Read Ebook: The Great Persian War and its preliminaries by Grundy George Beardoe

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It stood, indeed, on the same level as the great contemporary monarchies of the East, while as yet the Mede had not succeeded to the full heritage of that Assyria which he had helped to destroy. It absorbed for the time the attention of the Greek, when he gave his attention to anything beyond his home affairs. Its very splendour became a barrier of light which the Greek eye could not pierce so far as to see clearly what was going on in the region beyond, so that even the great Cyrus came not within the field of Hellenic vision until he had emerged from the comparative darkness of the lands beyond the Halys.

Archaeological discovery within Lydia itself has done far more than the meagre records of contemporary history towards disclosing the characteristics of the civilization which was thus brought into strong contrast with that of the Hellenic lands and cities. It would be out of place in a work of this kind to enter into details with regard to it; yet the possibilities of the future were at the moment of Croesus' accession so significant, and of such world-wide importance, that it is impossible to pass over in silence the main features of a social system whose influence upon the Hellenic world must have been very great, and might have been much greater.

The Lydians, a people of undeniable genius, seem to have built upon an indigenous foundation a composite civilization, made up largely of elements drawn from foreign lands. Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt all contributed to its formation; and the influence of the Greek of the Asian coast and of Europe is unmistakable, especially in the last years of its independent existence. It was, indeed, in the main a "civilization of intercourse," due to the important trading relations of the kingdom with the various nations which lay within its reach. Its main characteristics in the sixth century are Oriental, though the tendency towards its hellenization, fostered greatly by its rulers, is strikingly apparent. It must, indeed, on the other hand, have influenced the social life of the Greek cities within the borders of the kingdom; and it is difficult to say how far this influence might have affected the civilization of the West, had not the process of infiltration been brought to a sudden standstill.

It was, as might be expected from the variety of its origin, a strange compound of good and evil. From his very vocation the Lydian trader evolved a system of cosmopolitan humanity, rare in those ages, rare, indeed, in any age in eastern lands. Living at ease himself, he was naturally inclined to live and let live. The width of his trade connections, and the necessity of securing safe passage through foreign countries, would tend to make him cultivate friendly relations with the people around him. One thing that he evolved from the necessities of his mode of life has had as much influence upon the history of the world as any single invention of man before or since. The awkwardness of exchange and barter to a merchant whose trade had distant roots, and who had to make long overland journeys in the course of his business, led him to invent and gradually adopt one medium of exchange, which all peoples, however various their home products, would appreciate. #LYDIAN INFLUENCE ON THE GREEKS.# It required but little education in taste to make even the rudest of races set value on the most beautiful of all the metals; and the gold and silver which Lydia produced so freely was stamped into the first currency of which there is record in history. Greek and Persian alike lost but little time in adopting so magnificent an invention.

The Lydian works of art which have survived show that the nation had attained to considerable skill in that respect.

But if the virtues of this civilization were great, its vices were equally so. The grossest form of immorality, that pest which the East seems to inherit like a moral leprosy, was prevalent. Certain tales in Herodotus show this to have been the case. The Greek did not escape the disease, and it may be that it was from the Lydian that he first caught it. Wholesale immorality of another kind was not merely prevalent, but received a religious sanction in the guise of that Aphrodite worship which in various forms sapped the vigour of the East. The town populations of Greece, especially those which, like the Corinthians, had closest intercourse with the Asian coast, caught this infection also.

It would have been contrary to the very nature of things had the Greeks,--a race peculiarly apt to learn both evil and good,--escaped altogether the influence of this Oriental social system at their doors. It is fortunate for posterity that its influence was short-lived. The very excellence of the general relations between the Lydia of Croesus and the Greeks as a body made the Lydian influence the more dangerous. It was the bitter hostility which sprang up in after times between the Greeks and the representatives of that new Orientalism which was superimposed upon the Lydian form, which saved the Greek civilization from becoming itself orientalized. The danger which Greece ran in the great war of 480-479 was as nothing compared with the danger Hellenism would have run had the war never taken place. The bitter, lasting hostility which it roused was far less dangerous than friendly intercourse with a great empire, the heir of all the ages of a world-old civilization, which might have made a moral conquest of the Hellene, had it refrained from attempting a physical one. It was the war itself, rather than its issue, which proved the salvation of Greece.

