in the conquest of the south-western inhabitants of Asia Minor,—Karians, Kaunians, Lykians, and Doric Greeks of Knidus and Halikarnassus. Of the fate of the latter town, Herodotus tells us nothing, though it was his native place. The inhabitants of Knidus, a place situated on a long outlying tongue of land, at first tried to cut through the narrow isthmus which joined them to the continent, but abandoned the attempt with a facility which Herodotus explains by referring it to a prohibition of the oracle:[364] nor did either the Karians or the Kaunians offer any serious resistance. The Lykians only, in their chief town Xanthus, made a desperate defence. Having in vain tried to repel the assailants in the open field, and finding themselves blocked up in their city, they set fire to it with their own hands; consuming in the flames their women, children, and servants, while the armed citizens marched out and perished to a man in combat with the enemy.[365] Such an act of brave and even ferocious despair is not in the Grecian character. In recounting, however, the languid defence and easy submission of the Greeks of Knidus, it may surprise us to call to mind that they were Dorians and colonists from Sparta. So that the want of steadfast courage, often imputed to Ionic Greeks as compared to Dorian, ought properly to be charged on Asiatic Greeks as compared with European; or rather upon that mixture of indigenous with Hellenic population, which all the Asiatic colonies, in common with most of the other colonies, presented, and which in Halikarnassus was particularly remarkable; for it seems to have been half Karian, half Dorian, and was even governed by a line of Karian despots.
Harpagus and the Persians thus mastered, without any considerable resistance, the western and southern portions of Asia Minor; probably, also, though we have no direct account of it, the entire territory within the Halys which had before been ruled by Crœsus. The tributes of the conquered Greeks were transmitted to Ekbatana instead of to Sardis. While Harpagus was thus employed, Cyrus himself had been making still more extensive conquests in Upper Asia and Assyria, of which I shall speak in the coming chapter.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
GROWTH OF THE PERSIAN EMPIRE.
In the preceding chapter an account has been given, the best which we can pick out from Herodotus, of the steps by which the Asiatic Greeks became subject to Persia. And if his narrative is meagre, on a matter which vitally concerned not only so many of his brother Greeks, but even his own native city, we can hardly expect that he should tell us much respecting the other conquests of Cyrus. He seems to withhold intentionally various details which had come to his knowledge, and merely intimates in general terms that while Harpagus was engaged on the coast of the Ægean, Cyrus himself assailed and subdued all the nations of Upper Asia, “not omitting any one of them.”[366] He alludes to the Baktrians and the Sakæ,[367] who are also named by Ktêsias as having become subject partly by force, partly by capitulation; but he deems only two of the exploits of Cyrus worthy of special notice,—the conquest of Babylon, and the final expedition against the Massagetæ. In the short abstract which we now possess of the lost work of Ktêsias, no mention appears of the important conquest of Babylon; but his narrative, as far as the abstract enables us to follow it, diverges materially from that of Herodotus, and must have been founded on data altogether different.