All the Greek cities, which Xerxes had passed by, obeyed his orders with sufficient readiness, and probably few doubted the ultimate success of so prodigious an armament. But the inhabitants of Akanthus had been eminent for their zeal and exertions in the cutting of the canal, and had probably made considerable profits during the operation; Xerxes now repaid their zeal by contracting with them the tie of hospitality, accompanied with praise and presents; though he does not seem to have exempted them from the charge of maintaining the army while in their territory. He here separated himself from his fleet, which was directed to sail through the canal of Athos, to double the two southwestern capes of the Chalkidic peninsula, to enter the Thermaic gulf, and to await his arrival at Therma. The fleet in its course gathered additional troops from the Greek towns in the two peninsulas of Sithonia and Pallênê, as well as on the eastern side of the Thermaic gulf, in the region called Krusis, or Krossæa, on the continental side of the isthmus of Pallênê. These Greek towns were numerous, but of little individual importance. Near Therma (Salonichi) in Mygdonia, in the interior of the gulf and eastward of the mouth of the Axius, the fleet awaited the arrival of Xerxes by land from Akanthus. He seems to have had a difficult march, and to have taken a route considerably inland, through Pæonia and Krestônia,—a wild, woody, and untrodden country, where his baggage-camels were set upon by lions, and where there were also wild bulls, of prodigious size and fierceness: at length he rejoined his fleet at Therma, and stretched his army throughout Mygdonia, the ancient Pieria, and Bottiæis, as far as the mouth of the Haliakmôn.[71]
Xerxes had now arrived within sight of Mount Olympus, the northern boundary of what was properly called Hellas; after a march through nothing but subject territory, with magazines laid up beforehand for the subsistence of his army, with additional contingents levied in his course, and probably with Thracian volunteers joining him in the hopes of plunder. The road along which he had marched was still shown with solemn reverence by the Thracians, and protected both from intruders and from tillage, even in the days of Herodotus.[72] The Macedonian princes, the last of his western tributaries, in whose territory he now found himself,—together with the Thessalian Aleuadæ,—undertook to conduct him farther. Nor did the task as yet appear difficult: what steps the Greeks were taking to oppose him, shall be related in the coming chapter.
CHAPTER XXXIX.
PROCEEDINGS IN GREECE FROM THE BATTLE OF MARATHON TO THE TIME OF THE BATTLE OF THERMOPYLÆ.
Our information respecting the affairs of Greece immediately after the repulse of the Persians from Marathon, is very scanty.
Kleomenês and Leotychidês, the two kings of Sparta (the former belonging to the elder, or Eurystheneïd, the latter to the younger, or the Prokleïd, race), had conspired for the purpose of dethroning the former Prokleïd king Demaratus: and Kleomenês had even gone so far as to tamper with the Delphian priestess for this purpose. His manœuvre being betrayed shortly afterwards, he was so alarmed at the displeasure of the Spartans, that he retired into Thessaly, and from thence into Arcadia, where he employed the powerful influence of his regal character and heroic lineage to arm the Arcadian people against his country. The Spartans, alarmed in their turn, voluntarily invited him back with a promise of amnesty. But his renewed lease did not last long: his habitual violence of character became aggravated into decided insanity, insomuch that he struck with his stick whomsoever he met; and his relatives were forced to confine him in chains under a Helot sentinel. By severe menaces, he one day constrained this man to give him his sword, with which he mangled himself dreadfully and perished. So shocking a death was certain to receive a religious interpretation, but which among the misdeeds of his life had drawn down upon him the divine wrath, was a point difficult to determine. Most of the Greeks imputed it to the sin of his having corrupted the Pythian priestess:[73] but the Athenians and Argeians were each disposed to an hypothesis of their own,—the former believed that the gods had thus punished the Spartan king for having cut timber in the sacred grove of Eleusis,—the latter recognized the avenging hand of the hero Argus, whose grove Kleomenês had burnt, along with so many suppliant warriors who had taken sanctuary in it. Without pronouncing between these different suppositions, Herodotus contents himself with expressing his opinion that the miserable death of Kleomenês was an atonement for his conduct to Demaratus. But what surprises us most is, to hear that the Spartans, usually more disposed than other Greeks to refer every striking phenomenon to divine agency, recognized on this occasion nothing but a vulgar physical cause: Kleomenês had gone mad, they affirmed, through habits of intoxication, learned from some Scythian envoys who had come to Sparta.[74]