Croesus' succession to the great dominion which Alyattes had left was not undisputed. But the son had inherited the vigour of his father. He anticipated the plans of his rival. The pretender disappeared,--how or whither is not known; and his supporters, who were largely drawn from the feudal nobility of the land, met death in many grievous forms. Some of the Greek cities had more than sympathized with his antagonist, so to these he now turned his attention. All of them, AEolian, Ionian, and Dorian alike, were reduced to the position of Lydian dependencies, though in matters purely local they remained autonomous, if the name of autonomy can be given to a form of government in which a local tyrant played the part of administrator and political agent. Yet unpromising as was their position from the point of view of theoretical politics, they were in actual fact treated with marked consideration by Croesus.

It is impossible at the present day to sound the motives which underlay the attitude which this extraordinary man adopted to the Greeks alike of Asia and of Europe. It may have been from pure self-interest; it may have been because Hellenism had cast over him the glamour which it cast over other barbarian monarchs. Whatever the cause, the fact remains that, when once he had reduced the Greek cities to that position of dependence which was necessary for the political homogeneity of his empire, he seems to have lost no opportunity of ingratiating himself in the eyes of his Greek subjects and of their kinsmen beyond the seas. At Branchidae and at Ephesus he enriched the Greek temples with splendid offerings; and the wealth of the gifts he gave to Delphi excited the admiration of centuries. If contemporary report be not exaggerated, the value of his dedications to the great Hellenic shrine amounted to considerably more than a million pounds sterling of the money of the present day. Gifts of great value were also sent to the lesser Greek oracles.

#DESIGNS OF CROEUS.#

The authorities at Delphi would have been exceptional among similar societies in all ages of the world, had they not shown appreciation of a devotee so wealthy and so willing. He was made a citizen; to his embassies were given a precedence over all others.

It is difficult to imagine that Croesus should have expended such enormous sums on the cultivation of friendly relations with the Greeks of Europe for purely sentimental reasons. The oracles were not the only recipients of his gifts. The friendship of prominent and powerful families in various States, such as the Alkmaeonidae of Athens, was bought with a price.

Perhaps the explanation maybe sought and found in the previous and later policy of the king. He had subjugated the Greek cities of the coast, and by so doing had advanced his kingdom to its extreme limits on the west. Unless he converted Lydia into a naval power, further expansion on this side was impossible. So he turned his eyes towards the East, where nature and the circumstances of the time offered what must have seemed a favourable opportunity for the extension of his empire.

It must, however, have been quite evident to him that any policy of expansion eastward could only be carried out with safety in case his rear was secured from attack, where danger lay, not merely in the recently subdued Greek cities, but also in the possibility of any movement on their part being supported by help from their kinsmen in Europe.

Considerations such as these must have had a large influence upon his policy.

The story of his operations in the East has survived in history in what is manifestly a very mutilated form. It is fortunate that Strabo has preserved some reliable details which Herodotus does not mention in his somewhat legendary account of the last days of the rule of Croesus. The Lydian frontier had been extended to the Halys; but the motley collection of races and states included within the dominion was in some cases bound to the ruler of Sardes by comparatively loose ties. These ties Croesus strengthened.

Affairs in Asia beyond the Halys were at the moment, when Croesus brought his plans to maturity, about the year 548, in a condition which made all certain calculation as to their issue impossible. The Median dynasty had come to an end some four years before, and with it the treaty concluded by Lydia with the Mede in 585 had come to an end also. Cyrus must have been an unknown factor to the Lydian, though doubtless the merchant travellers had brought back from the East many a tale of his energy and success. He was certainly a danger: and the question probably suggested itself to Croesus whether he were not a danger which it would be wise to forestall, by pushing forward the Lydian frontier to that mass of mountains formed by the meeting of Taurus with the Armenian chains. Such a precautionary measure would be rendered the more attractive to the Lydian trader by the fact that it would lead to the inclusion within the empire of that rich mineral district on the south shore of the Euxine wherein the famed Chalybes dwelt.

Croesus was wise enough not to enter upon this venture single-handed.

It is evident that the comparative indifference with which Nabonidus and the Babylonians had originally regarded the change of rulers in Median empire, had by this time given place to a feeling of uneasiness, if not of actual alarm. The easy-going, peace-loving antiquarian of Babylon might well be apprehensive as to what might be the next object of the uncomfortable enterprise of his energetic neighbour. Even then the faint outlines of the writing on the wall were well-nigh decipherable.

Amasis of Egypt had far less grounds for alarm; but even he seems to have caught the infection of fear.

?H. i. 77.?

With these two states Croesus entered into negotiations, which resulted in the formation of a grand alliance, having for its object the suppression of the power which was so rapidly developing in the East.

