The Athenians sent back Artaphernes in a trireme to Ephesus, and availed themselves of this opportunity for procuring access to the Great King. They sent envoys along with him, with the intention that they should accompany him up to Susa: but on reaching Asia, the news had just arrived that King Artaxerxes had recently died. Under such circumstances, it was not judged expedient to prosecute the mission, and the Athenians dropped their design.[585]
Respecting the great monarchy of Persia, during this long interval of fifty-four years since the repulse of Xerxes from Greece, we have little information before us except the names of the successive kings. In the year 465 B.C. Xerxes was assassinated by Artabanus and Mithridates, through one of those plots of great household officers, so frequent in oriental palaces. He left two sons, or at least two sons present and conspicuous among a greater number, Darius and Artaxerxes. But Artabanus persuaded Artaxerxes that Darius had been the murderer of Xerxes, and thus prevailed upon him to revenge his father’s death by becoming an accomplice in killing his brother Darius: he next tried to assassinate Artaxerxes himself, and to appropriate the crown. Artaxerxes however, apprized beforehand of the scheme, either slew Artabanus with his own hand or procured him to be slain and then reigned (known under the name of Artaxerxes Longimanus) for forty years, down to the period at which we are now arrived.[586]
Mention has already been made of the revolt of Egypt from the dominion of Artaxerxes, under the Libyan prince Inanes, actively aided by the Athenians. After a few years of success, this revolt was crushed and Egypt again subjugated, by the energy of the Persian general Megabyzus, with severe loss to the Athenian forces engaged. After the peace of Kallias, erroneously called the Kimonian peace, between the Athenians and the king of Persia, war had not been since resumed. We read in Ktesias, amidst various anecdotes seemingly collected at the court of Susa, romantic adventures ascribed to Megabyzus, his wife Amytis, his mother Amestris, and a Greek physician of Kos, named Apollonides. Zopyrus son of Megabyzus, after the death of his father, deserted from Persia and came as an exile to Athens.[587]
At the death of Artaxerxes Longimanus, the family violences incident to a Persian succession were again exhibited. His son Xerxes succeeded him, but was assassinated, after a reign of a few weeks or months. Another son, Sogdianus, followed, who perished in like manner after a short interval.[588] Lastly, a third son, Ochus (known under the name of Darius Nothus), either abler or more fortunate, kept his crown and life between nineteen and twenty years. By his queen, the savage Parysatis, he was father to Artaxerxes Mnemon and Cyrus the younger, both names of interest in reference to Grecian history, to whom we shall hereafter recur.
CHAPTER LIII.
EIGHTH YEAR OF THE WAR.
The eighth year of the war, on which we now touch, presents events of a more important and decisive character than any of the preceding. In reviewing the preceding years, we observe that though there is much fighting, with hardship and privation inflicted on both sides, yet the operations are mostly of a desultory character, not calculated to determine the event of the war. But the capture of Sphakteria and its prisoners, coupled with the surrender of the whole Lacedæmonian fleet, was an event full of consequences and imposing in the eyes of all Greece. It stimulated the Athenians to a series of operations, larger and more ambitious than anything which they had yet conceived; directed, not merely against Sparta in her own country, but also to the reconquest of that ascendency in Megara and Bœotia which they had lost on or before the thirty years’ truce. On the other hand, it intimidated so much both the Lacedæmonians, the revolted Chalkidic allies of Athens in Thrace, and Perdikkas, king of Macedonia, that between them the expedition of Brasidas, which struck so serious a blow at the Athenian empire, was concerted. This year is thus the turning-point of the war. If the operations of Athens had succeeded, she would have regained nearly as great a power as she enjoyed before the thirty years’ truce: but it happened that Sparta, or rather the Spartan Brasidas, was successful, gaining enough to neutralize all the advantages derived by Athens from the capture of Sphakteria.
