Dêmokêdês, son of a citizen of Krotôn named Kalliphôn, had turned his attention in early youth to the study and practice of medicine and surgery (for that age, we can make no difference between the two), and had made considerable progress in it. His youth coincides nearly with the arrival of Pythagoras at Krotôn, (550-520,) where the science of the surgeon, as well as the art of the gymnastic trainer, seem to have been then prosecuted more actively than in any part of Greece. His father Kalliphôn, however, was a man of such severe temper, that the son ran away from him, and resolved to maintain himself by his talents elsewhere. He went to Ægina, and began to practice in his profession; and so rapid was his success, even in his first year,—though very imperfectly equipped with instruments and apparatus,[468]—that the citizens of the island made a contract with him to remain there for one year, at a salary of one talent (about three hundred and eighty-three pounds sterling, an Æginæan talent). The year afterwards he was invited to come to Athens, then under the Peisistratids, at a salary of one hundred minæ, or one and two-thirds of a talent; and in the following year, Polykratês of Samos tempted him by the offer of two talents. With that despot he remained, and accompanied him in his last calamitous visit to the satrap Orœtês: on the murder of Polykratês, being seized among the slaves and foreign attendants, he was left to languish with the rest in imprisonment and neglect. When again, soon after, Orœtês himself was slain, Dêmokêdês was numbered among his slaves and chattels and sent up to Susa.
He had not been long at that capital, when Darius, leaping from his horse in the chase, sprained his foot badly, and was carried home in violent pain. The Egyptian surgeons, supposed to be the first men in their profession,[469] whom he habitually employed, did him no good, but only aggravated his torture; for seven days and nights he had no sleep, and he as well as those around him began to despair. At length, some one who had been at Sardis, accidentally recollected that he had heard of a Greek surgeon among the slaves of Orœtês: search was immediately made, and the miserable slave was brought, in chains as well as in rags,[470] into the presence of the royal sufferer. Being asked whether he understood surgery, he affected ignorance; but Darius, suspecting this to be a mere artifice, ordered out the scourge and the pricking instrument, to overcome it. Dêmokêdês now saw that there was no resource, admitted that he had acquired some little skill, and was called upon to do his utmost in the case before him. He was fortunate enough to succeed perfectly, in alleviating the pain, in procuring sleep for the exhausted patient, and ultimately in restoring the foot to a sound state. Darius, who had abandoned all hopes of such a cure, knew no bounds to his gratitude. As a first reward, he presented him with two sets of chains in solid gold,—a commemoration of the state in which Dêmokêdês had first come before him,—he next sent him into the harem to visit his wives. The conducting eunuchs introduced him as the man who had restored the king to life, and the grateful sultanas each gave to him a saucer full of golden coins called staters;[471] in all so numerous, that the slave Skitôn, who followed him, was enriched by merely picking up the pieces which dropped on the floor. Nor was this all. Darius gave him a splendid house and furniture, made him the companion of his table, and showed him every description of favor. He was about to crucify the Egyptian surgeons who had been so unsuccessful in their attempts to cure him; but Dêmokêdês had the happiness of preserving their lives, as well as of rescuing an unfortunate companion of his imprisonment,—an Eleian prophet, who had followed the fortunes of Polykratês.