The negotiations of Croesus were not confined to the great powers. He sought and obtained allies in European Greece. The Lydian kings had had a long experience of the value of the Greek heavy-armed infantryman. Greek hoplites had fought many a time both with and against them. #LYDIA AND SPARTA.# The addition of a contingent of them to the grand army which the king was now gathering together would be of inestimable value. There was evidently a difficulty about his obtaining such a force from the Greek cities of Asia; nor can there be any reasonable doubt as to where that difficulty lay. These cities had within the last few years been robbed of much of that measure of autonomy which they had up to that time enjoyed, and upon which they had set a value out of proportion, doubtless, to its real worth. The vivid discontent which such a loss must have aroused in Greek minds, a discontent the depth of which the experience of ages would enable the Lydian to gauge, would inevitably render them dangerous elements in a Lydian army. The cities did, indeed, with one exception, remain proof against Cyrus' attempts to tamper with their loyalty; but their attitude at the time was probably as much due to caution as to fidelity. Their geographical position would not allow them to accept risks against Lydia.

It was, therefore, to Greece itself that Croesus turned. The relations which he had so assiduously cultivated with Delphi enabled him to obtain its assistance in the negotiations. ?H. i. 69.? The outcome was, so Herodotus says, that Sparta, partly persuaded by the oracle, partly flattered by the Lydian embassy, consented to give aid in the war. Moreover, the way to this alliance had been previously paved with Lydian gold.

It is true that this contingent never reached Lydia. Ere it had actually started, Sardes had fallen and Croesus was either dead or a prisoner. Whether the delay in despatching it was intentional or not, the satisfactorily attested fact of such an alliance having been made is evidence that the Lydia of that day exercised a very real influence in Greece. Of the danger to which Hellenic civilization was exposed by Lydian friendship, enough has been already said.

That friendship was genuine and unaffected on the side, at any rate, of the Greeks. The relations of Croesus with Delphi must have been largely instrumental in forming it; but what happened in relation to this very war showed clearly that the feeling of Greece towards Croesus was built upon wider foundations. The Greeks had come to regard him as a distinguished convert to that Hellenism they so much loved. The impression may have been false, but it was powerful. "He loveth our nation" is an article in a national creed whose possibilities can be hardly exaggerated. That the feeling had become independent of the relations with Delphi is conspicuously shown in the present instance by the fact that it was Delphi which administered to it a shock which the Greek world took long to forget. The remembrance of it was evidently vivid a hundred years later in the time of Herodotus.

It came about as follows. Anxious as to the issue of the great venture upon which he was entering, Croesus sought to fortify or defeat his own resolution by inquiring of the oracles as to what the future had in store for him.

?H. i. 53.?

Two of the oracles consulted, of which Delphi was one, answered that "if he warred with the Persians he would overthrow a mighty empire." The response was capable of two interpretations, of which Croesus seized upon the most obvious; and was thus, so the Greeks thought, led to his undoing. Despite the pious faith with which Herodotus regards the utterances of the Delphic oracle, he is unable to conceal the tremendous shock which this apparent deception caused to Hellenic sentiment all the world over. To the Greek it appeared as though the oracle had betrayed its best friend and his also. Even in the cities of Asia, chafing though they were under recent subjugation, this feeling must have found some echo, whose resonance lasted till Herodotus' own time. It is unlikely that he would ever have disclosed its existence had not the feeling been very widespread in the Hellenic world he loved. ?H. i. 90.? The legendary story which he relates of the conversation between Croesus and Cyrus, expresses evidently a feeling entertained by many besides Croesus himself; and in the chapter which follows upon this tale, he shows that the Delphic oracle was forced by public opinion to attempt to explain away the apparent deception it had practised. #FALL OF THE LYDIAN KINGDOM.# The true explanation, which would have relieved it of a large part of the burden of the moral guilt, was one it dare not give in view of the prophetic character which it had to maintain before the eyes of the world. Prophecy founded upon intimate knowledge of Greek affairs was very far from being the mere guesswork, wrapped in enigma, of its utterances relative to matters deep in Asia, of which it can have had no real ken.

The account of the campaign given by Herodotus is full of inconsistencies; but by comparison of his story with other incidental references to it in various sources, it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the main outlines of what took place.

The great coalition might have taken Cyrus by surprise, had not the plans of Croesus been divulged to him by an Ephesian traitor, if a tale preserved by Diodorus is to be believed. The mere fact that he was able to anticipate the designs of Croesus renders it probable that some disclosure of the kind did take place.

The sudden collapse of Lydia is one of the most remarkable incidents in history.

It fell in a moment, as it were, never to rise again; and it fell, not in the decadence of age, but at the very height of its young and vigorous life. To the Greek the spectacle was bewildering: nor is it strange that a catastrophe so sudden and complete, unparalleled, indeed, in the history of the world, should have so dazed the senses of those who were spectators of it, that they were never able to give a rational account of how it came to pass.

