consciousness of one common offence, he then threw off the mask, declaring himself at the head of the confederacy, and bid defiance to the power of Persia.

17. To enable himself to carry on the war with more vigour, he went, in the beginning of the following year, to Lacedæmon, in order to engage that state in his interests; and engage it in war with a power, that seemed every day to threaten the ral liberty of Greece. Cleomenes was at that time king of Sparta, and to him Aristagoras applied for assistance, in what he represented as the common cause.

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18. He represented to him, that the Ionians and Lacedæmonians were countrymen; that it would be for the honour of Sparta to concur with him in the design he had formed for restoring the Ionians to their liberty; that the Persians were enervated by luxury; that their riches would serve to reward the conquerors, while nothing was so easy as their overthrow. Considering the present spirit of the Ionians, it would not be difficult, he said, for the victorious Spartans to carry their arms even to the gates of Susa, the metropolis of the Persian empire; and thus give laws to those who presumed to call themselves the sovereigns of the world.

19. Cleomenes desired time to consider this proposal; and being bred up in Spartan ignorance, demanded how far it was from the Ionian sea to Susa? Aristagoras, without considering the tendency of the question, answered, that it might be a journey of three months. Cleomenes made no answer, but turning his back upon so great an adventurer, gave orders that before sunset he should quit the city. Still, however, Aristagoras followed him to his house; and finding the inefficacy of his eloquence, tried what his offers of wealth could do.

20. He at first offered him ten talents; he then raised the sum to fifteen; and it is unknown what effect such a large sum might have had upon the Spartan, had not his daughter, a child of nine years old, who was accidentally present at the proposal, cried out, Fly father, or this stranger will corrupt you. This advice, given in the moment of suspense, prevailed: Cleomenes refused his bribes; and Aristagoras went to sue at other cities, where eloquence was more honoured, and wealth more alluring.

21. Athens was a city where he expected a more favourable reception. Nothing could be more fortunate for his interests than his arrival at the very time they had received the peremptory message from the Persians to admit their tyrant, or to fear the consequences of their disobedience. The Athenians were, at that time, all in an uproar; and the proposal of Aristagoras met with the most favourable reception. It was much easier to impose

upon a multitude than a single person, the whole body of citizens engaged immediately to furnish twenty ships to assist his designs; and to these, the Eretrians and Eubæans added five more.

22. Aristagoras, thus supplied, resolved to act with vigour; and having collected all his forces together, set sail for Ephesus: where leaving his fleet, he entered the Persian frontiers, and marched by land to Sardis, the capital city of Lydia. Artaphernes, who resided there as the Persian viceroy, finding the city untenable, resolved to secure himself in the citadel, which he knew could not easily be forced. As most of the houses of this city were built with reeds, and consequently very combustible, one of the houses being set on fire by an Ionian soldier, the flames quickly spread to all the rest. Thus the whole town was quickly reduced to ashes, and numbers of the inhabitants slain.

23. But the Persians were soon avenged for this unnecessary cruelty; for, either recovering themselves from their former panic, or being reinforced by the Lydians, they charged the Jonians in a body, and drove them back with great slaughter. Nor was the pursuit discontinued even as far as Ephesus; where the vanquished and the victors arriving together, a great carnage ensued; and but a small part of the routed army escaped, which took shelter aboard the fleet, or in the neighbouring cities. Other defeats followed after this.

24. The Athenians, intimidated with such a commencement of ill success, could not be persuaded to continue the war. The Cyprians were obliged once more to submit to the Persian yoke. The Ionians lost more of their towns one after the other; and Aristagoras flying into Thrace, was cut off by the inhabitants with all his forces.

25. In the mean time, Histiæus, who was the original cause of all these misfortunes, finding that he began to be suspected in Persia, left that court, under a pretence of going to quell those troubles which he had all along secretly fomented: but his duplicity of conduct rendered him now suspicious to either party. Artaphernes, the Persian viceroy, plainly accused him of treachery; while his own Milesians refused to admit him as their master. 26. Thus wavering, uncertain, and not knowing where to turn, having picked up a few scattered remains of the routed armies, he fell in with Harpagus, one of the Persian generals, who routed his forces, and made Histiæus himself a prisoner. Being sent to Artaphernes, that inhuman commander immediately caused him to be crucified; and ordered his head to be sent to Darius, who received the present with that disgust which evinced his superior humanity. He wept over it with a friendly sorrow; and ordered that it should receive honourable interment.

27. In the mean time, the affairs of the Ionian confederacy every day became more desperate. The Persian generals finding that Miletus was the city which they chiefly depended on, resolved to march thither with all their forces; concluding, that having carried that city, all the rest would submit of course. The Ionians having intelligence of this design, determined in a general assembly, to make no opposition by land, where the Persians were too powerful; but to fortify Miletus, and exert all their efforts by sea, where they hoped for the advantage from their superior skill in naval evolutions.

28. They accordingly assembled a fleet of three hundred ships, at a little island over against Miletus, and on the superiority of this fleet they placed their whole reliance. But the Persian gold effected what their arms were unable to compass. Their emissaries having secretly debauched the greatest part of the confederates, and engaged them to desert, when the two fleets came to engage, the ships of Samos, Lesbos, and several other places, sailed off, and returned to their own country. Thus the remaining part of the fleet, which did not amount to more than an hundred ships, was quickly overpowered, and almost totally destroyed.

