Chapter LII (3)

[576] Thucyd. iv, 2-45.

[577] Thucyd. iv, 46.

Unfortunately for these prisoners, the orders given to Eurymedon carried him onward straight to Sicily. It was irksome, therefore, to him to send away a detachment of his squadron to convey these men to Athens,—while the honors of delivering them there would be reaped, not by himself, but by the officer to whom they might be confided: and the Korkyræans in the city, on their part, were equally anxious that the prisoners should not be sent to Athens; for their animosity against them was bitter in the extreme, and they were afraid that the Athenians might spare their lives, so that their hostility against the island might be again resumed. And thus a mean jealousy on the part of Eurymedon, combined with revenge and insecurity on the part of the victorious Korkyræans, brought about a cruel catastrophe, paralleled nowhere else in Greece, though too well in keeping with the previous acts of the bloody drama enacted in this island.

The Korkyræan leaders, seemingly not without the privity of Eurymedon, sent across to Ptychia fraudulent emissaries under the guise of friends to the prisoners. These emissaries—assuring the prisoners that the Athenian commanders, in spite of the convention signed, were about to hand them over to the Korkyræan people for destruction—induced some of them to attempt escape in a boat prepared for the purpose. By concert, the boat was seized in the act of escaping, so that the terms of the capitulation were really violated: upon which Eurymedon handed over the prisoners to their enemies in the island, who imprisoned them all together in one vast building, under guard of hoplites. From this building they were drawn out in companies of twenty men each, chained together in couples, and compelled to march between two lines of hoplites marshalled on each side of the road. Those who loitered in the march were hurried on by whips from behind: as they advanced, their private enemies on both sides singled them out, striking and piercing them until at length they miserably perished. Three successive companies were thus destroyed, ere the remaining prisoners in the interior, who thought merely that their place of detention was about to be changed, suspected what was passing: at length they found it out, and one and all then refused either to quit the building or to permit any one else to enter. They at the same time piteously implored the intervention of the Athenians, if it were only to kill them, and thus preserve them from the cruelties of their merciless countrymen. The latter abstained from attempts to force the door of the building, but made an aperture in the roof, from whence they shot down arrows, and poured showers of tiles, upon the prisoners within; who sought at first to protect themselves, but at length abandoned themselves to despair, and assisted with their own hands in the work of destruction. Some of them pierced their throats with the arrows shot down from the roof: others hung themselves, either with cords from some bedding which happened to be in the building, or with strips torn and twisted from their own garments. Night came on, but the work of destruction, both from above and within, was continued without intermission, so that before morning all these wretched men perished, either by the hands of their enemies or by their own. At daybreak, the Korkyræans entered the building, piled up the dead bodies on carts, and transported them out of the city: the exact number we are not told, but seemingly it cannot have been less than three hundred. The women who had been taken at Istônê along with these prisoners, were all sold as slaves.[578]

[578] Thucyd. iv, 47, 48.

Thus finished the bloody dissensions in this ill-fated island: for the oligarchical party were completely annihilated, the democracy was victorious, and there were no farther violences throughout the whole war.[579] It will be recollected that these deadly feuds began with the return of the oligarchical prisoners from Corinth, bringing along with them projects both of treason and of revolution: they ended with the annihilation of that party, in the manner above described; the interval being filled by mutual atrocities and retaliation, wherein of course the victors had most opportunity of gratifying their vindictive passions. Eurymedon, after the termination of these events, proceeded onward with the Athenian squadron to Sicily: what he did there will be described in a future chapter devoted to Sicilian affairs exclusively.

[579] Thucyd. iv, 48.

The complete prostration of Ambrakia during the campaign of the preceding year had left Anaktorium without any defence against the Akarnanians and Athenian squadron from Naupaktus. They besieged and took it during the course of the present summer;[580] expelling the Corinthian proprietors, and repeopling the town and its territory with Akarnanian settlers from all the townships in the country.

[580] Thucyd. iv, 49.