PERSIAN AND GREEK IN ASIA. THE SCYTHIAN EXPEDITION.

Despite the great catastrophe which had just taken place before their eyes, the Greek cities had no mind to make an unconditional surrender to the power which had vanquished their old master. It was unfortunate that, after coming to such a decision, they did not combine in a common resistance. The inherent weakness of their strategical position, together with the incompleteness of the sympathy between AEolian, Ionian, and Dorian Greek, made such united action difficult. There is a terrible sameness in the drama of history as played upon this coast of the AEgean. The scenery admitted of but one plot, of which the leading motive was disunion. In the present, as in other instances, the Dorian states of the Carian coast went their own way. They threw in their lot with their Carian neighbours. The AEolians and Ionians were not altogether blameless in the matter. They did not at first show a bold front to the Persian, but offered to submit to him on the terms on which they had submitted to Croesus.

Save in the case of Miletus, the largest and most formidable of the towns, Cyrus would not hear of terms; and so the cities prepared to fight for their liberty.

Cyrus was obliged to entrust the completion of the conquest of the Lydian kingdom to one of his lieutenants. The news of the fall of Sardes had scared Babylon into inactivity; but the Baktrians and Sakae on the extreme eastern borders of his dominion had seized the opportunity afforded by the western campaign to rise in revolt.

He had not proceeded far on his homeward march before news reached him of a rising in Lydia. Paktyas, a renegade Lydian who had embraced his cause, and to whom the conqueror had entrusted the care of the transport of the spoils, had intrigued with the Ionian Greeks; and, having ample funds at his disposal, had hired mercenaries from them. Tabalos, the Persian lieutenant whom Cyrus had left behind him, was besieged in the citadel of Sardes; and there was every prospect that, if the place fell, all the work of the late campaign would have to be done again. There was no time to be lost: nor was Cyrus the man to lose time. He despatched an army under Mazares the Mede to rescue the besieged, and Sardes was saved. Paktyas fled to Kyme, and thence to the islands. He neither deserved nor received sympathy, and, after various adventures, was handed over by the Chians to the Median commander.

With the flight of Paktyas the insurrection in Lydia came to an end; in fact, in so far as extant records go, the Lydians themselves played but little part in it. The passive and entire submission of this people, their acceptance, once and for all, of the yoke laid upon them, is one of the most extraordinary features of this extraordinary time. #CONQUEST OF IONIA BY PERSIA.# It might well have been expected that a nation with a past so recent and so glorious would have seized the first and every opportunity of attempting to regain the freedom, if not the dominion they had lost. But nothing of the kind took place; and even the great effort of the Ionian revolt failed to rouse them from the apathy of defeat.

The circumstances of Paktyas' rebellion showed Mazares that the Greek cities of the coast could no longer be left in a position to be the instruments of trouble in the newly-won territory. To them, accordingly, he immediately turned his attention. He first attacked Priene and sacked it; but, before he had completed the reduction of Magnesia on the Maeander, he died, and Harpagos, who succeeded him as governor, took up the task of reduction. Phokaea and Teos were besieged. Ere they fell, the mass of their inhabitants went into voluntary exile--the Phokaeans to Corsica in the farthest west, the Teans to the near coast of Thrace.

There can be little doubt that the departure of these peoples was a disaster of the first magnitude to the Greek towns of Asia. It is hardly possible to realize at the present day the strength of resolution which prompted the Phokaeans to undertake their long and perilous journey. They are the New Englanders of the sixth century before Christ. Their presence fifty years later, at the time of the revolt, might have given the Ionian resistance that "stiffening" which it seems to have lacked; indeed, a member of the remnant they left behind them, that dare-devil old pirate Dionysius, is the one prominent person on the Greek side in that distressful time whom later historians consented to praise. One by one the other Ionian and AEolian cities fell into Persian power. There does not appear to have been any real combined resistance. Nature had made them units without unity. The islanders of Samos alone escaped subjection.

Caria was next attacked. It yielded practically without a blow, and the Dorian colonies fell with it into Persian hands--a fate in their case not wholly undeserved. Lycia fought for its liberty, but in vain; and with its subjection the establishment of Persian rule on the continent of West Asia was complete.

The rest of the career of Cyrus, important though it is, has little influence on Greek history. His campaign in the East was a prolonged one. He seems to have extended the borders of his empire to the Thian-Shan and Suleiman ranges, if not into the plains of India itself. His aim can hardly have been the mere acquisition of these enormous areas of comparatively unproductive territory. The reason lying behind his policy was, in all probability, the fact that the races of this region were near akin to his own, and that he wished to advance against the Semitic peoples at the head of a forced coalition of the Iranian races.