The death of Kleomenês, and the discredit thrown on his character, emboldened the Æginetans to prefer a complaint at Sparta respecting their ten hostages whom Kleomenês and Leotychidês had taken away from the island, a little before the invasion of Attica by the Persians under Datis, and deposited at Athens as guarantee to the Athenians against aggression from Ægina at that critical moment. Leotychidês was the surviving auxiliary of Kleomenês in the requisition of these hostages, and against him the Æginetans complained. Though the proceeding was one unquestionably beneficial to the general cause of Greece,[75] yet such was the actual displeasure of the Lacedæmonians against the deceased king and his acts, that the survivor Leotychidês was brought to a public trial, and condemned to be delivered up as prisoner in atonement to the Æginetans. The latter were about to carry away their prisoner, when a dignified Spartan named Theasidês, pointed out to them the danger which they were incurring by such an indignity against the regal person,—the Spartans, he observed, had passed sentence under feelings of temporary wrath, which would probably be exchanged for sympathy if they saw the sentence realized.
Accordingly the Æginetans, instead of executing the sentence, contented themselves with stipulating that Leotychidês should accompany them to Athens and redemand their hostages detained there. The Athenians refused to give up the hostages, in spite of the emphatic terms in which the Spartan king set forth the sacred obligation of restoring a deposit:[76] they justified the refusal in part by saying that the deposit had been lodged by the two kings jointly, and could not be surrendered to one of them alone: but they probably recollected that the hostages were placed less as a deposit than as a security against Æginetan hostility,—which security they were not disposed to forego.
Leotychidês having been obliged to retire without success, the Æginetans resolved to adopt measures of retaliation for themselves: they waited for the period of a solemn festival celebrated every fifth year at Sunium, on which occasion a ship peculiarly equipped and carrying some of the leading Athenians as Theôrs, or sacred envoys, sailed thither from Athens. This ship they found means to capture, and carried all on board prisoners to Ægina. Whether an exchange took place, or whether the prisoners and hostages on both sides were put to death, we do not know; but the consequence of their proceeding was an active and decided war between Athens and Ægina,[77] beginning seemingly about 488 or 487 B. C., and lasting until 481 B. C., the year preceding the invasion of Xerxes.
An Æginetan citizen named Nikodromus took advantage of this war to further a plot against the government of the island: having been before, as he thought, unjustly banished, he now organized a revolt of the people against the ruling oligarchy, concerting with the Athenians a simultaneous invasion in support of his plan. Accordingly, on the appointed day he rose with his partisans in arms and took possession of the Old Town,—a strong post which had been superseded in course of time by the more modern city on the sea-shore, less protected though more convenient.[78] But no Athenians appeared, and without them he was unable to maintain his footing: he was obliged to make his escape from the island after witnessing the complete defeat of his partisans,—a large body of whom, seven hundred in number, fell into the hands of the government, and were led out for execution. One man alone among these prisoners burst his chains, fled to the sanctuary of Dêmêtêr Thesmophorus, and was fortunate enough to seize the handle of the door before he was overtaken. In spite of every effort to drag him away by force, he clung to it with convulsive grasp: his pursuers did not venture to put him to death in such a position, but they severed the hands from the body and then executed him, leaving the hands still hanging to and grasping[79] the door-handle, where they seem to have long remained without being taken off. Destruction of the seven hundred prisoners does not seem to have drawn down upon the Æginetan oligarchy either vengeance from the gods or censure from their contemporaries; but the violation of sanctuary, in the case of that one unfortunate man whose hands were cut off, was a crime which the goddess Dêmêtêr never forgave. More than fifty years afterwards, in the first year of the Peloponnesian war, the Æginetans, having been previously conquered by Athens, were finally expelled from their island: such expulsion was the divine judgment upon them for this ancient impiety, which half a century of continued expiatory sacrifice had not been sufficient to wipe out.[80]