The first enterprise undertaken by the Athenians in the course of the spring was against the island of Kythêra, on the southern coast of Laconia. It was inhabited by Lacedæmonian Periœki, and administered by a governor, and garrison of hoplites, annually sent thither. It was the usual point of landing for merchantmen from Libya and Egypt; and as it lay very near to Cape Malea, immediately over against the gulf of Gythium,—the only accessible portion of the generally inhospitable coast of Laconia,—the chance that it might fall into the hands of an enemy was considered as so menacing to Sparta, that some politicians are said to have wished the island at the bottom of the sea.[589] Nikias, in conjunction with Nikostratus and Autoklês, conducted thither a fleet of sixty triremes, with two thousand Athenian hoplites, some few horsemen, and a body of allies, mainly Milesians. There were in the island two towns,—Kythêra and Skandeia: the former having a lower town close to the sea, fronting Cape Malea, and an upper town on the hill above; the latter, seemingly, on the south or west coast. Both were attacked at the same time by order of Nikias; ten triremes and a body of Milesian[590] hoplites disembarked and captured Skandeia; while the Athenians landed at Kythêra, and drove the inhabitants out of the lower town into the upper, where they speedily capitulated. A certain party among them had indeed secretly invited the coming of Nikias, through which intrigue easy terms were obtained for the inhabitants. Some few men, indicated by the Kytherians in intelligence with Nikias, were carried away as prisoners to Athens: but the remainder were left undisturbed, and enrolled among the tributary allies under obligation to pay four talents per annum; an Athenian garrison being placed at Kythêra for the protection of the island. From hence Nikias employed seven days in descents and inroads upon the coast, near Helos, Asinê, Aphrodisia, Kotyrta, and elsewhere. The Lacedæmonian force was disseminated in petty garrisons, which remained each for the defence of its own separate post, without uniting to repel the Athenians, so that there was only one action, and that of little importance, which the Athenians deemed worthy of a trophy.
In returning home from Kythêra, Nikias first ravaged the small strip of cultivated land near Epidaurus Limêra, on the rocky eastern coast of Laconia, and then attacked the Æginetan settlement at Thyrea, the frontier strip between Laconia and Argolis. This town and district had been made over by Sparta to the Æginetans, at the time when they were expelled from their own island by Athens, in the first year of the war. The new inhabitants, finding the town too distant from the sea[591] for their maritime habits, were now employed in constructing a fortification close on the shore; in which work a Lacedæmonian detachment under Tantalus, on guard in that neighborhood, was assisting them. When the Athenians landed, both Æginetans and Lacedæmonians at once abandoned the new fortification. The former, with the commanding officer, Tantalus, occupied the upper town of Thyrea; but the Lacedæmonian troops, not thinking it tenable, refused to take part in the defence, and retired to the neighboring mountains, in spite of urgent entreaty from the Æginetans. The Athenians, immediately after landing, marched up to the town of Thyrea, and carried it by storm, burning or destroying everything within it: all the Æginetans were either killed or made prisoners, and even Tantalus, disabled by his wounds, became prisoner also. From hence the armament returned to Athens, where a vote was taken as to the disposal of the prisoners. The Kytherians brought home were distributed for safe custody among the dependent islands: Tantalus was retained along with the prisoners from Sphakteria; but a harder fate was reserved for the Æginetans; they were all put to death, victims to the long-standing apathy between Athens and Ægina. This cruel act was nothing more than a strict application of admitted customs of war in those days: had the Lacedæmonians been the victors, there can be little doubt that they would have acted with equal rigor.[592]
The occupation of Kythêra, in addition to Pylus, by an Athenian garrison, following so closely upon the capital disaster in Sphakteria, produced in the minds of the Spartans feelings of alarm and depression such as they had never before experienced. Within the course of a few short months their position had completely changed from superiority and aggression abroad to insult and insecurity at home. They anticipated nothing less than incessant foreign attacks on all their weak points, with every probability of internal defection, from the standing discontent of the Helots: nor was it unknown to them, probably, that even Kythêra itself had been lost partly through betrayal. The capture of Sphakteria had caused peculiar sensations among the Helots, to whom the Lacedæmonians had addressed both appeals and promises of emancipation, in order to procure succor for their hoplites while blockaded in the island; and if the ultimate surrender of these hoplites had abated the terrors of Lacedæmonian prowess throughout all Greece, this effect had been produced to a still greater degree among the oppressed Helots. A refuge at Pylus, and a nucleus which presented some possibility of expanding into regenerated Messenia, were now before their eyes; while the establishment of an Athenian garrison at Kythêra opened a new channel of communication with the enemies of Sparta, so as to tempt all the Helots of daring temper to stand forward as liberators of their enslaved race.[593] The Lacedæmonians, habitually cautious at all times, felt now as if the tide of fortune had turned decidedly against them, and acted with confirmed mistrust and dismay, confining themselves to measures strictly defensive, and organizing a force of four hundred cavalry, together with a body of bowmen, beyond their ordinary establishment.