But there was one favor which Darius would on no account grant; yet upon this one Dêmokêdês had set his heart,—the liberty of returning to Greece. At length accident, combined with his own surgical skill, enabled him to escape from the splendor of his second detention, as it had before extricated him from the misery of the first. A tumor formed upon the breast of Atossa; at first, she said nothing to any one, but as it became too bad for concealment, she was forced to consult Dêmokêdês. He promised to cure her, but required from her a solemn oath that she would afterwards do for him anything which he should ask,—pledging himself at the same time to ask nothing indecent.[472] The cure was successful, and Atossa was required to repay it by procuring his liberty. He knew that the favor would be refused, even to her, if directly solicited, but he taught her a stratagem for obtaining under false pretences the consent of Darius. She took an early opportunity, Herodotus tells us,[473] in bed, of reminding Darius that the Persians expected from him some positive addition to the power and splendor of the empire; and when Darius, in answer, acquainted her that he contemplated a speedy expedition against the Scythians, she entreated him to postpone it, and to turn his forces first against Greece: “I have heard (she said) about the maidens of Sparta, Athens, Argos, and Corinth, and I want to have some of them as slaves to serve me—(we may conceive the smile of triumph with which the sons of those who had conquered at Platæa and Salamis would hear this part of the history read by Herodotus);—you have near you the best person possible to give information about Greece,—that Greek who cured your foot.” Darius was induced by this request to send some confidential Persians into Greece to procure information, along with Dêmokêdês. Selecting fifteen of them, he ordered them to survey the coasts and cities of Greece, under guidance of Dêmokêdês, but with peremptory orders upon no account to let him escape or to return without him. He next sent for Dêmokêdês himself, explained to him what he wanted, and enjoined him imperatively to return as soon as the business had been completed; he farther desired him to carry away with him all the ample donations which he had already received, as presents to his father and brothers, promising that on his return fresh donations of equal value should make up the loss: lastly, he directed that a storeship, “filled with all manner of good things,” should accompany the voyage. Dêmokêdês undertook the mission with every appearance of sincerity. The better to play his part, he declined to take away what he already possessed at Susa,—saying, that he should like to find his property and furniture again on coming back, and that the storeship alone, with its contents, would be sufficient both for the voyage and for all necessary presents.
Accordingly, he and the fifteen Persian envoys went down to Sidon in Phenicia, where two armed triremes were equipped, with a large storeship in company; and the voyage of survey into Greece was commenced. They visited and examined all the principal places in Greece,—probably beginning with the Asiatic and insular Greeks, crossing to Eubœa, circumnavigating Attica and Peloponnesus, then passing to Korkyra and Italy. They surveyed the coasts and cities, taking memoranda[474] of everything worthy of note which they saw: this Periplûs, if it had been preserved, would have been inestimable, as an account of the actual state of the Grecian world about 518 B. C. As soon as they arrived at Tarentum, Dêmokêdês—now within a short distance of his own home, Krotôn—found an opportunity of executing what he had meditated from the beginning. At his request Aristophilidês, the king of Tarentum, seized the fifteen Persians, and detained them as spies, at the same time taking the rudders from off their ships,—while Dêmokêdês himself made his escape to Krotôn. As soon as he had arrived there, Aristophilidês released the Persians, and suffered them to pursue their voyage: they went on to Krotôn, found Dêmokêdês in the market-place, and laid hands upon him. But his fellow-citizens released him, not without opposition from some who were afraid of provoking the Great King, and in spite of remonstrances, energetic and menacing, from the Persians themselves: indeed, the Krotôniates not only protected the restored exile, but even robbed the Persians of their storeship. The latter, disabled from proceeding farther, as well by this loss as by the secession of Dêmokêdês, commenced their voyage homeward, but unfortunately suffered shipwreck near the Iapygian cape, and became slaves in that neighborhood. A Tarentine exile, named Gillus, ransomed them and carried them up to Susa,—a service for which Darius promised him any recompense that he chose. Restoration to his native city was all that Gillus asked; and that too, not by force, but by the mediation of the Asiatic Greeks of Knidus, who were on terms of intimate alliance with the Tarentines. This generous citizen,—an honorable contrast to Dêmokêdês, who had not scrupled to impel the stream of Persian conquest against his country, in order to procure his own release,—was unfortunately disappointed of his anticipated recompense. For though the Knidians, at the injunction of Darius, employed all their influence at Tarentum to procure a revocation of the sentence of exile, they were unable to succeed, and force was out of the question.[475] The last words addressed by Dêmokêdês at parting to his Persian companions, exhorted them to acquaint Darius that he (Dêmokêdês) was about to marry the daughter of the Krotoniate Milo,—one of the first men in Krotôn, as well as the greatest wrestler of his time. The reputation of Milo was very great with Darius,—probably from the talk of Dêmokêdês himself: moreover, gigantic muscular force could be appreciated by men who had no relish either for Homer or Solon. And thus did this clever and vainglorious Greek, sending back his fifteen Persian companions to disgrace, and perhaps to death, deposit in their parting ears a braggart message, calculated to create for himself a factitious name at Susa. He paid a large sum to Milo as the price of his daughter, for this very purpose.[476]
Thus finishes the history of Dêmokêdês, and of the “first Persians (to use the phrase of Herodotus) who ever came over from Asia into Greece.”[477] It is a history well deserving of attention, even looking only to the liveliness of the incidents, introducing us as they do into the full movement of the ancient world,—incidents which I see no reason for doubting, with a reasonable allowance for the dramatic amplification of the historian. Even at that early date, Greek medical intelligence stands out in a surpassing manner, and Dêmokêdês is the first of those many able Greek surgeons who were seized, carried up to Susa,[478] and there detained for the Great King, his court, and harem.