Throughout the maritime empire of Athens matters continued perfectly tranquil, except that the inhabitants of Chios, during the course of the autumn, incurred the suspicion of the Athenians from having recently built a new wall to their city, as if it were done with the intention of taking the first opportunity to revolt.[581] They solemnly protested their innocence of any such designs, but the Athenians were not satisfied without exacting the destruction of the obnoxious wall. The presence on the opposite continent of an active band of Mitylenæan exiles, who captured both Rhœteium and Antandrus during the ensuing spring, probably made the Athenians more anxious and vigilant on the subject of Chios.[582]

[581] Thucyd. iv, 51.

[582] Thucyd. iv, 52.

The Athenian regular tribute-gathering squadron circulated among the maritime subjects, and captured, during the course of the present autumn, a prisoner of some importance and singularity. It was a Persian ambassador, Artaphernes, seized at Eion on the Strymon, in his way to Sparta with despatches from the Great King. He was brought to Athens, and his despatches, which were at some length, and written in the Assyrian character, were translated and made public. The Great King told the Lacedæmonians, in substance, that he could not comprehend what they meant; for that among the numerous envoys whom they had sent, no two told the same story. Accordingly he desired them, if they wished to make themselves understood, to send some envoys with fresh and plain instructions to accompany Artaphernes.[583] Such was the substance of the despatch, conveying a remarkable testimony as to the march of the Lacedæmonian government in its foreign policy. Had any similar testimony existed respecting Athens, demonstrating that her foreign policy was conducted with half as much unsteadiness and stupidity, ample inferences would have been drawn from it to the discredit of democracy. But there has been no motive generally to discredit Lacedæmonian institutions, which included kingship in double measure,—two parallel lines of hereditary kings: together with an entire exemption from everything like popular discussion. The extreme defects in the foreign management of Sparta, revealed by the despatch of Artaphernes, seem traceable partly to an habitual faithlessness often noted in the Lacedæmonian character, partly to the annual change of ephors, so frequently bringing into power men who strove to undo what had been done by their predecessors, and still more to the absence of everything like discussion or canvass of public measures among the citizens. We shall find more than one example, in the history about to follow, of this disposition on the part of ephors, not merely to change the policy of their predecessors, but even to subvert treaties sworn and concluded by them: and such was the habitual secrecy of Spartan public business, that in doing this they had neither criticism nor discussion to fear. Brasidas, when he started from Sparta on the expedition which will be described in the coming chapter, could not trust the assurances of the Lacedæmonian executive without binding them by the most solemn oaths.[584]

[583] Thucyd. iv, 50. ἐν αἷς πολλῶν ἄλλων γεγραμμένων κεφάλαιον
ἦν, πρὸς Λακεδαιμονίους, οὐκ εἰδέναι ὅ,τι βούλονται· πολλῶν γὰρ
ἐλθόντων πρέσβεων οὐδένα ταὐτὰ λέγειν· εἰ οὖν βούλονται σαφὲς
λέγειν, πέμψαι μετὰ τοῦ Πέρσου ἄνδρας ὡς αὐτόν.

[584] Thucyd. iv, 86. ὅρκοις τε Λακεδαιμονίων καταλαβὼν τὰ τέλη
τοῖς μεγίστοις, ἦ μὴν, etc.

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]

[585] Thucyd. iv, 50; Diodor. xii, 64. The Athenians do not
appear to have ever before sent envoys or courted alliance with
the Great King; though the idea of doing so must have been
noway strange to them, as we may see by the humorous scene of
Pseudartabas in the Acharneis of Aristophanês, acted in the year
before this event.

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]

[586] Diodor. xi, 65; Aristotel. Polit. v, 8, 3; Justin, iii,
1; Ktesias, Persica, c. 29, 30. It is evident that there were
contradictory stories current respecting the plot to which Xerxes
fell a victim: but we have no means of determining what the
details were.

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]

[587] Ktesias, Persica, c. 38-43; Herodot. iii, 80.

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.

[588] Diodor. xii, 64-71; Ktesias, Persica, c. 44-46.