The turn of Babylon for attack was soon to come. Nabonidus' antiquarian researches absorbed more and more of his time, and the real conduct of the government seems to have passed into the hands of his son Bel-sharuzar, the Belshazzar of the Book of Daniel. In the final struggle, indeed, Nabonidus seems to have come to the front again.

Of the three rival kingdoms, Egypt alone survived. Doubtless Cyrus had designs upon it; but after the fall of Babylon in 538, he seems to have wisely devoted himself to the task of consolidating the empire he had won so rapidly in the previous fourteen years. Before his plans were ripe for an expedition beyond the Isthmus of Suez, disturbances in the far east called him thither. There he died, probably in a great battle about the year 529. The halo of legend which rapidly formed about his great personality concealed not merely the real man, but even his real history. #THE PERSIAN CIVILIZATION.# Four versions of the story of his death, each differing wholly from the other, were known to the Greeks. But whatever fate he met, his body was brought to his home-land, where the remains of his tomb may be seen at the present day. "I am Cyrus, the king, the Achaemenian," is the only part of his epitaph which survives. It would be too little for a lesser man. It is sufficient for him even now that he has been twenty-five centuries dead.

The new Orientalism with which the Asian Greek was brought into contact by the conquest of Lydia was, in many respects, of a different character to that which had preceded it in Western Asia. As years rolled on, and the specially Persian characteristics of it became more and more merged in the general Oriental type, the difference tended to disappear; but even until quite late times the hardy races from the mountains of Iran had many national customs which were in strong contrast to the typical civilization of the Euphrates plain. Though far from ideal, there were certain grand elements in it which struck the imagination of some of the finer minds of Greece, and which, through them, must have influenced Greek life, though in ways which it is not possible now to trace. Had the Greek come much under its influence, that influence, though it would have been disastrous in many respects, would not have tended wholly for evil.

The civilization was indeed essentially of an Eastern type. It is unnecessary to point out the significance of such a general characteristic. The Mede and Persian had been for centuries next-door neighbours of the population of the great plains, and it was inevitable that they should have borrowed from their brilliant life. Yet, despite their nearness, there was a triple gulf between the two, which the intercourse even of centuries could not bridge. Difference of race, difference of habitat, and, above all, difference of religion sundered them. The Iranian and Semite regarded the world and life in it from different points of view. The struggle for existence presented itself in wholly different aspects to the mountaineer and the man of the plain. The monotheist could have but little sympathy with a polytheistic creed.

The Medo-Persian was a strange product for an Asiatic soil. He was an Asian apart. His religious belief was alone calculated to make him remarkable among his contemporaries. The Asiatic of this time had a natural tendency towards polytheism. The monotheism of even the Israelites was spasmodic. But with the Persian monotheism was the set religion of the race. It had a legendary origin in the teachings of Zarathustra, or Zoroaster, as he appears in Western history. Ahura-mazda was the one god. There were, indeed, other objects of worship,--the stars, the sun, the moon, and fire, beautiful and incomprehensible works of Ahura-mazda; but he was god alone. Other spiritual beings there were too, represented as deified virtues and blessings--Good Thought, Perfect Holiness, Good Government, Meek Piety, Health, and Immortality; and these stood nearest to Ahura-mazda's throne.

The national religion had not, indeed, wholly escaped the contamination of the less spiritual cults of the neighbouring peoples. The animalism of the worship of the Babylonian goddess Mylitta had been introduced into the land under the guise of the adoration of the nymph Anahita.

Nevertheless, with the Persian the deification of the various forms of nature took a special form. The deities themselves were treated as demi-gods, rather than gods; creations of the great spirit of Ahura-mazda. One power alone, the power of evil, seemed to contest his supremacy. In opposition, therefore, to the god of that light which he looked upon as the visible embodiment of the Good, the Persian conceived the existence of a god of darkness, a god of evil, a god of the under-world, a god of death. This god, Angro-mainyus, possessed, indeed, the attributes both of Satan and of Pluto. There was no hope for the complete triumph of good over evil in this life. "Choose ye this day whom ye will serve,"--in that lay the whole alternative, the ultimate possibility for good or evil, in so far as the world of the present was concerned. Only in an after-life could the final triumph of the good be looked for,--in a life after that resurrection of the dead which the prophets, the sons of Zoroaster, awaking from their long sleep, should bring to pass.

#POLYKRATES OF SAMOS.#

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