But his history suggests, in another point of view, far more serious reflections. Like the Milesian Histiæus (of whom I shall speak hereafter,) he cared not what amount of risk he brought upon his country in order to procure his own escape from a splendid detention at Susa. And the influence which he originated and brought to bear was on the point of precipitating upon Greece the whole force of the Persian empire, at a time when Greece was in no condition to resist it. Had the first aggressive expedition of Darius, with his own personal command and fresh appetite for conquest, been directed against Greece instead of against Scythia (between 516-514 B. C.), Grecian independence would have perished almost infallibly. For Athens was then still governed by the Peisistratids; what she was, under them, we have had occasion to notice in a former chapter. She had then no courage for energetic self-defence, and probably Hippias himself, far from offering resistance, would have found it advantageous to accept Persian dominion as a means of strengthening his own rule, like the Ionian despots: moreover, Grecian habit of coöperation was then only just commencing. But fortunately, the Persian invader did not touch the shore of Greece until more than twenty years afterwards, in 490 B. C.; and during that precious interval, the Athenian character had undergone the memorable revolution which has been before described. Their energy and their organization had been alike improved, and their force of resistance had become decupled; moreover, their conduct had so provoked the Persian that resistance was then a matter of necessity with them, and submission on tolerable terms an impossibility. When we come to the grand Persian invasion of Greece, we shall see that Athens was the life and soul of all the opposition offered. We shall see farther, that with all the efforts of Athens, the success of the defence was more than once doubtful; and would have been converted into a very different result, if Xerxês had listened to the best of his own counsellors. But had Darius, at the head of the very same force which he conducted into Scythia, or even an inferior force, landed at Marathon in 514 B. C., instead of sending Datis in 490 B. C.,—he would have found no men like the victors of Marathon to meet him. As far as we can appreciate the probabilities, he would have met with little resistance except from the Spartans singly, who would have maintained their own very defensible territory against all his efforts,—like the Mysians and Pisidians in Asia Minor, or like the Mainots of Laconia in later days; but Hellas generally would have become a Persian satrapy. Fortunately, Darius, while bent on invading some country, had set his mind on the attack of Scythia, alike perilous and unprofitable. His personal ardor was wasted on those unconquerable regions, where he narrowly escaped the disastrous fate of Cyrus,—nor did he ever pay a second visit to the coasts of the Ægean. Yet the amorous influences of Atossa, set at work by Dêmokêdês might well have been sufficiently powerful to induce Darius to assail Greece instead of Scythia,—a choice in favor of which all other recommendations concurred; and the history of free Greece would then probably have stopped at this point, without unrolling any of the glories which followed. So incalculably great has been the influence of Grecian development, during the two centuries between 500-300 B. C., on the destinies of mankind, that we cannot pass without notice a contingency which threatened to arrest that development in the bud. Indeed, it may be remarked that the history of any nation, considered as a sequence of causes and effects, affording applicable knowledge, requires us to study not merely real events, but also imminent contingencies,—events which were on the point of occurring, but yet did not occur. When we read the wailings of Atossa in the Persæ of Æschylus, for the humiliation which her son Xerxês had just undergone in his flight from Greece,[479] we do not easily persuade ourselves to reverse the picture, and to conceive the same Atossa twenty years earlier, numbering as her slaves at Susa the noblest Hêrakleid and Alkmæônid maidens from Greece. Yet the picture would really have been thus reversed,—the wish of Atossa would have been fulfilled, and the wailings would have been heard from enslaved Greek maidens in Persia,—if the mind of Darius had not happened to be preoccupied with a project not less insane even than those of Kambysês against Ethiopia and the Libyan desert. Such at least is the moral of the story of Dêmokêdês.