29. After this, the city of Miletus was besieged, and was easily taken. All the other cities, as well on the continent as among the islands, were forced to return to their duty. Those who continued obstinate, were treated with great severity. The handsomest of the young men were chosen to serve in the king's palace, and the young women were all sent into Persia.

30. Thus ended the revolt of the Ionians, which continued six years from its first breaking out under Aristagoras; and this was the third time the Ionians were obliged to undergo the yoke of foreign dominion; for they inherited a natural love of freedom, which all the Greeks were known to possess.

31. The Persians having thus subdued the greatest part of Asia Minor, began to look towards Europe, as offering conquests worthy their ambition. The assistance given the Ionians by the Athenian fleet, and the refusal of that state to admit Hippias as their king; the taking of Sardis, and the contempt they testified for the Persian power, were all sufficient motives for exciting the resentment of that empire; and for marking out all Greece for destruction.

32. Darius, therefore, in the twenty-eighth year of his reign, having recalled all his other generals, sent Mardonius, the son of Gobryas, a young nobleman who had lately married one of the king's daughters, to command in chief throughout all the maritime parts of Asia; and particularly to revenge the burning of Sardis. This was an offence which that monarch seemed

peculiarly to resent; and from the time of that conflagration, he had given orders for one of his attendants, every time he sat down to table, to cry out, Remember the Athenians.

33. Mardonius, willing to second his master's animosity, quickly passed into Thrace at the head of a large army, and so terrified the inhabitants of that country, that they yielded implicit obedience to his power. From thence he set sail for Macedonia; but his fleet attempting to double the cape of Mount Athos in order to gain the coasts of that country, they were attacked by so violent a tempest, that upwards of three hundred ships were sunk, and above twenty thousand men perished in the sea.

34. His land army, that took the longest way about, met, at the same time, with equal distresses; for being encamped in a place of no security, the Thracians attacked them by night, and made a great slaughter among the enemy. Mardonius himself

was wounded, and finding his army unable to maintain the field returned to the Persian court covered with grief and confusion, having miscarried both by sea and land.

35. But the ill success of one or two campaigns was not sufficient to abate the resentment, or the ardour of the king of Persia. Possessed as he was of resources almost inexhaustible, wealth without end, and armies that seemed to increase from defeat, he only grew more determined from every repulse, and doubled his preparations in proportion to his former failures. He now perceived, that the youth and inexperience of Mardonius were unequal to so great an undertaking: he therefore displaced him, and appointed two generals, Datis, a Mede, and Artaphernes, the son of him who was late governor of Sardis, in his stead.

36. His thoughts were earnestly bent on attacking Greece with all his forces; he wished to take a signal revenge upon Athens, which he considered as the principal cause of the late revolt in Ionia: besides Hippias was still near him to warm his ambition, and keep his resentment alive. Greece, he said, was now an object for such a conqueror; the world had long beheld it with an eye of admiration; and if not soon humbled, it might in time supplant even Persia in the homage of the world.

37. Thus excited by every motive of ambition and revenge, Darius resolved to bend all his attention to a war with Greece. He had, in the beginning of his reign, sent spies with one Democedes, a Greek physician, as their conductor, to bring him information with respect to the strength and situation of all the states of Greece. This secret deputation failed; he was, therefore, willing once more to send them under the character of heralds, to denounce his resentment; and at the same time to learn how the different states of the country stood affected towards him.

38. The form used by the Persians, when they expected submission from lesser states, was to demand earth and water in the monarch's name: and such as refused were to be considered as opposers of the Persian power. On the arrival, therefore, of the heralds amongst the Greeks, many of the cities, dreading the Persian power, complied with their demands. The Æginetans, with some of the islands also, yielded a ready submission; and almost all, but Athens and Sparta, were contented to exchange their liberties for safety.

39. But these two noble republics bravely disdained to acknowledge the Persian power; they had felt the benefits of freedom; and were resolved to maintain it to the last. Instead, therefore, of offering up earth and water, as was demanded, they threw the heralds, the one into a well, the other into a ditch; and adding mockery to insult, desired them to take earth and water from thence. This they probably did to cut off all hopes of a reconciliation; and to leave no safety but in perseverance and despair.

40. Nor were the Athenians content with this outrage: but resolved also to punish the Æginetans, who by a base submission to the Persian power had betrayed the common cause of Greece. They accordingly represented the affair to the Spartans with all its aggravating circumstances, and heightened with that eloquence for which they were famous. Before such judges it was not likely that cowardice or timidity would find many defenders: the Spartans immediately gave judgment against the people of Egina, and sent Cleomenes, one of their kings, to apprehend the authors of so base a concession.

41. The people of Ægina, however, refused to deliver them, under pretence that Cleomenes came without his colleague. This colleague was Demaratus, who had himself secretly furnished them with that excuse. As soon as Cleomenes was returned to Sparta, in order to be revenged on Demaratus, for thus counteracting the demands of his country, he endeavoured to get him deposed, as not being of the royal family. In fact, Demaratus was born only seven months after marriage, and this was supposed by many to be a sufficient proof of his bastardy.

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42. This accusation, therefore, being revived, the Pythian oracle was appointed to determine the controversy, and the priestess being privately suborned by Cleomenes, an answer was given against his colleagues just as he had dictated. maratus thus being declared illegitimate, and unable to endure so gross an injury, banished himself from his country, and retired to Darius, who received him with great friendship, and gave him a considerable settlement in Persia.