FOOTNOTES
[18] [It is worthy of mention that since this embassy there were no diplomatic relations between Athens and Persia until, in the last days of 1902, a Persian ambassador was appointed to the Hellenic court—an interval of about twenty-four hundred years.]
[19] [“Large trees felled and scattered over the plain obstructed the movements of the cavalry,” says Bulwer-Lytton, not naming his authority.]
CHAPTER XVI. MILTIADES AND THE ALLEGED FICKLENESS OF REPUBLICS
Happy would it have been for Miltiades if he had shared the honourable death of the polemarch Callimachus, in seeking to fire the ships of the defeated Persians at Marathon. The short sequel of his history will be found in melancholy contrast with the Marathonian heroism.
His reputation had been great before the battle, and after it the admiration and confidence of his countrymen knew no bounds: it appears, indeed, to have reached such a pitch that his head was turned, and he lost both his patriotism and his prudence. He proposed to his countrymen to incur the cost of equipping an armament of seventy ships, with an adequate armed force, and to place it altogether at his discretion; giving them no intimation whither he intended to go, but merely assuring them that, if they would follow him, he would conduct them to a land where gold was abundant, and thus enrich them. Such a promise from the lips of the recent victor of Marathon was sufficient, and the armament was granted, no man except Miltiades knowing what was its destination. He sailed immediately to the island of Paros, laid siege to the town, and sent in a herald to require from the inhabitants a contribution of one hundred talents [£20,000 or $100,000], on pain of entire destruction. His pretence for this attack was, that the Parians had furnished a trireme to Datis for the Persian fleet at Marathon; but his real motive, so Herodotus assures us, was vindictive animosity against a Parian citizen named Lysagoras, who had exasperated the Persian general Hydarnes against him. The Parians amused him at first with evasions, until they had procured a little delay to repair the defective portions of their wall, after which they set him at defiance; and Miltiades in vain prosecuted hostilities against them for the space of twenty-six days: he ravaged the island, but his attacks made no impression upon the town. Beginning to despair of success in his military operations, he entered into some negotiation—such at least was the tale of the Parians themselves—with a Parian woman named Timo, priestess or attendant in the temple of Demeter, near the town gates. This woman, promising to reveal to him a secret which would place Paros in his power, induced him to visit by night a temple to which no male person was admissible. He leaped the exterior fence, and approached the sanctuary; but on coming near, was seized with a panic terror and ran away, almost out of his senses: on leaping the same fence to get back, he strained or bruised his thigh badly, and became utterly disabled. In this melancholy state he was placed on shipboard, the siege being raised, and the whole armament returning to Athens.