That insane expedition across the Danube into Scythia comes now to be recounted. It was undertaken by Darius for the purpose of avenging the inroad and devastation of the Scythians in Media and Upper Asia, about a century before. The lust of conquest imparted unusual force to this sentiment of wounded dignity, which in the case of the Scythians could hardly be connected with any expectation of plunder or profit. In spite of the dissuading admonition of his brother Artabanus,[480] Darius summoned the whole force of his empire, army and navy, to the Thracian Bosphorus,—a force not less than seven hundred thousand horse and foot, and six hundred ships, according to Herodotus. On these prodigious numbers we can lay no stress. But it appears that the names of all the various nations composing the host were inscribed on two pillars, erected by order of Darius on the European side of the Bosphorus, and afterwards seen by Herodotus himself in the city of Byzantium,—the inscriptions were bilingual, in Assyrian characters as well as Greek. The Samian architect Mandroklês had been directed to throw a bridge of boats across the Bosphorus, about half-way between Byzantium and the mouth of the Euxine. So peremptory were the Persian kings that their orders for military service should be punctually obeyed, and so impatient were they of the idea of exemptions, that when a Persian father named Œobazus entreated that one of his three sons, all included in the conscription, might be left at home, Darius replied that all three of them should be left at home,—an answer which the unsuspecting father heard with delight. They were indeed all left at home,—for they were all put to death.[481] A proceeding similar to this is ascribed afterwards to Xerxês;[482] whether true or not as matters of fact, both tales illustrate the wrathful displeasure with which the Persian kings were known to receive such petitions for exemption.
The naval force of Darius seems to have consisted entirely of subject Greeks, Asiatic and insular; for the Phenician fleet was not brought into the Ægean until the subsequent Ionic revolt. At this time all or most of the Asiatic Greek cities were under despots, who leaned on the Persian government for support, and who appeared with their respective contingents to take part in the Scythian expedition.[483] Of Ionic Greeks were seen,—Strattis, despot of Chios; Æakês son of Sylosôn, despot of Samos; Laodamas, of Phôkæa; and Histiæus, of Milêtus. From the Æolic towns, Aristagoras of Kymê; from the Hellespontine Greeks, Daphnis of Abydus, Hippoklus of Lampsakus, Hêrophantus of Parium, Metrodôrus of Prokonnêsus, Aristagoras of Kyzikus, and Miltiadês of the Thracian Chersonese. All these are mentioned, and there were probably more. This large fleet, assembled at the Bosphorus, was sent forward into the Euxine to the mouth of the Danube,—with orders to sail up the river two days’ journey, above the point where its channel begins to divide, and to throw a bridge of boats over it; while Darius, having liberally recompensed the architect Mandroklês, crossed the bridge over the Bosphorus, and began his march through Thrace, receiving the submission of various Thracian tribes in his way, and subduing others,—especially the Getæ north of Mount Hæmus, who were compelled to increase still farther the numbers of his vast army.[484] On arriving at the Danube, he found the bridge finished and prepared for his passage by the Ionians: we may remark here, as on so many other occasions, that all operations requiring intelligence are performed for the Persians either by Greeks or by Phenicians,—more usually by the former. He crossed this greatest of all earthly rivers,[485]—for so the Danube was imagined to be in the fifth century B. C.,—and directed his march into Scythia.
As far as the point now attained, our narrative runs smoothly and intelligibly: we know that Darius marched his army into Scythia, and that he came back with ignominy and severe loss. But as to all which happened between his crossing and recrossing the Danube, we find nothing approaching to authentic statement,—nothing even which we can set forth as the probable basis of truth on which exaggerating fancy has been at work. All is inexplicable mystery. Ktêsias indeed says that Darius marched for fifteen days into the Scythian territory,—that he then exchanged bows with the king of Scythia, and discovered the Scythian bow to be the largest,—and that, being intimidated by such discovery, he fled back to the bridge by which he had crossed the Danube, and recrossed the river with the loss of one-tenth part of his army,[486] being compelled to break down the bridge before all had passed. The length of march is here the only thing distinctly stated; about the direction nothing is said. But the narrative of Ktêsias, defective as it is, is much less perplexing than that of Herodotus, who conducts the immense host of Darius as it were through fairy-land,—heedless of distance, large intervening rivers, want of all cultivation or supplies, destruction of the country—in so far as it could be destroyed—by the retreating Scythians, etc. He tells us that the Persian army consisted chiefly of foot,—that there were no roads nor agriculture; yet his narrative carries it over about twelve degrees of longitude from the Danube to the country east of the Tanais, across the rivers Tyras (Dniester), Hypanis (Bog), Borysthenês (Dnieper), Hypakyris. Gerrhos, and Tanais.[487] How these rivers could have been passed in the face of enemies by so vast a host, we are left to conjecture, since it was not winter time, to convert them into ice: nor does the historian even allude to them as having been crossed either in the advance or in the retreat. What is not less remarkable is, that in respect to the Greek settlement of Olbia, or Borysthenês, and the agricultural Scythians and Mix-hellenes between the Hypanis and the Borysthenês, across whose country it would seem that this march of Darius must have carried him,—Herodotus does not say anything; though we should have expected that he would have had better means of informing himself about this part of the march than about any other, and though the Persians could hardly have failed to plunder or put in requisition this, the only productive portion of Scythia.
The narrative of Herodotus in regard to the Persian march north of the Ister seems indeed destitute of all the conditions of reality. It is rather an imaginative description, illustrating the desperate and impracticable character of Scythian warfare, and grouping in the same picture, according to that large sweep of the imagination which is admissible in epical treatment, the Scythians, with all their barbarous neighbors from the Carpathian mountains to the river Wolga. The Agathyrsi, the Neuri, the Androphagi, the Melanchlæni, the Budini, the Gelôni, the Sarmatians, and the Tauri,—all of them bordering on that vast quadrangular area of four thousand stadia for each side, called Scythia, as Herodotus conceives it,[488]—are brought into deliberation and action in consequence of the Persian approach. And Herodotus takes that opportunity of communicating valuable particulars respecting the habits and manners of each. The kings of these nations discuss whether Darius is justified in his invasion, and whether it be prudent in them to aid the Scythians. The latter question is decided in the affirmative by the Sarmatians, the Budini, and the Gelôni, all eastward of the Tanais,[489]—in the negative by the rest. The Scythians, removing their wagons with their wives and children out of the way northward, retreat and draw Darius after them from the Danube all across Scythia and Sarmatia to the north-eastern extremity of the territory of the Budini,[490] several days’ journey eastward of the Tanais. Moreover, they destroy the wells and ruin the herbage as much as they can, so that during all this long march, says Herodotus, the Persians “found nothing to damage, inasmuch as the country was barren;” it is therefore not easy to see what they could find to live upon. It is in the territory of the Budini, at this easternmost terminus on the borders of the desert, that the Persians perform the only positive acts which are ascribed to them throughout the whole expedition. They burn the wooden wall before occupied, but now deserted, by the Gelôni, and they build, or begin to build, eight large fortresses near the river Oarus. For what purpose these fortresses could have been intended, Herodotus gives no intimation; but he says that the unfinished work was yet to be seen even in his day.[491]